Comes a Horseman

by Robert Liparulo

  She was nodding.

  He continued. “You did a decent job capturing the oddness of her bedroom, all those religious trinkets. It would have been nice to get each of those things individually recorded from several angles. Don’t touch them; just move around them.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “I know it would take time, and with the cops there, you may not be able to do it on the first run-through. Any reason you couldn’t go back?”

  “Locals are pretty anxious to get what the CSD has for them and get me out of there. Lindsey’s attitude isn’t unusual. I could insist.” She smiled.

  “If we found a similar trinket or image at another crime scene or interviewed an UNSUB who worked where one was sold or made—something like that could break the case. One more thing. You panned around the rooms, but try to dedicate some time and focus on lifestyle groupings. That is, the bookcases, the furniture arrangements, any wall hangings, photographs, artwork.”

  “I thought the sweep would pick up all that.”

  “Not with enough detail. If there’s an open magazine on an end table, zoom in so we can see the publication name, issue date, and page number. Better too much information than not enough.”

  “So, missed three?” she asked.

  “That’s not bad.”

  She shrugged. “I suspect the CSD will be a continual work in progress, even after I’ve moved on. Different people will want different things from it, rules of evidence will change, new forensic methods will become vogue.”

  “Does that bother you,” he asked, “working on a project that will never be completed?”

  “Nah, not really. Name of the game these days. Imagine being a computer or software designer, knowing the product you’re working on every day till midnight will be obsolete a month after you’ve signed off on it. The CSD’s technology-based, so constant upgrades will be the norm. I just want to see it credited with locking up some really bad guy. Maybe watch it become the way crime scenes are approached.”

  “Something little like that.” He smiled at her.

  They crested Monument Hill, and a long stretch of highway opened up before them. The Taurus rocketed for the horizon. Brady wondered if Alicia measured driving success by the number of cars she passed. He retrieved the laptop from the foot well. He still had to give the CSD recording of the Loeb crime scene a more thorough inspection.

  “Any thoughts about the killer?” she asked.

  “Still assessing, but we may not be dealing with a serial killer at all. More and more, he’s looking like a spree killer.”

  “The short downtimes and the way he’s traveling?”

  “And the apparent lack of common denominators among the victims,” Brady answered. “Although I’m not ready yet to say that linkage doesn’t exist. Sometimes it only becomes clear after he’s caught and explains himself, if he ever does.”

  “What does the frequency of the killings tell you, the short time between each one?”

  Brady considered his answer, then shook his head. “Ambition . . . correlation to some other events . . . a developing taste for blood. At this point, we just don’t know.”

  She said, “Lindsey mentioned something I was curious about.”

  He looked at her.

  “The eating,” she said. “He was right about that being suggestive of someone who knew the victim or was somehow comfortable in the house?”

  “Suggestive, sure. But the human mind is infinitely complex, which makes every person and every motive different.”

  “So what does making a sandwich next to a severed head tell you about this one?”

  “One thing, he’s probably a sociopath. He has no sense of morality, no concept of right and wrong.”

  “What’s wrong with cutting someone’s head off, huh?”

  “Exactly. They know society thinks it’s wrong; that’s why they take steps to elude capture.”

  “Think this guy grabbed a snack at the other crime scenes?”

  “I didn’t notice that . . . Hold on.” He hooked an arm around his seat back and fished in the satchel on the rear floor for his binder. Using the closed computer as a desk, he flipped open the binder and read. After a minute, he said, “The first vic. Joseph Johnson in Ogden. They lifted two latents on the inside handle of the refrigerator, as though the perp had opened it.” He was turning pages more quickly now. “Here,” he said. “William Bell was killed in the parking lot of his apartment building in Moab. They place the time of death at about 12:05 a.m. from the coroner’s report, and that’s when a resident said she heard noises in the parking lot. She thought someone was trying to break up a dogfight. But she didn’t see anything when she looked out her window, and the noises had stopped. Now get this. Ten minutes earlier, Bell bought a cheeseburger, fries, and a chocolate shake from a late-night burger joint.” He looked up from the page. “He got them to go. The shake was found splattered on the ground near the body. But they never found the burger and fries . . . or their wrappers.”

  “So Bell ate in the car and tossed the trash out the window.” She didn’t believe it, but detective work was about playing devil’s advocate until every possibility had been considered.

  “Not likely,” said Brady, reading. “First, the cab of his truck was full of empty beer cans and other trash, including old fast-food bags and wrappers. They examined them, looking for evidence. They were all crusty-old. They did find a hash pipe and a dime bag of weed. Why would he risk getting pulled over for littering when he’s got contraband in the truck, especially since he’s driving a trash can anyway? Second, he had stopped at a video store before the burger place. The tapes he rented were near the body. Sounds like he’d planned on dinner in front of the tube. The house that Swanson built.”

  She thought a moment while Brady continued scanning the reports. “You’re saying the killer is taking their food?”

  Brady nodded. “I’d bet on it.”

  “That’s the motive ?” She was incredulous.

  “No, something else. Maybe it gives him a feeling of power. Or in some way it’s a symbolic transference of their life force to him, a delusion many psychopathic killers share. He took their lives and he took one of the requirements of life, food.”

  “Or maybe he was just hungry?”

  Brady raised his eyebrows. “Maybe so.”

  There were a lot of maybes at this point in the investigation. Or rather, investigations. Each murder was being handled by a local authority, at least until the Bureau stepped in to help compare notes and unify efforts.

  The car shot north, not slowing when the speed limit dropped from seventy-five to sixty-five to cut through the town of Castle Rock. Brady looked up from the binder that had diverted his attention from the video walk-through for the past ten miles. He studied the rook-shaped mountain from which the town derived its name. Radio and cell phone masts spired above its plateau. He could just make out the outline of a big star on its side, probably an illuminated, outsized Christmas decoration. What captured his attention most were the layers of strata making up the top quarter of the mountain, stark evidence of the sea that had once filled the Great Plains. Its shores had lapped at the Rocky Mountains and—as it receded—at this jutting plateau. Everything that was then, gone now. As everything now would be gone someday.

  23

  Leaving Castle Rock, the car picked up even more speed. As it caught the wind and roared over minor road imperfections, it rose and fell gently like a leaf on a rolling sea. Brady pushed the binder back into the satchel behind his seat and opened the laptop.

  Alicia pulled a crumpled pack of Camels from her blazer pocket. She smoked whenever she was impatient, which meant she had a pack-a-day habit, by his calculations. She saw him watching her.

  “You mind?” she asked, sincerely, not as a challenge.

  He shook his head. She lit up and cracked her window. Instantly the smoke whipped away like a soul who’d found a way out of hell.

  “Why don’t yo
u give me one?”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “You don’t smoke.”

  “I’m trying to start.”

  She kept the pack in her hand. “It’s a nasty habit.”

  “Nastier the better.”

  She laughed. “Since when?”

  Since I realized nasty things fare no worse and sometimes better than healthy, good things, he thought. Since I decided it doesn’t matter.

  He shrugged.

  She handed over the pack. “You worry me sometimes, Brady. You really do.”

  As they approached Denver, traffic slowed and she had no choice but to fall in line.

  “We need to get gas pretty soon. Ft. Collins is another hour after we get out of this mess,” she said, firing up another cigarette.

  One had been enough for Brady. He went back to the CSD walk-through. He would play a bit, stop, replay, move ahead. In this way, he had advanced to the baubles in Cynthia Loeb’s bedroom when Alicia spoke again.

  “You remember Muniz?” she asked.

  A tight smile pushed at the corners of Brady’s mouth. He nodded. “The hero,” he said. Special agent Rudolph Muniz had been part of an investigative team that had earned a white feather—Bureau-speak for solving a particularly important case. Feathers were especially heady when victory rose out of hopelessness. The case Muniz and his partner, Jack Barrymore, were working looked particularly bleak: the disappearance of an eleven-year-old girl. She’d been missing two weeks already when the locals called in the FBI.

  Brady and Alicia had heard the details about two months ago, the day following the bust. They were waiting for the Evidence Response Team’s debriefing to begin when Bull Jordans—a former LSU linebacker and New Orleans beat cop, with all the charm and sensitivity you’d expect from someone with that background—regaled them with the Bureau’s latest and greatest bust.

  “They’re making the rounds, right?” Bull said to the dozen faces turned his way. “Reinterviewing everyone. It’s grunt work, ’cause they figure the kid’s a graveyard steak by now anyway. But they go to the crib of the kid’s piano teacher.”

  Brady winced at the word “crib” coming out of the mouth of a forty-year-old white guy. “Graveyard steak” was more in line with Bull’s personality.

  “What’s this guy going to give ’em, they’re thinking,” Bull continued. “Thirties, married, no sheet. Normal guy, by all accounts. So they ring the bell, and a minute later the curtains over the front window move. Next thing, the garage door’s rolling up and a car’s in there revving and revving. Muniz and Barrymore run for the garage. Piano Man’s at the wheel of a ’68 Charger. Big engine, fast car.” Bull flashes an appreciative grin. “As soon as he sees ’em, he pops the clutch and burns rubber outta there.

  “Muniz and Barrymore are yelling, ‘Stop! FBI! Stop!’ They got their gats out, but they don’t wanna shoot in case this is their guy and he has the kid stashed somewhere. So Muniz drops his piece and—get this—he jumps on the hood. I mean, this thing is screaming out of the driveway and Muniz is holding on for dear life, sliding this way and that. Barrymore is, like, awestruck. He just stands there watching. Says the Charger ripped down the street like some street-racing movie played in fast-forward. Ya know those kick-butt movie cops; when they do that, they got these determined expressions.”

  Everyone nods.

  “Not Muniz. He’s got this look like he just woke up on this speeding vehicle and hasn’t got a clue how he got there. His face is like this—” Bull perfectly mimics the expression of someone who sees a train rushing toward him. “Muniz is screaming. Not ‘Stop the car!’ But ‘Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!’ All the way down the blasted street.”

  Roars of laughter.

  “Barrymore, that idiot, starts chasing after it, yelling, ‘Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!’ Finally, he gets his wits and runs back to their steed. He gets close enough to see the Charger go round a corner and Muniz fly off. I mean, he flies—like forty feet. Rolling and tumbling another fifty feet before landing in some old lady’s hedges. Piano Man loses control and pegs a tree. When Barrymore gets to him, he’s blabbering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ ‘Where’s the little girl?’ Barrymore says.” Bull shook his head and looked around as if to say, Some guys have all the luck. “Piano Man says, ‘In my basement! Oh, I’m so sorry! I’m sorry!’ Muniz is limping over, holding his arm, but obviously he’ll live, so Barrymore drives back to the house and there she is, in the basement, good as new. Kaching!”

  Over the next few days, more details trickled in. Turns out the little girl wasn’t as good as new, but she would recover. Physically, anyway.

  “Jumping on the hood of that car,” Alicia said now, jarring Brady out of the memory.

  He nodded.

  “Everyone made fun of him. ‘Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!’” She showed Brady the face Bull had made. “Thing is . . .” She hesitated. “I want to do that.”

  She looked at him, apparently expecting surprise or humor or something else less than encouraging. When he nodded again, his face impassive, she put her eyes back on the road and continued. “I want to jump on the hood of a speeding car or run across some field with people firing at me or leap from a helicopter onto a semitruck.” She glanced at him again. “You know?”

  “All in the name of rescuing a civilian or stopping an archcriminal from causing greater harm.”

  “Yeah. Not for fun.” She paused. “But I think it would be fun too.”

  Brady cleared his throat. “Jung called that a ‘hero complex.’”

  “Oh, great. I have a complex.”

  “We all do. Most of us have several. But complex is just a word. It’s a convenient way to categorize inclinations in thought and behavior.”

  “So is a hero complex good or bad?” She suddenly swerved onto a passing exit ramp, apparently having spotted a gas station she liked.

  Brady grabbed a handgrip on the door. Alicia approached a red light, braking hard.

  When the car stopped, Brady said, “Could be positive or negative. It’s good if it gives you initiative and makes you adventurous. It’s bad if it leads to foolhardiness and bravado.” He watched her think about this. “You might have something altogether different,” he added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Could be your desire to perform heroic acts stems from your passion for the job. You love being a special agent, and you want to experience it in every possible way. And, sure, you want to save people in the process. That’s one of the reasons you joined the Bureau, right?”

  Alicia didn’t respond. A horn honked. She saw the light was green and accelerated. Finally, she said, “I think I got into law enforcement because I wanted to kick butt.”

  Brady smiled. “If the butts belong to bad guys, you’re a hero. Congratulations.”

  “You don’t feel the same?”

  It was his turn to think. More than anything else, he was a desk jockey. He studied case descriptions and crime photographs and tried to turn them into a profile of the perp. Alicia liked the down-and-dirty stuff. She spent her off-hours on the shooting range; his idea of training was a few hours with The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. While he had been working on his doctoral dissertation, she’d been in the trenches, learning hero moves.

  He said, “Not to that degree, no.”

  “I bet Muniz pats himself on the back every day for jumping on that hood, despite the razzing he got for it.”

  “Broke his arm too.”

  “Oh, pish,” she said. “I broke my arm when I was fourteen. Didn’t even cry.”

  “Were you beating up the neighborhood bully?”

  Alicia punched the gas to get through a yellow light. It turned red before they reached the intersection. They zoomed through, then braked hard to pull into a Diamond Shamrock. “I was on my bicycle and hit a mailbox,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Now that I believe.”

  24

  The Middle Eastern sun bathed the city in orange fire that flared off
the windows and metallic surfaces of Tel Aviv’s modern skyline. A moist breeze coming off the Mediterranean made the air feel warmer than the 68 degrees reported by the large digital thermometer outside Bank Hapoalim’s Romanesque headquarters on Rothchild Boulevard. Day-trippers lingered on Gordon Beach, savoring a final plunge into the surf or one last sandy-toed stroll before heading inland to their homes. The office workers who had gone home to shower and change would soon reemerge to fill the many nightclubs on Hayarkon Street. Tel Avivians often surprised visiting Westerners with their cosmopolitan lifestyle and insatiable passion for merriment. They believed the day was for hard work, the night for cutting loose and taking it easy.

  Except for Luco Scaramuzzi.

  Ensconced in his private workout room in the Italian Embassy, he pushed at the limits of his strength and endurance. Rivulets of sweat tracked the sharp contours of his muscles like winter runoff—slicking over straining biceps, quadriceps, pectorals. They poured off his face and ran, glistening, through the fine black hair that swirled over his chest and stomach, soaking the waistband of his cotton gym shorts. Each heft of the fifty-pound dumbbells in his fists brought forth more sweat and tight-lipped groans of exertion. Shifting his gaze from a glass wall and the city beyond to a mirror-fronted column, his lids fluttered over stinging eyes. But he liked what he saw, the way his body responded to his daily workouts. He was sitting on a padded bench, the soles of his Pradas flat against the floor, his back straight, and still he saw no folds at his stomach, no fat edging over his shorts. His body tapered nicely from shoulders to waist. He pushed the iron over his head, watching what bulged, what quivered. He was after muscle mass and tone more than strength, so the weights were relatively light and he did lots of reps.

  He realized he had lost count and decided to keep raising and lowering the weights until the current track blaring through the iPod earbuds ended. It was “Murder (in Four Parts)” from the movie Road to Perdition—brooding and atmospheric, the sound he preferred for furious workouts. This evening his mind was troubled, so he had attacked the equipment with more intensity than usual—first with leg presses, then shoulder rolls, wrist curls, bench presses, a circuit of Nautilus stations, and now the dumbbells. His aching muscles were threatening to shut down. Each push up and draw down became exponentially harder—he lowered the weights with excruciating slowness, the way his trainer had taught him. His eyes squeezed shut. The weights were not merely quivering now, they were wobbling. But he got them up. His arms were on a glass-through-the-veins journey downward when he felt the air pressure in the room suddenly relax: someone had opened the door. With a savage grunt, he pushed the weights up, holding them steady, brought them down, then up again.