Her heartbeat speeded up. She was so new she still squeaked, but he was going to take a chance on her. “I’m ready, sir.”
She looked ready to leap out of her chair. He didn’t remember being this eager on his first day. He rose. “Good. We’re leaving this afternoon for Chicago. Bottom line: We’ve got a guy who killed a family of four in Des Moines. He did the same thing in St. Louis three months later. After St. Louis, the media dubbed him the Toaster. I’ll tell you about it when we’re in the air. That was Captain Brady in the Chicago Police Department, homicide, and he believes we might be able to help him. Actually, he’s praying we can do something. The media wants a sideshow, and he can’t even give them a dancing bear. But we can.” He looked at his watch. “I’ll meet you at Dulles in two hours. We should be there no more than three days.” He rolled down the sleeves of his white shirt and grabbed his jacket. “I really want this guy, Sherlock.”
The Toaster. She knew about him as well. She scoured all the major newspapers for monsters like this one. Yes, she already knew the details, at least the ones that had made the papers.
He opened the office door for her. Her eyes were positively glistening, as if she were high on drugs. “You mean you know how to catch him?”
“Yes. We’re going to get him this time. Captain Brady said he had some leads, but he needs us to come out. You go ahead and pack. I’ve got to update some people in the unit. Ollie Hamish is in charge when I’m unavailable.”
THEY flew on United in Business Class. “I didn’t think the Bureau let its agents fly anything but tourist class.”
Savich stowed his briefcase beneath the seat in front of him and sat down. “I upgraded us. You don’t mind that I have the aisle?”
“You’re the boss, sir.”
“Yeah, but now you can call me Dillon or Savich. I answer to either one. What do most people call you?”
“Sherlock, sir. Just plain Sherlock.”
“I met your daddy once about five years ago, right after he was appointed to the bench. Everyone in law enforcement was tickled to have him named because he rarely cut a convicted criminal any slack. I remember his selection didn’t go over too well with liberals in your home state.”
“No,” she said looking out the window as the 767 began to taxi down the runway. “It didn’t. There were two serious efforts to have him recalled—neither succeeded. The first try was after he upheld the death penalty for a man who’d raped and tortured two little boys, then dumped their bodies in a Dumpster in Palo Alto. The second was when he wouldn’t grant bail to an illegal Mexican alien who’d kidnapped and murdered a local businessman.”
“Hard to believe there are people who’d want to rally behind those kinds of killers.”
“Oh, there are. Their rationale in the first case was that my father showed no compassion. After all, the man’s wife had died of cancer, his little boy had been killed by a drunk driver. He deserved another chance. He’d been pushed to torture those little boys. He had shown remorse, claimed grief had sent him out of his mind, but Dad said ‘bullshit’ and upheld the death penalty. As for the illegal Mexican, they claimed Dad was a racist, that there was no proof the man would flee the U.S. Also they claimed that the man had kidnapped the businessman because he had refused to give him a job, had threatened to call Immigration if the guy didn’t leave the premises. They claimed the man hadn’t been treated fairly, that he’d been discriminated against. It didn’t matter that the businessman was an immigrant—a legal one. I also seriously doubt he made that threat.”
“They didn’t succeed in recalling him.”
“No, but it was close. You could say that the Bay Area is a fascinating place to grow up. If there’s any other possible take on something, some group of locals will latch onto it.”
“What does your dad think of your joining the FBI?”
The flight attendant spoke over the PA system, telling them about their seat belts and the oxygen masks. He saw it in her eyes—the wariness, the relief that now she could concentrate on her flotation cushion instead of his questions. She was proving to be a puzzle. He very much appreciated puzzles. A good one fascinated him. He’d get her again with that question. Maybe when she was tired or distracted.
He sat back in his seat and said nothing more. Once in the air, he opened his briefcase and gave her a thick file. “I hope you read quickly. This is everything on the three different crimes. I knew you didn’t have a laptop, so I had it downloaded and printed out for you. Read everything and absorb as much as you can. If you have questions, write them down and ask me later.” He gently lifted his laptop onto the fold-down tray and got to work.
HE waited until they were served a snack before he spoke again. “Have you finished reading everything?”
“Yes.”
“You’re fast. Questions? Ideas? Anything that doesn’t seem kosher?”
“Yes.”
This time he didn’t say anything. He just chewed on a carrot stick and waited. He watched her cut a small piece of lettuce from her salad. She didn’t eat it, just played with it.
“I already knew about this man from the papers. But there’s so much more here.” She sounded elated, as if she’d made the insiders’ club. He frowned at her. She suddenly cleared her throat, and her voice was nearly expressionless. “I can understand that he has low self-esteem, that he probably isn’t very bright, that he probably works at a low-paying job, that he’s a loner and doesn’t relate well to people—”
He waited, something he was excellent at.
“I always wondered why it killed families. Families of four, exactly.”
“You called him ‘it.’ That’s interesting.”
She hadn’t meant to. She forked down her lettuce and took her time chewing. She had to be more careful. “It was a slip of the tongue.”
“No, it wasn’t, but we’ll let that go for now, Sherlock. This family thing—the people in the ISU, as you’ve read in their profile, believe he lived on the same block as the first family he killed in Des Moines, knew them, hated them, wanted to obliterate them, which he did. However, they couldn’t find anyone in the nearby area of the first murders in Des Moines to fit that description. Everyone figured that the profile wasn’t correct in this particular case. When he killed again in St. Louis, everyone was flummoxed. When I spoke to Captain Brady in Chicago, I asked him if the St. Louis police had canvassed the area for a possible suspect. They had, but they still didn’t find anybody who looked promising.”
“But you had already talked to the police in St. Louis, hadn’t you?”
“Oh yes.”
“You know a lot, don’t you?”
“I’ve thought about this case, Sherlock, thought and thought and recreated it as best I could. Unlike the cops, I firmly believe the profile is right on target.”
“Even though they didn’t find anyone in Des Moines or St. Louis to fit the profile?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“You’re stringing me along, sir.”
“Yes, but I’d like to see what you come up with. Let’s see if you’re as fast with your brain as with that Lady Colt of yours.”
She splayed her fingers, long slender fingers, short buffed nails. “You still kicked it out of my hand. It didn’t matter.”
“But you made a good catch. I wasn’t expecting that move from Porter.”
She grinned at him then, momentarily disarmed. “We practiced it. In another exercise, he got taken as a hostage. I threw a gun to him, but he missed it. The robber was so angry, he shot Porter. As you can imagine, we got yelled at by the instructors for winging it.” She said again, still grinning, “Practice.”
He said slowly, shutting down his laptop, “I got creamed once when I was a trainee at the Academy. I wish I’d learned that move. My partner, James Quinlan, was playing a bank robber in a Hogan’s Alley exercise, and the FBI got the drop on him. I had to stand there and watch him get taken away. If I’d thrown him a gun, he might have had a ch
ance. Although God knows what would have happened then.” He sighed. “Quinlan turned me in under questioning. I think he expected me to break him out of lockup, and when I didn’t, he sang. Although how he expected me to do it, I have no idea. Anyway, they caught me an hour later heading out of town in a stolen car, the mayor’s blue Buick.”
“Quinlan?”
“Yes.” Nothing more, just the yes. Let her chew on nothing for a bit.
“Who is this Quinlan?”
“An agent and longtime friend. Now, Sherlock, what do you think we’re going to find in Chicago?”
“You said the Chicago police believed they were close. How close?”
“You read it. A witness said he saw a man running from the victims’ house. They’ve got a description. We’ll see how accurate it is.”
“What do you know, sir, that’s not in the reports?”
“Most of it’s surmise,” he said, “and some excellent stuff from my computer program.” He nodded to the flight attendant to remove his cup of tea. He gently closed his laptop and slipped it into its hard case. “We’re nearly at O’Hare,” he said, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
She leaned back as well. He hadn’t shown her the computer analysis on the case. Maybe he thought she already had enough on her plate, and maybe she did. She hadn’t wanted to look at the photos from the crime scenes, but she had. It had been difficult. There hadn’t been any photos in the newspapers. The actual photos brought the horror of it right in her face. She couldn’t help it; she spoke aloud: “In all three cases, the father and mother were in their late thirties, their two children—always a boy and a girl—were ten and twelve. In each case, the father had been shot through the chest, then in his stomach, the second shot delivered after he was dead, the autopsy reports read. The mother was tied down on the kitchen table, her face beaten, then she was strangled with the cord of the toaster, thus the name the Toaster. The children were tied up, knocked out, their heads stuck in the oven. Like Hansel and Gretel. It’s more than creepy. This guy is incredibly sick. I’ve wondered what he would do if the family didn’t have a toaster.”
“Yeah, I wondered about that too, at first,” he said, not opening his eyes. “Makes you think he must have visited each of the homes to make sure there was one right there in the kitchen before the murders.”
“That or he brought the toasters with him.”
“That’s possible, but I doubt it. Too conspicuous.” He brought his seat back into its upright position. “Someone could have seen him carrying something. Another thing, in a lot of houses, kitchen ovens are set up high and built in. In a situation like that, how would he kill the children? In the photos, all of these are the big old-fashioned ovens.”
“He had a lot of checking out to do when he visited the families, didn’t he?”
She looked at his profile. He didn’t say anything. She slowly slid all the photos back into the envelope, each of them marked. She slowly lined up all the pages and carefully placed them back into their folders. He’d given this a whole lot of thought. On the other hand, so had she. She still wanted to see the computer analysis. Then again, she hadn’t demanded to see it either.
The flight attendant announced that they were beginning their descent into Chicago and for everyone to put away any electronic equipment. Savich fastened his seat belt. “Oh yes, our guy did a lot of checking.”
“How did you even remember my question? It’s been five minutes since I asked it.”
“I’m FBI. I’m good.” He closed his eyes again.
She wanted to kick him. She turned to look out the window. Lights were thick and bright below. Her heart speeded up. Her first assignment. She wanted to do things right.
“You’re FBI now too, Sherlock.”
It was a bone, not a meaty bone, but a bone nonetheless, and she smiled, accepting that bone gladly.
She fastened her own seat belt. She never once stopped looking down at the lights of Chicago. Hallelujah! She wasn’t going after bank robbers.
FIVE
Chicago was overcast and a cool fifty degrees on October 18. Sherlock hadn’t been to Chicago since she’d turned twenty-one, following a lead that hadn’t gone anywhere, one of the many police departments she’d visited during her year of “mono.”
As for Savich, he wasn’t even particularly aware that he was in Chicago; he was thinking about the sick little bastard who had brutally murdered three families. Officer Alfonso Ponce picked them up and ushered them to an unmarked light blue Ford Crown Victoria.
“Captain Brady didn’t think you’d want to be escorted to the station in a squad car. This one belongs to the captain.”
After a forty-five-minute ride weaving in and out of thick traffic, everyone in the radius of five miles honking his horn, he let them off at the Jefferson Park station house, the precinct for what was clearly a nice, middle-class neighborhood. The station house was a boxy, single-story building on West Gale, at the intersection of two major streets, Milwaukee and Higgins. It had a basement, Officer Ponce told them, because it had been built in 1936 and was one of those WPA projects. When there’d been a twister seven years before, everyone had piled into the basement, prisoners and all. One nutcase had tried to escape. There had been little updating since the seventies. There was a small box out front holding a few wilted flowers and a naked flagpole.
Inside, it was as familiar as any station house Savich had ever been in—a beige linoleum floor that had been redone probably in the last ten years, but who knew? It still looked forty years old. He smelled urine wearing an overcoat of floral room spray. There were a dozen or so people shuffling around or sitting on the long bench against the wall, since it was eight o’clock at night. At least half of them were teenage boys. He wondered what they’d done. Drugs, probably.
Savich asked the sergeant on duty where he could find Captain Brady. They were escorted by an officer, turned wary after he’d seen their FBI shields, to a squad room with several offices in the back with glass windows. The room was divided off into modular units, a new addition that nobody liked, the officer told them. There wasn’t much noise this time of night, just an occasional ring of the phone. There were about a dozen people in the squad room, all plainclothes.
Captain Brady was a black man of about forty-five with a thick southern drawl. Even though there wasn’t a single white hair on his head, he looked older than his years, very tired, lines scored deeply around his mouth. When he saw them, his mouth split into a big smile. He came out from behind his cluttered desk, his hand out.
“Agent Savich?”
“Yes, Captain.” The two men shook hands.
“And this is Agent Sherlock.”
Captain Brady shook her hand, gave her a lopsided grin, and said, “You’re a long way from London, aren’t you?”
She grinned back at him. “Yes, sir. I forgot my hat, but my pipe’s in my purse.”
Savich was studying the computer on the captain’s desk.
Captain Brady waved them into two chairs that sat opposite a sofa. The chairs were surprisingly comfortable. Captain Brady took the sofa. He sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “Bud Hollis in St. Louis said you had followed this case since the guy killed the first family in Des Moines and the DMPD had asked the FBI to do a profile. He said I should get you here, and that’s why I e-mailed you. He, ah, appreciated your ideas even though they didn’t get him anywhere. But you already know that. The guy’s a mystery. Nothing seems to nail him. It’s like he’s a ghost.”
Captain Brady coughed into his hand, a hacking low cough. “Sorry, I guess I’m getting run-down. My wife chewed me out good this morning.” He shrugged. “But what can we do? We’ve been putting in long hours since the guy killed the family three and a half days ago. He did it right at six o’clock, right at dinnertime, right at the same time he killed the other two families. Sorry, but you already know that. You got all the police reports I sent you yesterday?”
“Oh yes,” Savich said
. “I was hoping you’d contact me.”
The captain nodded. “Bud Hollis also said you had a brain and weren’t a glory hound and did your investigating with a computer. I don’t understand that, but I’m willing to give it a try.
“I still wasn’t sure bringing you here was such a good idea until five minutes before I e-mailed you. Thank you for coming so quickly. I thought I should talk to both of you for a few minutes before I introduce you to the detectives on the case. They’re, ah, a bit unhappy that I called you in.”
“No problem,” Savich said and crossed his legs. “You’re right, Captain. Neither Sherlock nor I am into glory. We just want this guy off the streets.”
Actually, she wanted him really badly. She wanted him dead.
“Unfortunately we don’t have anything more than we did when I e-mailed you this afternoon. The pressure from the mayor’s office is pretty intense; everyone’s hiding in the men’s room because the media’s been on a tear since the first night it happened. They haven’t let up. Do you know that one station got hold of the crime scene photos, and they splashed them all over the ten P.M. news? Bloody vultures. They know all about Des Moines and St. Louis and that the media there had called the guy the Toaster. Got everyone scared to death. The joke in the squad room is that everyone is throwing out their kitchen appliances. You’ve read all the files from all the murders, haven’t you?”
“Yes. Every one. They were very complete.”
“I guess it’s time to cut to the chase, Agent Savich. Can you help us?”
“Both Agent Sherlock and I have a few questions. Perhaps we can meet with your people and get the answers. Yes, Captain, there’s not a doubt in my mind that we can help you.”
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