Presumed Guilty: (A Jefferson Winter novella)

by James Carol

  ‘I would have thought you’d prefer ‘The End’. All that stuff about killing your father.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘You consider yourself a genius. That’s why you admire Lennon and Hendrix.’

  He shrugged. ‘A genius is someone who can see so far into the future they’re looking right over the edge of the curve. Not only can they see into the future but nothing’s going to stop them getting there. And when they do finally get there, everyone else is going to be left with their mouths hanging open wondering how the hell they pulled that one off.’

  ‘And that’s how you view yourself?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Okay, Jefferson, here’s what I don’t understand. If you’re half as smart as you think you are, what the hell are you doing here?’

  He answered with a smile that Yoko didn’t like one bit.

  Firstly, it was a smile that said I know something you don’t, and she hated not knowing, hated being outside the loop, hated the idea that someone might possess information that she didn’t.

  Secondly, she’d seen that exact same smile before, three thousand miles west and six months ago. It had chilled her as much then as it chilled her now.

  Chapter 3

  Winter was staring at his hands again, his head bowed in a way that reminded her of his victims. She looked at him sitting across the table. The arrogant smile was gone and he was back to looking like the kid he was.

  It was hard to believe that this was Valentino. He was just so damn young. That was one of the things that got to Yoko the most. He was only nineteen. Sure, nineteen-year-old kids were capable of getting into plenty of trouble. But abducting young women and cutting their hearts out? That was a whole different kind of trouble.

  In her original profile, Yoko had speculated that they were looking for someone in their late thirties or early forties. This was based on the fact that the crimes were so elaborate. What she hadn’t considered was the idea that they might also have been committed by a boy genius who’d had a monumentally screwed-up childhood. In all the time she’d been doing this she’d never come across anything like it. Jefferson Winter was unique.

  Because Winter didn’t appear to want to talk any more, it gave Yoko the chance to return to the puzzle that was Valentino. For as long as she could remember, she’d always loved puzzles. A large part of her life had been spent trying to discern patterns where everyone else saw confusion and chaos.

  The Valentino case had landed on her desk with victim #2. This was back at the end of May, two months ago. A pattern had suggested itself on her first read-through of the file.

  Victim #1 had been murdered on 30 April, victim #2 on 30 May. Yoko speculated that victim #3 would be murdered on 30 June, and nobody disagreed. The logic was sound. It made sense.

  She was wrong.

  On the morning of Tuesday 29 June victim #3 was discovered.

  Mistakes and wrong turns and wild-goose chases went with the territory. The best you could ever hope for was to get it right more often than you got it wrong. Giving herself a hard time wasn’t going to help anyone. Go down that route and you’d end up so paralysed by the what-ifs that it would be impossible to do the job.

  Once she’d got herself re-centred, she pulled up a calendar on her computer and stared at the dates.

  Although victim #3 had been found on the 29th, she’d actually been murdered on the evening of the 28th, and when you factored that into the equation a brand-new pattern emerged.

  Valentino was a werewolf, a killer whose murders were dictated by the lunar cycle. There was no doubt about it. All his kills had taken place at the time of the full moon, and that was no coincidence. When you were dealing with highly organised offenders, coincidence did not exist. The next full moon wasn’t until 28 July, which meant they had thirty days to hunt Valentino down and get him into custody.

  Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened.

  Yoko drove to Bowie on the afternoon of Tuesday 27 July, leaving a little after three to miss the worst of the Beltway traffic, and arriving at twenty after four. The first reason she chose Bowie was because it was in the north of Prince George’s County, and that’s where the other three murders had happened.

  The second reason had nothing to do with the case. David Bowie had been her favourite singer ever since she first saw him performing as Ziggy Stardust. That performance had turned her world upside down.

  It had been a defining moment. The message Ziggy brought back from Mars was that it was okay to be different. Outsiders could shine as brightly as anyone. In fact, some shone even brighter.

  Yoko spent most of that evening at her motel, killing time by going through the case files for the millionth time on the off-chance that she’d missed something.

  All she could do now was wait for Valentino to make his move. The depressing truth was that most murders were solved in the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Any longer than that and the trail was too cold to yield anything useful.

  The bottom line: Valentino was going to kill again and, barring a miracle, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

  Yoko wanted to get to the crime scene as quickly as possible so she could get a head start when he did strike, and that’s why she was sitting in a crappy motel room getting slowly drunk on a rather spectacular fifteen-year-old single malt.

  So she’d sat and smoked and drunk whisky and waited for the sun to come up, and when the call came through she was one of the first people on the scene.

  As she pulled into the street where Alice Harrigan had once lived, she vowed that there would not be a fifth victim.

  Chapter 4

  The kid sat up abruptly, scrubbed a hand through his messy black hair and smiled across the table. ‘So, what? You’ve run out of questions.’

  ‘You looked like you needed a moment to compose yourself.’

  The smile widened to show two lines of neat white teeth. ‘Consider me suitably composed.’ He did a quick drum roll, the rat-a-tat-tat of his hands hitting wood sounding overloud within the confines of the small interview room. ‘So, bring it on, Agent. Let’s have your next question.’

  Yoko went through the hundred and one questions that were crammed inside her head, trying to decide which one to go with.

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Who?’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘You know exactly who I’m talking about, Jefferson.’

  He gave a tight smile. ‘Suzy Blane.’

  ‘And Suzy had blonde hair and big, baby-blue eyes. She was pretty, too. Does that sound about right?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  The kid reached for his Coke but didn’t drink any. He turned the can through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, only stopping when the logo was facing him again. There was a faraway look on his face, like he was no longer in the room. All of a sudden, he clicked back into the present and smiled across the table.

  ‘It took me a whole week to get up the courage to ask her to the senior prom.’

  ‘And she turned you down?’

  He snorted a laugh and shook his head. ‘If only. You know, if that’s what had happened we probably wouldn’t be sat here now.’

  ‘So what happened, Jefferson?’

  ‘She said yes. I never thought she would. Not in a million years. It wasn’t like she was the prettiest girl in school, but she was on the cheerleading squad. I knew I was punching above my weight, but sometimes you’ve just got to go for it, right? Shoot for the moon because the worst that’s going to happen is you’ll miss and end up swimming with the stars. That’s something my mother used to tell me when I was a kid.’

  While Yoko desperately wanted to know more about his mother, and his childhood, that was a tangent, something for another day.

  Suzy Blane was the key, the alpha and the omega. If Winter followed the pattern Yoko thought he was following, then the other four victims were a warm-up. If they hadn’t caught him, he
would have kept killing until he’d gone after Suzy.

  ‘What did Suzy do, Jefferson?’

  Yoko’s voice was soft and gentle. It was a voice that said trust me. It was a tone she’d found very effective in the past.

  ‘She told me to meet her at seven-thirty, and she told her real date to pick her up at twenty after seven. So I arrive dressed in a suit. I’ve got the corsage and I’ve hired a limo. Basically I blew all my savings because I wanted to impress her. And there’s Suzy coming out the door arm in arm with Tom Landry, Malo High’s quarterback. Her parents are waving her off and they’re all smiles.

  Winter picked up his Coke and took a sip. He put the can back on the table, turned it around and stared at the logo again. Thirty seconds passed before he next spoke.

  ‘So there’s Tom, and he’s all smiles, too. And why not? The guy looked like Gollum on steroids. Suzy should have been out of his league as well, but he was a football player, so the rules were different. Suzy looked over at me, and the bitch smiled. Then she leant over and whispered something to Tom, and they both started laughing.’

  Another sip of Coke. Another thirty seconds’ silence.

  ‘So I got back in the car and told the driver to drive. He’d obviously seen this before because he didn’t even ask where I wanted to go. He drove me around town until my time was up and then he took me home. I couldn’t face walking into that gym hall on my own. It would have been too humiliating.’

  Winter stopped talking and Yoko resisted the urge to prompt him. Interviewing wasn’t just about asking the right questions, sometimes it was about knowing when to shut up and butt out. The kid had got into a rhythm, and Yoko didn’t want to jolt him out of it.

  ‘The prom was on Friday, so I had the whole weekend to torture myself with how bad Monday was going to be. In the end, it was worse than I imagined. Much worse. It was like everybody was in on the joke, everyone except me.’

  Another long pause. Another sip of Coke.

  ‘I had some interesting times at high school, but this took things to a whole new level. The name calling I could deal with, but the verbal abuse quickly turned physical, and that I wasn’t equipped to handle. I was no match for those football idiots. The only saving grace was that we were almost at the end of the semester, and my mother was planning another move, so I didn’t have to put up with it for long.’

  Winter’s face had hardened, and for the first time Yoko saw something in there that convinced her he was capable of the crimes he’d been charged with. He looked older. It wasn’t a kid on the other side of the table any more: this was a lifer with ten hard years behind him and a couple of even harder decades stretching out in front.

  ‘It sounds like you had a tough time.’

  Winter stared at her as though she’d gone crazy. ‘I don’t need your understanding or pity, Agent Tanaka. I don’t need your empathy, either. What do you think’s going on here? That we’re having a bonding moment? That was a cheap shot, and it was beneath you. I really expected more.’

  For a second she felt chastised. Then she remembered where she was, and who she was talking to. Yes, this was a nineteen-year-old kid, but he was a nineteen-year-old kid who’d brutally murdered four young women. She had nothing to feel guilty about. Not a single goddam thing.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill Suzy and get it over and done with?’ she asked quietly. ‘Is it because you’re a coward and you don’t have the balls?’

  He shook his head and laughed. ‘You are so wrong. And you’re also assuming that I haven’t killed her already.’

  That almost stopped Yoko in her tracks. There was no way he’d done that. It didn’t fit the profile. ‘You haven’t killed her,’ she said without missing a beat. ‘I’d stake my whole career on that.’

  ‘You’d better start looking for a new job, then.’

  Winter grinned and for a moment he looked more like his father than ever. Put aside the differences that come from age and the two of them could have been one person. The thought was enough to make her shiver.

  Chapter 5

  Another long silence settled across the interview room. Yoko killed the time by revisiting that morning’s events.

  After getting the call from Dumas to say that Alice Harrigan’s body had been found, she’d covered the seven miles from Bowie to Greenbelt in a little over ten minutes. She turned into Darnell Avenue, pulled up outside Alice’s apartment, and, for almost a whole minute, she just sat there, smoking and watching and taking it all in.

  The apartment block where Alice had lived was as drab and dilapidated as everything else in Darnell Avenue. Cracked paving slabs leading up to the front door, crumbling plasterwork on the outside of the building, and God only knew when it had last been whitewashed.

  There were three floors, two apartments on each. Each had a small balcony that was walled in with dirty glass panels and rusting metalwork that had once been painted black. Some of the balconies had chairs on them, most had wire racks for drying clothes.

  Alice had lived on the second floor. The clothes rack on her balcony was loaded with clean laundry, brightly coloured clothing that she no longer needed.

  Her body had been discovered twenty minutes earlier and things were still quiet. So far there was only one police cruiser parked outside the apartment, but the sirens were getting closer. The media wouldn’t be far behind. This circus was just getting started.

  A dozen curious neighbours were standing outside their front doors. For now, they were keeping back, but that wouldn’t last long. As news spread, more and more people would turn out, drawn to the scene like flies. Increased numbers meant an increase in confidence. They would push up as close as they could get to Alice’s apartment and the police would push them back.

  Yoko took a last drag on her cigarette then got out of the car. The street had a rundown feel, everything a little frayed around the edges.

  At the same time, this area was a long way from rock bottom. There wasn’t much money, but there was plenty of pride, and that was something no amount of money could buy. She could relate.

  Her parents had arrived in America forty years ago with nothing but a couple of suitcases, their pride, and a two-year-old daughter they were determined to give a better life to. They’d worked hard and eventually saved enough to buy a small grocery store.

  One store became two, and, although they never became rich, they earned enough to put Yoko through college. They never got tired of letting everybody know how proud they were that their daughter worked for the FBI. Yoko pretended to be embarrassed, but deep down she was touched.

  She did feel guilty that the pressures of work meant she didn’t get out to California to see them as often as she’d like, but she believed them when they said it was okay. They understood sacrifice in a way she never would. Compared to them, her life had been one of privilege and opportunity. Not that she’d had it easy. She’d had to fight for every inch of ground.

  Thirty seconds later there was a screech of tyres and a sheriff’s department car fishtailed around the corner. It skidded to an overly dramatic halt, ending up at an awkward angle to the kerb. The light bar was flashing blue and red, stark and threatening in the still morning.

  Dumas jumped out and hurried over. His cheeks were flushed, his breathing heavy, and his eyes sparkled from the excess of adrenaline flooding his system. The journey from Upper Marlboro should have taken half an hour, so he must have broken every speed limit to get here so fast.

  ‘Agent Tanaka.’

  ‘Detective Dumas,’ Yoko replied with a small nod of the head.

  The detective had tried to get her to call him Charlie when they first met, but she wasn’t into the buddy-buddy game. It was good to have boundaries, good to have firmly demarcated lines, particularly when dealing with the locals.

  Dumas led the way and Yoko was happy to follow. She knew this particular dance and had no problem making the appropriate moves.

  The relationship between the FBI and the locals was complic
ated at best, and she had learned early on that the most efficient way to get the job done was through co-operation. Tread warily and do your best to avoid squashing toes.

  She followed Dumas up the stairs and they turned right at the top. Alice’s door was wide open, a cop guarding the entrance. The tiny fresh scratches on the lock might have been made by a key, though Yoko was betting they’d been made by a lock pick.

  All of Valentino’s victims had been white females. Blonde, blue eyed, pretty, early twenties. They’d all been cheerleaders back in high school, but from the lower levels of the pyramid rather than the top. And all of them had dropped out of the education system after high school and gone on to work in retail.

  These were girls of limited ambition, limited intelligence and limited imagination. They were treading water until they could land themselves a husband. For them, the dream was a pretty little cookie-cutter house with a whitewashed picket fence and a couple of kids.

  Yes, some of them might have achieved that particular happy-ever-after, but Yoko knew that, statistically speaking, they’d be looking at a couple of years of bliss followed by the harsh reality of parenthood, followed by affairs, divorce and a flirtation with either booze, prescription meds or both.

  Physically, the victims were so similar they could have been sisters. Not quite close enough to be twins, but close enough to at least be stepsisters. Yoko preferred cases where the patterns were obvious since it made the job easier.

  Too many criminals, not enough hours in the day.

  There was nothing worse than a disorganised offender who killed seemingly at random. Or worse, killed in line with an intricate belief system of their own invention, which amounted to the same thing. Once you had a handle on the fantasy, everything made some sort of sense. Unfortunately, that tended to happen only after the killers were caught.