by Leslie Wolfe
“We need a whiteboard here, right here,” she pointed at a spot on the conference room wall. “We need it now. Tell them if they don’t have it up in an hour, we’ll use the wall instead, and they’ll have to repaint.”
“Tell whom?” Michowsky asked quietly, ostensibly amused.
“Whoever does these things for you, the facilities people.”
Michowsky shot Fradella a quick glance. Fradella sighed, resigned. He wiped his greasy fingers on a paper towel, then ran them against the back side of his jeans, just in case. He grabbed his car keys from a drawer.
“Be right back,” he said, disappearing into the stairwell.
“Get a big one,” Tess shouted across the squad room, making several people shoot her disapproving looks.
Michowsky took Fradella’s place next to the printer.
“How are we doing with this? How many have we got?”
“We have all three case files. We’re halfway through printing the second one. By the time Fradella’s back, we should be ready.”
She leaned against Fradella’s desk and grabbed the last slice of pizza, now cold.
“I still feel we’re missing something,” she said. “Do we have the last 24 hours prior to Sonya’s abduction fully mapped? Do we know everything she did, all the people she talked to, every credit card transaction, every minute?”
“N—no, not yet. We started on it and we have some of the data, but not all. We’re waiting on phone records and social media passwords.”
“Still?”
“Yeah. Paperwork took forever.”
She chewed silently for a while, thinking about the filters she’d put in her DIVS search. She only went back two years. But this level of murderous skill, precision, and self-confidence one doesn’t build in two years and three victims. It takes longer, no matter how deviant, how angry and motivated the killer was. How many victims did she miss?
Four was enough to establish victimology. Or so she hoped. It would have been easy to redo the search and open up the time frame. Maybe she’d find fifteen victims instead of four. Yet studying fifteen case files would have taken them significantly more time than just four. What if he was getting ready to kill again? What if some poor girl hung in those horrendous harnesses right now, screaming in unspeakable pain, wishing she were already dead? No. She needed to maintain her focus, and study the four victims they already knew about. Only until they found the killer. After catching him, connecting him to any other of his earlier victims would be easier, without the potential risk of jeopardizing more lives. They’d have time after they found him. Now they didn’t.
“So, when are you calling in your team?” Michowsky asked. He wiped his mouth with a napkin, then finished his soda and crushed the can before sending it to the recycle bin with a precision shot, 10 feet through the air.
“I’m it. There is no team. I’m all you’re going to get.”
“I see,” he said, frowning. “Well, you got us this far, right?”
Tess searched his face with scrutinizing eyes. She didn’t see much confidence written in his facial expression; just a little maybe, and some acceptance. He seemed drained somehow, his features almost fallen, inert.
“What’s up with you?” she asked. “You seem down.”
He remained quiet and turned his head to the side, watching the printer’s rhythmical motions for a few seconds.
“Come on, it can’t be all because I don’t call 20 more feds right now, can it?”
He scoffed bitterly.
“No, it’s not that. It’s me.”
She waited patiently for him to continue, when he was ready.
“It’s my goddamn back. I threw it out a couple of days ago, at the gym. I’ve been popping pills like breath mints since. And I missed it.”
“Missed what?”
“The kids, at the dump site. That was on me and only me. A fuckup like that can throw a case sideways. You had to come in and clean up my mess. I’m glad you did, by the way, but it doesn’t make it any easier.”
“We all screw up, Michowsky. When I screw up, I’m on a roll, one after another, like beads on a string.”
He chuckled lightly, still staring at the carpet. “Fradella doesn’t even know. About my back.”
She looked at him intently, then smiled.
“But, of course, he doesn’t, right? He’s so young, and strong, and perfect.” She took two steps toward him, and he looked at her, a little irritated.
“News flash, Michowsky. You’re not old, and you’re not dead either. You’re just…” she hesitated, not sure how to put it. “Middle aged. You’re approaching midlife crisis. So go wreck a Ferrari and come back all fine.”
He scoffed again, this time visibly amused.
“No Ferrari, huh? Then let’s just catch this son of a bitch, and take some pride in that. Not much else you can do on a cop’s salary.”
A chime, and Fradella got off the elevator carrying a large whiteboard.
“I’ll get someone to stick some nails in the wall,” he said.
“No time for that,” Tess replied. “Here, let’s just lean it against the wall, on these chairs. That will do it for now.”
They put the whiteboard in position and started working. At the bottom of the board, Tess drew a timeline going back two years. She marked the dates when the girls were abducted, killed, and found. Then she added any kind of incident they found in their files, with even a remote chance of being related to the case. For Sonya, she marked the day she’d been at the club with her girlfriends, the day she’d met the so-called creep she later dumped in the parking lot. Tess wondered what the creep had done to earn his moniker. What could he have done, in the few minutes it took them to exit the club and reach the parking lot, to make Sonya send him on his way? Was he creepy, but otherwise okay, as in, he was sent away and got lost, end of story? Or was he the kind of creep who gets even? The kind who stalks the prey who rejected him, and when the time is right, he abducts her?
“Detective Fradella,” she said, “you go to clubs, right?”
“Um, sometimes, yes.”
“Play this scene out with me, will you? So you pick me up at the club. We dance and make out on the floor. It’s great, so great that I decide to let you take me home. We walk out of the club, hand in hand, after we say goodbye to my friends. Then what do we do?”
Fradella smiled, a little uneasy.
“Um, we continue to make out on the way to the car. If you’re into me, I’m not going to let you cool off. We kiss and—”
“We kiss, precisely,” Tess announced, triumphantly. Then she circled a date two weeks prior to her abduction, a date only eight days after the day she went clubbing with her friends. It was the approximate date Doc Rizza had estimated Sonya’s lower lip bite had happened.
“See? That’s what made him a creep. He bit her. A smart girl, she walked away. This creep is a definite lead. We can’t ignore him.”
“That could work, yes,” Michowsky said, “but the dates don’t work. I don’t think Doc Rizza could be off by more than a week on stuff like that.”
She pursed her lips, frustrated. It would make more sense if the dates aligned. But they didn’t.
“We need to go back and talk to the girlfriends. They have to remember something about the creep.”
She shuffled the case file papers from North Miami Missing Persons, where Detective Garcia had documented his interviews and had discarded the creep lead as irrelevant and unrelated. Unfortunately, little else was in the case notes; nothing she could use.
“Okay, let’s finish this,” she said, pointing at the whiteboard.
Above the timeline, they placed each girl’s picture, at the top of the board. Then they pasted a few crime scene photos for each victim, then listed key elements of each case. When finally done, they stepped back and looked at their work.
“I like to work serial killer victimology in a matrixed format,” Tess announced, then clarified, seeing how puzzled they looked.
“I just build a table and put in there all the commonalities we can find.”
She drew a table under the photos and above the timeline and started writing their names, aligning the names with the photos above. She added one more column, and titled it, “?”
“I thought you call them unsubs,” Michowsky said. “And what’s he doing in the victims’ table?”
“I can call him the unsub if you prefer,” she replied, correcting the table header. “This is a commonalities matrix. We identify what the victims have in common, then we add what little we know about the unsub, and maybe we can establish where their circles intersected. As we uncover suspects, we could add them to the matrix, and see who’s a better match. Clear?”
“Crystal,” Fradella replied, tilting his head with a smile of appreciation.
“The first to be found, almost two years ago, was May Lin, Chinese-American from Chicago, 17 years and 10 months old. She was found north of Kenosha, on the east-facing beach of Lake Michigan. Her father, Hiro ‘Hank’ Lin, is a real estate developer, major bucks.” She added a line to the table, and on the first column she wrote, “$$$.” Then she put a checkmark under May’s name, on the dollar’s column. “This is one of the things these victims have in common. They’re from rich families. But we also know, per Doc Rizza’s impeccable logic, that the unsub is pretty well off himself.” She added a checkmark on the unsub’s column, on the dollar’s line. “The unsub held her for only a day and a half, and what else are we noticing?”
“She wasn’t dumped naked,” Michowsky said. “The local cops thought someone had covered the body when they found it, but they couldn’t establish that. She was covered with a…” he checked his notes, “common, hotel-grade bed sheet. No trace fibers, no wear and tear, nothing. He probably bought it new and unsealed it at the dump site, wearing gloves.”
“Yeah, exactly. You know that means remorse, right?” Tess asked. “In theory, at least. Psychopaths don’t feel guilt or remorse.”
“So is it possible she was his first victim then?” Fradella asked.
Tess shuffled though the case printouts.
“No hesitation marks on the lethal blow or on the other cuts found on her body. We can’t assume she was his first victim. No, let’s consider this unverifiable for now. All right, victim number two, found 10 months ago. Shanequa Powell, 21, an African-American from Atlanta. She was found, yes, you guessed it, on a stretch of east-facing beach of Lake Lanier, northeast of Atlanta. She’d been gone almost four days when they found her. She majored in economics. Adoptive mother is the Carolyn O’Sullivan, bestselling romance novelist. Of course, loaded,” Tess added, and checked the dollar’s box, “and college grad.” She checked the respective box, then took a sip of water from a bottle.
She looked at the table for a minute, wondering what else the victims had in common. The geographical dispersion of the abduction and dump sites limited any common places or events the victims might have frequented. It’s relatively easy, when victims are from the same area, to establish where the unsub might have first set eyes on them. A church they all go to, a gym, or a massage parlor. Maybe a grocery store, or a car shop. In their case, however, geography was their enemy. One victim per state, and at the age where they don’t travel, don’t do much other than school, local friends, and social media. Could this predator have been an online stalker before grabbing them? Definitely a theory worth looking into. She scribbled a note at the side of the board, and circled it. It read, “check the online angle.”
“What’s that?” Michowsky asked. “You forgot us again, you’re working alone. We’re not spectators, you know.”
“Oh, come on, seriously? I was doing you a favor, writing down all this stuff. Jeez…” Amazing how men bristle out of anything. Everything is threatening their egos. She shrugged it off and continued. “I was thinking he could have stalked them online, that’s all. With this spread-out geography. And no, you’re not a spectator, so you do the next one, all right?” She handed the marker to Michowsky, who scoffed as he took it.
“We have Emma Taylor, 19, Caucasian. She was from Summerville, South Carolina, the daughter of Jerry Taylor, a dentist. Mother deceased. She was found on Johns Island, facing east. She was kept for five days. What else… yeah, she’d just finished pre-med,” he added, checking the college box. “Do we consider her for the dollars line? A dentist is not really that loaded.”
“They’re well off, so, yes, I’d say check the box,” Tess replied. “I see a new pattern. These girls are very smart, disciplined, hard-working overachievers. Look at their age, and they graduated from college already? Pretty darn amazing.”
She took the marker from Michowsky’s hand and added another line, labeled, “Overachiever.”
She checked the boxes for Shanequa and Emma, but added a question mark for May. They didn’t know that about her yet. May’s case file was particularly thin, skimpy.
“Finally, we have Sonya,” she added, writing her information in the table. “Caucasian, 22 years old, graduated from Florida State with a marketing and communications degree. Her father is a restaurant owner, so, yeah, bucks. Maybe not megabucks, like with Mr. Lin or Carolyn O’Sullivan, but definitely affluent.”
She stood upright and stretched her back, sore from bending forward to write on the board.
“That makes it easy,” Fradella said, “the way you do it. Commonalities are really clear.”
“Let’s look at discrepancies. The first victim is definitely different. Younger, only kept a day and a half, body dumped covered, not naked,” Tess listed, counting on her fingers.
“So what makes May Lin this unsub’s victim after all?” Michowsky said. “I don’t see it. Is it just the beach factor?”
“The beach factor allowed us to find her in the database,” Tess replied. “The beach as the secondary crime scene of choice doesn’t make her this unsub’s victim. Her autopsy report does; what was done to her. That’s why we need to see Doc Rizza again. My guess is this table of commonalities will soon add a few lines.”
Chapter Fifteen
Evidence
Doc Rizza read the medicolegal examination reports quietly, methodically, taking notes at times. He didn’t say a word until he finished all three, and even then he only spoke briefly, advising them he was going to reread his own findings on Sonya, to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything.
Tess stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, waiting impatiently for the ME to finish. She wanted to rush out there and interview Sonya’s friends, to see if her gut was right about the creep. She recalled being told on several occasions, by SAC Pearson and by another supervisor before him, that she tended to rush into doing things without giving them enough thought. That she favored action over collaboration, and that she many times left her team behind, frustrated, eating her dust. Was that a bad thing, though? They’d told her yes, it was a bad thing, and it needed to stop. It destroyed team cohesion, and was more than likely going to lead to errors, to costly mistakes made during the course of lengthier investigations. Yet her case record was perfect. It might have annoyed others, but for her, the method worked just fine.
On the other hand, her on-and-off therapist, Dr. Navarro, had told her she needed to rush into action, because she couldn’t bear to stand still and let unchecked memories and feelings invade her mind. Standing there, in the middle of the chilly morgue, and staring into the crime scenes photos scattered on Doc Rizza’s table, she fought a wave of loaded memories—memories she wanted deeply buried, never to come out again. It was hard not to let her mind wander in that direction. It was impossible not to identify herself with all those girls. Mostly she hated the thought that she’d always have such memories, such scars to bear and hide. Time could only bring limited relief, and, in her case, time had stood still for years. Time could be a son of a bitch when it wanted to. It could break your heart when you realized you’ve forgotten how a loved one looked or how they talked, only so soon after they’d left t
his earth. Or it could decide to forever torture you, not letting you forget the most agonizing moments of your life, condemning you to relive them over and over again, in sleep or in waking. Leaving you a deranged bundle of taut nerves, unable to enjoy life or to accept love, dreading and yearning for people’s company at the same time. Slowly, irreversibly turning you into a freak.
“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Doc Rizza broke the silence. He took off his thin-rimmed glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m not 100 percent convinced it’s the same man, but there are similarities.”
“Do you think—” Michowsky started, but Tess interrupted him.
“What do you see?” she asked. It was better to ask open-ended questions. People tend to be more objective and direct that way.
“They were all drugged, that’s true. But that’s where the similarities stop. May Lin, the first victim, was chemically subdued. She was given some Rohypnol, orally, most likely in a drink. Sadly, this is quite common these days. She was immobilized with some fabric ties, leaving her with friction burns, much different from Sonya’s. The lab identified some fibers in May’s case. Silk, cotton, polyester, all very common, a few tiny fibers caught in her abrasions. She was raped several times, and no DNA was retrieved. She was killed with a stab wound to the side of her neck. That fits, but nothing else does.”
He talked slowly, and normally that drove Tess up the wall, but he was very organized, structuring information really well, and that saved lots of time. She refrained from interrupting him again.
“Victim number two, Shanequa,” he continued, “was given codeine, also orally. No injection marks on her either. Her wrists and ankles were bound with cable ties and presented deep lacerations from the sharp edges of the ties. Shanequa was beaten badly, including her face. This element doesn’t fit the profile. She was also raped several times, including penetration with objects, and some form of electrocution. Doesn’t fit. There were contact burns on her thighs. Shanequa was strangled to death, which, again, doesn’t fit.”