“That’s what I mean. You’re a lot better at that than I am.”
“Am I? You sure about that?”
She studied him. “What do you mean?”
“Em, sometimes we act in order to impress other people. Other times, we act to preserve our own sanity.” This is new ground, he thought. Was it wrong to show her this side of himself?
“You’re acting?”
“Sometimes.”
“How come?”
“Because there’re two of me inside here, Em. One of me wants to die every day I wake up and realize your mother’s gone. The other sits up in bed and rubs his eyes.”
“Acting?”
“Sometimes, sure. Especially at first. I had to act it out until it felt familiar. You were counting on me, Em. Without that, I might never had made it. I owe my sanity to you. Your reliance on me forced me to be someone I wasn’t.”
“How come you never told me this?”
“You never asked,” he said.
She considered what he had said. Dewitt turned on the radio and found an oldies rock station. Doobie Brothers. Oldies? he thought.
“I’m supposed to act?” she questioned.
“You’re not supposed to do anything. I’m just telling you how it was for me.”
“I’m supposed to act like everything’s okay, is that it?”
“Don’t act for me. I love you as you are, Em. I feel for you. I worry about you. You know that. I’m just telling you how it was for me. It was like I was in a movie and I had to remember my lines. Then one day I woke up, and things weren’t perfect, but they were a lot better. I could handle it.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“Same here.” He said tentatively, “I want you to think about something while you’re away. Just think about it, that’s all.”
“Mom’s ashes,” Emmy said intuitively.
He reached over and they laced fingers and held each other’s hand strongly. She had the hand of a young woman, not a girl, he thought. He didn’t let go until he stretched for the automatic ticket at the airport’s short-term parking nearly an hour later. His hand was sweaty then, and like a child, he thought, I won’t wash it for a week.
She began to cry after check-in. “We are a team,” he said, wrapping an arm around her, his throat tight.
They stopped before Security. Dewitt was wearing his gun; he wouldn’t be allowed past without endless hassle. At that moment, exhausted, sick of the investigation, in grief over Anna, worried about Emmy, that gun at his waist seemed to represent everything bad, everything wrong with his life. His daughter went through the area without incident, looked back at him once and, on the verge of tears, waved.
Dewitt watched her until she was no longer visible, consumed by the teeming hordes of travelers.
He found the men’s room. Locked himself inside a toilet stall, sat down on the seat fully clothed, buried his face in his hands, and wept.
2
Dewitt spent the afternoon organizing a joint task force comprised of three detectives from M.C.S.O. and two investigators from the District Attorney’s office, with himself as its head. Rivalries existed between all law-enforcement agencies, most of them of a personal, incestuous nature: people having worked closely together and later transferred apart, creating an atmosphere of competition, prejudices, and/or envy. When it came to a homicide investigation, however, there was an immediate sense of camaraderie, us against him.
They were gathered around one of the large tables in the lunchroom, Dewitt at its head. They all wore sport coats, button-down shirts, and ties. The two from the District Attorney’s office were younger than the others. Only one of the five had facial hair, and he smoked. Dewitt directed their attention to the photocopy of a map of Seaside. “The two B’s on the map are the only two bike shops that service mountain bikes. One is also a dealer, though we’re assuming this guy stole the bike he uses for his escapes. The H is the only area hardware store that sells the Plexiglas we found on him. All six of us have different lists of clients of Brighton Laundry, motels at the top, and we all have copies of the key found in Lumbrowski. The hardware store and the bike shops aren’t much. I realize that. But they’re a starting point, and that’s all we’re using them as. The places on my list are inside the immediate triangle formed by the shops and the store. Each of you handles a quadrant, working out from that center.
“We try the key first. We don’t talk to management; we don’t announce ourselves. If the keys fits, we have enough probable cause to secure the area until a search warrant can be obtained and a search conducted. You don’t go inside that room, understood?” he asked rhetorically.
“For the time being, we’re referring to the suspect as Trapper John. That’s how it’ll be over the radio if you get a suspect. The face I’ve given you is a photocopy of an Identi-Kit face I put together. This may or may not be Trapper John, but anyone resembling this man should be detained for questioning. We estimate he’s between one-fifty and one-sixty, just shy of six feet tall. He may or may not own a red-haired dog with collie or shepherd markings. Trapper John is to be considered dangerous, and although the experts tell me he’s not likely to carry conventional weapons, treat him as if he does. One thing we do know about this man: He’s incredibly cunning. More than likely, he trapped at least two of his victims, possibly all three. We don’t know exactly what that means at this point, or how he might have accomplished this. So keep your eyes open. Any questions?”
The briefing continued for twenty more minutes, until just after the red winter sun extinguished itself in the ocean. Some days, Dewitt almost expected to see steam rising as it did so.
Clarence caught up to Dewitt just as he was leaving. “About Anna,” he said, his eyes glassing up. He shook his head. Dewitt placed a hand on his shoulder.
“You want to help our cause,” Dewitt said. “Keep riding Shilstein at Atascadero. We want Collette going over those files—those photographs—until he has something. Nelson has my notes. He’s going over the same files, looking for background information that matches. You might also check why Ramirez hasn’t gotten back to us on that roll of masking tape found in Lumbrowski’s Mustang. He’s supposed to be running a print through ALPS for Rick Morn.” Dewitt heard the tension in his own voice. He never spoke quickly, but he had just talked a blue streak.
Hindeman asked, “Are you all right?”
“No,” answered James Dewitt. He forced a confused grin and hurried down the hall.
Dewitt knew from his reading that when an FBI profile identified a specific search area—typically defined by the location of the bodies—it was best to start dead center and work your way out in a logical fashion. In this case, the targets were determined by the customer lists of the only local laundry that used the commercial bleach found on some cotton pills. Although it couldn’t be considered hard evidence, it was all they had. No reason not to conduct the search in an organized and logical manner. Dewitt divided his mile-square territory into four separate grids. He had six motels to check, a massage parlor, and four restaurants.
The first two motels on his list failed to help: One, the Star-Lite, had only ten rooms; at the second, the Best-Vu, his key didn’t fit. The third motel Dewitt parked near interested him immediately, for it not only fit the seamy description Priscilla Laughton had given John Osbourne’s lifestyle but piles of dog excrement dotted the landscape.
Dewitt monitored the radio channel the task force was using as each of the five others regularly checked in with Ginny, announcing their locations, their departures from and their return to their automobiles. Ginny, along with Commander Karl Capp, mapped the progress, tracking the movement of each, using colored pushpins to indicate an investigator’s status. Dewitt knew, as he now called in his arrival at the Just Rest’Inn, that a yellow pin would be placed at his location. When he checked back in, the pin would be switched to green.
He walked across the dirt parking lot, the night air cold, and could picture that this m
ight be a place where Marvin Wood would rip off a car stereo; dark, isolated, foreboding. He could also picture a killer lurking in the abandoned adjacent car wash, sipping on some cheap wine, awaiting another victim, his eyes possibly trained on him at this very moment. Dewitt felt the muscles in his upper back stiffen with the thought. Darkness did this to him in general; James Dewitt was not a friend to darkness as some people were. He preferred open spaces and the company of sunlight—the bluffs of Point Lobos. Darkness stimulated his imagination. As it did so now, he could picture a man waiting, stalking, killing, and stealing the body from one of the rooms. Perhaps that helped to explain his trembling hand as he withdrew the key from his pocket, slipped it into the lock of the door to Room 12, and found it not only fit but it turned.
He knocked. No response.
Dewitt was well aware of the rules: This was where he returned to his vehicle and called in the troops. This was when he started the gears in motion to have a search warrant walked through and signed by a judge. Yet Dewitt could not turn away from the door. Inside this room might be the solution to the murders that had baffled and frustrated him for so many days now. His brain told him to back off and play it by the book. But something more powerful pushed him forward. He pulled out his weapon, twisted the knob, and stepped into the room.
He pushed the door gently shut. His penlight scattered ovals of light around the narrow walls, over the small bed. The room was tiny, its cinder-block walls painted a dull colorless wash. With no one inside, Dewitt returned the gun to its holster and snapped some surgical gloves onto his hands to avoid leaving his own prints. He elected not to switch on the lights, not to announce his presence in this way. He moved to the room’s only window, a small horizontally mounted window at shoulder height. He was about to pull the brief curtains when headlights from the street caught the surface, illuminating four long yellow lines that were immediately apparent as scratch marks. It was then he realized the window was fixed and not glass, but Plexiglas. Synthetic resin: the same substance found beneath the nails of Malcolm McDuff. Suddenly the modus operandi became vivid in his mind. The victims were not stalked, abducted, and killed; they were gassed in a motel room. This motel room: a death chamber. A tiny room, would require precious little time to fill with gas and asphyxiate the inhabitant. They had been gassed in their sleep, the cotton pills of the bedding clinging to their skin. McDuff must have awakened and clawed desperately at the window before the fumes overcame him. The killer then dressed his victims, packed their bags, and moved their bodies. Trapper John indeed.
Dewitt’s forensic mind began to plot this possibility immediately as he moved from location to location: the vent above the bed, the bedding itself. It’s possible, he thought, stepping into the tiny bathroom and casting his light about. No window. Another vent grate.
What he had not looked at carefully was the trim surrounding the motel room door, the trim that carried a single pair of bell wires leading to a small magnetic switch above the topmost hinge. This, had he spotted it, would have told him much more than the evidence he now sought.
***
The man who thought of himself as Trapper John rested peacefully in front of a “M*A*S*H” rerun, his favorite, laughing when the television laughed, still experiencing the resonant glow from his accomplishment at the hospital. Despite all the fuckups, the changes in plans, he was only one kill from the end. Satisfaction seeped down his throat in the form of a beer. He petted the dog, who rested his head on his thigh. The Valium warmed his brain. Life was good.
When the buzzer sounded, announcing Dewitt’s entry into Room 12, Trapper John sat up in alarm. The buzzer was intended to monitor a potential victim’s movement in and out of the room; he had only left it armed because he had been unable to find the key he had given Lumbrowski—and though he knew Lumbrowski didn’t have it, from having searched him carefully, he was taking no chances. He jumped up from the bed in the small room off the motel office, reached into the closet, and threw the switch he had wired there. The wires from this switch ran in the crawl space for the distance of the motel: four dollars from Radio Shack. They tripped an electronic “night latch” that, when reversed as Trapper had reversed it, made the inside door knob useless, effectively sealing the inhabitant inside the room.
He kept the stun stick hidden inside the sleeve of a jacket he had hanging in the closet. He had ordered it mail order from the want ads in the back of Armed and Dangerous, his only magazine subscription. One hundred and fifty-six bucks. No tax because it came from Texas. There was sweet irony in using the same device the guards had used on him—and he knew damned well its effectiveness. Set to its maximum, it would knock a person unconscious for at least fifteen minutes, giving the exhaust plenty of time to hold the victim there. All in all, it was a perfect system, designed for the economy-minded killer. He took the stun stick in hand and hurried out the back door.
***
The sudden change of light caught Dewitt’s attention. He hadn’t heard a thing; he blamed that on his pounding blood. Something behind him! He spun around quickly, fear pumping adrenaline into him, arms swinging out at the dark. Light flashed briefly across a hairy face. The man lunged at him. Dewitt raised his hand to block the blow, knocking the arm aside. Another lunge, straight forward. Dewitt feared a knife, but as he blocked the attempt, it felt more like a nightstick. The next attempt caught him in the hand. The shock, so sudden, so severe, paralyzed him. He fell to the floor. Electrocution! None of his muscles obeyed him, limp and lifeless. Helpless.
That stick came at him again. A gooey blue substance seeped in from behind his ears, unconsciousness flirting with him. The last thing he saw was the back of a man’s shoes as he hurried in retreat.
***
As he came awake, there was a bitter taste in his throat, though not really an odor. Exhaust. His right hand and arm were numb from the electrical shock. A blinding headache pounded from behind his eyes. He rubbed his right hand. It was hot. Perhaps the latex glove had provided a thin layer of insulation from the enormous power of the stun stick, reducing the delivered voltage and sparing Dewitt the normal period of unconsciousness. One thing he understood perfectly well: The man had fried his victims with a stun stick—something Emmanuel had missed—and was now waiting for the piped-in exhaust to kill him. A death chamber indeed.
Instinctively, Dewitt checked for his gun. Gone. His pants pockets had been emptied as well, but the man had missed the pockets to his sport coat. He still had his few tools and his penlight.
As he attempted to move, the headache slammed into his forehead. Carbon monoxide poisoning. He knew the symptoms: He would become drowsy next, heavy-limbed; his heart and lungs, starved for oxygen, would begin to work harder, which in turn would only hasten his suffocation, increase his light-headedness. Reaching the door, he fell to one knee, a sailor on land for the first time in months. A kind of giddy, euphoric drunkenness overtook him, almost dreamlike. He was tired—his body begged him for sleep; the nearby bed called out to him. He knew that asphyxiation, like drowning, produced euphoria—a blissful gliding toward death and, as he stumbled again, he knew if he did not escape quickly, if he did not find air, he would die here. He hurried to the door. Locked: The Plexiglas window was fixed and unbreakable. Piece by piece, the solution to the puzzle fell into place—only now he was trapped by the solution: No way out. Was this the same panic McDuff had felt?
He tried to suck air from the small gap at the bottom of the door, but it was sealed tightly and he feared he was simply recycling room exhaust, his lungs tightening. How long until he was checked on?
Think! How to find fresh air if the door is locked from the outside and the window can’t be broken?
Back into the small bathroom, the filtered exhaust pouring through the overhead grate. He steadied himself at the sink, ran the water, and splashed cold water onto his face. If only he were a fish, he could suck the oxygen right out of the water.
Then it occurred to him.
H
e dropped to his knees, groping for the sink’s drainpipe. He pulled on it, shook it, but it remained fast. He had done enough home repair to know that the purpose of a sink trap is not to catch a lost earring but to provide a water block from the horrible smell of the sewer. Overhead stacks vented the sewer pipe in order to prevent a vacuum effect and to allow the waste water to drain. On the other side of the sink trap, there was air.
Every effort he made only served to further tire him, to increase his headache, to choke his lungs and squeeze his heart. He braced himself against the toilet and kicked out at the pipe. It moved. He kicked it again, and again. The linkage of pipe began to bend away from him. He kicked harder. That blue gel worked him down like the fists of a determined boxer. The pipe bent toward the floor. He twisted and wrestled with it until the trap broke off completely. Dewitt wrapped his lips around it and inhaled as deeply as he could. It was foul, putrid air, but never a sweeter sensation to his lungs. The welcome influx of oxygen charged his system and he felt the flush of stability.
The problem quickly went from his lungs to his stomach. He backed off and vomited, only to glue his lips back there and drink in the precious oxygen despite the stench. His stomach turned again. He glued his mouth to the plumbing like an opium smoker to the end of his pipe.
With his murky head calming, he began to contemplate his escape. The man had sneaked up on him. There was no way he had entered by the front door; Dewitt would have heard it. There had to be another entrance to the room, a clandestine means of retrieving the bodies without the risk of being seen.
The ceiling seemed impractical. More likely, a trapdoor beneath the carpet. James hyperventilated the grotesque air, charging his system with oxygen, and checked the corners of the carpet, attempting to tug it from the floor. Firmly fixed. He returned to the pipe for more air and then headed back out into the room again, pulling on carpet corners. Nothing.
If not a trapdoor, then what, a hidden panel? He ferried back and forth to the pipe repeatedly, building his lungs back up, then returning to the room and conducting a thorough panel-by-panel inspection of the walls.
Probable Cause Page 20