The Informant

by James Grippando

  He sat back in his chair, arms folded. “Have you ever been married?”

  “No. And I’m not against it. That’s not where I’m coming from. I just haven’t met the right guy.”

  “Well, I have met the right woman. You know, when Karen and I got married, she said that the only way two people can be totally open with each other is if they’re lovers or strangers. It’s been rough lately—most of it my fault, I guess—but if we lose trust, the best we’ll ever have is that no-man’s land in between.” He leaned forward, emphasizing his resolve. “I’m going to tell her the truth.”

  She sat back, looked at him, seemed to be making up her mind. “Okay, you tell her, but make damn sure she realizes everything we have on the line here.”

  Mike smiled, satisfied with the small victory.

  She checked her watch. “Anyway, looks like I’ve got a plane to catch in forty minutes. So what do you say we get down to business?”

  He nodded in agreement, pushing his paper plate aside. “He wants a hundred thousand by Friday. Same account.”

  Her eyes widened. “Already he’s doubling the demand? I’ll have to speak to my unit chief, but with the kind of information you’re getting, it should be approved. Just so you know: He’s verifying the deposits with an ATM card, and he’s withdrawing some funds at the same time. Six hundred bucks so far, the daily maximum.”

  “Pretty clever.”

  “Yeah. We can’t post guards or mark the bills at every machine in the country. But ATMs do have cameras, and every transaction creates a record of exactly where he’s been. He wore a ski mask to protect his identity, but some of these machines aren’t all that fast, so it’s a big risk for six hundred bucks a pop. My guess is, he’s desperate for cash right now. But once the nest egg builds up to something really substantial, he’ll want to make one big withdrawal, one quick transaction. When he does, we’ll be all over him quicker than you can say insufficient funds.”

  “When do I get the money?”

  “Probably Thursday. Don’t deposit it until Friday, his deadline.”

  Mike shook his head, sighing. “Funny. I got into this hoping he was the killer. The thought of him possibly getting his hands on all this money makes me not so sure.”

  “Well, whoever he is, I don’t think he’s totally in it for the money. He’s having some fun with us. Danced a jig in front of the camera outside the ATM machine in San Francisco, dressed like a bum.”

  She checked her watch. “Damn, I gotta get going.” She gathered up her trash, then stopped. “Oh, one other thing. I know we agreed you’d have complete editorial license to print whatever you wanted, but please think before you print. You did some serious damage to our investigation by printing the details of how the tongues are extracted. That was the modus operandi. Now that you’ve made it public, it’ll be harder to rule out copycats.”

  “So it was smart of him to reveal those details to me.”

  “Yeah, assuming he’s the killer.”

  “Don’t you think he is?”

  She paused, thinking about the memo she’d written to Assistant Director Dougherty. “Let’s just say there’s disagreement within the FBI on that point. That’s why we’d like you to get him talking less about the killing and more about the killer. We already know what this maniac does to his victims. We want to know why.”

  “He’s nuts, that’s why.”

  Her expression turned very serious. “No. I think he’s evil, sadistic and knows exactly what he’s doing. It makes a difference.”

  They rose together, and he held the door open. “Not to Timothy Copeland, it didn’t. Made no difference at all.”

  She dug her car keys from her purse. “But it did to his roommate.”

  He nodded, seeing her point. “If the roommate does happen to know anything, you know my number.”

  She opened her car door, then turned back to him with tongue firmly in cheek. “That’s what the FBI’s here for—to make sure reporters get good material for their stories.”

  “Nice to know you have your priorities straight,” he replied.

  “Later,” she called out through the window, then drove off.

  Chapter 13

  thirty minutes before sunrise Victoria parallel-parked her car at the curb outside Timothy Copeland’s town house near Telegraph Hill, a pricey residential area of narrow alleys and small frame houses perched on San Francisco’s alpine inclines. His was a Victorian-style flat, two story and brightly painted with a gabled roof. A tall Italian cypress evergreen shot up like a needle from a big pot on the front porch. Yellow police tape still covered the red front door.

  Victoria had been over the crime scene several times in the past two days, but never at 5:30 A.M. As best they could tell, that was the time of Copeland’s murder.

  As a matter of practice, she made it a point to visit murder scenes at the same time of day the killer might have been there. Just knowing how cold it got at that particular hour could give her an idea of the clothing he’d worn, or help her figure out whether he’d hidden in the bushes or inside his car before making his approach. The comings and goings around the neighborhood might offer a lead on a possible witness. Most important, she could see everything just as the killer had seen it, and maybe understand why the victim hadn’t seen him coming.

  The quiet street was wet and dimly lit, and the dampness made for a bone-chilling night. She pulled her brown leather jacket tight to keep off the cold as the car door slammed with an empty thud. She stopped and listened. Urban quiet. To Victoria, there was nothing more eerie than busy city streets turned dark and deathly still.

  From the sidewalk Victoria looked north and south, casing the neighborhood. Parked cars lined both sides of the street, but traffic was nonexistent. On the corner atop the hill she could see prosciutto hanging in the window of a small Italian grocery store, but it was dark inside and obviously closed. An old redbrick warehouse across the way looked as though it had recently been remodeled into expensive lofts and efficiencies. Only two apartments appeared lit in the whole building. She made a mental note of the night owls or early birds, whichever the case might be. Copeland’s side of the street was lined with refurbished apartments, all very similar to his. Some had single-car garages, but they were all too close to the street to have a driveway. Narrow alleys ran between the buildings, just wide enough for garbage cans. Low-powered streetlamps lit each of the alleys, except for one—the one directly across the street. Curious, Victoria took a flashlight from her car and crossed over.

  It was uphill to the other side, and the sidewalk put her at eye level with the top of Copeland’s doorframe. She glanced at the streetlamp overhead, but it was impossible to tell whether it had been tampered with or had simply burned out. She shined the flashlight down the dark alley. Trash cans lined either side, but the thing she noticed most was the continuing incline as the alley grew deeper. She glanced back at Copeland’s town house, then stepped slowly into the alley, walking uphill.

  The alley grew darker with each click of her heel, but the beam from her flashlight pointed the way. A small stream of water trickled in the gutter at her feet, racing toward the street. Gravity grabbed her as the grade grew steeper. She passed a cluster of trash cans, then stopped and turned around. It was like looking out of a tunnel—a telescope was more like it—right at eye level with Copeland’s second story. She could see directly into the upstairs bedroom in which he’d perished.

  With the flashlight she searched the ground around her. The cracked cement was wet, but she noticed several black dots that hadn’t quite washed away. She got on one knee for a closer look. It was hard to tell, but it looked as if someone had crushed out a few cigarettes. A few swipes of the flashlight confirmed her guess. A soggy cigarette butt lay in the gutter, next to the trash can. Someone had been standing there having a smoke. Jeffrey Dahmer was a chain-smoker, she suddenly recalled. She rose slowly and gazed back at Copeland’s bedroom.

  He’d watched from right h
ere, she realized. The killer had stalked him.

  In a split second she shot from the alley and was jogging back across the street. She wanted to turn the bedroom lights on, then return to the alley to see what the killer might have seen. She tossed the flashlight into her car, then retrieved the house key and went inside.

  The door closed behind her with a hollow echo. Strange, she thought, the way the ear always knew when there was no one home. She switched on the brass chandelier in the foyer, then headed upstairs on the Oriental runner. She moved quickly at first, then slower, until she stopped completely at the top of the stairs. The pictures on the wall made her feel like an intruder—stark reminders that this had been a home before it was a crime scene.

  From the amount of carnage, she figured the police had arrived expecting to find two gay men with a plentiful supply of whips and chains on the premises. Copeland and his partner had been effectively married for the past nine years, though. Neither was the type to have met a sadistic killer in a pickup joint. Seeing the two of them together in the photograph suddenly reminded her of what Mike Posten had said about lovers and strangers—that they were the only people who could be truly open. He’d forgotten about victims. Murder victims, in particular, were the most completely open of all. The books they read, their favorite snack, the thickness of their pubic hair—all of it became a matter of public record for the world to behold.

  She often felt guilty about that, as if the only people who deserved to know her own secrets were the victims she knew so well.

  She continued toward the bedroom, then froze in the open doorway. She was looking through the dark bedroom, directly out the window. With the lights off she could see outside. She had a clear view of the parked cars on the street, the sidewalk, the apartments on the other side. The alley, however, was pitch-black. Anyone could have hidden there, and Copeland would never have known it.

  She was about to switch on the bedroom light, then stopped. With narrowed eyes she stared out the window. She could have sworn that in the alley’s dark recesses lurked a tiny, glowing orange dot. She inched closer to the window, leaving the bedroom lights off. Halfway across the room she stopped and took another hard look. Ever so slightly, the orange dot had seemed to move—but it was definitely still there, deep in the alley across the street.

  Someone, she realized, was standing there smoking.

  Her heart raced. She knew from countless other profiles created back at Quantico that, when it came to serial killers, the old stereotype was often true: They did return to the scene of the crime. They’d even been known to “help” with the manhunt, so curious were they about the progress of the case. She pulled her gun from the holster and raced downstairs. If she could get down in time, she might trap him in the alley.

  At full speed she rushed out the door, down the front steps and across the street. She took cover behind a car parked in the front of the alley and aimed her pistol across the hood.

  “FBI!” she shouted. “Come out with your hands up!”

  She waited a moment, squinting as she searched for the orange dot. It was gone.

  “FBI!” she shouted, then listened. She heard nothing at first, but then came a slamming noise from somewhere in back. She suddenly realized it wasn’t a blind alley with only one way out—it must have had a rear exit. She jumped out from behind the car but stopped at the edge of darkness. She knew better than to run headlong into a dark alley, alone with no backup. She sprinted up the sidewalk a half-block to the next alley, which was lighted.

  “Shit!” In the light, she could see plainly that the alley ran clear through.

  She did the hundred-yard dash uphill, all the way through to the narrow street that ran along the back of the buildings. Her pace quickened as she rounded the corner and headed back up the block to the dark alley. She stopped twenty feet away from the back entrance. The wooden gate was wide open—the slamming noise, she realized, had been the sound of the orange dot getting away.

  “Damn.” She was breathing heavy from the all-out sprint. She looked one way, then the other, but the street was empty. With her gun drawn she stared into the blackness. The thought of being so close brought a tinge of fear, but she didn’t let it show.

  If he could somehow still see her, she wanted him to know: She was the one who’d crush him like his cigarette.

  Chapter 14

  on Wednesday morning Victoria and the field coordinator from the FBI’s San Francisco office computer-interfaced via ISDN circuit with their videotape analyst in Washington, D.C. The security camera at the bank’s automatic teller machine had recorded the informant’s transaction last Friday afternoon, and Victoria had sent the tape back for analysis at the FBI laboratory’s Video Support Unit on the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

  Special Agent Brent Schullman looked fiftyish with yellow-gray hair and a dogged expression that had probably served him well in his early years in the military police. He had the huge calloused hands of a man who liked to fix cars or work in the yard, which didn’t seem to mesh with his designer suit and gold cufflinks. Victoria figured his wife must do his shopping, and the way he cleaned his eyeglasses with his silk Armani necktie seemed to confirm her suspicion.

  The two agents sat beside each other facing the keyboard, computer and big twenty-inch color display monitor. Victoria worked the keyboard and mouse as the image appeared on the screen.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Edelman’s voice resonated over the speaker.

  Schullman did a double take, as if he’d expected to see the doctor’s face appear on the bright blue screen. Victoria sensed his confusion. “We’ll see the same thing here on our screen that he sees on his back in Washington,” she explained.

  “Good morning,” she said into the speaker. “Dr. Edelman, I have Special Agent Brent Schullman here with me. He’s the field coordinator and case agent for the San Francisco investigation. Actually,” she smiled, “I think the real reason he’s here is to see how his computer works.”

  A chuckle came over the line from Washington, but Schullman didn’t seem to appreciate the humor.

  “Anyway, Doctor, I know you haven’t completed your analysis yet, but I just got word from the lab this morning that the cigarette remnants I found in the alley near Copeland’s apartment were Marlboros, and the stock of paper indicates they were distributed and probably purchased on the East Coast. That makes it all the more evident that whoever was smoking in the alley probably didn’t live around there and had no business being out there. It made me curious to know whether you’ve been able to find any evidence that the man in the ATM video is a cigarette smoker.”

  “Understood. Let’s pull it up and I’ll show you what I got.”

  The screen flickered, and the grainy black-and-white image from the ATM security camera appeared on Victoria’s monitor. It was a frozen pose, showing one of the clearest images of a man in a ski mask standing at the machine.

  “As you can see,” said Edelman, “there aren’t any obvious signs this man’s a smoker. No cigarette pack poking out of his pocket, et cetera. If I had a high-resolution color tape I could probably tell you whether his teeth were stained with nicotine. But not with an ATM tape. I searched for signs of ash on his clothing, but in black and white that’s extremely difficult to pick up. The only thing I found is this,” he said, zooming in on the right hand. “Notice the thumb.” The zoom tightened until the screen filled with just the tip of the thumb. “See the little hole? The glove is burned right through to the skin.”

  “Like somebody who uses a cigarette lighter with his gloves on,” said Victoria.

  “Exactly.”

  “That seems a stretch,” said Schullman. “How do you know it’s a burn mark? Maybe he just takes his gloves off with his teeth and bit a hole through it.”

  The zoom tightened further, as tightly as it could without reducing the grainy footage to a meaningless collection of black-and-white dots. “Notice the fibers around the hole,” said Edelman. “T
hey’re not frayed, the way you’d expect them to be with biting and pulling. They’re singed. It’s a burn mark.”

  They stared at the image together, until both she and Schullman seemed convinced. “All right,” said Victoria. “Is there anything else?”

  “That’s it for now. I’ll call you if I get anything more. So long.”

  “Thanks, Doctor,” she said as the line disconnected. The screen turned a blank bright blue as she leaned back in her chair, thinking.

  “You buy this burn-hole theory?” asked Schullman.

  “If Edelman says it’s a burn mark, I believe it’s a burn mark.”

  “But where does it take you?”

  “Hard to say. Somebody was watching me at Copeland’s apartment, and whoever it was probably followed me there.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “At first I thought it might have been the killer—a chain-smoker who stalks his victims and returns to the scene of the crime, curious about how the investigation is going. Now it looks like it could have been the informant. We know he was here in San Francisco, since he used the ATM here. And if Edelman’s right, he’s probably a smoker. I just don’t know,” she said, sighing. “All I saw was an orange dot in the darkness. It could have been the informant, could have been the killer.”

  “Seems to me you’re overlooking an obvious possibility,” said Schullman.

  “What?”

  “The informant is the killer.”

  Victoria said nothing as she clicked the mouse and turned off the computer.

  Chapter 15

  late Friday evening Victoria cabbed it to the airport to catch the red-eye back to Washington, a five-hour nonstop that was supposed to leave San Francisco at 11:00 P.M. It was time to report to her supervisors. She’d spent most of the last six days working not with Schullman but with San Francisco Homicide, sharing everything she’d learned over the past three months and taking back little bits and pieces that might build on the collective knowledge of six—no, seven—different departments. One detective had compared it to earthquake seismology, how each murder was like another point on the Richter scale, increasing the intensity and complexity of the investigation exponentially rather than linearly. The analogy seemed to fit.