The Informant

by James Grippando

  “This is not a little detail.”

  “It is in the big scheme. We have a serial killer to catch.”

  “If Posten backs out of the deal over a wiretap, we might never catch him.”

  “He’s in too deep to back out now. If he’s not afraid for himself, he has to be afraid for his wife. We’re the only ones who can protect them. And if he stops cooperating, we stop protecting.”

  “I laid that on him before. That might not be strong enough anymore.”

  “Then make it strong enough,” he said sharply.

  Victoria took a deep breath, quelling her anger. “How do you suggest I do that?”

  He lit up another cigarette. “Tell him the truth. Tell him that if he wasn’t scared shitless talking to the informant before, he’d better be now. Because evidence is piling up that the informant is the killer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The tapes. We compared the voice of his informant to the tape Sheriff Dutton gave us. That’s why we decided to tap Posten’s phone in the condo—to hear the informant. Both the electronic analysis and psycholinguistic examination point to one conclusion: The same person made the calls.”

  “How can they be so sure? The Hainesville caller was obviously disguising his voice, and it was a terrible recording on a little Dictaphone held up to the receiver.”

  “I trust our experts,” he said flatly.

  “All right. Assume they’re right. Why does that lead you to the conclusion that the informant is the killer?”

  “Why?” he said incredulously. “Because he said he was the killer when he called Dutton. Now, I know that’s not a hundred percent conclusive, but we can’t just dismiss it.”

  “But he’s not the killer.” She moved forward in her chair, speaking with resolve. “The informant could have been lying when he told Dutton he was the killer, just to throw us off the trail. Logically, the longer it takes us to catch the killer, the longer his gravy train keeps on running. But more important, calling the sheriff is just like the other kind of pranks I’ve been talking about from the very beginning. The man we’re after isn’t nearly playful enough to resort to gimmicks like the Ernest Gill checkbook journalism thing. And he wouldn’t take unnecessary risks either, like sneaking into the Tribune to leave a clue on Posten’s computer terminal or calling the sheriff’s office to confess to the crime. Those are the juvenile pranks of some lightweight who’s trying way too hard to be clever. We’re not looking for a rambunctious gamesman. We’re looking for a smooth, efficient killing machine.”

  “Well, let’s hope you’re right,” Shapiro said, seething, “because I’m telling you: Heads will roll if it turns out we’re actually paying a serial killer for information on his own crimes. That was the reason I nixed this arrangement in the first place.” Shapiro made a visible effort to calm himself. “Look, just put your ego aside for a minute, okay? Let’s say you’re wrong, and everyone else is right. Tell me: How are you going to keep the killer from getting away with the taxpayers’ money?”

  “So long as the funds stay in the banking system we can track them. I’ve got sources at CHIPS, FedWire, and SWIFT to cover wire transfers, and I’m working with FinCEN out of Detroit to follow the CTR trail for large cash deposits and withdrawals.”

  “What if he goes international, tries to hide behind bank secrecy?”

  “Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties will help us there. They cover most of the major bank secrecy players—Switzerland, Mexico, the Bahamas, and twenty-some other countries.”

  “Suppose he goes someplace obscure.”

  “Then we’ll have to count on bank insiders. Informants. I know that sounds a little risky, but you have to remember: The only way we get into a jam is if it turns out he’s the killer and somehow I lose track of the money.”

  “Wrong. That’s not how we get into a jam. That’s how you do. You’re the one who wrote the memo to Assistant Director Dougherty, assuring him the informant wasn’t the killer.”

  She swallowed hard, then nodded with assurance. “That’s right, sir. I wrote it. And I stand behind it.”

  “Yes,” he said as he crushed out his cigarette. “And you stand alone.”

  Sunday afternoons were normally Mike’s quiet time, but not today. The phone hadn’t stopped ringing since his latest exclusive hit the newsstands. He was growing tired of the attention, and by four o’clock he’d stopped answering the phone. By five o’clock his answering machine stopped picking up because there was no more room for messages. A few calls came and went with a half-dozen rings. One, however, wouldn’t stop ringing. Somewhere after the twentieth ring, Mike picked up the phone.

  “You’re the hottest thing in print now, aren’t you, wonder boy.”

  The voice was scrambled by some kind of electronic device, making Mike bristle. It sounded a little like his informant, but it was too mechanical to be sure. “Who is this?”

  “I’m your ticket to fame. It’s all at my expense.”

  He paused, confused. “What’s this all about? Who are you?”

  “Never mind that. You were doing so well. Not just the scoop on the victims, but the details about the killings. Man, you had it exactly right. I was impressed. Even admired you. Then like a typical journalist, you turned and stabbed me in the back.”

  “You mean this morning’s story?”

  “No, I mean the Peanuts cartoon in the funnies, asshole.”

  “What was wrong with the story?”

  “What was right with it?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Nothing.” His voice grew louder, the anger coming through even with a scrambler. “Not a damn thing. You couldn’t resist, could you? You get a little momentum going, and all of a sudden you’re an authority on everything. You know all about the killings, so you think you know all about the killer. Well, let me tell you something: You don’t know shit about me.”

  “Then set me straight.”

  “Penile surrogate. Confused sexual identity. Possibly impotent. You left out every stereotype except how I hate pussy cats. Tired, cliché, bullshit. That’s what your so-called psychological profile is. And you knew it was bullshit.”

  “Listen, just calm down, okay? I wouldn’t print anything I didn’t think was true.”

  “You liar! You’d print anything to sell a fucking newspaper. You don’t care what you say or who you slam. Just so long as you’re first. Better to be dead wrong than dead last. Isn’t that what you news creeps say?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry if—”

  “Don’t patronize me.” He was speaking louder and faster with every word. “You think you’re gonna get away with this, don’t you?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Shut up! You figure if you’re wrong, so what? Today’s deathless prose is tomorrow’s kitty-litter lining. Well, for me, pal, it doesn’t just go away. If it’s in black-and-white today, it’s in black-and-white forever. It doesn’t end with the recycling bin. It’s already on the Internet. You know what that means? Right now some twelve-year-old, slanty-eyed, snot-nosed little shit is laughing at me in Singapore. It’s in the Library of Congress, you asshole. Know what that means? Little snot-nosed shits are gonna be laughing at me for the next two hundred and fifty fucking years. You understand me? It never ends.”

  “We can—”

  “I said shut up! You libeled me. I’ve been defamed. And I’m not going to stand for it!”

  “Look, I can fix it. What do you want me to do?”

  His breathing was heavy and erratic, giving eerie life to the robotic sound of his electronically scrambled voice. “I want you,” he said in a low, angry tone, “to hold your fucking tongue.”

  The phone slammed, and the killer was gone. Mike hung up slowly, then buried his head in his hands, shivering with the sinking realization that he’d finally met a man who sounded entirely capable of ripping out another’s tongue—over and over again.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 20


  victoria arrived in Quantico, Virginia, for a team meeting at nine o’clock Monday morning. They met two floors underground, in a windowless room with bright fluorescent lighting. David Shapiro, chief of the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit, sat at the far end of the long rectangular conference table, flanked on the right by Victoria, and on the left by two other CASKU agents, Steve Caldwell and Arnold Freeland. Bulging files stacked one atop the other rose from the table like broken columns from ancient ruins, each stack a different height. Nine altogether, one for each of the unsolved cases. On the wall directly behind Shapiro hung a colored map of the United States. Blue-headed pushpins projected from the random spots the killer had chosen, from Miami to San Francisco, Eugene to New York. On arrival, Victoria had noted two new ones in South Carolina—victims eight and nine, the first double homicide.

  For an hour, they compared the different victims and crime scenes, making judgments about the killer that were based as much on intuition as past experience. Victoria’s interest piqued when they turned to Mike’s latest article.

  “Let’s start with the Tribune profile,” said Shapiro.

  “Totally bogus,” said Victoria.

  “Don’t be so cavalier,” said Caldwell. He was a fifty-year-old academic type with curly salt-and-pepper hair, black-rimmed glasses, and an unlit pipe clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth, best known as the Academy’s full-time instructor in Sex Crimes and Applied Criminal Psychology. Caldwell had come to the CASKU “on loan” from the Investigative Support Unit, which was the new name for the original Behavioral Science Unit that had pioneered criminal profiling. The formation of CASKU had created a profiling turf war with the ISU, but when it was finally settled that CASKU would do its own profiling, the chief of the ISU sent Caldwell over to CASKU—ostensibly to help the new unit develop a profiling program, but more likely to rid himself of one highly intelligent but unbearably pompous pain in the ass.

  “The Tribune profile is fairly consistent with the profile we created,” Caldwell continued. “I do believe we’re dealing with a sexually dysfunctional male. Possibly impotent, like Posten’s article said, which is precisely the reason we see no evidence of penile penetration in any of the victims. In the most extreme scenario, we may even be dealing with a rapist who’s had his penis bitten off or nearly bitten off during forced oral copulation, which would explain his rage and oral fixation. The tongue is a quasi-sexual organ he can sever from both men and women, so the mutilation is indeed sexually motivated. The wide range of victims reminds me to some degree of the Richard Ramirez case, the California Night Stalker. Except with Ramirez both the victims and the killing methods were so varied, you would never suspect one person of doing it. Here it’s just the victims who vary. In either case, however, the variety doesn’t change the reason he kills.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think the killer is the typical sexually dysfunctional woman hater. There are too many male victims. Something else is driving him. It’s more domination. Manipulation. Control.”

  He took the pipe from his mouth, shaking his head in condescending fashion. “This is a classic psychosexual turmoil. I like to call it the Osiris complex.”

  “The what complex?”

  “Osiris,” he said with a haughty affectation, as if any dolt should have heard of it. “In Egyptian mythology, when the god Osiris is killed and dismembered, his companion retrieves all the body parts. Except she can’t find the penis. So she makes a huge phallic replica and orders all Egyptians to worship it. It’s the proverbial quest for the missing penis and veneration of its substitute. Here, the killer has made the tongue a substitute. In less extreme cases, the inadequate male who wishes to impress his wife or girlfriend might simply pay a plastic surgeon to inject fat cells into his scrotum. In more primitive cultures, like the sadhus of India, men tie a ten-pound weight around the penis and stretch it to lengths so absurd they can actually tie it into knots beneath their loincloth. If you can’t see the sexual motivation behind these killings, Victoria, then you’re simply overreacting to that last telephone call Posten received.”

  “I’m not reacting to anything. I felt this way before then.”

  He sighed impatiently. “Look, you’re relatively new here. We have to start with the premise that while few, if any, serial killers are psychotic, nearly all are psychopathic sexual sadists. That’s been true since the first documented serial killer, a nineteenth-century Frenchman who was a butcher by occupation, and who brought himself to orgasm by stabbing women to death. Why do you think we have so few women serial killers? The killer’s obsession with perverse sexual fantasy is something I’ve come to understand not just through literature, but through countless interviews with serial killers—all of which, I might add, were conducted long before you ever got to thinking it might be fun to be an FBI agent.”

  She glared at the cheap shot, but tempered her response. “All right, Steven. Just for fun, why don’t you consider the possibility that maybe this one doesn’t fit your mold?”

  Freeland jumped in. “I’m not choosing sides,” he said, mindful of Caldwell’s ego. “But I don’t think it’s totally absurd to postulate that if innocent people all over the country are suddenly getting their tongues cut out, it may be because they said the wrong thing, or possibly they spoke to someone they shouldn’t have spoken to. Maybe the motivation isn’t totally rooted in sexuality. He may be more mission oriented, like an assassin.”

  “When you think about it,” said Victoria, “the fact that he let Timothy Copeland’s roommate live tends to support an assassin profile rather than random sexual slayings. The guy doesn’t leave any more bodies than he has to, which is smart, since more victims means more physical evidence for us to study.”

  “Let’s proceed on both fronts,” said Shapiro, settling it. “Who wants to follow up on this?”

  “I’m already on it,” said Victoria. “I’ve been exploring whether the victims or the killer might be a government informant or somehow connected to one.”

  Shapiro raised an eyebrow. “Where do you stand?”

  “I’m working with the Information Management Division to check the names of every confidential informant still alive, every person who’s entered the federal witness protection program since Bobby Kennedy started it. None of them are victims. As far as we can tell so far, none of them are related to any of the victims, either.”

  He leaned back, folding his hands behind his head. “How about looking at it the other way. Any leads as to whether one of them might be the killer—or connected to the killer?”

  “That’s a bigger undertaking,” she said. “At any given point in time we’ve got three thousand people in witness protection, about two hundred new ones going in every year. Plenty of people have entered it and turned bitter. They lose their past, lose their families, can’t find a decent job once they start a new life. There’s plenty more who considered going into it, put their life on the line by testifying, and then decided not to go through with it once they saw what it entailed. And that’s just the federal program. We got fifty states to deal with on top of that.”

  “Keep at it, Victoria.”

  “We are. Of course, the witness protection programs are just the tip of the iceberg. At the federal level alone we’ve got volumes of informants who have nothing to do with the program. Add to that every person who might have a grudge against an informant and your list of suspects is endless. I’ve got everyone we can spare looking into it. Everyone with security clearance, that is.”

  Shapiro narrowed his eyes pensively. “Seems to me we’re overlooking one obvious category.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Assuming this has anything to do with informants, it doesn’t necessarily have to be government informants. The victims could be people who talked to the media. Or the killer could be some journalist’s confidential source.”

  “That’s a list of names we’ll never see,” she said. “Even if we were entitled to it legally, it’
d be logistically impossible to get it.”

  “I agree. But for some reason this informant has singled out one reporter from a Miami newspaper. We at least need a list of his informants.”

  Caldwell scoffed, tapping his pipe on the table as he spoke. “I would hardly expect a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to betray the confidence of every informant he’s ever dealt with. And I don’t think there’s any judge in America who would force him to do it, either. Confidential sources are protected by the First Amendment.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting we ask a judge to force it out of him. But I think Victoria could persuade him.”

  A prurient gleam came to Caldwell’s eye. “Sounds delicious. Do I hear the makings of an offer he can’t refuse?”

  “Enough of that,” said Shapiro.

  Victoria ignored it, speaking directly to Shapiro. “At the risk of breaking precedent, I agree with Steve. I can’t see a journalist divulging his sources. After all, it was Posten’s obsession with the need to protect a potentially legitimate source that was the basis for our unusual arrangement with the Tribune in the first place.”

  “I know it’s a tough assignment,” said Shapiro, “but your supervisors would be very impressed. Maybe even impressed enough to forget about a certain memo you wrote to Assistant Director Dougherty, saying the informant’s not the killer.”

  She averted her eyes, then looked right back at him. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said, “but I’m not fooling myself. I know there’s only one way you’re going to forget about that memo.”

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  She looked around the table, meeting each set of eyes. “If I was right.”

  Chapter 21

  victoria arrived in Miami just after three o’clock that Monday afternoon. Over the next several days she would have to contact each of the twenty-six different state and local law enforcement agencies and eight different FBI field offices that were now searching for the same killer. With Mike’s “profile” having been front-page news in Sunday’s Tribune, it was important to explain how it did and, more important, didn’t affect the FBI’s profile of their UNSUB—FBI jargon for “unknown subject.” Shapiro had told her to start in Miami.