Victoria strained to listen. His words were sometimes hard to understand. Burns was deaf. Victoria had always found a bit of irony in that—the dead speaking to the deaf.
“See here,” he said, pointing. “It sliced clean through, like a cleaver on a chopping block. Teeth marks from the knife’s serrated edge are plainly visible.”
Victoria leaned forward for a better look, close enough to see little blond hairs between the knuckles. “What can you tell so far?”
He smiled. “I can tell you’re uncomfortable with my being deaf. You enunciate too hard. Just talk—I’ve read lips all my life.”
She blinked with embarrassment. “Sorry. Let me rephrase the question anyway. What can you tell that I can’t tell?”
“I’ll have to make a cast and take more precise measurements to be sure. Study the photographs. I’ll need a radiologist to confirm readings—”
“All of which will take days,” Victoria interrupted. “I need to know now. Give me your gut reaction. Is this the work of our serial killer?”
“I’ll never be able to tell you that.”
“Why?”
“Maybe someone borrowed his knife.”
“So, you do think the knife used on Gertrude Kincaid was the same knife used on Cybil Holland.”
“If you’re asking me whether I can I testify to that in court, my answer is no. If you’re asking me whether I’ve seen enough to think it would be worth your while to follow up on this lead, the answer is definitely yes.”
Victoria nodded. “That’s what I wanted to know.” She glanced behind her at Tony Costello. The sight of the six foot two, hard-nosed Italian shivering in his shirtsleeves made her smile inside—she’d warned him he’d want a coat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Tony nodded eagerly and rubbed the circulation back into his hands as he followed her out the door into the lobby. After the icy autopsy room, the lobby felt like a sauna. He helped Victoria remove her coat, then looked her in the eye.
“Looks like your case has got a new priority—as in finding a ring with a heart-shaped diamond and emerald baguettes.”
She looked into the middle distance, thinking. “Something’s bothering me, though—something about the timing of all this.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let’s say it was the same knife—that whoever killed Mrs. Kincaid in south Georgia on Friday also attacked Mrs. Holland in Atlanta on Monday night.”
“Your forensic pathologist just told you it’s possible.”
“But if that’s the case, then our profilers back in Quantico need to seriously rethink their view that the informant’s the killer.”
“Why is that?”
“The informant picked a curious way of informing Posten that the next victim after Kincaid would be Timothy Copeland in San Francisco. He manipulated Posten’s computer to flash Copeland’s name on his video display monitor. He had to sneak into the building to do that. It was an illegal break-in, so our Miami office checked into it—dusted for fingerprints, the whole nine yards. Nothing turned up, but by checking the computer’s memory, the systems manager was able to tell that the modifications were done at exactly eight-twenty-six A.M., Tuesday—actually three days before Copeland’s murder.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that if this schizophrenia theory is correct—if the informant is the killer—then he somehow got from Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta to the Tribune headquarters in downtown Miami in less than twelve hours. He was in Atlanta one evening, and in Miami the next morning.”
“Big deal. It’s a two-hour flight.”
“That’s just the point. There weren’t any flights. Last night, after you called me, I began thinking about the Atlanta—Miami connection, and checked into it. I thought maybe we could get some passenger manifests. But the same ice storm that stranded Cybil Holland in downtown Atlanta had the airport shut down for five hours on Monday night, till one o’clock in the morning.”
“What about after one o’clock? He could have flown out as late as five-thirty or six and still gotten to Miami in time to manipulate the computer at eight-twenty-six.”
Victoria shook her head. “Think about it. The guy’s a wanted serial killer. He just sliced off a woman’s finger. He probably has her diamond ring stuffed in his coat pocket, and he maybe even still has his favorite knife tucked away in his baggage. You think he’d sit around the airport for five hours like a caged rat, hoping to catch the next plane to Miami, whenever that might be?”
“Okay,” Tony said, nodding in agreement. “So, he drove.”
She sighed, troubled. “It’s true that, at least according to the stereotypes, geographically transient serial killers love to take long drives. But it’s a good fourteen-hour drive from Miami to Atlanta.”
“It could be done in twelve. A buddy and I made it in thirteen down to Joe Robbie Stadium when we snagged Super Bowl tickets at the last minute. Granted, we had to take turns driving nonstop. I’m not sure I could have done it alone.”
Those last words hung in the air, as if the proverbial light had gone on above their heads. Finally, he said what they were both thinking: “You think he shared the driving?”
“As in, him and the informant?”
Tony shrugged. “That’s another option, isn’t it. The two of them working together?”
“Like Bianchi and Buono,” she said, thinking aloud.
“Who?”
“Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. They were cousins. Together, they were the California Hillside Strangler.”
Tony rubbed his temple, as if overwhelmed. “Enough already. If I’m going to assemble a team of agents to start asking pawnshop owners if they’ve seen a guy trying to hock a diamond ring, you need to tell me what the hell we’re looking for. Is it two guys working together, two guys outfoxing each other, or one crazy lunatic with multiple personalities?”
She looked past him, glancing toward the door to the autopsy room. “That’s what we need to find out.”
Chapter 26
mike woke at precisely 7:30 A.M. He lay in bed and stared up at the whirling paddle fan over his bed, wondering why it was that whenever he didn’t have to get up early his internal alarm clock worked like the countdown for a space-shuttle launching.
At 7:31 the empty feeling hit him. Probation. Last night’s face-to-face meeting with Aaron had changed nothing. For the first time in thirteen years he didn’t have to swing by the morgue before breakfast to say hello to the latest stiffs. There’d be no jailhouse coffee with the usual suspects, no visit to the emergency rooms for the bloody truth about last night’s street fights. Damn, he missed it already.
His energy level was too high to sit around watching Today’s Willard Scott wish happy birthday to another hundred-year-old woman who still enjoys skydiving. He didn’t care if he was on probation—if he dug out the stories, he knew Charlie Gelber wasn’t going to turn them away. He killed the morning over at the police station, therefore, scrounging for leads on that distinguished congresswoman who was supposedly ducking from a drive-by shooting when her head had landed in the unzipped lap of a twenty-year-old passenger who was not her husband.
Angry as he was about the way the arrangement with the FBI had blown up in his face, Mike kept his afternoon banking appointment. Aaron had made it clear that the only way to defend the arrangement was to get results—which gave him no choice but to continue doing all he could to catch the killer. Accordingly, when a hundred thousand dollars of the FBI’s money was wired to his account at three-thirty that afternoon, he promptly transferred the funds to the Citibank account of Ernest Gill, well under the informant’s Tuesday deadline.
Afterward, Mike went for a long drive to clear his head. February was the reason he lived in Florida. Cool breezes, blue skies. The late-afternoon sun felt warm on his skin, like an old friend with the power to heal. With the ragtop down, even a drive on the interstate beat the hell out of the Chicago winters he’d endured
growing up. The smell of sea salt in the air was a soothing substitute for road salt in your boots. His Saab was doing seventy as the road signs suddenly offered two very distinct choices: downtown or the beaches. He thought of the lyrics from an old Springsteen song, “Hungry Heart,” about the guy who took a wrong turn and just kept going. Not a chance, he thought. Not for Mike Posten. No running allowed. Not unless it was on the proverbial treadmill, in search of the brass ring.
Suddenly, the thought of a broken promise jolted him. Karen. Last night, he’d promised to call her as soon as he’d straightened things out with Aaron.
Tuesdays and Thursdays were her nights for aerobics, he knew. Her class started at six o’clock. He turned down the exit ramp, drove by the florist for a bouquet of apologies, then took the back roads to the health club.
As he steered into the parking lot, the lead story on the hourly news update caught his attention on the radio. It was an excerpt from last night’s show on Nightline, a sound bite of Aaron Fields responding to the charges of checkbook journalism. The convertible lurched to an abrupt halt as he slammed it into park and cranked up the volume.
“I’ve known Mike Posten for thirteen years,” he intoned over the radio. “Let me say that I questioned him point-blank about this, and he has assured me that all reports of improper payments to a secret informant for exclusive stories about murders he himself may have committed are patently false.”
Mike switched off the radio, noting the nifty way Aaron had inserted the qualifying word “improper” in front of “payments.” Should have been a politician, Aaron.
He spotted Karen cutting across the parking lot, but she didn’t see him—or if she did see him, she was ignoring him. She was dressed in a gray business suit with burgundy neckerchief—definitely courtroom attire—with her workout bag slung over her shoulder. Just as he started out of the car to catch her, his beeper rang.
“Not again,” he groaned. He glanced at the display. EMERGENCY, the message read. CALL ME VS.
He made a face, torn inside. Part of him said catch up with Karen, part said call Victoria. It was like last night all over again, when Aaron Fields had called, where there were no right answers. “Dammit.” He snatched up his portable phone from the console and punched out the number. Victoria answered on one ring.
“This had better be a real emergency,” he said as he watched Karen disappear into the health club.
“It’s the Ernest Gill account at Citibank. The quarter of a million dollars we paid your informant.”
“I made the deposit this afternoon. What about it?”
She paused, then said warily, “It’s gone. All of it.”
“Gone—how?”
“He moved it offshore. Wire transfer.”
“Surely you must have anticipated that.”
“We’ve known for the past week he was moving money through a series of wire transfers. We were tracing it, never missing a beat. The trail led offshore this afternoon, right after you made the last transfer deposit. Antigua. They’ve got some of the strictest bank secrecy laws in the world. Tighter than Switzerland or the Cayman Islands.”
“But if you know it’s in Antigua, why can’t you find out where in Antigua?”
“It’s like dropping a coin in the ocean. You can see it break the surface, but you have no way of knowing where it’s going to land. Antigua is one of the few bank secrecy havens that has no treaty with the United States for the exchange of banking information. I can get records from domestic banks showing transfers to Antigua, but the Antigua banks won’t give us any records of how and when he moves the money once it’s over there. I’ll have to rely completely on insiders to piece things together. There was always a risk he’d try to hide behind bank secrecy, but I just didn’t think your informant was savvy enough to pick one of the few places on earth that would be a total bitch for us.”
Mike waved off an old man selling mangoes on the sidewalk. “Do you think he’s cashing out? The game’s over?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling you, though. We have to map out a strategy in case he calls again.”
“He better call again. If we don’t catch this guy, I’m going down as the sleazebag journalist who did nothing but give a serial killer the financial incentive to keep right on killing.”
“Believe me,” she said, thinking of her memo to Assistant Director Dougherty. “You’re not out on that limb alone.”
Chapter 27
the cuckoo clock on the wall chirped three times in the darkness, echoing throughout the small, two-bedroom house. No one flinched except the man in the hallway, a stranger in the house.
He was an imposing silhouette, dressed in a black rubberized diving suit, a fabric that would shed virtually no fibers for the benefit of police and their labs. A rubberized hood meant that not a single hair from his head would be left behind. Thin but durable diving gloves gave him full use of his fingers without leaving prints. His face was covered with black greasepaint, making his features completely indiscernible in the darkness. As the cuckoo clock finished its silly and sudden intrusion, his white teeth flashed in a bemused smile. He seemed to welcome the absurdity it had cast over a deadly serious situation.
Curt Rollins moved with quiet confidence down the narrow, dark corridor that led to the bedroom. He was becoming more sure of himself each day, learning more with each victim, the diving suit being his most recent adaptation. He walked without a sound, one step at time, deliberate but patient. He stopped at the end of the hall and glanced at the assortment of photographs covering the wall. It was like a big collage, only neater, because everything was framed. A group of college-age women all dressed in ski clothes, smiling and clinging to each other atop a snowy mountain. A diploma from George Washington University—Bachelor of Science, Class of 1981. A pretty blonde in her twenties with an older woman who had to be her mother.
Rollins gave the entire collection a quick once-over, until his gaze suddenly fixed on a black-and-white photo in a gold-leaf frame, right next to the diploma. It was a silver-haired man in a judge’s black robe, probably in his seventies. Possibly her father, maybe her grandfather. He had a serious and distinguished look, posing before stacked shelves of law books, holding his horn-rimmed eyeglasses in his right hand. He wasn’t really smiling, but he flashed a hint of that flat power smile that smacked of law-and-order and long prison terms. Rollins stared into the old judge’s eyes, and the imaginary exchange made him bristle. He knew they’d never met, but he looked like every judge—including the crusty old bastard who’d sentenced him to prison nine years ago.
Rollins didn’t like to think about that day, but the ugly memory burned clear, as if it had all happened yesterday. Even the smallest details had stuck with him. The white fluorescent light glaring off a polished marble floor. Rich mahogany paneling with shiny brass trim. The young and nervous public defender who was assigned to his case. Most of all, he remembered the menacing, disgusted expression on the old judge’s face as he peered down from the bench and pronounced final sentence.
“The prisoner shall please rise,” said the bailiff.
Rollins and his lawyer stood side by side. The prosecutor stood to their left, behind the polished mahogany table that was closest to the empty jury box. Both the prosecutor and defense wore pinstripe suits, as if they were on the same team. An armed guard stood by the door, dressed in the standard gray slacks and crisp blue blazer. Several Chicago police officers in their midnight blue uniforms filled the gallery behind him, mere interested spectators on this auspicious morning. Everyone looked dignified, except the prisoner in the orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed behind his back. He felt like the courtroom jester. All he needed was a pointy hat.
“Mr. Rollins,” said the judge, almost spitting out his name.
He looked up at the judge’s scowl, trying to hide his contempt. He said nothing.
The judge glared right back, pointing his gavel as he spoke. “I am always outraged when I see a poli
ce officer on the take. But this case has convinced me that there is no more despicable character on earth than an officer of the law who would sell to a drug dealer the name of a confidential government informant. I thank God he wasn’t killed, and I wish I could put you away forever. I sentence you to the maximum term of seven years in prison.”
With a bang of the gavel it was all over. Seven years in state prison. A death sentence for a cop.
The cuckoo clock blared once more, marking the quarter hour. Rollins took a deep breath, leaving his memories and focusing dead ahead. He was standing in the open doorway to the master bedroom. The scene didn’t shock him, for it was much like the others. She was still on the bed, lying flat on her back. Her hands and feet were bound with an electrical cord. She was naked from the waist up, still wearing her pink panties with white lace trim. Stab wounds covered her stomach and chest, too many to count. Big puddles of blood had soaked through the white sheets. Her severed tongue rested on the pillow beside her.
Rollins moved closer to survey the evidence, but as he stepped into the room he was attacked from behind. Before he could react his arm was twisted up behind his back and there was a knife at his throat.
“Don’t move,” his assailant said.
Writhing in pain and racked with fear, Rollins went completely rigid, resisting every false move. His heart raced and he took short, panicky breaths. He could sense the sharp blade slowly cutting through the rubberized hood around his neck, working its way toward his bobbing Adam’s apple. His mouth was so dry he could barely speak.
“Don’t hurt me! Please. It’s me—Curt. Curt Rollins.”
The Informant Page 15