Next Victim

by Michael Prescott

  Last night, when Amanda Pierce had stopped at a motel in Salem, Oregon, after four hours on the road, she had received a call on her cell phone. The phone was a black-market model equipped with powerful encryption features, and the signal could not be tapped. But a long-range microphone aimed at Pierce’s motel room had picked up scattered words of her end of the conversation. It appeared that her contact in LA had called to change the details of their scheduled rendezvous. The microphone had caught Pierce saying, "…meet you at the hotel…"

  The next words had been lost in the drone of ambient noise from freeway traffic and buzzing air conditioners. There was no way to know what hotel it was, but possibly it was near the airport.

  The squad members from Portland were on the telephone, using either their secure cell phones or the office landlines, talking quietly and rapidly and taking notes. Five taxi companies handled nearly all pickup and delivery of passengers at LAX—America’s Best, Checker Cab, South Bay, United Independent, and Yellow Cab. The squad was putting in calls to all of them, requesting information on a pickup of a Caucasian female, thirty-eight years old, from the departures area thirty minutes earlier.

  The remaining two agents, Tennant’s own men, were consulting blueprints of the LAX terminal and comparing them with single-frame images captured from airport security tapes.

  But every one of them was looking at Tennant either directly or surreptitiously, and every one of them wanted to know what the hell Tennant was going to do now.

  Tennant wished he knew.

  His cell phone buzzed. It was Kidder, checking in from the hospital. Her preliminary examination showed no sign of injury, but she would be held overnight for observation—"just in case I was, you know, exposed," she said.

  "You’d have experienced symptoms by now."

  "Not if I had only cutaneous contact. In that case, symptoms can take hours to develop. And there’s no telling what that bitch might have done while I was unconscious. How are things at your end?"

  "We’ve got everything under control." Bullshit we do, he thought. But there was no point in worrying a pregnant woman who’d been held at knifepoint only half an hour earlier.

  Laura Kidder was the only other agent from DC that Tennant had brought with him. He’d thought the woman’s condition might be an asset—a pregnant lady was less likely to be pegged as part of a surveillance op. Great thinking on his part. He’d nearly gotten Kidder and her baby killed.

  "Hey," Tennant said, "we didn’t have much time to talk earlier. You were in direct contact with Pierce. Give me a seat-of-the-pants psych evaluation."

  "Hostile. Desperate." Kidder thought for a moment. "Ruthless. It’s all about survival for her now. She knows she’s been made, and there’s no going back."

  "Kill or be killed."

  "That’s my impression."

  "Okay, Laura. Take care of yourself and that baby of yours."

  He ended the call and turned to Kidder’s colleagues from the DC office, Jarvis and Bickerstaff, or J&B, as they were called. "You map out her route?"

  Jarvis looked up from the blueprints and security camera freeze-frames. "She went straight to this exit"—he tapped a spot on the blueprints—" on the departures level and caught the taxi."

  "Which, by the way, is against airport regs," Bickerstaff added in a voice like a sigh. The voice matched the agent’s rumpled suit and his still more rumpled face, a face that sagged with the impress of every frown it had ever known. "Passengers aren’t supposed to be picked up on that level. It’s for drop-offs only." He nodded toward the Portland agents working the phones. "So even if we do get through to the cab company, we may not be able to get them to admit they took the fare."

  "We’ll threaten to subpoena their records. They’ll talk." Tennant looked more closely at the freeze-frames. He knew the camera wasn’t sharp enough to show the license plate, but at least they ought to be able to tell what kind of cab it was. "You can’t see the taxi logo at all?"

  "Camera coverage is spotty outside," Bickerstaff said. "We can only see the wheels. Rest of the vehicle is out of frame."

  "Another angle—"

  "There are no other angles, sir. Spotty coverage, like we said."

  "Okay." Tennant wagged a finger at them. "Come with me."

  He led J&B onto the concourse, where they could have a private conversation. The agents requisitioned from Portland knew only the bare minimum about the case—that Pierce was a security officer with a government contractor, that she’d gone rogue, and that tonight she was planning to meet in LA with a representative of a black-market arms dealer.

  That was all they had been told. They knew nothing about the purpose of the meeting—or the contents of Pierce’s suitcase.

  J&B knew. Tennant could speak freely with them.

  "This never should’ve happened," he began, though of course they already knew that.

  "It’s not your fault," Jarvis said.

  "Like hell it isn’t. I’m the one who fucked this up. I should’ve snatched her out of the motel in Salem last night. I was too concerned about catching her with the contact, getting a two-for-one deal. I should have prioritized differently."

  The last words out of his mouth irritated him. Prioritized differently—had he really said that? After thirty years with the bureau, had he finally learned the jargon that every SAC used to cover his ass?

  Bickerstaff tried to be optimistic. "We’ve got her credit card companies ready to red-flag transactions on any of her plastic in real time, under her real name or her alias. The minute they get a hit, we’ll know her whereabouts."

  Tennant would not be cheered up. "Suppose she uses cash. Or suppose she’s got an extra set of ID and plastic we don’t know about."

  "We only need to reacquire her before she completes the transaction, and we’re golden."

  "And if we don’t reacquire her," Tennant said sourly, "we’re shit. Hell, she might be completing the deal right now."

  "Even if she does move the merchandise," Bickerstaff said, "there’s no immediate threat. She’s a salesman dealing with a middleman. It’s not like either one of them is gonna actually use the stuff."

  Tennant sighed. "We don’t know what Pierce might do if she’s feeling"—what was the word Kidder had used?—"desperate."

  "That kind of raises an issue." Jarvis looked at Tennant. "I know you want to hold off on telling the AD, but, uh, don’t you think it might be time to bring the local recruits up to speed? They don’t understand the urgency."

  "They understand their orders."

  "Yes, sir." Jarvis didn’t sound convinced.

  Tennant hated to explain himself. He saw it as a sign of weakness, just as old John Wayne had once said. Never apologize and never explain—that was the Duke’s motto. But sometimes explanations were necessary to keep the troops on his side.

  "Look," he said, "we have to keep this contained. Right now, no one on this coast knows anything, other than the Portland SAC, the AD here, and the four of us from the District. And I guess the doctor who’s treating Kidder. That’s it. That’s as far as it goes—and we’re keeping it that way. Because if the media gets hold of this thing, they’ll start asking questions we don’t want answered."

  "Like where Pierce got the stuff," Bickerstaff said. "And what exactly her job was."

  Tennant nodded. "Questions with foreign policy implications. International fallout. Not to mention the consequences for this city if the public overreacts."

  "All right," Jarvis said. "But if we get in a showdown with her and she decides to uncork it—"

  "Then it doesn’t matter what the guys from Oregon know or don’t know." Tennant looked down the concourse. "Nothing will matter, at that point."

  8

  "Let’s run through it again."

  "I’ve told you what happened three times already. It doesn’t get any more interesting the fourth time around."

  "Humor us. We’re trying to see how it happened, Bill. We’re really trying to understa
nd."

  Tess watched the bank of monitors, where William Hayde’s image flickered in the semidarkness of the surveillance room. Above the TV screens, the digital clock on the wall read exactly 2400. Midnight.

  Hayde’s background had been established. His movements and actions throughout the evening had been reported. Specific facts had been elicited, facts that could be checked and confirmed.

  That was part of the strategy, she knew. Get him to commit to verifiable details.

  Michaelson had done most of the talking. Now and then, when Hayde began to lose patience with him, Gaines eased himself into the conversation. It was nothing as simplistic as good cop/bad cop. The two interviewers complemented each other in a subtler way. Michaelson was genial and laid-back. Gaines was more businesslike.

  "Okay." Hayde sighed. "Here goes. I was at this club on Melrose. It’s early—nine o’clock. I’m on my first drink when I see her eyeing me."

  He nodded at the chair now occupied by Special Agent Linda Tyler. Tyler had been added to the mix twenty minutes ago, after her pager buzzed in the observation room, showing the message 10-88. This was police code for "Request backup," and it meant that Michaelson and Gaines wanted her in there with them.

  She sat across the table from Hayde, saying nothing, watching him. The intent was probably to rattle the suspect, but it wasn’t working.

  Nothing was working.

  "I check her out," Hayde said, "and she checks me out, and I think we’ve got a little thing going. So I buy her a drink, try to make myself sound interesting. She keeps asking me where I’m from, what I do for a living. More I tell her, the more she wants to know. She’s real fascinated by Colorado Springs, says she’s always wanted to live in that part of the country. Likes the mountains, blah blah blah. And she loves the idea that I’m a civil engineer, it’s like a turn-on for her. I’m thinking this is almost too easy. So I say this place is gonna be a zoo pretty soon, and she says maybe we could have a drink at her place. Sounds good to me, so we walk over there—it’s right down the street." He paused in his narrative. "I assume that’s not her real digs."

  "Just a furnished apartment," Gaines said.

  "All part of the act, huh? Well, she lets me in, fixes me a drink, asks if I want the guided tour. Next thing I know we’re in the bedroom and I’m sneaking a kiss. How about that kiss, Linda? Pretty tasty, wasn’t it?"

  Tyler was silent. Michaelson said, "We’re not here to rate your proficiency at seduction."

  "You might learn a few things. Anyhow, I kiss her, she seems okay with it, I figure it’s all systems go. Why wouldn’t I?"

  "And that," Michaelson said, "is when you tried to tape her wrists."

  "Well, yeah."

  "You carry a roll of duct tape with you."

  "A small roll. Fits in my pocket."

  "And you decided it would be a good idea to use the tape on this woman you’d just picked up."

  "Oh, hell. I told you already, she picked me up. And as for the S and M—hey, it’s not like I didn’t warn her. I mean, not explicitly, not in so many words, but I’d been dropping hints since we started to talk. You know, jokes about how I like it rough, she looks like she’s been a bad girl, maybe she needs a spanking…She didn’t pull back when I said that shit. She was eating it up. She wanted to hear more, like she was into it."

  Tess knew why Agent Tyler hadn’t objected. A fascination with sadomasochism was part of Mobius’s psychological profile.

  According to the experts in Behavioral Sciences Section, Mobius had started with a routine S&M fetish. He would have frequented the Denver leather bars, engaging in consensual sadomasochistic liaisons, always acting as the dominant partner. Dominance was important to this man. He would need to be in control, with the woman tied or duct-taped—helpless.

  One night he must have gone too far. Carried away, he’d ignored the safety word or signal they had arranged. He’d killed his partner. It would have been partly an accident, partly an act of sheer recklessness.

  Realizing what he’d done, he would have tried to cover up the crime. Still, he probably spent several anxious weeks waiting for the rap on his door. But the arrest never came. He had gotten away with murder. The ultimate act of dominance, of control—a rush unlike any other.

  He liked it. And so he proceeded to do it again, this time in a more methodical fashion. He improved his technique, using disguises, false names, avoiding the S&M bars because he knew the police might be watching those venues in the wake of the first killing. Most likely he engaged in regular sex, marked only by his domineering style. Afterward, he restrained and gagged the victim, then cut her throat.

  As he continued to elude apprehension, he became arrogant, his narcissism escalating to full-blown grandiosity. By now, he must think that no one could stop him.

  Maybe he was right.

  "So you grabbed her from behind…" Michaelson was saying.

  Hayde shook his head. "It’s not like I grabbed her"—he made air quotes around the verb with his free hand—"in a violent way. It’s just that it, you know, gets me hot. She sees me peel the tape off the roll, and I’m saying, ‘This won’t hurt a bit,’ which is just part of the act. Then all of a sudden there’s a gun in her hand and she’s yelling for backup."

  "You attacked her," Gaines said, his voice flat.

  "It was foreplay."

  "Foreplay."

  Hayde glanced at Gaines, then let his gaze drop to the bulging manila folder on the table, just out of his reach.

  At some point in the interview, Gaines had left the room for a minute and returned with the folder, which he’d set down with a hard thump. Tess had no idea what was in it—the thick sheaf of papers might be Mrs. Gaines’s recipes, for all she knew—but the folder was meant to convey the idea that the feds had compiled a mass of evidence and William Hayde was in serious trouble.

  Hayde’s stress level hadn’t risen measurably, however. And he did not seem unduly curious about the folder.

  "Look," Hayde said, looking only slightly embarrassed, "I don’t know what gets your rocks off, but this is what does it for me. And I didn’t think it was any big deal. Like I said, this is La-La-land, everybody to his brand of perversion, no questions asked. At least that’s what I thought. I’m starting to feel like I never left Colorado Springs."

  Michaelson picked up on that. "Or Denver, maybe."

  "Denver?"

  "It’s pretty close to Colorado Springs."

  "You spend a lot of time in Denver when you were in Colorado?" Gaines asked.

  "Yeah, I went to Denver now and again. On weekends or whatever. I like going to a city, getting some action."

  "Action like tonight?" Gaines pressed.

  "You the sex police or something? What’s your problem? Not getting enough at home? You two guys, you ought to shack up together. You make a cute couple."

  Neither man reacted. One of the cardinal rules of interrogating a suspect was to avoid a personality conflict.

  "I guess you thought you and Agent Tyler would make a nice couple," Gaines said.

  "Not exactly. I thought we’d make some nice coupling, if you see the distinction."

  "When she picked you up," Michaelson said, "did you think she was a whore?"

  "A hooker? The thought crossed my mind. But she never mentioned money."

  "I didn’t mean a hooker. I meant, did you think she was a tramp, a slut?"

  "What?"

  "That’s what I would think," Gaines said, "if some woman came up to me out of nowhere and started hitting on me. I’m not saying I wouldn’t be flattered…but I’d have to figure she’s pretty loose, if you know what I mean."

  "Lots of loose women in LA," Michaelson said. "Town’s full of them. They’ll fuck anybody that’s got a dick. They use their bodies like a welcome mat."

  Gaines nodded. "You act like a welcome mat, you’ve got to expect someone’s going to walk all over you. It’s just human nature."

  This kind of talk was a tactical move. Blame
the victim. Imply that she’d had it coming. Sometimes a suspect would open up if he thought his interrogators were on his moral wavelength.

  "You two for real?" Hayde looked genuinely amused. "Slut, loose woman—did I go through a time warp when I came in here? Is this 1954 or something? Or are you guys charter members of the Joe Friday fan club?"

  Tess glanced at the computer. Voice stress remained low.

  Michaelson leaned forward, abandoning informality, and hardened his voice. "Let me be straight with you, Mr. Hayde."

  He had switched to addressing the suspect by his last name. It was a signal to Gaines to try the direct approach.

  "What we’re looking at is not just this one case," Michaelson said. "It’s a pattern. Your actions tonight are part of that pattern. Your actions eleven days ago fit the same pattern."

  "Eleven days ago? What are you talking about?"

  On the computer screen, the sine waves had broken up, indicating increased stress but not necessarily deception.

  "Monday night, March twentieth. Angie Callahan. Ring a bell?"

  "No."

  The sine waves were smoothing out. The technology said he wasn’t lying.

  Tess studied Hayde’s face on the nearest monitor. She saw no darting eye movements, no defensive body language. Hayde was not looking toward his upper right, as he might if he were unconsciously accessing the creative centers of the right cerebral hemisphere.

  "Sure it does. You picked her up—or maybe she picked you up. It doesn’t matter. You went back to her condo. Your memory clearing up, Mr. Hayde?"

  "I’ve never heard of anybody named Angie Callahan."

  "You knew her. And you killed her."

  "Say again?"

  "You taped her wrists to the headboard of her bed, and you slit her throat, didn’t you?"

  "You think I’m a murderer?"

  "We know you are. We’ve nailed you. It’s over. We’ve got all the evidence we need."

  To punctuate his partner’s statement, Gaines held up the bulging folder.