And where was his God through all this? Probably jerking off on a cloud somewhere. He certainly didn’t give a damn about Dane Lewis.
Chapter 19
“What do you think?” Corrina asked as she marched into the task force room. Hank and Josh were already there, sitting with printouts of Fifteen-X’s latest offering. She’d called ahead after reading the chapter on her phone while McCrae drove her back to the office, and she’d forwarded the email to all the relevant parties.
“The bladder cancer seems significant,” Hank said, and got a nod of agreement from Josh. “He’s generalizing with the African children dying, but here he’s talking about a woman. A wife, maybe? His mother?”
“McCrae and I thought the same,” Corrina said. She wrote it up on the board. “Josh, get a list of all bladder cancer patients in the last fifteen years, and make it nationwide.”
“Sure. Want a family background again?”
“Definitely. Enemies, shady dealings, criminal associations, links to the other victims, social media contacts, everything.”
“I’ll help him,” Hank said.
Corrina sat in a chair.
“This chapter isn’t going to go down well in a Christian country,” Josh said.
“You mean America?” Hank asked. “You think this is a Christian country?”
Josh looked confused. “Well, isn’t it?”
Hank stood. “It’s a country with a lot of Christians in it, I’ll grant you that, but there’s also a lot of murderers. Do we call this killer country? What about the number of people in the States who masturbate? How many do you reckon? Half the population? Three-quarters? Does that make us a jerk-off country?”
“What’s got into you?” Corrina asked.
“Nothing,” Hank said, holding up a sheaf of paper. “I just happen to agree with this guy’s take on God.”
“Because of what you went through?”
“Exactly,” Hank told her. “What kind of God would put that boy in a situation where he was going to get blown away? What kind of God would give me the strength to pull the trigger?” He looked at Josh. “Come on, we got work to do.”
Both men left, and Corrina stared at the crowded wall. The space was diminishing daily, but they were still no closer to the killer. The facts list was looking particularly bare, while supposition took up two columns.
The database Josh had created had thrown up nothing so far. None of the GMC Savana owners who lived in LA also owned property like the one the killer had described. At least, none of the males over the age of twenty-six. He had to be at least that old to have held a driver’s license when he first struck.
Corrina picked up the marker pen and wrote in the supposition column:
Intention is to hurt the families?
Questions still remained regarding Jess’s idea, but the more she read the killer’s story, the more it made sense. Even if it were true, though, it wouldn’t help them until they understood why he wanted to hurt them. She’d been through everything Josh and Hank, and even Jess, had come up with on the surviving relatives. Apart from all being American, there was nothing to link them.
Might as well say they were all human, she thought, or all breathed air…well, all except Miriam Crane, she was dead…
But when had she died? Corrina checked Crane’s file and saw that it had been nine days earlier. Corrina looked up at the board. Miriam Crane had died four days before Fifteen-X had first contacted her.
That was the catalyst!
She whipped out her cell and called McCrae. He answered immediately.
“You’re getting good at this,” he said gleefully. “I was just about to call you.”
“I know why he contacted me when he did,” Corrina said, dispensing with the small talk. “Miriam Crane died four days before he sent me that first letter, the one telling us where to find Kerry Swanson. Jess was right. He wants to hurt the families of the victims, not the victims themselves. He couldn’t hurt Miriam Crane because she was already dead, so he went public to hurt the others before they managed to foil him by dying.”
She waited for McCrae to respond, knowing he was chewing her words over carefully.
“Sounds plausible,” he eventually said. “But we still don’t have a link.”
“It’s something the families did to him, I’m sure of it. Maybe they all visited the place he worked, or…or…”
“Don’t force it,” McCrae cautioned her. “It’ll come, you know it will. In the meantime, we got a tip on the third murder. A woman was up at the observatory with her daughter the day Thomas Crane disappeared and remembered something strange. A man put a bike in the back of a station wagon and drove away. Then about half an hour later he returned on the bike and got into a van. She didn’t know about Crane going missing at the time as there wasn’t a lot of press coverage, but reading the killer’s account in the Telegraph rang a few bells.”
“Please tell me she got a description,” Corrina said.
“Unfortunately, no. Her memory is hazy after all this time, but she did notice a lot about the van. Her eldest son had one exactly the same. He and his band used to travel to gigs in it. A quicksilver metallic GMC Savana. She can’t remember the license plate, but thinks it began with a one. She can’t be sure.”
Corrina walked to the wall and moved the van from Supposition to Fact.
“Any luck with the APB?” she asked.
“Nothing yet. If he’s as smart as we think he is, he’ll have ditched the phony plates by now.”
“For sure. Okay, I’m gonna concentrate on the link between the families. It’s there somewhere, we just gotta find it.”
She hung up and went to inform her team of the new developments.
* * *
“I knew there was something,” Jess said, though there was no one around to hear her. She was sitting up in bed, the laptop on her knees and a gallon of ice cream on the nightstand next to her.
Her initial search for Miriam Crane had revealed nothing other than her LinkedIn profile and a few pieces in medical journals relating to programs her hospital had implemented. It was only when she searched for the hospital that she found something.
An online news article, dated four months prior to Thomas Crane’s disappearance, told of a heavily pregnant African-American woman named Chloe Jackson, who’d collapsed while walking near Angel Rise Hospital. A passer-by had alerted medical staff inside the building, and she’d been taken in and diagnosed with eclampsia. The hospital then found that she didn’t have adequate health insurance and terminated treatment. According to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, Chloe should have been treated for the life-threatening condition, but a subsequent entry in her medical file suggested the eclampsia had been misdiagnosed and was in fact epilepsy. As the seizures had temporarily ceased, she was not deemed to be an emergency, and Chloe was transported to another hospital. She died en route, as did her unborn son. The hospital gave out a statement expressing sorrow for the tragic loss of life, but were adamant that they had acted with professionalism and compassion throughout.
The director at the time was Miriam Crane.
It fit with the new theory Jess had come up with. Corrina Stone had said there must be some kind of link between the victims or their families, but instead of looking for a way to connect them, Jess had sought what they had in common. Money was the first thing she thought of, but after discovering Swanson’s court case and Perry’s gentrification plans, she’d wondered if any of the other families had put profit before people. In Miriam Crane’s case, her hospital had refused to treat a pregnant woman who couldn’t afford her treatment. With Orville Lewis, it was his decision to close down a number of homeless shelters just before the coldest winter in California’s recent history. Nineteen people had died within two weeks, prompting him to make a U-turn and reopen them.
If Craig or Doreen Madden had a checkered past, it would confirm that she was on the right track.
Jess had asked Corrina to see what th
e FBI had on the Maddens, though she hadn’t told her what she was looking for. The last time she’d done that, Corrina had dismissed it. This time she wanted to confront her with irrefutable proof.
Jess had gone to the office on Wilshire for her daily thirty-minute briefing, but was disappointed. The Bureau’s data was next to useless. Financial records, work history, criminal records—or lack of—and social media profiles, none of which shed any light on their activities. The only thing that interested her was the work history. Craig Madden was CEO of FMT Group, a private equity firm.
Jess did a search for Craig Madden FMT Group and clicked the News options when the results appeared. The top story was from 2013. FMT had made headlines when they purchased Carrick Marketing Solutions, a call center business in downtown Los Angeles. Three months later, they outsourced the work to Asia, some contracts going to India, the rest to the Philippines. That had resulted in the loss of over fifteen hundred local jobs. The office had been reduced to just five local personnel.
Another news report from the financial papers—this one dated two years later—mentioned that Carrick had been sold by FMT, who had made a profit of almost twenty million on the deal. No mention of anyone being hurt by FMT’s actions, but it certainly fell into the profit before people category.
She thought about calling Corrina, but it was already late. Instead, she thought about the other interesting lead they had. She’d told the agent that she thought the mention of bladder cancer was something worth checking out. Corrina had said it was being looked into, but Jess decided to do her own research.
She looked into the causes and saw that smoking was the biggest contributor. Exposure to chemicals and previous radiotherapy sessions were other known factors. Jess then looked for the number of cases reported each year. About 81,400 new cases of bladder cancer were reported every year in the U.S.—roughly 62,100 in men and 19,300 in women. In terms of deaths, there were approximately 18,000, with the same ratio of men to woman.
Five thousand women a year. Was the killer’s relative one of them? Reading his latest chapter, it certainly seemed like it. There was no way she’d be able to get a list of all female victims, but she was sure Corrina could. She jotted down a note to ask for a copy when she had her meeting the next day.
It was after two in the morning. She returned the remains of the ice cream to the freezer and checked that her doors were locked, then went to bed. She checked her email one last time, in case the killer had sent another chapter, but it remained empty.
It was almost a relief.
She didn’t want to go to sleep with his latest actions in her head.
Chapter 20
Corrina was in a buoyant mood when she dropped Connor off at school on Monday morning. He’d had a great time with his grandpa and had been exhausted when she’d picked him up. Connor had gone to bed early, allowing her the chance to catch up on her own sleep. She’d woken refreshed and reinvigorated and was looking forward to a day in the office.
The bladder cancer was key—she knew it.
Josh had sent requests to both the California Department of Public Health and the National Centre for Health Statistics for a list of women who had died from bladder cancer in the ten years prior to Kerry Swanson’s disappearance. She was hoping the information would be on her desk when she arrived.
It wasn’t. Josh came over the moment she reached her desk and explained that he’d been on the phone to both departments that morning, pressing them to send the information.
“CDPH say it will be late this afternoon, while NCHS can’t give us a timeframe.”
Corrina hated having to work to other peoples’ schedules, but there was nothing she could do.
She walked into the task force room and performed her daily ritual of staring at the cluttered wall. The GMC Savana van was just about the only real lead they had, and the image of the silver vehicle was already burned into her memory.
Her cell rang, an internal number. Corrina answered and heard that Jess Duffey was in the building to see her. She informed the caller that she’d be there in a moment and hung up.
Jess was waiting with a female agent by the entrance to the large, open plan office. Corrina thanked the escort and took the reporter to a small meeting room.
“I think I may be on to something,” Jess said as she set up her laptop. “Remember I said he wanted to hurt the families of the people he killed? Well, I think I might know why.” She opened a file, standing aside so that Corrina could see it. “Anthony Swanson ran a business that skimped on safety testing costs. It resulted in the deaths of three children.”
“So?” Corrina asked.
“Bear with me. Vincent Perry’s construction company made life hell for an entire community until they had no choice but to sell. He bought all the properties, demolished them and built a new complex aimed at the high end of the market. The displaced people had no chance to buy them.
“Then there’s Miriam Crane. The hospital she ran turned away a pregnant African-American for not having health insurance. She died an hour later. Craig Madden ran the private equity firm that bought Carrick Marketing Solutions, gutted it and flipped it two years later for a huge profit. Orville Lewis closed down homeless shelters during the coldest winter on record. Nineteen people died.”
“So they’re not nice people,” Corrina said. “Is that all you’ve got?”
“It’s not just that they’re not nice. These people made money by screwing people over. I think it’s relevant.”
Corrina thought about it for a moment, but she wasn’t sold on the idea. “People do much worse things than outsource work to India,” she said.
“I know, but you’ll notice that with the exception of Kerry Swanson, who was in Las Vegas, the rest were taken in LA. I think he’s concentrating on what’s happening in the local area. Maybe FMT’s actions were the only thing that happened when Jennifer was killed.”
That made sense to Corrina. “Okay, let’s say that’s the connection. How does it help us?”
Jess opened a web page and clicked a link in her favorites. “He mentioned bladder cancer. Now, bearing in mind that he’s going after people who profit at the expense of others, I came to the conclusion that something similar might have happened to him. If his mother or daughter or sister died of cancer, I think they might have got it because of someone else’s action. This web page shows the causes of bladder cancer, and one of them is smoking. It wouldn’t be that because it’s self-inflicted, but bladder cancer can also be caused by exposure to certain chemicals.”
“So you think his loved one contracted cancer because someone wanted to manage costs or cut corners, and he’s killing people whose families did something similar?”
“I do,” Jess crowed.
“Then the question is, why? He could have gone straight for the person responsible.”
“You’ll have to ask him when you catch him, but I’m as sure as I can be that this is how he’s choosing his victims.”
* * *
It was late in the day when the data came through from Public Health. Corrina sat impatiently next to Josh as he loaded the information into the database.
“I want you to run a search matching surnames from the cancer file and owners of Savana vans.”
“And if that doesn’t give us anything?” Josh asked.
“Then it means the cancer reference could be another distraction.”
As she thought about it, it seemed the most likely scenario. Fifteen-X hadn’t knowingly given them any real clues up to this point, so why start now?
“Okay,” Josh said. “Fingers crossed.”
He hit the button to run the search, and the results were instant.
No hits.
“Shit,” they said in unison.
“Maybe the woman had a different name than the van owner,” Josh suggested. “Perhaps she was his married sister.”
The only way to be sure was to find the relatives for each of the cancer victims, and it would
have to be done manually. The data from the CDPH didn’t contain that information.
Corrina gave Josh the bad news, but he didn’t appear fazed by the mammoth task. He simply nodded and assured her he’d get on with it.
As it was already approaching six, Corrina decided to head home. On the way to her car, she checked in with McCrae to see if there were any updates, but his day had been uneventful. Corrina was disappointed to hear that. She found herself wanting an excuse to meet him, if only for a few minutes.
The only good news was that there hadn’t been any mispers in the last few hours that would fit the killer’s profile, so it looked like she wouldn’t be getting called out that night.
On the way home, she stopped for milk and called Kat to say she’d be there in fifteen minutes. The babysitter reported no problems and said that Connor had finished his dinner and was currently battling his math homework.
Corrina ended the call, and immediately felt strange. It was a sensation she’d felt before, one that was unnerving.
Someone was watching her.
She made a conscious effort not to look around. Instead, she put her phone in her purse and started walking casually back to her car, glancing in store windows to try to pick up her tail. None of the reflections appeared to be taking any interest in her, apart from one lecherous male who was so overweight he couldn’t possibly move fast enough to pose a threat.
When she reached her car, the sensation was still with her. She took out her cell phone again and pretended to make a call, looking around as she did so. All she saw were the regular comings and goings of Monday night shoppers.
You’ve got serial killers on the brain, she scolded herself as she got into her car. Nonetheless, she kept a keen eye on the rear-view mirror as she made her way home.
Her six was clear. One vehicle followed her for a few blocks, but it turned off a long way from home. By the time she reached her house, Corrina was convinced she’d imagined the whole thing.
She parked in front of the garage and got out. Cradling the milk, she locked the car and turned toward the door.
Fifteen Times a Killer Page 16