Authors: Mariah Stewart
She stared at him as if trying to follow his train of thought.
Sam stood and reached across the table for the other two photos.
“Walker was killed in Lincoln. Where I went to college. Maynard in Kendall, Illinois, where my wife grew up, where we were married. She’s buried there. Adams was killed in Dutton …” He looked down at Fiona, who was swiveling very slowly, very quietly, from side to side. “Am I imagining something here? Am I being paranoid? Is this some cosmic coincidence?”
“You know what Mancini says about coincidences, Sam.”
“Yeah. There aren’t any.” He tossed the pictures back onto the table. “I do not like what I’m thinking.”
“Maybe it is a coincidence,” she said thoughtfully. “Maybe this one time—odds being what they are—John Mancini’s theory will, by percentage, be proven wrong.”
They sat in silence for several long moments.
“Maybe you’re right,” he told her. “The chance that any of this could somehow be connected to me is practically zero. On the surface, it could be interpreted that way. I’m sure you’re right. This is one of those odd times when true coincidence comes into play.” He looked at her and smiled. “Sorry. It just spooked me for a moment.”
“It spooked me, too.” She laughed as if relieved. “For a minute, anyway.”
“Okay, spooky moment has passed.” Sam rearranged the photos. “Let’s see if we can figure out what our killer is telling us. Hamburger stuffed in the mouth. House made of cardboard. Empty water bottle in the mouth.”
“Maybe it’s the locations,” Fiona ventured. “Behind a soup kitchen for the poor. Under a bridge in a cardboard house. Sleeping on a park bench. Maybe they all relate somehow?”
“Excuse me.” There was a tap on the door frame. “Sam DelVecchio?”
Sam looked over his shoulder. In the doorway was a man in black, wearing a clerical collar. Years of training brought Sam to his feet.
“Yes, Father?” he addressed the man.
“I’m Kevin Burch.” The priest came into the room to introduce himself. “I’m Robert’s cousin. Trula told me you were up here, and I just wanted to pop in to meet you. I hope I’m not intruding.”
“Not at all, Father.” Sam took the hand the priest offered.
“It’s Kevin,” the priest told him. “Everyone here calls me Kevin. Robert’s kind enough to let me call this place home.”
He turned to Fiona.
“Ah, Father … er, Kevin …” Sam began. “This is Special Agent Summers. She’s with the FBI.”
“It’s Fiona.” She pushed back her chair to rise and Kevin waved her off.
“Don’t get up. Please. It’s nice to meet you.” He shook her hand as well, then looked at the table. “Looks as if I’ve interrupted something important here.”
“We’re just going over a case. The FBI has identified three victims that appear to be the work of the same killer. One of those cases happens to be the case we took on this week.”
“The good Samaritan from Nebraska.” Kevin moved closer to take a look. “The gentleman who was found behind the soup kitchen? A mission of some sort?”
“Yes.” Sam’s eyes darted to the photos, wondering if perhaps they might be too gruesome for the priest.
“Mallory called me about it.” He picked up the photo of Ross Walker and studied it, but did not flinch from the carnage. “Poor soul. Do you have any leads?”
“None. We were just discussing the fact that there are two other very similar cases that—”
“What’s in his mouth?” Kevin asked.
“A hamburger from a fast food restaurant,” Sam told him.
Kevin studied the picture, then picked up the next one.
“What’s this supposed to be, some kind of shelter …?” he asked.
“Apparently. It was put around him by the killer,” Fiona explained.
“And this?” Kevin next went to the picture of Calvin Adams. “The water bottle …”
“We don’t know what it all means,” Fiona said, “but we feel very strongly it’s connected somehow.”
The priest began to nod, as he replaced the photos in order, his expression solemn.
“If I could …” he began hesitantly.
“You have some thoughts, Father?” Sam asked. “Er, Kevin?”
“You’re Catholic, Sam?” Kevin asked.
“Yes.”
“Fiona?”
She nodded. “Me too, yes.”
“You’re familiar then, with the Church’s corporal acts of mercy?” the priest continued.
Fiona nodded. “The call to Christians to perform acts of charity and kindness to the needy,” she said. “To live as Christ would, treat our fellow man as He would.”
“Well said.” The priest then lifted the photos, in order, and dealt them out in front of the two investigators as if dealing from a deck of cards.
“Feed the hungry.” He peeled off the photo of Ross Walker. “Shelter the homeless.” Joseph Edward Maynard.
“Give drink to the thirsty.” Calvin Adams.
If a pin had dropped in the room, all three would have heard it land.
“Of course, being a priest, maybe I’m just reading into the photos what I see from my own perspective,” Kevin said. “Maybe it isn’t that at all.”
“No, that’s it.” Sam nodded slowly. “That’s it.”
“Except that Joseph Maynard was far from being homeless,” Fiona pointed out. “Calvin Adams was the homeless person.”
“But if the killer was selecting his victims at random, he wouldn’t have known that,” Sam told them. “And I’m just about one hundred percent certain that the victims were random.”
He explained that the killer could not have known that Ross Walker would have been the volunteer to take trash out to the Dumpster on the night he was attacked, but the killer had come totally prepared to commit murder.
“We may never know for certain if Maynard had been picked out ahead of time or if the killer had simply been in the parking lot, waiting for someone—anyone—to step outside.” He turned to Fiona. “You said that Calvin Adams was homeless and that he often slept in that park. In that case, he wouldn’t have had to look too far to find a victim. Especially if Adams was already asleep.”
“That’s true,” she said. “And since Adams was the only one of the three to have not fought back sufficiently to have gotten the killer’s skin under his nails, it does make sense that he could have been asleep when he was attacked.”
“So you have random victims but a specific … I don’t know what you’d call it.” Kevin frowned. “I’ve
read a lot but don’t know if you’d call the acts of mercy thing his signature or his MO.”
“Signature,” Sam told him. “His MO is the way in which he goes about committing his crime. The strangulation, the stabbings. But the posing, the props—they’re part of whatever emotional investment he has in these crimes. That’s what links him to his victims, that’s his payoff, what makes these killings uniquely his. And that’s what will eventually lead us to him.”
“It’s going to be hard to figure out though, don’t you think?” Kevin was still frowning. “I mean, you have random victims in random places.”
“Maybe not so random.” Fiona stood and leaned against the table. “I’m still not so sure the locations are random, Sam.”
“What do you mean?” Kevin asked.
“Ross Walker was killed in Lincoln, Nebraska—home of the University of Nebraska,” Fiona said.
“Great football there,” Kevin noted. “I’ve been a Cornhuskers fan for years.”
“You go to school out there, Father?” Sam had never addressed a priest by his first name and had to correct himself again. “Kevin.”
“No, I went to St. Joe’s, in Philly. But Nebraska’s teams always get TV time in the fall. They’re always worth watching.”
“Sam went to Nebraska,” Fiona told him. “Right, Sam?”
“Right. I did. I’m Nebraska born and raised.”
“You play ball there?” the priest asked, seeming to be grateful to have the conversation move from murder for a moment.
“Actually, yes, I did.” Sam nodded. “I played center, backup my freshman year, started the next three.”
“You must have been good.”
“I had my moments.”
“Well, moving along here.” Fiona tapped on the photo of Calvin Adams. “Mr. Adams was killed in a park in Dutton, Nebraska.” She turned to Kevin. “Sam went to high school in Dutton.”
“Seriously?” The priest stared at the photo, then picked up the picture of Joseph Maynard. “Tell me you didn’t go to grade school in the town where this young man died.”
“No, I didn’t go to grade school there,” Sam said solemnly. “But my wife—my late wife—did. As a matter of fact, we were married there. Actually, she’s buried there.”
“Holy … smoke.” Kevin leaned against the back of the chair and exhaled loudly.
“That’s what we were discussing when you came in.” Sam reached for his water bottle, the sick feeling returning to his stomach. Hearing Fiona lay it out for the priest that way made coincidence seem less and less likely.
“We were thinking it was probably a coincidence that Sam had a connection to the locations,” Fiona added.
“Well, I’m not an investigator, but it seems to me that if the victims are random but the location is not, then the key would be in the location, right?” When he realized what he said, Kevin looked at Sam apologetically. “But does it really make sense that someone would deliberately pick places that had ties to you? Would someone really do that? I mean, I know on TV
you see story lines like that, but in real life, do people do that?”
“I guess if they’re trying to get someone’s attention, they might.” Fiona stated what, for her, was obvious.
“If someone’s trying to get my attention,” Sam said slowly, “they’ve got it now.”
“But why would someone do that?” Kevin asked. “Why Sam? And why bring the acts of mercy into it?”
“The first question—why me?” Sam shrugged. “It could be someone who wants revenge against me for something, maybe for arresting them in the past, or maybe arresting a family member or a loved one. We can look into that through the Bureau’s records. But why the posing, feed the hungry and the rest of it? That’s the real question. And if we can find the answer to that, we’ll have the answers to all those other questions.”
“This is all speculation, Sam,” Fiona reminded him. “Maybe we’re reading too much into this. Maybe it is, as we discussed before, a creepy coincidence.” She thought for a moment. “Let’s look at this another way. You said this is your first week on this new job, right?”
Sam nodded. “Right.”
“Ross Walker was killed on February 9, 2008. How would someone in February of 2008 have known that in September of 2009, you’d no longer be with the Bureau? That you’d not only be working here, but that you’d be assigned to this case?”
Sam felt a prickle at the back of his neck.
“No one could have predicted that,” Kevin said.
“Right.” Sam turned to the priest. “I didn’t even
know that a year and a half ago. So you’re probably right. It’s probably just one of those creepy coincidences. I guess they really do happen.”
“Sure,” Fiona agreed all too readily. “I’m sure that’s it. Proving that even the great John Mancini isn’t invincible.”
Kevin looked at her blankly.
“Our boss, John. His theory is that there’s no such thing as coincidence in a homicide investigation,” Fiona explained.
Kevin smiled. “I guess you can tell him that he can lay that theory to rest. Somehow this killer just managed to pick three towns in the Midwest that had a connection to Sam, but it could have been any three towns. Could have been any other three towns that had a connection to someone else, right? So there’s got to be another explanation, right?”
“Right,” Sam and Fiona said at the same time.
“Well, I’m glad we got that straightened out.” Kevin patted Sam on the back. “Good to meet you, Sam. Welcome aboard. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other. Good luck with your case.”
“Thanks, Father.” She smiled as he left the room, then turned to Sam and said, “So we’re in agreement, then? We’re scratching the Sam connection here and we’re moving ahead?”
He hesitated just a bit too long.
“What?” Fiona frowned. “I thought we just agreed—”
“You have three murders where the MO is identical. What generally happens once a recognizable pattern is identified, Fiona?”
She didn’t answer right away. “Once the details are
entered into VICAP, sooner or later someone will pick up the similarities.”
“And if there are three or more …”
“Someone will stick the serial-killer tag on them. And sooner or later, the chances are very good that the case will fall into the lap of the Bureau, where odds are—at the very least—it will be reviewed by one of the profilers.”
“And since there were only two of us working for John’s unit—Anne Marie McCall and I—sooner or later, the connection would be made.” Sam looked at Fiona. “Annie knows I’m from Nebraska. She knows I graduated from UNL. She would have brought it to my attention.”
“So if we go back to the theory that the killer is trying to get your attention, he would most likely have gotten it.”
“Right. I think the only real coincidence here is that I came on board with the Mercy Street Foundation at the same time Lynne Walker applied to have her husband’s murder investigated. If I’d stayed with the Bureau, the connection would have been obvious.” Sam sighed. “And there’s one other thing I should bring to your attention.”
She tilted her head to one side, waiting.
“My birthday is February ninth.”
He waited for the significance of the dates to click in. He didn’t have to wait long.
“Walker was killed on the ninth in ’08, Adams on the ninth in ’09. Maynard, though, was killed on the fifteenth of the month, right?”
“That’s right.” He swallowed hard. “August fifteenth. The anniversary of my wife’s murder.”
“Holy shit.” Fiona stared at Sam. “Why didn’t you say something when Father Burch was here?”
“Because I think that bomb ought to be dropped on Mallory Russo and Robert Magellan first.”
“I guess I’d better call in to the office and have someone start running a list of all the cases you handled over the years, and see if anything jumps out. It would have to be someone you pissed off really badly, Sam.”
“Well, that should narrow the field down to a couple hundred people and their families and closest friends,” Sam said dryly. “You can lay an awful lot of track in sixteen years …”