Angel Killer (32 page)

“You ever date anyone older when you were my age?” asks Rosa.

“I didn’t date much. Boys were afraid of me, I was too serious, and I was never in one place for very long.” I leave out that I went on a lot of pretend dates with older gay dancers who worked in our show. We’d go to movies and clubs. It was fun role-playing for both of us. I got to pretend that I at least had a normal life for a little while.

“Yeah, but I bet they all liked you. That’s why I became a cheerleader.”

I have to smile. I’ve seen the effect a costume can have on a boy’s imagination.

“What I like about Ryan is that he never asks for photos or stuff. Never any pressure, you know.”

I think I know. I’m relieved to see he’s not trying to exploit her. Of course, that could be because he’s eighteen and doesn’t want to go to jail. Or because he’s waiting for one of my dancer boyfriends to come along.

“Where does Ryan live?”

“Houston,” says Rosa.

Long-distance romance is always the hardest. It’s also the most sincere. Without the physical attraction in the way, you tend to be at your most honest. At least that was the case for me. “Do you get to see him very often?”

Rosa makes a disappointed face. “No. Not in person since church camp. But we talk all the time.” She lowers her voice. “He gave me a phone so we could talk.”

An alarm bell goes off in my head.

She keeps talking, excited to confide. “He’s always busy with football practice and school. But he finds the time to talk to me. Which is funny, because at church camp he kind of ignored me. Didn’t really notice I was there. Then he e-mailed me afterward and said he was kind of shy. Which I can understand.”

He ignored her in person. I take a slow breath. “Rosa, how did you know it was him? Silly question, I know.”

Rosa frowns. “Oh, like how did I know it wasn’t one of his friends pulling a prank? We talk on Skype. He’s got a crappy Internet connection so it drops out a lot, which is a pain.”

She’s only seen him from video conferencing. We already saw how the Warlock can fake that with the added cover of a bad connection.

Thanks to Katya, we know the Warlock likes to lure his victims from afar. He kept up a fake interaction with Swanson’s wife to keep her convinced her husband was still alive. We still don’t know how he met Claire or Denise. They might have gone willingly with him after they met online or might have thought they were meeting up with someone they already knew and he showed up instead.

I’ve met friends for drinks a hundred times based on text messages. Anyone with ten dollars and access to the Internet can send a spoof text from a number you know. We’re so much more vulnerable than we realize, but we’re so worried about credit card thieves and eBay scammers that the idea of a serial killer using this technology against us is new. It’s something I’m afraid we’re seeing more of.

The Warlock is a spider at the center of a huge online web of deceit, pretending to be dozens of different personas. It’s a chilling thought.

How many of our friends are people we just know from online communication? It doesn’t take a freak like Damian to do this digitally.

“Rosa, what did you tell him in the bathroom? Did you mention us? It’s okay to tell me. We just need to know. We need to make sure he’ll be okay too.”

Rosa’s eyes widen. “What does he have to do with this?”

“Nothing, I’m sure. Did you mention us?”

“Yes. I know I’m not supposed to, but he’s a hundred miles away and has nothing to do with this. And I was supposed to call him anyways about . . .”

“About what, Rosa?”

She shakes her head.

“Rosa. We need to know.”

“I was going to go see his football game on Wednesday night. A friend of his was going to drive me.”

Knoll bursts in through the side door. He’s been listening with Johnson. “Rosa, we need your phone now!”

She looks scared as hell. She should be.

I
LOOK UP
at the Texas sun as an FBI helicopter lands in the field next to the motel kicking up a cloud of dust. Knoll and I rush aboard and buckle up.

FBI and Texas law enforcement were able to triangulate the phone call from Rosa’s phone to a moving vehicle. When it switched towers to a road passing through a thinly populated area, a spotter in an aircraft was able to make an identification of a black Suburban.

The Warlock probably wasn’t expecting us to identify his victim before the crime. He sure as hell wasn’t thinking we’d be able to pinpoint his location while he was still planning things.

A roadblock has been set up fifteen miles away from us. By the time we arrive, Highway Patrol and Hidalgo County sheriffs already have the vehicle surrounded. I count at least fourteen police cruisers and a Highway Patrol helicopter hovering next to ours.

Our take-down unit of eight agents dressed in armored flak jackets and black helmets is giving the driver instructions to throw his keys out the window and put his hands on the wheel. There’s a moment of hesitation, then he throws something shiny on the ground. He holds his hands up and our guys pull him out of his vehicle and cuff him at gunpoint.

From where we are, he looks to be an average-sized man. An agent tosses his hat and sunglasses aside and I see thin, dark brown hair. He looks to be in his early forties.

Nothing about him stands out. Put him in a suit and he’d look like a banker. A construction hat and he’d look like a foreman. Nothing about his mannerisms suggests anything suspicious. He’s acting like a man surprised by all the fuss.

Knoll is on the phone with the attorneys at the Justice Department trying to make certain we have a clear case for his apprehension. They assure us that suspicion of using electronic deception to talk to a minor is good enough cause to arrest him and search his vehicle. Rosa’s claim that he was going to send a friend for her gives us a case for intent to kidnap.

What we really want is evidence that connects him to the murders and the Michigan workshop. That may take longer, but if we can prove he was talking to Rosa on the phone, then we can hold him long enough to make the tightest case we can.

After they have him secured, lying facedown on the highway with his arms cuffed behind his back, our pilot lands us behind the roadblock. Knoll and I get out to watch our forensic team search the vehicle. One of our agents videotapes everything so we can show a clear chain of custody for any evidence we find.

An electronics forensic tech examines the cell phone found in the console. He removes and plugs the SIM card into a computer in the back of an SUV. I’m looking at the face of the man on the ground, trying to figure out if I’ve ever seen him before. Nothing strikes me. Damian was correct; this man is as bland as you can imagine.

Actually, he seems unusually calm and isn’t resisting. Often you build up an idea of a confrontation in your mind and it’s nothing like what you actually find. Other times, a simple traffic stop can result in gunfire. He’s just lying there in his blue jeans and polo shirt, acting as if this is all a mistake.

Knoll has a binder of all the faces that came up as probable matches before. He flips through them and stops at one photograph and shows it to me. It’s him. Or a close enough match. I’m willing to bet the guy on the ground uploaded his face at one point to the face-matching site to see if he had a double.

Or someone else did. Damn the uncertainty. At least we know the man we caught is connected somehow.

Knoll is thinking the same thing I am. Why was the Warlock looking for a double in the first place? Was he just curious? We have a face match, but it’s only circumstantial. We can’t hold him unless we find something that ties him to Rosa. We need to prove he called her.

I walk over to the agent checking the SIM card. He’s pulled up a log of phone calls and is checking them against Rosa’s number. None of them match. He uses another piece of software to see if any of them called proxies.

Meanwhile, the forensic team is still searching the truck. They could be looking for days. If he ditched the phone or just the SIM, we won’t have anything to arrest him on. We’ll have to let him go right here.

Swapping SIM cards has become an important part of criminal activity from drug trafficking to credit card fraud. We’ve busted gangs that issue members pill containers with a different SIM card for each day of the week. They take one out each day, then toss it after they’re done. It makes tracking them a nightmare.

One of the agents who made the arrest hands Knoll the man’s driver license. It’s a Georgia license with the name Michael Haywood. If it’s legit, at least we know his name. If it’s not and we can prove it’s a fake, we have a reason to hold him.

Knoll calls the license in to check it. I take another look at the man on the ground. I walk around to see his face. I’m still wearing the blond wig and the sunglasses. He glances up at me then away, but I can tell. He does a double-take just for a moment. He recognizes me but doesn’t want me to know he does.

If I wasn’t wearing the disguise he probably would have pretended to feign ignorance. It’s the wig and glasses that make him doubt himself.

It’s him.

Knoll hangs up his phone. “License checks out. He matches the description of Michael Haywood. No priors. No tickets. No warrants.”

The forensic team remove a laptop and a police radio scanner from his vehicle. Incriminating as the scanner may be, we’ll need a warrant if we want to search the laptop. Knoll walks over to the suspect for permission. The man on the ground says no in a barely audible voice.

What would I do if I knew I was being followed and I had a cell phone on me that could incriminate me? I’m sure he knows the law as well as we do. A phone would be easy to spot if he tossed it. A SIM card would be almost impossible to find. We might have to do a ground search for several miles to try to find it. Without either, the best we can hope to do is hold him for seventy-two hours, and that’s kind of iffy at best. After that, we’ll have to let him go if the Georgia license holds up and we can’t find any proof of identity fraud.

Knoll shakes his head as he examines the license again. “It just had to be Georgia.”

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“They stopped using fingerprints in their driver’s licenses ten years ago and purged the database.”

Proving he’s using a fake license would be an immediate bust. An agent is using a mobile fingerprint scanner to run his prints against known felons and other records we have on file. We’ve yet to find even a partial print at the other crime scenes or the warehouse, but anything that attaches him to another crime would still be helpful. The DEA will also start circulating his photograph to see if any of its informants know who he is. Anything would be something right now.

Knoll has a pained expression. We might have to let him go right here. We’d pulled him over expecting the cell phone to be a quick match. It wasn’t.

I walk over to the driver’s side door. A tech in rubber gloves is doing a careful sweep of the inside edges where the carpet meets the plastic paneling. She looks up at me and shakes her head. If he tossed the SIM on the floorboards or under the seat, they would have found it by now.

The highway is lined with miles of grassy fields. It’s an impossible search grid. Maybe Ailes and his genies can come up with some kind of magic by triangulating the point the SIM card was yanked and compare it with his speed, but that’s just wishful thinking.

A tech does a second search, pouring the suspect’s coffee through a sieve to see if anything is at the bottom of the cup. Nothing. She bags the coffee cup.

The only thing left in the front seat is a water bottle. It looks empty, but she takes it out anyway and pours the contents into a plastic bucket. The bottle and cap are set aside on a table they’ve set next to his SUV with the rest of the evidence.

Our agents have moved the suspect out of the sun and to the back of a van so he can’t watch as we search his vehicle. He’s got a smug look on his face. He knows he’s fooled us.

I look back in his truck and try to think of what I’d do if I wanted to have something small like a SIM card close by, but I didn’t want to be caught with it.

What would a magician do?

What would I do?

I’d hide it in plain sight. Somewhere so obvious I’d make you dismiss it right away. I’d make it easy to get rid of if I had to, without you ever knowing.

I look at the objects on the table and see what he did.

I
CALL OVER
to Agent Knoll and make sure the forensic tech with the camera is recording. We don’t want to leave anything to chance; it’s critical we preserve the chain of evidence. Finding the SIM might not convict him of the murders, but it could be enough for us to build a case. At the very least it would mean we don’t have to let him go.

The Warlock probably drives a lot and has to expect to get pulled over occasionally. Some states, like Texas, have random DUI stops. Police can’t search your car without probable cause, but that doesn’t always mean they won’t take a good look inside or flip through your phone if they have it in their custody. It wouldn’t be admissible, but if they saw a few cryptic texts, they might bring in a drug dog to sniff your car. That’s the way things work. I’ve never done it, but I know good cops who see things differently. The Warlock has to function in a world of fuzzy rules. One where police see an out-of-state license plate driving near a border town and decide to investigate. He can’t afford to ditch his cell phone or SIM every time he sees flashing blue lights. He needs a procedure. He needs at least two SIM cards. One that he uses for his illicit phone calls and the one he replaces it with when he gets pulled over so police don’t get suspicious when his phone flashes “NO SIM.”

Magicians have all kinds of places to hide things. Even in a pair of fishnets, a sequined bikini top and shorts, I could hide a dozen objects my gynecologist would never find. It starts with using the idea of innocence to hide things.

My grandfather gave me my first magic set after he taught me the trick with the red balls. Coincidentally, it had his face on it. Made in China for a buck, it was filled with plastic props that were scaled-down versions of stage tricks. A flimsy instruction booklet explained how to perform the ersatz miracles.