He suppressed his urgency, kept his voice casual.
“Did you recognize the cat? Did it belong to one of the neighbors?”
The boy thought. “Don’t think so.”
“Did it have a collar?”
“Huh uh.”
“What color was it?”
“Black.”
“Black and white, or just black?”
“All I could see was black. And blood.”
“Long hair or short hair?”
“Long.”
The boy was starting to glaze over, sinking into himself. A dead cat and a dead friend, it was too much. Roarke backed off.
“You’ve been a huge help. I’m going to give your mom my card. You have her call us if you think of anything, anything at all that seems weird, all right?”
The boy nodded, shyly proud at the responsibility.
“You go back inside, now, right?” Roarke told him. Stephen stood obediently, and looked back at the men before he slipped back in through the door.
“Holy motherfucking shit,” Epps breathed, as they walked out the front gate, toward the car. “You’re really thinking…”
“I think we need Lam and Stotlemyre up here. I think the father died first. I think someone killed them all.”
Neither said it, but the name resonated in the silence.
The Reaper
.
They drove back toward downtown to find a motel to set up camp. Roarke had been expecting casino kitsch, but the downtown had been developed and revitalized, with a Riverwalk and all kinds of modern glass and concrete structures.
Epps drove, shaking his head as he stared out the windshield. “Not downtown,” he said. “She’s not going to walk into a big hotel. We need a motel, someplace she would take the chance and come up close to.”
It took Roarke a beat to understand what Epps was saying. He’d again forgotten the initial purpose of this trip: to draw Cara out. His head was too filled with the disturbing parallels between the Reaper’s massacres and this new case that couldn’t possibly be connected to it.
Not possibly.
And yet
…
His phone vibrated, startling him. He glanced at the screen to see Jones’s name. Roarke knew he’d been watching the Leland house from down the block but they hadn’t called in to let the agent know what was happening.
“You want to tell me what the hell is going on, there?” Jones demanded.
Roarke shook his head as if Jones could see. “I wish to God I knew. We need to find a motel. Follow us.”
On the outskirts of town there was a rustic Old West-style motor lodge with connected cabins, arrangements of farm implements lining the walkways, corral-style fence posts, saddles, a pioneer wagon, even a giant concrete steer.
The sleeping quarters consisted of two rows of connected cabin-like rooms.
Epps checked them in, two cabins next door to each other. Jones could check into one across the way and have a perfect vantage for surveillance.
Roarke was talking, words spilling over before his door was even closed, before Epps could speak.
“Just listen. It’s a small town. They almost never see a case like this. The background of trouble in the marriage fits the outside visual of the scene, which is that the father goes crazy, kills the family. Lundgren isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, doesn’t bother to look at the statistics for murder/suicide to see that a stabbing M.O. for this kind of assault is almost unheard of. He sees it as a slam-dunk and clears the case. A rush to the obvious conclusion that the killer wants everyone to draw. But statistically, the likelihood of the father flipping out and slashing up his children like this? It isn’t how it happens.”
He paced. “What really happens is our guy gets into the house, maybe through a window, maybe the front door’s actually open like Lundgren said. Maybe there’s a hide-a-key, he could have figured that out if he’s been watching the place for a week.” He made a mental note to check about a hide-a-key. “The whole family’s asleep. The killer takes the father out first, then goes upstairs after the mother and the kids. Goes back down to the study, puts Leland’s slippers back on him, puts the knife in Leland’s hands to get the prints, and lets it fall.”
Epps was on his feet, too. “I don’t buy it. I don’t. Let’s get real. What are the chances the Reaper just picks up and starts killing all over again exactly twenty-five years later?”
Roarke was so deep in thought it took him a long time to pull himself back to the present to respond.
“I’m thinking Shawcross. Arthur Shawcross killed twelve prostitutes from 1988 to 1989 in the Rochester area, upstate New York. He was first arrested for rape and murder in 1972 and served fourteen and a half years in prison, after which he was paroled and went straight back to killing. The profilers on the case figured him for fifteen years younger because he was still showing all the emotional characteristics of the age at which he’d been incarcerated, but really he’d just picked up right where he left off.”
Epps actually took a few beats to think about it, but shook his head. “Uh uh. Here’s what I don’t like. What are the chances we start investigating all this just when it starts happening again?”
Roarke had been thinking that, too. Or rather, trying not to think about it. It was worse than coincidence… more dangerous, somehow. “I can’t explain it. But the anniversary of the Lindstrom massacre is a trigger for Cara Lindstrom, why wouldn’t it be a trigger for the killer?”
Epps held his hands up in protest. “The Reaper massacres were straight-up killings. They weren’t staged. No father suicide. It’s a huge anomaly.”
“But the Reaper would be twenty-five years older now. That’s long enough to learn some control. He still needs the frenzy, the release. He needs it to be a knife, needs the cutting, the slashing, the blood. But what if he learned a couple of tricks in prison? He’s had a long, long time to plot how to cover his tracks when he finally got out.”
Epps looked away.“If anyone had arrested the Reaper they’d have thrown away the key.”
Roarke pointed at him. “Exactly. So he had to have been arrested for
something else
. Something big, twenty-five years worth of big, but nowhere near what he really deserved. Nobody knew they had the Reaper. He was never connected to the massacres.”
Now Epps was the one to pace, pressing his big hands against his temples. “Man. And I thought this shit couldn’t get any crazier. You are entirely tripping me out right now.”
“I know.” It was like being dropped through the rabbit hole, all semblance of reality wavering.
Epps finally stopped still and they looked at each other.
“Only one way to find out,” Roarke said. “We get Lam and Stotlemyre up here to go over the evidence with the coroner.”
Chapter Fifteen
“We’ve got a problem,” Roarke told Singh on the phone.
As he filled her in, her silence was epic, and he thought again that they had slipped into some territory that he wasn’t sure he wanted any part of.
He told her to get Lam and Stotlemyre, the division’s best crime scene techs, up to Reno, and instruct them to take a cab to the Leland house upon arrival. She would be sending him photos of the Reaper massacres for comparison to the Leland killings.
“And we need to find out who owned that cat,” he told her, and gave her Stephen Marsden’s description of the animal. “Whoever it was may have seen someone watching
their
house. If we can find out when the cat went missing, we’ll know when the killer was here.”
“I will start with the animal shelters and lost pet sites,” Singh assured him.
Next Roarke pulled Bureau rank with the Reno Chief of Detectives to get access to the Leland house, this time without Detectives Lundgren and Samson.
He had time for a short nap, as they waited for the techs to arrive. Not anywhere near enough before his phone was ringing him awake at quarter past midnight.
The half moon was high as he joined Epps at the car. Jones was nowhere in sight, but Roarke knew he’d be shadowing them, still on the lookout for Cara.
Epps drove through a fast-food franchise for coffees, then they headed to the Leland house to meet Lam and Stotlemyre. They were Roarke’s favorite techs of the San Francisco Division’s six Evidence Response Teams to work with, one an enormous blond German, the other a reed-thin Vietnamese, joined at the hip. They’d been working together for aeons and Roarke suspected they were joined at the hip personally, too, though no one ever asked. It might be the San Francisco FBI, but it was still the FBI.
The four men greeted each other in the Lelands’ front hall. No handshaking. No one ever shook hands at a crime scene.
“So tell me — am I crazy?” Roarke asked, not joking.
“Not necessarily,” Lam said cheerfully. They all moved into the living room as he explained. “It’s not exactly sloppy detective work but it’s clear the lead detective had a bias. There’s been a rash of family murder-suicides in the last two years and the media has been hitting it hard, domestic violence linked to the recession, that kind of thing.”
Stotlemyre nodded assent. “It’s an easy enough conclusion to come to. When these cases keep showing up in the news…”
“It’s infectious,” Lam finished beside him. Roarke and Epps exchanged a glance. The extensive news coverage of some high profile crimes like school shootings and workplace massacres almost always seemed to trigger similar crimes across the nation, the intense media attention pushing other potential killers over the edge. Mass murder going viral.
“Except for the statistical improbability of a knife as the murder and suicide weapon,” Roarke said.
“Exactly,” Lam pointed toward him.
Stotlemyre concurred. “In fact I can only think of two: one in Arizona in 2002, where the father burned down the house after stabbing the family to death, and one back in the Dark Ages, 1970, the Jeffrey Macdonald killings. That turned out to be a staged home invasion, the father trying to make it look like his family had been killed by a Manson family copycat.” As he spoke, Lam used the dining room table to spread out crime scene photos, the two techs working together seamlessly as they always did. Now Stotlemyre stepped to the table to look down at the photos. “The Reno forensics techs did a good job with blood location. And the location of blood in each room throughout the house was consistent with the scenario the detectives settled on.”
Lam took over. “The crime lab typed the blood, and the murder weapon looks exactly like it should in a murder-suicide scenario. The wife and the second boy had the same blood type as the father, the youngest and eldest boys had different types, and all three blood types were found on the knife. And the father’s prints were on the knife, of course. All very damning, fine, no problem. But given the level of violence, the multiple stabbings, the struggle of the victims, the father realistically should have had
all three
types of blood somewhere on his clothing and/or skin. The lab found only
two
types mixed on the father’s clothing. The oldest boy’s, no surprise: the kid fought him and was really slashed up.” Lam put out a photo of the carnage in Seth Leland’s bedroom.
Roarke felt a twinge at the tech’s words that was not just the sheer horror of the scenario, but an additional prickle of significance. There was something here, something crucial he had to pay attention to. But before he could follow the thought, Lam added, “But we find it odd that nowhere on Leland’s person or clothes was there any blood from the youngest child.”
Stotlemyre continued. “Since the mother’s and middle child’s blood type was the same, we were wondering if just possibly there was blood from only
one
of those two on Leland’s clothes. If there was no blood from the youngest
or
the middle boy on Leland, it would give more weight to your theory of an outside killer,” he nodded to Roarke. “So that’s the first thing to check. DNA testing can separate various DNA profiles from a mixed blood sample.”
The techs exchanged a glance, then Lam spoke for both of them. “We’re getting the mixed blood samples from the crime lab and sending them to Quantico to rush the DNA.”
“Sounds like a long shot,” Epps said.
And a longer wait than we can afford,
Roarke thought uneasily
. We’re racing the moon, here
.
Stotlemyre shrugged philosophically. “It wouldn’t get you a conviction, but if you’re trying to establish that the father didn’t kill the family, it’s a place to start. Meanwhile we’ll comb through the rest of the evidence.”
“You need to handle everyone on the case with kid gloves,” Roarke told them, too aware that he himself hadn’t. “Assure them that there’s no way they could have seen these things unless they knew to look. We need to get them to cooperate and turn over all potential evidence to us.”
As Epps took Lam and Stotlemyre upstairs for a walk-through, Roarke drifted back to the study to picture the scene.
He didn’t turn on the light, but stepped to the window to open the slatted wood blind, and then just let his eyes adjust to the ambient light from the streetlights outside.
Leland had been drinking alone in his study, another reason for the Reno detectives to assume marital problems. According to the tox screens his blood alcohol level had been fairly high; it could well be that he’d fallen asleep at the desk. The window blinds had been up that night, an across-the-street neighbor had glimpsed him at the desk as she turned off her own lights on the way to bed. So someone else could have seen him there as well. Someone not so benign.
The Reaper had watched his victims for days; the time frame was more nearly a week, judging by the dead animals left on the porches. Perhaps in the Reaper’s head the animals were a warning, a clue to the families that might have saved them had they been attuned to the signs. Or it was some ritual only known to him.
Roarke stepped to the desk. The office chair of course had been removed; there had been too much blood to clean it. He pulled up a chair that sat against the opposite wall and sat down in front of the desk in Professor Leland’s place, looking out the window, staring through the trees and shrubbery in the front yard. He could see the street, and two of the neighbor’s houses across it, dark now, with just porch lights on.