Roarke’s heart sank. Unless by some chance…
“What did you do with his stuff?”
The manager brightened, if anyone could use that word for someone so washed out. “Wasn’t enough room in the trash for all of it last week. There’s a garbage bag in the laundry room.”
Roarke tensed. “I’d like to see that bag.”
He nodded to Epps, still on the phone, and followed the manager into the main building, trying and failing to contain the rush of hope he was feeling. Trash was fair game for law enforcement. They could take the whole bag and comb through it for incriminating evidence that Santos was planning the killing, or even blood or other DNA evidence if by any slim chance Santos had returned to the place after killing the Lelands.
Possibly killing the Lelands
, Roarke added in his head as he walked with the manager through a dank, hopeless hallway with dirty walls, rank with the smell of unwashed men. There were hundreds of these places in the state, thousands, housing the overflow from California’s bursting prison system. Men who had been too broken by the things they had done or that had been done to them ever to rejoin society. Insanity compounded by years confined in insane conditions. Like the creature that was the Reaper, Roarke thought, a sick mind becoming sicker, slow cooking to a more potent state of madness…
He forced himself away from the train of thought and spoke aloud to the manager as they walked. “Did you get a sense of sexual interest in children? Twelve, thirteen-year old boys?”
The manager looked taken aback. “No. Not like I hung out with him but… shit, no.” He frowned. “Some of these guys, though… it’s like there’s no
there
there, you know?”
Roarke knew.
They stepped through a back doorway into the sunlight again. There was a second door in the back wall of the building. As they approached that door, an obnoxious ring tone jangled, with buzzing for good measure. The manager shoved his hand into his pocket, scooping out a phone.
He shrugged an apology to Roarke as he moved aside. Roarke ignored him and opened the door into a dark space, with a short set of stairs leading down into a laundry room.
A tiny window at ground level provided a minimum of feeble light. He felt along the inside wall for a lightswitch and found nothing, so he stood, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Below he made out the shapes of a standard washer and dryer gleaming whitely beside rows of trash bins.
He started down the stairs. As he neared the bottom, he felt along the wall again for a lightswitch, and then stopped… sensing presence. He twisted around—
Suddenly wild eyes shone from the dark, and a hulking form barreled toward him.
Roarke reached out instinctively to grab his attacker’s wrist and used the momentum to slam him against the concrete wall. The man howled in rage and thrust his body backward. Roarke grabbed him in a headlock and wrestled him down to the ground, holding him down. He got a whiff of stale clothes and the faint burned-plastic stench of meth as he pinned his struggling captive to the floor and breathed through the adrenaline rush in his head.
He knew what he was dealing with from the smell, even before the overhead light sizzled on, as somewhere at the top of the stairs the manager flipped the switch… revealing a large and dirty man writhing on the floor beneath Roarke.
Roarke held the man down on the concrete with a fist in his hair and a knee in his back, and cuffed him with plastic cuffs.
The manager rushed down the stairs. “Jesus, Bronson. How many fucking times—”
“You know this guy?” Roarke demanded over the pounding of his own heart. He kept his knee firmly in the center of his captive’s body mass.
“Former resident,” the manager said. “He knows he’s not supposed to be here, but he keeps coming back.”
“Call the local cops,” Roarke ordered. He rolled the dirty man onto his side. “I’m going to help you up on three,” he said, and counted off. No stranger to handcuffs, obviously, the man opted for cooperation rather than pain. He heaved up to his knees and let Roarke haul him to his feet.
Roarke manhandled the guy up the stairs, using pressure on his cuffed arms to lever him forward. The manager followed at a safe distance, carrying the trash bag. At the top of the stairs, Roarke pushed his prisoner through the door, squinting against the sudden daylight.
Epps was rushing up the drive, looking over the man in cuffs. “Jesus. You okay?” he asked Roarke.
“Fine,” Roarke told him.
“Is it Santos?”
Roarke shook his head, catching his breath through the buzz of adrenaline in his blood. “Some former resident, off his meds and on meth. Local cops are on their way. Can you take him?”
“Got it.” Epps hooked the guy’s arm and spoke in a voice that brooked no argument. “We’re going to the curb to wait for your ride, sir.”
Roarke took a deep, steadying breath, then turned to the manager and took the trash bag. He opened it and without removing anything, did a quick visual scan.
Some ratty clothes, a chaos of papers, clipped newspaper articles that probably made sense to Santos and Santos alone, something that looked like a dead mouse. There was a smell of sickness to the clothes. Some types of schizophrenia had a certain heavy animal scent that put Roarke right back into his year of psych internship.
He looked over at the manager. “Anything else you noticed? Anything else you could tell us that he had in the apartment? Anything you might have kept?”
The manager was suddenly evasive. Roarke could feel the change in his posture instantly. And there was a particular quality to the evasion that Roarke recognized.
“What was it, porn?” he said. “What kind?” In his experience, porn was a better indicator of a person than a lie detector test.
The manager tried not very successfully to compose his face and Roarke made his voice hard. “Don’t make me get a search warrant for
your
place.”
The manager gave him a hostile look, but nodded toward his own front door and started for it.
Inside the seedy little apartment Roarke looked over a spread that the manager had hauled out from a drawer, including
Hustler, Juggs, Spicy Latinas
… women with ballooning breasts, gaping genitals.
“This all of it?” he asked, feeling tired.
The manager fidgeted behind him. “I swear.”
“Nothing with kids?” Roarke demanded.
The manager looked injured. “Hell no. Think I’d take that?”
“
Nothing
? Teenagers, boys?”
“Swear ta Christ.” Now the man was indignant. “Totally mainstream.”
As Roarke and the manager emerged from the apartment into the afternoon sunlight, Epps was coming up on them, without the prisoner, and talking into his phone. “Here’s Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roarke,” he said, and extended the phone to Roarke. Roarke took it, exchanging it for the black plastic bag of Santos’ belongings.
The man at the other end introduced himself as Lieutenant Montez, with DAPO. “Your man’s been saying we might have a sex offender on our hands.”
Roarke had the queasy thought that “sex offender” might be the least of their problems. “Possible sex offender and possible mass murderer,” he said.
There was a beat of silence on the other end, then the lieutenant said tersely, “I just kicked this PAL up to the highest risk classification level. Our San Jose intelligence and field units will be putting out an immediate and concerted effort to find him. We’re already on the line with Reno P.D., see if we can pick up a trail there.”
It was lucky for them there was a local force already in place to handle fugitive apprehension. It cut through all the bureaucracy and got the proper authorities instantly on the case.
“Appreciate it,” Roarke said. “Anything our office can do, we’ll be all over it, just let us know.”
He punched off and was about to hand the phone back to Epps when he realized they’d switched phones in the process. He pocketed his phone and handed Epps’ phone back to him.
Then he turned to the manager and extended a card. “Any sign of Santos, any word on where he might be, we want to know immediately.”
“Course,” the manager said. Roarke could hear the dislike in his voice.
Feeling’s mutual, pal
.
The agents walked away, back down the cracked concrete drive toward the car.
Epps finally spoke. “I sure enough don’t want to explain to Reynolds what we were doing here.”
Roarke looked back toward the door of the laundry room. He was having an uneasy feeling that had nothing to do with the adrenaline crash or the thought of what the SAC would have to say.
“All right, what?” Epps said. “What are you thinking?”
Roarke spoke reluctantly. “Santos left a stash of porn when he lit out. Not kids. Adult women. Bondage.” In his mind he kept going back to the plain fact that men are excruciatingly specific about their particular sexual fantasies.
Epps knew it, thought on it. “Doesn’t fit. But it could be a blind. Covering his tracks in case the P.O. does a drop-in.”
Roarke found himself shaking his head. “The guy sounds too disordered to pull that kind of planning off. In fact, I’m wondering if someone that disordered could have enough control to kill the Leland father like that. So pro that a professional law enforcement team wouldn’t have seen it as a suicide.”
“The timing fits,” Epps said. “He could have blown town right after his last check-in and done the Lelands. Two weeks until he shows up as officially missing.”
“The timing fits,” Roarke said, and didn’t like the feeling in his gut. “I hope we’re on to him, but…” he trailed off. “Damn it. I don’t like it.”
Epps frowned. “Well, DAPO’s on that case. Leaves us free to…” He left the sentence hanging.
Free to
what
was the question.
Pursue Cara
?
Let her pursue me
?
“I don’t know,” Roarke said. He pulled himself together. “I appreciate you being on board with it, though.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘on board,’” Epps said stiffly. “But…” He stopped, stared out into the darkening sky. “If there’s
any
chance you’re right… we can’t let it go.”
Chapter Twenty-three
The drive back was nightmarish. Thick fog had rolled in from the ocean, waves of it, and the traffic up the 101 had slowed to a crawl.
“Thanksgiving,” Epps muttered, and Roarke looked at him, startled again at the mention of the holiday.
“Damn,” he said.
“Yeah,” Epps said.
Offices would be closed all over for the next two days. It would slow down any information they were after, when they had no time to lose. On the other hand, he would be on his own, without Reynolds looking over his shoulder… or suspending him outright.
Back at the office, Roarke left Epps to check back in with Singh while he took the bags of Santos’ belongings to the lab for Lam and Stotlemyre, who providentially were still in.
“This is a favor,” he told them, and explained he needed them to comb through for hair and other DNA evidence that might be matched to the Leland murders and the Reaper scenes. “It’s asking a lot…”
Lam and Stotlemyre exchanged a glance. “Since you mention it…” Lam started.
“Look, we know Reynolds shut the Reno inquiry down…” Stotlemyre continued.
“But you know how
he
is.” Lam rolled his eyes toward Stotlemyre. “Once he gets the bit between his teeth.”
“So we’ve been doing a little work on this, and we think you should see this.”
Lam grabbed for a file. “It’s all about the voids.”
Roarke knew he meant the empty places in spilled or spattered blood that indicated that an object or a person had caught the projected blood rather than the surrounding area.
Lam put down a series of photos, which coldly captured the father slumped in his office chair in a pool of his own blood. “You can see in theses photos: these curtain-like patterns of blood on the wall from the arterial spray, caused by the last contractions of the father’s heart.”
Roarke face tensed as he looked at the images. It was always unnerving to see how much blood geysered from the human body when a major artery was cut. The sight also made him wonder again how much Cara’s predilection for cutting throats came from experiencing this very crime herself, from seeing her sister murdered in front of her, from feeling the knife in her own throat, all those many years ago.
He had to force himself to focus back on the present.
“But here’s the thing that contradicts the other visual evidence. You see this void here in the projected blood?” Stotlemyre was pointing to a close-up, indicating a blank space at the edge of the spray. “It’s subtle, the guy was actually quite careful under the circumstances, but if Leland were sitting here…” The tech took a chair and placed it in front of a lab table, sat down in it. “When you calculate the angle of the spray, it’s hard to explain the void in the spatter.”
Lam stepped up behind the chair. “Unless someone was standing behind him,” he finished.
Roarke felt his heart constrict. Behind him Epps said softly, “Someone else killed them.” Roarke turned to see the agent standing in the doorway. He hadn’t even heard him come in.
Roarke looked back to the techs. “How sure are you about this?”
The techs exchanged a glance, then Lam spoke for both of them. “Not sure enough. It would help a lot to get confirmation about the blood on the father. We sent the mixed blood samples to Quantico to rush the DNA – did that before Reynolds lowered the boom. But we’re confident about the void.”
Stotlemyre nodded agreement.
Roarke took the elevator back down a floor and went straight in to see Singh. Her face was lit by by the desk lamp in her cubicle, her raven hair shimmering around her shoulders. Working late, even on a holiday eve. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that unmarried agents were an anomaly in the Bureau, but he led a team of entirely single people. He supposed that had something to do with him.
She looked up as he stepped forward. “Chief.”