“That’s not on you,” he said.
But now it’s on me
.
Chapter Thirty-six
Roarke was far too wired to sleep. Instead he told the deputy to continue down the mountain to the County Scientific Investigations Division in San Bernardino.
All the way down the mountain he could not still his racing thoughts, the sickness he felt that had nothing to do with the vertiginous curves of the road.
Interviewing Tanner had been like looking into a mirror. Tanner, the same age as Roarke’s own brother when the Reaper had first been killing. There had always been an abyss of terror under everything about the case that Roarke had never acknowledged to himself until this night, looking into Tanner’s resolute and starkly vulnerable face. The terror that men could do these things to boys, too, that he was not safe, that his brother was not safe, that there was no such thing as safe…
The motion of the vehicle abruptly stopped and he realized he’d dozed off in the passenger seat. The deputy was pulling in to the sheriff’s department complex, a looming edifice against the night sky, with two horizontal rows of lit windows in continuous bands wrapped around the building. The complex was surrounded by high fencing and the landscaping consisted of a few scraggly banana palms.
Roarke followed the deputy into a glass lobby with an enormous gold sheriff’s badge decorating the door.
He stopped in his tracks as a familiar figure walked out the office door behind the front counter. For a moment he was sure he was seeing things.
“Singh?” he said.
His agent pushed back her dark fall of hair and smiled at him. “I am delivering the horse hair evidence from the original Reaper massacres. SAC Reynolds authorized the helicopter.”
He could read how he looked in the brief, searching glance she gave him.
“That bad, huh?” he said wryly.
“Pretty bad,” she replied. “Can I get you something?
“Not unless you’re carrying around a spare brain. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. I need the rundown on where we are.”
“The sheriffs have given us an office. Come.”
In an upstairs office, she laid three separate files out open on a desk before him. She touched the first, topped by a familiar, disheveled photo. “First, I have heard from DAPO. Santos is back in custody. He alibis out for the Cavanaugh murders.”
No surprise there, but it was good to have it off the table. Roarke nodded, and Singh closed the first file, gold arm bands glinting on her wrists.
“Second, I have been calling all equine transport companies which operate in California and Nevada to find any that have routes which include the cities of Reno and Lake Arrowhead. There is a National Horse Carriers Association that considers itself to serve what they call the horse carriers industry. Some have weekly coast-to-coast routes, and there is a west coast route that encompasses Washington State to southern California. Of course there are specialized trips as well. It is a vast network. But there are dozens of companies that are not registered with this association.”
Not good
, Roarke thought, with a sinking feeling.
“I have also been calling all horse transport companies that were operating in California in 1986 and 1987, checking for companies which serviced all three towns where the Reaper massacres took place: Arcata, Bishop and Blythe, focusing on companies based in or near Arcata. Operating on our assumption that the Reaper went missing or underground after or shortly before the last murders, I asked each company about male employees who left the company shortly before or after twenty-nine October, 1987, the date of the Lindstrom massacre. Also, this theory of decompensation that Agent Snyder writes about interests me. If it is true that serial killers tend to mentally unravel after a certain point in their activities, then I thought perhaps this behavior was noticed by employers and/or other employees, so I also asked each company about employees who were fired for odd or offensive behavior.”
Roarke was impressed, and also sensed this was leading toward something. “How many?”
“Out of sixty-five companies, an initial list of thirteen men who disappeared or were let go around the target date. I have tracked down six, of those I have eliminated four. The two remaining are interesting possibilities. In and out of prison and psychiatric facilities. The proper age range. One in Kern Valley, one in Sacramento.”
Both close to state prisons
, Roarke realized.
“Unfortunately both are transient, no known addresses. But I’ve alerted local authorities that finding them is a priority. On the others, I’ll continue the investigation.”
“We have a sketch artist working with the Fairchild boy now,” Roarke told her. “It’s not going to be the most detailed image but it will narrow the field.”
“Good news,” Singh said.
“Superb work, Singh, thank you,” Roarke said. At the same time, he knew it wasn’t enough. They had to work faster.
“We need to go see Lam.”
The two of them walked out across the parking lot to the adjacent building that housed the crime lab, and took the elevator to the second floor.
Lam sat at a long black lab table, hunched over a dual comparison microscope with dozens of glass specimen jars and evidence bags lined up in front of him. Another table behind him held scraps of cloth, cut-out pieces of carpet, samples of dirt and leaves, all taken from the crime scene. “Hola,” he greeted them, as cheerful and tireless as ever. Roarke had never seen him dragging; he seemed to have an inexhaustible flow of energy.
“Give me good news,” Roarke told him.
“Well – here’s pretty good news. There are mixed horse hairs that could be from different animals from the Leland scene and the Cavanaugh scene, but I’ve also found several hairs from both scene that are externally consistent in length and color, quite possibly from the same animal. I’ve also found very slight traces of fecal matter in the carpet, not just at the Cavanaugh scene, but in the stored evidence from the Merrill massacre in 1987. Also equine. That particular combination isn’t something you see at every crime scene. The evidence is piling up that we are looking at the same killer doing all five massacres, twenty-five years apart. I’ve already rushed samples of all the hair and feces to Quantico for DNA analysis as a top priority. We could have results in two to three days.”
Not soon enough
, Roarke thought.
Damn it
. “But bottom line is, we’re still hoping that the horse happens to be registered and we can match the DNA to a specific animal,” he said aloud.
“True that,” Lam said.
Roarke turned to Singh. “And these horse transport companies, they move a lot of animals that aren’t thoroughbreds, I assume?”
“Oh yes. Many more that aren’t registered,” Singh agreed with a frown. She understood his point.
She could get a hit on the truck routes or the fired workers, they could get lucky. But Roarke wasn’t going to count on it. Sunday was the full moon.
“We can’t wait,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The drive back up into the mountains was like ascending into a dream. A thick mist had materialized, folding itself into the clefts of the hills, blanketing light and sound. The overnight snowfall had left fields of white along the road and ice in slick dark patches on the road, which along with the snaking mist made the journey up the mountain even more precarious. As the deputy drove, Roarke fell into a fitful sleep in the passenger seat, and woke with a feminine voice in his head.
It’s me It wants
.
He stared out the windshield, regaining his bearings. They were stopped in the mist-shrouded parking lot of the lodge.
Epps had set one of the larger cabins up as a task force room, with several white boards, crime scene photos, and of course, the police sketch of Cara. Files were piled in various mesh baskets and a couple of deputies worked the phones, now faxing around the image of the Reaper that the sketch artist had come up with, thanks to Tanner.
Epps turned from a white board as Roarke walked in.
“New plan,” Roarke said.
Snyder, Jones and Epps sat in the inner room at a table. Roarke faced them.
“There was horse hair at two of the Reaper’s old crime scenes,” he told them. “It’s him.”
But as Roarke reported briefly on the horse company leads, he could see Epps shifting impatiently, obviously aware that all this was leading to something.
“So you’re saying, we’ve got a fistful of dead ends,” he summed up flatly.
“Not dead ends necessarily,” Roarke qualified. “But our time is running out. We’re not going to wait for this guy to strike. We need to be proactive, bring him to us. So what most likely to bring him out?”
Epps stared at him. “Besides a thirteen-year old boy? Because I hope to hell that’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I’m talking about the victim who survived him,” Roarke said.
He had been turning it over in some part of his mind ever since Snyder recounted what Cara had said to him. Roarke had the strong sense she was right. Out of curiosity or perversity, whatever it was that made the Reaper tick, if they put her out there, he would come after her. If for whatever reason he’d found Lynn Fairchild all these years later, he would find Cara. Instead of waiting for a few horse hairs to ring the right combination of bells, or worse: waiting for the Reaper to butcher another family and praying that they could find enough evidence to track him off that fresh crime scene, they could use Cara.
“What,
work
with her?” Epps said. Roarke imagined his agent’s blood starting to boil under his skin.
“Obviously not,” Roarke answered, and felt like the liar he was.
They couldn’t put Cara out as bait. They couldn’t work with her. They couldn’t cut a deal. She was the one person who could help them, and they could never, ever use her.
But they could pretend to.
He turned and went to the door and opened it… to let a woman walk in. Slim, blond, dressed in black jeans… and a black cashmere turtleneck.
Epps and Jones stared. Snyder simply sat back in his chair, nodding.
“This is Special Agent Danielle Soames,” Roarke said, and gestured to the men at the table. “Agent Epps, Agent Jones, Agent Snyder… meet our Cara Lindstrom.”
Agent Soames nodded to the men, and they looked her over.
Singh had pulled her out of the Los Angeles field office. She’d been on the streets in half a dozen stings, she knew the drill. She was a natural blonde, which wouldn’t necessarily have mattered, but it helped; and an athlete, with a firm, taut body and a California cheerleader prettiness. In everything but size and coloring she was unlike Cara in every way she could be. But they were creating an illusion.
Roarke had a hard time looking at her.
He addressed the men. “We’re going to use the media to create a story about the only living victim of the never-caught serial killer, the Reaper: Cara Lindstrom, the miracle girl, who is assisting the Bureau in catching the killer of her family.”
He looked around the room. “No one knows what Lindstrom looks like as an adult. We post photos of Agent Soames on the Internet, in the media. We draw this fucker to her and we nail him.” He stopped for breath, feeling exhausted with the import of his speech. There was utter silence in the cramped room. He could feel and see his team processing it.
Epps was the first to speak, reluctantly. “It’s good. I don’t like it, but it’s good.”
Roarke nodded to Soames; she took a seat across from the rest of the team. Epps reached a big hand across the table. “Damien Epps. Welcome aboard.” Soames returned his grip, and then Jones’ and Snyder’s. Roarke noticed Snyder studying her thoughtfully, and thought he knew what the profiler was thinking.
Physically perfect… in aspect, not even close
. But it didn’t matter. She was a stalking horse.
“Where do we do it?” Jones asked.
“Right here,” Roarke said. “We can have Agent Soames on site at the crime scene, the Cavanaugh house. That way it looks to him like she’s really helping with the investigation.”
“So we’re going to let it out that the Reaper’s back,” Epps said uneasily.
It was Roarke’s great fear, too. Getting the media involved with anything was a logistical nightmare. Getting the media involved in a twenty-five year old legendary unsolved series of massacres multiplied the nightmare by a hundred. But he didn’t see any way around it any more.
“At this point I think we’re going to have to,” he answered Epps. “Both for our investigation and for the sake of warning families. We don’t know where he’s going to strike next. People will panic, but at least they’ll be watching out, taking extra care.”
He saw that thought pass through the assembled agents like a ripple on water. Lynn Fairchild’s vigilance had likely saved her family’s lives. He could only pray no innocent people would be shot by panicked gun owners.
Epps turned to Snyder. “You think this guy will be paying attention?”
The profiler nodded abstractedly. “It stands to reason. Serial killers notoriously follow their own press. Though disorganized killers sometimes prove the exception to that rule.”
In his own mind, Roarke was still not convinced about how disorganized the Reaper actually was.
Epps was thinking on it. “Do we talk about about Lindstrom’s recent… activities?”
Roarke answered perhaps too quickly. “Nothing about the killings. It would complicate what we’re trying to do. We set her up as a surviving victim, that’s it. For now.”
He turned to the one empty white board and stepped up to tape a map of the town center onto it. “The village center is a perfect contained area to stage a sting. It’s surrounded by the lake on three sides so there’s only one large entrance we have to cover.” He indicated the area on the map. “We do a stakeout, bring the local detectives and deputies in on it, put agents in the stores. Late night, closing time, to keep civilians out of it.”