Authors: William Bernhardt
“Don’t make excuses,” Chuck snapped. “You knew we had staff meeting today.”
“But it was already four-thirty.”
“Then you should’ve stayed late.”
“But I had to pick up Angie—”
“No one else expects special treatment just because they have children, Shelly.”
“No one else—” She paused, then let it die, apparently realizing it was useless.
“Typical,” Rob whispered to Ben. “Chuck screws up, dumps the project on someone else at the last moment, and lets them take all the blame.”
Chuck swiveled back to Crichton. “I’m sorry about this, sir. I’ll take care of it immediately.” He glared again at Shelly, then tossed his notebook angrily into his briefcase.
Ben could feel himself perspiring—and he wasn’t even the one in the hot seat. At least, not yet.
Crichton drained the last of his coffee. “Damn,” he said. “Herb, call Janice. I need more coffee.” He peered across the table as if he were selecting candidates for a firing squad. “All right. Who’s next?”
S
ERGEANT TOMLINSON LEANED BACK
in the metal folding chair and stretched. He was so exhausted that he hurt. And with good reason. He saw by the clock on the wall that it was almost four in the morning. He’d been in the library since midnight—and that was after completing a full eight-hour shift on the switchboard.
The library was in the basement of the central headquarters building. It still looked like a basement, too—it was dank, poorly ventilated, and lit by a single phosphorescent lamp dangling from the ceiling. Not exactly ideal working conditions.
But his diligence was paying off. He was slowly assembling a profile of the serial killer and how he operated. The perpetrator was obviously highly organized. Clever—and what’s more, smart. Every action—the murders, the dismemberment, the disposal of the bodies—had been meticulously planned and executed. The killer was in charge at all times. As a result, he was very difficult to catch.
Tomlinson had spent the wee hours of the morning poring over comprehensive data accumulated by the FBI. The Behavioral Sciences Unit at the Training Academy in Quantico had been investigating the serial killer phenomenon for decades, but in 1978 they began the Crime Analysis and Criminal Personality Profiling Program. FBI agents systematically interviewed imprisoned serial killers (who were almost always anxious to talk) about their backgrounds, their motivations, and their methods of operation. Startling similarities emerged.
Broadly speaking, the FBI divided serial killers into two categories: the organized personality and the disorganized personality. Tulsa’s killer fell into the first category. According to the FBI profiles, this conclusion provided Tomlinson with considerable information that was more than likely true about the killer.
He was (a) a man, (b) between the ages of twenty and forty-five, and (c) almost certainly white. He was probably a first-born son. Parental discipline from his father had been inconsistent or nonexistent; his mother may have been abusive. During his childhood, he engaged in what the FBI called the
homicidal triangle
: the torture or abuse of animals, followed by bedwetting in his early teens, followed by a period of firestarting. He learned early in life that he obtained sexual gratification from inflicting pain.
He had a better than average I.Q., but his grades in school were mediocre. Not because he was stupid, but because he was apathetic. For similar reasons, he probably had a low-profile job and a spotty work history. He was living with someone—parents or maybe a girlfriend. He was an abuser of alcohol, or drugs, or both.
The list of probabilities went on and on. He loved nothing more than to drive. Serial killers were almost always trailers; they often put eighty thousand miles on their cars in a single year. He was friendly and socially adept. (All his friends said no one was smoother than Ted Bundy.) He captured his victims without using force. He would kill them in an efficient manner; he would always clean up afterward. He would probably keep a souvenir of each kill and he would be certain to follow the press coverage of his murders. Scrapbooks were not uncommon.
That was the portrait of the man they were hunting, as Tomlinson saw it. And unlike the rest of the force, he had an idea of where to look.
Before Tomlinson became a plainclothes officer, he’d walked the beat and driven a patrol car in downtown and north Tulsa—the best and the worst districts in Tulsa. In central downtown, it was all suits and ties—not much for a beat cop to do. Occasionally he even got to ride the Mounted Patrol horse. If you traveled a bit in the wrong direction, though, you ended up in the oldest and worst part of the city. Street crime was everywhere; it was just a question of where to begin. Tomlinson saw the full array: drunks, con men, prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts, drug pushers. After a few weeks, he came to know them well. And he was there for three years.
During that seemingly endless time, Tomlinson learned more about the people of the streets than he had ever wanted to know. He saw runaways jump off the bus and fall into the arms of their future pimps. He saw desperate druggies risking AIDS just to get that hot white magic shooting through their veins. But most importantly, he knew the significance of a certain twenty-acre tract in west Tulsa County—the area in which all three victims’ bodies had been found.
It was The Playground—the street people’s amusement park, the druggie’s Disney World. Every now and then, a bunch of heads, or maybe some ladies of the evening, would leave Eleventh Street (The Stroll, as its denizens called it) and throw a party. Usually the party was a large-scale sex and drugs group event. Sometimes the host would be a pusher who’d scored big; sometimes it would be an outsider—say a wealthy John trying to set a new personal record. The Playground was easily accessible, but safe, secluded, and absolutely unpoliced. The revelers could do anything they wanted out there.
And now it appeared that someone was.
Anybody in the Eleventh Street in-crowd would know about The Playground and might well consider it a fail-safe place to dump a body.
Tomlinson closed his books and threw down his pen. Just thinking about this was making him sick. He’d been learning all about the grisly activities and tragic backgrounds of America’s worst. He felt as if he knew this nameless killer, maybe even better than he knew himself. And he was repulsed. For the first time, he felt the horrible inefficiency of the criminal justice system. Due process? Probable cause? Someone just needed to grab a gun and put a bullet through this man’s forehead.
Tomlinson rubbed his aching eyes. There was so much more he needed to do. He wanted to access the FBI archives at the National Crime Information Center. He wanted to visit the morgue and see what Dr. Koregai could tell him about the victims. And he wanted to stake out Eleventh Street, to keep a watchful eye and an alert ear for possible clues. That was his edge, as far as solving this crime went—his link to the Eleventh Street criminal subculture.
But a stakeout would have to wait; now he had to get home. Karen would be furious. She wasn’t too keen on his staying up till he was blurry-eyed and frazzled. She’d much rather he stayed home with her and Kathleen.
For that matter, he’d rather be at home, too. But this was something he had to do; Karen and Kathleen would have to understand. He had to prove himself to Morelli. He had to prove that he belonged on the Homicide team. And most of all, he had to keep this maniac from striking again.
B
EN AND ROB CLIMBED
the stairs to the twentieth floor of the Apollo building. The elevators were out of order—some kind of electrical short.
They’d spent almost the entire day in the document retention offices in the basement. Ben was punch-drunk from staring at endless reams of internal memoranda that Apollo was producing in the Nelson case. His fingers felt as if the friction ridges had been rubbed smooth; his body had acquired the musty smell of warehoused files.
“What’s the time?” Rob asked.
Ben checked his watch. “Almost eleven. Man, I can’t believe we spent the day—and night—reviewing documents.”
“Yeah,” Rob concurred. “And we only covered about a hundred thousand pieces of paper. We must be slow or something.”
“Is this fascinating activity par for the course?”
“I’m afraid so. Litigators are obsessed with documents, especially when corporations are involved. Everyone hopes that if enough documents are produced, somewhere in the bowels of the corporate file cabinets they’ll find an incriminating memo written by some wayward employee in a bad mood. And if it takes hundreds of hours of document-sifting to find that one memo, well, so much the better for the private law firm billing its client by the hour. For in-house guys like you and me, though, it’s hell on wheels.”
“Everyone has to pay his dues.”
“Yeah, everyone just starting out. Don’t worry, though—my impression is that you’ve entered the department much too high on the totem pole to get stuck with a lot of document productions. Soon you’ll be making legal assistants suffer through all this. Then
they
prepare a summary and you just read it. In fact, if you weren’t taking those depositions tomorrow, before a summary could be prepared, I bet Crichton wouldn’t have sent you along today.”
“That’s so strange,” Ben said. “I don’t understand why Crichton’s treating me like some kind of superstar. Everyone in the department must hate me.”
“Nonsense,” Rob replied. A slow grin crept across his face. “Well…perhaps. Present company excepted, of course.”
They shared a brief chuckle and headed toward their offices. About halfway down the corridor, Ben heard loud banging and shuffling noises coming from the LEXIS room, a small alcove that housed computer terminals used to access online legal research databases. The LEXIS room was an interior office, separated from the main corridor by the central computer room, where accounting, litigation support, and other computerized records were kept.
Ben heard another bang, followed by a low moan. “What’s going on in there?”
Rob shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t imagine. Mice, maybe?”
“I don’t think so.” Ben walked through the computer room and stopped at the entrance to the LEXIS alcove. He could still hear some kind of disturbance inside, but he couldn’t identify it. Cautiously, he turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.
It was hard to tell who they were at first, since the man was facing away from him and the woman’s face was obscured by his bare-bottomed body. She was lying on the main table between two computer terminals, and he was hunched over her, his pants dangling around his knees.
The thin figure finally tipped Ben off. It was Herb, busily doing what he did best—which in turn suggested that the shapely object beneath him must be Candice.
Ben quietly tiptoed back, but bumped into Rob, who was standing just behind him. Rob emitted an
oof!
and fell against the door, slamming it loudly against the wall.
Herb, intent on his business, didn’t even notice, but Candice did. She looked over Herb’s shoulder and screamed. She shoved Herb away and rolled over on the table, grabbing a computer manual to cover her breasts. Herb groaned, a pathetic expression of
lustus interruptus
on his face. He swirled around and saw Ben and Rob standing in the doorway.
“What the hell are you two doing here?” Herb shouted, as he grabbed his pants.
“Shouldn’t that be our question?” Rob said.
Herb buckled his britches and shoved his shirttail inside. “You didn’t see this, Kincaid.”
“I didn’t?”
“No, you didn’t. Let me spell it out for you.” He walked right up into Ben’s face and stood so close they could slow dance. “You don’t want me for an enemy. Bob Crichton and I are tight, got it? I can make life miserable for you. So you’d better learn to keep your trap zipped.”
“The way I see it,” Rob said, “you’d better learn to keep your zipper zipped.”
Herb snarled. “Look, jerkface, this is serious. I’m not just screwing around here.”
“I beg to differ.”
Herb slapped his hand against Rob’s chest and pushed him back against the wall. “Last warning, punk. If word of this gets out, you’ll be chin-deep in document productions for the rest of your life. That goes for you, too, Kincaid.”
Herb glanced back at Candice, who was by now fully dressed. “C’mon, babe. Let’s get out of here.” He scooped his suit jacket off the floor and threw it over his shoulders, then put his arm around Candice and marched defiantly out of the alcove.
“Jeez,” Ben said, “I can’t believe him. Herbert the Pervert—you weren’t kidding.”
“Let me give you some advice, Ben. Herb isn’t nearly as tight with Crichton as he thinks, but he’s tight enough. If I were you, I’d keep a low profile around Herb for a while. If you have to be near him, be all smiles. Laugh at his jokes. Don’t mention what you just saw. Given the way Crichton’s been larding it over on you, Herb probably hated you already. But if he didn’t before, he certainly does now.”
“Message received and understood.” They walked back through the main computer room. “Let’s dump these files in my office. It’s just across the hall.”
As they approached his office, Ben noticed that the door was closed. “That’s odd. I’m sure I left my door open. Do the cleaning people do that?” He reached for the doorknob.
“On the contrary; they’re supposed to leave the doors open all night. Fire codes or something.”
Ben froze in his tracks. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A noise. Inside my office.”
“No.”
“Well, I did. You don’t suppose Herb and Candy reconvened their lascivious rendezvous, do you?” He grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door open. “Look, you horny lustbuckets, I want you out—”
Ben stopped in mid-sentence. Herb and Candy were not there. Everything appeared to be just as he had left it, except his desk chair was facing the back window. Ben approached slowly, crouched down, and swiveled the chair around. Something heavy was in it. Just as the chair pivoted to face Ben, the body of Howard Hamel fell forward. Ben reflexively caught him, then screamed and stumbled backward. The body continued to fall. It hit the carpet with a horrifying thunk. Ben saw a flat, square object bounce out of Hamel’s hand.