Presumed Guilty: (A Jefferson Winter novella) (2 page)

Winter stared across the table at Yoko and said, ‘Valentino. You know, you could have come up with something better than that.’

‘I like it. It’s a good fit.’

‘Why? Because I steal my victim’s hearts?’ He shook his head and made a disdainful snorting sound. ‘It shows a complete lack of imagination.’

‘And that annoys you, Jefferson?’

‘Of course it doesn’t annoy me. For that to happen, I’d have to give a shit what you people think.’

Dumas went to say something and Yoko shut him up with a look. This was her show now.

‘I know it’s controversial, but my favourite Hendrix album has always been
The Cry of Love
.’

Winter gave her an incredulous look. ‘What planet are you from? He was dead when that was finished. Maybe if he’d been alive, it would have been his best, but he wasn’t, and on that basis alone it can’t be a legitimate contender. We have absolutely no idea what his intentions were.’

‘Even so, that was him playing the guitar, and him singing. As far as I’m concerned that makes it as legitimate as the other three albums.’

Winter shook his head, frowning. ‘No way. What if it was supposed to be another double album like
Electric Ladyland
? Or even a triple album, and he never finished writing the songs? Maybe he would have ended up scrapping the whole thing and started again. The point is, we’ll never know.’

Another shake of the head, another frown. ‘No, his best album’s got to be
Axis: Bold As Love
, every time. ‘Little Wing’, ‘Castles Made of Sand’, ‘Spanish Castle Magic’. Those songs are genius. It doesn’t get any better.’

‘What the hell is this?’ Dumas cut in.

Yoko turned to face him. ‘Detective Dumas, perhaps you’d be so good as to give us a few minutes alone.’

The detective opened his mouth to speak, and Yoko raised her eyebrows.

Winter smiled. ‘What’s this? Good cop, stupid cop?’

The colour started rising in Dumas’s face. His fists weren’t clenching and unclenching yet, but that wasn’t far off, and then it wouldn’t take much for him to start pummelling the crap out of Winter.

‘Just a few minutes,’ said Yoko again.

Dumas stared for a second longer, then stalked from the room. He slammed the door behind him, leaving an awkward silence in his wake.

‘Something I said?’ asked Winter.

Yoko didn’t respond. She reached for her cigarette pack and Zippo. The lighter had seen plenty of action and was covered in scratches, the brass dulled by the passing years. Yoko nodded to the pack and Winter shook his head.

‘No thanks. Those things’ll kill you.’

‘So will the lethal injection, Jefferson.’

‘Was that an attempt at humour?’

‘I thought it was funny.’ She lit the cigarette and blew out a long plume of smoke. ‘I can see why you wouldn’t, though. If I was looking at spending the next ten to fifteen years on death row, I wouldn’t find it particularly funny. You know,’ she added, ‘that was one of the things that was flagged up at my last review.’

‘What? The fact you don’t have a sense of humour?’

‘No, that I’m lacking in people skills.’

‘You seem to be doing a pretty good job to me. That Hendrix comment was a good call. Try to establish some common ground with your interview subject in order to get them on side. And disagreeing with me was a good call as well. I hate yes people.’

‘I can relate.’

Winter laughed. ‘See, there’s nothing wrong with your people skills. Just because I hate yes people, it doesn’t mean there aren’t occasions when it’s appropriate to agree.’

Yoko took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘I met your father a couple of times.’

The room fell silent.

‘I have no father.’

‘Yes, you do, Jefferson. His name is Albert Winter. Or Al as he was known to his many and various friends. Or should that be ex-friends? Being a convicted serial killer is a great way to reduce your Christmas card list, don’t you think?’

She stared at Winter, and the kid stared right back.

‘Over a twelve-year period your father murdered fifteen young women. He took them into the forest at night and hunted them down like they were animals. He was eventually caught in 1991 and, as we speak, he’s whiling away his remaining years in a cell on death row at San Quentin prison in California. You were eleven when he was caught.’

‘I have no father,’ Winter repeated.

‘You can keep saying that, but it won’t make it true.’

Another awkward silence settled across the room. She sat and smoked and studied him. She did nothing to hide what she was doing. Just like he was doing nothing to hide the fact that he was studying her too.

Yoko had dealt with plenty of monsters but this Jefferson Winter was something else. She couldn’t get over how composed and self-assured he was.

He possessed the sort of confidence she associated with really hardened criminals. The lifers. The ones who’d spent most of their miserable lives bouncing from one jail cell to another. The difference was that they’d had years for their skin to thicken and this kid was only nineteen.

She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘You’re a Doors fan.’

‘The poster on my wall?’

‘I get paid to notice things.’

‘What else did you notice?’

‘You like The Beatles, but it’s Lennon you worship.’

Winter dipped his head fractionally, a small gesture that said
go on
.

‘Lennon, Hendrix, Morrison, they’re all dead.’

‘So is Elvis.’

‘Yes he is, but the other three you view as geniuses. You see Elvis as some farm boy who got lucky.’

He looked at her carefully. ‘And you don’t?’

‘Lennon and Hendrix, yes, they’re geniuses. As for Elvis, I suppose he could sing a bit, but, let’s face it, he doesn’t make the grade.’

‘What about Morrison?’

‘He was just a drunk who was pretty good at stringing words together.’

‘Pretty good?’ Winter shook his head. ‘The way he put words together
was
his genius. Go and listen to ‘Riders on the Storm’ then tell me that isn’t one of the most amazing lyrics that’s ever been written, or ever likely to be written.’

‘I would have thought you’d prefer ‘The End’. All that stuff about killing your father.’

He said nothing.

‘You consider yourself a genius. That’s why you admire Lennon and Hendrix.’

He shrugged. ‘A genius is someone who can see so far into the future they’re looking right over the edge of the curve. Not only can they see into the future but nothing’s going to stop them getting there. And when they do finally get there, everyone else is going to be left with their mouths hanging open wondering how the hell they pulled that one off.’

‘And that’s how you view yourself?’

Nothing.

‘Okay, Jefferson, here’s what I don’t understand. If you’re half as smart as you think you are, what the hell are you doing here?’

He answered with a smile that Yoko didn’t like one bit.

Firstly, it was a smile that said
I know something you don’t
, and she hated not knowing, hated being outside the loop, hated the idea that someone might possess information that she didn’t.

Secondly, she’d seen that exact same smile before, three thousand miles west and six months ago. It had chilled her as much then as it chilled her now.

Winter was staring at his hands again, his head bowed in a way that reminded her of his victims. She looked at him sitting across the table. The arrogant smile was gone and he was back to looking like the kid he was.

It was hard to believe that this was Valentino. He was just so damn young. That was one of the things that got to Yoko the most. He was only nineteen. Sure, nineteen-year-old kids were capable of getting into plenty of trouble. But abducting young women and cutting their hearts out? That was a whole different kind of trouble.

In her original profile, Yoko had speculated that they were looking for someone in their late thirties or early forties. This was based on the fact that the crimes were so elaborate. What she hadn’t considered was the idea that they might also have been committed by a boy genius who’d had a monumentally screwed-up childhood. In all the time she’d been doing this she’d never come across anything like it. Jefferson Winter was unique.

Because Winter didn’t appear to want to talk any more, it gave Yoko the chance to return to the puzzle that was Valentino. For as long as she could remember, she’d always loved puzzles. A large part of her life had been spent trying to discern patterns where everyone else saw confusion and chaos.

The Valentino case had landed on her desk with victim #2. This was back at the end of May, two months ago. A pattern had suggested itself on her first read-through of the file.

Victim #1 had been murdered on 30 April, victim #2 on 30 May. Yoko speculated that victim #3 would be murdered on 30 June, and nobody disagreed. The logic was sound. It made sense.

She was wrong.

On the morning of Tuesday 29 June victim #3 was discovered.

Mistakes and wrong turns and wild-goose chases went with the territory. The best you could ever hope for was to get it right more often than you got it wrong. Giving herself a hard time wasn’t going to help anyone. Go down that route and you’d end up so paralysed by the what-ifs that it would be impossible to do the job.

Once she’d got herself re-centred, she pulled up a calendar on her computer and stared at the dates.

Although victim #3 had been found on the 29th, she’d actually been murdered on the evening of the 28th, and when you factored that into the equation a brand-new pattern emerged.

Valentino was a werewolf, a killer whose murders were dictated by the lunar cycle. There was no doubt about it. All his kills had taken place at the time of the full moon, and that was no coincidence. When you were dealing with highly organised offenders, coincidence did not exist. The next full moon wasn’t until 28 July, which meant they had thirty days to hunt Valentino down and get him into custody.

Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened.

Yoko drove to Bowie on the afternoon of Tuesday 27 July, leaving a little after three to miss the worst of the Beltway traffic, and arriving at twenty after four. The first reason she chose Bowie was because it was in the north of Prince George’s County, and that’s where the other three murders had happened.

The second reason had nothing to do with the case. David Bowie had been her favourite singer ever since she first saw him performing as Ziggy Stardust. That performance had turned her world upside down.

It had been a defining moment. The message Ziggy brought back from Mars was that it was okay to be different. Outsiders could shine as brightly as anyone. In fact, some shone even brighter.

Yoko spent most of that evening at her motel, killing time by going through the case files for the millionth time on the off-chance that she’d missed something.

All she could do now was wait for Valentino to make his move. The depressing truth was that most murders were solved in the first forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Any longer than that and the trail was too cold to yield anything useful.

The bottom line: Valentino was going to kill again and, barring a miracle, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Yoko wanted to get to the crime scene as quickly as possible so she could get a head start when he did strike, and that’s why she was sitting in a crappy motel room getting slowly drunk on a rather spectacular fifteen-year-old single malt.

So she’d sat and smoked and drunk whisky and waited for the sun to come up, and when the call came through she was one of the first people on the scene.

As she pulled into the street where Alice Harrigan had once lived, she vowed that there would not be a fifth victim.

The kid sat up abruptly, scrubbed a hand through his messy black hair and smiled across the table. ‘So, what? You’ve run out of questions.’

‘You looked like you needed a moment to compose yourself.’

The smile widened to show two lines of neat white teeth. ‘Consider me suitably composed.’ He did a quick drum roll, the
rat-a-tat-tat
of his hands hitting wood sounding overloud within the confines of the small interview room. ‘So, bring it on, Agent. Let’s have your next question.’

Yoko went through the hundred and one questions that were crammed inside her head, trying to decide which one to go with.

‘What was her name?’

‘Who?’

She narrowed her eyes. ‘You know exactly who I’m talking about, Jefferson.’

He gave a tight smile. ‘Suzy Blane.’

‘And Suzy had blonde hair and big, baby-blue eyes. She was pretty, too. Does that sound about right?’

He nodded.

‘Tell me what happened.’

The kid reached for his Coke but didn’t drink any. He turned the can through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, only stopping when the logo was facing him again. There was a faraway look on his face, like he was no longer in the room. All of a sudden, he clicked back into the present and smiled across the table.

‘It took me a whole week to get up the courage to ask her to the senior prom.’

‘And she turned you down?’

He snorted a laugh and shook his head. ‘If only. You know, if that’s what had happened we probably wouldn’t be sat here now.’

‘So what happened, Jefferson?’

‘She said yes. I never thought she would. Not in a million years. It wasn’t like she was the prettiest girl in school, but she was on the cheerleading squad. I knew I was punching above my weight, but sometimes you’ve just got to go for it, right? Shoot for the moon because the worst that’s going to happen is you’ll miss and end up swimming with the stars. That’s something my mother used to tell me when I was a kid.’

While Yoko desperately wanted to know more about his mother, and his childhood, that was a tangent, something for another day.

Suzy Blane was the key, the alpha and the omega. If Winter followed the pattern Yoko thought he was following, then the other four victims were a warm-up. If they hadn’t caught him, he would have kept killing until he’d gone after Suzy.

‘What did Suzy do, Jefferson?’

Yoko’s voice was soft and gentle. It was a voice that said
trust me
. It was a tone she’d found very effective in the past.

‘She told me to meet her at seven-thirty, and she told her real date to pick her up at twenty after seven. So I arrive dressed in a suit. I’ve got the corsage and I’ve hired a limo. Basically I blew all my savings because I wanted to impress her. And there’s Suzy coming out the door arm in arm with Tom Landry, Malo High’s quarterback. Her parents are waving her off and they’re all smiles.

Winter picked up his Coke and took a sip. He put the can back on the table, turned it around and stared at the logo again. Thirty seconds passed before he next spoke.

‘So there’s Tom, and he’s all smiles, too. And why not? The guy looked like Gollum on steroids. Suzy should have been out of his league as well, but he was a football player, so the rules were different. Suzy looked over at me, and the bitch smiled. Then she leant over and whispered something to Tom, and they both started laughing.’

Another sip of Coke. Another thirty seconds’ silence.

‘So I got back in the car and told the driver to drive. He’d obviously seen this before because he didn’t even ask where I wanted to go. He drove me around town until my time was up and then he took me home. I couldn’t face walking into that gym hall on my own. It would have been too humiliating.’

Winter stopped talking and Yoko resisted the urge to prompt him. Interviewing wasn’t just about asking the right questions, sometimes it was about knowing when to shut up and butt out. The kid had got into a rhythm, and Yoko didn’t want to jolt him out of it.

‘The prom was on Friday, so I had the whole weekend to torture myself with how bad Monday was going to be. In the end, it was worse than I imagined. Much worse. It was like everybody was in on the joke, everyone except me.’

Another long pause. Another sip of Coke.

‘I had some interesting times at high school, but this took things to a whole new level. The name calling I could deal with, but the verbal abuse quickly turned physical, and
that
I wasn’t equipped to handle. I was no match for those football idiots. The only saving grace was that we were almost at the end of the semester, and my mother was planning another move, so I didn’t have to put up with it for long.’

Winter’s face had hardened, and for the first time Yoko saw something in there that convinced her he was capable of the crimes he’d been charged with. He looked older. It wasn’t a kid on the other side of the table any more: this was a lifer with ten hard years behind him and a couple of even harder decades stretching out in front.

‘It sounds like you had a tough time.’

Winter stared at her as though she’d gone crazy. ‘I don’t need your understanding or pity, Agent Tanaka. I don’t need your empathy, either. What do you think’s going on here? That we’re having a bonding moment? That was a cheap shot, and it was beneath you. I really expected more.’

For a second she felt chastised. Then she remembered where she was, and who she was talking to. Yes, this was a nineteen-year-old kid, but he was a nineteen-year-old kid who’d brutally murdered four young women. She had nothing to feel guilty about. Not a single goddam thing.

‘Why didn’t you kill Suzy and get it over and done with?’ she asked quietly. ‘Is it because you’re a coward and you don’t have the balls?’

He shook his head and laughed. ‘You are so wrong. And you’re also assuming that I haven’t killed her already.’

That almost stopped Yoko in her tracks. There was no way he’d done that. It didn’t fit the profile. ‘You haven’t killed her,’ she said without missing a beat. ‘I’d stake my whole career on that.’

‘You’d better start looking for a new job, then.’

Winter grinned and for a moment he looked more like his father than ever. Put aside the differences that come from age and the two of them could have been one person. The thought was enough to make her shiver.