Presumed Guilty: (A Jefferson Winter novella) (3 page)

Another long silence settled across the interview room. Yoko killed the time by revisiting that morning’s events.

After getting the call from Dumas to say that Alice Harrigan’s body had been found, she’d covered the seven miles from Bowie to Greenbelt in a little over ten minutes. She turned into Darnell Avenue, pulled up outside Alice’s apartment, and, for almost a whole minute, she just sat there, smoking and watching and taking it all in.

The apartment block where Alice had lived was as drab and dilapidated as everything else in Darnell Avenue. Cracked paving slabs leading up to the front door, crumbling plasterwork on the outside of the building, and God only knew when it had last been whitewashed.

There were three floors, two apartments on each. Each had a small balcony that was walled in with dirty glass panels and rusting metalwork that had once been painted black. Some of the balconies had chairs on them, most had wire racks for drying clothes.

Alice had lived on the second floor. The clothes rack on her balcony was loaded with clean laundry, brightly coloured clothing that she no longer needed.

Her body had been discovered twenty minutes earlier and things were still quiet. So far there was only one police cruiser parked outside the apartment, but the sirens were getting closer. The media wouldn’t be far behind. This circus was just getting started.

A dozen curious neighbours were standing outside their front doors. For now, they were keeping back, but that wouldn’t last long. As news spread, more and more people would turn out, drawn to the scene like flies. Increased numbers meant an increase in confidence. They would push up as close as they could get to Alice’s apartment and the police would push them back.

Yoko took a last drag on her cigarette then got out of the car. The street had a rundown feel, everything a little frayed around the edges.

At the same time, this area was a long way from rock bottom. There wasn’t much money, but there was plenty of pride, and that was something no amount of money could buy. She could relate.

Her parents had arrived in America forty years ago with nothing but a couple of suitcases, their pride, and a two-year-old daughter they were determined to give a better life to. They’d worked hard and eventually saved enough to buy a small grocery store.

One store became two, and, although they never became rich, they earned enough to put Yoko through college. They never got tired of letting everybody know how proud they were that their daughter worked for the FBI. Yoko pretended to be embarrassed, but deep down she was touched.

She did feel guilty that the pressures of work meant she didn’t get out to California to see them as often as she’d like, but she believed them when they said it was okay. They understood sacrifice in a way she never would. Compared to them, her life had been one of privilege and opportunity. Not that she’d had it easy. She’d had to fight for every inch of ground.

Thirty seconds later there was a screech of tyres and a sheriff’s department car fishtailed around the corner. It skidded to an overly dramatic halt, ending up at an awkward angle to the kerb. The light bar was flashing blue and red, stark and threatening in the still morning.

Dumas jumped out and hurried over. His cheeks were flushed, his breathing heavy, and his eyes sparkled from the excess of adrenaline flooding his system. The journey from Upper Marlboro should have taken half an hour, so he must have broken every speed limit to get here so fast.

‘Agent Tanaka.’

‘Detective Dumas,’ Yoko replied with a small nod of the head.

The detective had tried to get her to call him Charlie when they first met, but she wasn’t into the buddy-buddy game. It was good to have boundaries, good to have firmly demarcated lines, particularly when dealing with the locals.

Dumas led the way and Yoko was happy to follow. She knew this particular dance and had no problem making the appropriate moves.

The relationship between the FBI and the locals was complicated at best, and she had learned early on that the most efficient way to get the job done was through co-operation. Tread warily and do your best to avoid squashing toes.

She followed Dumas up the stairs and they turned right at the top. Alice’s door was wide open, a cop guarding the entrance. The tiny fresh scratches on the lock might have been made by a key, though Yoko was betting they’d been made by a lock pick.

All of Valentino’s victims had been white females. Blonde, blue eyed, pretty, early twenties. They’d all been cheerleaders back in high school, but from the lower levels of the pyramid rather than the top. And all of them had dropped out of the education system after high school and gone on to work in retail.

These were girls of limited ambition, limited intelligence and limited imagination. They were treading water until they could land themselves a husband. For them, the dream was a pretty little cookie-cutter house with a whitewashed picket fence and a couple of kids.

Yes, some of them might have achieved that particular happy-ever-after, but Yoko knew that, statistically speaking, they’d be looking at a couple of years of bliss followed by the harsh reality of parenthood, followed by affairs, divorce and a flirtation with either booze, prescription meds or both.

Physically, the victims were so similar they could have been sisters. Not quite close enough to be twins, but close enough to at least be stepsisters. Yoko preferred cases where the patterns were obvious since it made the job easier.

Too many criminals, not enough hours in the day.

There was nothing worse than a disorganised offender who killed seemingly at random. Or worse, killed in line with an intricate belief system of their own invention, which amounted to the same thing. Once you had a handle on the fantasy, everything made some sort of sense. Unfortunately, that tended to happen only after the killers were caught.

The similarities between these victims went beyond the physical, though. Most significantly, they’d all lived alone, and they’d been single when the attacks happened. Abduction was the trickiest part of the process. That was the moment when the bad guy had to step out of the shadows.

Where the ambush was staged was telling. At one end of the scale you had the risk-takers. Ted Bundy fit into this category. Some of his abductions had been incredibly high risk, but that was part of the game he played. The element of danger thrilled him. It got his juices going. On a couple of occasions he’d even snatched his victims off the street in broad daylight.

At the other end of the scale you had killers like Valentino. These ones were shy and cunning. Sneakier, too.

Valentino probably noticed his victims at work. Shopping malls were wonderful hunting grounds. The sea of ever-changing faces guaranteed anonymity. Granted, there were all those CCTV cameras, but unless you knew who you were looking for they were next to useless.

And that was before you got onto the whole question of
when
Valentino noticed his victims. Had that happened a week before the attack? A month? It was possible that tens of thousands of people had passed through the mall since Valentino had been there. A hundred thousand.

How did you pick one face out of a hundred thousand? Needles and haystacks didn’t even begin to cover it. This was on a par with going to the beach and trying to locate a single grain of sand.

Once Valentino had chosen a potential victim, he would have stalked them to make sure they were single. These were attractive girls so invariably some of them would be in relationships, and then it would be back to square one.

However, at least once a month he’d struck gold, which indicated that he was watching more than one girl at any one time, which took time, which meant that he was probably either unemployed or self-employed. Some bosses might be lenient when it came to lateness, but there were limits, and if you pushed those limits hard enough, you were inevitably going to get fired.

After establishing a target was single, Valentino would have followed them to get a feel for their routines. What time did they leave work? How did they get home? Did they go straight there or did they stop at a grocery store to pick up a quart of milk and a microwave meal?

On the day of the full moon, he would have waited until the quiet part of the afternoon. Siesta time. That part of the day where our senses dulled and our biorhythms cried out for sleep. He would have broken into Alice’s apartment and waited.

The waiting was an important part of Valentino’s MO. All those elongated seconds, each one filled with anticipation and impatience, precious moments that conspired to wind him into a frenzy that could only find release with the flash and crackle of the stun gun.

‘Put these on.’

Yoko was pulled from her thoughts by Dumas’s voice. The detective was holding out some latex gloves and bootees. He nodded for her to take them. Yoko slid the bootees over her shoes and snapped the gloves on.

‘Shall we?’ Dumas asked.

Yoko followed him inside.

The door at the end of the narrow hallway was open. She caught a glimpse of a drape that wouldn’t be in any room other than a bedroom, a shimmer of blue silk. She pushed past Dumas, all sense of etiquette gone, and hurried down the hall.

Alice was standing in the middle of the bedroom wearing a baby-blue prom dress that was the exact same shade as Cinderella’s ball gown. Her arms were straight, the right hand cupping the left, and her head was tilted slightly to the right. The overall picture was one of supplication.

It took a moment for Yoko to process what she was seeing. Alice’s skin was the colour of porcelain and her blue eyes were wide and unfocussed. She was obviously dead, yet somehow she was standing upright.

Yoko looked closer and saw the hooks that Valentino had screwed into the ceiling. She looked closer still and saw the high-tensile translucent fishing wire that had been tied around her wrists and elbows then fed through the ceiling hooks.

She saw the modified hair band. Valentino had added a chin strap to keep it in place. and there was a hook coming out of the side. The wire from this hook was fastened so that Alice’s head was tilted to the right.

She saw all this with the rational part of her brain, but what she was really seeing was the illusion that Valentino wanted her to see: Alice Harrigan looking like she was about to walk out of her bedroom to meet her prom date.

Winter looked up from his hands and smiled. This was Yoko’s cue to ask the next question. She’d seen this type of behaviour time and again, and understood the game he was playing.

It was all about power and control. By setting the pace of the interview he was saying,
I’m in charge here
. What he was looking for was a reaction. He wanted her to keep asking questions so he could ignore her. He wanted to see her lose her temper. He wanted her to get frustrated.

How she reacted wasn’t important, all that mattered was that he got a reaction. By sitting here quiet and calm and denying him a reaction she was saying,
Actually, buddy, it’s me who’s calling the shots
.

In her own time she said, ‘Do you know how many psychopaths I’ve met?’

‘Interesting question. Given what you do, the simple answer is hundreds. Except it’s not that simple, is it?’

‘How so?’

Winter rubbed his hands together and smirked. He had that expression on his face again, the one that gave the impression that this was the best game ever.

‘Okay, so some guy beats up another guy in a bar for no apparent reason and he gets labelled a psycho. The thing is, he’s not a psycho, he’s just some asshole with anger management issues. Your actual psychopaths, now that’s a different matter. And pure psychopaths are rarer still. You’re talking about something that might not actually exist.’

Yoko lit another cigarette. ‘And given what you do, I’m sure you can give me a definition of a psychopath.’

‘You mean the murders?’

‘No, I’m actually talking about your college degree, but that works as well.’

Winter glanced at the camera, then suddenly stood up and walked over to the mirror. He tapped the glass and a flat thick thud rang around the room. He gave the occupants on the other side of the glass a cheery wave, then sat back down.

‘The Hare Psychopathy Checklist is a twenty-point checklist designed by Canadian researcher Robert D. Hare.’

He recited this like he was reading from a textbook, talking in the bored dull voice of a teenager who’d been asked to explain something so obvious that it was a struggle to open his mouth, never mind expel enough air to fill out the words.

Yoko waved her hand, indicating that he should continue, her cigarette tracing a lazy smoke spiral in the air.

‘This checklist is split into two further lists that are referred to as factors, and each of those factors is split into two further subgroups. Factor One breaks down into interpersonal and emotional personality traits. That’s where you find the Machiavellian characteristics: the pathological lying, the lack of empathy, all that good stuff. Factor Two breaks down into lifestyle and antisocial behavioural traits. You still with me?’

Winter smiled at her, and she nodded for him to continue.

‘Like I said earlier, there are twenty elements in the checklist. Each element is scored on a three-point scale, zero to two. A zero means it doesn’t apply, and a two means that there is a reasonably good match to the subject.’

He stopped talking again, and Yoko nodded for him to go on. These pauses were shorter than earlier, which was probably due to the subject matter. What he’d been talking about before was personal, whereas now he was considering concepts and hypotheticals, which was obviously safer ground.

‘Okay, a score of thirty or above is indicative of a psychopathic personality, although for research purposes a cut-off score of twenty-five is sometimes used. In fact, a score of twenty-five in the UK is enough to get yourself classed as a psychopath. They’re not quite so hardcore over there.’

‘Very good, Jefferson. I’m guessing you passed that module with flying colours.’

Winter reached for his Coke and took a sip.

‘Your father is an interesting case.’

‘I’ve already told you: I have no father.’

Yoko stared for a second, then continued like he hadn’t spoken. ‘When the Hare Checklist is applied he scores a thirty, which, although high enough to get himself classified as a psychopath, isn’t that spectacular. There are CEOs who score higher.’

‘And plenty of movie stars and rock singers, too. Heaven forbid we forget them. Do that, and it might be enough to tip them over the edge. Can you imagine? A lead singer going postal and shooting up the front row with an automatic rifle. That would definitely cause a stir. Look how upset everyone got when Jim Morrison flashed his dick in Florida that time.’

‘However,’ she continued, ‘some researchers believe that the elements relating to antisocial behaviour should be removed from the checklist. Now, when you do that something really interesting happens. Your father’s score jumps to a hundred per cent. In other words, your father is a pure psychopath.’

Winter’s eyes narrowed. His lips were tight, his mouth shut even tighter.

Yoko wondered if she’d pushed too hard. She reached for her coffee and took a sip. She’d got him talking, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t clam up again in a heartbeat. She considered what to say next, weighing the pros and cons. Interviewing Winter was like walking a tightrope. One wrong step and you were going to plunge into the abyss. At the same time, if you didn’t take risks and try to move forward then you were never going to get to the other side.

‘You do have a father, Jefferson,’ she said finally. ‘Although, given where he resides right now, you might not have one for much longer. Your father talked about you when I went to see him. He told me all about the hunting trips you used to take. He said you were a natural.’

Winter stared a while longer, then smiled. ‘Where are you going with this? Nature versus nurture, is that it?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think that frogs should be wary of helping scorpions to cross rivers.’

‘And which one are you, Jefferson?’

He reached for the Coke can and turned it through another full three hundred and sixty degrees. ‘And how high do I score on your charts, Agent Tanaka? Am I a psychopath?’

‘Without a shadow of a doubt.’