Redheads (10 page)

“People on this pier might’ve seen a swimmer. Unless you guys have other plans for me tomorrow, that’s what I’m going to check for. Anywhere else you think I should look?”

“What about these other two shipyards?” Mike asked. He circled the laptop’s mouse arrow around two industrial yards on Pelican Island northeast of the one which lay directly across the channel from Allison’s condo.

“I checked. Neither one runs a night shift anymore.”

“How about the yacht basin on the other side of the channel?” Chris asked. The yacht basin had four long rows of covered slips and an uncovered fifth row, for sailboats, directly facing the channel. “Fireworks that night were on the Gulf side of the island. People might’ve gone over on their boats to watch. Maybe someone coming through the channel afterwards passed him in the water.”

“I’ll check.”

The glass door slid open and Julissa stepped inside. She’d been crying again.

“My parents finally got off their ship long enough to call home and check their messages,” she said. She went back to her chair and sat down.

“They coming home now?” Mike asked.

Julissa nodded. “Day after tomorrow.”

She put her elbows on the table and held her head in her hands, her fingers lost in her red hair. Chris thought of Cheryl, sobbing at the kitchen counter when her father died of cancer. The muscles in his legs tensed, ready to carry him over to her so he could kneel at her side and take her into his arms. Instead he stayed in his chair and looked at a blank space on the table. Julissa raised her head, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and pushed her hair out of her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Talking with them—it made it real again.”

Chris nodded and Westfield murmured something too soft for Chris to hear.

“I’m still with you guys,” she said. “I think I can probably help on the FBI hacking angle. At the very least I might narrow it till we can say for sure whether the files are getting erased from inside the FBI or from somewhere else.”

“What would you need to do that?” Chris asked.

She bit her lower lip.

“A computer I pay for in cash. A dedicated Internet connection, nowhere near Austin. That’s about it.”

“All right,” Westfield said. “So I’ll follow up on the swimmer. Julissa’s going after the FBI angle. Mike, what’ll you take?”

“I can get the IDs and background of everyone who works in the VICAP unit. It might be hard, but with some careful footwork I can probably do it in a week.”

Westfield nodded. “Chris?”

“I’ll follow up on the evidence I collected from Allison’s apartment.”

Mike looked up and raised an eyebrow in question.

“What evidence?” Julissa asked.

Chris nodded. It was time to tell them.

“The thing I know about him, that I didn’t write on the board yet, is sometimes he comes back to where he killed a woman. He did it with Cheryl. I didn’t realize at first. After the murder I didn’t go back into my house for three weeks. I stayed at a hotel in Waikiki through the funeral and until everyone in our families left. The police were finished with the house after four days. A detective told me I could call a cleaning service if I wanted, because they were through with the forensics. I called the next day, but it still took weeks before I went in the house. Even that was just to get a few things and leave again.”

“What’d you find?” Julissa asked.

“Nothing. I didn’t realize it until maybe a month later. I only saw the crime scene for a couple of seconds before they pulled me out. But I saw it in dreams. The dream was like studying a photograph with a magnifying glass. Every awful detail, a bit at a time. And then one morning I woke up and realized when she was killed, the countertops were bare. We had these new granite counters. Cheryl would polish them until they were like black mirrors. Except for the blood, they were like that. Bare and empty. But when I went into my house finally after three weeks to get some clothes, there was no blood anywhere, but there was a plate on the counter, and a frying pan on the stove and a fork and steak knife in the frying pan.”

“Jesus Christ,” Julissa whispered.

“I know. I didn’t put it together when I saw it. I just left with my clothes. Maybe a month later, I decided to get rid of the house. At first I was going to sell it, and I had a realtor list it. She probably washed everything and put it away, thinking she was going to show the house. But she never showed it. Instead I called a friend at the Department of Planning and Permitting and got a permit to have the house demolished.”

Westfield looked up. “How do you know it had anything to do with him? It could’ve been one of the cleaners, even a sloppy cop, who cooked something from your freezer and didn’t clean up.”

“It came from the freezer all right,” Chris said.

Thinking about it again made him feel cold all over. What chilled him most was the idea he’d been sharing the small island of Oahu with the killer for days. They might have passed each other on the street, or stood next to each other in the hotel elevator. Maybe they’d looked into each other’s eyes.

“I don’t know why I even found it. Movers were supposed to pack everything and put it in storage before the demolition. But there were some things of Cheryl’s I wanted to get myself, so they didn’t go missing. I went into the house to get them, and I was standing in our bedroom, looking in our safe for some of her jewelry. She didn’t always wear her engagement ring. She was a surgeon. The ring wouldn’t be good under a latex glove, so she took it off a lot. I couldn’t find it in the safe. I remembered her joking about her grandmother, always hiding cash and stuff in the freezer. So I went downstairs and had a look. She usually kept the food she wanted to eat on the bottom shelf. Vegetarian frozen dinners, Lean Cuisines, that kind of stuff. There was a pint-sized container of vanilla ice cream at the back of the freezer. It had been there about a year. Maybe even two. I’d never thrown it out because it was hers.”

He told them, speaking very quietly, about taking the carton out, prying off the frozen lid, and looking inside. It hadn’t been full of jewelry. A lump of frozen red flesh had been stuffed in there. Unidentifiable, horrifying. Drops of blood and ripped tissue were frozen to the waxed cardboard sides, the pooled blood frozen into a round puck at the bottom. This was the last he ever saw of his wife.

“What I think now, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about it,” Chris said, “is he eats his fill sometimes. He can’t choke down any more. But he isn’t satisfied, isn’t done. And he doesn’t want to walk away from the scene carrying anything.”

“So he hides it where it won’t be found, and comes back later, in his own time,” Julissa said.

“Yes. And why would a forensic team look in the freezer if there’s no blood trail leading to it, no prints on it, no connection? Why pull off the lid from an ice cream carton, or open a half-empty bag of frozen Brussels sprouts, if there’s no reason to? They don’t have time to turn over every stone. Just the ones they think they need to.”

“He did this to Allison?” Julissa asked.

Chris nodded.

“That sick fucking son of a bitch.”

“What’d you find?” Mike asked.

“A fork.” He looked at Julissa’s shock-whitened face and left out the grease-spattered frying pan, the empty ice cream container tipped over on the floor.

“Why would he leave something like that behind?” Mike asked.
 
“He’s so careful about everything else.”

“Because he knew the police were done with the scene.
 
He didn’t think about people like us, coming in after.”

“What’re you going to do with it?” Westfield asked.

“I’m taking it to a company in Massachusetts, for DNA sequencing. There’ll be DNA from Allison, but I’m betting there’s DNA from his saliva. I’ll get them to isolate it and then sequence it.”

Westfield shook his head.

“That—DNA profiling isn’t any good unless you have a sample from a suspect to match it to. What’s the sample? They just match up a bunch of points on different genes or whatever, and compare those to the sample to see if they’re from the same guy. If you’ve only got the one, what’s the point?
 
We don’t have access to the evidence from the old scenes, before he started getting careful—stuff might not even exist anymore.”

Chris nodded. He’d thought the same thing for the first year or two, until he’d done more reading.

“You’re talking about DNA profiling. I’m talking about
sequencing
. They can do it now. The whole sequence, every base pair on every chromosome, start to finish.”

“Then what, they’ll give you a police sketch?”

“Not quite. But we’ll have a description. Hair color. Eye color. Likely height and bone structure. Shape of his nose. Race. All kinds of things. I don’t know, maybe we could take it to a good sketch artist.”

“But sequencing must cost a fortune.”

“A hundred thousand dollars. Maybe less. It gets cheaper all the time.”

“You’re just going to write a check?”

“Yeah. Or a wire transfer.”

Chapter Eleven

A warm wind blew inland from the Gulf of Mexico and flapped the curtains in the dark conference room. Julissa stood on the balcony with her elbows on the carved stone rail. Bougainvillea grew from a terracotta pot next to her and climbed a trellis to tangle in the overhead wooden beams. She watched the lights of oil tankers moving slowly towards the coast from far out in the Gulf and sipped at a glass of whiskey.

After the meeting, she’d been able to reach her parents again. She told them she was in Galveston but didn’t say what she was doing. Her mother had been hysterical in the first telephone conversation, but detached by the second. She’d either been given a tranquilizer or had tranquilized herself at a hotel bar. Her father kept asking if there was any chance it was a mistake. Had she seen the body yet? No? Then it could still be a mistake. A mix-up. He started telling her about another mix-up, a van load of girls on spring break. She told him to stop. It was real. She was meeting the district attorney in the morning; the autopsy was still underway. She didn’t tell him everything she knew. But there was no point in letting her father lose himself in hope.

She’d hung up, left her hotel room, and come into conference room. It felt better in here.
 
She looked at the map for a while, then moved out to the balcony with a drink.
 

When she and Allison were little girls, they lived in the hills outside of Austin, near Lake Travis. Scrubby woods of juniper and elm lay behind their house. There were limestone stream beds with the tracks of old wagons still cut into the soft stone. In one of the deeper pools of a spring fed creek, they could dive to see the footprints of dinosaurs in the petrified mud at the bottom. The best thing, though, in those summer days of running wild in the woods, was to play with the pair of brothers who lived across the creek. They had many games, but Julissa’s favorite was hide-and-seek, with cap pistols. They played it all summer when she was eight and Allison was nine. Julissa would dream of it at night: new trees in which to hide, new boulders from which to ambush, her heart pounding in her sleep as her dreaming body raced down paths through the spear grass and around cactus patches, her feet sure and true as she leapt the old barbed wire fence and bolted across the pasture land that fell away to the limestone bluffs, Charlie or Dylan or Allison in hot pursuit, caps firing wildly.

That summer, her parents almost divorced. They locked themselves in a study, low conversations building to shouts. Whatever it was—she never learned, even after she became an adult—eventually passed. Her parents stayed married. But that summer’s game was a good enough distraction; she was only aware for a few hours each week of the mysterious fracture cutting down the middle of her family.

Now she had Chris, Aaron and Mike to play with instead of Charlie and Dylan. They could play with real guns and DNA tests and could hack into the FBI’s mainframe; they could ignore work and life and obligations and friends who didn’t matter anymore, and go on an international hunt for a killer who was more animal than man. And that sounded, to Julissa, like the perfect antidote to the stifling reality she would have to face if she did not throw herself completely and unequivocally into this new game.

Allison’s funeral.

All the rituals of collective grief played out, each stage of the wake and service and burial overseen by a fresh-faced stranger.

And then, when it was all over, she’d get up some morning to go back to work.

She heard the door open and she turned. Chris walked around the conference table and joined her on the balcony.

“Thought you’d be here.”

“I looked in my room for the minibar and didn’t notice it.”

“What’re you having?”

“Johnny Walker.”

“Any left?”

She nodded towards the bar. He went inside, poured a miniature bottle of Jack Daniel’s into a glass and came back. He stood at the rail next to her and took a sip from his drink.

“Allison and I used to play on the beach here when we were kids,” she said. “Labor day, I guess. Probably Fourth of July a couple times too. I was thinking, if you knew someday your happy memories would all turn dangerous and black, would you go ahead and do the things you did to make the happy memories in the first place?”