“This is insane.”
“Trust me. No matter how much heat our competitors in the media put on us, I’ll fend them off, so you can keep doing your job. Hopefully your stories will help catch the killer, and in the end we’ll have no public relations problem to speak of. Just remember: We’re in this box together. Right now, all we can do is let me play dumb and do a song and dance around the tough questions, until you can bring this thing to closure.”
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THE INFORMANT
“Basically what you’re saying is: Go catch myself a serial killer and all our problems are solved.”
His voice rose with urgency. “Do you see another way?”
Mike sunk in his chair. “You’re all heart, Aaron.”
“I gotta go. Just stick with the program.”
The line clicked in Mike’s ear. He brought his hand to his forehead, his mind racing.
“Can we talk now?” said Karen. She was standing in the open doorway, arms folded.
He winced. “Sorry, but I gotta go talk some sense into Aaron. He’s putting me on probation over this.”
“Can’t it wait until tomorrow morning?”
“It really can’t. This is getting worse by the minute.
He’s going on
Nightline
tonight.”
“That’s not for another three hours.”
He glanced at the clock, then back at Karen. His frustration was immense. “This is my
career.
Don’t
you
think I should go?”
“I can’t tell you what you should do.”
He took another look at the clock, then back at her.
He could see in her eyes that maybe it would have happened. If they had just stayed there on the couch with no interruptions, she would have opened up, maybe even asked him to spend the night.
“Karen, I
really
have to go.”
“Then go.”
He rose quickly and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she turned her cheek. His forced smile came out more like a grimace. He turned and hurried to the French doors.
Karen followed and stood watching as
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James Grippando
he slid them back. He stopped on the lawn and looked back longingly, pleading with his eyes.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get this straightened out. I promise.”
She folded her arms tightly and shook her head. “Don’t knock yourself out,” she said as she reached out and shut the doors tight.
Karen waited for Mike’s call, but it never came. She knew how important his career was to him, but he sure didn’t seem to appreciate the importance of what she’d been trying to reveal. At midnight, she unplugged the phone and went to bed.
At 6:30 A.M. she reset her alarm for nine o’clock. She was still trying to fall asleep, and if she did, she wanted to get at least a couple of hours. Even after two months, sleeping without Mike was still awkward, and a week at her mother’s had made the house feel even less like a home. The familiar noises from the kitchen weren’t so familiar anymore. Passing cars on the street seemed to stop right outside the house. Hours passed as she lay in the darkness, eyes wide open, listening for footsteps. In the small hours of the night, an empty house was a frightfully noisy place.
Lying on her back, she thought about her so-called protection. Maybe the alarm wasn’t enough. When she’d seen Mike, she’d frozen—hadn’t even thought to push the button. Maybe the agents outside had gone for coffee or had fallen asleep. Maybe they were lying in a ditch with their tongues cut out.
Fading in and out of no-sleep and near-sleep, she 183
THE INFORMANT
tried to imagine what Mike was going through, dealing with someone who might be a killer. She wondered if
she
could do it, if she could bring herself to converse with someone so psychotic. That thought stayed with her as her mind finally drifted, taking her to another level of consciousness, to another time in her life….
A cold Canadian wind had invaded the college town of Ithaca, rising in furious gusts as a steady rain beat on her windowpane. It all added up to yet another night of staring at the ceiling. She hated living alone, and she resented the hell out of her old roommate for dropping out of school, stuffing the rent payments up her nose, and sticking her with the apartment for the entire spring se-mester.
She heard a thud outside, like a slam against the building. She sat up in bed and listened intently. The wind and rain howled outside her window, but all else was quiet. Slowly, she lay back against her pillow, listening so hard that she could hear the feathers compress to envelop her head.
Another thud, and she shot up in bed. Her mouth went dry, and her heart raced. She listened, but there was only silence. The digital alarm clock said 4:27. The phone sat right on the nightstand, but she’d had so many false alarms with the campus police they’d started referring to her as the little girl who cried wolf. She drew a deep breath, then pulled back the covers and slid out of bed.
She was wearing a long cotton jersey that came to the middle of her thighs, with bikini briefs underneath and thick white socks on her feet. One foot went slowly in front of the other as she entered the hallway, 184
James Grippando
a long, dark tunnel with green sculptured carpet. She stopped at the living room. It was dark, lighted only by the faint glow of the night-light she’d placed in the kitchen. The furnace kicked on, giving her a start. She swallowed hard, calming her nerves.
Grow up,
she told herself.
Don’t cry wolf again.
She took a few more steps, then stopped and folded her arms tightly for warmth. It was chilly, downright cold, even with the heater on. Outside, the wind whistled. Inside, the curtain blew—and she gasped at the sight of the open window and the rain pouring in. Before she could scream there was a hand on her mouth and a damp weight on her back that pushed her to her knees and then to her stomach. She kicked and twisted, but he was sitting on her kidneys. She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t shake free. Again she tried to scream, but his big, gloved hand squeezed tighter around her mouth, and as she gasped for air her nostrils filled with stinking smells of old leather gloves.
“Shut
up
,” he grunted, breathing bourbon on her face.
“Just shut—”
Up she came, like a rocket from the sheets. Her hands were shaking as she frantically looked left, then right, searching and disoriented in the darkness of her own bedroom. Sweat poured through her nightgown. But all was quiet.
She caught her breath and rubbed the knots in her neck.
Dreaming again. That same nightmare. Worse than a nightmare. It was all too real.
If only it
were
a dream.
185
t
orrents of icy air streamed from the air-conditioning vents in the ceiling, making the autopsy room of the Georgia State Crime Lab feel like a meat locker in a packinghouse. After an hour in the chill, Victoria Santos had to put on her long winter coat. For a hot-blooded Latin, she was a confessed wimp in the cold.
Bright lights glistened off the white sterile walls and buffed tile floor. A long mobile cart for transporting bodies to the morgue was parked against the wall. A shiny metal autopsy table was in the center of the room, riddled with small holes that allowed water and fluids to drain into the round metal tank below. It looked like the perforated face of a giant cheese grater balanced on a huge tin can. Atop the table sat the small-parts dissection tray.
Atop the tray lay Cybil Holland’s frozen finger.
Victoria stood on one side of the table, staring down at the purplish stub with the pink French manicure 186
James Grippando
beneath the bright examination light. Beside her stood Dr. Leslie Harmon, a tall black woman from the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office who spent most of the time right in this room at the crime lab in Decatur. Tony Costello, the stocky Atlanta field agent, stood behind her in the shadows. On the other side of the table and hunched over the tray was Chester Burns, a fifty-nine-year-old internationally renowned forensic pathologist who smiled a lot, considering he was a walking encyclopedia on knives and stab wounds. Victoria had brought him down from the Bureau’s Forensic Science Research and Training Center in Quantico.
“We got lucky,” said Dr. Burns. He was smiling, as usual, but still staring down at the finger, squinting through gold-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a crisp white lab coat, and his short black hair was matted on his head, parted widely down the middle. He straightened up and stepped back from the tray. “The cut is very clean.
Fortunately, her attacker didn’t saw off the finger. Sawing would have shredded the tissue, splintered the bone. That would make my job a bear.”
Victoria strained to listen. His words were sometimes hard to understand. Burns was deaf. Victoria had always found a bit of irony in that—the dead speaking to the deaf.
“See here,” he said, pointing. “It sliced clean through, like a cleaver on a chopping block. Teeth marks from the knife’s serrated edge are plainly visible.”
Victoria leaned forward for a better look, close enough to see little blond hairs between the knuckles. “What can you tell so far?”
187
THE INFORMANT
He smiled. “I can tell you’re uncomfortable with my being deaf. You enunciate too hard. Just talk—I’ve read lips all my life.”
She blinked with embarrassment. “Sorry. Let me reph-rase the question anyway. What can
you
tell that
I
can’t tell?”
“I’ll have to make a cast and take more precise measure-ments to be sure. Study the photographs. I’ll need a radi-ologist to confirm readings—”
“All of which will take days,” Victoria interrupted. “I need to know
now.
Give me your gut reaction. Is this the work of our serial killer?”
“I’ll never be able to tell you that.”
“Why?”
“Maybe someone borrowed his knife.”
“So, you do think the knife used on Gertrude Kincaid was the same knife used on Cybil Holland.”
“If you’re asking me whether I can I testify to that in court, my answer is no. If you’re asking me whether I’ve seen enough to think it would be worth your while to follow up on this lead, the answer is definitely yes.”
Victoria nodded. “That’s what I wanted to know.” She glanced behind her at Tony Costello. The sight of the six foot two, hard-nosed Italian shivering in his shirtsleeves made her smile inside—she’d warned him he’d want a coat. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Tony nodded eagerly and rubbed the circulation back into his hands as he followed her out the door into the lobby. After the icy autopsy room, the lobby felt like a sauna. He helped Victoria remove her coat, then looked her in the eye.
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James Grippando
“Looks like your case has got a new priority—as in finding a ring with a heart-shaped diamond and emerald baguettes.”
She looked into the middle distance, thinking. “Something’s bothering me, though—something about the tim-ing of all this.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let’s say it
was
the same knife—that whoever killed Mrs. Kincaid in south Georgia on Friday also attacked Mrs. Holland in Atlanta on Monday night.”
“Your forensic pathologist just told you it’s possible.”
“But if that’s the case, then our profilers back in Quantico need to seriously rethink their view that the informant’s the killer.”
“Why is that?”
“The informant picked a curious way of informing Posten that the next victim after Kincaid would be Timothy Copeland in San Francisco. He manipulated Posten’s computer to flash Copeland’s name on his video display monitor. He had to sneak into the building to do that. It was an illegal break-in, so our Miami office checked into it—dusted for fingerprints, the whole nine yards. Nothing turned up, but by checking the computer’s memory, the systems manager was able to tell that the modifications were done at exactly eight-twenty-six A.M., Tuesday—actually three days before Copeland’s murder.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that if this schizophrenia theory is correct—if the informant is the killer—then he somehow got from Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta 189
THE INFORMANT
to the
Tribune
headquarters in downtown Miami in less than twelve hours. He was in Atlanta one evening, and in Miami the next morning.”
“Big deal. It’s a two-hour flight.”
“That’s just the point. There
weren’t
any flights. Last night, after you called me, I began thinking about the Atlanta—Miami connection, and checked into it. I thought maybe we could get some passenger manifests. But the same ice storm that stranded Cybil Holland in downtown Atlanta had the airport shut down for five hours on Monday night, till one o’clock in the morning.”
“What about after one o’clock? He could have flown out as late as five-thirty or six and still gotten to Miami in time to manipulate the computer at eight-twenty-six.”
Victoria shook her head. “Think about it. The guy’s a wanted serial killer. He just sliced off a woman’s finger.
He probably has her diamond ring stuffed in his coat pocket, and he maybe even still has his favorite knife tucked away in his baggage. You think he’d sit around the airport for five hours like a caged rat, hoping to catch the next plane to Miami, whenever that might be?”
“Okay,” Tony said, nodding in agreement. “So, he drove.”
She sighed, troubled. “It’s true that, at least according to the stereotypes, geographically transient serial killers love to take long drives. But it’s a good fourteen-hour drive from Miami to Atlanta.”
“It could be done in twelve. A buddy and I made it in thirteen down to Joe Robbie Stadium when we 190
James Grippando
snagged Super Bowl tickets at the last minute. Granted, we had to take turns driving nonstop. I’m not sure I could have done it alone.”
Those last words hung in the air, as if the proverbial light had gone on above their heads. Finally, he said what they were both thinking: “You think he shared the driving?”
“As in, him and the informant?”
Tony shrugged. “That’s another option, isn’t it. The two of them working together?”