Cold Hit Read online

  “You’re aware that there are no similar murders listed in the VICAP computer,” Underwood replied.

  VICAP is the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a computer database. Police departments all over the country were encouraged to enter all ritual-type killings into VICAP so other departments could match up signature murders that occurred in their cities. Serial killers tended to move around, but their signatures rarely changed. The problem with VICAP was, not all police departments went to the trouble of listing their ritual crimes on that database.

  “The missing fingertips, the chest symbol, would jump out on a VICAP scan,” Underwood defended.

  It was now dead quiet in the room. My remarks had dropped the temperature in here a few thousand degrees. I had only one more thing I wanted to say. Might as well go down swinging.

  “I think you may be inaccurate about the reason he’s pulling the coat up and covering their faces. By the way, that’s not part of the modus operandi. MO is something a killer does to avoid being caught. The act of covering the eyes is part of his signature, something emotional that he can’t help himself from doing. I see covering the face as avoidance and guilt. I agree he may be killing a father substitute. Patricide is a very heavy psychological burden for him to bear. After the killing, the unsub most likely is ashamed of his act and doesn’t want to deal with a father substitute’s disapproving gaze even in death, so he covers the face.”

  Underwood just stood in the center of the room with a strange, bewildered look on his narrow face. “One of us must be a complete idiot,” he finally said. “And I’m sure it’s not me.”

  “You asked for comments.”

  “After this briefing we’ll have a chat.” Jabbing the chalk at me. Dotting the I in idiot.

  Underwood had printed up his profile and now he passed it out. So far, beyond what he’d already told us, his unsub was an unattractive twenty-year-old who lived at home with a female parent, wanted to be a cop, and had a childhood history of fire starting and violence against animals. It was all textbook stuff and not worth much to this roomful of potential authors.

  In the end, Underwood couldn’t escape the need to follow up on the one solid lead I’d supplied—the medical insignia and the fact that Patrick Collins turned out to be a combat medic in Nam.

  We were instructed to designate four two-man teams to recheck each victim against VA records. Underwood selected a big, overweight detective named Bart Hoover to run this part of the investigation. Most all of us had heard stories about the aptly named Sergeant Hoover, who had major sixth-floor suck. He was a younger brother of a Glass House commander who headed the new Crime Support Section. Bart was a well-known fuckup who had actually once handcuffed a bank robber to his squad car steering wheel with the keys still in the ignition. The last he saw of that bust was his own taillights going around the corner. Despite bonehead mistakes, with the help of his brother, Bart had hoovered nicely up through the ranks.

  Underwood closed by telling us we were having morning and evening briefings just like this one, right here in this coffee room at 0800 and 1700 hours. Attendance was mandatory unless we were in the field, and then we needed to get his permission to miss.

  After the meeting broke, those with chairs pushed them back into the squad room. A few of my fellow detectives checked me out disdainfully. I had just marked myself as a troublemaker. I challenged Underwood, which could cause him to come down on everyone. Obviously I didn’t understand task force group dynamics.

  As I moved into the squad room, I was trying to keep from being put on one of the four background teams. I had other plans for the day. I ducked down and tried to hide while pretending to unjam my bottom desk drawer.

  Underwood stopped beside my desk. “That was interesting stuff in there. I want you to write it all down, every word so we’ll have a record, then you and I will go over it,” my FBI leader said pleasantly. Then he moved away, leaving me to that task. I smelled big trouble.

  16

  An hour later I finished my profile on the unsub and flagged Judd Underwood over. He veered toward me.

  “All done?” he asked pleasantly.

  “Yes, sir.” I handed four pages of profile material to him.

  “Good. Follow me.”

  He headed out the door, into the lobby. I didn’t know what the hell he was up to, but I tagged obediently after him. He was waiting for me outside the bathroom door.

  “Come on, I want to show you something,” he said.

  I followed him into the men’s room, wondering what the hell was going on. Then he dropped my four-page report into the urinal, unzipped his pants, took out his pencil dick, and started pissing on it. His yellow stream splattered loudly on the paper. When he was done he zipped up and turned to face me.

  “That’s what I think of your ideas,” he said, his voice pinched and shrill. “On this task force there will be only one profile and one profiler. I’m it. Get the murder book and come into my office.”

  I wanted to deck him, but seventeen years in the department has taught me that the best way to survive assholes is to wait them out. So I choked down my anger and followed Agent Underwood out of the bathroom and across the squad room, stopping to retrieve the murder book on the way.

  Underwood’s office was very large, but had no walls. He had instructed someone from maintenance to chalk out the perimeters on the gray linoleum floor. I was surprised to see that he swerved to avoid walking through the nonexistent south wall and entered through the chalked out opening that served as his door.

  I stopped at the line on the floor and looked in at him. Did he really expect me to walk around and not step over it? I paused for a moment to deal with this ridiculous dilemma. I was already in pretty deep with this guy, so I skirted the problem by finding my way into his office through the marked-out door.

  Welcome to The Twilight Zone.

  I waited while he sat behind a large, dark wood desk that he’d scrounged from somewhere. It was the only mahogany desk I’d ever seen at Parker Center and I had no idea where it had come from. He also had an expensive-looking, oxblood-red executive swivel chair, and some maple filing cabinets. All that was missing was an American flag, the grip-and-grin pictures, and a wall to hang them on. His cell phone sat on a charging dock in front of him. Several folders decorated one corner of his blotter. The five Fingertip case reports were stacked front and center, the edges all compulsively aligned. Taking the invisible office and all this anal organization into account, it seemed Judd Underwood had a few psychological tics of his own. But who am I to judge? I only had two semesters of junior college psych where I didn’t exactly bust the curve.

  “Where did you get all that hopeless nonsense?” he sneered.

  I smiled at him through dry teeth. “Since I got this case, I’ve been studying up on serial crime. I’ve read all of John Douglas’s books on serial homicide, Robert Ressler’s too, Ann Burgess and Robert Keppel—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it. But it’s one thing to read a book, it’s another to actually go out and catch one of these sociopaths. Since you obviously like reading about it, I suggest you pick up my book, Motor City Monster. It’s on Amazon dot com. Been called the definitive work in the field. In fact, let’s make that an order. You need to get some facts straight. Have it read by Monday morning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tapped a spot on his desk. “Put the murder book there.” I set it down while Agent Underwood settled into his executive swivel and picked up a folder. It was my two-week report. Every homicide detective routinely files a TWR with his or her supervisor. It details the workings of all active investigations. Underwood ran a freckled hand through his orange bristle, then opened the folder, licked his index finger, and slowly started to page through it, leaning forward occasionally to frown.

  Once, about two years ago, I was working a fugitive warrant that took me to Yellowstone Park. It was rattlesnake season and I hate snakes. I was paired up with a park ranger who
told me that when dealing with poisonous reptiles, the way to keep from getting bitten was to give them something more interesting than you to think about. It was time to put that strategy to use.

  Underwood looked up from my TWR. “I hope you and your partner are getting in some nice days at the beach, because, if not, this whole last two weeks has been a total waste of time.”

  I launched into action. “Agent Underwood, I have a plan to draw your unsub out.” Notice the clever possessive pronoun.

  Disinterested gray eyes, magnified and skeptical, studied me behind those thick wire-rimmed lenses. Undisguised contempt.

  “Really?” he finally said, stretching it way out so it sounded more like a wail than a word.

  “Yes. I think we should throw a funeral for one of these John Does.”

  Underwood steepled his fingers under his chin and scowled at me. Then he heaved a giant sigh that seemed to say that dealing with morons was just one of the ugly realities of command.

  When he next spoke, he enunciated his words very carefully so that even a fool like me wouldn’t get confused.

  “It probably hasn’t occurred to you, but since the advent of DNA, we no longer hold unidentified bodies at the morgue. All of those previous John Does have been buried. Since you’ve been so busy misprofiling this unsub, it may have escaped your notice, but Mister Collins has requested that his son be immediately flown back to Seattle, leaving no corpses for your little scam.” Then he tipped back in his swivel and regarded me smugly.

  “John Doe Number Four is still available,” I answered. “He’s the one we found at Forest Lawn Drive seven days ago. I checked with the coroner and he’s still on ice. We give him a phony name, publicize the hell out of the funeral, get some retired cops to be his mom and dad and see who stumbles in.”

  I could see he instantly liked it. It had flair. It was the kind of thing Jodie Foster might have come up with in Silence of the Lambs. But this only registered as a glint in his stone-gray eyes. His face never even twitched and you had to be trained at reading assholes to spot it.

  “Our budget is limited,” he equivocated.

  “I can get Forest Lawn to work with us. I know a woman down there who’s a funeral director. What if I could set it up for under three thousand? I’ll get him embalmed on the cheap so we can have an open casket. We’ll put on a full media blitz. I’m pretty sure I can rig it in a day or so.”

  He sat there running this over in his pea brain. It’s a well-known fact that some killers have an overpowering urge to attend the funerals of their victims. Judd Underwood should have suggested it himself instead of filling our briefing with psychobabble and lunar charts. But that’s a complaint better left to the book and movie guys milling in the squad room beyond the invisible walls of his office.

  “You get it set up for under three grand and I’ll get Deputy Chief Ramsey to approve it.”

  I didn’t believe that Forrest was part of the Fingertip case, so why stage an elaborate funeral to see who shows up? Well, I had a devious plan building in the back of my head that might solve all of my problems with one brilliantly deceptive move.

  I started to leave, stupidly moving to my right before I remembered and skidded to a halt. I had almost walked through the south wall again.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “I keep forgetting that wall is there.”

  “I’m not a complete moron,” Underwood said. “The reason that line is chalked out is so the contractors who are coming in this evening will know where to hang the partitions.”

  “Thank God for that,” I muttered.

  “I don’t like your attitude, Detective.”

  “Don’t feel bad. Nobody does. I’m not even sure I like it most of the time.”

  Then I stepped over the chalk line into the squad room where I used my cell phone to call my friend Bryna Spiros at Forest Lawn. Once I had her on the line, I explained what I needed. She cut me a great deal. Twenty-five hundred for everything, flowers, all park personnel and security services, even a priest to say a few words. I told her I’d have Rico From Pico get in touch to make arrangements for the body to be sent over for embalming. She said she’d loan me a casket at no charge because it was scheduled to be burned in a cremation later in the week.

  With all this in the works, I decided to head up to Special Crimes to talk to Cal. On my way out two of my new task force brothers were shooting the bull by the elevators.

  “Judd Underwood is legendary,” one of them said.

  I let the open elevator go and started stalling, fiddling with the buttons. I wanted to hear this.

  “Over at the Eye, they call him Agent Orange because he defoliates careers. If something goes wrong, he’ll pin it on the guys working with him.”

  A second elevator opened and Deputy Chief Michael Ramsey hurried out. He was tall, milk-white, and looked like a forties matinee idol, complete with the oiled black hair and pencil-thin moustache.

  He turned and faced me. “You’re Scully.”

  I reached out and stopped the elevator door from closing.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m looking for you to put this Fingertip deal down fast. Can you make that happen for me?”

  “Gonna try.”

  “That’s the ticket,” he said with false enthusiasm. “We got a storm blowing in on this one. You wait ’til it’s raining to pitch a tent, everybody gets wet.” Sounding like a scout leader giving out instructions before a jamboree.

  We stood there looking at each other. Me in the elevator, him in the hall. No connection. Nothing. We’d actually run out of small talk in less than ten seconds. So to end it, I slid my hand off the door and the elevator closed, cutting him from view.

  17

  I arrived at my digs in Homicide Special where the phones worked, and sat in my old cubicle without the murder book or my partner and rubbed my forehead. After talking with Fran Farrell yesterday, I had to admit I felt uneasy, unsure of what to do about Zack. All I knew was I was in a close race with Internal Affairs for his badge. But I couldn’t dwell on it because now I was also stuck with this funeral. So I headed in to see Jeb Calloway, brought him up to date, and then begged for his help.

  “Not my problem anymore,” he said, after I finished. “Take it up with your task force commander.”

  “Deputy Chief Ramsey put some rat-bag ASAC from the FBI in charge of the task force. The guy’s actually got us on a lunar calendar.”

  “Look, Scully, you’re a good cop, but sometimes you complain too much.”

  “Captain, we’re stuck in a Hannibal Lecter movie down there. His own people at the Eye call him Agent Orange.”

  “Whatta you want from me?” Cal said. “I didn’t put this task force on the ground. Take it up with the head of the Detective Bureau.” Some songs never change.

  I switched tactics. “I need to get this funeral set up fast. I’d like to run it out of here.”

  “Jeez, Scully.”

  “I’ll clear it with Agent Underwood,” I pleaded. “We don’t even have phones or furniture yet. There’s hardly any place to sit.”

  After a long, reflective moment, Cal nodded. “Okay, you clear it with your task force commander and I’ll let you work it from this floor temporarily.” Then he frowned. “A funeral’s a big expense for a copycat kill, or are you off that now?”

  “I’m keeping every option open, Cap. Just like you taught us.”

  He gave me a tight smile. He knew blatant ass-kissing when he saw it.

  “And I want Ed Hookstratten from Press Relations to handle the PR,” I rushed on. “I need press about this funeral in all the papers and TV. I know you guys are tight and I was wondering if you could pin him down for me.”

  “You got a name for the DB yet? We can’t put John Doe on the headstone.”

  “He’s gonna be Forrest Davies.”

  “Okay. You get Underwood to sign off. I’ll get in touch with Sergeant Hookstratten.”

  He fixed me with one of those hard-ass,
Event Security stares of his and said, “Agent Orange?”

  The rest of the afternoon I focused on the funeral. First I left a message for Underwood that I was working at my old desk until our task force phones were in. Then I did the casting for Forrest’s immediate family, who I decided to name Rusty and Alison Davies. I made a few calls and recruited two retired cops I’d worked with ten years ago. Detective Bob Stewart agreed to be Forrest’s dad and Sergeant Grace Campbell would play his mom. Both were gray-haired sixty-eight-year-old vets who looked like they could be the parents of a fifty-year-old man. I asked them to send over personal portraits for a press packet I was making up to go with the artist’s rendition of Forrest.

  At three o’clock, Bryna Spiros called back. There was a chapel available at one-thirty tomorrow afternoon. I took it and thanked her.

  By five o’clock almost everyone was back after an unsuccessful day at the V.A. I brought my team up to the Homicide Special break room for a pre-meeting. They were tired, and I was getting a decent amount of stink-eye. Big spender that I am, I bought everyone machine coffee. The funeral crew consisted of nine people including me.

  Sergeant Ed Hookstratten was a six-foot-four, hollow-chested, Lurch-like piece of work with a long hooked nose to go with his name. The man always slouched, but he was, without question, the best media guy in the Glass House.

  I’d picked the four cops that I already knew on the task force: Bola, Diaz, Ward, and Quinn. My long-lens photographers were Kyle Jute and Doreen McFadden, two patrol officers who were camera buffs. I’d used them both in the past. The last two players were the grieving parents, retired Sergeants Campbell and Stewart.

  Everybody sipped watery coffee while I laid out the op. We would be on Handy-Talkies with earpieces and would stay well back, watch, and photograph everything, making sure to get close-ups of all the license plates in the parking lot for DMV checks later. We had no warrants, so we would make no arrests unless some overt crime happened right in front of us.