“Look, just sit down, would you?”
The room had only one chair, the one she had been waiting in. I sat on the bed, closing my laptop sullenly and gathering the paperwork into one stack. She remained standing.
“Okay, I showed my creds and asked the manager to let me in. I told him your safety might be in jeopardy.”
I shook my head in confusion.
“What are you talking about? Nobody even knows I’m here.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. You told me you were going to the prison up here. Who else did you tell? Who else knows?”
“I don’t know. I told my editor and there’s a lawyer down in Vegas who knows. That’s it.”
She nodded.
“William Schifino. Yes, I talked to him.”
“You talked to him? Why? What is going on here, Rachel?”
She nodded again, but this time not in agreement. She nodded because she knew she had to tell me what was going on, even if it was against the FBI creed. She pulled the chair over to the middle of the room and sat down facing me.
“Okay, when you called me today, you weren’t making the most sense, Jack. I guess you are a better writer than a teller of stories. Anyway, of all that you told me, the part that stuck with me was what you said about your credit cards and bank accounts and your phone and e-mail. I know I told you I couldn’t help you but after I hung up, I started thinking about that and I got concerned.”
“Why?”
“Because you were looking at all of that like it was an inconvenience. Like a big coincidence, that it just happened to be going on while you were on the road working on this unrelated story about this supposed killer.”
“There’s nothing supposed about this guy. But are you saying it could be related? I thought about this but there’s no way. The guy I am trying to chase down would have no idea that I’m even out here and on to him.”
“Don’t be so sure about that, Jack. It is a classic hunting tactic. Separate and isolate your target and then move in for the kill. In today’s society, separating and isolating someone would entail getting them away from their comfort zone—the environment they know—and then eliminating their ability to connect. Cell phone, Internet, credit cards, money.”
She ticked them off on her fingers.
“But how could this guy know about me? I didn’t even know about him until last night. Look, Rachel, it’s great to see you and I hope you stick around tonight. I want you to be here, but I’m not getting this. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the concern—in fact, how did you get here so damn quick?”
“I took an FBI jet to Nellis and had them jump me up here in a chopper.”
“Jesus! Why didn’t you just call me back?”
“Because I couldn’t. When you called me, it was transferred to the off-site location where I work. There’s no caller ID on those transfers. I didn’t have your number and I knew you were probably on a throw-away line.”
“So what’s the bureau brass going to say when they find out you dropped everything and hopped on a plane to save me? Didn’t you learn anything in South Dakota?”
She waved the concern away. Something about the gesture reminded me of our first meeting. It happened to have also been in a hotel room. She had driven my face down hard into the bed and then handcuffed and arrested me. It wasn’t love at first sight.
“There’s an inmate in Ely that has been on my interview list for four months,” she said. “Officially, I came to interview him.”
“You mean like he’s a terrorist? Is that what your unit does?”
“Jack, I can’t talk to you about that side of my work. But I can tell you how easy it was to find you and why I know I wasn’t the only one tracking you.”
She froze me with that word. Tracking. It conjured bad things in my imagination.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.”
“When you called me today you told me you were going to Ely and I knew that had to be to interview a prisoner. So when I got concerned and decided to do something about it, I called Ely and asked if you were there and I was told you just left. I spoke to a Captain Henry there and he said your interview was put off until tomorrow morning. He said he recommended you go into town and stay at the Nevada.”
“Yeah, Captain Henry. I was dealing with him.”
“Yeah, well, I asked him why your interview was postponed and he told me that your guy, Brian Oglevy, was in lockdown because there was a threat against him.”
“What threat?”
“Hold on, I’m getting to it. The warden got an e-mail today with a message that said the AB was planning to hit Oglevy today. So as a precaution they put him in lockdown.”
“Oh, come on, they took that seriously? The Aryan Brotherhood? Don’t they threaten everybody who isn’t a member? Isn’t Oglevy a Jewish name, too?”
“They took it seriously because the e-mail came from the warden’s own secretary. Only she didn’t write it. It was written anonymously by someone who had gained access to her state prison systems account. A hacker. It could have been someone inside or someone from the outside. It didn’t matter. They took it as a legitimate warning because of the way it was delivered. They put Oglevy in lockdown, you didn’t get to see him and you were sent to spend the night here. Alone, in unfamiliar surroundings.”
“Okay, what else? This is still a stretch.”
She was beginning to convince me but I was acting skeptical to get her to tell me more.
“I asked Captain Henry if anybody else had called and asked about you. He said the lawyer you were working for, William Schifino, called to check on you and he was told the same thing, that the interview was delayed and you were probably spending the night at the Nevada.”
“Okay.”
“I called William Schifino. He said he never made that call.”
I stared at her for a long moment as a cold finger went down my spine.
“I asked Schifino if anyone besides me had called about you and he told me he had gotten one call earlier. It was from someone who said he was your editor—used the name Prendergast—and that he was worried about you and wanted to know if you had come to see Schifino. Schifino said you had come by and that you were on your way up to the prison in Ely.”
I knew my editor could not have made that call because when I had called Prendergast, he had not gotten my e-mail and had no idea I had gone to Las Vegas. Rachel was right. Someone had been tracking me and doing a good job of it.
My mind flashed on thoughts of Sideburns and riding up in the elevator with him, then of him following me down the hallway to my room.
What if he hadn’t heard Rachel’s voice? Would he have walked on by or would he have pushed in behind me?
Rachel got up and walked over to the room’s phone. She dialed the operator and asked for the manager. She was on hold for a few moments before her call was taken.
“Yes, it’s Agent Walling. I’m still in room four ten and I’ve located Mr. McEvoy and he’s safe. I am now wondering if you can tell me if there are any guests in the next three rooms going down the hall. I think that would be four eleven, twelve and thirteen.”
She waited and listened and then thanked the manager.
“One last question,” she said. “There is a door marked exit at the end of the hall. I’m assuming those are stairs. Where do they go?”
She listened, thanked him again and then hung up.
“There’s nobody registered in those rooms. The stairs go down to the parking lot.”
“You think that guy with the sideburns was him?”
She sat back down.
“Possibly.”
I thought about his wraparound sunglasses, the driving gloves and the cowboy hat. The bushy sideburns covered most of the rest of his face and drew the eye away from any other distinguishing features. I realized that if I had to describe the man who had followed me, I would only be able to remember the hat, hair, gloves, sunglasses and sideburns—the throwa
way or changeable features of a disguise.
“Jesus! I can’t believe how stupid I was. How? How did this guy find out about me and then actually find me? We’re talking about less than twenty-four hours and he’s sitting next to me at the slots.”
“Let’s go down and you show me what machine he was at. We might be able to pull prints.”
I shook my head.
“Forget it. He was wearing driving gloves. In fact, even the ceiling cameras down there won’t help you. He was wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses—his whole getup was a disguise.”
“We’ll pull the video anyway. Maybe there will be something that will help us.”
“I doubt it.”
I shook my head again, more to myself than to Rachel.
“He got right next to me.”
“That trick with the prison secretary’s e-mail shows he has a certain skill set. I think it would be wise to consider your e-mail accounts to be breached at this point.”
“But that doesn’t explain how he knew about me in the first place. In order for him to breach my e-mail, he had to know about me.”
I slapped the bed in annoyance and nodded my head.
“Okay, I don’t know how he knew about me, but I did send e-mails last night. To both my editor and my partner on the story, telling them that the story was changing and that I was following a lead to Vegas. I talked to my editor today and he said he never got it.”
Rachel nodded knowingly.
“Destroying outgoing communications. That would fall under isolation of the target. Did your partner get his?”
“It’s a her and I don’t know if she got it because she’s not answering her phone or her e-mail and she didn’t—”
I stopped in my verbal tracks and looked at Rachel.
“What?”
“She didn’t show up for work today. She didn’t call in and nobody could reach her. They even sent somebody to her apartment but they got no answer.”
Rachel abruptly stood up.
“We’ve got to go back to L.A., Jack. The chopper’s waiting.”
“What about my interview? And you said you were going to pull the video from downstairs.”
“What about your partner? The interview and video can wait till later.”
Embarrassed, I nodded and got off the bed. It was time to go.
I had no idea where Angela Cook lived. I told Rachel what I did know about her, including her odd fixation with the Poet case, and that I’d heard she had a blog but had never read it. Rachel transmitted all the information to an agent in L.A. before we boarded the military chopper and headed south toward Nellis Air Force Base.
On the flight there we wore headsets, which cut down on the engine noise but didn’t allow for conversation that wasn’t in sign language. Rachel took my files and spent the hour with them. I watched her making comparisons between the crime scene and autopsy reports of Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy. She worked with a look of complete concentration on her face and took notes on a legal pad she’d pulled out of her own bag. She spent a lot of time looking at the horrible photos of the dead women, taken both at the crime scene and on the autopsy table.
For the most part I sat in my straight-back seat and racked my brain, trying to put together an explanation for how all of this could have happened so fast. More specifically, how this killer could have started hunting me when I had barely started hunting him. By the time we landed at Nellis, I thought I had something and was waiting for the opportunity to tell Rachel.
We immediately transferred to a waiting jet on which we were the only passengers. We sat across from each other, and the pilot informed Rachel that there was a call holding for her on the onboard telephone. We strapped in, she picked up the phone and the jet immediately started taxiing out to the runway. On the overhead the pilot told us we would be on the ground in L.A. in an hour. Nothing like the power and might of the federal government, I thought. This was the way to travel—except for one thing. It was a small plane and I didn’t fly small planes.
Rachel mostly listened to her caller, then asked a few questions and finally hung up.
“Angela Cook was not at her home,” she said. “They can’t find her.”
I didn’t respond. A sharp stab of fear and dread for Angela worked its way up under my ribs. This didn’t ease any as the jet took off, rising at a steeper angle than I was used to with commercial airliners. I almost tore the armrest off with my fingernails. After we were safely up I finally spoke.
“Rachel, I think I know how this guy could’ve found us so quickly—Angela, at least.”
“Tell me.”
“No, you first. Tell me what you found in the files.”
“Jack, don’t be so petty. This has become a little bit larger than a newspaper story.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t go first. It’s also larger than the FBI’s penchant for taking information but not giving anything back in return.”
She shook off the barb.
“Fine, I’ll start. But first let me commend you, Jack. From what I have read about these cases, I would say there is absolutely no doubt that they are connected by a single killer. The same man is responsible for both. But he escaped notice because in each case an alternate suspect came to light quickly and the local authorities proceeded with blinders on. In each case, they had their man from the beginning and didn’t look into other possibilities. Except of course in the Babbit case, their man was a boy.”
I leaned forward, beaming with confidence after her compliment.
“And he never confessed like they put out to the press,” I said. “I have the transcript back at my office. Nine-hour interrogation and the kid never confessed. He said he stole her car and her money, but the body was already in the trunk. He never said he killed her.”
Rachel nodded.
“I assumed that. So what I was doing with the material you have here was profiling the two killings. Looking for a signature.”
“The signature’s obvious. He likes strangling women with plastic bags.”
“Technically they weren’t strangled. They were asphyxiated. Suffocated. There’s a difference.”
“Okay.”
“There is something very familiar about the use of the plastic bag and the cord around the neck, but I was actually looking for something a little less obvious than the surface signature. I was also looking for connections or similarities between the women. If we find what connects them we’ll find the killer.”
“They were both strippers.”
“That’s part of it but a little broad. And, technically, one was a stripper and one was an exotic performer. There is a slight difference.”
“Whatever. They both showed their naked bodies off for a living. Is that the only connection you found?”
“Well, as you must have noticed, they were very similar in physical makeup. In fact, the difference in weight was only three pounds and the difference in height was half an inch. Facial structure and hair was also alike. A victim’s body type is a key component in terms of what makes them chosen. An opportunistic killer takes what comes along. But when you see two victims like this with exactly the same body type, it tells us this is a predator who is patient, who chooses.”
It looked like she had more to say but stopped. I waited but she didn’t continue.
“What?” I said. “You know more than you’re saying.”
She dropped the hesitation.
“When I was in Behavioral it was in the early days. The profilers often sat around and talked about the correlation between the predators we hunted and the predators in the wild. You’d be surprised how similar a serial killer can be to a leopard or a jackal. And the same could be said for victims. In fact, when it came to body types we often assigned victims animal types. These two women we would have called giraffes. They were tall and long-legged. Our predator has a taste for giraffes.”
I wanted to write some of this down to use later but I was afraid that any obvious recording
of her interpretation of the files would cause her to shut down the exposition. So I tried not to even move.
“There’s something else,” she said. “At this point this is purely conjecture on my part. But both autopsies ascribe marks on each of the victims’ legs to ligature. I think that might be wrong.”
“Why?”
“Let me show you something.”
I finally moved. We were in seats that faced each other. I unbuckled and moved to the seat next to her. She went through the files and pulled several of the copies of photos from the crime scenes and the autopsies.
“Okay, you see the marks left above and below the knees here and here and here?”
“Yeah, like they were tied up.”
“Not quite.”
She used a clear polished fingernail to trace the markings on the victims as she explained.
“The marks are too symmetrical to be from traditional bindings. Plus, if these were ligature marks we would see them around the ankles. If you were going to tie someone up to control them or to prevent escape, you would tie their ankles. Yet we have no ligature marks in these areas. The wrists, yes, but not on the ankles.”
She was right. I just hadn’t seen it until she explained it.
“So what made those marks on the legs?”
“Well, I can’t say for sure, but when I was in Behavioral, we came upon new paraphilias on almost every case. We started categorizing them.”
“You’re talking about sexual perversions?”
“Well, we didn’t call them that.”
“Why, you had to be politically correct around serial killers?”
“It may be very nuanced, but there is a difference between being perverted and abnormal. We call the behaviors paraphilias.”
“Okay, and these marks, they’re part of a paraphilia?”
“They could be. I think they are marks left by straps.”
“Straps from what?”
“Leg braces.”
I almost laughed.
“You’ve got to be kidding. People get off on leg braces?”
Rachel nodded.
“It even has a name. It’s called abasiophilia. A psychosexual fascination with leg braces. Yes, people get off on it. There are even websites and chat rooms dedicated to it. They call them irons and calipers. Women who wear braces are sometimes called iron maidens.”