Deadly Dreams (18 page)

Nate smiled easily. “Understandable. Do you happen to have that picture handy? I’m not much of a fisherman, but I’d sure like to see it.”

The mention of pictures had her face losing its animation as memory intruded. She swallowed hard. “I’m not sure. It sat right there on that table”—she pointed at an end table next to the recliner—“for years and years. I don’t recall when it was put away or whether Patrick did it or I did.” Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them away rapidly. “At any rate I can look. Tell the kids to be on the watch for it as they go through the photos.”

“I appreciate that.” He caught the slight gesture Risa was making and rose. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Christiansen. I want you to know the department is putting a lot of man hours into finding the person who did this.”

“I heard there was a task force.” She stood, too, and her gaze was searching. “How long, do you think? I mean, I realize you can’t predict, but . . .”

“We’ve got a lot of people on this investigation. I’ll personally let you know as soon as we have a suspect. And keep us abreast of the memorial arrangements. I’m certain a lot of officers are going to want to pay their respects.”

She didn’t seem capable of speech then, but she gave a jerky nod and saw them to the door.

As they walked down the drive, he noted that the tiny lawn was just as immaculately kept as the neat white ranchstyle home had been.

Risa spoke first. “Okay, total coincidence, right?”

“The fact that she mentioned a Johnny?” They reached the car parked at the curb and both paused at the driver’s door. “And there’s a Johnny on the final segment of tape left at the crime scene?”

There was a flare of excitement in those odd-colored amber eyes. “Of course it might cease to be coincidence if that tape was left there for a reason.”

It wasn’t difficult to follow her line of thought because he was thinking the same thing. “You mean if we were meant to find it.”

She nodded, moved to round the car to her door. “Makes me really interested to see if anyone else is pictured in Christiansen’s fish photo.”

Jonas knelt before the statue of the Virgin Mary, kissed the rosary beads, and bowed his head. Weeks like these, when he worked second shift, allowed him to go to daily mass. But he took comfort in the time he had to pray in the solitude of his own home, as well.

He had more to pray for than ever.

The guilt that had eaten at him for over twenty years was a constant weight that lived inside him. A writhing fanged beast, it would lie dormant for days or even weeks at a time. And then spring forth in all its fury, teeth and claws flaying him alive from the inside.

It was the penance he deserved for living in a state of mortal sin.

He wept freely, the rosary clutched so tightly in his hands that it cut into his flesh. He didn’t pray for forgiveness. Jonas knew it was much too late for that. He didn’t pray for guidance. He’d never had the courage to follow through on the instructions he’d received from the confessional all those years ago.

He wasn’t sure he’d ever find that courage.

His eyes squeezed together tightly, and his shoulders shook with emotion.

The Holy Mother looked kindly down at him, her arms spread in a gesture of compassion. A compassion he knew he didn’t deserve.

In the end, all he could do was pray for the strength to follow through on the plan he’d set in motion. It might not make things right. But it’d end things.

Once and for all.

Risa tacked the department photos of Parker, Tull, and Christiansen above her desk and studied them. She needed to cull all their personal details from the briefing reports and interviews to compile a victim grid on each.
Know the victim, know the crime
. It was one of Raiker’s most oft repeated mantras.

She powered up her laptop and opened the investigative file she’d started, adding that reminder and another to have Nate direct her to the first two crime scenes. Her grids wouldn’t be complete without a visit to the scenes. She had to place herself at the location of their deaths. See the things they’d last seen. Imagine what they’d felt. What they’d heard.

Knowing the victims meant walking through their last hours and placing herself in their shoes. So that’s just what she’d do.

And if immersing herself in the familiar details of the job helped keep the old doubts and insecurities at bay for hours at a time, then that was a very welcome bonus.

She scanned the documents from the file on her portable scanner to load them on her computer. All of Raiker’s investigators were cross-trained, and he made sure all of them were profiling experts. But the organizational methods they used differed. Her colleague Abbie Phillips preferred setting up a victim board where she pinned up tags of pertinent information and used colored string to delineate intersections between the victims’ lives.

Risa was more comfortable with computers. Cutting and pasting the pertinent information into one grid, using different colors for each victim was her method of choice. Intermittently she backed her work up on a flash drive, which would be left here when she took the laptop home each night. The need for backing up their files had been beaten into her by Gavin Pounds, Raiker’s cyber wizard, after her one and only computer crash two years ago.

The familiar task soothed her and left her mind free to turn over the information she and Nate had discovered today, as well as the details from the briefing she’d just left. As she worked she forgot to wonder what was keeping him. When she’d left, he was deep in conversation with one of the task force detectives.

When the door pushed open, she looked up, blinking distractedly. But instead of Nate, she found Eduardo in the doorway.

“Nate still in the conference room?”

“As far as I know.” She eyed the manila envelope he was holding. “What do you have?”

“IT sent this over while we were in the briefing.”

Adrenaline flared. “The stills from the video left at the last crime scene? Let’s see them.”

Although he came farther into the room, he didn’t make a move to open the envelope. Instead, his eyes searched her face. “How are things coming? McGuire keeping you in the loop on the investigation?”

Inwardly she squirmed at the question. She’d never worked under Eduardo’s command. Had left the force before he’d climbed to his current rank. And while she recognized the obligations of his job, she was uncomfortable juggling the friendship-brass aspects of it. “I’ve got no complaints.”

He smiled wryly. “Wouldn’t voice them if you did, you mean.”

“It’s been going all right, Eddie. McGuire’s a decent guy. Believe me, working for Raiker and hiring out to different law enforcement entities all the time, I’ve come in contact with far worse.”

“Hardly high praise, but I guess I’ll take it.” Nate’s voice sounded behind Morales and Risa’s face heated. No use wondering if he’d overheard their conversation. His carefully impassive expression said it all.

As did the level stare he exchanged with his captain.

Eduardo made no attempt to explain or apologize for checking up on him. And that, Risa thought, was another facet of his position. He merely held up the envelope. “Got these from IT. Haven’t looked at them yet.”

Nate walked into the office and began to shut the door.

“Hold that open for a sec, please?”

Darrell Cooper, the red-haired man who worked the front desk, stopped by the still open door with the wheeled cart he was pushing. “Just cleaning up the conference area. Will you guys use this coffee? Otherwise I’ll take it to the staff room.”

“Yeah, sure, we’ll take it.” Morales gestured for him to wheel it into the room. Then he looked at Nate. “I’m guessing you’re going to be here awhile.”

He nodded, tossed the younger man an easy grin. “Thanks, Darrell. Your coffee is becoming famous around here.”

“Don’t say that too loudly.” Cooper’s expression was mischievous. “Flo’s on duty.”

The words brought a slight frown to Morales’s face. “You should have been off a couple hours ago, then.”

“I stayed awhile longer so she could go to her son’s track meet.”

“Nice, but don’t let people take advantage of you,” Nate advised, heading to the cart to pour himself a cup. “Seems like you pull extra hours more often than not.”

He shrugged, smiled. “They have families, I don’t. And I can use the cash. The ladies these days have high standards.”

As he backed out of the door, they heard him greet a passing detective. “Barnes, I sent some flowers in your name to your girlfriend. Florist will be sending you the bill.”

“What? I didn’t order any flowers.”

“I know. You should have.”

Morales reached out to swing the door closed, an abashed grin on his face. “Don’t tell Flo, but it’s not only coffee he’s better at. Reminded me of Renee’s birthday last month, too. She would have killed me if I’d forgotten.”

Risa raised a brow. “You did forget.”

“Only until Darrell reminded me. As far as she knows, I remembered. And that’s all that counts.”

“Ah, the complexities of the male brain,” she mocked, as she joined them to refill her cup. “A miracle of nature.”

“Tell it to Renee.” Eduardo hooked a chair leg with his foot and dragged it over. He looked at Nate. “Captain Steiner in Vice is very interested in that information you called in with on Javon Emmons. He’s going to have Crowley picked up, see what sort of other details they can get from him. If they use him to set up a sting, how reliable will he be?”

“Depends on what’s in it for him,” Risa answered bluntly before Nate could fashion an answer. “He’s scared to death of Emmons, and helping build a case against him is going to dry up a nice little revenue stream Crowley’s got coming in.”

“It might take a combination of cash, protection, and immunity to get him to cooperate.” Nate leaned his hips on the front of his desk, facing the two of them, and sipped from his steaming cup. “They’ll want to make it clear he goes down for his activities if he doesn’t help them get Emmons. He’ll cooperate. He’s pretty motivated by self-interest.”

Morales nodded, set his cup on the edge of the cart, and opened the envelope. “Then he’s exactly like ninety-nine percent of the people we get coming through here. Let’s see what IT came up with.” Risa and Nate moved to flank the captain, and he fanned out the top three of the five-by-seven photos.

Risa leaned down to study them more closely. As the IT tech had warned, the pictures were grainy, with some of the resolution lost. Two of the pictures depicted the speaker on the video. Johnny. One was of the man Nate thought was Roland Parker.

“Need to get this photo over to Parker’s widow for a positive ID.”

Nate glanced at his watch. “I’ll run it by there on my way to work tomorrow morning. While I’m there, I’ll ask her about any hobbies her husband had.”

“And anyone he might have known by the name of Johnny.”

Seeing Morales’s quizzical look, Nate quickly filled him in on the information they’d received from Bonnie Christiansen. When he’d finished, the captain looked thoughtful. “Interesting. I wouldn’t pin too much hope on the two Johnny’s being one and the same, though.”

Risa exchanged a quick glance with Nate. “We can presume the offender may be one of the men sitting at that table or the person recording their meeting. If it’s one of the men at the table, the tape was likely supposed to do exactly what we first supposed. Record the crime for the offender to relive later. But if it was left deliberately, the likelihood increases that the offender is the person recording, or someone close to that person. It would help to get a rundown on the location of that scene.”

Morales shuffled the photos until they were looking at a close-up of the corner of the room’s window. There was definitely a street scene outside it, although it was fuzzy. They all surveyed it silently for a moment.

“Well . . .” Risa said doubtfully, cocking her head a bit. “Those two letters still look like a
z
and a
p
.”

Nate stabbed a finger at another partial letter. “That could be
b
. Or maybe an
l
.”

“Or the tall part of an
h
,
f
, or
t
,” she retorted. “At least this one looks like an
e
.” She stopped. Squinted. “Possibly a
c
in that font.”

“Yeah.” Morales seemed more than happy to hand the packet of photos over. “Have fun pinpointing the location.”

“Of a business that existed sometime in the last twenty to thirty years?” Nate’s tone was wry. “No problem.”

The captain stood. “Oh, and the message from IT was that they’re still working on the sound and voice enhancements. I’ll let you know when those come through.”

“Thanks.” Nate rounded the corner of his desk to sit after Morales exited the room. “We’ve got old telephone books in the reference room.”