Presumed Guilty: (A Jefferson Winter novella) (4 page)

They fell into another long silence. Winter was staring at his hands again, while Yoko was staring at the scratched brass Zippo on the top of her cigarette pack, and watching him in her peripheral vision. She was fascinated by how smooth the skin on his hands looked, how wrinkle-free and unblemished it was. Once upon a time, she’d had skin like that.

Why was it that age showed up on your hands more than any other part of the body? What was that all about? People thought that she looked much younger than forty-two, but that was because they weren’t observant enough. If they bothered to look at her hands, they’d see the truth in every line and wrinkle.

Faces lied. Hands didn’t.

Yoko was happy to wait this one out for as long as it took. If Winter wanted to play mind games, that was fine by her. Bring it on. She’d eat him alive.

While she waited, her thoughts drifted back to that morning. In her mind’s eye she could see the crowd that had gathered on Darnell Avenue. The police barriers were up and there had to be more than a hundred people. And all this had happened during the short time she’d been in Alice Harrigan’s apartment.

The neighbours who’d been happy to stand by their front doors earlier were now part of the throng, jostling and gawping with the rest. There were plenty of cops milling about. Most were from the Greenbelt Police Department, but there were half a dozen men from the Prince George’s Sheriff’s Office.

The media were out in force, too. TV, radio and print. The reporters and their technical entourages were fighting it out for the best positions, pushing the locals out of the way.

Their vans were parked as close as they’d been allowed to get. The larger stations had the bigger vehicles, and bigger logos. CNN and Fox were there, along with a dozen other acronymic news channels. They’d probably camped out in nearby motels, too, so they could get here as soon as the news broke.

A black coroner’s van was parked opposite the apartment, and a couple of guys with
CORONER’S DEPARTMENT
on their jackets were hanging around next to it, waiting for the okay to move the body.

They were in for a long wait. This crime scene was too fresh. Forensics needed to do their thing before the body was released.

Yoko didn’t condemn the people in the crowd, or the media, since that would be hypocritical. They’d come here to make sense out of the senseless, and, when you got down to it, wasn’t she here for the same reason?

It was a little after nine, but already warm. The sky was a cloudless blue and there wasn’t any haze to burn off. Today was going to be a hot one. She walked to a nearby tree and stood in the shade for a while, watching and smoking.

She turned her attention to the mass of people pressing against the barriers. She could have sworn the crowd had got bigger. This didn’t surprise her. Valentino was a big deal, everyone wanted a peek. The fact they wouldn’t see much wasn’t any sort of deterrent. They just wanted to boast to their friends that they’d been here.

For a while she stood and smoked and studied the crowd. There was an equal number of whites and blacks with the odd Hispanic face thrown in, which was consistent with Greenbelt’s racial demographic.

There were babies in strollers, octogenarians and everything in-between. People were chatting to each other, as relaxed as if they’d bumped into one another at the grocery store.

Almost everyone was staring beyond the barriers, trying to see what was happening. Even when they looked away, it wasn’t for long. They might turn and speak to the person beside them, or glance towards the entrance to Darnell Avenue because they’d heard a vehicle, then they’d go back to gawping.

One kid caught Yoko’s eye because he wasn’t doing any of that. White male, average height, late teens or early twenties. She focussed on a point ten feet to the left of him, just far enough so she could keep him at the edge of her peripheral vision.

This kid was different from the rest of the crowd, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was acting like he couldn’t care less about what was happening on the other side of the barrier.

He’d positioned himself in a place where he could get the best view of the crowd, and his eyes were moving from person to person. There was a greedy look on his face, like he was drinking up their reactions and just couldn’t get enough.

The hairs on the back of her neck were tingling, and there was only room enough in her head for one thought.
That’s our guy.
It was going around and around inside her brain, making it hard to think straight.

She stood very still, not wanting to make any sudden movements. Not that it would have made much of a difference. The kid was far too interested in the crowd to pay any attention to her.

Unfortunately, the angles and distance made it impossible to see his face properly. Yoko wanted to know who she was up against. She wanted to look into his eyes so she could get some idea of what made him tick.

She always liked to see her opponent.

Yoko smoked her cigarette slowly, all the way to the butt, then made her way back inside. She found the crime-scene photographer taking pictures of the bath. She told him where the kid was standing, told him to hurry. Told him to pretend like he was James Bond on a secret mission and make sure the kid didn’t work out what he was up to.

She found Dumas hovering in the bedroom doorway, grim-faced, the stress showing. He was taking this too personally, acting like he wished he could turn back time. Except that wasn’t going to happen. There was nothing anyone could do about Alice Harrigan’s murder. That ship had sailed. Get over it and move on. Like her mother was so fond of saying: what was done was done and couldn’t be undone.

However, that didn’t mean they couldn’t stop Valentino from killing again.

‘I think I’ve found your guy,’ she told him.

When Yoko returned to the here and now, Winter was still giving her the silent treatment. She ordered some more drinks and Detective Dumas brought them in a couple of minutes later. He looked at her with a hopeful expression, and Yoko answered with a small shake of the head.

His presence would change the whole dynamic in the room, and not for the better. She felt she was making progress with Winter. It was slow going, but it was progress nonetheless.

Dumas banged the Coke can down in front of the kid, and Yoko knew she’d called this one right. The detective was just too hot-headed to be any use to her right now. The crappy coffee he placed in front of her needed three sugars to render it even close to being drinkable. Dumas left the room and Winter popped the lid of his Coke and took a sip.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘since you’re playing nice cop, what do you want to know?’

‘I want to know where you were at three o’clock yesterday afternoon.’

Winter took another small sip then placed the can back on the table. His eyes were locked on hers. She had his complete and undivided attention.

This was something she had seen on numerous occasions. There was nothing these assholes liked more than reliving their crimes. And when there was an audience involved? That just made it all the more thrilling.

‘I was in Alice’s apartment, waiting in the living room for her to come back from work. I was really looking forward to spending some quality time with her. They say that the feelings diminish after the first one, that you’re forever chasing that original high. Bullshit. For me, it just got better and better.’

He was talking in a cold, flat voice like he was reading names from a phone book. Given what he was saying, the delivery was all wrong. The least Yoko expected was a little sparkle in his voice. She nodded for him to continue.

‘So I waited and I waited, and I waited some more. And then finally I heard the key turning in the lock. I positioned myself at the side of the door, and the second Alice stepped into the room I hit her with the stun gun. She fell back against a wall and slowly slid down it. I caught her before she hit the floor. Got to watch out for noise, right? With these shared apartment buildings, there’s no telling who might be around.’

A pause, a sip. More staring.

‘So you’ve incapacitated Alice. What happens next?’

‘Now we get on to the real fun and games. I stripped off her clothes, then bound her with duct tape. Before the effects of the stun gun wore off, I carried her to the bathroom, put her in the bath and slashed her femoral artery. This part of the process can get messy, so I’m wearing a white plastic coverall. Two minutes and fifty-three seconds later she was dead. She got the record, by a whole ten seconds.’

‘You timed it?’

Winter shrugged. ‘It’s not like I had anything better to do.’

Yoko didn’t react. He was trying to bait her. Trying and failing. If he wanted her to bite then he was going to have to do better than that.

‘For you, it’s what happens post-mortem that’s important. The death itself is just a means to an end, isn’t that right?’

A barely perceptible nod. ‘I might be a lot of things, but I’m not a sadist.’

‘You’re father was a sadist, though, wasn’t he? Chasing those poor girls around the woods with a rifle. They must have been scared out of their minds.’

‘I have no father,’ Winter said quietly.

He reached for the Coke can and turned it until the logo was facing him. Yoko settled back in her chair and flicked a flame up from the Zippo. She considered pushing his buttons again just for the hell of it, then decided not to. She stared at the flame a second longer, then killed it with a snap of the lid.

‘So, Alice is dead. What happens next?’

‘I clean her up with the shower, get as much blood off as possible, then carry her through to the bedroom. It’s weird how much lighter she feels. You don’t think of blood as having weight but it does. It’s heavy. Take a gallon of the stuff out of a body and it’s going to make a difference.’

The kid smiled again, and again Yoko didn’t react. She sat absolutely still and resisted the urge to slap that smug look off his face.

‘What’s the matter, Agent? That doesn’t tickle your funny bone?’

‘I guess I’m just selective about what makes me laugh.’

Winter shrugged. ‘Okay, so I get to the bedroom and I get Alice made-up all nice in her prom dress, then I string her up from the ceiling. I pose her, then sit on the bed and just look at her for a while. She really is beautiful. I’ve got the window open, and the breeze blowing through the room makes the dress shimmer.’

Yoko stared across the table without saying a word, and Winter stared back, his face blank. Twenty seconds passed. Thirty. Then he smirked. It was a look that said,
But we both know that’s not the whole story
.

‘You want to know what we
really
got up to in the bedroom,’ he said softly. ‘Don’t you?’

Yoko felt colder than she’d ever felt in her entire life. Part of it was the fact that she was now certain she was sitting opposite Valentino.

The second reason was that she was one of a very small group of people who knew what had really happened in the bedroom. With cases like this you always held something back, a salient fact you could use to separate the lunatics from the real perpetrator.

‘And what did you get up to, Jefferson?’ Yoko’s voice was as cold and emotionless as Winter’s.

He nodded to the one-way mirror. ‘Are you sure you want me to go into that with everyone watching?’

Seven hours and forty-five minutes earlier, and twenty-one miles north, Charlie Dumas had spun around to face Yoko, his face wrinkled like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

‘There’s a kid in the crowd who’s acting strange,’ she told him. ‘With a big show like this, the bad guys often come back to watch. They can’t stay away. It’s like bees and honey. This kid is displaying the sort of behaviour I’d associate with an unknown subject who’s come to watch. His interest is focussed on the crowd rather than what the police are up to.’

Dumas was nodding like this was the best news he’d heard all year.

‘An unsub like this one gets off on the reaction to their work,’ Yoko went on. ‘They love to see the shocked looks, and they love to hear people talking about how twisted the killer is. The fact they’re stood right there and nobody has a clue gives them a thrill like you wouldn’t believe. That’s why the staging is so elaborate. They’re looking for maximum impact, and the reason for that is they want an even bigger crowd next time.’

‘Are you sure this is our guy?’

‘Not a hundred per cent, but he’s certainly a person of interest. Someone worth talking to.’

‘That’s good enough for me.’

Dumas grew by a couple of inches, and he turned to leave, his hand already reaching for his radio.

‘Wait a second,’ said Yoko. ‘You need to take a couple of deep breaths before you go charging in.’

‘But we need to get this kid in custody, and sooner rather than later.’

‘No we don’t. We’ve got almost a whole month before Valentino strikes again. For once time is on our side.’

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘Who’s your best surveillance person?’

‘That’ll be Keith Sullivan.’

Yoko thought for a moment. ‘Okay, get Sullivan to keep an eye on this kid. I want to know where he goes when he leaves here.’

‘What if Sullivan loses him?’

‘It’s a risk I’m willing to take. Serial killers usually keep their trophies at home because they like to have them close by. However, most trophies would look fairly innocent to the casual observer. A piece of clothing or jewellery, the sort of thing you can easily explain away. A human heart is another matter altogether. How the hell do you explain that one?’

The slim smile that slid across Dumas’s face was there and gone in the time it took to blink. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you’re going to have on your mantelpiece, that’s for damn sure.’

‘There’s every chance this kid’s going straight to wherever he keeps the hearts. He’ll be buzzing from hanging around the crime scene, and he’ll want to be somewhere he can completely immerse himself in his memories and fantasies. We catch him with the hearts and his next stop is death row.’

‘Okay, that makes sense. I’ll get Sullivan onto it.’

Dumas reached for his radio again, and Yoko put a hand up to stop him.

‘One more thing. Get your people to go through the crowd photos from the previous crime scenes. See if you can place this kid at them. If you don’t get any luck there, try the TV networks; someone’s bound to have some film footage. One thing you can absolutely guarantee is that he was at the other crime scenes.’

Dumas nodded like this made sense, then brought the radio up to his mouth and started talking. Yoko glanced over his shoulder and saw Alice Harrigan suspended from the ceiling like a waxwork model.

If you stepped away from the horror of the act, there was a dark sort of beauty in the way the body had been posed. There was also something arresting about the contrast of the baby-blue silk and the bloodless white of Alice’s face.

In her original profile, Yoko had speculated the unsub was an artist, quite probably a moderately successful one. There was a confidence and arrogance in the way the bodies were displayed that implied competence. This was someone who was very serious about their art.

Because of the sophistication of the crimes, her speculation that the killer was in his late thirties or early forties also fit. He would have needed time to complete his training and establish himself in the art community. He needed the patience that came with age.

If it turned out that this kid was the unsub, then she was wrong about his age. However, she still thought he was an artist. The only difference was that he’d be at art school rather than out there making a name for himself. Whichever art school he was at, he would have been noticed. Valentino had more than a little talent.

‘Agent Tanaka.’

She turned away from Alice. The crime-scene photographer was walking along the narrow hallway towards her, his camera clutched in his fist.

‘Detective Dumas,’ Yoko called into the bedroom. ‘I think you might want to see this.’

The photographer punched a button on his camera and held it out so she could see the screen. Dumas was already hovering at her shoulder.

‘Top left, facing away,’ the photographer said. ‘That’s your kid, right?’

Yoko nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s him. Can you zoom in?’

‘I can do better than that.’

The photographer hit a button and the next photograph appeared on the screen. The kid was smack-bang in the centre of the shot, looking to his right. It was pretty much just him in the picture. Yoko allowed herself the slimmest of smiles.

‘This just gets better and better,’ she said. ‘The kid’s called Jefferson Winter.’

‘How the hell can you know that?’ said Dumas.

‘Because I’ve met his father a couple of times. Does the name Albert Winter ring any bells?’

‘The serial killer?’

‘One and the same.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

‘No detective, I am most certainly not shitting you.’