Redheads (8 page)

“Because you liked her.”

“Yeah, I liked her. She was friendly. I see her in the window at night sometimes and she’s inside and safe—probably cooking flounder fillets, pouring a glass of wine or whatever—and everything’s okay. Like I got my whole world, and she’s a little piece of it and—”

“—everything’s as it should be,” Westfield finished.

“Yeah.”

“What about July Fourth?”

Hutchinson drew in on his cigarette and leaned over the railing to look at the water.

“I was up here working on the cargo boom. I’d welded its base from scaffolding underneath the landing pad the night before. I was up here using a cutting torch. Around midnight I put everything down and leaned against the rail here for a smoke. I looked across at her window and it was lit but I didn’t see her. Then I looked at the water and saw something moving.”

“What?”

“I guess it was a guy. I never seen anything like it. It looked like a man, swimming, out in the channel. In the middle of the night.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Not really. He was in the water. I could see the skin on his back and legs, so he was probably wearing just a swimsuit. Maybe he was naked.”

“Race?”

“White guy, I guess. I mean, just on skin color alone it’s hard to say. He wasn’t black. He could’ve been Asian, I guess.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“No. You ask me why, I can’t say why. He looked like a white guy, is all. Besides, how many Asians you seen in Galveston compared to how many white guys?”

“What about hair?”

“He was bald.”

“Clean shaven, or bald?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Where was he swimming?”

“Up the channel, that way.” Hutchinson pointed northeast towards Seawolf Park.

“What else you notice?”

“I mean, for one, I never seen anyone swim in this channel, day or night. Some divers might go in sometimes to work on the bottom of a ship. But nobody jumps in and swims. I mean, look at that filthy shit. Two, this was the middle of the night, in the middle of an industrial ship channel. But I guess what I noticed most was how fast he was swimming. I never seen anything like it. I never seen anyone swim in that…style, I guess.”

“He have fins on?”

Hutchinson looked at the water and thought about it.

“No. At least, I don’t think so. His feet kicked out of the water and I’d have noticed fins if he’d had them.”

“What about his hands, could you see them?”

“No. He was swimming without lifting them up. You know? Not like a forward crawl. It was a—what do you call it? A breaststroke?”

He mimed a stroke, his fingertips together, palms out, arms parting and coming to his sides.

“I think so. Breaststroke.”

“It was like that. His hands didn’t come out of the water.”

“Did he have an electric water scooter? Like the SEALS use to get into harbors?”

“Like Navy SEALS? I hadn’t thought of that. I guess it’s possible.”

“But you’re not convinced?”

“No. I saw a man swimming. He was swimming faster than I thought anyone could swim. But honest to god, it looked like he was doing it on his own.”

“You see him get out of the water?”

“He stuck to the channel till he was out of sight.”

“How far till you couldn’t see him?”

Hutchinson pointed at a tug and barge coming towards them from Seawolf Park.

“Not far. Between us and that tug.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It was dark.”

There were more industrial docks on the Galveston side of the channel in that direction. On the Pelican Island side, there was another shipyard farther down the island. Beyond that lay Galveston Bay, and past that, the Gulf of Mexico.

“You sure about the time?”

“Yeah. I looked at my watch when I took a break and I checked again when I got back to work. I started working again around 12:45, so I saw him sometime after 12:30.”

“How fast was he swimming?”

“That’s the thing.” Hutchinson pinched the end off of his cigarette and flicked the butt into the wind. “It had to be faster than a man could run. Twenty miles an hour, maybe. I didn’t see him long.”

Bullshit
, Westfield thought. He looked at the water.

“You sure it wasn’t a dolphin?”

“I know a dolphin when I see it. This was a man.”

Chapter Ten

Down the beach from the Hotel Galvez, a wooden pier stretched three hundred feet into the Gulf, carrying an assortment of T-shirt stands and shell shops, the kind of seaside junk stores Chris had seen a lot of in the last six years. The last building on the pier was a snack stand. Chris and Julissa were sitting backwards on their barstools, facing the ocean. Chris had an iced tea and Julissa was drinking a Coke. They hadn’t said anything for about an hour, but that seemed okay.

At five minutes till noon, they paid their tab and walked back along the pier and out to the sidewalk. It was easily a hundred degrees outside. They crossed Seawall Boulevard at the light, then walked through the gardens and into the lobby of the Hotel Galvez. Chris checked them in, retrieved their bags, and took key cards from the desk clerk for five rooms—one room for each of them, plus something that had been advertised as a corporate board room. He thought it was high time to take this thing from an amateur pursuit to a full-blown corporate endeavor. He had some hard evidence, he had some partners. There was a hint of a trail. Mike Nakamura called when he finished paying for the rooms.

“This is Chris.”

“I just got to the hotel. I’m in the parking lot.”

“Good. Julissa and I are already here. So we’re just waiting on Westfield.”

“Julissa?”

“I’ll introduce her when you get upstairs. You bring all the files?”

“Yeah.”

“Meet us in—” he shuffled through the key cards until he found the one for the board room, “—1020. We’re on our way up now.”

They rode the elevator to the tenth floor and Chris opened the double doors to the boardroom. It had a twenty-foot conference table surrounded with leather swivel chairs. Two sets of glass doors led to a curved balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. There was a dry-erase board, a cork bulletin board. A projection screen could retract from the ceiling. The projector sat in the middle of the table, cables waiting for a laptop.

“This’ll work.” Julissa said.

“Yeah.” There was a knock on the door. “Here’s Mike.”

Mike came in with Aaron Westfield behind him.

“Saw him in the lobby and recognized him from the pictures,” Mike said, indicating Westfield with his thumb.

Then he saw Julissa and froze. Westfield was in the process of taking off his tie and unbuttoning his collar, but stopped when he looked past Chris and saw her.

“Guys, this is Julissa Clayborn. Allison Clayborn’s sister. She saw me break into the apartment two nights ago, then saw Westfield take me. She followed us around all night.”

“Then you split up, so I could only follow one of you,” Julissa said. “From what I’d seen, Chris was less dangerous, so I followed him.”

“And interviewed me at gunpoint.”

“He’s told you what we’re doing?” Westfield asked.

“Yeah. And I’m in.”

Westfield gave a slight nod.

Julissa came around Chris and shook Westfield’s hand, then Mike’s.

“If anyone’s hungry, let’s order lunch now. Then maybe I can get us started while we’re waiting,” Chris said. They ordered sandwiches and cold drinks from the room service menu, then gathered at the table. Chris went to the bulletin board and pinned up the map he’d bought earlier that morning. He stood at the head of the table with his hands on the back of a chair.

“I want us to start thinking of this room as our headquarters,” Chris said. “I got it for two nights. If we haven’t moved on to someplace else in a couple days, and if everyone’s still on board, we can get it for as long as we need it. I asked you all to come because I think if we put together everything we know, and combine every talent we have, we have a better chance. Mike’s a former homicide detective and a P.I., Aaron was a Navy captain and was posted all over the Far East. Julissa’s a computer security expert at AMD and the NSA. I used to be a lawyer. All four of us probably still have connections in law enforcement, industry or government. We have favors we can call in. I thought maybe we could start by listing every killing we know.”

Mike booted his laptop and connected it to the projector. He went to the wall near the minibar and used the switches there to lower the screen and dim the lights. Then he came back to the table.

“Chris and I developed a search program over the years. We’ve used it to identify thirty-seven possible victims, starting in 2000 and going up to July 4th, when we found Allison.”

“But,” Chris said, “we also know Aaron found the pattern earlier, in 1996. Maybe we should start with Aaron so if there are any trends that are developing over the years, we see them by going chronologically.”

“Makes sense,” Mike said. He looked at Westfield. “You want to take over?”

Westfield took his own laptop from his backpack and put it on the table. He opened the screen and cleared his throat.

“First one I was aware of was in 1978. That was in Sasebo, Japan. My wife. Tara.”

He went to the map, found the little box of pins Chris had left on the shelf under the bulletin board, and placed a pin carefully at Sasebo.

“Two of you know this, but I’m just telling it for Julissa. I was aboard my ship when it happened. We were patrolling in the Strait of Taiwan. The Navy took me off the ship by helicopter to Kaohsiung, then arranged a transport plane to Sasebo. She was already dead three days by the time I got back. They found her in our apartment off base. She’d walked to the commissary that afternoon, then came back with groceries. They found her the next day. Her boss—she gave English lessons to a couple of kids—called the base when she didn’t show up.”

Mike projected a map of Sasebo onto the screen. Westfield went over and studied it.

“Been awhile since I looked at this.”

“Take your time,” Julissa said.

“Zoom in on this part here,” he said to Mike. He stepped back and waited for the image to resolve.

They were looking at warships moored along piers in a deeply inset bay. Westfield pointed where the piers met the land.

“This is the base. I don’t know about now, but in ’78 the commissary was here.” He touched the screen and it dipped away from him. He waited for it to stop swaying.

“She would’ve walked along this road, come out the eastern gate, then followed these wharves. There was a pedestrian bridge over this expressway. The apartment was here.”

He lightly touched a blue-roofed building.

“Military or industrial wharves?” Chris asked.

“Industrial.”

“The first thing you notice about all of these is how close they happen to the water. Almost without exception the victim is found somewhere within a mile of a major shipping harbor.”

“There’s always a close connection to wharves,” Westfield said. He looked at the map again and then came back to the table and sat. “I’ll skip what he did to her. We all know about that.”

“Maybe you better not skip it,” Julissa said. “What he does to the women is important. We should talk about it. Even if it’s unpleasant.”

Mike Nakamura looked up from his laptop. “I agree.”

“All right. Makes sense I guess.” Westfield looked out the window and then looked at Chris.

“The autopsy was conducted by a U.S. Navy surgeon, on the Sasebo base. The investigation itself was done jointly by local Japanese detectives and military M.P.s. At the time, the Navy wouldn’t give me the full autopsy report. It wasn’t until ’98 that I got the whole thing. I had to hire a lawyer and file a Freedom of Information Act request. The surgeon didn’t come to a full conclusion as to cause of death. It could’ve been blood loss or blunt force trauma. A third possibility is she died of shock, which to my mind, is a nicer way of saying she died of pain. Either way, it’s certain she died
in
pain, if not from it.”

Westfield swallowed and looked at them. “He made sure of that.”

He spoke quietly and slowly.

“I’ll start from the top and just go down. He ate off her face. There were bite marks in her facial bones underneath her nose. Which he bit off. The surgeon’s report says he may have been shaking his head back and forth. That’s the only way to explain the shape of the bite marks. Ever see a dog kill a squirrel? It would’ve been like that. He bit and shook until he pulled her face completely away from her skull. Most of it was missing and was never found. The presumption being, he swallowed it.”

Julissa had turned white. She was squeezing a ballpoint pen in her right hand.

“Aaron, I’m so sorry—”

“After he was done with that, he ripped her shirt off and started on her chest. Her breasts—he ate them both. Probably at that point, while she was still alive, he raped her. The semen samples got lost in the shuffle. I checked in ’96.”