Authors: David Wiltse
Karen was surprised and embarrassed by the sudden flood of emotion. Her voice cracked and her eyes filled with tears. Becker reached out to comfort her, but she pulled back from him and shot her chin up. When she spoke again she sounded angry, but there was no sound of tears in her voice.
“Kids—boys—have been missing from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts. Connecticut. They’re gone for a time, a month or two—the longest was eleven weeks—and then they are found dead.”
“How many?”
“Six—that we know about. The first that suits the pattern was a nine-year-old boy named Amell Wicker, who disappeared from a shopping mall in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Eight months later it was a boy from Bethpage, Long Island. Last seen in another shopping mall. His mother let him go for a slice of pizza while she was shopping for shoes. He never came back. They found his body in a garbage bag alongside the highway thirty miles from Bethpage two months later.”
“When was the next one missing?”
“Eight months later. Peabody, Massachusetts. Body discovered six weeks later.”
“How long had he been dead when he was discovered?” Becker asked.
“Less than forty-eight hours. Again it was in a garbage bag, alongside a highway.”
“This one taken from a shopping mall, too?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve checked all the employees to see if any of them worked in more than one of the malls.” It was not a question; Becker knew the answer.
“One employee in common. Peter Steinholz was the manager of a cookie franchise in Upper Saddle River and in Stamford, Connecticut, where the fifth boy was snatched. He’s a family man, wife, two kids.”
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“No prior arrest record except one DWI three years ago. Reasonable alibi. He checks out pretty clean.”
“Sales reps? Suppliers? Service people? Anybody who might have been at all the malls? The guy who fixes the cookie maker’s ovens, for instance.”
“A few overlaps, six or seven, but the timing is wrong on all of them. You know it wouldn’t be that easy or we would have found him already.”
“I’m just asking out of habit. I know you’ve done all you could or you wouldn’t be here. Tell me about the fourth one.”
“Ricky Stine, Newburgh, New York. Disappeared from a schoolyard during recess. Went out to play with the rest of the kids, never came back. They thought maybe he’d just wandered off, had him listed as a runaway for a couple of weeks until they found his body.”
“Why a runaway?”
“He was hyperactive, always into trouble of some kind. Not a bad kid, just hard to control. His parents said he’d had a history of running away from home, showing up again in a day or two. This time he didn’t show up again.”
“How long was that after the kid from Peabody was found?”
“Ricky went missing six months later.”
Becker nodded. He kept his eyes fixed on the folder as if reading it through the cover.
“Significant?” she asked.
“Not yet. How long till number five?”
Karen looked at her notes. “Four and a half months.”
“He’s getting more frequent. There was an interval of eight months after the first two, then six months, then four and a half.”
“Because he’s getting away with it? More confident?” Becker shot her a glance.
“He’s not thinking about getting away with it, not when he snatches them. Later, when he has to dispose of the body, he might think about details then.”
“What is he thinking about when he snatches them?”
“He’s not thinking at all. He’s feeling.”
“Feeling what?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what he does with them.”
“When I tell you what he does with them, will you know what he’s feeling?”
Becker heard the trace of contempt that Karen could not hide and looked up from the folder. He leaned back in his chair.
“It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t approve, but you’ll use it.”
“I didn’t mean anything, John. I know you don’t like it.”
“I don’t know anything everybody else doesn’t know. The only difference between you and me is that you censor it out. You don’t allow yourself to think it, or feel it, and so you tell yourself it’s alien to you. My particular curse is that I can’t censor it out. I know what those bastards are feeling because I can’t keep it out. You can. Inside, you’re just the same as I am.”
Karen shook her head adamantly.
“You don’t accept that about yourself? That you have the capacity to understand even the worst of the bastards if you’d allow yourself?”
“You wanted me to believe this before. I don’t.”
“You won’t.”
“No, John. I don’t. I do not know what they’re feeling when they do the things they do. I don’t mean anything against you, but I just don’t have the capacity.”
“You don’t want it.”
“You’re right. I don’t want to get into their minds. I don’t want to get into their hearts. I just want to catch them and put them behind bars. That’s all.”
“I’m not suggesting you would ever act on those feelings, Karen. I accept that those who do are different. But having the feelings in the first place ...”
“When you see the photos, you’ll know what I mean. I could never empathize with this monster in any way ...”
“Empathize is not the same as sympathize. I’m not suggesting you feel sorry for him.”
“I hate him,” she said. She pushed the folder toward him. “Look at them. Look at the pictures and tell me I have anything in common with this beast. Look at them.” She spilled the photos on the table, spread them out with a push without looking at them herself.
Becker winced. The photos were taken in the morgue. He recognized the particular light and clarity, the coldly impersonal attention to detail. It was not as bad as seeing the bodies in person, but it was bad enough.
Becker knew he would have to study the pictures later, but alone, when he could allow himself to feel the complex mix of revulsion and sickened fascination without a witness. The photos were obscene, but he had seen worse. And so had Karen. At this moment the strength of her reaction concerned him as much as the cause of it.
Becker shuffled the photos together and put them back in the folder.
“What were they beaten with?” he asked.
She looked neither at him nor the table.
“A variety of instruments, apparently. Some of them wooden, they left splinters. Some metallic. They found paint chips under the skin. Some were caused by unknown objects.”
“Lumber or wood?”
“What?”
“Were the splinters from processed, finished lumber, or was he using birch switches off of trees.”
“Birch switches? When was the last time anyone used a birch switch for anything? What the hell does a birch look like? Do you think this is some sort of bucolic, romantic operation? The wood was processed, lacquered, chemically preserved, rot-retarded, commercial pine. Birch switches? You’ve been in the mountains a little too long. How can you look at those pictures and ask me if someone beat those kids with a switch?”
Becker sat quietly, waiting for her anger to pass.
“I’m out of practice.” he said at last.
Karen breathed deeply and placed her hands in her lap. She forced herself to keep them folded and to keep her attention focused there.
“Sorry,” she said softly.
“Tell me about number five.”
“Stamford. Connecticut. A mall, a very big one called the Town Center.”
“Where the cookie man—Steinholz?—worked.”
“Correct. Larry Shapiro, shopping for a birthday present for his mother with his teenage sister who met some friends, got talking, told Larry to amuse himself for a minute. She thought he had gone to the toy store ... They found his body on the divider of the Merritt Parkway six weeks later.”
“On the divider? Not the side of the road?”
“On the divider. Is that significant?”
“Curious, anyway. The divider is on the driver’s side of the car, in the passing lane. I know the Merritt Parkway; there’s no way you could pull over and stop on the divider without drawing an awful lot of attention to yourself.”
“Which means?”
“Which means either he stopped on the right-hand shoulder, which is not uncommon and wouldn’t attract too much attention—but then he’d have to carry the body across the highway to the divider. Or he pushed the body out of the driver’s side while driving, which makes him both very strong and very adroit. The boy was how old?”
“Nine.”
“While driving he had to lift a corpse weighing what? Sixty? Sixty-five? Seventy pounds? This one was in a garbage bag, too?”
“The manufacturer calls them leaf bags. You can buy them in any grocery store by the dozen.”
“So he had to manipulate a seventy-pound bag, even tougher because there’s nothing to grab on to, no arms or legs for leverage.”
“Christ. Becker.”
“You want me to stop?”
“I don’t like the image of this monster grabbing a nine-year-old boy by the arm and tossing him out the window.”
“The boy was already dead.”
“I’m not sure that makes it any easier to take.”
“He was already dead, wasn’t he?”
“Forensics said he’d been dead about three hours before he was thrown onto the divider.”
“He was thrown then?”
“At some time after death, anyway. There was vast post-mortem trauma.”
“Was the bag torn?”
“I don’t know. But they’re made not to tear.”
“Find out.”
Karen nodded.
“So either we have this guy performing a considerable feat of strength while driving a car at some speed, or else we have him dashing across the highway with a body bag in his arms. Either way he’s taking a considerable risk. Why?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Only one reason I can think of offhand. Were the others found on the side of the road?”
“Yes.”
“So why is this one in the middle ? What is there about the middle of the road that is different from the side—where it would be a lot easier and safer to put the body?”
“Don’t play Socrates with me, John. If you know, tell me.”
“If the body is on the middle divider, you can’t tell which way the car was going when the body was dropped. If the body is on the right-hand side, you might as well place an arrow saying ‘car going this way.’ But if it’s in the middle, the car could have been going in either direction.”
“Which tells us the bastard is concerned about being followed. He knows, or thinks he knows, that we’re after him.”
“Maybe,” Becker said.
“Which means he’s left a pattern and is aware of it and thinks we are, too.”
“Although you’re not,” Becker said.
“Yet,” said Karen. “Which means he knows we’re after him in the first place. Now, how would he know that? We weren’t posting rewards, there was no publicity suggesting a connection between these cases.”
“But the Bureau had, in fact, already linked these deaths?”
“I’ve been working on it since Ricky Stine in Newburgh. The computer alerted us to the similarities.”
“You’ve been on the case for a year?”
“Seven months.”
“Two kids killed in seven months’ time?”
“Six months. We found the latest a month ago.”
“He’s accelerating very rapidly.”
“That’s part of the reason I’m here, John. This guy has started to need them so frequently he’s practically in free-fall. If he knows we’re on to him, it hasn’t slowed him down, it’s only made him cagier.”
“So how does he know you’re on to him? Does he have a spy in the Bureau?”
“I’m not that paranoid.”
“Maybe he knows someone has been asking questions.”
“How?”
“Maybe he knew someone who was interrogated?” Becker left it hanging for her.
“Or maybe we interrogated him? Christ, Becker, do you think we might have talked to this guy and let him go?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t change his pattern until after the fifth one was snatched—and before you knew he was dead. I’d go back over the interviews at Stamford; maybe you’ll catch something you missed the first time.”
Karen’s face had turned grim, her jaw clenched.
“If he’s in the interviews. I’ll find him.” she said. “There’s another possibility for covering his tracks in Stamford, of course, that might not have anything to do with his knowing about your investigation. It might just be a special place for him. Maybe he’s from Stamford originally. Maybe someone who knows him is there. Maybe there’s a clue of some kind there that he knows about but can’t change. Just an awareness of his increased vulnerability could cause him to act differently.”
“Still another reason to go back to Stamford.”
“I’d say so. It can’t hurt to go over the ground again. And there’s one other thing the body on the divider can tell us.”
“Why do I have to ask?”
“I’m thinking it through. It’s really a pretty clumsy way to put your pursuers off the track. A far better way would be to dump the body somewhere far away from the highway so there’s no clue as to direction at all. Or better yet, hide the body completely, give yourself months to get away. Or simply drop the body on the right-hand side of the road, turn around and go the other way. He didn’t do any of those things, and my guess is that the reason was he was in too much of a hurry. He’d been seen with the kid or something else happened to panic him and drive him off, fast. Check the incident reports with the Stamford police to see if anything unusual happened within a few hours of the estimated time of death. If he left fast, what did he leave behind? Did he leave owing rent, a mortgage? Most likely not, since he seems to be moving around so much. He’s probably a transient. In a motel, not a hotel; you wouldn’t want to walk through a lobby with a kidnapped child. Check all the motels in the area, see who left that day, particularly anyone who left without paying or ahead of time ...”
Becker paused and smiled at her.
“You’ve done all of this already, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Most of it,” she said. “But you’re right, it wouldn’t hurt to check again.”
“It’s not what you need me for.”
“In part. You’re very good at it. I hadn’t considered I might actually have interviewed the son of a bitch and let him go. I can’t tell you how that makes me feel.”