Dead Wrong (31 page)

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

E
VAN
C
ROSBY CHEWED ON THE END OF HIS PEN AND
stared at the computer screen in front of him. The call from Agent Cahill had been short and sweet and to the point. She would be in his office within the hour, accompanied by the FBI profiler, to help him break the Mary Douglas case. Even after he’d told her they had a suspect in custody, she’d insisted that unless their suspect was one Curtis Alan Channing, aka Curt Gibbons, the Lyndon PD had the wrong man.

Having spent the better part of the night interviewing the suspect, Crosby had to admit that he wasn’t convinced that Tom Mulholland was their killer, not by a long shot. Nothing about him—from his disheveled appearance to the disorganized mess of his small rented room—suggested that he was a man who could so coolly, so methodically, stage a crime scene. He just didn’t strike Crosby as a man who planned that far ahead for anything. And there was nothing neat or tidy about him. It was Crosby’s personal opinion that if Tom Mulholland ever killed anyone, it would be spur-of-the-moment, the scene would be utter chaos, and he’d be caught within hours because he’d leave his fingerprints everywhere and would, most likely, drop his wallet on his way out the door.

And Mulholland had sworn he’d never heard of Mara Douglas and never met a man named Vincent Giordano.

Crosby’d spent the past forty minutes going over his notes from the night before, trying to reconcile what he knew about Mulholland with what he knew of the killings, hoping to find the key before they arrived. Cahill had been just a little too cocky, a little too sure of herself.

He sighed and turned away from the screen, admitted that he wasn’t any closer to finding the truth than he was when this whole mess started. He bounced the pen off the partition on the opposite side of the room in disgust. Maybe Agent Cahill was right. Maybe she could help them to break it. Part of him hoped she could. The other part wanted to break it himself.

It was one thirty in the afternoon when tall, leggy Miranda Cahill walked into his tiny cubicle accompanied by Anne Marie McCall.

“I think you may have met Dr. McCall,” Cahill said by way of greeting Crosby, before cutting right to the chase. “We think we have a very strong lead.”

“Dr. McCall.” Crosby nodded to acknowledge the pretty blond psychiatrist. “How strong?”

“How strong would a name and a face be?”

“As you already know, Agent Cahill, we have a name and a face. In custody, at this very minute. What do you have that can convince me that we have the wrong man?”

Miranda dropped an envelope atop the pile of mail, papers, and files that littered the desk. From it she took a sketch that she passed to Crosby. “This is, we believe, your Mary Douglas killer. His name is Curtis Alan Channing. Our paths first crossed six years ago. I was part of a team that was investigating a string of murders along the Ohio–Kentucky border.”

Crosby studied the sketch. “Who did this sketch?”

“This was digitally enhanced from an old photo, aged to what the computer thinks he might look like now. The FBI is having a sketch artist work on a drawing, which we think will be more true to life, but we wanted something in hand quickly, and the computer gave us this.”

“Let me get my partner in here.” He punched the three numbers into the intercom. “Joe. Come in here.”

Joe Sullivan appeared in the doorway almost instantaneously. “What’s up?”

“You remember Agent Cahill? Dr. McCall? FBI?” Crosby nodded to the two women who were crowded into the small space. “They’re here to discuss the Mary Douglas killer.”

“What’s to discuss?” Sullivan shrugged. “The case is solved. Or didn’t anyone think to inform the FBI that we have a man in custody?”

“Agent Cahill thinks that Mulholland is telling the truth.”

Sullivan snorted. “And how did Agent Cahill come to that conclusion?”

She filled him in, ignoring his defensive attitude and relating what she’d already told Evan Crosby.

“These murders in Ohio, they were the same MO as ours?” Sullivan asked.

“No, but the same feel as yours,” she told him.

“The same
feel
?” The detective scoffed. “How did they
feel
?”

“Controlled. Organized.” Miranda took the high road and disregarded his sarcasm. This time. “Planned down to the last detail.”

“Victims stabbed to death?” Crosby asked.

“No, they were strangled.”

“Then where’s the connection?” Sullivan turned on her. “Serial killers stab or they shoot or they strangle, but they don’t change their MO. Everybody knows that.”

“That’s not exactly correct, Detective.” Anne Marie spoke up for the first time.

“Then why don’t you set me straight, Dr. McCall?” Sullivan’s tone was condescending.

“I think that Agent Cahill is right on target. Serial killers don’t always follow the exact MO—although it might appear that way on the surface. If they’re active long enough, they often evolve over time, as the killer moves closer and closer to the ideal fantasy.”

“Fantasy? You think this is about fantasy?”

“It almost always is, Detective Sullivan. He’s following a script, as most serial killers do. But the script changes as he moves closer and closer to his goal.” Anne Marie turned her attention to Detective Crosby, who struck her as being the more receptive of the two. “His early attempts might include some aspects of his later, perfected work, but he won’t start out achieving perfection.”

“So what you’re saying is that his early killings might only exhibit part of what drives him, maybe his need for controlling the scene, but his method of killing might be different from what he does later on?” Crosby asked.

“Exactly.” Annie nodded.

“Explain to me why you think this guy is our guy.” Sullivan nodded toward the sketch.

Miranda took over. “When I interviewed him six years ago, I had felt very strongly that he might have been connected to the murders we were investigating, but we didn’t have anything to hold him with. When we tried to locate him for a second interview, he’d disappeared. Recently, when I viewed the scenes of your Mary Douglas slayings, the details—the face covered by the cloths, the clothing pulled down as if to hide the fact of the rape—I was reminded of that scene. We dug up that old interview and sent an agent out to check around his home town.”

“And you found him, just like that.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Gee, the FBI is swell.”

Miranda leaned into his face, a wicked grin on hers. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” she whispered. “I’m about to show you just how swell we really are.”

She turned back to the desk and picked up the photo. “This is the man I interviewed six years ago. Curt Gibbons, whom we now know as Curtis Alan Channing. Through some truly swell investigative work“—she glanced at Sullivan—”we’ve learned that as a young boy Curtis had the very unfortunate experience of watching his mother raped and murdered. Stabbed to death.”

She looked from one detective to the other, then asked, “Either of you want to guess how many times Momma had been stabbed?”

“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess six,” Crosby said.

“Can’t put anything over on you, Crosby. Want to hear it all?”

He nodded. “Shoot.”

Miranda repeated the entire story as she’d heard it from Aidan Shields just hours earlier.

When she finished, the room was totally silent.

“Well, you could hear a pin drop in here right about now,” she noted with grim satisfaction. “Nothing to say, Detective Sullivan?”

“We already have a suspect in custody, and that”—Sullivan pointed to the sketch—“ain’t him. What do you have that says this guy has ever set foot in Lyndon?”

“That’s something we were hoping you could assist us in establishing.”

“Use the locals to do the dirty work?”

“Joe, that’s enough.” Crosby shot him a look.

Ignoring the rude remark, Anne Marie touched Crosby’s arm and asked, “What happened after the suspect was caught last night, Detective? Was the surveillance on the Mary Douglas homes terminated?”

Sullivan jumped in. “And why wouldn’t it be? Any fool could see that this guy—Mulholland—was lying. What’s the first thing anyone says when they’re picked up? ‘I didn’t do it, you got the wrong guy.’ ” Sullivan laughed darkly, then added, “But in Mulholland’s case, it was, ‘Oh, some guy I met in a bar paid me to break into this house. I wasn’t going to hurt her, I was just supposed to scare her.’ And her name just happened to be Mary Douglas? Right, pal. We got our man, Agent Cahill. If you think otherwise, you can track this guy—this Channing—all by yourself.”

“Joe, I think you have other cases that need your attention,” Crosby told him. “Go work on them.”

“Gladly.” He rose to leave the cubicle. “You’re wasting your time, Evan. She”—he pointed at Miranda—“obviously has her own agenda here. You know the Feds can’t stand not being the ones to make the bust. . . .”

“Joe.” Crosby’s face grew dark.

“Aw, they’re all yours,” he muttered as he walked away.

“Where did the Lyndon PD find him?” Anne Marie shook her head as Joe Sullivan’s footsteps faded down the hall. “He’s like a stereotype of every narrow-minded small-town cop I ever met. I honestly thought they stopped making them like that years ago.”

“Hey, he’s a good cop, but you just pushed a button.” Detective Crosby shrugged. “Sorry about that.”

“Accepted.” Miranda dismissed the departed detective.

“If this guy Channing is a serial killer . . .” Crosby swung slowly, side to side, in his beat-up chair, weighing what he knew against what he suspected. “What connects him to our victims? To Mara Douglas? To Giordano? I never heard of a serial killer who took contracts.”

“I don’t know how he became involved,” Annie admitted. “But I think the killings are right on target—in terms of escalation—with where Channing would be if he’d started out with strangulations. He watched the rape and murder of his mother. Now, he may have hated his mother for the terrible things she did to him—but she was still his mother. The police say that when they found him in the closet, he was covered with her blood. He’d been alone in the house with her body. According to the police report, the killer admitted raping her, admitted stabbing her to death, but he denied that he pulled her skirt down, denied having covered her face.”

“You’re thinking the boy came out of the closet and did that.” Crosby nodded slowly. “Covered her up . . .”

“I do. And years later, he’s repeating that scene over and over and over.”

“Why?”

“One, I think because the image was so strong in his head, and two, because I think he wished he’d done it himself, to end the abuse. It’s no accident that all Channing’s victims had six stab wounds in the exact same locations. I’m positive that when we get our hands on a sketch or a photo of his mother’s body, we’ll find that the placement of the stab wounds match up with those found on your vics. I think he watched the whole thing from the closet, watched the knife go up and down. He saw the wounds. He remembered exactly where they were.”

“But you said his early victims were strangled,” the detective reminded her.