2 in the Hat (12 page)

He took his time, looking in each of the store windows along the way. His favorite part of window-shopping wasn’t so much the items on display, but the design of the displays themselves. He despised discount stores, the way they just threw clothes over the mannequins and stuck them wherever they found some open floor space. The boutique shops on Newbury Street were different. There was an art to setting the displays, positioning the mannequins in a way that would entice people to enter the store to learn more about these life-sized dolls, the world they lived in, the clothes they were wearing. Sleep knew that he could do this better than anyone else, even without a college degree. He had, after all, been practicing on his own since he was a little boy.

A
lves was hungry. He waited patiently as Mooney unfolded the legs
of the card table and set it up in the living room. There was no dining room in Mooney’s tiny apartment, so this would have to do. Mooney went to a closet and rounded up a couple of folding chairs and set them up. “Dinner is served,” he said.

Alves took the sandwiches from the brown paper bag, figured out which one was the large Italian with everything, unwrapped it and used the wax paper as a plate. He forgot his manners and took a bite before Mooney had a chance to sit down.

“What do you have to drink?” Alves asked, his mouth full.

“Tap water and beer.”

“I don’t drink Boston tap water.”

“Let me get you a beer.”

Biggie, Mooney’s Maine coon cat, jumped up on the card table and started rubbing his chin on a corner of Alves’s wax paper plate. He wasn’t sure if the cat was begging for food or looking to be petted. His head was as big as a coconut. He waited for Mooney to come back with the beer.

“I really don’t like cats, Sarge.”

“You’re not allergic.” Mooney said. “So suck it up.” Mooney lifted Biggie and put him on the floor. By the time he sat in his chair, the cat
was back on the table. He flopped down on the one empty spot, as if he knew he’d get tossed out if he got too close to the food. Mooney handed Alves a beer, an ice cold sixteen-ounce can of Schlitz.

“I dislike Schlitz beer more than I hate cats.”

“Sorry. They were all out of that John Adams Wicked Pisser Summer Brew that you drink.”

“Where do you find this stuff?”

“I have my sources.”

Alves popped the top and took a sip. It wasn’t so bad, but he wouldn’t give Mooney the satisfaction. He made a face like he was drinking skunked beer, then cleared his palate with another bite of his sub. He watched Mooney take his time unwrapping his sandwich, folding the paper back so it wouldn’t touch his tie. “What did you get?” Alves asked.

“An American with mayo.”

“I forgot that hanging out with you is like going back in time. I know sub shops have Americans listed on the menu, but I’ve never actually seen anyone order one. What’s in it?”

“Bologna, boiled ham, salami and American cheese.”

“With mayo? I’d rather drink Schlitz beer.” Alves chugged half his beer and made a show of wiping his mouth with his shirt sleeve.

“Eat your sandwich before Biggie gets it.” Mooney took a bite and washed it down.

Alves could see the man’s mind working. He could see that Mooney was not in the mood to discuss the merits of his sub sandwich. “You come up with anything today, Sarge?”

“Yeah. A headache. I told you what Stone said about the gun. Later I interviewed Eric Flowers’s parents again, started digging around in his past. First time around, we spent a lot of time on Kelly Adams. I want to be sure Flowers wasn’t the primary target.” Mooney looked frustrated. “I have to figure out why he’s started up again.”

“I had a thought about that today,” Alves said.

“Let’s hear it,” Mooney’s mouth was full, a small glob of mayonnaise clinging to his lower lip.

Alves motioned for Mooney to wipe his face and he did. “I was talking with Eunice Curran about the possibility that this guy has a hit kit like Dennis Rader.”

“BTK.”

“Rader kept everything he needed for his so-called ‘projects’ in a hit kit in his bedroom closet.”

“I read about that on the Internet.”

“Look at our guy. The wire’s the same, the cheap necklaces, the ballistics, and it looks like he may have had the clothes stored away. Eunice mentioned mothballs.”

Mooney nodded. “So he’s had all this stuff stashed somewhere while he was away.”

“What if he wasn’t ‘away’? I got a list of recent releases from the DOC. Only a couple of guys live near the BC campus. Their records didn’t fit. Mostly involved with drugs. No real violence or sex offenses. That got me thinking. What if this guy stopped killing because he wanted to stop. He was smart enough, or paranoid enough, to stop because he didn’t want to get caught. BTK did the same thing. Just stopped killing. He had images of his victims, so he could relive the attacks as fantasies.”

Mooney closed his eyes. He looked to be mulling things over.

“Just a thought,” Alves said. “Maybe he has pictures or video of his victims.”

“How does this help us?”

“I don’t know that it does, beyond helping us understand him better. If that’s what happened, if he’s like Rader, just a seemingly upstanding citizen with no criminal record, who can stop killing when he wants to, then it does us no good to round up the usual suspects.”

“Do it anyway. It’s a nice theory, Angel, but we have no idea if it’s true. It just puts more pressure on us to figure out how he came across Steadman and Kipping.” Mooney downed the rest of his beer. He went into the kitchen and came back with two more. “Let’s get back to the two most recent vics. If the killer ran into them at school he’s probably not a student, unless they’ve got thirty- or thirty-five-year-old freshmen running around BC. Maybe he works there.”

“Administration faxed me a list of employees, from maintenance workers to professors. I have the groundskeeper who paints the lines at Alumni Stadium and the Zamboni driver at the Conte Forum. I have the BRIC helping with that, running everyone’s BOP.”

“What about the bars in the area?” Mooney asked.

“I talked to the sergeant who does the licensed premises checks in the district. He’s getting me a list from every bar. Bartenders, waitstaff, bar backs, bouncers, hostesses. Everyone. These two didn’t drink much, but they went out with their friends to hang out, dance.”

“I talked to Commissioner Sheehan. He’s putting out the word to all the media outlets that anyone with information should call the Homicide Unit or the Crime Stoppers Hotline. That should bog us down with useless leads.”

“I checked in with their professors, got class rosters, talked with a bunch of kids who were too busy texting and talking on their cells to notice anything.”

Alves and Biggie watched Mooney pick through his sandwich and pull out strands of shaved onions. “I knew I tasted onion. I told them no onions. Tomatoes, pickles, no onions. They can’t even make a simple sandwich anymore.”

“Are you going to finish eating that or what?” Alves asked as Mooney fished through his sandwich fiasco. Biggie was purring so loud it sounded like a motorcycle. He had never understood why people kept cats. They were unpredictable. A cat that big could kill a baby. Maybe, just maybe, he’d let Angel and Iris get a hamster some day. “I’ve had enough of working in your living room with Mr. Big Cat here, staring at my throat.”

Mooney took a bite of his crumbling sandwich. Typical Irish guy. Couldn’t eat a couple slices of shaved onion. “Almost done.”

“I got a bunch of video. BC has a decent number of cameras set up all over the campus, same with some of the bars. The guys at the BRIC are going over the footage, looking for Steadman and Kipping, see if anyone’s following them. I told them to look for suspicious vehicles circling the area, unmarked cruisers that don’t belong, the kind of stuff we talked about.”

“Are they monitoring the website, too?”

“That, and one of the detectives has been logging on to the site and leaving postings on the message board, trying to get a response.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing yet.”

Mooney took the last bite of his sandwich and wiped his hands with a paper towel. No napkins in the bachelor pad. He took his time, finished off his beer, and held the last can out to Alves. Alves shook his head. Mooney opened the beer and took a savoring draft. “It’s time for the same information to get leaked to the media. I don’t get along with many reporters, but I’ve got a few who owe me a favor or two. We’re going to have them tout me as the guy who caught the Blood Bath Killer. Now I’ve got my sights set on this guy. The press will catch me off guard, as I’m
walking out of headquarters. I’ll let it slip that I think he’s a copycat, a fraud, that the real killer is probably dead. We need to get him to communicate. And make a mistake.”

“I hope we’re not making the mistake. Forcing him to kill two more kids. Shouldn’t we wait on this, see what we come up with first? We haven’t looked into all the people working at BC, the bars. He’s not stupid. Even if he thinks we didn’t find the Tai-ji or the fortune, he would assume we have a ballistics match. Which means the killer isn’t a copycat.”

Mooney balled up his waxed paper. He stood up and reached for his jacket. “That’s what we’re doing tonight. Let’s go hit those bars.”

C
onnie pulled over when the call came in. His radio was the most
important tool for keeping on top of the action in real time. It could be cleared as shots fired. Or there might be a shooting victim.

He listened carefully.

“Three callers report hearing shots from the area of Greenhay and Magnolia,” the calm voice of the dispatcher anounced.

Connie thought about turning around and going to the area, but he didn’t want to waste time. No point unless the police confirmed someone had been shot.

One of the responding officers radioed back. “Negative. I got nothing out here.”

No witnesses.

No ballistics.

No victim.

Connie took his foot off the brake and continued on home. If anything turned up, a message would go out to all the alpha pagers. Like the one Connie wore on his belt, a gift from the captain at District 2. With the alpha pager, Connie got the same notification the BPD brass got whenever there was a shooting, homicide, hostage situation, any major occurrence in the city.

He was tired. He headed down Blue Hill Avenue and took a right
onto American Legion Highway. He’d be home in ten, fifteen minutes tops.

The radio crackled. The call sign indicated the Rapid Response car on Magnolia. “Bravo one-o-one,” the patrolman’s voice rose with nervous energy. “I got something behind Nine-thirty Magnolia. An abandoned house. I need a patrol supervisor out here and EMTs. I think we need to make notifications.”

They had a body.

Connie spun into a quick U-turn at a break in the island that ran down the center of American Legion Highway. The tires squealed as he put the pedal to the floor and raced back toward District 2. The heart of Roxbury.

A
lves checked his beeping alpha pager. Shooting on Magnolia
. One body. Male. The good news? The victim wasn’t wearing a tux.

The other good news was that Alves wasn’t on call tonight. He pulled his car into the driveway. It was almost eleven o’clock, and he’d just left Mooney. The minivan was parked in the driveway ahead of him. Lights were on in the bathroom and kitchen. Marcy might still be awake.

Alves hadn’t been home much since Iris had found the bodies two nights ago. He had only seen Marcy for a few minutes earlier in the day when he stopped in to shower and shave. Iris and Angel had already gone to school, and Marcy had given him the silent treatment. It wasn’t the usual silent treatment, the one he got for working late and leaving her to deal with all the kids’ activities. It was clear she was angry that he’d left her and the twins alone with a killer in the neighborhood.

He tried to open the front door quietly, but it stuck at the top the way it always did. He gave it a little shove with his hip, and it creaked open. Marcy was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She didn’t look up at him. “Are you sleeping here tonight?” she asked.

“I’m in for the night,” he said, taking care not to be sarcastic with his answer.

“You sure? I was just watching the news. They found a body in Roxbury.”

“God, they’re quick. That just came across the pager, and they’re already reporting it on TV?” He walked around the table and kissed her on the top of her head. “Mooney and I aren’t on call tonight. Unless someone turns up dead dressed in formal wear, I’m not going anywhere.”

She didn’t smile.

“How’s Iris?” he asked. “She make it through school today?”

Marcy nodded. “My mother picked them up at school. She had them all day. Said they were okay. Iris was a little withdrawn. Spent most of the day in her room reading. Mom left an hour ago, when I got home.”

It hit him. Marcy was teaching three classes this semester. A full time workload for a part-time professor. She usually taught two sections, Tuesdays and Thursday in the late morning. That way she could send the kids off to school and be home in time to meet them at the bus. Her schedule got thrown off this semester when one of the full-time professors took a medical leave, sticking Marcy with two afternoon classes and a night class. They had decided that she would get the kids out the door in the morning and her mom would be there for them in the afternoon. Alves agreed that he would come home early and help out. He figured he could manage since it was only two days a week. The first day with the new system and he’d already blown it. “I’m sorry, honey. I forgot. I’ll be early on Thursday.”

“That’s okay. You do your work,” she said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “The kids will be fine. They can just eat Cheerios out of the box. And my mother loves having them for eight hours straight, twice a week. It’s good for her arthritis to stay out until ten, eleven o’clock at night. And, sweetheart, it’s not like anything bad ever happens in our neighborhood. We haven’t had a double homicide in two whole days.”