Killing a Cold One (28 page)

49

Monday, December 29

GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN

The FBI meeting kept getting moved, but now it looked like it would actually happen that day. All along the string-out there were no explanations or excuses offered. Green Bay was 160 miles south, give or take, Austin Straubel International Airport the closest major commercial air facility to Marquette.

Senior Special Agent JoJo Pincock had called the day before, left a message that she would be at the Wingate Hotel on Airport Drive. She had been in Alaska for a week and was en route to the East Coast for New Year's with her family, but would hop from Minneapolis down to Green Bay and spend Monday night to see that they got adequate time. Service reserved two rooms for his team.

Friday got a confirmation on the identities of the two girls from Canada, which seemed to confirm Lupo's reluctant help.

On the way, Service told his guys who they were going to meet.

“Could this be the Pincock from the Great John R shootout?” Noonan asked.

Treebone jumped in. “She was Metro back then, on the force three years, in law school for two of them. Dispatch sent her to an office at John R and Mack, not far from Wayne State, report of a man brandishing a revolver, which turned out to be an AK-47, Chinese-made, fully auto.

“The office belonged to a lawyer named Pollini,” Tree continued, “whom Pincock later learned had been laundering cash for an intermediary of the Micalezzi family of Rochester Hills. Mr. Micalezzi's internal audit of Pollini showed him a few lira short. The armed men were freelance contract poppers out of Bossier City, Louisiana. By the time Pincock arrived, Mr. Pollini had been dispatched to Wop Heaven, but he had a temporary secretary from Manpower who slipped away and summoned the cavalry. The whole deal was a botch right from the start. Pincock's partner was an old warhorse named Jethro Lally; he'd gone down in the first volley, not killed, but hit badly enough to decide to retire when he came out of the hospital. Pincock hit one shooter right away and managed to drag Lally out of the line of fire. Additonal help came pouring in, but the shooters were barricaded pretty good, and a couple of curious civilians wandered by the outside windows and got nailed. The negotiation team arrived with SWAT forces. Pincock shot a second killer, and the third man finally surrendered. Soon as she finished law school, the FBI made her an offer and she jumped ship.”

“Cojones the size of John Deeres,” Noonan offered. “Solid cop. Should've recognized that name right away. Snow up here must be freezing my fucking brain cells.”

“Is that good or bad?” Service kidded.

“This place is hell compared to Detwat,” the old detective said.

“Without Detroit, maybe you wouldn't appreciate this,” Service said.

“I don't need to swim in the cesspool to know what's floatin' in it. This place up here is its own kind of scary.”

 

•••

 

They met Pincock at her room and Treebone opened a laptop for the briefing they'd cobbled together.

The senior special agent took a thermos out of an orange canvas bag emblazoned with the silhouette of someone floating under a parachute. The bag was labeled
life's short. jump often
!
Service wondered if she practiced what her bag advertised. She was tall and stocky with big, stone-steady hands.

Pincock was neither friendly nor unfriendly, just quiet and self-­contained. Service introduced everyone, and she looked at Noonan and said, “Bluesuit himself.”

The detective grinned and nodded. “Yo, JoJo.”

Tree conducted the briefing, had all the incidents on maps and charts with data for each event. Service had no idea his friend was so accomplished in such matters, but he wasn't surprised. It had been Tree's idea to call them events, not cases, the term making them seem connected, even if they weren't.

“Kick off your kicks, Senior Special Agent. This will take a while,” Tree began.

“I'll be the judge,” she said. “Understand, gentlemen, this is in the way of a ghost stopover. I was never here, never met any of you; this never happened—unless, of course, fate determines it should have, in which case it did, and will.”

“Fair enough,” Service said, not understanding at all. “We're looking for guidance from fresh eyes.”

Tree methodically marched them through everything:

Two dead women, no heads, hearts, or hands, only identified days ago as Jill and Dorie Moulton.

Body number three was a Lecair twin, around age five; body recovered with head and hands, but no feet.

Sean Nepo, all parts there except for his feet.

The next female victim, body number five, found in a Beaver Lake cabin with all parts there (just not attached).

Kelly Johnstone, faked suicide, reasons unknown.

Lamb Jones, her body (number six) recovered quickly—maybe part of this, maybe not. She didn't fit the pattern.

Another body (number seven), skinned and hanging from a tree, hands missing—still unidentified. After disappearing, Anne Campau was found alive a couple of weeks later, eight or so miles from where she was taken when investigating this body. Outlier?

Martine Lecair, legitimate suicide stimulated by what, they didn't know for sure. Definitely related.

The hit-and-run victim's story: Wendell John Bellator, aka Na-bo-win-i-ke, left on roadside; no signs of mutilation like the others, but clearly a homicide. Bellator was an Indian from Minnesota, retired cop, probably connected.

Parts of two bodies missing from a mortuary, possibly consumed.

It took the better part of three hours to slog through the details. Pincock rarely interrupted with questions, but continuously scribbled notes.

“That's it?” she said, when Tree had finished.

“Yes, ma'am,” Treebone said.

She took out her cell phone, flipped it open, tapped in a speed-dial number. “Carol, this is JoJo. Change my flight to tomorrow afternoon, late.” The agent closed the phone, pulled off her boots, and tossed them aside, launching each one with a sharp kick.

“Do you find murder intriguing, Detective Service?”

“No, ma'am, not especially.”

“I do,” she said, flashing her first smile. “It yanks my crank.”

“You've got some thoughts on all this?”

“Boys,” she said, “let's order us some food. We're gonna need fuel.”

 

•••

 

They ordered three pizzas to start and three more around midnight. Pincock ate the greater part of two of them while she tapped on her laptop, plugged into a cell phone, which was connected to an electrical outlet. Service liked how she ate, tended to judge people by this, how connected they let themselves be to food. She ate fast, but not like an automaton. He could see she liked flavor and texture and aroma, and didn't mind sauce on her chin.

Pincock said, “Terminology is always a problem in these atypical cases. We've got media calling all multiples ‘serial killings,' when the majority are actually sprees. Serial killers plan. They're hunters who carefully stalk their prey. ‘Sprees' whack whatever gets in their path. No plan, no obvious rationale. Serials tend to be intelligent. Sprees are lucky to get their shoes on the right feet, tendency toward real rockheadism. But we're starting to think of a third category, what some are now calling ‘sequence killers.' Sprees usually get stopped pretty quick, while serials go on and on until they're caught, snuffed, or picked up on some other charges, and dumped into an institution—penal, mental, you name it.

“Sequence killers seem to present with serial characteristics and profile but combine some aspects of sprees. They kill for a while and then disappear by choice, not because of our heat. They seem to have an agenda, exogenous, not some twisted OCD, fucked-up childhood deal. Serial killers are sociopaths. Sequence killers, too, but they have a purpose, an intended outcome beyond satisfying some sort of inner demon or personal devil's voice. They aren't technically insane.”

“Like terrorists?” Treebone asked.

She rewarded him with a smile and poked in his direction with a pen. “That's sort of the idea.”

“Ours?” Service asked.

She sat back and rubbed a foot. “Could be.”

“Your people are working on a profile of this new type?” Service asked.

“Very preliminary work only. It has yet to go through the bureaucratic and academic peer-review gauntlet, and some people in my line aren't convinced.”

“You have examples?” Noonan asked.

“There's no perfect signal case that might declare or verify the paradigm. We have pieces of cases, like a sexual mutilator in Eugene, Oregon.” She paused. “He looked like a serial at first, but the evidence wouldn't fit, and the suspect killed himself, so we never had a go with him. Certainly the brutality was there. He used a cleaver. But no scrapbooks of his clippings, no trophies, no anal assaults. Most serial killers seem to want to stick something up the back door, but not this one. In fact, there was no evidence of sexual activity, which we put down to condoms and good hygiene when no DNA sample was forthcoming.”

“That seems to fit ours,” Service said. “Bastard's invisible, leaves nothing.”

“No,” Pincock said. “He's leaving
something;
you just haven't found it yet. Backgrounds and intelligence are different, as well. This new group tends to be extremely intelligent and often well educated, IQs of 130 and upward. None from dysfunctional families, no history of abuse. Everything appears perfectly normal, assuming there is such a thing.

“I'm thinking there's something more, but I can't support my hypothesis with the evidence at hand. I've got fragments of maybe ten cases right now, but only three seem fairly clear-cut. A lot of bureau people don't agree with me, but we get paid to think independently. As long as my boss tells me to keep going, I will.

“All three cases involved a brother with a younger sister. No idea what's going on and certainly no explanations. But three cases of brother, younger sister, him with IQ over 130, brutal killers each, and no DNA left on the vicks. All three perps were teetotalers, people who appeared to fit into their communities, the sort of folks you feel comfortable calling when you need help. They seem to believe in civic duty and have high ideals, tend to
really
believe, and this may turn out to be part of the profile. They like to join groups, churches, Rotary, Lions, Eagles, Moose, all that stuff. By all measures, they seem like perfectly normal and well-adjusted people.”

“Who happen to like to butcher people,” Tree said.

“There ya go,” Pincock said.

“How do you find them?” Noonan asked.

“It's been pure luck so far. Accidents, serendipity, but as soon as we look at the cases we can usually see some patterns, classic twenty-twenty hindsight. The key seems to be their process. Not the same for all; each one has his own laborious, carefully developed method.”

“For example?” Service asked.

“The perp in Eugene was an amateur ornithologist. Led the local chapter of a group dedicated to preserving habitat for a certain rare songbird, ruby-throated mattress thrasher or some such hoo-ha. All birds look alike to me,” she confessed.

“Me, too,” Noonan said.

She continued, “He was simply extending his purpose, protecting habitat; a straightforward and socially acceptable goal knocked the balance bubble a bit off the level. Even his logic made sense in retrospect. Kill enough people in the target area and people will stay the hell away. You can't refute his reasoning.” She looked at Noonan. “It worked.”

“Indians and females are the general common denominators here,” Noonan said.

“Don't get hung up on gender,” Pincock said. “These people know what they are about. Says society: Women are weak and defenseless, and when the weak and defenseless are murdered, you tend to get public outrage, which attracts media, which cranks up more rage and fear. Media play is always critical to this type's agenda.”

“Until recently, we pretty much had the lid tight on all this,” Service said.

“Hard to judge if that's good or bad,” she said. “The media is his message, to steal McLuhan's line. Without it, he may have to jack up his activity, or he might pack it in. That happens, too. We think our boy in Eugene ran a similar deal down in Amarillo a few years before: That time around, it was anti-nukes. He started killing Pantex workers, just women. The Pantex plant assembled atomic weapons for the military. We got into that one early and sat on the publicity and kept it capped. He got nowhere with his cause and moved on. Later we confirmed he'd lived in Amarillo. The killings started shortly after he moved there and ended as soon as he departed. Circumstantial and correlative, but very instructive.”

“Which reduces us to Indians,” Service said.

She closed her eyes. “That's my guess. You've got to find a way to go deeper. What's going on around here—what issues, problems, causes—see?”