You Can’t Stop Me (15 page)

Following Anderson and the boss into the Pratt PD, Michael Pall had to wonder if the guy who’d held the door for them had been giving him the hairy eyeball. This was not an uncommon thought for him, and wouldn’t have been even before his face and form had been broadcast all across the nation on a top-ten TV show.

He was a handsome guy, in his own considered opinion, and physically fit just didn’t cover it. So gay guys gave him looks, and straight guys envious glances. But also sons of bitches who thought he was short. They gave him looks too, and laughed to themselves, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, except break them apart in his mind.

The attractive fortyish blonde woman in uniform behind the bulletproof glass of her booth gave them a big goofy smile as the trio trooped in, Arroyo and Ingram trailing, capturing the whole entrance on camera and boom. The only way into the PD proper was through a single door to the right of the booth where the receptionist oversaw the compact lobby.

A phone was the only way to communicate with the booth, and the boss picked it up and said, “Good afternoon.”

The woman, who wore a headset, said something only Harrow could pick up, and he replied, “Yes, ma’am. We’re here to see Chief Walker, that’s right.”

She made a call they couldn’t hear, then said something to Harrow that took a while.

“Sure,” he said into the phone. He turned to Pall and Anderson. “Chief’s expecting us. But before she buzzes us through, there’s an admission price to pay.”

Anderson frowned. “What’s that, sir?”

“She wants our autographs.”

The reception officer, who had a nice smile, passed a torn-off half sheet of report paper with a pen clipped on through the small slot under her window. Her name was Sandra, and they all signed the thing with the felt-tip Harrow carried for such occasions.

Pall wondered for a moment if she’d only asked Harrow for his autograph, and the boss was just being nice to him and Chris, to make them feel important too.

Not that Pall didn’t already have people coming up wanting autographs. Though he’d only been on camera twice, Pall seemed to spend half his days now, signing napkins in restaurants, magazines in drugstores, even a towel in a motel swimming pool when a fan had interrupted him doing laps a couple of days ago.

Whole thing felt weird to Pall, but for now he just followed Harrow’s lead and was always polite, tried to remember to smile, and never talked down to the fans. Seemed to be working.

He was unaware that the scientist side of him was at war with the bodybuilder—the scientist preferring to keep to himself and his colleagues, the bodybuilder wanting to look good and attract admiration, particularly from strangers. What he did know was this: being thrust into the public eye sometimes made him feel like an ant on the sidewalk looking up to see a kid with a magnifying glass.

Police Chief Alton Walker was a lanky fifty or so, with a hawk face and short white hair gone bald at the crown; he stood ramrod straight, and had a steel grip handshake, eye contact, and a smile ready for every introduction. Pall at once liked the man. The chief wore the same dark blue uniform as his officers, except for polished gold stars riding both shoulders, as if to say Walker might be chief, but was still a working cop.

Harrow had just finished the introductions when the phone buzzed and the chief excused himself, and was on for only a moment. When he hung up, he told Harrow, “Looks like the rest of your team’s arrived.”

Soon Garcia, Blake, Chase, and Choi were tramping in with their camera crew, and a second round of introductions was made. Walker wanted to get a uniform to bring in more chairs, but his quarters were cramped enough and—except for Harrow and his second-in-command, Laurene—everyone else stood.

“Been watching the show,” Walker said, behind his desk in his chair now.

“Thanks,” Harrow said.

“Don’t jump the gun, J.C.—I didn’t say I
liked
it.”

Harrow just smiled. “No, sir, you didn’t. But you
have
agreed to cooperate, and that’s all that counts.”

Before an uncomfortable silence could settle in, Walker grinned and raised a hand, admitting, “That was just a bad joke. The wife and me watch the show religiously.”

Choi said, “You mean you TiVo it till Sunday morning?”

The chief laughed at that, and so did everybody else, a little. Harrow glanced back at his resident smart-ass as if to say,
You got away with that, but don’t push it.

Pall wasn’t surprised the chief had something “funny” prepared to offer, since the police they contacted all knew they’d be on camera and human nature made them want to look clever and smart for the show. Usually this meant a little awkwardness at the top of an interview, but that soon went away and everybody—sometimes even the team itself—forgot they were being recorded for Friday night, if not posterity.

Walker got his long frame adjusted in the chair, and his attitude shifted as well. “Hell of a thing you’ve uncovered. If this fella is a serial killer of the proportions you say, this one goes in the history books.”

“We want
him
to be history,” Harrow said. “The books can wait.”

“I hear you,” Walker said with a grave nod. “What kind of progress are you making…and how can we help?”

Pall listened as the boss brought the chief up to speed. He glanced over to see Anderson still studying a section of the folded U.S. map he’d been poring over since the show last week, like a frat boy studying a centerfold. Actually, this was about the fourth map the kid had attacked with a Sharpie. Pall hoped Anderson was at least halfway paying attention….

Harrow was saying, “We followed the trail of license plates from Socorro, up the road to Albuquerque, then east on I-forty to Clinton, Oklahoma, then north on one eighty-three to two eighty-one to, well, here.”

Walker nodded. “Trail’s end of
that
hunt. Let’s hope it’s the whole damn deal.”

“Would be nice,” Harrow said, nodding. “Of course, no one has had any luck with the bartender—”

“Valerie Jenkins,” Walker supplied.

“Yes, Valerie Jenkins. Your department talked to her ex-boyfriend, I understand.”

“We did. Fact, I accompanied the detective who took the interview.”

“Anything come of it?”

“Nothing much,” the chief said. “The guy she dumped, Clayton Marxsen, is devastated. Said she left him cold. He never saw it coming, though others say it was her MO with guys, to up and leave.”

“She isn’t buried in Marxsen’s backyard, is she?”

“I’ve been at this thirty years, Mr. Harrow—”

“J.C.”

“Thirty years, J.C.
You
did this job—how’s
your
bullshit detector?”

“Still working just fine. But I’ve run into some good actors along the way…long before I moved to California.”

The chief smiled at that, then said, “If Marxsen is faking, he’s the best I’ve seen. Guy looks like hell. He’s let the apartment go to shit, there’s pizza boxes around, more fast-food wrappers than a dumpster back of Mickey Dee’s, bottles, ashtrays full of butts. Guy looks like the real miserable run-out-on deal to me.”

“You said he wasn’t her first ride at the rodeo.”

“No, but there’s no other guy in the picture right now that we’ve been able to find. We interviewed Valerie’s friends and co-workers at the bar where she got let go, and no one said anything about her fooling around, despite her rep from past days. Fact, to a man and woman, they were all surprised that Val left Clayton. I couldn’t even find anybody who had any idea where she might have been thinking of splitting.”

Laurene said, “This isn’t the kind of case where a disappearance doesn’t get an investigator thinking.”

“No, ma’am, it isn’t,” the chief said.

“Like…maybe our suspect took her out.”

“On a date?” Choi asked. “Or just
out
?”

Silence draped the room briefly.

“Either way,” Walker said, “we haven’t found the van.”

“Doesn’t feel right,” Harrow said. “He switched other plates and didn’t have any contact with the owners at all—why her?”

“Maybe,” Laurene said, “she caught him in the act.”

Pall said, “He’s too careful to get caught like that. He’s committed murders all over the country, for nearly a decade, and you could fit all the evidence we have in a drinking glass. He’s not going to get caught switching license plates.”

Laurene cocked an eyebrow and asked Pall, “You trying to
profile
this son of a bitch?”

Like all of them, Laurene believed in evidence, hard science—that was the team Harrow had put together, which notably lacked a profiler. The forensic sciences were Pall’s mantra as well—fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, tool marks, DNA, chemistry, computer forensics, and firearms examining, these were the tools of their trade.

“I understand your desire to catch this guy with hard science,” Pall said, choosing his words carefully, Laurene being his other boss, and the camera rolling. “But, Laurene, we have to use
all
the tools we have at our disposal…and profiling is one of them.”

“All right,” she conceded. “But have you had the training?”

“Yes,” Pall said flatly. “It’s not a specialty, but what I said about using all the tools also goes for acquiring as many as I can. I’ve taken seminars with the best in the field.”

“Okay,” Harrow said. “Take a run at our man.”

“He’s a loner,” Pall said.

Laurene rolled her eyes. “
He was a quiet loner
,” she said.

“I know, I know,” Pall said, patting the air. “But this guy really
is
. They’re not
all
loners, you know. Look at BTK. He was married for thirty-three years, had two kids and killed ten people without anybody even considering him a suspect. John Wayne Gacy was active with the Chamber of Commerce—in Waterloo,
Iowa
, boss.”

He had Harrow’s attention. All of their attention.

“This guy though? He travels extensively, probably days at a time, in the case of the Placida murders. These are not targets of convenience—he’s picked them out and planned them. The victims are family members of a male civil servant. He didn’t just happen to be in Florida and open a phone book. He struck when the male wasn’t home in every case. That tells us several things.”

Carmen asked, “For instance?”

But it was Laurene who quickly answered: “Males weren’t the targets.”

Pall said, “Good.”

“He maintained surveillance on them,” Harrow added. “Somehow he’s chosen these particular families and scouted them well enough to know when he could expect to
not
run into the male.”

“Exactly,” Pall said.

Wincing in thought, Choi said, “It’s not just that the male isn’t the target—the killer wants to
avoid
that confrontation. He’s a chickenshit.” He looked at the camera. “If you don’t want to bleep that, I’ll start over…. He’s a coward. He doesn’t think hecan take the male, no matter
who
that male might be, so avoids him.”

Pall said, “That’s my theory as well.”

Harrow asked, “Then, why the families of civil servants?”

Glances were passed around the chief’s office like a game of keep-away.

Carmen said, “He hates the government?”

“Join the club,” Choi said.

Chief Walker pitched in: “Then why not just kill the civil servant?”

Carmen mulled that momentarily. “Like Billy said, he’s a coward.”

“I’m not so sure,” Laurene said, shaking her head. “Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t…but even if he
is
afraid of the male, it’s more than that. He wants his victims to suffer.”

Jenny Blake spoke up, surprising everyone, including herself: “The victims don’t suffer. He takes them out with killing shots.”

“But they aren’t his
real
victims,” Laurene said with an awful smile. “His
real
victims, his primary intended victims, are the males. The survivors. That suicide in the Hanson case? It may represent our killer’s greatest triumph.”

The chief asked, “What kind of sick shit
is
this?”

They all considered the crude, profound question for several seconds.

Finally, Harrow—who had reason to know—tapped his own chest and said, “He wants us to suffer. Like he suffers.”

“
He’s
suffering?” Jenny asked.

Grabbing onto this new insight, Harrow said, “Somehow he feels the government has made him suffer…and he wants the ‘government’ to suffer just as deeply. An individual like me represents the government—stands in for the government.”

The chief asked, “What could make him feel like he’s suffering as much as people who have lost their wives and children?”

“Maybe he lost his,” Harrow said.

The room fell silent and still.

Then Harrow said, “He’s someone who thinks the government took away his own wife and family.” He looked around at his people, one at a time. “We need to start looking for someone who fits
that
profile.”

Glancing up from his map, Anderson said, “Someone who fits that profile…
and
who probably lives in Kansas.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Laurene said, pointing to the floor. “The trail ran out in Kansas.”

Anderson moved to the chief’s desk and spread the map of the United States out on it, big black dots from the Sharpie showing the scattering of towns where attacks on families of civil servants had occurred.

“What do you see?” the blond chemist asked.

They all stood over the map looking down.

“Easy,” Choi said. “Bunch of black dots.”

“Try connecting them,” Anderson said.

His voice soft and dry, Harrow asked, “If you do…what picture does it make?”

“Several, sir. I tried spokes, I tried grids, I tried all kinds of stuff—then I got it.”

They watched as he drew a big circle that connected dots in California, Texas, Placida, Florida, Pennsylvania, the upper peninsula of Michigan, Rolla, North Dakota, and Montana.

Laurene squinted, then widened her eyes. “What the
hell
…?”