Читать книгу The Fourth Monkey: A twisted thriller you won’t be able to put down - Джей Ди Баркер, J.D. Barker - Страница 24
ОглавлениеAlthough only two weeks had passed since the last time Porter stepped into room 1523, deep within the basement of Chicago Metro headquarters on Michigan Avenue, the space seemed dormant, lifeless.
Sleeping.
Waiting.
He flicked on the light switch and listened as the fluorescent bulbs hummed to life, sending a charge through the stale air. He walked over to his desk and shuffled through the various papers and files scattered across the surface. Everything was just as he had left it.
His wife watched him from a silver frame at the far right corner. He couldn’t help but smile at the sight of her.
Sitting on the edge of the desk, he pulled the phone over and punched in her cell number. Three rings, followed by her familiar voice mail message:
You’ve reached the phone of Heather Porter. Since this is voice mail, I most likely saw your name on caller ID and decided I most certainly did not wish to speak to you. If you’re willing to pay tribute in the form of chocolate cake or other assorted offerings of dietary delight, text me the details and I’ll reconsider your position in my social roster and possibly —
Porter disconnected and thumbed through a folder labeled Four Monkey Killer. Everything they had learned about him fit in this single folder, at least until today.
He had chased the Four Monkey Killer for half a decade. Seven dead girls.
Twenty-one boxes. You can’t forget about the boxes.
He’d never forget the boxes. They haunted him every time he closed his eyes.
The room wasn’t very large, thirty by twenty-five or so. Aside from Porter’s, there were five metal desks older than most of the Metro staff arranged haphazardly around the space. In the far corner stood an old wooden conference table Porter had found in a storage room down the hall. The surface was scratched and nicked; the dull maple finish was covered with tiny rings from the hundreds of glasses, mugs, and cans that had sat upon it over the years. There was a large brown stain on it that Nash swore resembled Jesus (Porter thought it only looked like coffee). They had given up trying to scrub the discoloration away a long time ago.
Behind the conference table stood three whiteboards. The first two held pictures of 4MK’s victims and the various crime scenes; the third was currently blank. The group tended to use the last one primarily for brainstorming sessions.
Nash walked in and handed him a cup of coffee. “Watson hit Starbucks. I told him to meet us down here after he checks in with the lieutenant upstairs. The others are on their way too. What’s going through that head of yours? I smell smoke.”
“Five years, Nash. I was beginning to think we’d never see an end to this.”
“There’s at least one more out there. We need to find her.”
Porter nodded. “Yeah, I know. And we will. We’ll bring her home.” He had said the same thing with Jodi Blumington just six months earlier, and they didn’t find her in time. He couldn’t face another family, not again, not ever.
“Well, there you are!” Clair Norton hollered from the doorway.
Porter and Nash turned from the whiteboards.
“This place has been like a morgue without you, Sammy. Give me some sugar!” She crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him. “If you need anything at all, you call me, okay? I want you to promise me,” she whispered at his ear. “I’m there for you, twenty-four/seven.”
Any attempt at affection made Porter nervous. He patted her on the back and drew away. He imagined he appeared as uncomfortable as a priest returning the hug of an altar boy with the eyes of the congregation upon him. “I appreciate that, Clair. Thanks for holding down the fort.”
Clair Norton had been on the force for nearly fifteen years. She became Chicago Metro’s youngest black female detective after only three years on patrol, when she helped break up one of the largest narcotics rings in the city’s history — every person involved was under eighteen. Twenty-four students in total, primarily from Cooley High, although the crimes spread across six high schools. They operated completely on school property, which made things difficult, and meant the young-looking Clair had to go undercover as a student.
The event had earned her the nickname Jump Street, after the old Fox TV show — nobody on the task force dared call her that to her face.
Clair shook her head. “Hell, you should be thanking me for babysitting your partner over there. He’s as dumb as a box of rocks. I bet if you locked him in a room, you’d come back an hour later to find him dead on the floor with his tongue stuck in an electrical outlet.”
“I’m standing right here,” Nash said. “I can hear you.”
“I know.” She turned and plucked the coffee from his hand. “Thank you, baby doll.”
Edwin Klozowski, “Kloz” to most, strolled in behind her, an overflowing briefcase in one hand and the remains of a Little Debbie chocolate cupcake in the other. “So, we’re finally getting the band back together? It’s about time. If I had to spend one more minute down in Central IT dissecting the hard drive of another porn lover gone rogue, I might have considered going back to video game design. How you doing, Sammy?” He reached out and smacked Porter’s shoulder.
“Hey, Kloz.”
“Good to see you back.” He dropped his briefcase on one of the empty desks and shoved the rest of the cupcake into his mouth.
Porter spied Watson standing at the door and motioned for him to come inside. “Kloz, Clair, this is Paul Watson. He’s on loan from CSI. He’s going to be helping us out. Has anyone seen Hosman?”
Clair nodded. “I talked to him about twenty minutes ago. He’s running Talbot’s finances but hasn’t come up with anything yet. Said he’ll get in touch with you as soon as he finds something.”
Porter nodded. “All right, let’s get started.”
They crossed the room and settled at the conference table. The Four Monkey Killer’s victims stared down at them from the whiteboards. “Nash, where’s that picture of Emory?”
Nash dug the photo out of his pocket and handed it to him. Porter taped it onto the board at the far right. “I’m going to run through this from the beginning. It’s old news for most of you, but Watson hasn’t heard it before and maybe we’ll pick something up from the refresher.” He pointed to the picture in the top left corner. “Calli Tremell. Twenty years old, taken March 15, 2009. This was his first victim —”
“That we know of,” Clair interjected.
“She’s the first victim in his pattern as 4MK, but the evidence suggests he’s sophisticated and had most likely killed before,” Klozowski said. “Nobody comes out of the box killing like him. They build up, developing methods and technique over time.”
Porter went on. “Her parents reported her missing that Tuesday, and they received her ear in the mail on Thursday. Her eyes followed on Saturday, and her tongue arrived on Tuesday. All were packaged in small white boxes tied with black strings, handwritten shipping labels, and zero prints. He’s always been careful.”
“Suggesting she wasn’t really his first,” Klozowski reiterated.
“Three days after the last box arrived, a jogger found her body in Almond Park. She had been propped up on a bench with a cardboard sign glued to her hands, which read DO NO EVIL. We had picked up on his MO when her eyes arrived, but that sign confirmed our theory.”
Watson raised his hand.
Nash rolled his eyes. “This isn’t third grade, Doc. Feel free to speak up.”
“Doc?” Klozowski repeated. “Oh, I get it.”
“Didn’t I read somewhere that was how he picked his victims? ‘Do no evil’?” Watson asked.
Porter nodded. “With his second victim, Elle Borton, we caught that. Initially we thought the victims themselves had done something 4MK deemed wrong, and that was why he went after them, but with Elle we learned his focus wasn’t on the victims at all but on their families. Elle Borton disappeared on April 2, 2010, nearly a year after his first victim. She was twenty-three. Her case was handed to us when her parents received her ear in the mail two days later. When her body was found a little over a week after that, she was holding a tax return in her grandmother’s name covering tax year 2008. We dug a little bit and discovered that she actually died in 2005. Her father had been filing false returns for the past three years. We brought Matt Hosman in from Financial Crimes at that point, and he discovered that the scam went much deeper. Elle’s father had filed returns on more than a dozen people, all deceased. They were residents of the nursing home he managed.”
“How could 4MK possibly know that?” Watson asked.
Porter shrugged. “Not sure. But the new evidence prompted us to go back and look at Calli Tremell’s family.”
“The first victim.”
“Turns out her mother was laundering money from the bank where she worked, upward of three million dollars over the previous ten years,” Porter said.
Watson frowned. “Again, how could 4MK know what she was doing? Maybe that’s the link. Figure out who has access to this information, and you find 4MK’s identity.”
Klozowski snorted. “Yeah, ’cause it’s that easy.” He stood up and walked to the board. “Melissa Lumax, victim number three. Her father was selling kiddie porn. Susan Devoro’s father swapped fake diamonds for the real ones at his own jewelry store. Barbara McInley’s sister hit and killed a pedestrian six years before Barbara went missing. Nobody connected the sister to the crime until 4MK. Allison Crammer’s brother ran a sweatshop full of illegals down in Florida. Then there’s Jodi Blumington, his most recent victim —”
“Prior to Emory Connors,” Nash chimed in.
“Sorry, his most recent victim prior to Ms. Connors. Her father was importing coke for the Carlito Cartel.” He tapped each of the photos. “All of these girls are related to someone who did something bad, but there is no connection between them. The crimes are across the board, no common thread.”
“He’s like a vigilante,” Watson muttered.
“Yeah, with better intel than law enforcement. None of these crimes were on our radar; we found them while investigating the murders,” Porter told him. “Without 4MK, these people would still be on the streets.”
Watson stood and walked over to the board, his eyes narrowing as he reviewed the photographs one by one.
“What’s up, Doc?” Kloz said, before bursting into laughter.
Everyone stared at him.
Kloz frowned. “Oh, so it’s funny when Nash does it, but not the IT guy? I see how things work down here in the basement.”
Watson tapped the board. “He’s escalating. Look at the dates.”
“Escalated,” Nash said. “His killing days are behind him.”
“Right, escalated. About one per year until after his fifth victim, Barbara McInley, then about every six or seven months. There’s this too.” He pointed at the photo of Barbara McInley. “She’s the only blonde. All the others are brunettes. Is there any significance to that?”
Porter ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t think so. With these kills, he’s really punishing the families for their crimes. I don’t think it was ever about the victims for him.”
“All these other girls are similar in appearance. Pretty, long brown hair, close in age. For someone without a type, he sure seems to have a type. All but Barbara, the only blonde. She’s an anomaly.” Watson paused for a second before asking, “Were any of the girls sexually assaulted?”
Clair shook her head. “Not one.”
“Did any of the girls have a brother?”
“Melissa Lumax, Susan Devoro, and Calli Tremell each had brothers; Allison Crammer had two,” Clair said. “I spoke to them when I interviewed the families.”
Watson nodded, the gears churning in his head. “If we assume half these families had at least one son and he grabbed their children at random, one or two male victims should have presented. That didn’t happen, so there was a reason he took the daughters over the sons — we just don’t know why.”
Porter cleared his throat. “Honestly, I’m not sure that matters anymore. We don’t need to worry about his future victims. Like Nash said, he’s done killing. We need to focus on his last one.”
Watson returned to his chair. “I’m sorry. Sometimes my mind starts going down all these paths and I lose focus.”
“Not at all. This is why we asked you to join us. You’re a fresh pair of eyes on some old evidence and information.”
“Fair enough,” Watson said.
Porter picked up a blue marker and wrote EMORY CONNORS in large letters at the top of the third board. “Okay, what do we know about our victim?”
“According to the front desk at her building, she left for a jog yesterday at a little after six in the evening,” Clair said. “They said that was the norm for her. She ran nearly every day, usually in the evenings. Nobody saw her come back.”
“Did anyone know where she liked to run?” Nash asked.
Clair shook her head. “They only saw her come and go.”
“I might be able to answer that,” Kloz said. He was pecking away at a MacBook Air. “She wore a Fitbit Surge.”
“A what?”
“It’s a watch that monitors your heart rate, calories burned, distance traveled. It also has a built-in GPS. I found a program installed on her computer that recorded all the data. I’m accessing the information now.”
“Any chance the GPS is still active?”
Kloz shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. The watch records the GPS data as you wear it, then syncs to the cloud with a phone app or by interfacing with a computer. She paired with her phone — that’s dead too, but I think I know where she went.” He flipped his Mac around so the others could view his screen. A map filled the display. There was a dotted blue line beginning at Flair Tower, which followed West Erie Street toward the river. At the water’s edge, the trail circled a large green space. “I found the same pattern nearly every day.” He tapped the screen. “This is A. Montgomery Ward Park.”
Porter leaned in close. His eyesight was going to shit. “Clair, you want to check it out when we finish up here?”
“Will do, boss.”
He turned back to Kloz. “Did you find anything else on her computer?”
Kloz flipped the Mac back around and pecked at the keys. “You gave me the opportunity to legally search the hard drive of a hot teenage girl. Needless to say, I was thorough.”
Clair wrinkled her nose. “Fucking sicko.”
Kloz smirked. “I pride myself on my sicko-ness, my dear. One day you will thank me.” He studied the screen for a moment. “Emory’s boyfriend’s name is Tyler Mathers. He’s a junior at Whatney Vale High. And” — all the cell phones in the room beeped simultaneously — “I shot you a recent photo, his cell phone number, and home address,” Kloz said. “They’ve been beau and boo for about a month. She thinks they’re exclusive.”
“And they’re not?” Porter asked.
Kloz grinned mischievously. “I may have taken a peek at his private Facebook messages, and our boy is a bit of a player.”
The group stared at him.
“Oh, come on! If you use your wife’s or girlfriend’s name as your password, you deserve to get hacked.”
Porter made a mental note to change his e-mail password. “Next time, wait for the warrant. We don’t need you mucking up the case.”
Kloz saluted him. “Yes, my cap-i-tan.”
Porter wrote TYLER MATHERS on the whiteboard and drew an arrow to the boy in the homecoming picture with Emory. “Nash and I will pay Tyler a visit this afternoon. Anything else on her PC?”
“Emory has a Mac, a very nice one at that. Please don’t insult such a fine piece of engineering by calling it a PC. Such insults are beneath you,” Kloz said.
“Forgive me. Anything else on her Mac?”
Kloz shook his head. “No, sir.”
“What about the three outgoing numbers on the landline?”
Kloz held up his hand and ticked off three fingers. “A pizza place, a Chinese place, and Italian takeout. This girl knows how to eat.”
Clair cleared her throat. “There’s a T. Mathers on the permanent guest list. The only other person listed is A. Talbot.”
Porter wrote ARTHUR TALBOT on the whiteboard with the word FINANCES? directly beneath. “I’m really curious to see what Hosman turns up on this guy. 4MK took this girl for a reason; I’m willing to bet the guy’s crooked.”
“Why not bring him in?” Clair asked.
“We bring him in and he’ll just lawyer up — we won’t get a thing out of him. If we need to talk to him again, I think it’s best to keep it an informal setting, try and catch him off-guard someplace he feels comfortable. He’s more likely to slip,” Porter told her. “He’s also a bigwig around town, buddies with the mayor and who knows who else. If we bring him in early, we may get nothing, then if we try to bring him back, he may call one of his buddies to run interference. Best to wait until we have something concrete.”
“This is interesting,” Kloz said. His eyes were fixed on his MacBook again. “The fancy elevators in that building record all the card traffic in and out.”
Porter groaned. “Are you operating under the same warrant you used to hack the boyfriend’s Facebook page right now? ’Cause if you are —”
Kloz raised both hands. “Come on now, do I look like a repeat offender?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Clair said under her breath.
“Fuck you too, Ms. Norton.”
She smirked and stuck out her tongue.
“The building manager was kind enough to provide access to us,” Kloz said.
“What do you see?” Porter asked.
He pursed his lips and squinted as he scrolled through a text file. “We’ve got Emory going down at 6:03 p.m. yesterday; she never comes back. All is quiet until 9:23 p.m.; then an N. Burrow goes up. She came back down at 9:06 this morning.”
“That’s only a few minutes before Metro arrived,” Clair said.
“I’m willing to bet that’s our missing housekeeper,” Porter said. “Can you run that by the front desk at Flair Tower? Ask if they can provide a full name?”
“Will do,” Kloz said, making a note.
Porter drew in a breath. “All right, that brings us to the man of the hour, our victim from this morning.” He told the group what they had learned from Eisley.
“Shit, he was dying?” Kloz said.
“Less than a month left.”
“Do you think he stepped in front of that bus intentionally?”
“I think we need to consider that a possibility,” Porter replied. He wrote 4MK on the board and listed the following:
Dry cleaner receipt
Expensive shoes — two sizes too big
Cheap suit
Fedora
.75 in change (two quarters, two dimes, and a nickel)
Pocket watch
Dying of stomach cancer
“I can’t believe the fucker was dying,” Kloz muttered, picking at something on his arm.
Porter tapped on the whiteboard. “What do the personal items tell us?”
“The dry cleaner receipt is a bust,” Clair said. “Aside from the number, there’s no identifying information, not even the name or address of the cleaners. It’s from a generic receipt book that can be ordered from hundreds of shops online. Half the cleaners in the city use the same one.”
“Kloz, I want you on that. Create a list of all cleaners within five miles of the accident this morning, and contact each one. Find out if they use this particular type of receipt. If they do, ask if number 54873 is active. Obviously, 4MK won’t be picking it up. Even if you find more than one, we’ll be able to narrow down the list as the other tickets get closed out. If you don’t find anything, expand your search grid. He was walking, though — I think the cleaners will be close.”
Kloz waved at him. “I accept your challenge.”
Nash scanned the board. “What do we do about the suit and shoes?”
“Kloz can check all the shoe stores while he’s running the dry cleaners,” Clair said.
Kloz raised his middle finger and stuck his tongue out at her.
Porter stared at the board a moment. “I’d rather Kloz focused on the cleaners. The size mismatch definitely bugs me too, but it’s just noise right now. We’ll keep the info on the board in case it comes into play later.”
“Coins aren’t much of a clue, either,” Nash pointed out. “Everyone in this room probably has a pocket of change right now.”
Porter considered erasing the seventy-five cents, then changed his mind. “We’ll leave that up there too.” He turned to Watson. “Any luck on the pocket watch?”
“I’ll head over to my uncle’s shop once we finish up here,” he replied.
Porter turned back to the board. “I think we’ll find him with this,” he said as he drew a line under DYING OF CANCER. “Eisley said he found octreotide, trastuzumab, oxycodone, and lorazepam in his system. Trastuzumab can only be administered by a handful of centers in the city. We need to reach out to each of them with a description of 4MK and hunt for missing patients.”
“I can do that,” Clair said. “How many fedora-wearing, cheap suit buying, expensive shoe owning stomach cancer patients can there possibly be out there? That’s where the clothing items will help us. He’d stand out walking into a treatment center dressed like that.”
“Good point,” Porter said. “Eisley also found a small tattoo on the man’s right inner wrist.” He loaded the image onto his phone’s screen and passed it around the room. “It’s fresh. Eisley said he probably got inked within the past week.”
Kloz studied it closely. “Is that an infinity symbol? Kinda ironic for a guy on his way out the exit door.”
“It obviously meant something to him,” Clair said, leaning over his shoulder to get a better look. “If you’re going to permanently mark your body, you put some serious thought behind your ink.”
Kloz grinned up at her. “Speaking from experience? Is there something you want to show the group?”
She winked at him. “You wish, geek boy.”
Porter reached into his pocket, removed the diary, and dropped it onto the table. “Then there’s this.” They all fell silent for a moment and stared at it.
“Shit, I thought Nash made that up,” Kloz said. “The fucker really had a diary on him? Did you log that into evidence? There’s no reference on the case log.”
Porter shook his head. “I don’t want the press to know. Not yet.”
Kloz whistled. “4MK’s handwritten manifesto? Hell, that’s worth a fortune.”
