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I shared with him Hollis’s theory that the killer may have left Atlanta for New York.
“Sorry to say it, but I agree,” Carter said. “Sounds like our killer moved to New York. I hope you have better luck catching him than I did.”
“It’s going to tak
e some kind of luck to figure out how he took blood from a crime scene, stored it, transported it hundreds of miles, and reintroduced it at a second scene. Even if he took the sample in a sterile vial, he’d have to have maintained it under perfect conditions for the blood to be analyzable.” I then asked, “Did you get any impressions or ideas from the crime scenes? I don’t mean stuff you might put in a report; I’m talking about opinions.” There was a long silence on the phone and I was afraid I had lost the detective. Then I realized he was taking the time to consider every angle.
Finally, Carter said, “They were…disturbing scenes. A lot of blood, and the killer seemed to have deliberately spread it around each of the scenes. All five victims were stabbed in the neck or chest, and in their left eyes.”
I was taking notes, and I triple underlined that last detail. It was all too familiar.
“Of course we kept that detail from the media,” Carter said. “A signature that distinctive risks inviting copycats.”
I made another note. New York was following the same plan of keeping the eye stabbing confidential. But I needed more information to be sure.
“Were there any similarities between victims?”
“They were all young women, one black and four white. The black woman was killed in her office—the only one who was—and that scene was the least bloody, as if the killer was pressed for time. The other four victims were found dead in their own homes. I suspect the killer did some surveillance before he struck.”
“How long between the first homicide and the final one?”
Carter didn’t hesitate. “Almost two months. Fifty-four days to be exact.”
I knew what it was like to live through a case like this. It didn’t surprise me at all that he knew the exact number of days it had lasted.
“Then the killings stopped as abruptly as they began. We started to wonder if maybe something had happened to the killer, if maybe he’d died. Now it looks like he moved on to New York City.”
I said, “Regrettably, he seems to be alive.”
Carter said, “The NYPD has serious bragging rights when it comes to the size of their force and resources, and they’re not shy about letting smaller PDs know who’s the biggest and the best. I hope it’s true.”
“I hope so too.”
Chapter 39
Detective Alvin Carter from Atlanta had given me some ideas, and I was becoming convinced that these blood-soaked homicides were all related. I again compared the reports from New York, Atlanta, and San Francisco. I gathered all the files and laid them out on my desk. The crime-scene photos were horrific. I kept studying them, looking for the meaning of the killer’s distinctive signatures. The blood. The stabbing of the eyes. The arrangement of knickknacks at the scene. And now the introduction of the blood of a previous victim.
I made a list of follow-up questions for Carter. I wondered if there had been more than one blood sample found at any of the Atlanta crime scenes, and if so, if we could find out whether that blood had come from either of the San Francisco victims.
Hollis approached my desk. I looked over my shoulder at the conference room where Task Force Halo was operating and asked him, “Any new leads coming in?”
“There are new leads, but a lot of wacky leads, and the hardest thing is trying to organize them all,” Hollis said.
That’s the way it always happened. Someone above you in the chain of command had the idea to open up phone lines for some tips, and the next thing you knew, all you were doing was listening to crazy people jabbering about their weird neighbors or how they were “psychic” and wanted to help the case.
I didn’t miss the irony that we were actually using a task force that had been designed to fake out and shut up the mayor’s office. Hollis showed me that the tips weren’t only coming in via the phone lines—some helpful citizens were even sending in pages of Cutco and L.L.Bean catalogs with circles around pictures of knives that might be the murder weapons.
“One caller said he has a strange, secretive neighbor in Red Hook who gave him a weird vibe, and who had girls coming and going all the time,” Hollis continued. “It turns out that the neighbor is a photographer of high-end nude models. The local precinct detective followed another lead, up in the Bronx, and uncovered a counterfeiting operation. Turned out to be pretty big-time. The detective is going to be recognized by the commissioner.”
I could see that the young detective had done a good job managing the onslaught.
“That’s always the way—poke around places we normally don’t and find all kinds of shit. Opening cases NYPD doesn’t even know they have. And then we end up clearing everyone else’s cases but not our own.”
I was starting to get back in my groove when I noticed someone skulking through the office.
It was the mayor’s aide, John Macy.
Chapter 40
