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Hollis had done some practical problem-solving. And shown some compassion. I was impressed.
Chapter 52
Back in the office, I looked like a crazed hoarder with towering stacks of paper and crime-scene photographs piled high and spread around my desk, on my guest desk chair, and all over the surrounding floor. Other detectives veered around me and avoided eye contact. I’d have to remember this trick in the future when I didn’t want to chat.
I was comparing five case files. The two San Francisco homicides were on the desk directly in front of me. I had three of the five total Atlanta-area homicides on the chair next to my desk—two from Detective Carter and one from his cooperative suburban counterpart. Neither of the agencies investigating the other two murders down there were interested in sharing their files with the NYPD. Fine. I didn’t have time to argue.
And I didn’t have any more time to spare making certain that the killer who’d likely hit first San Francisco and then Atlanta was probably the same one still at large in New York. The one who in a published letter had threatened the entire city that he would kill again.
The city was in a panic, and John Macy was breathing down our necks.
I had a full range of law-enforcement tools at my disposal. Photographs, forensic reports, interviews, even security footage, though nothing identified the killer. The local agencies had also done video walk-throughs of each crime scene. Some were excellent and gave complete views of every surface and angle. Some were rushed and cursory. Not that the detectives and PD photo techs could have ever imagined that the images they were capturing might prove part of a multistate serial-killing spree.
I stared at a set of novelty shot glasses in the crime-scene photos from one of the San Francisco victims. Souvenirs, I assumed, from the victim’s travels, advertising Cancún, Kingston, and Key West. One lone shot glass stood about a foot away from five others. Once again, my mind went back to the strange, asymmetrical arrangement of the bobbleheads in Elaine’s apartment here in New York…and the ballerina and musician figurines in the other San Francisco victim’s apartment.
Once I started searching, I discovered similar arrangements in the other crime-scene photos, from the Bronx and Brooklyn, and in the three Atlanta-area scenes.
For instance, in one of the Atlanta crime-scene photos, I spotted a shelf where three teacups were lined up on the left, and nine were on the right, with about a foot-wide space between the two groups. In one of the other Atlanta victims’ homes, a collection of small vases was divided into clusters of two and seven.
There’s always a certain amount of luck and chance involved in any investigation. And this methodology of dividing the victims’ collections seemed too deliberate not to be significant.
Looking for more evidence to bolster my theor
y, I brought up the walk-through videos from the third victim in Atlanta. The footage did a pretty good job of covering her entire apartment, though the detective working the camera had been more focused on getting close-ups of the victim’s injuries and body than views of the crime scene. I could understand this victim-centric technique, but for my purposes, it was frustrating not to see more of the house.
I let out a short groan of annoyance that caught Brett Hollis’s attention.
He stood up from his desk and stepped over to mine. “What are you looking for? Anything specific?”
I pointed to the crime-scene photos. “See those bobbleheads? And these shot glasses? The vases, the teacups, and the figurines? A number of similarly strange-looking setups at different crime scenes, and I’m wondering if the items might’ve been separated like that deliberately.”
“You think the killer was sending a message?”
I made a face. “That’s what I’m starting to think, yeah. But I’m just not sure what.”
Hollis looked intrigued. He stood behind me as we watched the Atlanta video again. We divided the screen so he looked at the right side and I looked at the left.
About two minutes into the video, Hollis yelped, “There. There it is. Hit Pause.” His finger tapped the screen of my laptop.
On a windowsill in the far background there was a barely noticeable line of grayish dots. We froze the image and tried to enlarge it. There was one dot to the left, and three to the right, a gap of about five inches between them.
Hollis stared at the screen. “What are those? Buttons?” After a second he said loudly, “Coins! Those are dollar coins.”
“Nice catch. Good eye.”
Hollis said, “We still have no idea what the killer is trying to tell us.”
It was something about staring at the dollar coins that made my swirling thoughts click into place. It was as close to an epiphany as I had ever had, at least in police work.
I said, “He’s counting his kills for each location.” I quickly grabbed the Atlanta-area crime-scene photos. “See? The video is of the first crime scene in the Atlanta area. Look at the date. Then it’s three weeks before the next crime scene, in the actual city of Atlanta. That crime scene shows these two little vases on the left. The next crime scene is in some place called Dunwoody, about six days later. It’s the set of teacups with three on the left and nine on the right. His third murder in the Atlanta area. Now it all makes sense. Like the bobbleheads at Elaine Anastas’s apartment. She was the fourth murder in New York.”
It felt right, like we had solved one important piece of the puzzle.
Now I had to find out if the other cases also fit the pattern.
Chapter 53
Daniel Ott sat in a McDonald’s on 42nd Street, a few blocks from the New York Public Library. About every ten minutes, waves of customers entered and exited, effectively switching places. That’s what Ott wanted right now: a lot of people around him. He looked at the crowd. He listened to their conversations.
