Murder Theory Page 25

  “So, how come they haven’t quarantined this whole place off?” Mylo asked, looking around the property.

  “Because I’m not exactly the most credible person to them,” I replied.

  “Oh, like the boy who cried wolf?”

  “No,” Hailey interrupted. “Like the boy who cried werewolf and Frankenstein and was right every time, but they refused to believe him when he said, ‘Dracula.’”

  “Er, yes. Something like that,” I replied.

  Most of our time has been spent calling out the different entries in the journal. They typically read like this:

  5/00124

  6/2/2000: Police arrested Norville Shenton for suspicion of murder. Implicated in five separate slayings of young gay males and burying bodies in woods near workplace at 1244 Crossing Ave., Benson, AZ.

  6/4/2000: Visited scene of second victim’s death. Removed bloodied rock. Entered Shenton’s home, gathered biological samples. Got Shenton blood sample from forensics.

  Forrester seemed very interested in two things: collecting some kind of trophy from the crime scenes and trying to get blood or tissue samples from the killer, even going as far as doing on-site blood draws dressed as a paramedic when he was close enough to make it to the scene of the crime in time.

  We’ve found a few vials of blood in the jars, but I don’t think that’s where Forrester keeps his primary samples. More than likely he leases freezer space from a medical services company.

  We’ll have to find out where that is and what’s stored inside. “Any luck finding anything about Dunhill, Marcus, or the Pale brothers?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” replies Hailey. “Think he’d write up his crimes?”

  “He does about visiting crime scenes,” says Mylo. “Kind of incriminating.”

  “Not exactly,” I reply. “He could claim it’s a work of fiction. If they try to connect any of the forensic samples to those crimes, the problem is that it opens up everything and introduces the fact that those investigations were compromised. Prosecutors would freak.”

  “And he said there were clues here?” asks Hailey.

  “More or less. He really wanted me to see these. I’m sure it’s not just because he’s the most anally retentive serial-killer groupie in history.”

  “Whoa,” says Mylo. “Check this out: We have a number forty-nine here. Gary Ridgway?”

  “Green River Killer,” I say. “Joe Vik’s count is going to end up much higher. Oyo’s, too, probably. Those numbers are what’s proven. Some killers claim a lot more. Pedro López, the Monster of the Andes, probably has them all beat. Luis Garavito, La Bestia, had more confirmed kills, but forensics was a lot better by the time he was caught. His official number was 138.”

  “What’s this guy’s number?” asks Hailey.

  “Three, I think. But if you count the murders committed by the people he infected, it’s closer to twelve. Maybe higher.”

  Mylo looks over her notebook. “Do they count?”

  “To the victims’ families,” I reply.

  “Yeah, but how are they scored?” asks Hailey. “I mean, is there some kind of Wikipedia page for that? For being an accessory?”

  “I don’t know if anyone actually collects that data. It’s kind of its own category.”

  “I’d consider him a serial killer,” offers Mylo.

  “Me too,” says Hailey. “People are basically his guns and knives. Right?”

  “I guess you could look at it that way. But it’s a new thing. I’m not sure how people will wrap their heads around it.”

  “Damn,” Mylo exclaims, looking at her phone. “I didn’t realize that there were this many serial killers.”

  “Those are the ones we caught. The full list would be much, much longer. It has to be from a statistical point of view.”

  “And Ridgway is at the top for America? How come I never heard of him?”

  “Because he wasn’t as sensational as Bundy or Gacy. He was your run-of-the-mill kill-prostitutes kind of serial killer.”

  “They’re called sex workers,” says Mylo.

  “How is that a better term?” asks Hailey.

  Mylo shrugs. “So, is this asshole a first of a kind?”

  “As far as I can tell. It’s really hard to connect one person’s actions to another person killing. I mean you could call Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and Pol Pot the worst of the twentieth century, but only if you count other people doing what they ordered them to.”

  “What about FDR firebombing Tokyo or using the atomic bomb?” asks Mylo.

  “First, Truman ordered the atomic bomb to be used. Second, civilian casualties in wartime are a harder thing to consider. Third, Hitler and the rest straight up ordered millions of their own people to be killed. Technically I don’t think you’re going to find a leader of any country that didn’t give an order that led to civilian deaths. But can we focus on what’s at hand? The sun is going to be up in a few hours, and we’re losing time. Real lives are at stake. What am I missing here?”

  “I don’t see any hidden codes. Nothing that pops out,” says Hailey. “The journals seem to be exactly what they are. Some psycho’s version of stamp collecting.”

  I stand and stretch—immediately regretting it when my shoulder starts to ache. I lower it back down and walk to the middle of the lawn and stare at the barn. What was Forrester trying to tell me? He wanted me to see something.

  Well, I have. I’ve seen his grotesque trophy collection and read through his journals. He’s probably the greatest student of serial killers the world has ever seen. So, what?

  What did Gallard say? This was a dick-measuring contest . . .

  He’s right . . . but it’s not about me.

  Fuck.

  It’s about Forrester and everyone in his evil menagerie. All the other serial killers are his real competition. Both Hailey and Mylo consider him a serial killer. Hell, the FBI will try to have him convicted as such. More importantly, that’s how he sees himself . . . at least abstractly.

  Forrester wasn’t going to beat me by letting me live or killing himself. He planned to win by letting me watch helplessly as he did something else . . . something big.

  Something enormous.

  Forrester wants me to watch as he becomes the biggest serial killer in history while he sits there in his hospital bed.

  But how?

  Putting Hyde into air-conditioning units is unreliable, and I don’t think he had the chance to scale it. Maybe he made a more virulent strain? Maybe . . . but would he be satisfied it would spread? Making something like that would be hard. Nations have tried that.

  Okay, let’s assume he’s still working with the version of Hyde I found. How can he spread that as far as possible?

  What did he say to me before shooting himself? “Theo thinks he has all the answers, when the fun has only just begun.”

  Just begun. As in recently . . . like today.

  “We need to go,” I yell to Hailey and Mylo. “Now!”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  IMPOUND

  We’re racing down the highway in Hailey’s Tesla. She’s sitting in the driver’s seat with her arms crossed while I nervously watch from the passenger side.

  “You know you’re not supposed to let go of the steering wheel,” I tell her.

  “You’re not supposed to break into crime scenes and steal evidence.”

  “We didn’t steal any evidence,” I reply.

  “I did,” Mylo says from the back seat. “I always take a souvenir from an escape room. This one was kind of boring, to be honest. You need better puzzles.”

  “What? You know this is real, right?”

  “Ignore her,” says Hailey. “So where exactly are we going?”

  “The hospital,” I reply. “To Forrester.”

  “All right. And . . . ? Whatcha gonna do? Beat the information out of him?”

  “In a roundabout way. I’d like to try to drug him first with something that will make him babble. Then ask him m
y questions.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “Between kidnapping him out from under police supervision, breaking into the pharmacy, and getting him somewhere where we can dose him? A few hours.”

  “We’re breaking into a pharmacy?” says Mylo.

  “Maybe. Or I can just beat it out of him.”

  “Is this really the best plan you have?” asks Hailey.

  “It would’ve been a horrible plan earlier today, but right now I’m out of options.”

  “How about hacking his computer?” suggests Mylo.

  “No,” Hailey and I say at the same time.

  “He’ll have unbeatable encryption,” I tell her. “Plus, we don’t know if that’ll tell us anything.”

  “What about his phone?” asks Hailey. “That might be easier to hack. I’m sure I can find someone who has a gray box. Or we can sneak into his hospital room and use his thumbprint.”

  “We’d need his phone to do that. Chances are the police have it locked up in evidence.”

  “Why don’t you go to the costume store where you got your doctor’s outfit and get a cop uniform?” asks Mylo.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a horrible plan. I stole this from the hospital laundry.”

  “Cops need to do their laundry, too,” she answers back.

  “I wish it was that easy. Having a uniform isn’t enough . . .”

  My mind follows a thread as I stare at the distant lights of a car lot. Forrester was dressed like a paramedic when he stopped me. His journals mention other disguises he’s used, but I didn’t see any in his closet.

  Where does he keep them?

  Unknown.

  When does he need them?

  When he goes to crime scenes—crime scenes that he tries to get to as soon as possible . . .

  “Okay, change of plans. Follow my logic on this. I was shot by him in front of his house. He’d just come home. Right? Now I’m pretty sure he was expecting me to catch up with him at some point, but not so quickly. For reasons I won’t get into, he just found out a day ago that he might have been identified. So that means he was in a hurry. The last place he spent a lot of time would be his car . . . in fact, he probably spends a lot of time in his car.”

  “Where is his car?” asks Hailey. “Did the police take it?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “Mylo, can you pull up the location of the Travis County Sheriff’s Department’s impound lot?”

  “How about I do it?” Hailey presses a button and tells her car to show us how to get there, and a map appears on the center display.

  Twenty minutes later, we’re parked on the far side of the impound lot, which is brightly lit and heavily covered by security cameras. Any plans I had for using Hailey and Mylo to distract the guards are made irrelevant by the fact that there is nobody here to distract.

  “Okay, you guys wait here.” I glance up at the fence and feel my shoulder hurting. “And I’ll climb this. Just watch for police.”

  “Why don’t we pretend to change a tire or something?” asks Hailey.

  “Do you know how?”

  Both of them give me the look of death.

  “Uh, sorry. Okay, then, would anyone care to help a wounded chauvinist over the top of the fence?”

  Hailey follows me over to the darkest spot. We take her floor mats and throw them over the barbed wire at the top of the fence. I climb as high as I can, then clamp down on my jaw and throw part of my body over the fence, using the mats to keep from puncturing myself.

  Hailey watches me struggle but doesn’t say anything. I feel like pointing out my bullet wound but manage to keep my mouth shut.

  “Just yell if someone’s coming,” I tell her.

  “Anyone?”

  “Use your judgment.”

  I walk through the cars until I find the black Ford Taurus that Forrester was driving. It’s sitting in the middle of the lot with stickers that say “Evidence” on the windshield and driver-side door.

  I check the doors. Locked. Assuming that they disabled the alarm when they towed it, I take the key chain from my pocket and use the tip of a brass key to hit the window.

  It shatters into a thousand pieces. I glance around to see if anyone noticed, but the lot remains quiet.

  All of this is being captured on video, of course, but I can worry about that later.

  I climb into the driver’s seat and start to look through the center console and the glove box. There are registrations, maps, napkins, bottles of aspirin, pens, paper clips, coins, and a hundred other random little items, but nothing that screams smoking gun—not even a gun.

  Just in case, I reach under the seat and feel around. It’s remarkably clean. Forrester probably has the Taurus professionally cleaned on a regular basis to remove trace evidence.

  I sit back and try to think about where to look next.

  Obviously the trunk, but what am I missing?

  A shadow covers the passenger-side window, and I nearly have a heart attack until I recognize Hailey’s grinning face.

  “Let me in,” she says.

  I unlock the car, and she opens the passenger’s door. “Whoops,” she says, looking down, and throws a piece of trash back into the car, then sits down. “Well, Science Man?”

  “I expect we’ll find his costume collection in the trunk. Want to have a look?”

  I pop the trunk, and we both get out.

  Surprising neither of us, there are garment bags containing uniforms for a paramedic, security guard, postal employee, field tech, doctor, lab technician, and a half dozen others. There’s also a box of ID badges to match. It’s an impressive collection.

  In the event that he gets randomly stopped and searched by the police, the garment bags all say, “Hollywood Motion Pictures Prop Rental.”

  Hailey and I lean against the trunk, arms folded. “Now what?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. There could be a million clues here.” The sun is starting to rise in the distance. “I’m regretting not going with plan A.”

  “Beating the shit out of him? There’s still time. He may not talk, but I’m sure it’ll make you feel better,” she says.

  “I like your spirit.” I point to the cameras. “You know they have you on tape now.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not tape. But yes. I’ll just tell them the world-famous Theo Cray told me I had to help him save the world. What girl could resist?”

  “Good luck on that one.” I stare at the asphalt, afraid Forrester has gotten the better of me.

  “What could he have done in just a few hours?” asks Hailey.

  “Poison a water tower. Sell it to the North Koreans. Put tampered pills on shelves.”

  “Okay, what would do the most amount of damage?”

  “Giving it to an enemy power,” I reply.

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t get the credit that way. He’s a virologist, right? That’s about vectors. The better vector, the better it’ll spread?”

  “Yes. In this case, Hyde is kind of weak. It takes long-term exposure or a very powerful initial dose.”

  “So what kind of vector could cause that?”

  “You’d need some other factor. Some other means of distribution.”

  I go back into the car and search the floor and floor mats around the seats. “Look for anything. A receipt, a parking-garage ticket. Anything that looks new.”

  Hailey opens the back door and uses her phone light to search under the seats from the rear.

  I shine mine under the passenger side and spot a long white strip of glossy paper. It wasn’t there before—this is what fell out when Hailey got into the car.

  I hold it up to the light. It’s about twelve inches long.

  Almost exactly. It’s the backing to some sort of adhesive strip.

  “From a shipping box?” asks Hailey.

  “Was this inside the door?” I reply.

  “Yeah. It fell out . . . it must have been tossed there.”

  “In a hurry. Damn.” />
  We both start running back to the fence. I pray that Mylo didn’t actually start changing a tire on the car.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  TRANSIT

  Hailey and Mylo fly across the parking lot toward the twenty-four-hour FedEx store like a couple of maniacs while I call Gallard from the car.

  “Hello?” he says, sounding half-asleep.

  “It’s me, Theo. Listen carefully: Forrester is up to something.”

  “Yes. We talked about that,” he replies. “Where are you calling me from?”

  “I’m near Richmond. Forrester was probably trying to mail something. We’re not sure how, but a box maybe a foot across. Probably a next-day-air package. I think he missed the shipping cutoff, so that means it could still be in a facility in Virginia or somewhere close by.”

  “Post office?” says Gallard.

  “Maybe. Could be FedEx. We’re trying to figure it out. Can you hold all packages at the facilities?”

  “Are you kidding me? We can’t even get a mail truck to pull over unless we have a federal judge tell us to. We need more than that.”

  “How about when the bodies start piling up? Will that be enough?” I’m shouting now. “I gotta go.”

  Hailey and Mylo come running back to the car with their arms full of flat boxes and envelopes.

  “Everything okay?” asks Hailey. “Okay, dumb question. Here.” She dumps a load of boxes into my arms.

  We start comparing the size of the strip from Forrester’s car to the FedEx and post office packaging.

  “Close, but no,” says Hailey as she tosses a box out the door. “Next.”

  “Nope,” I reply, checking mine.

  “Me neither,” says Mylo. “Close, but nothing matches.”

  “All right, what about UPS?” I ask.

  “Let me find the nearest supply center,” offers Hailey.

  “Hold on . . .” I get out of the car and pick up a FedEx and a USPS box, then get back inside. “What do you notice?” I hold the strip next to them.

  “They’re the wrong size?” says Mylo.

  “What else?”

  “The FedEx and postal strips have their logos on them. This is some off-brand shit,” says Hailey. “Or a smaller carrier.”

  “A smaller carrier?” asks Mylo.