Chapter 26

 

The next morning, Fred arose before dawn. His sleep had been troubled with visions of victims of all ages and sizes being shot with arrows and then falling into a great endless abyss. Fred couldn’t analyze dreams but he felt the abyss symbolically represented his inability to solve the murders. He didn’t understand the reason for the arrows; maybe Maureen could decipher them for him later. Maureen was still in a deep sleep when he got dressed and left for the office.

City streets were completely deserted at this early hour with the exception of a couple of vagrants most likely seeking escape from the harsh winter to the north; the sun was still a couple of hours away from removing the night’s chill from the countryside. At this early hour not even Paul had arrived at the office yet.

Fred spent his rare free time working on his blackboard and making notes as he pondered. On the left segment of the blackboard he had written “Observations.” Below that heading were notes that he had written about the two shootings. To the right, a column headed “Actions taken and Pending,” was keyed to the first column’s notes. A third column was titled “Conclusions.” The annotations under the third column had been either left blank or were marked “No success.”

Fred perused the board left to right, constantly asking himself, what am I not doing, what haven’t I thought about?

Up to now, he had employed a technique known in intelligence circles as “serial network analysis.” It sounded complex but it was simply a data gathering and mining methodology that attempted to expose previously unknown connections among people. The logic behind it was that people in disparate organizations often have common acquaintances. In effect, that was what Fred had attempted to do in his interviews pertaining to the victims at the bank, to somehow link the murderer with his victims. If he could find some previously unknown link, then perhaps he could separate the mass murder from a random non-purposeful event to one that had been engineered and designed. Virtually everybody around him saw the killings as a senseless act. He thought differently but could not yet find the reason for any of the needless killings, even though his subordinates had already logged hundreds of man-hours in a futile search for links and clues.

Then something struck him! Suppose the link was broader than what he had been searching for. Suppose the link he was seeking was not limited to the bank victims, but perhaps a connection of some type existed between the bank and the theater shooting. Also suppose that link was associated with the firms that the victims worked for.

Fred was now speaking out loud to himself, “The killer may in fact have hoped to drive us into a dead end while, in fact, part of the puzzle he created may have been to make these shootings look totally random. His goal may have been to cross me up by executing a plan which appeared by all observers to be two disparate shootings.”

So far there were no matches in the case of the bank shooting but, he thought, what if we compared the employers of the victims at the bank with the employers of the victims at the theater? This seemed to be far out, in fact very far out but it was a possibility; and so far, looking at his blackboard, Fred felt nothing had panned out, so anything possible was worth a try. But for Fred’s theory to be on the mark, the killer would have had to know at some level of detail the way Fred and his department went about solving selective crimes.

Only those very close to him would have that knowledge. His predecessor, who had retired from the force unexpectedly, shared the same “damn the torpedoes, no holds barred” attitude as the Chief and Paul. To say they employed complex techniques in crime solving was to say the Neanderthal might have been on the threshold of determining how to go to the moon just before they evolved out of existence.

Fred had only discussed his methodology with the chief, Jim, Paul and Maureen. To make his theory even plausible it would mean that someone knew that he would become the prime investigator on the case after his predecessor left and possibly also understood Fred’s thought process. Fred said to himself, this is crazy, and he almost dismissed his theory out of hand; but paraphrasing the statement by Sherlock Holmes to Watson, when the possible is eliminated from consideration, the answer must lie in the improbable.

He also recalled a prosecutor once said, if you hear the sound of hoofs it may not be horses but it could be zebras. Facts do not always point to that which is logical or apparent. At that moment Fred decided to continue the investigation following his theory, as outlandish as it might be.

When Jim arrived at the station, Fred gave him his assignment. “I want you to check out all the victims from the theater and then compare them to the information you have on the victims from the bank. I also want you to start with those that were killed.”

Jim said, “You really think that the two shootings were connected?”

“I don’t know, but I want to leave no stone unturned.”

Fred could see in Jim’s eyes a reluctance to go down this very questionable investigative path, but as a good friend and a dedicated subordinate he didn’t question his boss’s orders.

As Jim left the office he thought, “The track I have been directed to take on this investigation is crazy. If he only knew how much I want his job and how differently I would be handling it if I were in charge. Perhaps someday soon I will be.”