“They’re letting him out?” Carrie said in almost a shriek when the three of them were back in the hallway. “I’m the only witness against him. What am I supposed to do, go home and wait for him to come and kill me?”
“He’ll be wearing an ankle monitor,” Odermatt told her in the voice a parent uses when speaking to a frightened child. “If he goes more than five miles from his home we’ll know it and we’ll move you to a safe house.”
Carrie shook her head and placed her back against the safety of the courthouse wall. “And what happens when he cuts his monitor thing off? Then what?”
“The anklet sends out an alarm if it’s removed. If that happens or it goes dead we’ll know long before he could get within a hundred miles of the Arizona state line.”
Carrie rubbed her palms over her face and looked wildly down the corridor as if expecting to see Crocker striding up the hallway toward her.
“Carrie, I’ve been protecting witnesses a long time,” Virgil told her in as calming a voice as he could manage. “I’m telling you that he can’t get to you. He’s stuck here three-hundred miles away from where you live and he wouldn’t have enough time to even get out of L.A. before we could have the Arizona State Police at your door. If anything happens they’ll put you in a cruiser and take you to a safe location.”
“What if he escapes? What if he runs and you can’t find him? Are you going to keep me in this safe house of yours for the rest of my life?” she demanded, her eyes round and moist, her face pale.
“He’s not going anywhere without a passport,” Odermatt said, trying to sound confident, “and if he does try to run every cop in the country will be looking for him.” The A.U.S.A. put his hand on Carrie’s shoulder.
“His lawyer pulled this stunt because he wants a plea bargain. He tried to shake you up because he’s hoping you’ll get cold feet and refuse to testify and that then he’ll be able to push me into giving his client a deal. He did this to frighten you in the hope that you’ll give up and I’ll have to let Crocker go.”
Carrie looked from Odermatt to Virgil and then back to the A.U.S.A.
“This was all just to frighten me into refusing to testify?”
“It’s a common tactic,” Odermatt told her. “We see it all the time. The question is, is it going to work? Are you going to let him get away with it?”
Carrie looked at Virgil.
“Hell, no she’s not,” Virgil said. “Crocker picked the wrong woman to mess with.”
“Carrie?”
“Hell no,” she said softly, not taking her eyes off Quinn. Then her jaw stiffened and a tinge of anger flushed her face. “He’s not going to beat me.”
“Good.” Odermatt patted Carrie’s shoulder. “Good. . . . Could you give me a minute with the Marshal? We need to go over some paperwork details. It won’t take long.”
Odermatt smiled and led Virgil ten feet down the corridor.
“Something’s very wrong here,” Odermatt said in a low voice, making sure to keep a smile on his face for Carrie’s benefit.
“I’m guessing you don’t mean the judge reducing Crocker’s bail.”
“Did you ever watch those old, black and white Perry Mason TV shows? They still run them on some of the cable channels.” Virgil shrugged. “Lawyers hate that show because Mason always put on a full defense at the preliminary hearing, and real lawyers never do that. You always save your best stuff for the trial. You don’t want the other side to know what you’ve got up your sleeve, and you don’t want to give the other guy’s witnesses a preview of how you’re going to go after them.”
“You’re wondering why Fitch laid out his strategy today.”
“No competent attorney would give me a blueprint of his defense that way and Fitch is a damned good lawyer, so I have to ask myself, why?” Odermatt frowned and glanced at Carrie.
“You think Crocker’s planning on coming after her?”
“The prelim is in two weeks. When she testifies she’ll be subject to cross examination which means that it won’t matter if something happens to her after that. Her prelim testimony will be admissible in evidence against him at trial if she’s unable to testify.”
“But if she disappears before she testifies at the prelim,” Virgil said, “the case against Crocker disappears with her.”
“If she doesn’t make it to the prelim, he walks.” Noticing Carrie’s nervous expression, Odermatt gave her a little wave and held up one finger, as if to say, ‘Just a minute longer.’
“You think he told his lawyer to shoot his whole wad, whatever it took, to get him out on bail so that he could make sure that she won’t be around to testify against him?” Virgil asked.
“I’m not sure of anything except that there’s some really big reason why Crocker is so desperate to get out of jail right away. Can the Marshals’ service get her another place to live for the next two weeks, someplace where Crocker won’t be able to find her?”
“I’ll talk to my boss. I can at least keep her in L.A. for a couple more days while we see what we can do.”
“Thanks,” Odermatt said, then forced a smile for Carrie’s benefit. He shook Virgil’s hand, then gave Carrie another wave before heading to his next appearance.
“Is everything all right?” Carrie asked uneasily as Virgil led her to the elevators.
“Just housekeeping details, how we’re going to coordinate your testimony between the U.S. Attorney’s office and my people.”
“What kind of details?”
“Money, mostly,” Virgil lied. “We need to figure out if it will be cheaper to fly you home to Arizona and then bring you back here again or if it might be easier to just keep you in L.A., and whose budget the money is going to come out of. Nothing you have to worry about. My boss will talk to Odermatt’s boss and they’ll figure it out.”
“You’re saying that I might not be going home?”
“You could get lucky and stay here, spend some time in the big city. Like I said, it’s kind of a money and resources thing. If they decide to keep you here we’ll get you a car and you can play tourist for a few days.” Carrie slowed and parted her lips to ask another question but Virgil didn’t give her the chance. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
“I. . . uh–”
“I’m starving. I didn’t get any breakfast. I know a nice place, right down the street. The Government’s buying,” he said and hit the remote for the Cadillac’s doors. Two hours later he had Carrie checked in at a different motel.
“Why are you moving me?” she asked as Virgil pulled her bag from the trunk.
“We never leave a witness in the same place too long. It’s standard procedure.” The lie came easier this time. “Besides, if they decide to keep you here until the prelim I thought you might like a little nicer place.”
“Thanks,” Carrie said and gave Virgil a little smile. For a moment he almost thought she believed him.
“What’s wrong?” Virgil’s partner, Brian Pignataro, asked late the next morning. “Is the boss sending your witness back to Arizona?”
“No, the A.U.S.A. twisted Andrew’s arm into letting her stay here where we can keep an eye on her.”
“Then what?”
“I’m missing something,” Virgil said and pushed back from his desk. “Crocker’s up to something and I don’t know what it is.”
“You’re thinking he’s figured out a way he can get to your witness?”
“I moved her to a new location. She’s not using her credit cards. We got her a clean car. . . .” Virgil raised his hands in frustration.
“Maybe he wants out because he’s going to run.”
“His prelim’s in two weeks. If he gets lucky he’ll probably be able to make a sweet deal. He might even get it kicked. He’d be a fool to run now.”
“Unless he knows he’s going down the crapper,” Pignataro said.
Virgil shook his head. “It’s a ‘he-said-she-said,’ her word against his. He’s got a shot and that’s not going to change in the next two weeks.”
“Well,” Pignataro said with a shrug, “maybe he thinks something else is going to change in the next two weeks.”
“Like what?” Virgil snapped, then stopped.
“What?”
Virgil didn’t move for a full five seconds.
“Are you having a stroke or something?”
“The rape kit,” Virgil muttered.
“What?”
“The rape kit. They found a whole God damn rape kit in his car when they grabbed him.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, he’s no amateur. He knew what he was doing. The only random part of his attack was which victim he grabbed. It was just his bad luck that he got one who fought back.”
“None of that is exactly new information,” Brian said, pulling up a chair.
“At his bail hearing his lawyer made a big deal about Crocker having a clean record but everything about this guy tells me he’s done this before.”
“Meaning he’s good at it, or he’s lucky.”
“What if he’s not?”
“You’ve lost me,” Brian said.
“What if the big hurry to get him out of custody doesn’t have anything to do with his prelim? What if there’s some other reason he needs to make a run for it now?”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe some other jurisdiction is looking at him for another crime. If he gets popped for something else he can kiss bail goodbye and if another victim turns up with a similar story that will kill his ‘he-said-she-said’ defense. What if he’s got to run now before it’s too late?”
Pignataro shook his head. “If there were other cases pending the cops would have found them when they arrested Crocker and ran him through NCIC.”
“Not if he hadn’t been charged.”
“If someone else was looking at him our case would have popped up on their computer search and they would have called us.”
“How would they know? He grabbed Carrie in some two-bit town in the Arizona desert. What if he used the same M.O. on his other victims?” Virgil asked. “How is some county sheriff out in the middle of nowhere going to know that we’ve arrested Crocker down here in L.A.?”
“He’d know because the first thing they’d do when they started looking at Crocker is run him through the system.”
“What if it’s an old investigation? What if they ran Crocker’s pedigree before the LAPD grabbed him?”
“That’s a lot of ‘ifs’ and even if you’re right, how would Crocker know they’re getting ready to charge him?”
An image of Martin Fitch telling the judge that Crocker had a clean record and that there was no evidence that he had committed any other crimes popped into Virgil’s head. If Crocker was about to be arrested someplace else wouldn’t Fitch know about it?
“We’ve got to get out an alert to every police and sheriff’s department in California, Nevada and Arizona.” Virgil said. “We need to ask them to check their open cases for any mention of Miles Steven Crocker.”
Brian hesitated a moment, then rolled his chair over to his own desk. “You write it up and I’ll set up the list of recipients.”
The first call came in a little after three that afternoon from a Detective Sandra Torres from the Nye County, Nevada Sheriff’s Department.
“I’m calling about your info request on Miles Crocker,” Torres said when Virgil took her call.
“How did his name come up on your radar?” Virgil asked her.
“Missing girl from Tonopah, seventeen, high school student. Vanished on her way home from cheerleading practice. Someone reported seeing a black SUV cruising the vicinity. That didn’t get us anywhere but then we found a second witness who said it was a foreign make, German – a Mercedes, a Porsche or maybe an Audi. It took us a while to run down all the video cameras for five miles in every direction from where she was last seen but when we went through the files we came up with three possibles, two Mercedes and one Porsche. We cleared the Mercedes but we’ve been having trouble getting any cooperation from the owner of the Porsche, Miles Crocker.”
“Let me guess. He wouldn’t return your calls,” Virgil said.
“Not exactly. His lawyer called us back and flat out refused to let Crocker talk to us.”
“When was this?”
“A little over a year ago. I tried to get my boss to authorize a trip to L.A. I thought maybe we could brace Crocker at work and get something out of him, but my Lieutenant wouldn’t authorize the expense. He said it would be a waste of time. After that our case was pretty much dead in the water.”
“Until now,” Virgil said. “In the last few weeks something changed, didn’t it?”
“Why do you say that?” Torres asked, suspicion clear in her voice.
“What happened?”
There was a long pause then, reluctantly, she answered him.
“A month ago we found her body. Animals had partially dug it up. Some guy with a dog got a flat tire and while he was jacking up his car the dog started running around and sniffed it out. Most of her was still wrapped in plastic sheeting. The doer was too lazy to bury her very deep.” Torres went silent for a few seconds and when she started speaking again Virgil heard a flutter in her voice.
“Anyway, we got fibers that matched to the carpeting used exclusively in the 2012 Porsche Cayenne. Her phone was still in her pocket. The killer had smashed it but the techs were able to determine the date and time it was broken which turned out to be about half an hour after the surveillance camera captured a picture of Crocker’s Porsche. And we got touch DNA from one of her breasts. That was a miracle given the state of the body, but sometimes you get lucky. Once we get a sample of Crocker’s DNA I figure it’s going to match.”
“How much of that evidence does Crocker’s lawyer know about?”
“None of it. We just told him that we needed to interview his client and that if Mr. Crocker wouldn’t appear voluntarily we would get a court order.”
“When was this?”
“Two weeks ago when the forensics on the carpet came back.”
“And he told you ‘No way,’ right?”
“He said that his client would not answer any questions under any circumstances. The D.A.’s getting ready to bring the case to the grand jury. Of course, Crocker will take the Fifth but we’re at least going to make him show up. We got a warrant for his DNA and as soon as he sets foot in Arizona we’re gonna serve it. . . . Look, Marshal, I’ve answered all your questions. Now it’s your turn. What’s your interest in Miles Crocker?”
“I’ll tell you, but first let me ask you one more question. Crocker’s lawyer – is he a guy named Martin Fitch?”
“No, he’s an asshole named Martin Fitch. Your turn. What’s the Marshals’ Service’s interest in Miles Crocker?”
Virgil told her, then put in an emergency call to Bradley Odermatt.
“Crocker’s going to run,” Virgil half-shouted when Odermatt picked up.
“What? How do you know?”
“He killed another girl in Nevada. They’re taking it to the grand jury and they’ve got a pretty good case. The kicker is that Fitch knows they’re closing in. He’s representing Crocker on that one too.”
“Damn! I’m going need to make an Ex Parte motion to revoke Crocker’s bail. How fast can you get over here? You’re going to need to tell all this to Judge Wilkington.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes, as soon I ask the locals to grab up Crocker before he makes a break for it.”
Quinn hung up but before he could call the LAPD his other line beeped.
“Quinn.”
“Marshal, Bill Harris in the tech center. We just got an alert on your defendant, Miles Steven Crocker. The system’s been pinging his bracelet for ten minutes now but it seems to be off line. It might be nothing. Sometimes it hits a blind spot and we lose the signal, but the protocol is to alert your office just in case he’s found some way to disable the device. You might want to–”
“He’s on the run!” Virgil half-shouted. “Give me his last location, now!”