It didn’t take Virgil long to skim through the file Denny Ivers sent over. The victim, Dale Atherton, was a twenty-three-year-old male, hit in the head with a blunt object, probably a piece of rebar, then stabbed several times after he was down. His money, watch and phone were missing. The killer hadn’t taken his credit cards or ID. No prints, no fibers, no witnesses.
A killing of opportunity, Virgil thought. Nobody plans to murder someone with a rusted steel rod. That meant that the killer and the victim probably didn’t know each other which meant there was nothing in the victim’s life that would provide any clues to the murderer’s identity.
A search of the neighborhood turned up a few passing videos of the victim but he was alone. Certainly, no one appeared on any of the recordings with the words “Psycho Killer” tattooed on his, or her, forehead.
Virgil stood and a sudden jolt shot through his chest. He hunched over and put his hand out to steady himself. He paused there for half a minute, eyes closed, listening to his breath wheeze in and out until, slowly, the burning in his lungs died away. He straightened up and shakily made his way to the kitchen for a glass of juice. The clock on the stove read a quarter to four. He looked around the empty apartment and thought, Now what? For lack of any better plan he returned to the computer and ran an NCIC search for the phrase “limping man.” Nine case numbers, all still technically open, appeared.
Virgil opened them one-by-one in the order listed. They were all different and all the same. The victims were all over the map – as young as sixteen and as old as sixty-two. Male, female, black, white, and Hispanic. Some had been hit in the back of the head, some in the front. One had a torn diaphragm and another a shattered knee. Most had been stabbed but a couple had been strangled.
In the narrow sense there was no signature, but when you stood back from the crimes an overall pattern began to emerge: a random encounter between the victim and the killer; the victim is incapacitated by blunt force from a weapon of opportunity, a rock, a two-by-four, a piece of rebar; after he, or she, is down the victim is either stabbed or strangled; the stolen property is limited to cash, jewelry and cell phones. In four of the cases valuables that were supposed to be in the victims’ vehicles – an iPad, a laptop, a camera and gun – were missing, but the vehicles themselves weren’t taken.
All this told Virgil that the killer, if it was the same person and not nine different people, somehow encountered the victims and for some unknown reason decided to kill them. He ambushed them, murdered them, took whatever they had that was easily convertible into cash and left in his own vehicle. Three of the female victims were sexually assaulted but no semen was left behind which meant he used a condom.
He was careful and either reasonably smart or very experienced. He never took vehicles or credit cards, both of which could be traced back to him. In each case the batteries had been removed from the victims’ cell phones and laptops so that the phone could not be traced via GPS. None of the phones, laptops or jewelry had been recovered from pawn shops or found on eBay. To Virgil, all that meant that the doer was no kid looking for easy money so he could score drugs. Virgil figured the perp was over thirty maybe over forty. Given the varied locations, he wasn’t an organized guy with a home and a job.
Virgil charted the dates, the days of the week, and the times of the killings and they also appeared to have no pattern. Serial killers enjoyed the hunt and the crime, taking a victim, then remembering it, then thinking about the next killing, planning it, then doing it again. They tended to have semi-regular intervals between kills, time frames that often accelerated as it became harder and harder for them to reach the desired level of excitement. This guy’s crimes were nothing like that. The periods between them were apparently random, varying from days to months with no pattern of acceleration or deceleration.
What was he then? Virgil asked himself. A drifter, male, thirties or forties, not physically imposing, a back-stabber not a fighter, someone who appeared non-threatening, angry, reasonably smart but probably poorly educated, with a low sex drive or one that had been sublimated from sexual release through intercourse to satisfaction through killing, a sociopath with some kind of a trigger that caused him to kill. Given the random victimology Virgil had no idea what that trigger might be.
None of which did him the slightest good in actually identifying the killer, leastwise giving Virgil a clue about how to find him. Quinn looked up from his notes and the screen seemed to waver as if seen through warped glass. He blinked and closed his eyes and the room appeared to dip.
“Not as over our little disaster as you thought, are you, Virgil?” a woman’s voice whispered from behind him.
Virgil spun around and the movement triggered a pain like a ragged tearing in his chest. Janet stood in front of him, her feet seeming to float a quarter of an inch above the floor.
“Hey, partner. Miss me?” The words were slightly out of sync with the movement of her lips.
“Janet,” he tried to say but her name came out as a whispered hiss.
“That doctor said you might have a few hallucinations,” Janet said, smiling. “Here I am.”
Virgil shut his eyes for a count of two, but she was still there when he opened them again, except that now he noticed that this was not the Janet of a few days ago. This was the Janet from their time in the Marshals, almost ten years younger, with longer hair and that lopsided smile she used to give him when he did his impression of their old boss complaining about their reports.
“I–” Virgil began, then blinked and shook his head.
“I’m not going away that easily,” Janet said, then laughed. “Relax, Virgil, I’m just all those chemicals you inhaled giving you a way that you can talk to you.” Janet took a step back, rippled slightly then settled onto the couch without dimpling the cushions. “See.”
“If I talk to you as if you’re there does that mean I’m crazy?” Virgil asked, not sure if he was talking to her or to himself.
“No crazier than if you close your eyes and pretend that you don’t see and hear me. Come on, Virgil, think. Why am I here? Why is your brain imagining me?”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Virgil whispered, afraid that his neighbors might hear him talking to himself and have the men in white coats come and take him away.
“Sure it does. Some part of you wants you to know something that another part of you doesn’t want to hear, so it created me. I bet there are a million shrinks who wish there was a pill that would do for their patients what those chemicals did for you. Imagine what therapy would be like if everyone’s inner selves could stand up and give them a good talking to.”
Virgil stared hard at Janet as if expecting her to shimmer into transparency and then fade away.
“Sorry, Virg, but you can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m sticking around until you’re ready to hear what I’ve got to say.” Janet gave him a twisted smile and leaned back against the couch.
“All right,” Virgil said a moment later. “What is it?”
“That didn’t sound very sincere.”
“I–”
“I’m just pulling your chain. OK, you ready? Here it is: You’ve got to forget this Limping Man thing and get back to work on our case. The Mad Dog Gang isn’t going to stop unless we stop them. Lieutenant Paperpusher is going to drag his feet until Rogers can send the case back to Major Crimes. I may be gone but you’ve still got juice with the Mayor. If you push him hard enough you can get him to put you in charge of the squad, but you’ve got to act fast before it all turns to shit.”
“How am I going to run the squad when I can barely walk to the end of the block and I’m seeing ghosts?”
“I’m not a ghost. I’m an hallucination, and no one will know you saw me if you don’t tell them. . . Come on, Virgil, you’ve got to get these guys before they kill again. If not for the victims then to avenge my death.” Janet gave him an impassioned stare then broke into a laugh. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
“How am I supposed to do that? Stan tells me they’ve hit a dead end,” Virgil said as if it was actually Janet sitting there instead of a figment of his imagination.
“Latwan Monroe is still out there. You find him and he’ll lead you to the rest of the gang. And you were right about there being something else behind these attacks. There’s more to these robberies than just robberies. Something bigger’s going on.”
“Like what?”
Janet shrugged. “I don’t know any more than you do. I’m just your subconscious talking to you, cutting out the middleman. By now Stan and Carl should have started talking to the victims’ relatives, asking if anything unusual happened after the killings, unless Parker’s got them locked in the squad room typing reports. Seriously, you’ve got to take over the squad before it’s too late.”
“I–”
“OK, my work here is done,” Janet said standing and taking a step forward. “Get some sleep and then go see the Mayor. Call Peter Fineman. Tell him it’s an emergency. Use my name if you have to, you know, avenging my death. He sort of had a thing for me.”
“You’re not you. How would I know if Fineman had the hots for you, for Janet, if you’re me and not you?”
Janet froze for an instant like a DVD encountering a scratch, then smiled and said, “I always loved you, Virgil. It’s not your fault that you never loved me back.” Then she shimmered once and was gone.