Chapter Nine
After Morris finished up with Roger Smichen, he next talked with Detective Walsh to get the lay of the land. As with the ME, Morris had known Walsh for a number of years. A tough-as-nails police officer who was bulldogged when it came to investigating her cases. Morris had tried recruiting her for MBI, but she turned him down, telling him that someone needed to stay on the force to catch the bad guys.
“Corey Freeman,” Walsh said, telling Morris the name of the victim. “He was a realtor working at Lacey Properties here in Venice. The house is for sale, and Freeman’s body was discovered when another realtor was showing the home to a couple—”
“Are they being kept under wraps?”
Walsh nodded. “For now, yeah. They’re at the Santa Monica station on Olympic Drive. Before we let them go, you’ll get a chance to talk to them, and let them know what they can and can’t say. We received the call about the body at four. Uniforms had the site secured shortly after that, and I got here not much later, probably quarter past. It wasn’t hard to figure that I needed to get the FBI looking at this, and so I sent them the same digital shots that I think you’ve seen.”
“Yeah, Doug Gilman had a set of prints made and showed me them when I got here.”
“Okay, so those photos show how it looked before the ME and forensics team arrived. They didn’t change it too much other than seeing how the skull pieces fit together. It didn’t take long, maybe a few minutes after I sent those photos in, for me to get a call back from a field agent named Charlie Higgins telling me this looked like SCK. Higgins was one of the agents who had investigated the murders in New York. Other than that, we’ve got uniforms canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses, and Greg Malevich is trying to find out who Freeman was supposed to meet here.”
Morris knew Malevich. A big, blustery guy, but also a solid detective.
“We need to find out what time Freeman stepped into this house,” Morris said. “We’ll see what Roger comes up with for time of death, but I’m sure it will be at least a four-hour window, and knowing when Freeman came here will help a lot.”
“We’re still in the dark about that. Just like we are about who he was showing the house to.”
“If he was even showing the house,” Morris said, frowning. “He could’ve brought the killer here under a completely different pretext. Or maybe Freeman came here to show the house to someone else, and the killer knocked on the door and asked for a quick look around.” Morris sighed and rubbed his eyes as more possibilities came to mind. “We need to get all parking tickets from the area pulled over the last week.”
Walsh agreed that made sense. The reason for looking for a week’s worth of parking tickets was in case the killer had come to the neighborhood other times, either for casing the house or as part of his planning.
“How about a four block radius? Maybe we’ll get lucky with this.”
“Sure, I’ll put a call in first thing tomorrow morning.”
“We also need Freeman’s complete schedule for the last month. If he was in fact here under the pretext of showing the killer the house, this might not have been the first house he showed him. The killer could’ve been planning to kill Freeman at an earlier date, but was interrupted.”
“I’ll talk to Greg and ask him to dig for that information.” Walsh showed a half grimace, half smirk. “Just our luck, huh? This psycho finally decides to crawl out from whatever rock in New York he’s been hiding under the last five years, and he has to come out here.”
“If it’s really SCK.”
“Ten to one it is.”
Morris almost took Walsh up on that, but he’d never been much of a betting man. Besides, assuming the killer was going to keep killing, their best chances of catching him was if it really was SCK back at work. At least that way they’d have an FBI profiler who’d been studying the murders, as well as a small mountain of other investigative groundwork, and they wouldn’t have to be starting from scratch. And if it was SCK responsible for this killing, finding out why he’d been dormant for five years could be what breaks the case open.
Morris decided he’d better get on the phone and talk to Detective Greg Malevich directly. They had no time to waste with this.