“What do you mean he’s a collector?” Paula said from behind her desk.
“He’s deliberate in every aspect of his work. I’d say almost obsessive in his absolute precision, right?” John said. He peeled a square of nicotine gum and tossed it in his mouth.
“Okay, I’m with you so far.”
“Everything he does is reasoned and planned.”
“There’s nothing reasonable about any of this,” Paula said, gesturing to the crime-scene photos on the wall behind her desk.
“Arms, legs, and heads removed, and not a one turned up anywhere. What did he do with them?”
“We’ve said that he dismembered the bodies to stop us from identifying them. Now you think he has a trophy room?” she asked.
“We know the killer dismembered them. What if it had nothing to do with hiding their identity? What if he kept what he wanted? Still with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Think about this like any other supply-chain business. He brings in his supplies and needs a place to work. He does something with them, and then what? He’d have to stash his product until he gets rid of it. Think of it like a meth lab—product in and product out.”
Paula examined the crime-scene photos again. “That still brings us back to how he selects his victims.” She ticked off points on her fingers. “Were all three victims gang informants? If they were, then who stands to benefit with them off the board?”
“The FBI profiler mentioned the symbolic injury the killer is acting out. What is it that Johnson, Mercer, and Cardozo did that put them on the killer’s radar?”
“They were all gang members in the lower rungs of society, preying on the vulnerable. If our killer ran in those circles, how is he able to pull this off without having the full weight of the Crips, Skinheads, and West Block Norteños come down on him? We’ve heard no talk of revenge or retaliation, a very un-gang-like response to losing a member. Now we can add to the list that we don’t know where he keeps his body-parts stash.”
From behind John and Paula, Lieutenant Barnes chimed in, “That is not very comforting, Detectives. What, exactly, do we know?”
Paula’s face reddened. She stood and pointed toward the three photos of the body dump sites. The gruesome similarity of the bodies was unmistakable, each one deprived of limbs, heads, and entrails. “Each of these victims turned up where they would be discovered, sooner or later. Cardozo was dumped on the riverbank, Mercer on the bike trail, and Johnson in Miller Park. All public places and all within the city limits, but none of them lived in the city. Cardozo lived in West Sacramento, Mercer in Rancho Cordova, and Johnson was from Grass Valley.” Paula looked at her partner and saw his nod to continue.
She pulled a file from beneath her keyboard and said, “The victims were gang members, but not in the city . . .”
“Something drew them here,” Barnes added.
“Or someone,” Paula said.
“What’s your theory, Detective?” Barnes asked.
She looked surprised that the lieutenant wanted to hear what she had to say. “Um . . . I haven’t run this by Detective Penley yet. It’s only a theory.” She got another nod from Penley. “According to all our interviews with the victims’ families, there was no reason for Mercer or Johnson to be in Sacramento. Cardozo moved his wife and kid here but kept his ties across the river. The killer got them all to come to him. What would lure a gang member? Money or power. If our killer got them to meet him with a promise of a payoff or some information they could use to move up the ranks, it means he’s not randomly targeting his victims. He knew who he wanted and went after them.”
Lieutenant Barnes pinched the bridge of his nose, as if he fought off a headache caused by the puzzle pieces Paula laid out. “He’d have to offer one hell of a payday to convince someone like Cardozo to turn on the West Block Norteños. What is special about this guy that he can be the Gangland Pied Piper and get his victims to come to him?”
“I don’t know, but it means he has a way to identify them,” she responded.
“Which is . . .” Barnes said.
“I–I don’t know yet. He’s precise in everything, so why not in his choice of victims?”
“What else?” Barnes asked.
“He has a place where he takes them and kills them. It has to be private and isolated, with access to the river. Cardozo was dumped by boat, the bike trail is next to the levee, and Miller Park is right on the water. Nothing is random about that.”
Barnes nodded, then after a pause said, “Find out how he does it, Detective.” He began to walk back to his office, stopped, and turned back. “Good work, Newberry.” He turned around once more and headed away.
Paula looked back to John, and a pained look grew on her face. “John, look—I’m sorry I said anything. I didn’t mean . . .”
“Don’t you ever do that again,” John said.
“I’m sorry! The lieutenant surprised me, and I blurted it out. I feel so stupid.”
“That’s not what I mean. Don’t ever apologize for doing your job. Not in the past and not now. The lieutenant’s right. How long have you been working on the idea that the killer has a place near the river?”
Paula sat behind her disheveled desk and pushed files around like a bad poker dealer until she found the one she wanted. “Yesterday before work, I took a run along the bike trail. I didn’t really put it together with Cardozo getting dumped on the riverbank until today. The bike trail is next to the river, and the spot where Mercer was dumped is maybe fifteen feet from the water.”
She pulled a city map from the folder and handed it to John. The map had green circles indicating the three body-drop sites.
“If you look at the map, the bike trail curves toward the river in this spot. Ten yards up- or downstream, the bike trail bends away from the water,” she said.
John looked at the map, opened a desk drawer, and pulled additional photos from a file. He flipped through them until he found one that showed an angle of the waterline from Mercer’s body. “I know we did a grid search of the entire scene, but nothing popped up near the riverbank to indicate the body came in that way.”
“Everyone focused on the bike trail and the parking lot a hundred and fifty yards to the west. That seemed like the most logical approach for his body dump.” Paula came around to John’s desk and tapped the green circle she’d drawn around Miller Park. “The boat ramp at the park is no more than twenty yards from where we found Johnson’s body.”
“The bodies hadn’t been in the water, so we didn’t look at the water as part of the MO,” John said. He pushed back from the desk, upset he didn’t make the connection earlier. “You know what bugs me about this? He’s going to a whole lot of extra trouble to make these dumps. Talk about risk versus reward. It would be much easier—and safer—for him if he just dropped the bodies in the river.”
“This means that the open display of the victims is as much a part of his work as the body parts he keeps. He isn’t dumping them—he’s showing us what he can do, like advertising. He wants us to know.”
John chewed that last point over in his mind.
“What? You’ve got the quiet, gloomy thing going,” Paula said.
“I’m not gloomy. I’m thinking.”
The phone on Paula’s desk rang and cut off her response.
John fidgeted with the photos and stacked them neatly. He noticed another pink message slip from a newspaper reporter. It went into his wastebasket. Reporters always wanted the inside scoop from the lead investigator instead of going through the department’s public information officer.
Paula scribbled notes as she spoke with her caller, and John picked up the leftover message slip from someone named Mario Guzman. John dialed the number, and someone responded on the first ring. The guy must have been sitting on the phone.
“Mario Guzman?”
“Who’s this?”
“John Penley,” he responded, purposefully leaving out the “detective” title.
“Hold on a sec.” In the background, voices of children faded, followed by the unique sound of a screen door slamming against a doorframe.
“Detective Penley?”
“Yes.” Guzman knew who John was.
“Manny Contreras said I should give you a call.”
“Let me guess, Manny told you to tell me that the West Block Norteños had nothing to do with Daniel Cardozo’s murder. Well, you can tell him that you passed on the message.” It was clearly another smoke screen to insulate the gang from murder.
“I don’t know if they did or not,” Guzman said.
Not the response John expected. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know how the Norteños figure in Danny’s death. He’s dead because of what he—what we saw.”
John’s neck tingled. “What did you see?”
There was a pause on Guzman’s end of the phone, then, in a raspy whisper, he said, “We saw dead bodies, man.”