“Let’s head in. I’m sure by now, the rest of the team has seen the other bodies, talked to the police, and spoken with people in the area. They’ve probably gone back to headquarters already.”
“Sounds like a plan.” I searched my phone as Renz drove.
“Whatcha looking for?”
“A contact name at a nearby shelter. Hopefully, they’ll talk to Mary and convince her to stay there, at least for the winter months. It won’t be long before the snow is flying.”
Renz looked up. “Yep, and once the sky takes on that winter-gray hue, it doesn’t change again until April.”
“Thanks for that image. Winter is already too long and too cold, but why does it have to be gray too?”
Renz pulled a quarter out of the console tray. “Don’t know, but here’s a quarter.”
I grinned. “Yeah, and what am I supposed to do with that?”
“Call a weatherman. He might have the answer to your question.”
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me? First, I don’t think pay phones exist anymore, and second, you should have said ‘weatherperson’ since the meteorologist I watch on my favorite news channel happens to be a female.”
I punched his shoulder, and Renz laughed. “Sorry. I keep forgetting we live in the twenty-first century.”
“Okay, I think I found somebody who can help Mary, so shush while I make the call.”
We were back at our St. Francis headquarters twenty minutes later. I looked out at Lake Michigan as Renz pulled into our parking spot. The water looked cold and uninviting, and other than a barge along the horizon, I didn’t see a single boat.
Once on our floor and after seeing that every office was empty, we grabbed our coffee cups and headed to the conference room. There was always a pot of fresh coffee when we had updates and brainstorming sessions. Renz and I entered and found everyone from our team back and seated. Each agent gave us a quick update of the site they went to, and most were repeats. There were no witnesses to the brutal killings, and all the victims appeared to be from homeless camps.
We went over our findings with the group. The first victim, a female around fifty, had no identification, so she would be considered a Jane Doe unless someone who actually knew her name came forward. I explained that we did have a witness of sorts—the man who called 911 and went by the name Ray. We went over his account of hearing sounds in the night and seeing shadows moving toward the alley.
“He remembered the church bells ringing twice.”
“So two in the morning?” Taft asked.
“That’s correct, ma’am. Ray admitted to being afraid, so he didn’t wander out until after daylight when other people were up and about. He told us he recognized dumpster sounds from the night before and went to investigate. That’s when he found the body, ran to the corner market, and had them call 911.”
Maureen raised a brow. “Did he recognize the woman?”
Renz took over. “He said he did and knew which tent she lived in. His opinion was that she was a victim of a crime of opportunity for the perp since her tent was the farthest from the rest. He assumed the killer saw an easy target and chose her as his victim.”
I added my two cents. “Ray said she had only lived at the camp for a few weeks and kept to herself, so that’s why nobody knew her name. We searched her tent and found a little bit of food, a couple of T-shirts and two pair of pants, cigarettes, and some change at the bottom of her tote. Nothing of importance.”
Taft tipped her chin after taking notes. “Okay, and the second location?”
“We actually found the wife of the victim at Iroquois Park, where a homeless camp is set up. The deceased did have an ID, and that, along with a few other items, was collected in an evidence bag. I took a picture of the ID, and then we went from tent to tent until we came upon the wife. She was worried sick. Said her husband, Lenny, had left the night before to go to the gas station to buy her cigarettes. The gas station closes at two a.m.”
Tommy asked about the cigarettes. “So did he have a new pack of cigarettes on his person?”
I sighed. “He did, but we didn’t tell the wife that. She felt guilty enough.”
“So that means he was killed right after two o’clock and was heading back to the camp.”
Renz nodded. “That’s what we concluded and what would make the most sense.”
“His name?” Taft asked.
“Leonard Roche. I called the nearest shelter, and they have room for the wife, Mary. They said they’d send somebody out to talk to her.”
“Good. Sounds like those two murders were purely crimes of opportunity. Neither victim was targeted in particular. What about the rest of you? Any evidence that the murder victims were deliberately chosen?”
Everyone shrugged and said that after interviewing people who knew the victims, not one could think of anyone who’d had a problem with them.
Fay brought up a good point. “So we now know that two of the victims were killed around two a.m., and we’ll learn the approximate TOD on the other three as soon as Dave reports in with his rigor and temperature analysis. What if the person who died was completely irrelevant and it was more about the timing?”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up. “Well, knowing that Leonard and Jane Doe were killed at roughly the same time and the locations were ten minutes apart by car, then there has to be more than one person committing the murders.”
Kyle cocked his head. “Or they aren’t connected at all. Maybe slitting throats is the latest method killers are fond of. It could be a new trend among the depraved because it’s a quiet act.”
“That’s also a possibility, but at least we’re throwing out ideas,” Charlotte said. “If the time of death is what we’re supposed to notice, then it was absolutely a coordinated plan of attack. The killers”—she air quoted the plural word—“want us to know there’s more than one of them, and the only way to do that is by killing all five victims in a scattered area at the same time.”
Taft reached for the landline phone. “I need to ask Dave if he has TOD estimates yet, and they have to be as precise as possible.”
While Taft made the call, I started scratching out a list of questions to field to our team. We needed to know if there were hate groups who might be suspects. Were there people who hated the homeless or the space they took up in our cities? Could tourism be affected? Safety? Maybe even organizations who fought drug and alcohol abuse were angry. The sanitation department would have to be involved and possibly restaurant owners whose businesses could be failing because homeless camps took up sidewalk space right outside their eateries. Maybe that sidewalk space could have been used for outdoor dining. The list went on and on, and we had a lot of work ahead of us.
Maureen hung up minutes later and told us Dave’s initial findings. According to body temperatures and the amount of rigor setting in, he had put the TOD for the other three within the same parameters as the two Renz and I saw—between midnight and four a.m. That wasn’t good enough. We were sure about the time of our victims’ deaths, and we needed more, as in video evidence or witness statements at the other scenes in order to know if the time of death was the same for all five people. We had our work cut out for us, and we had to consider the citywide police jurisdictions and the county sheriff’s office too. I could see the number of officials involved causing the investigation to go sideways fast. It was something Maureen said she would address. She said she’d also try to get Dave to tighten the time frame once he had the victims in the autopsy room and under ideal conditions for examination.
I brought up the hate-group idea to check the temperature of the others, and they all thought it could be a possibility. By picking out one homeless person to kill from each camp, the message was coming across loud and clear—homeless camps weren’t wanted in the city, but finding the individuals or group responsible would be a challenge.
I addressed Maureen. “We do have a nationwide database of hate groups, don’t we?”
“We do, and that would be a good starting point.”
Over the next hour, we narrowed down the most likely group of people who would be affected by the homeless camps. We came up with restaurant owners and safety and sanitation committees as the people most likely to be hurt financially and physically by the homeless presence. There weren’t specific hate groups in those businesses, and getting angry at the possible lost revenue and unsightliness and then turning to murder was quite a jump, but people had killed for less. We needed to put feet on the ground and interview restaurant owners near camps and talk to authorities in the city’s safety and sanitation department.
I brought up my own thoughts before we were tasked with those assignments. “Wouldn’t our work be more productive at specific locations? I’d think police detectives would be able to speak with restaurant owners and sanitation departments. That way, each branch of law enforcement would have a particular task to follow through with and wouldn’t have overlapping duties or step on each other’s feet.”
Taft rubbed her forehead. “You’re probably right. I want all of you to return to the crime scenes you were at earlier. Look for store cameras, PODs, anything in a three-block area of the murder that might be of help. Talk to more people too. By the time you’re back, Dave will probably have a tighter time frame of when the victims died. If you’re able to review camera footage, look specifically for suspicious activity between one and three o’clock in the morning.”