Criss Cross

Chapter 62

Eleven years before

John Sampson looked over at me and shook his head. My stomach lurched. My throat burned with reflux.

“There has to be something here besides the neckties,” I said. “A guy like this? He has trophies somewhere.”

We’d been searching a three-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, that had an expansive view of the Potomac River and the Jefferson Memorial. The apartment belonged to Michael “Mikey” Edgerton.

After Kyle Craig killed Gerald St. Michel, the necktie salesman with a history of predatory sexual behavior, most people believed that St. Michel was responsible for the murders of the other young women, including Kissy Raider. But I had my doubts.

Evidently, so did M, because I heard from him for the first time about three weeks after Kyle Craig killed St. Michel.

The two-sentence message came typed on plain white paper in a plain white envelope with no return address: It’s not St. Michel. Thank me later. — M

I happened to agree with M, whoever he was, and set the message aside.

But then a man grabbed Gladys Craft, a young blond woman running late at night in Falls Church, Virginia. He used a necktie to bind her hands and then threw her in a van.

Craft managed to escape the van when he stopped at a light, and she was able to give police a rough description of her assailant and the last two digits of the van’s Virginia license plate.

When we heard about the necktie, Sampson and I got involved again. We used computers to sift for possible matches between owners of cars with plates that had those last two digits and criminals who had histories of sexual assault.

We got a resounding match on Michael Edgerton, who lived in Arlington, ran an office of his family’s import/export business, and had been a suspect in three assaults while he was in school at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Those cases had all been dropped at the request of the victims. Edgerton’s parents had bought them off. When we contacted the women, all buxom young blondes, they were reluctant to talk until we described the women who’d died.

The second we mentioned that the women were strangled with ties, each of them started crying because Edgerton had used silk ties to control them all.

We became convinced that Edgerton, not the dead tie-shop owner, was responsible for the rapes and murders of Kissy Raider and the other dead women. We put him under surveillance and kept digging into his past.

When we were able to place him in the vicinity of six of the eight victims around the times of their deaths, a judge granted us a search warrant. Which had led us to Edgerton’s apartment that day.

“I’m not seeing any trophies,” Sampson said.

“I know,” I said. “But he is our man. I know it in my gut.”

“I think so too. But he’s not keeping his trophies here.”

“Probably not,” I said and went into the bathroom.

The place was spotless for a man living alone. On the wall hung a photograph showing a younger Edgerton and his family on a sailboat, all of them beaming.

The whole family knew Mikey was a psycho even when he was that age, I thought. Mom and Dad had already bought off three young women by the time this picture was taken.

It made me angry to think that unless we found some evidence, and soon, this guy would get away with rape and murder again. At the very least, if we didn’t find something, it would be more difficult to obtain search warrants for other places he might have used to store evidence of his cruelty.

Before I knew exactly what I was doing, I pulled out a small plastic bag. In it was a single strand of Kissy Raider’s hair. I was drawing it out of the bag when Sampson came into the bathroom. He looked at the bag and the strand of hair.

“He’s hidden the trophies somewhere else,” I said, and I let the hair fall.

John didn’t say anything for several long moments. Then he said, “I’ll have forensics work in here next.”