Into the Dark

39

Downey and Commerce, California

“So, can I go, Dad?”

The question surprised Tanner.

His thoughts had been buried deep in the case as he drove Samantha to school. He glanced at her in the rearview mirror.

“Go where?”

“Dad! Are you listening? Lindsay’s birthday party!”

“Oh, right, sorry, honey.”

“Aunt Kim said she would take me on Saturday. And today, after she gets me at school, we’re going to the mall to get Lindsay’s present, re-mem-burr?”

“Yes, I do.”

Tanner brought their car to a stop in the drop-off zone at school. He put his holstered gun in the glove compartment, got out and helped Sam with her backpack. In the seconds he looked into her little face, he caught a glimpse of Becky and his heart warmed. “Love you, Daddy.”

“Love you, too.”

After watching his daughter head into the school, Tanner drove off with a load of guilt as he shoved any thoughts not connected to the case from his mind.

Ever since they’d found the gruesome fingerprint message, proving that one killer was responsible for five cold case homicides, Tanner needed to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, or overlooked a new angle. The monster having surfaced brought them a step closer to the suspect, but the pressure on the new task force to make an arrest was mounting.

Will we stop him before he kills again?

Tanner arrived at the bureau and checked the time. He had half an hour before the next case status meeting. Inside, he got a fresh coffee and set to work at his desk, following the same routine. He looked for any new leads or breaks and resumed examining the files. As he reread them for the thousandth time, something was materializing-something in a corner of his mind that had niggled at him the other night. He’d been drifting between sleep and consciousness when an idea took shape, but he couldn’t identify it.

What the hell was it?

Tanner was still concentrating on it when the status meeting began with FBI Special Agent Brad Knox saying that the task force had now received 323 tips from across the state and across the country. Police agencies everywhere were helping pursue each one. Even though most were vague, superficial or just plain weird, seasoned investigators knew that each one had to be cleared.

“Here’s a sampling.” Knox presented the summary. “This is from Anaheim. ‘My neighbor talks to his dog and I overheard him confess to his Great Dane that he killed them girls.’ Then we have this from Texas, ‘A trucker in a bar in Fort Worth was bragging that he had all the information cops needed, but was waiting for them to post the right amount of reward money.’ Then we have this, an anonymous call to Bakersfield P.D.-‘This was channeled spiritually so receive it as you wish. The killer is Delbert Gill Gettysen, age forty-three, recently paroled from a prison in California after serving time for assaulting women. Gettysen told his parole officer that he was the Dark Wind Killer and was going to continue offing bitches.”

Knox acknowledged that on the face of it, the tip was consistent with the pause from the time of the fifth victim to the killer’s communication.

“We checked with parole and prison officials in California. Nothing surfaced for the name, variations of the name, the age, nothing. The call was from a public phone near a mall. Nearby security cameras were not working,” Knox said. “And, I should add, we were already involved in reviewing the status and whereabouts of known offenders.”

LAPD Detective Art Lang peered over his bifocals from his notes.

“Where are we with physical evidence, starting with the killer’s letter to the reporter? We were awaiting further lab work?”

Eugene Rowe, a postal inspector with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, had a status report.

“The envelope is a national federal eagle design, made exclusively and sold only by the U.S. Postal Service. Our forensic lab is working with the FBI lab. We’re analyzing the ink used via solubility testing and thin layer chromatography to give us more information on the felt-tip pen that was used. Neither the envelope or the letter exhibited watermarks, hair, latent fingerprints or any trace DNA.”

“So we’ve got nothing to run through CODIS,” Lang said, referring to the FBI’s national database, called the Combined DNA Index System. The network lets crime labs exchange and compare DNA profiles electronically, providing the ability to identify ties to crimes and convicted criminals.

“No, nothing so far,” Rowe said, and returned to his page of notes.

“As we all know, the letter bore an Alhambra, California postmark. It doesn’t mean our sender lives in Alhambra, but it’s a focal point for next steps,” Rowe said.

Tanner waited, tapping his pen against his pad, then turned to Knox.

“What do we have on our ViCAP submissions of the five cases in the wake of the letter and its contents?”

“Nothing,” Knox replied, shaking his head. “But the profilers updated their further analysis of the cold cases and the letter. They peg the likelihood that our guy will kill again at seventy-five percent. And if he does, he’ll gloat over it with a message to investigators and the press. He’s gaining what he needs, worldwide attention.”

Soft cursing rippled around the table as the meeting ended.

Tanner returned to his desk with images burning in his mind: Leeza Meadows, aged twenty-one, her body found by a birdwatcher at the edge of Santa Clarita. Tanner suddenly thought of Samantha and how he would feel if it were his daughter they’d found sexually assaulted, her naked body dumped. He knew the pain of losing his wife, but to lose your daughter-to evil, to darkness.

And this creep is still out there.

Time was slipping by them.

Why these five? Why did he select them?

Tanner echoed the question the reporter Mark Harding had asked: “What did a waitress, a hooker, an accountant, an actress and a writer, all have in common with their killer?”

Again, Tanner went back to the six-month rule. What had each woman done in the last six months of her life? Where had she gone? Who had she seen? What did she do? Was it something common in all five cases? He’d flipped through pages and pages of notes detectives had made in working with the family members and loved ones. Notes, journals and logs on routines, appointments and activities.

Then he cross-checked them through the database, searching for a common thread, almost willing one to appear.

Again, he found nothing.

All of the women had jobs, all had routines, friends, social circles that had been investigated extensively.

All had traveled in the last six months of their lives.

Traveled?

Tanner paused. Thinking.

Now that was an angle he hadn’t pursued deeply.

Where did they travel? He reached for the files. A charter group? That would be a common factor. Flipping through the files, he saw that Bonnie Bradford had made a few trips to New York to talk to a literary agent. Monique Wilson had visited Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia so many times for her accounting firm, she got to know some of the airline crew, her sister had noted. Then there was Fay Lynne Millwood; she’d gone to Denver for a conference. Esther Fatima Lopez had gone to Las Vegas and Atlantic City to work. Leeza Meadows had flown to Boston to visit a friend in college.

All had flown but not with a charter group. The common link couldn’t be travel, Tanner thought as his phone rang. The distraction caused him to pass over the name of the airline listed in each file and the fact that at one time or another, each of the women had flown with the same airline.