Cold Hit

Chapter 42

Alexa arrived at a little past five that afternoon. The sun was already down as she walked into my hospital room and kissed me on the lips, letting the moment linger before pulling me close and gingerly hugging me. Then she looked over and saw Judd Underwood's book on the nightstand.

"You're reading this?" She seemed surprised as she picked it up.

"Just finished it," I said.

She thumbed through a few pages before setting it back down.

"I thought you said he was a jerk."

"Actually, there's a lot of good stuff in there."

She settled in the chair beside the bed and took my hand. "Okay, let's hear it. Something's on your mind." I took a moment to gather my thoughts. "I need to know what's going on with Zack," I said.

"Nothing. He's in the wind. Of course, after what he did to you he's probably dust on the LAPD. We could file on him for assault with attempt to commit and battery against a police officer, but for that to stick, you'd have to be willing to press charges and testify. Knowing you, I'm guessing you won't."

I nodded my head.

"So that train probably doesn't get out of the station," she said. "It'll still have to go to the Bureau of Professional Standards. But so far, all we've got is a psychologically distressed cop who went momentarily nuts, knocked you in the head, and split. Since he was legally committed here by his wife, there's some monetary and civil complaint issues, but that's it."

I nodded. I was reluctant to get started because once I did there was probably no turning back. She sensed my hesitancy and pressed me gently.

"Where Zack went isn't what's bothering you. I can't help if you won't tell me."

"Some of this is theory, some just guesswork. So if you go proactive on me before I get this completely straight in my mind, then there's a good chance it's going to ruin what's left of Zack's life, 'cause I could be completely wrong."

"Shane, stop dodging. What is it?"

"Okay, but you won't like it."

She let go of my hand to pull an LAPD detective's notebook out of her purse.

"It starts with an old open homicide that Zack was working before we partnered," I began. "We agreed to handle all of our prior cases separately, but he told me about this open murder case the first week we teamed up.

Alexa started making notes.

"The victim was a woman named Arden Rolaine. She was clubbed to death with a brass candlestick in her house in Van Nuys back on June third of this year. Zack and Van Kelsey caught. The squeal. The one-eightyseven was sent to our division because she used to be in a singing group called The Lamp Street Singers, and it got classified as a celebrity homicide."

"Let me jump ahead," Alexa said. "You're about to tell me Arden and Vaughn Rolaine were related." Writing it down as she said it.

"Brother and sister." I took another deep breath. "Arden had some substantial money saved up from her music career, but Zack and Van never found any of it after she died."

"And you think it was under her mattress or buried in a fruit jar in the backyard. The doer beat it out of her, dug it up, and took it."

"Yes. Zack's prime suspect in that murder was Arden's brother Vaughn. He was homeless, but was always coming around and mooching money from his sister. Finally, she got tired of it and told him to buzz off. Zack's theory was Vaughn got pissed and came back in early June to burgle her place. She surprised him. He smacked her around, got her to give up the dough, and then put her down with the candlestick."

"Pretty straightforward," Alexa said.

"What's troubling me is how Vaughn Rolaine could be the prime suspect in one of Zack's murders last June, and then turn up as the first dead body on the Fingertip case this December."

"A little coincidental, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but not impossible, I guess."

She nodded and finished writing that down.

"The Arden Rolaine murder book is a mess," I continued. "Zack didn't organize anything. Maybe because by then the spark was out and he'd stopped trying, or maybe it was all unfiled because he never planned on solving it. I was going through the binder, getting it in shape before giving it to Underwood and I came across this margin notation: 'Re-interview VR, on timeline for June third.' Zack told me he never spoke to Vaughn Rolaine. Couldn't find him. They never met."

"Then how could he be re-interviewed?"

"He couldn't. Just before he jumped me, I asked Zack if it was his casebook shorthand for something else, like Victim's Relative. He couldn't remember at first, then changed his mind and told me that, on second thought, that's what it stood for." I waited for her to finish writing and look up. "How long you been a cop?" I asked.

"Seventeen years."

"If you use shorthand in case notes, you think you'd ever forget what your abbreviations stood for?"

She shook her head.

"Me neither. So if VR doesn't stand for victim's relative, then it probably stands for Vaughn Rolaine, and that means Zack talked to him once before and was lying to me. Zack said he couldn't find Vaughn because he moved around a lot. But the homeless people we talked to in Sherman Oaks Park two days ago, said he was a fixture down there. So which is it?"

"Where's this going?" She stopped writing.

"I don't have a shred of evidence for this. It's all total speculation, but I keep wondering if it's possible that Zack was the one who killed Vaughn Rolaine. It's the only construct I can come up with where all of these coincidences line up and make sense."

"What's his motive?"

"The missing money. Arden's recording industry dough. His case notes say he and Van couldn't find it in any bank accounts of hers, no safety deposit boxes. According to Zack's theory, Vaughn forced his sister to tell him where it was before he killed her. So if her little brother found it and took off with it, then maybe Vaughn buried it in the park somewhere."

"And you think Zack waited four or five months until Arden Rolaine's case cooled down and then went after it."

"His divorce probably helped determine the timetable, but yeah, that's what I'm wondering. Zack goes to the park, drags Vaughn up into the foothills, stuffs a rag in his mouth and clips off the guy's fingers to get him to talk, ends up killing him. Zack's a cop. He'd know clipping off the fingertips and moving the body to the L. A. River would bitch up our investigation. With no fingerprints, there'd be nothing connecting him to the case, 'cause we'd never ID the body. And we almost didn't."

Alexa blew out a long breath. "If your theory has him catching the Vaughn Rolaine murder himself so he could control the spin on the investigation, then the big question is how did he set it up so you two would get the case?"

"The night we found the body in the L. A. River was a Friday. That previous afternoon, Zack and I moved to the top of the murder board. We knew we'd get the next one-eighty-seven. We even went home early to get some sleep. Zack would have known those mutilations would get the case sent to Homicide Special where we were on deck. He left Parker Center at four o'clock Friday afternoon. That gave him plenty of time to find Vaughn, torture him, get the money, and do the murder. That first body was easy to see from the river bank, so he knew it would be found quickly. He also knew we'd probably catch the squeal because, as the killer, he had control of the timetable.

Alexa was still frowning as she made a few more notes.

I picked up Agent Orange's book and handed it to her. "According to Underwood, stress is the big precipitator for serial murder. The big stressors are marital, financial, and work related. Zack hits bars and stars on all three.

"When we got to Vaughn Rolaine's body it was midnight, and while we were waiting for the MEs, I remember looking into Zack's car, and seeing that he was crying. Later he told me that Fran had thrown him out on Thursday and asked for a divorce."

"And you think that's what snapped him," Alexa said. "He's lost his marriage; he knows the divorce will bankrupt him, so he goes to see Vaughn Rolaine to get the stolen money. Starts chopping off fingers, and kills him in a rage."

I nodded.

"What else?"

"Well, lots of stuff. None of it alone is very earthshaking, until you add it all up."

I retrieved Motor City Monster from her, opened it to a chapter entitled "Antecedent Behaviors in Criminal Profiling," and then gave it back.

"According to this book, the first murder done by most serial killers is close to home. Underwood calls it killing in the comfort zone. Zack and I worked for two years in the West Valley. That area was definitely in his comfort zone."

She was writing again.

"After the unsub kills Vaughn, he goes postal. All the latent rage from his childhood comes out, the signature elements of the murder. He carves the Medic symbol on the chest-all the other postoffense behaviors. If these victims are father substitutes, he covers up the vic's eyes so his dead father won't stare at him. That chapter you're looking at is about parental abuse and the early psychological factors that help form serial criminals. Parents play a big role. If his father sodomized him or abused him physically, that could be a huge factor. If his dad was a medic in Nam, that explains the symbol on the chest.

"Zack told me a few days ago, when I was driving him to his brother's, that he wished his father hadn't done something. I asked him what, and he wouldn't say, but said something about not being in control of his destiny. That his actions were written in his DNA long before he was born."

"And you think that's why he's killing father substitutes?"

I nodded. "According to Underwood, most serial killers vacillate between extreme egotism and feelings of inferiority and self-contempt. They're not in control of their lives or emotions, so they crave control in the commission of their murders and often look for jobs that give them a sense of authority."

"Like a cop," Alexa said.

"Exactly. There's a thing Underwood calls the sociopathic or homicidal triad. It includes bed-wetting, violence against animals or small children, and fire starting. This book says if two of those three conditions are present, you're heading for big trouble. They're often precursors to serial crime. His psych evaluator hinted that Zack used to be a bed-wetter and I found out that he ran over the family dog the week after Fran threw him out."

She was just looking at me now, her notepad forgotten on her lap.

"Stress plus rage equals blitz kills," I said. "The doctor psychoanalyzed Zack for two days and said he appeared to be a cognitive disassociative personality, incapable of having relationships. He also said Zack might be a narcissist. According to Underwood's book, that's a pretty classic mindset for a homicidal sociopath."

"You want my opinion, Shane?"

"Of course. It's why I'm telling you all this." "Okay, let's take your points one at a time."

She looked down at her notes. " 'Re-interview VR' could stand for re-interview victim's relatives as you suggested, and Zack was so drunk, he simply forgot. But it could also stand for half a dozen other things. To name a few, it could mean 'Re-interview victim's Realtor,' or 'victim's rapist' if she had a prior sexual assault. You've still got some back-checking to do on that."

She kept her eyes on her notes. "Forgetting for a moment that huge leap you just made that Zack's dad was a corpsman in Nam, let's just deal with natural probabilities." She paused, then asked, "How many of the homeless men in the West Valley would be Vietnam vets?"

"I don't know."

"Ten percent?"

"Maybe."

"That makes the odds of our unsub killing a vet about ten to one. So far, we've only identified three. It's not impossible that it's a coincidence they're all vets."

"I guess you're right," I said. "But I don't think it's a coincidence. How could that be?"

"I don't know. I'm just playing defense here. Putting in the exculpatory evidence." She consulted her notes again. "If Zack was planning on stealing Arden Rolaine's money, why would he include the fact that it was missing in his case notes? Wouldn't it be smarter to just leave out that fact all together?"

"Van Kelsey was his partner. How could he leave it out?"

"Yeah, but Van Kelsey retired well before Vaughn Rolaine was murdered. Zack could have easily gone back and removed that material from the Arden Rolaine case files. But he didn't. Why?"

She had a point.

"Then there's the whole question of Davide Andrazack," she continued. "You don't really believe Zack killed Andrazack, right?"

"That's right. It was a political assassination."

"We've completed our computer sweep of the Glass House and none of the bugs we found in the police department was on computers that included Fingertip case information or a description of the chest mutilation. That means it's still possible that Andrazack was killed by the Fingertip unsub and that it wasn't a political assassination. So, which is it?"

I didn't know. "What about the polygraphs the chief was doing on the ESD techs?" I said. "If we could find out who planted those bugs, maybe we could roll him."

"Nothing yet," she said.

"What about the medical examiner's computers?" "Still checking, but so far they're clean."

Alexa was slowly shooting down my entire framework.

"So you think I'm nuts."

"No, I'm just showing you some holes in your theory. So far, you have nothing that directly ties Zack to any of these murders. It's just intriguing speculation. You better find some evidence if you want a municipal judge to write an arrest warrant."

"Alexa, believe me, I don't want this to be true. It might just be a lot of coincidences, but don't we need to find out?"

"What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Zack lived in Tampa as a kid. Contact the police department there and find out if they have a record on him. You might have to get somebody to unseal a juvenile record if he had one. Next, we need to find out, Was he a loner? Did he beat up younger kids? Did he kill or torture pets? Was his father a medic in Vietnam? You know the questions to ask, but we have to keep this strictly to ourselves. If we're wrong and it gets out, it could destroy what's left of him."

Alexa closed her book and frowned. "Of course, you know, either way this turns out, we're gonna end up being wrong."