Deadly Pursuit

3

At eight-fifteen on Saturday morning, a tenant of Saguaro Terraces was unlocking his Jeep Cherokee in the carport when he noticed the ceiling light in a Toyota Paseo glowing dimly, the passenger-side door slightly ajar.

He found a young woman lying in the driver’s seat, which had been levered back to a nearly horizontal position. Her dress had been lifted above her hips, her panties shredded.

“Miss?”

He rapped on the windshield and, when that failed to rouse her, reached through the open window and shook her gently.

She listed sideways in her seat, her pretty face turning toward him as her head rolled. Through a net of blond hair, her eyes stared at him and through him, their blue gaze fixed on death.

After that, things happened very fast.

Phoenix P.D. was on the scene by 8:27. A senior homicide investigator, Detective Robert Ashe, arrived soon afterward. Examining the body with gloved hands, he found the needle mark at the side of the throat.

Ashe was a twenty-year veteran, eligible for a full pension and thinking seriously about taking it, but he was still conscientious enough to read the bulletins that crossed his desk. He recognized the pattern.

“Better call the feds,” he told the watch commander.

It was nine-fifteen by then, and already Phoenix was getting hot.

Two special agents from the Denver field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were on the ground at Sky Harbor Airport three hours later. A Phoenix agent met them at the flight gate and introduced himself as Ramon Pena.

“I’m Peter Lovejoy.” The tall, pale Denver agent shook Pena’s hand and sneezed. “Don’t worry. Nothing catching. Only allergies.”

Tension and fatigue were recorded on Lovejoy’s thin face. His high forehead was prematurely lined, his eyes tired and angry. It was obvious that the long investigation had worn him down.

“You’ll like Phoenix,” Pena said, trying for a light note. “Whole environment is hypoallergenic.”

Lovejoy’s partner smiled. “Don’t count on it. Peter’s nose has the extraordinary ability to sniff out individual pollen grains five hundred miles away.”

She said it with affection, but Lovejoy looked nettled anyway. “Possibly a slight exaggeration,” he muttered, then blew wetly into a crumpled Kleenex.

Pena wasn’t looking at him. The woman held his attention now. She was slender and poised, her skin the color of dark rum, her brown hair close-cropped in a skull-tight Afro. The sculptured planes of her face captured a regal quality that made him think of carved likenesses on ancient monuments.

He supposed she must be worn out, too, and as frustrated as her partner, but she didn’t show it. Though she wore the Bureau’s trademark navy blue jacket, white shirt, and beige slacks, she conveyed the austere glamour of a model on a fashion runway.

“I’m Tamara Moore,” she said as they started hiking down the concourse.

“Tamara, huh? Nice name.”

“I’ve been told it means ‘date palm.’”

“A date palm in the desert. You’ll fit right in.”

Moore smiled, and Lovejoy sneezed again.

Guiding the government sedan onto 1-17 with the air conditioner on high, Pena asked how long they’d been after Mister Twister.

“Eight months,” Lovejoy answered. “Since he did a girl in Denver.”

“How’d the Denver office get involved in a homicide?”

“The victim’s body was dumped on Trail Ridge road in the Rocky Mountain National Forest. Federal jurisdiction.”

“And you tied it to some earlier murders?”

“Yes.” Lovejoy honked into a tissue. “In our judgment, there were two relevant unsolved homicides, one in San Antonio, the other in Albuquerque. Each case was handled locally, and nobody’d made the connection.”

“What is the connection? What pattern do you look for?”

“Within certain parameters, he follows the same M.O. each time. Bar pickup, lethal injection in the neck. Always on a weekend-Friday or Saturday night. And always the same victim profile: attractive woman, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, blue eyes, blond hair, fair complexion, slender build.”

Pena caught a strong whiff of the bureaucrat’s cover-your-ass mentality in Lovejoy’s answers. In our judgment… within certain parameters…

This guy will go far, he thought with a mixture of amusement and bitterness. “So there’ve been three victims since?”

This time Moore answered. “Not counting the latest one. Las Vegas, Dallas, San Diego. Add Phoenix to the list, and you’ve got seven in all.”

“He keeps busy, doesn’t he?”

“Too damn busy. Murder is a compulsion for him. He won’t stop till he’s caught or killed.”

No equivocations or qualifications for her. She was a straight-shooter.

“Guess you’ve got a lot of people working this thing,” Pena said.

“Over sixty law enforcement agents full-time. It’s a multijurisdictional task force, and somehow we wound up in charge. Well, actually Peter did.”

Lovejoy shrugged. “I had seniority, so the Denver SAC made me task force leader. But from my perspective, Tamara and I are functioning as equals. We share the work and the responsibility.”

And the blame if anything goes wrong, Pena thought. Aloud, he said, “I’m surprised the Denver SAC didn’t take over the task force himself.” A special-agent-in-charge normally grabbed the high-profile assignments for himself.

“He might have wanted to.” With effort Lovejoy stifled a sneeze. “Initially they unloaded the case on a couple of street agents-that is to say, us-because they thought it was just another random homicide that would never be solved. Once we detected what appeared to be a pattern, we were in too deep to be pulled off.”

“Lucky you.” Pena had one more question. “Where did his name come from? Mister Twister?”

“Not our idea,” Moore said. “Officially he’s the Trail Ridge Killer. But that’s not sexy enough for the media. There’s a line in a song-something about a Mister Twister. How loving him is like embracing a whirlwind; he destroys everything he touches. Must have struck someone as an appropriate image, and it just caught on.”

“Well,” Pena said as he found the Central Avenue off-ramp, “this guy’s sure as hell been cutting a swath of destruction across the great Southwest. And we usually don’t get twisters around here.”

On Veronica Tyler’s neck, near the puncture wound, the M.E. found a few droplets of clear fluid that must have spurted from the syringe. Serological analysis identified it as a 9.25 % solution of hydrogen chloride in water, with traces of n-alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride and n-alkyl dimethyl ethyl-benzyl ammonium chloride.

“The same stuff used in the other six killings,” Moore said, putting down a faxed copy of the serology report. She had just looked at the crime-scene photos of Veronica Tyler, and for some reason she found it difficult to hold her voice steady. “The details of the injection were never made public in any of the cases. This is the real thing-no copycat.”

Nobody had expected a copycat anyway. The murder was right on schedule for Mister Twister. Seven victims in fourteen months. A new corpse every eight or nine weeks. Always on a weekend. Reliable as clockwork.

Detective Ashe studied the report, smoothing out the flimsy fax paper with one hand. “Hydrogen chloride. Is that like hydrochloric acid?”

“In a more diluted form.”

“Something he mixes up himself?”

Moore shook her head. “It’s toilet-bowl cleaner. A commercially available brand. Highly corrosive. He shoots it into the carotid artery, straight to the brain.”

“I guess that’s one way to think clean thoughts,” cracked a homicide cop, and the other detectives in the squad room, men in rumpled brown suits and loosened neckties, laughed nervously.

The Phoenix SAC, a silver-haired man named Gifford, shifted in his seat. “Is this stuff distributed nationally?”

Lovejoy nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. There’s no hope of tracking the purchase. The manufacturer reports moving thirty thousand units a day.”

“What about the syringe? You can’t just walk into a store and buy one, can you?”

“Under normal circumstances, no. Syringes are prescription items. There was some preliminary speculation that our man could be a doctor, but the M.E.’s who’ve done the postmortems don’t think so. He shows no unusual skill or knowledge in the placement of the needle. Possibly he’s an orderly or he works at a medical-supply firm.”

“Of course,” Moore added, “anybody can obtain needles on the street.” She’d seen enough of that in her childhood years.

Gifford frowned. “Dead end.” He seemed about to say something more when Ashe’s phone shrilled.

The desk sergeant transferring the call said there was a guy on the line who seemed to know something about the Tyler case. Ashe put him on speaker.

“Detective? Name’s Wallace Stargill. Call me Wally.” His voice, coming over the cheap speaker, had a hollow sound. “I tend bar over at the Lazy Eight on Second Street. Think I saw that girl in here last night.”

By this time Veronica Tyler’s family had been notified of her death, and her most recent photo had been released to the local media.

“Okay, Wally,” Ashe said, nicely composed. “You pretty sure it was her?”

“Yeah, damn sure.”

“Was she with anyone?”

“This guy. I mean, she was by herself at first, and then he sat down next to her. Seemed to be coming on pretty strong.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Not too good. It was crowded in there. The girl I noticed; she was a looker. As for the guy-I don’t know. He was dressed nice, I remember that.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the bar. I’m just opening up. Saw the report on TV while I was getting the kitchen ready for Julio.”

“Who’s Julio?”

“Substitute dishwasher. Our regular guy, Pedro, came down with the flu last night and had to go home early. Got a mess of dirty glasses here.”

Moore was out of her seat. “Tell him not to wash anything. We’ll be right over.”

The bar had a friendless, disconsolate quality in daytime. Upended chairs rested on rows of tables. Sunlight struggled through high, frosted windows. The smell of stale booze hung over the place like the odor of disinfectant in a morgue.

There was a kitchen at the rear where the overworked waitresses had deposited trays of used glasses. “Slow nights, I wash ’em myself,” Wally Stargill said to the small mob of agents and cops crowding in for a look. He was a tall, laconic man, his fleshy forearms crossed awkwardly over a spreading gut. “But Fridays and Saturdays are crazy here.”

“Crazy,” Gifford echoed, perhaps thinking of Veronica Tyler with an ampule of toilet cleaner in her neck.

Moore asked if the victim and the man who’d picked her up had left before or after Pedro went home.

“After.”

“So the glasses they used weren’t washed?”

“Probably not, unless I cleaned them in the sink under the bar. Like I said, I do that when we’re not too busy. Last night I doubt I got a chance.”

Moore pointed at the rows of glasses. Only Lovejoy knew her well enough to see that she was worked up. “He handled one of those.”

Ashe frowned. “What are you going to do? Print them all?”

“Right.”

“You serious?”

“Sure am.”

“There must be three hundred glasses here.”

“Then we’ll print three hundred glasses.”

Lovejoy cleared his throat, a tentative sound. “Conceivably we can narrow it down.” He turned to the bartender. “You happen to recall what the man was drinking?”

Stargill thought for a moment. “Beefeater on the rocks.”

“You’re certain?”

“Oh, yeah.” A sheepish smile. “I never forget a drink.”

“So it was a lowball glass,” Gifford said.

“That’s how we serve ’em.”

Lovejoy coughed again. “There would appear to be no more than thirty or forty of those.”

“All of a sudden this sounds a lot more practical,” Ashe said. “Got to warn you, though, our lab is pretty backed up. Staff cutbacks. You know the story.”

“Possibly we can requisition some help, expedite the process.” Lovejoy sneezed. “Damn. I hate this climate.”

“You hate all climates,” Moore said briskly. “Come on, let’s talk to I.D. Wally, may we use your phone?”

Identification Division flew in the Latent Fingerprints section chief, Paul Collins, to assist the Phoenix P.D. crime lab in the tedious procedure.

Collins, an East Coast native who thought of Arizona as cow country and the local constabulary as rubes, was pleasantly astonished to find an argon laser at his disposal, along with cyanoacrylate fuming cabinets, iodine fume guns, and gentian violet baths. By the end of the assignment, he was humming “My Darling Clementine” and considering retirement in the Grand Canyon State.

One hundred forty-six latents were recovered. It took three days to run cold searches on them all, using a modem link between the Phoenix P.D. computer and the FBI’s FINDER system, a database of eighty-three million prints. FINDER did the gross preliminary work, but the final, subtle matching had to be done by visual comparison, a time-consuming process.

Lovejoy and Moore stayed busy while the print searches progressed. Lovejoy flew home to brief the Denver SAC and wound up in a conference call with a deputy director and the Behavioral Science section chief. He appeased the media with a thirty-minute briefing in which he conveyed the impression of speaking substantively while actually saying nothing at all. He made no mention of the massive fingerprinting procedure already well underway.

Moore read a transcript of the news conference and felt a familiar blend of irritation and bemusement. She knew that Peter was good at what he did, a competent agent and a decent man, but he was too willing to play the game on others’ terms, to stifle his own personality in a numbing quest for blandness. Fundamentally he was weak, crippled by insecurity; and a hard life had taught her to despise softness of any kind.

In Phoenix she kept the other members of the task force updated by phone, fax, and e-mail. She was dealing with police departments in three cities, sheriff’s offices in three counties, and the FBI field office in each of the states where a killing had occurred. The logistics were maddening.

Most of the effort was wasted anyhow. So far there was little news to report, as she informed Lovejoy when he called. “Ashe’s people interviewed the two waitresses at the bar; they don’t remember Veronica or her date. Her car has been dusted. Smooth glove prints on the passenger-side door handle.”

“Evidently he wore gloves, as usual.” Exhaustion dragged Lovejoy’s voice down.

“Of course he did. There were some viable latents in the car that don’t belong to the deceased. For elimination purposes Phoenix P.D. is printing Veronica’s friends, neighbors, coworkers, anyone who might have ridden with her. But we both know he doesn’t leave prints.”

“How about the autopsy protocols?”

“Just delivered. No sign of anal or oral intercourse, but penile-vaginal contact is certain. Penetration was postmortem and rough. No semen was found; he’s careful, used a condom.”

“As usual,” Lovejoy said again. “He doesn’t seem to give us much to go on, does he?”

“You got that right.”

“Well”-Lovejoy tried to sound hopeful-“possibly the bar angle will pan out.”

“Speaking of which, Wally Stargill spent two hours with an Identikit artist and gave us a vague but not totally useless sketch.”

“I know. I received the fax. But Drury wants to keep it out of the media for now. If the prints don’t come through, we’ll probably have to release it. Until then, the policy is to indicate no hint of any progress,

nothing to make him cut and run. Have to go, my other line’s buzzing. I expect to be back in Phoenix tomorrow, first thing in the A.M.”

“Stay healthy.”

Lovejoy sneezed. “Easy for you to say.”

Each night Tamara caught a few hours of troubled sleep in her hotel room. When bad dreams woke her-dreams of a man with a honey-smooth voice and a vial of poison in his pocket-she would stand on the balcony, gazing at the downtown skyline under a canopy of stars.

There had been no stars above the Oakland slums where she was raised. No men with poison either-at least not Mister Twister’s kind of poison. Other varieties were easy enough to come by. She saw friends try some and get hooked, saw conscientious students become burnouts and bums. Every day meant running a gauntlet of proffered drugs. It took a heroic effort just to stay clean.

Her looks didn’t help. The other girls envied her, called her Miss America and Charlie’s Angel; but Tamara passed many angry hours wishing she had been born plain. Her face and figure made her an irresistible object of seduction for every strutting gangbanger, every pimp or aspiring pimp plying fantasies of a modeling career, and every one of her mother’s boyfriends-men who could barely wait for Doreen Moore to leave the room before hitting on her daughter.

At night, through the cellophane-thin bedroom wall, she would hear her mom and her current paramour shaking the mattress springs and grunting; and she would wonder if the man was thinking of sweet little Tamara as he did it, if it was her breasts he imagined himself kissing, her legs that were spread for him in invitation. Even the thought of it would leave her dizzy with nausea.

She survived, though. Fought off the pushers and pimps and priapic older men, graduated as class valedictorian, attended U.C. Irvine on a full scholarship, and ended up somehow at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, learning to be a G-man or a G-woman or whatever the hell she was.

Tamara sighed. The dry, balmy night air brushed her cheeks and reminded her of how far she’d come from Oakland. No chill morning fog creeping in off the bay to carpet the littered streets in a shimmering ground cover, not here. This was the desert, an environment alien to her, a Martian waste of leafless plants and chalk-dry riverbeds, flat and arid and brutally hot. Not her sort of place, but there were some who loved it.

Had Ronni Tyler been one of them? Had she awakened at night to study the stars, or risen before dawn to watch the pink glow of sunrise brighten the encircling mountains?

Ronni’s roommate, interviewed by the police and FBI on the day of her return from Santa Fe, had said something funny about her friend. “Ronni-cripes, she was just a small-town girl at heart, but she didn’t know it. She kept looking for something more, something bigger, better, than what she had. That was the thing with her. There always had to be something better… somewhere.”

Tamara had known the same need. Huddled under her blankets in her mom’s apartment in the projects, listening to the rattle and squeak of the bed next door, she had made herself believe that there was something better somewhere. That there had to be.

She had found it, too. An exciting life, a job that challenged and satisfied.

But Ronni Tyler hadn’t made it that far. Now she never would.

Alone on the balcony, unseen in the dark, Tamara cried a little, in memory of a woman she had never met, in mourning for a stranger.

She cried, and the thirsty air licked the dampness from her cheeks.

“Collins just called,” Lovejoy reported as Moore walked into their borrowed office on the morning of the fourth day. They were encamped in a hastily furnished storage room in the FBI’s Phoenix field office. Photos of the President and the Director gazed down on them, one smiling, the other stern.

She tossed her purse on the chipped Formica desk top and tried her best to be calm. “Search over?”

“As of approximately an hour ago.”

“Results?”

“Thirteen hits.” Lovejoy consulted his scrawled notes. “Four are women. Of the nine men, six would seem to be disqualified because of age, race, or body build. In all probability, the bartender’s description rules them out.”

“The remaining three?” She heard the excitement in her voice, straining against the short leash of her self-control.

“Michael Benjamin Garrett, resident of Scottsdale, one arrest for reckless driving.”

She shook her head. “Unlikely, since he’s a local. Our man travels.”

“Noted. Paul Thomas Squire, Chicago, two arrests on battery charges.”

“Interesting.”

Could it be him? Could Paul Thomas Squire be Mister Twister? Could the nightmare have ended at last?

“They were bar fights,” Lovejoy said slowly. “He would appear to be a brawler.”

Her brief enthusiasm failed. “That’s not how I see our guy. Not how Behavioral Science profiled him, either. He’s slick, polished, not some bruiser spoiling for a fight.”

“I’m inclined to agree. Still, we’ll have Chicago check him out.”

“Sure.” Moore had already dismissed Squire from her mind. “Who’s last?”

“John Edward Dance. L.A. No violent crimes on his rap sheet, just three arrests for fraud.”

“What kind of fraud?”

“Telemarketing, some kind of home-equity con, and a bank-examiner scam. He did time for the last one. Beat the rap on the other two. He-”

Moore shut her eyes, drew a sharp breath, felt the sudden violent trembling of her body.

“That’s him,” she whispered.

“Do you think so?” Lovejoy frowned at his notes. “I don’t know. There’s no sexual assault, no indication of homicidal tendencies.”

He was missing the point. Good Lord, how could he be so close to it and not see?

“Peter, the man is a con artist.” She rushed the words out, impatient to give form to her thoughts. “Don’t you get it? He’s a smooth talker. A manipulator. A Don Juan. The kind of guy who’d be good at picking up women in bars.”

“A lady-killer,” Lovejoy said thoughtfully. “Perhaps… literally.”

“No perhaps. No doubt about it.” Moore paced the narrow office, tremors shaking her thin shoulders. “He cons women the same way he cons the marks in his bunco games. Charm and phony self-confidence. A pose that a girl like Ronni Tyler would fall for. He sells himself. He’s good at it. That’s how he gets people to empty their bank accounts for him. And it’s how he gets beautiful blonds to take him home.”

“You’re awfully certain about this.”

“Damn straight I am.” She heard herself laughing, a wild, ecstatic sound. “Come on, Peter! Get pumped, will you? Mister Twister is history. We got him. We nailed the son of a bitch!”