Double Cross

Chapter 72

“GODDAMN HIM TO HELL!” Sampson said in an angry voice that he managed to keep under his breath. “That son-ofabitch! That miserable fucker!”

As homicide scenes go, this one was particularly obscene and troubling. This was a place where families went to be entertained. The IMAX theater had soaring walls, textured only with directional lighting. The rows of high-backed seats were steeply raked in a concave arch across the auditorium, like a modern take on an old medical-lecture theater-right down to the cadaver, right?

The victim had apparently been killed near the base of the five-story-high movie screen. That seemed odd to me, but it was the advance word we’d gotten from Gil Cook, and no one else was questioning it so far. I probably shouldn’t have either. Not yet.

The poor woman’s body lay faceup now. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and even from a distance, I could see silver duct tape wrapped across her mouth. Just like at the Riverwalk. I also spotted a wedding band on her hand.

As I got closer, I saw that the tape was stained dark over her lips where blood had been unable to escape. Probably after internal injuries. Mrs. Courlevais’s white dress was discolored and looked rusty brown all over. She’d obviously been stabbed… repeatedly.

Next to the mutilated body was an oversize canvas rucksack. There were metal grommets around the top. The sack was laced with a thick cord, presumably for tying it closed.

Another present from DCAK? Another clue for us to follow nowhere?

More bloodstains and several perforations showed me what I already knew instinctively, that the victim had been stabbed inside the sack. The vicious killer had left Abby Courlevais in there, either dead or dying. The EMTs had taken her out in hopes of reviving her, but it was obviously too late.

When I lifted the empty bag to look for markings, I found U.S. POSTAL SERVICE and a long string of numbers stenciled on the side in faded black letters.

So was this the latest calling card? Had to be. But what was it supposed to mean? What was DCAK saying to us this time? And was this murder committed by him or possibly his copycat?

Witness accounts had already described a blue uniform and cap on the killer. Maybe that was DCAK’s version of an in-joke-he’d “gone postal” on us. He had also left us “holding the bag.”

I walked to the far side of the floor, near the entrance the killer had used to come in. From here, I tried to imagine the events as Detective Cook had described them. The killer had needed to catch Mrs. Courlevais unaware-long enough to bind her hands and mouth-and to get the cloth bag over her head. A mat of dried blood in her hair indicated some kind of blunt trauma but probably not enough to knock her out. Conscious would be better, anyway. More effective for DCAK’s purposes, for the theater of it.

And, in fact, witnesses had seen the bag moving when he’d dragged it into the theater.

I walked back to the woman’s body again and looked around at the empty auditorium. This audience was closer to him than any of the others had been, so he’d needed to work quickly. No time for lengthy speeches or the usual sickening grandstanding. He hadn’t been able to make a full star turn tonight. So what had been so attractive about this particular location, this audience, this French woman?

The impact seemed to have been mostly visual. He’d shouted, “Special delivery!” and then got right to it-half a dozen vicious swings with a blade large enough to be seen from the theater’s back row.

I looked down at Mrs. Courlevais, then back at the empty sack next to her.

Suddenly, another angle occurred to me. What else might be tucked inside there? Was there something else in the mail sack?

I worked the bag open, dreading what I might find. Finally my hand touched a flat piece of plastic. Something was definitely there. What?

I pulled the object out. What the hell? It was a postal worker’s ID. A second photo had been pasted over the original. The name was changed too. It said Stanley Chasen.

The image on the ID was a match to the preliminary description we’d gotten: elderly white man, possibly in his seventies, silver hair, bulbous nose, horn-rimmed glasses. Heavyset and tall.

“Who’s Stanley Chasen?” Sampson asked.

“Probably nobody,” I said. Then it hit me. I knew what he was doing-I was thinking like him, and not liking the feeling. “It’s a figment of this sick bastard’s imagination. He’s creating characters, then he’s playing them, one at a time. And all the characters inside his head are killers.”

And… what? He wants us to catch them all?