Midnight Rambler

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The next hour passed in a blur. I left the Skell file at the Sheriff 's Department headquarters along with an IOU for three hundred bucks for Russo. Back at my office, I hung the copies of the victims' photographs and spread the copied files on the floor, just as they were before. Carmella's photo gave me pause, and I wondered if the body in her sister's backyard had been identified as hers. I supposed I'd find out like everyone else-from the TV.

Then I drove to the Sunset. I needed to jump into the ocean and wash away the scene at Claire's. Of all the rotten things that had happened to me recently, getting eighty-sixed from a crummy sandwich shop had been the most humiliating.

Parking in the Sunset's lot I remembered the transmitter attached to my gas tank. Whoever had put it there was probably still tailing me. I pulled the device free and walked down to the shoreline. Before I could throw it into the ocean, a black 4Runner pulled into the lot and parked beside my car. The FBI agent I'd roughed up earlier got out and came toward me.

The agent stopped when he was fifteen feet away. The first thing I noticed about him were his eyes. They were sad-looking and matched the gunmetal of his close-cropped hair. I pointed at Buster, who stood protectively by my side.

“He isn't friendly,” I said.

“Neither's his owner,” the FBI agent said.

He said this in a good-natured way. I told Buster to heel and showed the agent the transmitter.

“Looking for this?” I asked.

“What is it?”

“An electronic transmitter. Someone stuck it beneath my car.”

“Not me,” he said.

I heaved the transmitter into the ocean. Then I peeled off my clothes until I was standing in my underwear. My regard for the law had changed since my departure from the force, and I wasn't going to let this guy stop me from taking my swim.

“Jack, I need to talk to you,” the FBI agent said.

“That's nice,” I replied.

“Do you know who I am?”

“No, should I?”

He took out his wallet and showed me his credentials. Special Agent Ken Linderman, Quantico, Virginia. I'd heard of him. Linderman was the only living agent to receive the FBI Director's Award for Special Achievement for his accomplishments in hunting serial killers. Five years earlier, his daughter had vanished while jogging near the University of Miami, and it was no secret that he'd been hunting for her ever since.

“I'll be right back,” I said, and dove into the water.

Ten minutes later my mood had lifted, and I swam back to shore. Linderman sat in the sand, making nice with my dog. Standing in front of him, I let myself drip dry.

“What brings you to sunny Florida?” I asked.

“I moved to Miami six weeks ago,” he explained. “I'm running the Bureau's Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Teams throughout the state.”

I'd worked with plenty of CARD teams. The FBI had established them to deal with the overwhelming number of child abductions throughout the country. Each team had four members: two field agents supported by two profilers from the Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico.

“Is there someplace we can talk in private?” Linderman asked.

“Do you want to interrogate me?”

“Actually, I was hoping we could share information about Simon Skell.”

I felt myself stiffen. Linderman had dug up new evidence. That was why he'd tracked me down. I wanted to kick myself.

“How about my office?” I suggested.

“Your office it is,” Linderman said.

He followed me to Tugboat Louie's. My office was dark, and I opened the blinds and flipped on the overhead lights. He instinctively went to the wall where the victims' photographs hung and studied them. I went to Kumar's office and got another chair. When I returned, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, poring through the Skell file.

“Feel free to look around,” I said.

He looked up, embarrassed.

“Sorry. I should have asked.”

“That's okay,” I said.

He spent several minutes with the file. Knowing he had lost a child made me see him in a different light. I listened to the music coming from downstairs, the Doobie Brothers' “China Grove” rocking the house. Finally he got up and took a chair.

“Sorry, but I have an insatiable curiosity for cases that perplex me,” he said. “My wife says it borders on rudeness.”

Rose had told me the same thing many times. Taking a quarter from my pocket, I balanced it on my fingertips.

“Call it,” I said.

“Tails,” he said.

The quarter did several lazy gyrations above our heads. I slapped it on the back of my hand.

“Tails it is. You want to go first, or should I?”

Linderman hesitated. The sadness in his eyes was still there. I've heard it said that when you lose a child, you die every day.

“You go first,” he said. “I want to hear how you figured out Simon Skell was the Midnight Rambler.”

I paused to gather my thoughts. I'd spoken to no one about the case since the trial, and I didn't want to sound resentful for how things had turned out. As Jessie was fond of saying, it was water under the bridge.

Linderman sat with his hands folded in his lap. Something about his demeanor told me I could confide in him. Reaching across my desk, I punched a button on the CD player, and the Rolling Stones' “Midnight Rambler” came out of the speaker. The song, a thinly veiled homage to a notorious serial killer called the Boston Strangler, described a man breaking into women's houses late at night and brutally murdering them. The song was filled with rage; it described furniture and plateglass windows being broken, and how the Midnight Rambler tracked and killed his victims with a knife or a gun. Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in Positano, Italy, in 1969, it was recorded that same year at Olympic Studios in London and Elektra Studios in Los Angeles. At the time, the Stones were being billed as the Beatles' evil antithesis, and at their producer's urging, they wrote and recorded many dark songs, including “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Let it Bleed,” and “Paint it Black.” But nothing they recorded compared to the evil of “Midnight Rambler.”

The song was six minutes and fifty-two seconds long and had four distinct tempo changes, each rapidly building upon the next. I could not hear it played without imagining a terrified woman running for her life.

“Two and a half years ago, I went to an apartment complex in Fort Lauderdale where a prostitute named Chantel Roberts lived,” I began. “I'd known Chantel as a teenager when she was living on the streets, and I'd helped her out. We spoke about once a month. When the calls stopped, I decided to check up on her.

“Chantel's neighbors hadn't seen her in a while. I got the super to open her apartment, and there was no sign of foul play. Her car was also parked downstairs. I left the complex not sure what was going on. Driving away, I spotted graffiti on a schoolyard wall across the street and stopped to have a look. The graffiti was the opening lyrics to ‘Midnight Rambler,’ and included the words ‘The one that shut the kitchen door.’”

“The graffiti disturbed me, so I drove back to Chantel's apartment and got the super to open her place back up. In the kitchen was a swinging door, and I saw a man's shoe print to one side of where it had been kicked.

“I kept looking for Chantel but never found her. I knew she hadn't run away or just skipped town. I knew something was wrong.”

“How did you know that?” Linderman asked.

“On her kitchen table was a brochure for Broward Community College, with pencil checks next to classes for cosmetology. I called the school and learned she'd enrolled.”

“So she had dreams,” Linderman said.

I thought of his lost daughter and nodded.

“Yes. Chantel had dreams. Over the next fourteen months, I stopped hearing from other young women I knew in the sex industry, with each vanishing every few months. I'd go to their apartments or houses and find lyrics from ‘Midnight Rambler’ painted on a wall outside. If the lyric referenced something being smashed or broken, I would find that inside the dwelling.

“For a while, the case went nowhere. Then one day, a prostitute named Julie Lopez called, and said her sister Carmella, who was also a prostitute, was missing. I decided to visit Carmella's apartment and do a search. Nothing appeared out of place. Then I went outside and looked around. The lyrics were painted on the parking garage wall. Carmella had disappeared the day before, so I knew her trail was warm.

“I went to Bobby Russo, who heads up the homicide division of the Broward County Police Department, and asked for help. Russo put half his team on the case. One of them tracked down Carmella's cell phone service and obtained a list of phone calls Carmella had made the day she went missing.

“There were over forty messages. Carmella did out-calls, so we knew most of them were johns. Russo's detectives got the names and addresses for every one. We split them up, with each person taking five names.

“Simon Skell was on my list. I went to his house in Lauderdale Lakes and spoke with him. He was cordial and let me look around. I asked about Carmella, and he admitted hiring her for sex a few days before but said he hadn't seen her since. I asked him if he'd let a forensic team search his place, and he said yes.

“At that point, I didn't think Skell was our killer. He wasn't hiding anything and was actually quite friendly. His house was filled with books, and I saw a certificate from Mensa, the genius organization, hanging in his study, which didn't fit the profile of any killer I've ever hunted.

“I started to leave, and he offered me a cold drink. I said sure and followed him into the kitchen. A CD player was on the kitchen table, and I realized that I'd seen stereos and boom boxes and CD players in every room of the house. Skell was also wearing an iPod, and I asked him what kind of music he listened to.

“Skell just stared at me. He has strange eyes that are too small for his face. I saw a darkness in them that hadn't been there before. I knew something was wrong, and I hit the Play button on the CD player on the table, and ‘Midnight Rambler’ came out of the speaker. That's when I knew it was him.”

“Is that when he became violent?” Linderman asked.

I nodded solemnly.

“Did you provoke him?”

It's a question that I'd asked myself many times.

“No,” I said firmly.

“Then why did he become violent?”

“I have a couple of theories,” I said.

Linderman straightened in his chair. “Go ahead.”

“Skell's reaction to being arrested reminded me of many pedophiles I've arrested. They know their lives are about to become a living hell, so they get crazy.”

“Do you think Skell is a pedophile?”

I nodded again.

“But he doesn't have a record for pedophilia,” Linderman said.

“I think he's a closet pedophile,” I said. “Look at the victims he picked. They'd all been robbed of their childhoods and were emotionally immature.”

“Children in adult bodies,” Linderman said.

“That's right. I think Skell knew the consequences of preying on kids were severe, so he targeted immature women as a substitute. He chose women in the sex industry because he knew there would be less concern if they went missing.”

“Perfect victims,” Linderman said.

“Exactly. My other theory concerns Melinda Peters, the prosecution's key witness at Skell's trial. Skell kept her locked in a dog crate and played ‘Midnight Rambler’ on his stereo while standing in the next room. Melinda told me she thought he was masturbating. One day, Skell acted stressed out, and Melinda sensed he couldn't get an erection. She offered to have sex with him, and he let her out of the cage. That's when she bolted.

“I think Melinda's escaping sent Skell over the edge, and he went from being a closet pedophile to being a killer. He started picking up women who'd say they'd have sex with him, and murdered them.”

“So his fantasy changed from torturing women to killing them, with Melinda Peters fueling his rages.”

“That's correct.”

“I read in the newspaper that Skell's house was examined from top to bottom by a team of forensic experts and was absolutely clean,” Linderman said.

“Correct again.”

“So if you hadn't started his CD player, Skell would still be on the loose.”

“Yes.”

There was a brief silence as Linderman digested everything I'd said. Talking about the investigation had made me feel better, and I leaned back in my chair.

“Your turn,” I said.