Pop Goes the Weasel Read online

  No! He wouldn’t do it! To hell with the dice. He wouldn’t leave. He couldn’t. He was losing all impulse control, wasn’t he? Well, so be it. Alea jacta est, he remembered from his schoolboy Latin classes—Julius Caesar before he crossed the Rubicon: “The die is cast.”

  This was a monumental night. For the first time, he was breaking the rules. He was changing the game forever.

  He needed to kill someone, and the urge was everything to him.

  He hurried to the house before he changed his mind. He was nervous. Adrenaline punched through his system. He used his glass cutter at first, but then just smashed in a small window with a gloved hand.

  Once inside, he moved quickly down the darkened hallway. He was sweating—so unlike him. He entered Deirdre’s bedroom. She was asleep, despite the breaking of the glass. Her bare arms were thrown up over her head, the surrender position.

  “Lovely,” he whispered.

  She was wearing white bikini panties and a matching bra. Her long legs were spread delicately, expectantly. In her dreams, she must have known he was coming. Shafer believed that dreams told you the truth, and you had better listen.

  He was still hard, and so glad he’d chosen to disobey the rules.

  “Who the hell are you?” he heard, suddenly. The voice came from behind.

  Shafer whirled around.

  It was Lindsay, the daughter. She wore nothing but coral-pink underwear, a brassiere and briefs. He calmly raised his gun until it pointed between her eyes.

  “Shhh. You don’t want to know, Lindsay,” he said in the calmest voice, not bothering to disguise his English accent. “But I’ll tell you anyway.”

  He fired the gun.

  Chapter 54

  FOR THE SECOND TIME in my life I understood what it felt like to be a victim of a terrible crime rather than the detective investigating it. I was disconnected and out of it. I needed to be doing something positive on a case, or get back to volunteer work at St. Anthony’s—anything to take my mind off what had happened.

  I had to be busy, but I knew I’d lost my ability to concentrate, something that had always come so naturally to me. I came across a pair of shocking murders in Maryland that bothered me for some unspecified reason. I didn’t follow up on them. I should have.

  I wasn’t myself; I was lost. I still spent endless hours thinking about Christine, remembering everything about our time together, seeing her face wherever I went.

  Sampson tried to push me. He did push me. He and I made the rounds of the streets of Southeast. We put the word out that we were looking for a purple and blue cab, possibly a gypsy. We canvassed door to door in the Shaw neighborhood where Tori Glover and Marion Cardinal had been found. Often we were still going at ten or eleven at night.

  I didn’t care. I couldn’t sleep anyway.

  Sampson cared. He was my friend.

  “You’re supposed to be working the Odenkirk case, right? I’m not supposed to be working at all. The Jefe would be livid. I kind of like that,” Sampson said as we trudged along S Street late one evening. Sampson had lived in this neighborhood for years. He knew all the local hangarounds.

  “Jamal, you know anything I should know?” he called out to a goateed youth sitting in shadows on a graystone stoop.

  “Don’t know nothin’. Just relaxin’ my mind. Catchin’ a cool night breeze. How ’bout yourself?”

  Sampson turned back to me. “Damn crack runners working these streets everywhere you look nowadays. Real good place to commit a murder and never get caught. You talk to the police in Bermuda lately?”

  I nodded, and my eyes stared at a fixed point up ahead. “Patrick Busby said the story of Christine’s disappearance is off the front pages. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s probably bad.”

  Sampson agreed. “Takes the pressure off them. You going back down there?”

  “Not right away. But yeah, I have to go back. I have to find out what happened.”

  He looked me in the eye. “Are you here with me right now? Are you here, sugar?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. Most of the time. I’m functioning okay.” I pointed up at a nearby redbrick building. “That place would have a view of the front entryway into the girl’s building. Any of those windows. Let’s get back to work.”

  Sampson nodded. “I’m here as long as you want to be.”

  There was something about pounding the streets that appealed to me that night. We talked to everyone in the building that we could find at home, about half the apartments. Nobody had seen a purple and blue cab on the street; nobody had seen Tori or Marion, either. Or so they said.

  “You see any connections anywhere?” I asked as we came down the steep stairs of a fourth-floor walk-up. “What do you see? What the hell am I missing?”

  “Not a thing, Alex. Nothing to miss. Weasel didn’t leave a clue. Never does.”

  We got back down to the entrance and met up with an elderly man carrying three clear-plastic bags of groceries from the Stop & Shop.

  “We’re homicide detectives,” I said to him. “Two young girls were murdered across the street.”

  The man nodded. “Tori and Marion. I know ’em. You want to know ’bout that fella watchin’ the buildin’? He was sittin’ there most the night. Inside a slick, fancy black car,” he said. “Mercedes, I think. You think maybe he’s the killer?”

  Chapter 55

  “I BEEN AWAY AWHILE, y’see. Visitin’ wit’ my two old-bat sisters in North Carolina for a week of good memories, home-cooked food,” the elderly man said as we went up to the fourth floor. “That was why I was missed during the earlier time through here by your detectives.”

  This was old-school police work, I was thinking as I climbed stairs—the kind of work too many detectives try to avoid. The man’s name was DeWitt Luke, and he was retired from Bell Atlantic, the huge phone company that services most of the Northeast. He was the fifty-third interview I’d had so far in Shaw.

  “Saw him sittin’ there around one in the mornin’. Didn’t think much of it at first. Probably waitin’ for somebody. Seemed to be mindin’ his own business. He was still there at two, though. Sittin’ in his car. Seemed kinda strange to me.” He paused for a long moment as if trying to remember.

  “Then what happened?” I prompted the man.

  “Fell asleep. But I got up to pee around three-thirty. He was still in that shiny black car. So I watched him closer this time. He was watchin’ the other side of the street. Like some kind of damn spy or somethin’. Couldn’t tell what he was lookin’ at, but he was studyin’ somethin’ real hard over there. I thought he might be the police. ’Cept his car was too nice.”

  “You got that right,” Sampson said, and barked out a laugh. “No Mercedes in my garage.”

  “I pulled up a card-table chair behind the darkened window in my apartment. Made sure there were no lights on, so he couldn’t see me. By now he’d caught my attention some. Remember the old movie Rear Window? I tried to figure out why he might be down there sittin’, waitin’. Jealous lover, jealous husband, maybe some kinda night stalker. But he wasn’t botherin’ anybody far as I could see.”

  I spoke again. “You never got a better look than that? Man sitting in the car?”

  “Around the time I got up to pee, he got out of the car. Opened the door, but the inside light didn’t come on. That struck me strange, it bein’ such a nice car and all. Fueled my mind even more. I squinted my eyes, get a better look.” Another long pause.

  “And?”

  “He was tall, a blond gentleman. White fella. We don’t get too many of them around here at night, or even in the daytime, for that matter.”

  Chapter 56

  DETECTIVE PATSY HAMPTON’S INVESTIGATION of the Jane Doe murders was starting to show forward movement and positive results. She thought she might have something good in the works. She had confidence in her ability to solve the murders. She knew from experience that she was smarter than everybody else.

  It helped to h
ave Chief Pittman and all the department’s resources on her side. She had spent the past day and a half with Chuck Hufstedler at the FBI building. She knew she was using Chuck a little, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was lonely, and she did like his company. She and Chuck were still sitting around at three-thirty in the afternoon when Lancelot entered the Gamester’s Chatroom again. Laughalot, she remembered.

  “He couldn’t resist, could he?” Hampton said to Hufstedler. “Gotcha, you fantasy freak.”

  Hufstedler looked at her, his thick black eyebrows arched. “Three-thirty in the afternoon, Patsy. What does that say? Tell you what it says to me. Maybe he’s playing from work. But I bet our Lancelot is a school kid.”

  “Or he’s somebody who likes to play with school kids.” She offered a thought that upset her even as she uttered the words.

  This time, she didn’t try to make contact with Lancelot. She and Chuck just listened in on a stultifying discussion of several role-playing games. In the meantime, he was trying to trace Lancelot.

  “He’s pretty good at this, a real hacker. He’s built a lot of security into his system. Hopefully, we’ll get to him anyway.”

  “I have confidence in you, Cheeseman.”

  Lancelot stayed in the chatroom past four-thirty. By then it was all over. Chuck had his name and address: Michael Ormson, Hutchins Place, Foxhall.

  At a few minutes before five, two dark-blue vans pulled up in front of the Ormson house on the Georgetown Reservoir. Five agents in blue FBI windbreakers and Detective Patsy Hampton surrounded the large, Tudor-style house with an acre or two of front and back lawn and majestic views.

  Senior FBI Agent Brigid Dwyer and Hampton proceeded to the front door and found it unlocked. With weapons drawn, they quietly entered the house and discovered Lancelot in the den.

  He looked to be around thirteen years old. A baby geek. He was sitting at a computer in his shorts and black socks.

  “Hey, what the heck is going on? Hey! What are you doing in my house? I didn’t do anything wrong. Who are you guys?” Michael Ormson asked in a high-pitched, peeved, but quivering voice.

  He was skinny. His face was covered with acne. His back and shoulders had a rash that looked like eczema. Chuck Hufstedler had been right on target. Lancelot was a teenage geek playing with his fancy computer after school. He wasn’t the Weasel, though. This boy couldn’t be the Weasel.

  “Are you Michael Ormson?” Patsy Hampton asked the boy. She had lowered her weapon but hadn’t holstered it.

  The young boy dropped his head and looked ready to weep. “Oh, God, oh, God,” he moaned. “Yes, I’m Michael Ormson. Who are you guys? Are you going to tell my parents?”

  Chapter 57

  MICHAEL’S FATHER AND MOTHER were immediately contacted at their jobs at Georgetown University Hospital and the U.S. Naval Observatory, respectively. The Ormsons were currently separated, but they both made it to Foxhall in less than ten minutes, even with rush-hour traffic starting to build. The other two Ormson children, Laura and Anne Marie, had already come home from high school.

  Patsy Hampton convinced the parents to let her talk to their son at the house. She told the Ormsons that they could be present, and could interrupt, and even stop the interview anytime they wished. Otherwise, she and Agent Dwyer would have to take Michael to FBI headquarters for the interview.

  The Ormsons, Mark and Cindy, agreed to let Michael talk. They were clearly frightened, especially of the FBI personnel, but they seemed to trust Detective Hampton. Most people did, she knew. She was pretty and sincere and had a disarming smile that she used when she needed to.

  “I’m interested in the game called the Four Horsemen,” Hampton said to the boy. “That’s the only reason I’m here, Michael. I need your help.”

  The teenager dropped his chin to his chest again and then shook his head back and forth. Hampton watched the nervous boy and decided to take a chance with him. She had a hunch that she wanted to play.

  “Michael, whatever you think you’ve done wrong, it’s nothing to us. It’s nothing. We don’t care what you’ve done on your computer. This isn’t about you or your family or your hacking. There have been some terrible murders in Washington, and there might be a connection to this game called the Four Horsemen. Please help us, Michael. You’re the only one who can. You’re the only one.”

  Mark Ormson, who was a radiologist at Georgetown University Hospital, leaned forward on the black leather couch in the den. He looked more frightened now than when he’d gotten home. “I’m beginning to think I better get a lawyer,” he said.

  Patsy Hampton shook her head and smiled kindly at both parents. “This is not about your son, Mr. and Mrs. Ormson. He’s not in any trouble with us, I assure you.”

  She turned back to the teenager. “Michael, what do you know about the Four Horsemen? We know you’re not one of the players. We know it’s a very private game.”

  The boy looked up. She could tell that he liked her, and maybe trusted her some. “Hardly anything, ma’am. I don’t know too much.”

  Hampton nodded. “This is very important to us, Michael. Someone is killing people in the Southeast part of Washington—for real, Michael. This is not a fantasy game. I think you can help us. You can save others from getting murdered.”

  Michael dropped his head again. He had hardly looked at his mother and father since they arrived. “I’m good with computers. You probably already figured that out.”

  Detective Hampton kept nodding, giving the boy positive reinforcement. “We know you are, Michael. We had trouble tracing you here. You’re very good with computers. My friend Chuck Hufstedler at the FBI was really impressed. When all this is over, you can see where he works. You’ll like him, and you’ll love his equipment.”

  Michael smiled, showing off large, protruding teeth with braces. “Back at the beginning of summer, probably late in June, this guy came into the Gamester’s Chatroom—where you found me.”

  Patsy Hampton tried to hold eye contact with the boy. She needed him badly; she had a feeling that this was a big break, her biggest so far.

  Michael continued to speak softly. “He sort of, like he took over the conversation. Actually, he was pretty much a control freak about it. He kept putting down Highlander, D & D, Millennium, all the hot games that are out now. Wouldn’t let anybody else get a word in. Almost seemed like he was high on something.

  “He kept hinting about this completely different game he played called the Four Horsemen. It was like he didn’t want to tell us about it, but then he would give out bits and pieces anyway, but not much. He wouldn’t shut up.

  “He said the characters in Dungeons and Dragons, Dune, and Condottiere were predictable and boring—which, I must admit, they are sometimes. Then he said some of the characters in his game were chaotic evil instead of lawful good. He said they weren’t fake heroes like in most RPGs; his characters were more like people in real life. They were basically selfish, didn’t really care about others, didn’t follow society’s rules. He said Horsemen was the ultimate fantasy game. That was all he would tell us about the Four Horsemen, but it was enough. I mean, you could see it was a game for total psychos.”

  “What was his call name?” Agent Dwyer asked Michael.

  “Call name, or his real name?” Michael asked, and offered up a sly, superior smile.

  Agent Dwyer and Hampton looked at each other. Call name, or his real name? They turned back to Michael.

  “I traced him, just like you traced me. I got through his encryptions. I know his name, and I know where he lives. Even where he works. It’s Shafer—Geoffrey Shafer. He works at the British Embassy, on Massachusetts Avenue. He’s some kind of information analyst there, according to the embassy’s Web site. He’s forty-four years old.”

  Michael Ormson looked sheepishly around the room. He made eye contact with his parents, who finally looked relieved. Then he looked back at Hampton. “Is any of that stuff helpful to you? Did I help?”

  “Yes, you di
d, Laughalot.”

  Chapter 58

  GEOFFREY SHAFER HAD VOWED he would not get high on pharmaceuticals tonight. He’d also decided he was going to keep his fantasies under control, under wraps. He understood precisely what the psychobabbling profilers on the murder cases would be thinking: his fantasy life was escalating, and he was approaching a rage state. And the profilers would be exactly right—which was why he was playing it cool for a while.

  He was a skillful cook—skilled at a lot of things, actually. He sometimes put together elaborate meals for his family, and even large dinner parties with friends. When he cooked, he liked to have the family with him in the kitchen; he loved an audience, even his wife and kids.

  “Tonight we’ll be eating classic Thai,” he announced to Lucy and the children as they watched him work. He was feeling a little hyper, and reminded himself not to let things get out of hand at home. Maybe he ought to take some Valium before he began to cook. All he’d taken so far was a little Xanax.

  “What sets Thai food apart from other Southeast Asian cuisines are the explicit rules for proportions of ingredients, especially seasonings,” he said as he prepared a centerpiece of carved vegetables.

  “Thai is a distinctive cuisine, blending Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, Portuguese, Malaysian. Bet you didn’t know that, Tricia and Erica.”

  The little girls laughed, confused—so much like their mother.

  He put jasmine blossoms in Lucy’s hair. Then a blossom each for the twins. He tried the same with Robert, but his son pulled away, laughing.

  “Nothing too hot tonight, darling?” Lucy said. “The children.”

  “The children, of course, dear. Speaking of hot, the real heat comes from capsaicin, which is stored in the ribs of these chili peppers. Capsaicin is an irritant and burns whatever it touches, even skin, so it’s wise to wear gloves. I’m not wearing gloves, of course, because I’m not wise. Also, I’m a little crazy.” He laughed. Everyone did. But Lucy looked worried.