Unsolved Page 17

  I pat him on the cheek. “Exactly. Now he’s scared. His methodology didn’t work. He’ll be looking over his shoulder now. He knows we know about Mayday. He’s probably wondering if we got surveillance footage of him at Mayday’s spot across from the payday-loan store.”

  “We didn’t. But he doesn’t know that,” Pully concedes.

  “Right—he doesn’t know what we know. So what’s his most likely move? What would you do if you were him?”

  “Me? Shit, I’d go into hiding.” Pully grabs his bag and hikes it over his shoulder. “I’d stop, at least for a while.”

  “And that, my friend, is what I’m shooting for. I want to catch this guy as much as anybody, but more than anything else, I don’t want a repeat of Chicago.”

  “So you’re slowing him down. Making him reevaluate.”

  “Slowing him down is the best I can do right now,” I say. “And while he’s sweating a little, looking over his shoulder, lying low—I’ll use that time to catch him.”

  Pully still seems unsettled, like there’s more he wants to say, more on his mind, something he can’t quite put together.

  I walk him to my front door, ready for another long night of analysis. I briefly consider what Pully does in his free time. He’s single and young enough that he should be going out tonight, but my guess is that he’ll be sitting in front of a screen playing some video game or engaging in an online chat about Dungeons and Dragons or whatever the rage is nowadays.

  Pully turns to me. “I’d make a terrible agent,” he says. “I can’t think like these people. I’m a numbers-and-algorithms kid.”

  “A damn good one,” I say, but I can see that he wasn’t fishing for a compliment. He was warming up to something else.

  “What you wrote,” he says. “‘I know’ Chicago wasn’t Citizen David. ‘I found Mayday.’”

  “Yeah?”

  “You used the first person,” he says. “Not ‘the Bureau knows.’ Not ‘we found Mayday.’ You wrote I.”

  Maybe there’s more to Pully than computer code and algorithms after all.

  “His problem is you,” he says. “It has been all along. You tracked him all this time by yourself, right here in your apartment. Not the Bureau. Shit, the Bureau doesn’t even approve of what you’re doing. It’s all you, Emmy. Even now. You know he did the Chicago bombing. You found Mayday.”

  “Eric, what I wrote will give him pause. He doesn’t know what the Bureau thinks or knows. If he has brains and a sense of self-preservation—which he does—he will suspend his plans for a while and wait for the dust to settle. He’ll check the news and read whatever I write on my computer. He’ll lie low and give me time to catch him.”

  Eric’s cherubic face pales, and he grimaces.

  “You could have accomplished the same thing without using the first person,” he says. “You’re putting a target on your back, Emmy. You want him to come after you.”

  61

  HE STARTS at the bottom and moves up.

  That’s what makes the most sense to Books. If you’re looking for the mole in the organization, the one leaking information for money, and you have no obvious suspects, you start with the people who make the least money.

  So while Petty, his homeless friend who is quickly blossoming into a master salesman, plugs a new novel set during the Revolutionary War to a mother and daughter (“Have you seen the musical Hamilton? Then you’ll love this book!”), Books pores over the documents obtained from multiple subpoenas issued for him by the Justice Department. He starts with the field agents from the various branches of the Bureau—National Security, Intelligence, CID, and Science and Technology—who’ve been assigned to the Citizen David task force.

  So far, nothing.

  No irregularities in bank accounts. No large deposits. No series of small deposits meant to disguise a large bribe. No evidence of wire transactions. No Swiss bank accounts.

  Credit card transactions reveal nothing of interest. There are no ridiculous expenditures that would stand out for an agent on a government salary—no major home remodels or expensive cars, the kinds of things that can be paid for in cash to launder the bribe money.

  And nothing, thus far, revealed in online activity. No suspicious e-mails. Websites are all over the place—including a fair amount of porn for a few of the agents, even some of the married ones—but nothing that sounds an alarm for Books, no secret message boards or additional e-mail accounts where the agent might surreptitiously rendezvous with Citizen David.

  But whoever he is, he wouldn’t be that stupid. He probably doesn’t have any interaction with David at all. The leaks to Shaindy Eckstein at the Post are likely his sole means of communication at this point.

  He raises his eyes and looks at Petty, who is asking the customer’s young daughter what kinds of TV shows she likes so he can analogize it to books. That’s the right technique for people who walk into a bookstore with no real idea what they want. It took Books, a cop by trade, quite a while to figure out that that’s how you sell books. He’s always loved everything about books, the way they transport you to another place, stimulate your mind, widen your horizons, but he doesn’t enjoy the sales or business side of it. Petty, however, has proven to be a natural at finding out what people want and then closing the deal.

  Too bad, Books thinks, that a talented guy like Petty can’t have a more normal, stable life. But then, what the hell is normal? Petty has never seemed particularly unhappy, never showed the slightest hint of self-pity. He drifts along, sure. His future doesn’t look so bright. But he’s apparently fine with living in the present.

  And what does Books really know about this guy other than that he was messed up in the war, loves to read, and sleeps in the bookstore’s back room during the week?

  You’re one to judge, Books thinks. Your bookstore’s on the verge of failing, yet you’re more concerned with your temporary Bureau job. And you can’t find a way to make things work with Emmy, the only woman you’ve ever loved, the best person you know. And you think you can decide what Petty needs to be happy?

  He returns to his investigative work, stopping only to answer the phone and ring up customer purchases. There aren’t many. It’s been a rough couple of months for his store. Okay, it’s been a difficult year.

  But how easily he dives back into this work, the Bureau stuff. How quickly it revs his motor. He loves hunting for clues. Discerning patterns. A game of chess. A game made all the more enticing because the people he’s investigating are trained agents who’ve done the very thing he’s doing right now and who know how not to leave bread crumbs.

  I’m going to find you, he vows to himself, the bravado of an agent returning to him. You’re in here, in these papers somewhere, and I’m taking you down.

  62

  I SMILE at Dwight Ross’s secretary, who shakes her head dismissively as I pass her with the grande cup of Starbucks. When I enter his office, Dwight is standing by a table in the corner that is stacked with folders. Elizabeth Ashland has her nose in a file. She looks up at me, then at the coffee, a question on her face.

  Dwight, reading something on his phone, notices me and mumbles, “That’s not necessary, Emmy,” part of his standard routine, then he glances at his watch to see if I’ve made it by eight a.m. I’m supposed to reply with a Just wanna show my appreciation, but I don’t bother. Elizabeth nods at me with a slight pursing of her lips that is supposed to convey something short of outright hostility, then she looks again at the coffee. I put it down on his desk and go back to my cubicle.

  Rabbit and Pully have beat me to work. Rabbit’s gray hair is pulled back in a bun, which is about as fashionable as she gets, though it’s meant to be practical rather than stylish. I’m just about to call for a quick morning update when my phone rings. The caller ID says Sgt. Crescenzo NOPD.

  “Robert Crescenzo!” I say into the phone, hoping that my trip to New Orleans paid off, that our visit to Nora Connolley’s house bore fruit. At this point, I’d settle f
or a tiny shred of hope. Or is he going to tell me that he’s done some looking and I’m completely wrong?

  “Good morning, Emmy.”

  “You got the results from the tox screen?” It was the one concession I dragged out of him; because of the unexplained puncture wounds on Nora Connolley’s body, he agreed to have the ME test her blood.

  “I do,” he says. “It’s negative. Negative for illegal drugs, paralyzing agents, anything that would have subdued her.”

  I close my eyes. If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all.

  “But you put a bee in my bonnet,” he says. “Are you near a computer?”

  “Uh—yeah, give me one minute.” I turn on my computer and wait for it to boot up, wondering what Sergeant Robert Crescenzo has for me.

  “So you piqued my curiosity about Nora Connolley, and I followed up on a few things,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say. “I appreciate that.”

  “You don’t have to thank me for doing my job. Anyway, I checked her credit card activity. The night before she was found dead”—Sunday night, I think—“she went to the grocery store. I’ve seen the interior video and she’s on it, she’s in there, but there’s nothing unusual about it. I can send it to you just in case.”

  “Please do.” With my free hand, I type in my computer password.

  “The store has exterior surveillance too. Cameras that look over the parking lot. I saw something interesting there. Something that—well, it’s interesting. I just e-mailed you the clip. You remember her car?”

  “Yeah. It was a pretty standard car. A Honda, I think.”

  “Honda Accord.”

  “I remember getting inside it in her garage. And the driver’s seat was way too far back for her to have been driving it last.”

  My computer comes to life, and I open the e-mail from Robert Crescenzo. “The attachment here is the video of the grocery-store parking lot?”

  “Yup,” he says.

  I click on it. The video is gray, colorless, showing a large parking lot, probably eight rows wide and twenty deep. The store wasn’t getting a great deal of traffic that night, so there are only about fifteen cars parked near the front of the store.

  “You see Nora Connolley’s car pulling into the sixth slot, one of the middle rows?”

  I do. At the time stamp of 17:33:04—just after 5:30 p.m.—the Honda Accord angles into a slot, and Nora Connolley emerges from the car, her purse hiked over her shoulder. She is petite, as described, walking with the cane that I found in her house, and looking rather athletic at the age of fifty-eight (her details are coming back to me) as she approaches the store.

  I get the creeps and shake them off. I’m watching a woman who has no idea she has only hours to live.

  “Nothing happens for about four minutes. Fast-forward to five thirty-seven.”

  At 5:37, the parking lot still looks like a normal grocery-store lot: people carrying bags or pushing shopping carts to their cars, some of the carts with children sitting in the front compartment. Two women stop near their cars and chat; a man grabs his little boy’s hand before they cross the lot into the store, pausing for a vehicle moving past; a man in a wheelchair rolls past them toward his car.

  “What am I looking for?” I ask.

  “You’re looking for the wheelchair guy,” says Robert Crescenzo.

  “Seriously, Robert.”

  “I’m as serious as a heart attack,” he says. “Watch the guy in the wheelchair.”

  63

  ON THE fuzzy gray screen, the man in the wheelchair has his back to the camera. He keeps his eyes forward, his face turned away. He’s wearing a baseball cap and a light jacket of some kind with the collar turned up, further obscuring him. Also wraparound sunglasses, even though shade has covered this parking lot.

  He’s motoring his wheelchair down a row of cars. But not just any row. The row where Nora Connolley parked her Honda Accord.

  He stops right by her car. He leans forward and then to his side, as if checking something on his wheelchair, the wheel or the brake.

  I lean forward too, toward the fuzzy images on the screen.

  He’s not looking at something on his wheelchair, I realize. He’s pretending to while he glances around, making sure nobody’s watching him.

  In one smooth maneuver, the man in the wheelchair reaches out with his left hand, tucks it under the rear bumper of the Accord, and leans forward. Not much to see here—it looks like he’s checking something by his feet, using the car bumper as a brace so he won’t fall out of his wheelchair.

  But that’s not what he’s doing. His hand isn’t gripping the fender. His arm isn’t tensed. It looks like he’s…

  “Is he putting something under the bumper?” I ask.

  “Seems like it,” says Robert Crescenzo. “I can think of only two things it could be. One is some kind of explosive. But he didn’t blow up her car, did he?”

  The wheelchair man motors on, continuing in the same direction he was headed, maddeningly away from the camera. When he turns his wheelchair to the right, giving us the first chance to see his profile, he’s much too far away for these rudimentary cameras to pick up any details. Eventually, he disappears out of range.

  “He didn’t have a car parked in the lot,” I say.

  “And he never entered the store either. I checked the video for the entire day and never saw him. He must have come up to the store from the side and angled his way toward the row of cars where she was parked. He knew where the cameras were, Emmy. He kept his face out of sight. He ran a little half-loop through that parking lot and disappeared.”

  I rewind to the point where we first see the wheelchair guy. Robert is right; as he comes into focus near the front of the store, he has already turned mostly away from the camera, and his head is tucked low enough that all you can really see are the sunglasses and baseball cap.

  “That guy had no reason whatsoever to take a detour through that parking lot. He had no reason to be there at all.”

  “Except to stop at Nora Connolley’s car,” I say.

  “Right. Nora Connolley left that store a little after six o’clock. She drove to her bank to make a deposit at the ATM. Then she stopped and bought a few things at a hardware store. I’ve got video footage of her at that parking lot too. But no sign of the wheelchair guy. He didn’t follow her.”

  “He didn’t need to,” I say. “Because he knew where she lived. And he planted a GPS device under her bumper so he would know exactly when she was arriving home.”

  “Right.”

  “My guess?” I say. “He couldn’t lie in wait and ambush her, not in a wheelchair. He set up near her house, probably in the alley, and put himself in a position that she’d stop and help a guy in a wheelchair. Then he attacked her and managed to get her and her car home. His legs must work well enough to drive a car a short distance, at least.”

  “And once he got her in that garage and private backyard,” says Crescenzo, “he could set up things at her home however he wanted and stage it as an accident.”

  “Sounds like a good working theory, Detective.”

  “It’s hard to believe and even harder to prove, Agent Dockery. But my gut tells me that’s what happened.”

  “Call me Emmy. I’m not an agent.”

  “Well, maybe you should be,” he says. “Because I believe you now. I’m opening a homicide investigation into Nora Connolley’s death.”

  “That’s great, Robert. But remember what we talked about.”

  “I do, I do. I’ll keep it under the radar. No public statements. No press.”

  “Good,” I say.

  The last detective I convinced to open a homicide case had made it public, and that got him killed.

  64

  “A WHEELCHAIR,” says Bonita Sexton. “Darwin’s in a wheelchair?”

  “It was right there for me to see,” I say. “I don’t know how I missed it.”

  She looks back at the computer scre
en, which is paused on the video from the parking lot. “His victims all have single-story homes…yeah. Holy shit.”

  “I mean, for God’s sake, Rabbit, I even had in my notes that the subject doesn’t seem to like stairs. And my amateur profile on him was that he might be self-loathing.”

  “He’s killing people just like himself,” she says. “Or the people who help them.”

  “He lures them in somehow. It wouldn’t be hard. If you’re an advocate for the homeless or the sick, and a guy in a wheelchair approaches you, you’re not going to see him as a threat.”

  “And then he injects them with something and subdues them.”

  I nod. “Once subdued, they’re at his mercy, even if he’s wheelchair-bound.” I click on the video again and watch the man move his wheelchair farther and farther from the camera’s view. “It’s motorized. So he can move pretty well. I’m not sure how he does it, but once he subdues the victims, he gets them back in the house. And he stages a scene that makes it look like they died in an accident or of natural causes.”

  “That’s why he does it at night,” she says. “He uses the cover of darkness. He—so he transported Nora Connolley from her garage, through her backyard—”

  “Her secluded backyard.”

  “—her secluded backyard, into her house, and up to the shower. Then what?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Either she was already dead and he posed her, or he put her in the shower and banged her head against the base of the tub to kill her.”

  Bonita muses on that, looking upward. “Whatever he injected her with must have knocked her out or paralyzed her. It would show up in her blood.”

  I shake my head, recalling my conversation with Robert Crescenzo. “The New Orleans medical examiner found nothing in Nora’s blood. No roofies or paralyzing agents or illegal narcotics.”

  “They’ll have to dig deeper.”

  I wave my hand. “Which is why I’ve been begging someone to do an autopsy.”