Criss Cross Page 5

  I went back to Marks’s file from the Newport Beach detectives and then to an FBI dossier Kyle Craig had sent over. I found her application to the burger joint and looked at what she’d listed as prior employment.

  Five months before her death, Marks had left a job at a Hooters in Fairfax, Virginia, after spending nearly a year in the area.

  Feeling like I might be onto something, I started digging madly through Kissy Raider’s files. I found her job application for the Stallion Club, but she’d written Not applicable to the question about previous employment.

  So I called Crystal Raider in Florida.

  When Kissy’s sister answered, I could hear kids yelling. “This is Crystal,” she said wearily.

  “This is Detective Cross.”

  “Yes?” she said, perking up. “Have you found him?”

  “We’re still hunting,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, disappointed. Then she asked anxiously, “How long will it take to find him? You don’t know what it’s like waking up day after day not knowing.”

  “Actually, I do know,” I said. “My wife was murdered several years back, and her killer is still at large. Just like my wife’s case, Kissy’s investigation will take as long as it takes. We don’t give up on capital crimes. Ever.”

  She sighed. “How do you live with it? Not knowing?”

  “You learn to box it up and put it away until it has to be opened.”

  “I can’t do that yet.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  Crystal sighed again. “How can I help?”

  “Did Kissy ever work at a Hooters? I mean, before the Stallion Club?”

  “No, I…wait. Yeah, maybe. I think she said she was there only a couple of weeks. Some creep kept hitting on her, so she quit.”

  “To go work at a strip bar?” I asked.

  Crystal’s voice was colder when she replied. “Kissy felt safe at the Stallion Club. They had bodyguards for the girls. Far as I know, that’s not the case at Hooters.”

  “I’m sorry if I sounded snarky there. I’m just trying to understand the situation.”

  There was silence before she said, “Okay.”

  “Do you remember which Hooters she worked at?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere around DC. How many can there be?”

  Chapter

  16

  For the record, there are seven Hooters restaurants in the DC area, including one on Seventh Street in the northwest part of the District.

  Sampson and I went there on a muggy June evening, but when we showed the manager a picture of Kissy, he said he’d never seen her before. We asked if he could search the Hooters chain for her, but he said we’d have to take that up with corporate in Atlanta.

  It was nearly seven p.m., which meant it was highly unlikely that the Hooters’ bean counters would still be at their desks, so we decided to go to the franchises in Laurel, Maryland, and Fairfax, Virginia, where we knew for certain two of the victims had worked.

  Alice Fox, the manager at the Laurel location, recognized Samantha Bell right away. “Sure,” she said. “Got a young kid. Hard worker, that one. Why?”

  Sampson said, “She was murdered in Florida.”

  “Murdered?” she said, horrified. “My God. You never know, do you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “Why’d she leave?”

  Fox frowned, said, “I think she had issues.”

  “Boyfriend issues?”

  “A few weeks before she quit, she started insisting that someone always walk her to her car. She said she thought a guy was stalking her.”

  “What guy? A customer?”

  She frowned again, thought a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. She would have said something about that, right?”

  “You’d think.”

  “Sorry I can’t help you more than that,” she said.

  “No, this helps,” I said.

  On the way to the Fairfax Hooters, we laid odds on the likelihood of a creep or stalker having shown up in Althea Marks’s life. Sampson was calling it at three to two.

  But I was thinking five to one when we went through the front doors and saw well-endowed young women in tight shorts and white T-shirts ferrying drinks and food to ogling young men, just like we’d seen at the Hooters in DC and in Laurel.

  A creep could definitely be stalking young women here, I thought while Sampson asked to speak to the manager. Peter Mason, the manager, came out and apologized when he was unable to identify Kissy Raider or Althea Marks from photos.

  Sampson said, “Ms. Marks worked here. She put it on a job application.”

  Mason frowned. “How long ago?”

  “Three years and a couple of months?”

  He thought about that and then his brows shot up. “I was on paternity leave for ten weeks about then. Let me ask Stella. She’s been here as long as I have.”

  Stella, the assistant night manager, didn’t recognize the name Althea Marks, but when she looked at the picture, she said, “Aly. Yeah, she worked here, maybe six weeks. Good waitress.”

  “She say why she quit?” Sampson asked.

  That seemed to make Stella uncomfortable. “What’s this about? She okay?”

  “No,” I said. “She was murdered in Newport Beach, California, two years ago.”

  “Murdered?” she said in a bewildered voice. “Oh my God. She was right.”

  “Aly was right?” I said.

  “I wanted to promote her or at least give her more shifts. But out of the blue, she came in and said she thought she and her son were unsafe here and that she was quitting. She wanted me to send her last paycheck to some PO box in California.”

  “Who was making her feel unsafe? A customer?”

  She shook her head. “No. Anyway, I don’t think so. We didn’t have any incidents with her and a guy that I could point to. But you know how it is—people’s lives are complicated. Especially for a young mom like that.”

  By the time we left, it was pushing ten, and Sampson was in favor of calling it quits for the evening.

  “No,” I said. “We’re three for three on the victims thinking they were unsafe or being followed by a creep. We just need to find out where Kissy worked.”

  “You want to go to all four other Hooters on the list tonight?”

  “One more,” I said. “The one in Chantilly, and then we’ll call it.”

  Big John wasn’t thrilled about it, but he said, “Deal.”

  We had luck on our side.

  Carol Patrick, manager at the Chantilly Hooters, recognized Kissy Raider the second she saw the picture of her.

  Her face lost all color and she said, “Is Kissy okay? Please tell me that beautiful soul is okay.”

  Chapter

  17

  Carol Patrick broke down in a booth at the back of the Hooters where we’d gone to talk.

  “Kissy told me he was a psycho,” Patrick said through sobs. “She said she could see it in his eyes, and that she needed to run.”

  We told her to back up and give us what she knew. After she’d composed herself, Patrick said there’d been a guy in his thirties, real well dressed, who’d come to the restaurant several times and always asked for Kissy to be his server.

  “He tried to follow her home one night,” Patrick said. “Kissy said she drove her car crazy and lost him, but she was frightened out of her mind, said she needed to quit.”

  “Do we have a name?” Sampson asked.

  “I don’t think she knew for sure. She called him creepy Mike, I think.”

  “Mike,” I said, writing it down. “No last name?”

  “Just creepy Mike with the dead eyes. And he wore a toupee.”

  Sampson said, “He pay with a credit card?”

  “No. That I do know. He paid cash and left her a big tip every time he was in.”

  “And that was how often?” I asked.

  “She worked here only, what, three weeks? He might have been here four times.”

  “What about after she left?”

  Patrick thought about that. “I don’t see everyone who comes through the door.”

  “But you saw him?”

  “I did. Twice.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?” Sampson said. “Enough for you to work with a sketch artist?”

  “I guess. Sure, and…” Something seemed to dawn on her.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ll be a son of a…I got someone you might want to talk to.”

  Patrick got up and came back with a Hooters girl in tow. Her name was Marlene Rogers. She was in her late twenties, five two, a buxom pretty blonde.

  “She could be Kissy’s sister, couldn’t she?” Patrick said. “I’ve always said that.”

  We knew Kissy’s sister, and she didn’t look anything like Ms. Rogers, but there was no denying Marlene’s resemblance to Kissy Raider, Althea Marks, and Samantha Bell. They were all of a type.

  “Tell them, Marlene,” Patrick said. “Tell them what you told me last week.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, twisting a strand of her hair. “It’s just a feeling I’ve been getting.”

  “What kind of feeling?” I asked gently.

  “Like I’m being watched. Like maybe someone is following me.”

  “Who?”

  “I…I don’t know for certain, but I’d swear it was this guy who came in for lunch about six weeks ago. Maybe longer.”

  “Sharp dresser,” Patrick said. “Obvious toupee, right?”

  Rogers frowned. “No toupee. He was balding. He was big and lean, and yeah, he had nice clothes.”

  “What did he talk about?” Sampson asked.

  “Wanted to know all about me.”

  “What about you?”

  “Like if I was married. And if I had a kid.”

  “Are you? Do you?”

  “My husband died in Iraq, and I have a little boy. Eddie.”

  “How old?” I asked.

  “Four.”

  Blond, busty single mother with a young son.

  We asked her if she remembered anything specific about the guy other than that he was lean and a sharp dresser. She said that he made her uncomfortable every time she went to his table because he stared at her with this bright smile. “And his eyes were weird. Too blue to be real, like he was wearing contacts.”

  She didn’t remember the exact date that he’d been in the restaurant, but it was definitely more than a month ago. Patrick said that, unfortunately, they didn’t keep security-camera footage past thirty days. Corporate policy.

  The waitress was more than willing to work with a sketch artist as well.

  “That will help, thank you,” I said. “One final question?”

  “Sure.”

  “When was the last time you felt you were being watched or followed?”

  “Like, every night since then. I’m always looking over my shoulder.”

  We gave them our cards and told Ms. Rogers to alert us if that customer came into the restaurant or if she saw him anywhere else in her life.

  “You can call anytime,” I said. “Day or night.”

  All the way home and even as I finally started to fall asleep, I kept thinking that if he was the same creep Kissy Raider believed was stalking her, he sounded very much like a predator.

  And Marlene Rogers might be as close to bait as we were ever going to find.

  Chapter

  18

  The following night, Sampson and I camped out in an unmarked squad car outside the Chantilly Hooters while Marlene Rogers worked her shift.

  We were on the lookout for a big, lean balding guy or a big, lean guy wearing an obvious toupee, but we saw no one meeting either of those descriptions. I began to wonder if the waitress felt like she was being watched or followed because she’d been conditioned to feel that way.

  I considered that idea. I’d been to a seminar earlier that year in which a speaker asked how many of the men in the room had felt physically or psychologically threatened during the previous month. Maybe four men out of the two hundred there raised their hands. When the two hundred women there were asked the same question, a hundred and seventy or so raised their hands.

  I’d been shocked by that, and it had given me a new appreciation for what women, including Marlene Rogers, went through on a daily basis. I decided she’d probably been sexually harassed enough to know when a guy posed an actual threat, so if she said someone was following her, I believed her.

  Around nine, Rogers, no longer in her Hooters uniform and with a heavy purse over one shoulder, came out the back door of the restaurant. She climbed into her Toyota Prius and drove out of the parking lot. No one followed her except us.

  “She’s headed to her mom’s place to pick up her son,” I said. “Let’s go sit on her condo and make sure she gets inside, then we’ll call it a night.”

  “Works for me,” Sampson said.

  Rogers lived in the upper right unit of a two-story, fourplex rental near the Walmart Supercenter off I-66. We parked across the street and down the block.

  I used binoculars to scan the cars on the street but saw no one in any of them. Rogers rolled in ten minutes later, parked the Prius in her normal spot—nose in against a cedar hedge—and carried her sleeping son up the stairs and into the apartment.

  We watched for a few minutes, and I was about to call it when Rogers came back out and hurried to her car. She opened the door, ducked inside, and emerged with her purse. Slinging it over her shoulder, Rogers turned to head back to her apartment.

  A looming dark shape slipped from the cedar hedge, took two steps toward her, and grabbed her from behind.

  Chapter

  19

  He was big and outweighed Marlene Rogers by a solid hundred pounds at least, maybe more. He clamped a gloved hand over her mouth and wrapped his other arm around her neck.

  He started dragging the waitress as we bolted from the squad car and ran down the street toward them. He’d taken her through the hedge by the time we reached her car.

  We went through the hedge, guns drawn, and found ourselves on a lawn behind the parking lot of another, larger apartment complex.

  He was maybe fifty yards away, dressed in black from his boots to his face mask and hood. Rogers had stopped squirming, and he was hustling her toward the open side door of a beige panel van. We sprinted at him, me slower and more off balance than Sampson but refusing to stop.

  Still not seeing us, he turned, keeping the waitress in front of him, and tried to pull her back into the van. But when he did, she dug in her heels and drove herself backward, going with his momentum. It threw him off balance, and he let go of her mouth long enough for her to scream and strike at his ribs with her elbow.

  He grunted, swore, reached behind.

  “Police!” Sampson shouted, gun up, coming between two parked cars about thirty yards away from them. “Let her go!”

  The man put a Glock to Marlene’s head. In a flat voice, he said, “If you want her to live, you let me go.”

  “Let her go now!” I said, coming at him from a slightly different angle.

  “Stay where you are, or I’ll kill her,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to lose. I swear I’ll kill the bitch out of spite.”

  Before we could say anything in response, a shot rang out, then another.

  Sampson and I dived for cover.

  But we needn’t have.

  The big guy wasn’t the one who’d fired the gun. One bullet went through his right shoulder, which caused his arm to buckle and sag, and the second round struck him four inches higher, entering the side of his neck.

  He went limp as a rag doll and let go of the gun and Marlene Rogers. Then he fell backward and landed half in and half out of the panel van.

  The waitress let out a shriek and ran. I tried to grab at her from my knees as she passed. “You’re okay!”

  “No, I’m not!” she screamed. “I have to make sure Eddie’s safe!”

  She got by me and tore toward the cedar hedge, sobbing hysterically.

  Sampson and I lurched up and got into combat shooting crouches, still on high alert, guns aimed toward the darkness where the two shots had come from.

  FBI special agent Kyle Craig stepped from the shadows, right hand and service weapon hanging at his side, his open left palm raised in salute and surrender.

  Chapter

  20

  “Good thing I came along when I did,” Craig said, sounding matter-of-fact rather than smug, “or that young lady would have been dead. Or one of you.”

  Our astonishment was complete as we lowered our pistols.

  “Jesus, Kyle,” Sampson said. “Where did you come from?”

  “Back there,” he said, walking toward the body. “I’ve been watching this guy. But I had no idea what he was going to do even after he disappeared through that hedge.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You’ve been following him?”

  “Last night and all day today,” Craig said.

  “You know who he is?” Sampson said.

  “Definitely,” Craig said, holstering his weapon, getting out a flashlight, and shining it on the dead man’s face. He removed the mask and said, “Pal of yours, Sampson.”

  We gaped at Bernard Mountebank, the shop owner who’d given us the runaround when we asked about the tie.

  “What?” Sampson said, dumbfounded.

  “Right?” Craig said, sounding pleased with himself.

  Hearing sirens in the distance, no doubt summoned by Craig’s shots, I said, “How did you get onto him?”

  “I knew he was bad from the get-go, kind of smelled it, especially after he sent us all to see that old man at the cupcake shop. So I dug into him a little. He’s not Bernard Mountebank, and he’s not from England. Meet Gerald St. Michel, suspected serial sex offender from the British Virgin Islands.”