A pause.
“Makes sense to me,” says Books.
“Given your track record, Emmy, I’m not so sure,” Dickinson scoffs.
Books starts to object on my behalf, but I wave him off. Let Dickinson get his licks in. I don’t need his approval. I don’t need anyone’s approval.
Marta used to say that about me, that I was militantly independent, that I made a point of alienating those close to me. Strong, independent Emmy, she used to say, with her usual combination of scolding and love. Always trying to prove you can go it alone.
“The question,” says Books, “is whether our subject has read that Tribune article and, if so, what effect it has on him.”
“Do you have an answer for that, too, Miss Dockery?”
I don’t. Not grounded in data, at least, which is typically how I form my opinions. But I do have a hunch.
“It’s going to motivate him,” I say. “He needs to prove to himself that he won’t let the FBI scare him off.”
Books inhales deeply, his eyes moving with worry to the ceiling.
“It’s going to get worse,” I say.
78
* * *
“Graham Session”
Recording # 20
September 27, 2012
* * *
Okay, well, I just want everyone to understand—it didn’t have to be this way. And who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t have been. We’ll never know now, will we? No. No, we won’t.
But meeting Mary…meeting her has…
[Editor’s note: pause of eleven seconds.]
…meeting her has changed me. Or it could have changed me. If you’d just given me a chance to find out.
But no. No, you pick now to discover what I’ve been doing. Not a year ago or even six months ago. No, you wait until I’ve met this perfect woman and then you suddenly grow a brain and figure out what I’ve been doing and blab about it to the newspaper and turn my whole life upside down.
So now I’m…well, I’ll say it like this. I’d like to express my displeasure to you. I’d like to show you what happens when you mess with my life.
No more Mister Nice Guy.
[END]
79
“THAT DOESN’T sound right,” I say into my phone as I pace in my office. My eyes drift to the wall clock, which says it’s nearly midnight, Thursday night.
Officer Glen Hall responds breathlessly: “I’m just reporting what I was supposed to report, ma’am. I was told if there was a residential fire, I had to immediately call it in. And then our dispatch forwarded my call to you—”
“No, I understand. You did the right thing.”
Officer Hall did what he was told. We’d put out a blanket advisory to the two possible areas where our subject might strike this week—Detroit and Philadelphia—to alert us of any residential fires immediately. He responded to a residential fire and he immediately called it in.
I was certain that our subject’s next stop would be Philadelphia. But Officer Glen Hall works for the police department in Allen Park, Michigan—a suburb of Detroit.
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “How many victims did you say?”
“Ma’am, there are…there are…”
His voice breaks off. I don’t know if it’s a bad connection or, more likely, emotion.
“There are six bodies,” he says.
“Okay, Officer, and they were found in a single bedroom?”
“That’s…cor—correct.”
“I’m sorry to ask, Officer, but can you describe the position of the bodies?”
“I…it…it looks…” I hear him take a breath, gather himself. “They’re lined up like a morgue in there.”
It’s him. It has to be.
“I got your text.” Books comes rushing into my office. “It’s him? With six dead?”
I nod my head, my eyes down.
“Six people? He’s never done that, Emmy.”
“It’s him,” I say. When I hear nothing, I look up and meet his eyes. “It’s him.”
Books opens his cell phone. “This is Bookman,” he says. “Mobilize the rapid-response team. We’re going to Detroit.”
80
NINETY MINUTES after getting the call from Allen Park, Michigan, I’m in a small ten-seat plane with Books and six members of our rapid-response team. Books is on the phone talking with the special agent in charge in the Detroit field office, barking out directions. I’m looking out the window, my mind spiraling in countless directions, when the man sitting across from me, to whom I’ve just been introduced but whose name already escapes me, interrupts my thoughts.
“So there’s no pattern to his victims?”
“No pattern,” I say. “Men and women. White, black, Hispanic, Asian. No children, but otherwise all ages from twenty to seventy-seven. All socioeconomic backgrounds. Accountant and lawyer and doctor and shoe salesman and janitor and grocery clerk. The only thing these victims have in common is they live alone.”
“They don’t have anything else in common?”
I shake my head. “Nothing we can figure. And we’ve tried everything. We’ve cross-referenced them down to the towns they grew up in, the schools they attended, clubs they’ve joined, religious affiliations, social media they use, everything. No,” I say, blowing out a sigh. “They’re all normal, regular people with no unifying characteristic.”
Books hangs up his phone and looks at me. “The victims tonight were all women,” he says. “Six women. Four have been identified and they’re working on the other two. Looks like there are severed limbs and stab wounds and possibly GSWs, but that won’t be clear until the autopsy.”
“That’s different from his m.o., right?” says one of the agents on the plane.
“It’s different,” I say. “Six victims at a time is different. The methods of killing are different. The fact that they’re able to discern as much as they have from the crime scene, that the fire hasn’t totally obscured matters—also different. It’s all different.”
“He’s losing his discipline,” says Books. “He’s coming unglued.”
“He doesn’t need the same discipline,” I say. “Because now he knows that we know what he’s doing. He doesn’t need these obscure methods of killing that look like natural causes because he knows we won’t buy it. Frankly, I’m not sure why he even bothered setting a fire at all.”
“He wants to be sure we know it’s him.” Books thinks about that and nods. “He’s sending us a message. He’s saying, ‘I’m not afraid of the FBI. In fact, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’”
I shudder at the thought, as if it hasn’t been my fear since the moment the media got hold of the story and published it.
“He’ll make a mistake now,” says another agent. “If he starts lashing out, he’ll do something wrong.”
Maybe. This is their area of expertise, not mine. I’m not sure I buy it. And I’m not sure, at the moment, that I care. Right now, I only want one thing.
I want our subject to attend the Vikings-Lions football game this Sunday.
81
BOOKS PACES at the front of the luxury suite at the north side of Ford Field, where we’ve established Command Central. He is on fire, focused, completely in his element up there, debriefing our crew of state, local, and federal law enforcement employees, all 150 or so of them in plainclothes, undercover, looking like men and women who are taking in a football game. This is the Books I first met, the steely Joe Friday agent whom you couldn’t envision having a life outside the office, who appeared to care about nothing in this world except catching the bad guy, getting the job done.
“Okay, everyone, quiet down,” he says, and within seconds the posh luxury suite is totally silent. “This may be our best chance to catch the worst serial killer I’ve ever seen, so it’s important we remember the fundamentals.” He takes a nervous breath. “There are going to be sixty thousand people here today, and one of them is going to be our subject. If you look like an FBI agent, he will notice you
. If you look like a plainclothes police officer, he will notice you. If you look like you’re searching for someone, he will notice you. He is smart, perceptive, and supremely careful. You must not be noticed.”
Books’s voice lowers with intensity, and the room hushes with him.
“Because of this, we are going to do things a little differently. We want him to come into the stadium. And once he’s in here, we don’t want him to leave. If we have to stop every white male in his thirties or forties—maybe with a protruding gut, maybe not; maybe bald, maybe not—but if we have to stop every one of those men on the way out of the stadium, then we will. But you must first let him in. Your job here today is to identify potential suspects once they enter the stadium and phone them in to us here at Command Central. Do not apprehend anyone until you hear from us.
“You will not wear earpieces, and you will not use radios. You will call the numbers issued to you on your cell phone, and you will look like you’re asking your wife or husband why it’s taking so long to get back from the bathroom. You will do your best to look like you’re actually here to watch the Lions kick the shit out of the Vikings.”
“Amen to that,” whispers a young local officer wearing a bright-blue Lions jersey. Urban decay may be devouring the city from the inside out, and we may be hunting the most brilliant serial killer in history, but football is football, I guess.
“The group up here in Command Central will be watching everything that walks, crawls, or flies within a half mile of this stadium on our monitors. Lucky for us, when Ford Field hosted the Super Bowl in 2006, they installed an extensive wireless surveillance web to monitor crowd activity, entrances, exits, and the surrounding area. And God bless Detroit, it still works. You phone us with a location and a description, and we’ll zoom in on him. Then we’ll make a decision about what to do next. We do not want to scare this guy off before we’re ready to snatch him.”
Books hands the briefing over to the local sergeant in charge of issuing assignments and joins Sophie, Denny, and me along the side wall. Caterers arrive and begin setting up chafing trays on the counters along the wall next to us. I raise an eyebrow, and Books gives a humorless smirk. “Well, we do have to look like any other luxury suite. We’re on the north side, and all the suites on the south side will be able to see us if they try. We’re just keeping up appearances.”
“How nice that your appearances seem to include Italian beef,” I whisper.
I hear our names called out. “Agent Bookman, Command Central. Sophie Talamas, Command Central. Denny Sasser, you’re leading a team scalping tickets over at the Eastern Market. Emmy Dockery, Gate A…”
“Gate A?” I say to Books. “You put me at Gate A? You know as well as I do that he won’t use Gate A.”
With Comerica Park right across Brush Street to the west and the 36th District Court across Beacon Street to the southeast, there are enough cameras there to show us what the local ant population had for lunch. He’ll choose one of the entrances on the north side: Gate B, C, D, E, or F. Those gates have better access to the parking lots and fewer tall buildings nearby where people could be watching.
Books blinks his eyes patiently. “Really?” he whispers. “Well, then, he won’t be likely to recognize you from your photo in the Tribune, then, while you’re watching Gate A, will he?”
He has a point. I hate it when he has a point.
When the assignments have been doled out, Books reasserts himself and looks over the crowd. Grown men and women are hopping in place, stretching out, shaking out their limbs to release nervous energy. It is as if we are about to play a football game ourselves.
“Most people don’t go to football games alone,” he says. “So he should stand out in that regard. But he’s smart. So he’ll probably try to walk in with a family, or some group of people, as if he fits in with them. He’ll probably strike up some conversation with them, so he looks like he belongs with them. But at some point, he’ll break free from them. I can’t write this out for you in a script, so all I can say to you is, keep an eye out for what I’m talking about—without looking like you’re keeping an eye out. Easy, right?”
Some muted laughter. This is classic Books, empathizing with their difficult task, trying to bring the team together.
And then reminding them of the importance, one last time.
“This man has scalped, scalded, and meticulously dissected seventy or more individuals in the last year. He has committed acts of torture that would make a Nazi war criminal blush. He butchered six women on Thursday night in Allen Park. On Friday, he executed a mother and three children before setting them on fire. He’s the most prolific serial killer I’ve ever seen, and he’s spiraling now. He’s actually getting worse.”
Books looks around the room. “This man is a monster. And today, we’re going to bring him in, dead or alive.”
82
“EMMY, YOU’RE going to wear a hole in the ground if you keep pacing like that,” Books says when I answer my phone, “and you couldn’t look any less like you’re actually going to a football game. Just stand still and look bored, like you’re waiting for your boyfriend to show up with your tickets.”
“It’s hard for me to pretend,” I counter. “I never had a boyfriend who took me to a football game.”
“That’s cold. You never showed the slightest interest in football.”
True enough. “Any luck with the scalpers?” I ask for the hundredth time. We’ve assumed that our subject is a cash-only guy who wouldn’t want to throw down a credit card for his ticket to the game, preferring to buy it outside the stadium before the game.
“We have some leads,” he responds with annoying vagueness. “Just worry about your assignment.”
“Thanks for the great advice.” He’s right, of course. I’m nervous and it probably shows. So is Books. Everyone’s nervous, and coping the way cops and agents typically cope, with sarcasm and one-liners.
The gates opened two hours before kickoff, and I’ve seen probably fifteen thousand paunchy white males wearing different shades of blue on their shirts, pants, faces, and other body parts. I haven’t seen any loners, though; every man seems to be walking into the stadium with at least one other person.
I end the call. I check my watch and shake my head as if I’m annoyed, playing the part of the girlfriend waiting for her boyfriend. Why am I stuck down here while Sophie’s upstairs at Command Central? I know the answer, of course; it turns out that Sophie has specialized experience in operating complex networks of surveillance technology, which is why she is up in the luxury suite and I’m enduring a modified pat-down by a woefully undertrained security guard on my way into the stadium. No courtesy wave-through for law enforcement here. We must keep up appearances. Though I can identify about twenty places on my body I could have hidden contraband unnoticed by stadium security.
I weave in through the security checkpoint, deliberately not noticing the five other agents doing the same thing. Many of the undercover agents are in pairs, to keep up appearances, but we also need to spread out as much as possible.
I’ll admit, I never thought I’d say the interior of a football stadium was “pretty.” But this one is, at least where I’m entering. All glass and steel and brick, the atrium open, breezy, and flooded with natural light, more like a shopping mall than a stadium. It was built up around an old department store, and the architecture was preserved, including the old cobblestone street. I had gathered that the locals were all pretty proud of it, and I don’t blame them. Plenty of balconies here, though, where our subject could be watching us file in.
And not all of us good guys are entirely…inconspicuous. I glare at a middle-aged man with close-cut hair standing in the entrance of the More Than a Roar team gear store, spending a lot more time looking over the crowd than admiring the toddler-size jersey he is clutching. He might as well be wearing a sign that says, I’M JUST PRETENDING TO SHOP; I’M REALLY A COP.
I make my way through the Adams Street con
course around to my seat—I’m stationed at the head of section 112. The playing field was built well below street level, something about not wanting to build the stadium too high and obscure the skyline. As I enter past the long wrought-iron gates separating the concourse from the field, I can see that the whole first seating section is downstairs, rather than up.
It is overwhelming. The noise, the sheer mass of humanity—everything. We’re never going to find him here. There are too many, and we are too few.
Get a grip, Emmy.
I scout the section while walking slowly to my seat. I call Books.
“Hi, honey!” I say brightly. “The stadium sure is full today! Boy, I wish you could be down here. But I’m so glad you’re getting to see it on TV!”
“Nice, Emmy,” I hear Sophie say on the other end. “What do you have?”
“Section one eleven, row nine, seat three or four. Section one thirteen, row twenty-six in the middle, and row thirty, seat five or maybe six. And section one twelve, row eighteen or nineteen, couldn’t be sure, in the middle. All either bald or with their heads and faces obscured. I’ll have a dozen more by the half, I’m sure.”
I sit down to at least pretend like I’m watching the game, and the Vikings return the kickoff for a touchdown. Helluva start, Detroit.
83
WHEN THE fourth quarter begins, Detroit is losing 20 to 6. I could not possibly care less about the outcome of this event, where grown men dress up in colorful gladiator costumes and try to carry a leather ball across a demarcated line—but I do care about how close the score is. If it’s what Books calls a “blowout,” then the fans might start to leave, and we’ll have to be ready for the exit of our subject a little earlier than planned.