“The bullets appear to have come from the same revolver that was used in most of the other cases.”
“You say ‘most of the other cases.’ Isn’t it likely there are more than one of them?”
“Revolvers or vigilantes?”
Cavender smiled a bit. “Vigilantes, Captain.”
“We know for sure that there is one vigilante. There may be a second one, but that hasn’t been established beyond doubt.”
“But the use in different cases of two admittedly distinct handguns …”
“He could own two guns, you know. Particularly today’s case suggests that it’s the same man. He used the thirty-eight revolver today, but he fired from his car, and that’s the same pattern that’s been established in two or three other cases where he’s used the forty-five automatic.”
“I see. Then you’re pressing your investigation on the assumption that you’re looking for a single culprit.”
“We haven’t closed any doors.”
Cavender shifted in his chair; it was an indication he wanted to change to another angle of attack. “Captain, the modus operandi of the Chicago vigilante, whether one man or two men or an entire society of men, seems to be quite simple, in a sense. That is, he simply finds a criminal in the act of committing a crime, and shoots the criminal dead in his tracks. Would you agree that’s a fair summary of his pattern?”
“It’s what the evidence suggests.”
“Yes. Well doesn’t it seem curious to you that this vigilante seems to have very little trouble locating these people?”
“I’m not sure I understand your question.”
“What I’m saying, Captain, is that the vigilante seems to find it very easy to find out who is going to commit a crime, and when and where the crime will take place. Then all the vigilante has to do is be at the right place at the right time. Now I suppose you must have devoted some part of your investigation to inquiring into that question, haven’t you?”
“Naturally.”
“The sources of the vigilante’s intelligence, I mean. How he identifies the criminals. How he finds out when and where the crimes will take place.” Cavender leaned forward now, peering at the policeman with something like a vindictive gleam. “How does he do it, Captain? How does he do it so easily?”
“There’s a certain logic to it. In some of the cases it’s pretty obvious that he sets himself up as a mark. He probably dresses fairly well, and a man who’s well-dressed walking alone in some neighborhoods is an open invitation to a mugging. He just waits for them to come to him, and when they begin to attack him he kills them. It isn’t that hard, if you know the city and the neighborhoods.”
“I see. But what about the cases where he’s interrupted crimes against other persons?”
“We have a theory that he has access to information about criminals. Possibly police records or court records. He finds the name and address of a criminal, we think, and then he stakes out the criminal and tails him until the criminal makes a move. Then the vigilante moves in for the kill. We’re assuming this because nearly all his victims have had prior records of arrest and conviction. Therefore we assume the vigilante has access to these records. Of course a lot of them are matters of public record—he could find them in the official directories of court proceedings, or even the newspaper morgues.”
“Yes. Or the files of the Police Department itself?”
“It’s possible.” Mastro actually smiled: it was evident he knew what was coming.
Cavender plunged. “Doesn’t this suggest the strong possibility that the vigilante is himself a police officer?”
In the rocking chair Harry Chisum snorted. “What absolute bloody rubbish.”
Mastro was still smiling, his grey face wavering on the television screen. “I wouldn’t call it a strong possibility. But we admit it’s a possibility. We’re not ignoring that avenue of investigation. We’re checking it out.”
“Yes, of course. But it leads to a far more compelling question, doesn’t it, Captain.”
“What question?”
“Simply this. If the vigilante can so easily find these criminals, and beat them to the punch as it were, then why can’t the police do the same thing?”
“You mean kill them on sight, Mr. Cavender?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean, Captain. Why can’t our policemen be as successful as this vigilante in preventing crimes?”
“Actually they are. They’re far more successful, as a matter of fact.”
“You’ve just lost me, Captain.”
“We assign plainclothes officers to shadow known criminals, particularly some of those who are let out on bail, or those who have just returned from prison, or others when we receive tips from our informants that they’re planning something. We have a sizable group of detectives that’s assigned to surveillance of these suspects, and quite often the surveillance results in arrests when the officers apprehend the suspects in the act of committing crimes. But the point is, these arrests don’t generate the kind of publicity the vigilante gets with his cold-blooded murders. As a case in point, the vigilante has killed at least sixteen people in the past two weeks or so—or at least that’s the number of killings that have been attributed to him. At the same time, our stakeouts have resulted in more than forty arrests, under very similar circumstances. But naturally these arrests don’t make headlines the way vigilante murders do.”
“An entire metropolitan police department prevents only two or three times as many crimes from being consummated as one man with a couple of handguns. Isn’t that a pretty woeful batting average for the police?”
“We don’t have unlimited funds or unlimited manpower, Mr. Cavender. If we had enough men and money to put tails on every suspected criminal in the streets of Chicago, we’d do it, believe me. It would make our job a whole lot simpler. But we’ve got a great deal to do, an enormous territory to cover, and a great many duties other than crime prevention and suspect-shadowing. We’re spread thin, and I think we’re doing a damn good job considering everything.”
“I have no doubt you feel that way, Captain, but I think you can understand how some of us may not agree with you completely.”
“That’s your privilege.”
“I’m impressed, at any rate, by the fact that you haven’t chosen to rear back on your dignity and plead that you’ve been hamstrung by the laws about entrapment and such.”
“We do have those problems, yes, but there’s not much point bleating about them. We’ve got to operate within the system as it is, not as we’d like it to be.”
“I think we’re all fortunate that’s the case, Captain. Very well, I’d like to get your views on another side of this subject. What can you tell us about the vigilante himself?”
“In what sense?”
“What sort of person is he? Have you formed an impression of him?”
“A physical description?”
“Well obviously we’re all eager to know whether you have a description of the man yet, after all this time, but in addition to that, I think our audience is curious to know what picture of the vigilante you may have formed in your own mind. What sort of personality he is. What his character is. Anything you may have concluded about his background, or especially his motives. But let’s start with the physical description, since you mentioned it. What does he look like?”
“I’d prefer not to go into much detail about how much we know about him. I can say this much. We believe he’s a male Caucasian.”
“A white man.”
“Yes.”
“Ruling out blacks, Spanish-Americans, Orientals, American Indians, women and children. Well that’s quite a step, Captain, it must narrow the field right down to two or three million suspects.”