“I’ll be here.”
Linderman sat in the McDonald’s parking lot and waited for a call back. He had spent most of his career toiling in an office at Quantico, protected from the outside world. Only since becoming a field agent had he experienced the bitter pill when a case broke bad, and all his hard work led to nothing.
Wood called him back. He wanted the news to be good, and the dark clouds swirling around him to evaporate. He answered by saying, “That was fast.”
“This is a beauty,” Wood said.
“Let me guess. Drake has a criminal record a mile long.”
“Actually, he’s clean as a whistle. Never committed a crime in his life, as far as we know.”
“Then why is this a beauty?”
“Eric Drake is a guard at Florida State Prison in Starke.”
Chapter 7
Linderman knew of Florida State Prison. Also known as Starke Prison, it was a brutal correctional facility in north/central Florida that housed some of the worst criminals in the country, many of whom sat on death row, awaiting the executioner’s call.
Eric Drake had been a guard at Starke Prison for three and a half years, and presently worked the graveyard shift. Thirty-three years old, he was a highschool grad with four years in the Navy. He shared a house in nearby Jacksonville with his brother, Randy, a known crystal meth dealer. Outside of his brother’s lengthy rap sheet, there were no blemishes on Drake’s resume.
Linderman was deeply concerned by this new twist in the investigation. Starke Prison housed a number of notorious serial killers, several of whom he’d profiled while at Quantico. Eric Drake came in contact with those offenders every day, and now he was linked with another serial killer, this one on the outside. Linderman’s gut told him there was a link, and he needed to find out what it was.
“How badly do you want to talk to this guy?” Wood asked.
“Badly,” Linderman replied. “A serial killer named Mr. Clean spoke with Drake this morning. I want to know why.”
“Should I haul him in?”
“I’d prefer if you put Drake under Special Ops, and watch him. I need to talk to the agent handling the case about our next step.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“Rachel Vick.”
“You pick Vick in charge?”
“She asked, so I said yes.”
“Do you think she’s ready?”
“She needed to get her feet wet. I’ll call you once I know something.”
Linderman drove to the Broward County Sheriff’s Department headquarters on Andrews Avenue. Special Ops was a surveillance procedure used by the FBI to monitor people of interest, and employed wire-tapping, hidden tracking devices, and small planes and helicopters to follow a person’s movements twenty-four/seven. It was a real life Big Brother, and he hoped it turned up information that explained what Drake was doing.
Sheriff’s headquarters was humming as he walked in, a mixture of uniformed cops, lawyers in expensive suits, and their clients in cheap threads. The food chain in law enforcement was strange that way; only the hired mouths seemed to prosper.
He showed his ID to the receptionist, and asked for Vick. He was directed to the third floor, office at the end of the hall. Rachel was at a computer when he entered.
“Good morning. How’s it going?” he asked.
“I’m almost done,” Vick replied. “The web site devoted to catching Mr. Clean will be ready to go live this afternoon. Tell me what you think.”
He pulled up a chair. You couldn’t be in the forensic business without being computer literate, and he recognized his own limitations. That was why he liked to work with young people. They’d grown up playing on computers, and were more comfortable with them than driving cars.
The web site Vick had created to catch Mr. Clean was a static site, without any streaming audio or fancy computer graphics. In that regard, it was identical to other web sites run by the Broward Police, and used the same color schemes and typeface. A letter on the home page from Chief Moody contained his smiling photo.
The site had three distinct areas. The first was devoted to information about the abductions and killings; the second, a physical profile of Mr. Clean along with an artist’s composite; the third, a blog where people could share tips or exchange ideas about the case.
There was a certain clumsiness to the site that was immediately evident, including a number of misspelled words and an occasional grammatical mistake. He assumed that Vick had found similar mistakes on other web sites run by the Broward cops, and had decided to emulate them.
Vick had also decided to play a psychological game with Mr. Clean. In the profile area, she’d referred to Mr. Clean as “a sloppy dresser,” when in fact they knew he was meticulous about his appearance. She had also stated that their suspect was “Hispanic, possibly of Mexican descent” when they knew he was Cuban. Vick had purposely included these mistakes on the site to target Mr. Clean’s vanity, and irritate him. Hopefully, he’d come onto the site, and post a correction on the blog.
“I like it,” Linderman said. “What software did you use?”
“Dream catcher,” Vick said.
“How will you track viewers who come on the site?”
“I’m going to place an alarmed visual traceroute program in front of the site. If anyone accesses the site, either by hacking or through authorized channels, a notice of the person’s ISP and physical location will be instantly sent to my BlackBerry. Using that information, I should be able to find out who that person is, and run a background check on them. If they’re someone of interest, I’ll proceed accordingly.”
Vick made it sound like another day at the office. Only it seldom worked out that way; serial killers often understood computers and the Internet as well as they did. He said, “When do you plan to go live with this?”
“By six o’clock. I want to make tonight’s local news broadcasts. Chief Moody has agreed to have one of his detectives hold a press conference, and trumpet the site. The publicity should generate a wave of viewers the first night. After that, traffic will thin out, and only family members and the morbidly curious will visit. And hopefully our killer.”
“Which detective is going to the media?”
“DuCharme.”
Linderman frowned. “Why him?”
“He was the first plainclothes detective at the crime scene, and spoke with a newspaper reporter. He also broke the news to Wayne Ladd’s mother yesterday. Chief Moody felt that for continuity’s sake, DuCharme should be the police’s face on the case.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Vick started to reply, then stopped. Rising from her chair, she went to the door, shut it, then sat back down. “DuCharme’s an asshole. He also thinks he’s God’s gift to women. Personally, I’d rather not work with him, but I think Moody has a valid point.”
“You don’t want DuCharme jeopardizing your investigation. Get rid of him the moment he starts acting up. Understand?”
Vick’s face reddened. She mumbled “Yes, sir.” and nodded stiffly. She acted flustered, and it made Linderman wonder if he’d made the right decision in turning the case over to her. There could be no hesitation or second-guessing when dealing with evil. He stared at the web site she’d created to catch their killer.
“I tracked down the person Mr. Clean called from the pay phone this morning,” he said. “His name is Eric Drake. He lives in Jacksonville, and works as a guard at Florida State Prison in Starke.”
“Mr. Clean called a prison guard?”
“Yes. According to Drake’s phone records, he’s received several hundred phone calls from Broward County over the past twelve months, all from different numbers and no number twice. A rather odd pattern, don’t you think?”
He watched Vick’s reflection in the computer screen. She started to reply, but bit her lip instead. He who hesitates is lost.