The detective kept reading for a few seconds more, then shut the file.
“Something’s bothering me,” DuCharme said.
“What?”
“Mr. Clean wanted the police to find his victims, yet he never contacted the police to take responsibility for the killings. That’s not normal, is it?”
Vick blinked. DuCharme was right. Serial killers who killed their victims in public places generally contacted the police or the media and took responsibility. It was how they satisfied their cravings for recognition.
But that wasn’t Mr. Clean’s profile. He’d been killing women for a quarter century, and not once contacted the police, or the media. He was an invisible man.
Vick was wide awake now. There was something else going on here, some other reason why Mr. Clean had dumped the bodies to be found. She turned down the AC and gave DuCharme her best southern smile.
“Good call,” she said. “Now what does it mean?”
DuCharme reached into the backseat and retrieved her thesis on Son of Sam. He opened the report to the section which detailed Son of Sam’s killings, and slapped the pages with his fingers.
“It’s in here, right?” he asked.
“Right,” she said.
“Why don’t you drive, and I’ll read it to you. Maybe you’ll see it.”
“Why should I drive?”
“It was an old trick my partner used to use. When a case was bothering him, he’d drive around town and have me read the case file to him,” DuCharme explained. “There was something about the concentration that it took to drive the car that cleared his head.”
“It worked?”
“Most of the time, yeah.”
Vick was willing to try just about anything at this point. She started the engine and drove down the shoulder of Sunrise Boulevard and merged into traffic. The roads were jammed, and she drove with her eyes glued to the sea of cars.
“Start reading,” she said.
“Okay. Son of Sam’s first tried to kill his victims with a knife. On three different occasions, he stabbed a woman on the streets of New York and ran away. When he saw no mention of the crimes in the newspapers, he assumed the women had survived, and decided to start using a gun.
“He drove to Texas and purchased a Charter Arms.44 pistol and some bullets. He was afraid to buy ammunition in New York because he was afraid the police would somehow track down the shell casings to his residence.
“His first victim was a nineteen-year-old named Donna Lauria. Lauria was sitting in her car with a friend named Jody Valente in front of Lauria’s home at one o’clock in the morning on July 21, 1976. Valentne started to exit the car when Son of Sam approached holding a brown paper bag. He drew a gun from the bag and fired five shots, wounding Valente and killing Lauria. Then he ran away.
“Son of Sam later admitted to the police that killing Lauria and wounding her friend had sexually excited him. For several days after this, he read the newspaper articles in his home while masturbating. It satisfied a need which so far had gone unfulfilled.”
Dark clouds were directly ahead. In her hurry, Vick had driven directly into the storm. It was the last place she wanted to be.
She hit her indicator and tried to get into a turn lane. Heavy drops of rain pelted her windshield. A split-second later, the clouds opened up, and the downpour began.
“Say that last line again,” she said.
DuCharme ran his finger down the page. “It satisfied a need which so far had gone unfulfilled.”
“That’s it.”
Vick hit her horn and started cutting across the lanes of traffic. She came to the intersection and did an illegal U-turn and headed back the way they’d come. DuCharme said nothing, his mouth agape as he watched her drive.
She punched the gas, hoping to outrace the storm. But it was too late; the darkness and rain had already enveloped them. At the next light, she threw her Audi into park.
“Mr. Clean is dropping the bodies in these locations because it satisfies a need,” she explained. “He’s done it with every one of his victims. It’s part of his signature.”
“Is that what links him to Son of Sam?”
“Yes. Now we have to figure out what that need is.”
The light changed. Vick’s car skidded on the wet road as she hit the gas.
“Keep reading,” she told DuCharme.
Chapter 39
Dusk was settling as the Southwest Airlines jet touched down on the runway at Pittsburgh International Airport and the cabin of people broke into applause. The flight had been as rocky as a roller-coaster, and everyone was happy for the safe landing.
Linderman pulled his overnight bag out of the overhead bin. He was one of the few onboard who hadn’t been bothered by the rough conditions. Flying in an airplane was safer than riding in a car, not that you could convince most people of that. The things that people should have been truly frightened of, they rarely were.
Soon he was sitting in a rental on the Avis lot. He’d rented a GPS system, into which he keyed the address of the Crutchfield house. He did not know Pittsburgh, and was going to rely on the GPS to keep him from getting lost.
The interstate was jammed with rush-hour traffic. He inched along, thinking dark thoughts. It had been a brutal day. He’d fantasized killing Crutch in the chapel, imagined seeing Crutch electrocuted at the restaurant, and had visualized Crutch trying to kill his own family at the FBI office in Jax. Evil thoughts had invaded his mind, and would not go away. Kessler had warned him about this, but Linderman hadn’t understood the danger.
Traffic started to move. Soon the city’s gray buildings were behind him, and he was traveling through the hilly suburbs. He had programmed the GPS system so the voice would have a female British accent. It was a nice change, and he let the voice guide him to the Crutchfield home on Morningside Drive in Oakmont.
It was dark when his headlights found the mailbox with the address. It was a remote area with no streetlights, the land heavily forested. He got out of his car to make sure he had the right place. Printed on the side of the mailbox in faint letters was the word CRUTCHFIELD.
He inched his rental down the gravel driveway past a stand of trees. Almost immediately he had to stop. A fallen oak tree lay in his path. He tried to drive around it, only to find there was no room on either side.
He climbed out and tried to move the tree. He managed to get it an inch off the ground, nothing more.
“Damn it.”
He hadn’t come all this way to be stopped by a lousy tree. He opened the trunk and got the flashlight from his garment bag, and checked it to make sure the batteries still worked. They did, and he headed down the driveway by foot.
The walk lifted his spirits. The air was cooler than back home, and there was a refreshing chill in the air. He hadn’t appreciated the cold until he’d moved to Florida to hunt for Danni. Now, the cold was something he dreamed of going back to.
A tall wooden fence greeted him at the driveway’s end. A painted sign had been nailed to the fence. The sign read No Trespassing – This Means You!
He tried to open the gate, and found that it was locked. On either side of the gate was a fence topped with metal spikes. It was growing dark and he probably should have gone back to his car and waited until tomorrow but instead he grabbed the top of the gate with his hand and pulled himself up so he was looking over it.
That was when he saw the house.
It was an old Victorian three-story with a gabled roof and a wraparound front porch with a metal swing. The swing moved eerily back and forth despite there not being a hint of breeze. The front door had criss-crossing boards nailed over it, and pieces of plywood covered the windows. Shingles were missing from the roof and the paint was peeling in large chunks off the front and sides. Not a soul had lived here for years.
He wanted to see more.
It was a bad idea. He didn’t have a search warrant, and would be breaking the law should he step onto the property without one. He believed in the law, and what it stood for. He had never broken the law for the sake of speeding up an investigation.