“None of that matters,” McCaleb said quickly. He had been anticipating the question. He had done nothing but think about the questions and their possible answers during the drive out with Buddy Lockridge from the marina. “If I’m right, this would fall into what we called the power kill model. Basically, it’s a guy who is doing it because he can get away with it. He gets off on that. It’s his way of thumbing his nose at authority and shocking society. He transfers his problems with a particular situation-whether it’s a job, self-worth, women in general or his mother in particular or whatever-onto the police. The investigators. From tweaking them, he gets the jolt in self-worth that he needs. He derives a form of power from it. And it can be sexual power, even if there are no obvious or physical sexual manifestations in the actual crime. You remember the Code Killer out here a while back? Or Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer in New York?”
“Of course.”
“Same thing with both of them. There was no sex in each crime itself but it was all about sex. Look at Berkowitz. He shot people up-men and women-and ran away. But he came back days later and masturbated at the scene. We assumed the Code Killer did the same thing but if he did, our surveillances missed him. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t have to be obvious, Jaye, that’s all. It’s not always the obvious wackos who carve their names in people’s skin.”
McCaleb watched Winston closely, leery of talking above her. But she seemed to understand his theory.
“But it’s not only that,” McCaleb went on. “There’s another part to this. He gets off on the camera, too.”
“He likes us seeing him do it?”
McCaleb nodded.
“That’s the new twist. I think he wants the camera. He wants his work and his accomplishments documented, seen and admired. It increases the danger to him and therefore increases the power reflection on him. The payoff. So to get that situation, what does he do? I think he picks up on a target-he chooses his prey-and then watches them until he has their routine and he knows when it takes them into places of business where the cameras are. The ATM, the market. He wants the camera. He talks to it. He winks at it. The camera is you-the investigator. He’s talking to you and getting off on it.”
“Then maybe he doesn’t choose the victim,” Winston said. “Maybe he doesn’t care about that. Just the camera. Like Berkowitz. He didn’t care who he shot. He just went out shooting.”
“But Berkowitz didn’t take souvenirs.”
“The earring?”
McCaleb nodded.
“You see that makes it personal. I think these victims were chosen. Not the other way around.”
“You’ve thought this all out, haven’t you?”
“Not everything. I don’t know how he chose them or why. But I’ve been thinking about it, yeah. The whole hour and a half it took us to get out here. Traffic was bad.”
“Us?”
“I have a driver. I can’t drive yet.”
She didn’t say anything. McCaleb wished he hadn’t mentioned the driver. It was revealing a weakness.
“We have to start over,” McCaleb said. “Because we thought these people were chosen at random. We thought the locations were chosen, not the victims. But I think it’s the other way around. The victims were chosen. They were prey. Specific targets that were acquired, followed, stalked. We’ve got to background them. There’s got to be an intersection. Some commonality. A person, a place… a moment in time-something that hooks them either to each other or our unknown subject. We find-”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.”
McCaleb stopped, realizing his voice had been rising in fervor.
“What souvenir was taken from James Cordell? Are you saying the money he took from the ATM is a token?”
“I don’t know what was taken but it wasn’t the money. That was just part of the robbery show. The money wasn’t a symbolic possession. Besides, he took it from the machine, not Cordell.”
“So then, aren’t you jumping the gun?”
“No. I’m sure something was taken.”
“We would have seen it. We have the whole thing on video.”
“Nobody picked up on it with Gloria Torres and that was on video, too.”
Winston turned in her chair.
“I don’t know. This still seems like a-let me ask you something. And try not to take it too personal. But isn’t it possible that you’re just looking for what you always looked for before, when you were with the bureau?”
“You mean, like am I exaggerating? Like I want to get back to what I was doing before and this is my way of doing it?”
Winston hiked her shoulders. She didn’t want to say it.
“I didn’t go looking for this, Jaye. It’s just there. It is what it is. Sure, the earring might mean something else. And it might not mean anything at all. But if there is anything I know about in this world, it is this kind of thing. These people. I know them. I know how they think and I know how they act. I feel it here, Jaye. The evil. It’s here.”
Winston looked at him strangely and McCaleb guessed that maybe he shouldn’t have been so fervent in his response to her doubts.
“Cordell’s truck, the Chevy Suburban, wasn’t in the video. Did you process his truck? I didn’t see anything in the stack you gave me about-”
“No, it wasn’t touched. He left his wallet open on the seat and just took his ATM card to the machine. If the shooter had gone into his truck, he would have taken his wallet. When we saw it still there, we didn’t bother.”
McCaleb shook his head and said, “You are still looking at it from the point of view of a robbery. The decision not to process the truck would have been okay-if it had been a real robbery. But what if it wasn’t? He wouldn’t have gone into the truck and taken something as obvious as the wallet.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. Something else. Cordell used his truck a lot. Driving all day along the aqueduct. It would be like a second home to him. There could have been lots of things of a personal nature in there that the shooter could’ve taken. Photos, things hanging from the rearview, maybe a travel diary, you name it. Where is the truck? Make my day and tell me it’s still impounded.”
“No chance. We released it to his wife a couple days after the shooting.”
“It’s probably been cleaned out and sold by now.”
“Actually, no. The last time I talked to Cordell’s wife-which was only a couple weeks ago-she said something about not knowing what to do with the Suburban. It was too big for her and she said it gave her bad vibes now anyway. She didn’t use those words but you know what I mean.”
A charge of excitement went through McCaleb.
“Then we go up there and look at the Suburban and we talk to her and we figure out what was taken.”
“ If something was taken…”
Winston frowned. McCaleb knew what she was facing. She already was dealing with a captain who, after the hypnosis and Bolotov fiascos, probably thought she was being controlled too easily by an outsider. She didn’t want to have to go back to the man with McCaleb’s new theory unless she was sure it was dead-solid perfect. And McCaleb knew it could never be that. It never was.
“What are you going to do?” he asked “It’s like I’m in the car and ready to go. Are you getting in with me or staying on the sidewalk?”
It had occurred to him that he was not constrained by such worries or by a job, a role, inertia or anything else. Either Winston could get in the car or McCaleb could drive on without her. She apparently realized the same thing.
“No,” she said. “The question is what are you going to do. You’re the one who doesn’t have to deal with the bullshit around here like I do. After the hypnosis thing, Hitchens has been-”