“On the phone!”
It was possible for someone to be making something like this up on the spot, but it seemed unlikely. The best way to ferret out a lie is with a follow-up question. “Who are you working with, Vincent?”
“No one.” A pause. “What do you mean?”
“Abducting the man in the alley. Who else was involved?”
“No one. It was just me.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“He made me do it! I swear. Stop wasting time. He’s going to kill her if-”
“Where do you live, Vincent?”
He rattled off an address and I radioed it in to get a car over there. I was still holding him down and he was a hefty man, so I was glad that, at least for the moment, he’d stopped trying to roll away.
“No, no no, they’re not there-” Then abruptly, he seemed to change his mind. “Wait. You can’t go in. If he sees you, he’ll kill her! He said no cops!”
There was no question that I needed to check out this guy’s story to see if his wife was safe. “Go in dark,” I told dispatch. “Possible hostage situation.”
Swift, light footsteps approached us. I whipped out my SIG, snapped around, ready, wired. But it was just Sergeant Brandon Walker, the guy we called Radar, entering the circle of light tossed down from one of the streetlights about thirty meters away.
At thirty-seven, Radar was twelve years older than me and was the one officer Lieutenant Thorne thought wouldn’t be threatened or insulted partnering with the youngest homicide detective on the force. He’d been right. Radar was a good cop. A good man. A great dad. Even though he wasn’t an imposing guy-slim, balding, stuck with a nose that was a little too big for his face-Radar was scrappy and smart, and I was glad he was my partner.
I holstered my weapon, hailed Radar, then asked Vincent, “Why would he kill her?”
“I don’t know! He made me do it. Like I told you, he said if I got caught, he’d slit her throat! You have to-”
“You alright, Pat?” It was Radar jogging toward us, weapon out to cover me.
“I’m fine. You hearing this?”
“Yeah.”
He arrived at my side.
“Get two cars over here, Radar. I want this guy in a cruiser ASAP so we can talk to him in private.”
He was eyeing my face where Vincent had punched me.
“Go on,” I told him.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Only then did I become aware of the pain emanating from my jaw and pounding through my head. It was hard to imagine that I hadn’t noticed it a few seconds ago, but adrenaline does that to you. My index finger ached too; it’d gotten wrenched pretty badly when Vincent yanked at my SIG, and now the proximal interphalangeal joint felt thick, swollen, hard to move. “I’m good. Make the call.”
While Radar stepped away to radio the cruisers, I asked Hayes, “How would he know you did it? Were you supposed to meet him? Call him?”
“He said he’d be watching.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
I scrutinized the area again. “Tell me what happened. Make it quick.”
He snatched a breath and quickly recounted the story. “I came home, found blood in the kitchen. He’d taken her. There was a note with a phone number and I called it. He told me I needed to leave a black man in his twenties, naked, cuffed in that alley, that if I got caught or went to the cops, he’d kill Colleen.”
“Did he tell you that alley on Twenty-fifth, that specific one?”
“Yes.”
That was the alley where, back in 1991, Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found. The teenage Laotian had been drugged and was disoriented, but had escaped apartment 213 when his abductor, a serial killer named Jeffrey Dahmer, briefly left him alone.
When the police arrived, Dahmer convinced the two MPD officers that Konerak was his drunk lover. When the officers returned Konerak, who was still disoriented from the drugs, to Dahmer’s apartment, they caught the scent of a terrible smell that Dahmer told them was his aquarium he’d been putting off cleaning-but it was really the decomposing body of a victim Dahmer had killed earlier that week, Tony Hughes. The officers left Konerak with Dahmer, who, within minutes, overpowered him, killed him, and began to eat his heart.
The same alley.
When Konerak was found there, he’d been handcuffed-naked and cuffed, just like the guy tonight. Two months later, when a young African-American man named Tracy Edwards escaped from Dahmer and led the police to Dahmer’s apartment, one of his wrists was cuffed as well. He’d fought back when Dahmer attacked him and barely managed to get away in time. Everyone on the MPD knew the story.
I processed everything, made a decision, told Radar, “Send out a call that the suspect got away.”
He glanced at Hayes, then looked at me again quizzically. “That he got away?”
“If this guy’s telling the truth, as long as he’s free from the police, his wife stays alive.”
“Got it.” Radar went for his radio again.
“Okay.” I turned to Vincent. “What’s the phone number you found at your house?”
“On my portable phone. The last number I called. I don’t remember it.” Obviously he was scared, worried, desperate, but he must have been able to tell that I was trying to help, that I wasn’t discounting his story, and his straight answers were just what I needed.
I took out his phone and yanked the antenna up. I wished there were a simple way to redial portable numbers, but a quick call to the station, then to the telephone company, got me what I needed.
I punched in the number and let it ring.
While I waited for someone to pick up, the two cruisers I’d requested pulled up to the curb and four officers jumped out. Radar helped them hustle Vincent Hayes into one of the cars.
The phone kept ringing. Still no answer.
Radar returned and I told him urgently, “Have everyone keep their red-and-blues on. I want it to look like we’re still searching for the suspect.” It wasn’t much, and if Vincent was telling the truth and his wife’s abductor was watching, or maybe if he was monitoring emergency frequencies, it would already be too late. But it was worth a try and-
The ringing stopped. I waited, but whoever was on the other end said nothing, so I did: “It’s done.” I kept my voice low and tried to sound out of breath so that whoever was on the other end wouldn’t recognize that I wasn’t Vincent. “The cops came, but I got away.”
No answer.
“They found the black guy,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You said you’d let Colleen go.”
“Who is this?”
“Vincent,” I lied. “I did it. I swear. Let me talk to-”
I heard a gasp and then a scream on the other end of the line, and then nothing at all.
“Colleen!” I yelled.
A blank silence, and then a rapid beeping sound. The man had hung up.
I redialed, nothing. Called the station: “Get me a trace on 888-359-5392. Now!”
4
We were unable to trace the call, found no one at the Hayes residence, didn’t learn anything helpful from the bartender at New Territories, and when I met up with Vincent at police headquarters in interrogation room 2A thirty minutes later, I had no good news to share with him.
It was possible that the woman I’d heard scream on the phone wasn’t Colleen Hayes, and it was also possible that the scream was staged, that no one had even gotten hurt. I found that unlikely, but all too often premature assumptions end up needlessly derailing investigations and I wasn’t about to let that happen in this case. Facts need to establish hypotheses, not the other way around.
Right now Vincent didn’t need to know anything about someone screaming on the phone.
I found him seated at a metal table bolted to the floor, his hands and feet shackled. If his story was true, he’d been coerced to commit tonight’s crimes and theoretically might not pose a risk or need to be cuffed. But he had drugged and kidnapped a young man, resisted arrest, assaulted an officer of the law-in fact I wasn’t even sure how many laws he’d broken in the last two hours. We still hadn’t confirmed his story. Cuffed was good.