Speaking of eyes, there’s just one task left to perform.
“If thy right eye offends thee...”
Chapter Sixteen
Doing his own Net research, Mark started digging into the lives of Stuart Carlyle, Patti Roland, and Bradley Slavens, stopping just short of violating anyone’s civil rights.
As Levi had said, Slavens was off the grid. The guy had no online presence, neither Facebook nor Twitter, nor any other social website. A Google search had brought up next to nothing, not even a photo, which was frustrating — a simple photo shown to Jordan could either rule Slavens out or give them their man.
But there was nothing about this ghost — nothing in obits, neither local nor online, though in Slavens’s employment history, a short post-Havoc stay at a rival gymnastics training center did turn up, then nothing. Aggravating though this was, Mark took solace in Slavens being the least promising suspect, not fitting the time frame as well as Roland and Carlyle.
He would concentrate on them.
Roland appeared to be a first-rate gymnastics instructor. The three-year-old sexual abuse charges had been a one-time thing, most likely brought on by a mother with a conservative background being offended by Roland’s openly gay lifestyle. The out-of-court resolution may have been a cash settlement or a lawyer advising against further pursuit of a weak case.
Despite the matter being a civil one, the case began with a criminal complaint that, though it didn’t get anywhere, resulted in a mug shot. Patti Roland had short black hair and a narrow, angular face; with makeup she might have been borderline pretty. Without it, she looked hard and her eyes stared at the camera lens in cold rage. Was she merely angry about the false charges, or was Mark looking into the eyes of a killer? Half of a killing duo maybe?
She had frequently traveled with Havoc and had been in every city that Mark had associated with a nearby murder. Was she as clean as her record (minus that questionable sexual abuse charge) appeared? Was she capable of violence, as her angry mug shot seemed to indicate?
But her gayness spoke against that. Few lesbian couples indulged in the kind of sick sexual conquest games that male-female serial killing teams pursued. And, anyway, there was no other woman on their very short suspect list.
Likewise, Carlyle had been in all the same cities at the same times. His record was even cleaner than Roland’s. He had no mug shot. But surveilling Havoc, the detective had seen the tall, lithe Carlyle several times, coming out of the center into the parking lot — his name had been stitched to the breast of his windbreaker. Pushing forty, with short blond hair, he could be the monster Jordan had described.
Yesterday he had driven to the gymnastics school and used his cell phone to grab a parking-lot picture of Carlyle. Mark got a decent three-quarter front shot as the guy was getting in his car. Then he’d called Jordan and asked if he could stop by her place, briefly, to discuss a possible suspect.
They sat at the black-topped table near the kitchenette, as before, having some of the Coke Zero left over from his previous visit.
Mark brought the photo up on his phone and handed it to her. “Is this your intruder?”
She studied it awhile.
“I’m... I’m not sure,” she said finally. “The blond hair and blue eyes are right, but a lot of guys have those. You have those. Ten years is a long time.”
She’d had to barely glance at a cell-phone photo to dismiss Havoc.
“He has... isn’t that a scar by his eye? His right eye? The intruder didn’t have that scar. But he could have gotten it since. Ten years is... I said that, didn’t I?”
“Take your time, Jordan. Could it be him, ten years on?”
“I think maybe his eyes are spaced wider. And his hair is parted. The intruder’s wasn’t.”
“He could have changed his hair,” Mark said.
“Is there any way to tell how old a scar is?”
“Somebody with more medical expertise than me might be able to approximate when he got it.”
“He’s around the right age. And you can put him at the scenes of the out-of-town murders?”
“He was traveling with Havoc to nearby cities. Is it him?”
“Maybe.”
That was good enough to keep Mark going. He searched the Net for a younger shot of Carlyle that might enable Jordan to make a more definitive ID; but he got nothing.
And no mug shot. The only blip on the police radar that Carlyle ever made was when he’d reported his gun stolen six years ago. The missing piece was a nine mil, like the ones used in some of the murders. A coincidence? Lot of guns like that out there, particularly Glocks, many like this one with a polygonal barrel. Hard to trace.
Had Carlyle reported the gun stolen so he could more safely use it to commit murder?
At that point, the whole twisted scenario started over.
Friday morning, a day off that he intended to start by sleeping in, Mark was awakened by his cell phone on the nightstand.
He fumbled with the thing, then heard himself saying, “Yeah. Pryor.”
Captain Kelley’s voice. “Pryor, you don’t sound awake. It’s ten-thirty, man.”
“I’m awake now, sir. What is it?”
“I got the results of the bullet-matching tests from the different cases you’ve been looking at.”
Mark sat up. “And?”
“Not great news,” Kelley said. “They’re all nine millimeter, but because of the polygonal barrel, there’s no matching the bullets. Those interchangeable barrels make it practically impossible.”
“What about shell casings?”
“The shooter appears to’ve picked up his brass.”
“Damn.”
“Don’t give up so easy, Pryor — he missed one casing. The family in the Bronx? Rolled under a low sofa and he missed it.”
Kelley was sounding like he was accepting as fact Mark’s theory that one killer was behind these family homicides.
“So we have a casing,” Mark said. “Finally something solid.”
“Solid, but with nothing to compare it to. Running it through NIBIN will take for-fucking-ever.”
NIBIN — the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms — matched bullet and shell casing marks from cases nationwide.
Mark said, “I may have a comparison for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Long shot, but still a possibility. One of the women in that little spin-off team from the victim support group — Kay Isenberg? I spoke to her about the supposed murder-suicide of her sister and brother-in-law, Katherine and Walter Gregory.”
“Supposed?”
“Captain, it was ruled a murder-suicide...”
“That’s my memory.”
“But there are some... discrepancies.”
“Enough discrepancies to open the file of a closed case?” The old irritation was back in Kelley’s tone.
Mark pressed on: “There’s a right-handed bullet wound from a left-handed supposed suicide, and the wife and husband were sleeping on each other’s side of the bed.”
“And you think that’s enough to—”
“I didn’t bring it to you, Captain,” Mark said, “but I’m raising it now because there was a Glock at the scene. Might be worth comparison.”
“This so-called serial killer of yours has the most fluid goddamn MO I ever heard of. It’s almost like you were just stringing a bunch of unrelated homicides together to see how big a jackass you can make out of me. What the hell am I going to do with you, son?”
“Keep helping me?”
After a long sigh of exasperation, Kelley said, “You come up with anything else about any of these murders that might lead us somewhere?”