[2017] The Extraction Page 7

  My gut told me she was the perp, but as yet, I had no way to prove it. She had executed the same highly specific ritual at each victim’s house. Most likely, she had ritualized her process for collecting her victims, too. That meant she probably hooked up with the other victims in a bar or nightclub too, just like she had with Jordan Myers.

  I turned my attention to checking with the family and friends of the two other victims to determine what nightclubs, if any, they frequented. With a bit of luck, the lady with the oversized purse might be traced back to one of those bars, too.

  After spending most of the afternoon on the phone, I had several good nightclub leads for both of the other victims. Next step: see if the lady in the tan cowboy hat had visited any of them the same nights as the victims.

  CHAPTER 19

  I visited the nightclubs on my list that evening—a busy time for them, but better for me since virtually the entire staff worked those hours.

  The third victim, a freelance mechanic, had been seen on the night of his murder by the staff at Hog Heaven, a biker club far to the south of downtown Atlanta. The bar had no cameras at all, and none of the staff recalled the victim leaving with anyone that fateful night. In fact, they hadn’t seen him leave at all. Talk about striking out.

  The next stop yielded better results. The staff at Sand Dunes, a surfer bar in the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, confirmed Sean Doyle, the first victim, had been a regular. The Dunes had a more extensive network of security cameras than The Roundup. It took only minutes of reviewing the front-door recordings to spot Doyle entering the establishment on the Saturday night of his murder. I fast-forwarded a bit before resuming normal speed. At last, Doyle’s form exited the door.

  Now that I knew the suspect’s MO, I had the bar’s manager queue up security footage from side exits for just after the time Doyle exited. Sure enough, the lady used a side door to leave several minutes later. On this occasion, she still carried the Vera Bradley bag but had ditched the cowboy hat in favor of a baseball cap and a colorful aloha shirt—another indication of her advance planning. She wanted to blend in to each bar. Fortunately, the ball cap didn’t do as good a job hiding her features as the cowboy hat had, probably not as much as she had hoped. The recording showed a good, clean image of her face as she entered earlier in the evening. Yet even when shown this image, none of the staff recognized her. She had been careful to visit establishments where her identity wasn’t known. In fact, she might not visit bars at all, not until a particular evening felt like a good time for murdering some poor sap.

  Different outfits…different bars in widely dispersed cities…no distinct pattern at all. Surely this was all part of her carefully orchestrated plan.

  But like all other criminals, she had a blind spot. She didn’t realize that a non-pattern constituted a type of pattern, too. In other words, I could predict that if she struck again before we were able to track her down, it would be at a different bar and different Atlanta suburb than any she had plumbed before.

  I met with Nolan first thing the next morning to review my findings. Based on the cornucopia of evidence I had gathered, he agreed that this “lady of the lounges” looked to be our prime suspect. He directed a subordinate to email the suspect’s facial image to bars throughout the metro Atlanta area, along with an FBI hotline number to be called in case anyone spotted her.

  In the meantime, Nolan and I sat down at our “Next Generation Identification” biometric database. In 2010, this suspect identification system had been augmented with facial recognition capabilities. This particular feature didn’t work perfectly, but it often narrowed our search down from millions of suspects to a handful or two.

  We crossed our fingers as Nolan entered the suspect’s image into the system. An hour later, it spit out a list containing seven names and the social security number of each. Only three of the ladies lived within a hundred miles of metro Atlanta. With any luck, one of these suspects would turn out to be our murderer and we could take her off the streets.

  “The vics were all blue-collar kind of guys,” I told Nolan. “I’m thinking our perp is, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The specificity of all three victims scream ‘substitute’ to me, as in the victims were surrogates for the actual abuser she resents and would ultimately like to kill. That gives us powerful insight into her background. Here’s my theory: this perp grew up in a poor household. Somewhere along the way, either as a child or adult or both, there was a male in her life who sexually abused her, probably after getting drunk. Maybe her dad, maybe a relative, maybe her boyfriend. But this guy visited bars, came home, and did his creepy thing to the perp. That’s why she goes after the same type of guy: to kill men who fit the pattern of her original abuser.”

  “So you don’t think these guys tried to abuse her?”

  “No. We would’ve seen evidence of that if they had. These guys brought a woman home from a bar. They were just hoping to get laid.”

  Nolan rubbed his chin, ruminating.

  “Think about it,” I continued. “How bad would our perp’s luck have to be for her to go home with a drunken abuser all three times? No, she was careful to hide her tracks, and she brought her own rope and latex gloves. These victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Nolan and I worked as a team to piece together the backgrounds of these three female suspects, beginning with IRS records and social media. It was quick and dirty, but you’d be surprised how often that approach works.

  The first potential suspect turned out to be a wealthy, happily married mother of two who had time-stamped pictures at a friend’s birthday party in Facebook the night of the first murder. We didn’t bother to spend any more time on her.

  The second suspect looked more promising. She held a cashier’s position at Kohl’s department store. She was married, but her husband worked the night shift in an I.T. support center, so they rarely spent time together. Their annual income of $45,000 fell below the national household average. It met the profile somewhat, but the description didn’t resonate with me. My gut told me this wasn’t our criminal. Nolan suggested he continue to dig deeper into this suspect while I performed a first, cursory review of the third.

  I pulled up the usual social media accounts. Her name didn’t appear on Instagram but did in Facebook. The more I read, the more my profile of this criminal seemed to come to life.

  “I might have something,” I called to my colleague.

  “What is it?”

  “Our third suspect. Divorced. No kids. Works part-time as a CNA, Certified Nursing Assistant, in a nursing home.” I scanned her uploaded photos. “Her face looks like a good match to the still frames from the clubs’ surveillance videos.”

  Nolan rolled his eyes. “All three of those ladies did. That’s why we’re looking into them now.”

  “Yeah, but this one looks to be the right height, too. And she’s kind of scrawny, like the lady in the nightclub recordings.”

  “Let’s see what the IRS says about her.” Nolan logged on and used a series of search criteria to find the suspect. He nodded. “Income of twenty-eight K last year. Definitely on the low end.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked, wondering if she used a false name for her Facebook profile.

  He squinted at the small print filling his screen. “Edna Haas.”

  “That’s the same as her Facebook profile.”

  Nolan’s fingers danced over his keyboard. “Here’s her address. Why don’t I have my team pay her a visit?”

  Arrest and prosecution after that was, as they say, “uneventful.” Nolan found the partially used spool of Zoro nylon rope in Edna’s mobile home. Chemical analysis of its specific composition matched it to the cord used on the murder victims. And a perfume bottle in Edna’s purse actually contained the Ketamine we had found in her victims’ systems.

  Yep, prosecution was a slam dunk. Edna wasn’t too keen on the prospect of receiving the death penalty, so she a
greed to a plea deal: consecutive life sentences with no possibility for parole if she pled guilty and supplied detailed confessions of each crime.

  I attended her first debriefing session, where she outlined her murder of Sean Doyle, the first victim. I later learned this homicide matched the other two in almost every way.

  As she described her actions, her voice trembling at times, a chill ran down my spine—not just for the horrendous nature of her crime, but also for the degree to which my predictions had come to pass.

  Edna started by picking out a blue-collar bar located far from her house, varying the theme on later dates so as not to fall into a predictable pattern. Dressing for the nightclub’s theme, she arrived, picked out a typical customer—Doyle, in this case—and struck up a conversation with him. Convincing him to take her back to his place was easy. She merely had to suggest she was open to a night in the sack. Doyle’s inevitable offer “proved” his guilt as a sexual predator.

  All the cop shows Edna had seen on TV served as an informal “how to pull off a crime” tutorial. Once in Doyle’s home, she was careful to avoid touching anything. She suggested a drink, a request he was all too eager to grant. She then slipped the date-rape drug into her partner’s beverage.

  Nolan asked Edna how she transported the drug. She explained that to keep the chemical in her purse without raising suspicion, she had dumped out the contents of a perfume bottle and poured in the Ketamine. But while emptying the perfume bottle, she had shaken it up and down, like a ketchup bottle, to make it drain out faster. Some of the fragrance had splattered onto her purse and soaked into its fabric, where over time the scent leached out onto the rope she kept stored there. Edna realized this bottle represented incriminating evidence; when Nolan arrived at her mobile home to question her, she had attempted to dash out the door and pour its contents on the ground, but the detective stopped her before more than a few drops escaped.

  Once Doyle was incapacitated, Edna donned latex gloves and wiped down her drink glass. She then lugged him into one of his own chairs and pulled down his trousers, exposing the “offending organs,” she said. Finally, she used the rope from her purse to bind Doyle to the chair and gag him.

  She waited for him to awaken, then “gave him a talkin’ to,” which I took to mean working herself into the psychotic rage that enabled the feats of strength that followed. Once she finished berating the man for his sexual deviancy, she proceeded with his gruesome castration.

  She had expected blood loss from the procedure to kill him immediately. When it didn’t, she grabbed a smaller, shaper knife from his cutlery drawer and used it to slice his carotid artery.

  “I didn’t think CNAs were trained in that sort of thing,” Nolan said.

  “They ain’t. But I learned it a while back for…something different.” Her eyes gleamed as she spoke the words.

  She admitted to walking for miles after the crimes, hoofing it until early dawn before summoning a ride from a taxi.

  Where did this rage come from? I had my theory but didn’t know to what extent it was true. Time to find out.

  “Edna,” I said. “I bet Mr. Myers and the two other men made you angry, didn’t they?”

  “Well, duh,” she replied with matter-of-fact simplicity. “I killed them, didn’t I?”

  “Can you tell me what they did that made you upset?”

  For the first time, Edna’s eyes welled with tears, the story spilling out of her. Her father, a chronically unemployed alcoholic, had molested and raped her for years, beginning around her seventh birthday. She moved in with a friend at age fifteen and shared an apartment a few years later while attending a technical school. After receiving her certification, she moved into the trailer in which Nolan caught her.

  Edna may have moved out of her father’s house years ago, but all the while her resentment of his abuse lingered unresolved, a spiritual abscess festering under the surface. Eventually, this anger boiled out. Even on the job, she could no longer bring herself to pretend she liked men, especially those who resembled her drunken, abusing father.

  She drifted from job to job, her smoldering hatred sooner or later leading to her dismissal. As the firings piled up, she found it increasingly difficult to find steady employment. The part-time, night shift work she was holding down until a few days ago had been the only employment she could find.

  Even this aspect of my profiling—Edna’s early abuse and her pathological hatred towards men who resembled her abuser—had proved to be accurate. In a morbid way, I owe Edna credit for boosting my reputation as a profiler…and for reinforcing the “Grinder” nickname.

  Months later, Nolan told me he had attempted to track down Edna’s father and discovered the man had gone missing eleven years previously. Edna had hated the man…and then he had disappeared. Could this explain her preexisting knowledge of carotid arteries? Had she practiced on her old man years ago?

  CHAPTER 20

  In the FBI building, I stop my narrative, having no further details of the case to share with Sampson.

  She nods and leans back in her desk chair. “For sure the first four lines of the clue point to Edna Hass. But what do the last four mean?”

  My mind mulls over the second stanza.

  Suffering souls don’t get no justice

  Innocent women must take a stand

  Go back to the source of vengeance for ladies

  Where the juice of justice taints the land

  “That section of the poem must also connect to the Edna Haas case,” I reply. “But how?”

  “Beats me,” says Sampson. “Honestly, I doubt anyone who wasn’t directly involved in that case could decipher the second clue.”

  I think about the family or friends that must be involved, given that Edna is still serving time. “Or at least someone who’s been informed about her crimes—in detail.”

  Sampson shrugs.

  I hunch over and begin talking to myself as much as Sampson. “The kidnapper said the second clue in each box would be harder to solve. He wasn’t kidding. Does ‘juice’ stand for blood? If so, should I visit each of Edna’s bloody crime scenes until I find the box? Any of them could be construed as ‘the source of vengeance for ladies.’” I glance at my watch: eighteen hours left. With the clock counting down the hours, searching each crime scene individually will consume precious time, especially if the crime scenes’ current homeowners object to some raving lunatic looking for a secret box on their property.

  Sampson reads my thoughts. “It’ll take time. I could send agents to all three houses.”

  “It won’t work,” I reply. “You said so yourself. Only someone with intimate knowledge of the case will be able to untangle this. And maybe not even then.” I hesitate. “Maybe we can at least narrow this down.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it. Would the box of clues be hidden inside a victim’s house, or somewhere outside? Unless the kidnapper is a locksmith, he’d have to choose an outside hiding spot.”

  I linger again, reconsidering the notion of the source of “vengeance for ladies.”

  “The original source of vengeance for ladies would be Edna’s father,” I continue, “but according to Nolan, the man hasn’t been seen in years.”

  “Does that mean Edna’s childhood home is the ‘original source’?” says Sampson, crossing her legs.

  “Probably not, since she grew up in Valdosta,” I reply. That southern-Georgia city lies nearly four hours away. “Anyway, I’ll have to hope that’s further than the kidnapper intended, since making a round trip there would use up almost half the time Trin has left.”

  “What about Edna’s former mobile home. It’s here in the Atlanta area, right?”

  I nod. “Yep. And that might make sense. It’s where she lived when she planned and carried out her murder spree.”

  Sampson frowns. “But how would ‘juice of justice taints the land’ fit in there? Haas never murdered anyone at her own place, did she?”

&nb
sp; “No.” Standing here equivocating all day won’t help Trin. From what I can tell, there’s nothing in the second stanza to suggest one of the victims’ houses over the others. For no better reason than the fact that searching three locations will take more time than searching only one, I opt to start looking for the next box at Edna’s former mobile home. “But I’m going to check it out anyway.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I race across the parking lot of the FBI complex and drop into the driver’s seat of my Malibu. It shudders as I turn the key a handful of times.

  C’mon, baby…

  Finally, the sedan roars to life. I accelerate from the complex and weave through traffic, finding myself on I-85 south within minutes. Once I hit downtown, I’ll switch over to I-75 south, then work through side streets to Edna’s former trailer. Unfortunately, it lies south of the city, far away from my current location. It’ll take a good hour to get there, maybe a bit less if rush-hour traffic has already dissipated.

  As usual, the stream of 8:00 P.M. headlights from the interstate’s opposite lane has a mesmerizing effect, much as it did when I worked for the Bureau. I should concentrate on finding the next box of clues and tracing down the kidnapper, but my mind keeps drifting back to Trin. How is it possible she’s on the verge of dying? And how ironic is it that the chain of events leading to this crisis started with the best of intentions? Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of being someone’s hero, the man who would save the day. Serving as a cop seemed a natural fit. And not just any cop. I was the guy who locked psychopaths away, putting an end to their serial crime sprees. And in the eyes of those offenders, that made me the bad guy…the one who needed to be punished.