“Let’s get some patrolmen,” I said to Cassie, “walking our sketch door to door in these plazas. Someone knows this guy.”
“Heard,” she said.
Cassie left the room to coordinate with Detective Quinones, and I suggested to Frank that we put the medical angle aside, rather than fixate further on it.
While I did this, Frank took a turn in his analysis.
“One of the things that’s been bothering me, Gardner,” he said, “is the why.”
“Why he’s doing this?” I asked.
“The bodies show no evidence of a blitz attack, based on everything in our ME reports. Also, none of the telltale signs of abuse. And like you said, the victims appear to come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.”
There was a reason Frank raised these specific points. Data told us that 62 percent of US serial killers claimed they had murdered their victims for either enjoyment or financial gain. But if we could not make some personal connection between victim and killer, and if these women were too poor to offer El Médico money… why on earth had they been targeted?
And if there was no pattern in picking them, how would we find their killer?
Cassie came back into the room. She told us that patrol was on their way to the medical plazas we’d marked. I stepped closer to the wall and stared at the composite sketch.
“His picture’s all over the news,” I said, “but no one recognizes him.”
I thought of the detail about the mask on his face and how that affected the quality of our sketch. Of Richie’s mention of a bandage.
Is he purposely trying to disguise himself?
It felt like we had explored everything from the killer’s point of view, so as a group, we decided to switch back to another urgent matter: how Richie might have attracted the attention of El Médico. We had begun to chase down a half dozen leads on the case. Any one of them might have led Richie into the hands of a killer.
“Let’s start with the pimp boyfriend, Dog,” I said, pointing at the paper I had taped to the conference room wall. “Richie had the ME grind up one of the skeletal hip bones to compare it to Dog’s baby teeth, which his mother had supplied. Do we know if Richie heard back on that yet from Quantico?”
“On it,” Cassie said and began typing on her laptop.
I turned back to the wall. “Freddie,” I said. One word.
“What about him?”
“Richie was convinced the cases were connected. If not the cases, the two men.”
“El Médico and your first C.I.?” Frank asked.
I nodded, turning back to the wall. “Natalie Kastner,” I said. This was Freddie’s cousin, the one whom Shooter had interviewed at the funeral reception. “When I spoke to Shooter from D.C., the plan was to keep Jo’s cover as the ex of Freddie Pecos intact. Jo had asked Richie to follow up on case details with Natalie. Interview her.”
“Do we know if he actually did that?” Frank asked. “If he called her or drove down to Lucas Beach?”
“We were all so busy in D.C.” Cassie shrugged. “I don’t think any of us know.”
The truth was that we’d left Richie on an island while we pursued the gun case. Left a rookie in the crosshairs of someone who’d killed nearly a dozen times.
“I’d also asked Richie to keep digging into how El Médico and Freddie might know each other,” I said. “Richie looked back at the original ATM footage from Hambis. He told me that Freddie looked confused when he saw El Médico. Then surprised. Then happy.”
“And?” Frank asked, his voice impatient, the veins on his neck showing.
“There’s something about him.” I tapped on the sketch. “People don’t notice him. But Freddie…”
“Freddie did,” Cassie said.
“And Freddie didn’t live much longer after,” Frank said, shaking his head.
Cassie pointed. “But the happy part.”
