“It was summer, and the place had bad air conditioning. He said he kept the apartment door open for a cross-breeze, saw it all from his couch.”
“And your perp couldn’t talk to deny it?”
“He could talk. But he didn’t have anything compelling to say. Just a flat-out denial. But he denied other things too. He said he’d never been in the hooker’s place, but we had lots of DNA placing him there, he was in her appointment book, and several neighbors, not only Wooderson, had seen him in the building on previous occasions.”
“He lied because he was embarrassed about going to a prostitute,” Jericho said quietly.
Fernandez nodded. “Seems like. But at the time, we thought he was covering for himself.”
Of course they would have. People just didn’t frame each other for murder all that often. Even the most paranoid detective would be inclined to take the obvious answer as truth, and not waste a lot of time searching for convoluted alternate theories. “So what changed? What made you think he was involved?”
“He started hounding us. He wasn’t aggressive, exactly, but way too involved. He wanted to know every detail of the case, went to visit the suspect in jail, and seemed too wrapped up in it all. I eventually called him on it, and he gave me some line about needing closure in order to get over the trauma of almost witnessing a murder.”
“He gave me the closure line too. The girls needed to stick around and see Will come out of the forest because he’d startled them, and they needed to know he was caught, for closure. And he visited Will in jail.” Jericho felt almost dirty. He’d been part of it, part of letting this sick bastard get his thrills from watching Will suffer. Now he would damn well be part of making the asshole pay. “Was that it? Just that instinct?”
Fernandez shook her head. “No. Not at all. I kept after him, poking into his background, trying to figure it out, and finally he—well, he confessed, really, but not in a way I could use.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t actuallysayhe did it. But he made it clear all the same, you know? Hinting and smirking about it. He was so fucking proud of himself. I think you’re right that framing Jared Scott was part of the thrill, but Wooderson definitely got off on the killing too, and gloating to a cop was the icing on the cake.”
“It was reckless, though. Confessing to a cop, even if it’s not something admissible in court? That’s the kind of ballsy that seems a lot like stupid.”
“Not as reckless as you’d think,” Fernandez said heavily. “He did it two days after Jared Scott suffocated himself with a trash bag in our lockup facility. We were already taking serious heat for having a guy die in custody; it would have been way, way worse if it had turned out he was innocent.”
“So you stopped trying?”
“Fuck you,” she shot back at him. Then she frowned, lowered her shoulders, and said, “No, I didn’t stop trying. But I was getting no support. The prosecutor, my boss—they wanted this to just go away. There was no family yelling at them, no community concern. Dead whore, dead perp, dead case. You know?” Her voice had the remains of bitterness in it, but also a fair dose of pragmatism. Things were the way they were. “I kept after him when I could. Kept an eye on him and let him know I was watching. But I’m a single person; I couldn’t do twenty-four-hour surveillance, and I had other cases to worry about. So one day I went by his house, and he wasn’t there. His fucking job is totally mobile—I don’t know what it takes to design a website, but he does it all over the internet, with whatever business names he feels like using. He pulled the girls out of school and took a copy of their records with him so nobody’d be calling back to get information on them. He was gone, and it’s not like I could initiate a large-scale manhunt with no support from the higher-ups.”
“But now he’s here, and you are too,” Jericho said. “Now we’ve got a chance to get him for this murder, and maybe others. I mean, we only know about two, but there could be more, right?”
“I did a pretty thorough search of his past. I hadn’t figured out the connection to disabled people, so maybe that’ll be a new filter that lets me find something new. But it’s not catching him for past crimes that I’m worried about. Not really.”
Jericho nodded. “Yeah. The most important thing is the future. He’s already done this at least twice, each murder ruining two lives, and we don’t stop him? We know how serial killers work. If we don’t stop him, he’ll kill again.”
