CHAPTER 46
An hour later Ruby joined me in the interview room. Assuming her appearance mirrored my own, I looked absolutely horrible. I’m guessing we were both just a few notches above roadkill on the beauty scale—dirty, worn out, and utterly exhausted.
More people had joined us, so we went over our stories again, but by this point I’d lost track of how many times. Clegg was in the room, as were Gant and Kaminski. The chief of police, a burly guy named Eric Higgins, joined the party as well. They brought in a sketch artist even though I told them it was a waste of time. They could draw a guy wearing a ski mask and a Super Mario disguise all they liked, but it wasn’t going to help anybody catch a killer. I signed a stack of consent forms allowing the police to take possession of my computers, my phone, and such. I doubted much would come from it, and when I told a tech about the anonymous proxy servers used to avoid detection, the look he gave me suggested he thought the same.
I’d grown so accustomed to referring to our tormentor as Elliot Uretsky that it was a difficult adjustment for me to call him anything else. A couple of times during the interviews I referred to him as Uretsky, and that caused all sorts of confusion.
“The dead Uretsky or the guy you thought was Uretsky?” Kaminski would ask.
The press referred to him as the SHS Killer, but he wasn’t just a media label to me. We’d forged an entirely different sort of bond. I started to think of him not as Uretsky, but as “the Fiend.” My sobriquet befitted the man: a devil, a demon, a person of great wickedness. Uretsky might have been dead, but the Fiend was still very much alive.
The police were asking all sorts of questions, while I struggled to provide them with any useful answers. There simply wasn’t much information to share.
At some point an FBI profiler joined our gathering, introducing herself as Special Agent Andrea Brenner. Agent Brenner was thirtyish, athletically built, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, arched eyebrows, a pronounced nose, and wide brown eyes that could not conceal her enthusiasm for this case. Honest-to-goodness psychopaths weren’t an everyday occurrence, even for the FBI.
“How do you think this person found out you stole an identity he’d already stolen?” Brenner asked me.
“The Fiend, you mean?”
“If that’s what you want to call him.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m guessing he contacted UniSol for some reason. Maybe he was trying to use Uretsky’s insurance, same as we did. Maybe he was just trying to close up loose ends and found out someone was using the insurance. That would have raised a red flag because he had already killed Tanya and Elliot.”
“What do you think he wanted from you?” she asked.
“I told you already. He said he wanted to teach me how to become a real criminal.”
“Do you still think that’s true?”
“No,” I said.
“What do you think he really wants from you?”
I took a moment to answer. “I think he wants to see how far he can push me,” I said. “He’s curious to know what sorts of things he can make me do. He once asked me if a good man could be pushed by circumstance into committing evil acts. It’s like an experiment to him. He wants to inflict the maximum amount of torture on me as possible. He gets off on it.”
“In a sexual way?” Brenner asked.
Ruby looked exasperated. “You’re the expert,” she said. “We’re just his victims.”
Gant pressed his palms against the table and leaned his body between Brenner and me. “I know it’s a challenge for you to find out what makes this guy tick, Agent Brenner,” he said. “But we need to figure out who this guy is first.”
“We have the same goal,” Brenner said.
“I already gave you two names of people he could be,” I said.
Kaminski nodded. “Yeah, the purse snatcher from the Brookline bar and”—he glanced down at his notes—“this Carl Swain fellow from Medford.”
Ruby flashed me a look—one that said she still hadn’t ruled out Clegg as a possible suspect. I guessed her theory held even more validity, in that the Fiend could be anybody. He could be a priest, a gas station attendant, a teacher, a purse snatcher, a level three sex offender, even a cop. He could even be a friend. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that Clegg was involved.
“Any luck tracking down either of those men?” Chief Higgins asked Clegg.
“We’ve got detectives on it,” Clegg said, checking his watch. “It’s three in the morning right now. We’ll go see them in a couple hours. The purse snatcher is Edwin Valdez. He lives in Everett with his girlfriend. We’ve got Swain’s address in Medford.”
“A couple of hours?” I said, sounding incredulous. “What are you talking about, a couple of hours? Go get these guys right now. Go search their homes! Tear their places apart, and start with Swain, because that’s our guy. The more I think about it, the more sure I am. His neighbor told us he was watching Tanya Uretsky every chance he got. He lives on the same street as the Uretskys. He has a criminal record, for crying out loud.”
Clegg kept his composure, though my outburst had rumpled his suit just a bit more. “We can’t go get a search warrant based on your suspicions, John,” he said. “We can go talk to him. We can ask for his cooperation. But we have no probable cause for a search warrant. No evidence. Nothing we can give to a judge. I’m sorry, but that’s not how it works.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I shouted.
“Take it easy, John,” Ruby said, gripping my arm.
“No, I’m not going to take it easy!” I knocked over my chair as I stood up. “One of these two guys, Swain or Valdez, took my mother-in-law and tried to get me to burn her alive. He used the fingers of four people, four now dead people, to parody some proverb. He kidnapped women. He threatened their lives. He murdered. There is a monster out there who wants to keep hurting people, including my wife and me. So I’m not going to just take it easy. You guys need to do your jobs and go get this f*cker. Now!”
Higgins went red in the face. “May I remind you, son, that we can still arrest you for the felonies you’ve confessed to committing? Do you know how thin and tenuous a thread you’re currently dangling from? You do as we say, or our cooperation ends right here and right now, and off to jail you go. That’s how we do our job.”
“John, it’s late,” Clegg said. “You’ve been through a lot. Trust us, we’re going to investigate.”
“It’s interesting,” Agent Brenner said, “that with John all the victims have been women, but he killed a man. He killed Elliot Uretsky. Why? What significance does that have?”
Blank stares all around.
Chief Higgins rose from his chair, his knees creaking as he stood, his face reverting back to the less threatening shade of pink. “Get someone to drive these two back to their home—wherever they live. But I want you both back here at this station at nine o’clock tomorrow morning to work with Special Agent Brenner. It’s not a request. It’s an order.”
“Yes, of course,” Ruby said. “We’ll be here.”
“I want two patrols put outside their apartment,” Higgins said.
“Right on that,” Gant said.
“We’re going to put a task force on this,” Brenner said, addressing Ruby and me. “So they’ll be quite a few more agents involved starting tomorrow.”
“That’s fine,” Ruby said. “Whatever you need from us.”
Chief Higgins turned to Clegg. “I want you to release the identities of the two victims to the media. Thanks to some freaking leak in our department, the press already knows that the body parts recovered from the Fells are linked to the other two murders. The SHS Killer is getting a lot of attention, and rightly so. We might as well get as much information as we can from the public. Who knows what it might bring?”
Clegg nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said. “We’ll get right on it.”
We stayed another fifteen minutes or so while more plans were being hatched to get the public messaging and communication strategies in order. Meanwhile, I was making plans of my own. I was thinking about how I was going to get the police the probable cause they needed to execute a search warrant on Carl Swain’s house.