The Lawyer's Lawyer

CHAPTER Four



Okay, let’s take this new information and try to develop some leads from it. We’ll meet back here at eight tomorrow morning,” Captain Jeffries said as he dismissed the task force on Tuesday morning. Jeffries was the head of the homicide division at the Apache County Sheriff’s Office, and Danni had known him for over ten years. His appointment as head of the task force was a little controversial since the FBI normally liked to run its own show.

The sketch had been distributed to every police officer in the Oakville Police Department, the Apache County Sheriff’s Office, all FBI agents on the case, and all other law enforcement agencies within a 150-mile radius. That geographical limitation would expand, as would the number and type of people who would receive the information. The decision had been made not to release it to the general public at this time.

The task force had set up a hotline after the third murder and encouraged people to call into it with any information they thought might help. There were two operators assigned and trained to take the calls, which were recorded. They had a series of questions to ask. Two secretaries typed up the recorded questions and answers, which were then divvied up among the task force teams. Every morning after the briefing, Danni and Peterson would go through their allotted interviews and make callbacks if they felt the need to follow up. It was tedious work and, so far, fruitless.

The murders had taken place throughout Oakville over a four-month period of time, and there was no discernible geographical pattern—or any other pattern, for that matter. Some had occurred during the day, some at night. Victims one and four had been killed at separate student-housing facilities on Arthur Road south of the campus. Victim one had been strangled while victim four had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen. Victim two was living in a similar complex off Thirty-ninth Street, northwest of the campus. She had been stabbed and eventually choked to death with her own pantyhose. Victims three and five lived in houses with other students: three, a few miles east of town, and five, northeast of the campus. They had both had their throats cut, victim three almost to the point of being beheaded. Two of the victims were blondes; three were brunettes.

Stacey Kincaid was the first coed the killer had attempted to make contact with on campus. He was getting bolder.

Murder number three was the one that hit Danni the hardest because of the sheer brutality. The task force was formed after that murder. Three was the magic number for the FBI to label someone a serial killer. Before that it was just murder and that was a local issue. Although Allan Peterson was on the task force, he had not been assigned as Danni’s partner until recently. He was a tall, handsome blond, not bad to look at, but they were still feeling each other out as partners.

“Anything on the Volkswagen?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s registered to a female student,” Peterson replied. “She parked it at the spot where the victim was attacked but didn’t lock the doors. Said she had no reason to. Nobody would steal a broken-down old Bug. And get this: It had been there for three or four days—she couldn’t remember exactly.”

“What are these kids thinking?” Danni said. “Leave your car in the same spot unlocked for days and expect nothing to happen. I don’t get it.”

“She probably figured nobody would want it—at least, not to stage a murder in. I’ll bet if he knocked her out he was going to hot-wire it and take her somewhere to do the killing. Those old Bugs are easy to steal.”

“You’re probably right,” Danni replied. “So he had to set that whole scenario up. He knew where the car was. He knew the door was open. He put his weapons in there. Then he got some books, put on a fake cast, and waited for Stacey to walk out the front door of Fogarty Hall. He even pretended to open the car door as she watched. Now that’s what I call calculating.”

“Like he was writer, director, and star of his own play,” Peterson observed. “He’s an organized killer all right. No doubt about it.”

Danni knew exactly what Allan was talking about. There were three types of serial killers: organized, disorganized, and mixed. Organized killers were usually very bright and plotted their murders, sometimes very intricately. They were usually male and, in this case, considering the victims, the killer was almost definitely a man. Murders like this didn’t happen in small-town America every day, but they did happen on college campuses from time to time.

“Did you read that information we received last Friday on serial murders that have occurred in the last ten years?” she asked.

“I’ve seen it before.”

“So you know there was someone killing coeds on the campus of the University of Utah two years ago?”

“And two years before that at Florida State, and before that the University of Texas,” Allan replied.

“Any discernible patterns?” she asked.

“They were all organized killers. The killings in Utah and at Florida State, like here, had no pattern or ritual to the murders themselves. And the killer was never caught. He apparently just moved on.”

“Any people we know of who were in Utah and are now here?”

“There was a first-year law student who did undergraduate work at Utah. Somebody already talked to him though.”

“Law student? That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s intelligent, but it could.”

Peterson had a law degree and Danni knew it.

“Simply because somebody is a law student and goes to a different graduate school for their studies is not grounds to put them under suspicion,” he said.

Danni had made the remark as a joke, but they obviously did not have the same sense of humor. She let it go.

“Maybe not, but he’s here, so let’s go talk to him again and see for ourselves if he fits our profile in any way.”

“It can’t hurt,” Peterson replied.