“Slow it down, Detective,” said the chillingly altered voice. “I called
you, remember?” And then he laughed a joyless laugh. “Rainbow Killer, huh? Kinda
like that. Red, yellow, purple, green. Green… Wonder who’s green. Do you wonder
who’s green?”
“Let’s talk about what’s going on here, OK?” She sat down and picked up a pen,
just in case. “Who am I talking to?”
“Are you shitting me?”
“I’ve got to call you something. You know my name. What about you?”
“Sure, OK, how about you call me Fuck You? Because if you think you can work the
psych bullshit on me by trying to personalize, that’s what I am. I am Fuck You.”
“Come on, I was only—”
“Rainbow, then,” he said, suddenly pleasant. “Yeah. Call me Rainbow. Fuck You
Rainbow.” He laughed again and then cut himself off, turning ice-cold. “Think you
almost got me yesterday at that fucking locksmith’s, huh? Think you’re smart?”
“Smart enough,” she said, testing him with a bit of defiance.
“Oo, the bitch pushes back.” He paused, and she could hear his electronically
altered breathing. It sounded like Brillo. “Well, I’ll give you that one. Never
had a cop this smart.” And then he added, “We’ll see pretty soon how smart. Think
green.”
Click. The line went dead.
EIGHT
Of course there was not one detective in that precinct who had not been thinking in
colors. Wondering every moment who the other end of that green string connected to—
bent on beating the killer there again like they had with the locksmith. The
difference this time was that they not only wanted to spare a life, they really
wanted this bastard.
“Fuck you, Rainbow,” said Randall Feller when the detectives listened back to the
recording.
During the playback, Heat circled the only note she had made during the brief
conversation: “Nvr hd cp ths smrt.” She weighed those words and put in a call to
the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, Virginia.
Nikki had worked several cases recently where she reached out for a Center assist.
Dealing directly with the analyst she had befriended there felt different than the
muck and mire she tried to avoid in dealing with the feds. This felt more personal.
Her own Bureau boutique, FBI-Lite, she thought, and smiled.
The NCAVC analyst told Heat she had already been briefed on the case, and indeed she
knew just about everything, including the colored strings. Heat said, “We’ve run
this string MO through our RTCC data banks, of course, but I want to see if you get
any hits on something kind of new.” She recapped the call she’d just gotten and
could hear a keyboard clacking on the analyst’s end of the line as she spoke.
“Detective, can you send me WAV files of both those calls for me to scrub here?”
Nikki told her she’d attach them to an e-mail right after they hung up. “Meantime,
there’s a marker we haven’t run for cross-check yet. You’ll hear it yourself at
the end of today’s recording. He said he’d never had a cop this smart.”
“Oh…” The analyst felt the gravity of that, same as Heat. “I’ll bet you want me
to look for intersections of serial homicides involving direct voice contact with
law enforcement and get back to you with any hits.”
“This is why you do what you do,” said Nikki.
“Just helping the good guys, Detective Heat.”