In fifteen minutes, O’Neil pulled onto a dirt road, where an MCSO cruiser was parked. The officer gestured them on. About a hundred yards farther on they came to an abandoned house. Two more cruisers were there, along with the medical examiner’s bus. The officers waved to O’Neil and Dance as they climbed out of the car and made their way to the front door of the shack.
‘Door was unlocked when we got here, Detective, but he had quite a fortress inside. He was ready for battle if we came for him before his hired gun finished with the revenge.’
Dance noted the thick wooden boards bolted over the windows of the one-story structure. The back door, the officer explained, was sealed too, similarly, and the front was reinforced with metal panels and multiple locks. It would have taken a battering ram to get inside.
She spotted a rifle, some scatterguns. Plenty of ammo.
Crime Scene had arrived too, dolled up in their Tyvek jumpsuits, booties and hoods.
‘You can look around,’ one officer said, ‘just mind the routine. Nothing’s bagged or logged yet.’
Meaning: keep your hands to yourselves and wear booties.
They donned the light blue footwear and stepped inside. It was largely what she’d expected: the filthy cabin, latticed with beams overhead, was dingy and sad. Minimal furniture, second-hand. Jugs of water, cans of Chef Boyardee entrees and vegetables and peaches. Thousands of legal papers and several books of California statutes, well thumbed, with portions highlighted in yellow marker. The air was fetid. He’d used a bucket for his toilet. The mattress was covered with a gray sheet. The blanket was an incongruous pink.
‘Where’s the body?’ O’Neil asked one of the officers.
‘In there, sir.’
They walked into the back bedroom, which was barren of furniture. Otto Grant, disheveled and dusty, lay on his back in front of an open window. He’d hanged himself from a ceiling beam. The medical team had untied the nylon rope and lowered him to the floor, presumably to try to save him, though the lividity of the face and the extended neck told her that Grant had died well before they had arrived.
The window, wide open. She supposed he’d chosen this as the site of his death so he could look out over the pleasant hills in the distance, some magnolia and oak nearby, a field of budding vegetables. Better to gaze at as your vision went to black and your heart shut down than a wall of scuffed, stained sheetrock.
‘Michael? Kathryn?’
With a last look at the man who’d caused so much pain to so many, O’Neil and Dance stepped back into the living room to meet the head of the CSU examination team, dressed in overalls and a hood.
‘Hey, Carlos,’ Dance said.
The lean Latino CSU officer, Carlos Batillo, nodded a greeting. He walked to the card table that Grant had been using for his desk. The man’s computer and a portable router sat on it. It was open to his blog, the entry that Dance had read to O’Neil on the drive there.
‘Find anything else on it?’ O’Neil asked.
‘Bare bones. News stories about the stampedes. Some articles on eminent domain.’
Dance nodded at a Nokia mobile. ‘We know he hired somebody to handle the attacks. He’s the one we want now – the “soldier of fortune” he referred to. Our unsub. Any text or call-log data that could be helpful? Or is it pass coded?’
‘No code.’ Batillo picked it up with a gloved hand. ‘It’s a California exchange, prepaid.’
When he told her the number Dance nodded. ‘The unsub called it from his burner, the one he dropped in Orange County. Can I see the log?’
She and O’Neil moved closer together and looked down, as the CSU officer scrolled.
‘Hold it,’ Dance said. ‘Okay, that’s the number of the phone the unsub dropped. And the others are the ones he bought at the same time, in Chicago.’
Batillo gave a brief laugh. Perhaps that she’d memorized the numbers. He continued, ‘No voice mail. Fair number of texts back and forth.’ He scrolled through them. ‘Here’s one. Grant says he has, quote, “the last of your” money. “I know you wanted more and I wish I could have paid you more.”’ The officer read on. ‘“I know the risks you took. I’m For Ever in your debt.” “For Ever” capitalized. He does that a lot. Then, going back … Grant tells him the targets were perfect: the roadhouse, the Bay View Center, the Monterey Bay Hospital, “probably better the church didn’t work out”.’
‘He was going to attack a church?’ Dance asked, shaking her head.
Batillo read one more. ‘“Thanks for the ammo.”’
Soldier of fortune …
The officer slipped the phone into a bag with a chain-of-custody card attached. He signed it and put the sealed bag into a large plastic container resembling a laundry basket.
She glanced down at a treatise on the law of eminent domain.
‘How’d he meet the doer?’ Dance wondered aloud. ‘He said a few years ago.’
Batillo said, ‘I saw some texts about “the gun show”. “Enjoyed talking weapons with you.”’
‘And I found the ammo I think he was talking about. Brick of twelve gauge and two twenty-three. “Arlington Heights Guns and Sporting Goods” on the label.’
‘Chicago,’ Dance said.
O’Neil said wryly, ‘Tough manhunt. Six million people.’
‘We’ve got the gun-show reference. The ammo. The phones.’ She shrugged and offered a smile. ‘Needle in a haystack, I know. Right up there with “When it rains it pours.” But that doesn’t mean the needle isn’t there.’
Forty minutes later she was back in her office, scrolling through the crime-scene pictures of the Otto Grant suicide – the rest of the report wouldn’t be ready for a day or two – and considering how to narrow down the task of finding their unsub in the Windy City, or wherever he might be. Page after page … Dance found herself staring at the pictures of Prescott and the woman he’d killed, positioned under the lights to get pictures for proof of death. If only she could let her eyes be theirs for a brief moment before they had glazed over, and darkness embraced them.
To catch a fleeting glimpse of the man who’d done this.
Who are you? Are you headed back to your home in Chicago, or somewhere else?