CHAPTER NINE
Faith nodded and sipped her coffee. The sky outside was darkening rapidly, and with no solid leads to follow, it looked like the day was going to end unfruitfully. “I’ll take what we can get.”
“Yeah, like I said, it’s better than nothing.”
Faith sipped more of her coffee. “This killer’s sending a message.”
“Yeah, they all are.”
Faith pushed through her partner’s frustration. “The key is in the bombs.”
“Not the phone calls?”
Faith shook her head. “The phone calls are because of the added urgency of the timers. The bombs are duds, but people have to act like they’re not duds. If they show up and see a zero timer, then they’ll know the bombs are duds.”
“He’s probably also impatient for people to get whatever message he’s sending.”
“Yes, and the bombs are the message. Both of them were staged holding the bombs. That’s the killer saying they’re responsible. This explosive thing is their fault.”
“Sure it’s not the killer just saying, ‘I want to blow them up’?”
Faith shook her head. “No, he’s putting the blame in their hands. Literally.”
“Raelynn Hayes’s legs,” Jessica said. “I know what you always say, but I have to ask: you don’t think there’s a sexual component to this?”
Again, Faith shook her head. “No, I don’t. Stabbing sometimes can mean simulated sexual penetration, but I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at here. I don’t even think the stabbing is particularly important. I think it’s just how he controls them.”
“So the bomb is the important part.”
“It has to be. It’s the part at which the killer takes the most care.”
“Does he, though? Both bombs were duds.”
“Yes, and both were duds in a different way. That’s important. That’s the message.”
Jessica bit into her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully.
Turk finished his beef, sighed contentedly, and trotted in between the two beds.
The television was playing an old cartoon about a Great Dane who solved mysteries with his human companions while traveling in a panel van decorated in a psychedelic lava lamp pattern.
Turk watched with mild interest as the group fled from a scarecrow-like villain who would eventually be revealed to be the only other person in the episode with any noticeable screentime.
Jessica swallowed and asked, “So is he saying that the victims were duds?”
“I think so,” Faith agreed. “But a specific kind of dud. Entwhistle’s bomb was a gasoline bomb that would have worked except the detonator wasn’t attached to the explosive.
Hayes’s bomb was a brick of plastic that looked like plastic explosive but had no explosive component. It wouldn’t have gone off at all.”
“Hmm. So what does that mean?”
Faith shook her head. “I don’t know yet.” She sipped her coffee and asked, “Have we determined a connection between Craig Daniels and Raelynn Hayes yet?”
“Shit,” Jessica said. “I got caught up arranging protection for the other K9 supervisors in the area. Let me look into that.”
While Jessica pulled up Craig Daniels’s records, Faith unwrapped her sandwich and ate slowly, her mind poring over the problem.
She knew the bombs were the key to understanding these murders, but without a frame of reference, she couldn’t know what each bomb meant.
The gasoline bomb that was actually explosive, but whose explosiveness was unusable due to a design flaw.
The plastic bomb that looked like a real bomb but was just a brick of clay.
Was that a statement about each victim’s personality or a personal history with the killer?
Was it just a specific event where they acted in a way that harmed the killer in some perceived or actual way?
She couldn’t draw any conclusions about that with the information they had now, so she pulled back and tried to think about who the killer was as a person.
Their last killer was artistic. He staged his victims in a mockery of Christianity by posing them in prayer positions and hanging dog tags around their necks.
It was cold and brutal but also showy, like shouting “Sic Temper Tyrannus” after shooting a President or carving a smile onto a dead aristocrat’s chest.
This was showy and symbolic, but it didn’t strike Faith as artistic. She got more of a sense of craftsmanship than artistry. The pieces were constructed with attention to detail, and the small components—the bombs—were given more attention than the larger components—the bodies.
She was reaching, she knew, but it felt right. This killer wanted to be appreciated for their precision, not the overall grandeur of their work. As the saying went, the devil was in the details in this case.
“Okay,” Jessica said. “It looks like Hayes used to work with the TSA at Thurgood Marshall. She was only there for a little while, but she would have served with Daniels for a bit before she left and went to ATF.”
Faith nodded. “Good. We can follow up on that. Address?”
“Apartment in Port Covington. Not a nice neighborhood. Situated close to a lot of ritzy places close to shore but has poor access to the freeway and a lot of vacant properties and failed businesses. It’s become a kind of refuge for the down-and-out.
He works at a warehouse a mile up the peninsula that offloads textiles from ships and loads them onto trucks for shipment across the country. ”
“Got it,” Faith said. “Do we know what shift he works?”
“Not the night one. I called the warehouse. Its business hours are from nine to seven.”
Faith frowned. “Seriously? Most distribution centers I know are twenty-four-hour affairs these days.”
“Well, like I said, it’s not a successful neighborhood.”
“Right. His home it is.”
She finished the last of her sandwich and got to her feet. “Turk, come on, boy. We’ve got a bad guy to catch.”
Turk barked and got to his feet, tail wagging. He cast a final glance at the television, where the villain was indeed revealed as the primary guest character of the week, snorted, and followed the two humans out the door.
***
It was a fifteen-minute drive north from their motel to reach Port Covington.
As Jessica described, the neighborhoods they drove through were pristine and beautiful, with well-built rowhouses and colonials set in tastefully landscaped neighborhoods sprinkled liberally with historical monuments and small but well-appointed parks and green spaces.
The cars parked in the driveways and along the streets were all late-model luxury vehicles, with the occasional Ferrari or Porsche tossed in to add a little flavor.
Then, almost immediately, the atmosphere changed.
Gorgeous houses became rundown apartment complexes.
Luxury SUVs became old, beat-up sedans and pickups.
Green was almost completely gone save for a single park with a wan attempt at a lawn and a rickety play area that Faith wouldn’t have trusted her kids on if she had any.
It didn’t appear particularly dangerous despite Jessica’s description of the place as a refuge for the down-on-their-luck.
More than anything else, it appeared empty.
A lot of the houses were boarded up. Many of the businesses sported broken windows and graffiti.
Trash littered the sidewalk sporadically, but there were no sleeping bags, tents, or cardboard boxes, nothing that indicated a permanent homeless population, though Faith supposed they could be squatting in the empty buildings.
Billboards advertised products that had gone out of style years before.
It was like a post-apocalyptic scene from a zombie movie.
Craig Daniels had indeed fallen on hard luck. Hard luck, in Faith’s experience, was a strong motivator for murder.
The apartment building where Craig Daniels lived was a step up from most of the properties in the neighborhood.
Enough people lived there that management considered it worthwhile to keep the sidewalk free of trash and the facade relatively clean.
Inside, the building was also decently clean.
Cheap, with linoleum floors, a particle board staircase and floral wallpaper, but clean.
Faith and Jessica climbed the stairs to the fourth floor where Craig’s one-bedroom was located.
Turk’s tail switched back and forth, and his nose dipped side to side as he scanned for anything that reminded him of the crime scenes.
Faith watched his reaction as they approached the apartment but other than a slight increase in tension, he gave no sign that he detected anything suspicious.
Faith knocked on the door. There was no answer. She shared a look with Jessica and tried again. “Craig Daniels? FBI. Come talk to us, please.”
Still no answer. She looked at Turk. He was watching the door warily, but he didn’t growl or bare his teeth.
“Does he smell anything?” Jessica asked.
“I’m not sure. Turk? You have anything?”
Turk snorted and dipped his head. That was a no.
Faith frowned. If Turk wasn’t picking anything up, did that make this a false lead too? He’d gotten the killer’s scent from the previous scenes. If Craig Daniels was their killer, then Turk should have the scent whether he was home or not.
Turk’s nose wasn’t infallible, though. He was almost never fooled, but almost was a big word. They still needed to talk to Daniels. She tried a final time. “Craig Daniels? This is the FBI. We need to talk to you. Come out, or we’re coming in.”
The last part was a bluff. They didn’t have a warrant, and with the media following this case like a cloud of flies, Faith didn’t want to risk bending the rules.
If Craig heard the bluff, he didn’t fall for it. No one came to the door.
The door to the right opened, and a leather-faced old man who could have been any age between eighty and one hundred rasped, “He ain’t there. Probably up Locust Point. He’s got a girl there he sees from time to time.”
“Do you have an address for her?”
“Hell no. I look like I get involved in other people’s business?”
Faith shared another look with Jessica. “Have you noticed anything suspicious lately? Anything—”
“I ain’t seen nothin’, the man spat, turning around and closing the door.
Faith heard the latch click and asked, “What do you think? Is he hiding something, or he just doesn’t like law enforcement?”
“I think it’s the latter,” Jessica said. “This strikes me as the sort of place where it pays to stay out of other people’s business.”
“Hmm.” Faith folded her arms across her chest. “Okay. So do we put an APB out for this guy or just visit him at work tomorrow?"
“I’d rather deal with a pissed-off suspect than a dead body,” Jessica said. “I say put the APB out, and if we’re wrong, we just smile sweetly and say, ‘We’re sorry, Mr. Daniels.’”
“Yeah, works for me. Make the call. We’ll head back to the motel and keep our cell phones on.”
Jessica called Baltimore PD with the request as they descended the stairs. No other neighbors came out to see why the FBI was here. Like Jessica said, this was the sort of neighborhood where locked doors and shuttered windows were preferred to watchful eyes and listening ears.
That was another reason why crime was prevalent in neighborhoods like this.
People looked the other way. Better to pretend crime didn’t exist than to put oneself in the crosshairs of a desperate, bitter killer lashing out against his circumstances.
Better to hope that when those killers inevitably lashed out, they struck someone else, someone less willing to ignore the plight of others in favor of their own safety.