Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Gary scowled at the evidence board. “Why do I get the feeling that right now our guy is laughing his ass off? We’ve got his DNA from four of the crime scenes. He could’ve taken the condoms with him, but he didn’t. So why leave them unless it’s to taunt us?”
“He knows he’s not in the files, that’s why,” Riley remarked. “It’s weird. He leaves his spunk but not his prints.”
A clacking sound followed. Gary twisted to look at him and blinked. Riley had a bag of Scrabble tiles on the desk and had five of them lined up in front of him. “What’s your best word score so far?”
Riley snorted. “Looking better by the minute. X is worth eight points.” He shuffled the tiles, then pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “I’m gonna make a prediction, though. I think his next letter will be T.”
Gary peered at the tiles. E-X-P-E-R. “Which is probably how he sees himself. And we’re just the jerks who can’t find him.” He locked gazes with Riley. “Except there isn’t going to be a next, is there? Because we’re going to catch him before then.”
Riley gave a solemn nod. “From your lips to God’s ears, boss.
” He got up from his chair and wandered over to join Gary.
“I’ve been looking at the intervals between deaths.
” He pointed to the first photo. “March 2016, Trey Hopkins. Then nothing until December that year.” He rubbed his stubbled chin.
“Why did he wait eight months? Did he only intend killing once and then changed his mind?
“We won’t know the answer to that until we catch him.”
Riley stabbed a finger at the next photo. “He waits six months and then does it again. Another six months. And then goes to five.” He glanced at Gary. “You spoken to Kathy Wainwright about that?”
Gary nodded. “I know what you’re thinking. Does this mean he’s gotten tired of waiting so long between victims? I asked Kathy the same question.”
“And what was our hot police psychologist’s opinion?”
He gaped. “Excuse me? One, you shouldn’t talk about her like that, and—”
Riley grinned. “Hey, she already knows I think she’s hot. I asked her out.”
“When was this?”
“Last month. She turned me down, in case you’re interested. So what did she say?”
“She couldn’t give me a definite answer.” He cocked his head. “Why’d she turn you down? You’re a good-looking dude.”
“She said something about not being a cougar.” Riley pushed out an exaggerated sigh. “And there you have it. My hopes of being the boy toy of a sexy older woman, dashed.”
Lewis strolled into the evidence room. “I finished going through all the statements from the residents in Marius Eisler’s building. I’m beginning to think this guy has Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.” He flopped into a chair.
Gary’s stomach gave a slow roil. “Let me guess. No one saw anything.”
“Yup. They all said the same thing. Always a stream of different guys in and out of there. Some had to be models, of course. But maybe some were hookups too. He might’ve painted ’em then fucked ’em.
Or it could have been the other way around.
” Lewis’s eyes glinted. “Maybe sex got his creative juices flowing.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and peered at the screen.
“One woman did report seeing a guy in a hoodie the night Eisler died. She can’t describe him, though.
She said what they all said: ‘Just another one.’”
Riley headed for the door. “I need caffeine.” He waved his hand as he left the room. “Yeah, I’ll bring you some too.”
Lewis snickered. “You’ve got him well trained.”
Gary stared at the board. “He’s a good cop.” The three of them had worked together as a homicide squad for the past two years.
“I called you last night.”
“I saw that when I got home. Had my phone switched off as I wasn’t on call. I figured if it was urgent, you’d have called again.” The last thing he’d wanted to do was talk to Lewis.
“Since when do you switch your phone off?”
Gary raised his eyebrows. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I went out for a drink with a friend.”
“That gay guy again? The personal trainer?”
Gary narrowed his gaze. “Okay, a couple things I want to say here. Do you label everyone? Are we all reduced to gay, fat, skinny, pretty, ugly…? Do you ever refer to someone as that straight guy?”
Lewis shrugged. “I look for the distinguishing characteristic. You got a problem with that?”
He had more than a few issues with Lewis, but none he was about to share. As a cop he got the job done, but with no flashes of inspiration. Lewis plodded through his cases, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.
I don’t have a problem with the way he works.
I have a problem with the way his mind works.
Now and then what came from that mouth had a tinge of ugliness to it—nothing too overt but enough to leave a sour taste.
Certainly not enough to be worth reporting.
And while Gary and Riley might have gone out on the weekend a couple of times, Lewis had never received a similar invitation and never would.
“Next question. How do you know who I was drinking with?”
“I heard you talking with Riley one time. He wanted to change gyms, and you recommended this place where a friend worked. Cory something or other? You were talking about him, where you met, stuff like that.”
Gary took in Lewis’s pinched expression, his pursed lips, the flush in his cheeks, and realization slammed into him.
He’s jealous. Pissed that he didn’t get an invite when Riley and I went out.
But Lewis came out with all the guys when they went bowling or drinking. We’re not joined at the hip, right?
He regarded Lewis with wry amusement. “So you figured I had to have gone for a drink with Cory because I only have one friend?” Gary was done talking about this. “Let’s get back to work. We need to find this guy.”
“Except finding him is like looking for a proverbial needle in a haystack.” Lewis gazed at the photos on the board. “We still going with the theory that he’s using Grindr to choose his victims?”
“It fits the facts. He picks men who have a steady stream of sexual partners, where a guy going into the victim’s place is an everyday occurrence so no one bothers to look at them. All our victims were on Grindr—well, we assume Marius was. We’ll know more when they send us the records.”
“He’s trying to slow us down by taking their phones, isn’t he?”
“Possibly. There’s another possibility, though. What if he contacted them outside of the app? WhatsApp maybe? Conversations are encrypted, so we wouldn’t see those—unless we had their phone.”
Lewis scowled. “Do you know how many guys there are so far on our crossover list? Two hundred, and they all hooked up with each victim. Two hundred profiles to go through, interviews, alibis to check….”
“And one mystery guy who could be our man.” Gary pointed to the slip of paper Riley had printed and stuck on the board.
Kris Lee Arill. His name had shown up in the Grindr records for all the first four victims—only as messages expressing interest, no requests to meet—and they wanted to find the guy, if only to eliminate him from their inquiries, but there was a problem with that.
Kris Lee Arill didn’t exist.
No phone records in that name, no address, no social security, nothing.
He was on Grindr, but the account was fake, and the photos on his profile were images from the internet.
Fake accounts were nothing new—especially if an individual was trying to track down some Grindr troll—but Grindr was obliged to comply if the police or FBI wanted to know what email address was associated with the account in order to trace it back to the originator.
Kris Lee Arill’s email was fake.
Gary and Riley had come up with a workable theory.
Grindr usually asked for an email or a phone number for verification when setting up the account.
The fake email would have been jettisoned as soon as the account was verified, and if need be a phone number added that would not need verification.
The jettisoned and deleted email could still be used as the login.
The phone number could be a burner phone account, prepaid in cash and signed for with a fake name and ID.
“If our victims got together with this Kris, he was careful not to set up meetings in the app. So he had to have found another way to contact them.”
Riley came back into the room with three steaming cups.
“So far we’ve assumed there could be a legitimate reason why our Mr. Arill is hiding his true identity,” he mused.
“He could be a married man with a family, and he doesn’t want his secret life getting out.
If his wife or partner checks his phone…
. A lot of gay guys come out late in life.
Maybe he can’t come out. Maybe he’s in the public eye, and he thinks this could harm his rep. ”
Gary nodded. “That makes sense.”
“And I’ve been thinking.”
Lewis chuckled. “Did it hurt?”
Riley ignored him. “Our guy’s setting us a puzzle, and this one’s got a few pieces. Firstly, the same items have been found at every crime scene—the GHB, rope, and cuffs. We all agree they’re important.”
“Maybe Del Maddox is correct, and they’re a message,” Gary suggested.
“But then there are the letters. So what if his name is another puzzle?”
Lewis frowned. “What do you mean?”
He sat at the desk, grabbed the Scrabble bag, and tipped more tiles onto the wooden surface with a clack. Riley spelled out Kris Lee Arill, then proceeded to move the tiles around. “The K makes it a little easier. I mean, how many twelve-letter words contain the letter K?”
Lewis got onto his phone. He snorted. “About ninety-nine.”
Gary stared at the tiles. “Who’s to say it’s one word? It could be two, three, four….”
Riley nodded. He pushed four tiles out on their own, spelling K-I-L-L. “There’s the most obvious four-letter word. Except he’s not gonna be that obvious, right?” He went back to shuffling the tiles.
“Why haven’t we done this before?” Lewis demanded.
Gary knew the answer to that one. With each new victim, they’d identified men who had been in contact with them, but there was no evidence to point to them meeting their mystery man, so that was what he had remained—a mystery.
They’d exhausted all the genuine leads, and there was nothing to go on with Arill.
A dead end.
“You’re right, you know,” Riley murmured. He raised his head and stared at Gary. “He is laughing at us.” He shivered.
Goose bumps broke out on Gary’s arms. “What is it?”
“I take it back. He is that obvious. And it’s two words.”
Gary frowned and walked around the desk to stand behind him. He peered at the tiles, and his stomach heaved. There was a sour taste in his mouth. “He’s not planning on stopping anytime soon, is he?”
Riley shook his head. “You’re not getting it. His name is linked to all the victims.” His eyes were wide. “Don’t you see? He knew what he was going to do, right from the start.”
The black letters were stark against the white plastic.
S-E-R-I-A-L K-I-L-L-E-R