Michael Prescott: Next Victim

"I know that. But I was starting to wonder."

"Were you?"

"Yeah. I thought you might be with the chamber of commerce, what with all this crap about the weather."

DiFranco stifled a laugh. William Hayde wasn’t buying Michaelson’s just-getting-to-know-you routine. And it looked like he hadn’t Stockholmed, either.

Tess allowed herself to study the image in the nearest monitor.

The interrogation room looked as it always did, a drab, spartan chamber with no clock on the wall and no windows. A steel table, gunmetal gray. Four straight-backed steel chairs, deliberately uncomfortable.

Two of the chairs were occupied by Michaelson and Gaines, a third by William Hayde. Gaines was seated next to the suspect, while Michaelson sat on the diagonal. This was standard procedure. Never sit directly across the table from the person you’re interrogating. You need to be able to lean close and invade his space, then back off if he starts to confess. Like the room itself, the techniques of interrogation were designed to put the suspect at the greatest possible psychological disadvantage.

Michaelson wore a dark gray suit and a blue tie, and he was leaning forward, his hand on the table near a tape recorder that was ostentatiously recording the interview. The tape recorder was for show. The real recording was done by the audio equipment in the surveillance room.

"You’re right, Bill," Michaelson said. "We’re not here to talk about the weather. We’ve got a little problem, you see."

"Looks like you think I’m the one with the problem," Hayde answered, unperturbed.

Tess stared at his face on the screen. A smug, unlined face. Thin lips, sharp cheekbones, eyes that squinted without humor. He was clean-shaven, his cheeks ragged with a hint of stubble. His hair was cut short, blondish on top, darker at the sides. He had no obvious scars, moles, or birthmarks. There was nothing distinctive about him at all.

Was it Mobius’s face? Could he be this ordinary, this forgettable?

There was no way to know. Dozens of people had seen Mobius in Denver, and a few had seen him in LA, but no two of them ever seemed to see the same man.

All that could be said about Mobius was that he was Caucasian and at least five-foot-ten, with a lean but wiry build. All the bartenders and witnesses agreed on these details. That he was white was no surprise; for some reason, nearly all ritualistic sex murders were committed by white men. That he was physically strong was no surprise, either-it would take a strong man to hold down a struggling woman while duct-taping her to a bed.

Nothing else was known about him. Sometimes his hair was brown, sometimes blond, sometimes thick and long, sometimes thin and close-cropped. He wore glasses occasionally but most often did not. Beards and mustaches came and went on his face, changing as frequently as his style of dress-casual one night, stylish the next.

People remembered him as anywhere from thirty to fifty. He was a young professional or a middle-aged working man. He reminded some people of a plumber or electrician, while others had him pegged as a college professor or business executive.

He had never used valet parking, and no one had ever seen his car. He wore a condom and left no semen for the forensic analysts to find. And he was careful to present them with no other clues-no fingerprints, no telltale fibers. He routinely cleaned and disinfected every surface at the crime scene before departing.

He was cunning and obsessed, and he gave his enemies nothing to work with.

After the second killing, the Denver media had nicknamed him the Pickup Artist. Although the case had been widely publicized, there had been no decline in the number of people frequenting singles’ bars. Evidently the element of danger injected into the dating milieu had served as a turn-on. No one in LA was paying attention, either-but the media had not yet connected Angie Callahan’s death with the Denver story from two years ago.

Eventually the details would come out, but most likely curiosity and a pleasurable thrill of passing interest would be the only public reaction. Tess ought to have been happy about that. It made her job easier. But she couldn’t help wondering if passive acceptance of a phenomenon like Mobius was not, in the long run, a greater threat than Mobius himself.

She noticed that the computer operator was sneaking glances at her. She returned his stare, and he smiled, embarrassed. "You’re Tess McCallum, right? The Black Tiger case."

Black Tiger again. People always wanted to talk about that.

"Yes," she said with a shrug.

"We, uh, we studied it at the academy."

This made her feel old. "Thanks."

"That was some amazing work you did."

"It was a long time ago."

"Not so long. Seven, eight years, right?"

She turned away, ending the conversation. "Seems longer."

Seems like a lifetime, she thought.

"Well," Michaelson was saying, "why don’t we see if you can help us with our problem, Bill. I want to talk about what happened tonight."

"Nothing happened tonight," Hayde said.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing important. Hell, I thought LA was supposed to be laid-back. Live and let live, isn’t that the local philosophy?"

He seemed calm. Tess wasn’t certain if this was a good or bad sign. Most innocent people, accused of a crime, would protest noisily. But there were exceptions-people so sure of their innocence that they figured it was all a misunderstanding, easily worked out. Or people who simply didn’t allow themselves to be flustered, people who needed to be in control.

Of course, a sociopath wouldn’t be flustered either.

Tess wondered which kind of man William Hayde was.

"It’s the land of casual sex and sunny hedonism," Hayde said. "At least, that’s the subliminal message in all the brochures, not to mention every TV show of the last thirty years. So where did I go wrong, Officer?"

"I’m not a police officer," Michaelson said. "I’m a special agent of the FBI."

"Like Mulder and Scully, right?"

"I don’t watch cop shows. I take it you do."

"That’s a mark of criminal tendencies, isn’t it? Exhibiting an unhealthy interest in fictional presentations of law enforcement? Part of the profile, maybe?"

"How do you know about profiles?"

"TV. Everything I know, I learned from TV. It’s our great national educator."

Tess frowned. His coyness was maddening. He behaved like a guest at a cocktail party, not a suspect under interrogation.

Mobius might be this smooth, this unflappable. But would he be reckless enough to show it?

She looked at his hands-large hands, the prominent knuckles tufted with pale hairs.

A killer’s hands?

One of those hands was manacled to a leg of the table. The other was free to gesticulate. Hayde was doing a lot of gesturing, but his hand movements were lazy, almost insolent. He wore flashy cuff links, black pearls set in silver borders. The cuff link on his free hand flashed, catching the light. It seemed to be winking at her.

"Anyway," Hayde said, "whenever I watch a cop show, I root for the good guys. I’m a big fan of the boys in blue-and that includes blue suits, you’ll be happy to hear." This with a nod at Gaines, who wore a suit of that color. "Now, are you going to tell me what this is all about, or am I going to have to invoke my right to an attorney and get all legalistic and tight-assed?"

He was smiling as he said it. Tess knew he was smart. Of course she would expect an engineer to be of above-average intelligence. His vocabulary only confirmed that presumption-words like legalistic, hedonism, subliminal. Two-dollar words, as her father would say.

Mobius was intelligent also. They had known that from the beginning. He would have to be intelligent, even charming, to be successful in the bar pickup scene. Anyway, serial killers classified as the organized type-methodical, obsessive, cunning-were often of above-average IQ.