Michael Prescott: Deadly Pursuit

He found a young woman lying in the driver’s seat, which had been levered back to a nearly horizontal position. Her dress had been lifted above her hips, her panties shredded.

“Miss?”

He rapped on the windshield and, when that failed to rouse her, reached through the open window and shook her gently.

She listed sideways in her seat, her pretty face turning toward him as her head rolled. Through a net of blond hair, her eyes stared at him and through him, their blue gaze fixed on death.

After that, things happened very fast.

Phoenix P.D. was on the scene by 8:27. A senior homicide investigator, Detective Robert Ashe, arrived soon afterward. Examining the body with gloved hands, he found the needle mark at the side of the throat.

Ashe was a twenty-year veteran, eligible for a full pension and thinking seriously about taking it, but he was still conscientious enough to read the bulletins that crossed his desk. He recognized the pattern.

“Better call the feds,” he told the watch commander.

It was nine-fifteen by then, and already Phoenix was getting hot.

Two special agents from the Denver field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were on the ground at Sky Harbor Airport three hours later. A Phoenix agent met them at the flight gate and introduced himself as Ramon Pena.

“I’m Peter Lovejoy.” The tall, pale Denver agent shook Pena’s hand and sneezed. “Don’t worry. Nothing catching. Only allergies.”

Tension and fatigue were recorded on Lovejoy’s thin face. His high forehead was prematurely lined, his eyes tired and angry. It was obvious that the long investigation had worn him down.

“You’ll like Phoenix,” Pena said, trying for a light note. “Whole environment is hypoallergenic.”

Lovejoy’s partner smiled. “Don’t count on it. Peter’s nose has the extraordinary ability to sniff out individual pollen grains five hundred miles away.”

She said it with affection, but Lovejoy looked nettled anyway. “Possibly a slight exaggeration,” he muttered, then blew wetly into a crumpled Kleenex.

Pena wasn’t looking at him. The woman held his attention now. She was slender and poised, her skin the color of dark rum, her brown hair close-cropped in a skull-tight Afro. The sculptured planes of her face captured a regal quality that made him think of carved likenesses on ancient monuments.

He supposed she must be worn out, too, and as frustrated as her partner, but she didn’t show it. Though she wore the Bureau’s trademark navy blue jacket, white shirt, and beige slacks, she conveyed the austere glamour of a model on a fashion runway.

“I’m Tamara Moore,” she said as they started hiking down the concourse.

“Tamara, huh? Nice name.”

“I’ve been told it means ‘date palm.’”

“A date palm in the desert. You’ll fit right in.”

Moore smiled, and Lovejoy sneezed again.

Guiding the government sedan onto 1-17 with the air conditioner on high, Pena asked how long they’d been after Mister Twister.

“Eight months,” Lovejoy answered. “Since he did a girl in Denver.”

“How’d the Denver office get involved in a homicide?”

“The victim’s body was dumped on Trail Ridge road in the Rocky Mountain National Forest. Federal jurisdiction.”

“And you tied it to some earlier murders?”

“Yes.” Lovejoy honked into a tissue. “In our judgment, there were two relevant unsolved homicides, one in San Antonio, the other in Albuquerque. Each case was handled locally, and nobody’d made the connection.”

“What is the connection? What pattern do you look for?”

“Within certain parameters, he follows the same M.O. each time. Bar pickup, lethal injection in the neck. Always on a weekend-Friday or Saturday night. And always the same victim profile: attractive woman, mid-twenties to mid-thirties, blue eyes, blond hair, fair complexion, slender build.”

Pena caught a strong whiff of the bureaucrat’s cover-your-ass mentality in Lovejoy’s answers. In our judgment… within certain parameters…

This guy will go far, he thought with a mixture of amusement and bitterness. “So there’ve been three victims since?”

This time Moore answered. “Not counting the latest one. Las Vegas, Dallas, San Diego. Add Phoenix to the list, and you’ve got seven in all.”

“He keeps busy, doesn’t he?”

“Too damn busy. Murder is a compulsion for him. He won’t stop till he’s caught or killed.”

No equivocations or qualifications for her. She was a straight-shooter.

“Guess you’ve got a lot of people working this thing,” Pena said.

“Over sixty law enforcement agents full-time. It’s a multijurisdictional task force, and somehow we wound up in charge. Well, actually Peter did.”

Lovejoy shrugged. “I had seniority, so the Denver SAC made me task force leader. But from my perspective, Tamara and I are functioning as equals. We share the work and the responsibility.”

And the blame if anything goes wrong, Pena thought. Aloud, he said, “I’m surprised the Denver SAC didn’t take over the task force himself.” A special-agent-in-charge normally grabbed the high-profile assignments for himself.

“He might have wanted to.” With effort Lovejoy stifled a sneeze. “Initially they unloaded the case on a couple of street agents-that is to say, us-because they thought it was just another random homicide that would never be solved. Once we detected what appeared to be a pattern, we were in too deep to be pulled off.”

“Lucky you.” Pena had one more question. “Where did his name come from? Mister Twister?”

“Not our idea,” Moore said. “Officially he’s the Trail Ridge Killer. But that’s not sexy enough for the media. There’s a line in a song-something about a Mister Twister. How loving him is like embracing a whirlwind; he destroys everything he touches. Must have struck someone as an appropriate image, and it just caught on.”

“Well,” Pena said as he found the Central Avenue off-ramp, “this guy’s sure as hell been cutting a swath of destruction across the great Southwest. And we usually don’t get twisters around here.”

On Veronica Tyler’s neck, near the puncture wound, the M.E. found a few droplets of clear fluid that must have spurted from the syringe. Serological analysis identified it as a 9.25 % solution of hydrogen chloride in water, with traces of n-alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride and n-alkyl dimethyl ethyl-benzyl ammonium chloride.

“The same stuff used in the other six killings,” Moore said, putting down a faxed copy of the serology report. She had just looked at the crime-scene photos of Veronica Tyler, and for some reason she found it difficult to hold her voice steady. “The details of the injection were never made public in any of the cases. This is the real thing-no copycat.”

Nobody had expected a copycat anyway. The murder was right on schedule for Mister Twister. Seven victims in fourteen months. A new corpse every eight or nine weeks. Always on a weekend. Reliable as clockwork.

Detective Ashe studied the report, smoothing out the flimsy fax paper with one hand. “Hydrogen chloride. Is that like hydrochloric acid?”

“In a more diluted form.”

“Something he mixes up himself?”

Moore shook her head. “It’s toilet-bowl cleaner. A commercially available brand. Highly corrosive. He shoots it into the carotid artery, straight to the brain.”

“I guess that’s one way to think clean thoughts,” cracked a homicide cop, and the other detectives in the squad room, men in rumpled brown suits and loosened neckties, laughed nervously.

The Phoenix SAC, a silver-haired man named Gifford, shifted in his seat. “Is this stuff distributed nationally?”