Raffi Yessayan - 2 in the Hat

“Let me get you a beer.”

Biggie, Mooney’s Maine coon cat, jumped up on the card table and started rubbing his chin on a corner of Alves’s wax paper plate. He wasn’t sure if the cat was begging for food or looking to be petted. His head was as big as a coconut. He waited for Mooney to come back with the beer.

“I really don’t like cats, Sarge.”

“You’re not allergic.” Mooney said. “So suck it up.” Mooney lifted Biggie and put him on the floor. By the time he sat in his chair, the cat was back on the table. He flopped down on the one empty spot, as if he knew he’d get tossed out if he got too close to the food. Mooney handed Alves a beer, an ice cold sixteen-ounce can of Schlitz.

“I dislike Schlitz beer more than I hate cats.”

“Sorry. They were all out of that John Adams Wicked Pisser Summer Brew that you drink.”

“Where do you find this stuff?”

“I have my sources.”

Alves popped the top and took a sip. It wasn’t so bad, but he wouldn’t give Mooney the satisfaction. He made a face like he was drinking skunked beer, then cleared his palate with another bite of his sub. He watched Mooney take his time unwrapping his sandwich, folding the paper back so it wouldn’t touch his tie. “What did you get?” Alves asked.

“An American with mayo.”

“I forgot that hanging out with you is like going back in time. I know sub shops have Americans listed on the menu, but I’ve never actually seen anyone order one. What’s in it?”

“Bologna, boiled ham, salami and American cheese.”

“With mayo? I’d rather drink Schlitz beer.” Alves chugged half his beer and made a show of wiping his mouth with his shirt sleeve.

“Eat your sandwich before Biggie gets it.” Mooney took a bite and washed it down.

Alves could see the man’s mind working. He could see that Mooney was not in the mood to discuss the merits of his sub sandwich. “You come up with anything today, Sarge?”

“Yeah. A headache. I told you what Stone said about the gun. Later I interviewed Eric Flowers’s parents again, started digging around in his past. First time around, we spent a lot of time on Kelly Adams. I want to be sure Flowers wasn’t the primary target.” Mooney looked frustrated. “I have to figure out why he’s started up again.”

“I had a thought about that today,” Alves said.

“Let’s hear it,” Mooney’s mouth was full, a small glob of mayonnaise clinging to his lower lip.

Alves motioned for Mooney to wipe his face and he did. “I was talking with Eunice Curran about the possibility that this guy has a hit kit like Dennis Rader.”

“BTK.”

“Rader kept everything he needed for his so-called ‘projects’ in a hit kit in his bedroom closet.”

“I read about that on the Internet.”

“Look at our guy. The wire’s the same, the cheap necklaces, the ballistics, and it looks like he may have had the clothes stored away. Eunice mentioned mothballs.”

Mooney nodded. “So he’s had all this stuff stashed somewhere while he was away.”

“What if he wasn’t ‘away’? I got a list of recent releases from the DOC. Only a couple of guys live near the BC campus. Their records didn’t fit. Mostly involved with drugs. No real violence or sex offenses. That got me thinking. What if this guy stopped killing because he wanted to stop. He was smart enough, or paranoid enough, to stop because he didn’t want to get caught. BTK did the same thing. Just stopped killing. He had images of his victims, so he could relive the attacks as fantasies.”

Mooney closed his eyes. He looked to be mulling things over.

“Just a thought,” Alves said. “Maybe he has pictures or video of his victims.”

“How does this help us?”

“I don’t know that it does, beyond helping us understand him better. If that’s what happened, if he’s like Rader, just a seemingly upstanding citizen with no criminal record, who can stop killing when he wants to, then it does us no good to round up the usual suspects.”

“Do it anyway. It’s a nice theory, Angel, but we have no idea if it’s true. It just puts more pressure on us to figure out how he came across Steadman and Kipping.” Mooney downed the rest of his beer. He went into the kitchen and came back with two more. “Let’s get back to the two most recent vics. If the killer ran into them at school he’s probably not a student, unless they’ve got thirty- or thirty-five-year-old freshmen running around BC. Maybe he works there.”

“Administration faxed me a list of employees, from maintenance workers to professors. I have the groundskeeper who paints the lines at Alumni Stadium and the Zamboni driver at the Conte Forum. I have the BRIC helping with that, running everyone’s BOP.”

“What about the bars in the area?” Mooney asked.

“I talked to the sergeant who does the licensed premises checks in the district. He’s getting me a list from every bar. Bartenders, waitstaff, bar backs, bouncers, hostesses. Everyone. These two didn’t drink much, but they went out with their friends to hang out, dance.”

“I talked to Commissioner Sheehan. He’s putting out the word to all the media outlets that anyone with information should call the Homicide Unit or the Crime Stoppers Hotline. That should bog us down with useless leads.”

“I checked in with their professors, got class rosters, talked with a bunch of kids who were too busy texting and talking on their cells to notice anything.”

Alves and Biggie watched Mooney pick through his sandwich and pull out strands of shaved onions. “I knew I tasted onion. I told them no onions. Tomatoes, pickles, no onions. They can’t even make a simple sandwich anymore.”

“Are you going to finish eating that or what?” Alves asked as Mooney fished through his sandwich fiasco. Biggie was purring so loud it sounded like a motorcycle. He had never understood why people kept cats. They were unpredictable. A cat that big could kill a baby. Maybe, just maybe, he’d let Angel and Iris get a hamster some day. “I’ve had enough of working in your living room with Mr. Big Cat here, staring at my throat.”

Mooney took a bite of his crumbling sandwich. Typical Irish guy. Couldn’t eat a couple slices of shaved onion. “Almost done.”

“I got a bunch of video. BC has a decent number of cameras set up all over the campus, same with some of the bars. The guys at the BRIC are going over the footage, looking for Steadman and Kipping, see if anyone’s following them. I told them to look for suspicious vehicles circling the area, unmarked cruisers that don’t belong, the kind of stuff we talked about.”

“Are they monitoring the website, too?”

“That, and one of the detectives has been logging on to the site and leaving postings on the message board, trying to get a response.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing yet.”

Mooney took the last bite of his sandwich and wiped his hands with a paper towel. No napkins in the bachelor pad. He took his time, finished off his beer, and held the last can out to Alves. Alves shook his head. Mooney opened the beer and took a savoring draft. “It’s time for the same information to get leaked to the media. I don’t get along with many reporters, but I’ve got a few who owe me a favor or two. We’re going to have them tout me as the guy who caught the Blood Bath Killer. Now I’ve got my sights set on this guy. The press will catch me off guard, as I’m walking out of headquarters. I’ll let it slip that I think he’s a copycat, a fraud, that the real killer is probably dead. We need to get him to communicate. And make a mistake.”

“I hope we’re not making the mistake. Forcing him to kill two more kids. Shouldn’t we wait on this, see what we come up with first? We haven’t looked into all the people working at BC, the bars. He’s not stupid. Even if he thinks we didn’t find the Tai-ji or the fortune, he would assume we have a ballistics match. Which means the killer isn’t a copycat.”