Mariah Stewart - Acts of Mercy

“Who responded to the initial call?”

“Couple of cruisers. They finally convinced Mrs. Walker to go on home, that maybe her husband ran into an old friend or for whatever reason needed to be alone. Both officers said their first thought was that he might have sneaked out to hook up with a girlfriend and things got carried away, but they weren’t about to say that to the wife. She went home around midnight, but called back in around three, and then again at six. By this time, she was hysterical, said she knew something terrible had happened to him. Another car went back to the mission and the officers searched the place from stem to stern without finding a thing. But after the breakfast shift, one of the volunteers took a bag of trash out to the Dumpster, and found Walker slumped behind it on the ground, between the Dumpster and the fence.”

“I’d like to see the crime-scene photos if possible.”

“I can email some of them to you.”

“Hold on for just a minute.” Sam put the phone down and went into the hall, counted doors until he found the one he believed to be Mallory’s. He stuck his head in and said, “I need an email address.”

She recited the address they’d set up for him without looking up from the file she was reading. “Sorry. I meant to give you that earlier. I’m assuming you found your laptop on your desk?”

“I did. Thanks.” He hurried back to his office and repeated the address for Coutinho as he opened the laptop and booted up.

A minute later the email appeared, the photos attached. He opened the document and studied each one carefully.

“Sam?” Coutinho said after several minutes had passed in silence.

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“Sorry, I don’t know what else to call you.”

“Sam is fine,” he said somewhat absently, the photos of Ross Walker drawing all his attention.

He went through them, one by one. “No suspects?” he asked when he reached the last one.

“We had a few of the usuals. The lowlifes that you bring in from time to time then have to let back out on the streets, but you know it’s only a matter of time before they’re back in for something big? You know the ones I’m talking about?”

“All too well. None of them panned out?”

“They were all someplace else doing other things with other people.”

Sam ran through the photos again, the detective waiting patiently on the line for him to finish.

“I thought it was real odd that the cause of death is listed as strangulation when you have all that carnage,” Coutinho said. “The ME said the guy had been strangled before any of the slashing took place.”

“All the blood at the scene, the vic was killed right there. So what are you thinking? That the killer was waiting out back for Walker to come out?” Sam frowned, trying to see it in his mind.

“Basically, yeah, that’s pretty much the way I see it. There’s only one light out back there, over the door. So Walker steps out into the dimly lit area, walks back to the Dumpster, and he’s brought down, strangled manually-there were no ligature marks on the neck, did you notice that? Then the killer drags him behind the Dumpster, stabs him, stuffs the burger in his mouth, and takes off.”

“He’s gotta be covered with blood,” Sam murmured.

“Yeah, you’d think, but there were no drops of blood leading from the alley.”

“So maybe he brought a bag or something with a change of clothes in it.”

“That’s what I figured. At least, he’d have had another shirt to change into.” Coutinho paused. “But what we couldn’t figure out is why all the drama with the knife if he was going to strangle the guy.”

“He was blowing off steam. He wanted the guy dead quickly and quietly, so he takes him out immediately. Then he gets to take his time, do what makes him happy, make his statement.”

“You think this was his way of making a statement?” the detective asked flatly.

“Yeah. I do.”

“What’s he saying?”

“When I figure that out, you’ll be the first to know.”

“We figure this was real personal, that the killer knew Walker, had some beef with him, knew his routine, knew where he’d be at that time on that night. He’s all prepared, right down to the change of clothes ’cause he knew it was going to be messy.”

“That would have taken a lot of planning, which would take it out of the realm of a random killing. The body was left where it would be found quickly, but not too quickly, so the killer has time to slip away. It could suggest a crime of retaliation, or revenge, but what do you suppose is up with the burger?”

“Maybe the hamburger has something to do with the fact that Walker was there at the mission serving food?”

“Hard to tie that to a possible revenge motive though. And revenge leads to the question, what did Ross Walker do to deserve this kind of retribution?”

“The wife says he has no enemies. The other volunteers and his coworkers all said the same thing. Everyone we talked to had only good things to say about him. Nicest guy in the world, wouldn’t hurt a fly. Loved by one and all.”

“All but one, apparently.” Sam thought it over, then added, “Assuming that you’re right, that this is personal, that it’s revenge for something.”

“What else could it be?”

“Not sure. Revenge is the obvious. But I’ve been around too long to believe that everything is always the way it seems.”

“What else could it be? The attack after the guy was already dead makes it appear personal to me,” Coutinho said, somewhat defensively. “The killer went there prepared to kill Walker, and he did just that. Why would you think there’s another explanation?”

“Something just doesn’t feel right to me. If this is payback, why the burger?”

“I don’t know, maybe burgers were on the menu that night. We can check on that. But like I just said, the guy was already dead,” the detective said pointedly and with no lack of exasperation. “He wasn’t eating that burger.”

“That’s my point.” Sam thought it through. “The burger is part of the message.”

“So you’re saying the stab wounds aren’t important?”

“Oh, they’re important, all right. Everything about this murder tells us something important. The over-the-top number of stab wounds tells us the killer was angry, either at Walker or someone else. But the posing of the body, the food stuffed in the mouth… that’s a part of the story, too. We just need to piece it all together.”

“You have a lot of experience with this sort of thing?”

“Some.”

“What did you do before you were a PI? Were you on the job someplace?”

“I was with the FBI.”

There was another pause, then Coutinho asked, “Special agent?”

“Yeah.” Sam debated, then added, “BAU.”

“That’s that behavior analysis stuff, right?”

“Yes.”

“You one of those profilers, like we see on TV all the time?”

“Nothing like what you see on TV,” Sam told him. “Nothing at all like what’s on TV.”

“But you do that, right, analyze behavior and see if you can figure out who the killer is from that?”

“That’s the short version. It’s more than that. You look at the crime scene, try to interpret the killer’s behavior before and after the crime, try to read the evidence he leaves you.”

“So you think you can figure out what motivated this guy?”

“It’s tough to do that with one victim, Detective, you know that. And there’s the conflict for us, right? On the one hand, you’re hoping that this guy has done what he set out to do-exact revenge, settle a score, whatever-and that he won’t repeat. On the other hand, with a series of victims, you see a pattern, you develop a sense of what the killer is after, what he wants.”