Double Cross

Part Three

Chapter 71

I HAD VISITED the National Air and Space Museum many times with my kids but had never seen anything like this. As we arrived, the building looked dark and foreboding from the outside, except for the glass-walled atrium of the cafeteria. Upon entering, though, we saw dozens of shell-shocked people sitting at tables, waiting to go home. Witnesses, I knew. To a person, they had seen a horrific event tonight. What made it worse: at least half of them appeared to be children, some just two or three years old.

A bulging army of news reporters and photographers had been cordoned off over on Seventh Street near the Hirshhorn. At least it made the vultures easier for us to avoid.

Sampson, Bree, and I had come in directly from Independence Avenue. Gil Cook, one of our D-2s, met us at the cafeteria entrance. He approached Bree on the run, waving one arm over his head.

“Detective Stone, the museum director would like to speak with you before -”

“After,” Bree said, and she kept walking. She was on the Job now, somebody not to be trifled with. I liked how she worked, how she took control of the homicide scene.

Gil Cook followed her like a chastened pup looking for table scraps. “He said I should tell you he’s on his way out to talk to the press.”

Bree stopped walking and pivoted toward the D-2.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Gil. Where is he?”

Cook pointed her in the right direction and then kept pace with Sampson and me. The three of us passed by the darkened Milestones of Flight exhibit, with its life-size planes like giant toys hanging from the ceiling. Very cinematic-right up our thrill killer’s alley. More and more, his work was reminding me of Kyle Craig’s. The theatrics, the viciousness. Had he studied Kyle’s crimes?

“Victim’s name is Abby Courlevais. Thirty-two years old. White woman, tourist from France. Worst thing about it, she was five or six months pregnant,” Cook told Sampson and me.

The murder had taken place inside the Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, which showed museum fare during the day but sometimes Hollywood blockbuster stuff at night. The actual killing had occurred right in the middle of my Baltimore speech. And then I’d gotten the note: Guess again, smart guy. I’m not psychotic!… See you back in DC, where it’s all happening….

He was really going out of his way to mock us now-getting into it good. And the killer seemed to be topping each act with the next. Who was the woman in Baltimore? The Indy race-car driver who had taken me on a wild-goose chase, only to get away on I-95.

A pregnant victim, a visitor from another country-and a more “civilized” one-would capture media attention in a new way, and that wasn’t the half of it. The killer had just pulled off another very public execution inside a national institution. In a post-9⁄11 world, that meant a new level of intensity for everything-press coverage, public paranoia, pressure on the police to get this thing under control, to end it before anyone else died. No one would care that it was an almost impossible assignment. How many years had it taken them to get the Green River Killer-and had they ever gotten the Zodiac?

As to where DCAK might try to take things from here, I didn’t even want to speculate about it.

Right now, I had a body to see.

Two bodies, actually.

Mother and child.

Chapter 72

“GODDAMN HIM TO HELL!” Sampson said in an angry voice that he managed to keep under his breath. “That son-ofabitch! That miserable fucker!”

As homicide scenes go, this one was particularly obscene and troubling. This was a place where families went to be entertained. The IMAX theater had soaring walls, textured only with directional lighting. The rows of high-backed seats were steeply raked in a concave arch across the auditorium, like a modern take on an old medical-lecture theater-right down to the cadaver, right?

The victim had apparently been killed near the base of the five-story-high movie screen. That seemed odd to me, but it was the advance word we’d gotten from Gil Cook, and no one else was questioning it so far. I probably shouldn’t have either. Not yet.

The poor woman’s body lay faceup now. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and even from a distance, I could see silver duct tape wrapped across her mouth. Just like at the Riverwalk. I also spotted a wedding band on her hand.

As I got closer, I saw that the tape was stained dark over her lips where blood had been unable to escape. Probably after internal injuries. Mrs. Courlevais’s white dress was discolored and looked rusty brown all over. She’d obviously been stabbed… repeatedly.

Next to the mutilated body was an oversize canvas rucksack. There were metal grommets around the top. The sack was laced with a thick cord, presumably for tying it closed.

Another present from DCAK? Another clue for us to follow nowhere?

More bloodstains and several perforations showed me what I already knew instinctively, that the victim had been stabbed inside the sack. The vicious killer had left Abby Courlevais in there, either dead or dying. The EMTs had taken her out in hopes of reviving her, but it was obviously too late.

When I lifted the empty bag to look for markings, I found U.S. POSTAL SERVICE and a long string of numbers stenciled on the side in faded black letters.

So was this the latest calling card? Had to be. But what was it supposed to mean? What was DCAK saying to us this time? And was this murder committed by him or possibly his copycat?

Witness accounts had already described a blue uniform and cap on the killer. Maybe that was DCAK’s version of an in-joke-he’d “gone postal” on us. He had also left us “holding the bag.”

I walked to the far side of the floor, near the entrance the killer had used to come in. From here, I tried to imagine the events as Detective Cook had described them. The killer had needed to catch Mrs. Courlevais unaware-long enough to bind her hands and mouth-and to get the cloth bag over her head. A mat of dried blood in her hair indicated some kind of blunt trauma but probably not enough to knock her out. Conscious would be better, anyway. More effective for DCAK’s purposes, for the theater of it.

And, in fact, witnesses had seen the bag moving when he’d dragged it into the theater.

I walked back to the woman’s body again and looked around at the empty auditorium. This audience was closer to him than any of the others had been, so he’d needed to work quickly. No time for lengthy speeches or the usual sickening grandstanding. He hadn’t been able to make a full star turn tonight. So what had been so attractive about this particular location, this audience, this French woman?

The impact seemed to have been mostly visual. He’d shouted, “Special delivery!” and then got right to it-half a dozen vicious swings with a blade large enough to be seen from the theater’s back row.

I looked down at Mrs. Courlevais, then back at the empty sack next to her.

Suddenly, another angle occurred to me. What else might be tucked inside there? Was there something else in the mail sack?

I worked the bag open, dreading what I might find. Finally my hand touched a flat piece of plastic. Something was definitely there. What?

I pulled the object out. What the hell? It was a postal worker’s ID. A second photo had been pasted over the original. The name was changed too. It said Stanley Chasen.

The image on the ID was a match to the preliminary description we’d gotten: elderly white man, possibly in his seventies, silver hair, bulbous nose, horn-rimmed glasses. Heavyset and tall.