What Have You Done(65)
48
The control room was a mass of confusion. Sean stayed out on the perimeter, watching everyone run this way and that, searching for his brother, who they were convinced was a murderer. The photo of Liam that had been up on the whiteboard was now replaced by a map of Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, which was also enlarged on a digital screen at the front of the room. There was a red dot on Penn’s Landing where Sean’s boat had been moored and a dashed line that showed the route the boat had taken, which ended in a second red dot upriver that represented the place where the boat had crashed onto the shore. Smaller green dots pocked the screen on the New Jersey side, representing all the possible ways Liam could’ve escaped into the woods and, farther on, into the neighboring cities. No one had any answers. Their suspect had slipped away with the precision of a real convict, which bought Sean the time he needed to get things back on track.
Keenan slammed down the phone. “The news chopper lost him after the barge passed. I can’t believe this!”
“We have our own bird in the sky,” Phillips called over his shoulder as he studied a computer screen in front of him. “Camden PD has scrambled their SWAT units, and the BOLO is going out to every department in the county.”
“What about news coverage?” Heckle asked.
Phillips nodded. “Five and six o’clock. Lead story. Top of the hour. They’ll get his face out there.”
Keenan walked from behind the desk he was at and looked up at the display screen. “How could the chopper lose him? They were following him the whole time.”
Don pulled a sheet of paper from the printer and scanned it. “News choppers are for car accidents and fires,” he said. “Stable things. This isn’t LA, where you film a high-speed chase every other day. They didn’t have the expertise. They followed the moving object, which was the boat. By the time they realized the boat was empty, Liam was in the woods, and the brush cover camouflaged him from the sky. Not the pilot’s fault.”
Phillips stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Okay, people, no more bitching. I don’t want to hear it, and it doesn’t get us any closer to bringing Liam in. Camden PD is on it, and our bird is in the air with their permission. Let’s keep working with what we have to try and figure all this out. And where is my traffic cam footage from the Guzio house?” He pointed to Heckle and Keenan. “You two get over to the command post in Camden. I want you on the ground if he’s spotted. This is our guy, and we bring him in our way.”
The two detectives headed toward the exits. As Sean watched them go, he saw Jane in the hallway, motioning for him to come to her. He pushed off the wall he was leaning against and followed her outside.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Jane was nervous. She kept looking around to make sure they were alone. “I need to talk to you.”
“Shoot.”
“Back in the beginning of the investigation, Liam had me run an off-line search through NCIC. That’s how we found the second victim. We started with loading the criteria from our victim at the Tiger and spinning our search outward from Philadelphia in ten-mile increments.”
“Okay.”
“We found more.”
Sean nodded and took her gently by the shoulder, guiding her up the hallway and through one of the exit doors that led into the parking lot. The sun was setting, but he could still feel it on his face when he walked outside. “What do you mean you found more?”
Jane held out a file she’d been holding. “They aren’t as comprehensive as the Delaware victim, but there are enough pieces here to fit the MO of both the Miller vic and the prostitute in Wilmington.”
Sean took the file and opened it. Inside, there were pictures and PDF copies of police homicide reports from all over the Northeast. Boston, Mamaroneck, Nantucket, Bridgeport, Baltimore.
“NCIC picked them up because they were all prostitutes, abducted from remote locations like the train tracks or the harbor. Each victim was found the next day. It started with Boston. Vic was found behind a set of dumpsters in the back of a Starbucks. Strangled, hair cut off. Second vic was Mamaroneck, New York. Also strangled, but this time hung from a tree in a local park. Abducted in Yonkers. Hair cut as well.”
Sean kept reading the reports while Jane explained. He scrolled through each one, reading every line.
“He goes back to Massachusetts for the third vic,” Jane continued. “Found in a motel in New Bedford. Strangled but left on the bed. Hair shaved more than cut this time.”
“He was building up to it,” Sean said. “Liam was using these girls as models to build up to what he did to Kerri.”
Jane nodded. “I was thinking the same thing because Bridgeport and Baltimore were almost identical. Vics were found hanged in a hotel, one from the clothes rack in the closet and one from the shower-curtain rod that was bolted in the wall. Heads shaved. By the time he got to our girl in Wilmington, he was almost perfect. The only thing missing was the laceration across the stomach. None of the practice victims were cut. I think our vic from the Tiger was what he’d been building up to.” She paused for a moment. “Wilmington PD also got back to me on their bone analysis of the exhumed prostitute. They found traces of ketamine hydrochloride. This is all Liam.”
Sean closed the file and handed it back to Jane. He put his hands up to his face and sighed deeply. “I can’t believe this is happening.”