his shoulders. Whatever Westfield had shot into his neck was having secondary effects. That, or the adrenaline was wearing off. His face felt leaden. He was half asleep when he heard Julissa turn back the covers on the other bed and switch off the lamp on the table between them.
She was asleep when he woke that night. Her ID card was still on the table, face up. He looked at her face in the photograph above the slightly raised seal of the National Security Agency and the nononsense corporate logo of Advanced Micro Devices. He turned the ID facedown and went out quietly.
Chapter Seven
Mike Nakamura arrived at the airport two hours ahead of schedule. He sat on a bench in the Japanese garden underneath the triangle of walkways leading to the Hawaiian Airlines gates. With the koi pond behind him, it was the best place in the airport to use a laptop computer without someone walking behind him and seeing the screen. He was researching VICAP; what he was finding scared the shit out of him. He looked around again to be sure he was alone, then checked his watch. Ten hours to Houston was a long time.
He couldn’t believe he’d never seen this before.
The FBI ran the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program out of its training school in Quantico, Virginia. VICAP was an electronic clearing house for unsolved murders and sex crimes across North America and Western Europe. Law enforcement agencies could input data from their unsolved cases and search the database for similar murders. VICAP sought cases where the victim appeared to have been selected at random, and where the killing was motiveless or sexual. All cases were kept in the system indefinitely, and were electronically checked against each other to compile lists of possibly linked killings. The program could identify serial killings by matching the signature aspects of each crime.
Mike knew VICAP fairly well. He’d been a Honolulu Police Department detective before Chris gave him a fulltime job working on the Cheryl Wilcox case. He uploaded Cheryl’s killing into VICAP himself.
After talking to Chris, he’d called a friend who was still with HPD and asked for a favor: to borrow a Law Enforcement Online password for a couple of hours. Once he’d gotten to the airport, he’d logged into VICAP to find out what the FBI knew. In the database, he entered search parameters that would surely have picked up Cheryl Wilcox’s file. A search as simple as “*victim sex: F*victim hair color: red*loc: Honolulu*MO: cannibalism*” would surely have brought up Cheryl’s file and no other. But instead, the system came back with an even simpler response: No results. Please enter new search parameters and try again .
He searched for all cold-case murders in Hawaii and scrolled through the results. Unsolved murders in Hawaii were vanishingly rare. VICAP listed five, going back to 1988. There should have been six.
Cheryl’s case was not in the system.
He searched for the New Orleans case. The young woman there, two and a half years ago, had been a Tulane student named Robin Knappe. Robin’s landlady found her in the gingerbread shotgun house she’d rented for two years on Magazine Street near Audubon Park. Both of Robin’s breasts, her left buttock, and her lower jaw and tongue had been missing and were never found. Even a police force as beleaguered as the post-Katrina NOPD would have entered such a case on the VICAP network. The most rookie detective would’ve taken one look at the case and thought to do it. But Robin Knappe was missing.
New Orleans had the highest murder rate in the country, even after Katrina when a third of its population never returned. The city accounted for over a hundred and thirty cold-case murders on VICAP, and Mike scrolled through them all to make sure he hadn’t missed Robin somehow. She was simply not there.
The girl in Vancouver was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, supposedly spending the weekend with her girlfriends. In fact, she
She was asleep when he woke that night. Her ID card was still on the table, face up. He looked at her face in the photograph above the slightly raised seal of the National Security Agency and the nononsense corporate logo of Advanced Micro Devices. He turned the ID facedown and went out quietly.
Chapter Seven
Mike Nakamura arrived at the airport two hours ahead of schedule. He sat on a bench in the Japanese garden underneath the triangle of walkways leading to the Hawaiian Airlines gates. With the koi pond behind him, it was the best place in the airport to use a laptop computer without someone walking behind him and seeing the screen. He was researching VICAP; what he was finding scared the shit out of him. He looked around again to be sure he was alone, then checked his watch. Ten hours to Houston was a long time.
He couldn’t believe he’d never seen this before.
The FBI ran the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program out of its training school in Quantico, Virginia. VICAP was an electronic clearing house for unsolved murders and sex crimes across North America and Western Europe. Law enforcement agencies could input data from their unsolved cases and search the database for similar murders. VICAP sought cases where the victim appeared to have been selected at random, and where the killing was motiveless or sexual. All cases were kept in the system indefinitely, and were electronically checked against each other to compile lists of possibly linked killings. The program could identify serial killings by matching the signature aspects of each crime.
Mike knew VICAP fairly well. He’d been a Honolulu Police Department detective before Chris gave him a fulltime job working on the Cheryl Wilcox case. He uploaded Cheryl’s killing into VICAP himself.
After talking to Chris, he’d called a friend who was still with HPD and asked for a favor: to borrow a Law Enforcement Online password for a couple of hours. Once he’d gotten to the airport, he’d logged into VICAP to find out what the FBI knew. In the database, he entered search parameters that would surely have picked up Cheryl Wilcox’s file. A search as simple as “*victim sex: F*victim hair color: red*loc: Honolulu*MO: cannibalism*” would surely have brought up Cheryl’s file and no other. But instead, the system came back with an even simpler response: No results. Please enter new search parameters and try again .
He searched for all cold-case murders in Hawaii and scrolled through the results. Unsolved murders in Hawaii were vanishingly rare. VICAP listed five, going back to 1988. There should have been six.
Cheryl’s case was not in the system.
He searched for the New Orleans case. The young woman there, two and a half years ago, had been a Tulane student named Robin Knappe. Robin’s landlady found her in the gingerbread shotgun house she’d rented for two years on Magazine Street near Audubon Park. Both of Robin’s breasts, her left buttock, and her lower jaw and tongue had been missing and were never found. Even a police force as beleaguered as the post-Katrina NOPD would have entered such a case on the VICAP network. The most rookie detective would’ve taken one look at the case and thought to do it. But Robin Knappe was missing.
New Orleans had the highest murder rate in the country, even after Katrina when a third of its population never returned. The city accounted for over a hundred and thirty cold-case murders on VICAP, and Mike scrolled through them all to make sure he hadn’t missed Robin somehow. She was simply not there.
The girl in Vancouver was a seventeen-year-old high school senior, supposedly spending the weekend with her girlfriends. In fact, she
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