LITMIR.BIZ

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looked tired. There were dark circles under his eyes.

      “You look like you’ve been burning the midnight oil,” Garon remarked.

      He laughed, a little hollowly. “I take these homicides seriously. I phoned the Oklahoma P.D. where the other red ribbon murder occurred. That was an eleven-year-old girl. They found her facedown in a patch of brown-eyed Susans near a cemetery.”

      “Assaulted?” Garon asked.

      Marquez nodded curtly. “Yes. Strangled, as well. And then stabbed about twenty-five times. Just like this one we’re working on. Too similar to be unrelated.”

      Garon’s lips made a thin line. “A very personal attack.”

      “Exactly my feeling. The perp hated the child, or what she represented. It was overkill, plain and simple. Something else—there was another victim, same basic MO, over near Del Rio, about ten years ago, killed with a knife and left in a field. I was looking for similar cases and happened to run into one of our older investigators who remembered it. It wasn’t even fed into a database, it was so old. I e-mailed the police department over there and asked them to fax me the details.” He ran a hand through his thick, straight black hair. “Little girls. Innocent little girls. And this monster may have been doing it since the nineties, at intervals, without getting caught. I’d give blood to get this guy,” Marquez added. He paused long enough to give the waitress his order and wait until she could pour coffee in his cup before he spoke again. “He’s got to be a repeat sex offender. He’s too good at what he does for a sloppy amateur. It takes a wily so-and-so to take a child right out of her own bedroom with her family in the house. And he does it over a period of years, if the cases do match, without getting caught or even seen.”

      “That piece of red ribbon?” Garon murmured, sipping coffee, “must have something to do with a fantasy he’s acting out.”

      “That’s what I thought,” the younger man said. “The detective who told me about the Del Rio case also remembered hearing of a similar cold case, from twelve or more years back, but he couldn’t recall where it happened. He thinks it happened in south Texas.”

      “Did you look in the database for that case?”

      “Yes, but the Del Rio case wasn’t there. God knows how many others aren’t, either, especially if they happened in small, rural towns.” He smiled. “I told my lieutenant about that Del Rio cold case, and about the other two children in Oklahoma who were taken from their homes and found dead. I said we needed to get the FBI involved so you guys could do a profile of the killer for us, and he laughed. He said the deaths had no connection. So I went to the captain, and he called your ASAC. Thanks.”

      “No problem,” Garon mused. “Most veteran cops hate paperwork and complications. Nobody wants to be looking for a serial killer. But we might catch this one, if we’re stubborn enough.”

      Marquez pursed his lips. “I asked one of your squad members about you,” he said. “He says that you’ll chase people to the gates of hell.”

      Garon shrugged. “I don’t like letting criminals get away.”

      “Neither do I. This guy’s a serial killer. I need you to help me prove it.”

      Garon paused while their steaks were served. “What sort of similarities are we talking about, with that cold case in Del Rio?”

      “All I have is sketchy information,” came the reply, “but the manner of abduction was the same, and they narrowed the suspects down to a stranger. The victim was assaulted and stabbed. I don’t know about red ribbons. I filled out our case on the form for VICAP and I did turn up several child murders in other states. But none of the children were strangled and stabbed, which may signify some other perp.”

      “Or he might have changed his habits. Maybe a gun gave him more power in an abduction.” As they both knew, a murderer might change the way he killed, but if the crime had a signature, it usually wouldn’t vary from crime scene to crime scene.

      “Any red ribbons in those other cold cases?” he asked, because the ribbon did seem to serve as a signature in at least one case.

      “No. At least,” he added, “there were none in the information I accessed. As I said earlier, we always hold back one or two details that we don’t feed to the media. Maybe those detectives did, too.”

      “Did you try calling the detectives who worked the Oklahoma cases?”

      “I did. The first Oklahoma one was sure I was actually a reporter trying to dig out unknown facts in the case. I gave him my captain’s phone number, and he hung up on me. He said anybody could look that information up online. Nobody at the second police department knew anything about a cold case.”

      “How about the other Texas case?”

      “That’s a doozy of a story,” Marquez told him with pure disgust in his tone. “It’s in Palo Verde, a little town up near Austin. I couldn’t get their single policeman on the phone at all. I tried e-mailing him, along with my phone number. That was week before last, and I’m still waiting for an answer.”

      “We get a lot of kooks e-mailing us for various reasons,” Garon told him. “And we get about two hundred spam messages a day. The captions are so misleading that you occasionally open one without meaning to. It’s always a scam or a link to a porno Web site. Even with filters, they get through. Maybe your message ended up in the deleted files.”

      “I hate spammers,” the younger man muttered.

      “We have a cyber crime division that spends hours a day looking for scams and shutting them down.”

      “Good for you, but that still doesn’t solve my problem.”

      “You can fly to Oklahoma and show your credentials in person, can’t you?”

      “I can barely pay my rent,” Marquez said miserably as he finished his steak. “I can’t afford the airfare.”

      “Your department would pay for the tickets,” Garon said.

      Marquez’s eyebrows met his hairline. “Like hell it would,” he shot back. “Didn’t I tell you that I had to buy my own damned digital camera because my lieutenant wouldn’t authorize the expenditure? He likes his job and the city manager goes over departmental budgets with a microscope.”

      “I know how that feels.”

      “No, you don’t,” the younger man assured him. “Unless you’ve had to bring in a receipt for a cup of ice water you bought from a convenience store to back up claiming it on your expense account!”

      “You have got to be kidding!” Garon exclaimed.

      “I wish I were,” the other man said sadly, shaking his head. “I guess they’d lock me up for a whole giant Coke.”

      Garon chuckled helplessly. “You need to come and work for us,” he told Marquez. “You could even have a Bucar.”

      “A what?”

      “A bureau car,” Garon told him. “I get to drive mine home at night. It’s like moving storage for all my equipment, including my guns.”

      “Guns, plural?” the detective exclaimed. “You have more than one?”

      He gave the detective a wry look. “Surely you have access to body armor and stop sticks and a riot gun…?”

      “Of course I do,” he muttered, “but it’s not my own. As for stop sticks, I pull my service weapon and try to blow out tires as long as the suspect isn’t near anything I might conceivably hit by mistake. As for a riot gun…” He pushed back his jacket to display his shoulder holster. “This is it. I hate shotguns.”

      “They let you wear a shoulder holster?” Grier asked. “We aren’t allowed to.”

      “I don’t know if I want to apply to the Bureau if I can’t wear a shoulder holster.

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