d found much the same list. There didn’t seem to be that many Thierry Mulches in the world.
I put on latex gloves, got an evidence sleeve, and slid in the letter and the envelope. My fingerprints were on the letter, but maybe Mr. Mulch’s prints were there as well. It was certainly worth a shot, anyway.
Sampson returned from the cafeteria with two cups of coffee. I showed him the letter. He scanned it, looked at me, and said, “That supposed to be you with the big, uh, physicality?”
“Evidently.”
“So he understand something about you I don’t?” Sampson said, laughing.
“Read the letter, wise guy,” I said, turned away, and started searching for killings in massage parlors in Tampa and Albuquerque.
It didn’t take long to find them.
Chapter
48
Two Aprils before, a hooded killer had attacked Sensu Massage in Tampa, killing two Korean women, a male customer, and the guy working security at the front desk. All were shot at relatively close range. Bullet placement—head and chest—had in all cases ensured a quick but violent death.
I soon reached Steven Hall, one of the Tampa detectives charged with investigating the slayings. Hall said that the killer in Tampa had left little if any evidence, though he’d neglected to take the security tapes with him.
“You never see his face,” Hall said. “Very smart about it. But you see him taking the third girl.”
“Third girl?”
“Esmeralda Felix, twenty-year-old Cuban-American coed at Florida State, working her way through school.”
“This sounds like the same guy,” I replied. “We’ve got a missing Vietnamese female from George Washington University who worked in the spa.”
“Hope she doesn’t turn out like Esmeralda,” the Tampa detective said before explaining that the student’s body had turned up on a remote beach south of Naples, Florida, sixteen days after the massage parlor killings in Tampa. “She’d been dead for three days, strangled with a strip of green terry cloth. Before the sicko throttled her he cut off her nipples with pinking shears.”
I tasted something foul at the back of my mouth, asked Hall to e-mail the file to me in the morning, and told him we’d be in touch if we got any significant leads.
Arlene Lavitt, the detective overseeing the massage parlor killing in Albuquerque, was less forthcoming when I reached her at her desk. Then I told her I used to work FBI behavioral science with Gabriel Rodriguez, the current chief of the Albuquerque police department.
“I’m sorry,” Detective Lavitt said. “We’re just swamped here.”
“You haven’t heard about the murder rate in DC?” I asked.
She sighed. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Just tell me what I need to know and I’ll be out of your hair.”
Detective Lavitt was all business then, and shared the following with me: Four Aprils prior, a hooded male opened fire in the Empress Spa on a desolate stretch of Highway 85 south of Albuquerque. A Korean girl working there was shot in the head. So was an older woman at the front desk. A third female was shot in the chest in the locker room. A fourth was kidnapped.
“Let me guess,” I said. “She turned up dead, mutilated?”
“Strangled but not mutilated,” the detective replied. “Fifteen days after she disappeared, a hiker found her body up on US Forest Service land east of the city. She’d been dead two days.”
“Pick up any terry-cloth fibers on the body?”
“As a matter of fact. Green terry cloth.”
I considered the two cases. “Some of his ritual appears set and some of it is evolving, Detective.”
“You’re saying you think he’s a serial killer?”
“A mass serial killer. Albuquerque might have been his first go. Certainly the first one we know of, anyway. I’ll have the Tampa files sent to you.”