When the Devil Doesn't Show: A Mystery (13 page)

“He’s been on the run for a little over a week and he decides to come here and not go home to El Paso?” Gil asked. “That seems strange.”

“Wait, listen to this,” Joe said, reading off his computer screen. “The two guys he escaped with were found dead the next day. Looks like Hoffman has a habit of killing his partners. He clearly has trust issues.”

Gil started to say, “He likely learned his lesson after his accomplice turned him—”

Joe interrupted with a yell that made people sitting at their desks outside the conference room turn and look—“Holy shit, we met him.” Joe jumped up from the table and threw his notebook across the room. Then he started to pace, still swearing but no longer yelling. Gil turned Joe’s laptop so he could get a better look at the photo on the screen. It was a mug shot showing a young man with sandy hair and blue eyes who was five feet, eleven inches tall according to the page.

“I don’t recognize him,” Gil said.

“The guy in the SUV outside the burned house, remember?” Joe asked. “He wanted directions to the ski area. Damn it. We fucking had him.”

*   *   *

Lucy spent an hour trying to reach her brother, with no luck. He was probably at the hospital, where he’d have to turn off his cell phone. She was at home, her suitcase packed, ready to go. She could still fly to Florida. Even if her mom was in the psych ward, she could visit her on Christmas Day.

The phone blinked on, and she picked it up before it even rang.

“What’s going on?” she said as her way of answering. “How’s Mom?”

“It’s just like I told you on the phone,” he said. “She’s on lockdown.”

“How bad?”

“Bad,” he said. “Remember that time when we were kids, and she had the knife? She’s talking like that again.”

“I can still come…” Lucy started to say.

“But Mom won’t even remember that you were there,” he said. “Just stay home. Maybe you can come next week, for New Year’s. But listen Lu, I think Mom would want to get better as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” she said slowly, not sure what the issue was.

“If they put her on oral medication, it will take another two weeks to take full effect,” he said. “But she could get a mega dose shot now, and she’ll be better in two days. She’d be able to get back to her life.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“I can’t authorize them to give Mom the shot since you have her power of attorney…”

“Mom hates needles,” Lucy said. “You know that. She hates them.”

“But that way she’d get back to normal almost right away—” he started to say, but Lucy interrupted.

“I know. I know. I just hate having to put her through that.”

“She wants to be on her meds,” he said. “Just like I do.”

“But the thought of them holding her down and sticking a needle in her arm.”

“It’s not exactly like that,” he said. “They’ll put it in her IV. She’s already doped up on Ativan and strapped down.”

“Strapped down? You’re not making me feel any better,” she said. “Was it scary when they did it to you?”

“I barely remember it, Lu,” he said. “Seriously. It wasn’t that bad.”

She rubbed her eyes and said wearily, “Hand your phone to the nurse. I’ll tell them to give her the shot. What a great Christmas present for Mom.”

*   *   *

After Joe had calmed down, Gil suggested they check stolen vehicle reports to see if anyone had reported a missing SUV, but a quick file search was fruitless.

“Do you remember what kind of plates were on the car?” Gil asked.

“New Mexico, I think?” Joe said. “Shit, I don’t know.”

Gil closed his eyes, trying to picture the man in the SUV, but only the vaguest images would come to mind. “Let’s have Dispatch put out Hoffman’s picture to patrol plus the description of the SUV.”

“Why do you think he showed up at the house again?” Joe asked.

“Maybe he wanted to see what kind of damage the fire had done,” Gil said.

Joe’s phone rang with the robotic notes of Def Leppard. It was Liz. Before she could mention her reason for calling, Joe told her about Hoffman and the second home invasion.

“Can you run the dental records of the burned victim against any known associates of Hoffman?” Gil asked her.

Liz groaned. “Seriously?” she said. “You’re going to make me try to get dental records from Texas? I might as well ask the pope if I can make a dress out of the Shroud of Turin.” Texas, with a population of almost 26 million, was known for officials who strictly adhered to interdepartmental rules and regulations, likely due to the sheer number of people they served. The state seemed to follow the old adage “Do a favor for one and you have to do it for everyone,” which resulted in no favors at all. But in New Mexico, with only 1.5 million people, bending the rules to help someone out was not only the norm, but was considered polite. It made interstate cooperation strained. It was likely that Liz would make the dental record request of Texas, only to be told by a specialized department that a dozen or so required forms needed to be completed, and accompanied by signatures and photocopies. If Texas made the same request of New Mexico, whoever answered the phone would just tell them whatever they wanted to know.

“Thank you, Liz,” Gil said.

“So why were you calling?” Joe asked. “Please tell us you have good news. We need it.”

“I don’t know how good it is,” Liz said. “I was able to dry out what was left of your burned victim’s clothing. In one of the pockets, he had a receipt.”

“That might be helpful,” Gil said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “It was from Baja Taco, dated three months ago. He had a green chile cheeseburger and paid in cash. But on the back, there was a handwritten list.”

“I will pay you lots and lots of money if you say it was a list of accomplices,” Joe said. “Or addresses of houses to be robbed.”

“It looks like a shopping list,” she said. “I’ll e-mail you a photo.”

Joe stood over his computer, hitting the
REFRESH
button on his e-mail again and again until Liz’s message appeared. He read the list aloud to Gil, who wrote it on the white board. There were only six items: beer, box cutters, duct tape, trash bags, pads, and the letters
tpx.

“Actually, he spelled duct tape wrong,” Joe said. “He has it
d-u-c-k
tape.”

Gil made the correction as Joe looked at the board. “I have no idea what
tpx
stands for,” Joe said. “But everything else is what you would need to tie someone up and torture them.” He added the heading M
URDER
S
HOPPING
L
IST
at the top.

Gil knew that coming across a killer’s “need to buy” list during an investigation was atypical but not uncommon. Most law enforcement officers had at least one or two cases in their career where a criminal made a list. During actor Robert Blake’s trial in 2005 for the murder of Bonny Lee Bakley, the prosecution produced a list allegedly made by Blake’s handyman, who also was his codefendant. The list included shovels, a sledgehammer, lye, pool acid, and duct tape, which the defense argued were items any handyman would need for work. Before the 2011 massacres in Norway that left seventy-seven dead, Anders Behring Breivik made an online shopping list that included sulfur powder for explosives and a drill-press vise for making poison-tipped bullets. Mr. Burns’s list was, by comparison, fairly unimaginative.

“Maybe
tpx
stands for ‘toilet paper extra-large,’” Joe said. He went back to his computer and typed the letters in. “There is a gun manufacturer called TPX. Oh wait … they make paintball guns. Here’s something. Did you know there is a Louisville Slugger called TPX? That could be it. They could have used a baseball bat to ram down those doors.”

“Maybe,” Gil said. “But do we really think the same man who spelled duct tape using d-u-c-
k
knows the various brand names for the Louisville Slugger?”

“He could be a baseball nut,” Joe said.

“What about the box cutters,” Gil said, trying to get them back on track. “Where can you buy those in town?”

“Pretty much at every hardware store and Walmart, I would think,” Joe said. “What I don’t get is why Hoffman cut these guys. What the hell is that about? You torture someone to get information out of them, like a PIN number or combination. But we didn’t find a safe, and no money is missing from their accounts.”

“Torture was the goal,” Gil said, “Home invaders are a different animal. Most burglars wait for you to leave the house. A home invader waits for you to get home. They aren’t doing it for money. They do it for fear. They feed off it.”

“A group of homicidal strangers break into your house and all they want to do is torture you?” Joe asked. “Jesus, that sounds like my worst nightmare.”

*   *   *

Natalie Martin put the boys down to a nap and fished the keys to the storage shed out of the junk drawer before pulling on her boots and coat. She went outside, noticing for the first time that it was snowing again. In her pocket was the receiver for the baby monitor, just in case the boys woke up during the few minutes she’d be outside. She fiddled with the keys in the lock and pushed the door open against a drift of snow. She was hoping to find another set of Christmas lights in the shed. She could have sworn they had five sets of white lights, but she could find only four. She squeezed herself between some shelves and the Pontiac Tempest, which was sitting snug under its fitted cover. She accidentally pushed up part of the car cover as she slid by, showing a flash of baby blue paint, which looked as smooth as nail polish, and the black cloth convertible top. Nick used to work on the car every weekend when they were first dating. He’d even proposed as they sat in it watching the stars. But it’d been more than two years since he’d even taken the car cover off. Since before the boys were born. A two-seater convertible leaves little room for baby seats. She smoothed the cover back down and turned to the shelf. After a few minutes of searching, she decided she was too cold to keep looking. She had just gotten back into the house when she heard the front door open and Nick yell, “I’m home.” She rushed out to the living room to shush him.

“Hi, honey,” she whispered as she gave him a kiss. “I put the boys down for a nap.” She looked at her watch and asked, “Why are you home so early?”

“They let us off because some major storm is coming in,” he said. “It’s really starting to snow. They think we’ll get another eight inches.”

“It’ll be a white Christmas,” she said. “How was work?”

“I think half of my experiments are dying,” he said. “But on the bright side, that paper I coauthored looks like it’s going to be published.”

That’s when the front door exploded behind them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

December 22

Joe and Gil were in the conference room, still facing the white board. In red Dry Erase marker, Joe had added “Hoffman behavior profile: likes to torture; rich, male, Anglo victims; on the run; kills accomplices; revisits crime scenes; may like extra-large toilet paper.”

Now he was drawing a long horizontal line with hash marks on it. It was the beginning of their time line. The first item on it was the day of Hoffman’s escape from prison a week earlier. The next entry was “December 19, 5:47
P.M
.: Dr. Price leaves lab.” Between the first entry and the next was a large blank space, indicating how little they knew about Hoffman’s movements in between his escape and crime spree.

“We know Hoffman had to be in town getting a crew together at least a few days before hitting Dr. Price’s house,” Joe said. “Or maybe he had the whole crew already from out of town, and Mr. Burns was his only local contact. Hell, I’d usually say at this point we should try to find Hoffman’s past known associates, but he kills those people, so that’s a dead end. Literally.”

“After he escapes, Hoffman makes his way here, for some reason,” Gil said. “Let’s say it took him three days to get here. That gives him four days to get a gun, find a crew, and determine his victims.”

“Now that’s something I hadn’t thought about,” Joe said. “How is he choosing his victims? There might be a connection between them or something.”

“Likely several connections,” Gil said. “Santa Fe isn’t a big town. Most people’s lives overlap here. They shop at the same stores or their kids go to the same school.”

“Personally, if I want to find rich people, I’m driving around looking at nice houses,” Joe said. “But that doesn’t make any sense really, because Price and Jacobson lived so far off the street that Hoffman would’ve had to make a special effort to find their place. Maybe one of the accomplices knew the victims? You know, we still haven’t interviewed the snowplow guy.”

“How did Hoffman find his victims in the past?”

“Now, that’s a good question,” Joe said. He tapped the computer a little while and then said, “Okay, it looks like last time, he got a list of names from a buddy.… One of the crew worked as a mechanic in a high-end dealership.”

“Okay,” Gil said. “That’s a place to start. Let’s look to see if any of our victims had their cars worked on recently.”

“Can you handle that?” Joe asked. “I want to check something else.”

“What’s that?”

“Just give me a second,” Joe said, typing another few strokes on the keyboard. “I read something last night on Alexander Jacobson’s Facebook page…”

“You stayed up reading his Facebook page?”

“I know you think I just watch porn and drink a fifth of whiskey every night, but that’s only on days that end in a
y
,” Joe said. “Anyways, Jacobson wrote something … okay, wait, here it is … yeah, he says, ‘I just got a new gig. Hope I get to see somebody famous.’ What does that sound like to you?”

“Like he got a job,” Gil said. “Doing what? He was a makeup artist for the Opera, but their season doesn’t start for months. It had to be work for another client.”

“Exactly—someplace where he’d meet a celebrity,” Joe said, looking through some papers on the table. He pulled out his notepad and flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. “The state police said their victim, Stanley Ivanov, worked for TV and film companies finding them props. What do you think? Coincidence?”