Mind Switch (13 page)

He had a picture of Slivers with him and showed it to the first of the three dealers. The dealer glanced fleetingly at the picture and said, “Nope, don’t know him, never saw him, sorry.”

“Okay,” Fred said, “Let’s take another look, and be sure to concentrate this time.”

The dealer, obviously irritated, grabbed the picture and after studying it for some time said, “No! I am sure that I’ve never seen him.”

Fred had no luck at the next booth. The third booth was manned by a stocky individual who looked like he had not shaved in a week. He wore a plaid shirt with both sleeves cut off allowing everyone to view his bulging muscles. On his left arm he sported two black and red tattoos, each were exactly alike with the annotation,
Freedom is not for the timid.
On his right arm he wore a tattoo with a drawing of an elderly woman with
Mother
written over it.

After looking closely at the photograph of Slivers the dealer said, “Yeah, I remember him. He seemed to be totally absorbed with buying a weapon, it was around noon time as best as I can recall, one day during the earlier part of the week. I was going out for a sandwich just as he came over to my booth. At first I thought he was just another looker and I had enough of those already that day. I didn’t have a single sale up to that point and I had already been open over three hours. A hundred people must have come by and asked questions but no takers. This guy asked me for any sort of weapon that would fire several rounds in the shortest amount of time.

“I asked him a few questions about the type of manufacture and the caliber he might prefer, but he seemed to have no knowledge at all about guns. He just kept repeating the same request over and over again. At first I thought he was playing games with me, so I brought out the most expensive weapon I could find and assumed that would get rid of him fast so I could take my lunch break. To my surprise he didn’t quibble at all, he just asked how much? I still thought he wasn’t really serious since he was not like any gun purchaser I ever met. I told him the price and he pulled out a bunch of twenties from his wallet and that was it, except that I asked him did he want bullets and he didn’t seem to know what to say. Finally I said, ‘Look, I’ll throw them in for free,’ and again he said nothing, not even thanks.”

“What was his mood, was he happy, sad, what?” Fred asked?

“He seemed to be neither; it was almost like he was in a fog.”

“What name did he give?”

“Let me see, I have a copy of that day’s receipts somewhere”

“Oh, here it is, John Smith and the date was December 3rd.”

“Didn’t you think something was wrong when he asked for a weapon that could fire a lot of rounds quickly and the guy didn’t even know what type of weapon to ask for?”

“Officer, that’s none of my business. I thought he must have had a lot of squirrels or rabbits around his place.”

“Oh, I understand; and they must have been as big as an elephant for him to want to purchase a weapon of that caliber.”

“As I said, it’s none of my business, I just sell ‘em.”

Fred was able to obtain the serial number of the weapon from the vendor and very little else. Obviously, John Smith was an alias.

He left the crowded arena and returned to the parking lot. A Bradenton traffic ticket was on his windshield. A note was attached: “
Sorry, but this is in exchange for the ticket you Sarasota guys gave me when I was in your town.
” In disgust Fred ripped up the ticket and returned to his office.

* * *

Fred could now account for virtually all of Slivers’ time line since he had left his workplace. Fred had calculated the minimum amount of time that Slivers would require going from his office to the Sarasota Fair Grounds where the gun show had been held earlier. He then estimated another half hour would have been required for Slivers to procure the weapon and complete the necessary paperwork. Slivers had parked his car about three blocks from the bank. Fred figured a normal walking speed of about three miles an hour would be appropriate for Slivers to walk from his car to the bank. Adding it all together the sum time was within 15 minutes of Slivers’ actual time of arrival at the bank. “Close enough for government work,” Fred said to himself.

Was this a premeditated murder? Fred felt in the last analysis that would be for the prosecution to determine. However, he felt establishing premeditation would be difficult at best; why would Slivers wait until just before he committed his crime to procure the weapon if premeditation existed? Was it a case of multiple personalities? Perhaps, since Slivers’ demeanor had changed markedly during the period in which he committed the murders. At the same time, Slivers had enough composure to provide a false name when he procured his weapon. On the other hand, it was very strange that Slivers had no idea what sort of weapon to acquire. Most premeditated murderers are fairly detailed as to every aspect of a murder plan; and Slivers was confirmed to be a very detailed person. However, Slivers didn’t even seem to understand that he needed ammunition as well as a weapon. Was it a case of a small prefrontal cortex dictating his behavior, as Maureen had suggested? Well, that’s for the psychologists to determine, it’s certainly beyond my field of expertise, thought Fred.

It was five p.m., and just as Fred sat down, Jim entered the office to brief him on the progress he had made in interviewing the remaining people on the bank and theater list. Nothing was new. Jim had contacted fifteen prospects with no leads. He said Paul was still out working on his list but so far no luck.

After Jim left, the chief called Fred in.

Fred briefed the chief about his experience with the gun dealer and told him the latest status on the interviews being conducted by Paul and Jim. The chief yawned as he was briefed and only seemed to perk up when Fred provided status on Paul’s progress. The chief said, “Paul is a good man; in fact he was the board’s second choice after you to get those lieutenant’s bars. Make sure that you use him effectively.” The chief turned away. It was obvious that the discussion was over.

When Fred left the office, he saw Paul taking to the chief’s secretary. Fred knew that Paul was going to go in the chief’s office to “re-brief” him. He was not happy with that development but decided to hold his cool.

Fred called Maureen to tell her he would be home late that evening.

Maureen said, “Well, I’ll probably be in bed. I’m dog tired—sorry, Molly,” she added, “but I’m still having problems sleeping and the pills I’m taking aren’t doing any good at all. I’m trying a new type of therapy and am hopeful that it will work.”

Fred started to tell her about the latest developments in the case including the strange behavior of Slivers at the gun dealer, but he thought better of it. He wanted Maureen to determine if that behavior fit into the multiple personality concept; but he didn’t want to bother her while she didn’t feel well.

He could hear Molly barking in the background. Obviously Molly wanted Maureen to play and, similar to a movie character he had once seen, Molly would not be ignored! Molly’s aggressive play routine would tire Maureen even more, Fred thought, but he knew Maureen would ultimately give in to that tenacious, lovable little terrier.

Chapter 26

The next morning, Fred arose before dawn. His sleep had been troubled with visions of victims of all ages and sizes being shot with arrows and then falling into a great endless abyss. Fred couldn’t analyze dreams but he felt the abyss symbolically represented his inability to solve the murders. He didn’t understand the reason for the arrows; maybe Maureen could decipher them for him later. Maureen was still in a deep sleep when he got dressed and left for the office.

City streets were completely deserted at this early hour with the exception of a couple of vagrants most likely seeking escape from the harsh winter to the north; the sun was still a couple of hours away from removing the night’s chill from the countryside. At this early hour not even Paul had arrived at the office yet.

Fred spent his rare free time working on his blackboard and making notes as he pondered. On the left segment of the blackboard he had written “Observations.” Below that heading were notes that he had written about the two shootings. To the right, a column headed “Actions taken and Pending,” was keyed to the first column’s notes. A third column was titled “Conclusions.” The annotations under the third column had been either left blank or were marked “No success.”

Fred perused the board left to right, constantly asking himself, what am I not doing, what haven’t I thought about?

Up to now, he had employed a technique known in intelligence circles as “serial network analysis.” It sounded complex but it was simply a data gathering and mining methodology that attempted to expose previously unknown connections among people. The logic behind it was that people in disparate organizations often have common acquaintances. In effect, that was what Fred had attempted to do in his interviews pertaining to the victims at the bank, to somehow link the murderer with his victims. If he could find some previously unknown link, then perhaps he could separate the mass murder from a random non-purposeful event to one that had been engineered and designed. Virtually everybody around him saw the killings as a senseless act. He thought differently but could not yet find the reason for any of the needless killings, even though his subordinates had already logged hundreds of man-hours in a futile search for links and clues.

Then something struck him! Suppose the link was broader than what he had been searching for. Suppose the link he was seeking was not limited to the bank victims, but perhaps a connection of some type existed between the bank and the theater shooting. Also suppose that link was associated with the firms that the victims worked for.

Fred was now speaking out loud to himself, “The killer may in fact have hoped to drive us into a dead end while, in fact, part of the puzzle he created may have been to make these shootings look totally random. His goal may have been to cross me up by executing a plan which appeared by all observers to be two disparate shootings.”

So far there were no matches in the case of the bank shooting but, he thought, what if we compared the employers of the victims at the bank with the employers of the victims at the theater? This seemed to be far out, in fact very far out but it was a possibility; and so far, looking at his blackboard, Fred felt nothing had panned out, so anything possible was worth a try. But for Fred’s theory to be on the mark, the killer would have had to know at some level of detail the way Fred and his department went about solving selective crimes.

Only those very close to him would have that knowledge. His predecessor, who had retired from the force unexpectedly, shared the same “damn the torpedoes, no holds barred” attitude as the Chief and Paul. To say they employed complex techniques in crime solving was to say the Neanderthal might have been on the threshold of determining how to go to the moon just before they evolved out of existence.

Fred had only discussed his methodology with the chief, Jim, Paul and Maureen. To make his theory even plausible it would mean that someone knew that he would become the prime investigator on the case after his predecessor left and possibly also understood Fred’s thought process. Fred said to himself, this is crazy, and he almost dismissed his theory out of hand; but paraphrasing the statement by Sherlock Holmes to Watson, when the possible is eliminated from consideration, the answer must lie in the improbable.

He also recalled a prosecutor once said, if you hear the sound of hoofs it may not be horses but it could be zebras. Facts do not always point to that which is logical or apparent. At that moment Fred decided to continue the investigation following his theory, as outlandish as it might be.

When Jim arrived at the station, Fred gave him his assignment. “I want you to check out all the victims from the theater and then compare them to the information you have on the victims from the bank. I also want you to start with those that were killed.”

Jim said, “You really think that the two shootings were connected?”

“I don’t know, but I want to leave no stone unturned.”

Fred could see in Jim’s eyes a reluctance to go down this very questionable investigative path, but as a good friend and a dedicated subordinate he didn’t question his boss’s orders.

As Jim left the office he thought, “The track I have been directed to take on this investigation is crazy. If he only knew how much I want his job and how differently I would be handling it if I were in charge. Perhaps someday soon I will be.”

Chapter 27

Two more days had gone by with virtually no progress in either of the two cases. The DA had agreed to the delay requested by the defense in the Slivers indictment. The defendant was being held in the county jail without bail. Based on the vicious nature of the crime, the defense conceded early on that bail would not be a remote possibility so they focused their efforts further downstream on creating a palatable defense that might resonate with a jury. However, the defense was having a hard time understanding the rationale for the crime and had been unable to get any more coherent information from Slivers than the police had. As a result they sought to buy some additional time before the case went to trial. Since the DA wanted to present a rock solid case, he had no problem agreeing to the proposed delay in the trial date.