The Cross Streets Killer

The Cross Streets Killer

by Avril Maria Serene

… a Debra Ann Wynn mystery

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SAN DIEGO

The firefighters’ favorite diner was slow this afternoon; the fifties vibe the restaurant meant to project didn’t quite work without the usual background activity. Still, the inviting smell of barbecue and something Italian hung in the air.

“Hi, beautiful!” Danny, my fiancé of the past eight months, looked up, smiling. Alan made room so Ron could switch to the other side of the table.

“Was  everything good with the doc?”

Danny tried to downplay his concern, but deceit didn’t suit his boyish face. And he had an obvious tell when worried about something—he’d run his hand around the nape of his neck under his curly dark blonde hair, elbow up in the air.

I slid in on the red pleather next to Danny.

“Hi, lover,” I said, pecking him on the cheek and invoking the pet name I enjoyed using around his fellow firefighters. It made them squeamish; they’d rather ignore their co-workers’ romantic sides.

“It’s all good, still in remission, coming up on three years.”

“Woohoo!” Danny exclaimed, his face beaming as we high-fived.

Ron was short and squat. The tiny coils of his black hair framed a rugged face resembling a young Forest Whitaker. I had to smile seeing Alan and him hanging out together. Alan was pencil-thin and gawky with sandy red hair—he still had his childhood freckles. When stories about Mutt and Jeff circulated, no one at the firehouse doubted who they were about.

“Hi, Ron, and good to see you, Alan; it’s been a while. When I see the two of you together, I still feel like you’re up to something.”

“Marci—or should I say ‘Detective Robbins?’” Alan said, half-whispering, “You look even better out of uniform.” He was leaning in toward me, his face close to the table, while sneaking a sly look at Danny from behind his raised palm. “That’s because Ron and I are trying to figure out how to bump Danny off. We have to do it in a way that makes us look like victims; then, we can have you all to ourselves. We keep running into that hitch, you being on the force and everything.”

I gave Alan as patronizing a smile as I could muster. Danny had wedged himself into the booth’s corner, a wry smile as he shook his head.

“What’s with the laptop, Ron?” I asked, “Are you finally taking the lieutenants’ exam? It’s about time; a good fit for you.”

“Nah, still thinking about it. One of my buddies sent me an NSFW video, and I wanted to show it to Danny. Here, check this out.”

Ron placed the notebook against the booth partition between the salt and pepper shakers so we could all see its screen.

“They shot it from a residential intersection where three streets descend from hills and meet at the bottom. A fourth, Mount Albertine South, leaves that intersection at a reasonably level grade. It’s a gentle rise going north up Mount Albertine from there, with a fairly large preschool and school zone on the right and a long row of condos on the left. South on Mount Albertine and east and west on Mount Aquilar are middle-class single-family homes, progressively nicer as you go south.”

“I know that neighborhood,” I said. “Debra Ann’s cousin owns one of those condos.”

“The city mounted stop signs at three corners of that intersection,” Ron explained. “They removed the sign at the fourth corner for a handicapped sidewalk ramp and painted the street beside it with the word ‘STOP’ in tall, broad white lettering.”

“Small children play in the yards; there are babies in strollers, kids riding bikes and scooters, people walking their dogs, and a mix of the elderly and stay-at-home parents jogging and exercising. Still, cars regularly run through those stop signs. And at pretty high rates of speed, all hours of the day and night. One out of ten cars might attempt a rolling stop; none come to a full halt.”

“Pretty common in those residential neighborhoods,” Danny said, raising an eyebrow and giving me a sideways glance. “You’d be surprised how many washdown, vehicle fire, and jaws-of-life calls we get for accidents around intersections like that.”

“This video starts with two of the area’s homeowners and their dog,” Ron explained, “talking into the camera, describing how they’ve tried to make the intersection safer. They’ve written letters to city officials, the homeowners’ association, the TV stations, and the newspaper.”

“We have the same problem in Temecula,” Alan commented. “But what are you going to do? Can’t post a police car at every intersection.”

“And therein lies the rub. The residents get no support from the authorities, so they set out to Web-shame the violators. They’ve created a Web page and posted offenders’ license plates. They get contact information from DMV data and display that on their website along with videos of the violations they’ve captured.”

“I get why, but man, that’s dangerous….” My voice trailed off as I recalled incidents I had to referee years ago when I patrolled a beat.

“It’s a Catch-22,” Ron said. “The city tells them, ‘Don’t do that; that’s a police officer’s job,’ but they’ve already asked cops for help, and nothing has happened. The homeowners have blurred their faces in the video. The residents explain that while they’re not ashamed of what they’re doing, homeowners have to take precautions—during their filming, they’ve been cursed, threatened, and nearly run over by offenders. It’s not like they can relocate their houses.”

“They’re lucky they haven’t been shot, stabbed, or chased down with a golf club,” I said with a sigh.

“That’s the reason for bringing a dog with them today, one they’ve selected specifically for the task. A three-year-old pit bull, weighing maybe forty pounds. You’ve got to see the chest on this thing, muscles on top of muscles.

“Bruno’s not fully socialized and, apparently, not fond of being on Earth generally. World peace does not seem to be his thing, I’m guessing, because it’s not edible. One of the men explains he’d been given Bruno by a friend eight weeks after birth and hadn’t bothered to have Bruno chipped. So, they didn’t choose the dog just for its temperament. They weren’t planning to have any issues, but if something did happen involving the dog, no one could trace it back to them. Always good to be prepared, right?”

“No way this turns out well,” an attentive Danny murmured.

“I don’t want to turn up the volume,” Ron said, his eyes wide. “There’s some cursing in it with words even I had to look up. We still have a few other patrons, and two kids are in the booth behind you. We don’t want to make trouble for the manager. I’ll narrate over the top of it as it plays.”

With that, Ron dusted off the David Attenborough impression and vocabulary, rehearsed from Planet Earth and Blue Planet videos, for which he was famous at the firehouse.

“The video shows the men accosting several vehicles rolling through the intersection, with the typical flipping off and gunning the engine and other childishness you’d expect from the drivers.”

“Then,” Ron continued, “just as they’ve filmed the license plate of one stop-sign runner and turn back to the intersection, an older black Dodge Challenger R/T rolls through without even trying to slow down, much less stop. As it does, the man with the dog yells at the driver,” Ron lowered his voice out of respect for the other patrons of the restaurant, “‘Nice job stopping, you fucking asswipe!’”

Ron’s voice returned to its regular volume. “The man with the camera is closest to the vehicle, and he kicks the Dodge in the rear side panel as it flies by. He then takes a shot of the car’s license plate.”

“Why do I get the funny feeling it won’t end there?” Danny said in mock sarcasm.

“The Dodge hits the brakes with a screech,” Ron said, “about fifty feet past the intersection. The driver rolls down his window and starts shouting expletives back at the two homeowners. They reciprocate in kind, walking up to the side of the car, filming all the while. At this point, you can see the two men they’re dealing with in the front seat of the Dodge.

“As the camera pans across the Dodge driver’s face, you can see his sallow complexion, the sores and scabs on his face, the thick black hair, and a truly unfortunate unibrow. He’s wearing a QAnon tee shirt and a MAGA ball cap. An unopened Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is clamped between his legs, his right forefinger flicking the pull tab. He’s got a little vaginal beardlet on his face and a teardrop tattoo shakily drawn beside one eye.”

“No relationship to Einstein, I take it?” I offered with a snicker.

“Not likely. Maybe of an incestuous nature. The passenger’s heavyset with light brown hair, carrying a beer gut you could use for a bookshelf. He’s wearing a tee shirt for Dorrance Publishing. They’re the sleaziest of the vanity-slash-hybrid book ‘publishers’ that scam new and wannabe writers, mostly retirees writing their memoirs. That’s odd, considering this guy doesn’t look like he reads much more than graphic novels. He has a faded blue prison-ink tattoo that reads ‘Mopar’ on his right arm, a sketchy outline of a cross on the back of his left hand, and he’s smoking a cigarette. The average IQ in that vehicle couldn’t have been more than 80. Both could easily have been extras rejected from the cast of Trailer Park Boys for lack of work ethic.”

“Why do film clips from Dumb and Dumber keep popping into my head?” Danny asked no one in particular.

“These guys are all of that, but with a mean streak. As the camera surveys the vehicle’s interior, they exchange heated words and emphatic threats with lots of finger symbolism. Then suddenly, without any notice whatsoever, the homeowner with the camera steps back, and the other homeowner tosses Bruno, leash and all, past him and through the driver’s open window. When the dog’s hindquarters don’t quite make it through the window, one of the homeowners gives Bruno a little boost. That doesn’t make the dog any happier.”

“No, no, no…” I said with a slight shake of my head.

“All hell breaks loose. The car’s an automatic, and the driver hadn’t put it in park or neutral. He’d kept his foot on the brake to hold the car still. I’m sure that was so he could stage a tire-squealing getaway at some point. Not surprisingly, the first thing that happens, other than the screaming, the barking, the growling, the biting, the clawing, and the camera operator yelling ‘Holy shit!’ over and over, is the driver’s foot coming off that brake and his hands off the steering wheel.

“At this point, the Dodge is moving freely on its own. It suddenly mates front-to-rear with the Toyota Corolla sitting at the curb in front of it. The Dodge driver seems preoccupied trying to exit the vehicle while extricating himself from the very unhappy, and likely hungry, dog.”

“Oh, my Lord,” Danny muttered.

“If this video’s any clue, whatever you’ve heard about adrenaline canceling out drunkenness is just not true. First, the driver tries to clamber out his window, which exposes his rear to the dog. That presents an appetizing target for Bruno, who begins chomping away. When the window doesn’t work out as painlessly as the driver likely hoped, he’s finally able to get the door latch open—the lock knob had been down, of course—and he half rolls, half stumbles, and finally falls out of the car. He’s lying out in the street on his back, rocking side to side, clothes torn in strips, moaning and bleeding. At some point, either the beer can between his thighs exploded, or he urinated all over himself.”

“I’ll take door number two.” Danny grinned.

“The dog then turns its full attention to the passenger, who, in his extreme panic, can’t get out of the car, either—he keeps swiping at the lock knob and pulling on the door release, but it’s not synchronized, so he keeps locking himself back in.

“Now the front of the Dodge, still in gear, has been bobbing up and down as it keeps grinding away at the Toyota in rhythmic pulses. With each bob, the black hood crumples up more, finally shooting two jets of radiator steam into the air. Orgasmic. That, in turn, sets off an airbag inside the car, ejecting the passenger out through the now-unlatched door. He plops onto the curb and rolls onto the sidewalk; the snarling dog clamped to his elbow. The passenger gets up first to his knees, then to his feet, the dog leaping for his face.”

“Hold that thought,” I said, laughing as I waved my empty cup toward the waiter, “let me get us another round of coffee.”

“The last thing you see in the video,” Ron continued, “is the passenger and his construction worker’s butt-crack waddling away down the sidewalk as fast as he possibly can. To quote the neighbor watching as his partner films, ‘like John Candy chasing an ice-cream truck.’ A spreading brown stain has soiled the seat of his pants. The dog is in hot pursuit, bounding and leaping at the man’s hip pocket with his leash trailing behind. The video looks like someone edited it to simulate slow motion. A halo forms around the fleeing man from a mist of saliva, blood, and sweat cast out with each pounding footfall, sparkling briefly in the rays of sunshine angling through trees and buildings in the coming dusk. The slow-motion effect dulls the consonants, devolving the sounds into warbling wailing organ chords.”

“Thank you,” I said to our server as he poured us another cup of coffee and cleared some of our dishes.

“The video returns to regular speed,” Ron explained, “and the screaming, barking, growling, biting, clawing, and the camera operator yelling ‘Holy shit!’ over and over continues unabated. It slowly quiets into the distance, replaced eventually by the moaning and groaning of the Dodge’s driver. Finally, the video fades into blackness.

“The recording has a disclaimer which states that, in the end,” Ron grinned at how he’d worded it, “no pun intended, everyone was okay, especially the dog. It says that any penalties or punishments due to illegal behaviors have been properly adjudicated since then. I’d have to add that some natural justice appears to have been rendered within the video itself.”

“By the way,” Danny asked rhetorically, “what is the by-product of a union between a Toyota Corolla and a Fiat-built Dodge R/T? Would that be a 12 miles-per-gallon, 250-horsepower Yugo … maybe on a K-car frame?”

“Sounds like my first patrol unit,” I said, a little too loudly and with a hearty chuckle.

By this time, I was near tears. Danny had both hands over his face so his laughing wouldn’t disturb other guests. Alan had been quiet throughout—I assumed he’d already seen this presentation—and now he and Ron were sitting back in their seats with self-satisfied expressions like they’d produced the thing themselves.

Suddenly, I froze—a realization had come to me out of the clear blue.

Danny immediately stopped laughing and, with some alarm, asked, “Are you okay, kid? What’s the matter?” His comment drew looks of concern from Ron and Alan—I’m sure everyone thought I’d had a stroke.

“Oh, I’m fine—look, I hate to do a drive-by here, but I think you guys just helped me solve part of a serial murder case I’m working on. I love you, Danny, and it’s been great to see the two of you,” I said, bouncing my eyes between Ron and Alan, “but I gotta go!”

As I looked over my shoulder and waved, I saw the three of them, palms facing up and out to their sides, wondering what happened.

 

THREE WEEKS PRIOR

Reported just an hour ago, number seven kept to the pattern, such as it was. A car chase ending in death; road rage was the natural assumption—a single lone occupant in the pursuing vehicle. Witness descriptions varied but tended toward an older white guy a little taller than average. Glasses or sunglasses, a ball cap, a long-sleeved shirt or jacket, and a chase vehicle with the plates removed. One of these a month like clockwork for the past six months except for the month before last, when there were two … opportunistic, or maybe devolving?

There were just enough similarities in these murders that my gut told me these were serial killings. Maybe it was just wishful thinking—with serial murders, investigative work devoted to one helps solve the others. Seven completely separate homicides would further stretch the department’s already thin resources.

Harsh realities were working against the idea these deaths were linked; nothing else about these homicides was the same. The perpetrators used different sets of wheels for the pursuits; the victim types and their vehicles varied from one another, and the killers used dissimilar methods in the murders. The victimology turned up nothing that tied the deceased together other than coincidentally.

I wasn’t sure how to classify these crimes’ locations; they were also different but generally within the same ten-mile-wide circle.

The ways the victims died bothered me the most. Statistically, the murder weapons of choice when a car chase is involved are a firearm or the vehicle itself; the numbers were overwhelming. Here, the killers seemed to go out of their way to commit their homicides in different ways, so much so that, in my mind, it reinforced the idea of a single person or organization doing them.

In the latest incident, the assailant had waited for the victim to pull over and run for the safety of a building. He caught her on the sidewalk, slitting her throat from behind, likely with a military or hunting knife.

Victim number one, a twenty-two-year-old male college student, had been shot through the rear window of his Mustang while in motion. Witnesses reported the rounds came from a silver Nissan Sentra.

The second victim, a woman who died a month after the first, was a 40-year-old financial planner visiting from New York City; she was driving a rental Mercedes. She’d been lured out of her car by a black Ford Explorer tapping her rear bumper. Stepping outside to check the damage, her assailant beat her to death with a baseball bat.

A month later, the 55-year-old male owner of a small construction company died from exsanguination when his old pickup truck, forced off the road by a maroon Escalade, ran into a telephone pole. A dislodged strip of chrome trim pierced his aorta.

The fourth victim killed four weeks later, was a 48-year-old life coach in a Lexus sedan. A green pickup pulled up alongside as she was driving. The occupant threw a tire iron through her window, causing her to run into another car parked on the curb. When she stumbled out of her vehicle, she was stabbed nine times in the neck, shoulders, and abdomen.

The fifth death, just a week later, was of a woman who’d pulled over to the curb in front of her friend’s house. As she opened her door and stepped out of her car, a Jeep Wagoneer coming up from the rear crushed her, in the process tearing the driver’s door entirely off her Toyota Camry.

The sixth homicide, three weeks after the fifth, was that of a 26-year-old unemployed software engineer on a Harley. A rust-colored Camaro was chasing him, and at the time of impact, he was going more than one hundred miles per hour. He was wiped out of existence by a semi on the cross street when he ran a red light at a busy intersection trying to escape.

We’d first treated each of these cases as a standalone, working on the forensics and interviewing everyone who knew the victims, trying to tweak out suspects and motives. After chasing down alibis, leads, and alternative theories, we’d concluded these were all spur-of-the-moment stranger-on-stranger attacks, the hardest to solve. I couldn’t honestly tell you why I began considering the possibility of serial killings. The inspiration didn’t matter much; the idea hadn’t gotten me anywhere yet.

 

PRESENT DAY

I’d taken a rare day off from work in case my yearly checkup required significant testing. It wasn’t necessary; technically, I could spend the rest of my day relaxing. But with the epiphany I’d just experienced after seeing Ron’s video, I needed to get to my desk at the precinct. I didn’t bother to change out of my civvies—I didn’t intend to interact with anyone. I didn’t even want to vocalize my hunch out loud for fear of jinxing it, and I certainly wasn’t ready to share it with anyone else.

I grabbed all seven case files. Rifling through them, I wanted to know just one thing—in what direction were the vehicles headed when the murders occurred? Months ago, I’d taped a San Diego city map over the corkboard on my cubicle wall, with pushpins showing the location of each killing. Now, I placed a sticky note next to each pin with an arrow showing which way they’d been traveling. With one exception—the fifth murder—there was an obvious pattern; everyone else had been outbound from a common central area. To make it even more apparent, I strung twine from each pushpin in the direction opposite the sticky note arrows. That provided an answer to at least one question.

Detective Eve Byrne had been my assigned partner for the last two years. I dialed Eve’s number on my desk phone, hoping she was in the precinct.

“Oh, Eve, I’m glad you’re in. Listen, we just caught a break on the road rage murders. Danny and his firefighter buddies gave me an idea—what if these things happened because the victims drove past somebody’s home, somehow pissing off one of the residents? I checked out how the murder scenes fit with the idea of a chase originating from the same fixed location. Crazy, I know … but Eve, it works. I’ve got it narrowed down to a nine-block area. Can you come over to my desk? I’m going to need some help with this.”

Five minutes later, Eve showed up. Short and stocky, with a swarthy complexion and a face pockmarked by severe acne in her youth, Eve was an accomplished investigator in her own right, and no one worked harder. Her wide range of skills—she was the department’s best marksman and a talented computer data analyst with an eagle eye for detail in the field—complemented mine perfectly. Together, we’d earned a growing reputation for solving complex cases.

“Hey, boss, I thought you were taking a day off for your annual physical,” Eve asked, arriving at my cubicle bearing two bags of Fritos and handing one to me. “Everything come out okay?”

“Yes, and thanks. So far, I’m having a kickass day. Check out the map—the arrows show which way the victims were heading. Number five doesn’t fit—need to look into what’s up with that.”

“So, we have to find somebody who lives in those nine square blocks,” Eve said, jumping ahead of me, “with access to different vehicles and a serious anger management problem.”

“Yup, you got it. Uniforms could canvass the area, but it would take a while. If our perp sticks to a schedule of a month apart, we’ve only got a week before the next one. I’m shortcutting this for the sake of time, but let’s assume this is a homeowner or renter obsessed with what happens on the street running in front of their house.”

Something Ron had said about the homeowners in his video clicked.

“Before all this started, I’d bet the perp—I’ll use male pronouns because that’s what all the witnesses reported—phoned in complaints to the traffic unit. He likely didn’t get the response he wanted, and that amped him up for this. Can you search our databases for residential traffic complaints in our nine-block grid for the months ahead of the first homicide? Maybe we can get lucky.”

“I’m on it. I’ll crosscheck anyone I find interesting for access to motor vehicles, domestic abuse, crimes of violence, and all that.”

“Perfect—we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Thanks, Eve.”

With that part of the problem in capable hands, something else still bothered me, and I had another hunch. The husband of the woman crushed between the door of her Toyota Camry and the Jeep Wagoneer worked as a computer support tech for a high-end support services company.

I called up the husband’s manager, identified myself, and re-confirmed the man’s alibi that he’d been at his desk servicing a client support call for an hour and a half across the time of his wife’s murder.

“I appreciate the verification. So, online support as a private citizen means typing into a chatbot until my fingers bleed. Is that what you do?”

“Oh, no, we offer upper-tier support. We sometimes use chatbots, true, but we assure our clients a real American on the other end. That separates us from our competition.”

I decided to gamble on the man’s sincerity.

“Gerald, I need a favor, something just between us. You don’t have to, but if you do this, you’ll perform a service to the community and maybe save lives. But you can’t tell the employee what you’re doing.”

Though at first hesitant, he agreed. With that, I explained what I needed him to do.

#

Eve came bouncing into my office late in the afternoon the next day. “I don’t know how you knew, but we got him. Thomas Levine. The traffic unit desk officer remembered this guy. He nearly climbed through the phone screaming at her because she wouldn’t send a uniform to stop people running the stop sign in front of his house; it sits on a corner lot. The man’s got priors for a bar fight and assaulting a mail carrier. He accused the postal employee, get this, of holding onto a check he was expecting.

“His family owns a low-end used car lot, one of those places where you pay by the week; they have a rent-a-wreck business on the side. He doesn’t even own a car in his name—drives the ones from the lot. Nasty divorce—she accused him of beating her with, among other things, a curtain rod he tore off the wall. But get this—he’s got two boys, tweens, and the court gave him visitation once a month. It’s in the two-day window after he takes them back to the ex that he’s killing our victims. Something else must have set him off when he did our fifth homicide.”

“He’s getting worked up about his custody arrangement and taking it out on the first person he sees rolling through that stop sign. Who knows what pissed him off to put the Toyota Camry driver in his sights. Do we have an arrest warrant for the apprehension team?”

“Already done, and they’re standing by. That’s why I came to see you. I thought maybe you might want to ride along and hook him up yourself since you were the one who figured this out.”

“Gotta give Ron, Danny’s firehouse friend, his props, but yeah, I’d like to come with. You driving?”

Before Eve could answer, my desk phone rang. It was the manager of the computer support service. I put him on speakerphone so Eve could hear.

“You were right about Marty,” he said. “We cloned his hard drive overnight. It didn’t take long to see what he’d done when we started looking. He’d set up a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence. The call came in from another AI chatbot; we assume it was at his house or another location he could access. Whatever he was doing during that time, he wasn’t working with one of our customers. We also found hundreds of messages on that drive to a girl who’s not his wife, pretty intimate. You might want to see those.

“We’re getting ready to fire him. We took his laptop—we told him we needed to upgrade it—so he can’t erase anything. But before we send him on his way, I thought you should know. Maybe you’ll want to arrest him before he takes off?”

I took the phone off speaker and explained that I needed him to stall the man’s termination until we could get officers on the scene. They’d meet Marty as he exited the building to avoid any unnecessary disruption of the company’s work environment. I thanked him for his assistance, and we said our goodbyes.

“Our fifth murder was a copycat,” I explained to Eve. “The husband tried to hide his wife’s killing between the road rage murders—he had a new girlfriend.”

Eve pondered the new development for a moment.

“How’d you know that fifth homicide was hinky?” she asked.

“You know, nine times out of ten, it’s the significant other. I just had to figure out how he did it. He didn’t have money to hire someone; had to be in his alibi.”

“No, I meant, how’d you know it wasn’t the same guy who killed the others?”

“Not once a month like the rest bothered me. And if it wasn’t road rage but an irate resident, the car pointed the wrong way.”

“Come again? I’m not following.”

“Everybody else was escaping from that one general location—all their vehicles were headed outbound from that area. The Toyota Camry’s nose was inbound toward the place everyone else was leaving.

“Supposedly being pursued, yet she parks—not in the drive, but on the curb. Gets out of her car on the street side and then just stands there with the door open?”

##

Copyright © Avril Maria Serene, All rights reserved.