Rhymes with Prey 3 page

Lucas said to Lily, “You know what I think. If those are trophies hanging on his wall–”

“They are,” Lincoln said.

“Then we’re dealing with a lot more than four dead. Even if we don’t have what we need for a search warrant, we need to go in there anyway.”

Lily shook her head. “We need a warrant.”

Lucas turned to Lincoln. “Help me out here.”

Lincoln said, “We took samples from the poured concrete steps outside the building, for which we didn’t need a search warrant, and we found that the concrete matched the flecks of concrete in the victims’ backs. We also found flecks of bronze which are chemically identical to the bronze found in the victims’ backs.”

“But–” Amelia said.

Lincoln raised his hand. “Quiet.”

“That’s certainly enough for a warrant,” Lily said. “At least, if I go to the right judge, and I will. If you’ll write out the specs for the application, I can have it in an hour.”

“I’ll do that,” Lincoln said. And to Lucas: “If you’ll go back to the building with a couple of collection pads, get those samples for me. Backdate them to this morning. There may not be any bronze, but we’ve got a fair collection of it now. Take a few flecks with you. You know. Just in case.”

They all looked round at each other, then Lucas said, “At least a dozen trophies.”

“After you make the collection, just wait there,” Lily said. “I won’t be long behind you.”

“I’ll go with Lucas,” Amelia said. “If we need to block the back of the building, or he needs backup while we’re there.”

“You might want to bring an entry team,” Lucas said to Lily.

“Entry team? I’m bringing everybody. I’ll make a courtesy call to the FBI, they’ll want to have an observer.”

“I’ll be there,” Lincoln said. “I don’t want your entry team trashing my evidence.”

They took Amelia’s car, a maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, kicking out nifty 405 horsepower, with 447 pounds of torque. They made the twenty‑minute trip in twelve minutes. Eight minutes out, she looked at Lucas and said, “You’re not holding on to anything.”

“You know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re almost as good as I am.”

She snorted: “What do you drive?”

“A 911.”

“I always heard”–she paused in her comment to chop the nose off a town car as she took a left turn–“that 911 drivers–”

“Have small penises. I know. Every time I meet somebody who can’t afford a 911, I get the ‘small penis’ line. So I ask them how large a sample they’ve looked at.”

She grinned as she said, “I’ll tell you what, though: in a fair run, I’d eat your 911 alive.”

“I don’t like the word ‘fair,’ ” Lucas replied. “ ‘Fair’ always means, ‘to my advantage.’ If it’s not to my advantage, it’s ‘unfair.’ If you guys ever get to Minneapolis, bring your car. I’ve got a run just across the border, in Wisconsin. Narrow blacktop, blind hills, twenty miles long, maybe two hundred braking curves.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, but she grinned again, and threw the Cobra down an alley, the walls whipping by, two feet away on each side, six inches from Lucas’s window when she dodged a trash can. Lucas yawned and said, “Wake me up when we get there.”

He tilted back in his seat and then said, “By the way, I’m one of the best action shooters around.”

Amelia dropped off Lucas, who was dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and running shoes, at Verlaine’s apartment. He was carrying a backpack loaned to him by Amelia. There were four men on the long block, two on each side, each one by himself.

Amelia was headed around the block, where she could watch the back of the building. Lucas sat on Verlaine’s stoop; he was too well fed to be a street person, but from a distance, with the pack by his feet, he could pass. They’d put a few bronze flakes in the bags with the sampling pads before they left, and now he took them out, one at a time, trying to look like he was shaking cigarettes out of a pack, and pressed them into the stoop. When he had five samples in place, he put them in the pack and zipped it up.

That done, he stood and ambled up the block, took out his cell phone, and called Lily, Lincoln, and Amelia, and said the same thing to all of them: “We’re good to go.”

Lily said, “Forty minutes.”

“What’s taking so long?”

“Nothing. You just got there quicker than you should have. I’ve got the application, I’m seeing the judge in about two minutes, and the entry team is gearing up. So, easy, boy.”

Lucas continued up the block, and on to the next block, and then walked back, and finally, with nothing at all going on at Verlaine’s building, he turned the corner and walked around the block, where he found Amelia’s car, parked, with Lincoln’s Chrysler van right behind it. Amelia climbed out of the passenger’s side: “Want to leave the pack?”

“Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “Half an hour, yet. I’ll find another place to sit.”

“Stay in touch,” Lincoln said, from the back.

Lincoln’s aide, Thom, who was driving, said, “I brought some sandwiches along. These two can spend hours at a crime scene. If you want a ham‑and‑cheese–”

“I not only want one, it’ll give me something to do while I’m watching,” Lucas said. “Some reason to be sitting there.”

Lucas ambled back around the block, carrying his brown‑paper sandwich bag, and found a stoop fifty yards down the block from the entrance to Verlaine’s studio. He sat down, took Thom’s ham‑and‑cheese out of the sack, took a bite, and said, aloud, “That’s a great ham‑and‑cheese.”

He was thinking about the fact that you almost couldn’t buy a great ham‑and‑cheese in the Twin Cities, and why that might be, but that you could get a great one in Des Moines or Chicago, and then thought about Chicago being the “hog butcher to the world,” when a man stuck his head out of the door behind him and said, “This look like a fuckin’ cafeteria? Hit the road, asshole.”

Lucas chewed and swallowed, then shook his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Lily, ostentatiously pushed the speakerphone button, and, when she answered, said, “I’m being hassled by a guy across the street from the target, at 219–how long would it take to get, say, a half dozen building inspectors here? The place doesn’t look so sturdy.”

“I could have them there in an hour,” Lily said.

Lucas looked at the guy in the doorway. “An hour good for you?”

“Stay as long as you want,” the guy said, and eased the door shut.

Five minutes after that, a white van drove by Verlaine’s building, and the guy in the passenger’s seat took a close look at Lucas, and then nodded to him. Lucas nodded back. The van reappeared another five minutes later, going in the opposite direction, and this time the driver nodded to him.

Ten minutes after that, Amelia called: “We got the blocking squad here. Lincoln and I are coming around.”

And Lily: “One minute.”

The entry team arrived in two white, unmarked vans, closely followed by Lily in an unmarked car, another unmarked car, Amelia’s car, and two patrol cars. Behind them all, Lincoln’s van turned the corner. Lucas jogged down the street toward them as the vans stopped directly in front of Verlaine’s stoop and two guys carrying an entry ram hustled up to the door; four cops in armor were right behind them, and as Lucas came up, the ram handlers smashed the door open, and the armored cops went in.

Lucas was right there with Lily, and as they piled into the entryway, the team suddenly stopped, there was some milling, and the team leader called, “We got a body.”

Lily and Lucas shouldered their way from behind through the crowd, with Amelia a step behind, and they turned the corner at the door that went into the studio.

Verlaine was there, staring sightlessly at one of his sculptures. His head was a bloody mess, and a semiauto pistol lay on the floor by his fingertips.

“Got some brass,” Amelia said; she sounded like a professor of murder, her voice cool and analytical. Lucas saw the shell sitting by Verlaine’s foot. Then Amelia turned to the entry‑team leader and said, “We’ve got to clear the building. But just two guys on this floor, and stay out on the perimeter, away from the kill site.”

The team leader nodded, and started calling names.

Lincoln pushed through the crowd in his chair, saw the body. Lily said to him, “This could solve a lot of problems.”

“Yes, it could,” he said. “But the statistics say that it probably won’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Serial killers don’t often commit suicide. They like the attention they get from us. The spree killers, who are going through a psychotic break. They’ll kill themselves almost every time, if you give them a chance. It’s either a problem or an opportunity,” Lincoln said.

“Opportunity?”

“If he didn’t kill himself, it’s a problem,” Lincoln said. “If he did, I might get a nice paper out of it.”

* * *

“How bad is it, Sachs?”

Looking over Verlaine’s apartment, she said, “Seen worse.” She was speaking to Lincoln, who was outside on the street in front of the place. They were connected via a headset and stalk mic.

Her judgment had nothing to do with the unpleasant detritus of gore and bits of bone littering the sculptor’s floor near the body (in fact, head wounds produce minimal blood flow). What she meant was that the place was relatively uncontaminated. If scenes were left virgin after the crime, forensic teams would have a much easier time processing the evidence. But that rarely happened. Bystanders, souvenir hunters, looters, grieving family members would pollute the scene with trace evidence, smear fingerprints, and walk off with everything from telltale epidermal cells to the murder weapon itself. And some of the worst offenders were the first‑responders. Understandably, of course; saving lives and clearing a scene of the bad guys take priority. But leads have been destroyed and suspects found not guilty because otherwise solid evidence was destroyed by tactical teams and EMTs.

Here, though, once it looked like Verlaine had offed himself, the entry team backed out and let Lily and Amelia, armed with their Glocks, clear the place. They were careful not to disturb anything.

Then Lily backed away and let the expert do her thing. Now in her crime scene unit overalls, booties, and hood, Amelia was walking carefully through the fifty‑by‑fifty open space.

“It’s like a junkyard, Rhyme.”

Workbenches were littered with tools and slabs of metal and stone and instruments, welding masks, gloves, and leather jackets so thick they seemed bulletproof. The floor was equally cluttered. Rough‑hewn wooden boxes holding ingots of metal. Pallets loaded with stone and more scrap. Gas tanks filled one wall. Hand trucks and jacks. Electric saws and drill presses. Overhead, a series of rails and tracks ran throughout the space at ceiling height, about fifteen feet up. These held electric pulleys and winches for transporting loads of metal and the finished sculptures throughout the space. Rusty chains and hooks dangled.

How homey, Amelia thought.

And everywhere: Verlaine’s sculptures, made of metal sheets and bars and rods, welded or soldered or bolted together. Bronze mostly, but some iron and steel and copper. It was as if he couldn’t bear to have a space in his studio not presided over by one of his ladies.

And ladies in extremis.

Though the works were impressionistic, there was no doubt what each one depicted, a woman in pain, just as horrific as Lucas Davenport had described. Bent over backward, on all fours, tied down on their backs, crying in agony, pleading. Some were pierced by lengths of rebar reinforcing rods.

She forced herself to look past the disturbing sculptures and get to work. Just because Verlaine apparently killed himself, Amelia didn’t search any less carefully. After all, suicide is technically a homicide. That the perp and the vic are the same simply means the investigators don’t have to hump as hard as in murder. But they still have to hump.

And in this case, of course, there was a lot at stake, even after Verlaine’s death. She was well aware that the sculptor might’ve kidnapped and stashed another victim somewhere else, chained underground, with only a few days to live before she died of thirst or bled out – if he’d been having some of his sick fun with her.

Amelia searched the hell out of the scene.

First, she processed the body, photographing and filming, then clearing and bagging the Glock he’d used, collecting the one spent nine‑millimeter shell, swabbing his hands for gunshot residue and wrapping them in plastic bags as well.

She bagged his Dell laptop, along with the phone and iPad, noting that there’d been no hard copy or e‑version suicide notes. She’d just run a case where a man’s farewell before leaping off the Fifty‑ninth Street Bridge had been tweeted.

Amelia searched the way she always did, walking the grid. This involved pacing step by step in a straight line from one end of the scene to the other and then turning around, moving slightly to the side, and returning. And then, when she was done with that, she covered the same ground again, perpendicular to the first search.

For an hour she walked the grid, taking samples of trace. She collected the necklaces and crosses in the alcove. Seeing them up close, Amelia realized that several of them looked familiar – and finally she knew why. In the pictures Verlaine had shown to her and Lily in the bar, the women he was playing his S&M games with had all been wearing necklaces like these. Yes, Lucas was right, they were trophies. Trophies not of the murder victims, but of his sexual conquests.

Then she turned to the steel door Lucas had told them about, the one leading to the basement. It had been unlocked when the team entered and she and Lily had cleared it fast. Now she searched it from the point of view of a forensic cop. The small underground chamber was brick‑lined and had a raw concrete floor. The smells were of heating oil, mold, standing water, and sweat. Maybe that last scent was her imagination but she thought not.

She looked at the hooks protruding from the walls, the stains on the floor. Amelia walked down a set of rickety stairs into the thoroughly creepy place. She ran a fast fluorescein test on several of the dark patches; the results confirmed her initial hypothesis of blood. And there was no doubt about the bits of dark, elastic curls she popped into evidence bags. She knew dried flesh when she saw it.

Her gloved finger hit TRANSMIT and a moment later she heard Lincoln’s impatient voice. “Sachs. Where the hell are you?”

“On the other side of the steel door. In Verlaine’s basement.”

“And?”

“It’s almost a home run.”

“That’s like being nearly pregnant. But I’ll forgive the sloppy metaphor just this once. Get the evidence back ASAP.”

He disconnected without a good‑bye.

* * *

Lucas was staying at the Four Seasons on Fifty‑seventh Street. He was lying in bed with his toenails scratching the top sheet, thinking about clipping his nails and then walking over to Madison Avenue to do a little shopping for an autumn ensemble, when his cell phone rang.

Amelia: “Get over here. Right now.”

“What happened?”

“It’s not good. And better not to talk about it on a cell phone.”

He needed to clean up: unless there was a shootout going on at Lincoln’s town house, he figured he had that much time. He was out of the hotel fifteen minutes after the call, and found a taxi outside the front door, dropping off a customer. Lucas got in the cab and gave the driver Lincoln’s address, and the driver said, “Not hardly worth turning on the meter for that.”

“Do what you want; I’ll give you a twenty when we get there.”

The driver drove with some enthusiasm, and Lucas was ringing Lincoln’s doorbell twenty minutes after Amelia called.

“What happened?” he asked, when she opened the door.

“Lily’s been detained by Internal Affairs. They could be coming for us next.”

“What?”

“I’ll let Lincoln tell you.”

Lincoln smiled when Lucas came in and said, “Now things are getting interesting.”

“Tell me.”

The evidence that Amelia had collected under Lincoln’s direction, which Lincoln conceded was “quite good, under typical circumstances,” had not been taken to Lincoln’s lab, but to the city laboratory.

First, they found some evidence that the dead women had been tortured and murdered in a small storage area in the basement of the sculptor’s studio. Not much evidence was visible, but the small stuff – tiny spatters of blood, flakes of skin, urine samples – proved that the dead women had been there.

The gun had also been examined – and that was where the problem arose.

“Last year, we had another psycho roaming around the city, but he was not particularly clever. He was a serial shooter. Guy named Levon Pitt. Owned a junkyard here in town. That’s where he had dumped the bodies. Lily ran the team that tracked him down. They had an entry team, and cracked his apartment but there was nobody home. So they set up outside the apartment to wait for him, and pretty soon, here he came, with his adult son. When the police approached him, he figured out what was about to happen, and pulled a gun, and actually tried to take his son hostage. In the scuffle, he fired the gun, once, and Lily shot him, firing three times, and he died on the way to the hospital.

“When the man had been shot, Lily froze the scene, and they brought in the crime scene crew. Among other things, they recovered seven different pistols in the man’s apartment. He’d used four different weapons in the murders that the police knew about, and after testing, they found that three of the guns they’d recovered were among the four used in the crime.”

Lincoln paused in his narration, and Lucas prompted, “So?”

“The gun we found yesterday, by Verlaine’s hand, was the fourth gun.”

“What?” Lucas was momentarily confused. “Verlaine was involved with Levon Pitt?”

“That’s not what they’re suggesting,” Lincoln said. “For one thing, there’s no apparent connection. For another, one of the shells in Verlaine’s gun had Lily’s fingerprint on it.”

It took Lucas a moment to get it. “So they’re saying, what? That she picked up a gun at the first site, and kept it as a throw‑down? And then she went into Verlaine’s apartment sometime last night, killed him, and made it look like a suicide?”

“That’s what they’re suggesting.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lucas said.

“Internal Affairs doesn’t think so,” Amelia said. “The thing is, they can’t figure out any other mechanism for getting Lily’s fingerprint on that shell. She never touched the gun at Verlaine’s place.”

“But why would she do that? Why kill Verlaine? After I went in there, we knew we had him.”

“But we had no hard evidence, and that’s all Internal Affairs knows. That’s what Lily reported last night. We can’t tell them that we did have hard evidence, because then we’d have to tell them that you illegally entered. So their theory is she knew who the killer was, but couldn’t get at him, so she killed him. Got him off the street.”

“Aw, man, that’s not right,” Lucas said.

“There’s another aspect to it,” Amelia said. “Lily is an operator. She gets things done, but she steps on a lot of toes. That’s fine, when she’s got all that protection at the top. But now, with this, well, somebody leaked the lab results almost instantly. Probably some old bureaucratic enemy. It’s on every TV station in New York. They’re screaming for her head.”

“Don’t forget to tell him about what else is coming down the line,” Lincoln said.

“Oh, yeah.” Amelia pulled out her cell phone and looked at the time. “IA wonders if any of us had anything to do with it. We’ve got a couple of homicide cops on the way here. They want to talk to us. I know them. They’re hard‑nosed guys.”

Lucas shrugged. “We leave out the burglary, leave out the evidence collection from last night, and tell them everything else. And we tell them that they’re being taken as chumps – that Lily couldn’t have done this, and that somebody is running a con on them.”

“That’ll piss them off,” Amelia said.

“Which is what we want to do,” Lucas said. “We want them on the defensive. We want them off our backs so we can figure out what actually happened. And we tell them that.”

* * *

“The question,” Lucas Davenport spat out, “is who’s setting her up?”

Lincoln agreed. That was the only question. There was no doubt in the minds of Lucas, Amelia, and Lincoln that Lily was innocent.

However much of a shit Jim Bob Verlaine had been, however guilty he was of sadistic murder – and however much of a tough number Lily Rothenburg was – there was no way she’d take him out like that.

The team was back in Lincoln’s town house – all of them except Lily, of course, who was still being detained.

And whose absence was glaringly obvious.

“So,” Lucas repeated. “Who’s behind it?”

“Somebody with a grudge?” Amelia offered.

“Could be,” Lucas said. “She’s made some enemies in her day. Or maybe some asshole wants to derail a case she’s running.”

“And what about Verlaine?” Amelia asked. “Did he kill those women? Or was he being set up, too? And what’s the reason behind that?”

Lincoln’s view, admittedly myopic at times, as to the questions why and who was generally best answered by how and what: that is, by the evidence. “Why waste fucking time speculating? Look at the facts. ”

“You ever in a good mood, Lincoln?” Lucas asked.

A grunt suggested that the answer might be no.

But Lucas took his point. “What do we have to prove the suicide was faked?”

Looking over Amelia’s photos of the body, Mel Cooper said, “Powder burns and muzzle stamp’re consistent with a close‑contact gunshot.”

Lucas regarded the pictures, too. “And the tissue, blood, and bone on the receiver of the piece confirm that. But it was a temple shot. That’s rare in self‑inflicted wounds. Usually the poor bastard bites the muzzle.”

“Which means somebody could’ve pulled out the piece when Verlaine was turned away, come up behind or beside him, and shot. So, maybe he knew the shooter.”

Cooper said, “But there was gunshot residue on Verlaine’s hands.”

Firing any pistol, and most rifles, results in burnt gunpowder particles and gases contaminating the hand holding the weapon.

But Lucas muttered, “Fuck, that’s easy. He fired twice.”

“Yes!” Lincoln said enthusiastically. “Good. Verlaine lets the perp in. He – or she – stands beside him and blows his brains out. Then the perp puts the gun in Verlaine’s hand and pulls the trigger again. Bang… Verlaine’s fingerprints’re on the piece, and GSR’s on his hand. Perp collects the second shell and leaves the gun on the floor.”

“But where’s the other slug?” Cooper asked.

Lucas, clearly pissed his friend had been set up, snapped, “Christ, just look at the pictures of the scene! The whole goddamn studio’s like a gun‑range bullet trap – a thousand hunks of metal. Half of his quote art looks like a monkey pounded on it with a hammer. Nobody’d spot a bullet ding.”

Amelia said, “Okay, that could work. But the big issue: what about Lily’s fingerprint on the shell casing fired from the murder weapon? How the hell did the perp finesse that?” She tossed her long red hair over a shoulder. Lincoln was amused to see Lucas following the sweep closely. He reflected: Just ’cause you’re a faithful husband doesn’t mean you are blind.

Lincoln said, “Internal Affairs is claiming that Lily picked the gun up at the scene where she shot Levon Pitt – rescuing his son. What was the name again?”

“The boy?” Mel Cooper asked, flipping through a file. “Andy.”

Lucas then snapped his fingers. “Hold on. Something’s wrong here. It’s Levon Pitt’s gun – and presumably it was loaded with Pitt’s ammo. Why would Lily reload the mag with her rounds? That makes no sense. I’m not saying she’d take somebody out like that, but if she did, she wouldn’t be stupid about it.”

Amelia said, “Somebody stole one of her cartridges and popped it in the mag.”

“Wore gloves.”

“Or knuckled it,” Lucas said, referring to loading a weapon by holding the bullets between your fingers, never letting the tips come in contact with the brass or slug.

Lucas nodded. “Our friend Markowitz ain’t real crazy about the boys and girls from Narcotics being involved. But it’s leaning that way to me.”

“Well, IA’s not going to take our word for it,” Cooper pointed out. “How do we prove somebody copped a spent shell from Lily?”

An idea occurred to Lincoln. “Call Ballistics. Have them test fire a round from the bottom of the mag of the gun at Verlaine’s suicide. I want three‑D images of that shell compared with the one with Lily’s prints on it. And I fucking want them now.”

“Will do.”

Not that fast, but it wasn’t bad. A half hour later the images were on the big monitor in front of them.

Lincoln glanced toward Lucas then Amelia. “You two are the shoot‑em‑up mavens. What do you think?”

It took no more than a fast glance. They nodded at each other. Lucas said, “The shell with Lily’s prints was machined to fit the receiver of Pitt’s gun. The real perp got one of her cartridges and altered it.”

“Yep,” Amelia agreed. “So whoever did it knows weapons and metalwork. It’s real high quality, close tolerances.”

“Okay, that proves she was set up. But it doesn’t get us any closer to who’s setting Lily up,” Cooper said.

Breaking a lengthy silence, Lucas said, “Maybe it does. Amelia, you know somebody in the NYPD evidence room?”

“Know somebody?” she asked, laughing. “It’s my home away from home.”

* * *

Stan Markowitz stood at the podium beside the police commissioner, along with some minion from the mayor’s office and a Public Affairs officer or two. They were in the Press Room in One Police Plaza.

Microphones and cameras and cell phones in video mode bristled like RPGs and machine guns, aimed the officials’ way – though Markowitz, it seemed, was the preferred prey in the crosshairs, to judge from the tight shots.

“I don’t think your boss’s having a good day,” Lincoln said to Amelia. They sat beside each other, watching on the big‑screen TV in the corner of his parlor.

Lucas was elsewhere, preparing.

“Doesn’t look it. And what do you think?” she mused. “Half the city’s watching?”

“Half the country, ” Lincoln countered. “No good serial killers in the news lately. All the sharks want a piece of this one.”

Every media outlet except CSPAN and Telemundo, it seemed, was represented.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Markowitz began reasonably, though with a tone that suggested he actually viewed them as sharks.

He was drowned out by their shouted questions.

“What was the motive for the torture?”

“Is it significant that the victims were minorities?”

“Is there a connection between this case and the Bekker case a few years ago, involving Lucas Davenport?”

“Could you fill us in about Verlaine’s sex life?”

Frenzy.

Markowitz had obviously done this before and he began speaking very softly – an old trick. Suddenly the sharks realized that they weren’t going to hear anything if they kept yammering away and they spontaneously, to a fish, fell silent.

The COD gave it a beat and then continued. “As you are probably aware, a thorough examination and analysis of evidence and behavioral profiling led investigators to believe that a resident of Manhattan, James Robert Verlaine, was the perpetrator in the spate of recent killings of women in the city. Mr. Verlaine appeared to take his own life as a result of said investigation. And evidence supported that supposition.”

Lincoln muttered, “Ah, sooo pleased to see that they still teach courses at the academy in using ten words when one will do.”

Amelia laughed and kissed his neck.

“You are probably also aware that it was believed that an NYPD detective shot and killed Mr. Verlaine and attempted to cover up the murder by making it appear that the death was a suicide.

“Further investigation has determined that the detective, Lily Rothenburg, was not, in fact, involved in the death of Mr. Verlaine. A person or persons intentionally planted evidence in an attempt to implicate the detective. This officer has been exonerated. It now appears, too, that Mr. Verlaine was not the perpetrator behind the murder of the women. Detective Rothenburg is once again in charge of the task force investigating the killings. We expect to have a suspect in custody soon. I have no further comments at this time.”

“Does that mean, Chief of Detectives, that Verlaine was murdered by this suspect as well?…”