Page 44 of Return of the Spider
He studied the picture for a long time before shaking his head. “Don’t know.”
“But it could be,” Sampson said.
“Don’t know,” the injured man said, tears coming to his eyes as he looked to his wife in desperation. “Don’t know anything, Kat.”
He began weeping.
His wife moved to his side, rubbing his arm and soothing him. “It’s okay. You heard what the doctors keep saying. This is going to take time, hon.”
He sighed again and shut his eyes.
Kathleen said, “He had a difficult night, Detectives. Can I call you when he begins to remember more of what happened?”
“Of course,” we said, and we left, feeling frustrated that we could not say for sure that the driver of the white van was responsible for the murder of Conrad Talbot and the attempted murder of Carl Dennis.
The next morning, word of my Berkowitz theory leaked.
The headline across the top of the front page of theBaltimore Sunread:
Is Killer Mimicking Son of Sam?
The police department phones began buzzing and jangling with calls from local and national news organizations keying in on the Berkowitz angle. The media set up camp outside Metro headquarters and squawked about it for hours, even dissecting the fact that the Son of Sam had first killed two women, then a man and a woman, the reverse of the current situation.
TheSun’s original piece—and almost every story afterward—named me as the theorist, noting my doctorate from Johns Hopkins and the parts of my dissertation that included Berkowitz. I declined to make any comment and deferred to Chief Pittman, who actually proved remarkably adept in the spotlight, running two crisp, efficient press conferences in which he confirmed that Metro and Prince George’s County detectives were looking into a Son of Sam copycat.
“It would be a dereliction of duty if we were not actively looking into Dr. Cross’s theory,” Pittman said on TV as Sampson and I watched from the squad room on Friday.
Detectives Kurtz and Diehl were there in the squad room as well, both with their arms crossed. Pittman went on, “We’re telling people in the greater DC area to beware. He’s now killed three people and gravely wounded a fourth. We want to stop him before there is a fifth.”
Kurtz reached over and clicked off the TV. Diehl shook her head.
“He’s left you dangling, and you don’t even see it,Dr.Cross,” Diehl said, putting heavy sarcasm on the title.
“How so?” I said, ignoring the edge.
Kurtz snorted at my naïveté. “Pittman’s smart. He’s thought ahead. He’s pinning this all on you, so if things go more sidewaysthan they already have—if you don’t catch someone acting like Berkowitz or if the real killer’s off in a completely other direction and someone dies because of it—well, Pittman can say it was all your idea. Maybe you don’t survive your three-month probationary period.”
“Yeah,” Diehl said as she walked away. “Wake up, Doc. You’re in the big leagues now.”
CHAPTER
33
Sampson sat down. Icaught him looking at me as I took my chair.
“Tell me I’m wrong about this,” I said, arms crossed.
“You’re not wrong,” John said. “Or at least, I don’t think you’re that far off. Let’s just get back to work and prove it.”
I nodded, feeling more pressure than I’d ever experienced in my career. And my home life was strained too. Maria and I had made up after our fight, our first real one in a long time, but damage had been done. I’d still sensed friction between us that morning when she set off for work.
Rather than think about that, I forced myself into action by taking a hard look at where we were in the four different cases battling for our attention.
John and I remained largely stalled in our probes into the deaths of Tony Miller and Shay Mansion, but I went backthrough my notes on our second interview with Mansion’s mother, Rosalina Mansion.
Her cousin Guillermo Costa had accompanied us when we’d informed Rosalina of her son’s death. She’d collapsed into her cousin’s arms, inconsolable. In our second interview with Rosalina, she’d been alone, but she claimed to have had no idea that her son had joined Lobos Rojos and vigorously disputed the suggestion that her cousin was the gang’s leader. She said that Costa had gone straight after prison.
“You cannot blame this on Guillermo at all,” she insisted. “If Shay was involved, it’s on him. Once he quit school, I lost control over him. With his father gone, he was out at all hours, sometimes sleeping at home, sometimes not. And he never asked for money.”
