The Murder Channel by John Philpin Page B

from Atascadero State Hospital after he had served five years for killing his grandparents. In his confession to police, he said he shot and repeatedly stabbed his grandmother, then waited for his grandfather to come home and shot him, because he wanted to know what it felt like to kill. Three years after his release he killed again—eight times in twenty-three months.
    In 1981, Michael Ross dragged an Ohio sixteen-year-old into the bushes, and bound and gagged her before police interrupted him. He pleaded guilty and was given a probationary sentence of two years. Six months later he tried to strangle a woman in herhome. A month later, out on bail and undergoing a sixty-day psychiatric evaluation in Connecticut, Ross killed for the first of at least six times.
    The man of two dozen aliases, and alleged killer of eight known victims, Angel Maturino Resendiz, was detained and released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in El Paso on June 2, 1999. Days later, two of his suspected victims were found, bludgeoned to death.
    “I don’t know the answer to that question,” I told Bolton.
    “What are we paying you for?”
    “To observe a man that the Commonwealth had in custody. I get time-and-a-half for schussing around Boston.”
    “I’d like to look at the files,” Waycross said.
    Bolton opened his mouth, but the former cop silenced him with a wave of his hand.
    “I saw Shannon. I don’t want to read about her. I’ve never read any of the case materials. There might be something in there that I don’t know about, or that I’ve forgotten.”
    “There are copies of most of the reports in the conference room,” Bolton said.
    “Take time out to watch the BTT evening news,” I told him as he headed for the door.
    “Why do you care what Pouldice’s outfit has to say?” Bolton asked.
    “She’s a CEO. What’s she doing in the studioprepping for a newscast hours before it airs? And why does she have her muscle with her?”
    “Braverman?”
    “She knows something that we don’t,” I said.
    “BTT coverage has been nonstop since this morning. Every reported sighting, we get there, Vigil’s already there and BTT’s cameras are shooting the story. Pouldice’s people are getting interviews before we get them. We have to stand in line. Things have gotten crazy, Lucas.”
    “This has always been a crazy business. You just never noticed. You ready to get out?”
    Bolton had been eligible for retirement for three years. He refused to leave until he had cleared his cold cases.
    “I’ve got one more unsolved, Stallings. When that’s a wrap, I’m out of here.”
    I remembered the case. Theresa Stallings was fifteen, a high school freshman when she disappeared from a Dorchester basketball court.
    “That was ten years ago,” I said.
    “Eleven last September.”
    “You never found a body.”
    “Nothing. I’ve got a short, red-haired guy hanging around the court a couple of days before she disappeared, and I’ve got a white car, no make.”
    “You planning to die behind that desk?”
    “I still talk with Mrs. Stallings every Friday before I leave the office. She tells me how the kidsare doing. Virginia is on the dean’s list in college. William’s wife is going to have a baby.”
    Bolton pushed himself from the desk and stood. “I’m tired, Lucas. I won’t deny it. When Louise died, I promised myself they’d all be closed before I walked out the door. I dream about Theresa Stallings.”
    Ray’s wife Louise died of leukemia six years earlier. Her nightmare throughout their marriage was that a police captain would knock on her door at three A.M. to tell her that she was a widow. She was certain that Ray would predecease her, and die violently, but she never asked him to stop being a cop. She hated the bad guys and loved that her husband brought them down.
    “Ray, you gave me shit about getting back into it.”
    “You can give me shit about not getting out of it.”
    Bolton paced his office.
    I