As Detective Yasiv led them to the scene, Stitts posed the question that was on all their minds.
“Why’d the killer come back?”
Chase thought about this for a moment.
“It’s fairly common for a killer to revisit the scene of their crime. Murderers are addicts of a sort; like a heroin junkie looking to recreate the thrill of their first injection, they come back to try and recreate the feeling of their first kill.”
Agent Stitts nodded.
“True. But rarely are new victims dumped in the location that has already been found by the police.” He offered a side-long glance at Detective Yasiv before continuing. “Too dangerous. Too risky.”
They made it down the embankment in silence. As they neared the door with fresh crime scene tape, Agent Stitts continued.
“And yet, even knowing what we know, none of us thought that the killer would return here. Otherwise, we would have made sure that an officer remained stationed.”
Chase frowned.
“Detective Yasiv volunteers to stay here day and night from now on.”
Detective Yasiv clenched his jaw, but didn’t protest.
“Returning to a crime scene once is one thing, but three times? I highly doubt that,” Agent Stitts added. “But that’s not the question I asked. I want to know why none of us thought that the killer would return to this particular scene.”
Chase didn’t know why she had felt this way, but she most definitely had. To be honest, she hadn’t extended much thought on the issue, but now that Agent Stitts had verbalized his point…
It’s the same reason that I didn’t ask about the lipstick on the other victims. Because of… what had Agent Stitts called it? Intuition. Because of intuition.
Only in this case, her intuition was wrong.
And it wasn’t the first time, either.
Chase resisted the urge to look down at her forearms, even though they were covered by a thick coat and a sweater beneath.
It was Detective Yasiv who answered.
“I guess it was because I thought the killings were random. My thinking was that if the killings were random, then the drop location might also be random—holding no value or meaning to the killer.”
Chase found herself nodding subconsciously. She shared Hank’s sentiment, she realized.
“I’ll buy it. Only now we don’t think that the victims were entirely random, do we?”
Again, Chase nodded.
“Wait—we don’t?” Detective Yasiv asked.
“No,” Chase replied, lifting the tape covering the doorway and stepping into the derelict barn. “We don’t.”
***
The victim, whom they had already identified as Charlotte Banquise based on a recently filed missing person report, wasn’t buried as Melissa or Tanya had been. The killer had taken a calculated risk coming back here, but he hadn’t been so bold as to take the time to even pull the hay over top of her body.
Like the other two victims, her face was pale, her lips a deep maroon. Only this time, there weren’t multiple cuts on her arms. In fact, her arms were pristine.
Instead, her throat had been cut in a ragged gash that ran from ear to ear.
“He’s speeding up,” Chase said as she surveyed the scene. “With the first two, he had taken his time, cut them slowly, let them starve to death or freeze or bleed out. With Charlotte, he was much quicker.”
Agent Stitts got a far-off look in his dark hazel eyes.
“Which is the opposite that usually happens. Typically, the first kills are fast, the killer worried that they would either be caught or that they would lose their nerve. But not in this case.” He paused. “Why?”
Chase mulled this over.
“Maybe she fought? Maybe the local PD was closing in? Perhaps they had caught wind of him for an unrelated crime and he had to get rid of the body quickly?”
“Maybe,” Stitts replied. “But then why this location? Detective Yasiv, did the uniforms comb the adjacent woods?”
Henry nodded.
“There were some tire tracks off the road about a mile down. They made some casts, but the falling snow already obscured anything of use. They know that it was a car, front wheel drive, likely nothing bigger than a sedan. They also found some disturbed areas where it looks like a body might have been dragged, but, again, the snow makes it next to impossible to draw any strong conclusions.”
“No cabin in the woods?”
Yasiv nodded.
“They found an old hunting cabin, but it hasn’t been used in years. Cobwebs everywhere. CSU cleared that as well.”
“What about the old man who owns this place? Doesn’t he live nearby?” Agent Stitts asked.
“Yep—five miles down the road. He’s been cooperative, and we’ve gone over his house with a fine-toothed comb. He’s been ruled out, and it is highly unlikely given the state of his house that the killer was using it with or without his knowledge.”
As was her habit, Chase crouched low and stared into the victim’s eyes. They were open slightly, revealing the bottom crescents of what she suspected had once been vibrant green eyes.
Green eyes not that unlike her own.
“And Brent Doakes?” she asked.
“Doakes?”
“Melissa’s boyfriend.”
Yasiv cleared his throat.
“Cleared. He’s been locked up for possession for the past week.”
Chase nodded and returned her attention to Charlotte’s body.
“The killer was rushed with the murder, but not with the body drop. He came here specifically, but why?”
There was no response, and she hadn’t expected one.
There was only one person who could answer that.
The killer.
Chase sighed and started to stand.
“Get CSU in here,” she said. “I doubt they’ll find anything, but I want them to scour every inch of this place. Again.”
Chapter 28
Drake couldn’t believe what he was reading. While at first he had doubted that the story on the e-reader and the bodies in the barn was a coincidence, now he was absolutely certain that it wasn’t.
The similarities were uncanny.
Two bodies, both dead from a combination of blood loss and exposure, half-buried beneath piles of hay in a broken-down barn.
And it didn’t stop there.
In the book, like in life, the women’s lips had been stained with blood.
“Jesus,” he whispered, exhaling slowly.
There were even details about Chase and himself, only the names were different. What they hadn’t included, however, was FBI Agent Stitts. With shaking hands, he finished the book—more of a short story, really—which concluded with fictional Chase and himself wondering who the killer was.
There was no real ending, so to speak.
When he had finished reading, there was no question in Drake’s mind that the only person who could have written this was the killer.
I have to tell Chase, he thought suddenly. And then, as if on cue, his phone started to ring.
He picked it up and was only half surprised that it was Chase.
“There’s been another murder, Drake. And the body was dropped at the barn. Again.”
Drake’s eyes bulged.
“What? The same barn? Nobody was watching it?”
Chase’s reply was strained.
“No. They wrapped up and then relinquished custody back to the owner.”
“Are you out there now?”
“Yes, as is Agent Stitts and Detective Yasiv. We need your help, Drake. Can you make here?”
Drake glanced at the e-reader on his desk.
“On my way. And there’s something that I have to show you.”
***
Drake pulled up behind a Ford Taurus and slammed his Crown Vic into park.
Thankfully the snow had stopped falling, but the temperature had continued to drop. He pulled the neck of his jacket closed as he walked
through the snow to the barn.
Inside, he was met with an eerily similar scene to the one that he had observed the other day.
Detective Yasiv and Chase hovered over the body, while Agent Stitts stood back, his eyes moving about the dimly lit barn.
Drake announced his presence, then went directly to the corpse.
The victim was a woman in her mid-forties, her throat slit, blood on her lips. He swallowed hard, and then instinctively reached into his pocket and fondled the rubber backing of the e-reader buried within.
This was a cluster fuck, the story notwithstanding.
“Did you speak to the parents of the first two victims?” he asked, breaking the silence.
Chase admitted that she had.
“And? Anything of use?”
“Sergeant Adams thinks it might have to do with books… that the victims are somehow connected through books?”
All of sudden Drake had trouble breathing, as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of the barn.
“Wh—what?” he stammered.
Chase gave him a strange look.
“Books—Melissa was an avid reader, and Tanya’s room was filled with them. All types of novels.”
Drake felt dizzy and put a hand on the wooden stall to keep from falling. Chase was on him in an instant, putting an arm on his shoulders, bracing him.
“Drake? You okay?”
He shook his head and found that he was unable to speak. The burn on his cheek itched horribly, but he couldn’t even muster the strength to scratch it.
“Drake?”
With considerable effort, he managed to straighten himself.
“Books? You sure?”
“No, not sure. Just a hunch. But I bet that Charlotte here liked to read as well.”
He slipped a hand into his pocket and pulled out the e-reader.
“There’s something you need to see,” he said quietly. “Something you need to read.”
***
“I managed to pull up Melissa Green’s library records—the woman took out a lot of books. I’ve also acquired Tanya Farthing’s bank records, and have singled out her purchases at bookstores and online. Problem is, there’s so much data that it’s going to take a while to process,” Agent Stitts said.
Drake looked around the conference room, feeling more comfortable than he figured he deserved. There were five of them in the room: himself, Chase, Agent Stitts, Detective Yasiv, who had since stationed two uniformed officers at the barn, and Officer Dunbar.
“I’ll have a go at that. I have a program that can look for similarities in purchases. Shouldn’t take that long.”
Chase nodded.
“Good. I’ll go with Agent Stitts to speak to Charlotte’s family, see if we can see if there is a connection there, confirm that she was also a reader.”
Drake looked at the e-reader that had been placed in the center of the table like some sort of modern golem.
“And the book? What about the book?”
Officer Dunbar cleared his throat.
“I already downloaded all the data I could from it. So far as I can tell, the IP that sent the books to the reader was scrambled. Pinged all over the Middle East, then Asia. I’ll keep plugging away, but I doubt I’ll get any hits.”
Drake nodded. Screech had already told him as much.
“And the book itself?” Detective Yasiv asked. “Where’d it come from?”
“Screech looked into it. Said it was written by a pen name, untraceable. Right now, it’s hidden in the ranks, even though it’s available online at most retailers. Should we ask them to pull it?”
Drake bit his tongue, stopping himself from asking the next question that was on his mind.
Why the hell was it sent to me?
Chase chewed the inside of her cheek.
“No, not now. All we need is someone book selling gunslinger to let something leak, and we’ll have a media shitstorm on our hands. For now, have Screech see if he could dig deeper into the bigger retailers, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, see if he can find out any connections between Also Boughts, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. We have to find out who wrote the damn thing.”
When she paused to take a breath, Detective Yasiv spoke up.
“What about the media in general? I mean, it wasn’t hard to keep them out given the remote location of the crime scene, but now with a third victim… if even one friend or family member of the deceased goes to the press…”
“For now, we keep it under wraps,” Chase replied. “Nobody’s to speak to the press.”
Silence fell over the room, and their eyes skipped across the images of the three women on the board at the head of the room.
“On second thought, I’m going to set up a press conference. Nothing specific, just to remind women between the ages of twenty to fifty not to accept rides or help from…” She let her sentence trail off, then turned to Stitts. “Agent Stitts, can you help us out here? What sort of profile are we looking at?”
Stitts flipped through a pad of paper before stopping on a page full of notes.
“I’ve generated a preliminary profile, given the ages of the victims and their cause of death. That being said, it’s only a loose profile given the differences in the vics’s socio-economic backgrounds.”
“Shoot,” Chase said.
Agent Stitts cleared his throat and then started to read.
“Based on historical precedence, we are looking for a male between the ages of thirty-five and fifty—just a few years older than the first two victims. Has to be in pretty good shape to have carried the bodies through the woods, and judging by the lack of hurriedness of the first two kills, this is likely someone who has no conscience whatsoever. They are doing this as a means to an end, not necessary just to extract pleasure from the act. The killer likely keeps a low profile, is a middle to high-income earner who, if he had previous encounters with the law, would only have been convicted of some minor crimes. Given the violence of the kills, and the prolonged period of capture for the first two victims, the man is trying to exercise control; he was likely emasculated in his youth, abused by a mother figure, perhaps. A nurse, a nun, something like that. We’ll know more after we speak to Charlotte’s family, but knowing that at least Tanya appears to have been abducted in broad daylight, the man would be physically unassuming and is likely friendly, handsome, or in the very least charismatic.”
The FBI Agent’s speech left Drake unimpressed. He wasn’t so naive or old-school to believe that FBI profiles had no value, but this one held about as much truth as a horoscope: it was ambiguous to the point of nearly being impossible to be proven wrong, but on the same token, it wasn’t all that useful either.
“You’re right,” he said with a scowl. “It isn’t much to go on.”
“Still, it’s something,” Chase said, eying him suspiciously. “When I speak to the press, I’ll advise women to stay away from men who approach them outside of malls, grocery stores, and, most importantly, bookstores. We are going to be bombarded by calls, but we can’t have another murder on our hands while we just sit on them.”
Drake nodded.
“I still have a contact or two in the publishing world I can approach, see if they can find out who this author—this L. Wiley—might be. It’s a stretch, but…”
“Anything might help,” Chase said, reaching across and grabbing the e-reader. She held it out to Drake, who didn’t immediately take it. “Hold on to it, Drake—the killer might send you another story. For whatever reason, he’s taken a liking to you. If he does send something else, maybe you can learn from it.”
Drake reluctantly took the e-reader. It felt warm in his hands, but he wasn’t sure if it was running hot or if it was just his mind playing tricks on him.
“Oh,” Officer Dunbar interjected. “Almost forgot; I sent the entire file to our forensic document examiner. Although he specializes in analyzing handwriting, he might have some insight into the background of the author based on word choices,
etc.” He shrugged. “Not an exact science, but you never know.”
Chase stood, and the others followed her lead.
“Good. Dunbar, do you have someone in records you can trust? Someone who might be able to scour perps with criminal records that might have a link to the book publishing business?”
Dunbar thought about this for a moment.
“Yeah, I can ask Pauley. He might be able to do it. Good with computers, and better at being quiet.”
“Fine, get him on it. I’ll set up a press conference after visiting Charlotte’s family. Everyone else, let’s keep this book idea under wraps. The last thing we want is to turn this sick bastard into a bestselling author.”
With that, Chase made her way toward the door, Detective Yasiv, Officer Dunbar, and Agent Stitts in tow.
Before leaving the room, she turned back to Drake, who remained seated.
“Let’s catch this bastard before he kills again.”
And then they were gone, leaving Drake to his own thoughts. He looked up at the horrific images of the three dead women, a feeling of disgust working its way deep in the pit of his stomach like food poisoning.
Chase was right, they had to catch the killer before they struck again. Except that wasn’t their only problem here.
Chase was going to go public about another set of murders, only a few months removed from Craig Sloan’s killing spree and ultimate demise.
And there was one person who really, really wasn’t going to be happy about it.
It just so happened that Drake also worked for this man.
Chapter 29
“What is this place, daddy?” Colby asked from the backseat.
Colin stared at the cabin before replying. It wasn’t much from the outside—in fact, it needed quite a bit of work—but he could see deeper than the peeling paint, the lifting roof shingles, the rotting porch.
He could see a future here, one where he would spend his days fixing up the place, his evenings at the computer typing away.
The best part about the place was how far it was from any neighbors. It was at least fifteen miles from the nearest farm, and twice that from the closest real suburb.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 61