by S W Vaughn
Fehily wasn’t the killer.
And I couldn’t tell that to Detective Clarke.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Preston
Reverend Fehily had requested that Preston perform the interrogation herself, without North present. Not because of any city prejudices, he’d assured her, but because he had to disclose personal information that he didn’t want North to hear.
Her partner didn’t like that idea, but he’d agreed. He would be at the interrogation room window anyway, watching and listening to every word.
Though if Preston’s suspicions were correct about what Fehily wanted to disclose, he might not want to listen for very long.
The reverend had been cleaned and bandaged, and now he was dressed in pale green prison scrubs. Not because he’d been arrested — yet — but because his shirt and the back of his pants had been heavy and damp with blood. There were already a few bright red spots blossoming near the shoulders of the scrubs where it soaked through the bandage.
She’d seen his back while Doc Bowerman was treating him.
It was very bad.
With Reverend Fehily seated gingerly on the other side of the table, facing the window, she took the chair across from him and placed the folder she’d brought in on the surface in front of her. Crime scene photos. The number one prop for police interrogations everywhere. “Do you know why you’re here, Reverend?” she said calmly.
She’d already decided not to treat him as hostile, unless he gave her a reason to.
Clearly, he wanted to atone for his sins.
“Yes,” he replied, just as calm, though there was a pained edge to his voice. “Do you need me to … state my name, or anything like that? For the record.”
“No, that’s fine. We have you identified,” she said. “Can you tell me, in your own words, why you think you’re here today?”
“Because you think I killed Eleanor Schilz,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“Yes, that’s one item we’d like to discuss with you.” Preston opened the folder slowly. There was a photo of Schilz on top of the stack of pictures inside, clearly showing the hole in her skull, the blood pooled on the floor around her head like a demonic halo.
Reverend Fehily make a thick sound and turned away fast.
One point for him. That was typically an innocent person’s reaction to full-color, glossy death.
But it was also the reaction of a good actor who knew how innocent people were supposed to react.
People who knew how to avoid leaving evidence at a crime scene.
“Eleanor Schilz,” Preston said. “Your foster mother.”
He was still turned away. “Do I have to look?”
“I’d appreciate it if you would try.”
Slowly, reluctantly, he faced forward again. But his gaze was pointed up and to the left of the folder.
She turned the Schilz photo over, revealing the next one. “Chelsea Mathers,” she said. “Your congregant.”
“Good Lord!” Fehily squawked in a high, choked voice. He jerked back so hard that he knocked the chair over and landed on the floor with a cry of pain. Pushing up with a sob, he scrambled on hands and knees to the back wall of the room and vomited.
The thick, wet splash made Preston’s stomach hitch.
“Why?” Reverend Fehily croaked. “Why would you show me … oh, Father in Heaven, that poor girl. Please. I can’t …”
Preston waited until he looked up with wet, red-rimmed eyes. “Why do you think I would show you that, Reverend?”
It took him a minute. “No,” he whispered. “You can’t possibly think … that I could ever …” He shook his head fiercely. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Please take your seat,” she said patiently.
“Please close that folder.”
“All right.” She did so. Slowly, calmly.
They would come back to the photos.
It took Fehily a few minutes to right himself, right his chair, and settle into it. The sick-sweet stench of his vomit wafted through the air, but she wouldn’t call anyone to clean it up yet. She wanted him uncomfortable, looking for a way out of this room.
Confession was the fastest way out for him.
“Maybe there’s something you’d like to tell me, Reverend,” she said, folding her hands on top of the closed folder. “I’ll listen, if you want to talk.”
He bowed his head. “I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “There’s been a mistake.”
“We don’t have to talk about killing anyone. You can say anything you want.”
“All right. I will.” He looked up, and his eyes blazed with injured fury. “Eleanor Schilz was an evil, Godless creature, not even fit to be called a human being, and she deserved to be put down,” he said. “But I didn’t kill her, though God may strike me down for wishing her dead.”
Preston nodded as if she understood. “Tell me about Eleanor Schilz.”
“You must know. She was … a monster.” He shuddered visibly, and his gaze flicked to the mirrored window. “Is he out there, listening?”
She said nothing.
Whatever he made of her silence, he went on regardless. “As a police officer, I’m sure you’ve seen the charges that were brought against her,” he said. “Child abuse, child neglect, reckless endangerment, corruption of a minor. But those words … they’re nothing. They don’t come close to describing the true depths of her darkness.”
“Can you describe it for me?” she said.
He stared at her. “Believe me, you really don’t want me to.”
She didn’t, actually. But she needed to have as much information as possible. “Please,” she said. “Go on.”
The reverend took a deep, bracing breath.
“To say that she beat us was … a discredit to beatings,” he began. “She inflicted torment on every child that passed through that house, including her own daughter. No one was surprised when Diamond disappeared. We all thought …” He paused, hitched a breath. “We hoped she’d gotten away. And I suppose she did, in a manner of speaking. It was over for her.”
Mercy killing, Preston thought but did not say. “And the rest of you?”
“We muddled on. No choice,” he said, shaking his head. “Beatings were a simple fact of life for everyone in that house. We took them, we licked our wounds as best we could, we tried not to cross her again. It never worked, of course. She angered at nothing and everything. At our very existence.” He paused for another look at the window. “But Donovan … she singled him out from day one.”
And now they were coming to the part she’d feared. The one that North really didn’t need to hear. She hoped he had the sense to walk away, right now. “Singled him out how?” she had to ask.
Anton Fehily closed his eyes. “She broke him,” he said. “His beatings were the longest, the hardest, the most frequent. And when she wasn’t beating him, she forced him to … pleasure her.” His mouth grew tight with disgust as he forced the words out.
Preston absolutely wasn’t going to prod him for details on that.
“Have you heard enough, Detective Clarke?” Reverend Fehily said, his voice utterly flat.
She took a few moments to pull herself together. At last she said, “I’d like you to stay here for a bit, Reverend. I’ll send someone in to clean up, and to bring you some water. I’ll be back in a while, and we can talk again.”
He watched her stand. His eyes followed her to the door. “I didn’t kill anyone, Detective,” he said. “But Donovan might have — and if he did, Lord help me for saying so, even God Himself wouldn’t hold him accountable for his actions.”
Shivers cascaded down her back as she stepped out and closed him in the room.
It was another long moment before she could force herself to step out into the corridor, where North still stood in front of the interrogation window, every line of his body rigid. Steel cables of tendon stood out on his neck, and his fists were clenched to white.
“Please. Don’t say anything,” he
rasped without looking in her direction.
She didn’t.
She waited.
It took the better part of five minutes for North to relax into something that resembled normal. “You still believe that I didn’t kill her,” he said wearily. “Right?”
“Right,” she said.
“Good, because I have bad news.” He pivoted slowly toward her and jerked a thumb at the interrogation room, the man behind the glass. “I don’t think he did, either.”
She got angry first. There was no way, absolutely no way, that Fehily was not the killer. He fit so perfectly. Right down to the trips to New York. He’d all but confessed at the cabin, before he had time to think and change his story on the ride in.
They needed him to be the killer. Because if he wasn’t, they had nothing. Again.
And that, she knew, was the reason she had to consider that he wasn’t.
“Maybe he didn’t,” she admitted, though it pained her to say it. His reaction to the photos had definitely seemed genuine, and she hadn’t even gotten into his alibis yet. He might have them, for some or all of the murders. “But if not him, then who?”
North gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Not me. And not you,” he said. “So that’s … three down. How many people live in Landstaff Junction?”
Her laughter emerged a weak huff, but it was there.
She had no idea how he could crack jokes after hearing his unimaginably horrific childhood recounted by one of his foster brothers, but maybe it was a coping mechanism, or some such thing.
“Come on,” she said. “We have to send someone in there to clean up.”
North smirked. “Can I pick? I vote for Officer Henderson.”
This time she actually laughed. “I’ll suggest that to August. He’ll probably agree.”
Back in the bullpen, once she’d updated August and Kratt about the progress — or lack thereof — with Fehily, she settled at her desk while North volunteered to pour them both some coffee. Her head was thick, her thoughts tangled with too much input, and she couldn’t decide what to do next other than let the reverend stew for a while. She wasn’t going to completely give up on the idea that he was the killer just yet.
Without thinking much about it, she opened her email. She had one new message with a slew of attachments.
It was from the NYPD.
She clicked on the message, read the perfunctory text: Attached please find the information you requested. This transmission is confidential.
The standard disclaimer below it was a mile long, but she ignored it and started downloading the files. It was going to take a few minutes.
Those files were big.
“Anything interesting?” North suddenly said at her shoulder.
She managed not to follow her first instinct to cover the screen with her hands or shrink the browser. “Just some more stuff from the NYPD on the Kid Glove Killer,” she said. “You know, besides what you sent us.”
“Oh.” He handed her a cup of coffee. “That’s good news, right? Maybe it’ll help.”
He didn’t seem bothered by anything she’d said, or implied.
That was … interesting.
“I’m hoping it will,” she said as the first of the files finished downloading, and she double-clicked to open it. This one was a copy of the evidence logs from all eight cases, bundled into one PDF. And just like the murders here, there wasn’t much in the way of evidence.
Most of this was a list of the victims’ personal possessions, taken to search for any hint that might lead to the killer. No clothing, because none of them had been wearing any. No jewelry. Bedsheets, pillows, cell phones, purses. The ropes used to tie the victims down.
“Clarke,” North said, and she jumped a little. She’d forgotten he was behind her. “Can you forward those files to me?”
His voice sounded a little uneven. She turned to look at him. “Did you pick up on something?”
“I don’t know yet.” He looked strange, stiff. “Maybe. Will you send them over?”
“Sure, no problem.” She hit forward on the message and typed in his department address — always the same for everyone, first-name-dot-last-name at LJCPD.com. “It’s on the way.”
“Thanks.” He walked past her desk, a distant expression clouding his face as he made his way to his seat and plunked down.
Overwhelmed, she thought. And with good reason. It couldn’t have been easy for him, making the decision to come back to a town where he’d experienced nothing but pain and suffering. But he’d done it to catch a killer, and he was still trying. Even after everything that happened with Eleanor Schilz, and then Anton Fehily.
So what if he’d exaggerated a little when he convinced the chief to hire him?
He was a good man. A good partner.
She was glad he’d come home.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Donovan
I had no idea how I’d managed to get through the rest of the day after the bombshell dropped — and I didn’t mean Anton Fehily, the fact that he wasn’t the killer, or even the inhuman atrocities he’d described in the interrogation room.
It was the evidence logs.
I thought the end of the day would never arrive. It took me a while to piece together exactly what had given me the hollow, sinking feeling when I looked at that file on Detective Clarke’s computer, the list of mundane, everyday items made terrible by association. One set of bed sheets, green floral, bloodstained. Two pillows, white, one clean. One pillowcase, pink, clean. One pillowcase, white, bloodstained. Two lengths of braided nylon rope, bloodstained. On and on and on.
After I knew, it took me a while longer to figure out how I could prove my suspicion … to myself. I could never prove it to anyone else.
And then, when I started watching the clock for the time that I could finally leave the station and verify what I thought was the truth, the horrendous truth, and nothing but the sickening truth, I learned that the reverend had alibis for the murders, and we had to search his properties for evidence. But if we found nothing, he would be released.
Reverend Anton Fehily was a free man, as of nine P.M. An hour ago.
Now I was back in my suite at the Whispering Pines, staring at the file box that came all the way from New York with Donovan North as if it were full of poisonous snakes devouring severed human limbs.
The evidence logs.
The crime scene photos.
The real crime scene photos.
I grabbed the laptop from the end table where I’d left it and powered it on with shaking hands. I’d had to be surreptitious, figuring out how to access my police department email from home, but I’d managed. Once I had the browser open on the laptop, I grabbed the phone and opened the picture I’d taken of Clarke’s desktop monitor when she’d gone to the bathroom. One that showed the URL of her email account.
I typed it into the address bar and fiddled with it until I managed to navigate to the login page. Got into my account, started downloading the attachments that the detective forwarded me to the laptop.
Then I dragged the file box over to the couch. But I didn’t open it yet.
The last time I’d looked at the contents of this box, I knew next to nothing about police records and procedures and evidence chains. I assumed things. My assumptions were simple: Donovan North was a cop. This box was full of cop things.
Now, I had more information. And what I’d thought about this box wasn’t the case at all. I knew so many things I didn’t want to know.
I knew the police didn’t photocopy reports. They emailed them.
I knew that evidence belonged in an evidence lockup, after being carefully recorded in an evidence log, and the police weren’t allowed to remove said evidence from the premises, with the exception of court cases.
I knew that the evidence in Donovan’s box, carefully labeled with each victims’ name and the collection dates, had not been entered into the evidence logs.
And I knew that the NYPD did not tak
e crime scene photos with Polaroid cameras.
The files were downloaded. There was nothing left to keep me from finding out the truth. No more stalling.
I opened the box.
Removed the folder for the first victim.
Kristi Gontz, twenty-three. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Sad, stark Polaroid pictures. Evidence bag containing one ladybugs-and-frogs charm bracelet, silver, clean. Gontz, Kristi printed on a red line on the front of the clear plastic, and the date on the line below that.
Not the date that the body was discovered, according to the official reports, but the day before.
The day she died.
I spread the Polaroids, three of them, on the couch cushion beside me and opened the report packet for Kristi Gontz on the laptop. The NYPD had sent the full run of paperwork, including scanned copies of the crime scene photos. Full-sized glossy pictures, just like the Landstaff Junction prints.
For a few minutes, I looked back and forth between the images on the screen and the Polaroids on the couch, desperate to convince myself that maybe Donnie had just taken pictures of the crime scene photos, that there’d been some kind of flaw in my logic. That I was wrong — please, let me be wrong.
But there were no similarities at all. The Polaroids were taken at completely different angles from the full-sized photos, with completely different compositions. One head shot, one torso shot, one whole-body shot, all snapped straight on. As if the photographer had been on the bed with the body when he took the pictures.
To get the head and torso shots, he’d have had to actually straddle the body.
Even though I didn’t need more proof, I went through every single victims’ folder and looked at the same things. None of the little personal items had been logged into evidence. All of them were dated the day of the murder, rather than the day of discovery. And none of the Polaroid pictures matched up with the crime scene photos.
There was only one way Donovan North could have gotten these items, these pictures. I didn’t want to believe it, but it had to be true.
I knew who the killer was. And I couldn’t tell anyone.