by RJ Scott
I hugged him again. And this time when we parted, we had matching stupid grins.
“Avery said Lucas had to go see Sawyer, but when he’s back, can we get pizza?” he asked hopefully, playing on this newfound connection of knowledge.
“Good idea.” We had Lucas, Avery, and three technicians taking up rooms, and maybe they’d all go for a pizza delivery. Then dinner would be over quickly, and then maybe I could get an early night. With Lucas. “Order six, not all with pepperoni, okay?”
He sat back at reception and pulled out his art pad, and within moments, he was lost in his art, and I didn’t know what to do next because Lucas wasn’t here.
I went into my office, shut the door, and opened the doors to my abandoned computer space. All I needed to do was go searching, and I’d find something. Only, it wasn’t the normal search strings I input but a series of names and dates that I’d memorized from the murder board in the poker room, added to the details I’d seen in Sawyer’s office. I didn’t have an eidetic memory, but as a programmer, I knew how to file away information in retrievable amounts. I didn’t know why I even thought this was a good idea. But I thought it had something to do with Lucas and his grandpa Toby and the sadness I’d seen in Lucas’s eyes when he was talking about his family.
Jessica. Angela. Melissa. Amelia.
I left off Olivia because right now she was just Jessica’s friend and a possible outlier with nothing to do with the case. There were tentative links all over the place from the fact that two were from Buffalo, the other two from Corning. Three had gone to Penn State, although one had left just after they’d started. All four had come from families with money, daughters of lawyers, doctors, all from the more expensive suburbs of Buffalo and Corning, respectively. Amelia hadn’t attended Penn State. She was a grocery store manager, but as I dug a little further, it became obvious that she part-owned the store, one of eighteen built up by the Shaw family.
Okay, so money might be a connector. I was good at following money, had contacts I could rope in on smaller details. Adding Olivia, the outlier, to the search didn’t help much. She, too, had been from a wealthy family, but she hadn’t attended Penn State, and she hadn’t had any obvious connections to Amelia, the store owner. Then I hit a wall. Jessica, twenty-three, vanished in 1974, had an arrest record that never amounted to anything. Probably Daddy or Mommy had paid off someone, or there was a fancy lawyer who used nothing but big words and got her off. The records weren’t sealed, but they’d been lost in the system, and at over forty-five years since it had happened, I didn’t hold out much hope for details. So much for data available online. Now was the time to dig deeper.
I made sure the door was locked, and then with a few practiced keystrokes, I was in parts of the web that only the very focused hacker would get to. Not exactly dark web, so I was keeping my promise to myself and Lucas, but here it was a different world, good guys and bad guys milling around, exchanging information, things that not even the FBI would have access to. My hacker name was Gilded, followed by a stream of numbers, taken from the view out of my window where I could see the ornate and gilded town clock. The word sat with me a while, but it was that cloak I used to access information. Most of the time it was to hack into security systems or track down the people who were doing the hacking, but it still made me feel dirty to know the kinds of things that were locked away inside here. When I’d first become proficient, guided by a user with the handle Birthtwin7, I’d spent hours trying to find Casey McGuire for Drew. I’d never found a single thing. The day we’d all found out it was Casey in Hell’s Gate, I’d come to terms with his loss a long time before.
I interrogated all the federal databases I had access to, then went off-script, typed in the parameters, and waited for a response, but there was nothing immediate, apart from an old hacker friend Lupin, who I swore was a Harry Potter fan and was probably fifteen and in his parents’ basement.
He was an expert in coding, not that he’d ever given me anything, but he’d attached himself to me. Only this wasn’t his playground.
Something might come through immediately, or it might be days.
“DAD! Pizza is here!”
I closed everything down, logged out, locked it all, and then headed out to normal life, stealing a kiss from a serious Lucas as he came out of the poker room.
“What was that for?”
“You were there. You’re sexy. I’m falling for you, and I wanted to kiss you.”
“Oh,” he replied, and he was so confused that I kissed him again. He’d understand one day, and if that big brain of his didn’t get it, then I would explain a few things to him.
Don’t go. Stay here with me and Harry. Kiss me every day. You’re mine.
Eighteen
Lucas
Sawyer and I headed through the park, and I stopped when he did, as townspeople greeted him, talked about the weather, and pointedly avoided talking about the mayor or Adam Gray. I glanced over at the hotel. Josh was outside cleaning windows, up on a small ladder, the muscles in his back bunching and releasing.
I remembered the way he’d moved in the shower, the way he’d held me, told me what he wanted. He was pure honesty in a sexy wrapper, and I had the ache in my muscles and ass to remind me of exactly how much sexy had gone into last night.
“Earth to Lucas?” Sawyer said.
My face grew warm. “Sorry, you were saying?”
“Trouble ahead,” he murmured.
I was snapped from daydreaming about shower sex and being fucked into the mattress when a tall, skinny man with a camera around his neck stepped in front of us. He didn’t pay me any attention, but he went straight for Sawyer.
“Captain Wiseman, what is the status of the investigation into the brutal murder of Mayor Stokes?”
“No comment,” Sawyer said and marched on past.
I didn’t get a second chance, it seemed, and I followed Sawyer, but the questions that were shouted after us gave away a lot.
“Is the FBI making headway? Do we know why town citizens Adam Gray and Mayor Stokes are both dead? Are the cases connected? Is this something to do with the bones and Casey McGuire? Have you identified the remains found in Hell’s Gate? Do we have a Hell’s Gate serial killer? Is the department incompetent? Captain Sawyer! Do you have no statement to make regarding a serial killer terrorizing Lancaster Falls?”
Sawyer ignored it all but couldn’t avoid the small group of townspeople huddled by the fountain, talking among themselves. I identified Nicky Farmer, the person who’d found the first skull. I saw the man that the town called Doc, who was waving a stick and attempting to calm everything down.
“Morning,” Sawyer murmured as he joined the group. I stayed back as a barrier to the reporter. When I turned to check if he was behind me, there was no sign of him. I didn’t know which was worse: a journalist I could see or one I couldn’t.
“We’re scared, Sawyer,” Nicky exclaimed and clung to Sawyer’s arm. He didn’t shake her off, but he gently extricated himself from her hold and distanced himself by standing on the other side of Doc. There was a huge cast of colorful characters in the town, the same as my own. It was a matter of deciding where people fit into the dynamic. He spoke to everyone, and I should’ve moved closer and found out how he was explaining that everyone needed to calm down. He probably tempered it with warnings to stay safe, but I thought he knew his own town, and after a moment, the group dissipated. All but the elderly doc, and
another older woman who’d linked her arm through his. There were a few more words spoken, and then even they left, and we completed the rest of the journey in contemplative silence. Sawyer’s head must’ve been close to exploding, and I searched for the right things to say.
“You’re doing a good job,” I offered, but he glanced at me with an incredulous expression. So much for reassurance. Thank god we reached the bank, a solid building just down the road from Calabresi’s and right opposite the park.
“This is the only bank in town?”
“Yeah, old money, goes way back one side of the Dwyer family, Joe Dwyer, owner-manager, Letitia Mendive, chief cashier, Mike as security, a couple of part-timers who cover vacation time. It’s not a big place, but it’s local and important to the town.”
The interior was cool, the bank empty, but what was odd was that the security guard was absent, nor was there any sign of a teller behind the glass partitions. My hackles rose, and I pulled my weapon, but Sawyer beat me to it and gestured for me to stay. I pulled the front door shut, locked it with the bolts, and waited as close to the back of the bank as I could without following Sawyer down, even though I really wanted to. I caught movement in my peripheral vision, whirled to face the adversary, but it was a woman crouched over an unconscious man dressed in a security guard’s uniform.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she was murmuring.
I didn’t take my gun off her. “Ma’am?”
She glanced up at me. “I went to sleep,” she said on the hitch of a sob. “I was so tired. I felt sick, and when I woke up, Mike was unconscious on the ground. What happened? Where is everyone? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know.”
“Who did this?”
“I don’t know, okay? I was asleep.” She grew agitated, even as the security guard blinked his eyes open, staring up into her face.
“Letitia?” he asked, confused, and I noticed the trickle of blood on his temple.
“Talk to me.” I went to a crouch next to him.
“I was so tired,” Mike said. Blood dripped near his eye, and he absently wiped at it. “I don’t understand.”
“Lucas? You need to see this,” Sawyer said flatly, and when I stood and faced him, gripping my weapon, and saw the expression on his face, I knew this wasn’t good.
“Stay here,” I ordered Letitia and Mike and followed Sawyer.
I knew before we even got here: the scent of cordite, of blood. Sawyer carefully pushed open the door to the manager’s office, using his elbow.
“Fuck,” Sawyer cursed.
“Shit, he’s dead.”
Joe Dwyer was slumped to the left in his chair, papers on the desk, and apart from the neat hole in his right temple and the fact that the wall to the left of him was scarlet with blood and fuck knew what, it looked as if he were having a normal day. I felt sick as I picked up the smaller details. The fact that his throat had been cut, the way brains splattered the wall next to him.
We could see the weapon lying on the floor, a pistol with a silencer, Joe’s hand hanging loose.
I took a cautious step closer, only enough to get a look at what was laid around him, some kind of official medical report with photos and five or more mortgage deeds, plus what looked like a will. The stench of death was heavy this close, and I gagged.
There weren’t any photos here, like on the mayor’s body. Did that mean he wasn’t involved in hurting kids? Something slithered down the wall, and I couldn’t even look, stepping back and away and nearly colliding with Sawyer.
“Dispatch, 10-23 at the bank, 10-32, paramedics, coroner, and get over here. We need a cordon.”
I waited until Sawyer had done his part. Then I connected to Avery, told her to get to the bank, and then like everything else, it was a waiting game.
“His throat is cut,” Sawyer said.
“Just like the mayor, but this time with a gun to his head. Is that overkill?”
“Maybe the target here was his brain?”
“You mean, not the sexual organs that the mayor used to…”
“Yeah, but the brain that did what? Embezzled? Bribed?” Sawyer made as if to reach for the closest files but stopped. We couldn’t touch a damn thing.
“Cutting the throat, that matches a small part of the MO with the mayor but also to Adam Gray and to the women in the sinkhole,” I suggested, and Sawyer nodded.
“Either it’s the same person or someone copying the MO. Or it’s just one huge fucking cosmic coincidence.”
We stood mainly in silence. The puzzle was too much for either of us to contemplate, and all too soon, an army of professionals was on-site. A crowd had gathered outside—townspeople— and the flashing lights of a cop car holding people back cast color onto the walls behind the teller stations. Mike refused to go to the hospital, said he wanted to stand guard until the scene was clear, and I was glad of his steady presence, but only after the paramedics and Doc had checked him over and declared him fit for the time being.
Liam, the coroner, and his deputy, Carl, arrived within an hour, by which time the paramedics had checked both Mike and Letitia, who suggested everything from carbon monoxide poisoning to drugs. Whatever’d knocked them out would need further investigation. They were both coming around more. I made notes, but if this wasn’t some kind of accident, then it was premeditated and that made everything a million times worse
“This is getting ridiculous,” Carl observed, and I couldn’t have agreed more, but something he’d picked up from the desk and bagged gave him pause.
“Eric Young?” he mused, and Liam glanced up sharply.
“What?”
“I recognize that name. This is a coroner’s report signed by Eric Young, on”—he peered closer—“Rowan Edwin McGuire?”
Liam went still. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“What?” I asked and tried to see what the issue was.
Liam sighed noisily. “Young is a blast from the past. He was caught falsifying reports in exchange for cash. He killed himself before he went to trial, but it was a stain on our profession.”
“And the connection here is what? Is this file out here for us to find like the photos on the mayor?”
“Rowan McGuire is Casey and Drew’s father, and he worked here at the bank,” Sawyer explained.
“I recall the name. If I remember rightly, he had a brain hemorrhage and hit his head on the marble bank counter.” I exchanged glances with Sawyer, who looked as if someone had stabbed him in the heart.
“Yeah. So it was left here deliberately for us to find, and I bet that everything else on that desk is some shit that Joe Dwyer pulled.”
“So one theory could be that someone is dispensing justice,” I suggested.
Sawyer cleared his throat. “Then why the coroner’s report? Does that suggest that you think Joe Dwyer paid to have the coroner show that Rowan McGuire’s brain hemorrhage was a natural occurrence? And that maybe Joe killed him?”
I met his gaze steadily, listened to my gut, and decided that honesty was the best policy.
“With everything placed in front of us like this? Yes.”
“But whoever is dispensing this justice would have to know these secrets.”
Sawyer snapped his fingers. “The first of the secret keepers. That is what Beverly Kirkland said in the murder-suicide.”
“Have we got…?” He pulled me to one side, where we couldn’t be heard. “Is there something in this serial killer thing? Adam Gray, throat cut, then Gerald Stokes and Joe Dwyer, all murdered in the space of a few weeks. You know that lone journalist out there will become more reporters. When the coroner confirms death we’ll be swarming with reporters in town all wanting to report on the Hell’s Gate serial killer.”
I had to do my job here and stop that altogether. “It’s dangerous to give potential serial killers names. It gives them mysterious kudos, a glamor that isn’t there.”
“It’s not me that said it, Lucas. It’s every single fucking reporter in my t
own, not to mention the groups hanging around on corners talking about it. We’ll have nut jobs coming here thinking they can solve the murders. Do you know there were theories that aliens had abducted Casey McGuire? Fucking goddamn aliens!”
I pressed a hand on his arm and waited until he stopped vibrating with anger and adrenaline. “There’s no pattern here, no ritual in the manner of murder, no signature except for the observation that could be made that both the mayor and Mr. Dwyer were surrounded by evidence of their guilt in some way or another. Almost staged for us to find. Maybe this is a signature of one person, something that the subject is doing intentionally for emotional satisfaction? It wasn’t necessary to stage the scene to commit the crime, but is what we found a way for any killer to fulfill their fantasies?”
“You’re saying you think we have a serial killer in Lancaster Falls.”
I glanced behind me at the empty bank. Only Logan and Heather were on-site after the coroner and his assistant had left, although Mike, the security guard, was blocking the front entrance, impassive against the chaos of people swirling around out there. Some of them could be journalists, others gawking onlookers, but he was a brick wall, and we needed that right now. I spotted a few familiar faces. Sandoval was at the edge of the crowd, his hands in his pockets, frowning, and way back, I could see Nicky Farmer, the bearer of town gossip. I wished both of them weren’t there.
“All I’m saying is that if the murders were done by the same person, then it can tell us something about their personality. The two men who died had secrets and guilt. But how does Adam fit into that? He wasn’t left with any markers to indicate his guilt in anything at all.”
“Jesus fucking…”
“Then we’ll look at the MO because the modus operandi reflects what the killer had to do to commit the crime. In the case of the bank here, the guard and single staff member needed to be incapacitated. Neither was visibly restrained. No mistakes have been made, no obvious prints or other evidence. These two crimes, if linked, were carefully planned, suggesting an organized, intelligent person is behind them.”