by Rachel Ford
I decided not to argue. It was tangential to my point anyway. “Which means either they knew him, or they’d planned for that contingency. Or it’s a different killer.”
“We’re examining all angles.”
“But you’re leaning toward it being the same guy?”
She didn’t answer that. She asked instead, “Do you know if your brother would have known either of the other two victims, Angela Martinez or Mason Anderson?”
She showed me a set of pictures. One was a pretty young woman with dark hair and dark eyes. She was smiling just past the camera, at some point out of the frame. She looked happy and full of life.
The other printout was a side-by-side: two shots, one clear and old. A high school senior portrait, I figured, of a skinny kid with light eyes and a pensive gaze. He had light brown hair with a short cut. He was wearing a striped polo.
The picture beside it showed an entirely different human being. It was grainy, but not grainy enough to obscure the change. Mason looked a hundred years older, and thin as a rail. His cheeks were hollow, and his eyes were sunken. He had the same hair, though it was thinner, and the same eyes, but they were sadder. He had a scruffy growth of facial hair, but it was patchy and spottled.
I’d seen the subjects before, with bold type headlines plastered overhead.
Brutal murder of local woman
The ‘Nursery Rhyme Killer’ strikes again
Two victims: when will he strike again?
But I hadn’t seen those shots before. I studied them for a long moment.
She repeated her question.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “Martinez? Probably not through his ministry, anyway. She was catholic, right? His church would have been way too New Agey for her.” I looked at the picture of the skinny, hollowed man. “But Anderson? Maybe. He was always trying to save lost souls. A junkie would have been as good a target as any.”
“Did he ever mention Mr. Anderson?”
“No. I told you, we didn’t really talk much. And he never mentioned names. That would have been unethical. Privacy, and all that.”
“But you think he might have known him?”
“It’s possible. It’s a big city, but I know they had homeless outreach programs. He was working with the city to build another shelter. He was big into that kind of thing: helping battered women, trafficked kids, homeless families.”
“I know,” she said. “He sounds like he was a good man.”
“He was.”
“For what it’s worth, Mr. Day – Owen – you have my sincere sympathies. And my word: we’re going to catch this guy.”
She believed it. I didn’t know if I did. Killers got caught all the time. Serial killers, especially sensational ones, attracted a lot of press. People started looking for suspicious persons, and putting two and two together.
And usually even the smart ones messed up, sooner or later.
But it didn’t always happen, and it didn’t always happen in any kind of acceptable timeframe. It had taken decades to track down the Golden State Killer. Despite an almost obsessive public interest, it had taken decades just to crack the Zodiac Killer’s codes.
I didn’t know how smart NRK was. He’d killed three people, and the police – for all their good intentions – didn’t seem to have a clue who they were dealing with. Yet anyway.
But one of those people had been my brother. So he wasn’t that smart.
And I wasn’t going to wait decades, or years, or months for that matter. Either the cops were going to get him, or I would.
Which is where the real test of his smarts was going to come in. Because if he was smart, he’d turn himself in long before I got close to him.
Chapter Three
Data and numbers were my forte. Observed patterns, predictive analytics, statistics: those were the kinds of things my brain understood.
People? Not so much. I liked people well enough. I was no kind of misanthrope.
But I liked them from a distance, the way a feral dog might; a member of a social species, but not necessarily a well-adjusted one.
Which would be a problem. Not an unsolvable one, but a problem anyway. Because numbers and data weren’t going to solve this case. Not on their own.
I would need to talk to people. And not just the cops, either. I’d need to talk to the people who knew my brother best. Which included his wife and ex-wife.
Ironically, I dreaded the former more than the latter. Missy Sheldon, Andy’s first wife, and I got along alright. We always had.
Even after they split, and despite the circumstances of that split, we went on getting along. She still sent me Christmas cards. She still called to wish me a happy birthday. She still made Jon, her son, wish his uncle a happy birthday.
I liked Missy. I’d always liked Missy. So I didn’t want to call her and talk about her ex. My dead brother.
Megan Welch was another story. I didn’t want to talk to her at all, much less in person. But she lived closer, and she was the current wife. I didn’t have a choice.
Not that I was even sure she’d talk to me. But I had to try. If Andy’s murder had been targeted, she more than anyone I could think of, would know who targeted him.
So I left the police station, and Detective Clark’s antiseptic interview room, with its beige walls and overstuffed sofa, and headed for Andy’s house.
Megan’s house, I guess.
I thought as I drove. In the police station, talking to Detective Clark, my thoughts had been all over the place.
But behind the wheel, with the road and its distractions to occupy that part of my brain that never really stopped churning, I could focus.
I thought about Andy’s killer. On some level, so far I’d assumed it was a guy. But I didn’t know that, not for sure.
From a purely data driven perspective, it was likely. The odds of any random killing have been committed by a man were about nine to one. They got a little longer in the case of serial killers.
Which, assuming Andy was NRK’s victim number three, was the case here. For a serial killer, we’d be looking at four to one odds in favor of a male suspect.
Of course, probabilities didn’t tell the whole story. Which was a concept I found that people in general didn’t seem to understand well. Their feelings got them mixed up on the topic. Tell a man he has a one to fifteen thousand-some odds of being hit by lightning, and he’ll assume it’ll never happen. Tell him he has a one to three hundred million chance of winning the jackpot, and he’ll buy lottery tickets religiously.
I didn’t get mixed up on it. Low probability didn’t mean never. Hell, the Guinness World Record holders for the most prolific murder partnership were a pair of women. Sisters, no less: Delfina and Maria De Jesus Gonzalez, with a slew of murders of women, men and kids to their names.
Low probability didn’t mean never.
Of course, there were other factors at play here. The Nursery Rhyme Killer would have to be able to transport dead people.
Mary Ann Cotton would have been easy enough for a reasonably fit woman to move and even overpower. She’d been slight and thin. She probably would have been terrified, especially if a weapon had been present. She would have written the note without any sure idea of what would follow. Hoping that her compliance would earn her mercy.
Strangling her wouldn’t have taken much strength. Cutting her eyelids off would have required almost none, just a degree of precision and hand-eye coordination.
Dumping the body would have been only a little harder. She would have weighed a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifteen pounds, which would have been no challenge for a reasonably fit person.
It wouldn’t be quite as simple as lifting a hundred pounds, of course. Maneuvering a body, with the rigidity of life gone, its muscles relaxing, its limbs being nothing more than trailing deadweight, would be more challenging. But she’d been small and short. Anyone of average height would have been able to manage, trailing limbs or not.
Hump
ty Dumpty would have been harder. He was thin, but tall and gangly. He would have had long arms and gangly legs spilling every which way. In the beginning anyway – until the killer got out their axe.
Which potentially narrowed the suspect pool too. It would have taken a sharp axe and lot of strength to get through his joints and tissue. Above average strength.
The site of the butchery still hadn’t been located, so presumably it hadn’t happened in the middle of the city. The police had already canvassed his usual haunts, and talked to the homeless population.
They weren’t, as a rule, overly given to talking to cops. But when one of their own had been hacked to pieces like dog food?
Someone probably would have said something. So it seemed safe to assume that Humpty had been moved after death. Moved, or lured prior to it from his usual haunts to some secluded area, probably to some place outside Kennington. Probably to wherever Mary Ann Cotton had met her end.
The impact on probabilities was unclear to me. If NRK had lured Humpty out of town, then there might not be any impact on the numbers, since the killing wouldn’t have required prodigious strength after all. The killer could have carried him a piece at a time, after everything was separated.
On the other hand, it might skew things a little more in favor of a female killer than a male. Most people, especially vulnerable people, were a lot more likely to get in a strange woman’s car than a strange man’s.
But those odds shifted when we got to the sandy boy.
My brother.
Andy wasn’t thin. He hadn’t been thin in years. His BMI charts would have listed him as obese. Not that he looked fat. Dad bods was the term in vogue at the moment to describe guys who look like he did: a little filled out around the midsection, a little flabby and a little rounder than they should be.
But a long ways away from Santa Claus.
Of course, you didn’t need to be Santa Claus to be hard to transport or overpower. Heavy or not, Andy had always been scrappy and tough. A lot tougher than he looked.
Unless the killer took him completely by surprise, he would have put up a hell of a fight before anyone got a knife near his throat. And the bruising Detective Clark mentioned seemed to rule out a surprise attack.
So NRK had to be capable of overpowering a scrappy guy still in the relative prime of his life; dismembering and transporting, possibly as a whole but certainly in pieces, a skinny guy; and transporting a small woman.
None of which was undoable for a woman, but it would require enough strength to cut the probability steeply.
My mind went back to Delfina and Maria De Jesus Gonzalez. Technically, the murder duo was only part of the whole story. There were two other sisters and a slew of accomplices involved in their decades long sex trafficking and murder spree. But they certainly weren’t the only duo or group of serial killers throughout history.
The Toolbox Killers.
The Moor Murderers.
The Railway Killers.
The Killing Cousins.
The Sunset Strip Killers.
The list went on. Statistical blips, maybe. But low probability didn’t mean never. And a duo would solve some of the issues with transport and movement.
Two relatively short, relatively weak people could manage a larger body together as easily as a single taller, stronger person might alone. Heterosexual couples were perceived as more approachable and less threatening than lone men. Without obvious conflict or over the top public displays of affection, average looking couples didn’t attract much attention. They were practically invisible.
Of course, the logistics would get more complicated with two people. It would mean four hands instead of two, twenty possible sources of fingerprints instead of ten. It would mean two sources of DNA, two people sharing the urge to kill but keeping the secret.
There were good reasons serial killer duos were rare, and there were good reasons they happened. There was strength in numbers, but no one you could trust more than yourself.
I ran through the possibilities as the city shifted around me. I left the downtown area: the city government, and Main Street with its shops and restaurants. I moved through the historical district, and the rows of well-maintained homes and impeccable lawns. I moved into the newer suburban area, with big middleclass homes and big, private yards.
I thought about what I’d say to Megan. It helped, in my experience, to rehearse these things, to have a plan, to consider your contingencies. Some people could handle awkward social interactions off the cuff. I tended not to be one of those people.
And this was definitely going to be an awkward interaction. I hadn’t spoken to Megan in almost ten years. The last thing I’d told her was to go fuck herself.
Now Andy was dead, and here I was. There were a lot of ways this might go bad, quick. And not a lot it wouldn’t.
But if anyone knew if my brother had got himself into trouble recently, or had some connection to the other victims, it’d be her. So I had to try.
Andy’s house – Megan’s house – was sprawling, two stories with bluish gray vinyl siding and white trim accents around the windows, doors and fascia and soffit. The roof was black metal, stamped to look like shingles.
I could see a pool in the back. Not a permanent one, but one of those above ground ones with an inflatable ring at the top.
It was early for that, I thought. But Andy loved pools. It was one of the things he’d always wanted as a kid. Always wanted, but none of his fosters ever had one. So I guessed he wanted to make sure his kids did. Even if it meant setting it up before any sane person would use it.
There were a few swim toys floating around the surface: boats and beach balls and foam noodles. Either Andy had been overly optimistic and dragged stuff out before anyone dared get in the water, or the kids had inherited their dad’s aquatic gene.
The grill was out, too, on the patio opposite the house, and the lawn looked pristine. The whole place looked like Andy.
For a minute, I sat at the end of the driveway, just staring. I was having a hard time breathing. It felt like I was underwater. Deep underwater, a mile from the surface, so far down that I couldn’t see light anymore. So far down that the pressure might break me.
Then a car rolled up behind me, some kind of foreign electric model traveling slow, mindful of the residential speed limits. I saw it approaching in my rearview mirror, and I took a breath. I pressed the turn signal and pulled into the driveway.
There were three cars there besides my own. One, I didn’t recognize. It was an old Ford pickup truck, resting too unevenly and sporting too much rust to look at home in the neighborhood. Its windows were down, its doors unlocked, and its engine was dripping some kind of oily substance.
The others were a matching pair: Andy’s maroon Subaru Forester and Megan’s blue Forester. They were that kind of couple: matching vehicles in the yard, and couples costumes at Halloween, and pajamas on Christmas Eve, and matching opinions about everything, until they were practically indistinguishable from one another.
The truth was, it creeped me out a little. But Andy had no problem with it. ‘Two shall become one flesh,’ he’d say. ‘It’s how marriage is supposed to work.’
It seemed more like some hackneyed attempt at cloning than marriage to me. But that was their business. So I walked past the his and hers Subaru’s. I walked past the rusty old Ford, and up the walk to the door. I rang the doorbell and waited.
Nothing happened for ten long seconds.
I glanced around the yard a second time. No sign of any recent use: no toys on the lawn, or picnic ware or anything else. Not in the front yard.
There wasn’t anyone at the windows, peering out and trying to figure out who had rung the bell.
It was just after one in the afternoon, and the sun was shining brightly. It’d be way too early for bedtime, but maybe not too early for naps. Maybe, after the kids got the news, the best thing to do was cry themselves to sleep.
That’s what Andy had done
when we got the news, about the drunk driver. So maybe that’s what his kids were doing right now.
Except, that didn’t explain the pickup truck. Whoever it belonged to didn’t live here. I was pretty sure of that. So they wouldn’t be napping.
I glanced back at the truck, and then at the Foresters, and then at the houses up and down the road. I frowned.
I could see eight driveways clearly, and another five mostly unobstructed. Only one of them had a vehicle parked outside, and it was a cable company’s work truck. Probably, someone come to fix the cable, or maybe install it.
Because this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people parked in the driveway. This was the kind of neighborhood where people parked in their two or three car attached garages.
My eyes went to the garage overhead doors: two of them, his and hers, for their his and hers SUVs. Except the SUVs were outside.
I rang the doorbell once more, gave it twenty seconds, and then headed toward the garage. Aside from the two overhead doors, there was a regular door just to the side of the garage. There was a doorbell here, too. I could see light coming from inside, behind a drawn curtain.
I rang the doorbell. Five seconds passed. Then the curtain drew back, and a face peered out at me. Megan’s face – but, not Megan’s face.
It had the same oval shape, the same bright blue eyes and aquiline nose. It had the same small, tense mouth. But this face was a little leaner – too lean – and a little younger. Maybe four or five years younger. And harder, too. And, male.
He stared at me from behind the curtain, no recognition on his face. Which didn’t surprise me. Andy and I were brothers, or more accurately half-brothers. But we didn’t look much alike. He looked like our mom. He was shorter and blonder, and friendlier looking. I looked like my dad: taller by almost half a foot, with black hair instead of sandy brown.
So the lack of recognition was par for the course. Strangers never pegged us as brothers, or relatives at all. The part that did surprise me though was the complete inaction.
He stared at me, making no move whatsoever – not to open the door, not to call anyone. He just stood there.