by Rachel Ford
“This guy – our guy – is methodical. He’s smart. We might not get the reasons for his actions – yet – but believe me, he’s got reasons.”
He went on in this vein until we reached my house, and no doubt would have went on going on after. But I turned the engine off and got out. The yard still reeked, but not as badly as it had.
Jason got out a moment later. “I know he’s kind of a dick,” he said, trailing me. “But he’s smart.”
I snorted and fitted the key to the locks. “If he’s smart, I’m –”
I cut off as I tried the deadbolt lock. Unlocked.
Jason started to move forward, saying, “You just don’t give him credit because –”
I held my arm out, blocking the way. “Stop.”
He glanced up at me, surprised. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t touch anything.”
He threw a glance around. A worried glance, like someone might spring out from the trees. “Dude, what’s going on?”
“Someone broke into my house.”
Chapter Twenty
Jason was easier to persuade than the cops. He’d been there when I locked up. He’d watched me unlock, too. He knew I wouldn’t have missed one of my locks.
The cop who showed up, though, clearly thought I was out of my mind. It didn’t help that nothing had been taken or damaged.
But someone had opened my door from the inside. They’d turned the regular lock and slammed the door. So it had been locked when I got back. But not the deadbolt.
They’d rifled through my office, too. My investigation boards were out of order. The cop stared at me when I explained, an eyebrow raised. Then he stared at the boards, his eyebrows raising even higher.
“So someone broke into your house and looked at this very curious collection? And what? Took absolutely nothing? Damaged absolutely nothing?”
“They mixed up the order. They separated cases. Look: this one is a cold case in Montana. And this one’s from Wisconsin.”
“Right. But…” He took the board and put them back where they belonged. “No harm done. Right?”
“What are you doing? Aren’t you going to fingerprint them?” I asked. He hadn’t even been wearing gloves.
He didn’t answer. He threw a glance around my office, his eyes lingering on the various boards. “So if this was some kind of B & E, how’d they get in?”
“You’re the cop. You tell me.”
“Look, Mr. Day, isn’t it possible you just forgot to lock the door?”
“No. I never forget to lock the door.”
“He doesn’t,” Jason piped up. “He’s pretty anal about it.”
“Who are you again? What’s your connection to all of this?”
“Brother-in-law. Well I guess not technically. My sister was married to his brother. Before he got killed.”
“Okay. And what are you doing here?”
He shrugged and gestured out to the yard. “Checking on the truck.”
The cop frowned. “You’re the guy with the truck?”
“Not anymore, I guess. But yeah.”
“Okay. So how do you know he locked the door?”
“I was here.”
“You saw him?”
He nodded.
“You’re a hundred percent certain?”
“Yeah. Ninety-nine percent, anyway.”
The cop sighed. “Mr. – what was your name?”
“Rathe. Jason Rathe.”
“Right. Well, Mr. Rathe, you’re ninety-nine percent certain you saw him lock the door?”
“Absolutely.”
He made a note and nodded. “Okay.”
“Are you going to dust for prints?” I asked again.
The cop gave me a sour look. But he nodded. “Sure.”
He finished a walkthrough with an air of extreme skepticism – until we found the jimmied bedroom window lock. The intruder had used some kind of knife or bladed tool to flip the sash lock. And he’d scuffed the wood in the process. There was a fresh gash, much lighter in color than the dark finish, and a splinter hanging off the frame.
At the sight of that, the cop frowned, took pictures, and got his fingerprint kit.
He found plenty of fingerprints, but whether they were mine or someone else’s, I could only guess. He urged me again to look around, and catalogue my possessions.
But nothing was missing. I was sure of that. Someone had rifled through my belongings, but they hadn’t taken anything.
“Hey,” Jason said, “you think this has something to do with the case?”
“What case?” the cop asked.
“The big one. The Nursery Rhyme Killer.”
“Why would it?”
Jason shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s the brother of one of the victims, right? And what about my truck?”
“What about your truck?”
“Well, how did it go up?”
“Why would the Nursery Rhyme Killer burn your truck, Jason?” I asked, a bit incredulously.
“Maybe he thought it was yours.”
“That’s not how he operates.”
“Sure it is. He burned the judge’s place, didn’t he?”
The cop cleared his throat and suggested he run the prints before anyone jumped to any conclusions. “Still, I’ll alert the investigating detective, since there have been two incidents here. Not that I think they’re connected. But just in case.
“And you might want to think about renting a room somewhere for a day or two.”
So I headed back to the hotel and spoke with the woman at the desk about extending our stay. She tapped her keyboard and hemmed and hawed for a minute. “There is a reservation for your room but let me see…I think I can…ah. There we go.
“Someone else had requested a king suite, but I was able to move them to another floor. As far as your other room – room 512 – that’s no problem at all.”
She quoted a price that made me flinch, but I paid anyway. Resettling three times in as many days was more than I wanted to deal with.
Then I got back to work. At least, I tried. I spent most of my time staring at my computer screen. Something was bothering me. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
It wasn’t the breaking and entering. Jason had gone wild with theories on the topic. He was convinced I was the Nursery Rhyme Killer’s next target.
I hoped he was right. I hoped he’d bring himself to me. But I figured my luck wouldn’t be that good. No, my money was on another source altogether: Tiny.
Travis had said it was done. He had no more interest in Jason. I believed him. He’d got his five grand. I’d walked into his shop, where his guys were working. And he’d let me walk out without interference.
No, I believed Travis when he said his business with Jason had concluded.
But Tiny was another thing altogether. Tiny had come into work with an easy assignment and ended up in the hospital before the day was done.
And then his boss had got his money, and decided the case was closed. That’d be enough to piss off a reasonable, level-headed guy. It’d be enough to drive a stupid guy to do stupid, impulsive things. Like go behind his boss’s back. Like break into the house of a guy who kicked his ass two days ago.
And maybe even torch a truck in his front yard.
But that wasn’t what bothered me. I’d handled Tiny once. I could do it again if he went on being a problem.
No, there was something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I kept at it for the rest of the afternoon but got nowhere. Jason showed up to use the hot tub and didn’t seem to hear me tell him to get lost. He’d apparently been working out in the first-floor gym. “Everything hurts. Everything.”
So I got us food. Subs this time, instead of fried chicken.
Jason was still in the tub when I got back. I tossed him his food and was vaguely disappointed when he caught it before it hit the water. “Thanks, man.”
“I’m going to start bolting
my door to keep you out.”
He laughed like it was a joke. “Hey, you see the latest update?”
“What update?”
“The case. They’re charging the guy, Bret.”
I hadn’t seen it, but I pulled up the news. Sure enough, the headlines – local and national – were all about the case. And specifically, all about Bret Myslinski. He was being charged with second degree homicide in the death of Breelyn Thayne. There would be other charges: providing false statements to investigators, interfering with an investigation, and so on.
But the murder charge was the one that dominated the headlines. That, and the chief’s rather brief statement when asked about the other murders: “This remains an ongoing investigation. We will update the public as soon as we have details.”
Details about Breelyn’s life trickled in after that. The consensus seemed to be that she was a good kid, with bad taste in men. Her parents were divorced and each remarried more than once. Both had kids from the subsequent relationships. Both acknowledged growing up hadn’t always been easy for Breelyn.
But she’d been a straight-A student who was going places.
Until she hit sixteen. Then she met and moved in with a thirty-two year old named Jake Turney. She went from getting good grades to skipping classes. She failed her junior year. Half a year later, she ended up in the hospital with broken bones. He ended up in prison.
She retook classes in a neck brace and got her GED. She started community college for nursing. She looked like she was getting her life on track again.
“She had a few boyfriends after that,” her mom said in a tearful interview. “But nothing serious. Jake had scared her off dating, I think.”
Until Bret came along, anyway. “She thought he walked on water. I’d never seen her so serious about anyone. Not since Jake. Which scared me, you know? I warned her. I tried to tell her not to let her heart get ahead of her head.”
“I don’t know what the hell she saw in him,” a brother named Dylan told interviewers. “She’s working sixty hours a week at the hospital, pulling double shifts, and he’s not working at all. She’s killing herself to settle his debts, and meanwhile he’s buying new boats and snowmobiles.”
“I knew I should of beat his ass the first time I saw him,” her father said. His face was red and swollen, and his voice was choked. “I knew he wasn’t good enough for her. But a killer? A serial killer? I didn’t figure he had the brains for that.”
Interviewers spoke to Breelyn’s friends. They ran stories about her pets growing up, her dream to put herself through medical school, and of course the thoughts of anyone who had ever known her and was willing to get in front of a camera.
A few declared themselves unsurprised. “Breelyn was the kind of girl who always found trouble, you know? I don’t mean she was looking for it, exactly. Just, it found her anyway.”
Some declared it to be an absolute shock. “I just can’t believe it. She was the nicest girl you ever met. Living with a killer? I never would have guessed.”
Where Myslinski was concerned, though, the reporting delved beyond puff pieces and grief porn into actual journalism. Some of it was sensational and some speculative, but there were a lot of solid details.
And absolutely none of them changed my mind: Bret Myslinski was not the Nursery Rhyme Killer.
He was a serially unemployed loser with a lot of debt and a handful of misdemeanors, mostly stemming from traffic violations and disorderly conduct. He was personable and charming. Until he wasn’t, anyway. He made friends easily and lost them frequently.
Some of his buddies had good things to say about him. “He was the guy you always called when things were going to shit, you know? He’d show up with a twelve-pack, or two. And things wouldn’t seem so bad after all.”
Some of those same friends recalled that he had, “a bit of a temper. I mean, everyone does. But Bret had maybe more than most.”
Others had less rosy stories. “He’s an asshole,” his brother Dave declared. The article helpfully transposed some of the letters with asterisks. Apparently, so I wouldn’t be offended by the language. “And the laziest son-of-a-bitch you ever met. He lived with Katie and me for a summer two years ago, and it was the stupidest thing I ever did.”
There were accounts of disagreements that became brawls. There were former friends who accused him of stealing from them, and former coworkers who said he’d been let go for dipping into the till. “Nothing we could prove. But money always went missing when he was on shift.”
There was an old boss who fired him because he’d blown up at members of his team one too many times. “He’s the kind of guy you figure, if anyone ever shows up with a gun, it’ll be him. Crazy eyes, bad temper.”
There was an ex who said he’d given her a blackeye once and had pictures to prove it. “That was the final straw for me. He was watching TV and I asked him a question. And bam. He’s a real piece of bleep.”
There was also an ex who said he was the nicest guy she ever dated. “No way he harmed that girl. I never had a man treat me so good as Bret did. I would’ve married him, if he’d asked, he was that good a guy. I probably still would. Just, don’t tell my boyfriend.” She laughed at that, and added, “But don’t you listen to no one who tells you different.”
When asked about allegations that he’d beat former girlfriends, she laughed again. “You mean that skank Mikala? Yeah, I heard about it. I don’t believe it for a second. And even if he did, she’s the most annoying bleep you ever met. I don’t even blame him.”
News anchors speculated that this might be the end of the Nursery Rhyme Killings, now that Myslinski had been apprehended. Experts – and a smattering of idiots – debated the assumption that Myslinski was the serial killer.
Wyatt Wagley fell squarely in the idiot category. But for some inexplicable reason, he scored two interviews overnight. He used the opportunity to reiterate his theory that Myslinski wasn’t the Nursery Rhyme Killer. “He’s a copycat. That’s all. He absolutely killed Breelyn. But Breelyn wasn’t a real NRK vic.”
As to the question of who the real killer was, he allegedly had a rock-solid theory on that, too. But naturally he wasn’t ready to share it. “I’m giving the police a first run at it. I don’t want to spook the guy, so he disappears.
“But if they don’t act on it, I’ll have the truth up on my site by Tuesday, eight AM central standard.”
Jason was excited. “I don’t know why you hate him so much, dude. He thinks like you.”
I, on the other hand, felt more certain than ever that he was nothing more than a dumbass. “No he doesn’t. Myslinski isn’t a copycat.”
“I thought you said he was? That he couldn’t be the Nursery Rhyme Killer?”
“He’s not. But he’s not a copycat, either. They’re hitting him with murder in the second degree: murder, but not pre-mediated. The Nursery Rhyme Killings were all premediated.”
“Maybe that’s all they thought they could get to stick. Maybe they’ll upgrade the charge when they get more evidence.”
“They won’t. But it’s not just what the cops say. It fits what most people say about him: violent temper, unpredictable behavior. The kind of guy to beat you to death in an argument. Not the kind of guy to stage elaborate killings.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“He beat that girl to death, and then tried to cover his ass by making it look like she was another victim of the serial killer. Turn the investigation away from him.
“But if the nursery rhyme killings weren’t going on right now, he would have tried to pass it off like some kind of random violence. A home invasion, or whatever.”
Jason hemmed and hawed and finally declared it to be a good point. “Still, Wagley might have meant that. They don’t give you long in those interviews.”
“He might have meant ‘not a copycat’ by calling it a copycat? Do words mean the opposite for geniuses now?”
He rolled his eyes. “No. Ju
st, not everyone’s as anal about things as you are.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Detective Clark called me Monday morning. She wanted to meet up. We apparently had “things to discuss.” So I invited her to the hotel, and we met in the lobby.
In the lobby, because I didn’t want to risk her spotting the investigation boards and getting the wrong idea. Or, the right idea, since I was essentially lying to her about the extent of my interest in the case.
Aside from the woman at the desk, we had the lobby to ourselves. “Coffee?” I asked as she stepped in.
“Sure,” she said.
I grabbed two travel mugs of steaming hot coffee, two stirrers, a handful of creamers for the pair of us, and a handful of sweetener packets for her.
“I don’t know if you like the artificial stuff or sugar or what,” I said, dropping them onto the table between us.
“None of the above. But thank you.”
She poured creamer into her coffee, and so did I: unsweetened half and half. It wasn’t milk, but close enough. Then I mixed it.
She watched me with a curious expression.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. You’re just – very particular about your coffee.”
“So?”
“So nothing.”
I harrumphed and took a sip.
“You stir it three times before you drink. Did you know that?”
“What?”
“You did the same thing with your matcha. Three stirs. Three sips. Repeat ad infinitum...”
The hint of amusement in her tone reminded me of Jason. So I snapped the lid on my cup with a kind of finality. Not this time. “Is that why you wanted to talk to me, Detective? To ask how I like my coffee?”
She smiled. “No. And I appreciate you making time to see me. But I wanted to ask you about the fire, and the break in.”
“What?”
“At your place. I got a call – a very worried call, I might add – from one of our patrol officers. He got a call about a break-in at your house yesterday. And apparently it’s not the first incident in the last few days.”