Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  Then Morris had sent a guy to go talk to Mrs. Harper. She’d been alarmed, initially, and then irate. Of course she wasn’t any kind of killer. Of course she hadn’t raised a killer. She didn’t care if he was an FBI agent: he should be ashamed of asking a law-abiding, God fearing citizen a question like that.

  Eventually, the agent had managed to convince her that he wasn’t accusing her of anything. He just wanted to know if she sold the car. This earned him another lecture. Why would she sell to a killer? Didn’t he hear her the first time?

  She was a law-abiding citizen. The car was in the garage, where she’d left it ever since she lost her license the year before. Some fool at the Department of Motor Vehicles had said she wasn’t fit to drive anymore. Another useless government bureaucrat making the lives of law-abiding citizens more difficult.

  In the end, she did grant him permission to look in the garage. Indeed, it sounded like she went out with him just to witness his humiliation when the vehicle was exactly where she’d left it.

  Which didn’t turn out to be quite the triumph the old woman anticipated. The car was there, but someone had stripped off the plates.

  A BOLO had gone out for the plates as soon as I talked to Morris. Now a second went out, for all sedans matching that make and model driven by a white male with a possible facial injury.

  They didn’t get more specific than that. NRK might dye his hair, now that he’d been spotted. That would impact hair color descriptions, but also might change perceptions about his age. He might switch back to his original license plates, whatever they were. Or he might have another set of stolen plates for the occasion.

  Beyond the BOLO, they were working through a list of cars of that make and model in the area. Which sounded a lot more promising than it actually was, since there were tens of thousands of them registered in the state.

  They weren’t going to figure it out overnight. I knew that. But with a sketch of NRK’s face all over the news, a description of his vehicle, and the leads we had? Even with the bad news, I felt pretty confident. We were going to get him. It was just a matter of time now.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Clark talked to Morris, who called a contact he had with the ATF. I wouldn’t have to worry about Tiny anymore, she said. That situation would be resolved soon.

  I didn’t ask for details. The lack of sleep and the adrenaline had finally caught up to me. So when they were done with me, I was happy to go home.

  I let my boss know I needed to take an emergency day of PTO. I told her I’d gone to the hospital, but I was alright. She was more concerned and solicitous than she needed to be, but eventually I got through that I was alright. I just needed the day off.

  Then I went to bed. I slept for fourteen hours, and woke up shortly after midnight. I’d missed dozens of calls and text messages.

  At first, I worried that I’d slept through NRK’s capture. Then I was disappointed when I realized he hadn’t been apprehended yet.

  The messages came from Clark and Morris and my boss, who wanted to know how I was doing. They came from Jason – over two dozen from him alone – with updates to the case.

  OMG. Dude they released a sketch of NRK.

  He almost killed a cop today, but she got away.

  Dude, you got to read this.

  There were links and voice messages and hopeful predictions that they were about to capture the killer. He even sent me a screenshot of the artist’s sketch.

  I yawned and got out of bed. I thought about texting back to tell him I knew all about the incident because I’d been there. I decided against it. Mildly gratifying my ego wouldn’t be worth the ten thousand questions that would inevitably ensue.

  I made myself coffee and stretched. I responded to a few of the messages. Yes, I was alive and well. No, I didn’t need anything. Yes, I would be online later for work.

  Then I sat down and thought about the new pieces of the puzzle, and the way they all fit together. I hadn’t had a chance to really do that yet.

  We had seen the Nursery Rhyme Killer. We knew what he looked like. We knew what he drove, or at least what he drove some of the time. Which meant, obviously, we knew what we were looking for.

  But what else did it mean? The car didn’t tell us much. It was a mid-range, domestic sedan owned by millions of Americans. Nothing sporty, nothing fancy. Just comfortable, reliable, and reasonably affordable.

  NRK’s appearance was another story, though. I’d thought he was a cop the first time I spotted him. He had a cop like bearing. That’s what I’d told Clark.

  So what did that mean? Had I completely missed the mark? It had been a snap judgement based on the haircut, physique and bearing. But there’d been factors potentially influencing that judgement.

  I’d spotted NRK multiple times in the same few days. And I hadn’t assumed he was a cop the first time I saw him. I thought back to the church parking lot, right after Clark had caught me poking through Andy’s office.

  I remembered the guy with salt and pepper hair sitting in his car.

  No, I hadn’t seen a cop. I’d seen a mourner, come to pay his respects for my brother. So maybe my brain had seen what it expected to see. Maybe I’d interpreted the presence of the same guy multiple times in a row as a cop because that was the only thing that had made sense to me at the time.

  I thought back to the way he walked, and the way he held himself.

  No, I hadn’t imagined it. There was something there. Maybe not a cop. Maybe former military, or FBI. But not a civilian. There was too much control, too much self-possession for a civilian.

  And too much insider knowledge, too. He’d been smart from the get-go. He’d put thought into every detail. Hell, he’d gone to the length of stealing plates from a similar vehicle to cover his tracks. He’d been trailing Clark for weeks. He’d probably trailed his other victims too.

  He had to, to get the insider knowledge he clearly had. He knew how to avoid security cameras. He knew where to strike and when. He knew who would be home at what time.

  All of which pointed to some kind of training. Not a guarantee, of course. A smart person could put in the time and research, and do what he’d done. Probably.

  But a cop wouldn’t need to do the research. He’d know what cops would look for. And NRK wouldn’t be the first cop or ex-cop in history to go on a killing spree.

  The Golden State Killer.

  Christopher Jordan Dorner.

  David Stephen Middleton.

  Of the two, I was leaning toward ex-cop. No one could work a job and carry on the killing schedule the Nursery Rhyme Killer had managed. So if NRK had been a cop at some point, he wasn’t anymore, or he was on some kind of leave.

  There was another reason, too. NRK had murdered lots of people. But he hadn’t been sadistic about it except in two cases: Dandridge and the cops. He’d murdered Shelby Dandridge’s kids in one of the most horrific ways imaginable. He’d addressed the killings to her, and left her alive to deal with the fallout.

  And he’d let the police know that he was coming for them: that at least five officers would die. He hit them in their homes and leisure time. He let them know they weren’t safe anywhere. Their locks, their guns, their badges and their training didn’t mean a thing. Kids and family and even retirement wouldn’t save them.

  And he’d called them pigs in the process. The whole of Kennington, the whole nation – the international news cycle – was watching and listening and repeating that rhyme. People didn’t remember James Ryan Cooper as the rising star rookie that he’d been. They remembered him as the first Little Piggy.

  David Dorn’s entire career had been boiled down to Piggy Number Two. A whole man, a whole lifetime of service. Forever overshadowed by that rhyme.

  There was too much malice in that to be overlooked.

  I got up and paced the room. Everything was falling into place now in my mind. It was like the blinders had been lifted, and I was blinking into sunlight for the first time in weeks.
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  I’d starred Judge Dandridge and Captain Dorn’s names on my board, because they were the outliers. They were the cases that didn’t follow the same pattern as everyone else. Now, I was starting to get some idea of how they connected.

  Dorn had been on the force for decades. Dandridge had been a prosecutor, and then a judge at several levels. A cop, especially a cop who would have started when NRK was in his early twenties, would almost certainly have encountered both of them.

  I remembered again the feeling that I knew NRK from somewhere, that I’d seen him before. I headed to my computer and pulled up google, the same as I’d done the morning before in the parking garage.

  I hadn’t had a chance to go through with the search then. Tiny and his goons interfered first.

  But now I did. I put Dandridge’s name in and searched. The familiar slew of results, so many of them dealing with the fire and NRK, came up. I narrowed my search terms. I wanted cases she prosecuted. I’d start there. I got a lot of news articles that mentioned her days as a prosecutor. But the mentions were largely in passing.

  I got the public case record search too. But that was less helpful. It was all text, no photographs. I didn’t know who I was looking for. I didn’t even know if he was a defendant or an investigating officer, or a relative of the accused or an interested party. I didn’t know if this was a revenge spree over some kind of personal animus, or a general animosity toward cops and prosecutors, or something else entirely. I just knew what he looked like.

  I figured the motive would be more obvious once I figured out NRK’s identity.

  I switched to Dorn. I pulled up all the same articles I’d seen before. Pages and pages of results. A needle in a haystack.

  So I tried something else. I pulled up an advanced search and I put in keywords to exclude: NRK. Nursery rhyme killer. Nursery rhyme killing.

  Then I entered the terms I wanted to search on: Shelby Dandridge. David Dorn. I put them in the exact match category. I didn’t want results that included one but not the other. If I was right, they were linked in some way to NRK. Both of them. Maybe this would tell me why.

  I got a list of twenty-three results. Most of them pertained to a single case. The top result had a photograph along with a name: Bernard Thurn.

  I stared, stunned. I’d seen NRK alright, back when I was trying to figure out who might want to do Dorn in. He was the rogue cop, the officer David Dorn busted almost thirty years ago. Bernard Thurn.

  He was very young and very lean in the old photograph, with light, close-cropped hair and chiseled features. He looked like a generic, vaguely military white guy back in the day. The kind of guy you’d see in movies about soldiers or cops. Maybe not the lead, but one of his friends.

  He’d filled out since then. He’d aged and grown facial hair. But he was the same guy. No doubt about that. He had the same light in his eyes, the same self-assurance.

  I picked up my phone and started to dial Clark’s number. The phone sounded with high, electronic tones with each keypress. I got five digits in.

  Then I heard a creak behind me: old wood, soft, slow movement.

  I swiveled in my seat, spinning to see what had made the noise. But I knew already. I lived alone in the middle of nowhere. I had no pets, no family; nothing that should be making noise in the middle of the night.

  Bernard Thurn stood there, two and a half decades older than the photo on my computer, with a busted nose and the same smug expression on his face. And a Glock 43 in his hand, aimed straight at my center mass.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The G43 is just over six and a quarter inches long, with a barrel under three and a half inches long. A great gun to conceal. Its magazine held six 9mm rounds, any one of which could end my life in a fraction of a second.

  I didn’t know if this was the 9mm he’d used on Lange and Dorn. There was no suppressor on the end of it. But there was no need for one. We weren’t in town, with neighbors ten feet away, where a shot in the middle of the night would wake up half the street.

  This was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, inside a house all by itself. My nearest neighbor was an old lady who lived across the street, and either was or pretended to be half-deaf.

  An old lady who was a known crank. So even if she heard anything, and even if she realized what that something signified, the police would be unlikely to take her too seriously. They probably had a stack of reports from her about everything from offensively loud geese to suspicious bicyclers.

  No, the worst Thurn had to worry about was the sound. A pistol in an enclosed space of moderate size would be loud. Loud enough to do some real damage to his hearing if he did it over and over again. But one or two shots, once?

  Not a big deal. Not worth adding another six or seven inches to the length of the gun. Not worth making it harder to conceal, and easier for your victim to grab.

  Those observations and realizations flashed through my mind in the first two seconds. He was watching me. Smiling.

  “Thurn,” I said.

  He nodded, just a quick tip of his head. “You’re a smart guy, Owen. Not smart enough, obviously.” He had a good voice, even when it was dripping with malevolence, like it was now. The kind of voice that no doubt could have been charming and trustworthy when he had a mind to make it so.

  The kind of voice that might convince an old lady to let you into her shop after hours. Or that might convince a young woman to take you up on an offered ride. Or a kid to get in, out of bad winter weather.

  Or a chronic do-gooder, to get into your car on some spur of the moment pretext.

  “Smart enough to end you,” I said. “It’s over, Thurn. The cops know all about you. They’ve got your picture. They’re running the rope for DNA. It’s just a matter of time before they figure out your name. Just like I did. It’s over.”

  He nodded. “For both of us. You fucked me over, Owen. Now it’s my turn.” He shrugged. “And, it’s not over yet. Even when they figure out my name, they still have to catch me. That’s not going to happen. Not right away.”

  “So what? You’ve got more people on your kill list? More cops you want to off?”

  “You mean Clark? Oh, she wasn’t a target. Not really. She was more…” He shrugged again. “A challenge. A lark. I needed to kill five piggies. Why not the bitch who was hunting me? Now that’s changed, of course. She went and painted a target on herself.

  “So I’ll think of something special for her. But you first.”

  He smiled, happy with himself.

  I had no plays. I was seated, feet away from him. If I tried to move, he’d shoot me. If I sat still, he’d shoot me. I was going to die.

  But at least I’d die knowing that the Nursery Rhyme Killer was done. Whatever his bravado, his spree was over. If I’d ID’ed him, Clark wouldn’t be far behind.

  So I said, “Go ahead, then. Get it over with.”

  His smile broadened. He glanced at the gun and then me. “Oh, this? No. That’s not tonight’s schedule of events, Owen. I mean, it can be, if you like. If you try to be heroic.

  “I can shoot you, maybe in the thigh or the kneecaps. I don’t mind. It’s not like anyone’s going to hear the shot, or you screaming. And I don’t need you mobile.” He slipped his gloved hand into his pocket and took out a pair of handcuffs. “But if that doesn’t appeal, you can put these on.”

  “Why?”

  “Catch,” he said. “Or I shoot.” Then he tossed them over.

  I caught them one-handed. My mind raced. Dying at this son-of-a-bitch’s hands was one thing. Not what I wanted to do, but it didn’t look like I was going to get a say in the matter.

  But cuffing myself, for whatever he had in store? Hell no. Then again, what good would a bullet through my kneecaps do?

  “Put them on,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He lowered the barrel of the gun, toward my legs. “Because I’ll shoot if you don’t.”

  I slipped it around one wrist and shut i
t. “What’s my rhyme?” I asked. “I suppose I get a rhyme?”

  “You’ll see,” he said. Then, he grinned. “Or not. Other side. Now.”

  I sighed and started to move my right wrist toward the metal. I wasn’t going to do it. I was going to charge him. He’d shoot me. I knew that. But if I moved fast enough, maybe I could cover the distance between us. Maybe I could reach him before I died, or before he immobilized me.

  Even if I didn’t, well, I’d probably bleed out pretty fast with six bullet holes in me. Maybe faster than whatever he had in mind.

  The irony was not lost on me. This is what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? Not this in particular, of course. But I’d wanted to be the one to confront him, to find him, to have my shot at ending him. So much for that.

  A familiar phrase floated through my thoughts. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

  Maybe Andy was getting the last laugh after all. Because that’s how it was going to be in the end, wasn’t it? Clark or someone else would cast the first stone.

  I’d be another victim. Another person reduced to some ridiculous line. Maybe I’d be Little Boy Blue who cried when he woke, or the Muffin Man who lived on Drury Lane. Maybe I’d be the weasel who popped around a mulberry bush or a cobbler’s bench.

  My right hand reached my side. I started to shift my weight. The muscles in my legs started to tense, so I could vault out of my seat.

  Then, I saw something in the dark hall behind Thurn. A pale face. A woman’s face. She touched a finger to her lips.

  Detective Clark.

  “Now,” Thurn said. “Or I’ll shoot. Don’t think I won’t, Owen.”

  I clasped the cuff around my wrist.

  He smiled. “Good boy. Now, get up, slowly.”

  I did what he said. He slipped the gun into a holster under his jacket and stepped toward me. Quick as a flash, he punched me.

  I saw it coming a second before it hit. I started to move, but not quickly enough. His knuckles careened into my nose and cheek. Not with the full force he’d intended, but it was enough.