by AR Simmons
No exit—probably a twenty-two. Execution just to clean things up.
You watch horrified as your wife and daughter are—No. He started with you.
Empathy hit him like possession.
The women knew they would die as soon as you killed him.
He choked off the emotion and tried to envision the entire crime.
So what did the rest of you do? Did you participate? Or did you just sit and watch?
Like her husband, the woman was tied to a ladder-back chair. A pillowcase covered her head. No wounds were visible. The click of the local criminalist’s camera intruded from the adjoining room where the girl lay.
“Are you about through in here?” he called.
“Yes. Please don’t remove the pillowcase from the woman, sir.”
She sounded as if she should still be in high school. A surprise. Tanner might have to reevaluate his assessment of the sheriff.
“Can we remove this pillowcase now?” he asked when she came into the room.
“You haven’t touched anything yet?” she asked.
Tanner smiled. “No. I’ve been waiting for you.”
He and the young deputy exchanged introductions. She gingerly took a corner of the pillowcase and removed it, placing it in an evidence bag. After noting the dark bruising around the eyes, he peeled back the right eyelid to reveal ruptured capillaries in the conjunctiva where the white met the upper lid.
“Petechia,” said the young tech.
A short nylon cord looped around the woman’s neck and draped over her back. An angry looking cigarette burn was on the right side of her neck about two inches from the trachea and just below the ear.
You burned her, but only once?
He stood behind her, trying for the position the perp would have taken had he burned her while she sat in the chair. The positions of the victims and the perpetrator formed a straight line. Maybe he had the order of the deaths wrong.
If you wanted him to watch while you killed her, why cover her face?
It didn’t feel right. He didn’t know how he knew, and could never have explained it, but he knew the man had died before the wife. He examined the burn more closely. What did it tell him? Right handed, just like whoever clubbed Riepe. That really narrowed things down, didn’t it? The burn had begun to scab over. It wasn’t perimortem.
You did this earlier. You wanted him to either tell you where the money was, or how to get the gun safe open.
Staring at the burn again, he wondered if an autopsy could pinpoint how long before death it had occurred. He had a gut feeling that it been quite a while, perhaps hours.
Why the pillowcase? he thought again. Ashamed of what you did? Really?
Unlike her husband, Mrs. Riepe hadn’t been merely executed.
So, you stood behind her, but didn’t want to see her because … she was too old? Too much like your own mother? Or just not your preferred victim?
What he found in the bedroom made him sick, but no one watching him would know that. The young deputy tried hard to remain detached, but was having trouble.
“Concentrate on the details,” he advised as he examined the youngest victim.
This was what it was all about for you.
Lengths of window blind cord were still attached to bedposts, but the body lay face up diagonally across the bed, arms at the side, hair splayed carelessly. One leg protruded from the sheet in which she was wrapped, hanging over the edge of the bed, bent at the knee. A blue bathrobe lay on the floor. Its belt was knotted around the victim’s neck. A towel covered the face.
Complete control. You needed to hear the terror in her voice, see it in her face, and feel it in your hands.
Tanner wasn’t reading minds; he’d just seen it before, and he’d interviewed sexual sadists in prison. That’s what they had here, but the locals hardly needed him to tell them that.
He tried to make sense of the position of the body.
You were going to take her with you so you could play some more. But that wasn’t a good idea. So at the last minute you threw her back on the bed.
The towel across her face puzzled him, but only for a moment.
“Sheriff Myers,” he called out. “Sir, could you come in here a minute?”
The man swaggered into the room, jaw clenched in an effort to deny his unease in the presence of the nightmare scene. He pointedly didn’t cast a glance at the bed.
“Was that towel over the victim’s face when your men got here?”
“Logan!” bellowed the sheriff. “Come in here.”
A rail-thin deputy came in. His eyes darted to and quickly away from the body on the bed.
“Was that towel over the girl’s face when you found her?” asked his boss.
“No, sir.” He swallowed with difficulty before continuing. “I did that. It seemed like the decent thing to do.”
“You don’t have the luxury of being decent at a crime scene,” said Tanner. “Did you touch anything else?”
“No. Did I destroy evidence or something?”
“I hope not. However, it could have misled us, couldn’t it, sheriff.”
He had found that the more he used “us” and “we” with the local authorities the less “I” problems he had.
“Covering her face wouldn’t have fit,” said the sheriff.
“No. It’s a sign of remorse. There’s no remorse here. Your perp enjoyed what he did to the women, especially this one.”
“Lot of hate, right?”
“I don’t think he hated them—at least not personally.”
“What do you think this is all about then?”
“What’s really interesting is that we seem to have two different crimes here. We’ve got a planned robbery, and then a prolonged and elaborate sexual homicide.”
“I’ll buy the planned part,” said the sheriff. “They got in without breaking glass or jimmying a door. It looks kind of like your typical burglary. Whoever went through that chest of drawers started at the bottom and left them all out. This could be just a burglary gone bad. Maybe that’s why they left so much stuff.”
“There’s a purpose to everything we see here,” said Tanner, trying to win the sheriff over. “What do you think they were looking for?”
“The electronics are still here. Pistols and shotguns too. They took a bunch of rifles. Your ATF boys are going through Riepe’s records for a list. They were probably after the business cash—maybe jewelry too.”
He looked toward the bed. “I just don’t know why they had to kill her in front of her folks?”
“If it’s any consolation, I think the parents died first.”
“Maybe we’ll catch a break on the fingerprints.”
Tanner looked the scene over. There wouldn’t be fingerprints or seminal fluid either.
“How can a man do something like this?” asked the sheriff.
An experienced homicide cop would never ask, but experience came slowly in rural areas.
“So what kind of help can I expect, Agent Tanner?”
Tanner ignored the overt skepticism. “I’ll work up a tentative profile of your killer. I should have something by tomorrow.”
“The way I figure it is that they got the guns and money and then decided to kill the witnesses,” said the sheriff. “Then they decided to rape the girl while they were at it.”
The young criminalist had come back in and was taking close-ups of the girl’s ligature marks.
“He killed her like that,” said Tanner, nodding toward the bed, “because he likes doing it that way. He’s done it before.”
“They were all killed different,” mused the sheriff. “Hey. Maybe there were three of them, and each one of them killing in his own way.”
“I don’t think there’s more than one killer, Sheriff. It occurs, but not often. Accomplices usually say that they didn’t want it to happen.”
Tanner tried to imagine how it came together. “You found the Riepe van down the road, so maybe the other one
, or ones, went on with the guns while the killer stayed behind and did this.”
“Two crimes, two motives?”
“I think so.” Tanner closed the pad containing his notes and sketches. “I’ll need copies of the crime scene photos, plus anything you can get me on the victims, and a preliminary coroner’s report. I’ll try to get into this guy’s head and tell you what kind of person you need to look for.”
•••
Near Turnbough Camp, Hawthorn County, Missouri, 8:15 PM
Deputy Richard Carter ran the back roads of Hawthorn County on night patrol, unaware of the manhunt one hundred and seventy-five miles to the southeast. He was not doing real police work, nor did he expect to. Things had happened to him. That’s what his wife never tired of telling him. However, things hadn’t just happened to him; he had caused things to happen. He had done things—things a pardon could neither absolve nor expunge.
He came to Route D and turned off toward one of the county’s many named places. The old lumber camps, railroad stops, and post offices had evaporated, leaving nothing behind but names quickly losing their significance. Once, he had mistaken them for real towns rather than place names that had only survived as useful landmarks. He turned on the radio briefly to catch the news and weather from the NPR station at Arkansas State University.
“… in the northeast Arkansas town of Marked Tree. They were killed in what local authorities term a ‘firearms theft.’ The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is assisting the investigation,” intoned the announcer.
Quick news bits followed along with a summary weather forecast. He was curious about the arms theft, but listening to civilian radio was against department procedure. Carter had no idea that he would be involved in the manhunt in less than a week.
•••
Poplar Bluff, Missouri
The two thousand tempted him to score, but that wasn’t smart in a strange town. Opting for safer stimulation, he found a run-down place called the “Blue Moon,” where he wolfed down a greasy steak sandwich and allowed himself two beers. Scanning the room, he saw mostly overweight, shabby women trolling the gloom, the one exception being a girl in jeans and cowboy boots who kept making eye contact until her redneck escort finally noticed. She was trying to involve him in a fight, which would have been just fine—under different circumstances.
He called it a bust at 11:45 and hit the door. Twenty minutes later, he hit the US 60 ramp north of Poplar Bluff and headed west through the sparsely settled eastern edge of the Ozark Plateau, holding his speed right at the legal limit. It was vanilla driving, but he didn’t want to attract the attention of a bored patrolman. Traffic was light, mostly semis like his old man used to drive.
Thin wisps of devil fog threaded across the highway whenever it dipped into valleys. He tooled along, his mind less on his driving than on the gun dealer’s daughter and the woman at the bar. As he topped a hill, a brownish-gray blur hit the periphery of his vision a split-second before a hard thump sent the Contour fishtailing onto the gravelly shoulder. Spinning to the right, it slid with a sickening screech of metal, and came to a sudden stop at forty-five degrees with the passenger side wedged hard against the rock face of a road cut. Its remaining unbroken headlight angled skyward, illuminating steaming clouds of coolant.
Once the air bag deflated, he grabbed the door handle to keep from sliding down and unbuckled himself. Now that he had time to think, he realized that he had hit a deer. He braced his foot on the console and forced the door open. He managed to extricate himself just as headlights lit the tops of the pine trees on the rocky bluff to his left. Not until his feet hit the loose gravel of the shoulder did it register that he would be in deep trouble if the approaching vehicle were a patrol car.
As it slowed, Paget slipped the butterfly knife from his pocket and flicked it open. The car closed in without the appearance of flashing lights, and crunched to a stop on the eastbound shoulder.
The window came down. “Are you hurt?”
He couldn’t see her face, but she sounded young.
“No, I … I don’t think so,” he said, affecting a shaky voice as he closed the knife and put it back in his pocket. “But I’ve got a … kind of a weak heart, and I feel kind of … funny, you know.”
“Do you have like medication or something?”
“No, but I think …” He put his hand to his chest and slumped to a sitting position. “I think need to get to a doctor.”
“Oh my God!” said the woman, as she jerked the door open.
Sandals clapped on the pavement as she ran across the highway. When she knelt, he got a glimpse of her face. She wasn’t bad.
“Careful, I’d hate to see you ruin that pretty dress,” he said weakly.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get you to the hospital.”
“Maybe I’ll be okay until an ambulance gets here,” he said with a grimace. “Did you call 911?”
“I don’t have a cell phone,” she said apologetically. “Can you stand?”
“I’ll try.”
He winced as she helped him to his feet. Leaning heavily against her, Paget felt the heat of her body as she guided him to the car.
“You’ll have to get in the back,” she said. “My baby’s up front.”
A brat! he thought with disgust. Like I need that.
Paget let her help him in, but grabbed her wrist when she tried to fasten his seat belt. “No. I don’t think I can stand the pressure.”
After she pulled onto the road, she glanced into the rear view, but didn’t see him. “Are you okay back there?”
“I think so,” he said, sliding his hands appreciatively over the Thunderbird’s leather upholstery.
“By the way,” she said. “I’m Cathy Hansen.”
“I’m John Kruger,” he said from directly behind her. “Don’t speed.”
She assumed that he had slid behind her so that he could lean against the door. “I’ll risk a ticket. We’ve got—”
Cathy caught her breath in surprise as he took her by the hair. She wrestled with the incredible reality. There was a knife at her throat!
“Slow down!” He jerked her head back for emphasis. “You got that?”
Stunned, she couldn’t respond.
“I said, ‘You got that?’“
“Yes,” she gasped.
She briefly considered flooring the car and ramming it into the pines lining the highway, but couldn’t risk it with Billy in the car.
“Good. Now let’s go home, Cathy.”
Paget needed her calm and controllable. “That car was stolen,” he said. “I just need a place to stay until I can find a way out of here.”
“You can have my car,” she said quickly. “Just let us out and I won’t say anything.”
“Right. A patrolman comes along—you tell him which way I went, and it’s all over. I’m not going back to prison. Just do what you’re told, and nothing will happen to you … or your baby.”
The threat to Billy frightened her beyond thinking.
“Will your husband be home when we get there?” The pressure of the blade increased. “Tell me the truth now.”
“I’ll know if you’re lying,” he murmured, now comfortable with the situation.
“I’m not married—I mean … not anymore.”
“So will the guy you’re shacking up with be home?”
“I live alone.”
“Well good. Maybe I’ll just stay with you and the kid a day or two. You got a job?”
“No,” she lied.
“Figures.”
•••
Marked Tree, Arkansas, April 27, 9:00 AM
PROFILE OF UNSUB
KILLER OF THE RIEPE FAMILY
MARKED TREE, AR
The perp is a white male, aged twenty-five to thirty-five.
He has a criminal record stretching back to his juvenile years involving voyeurism, burglary, and/or arson. He has served jail time, possibly for sexual assault, and/or burglary
. The crime is atypical of his usual MO in that the motive was primarily robbery, and in that he worked with another/other person(s).
He is unmarried, divorced, or separated. If he has a consensual relationship presently, it is a stormy one, probably abusive.
He probably abuses drugs and/or alcohol.
He is either a high school or college dropout, with at least normal intelligence.
If he was in the armed services, he will not have served a full enlistment, but will have been discharged either dishonorably or with a face-saving general discharge.
He may be unemployed, but has worked manual labor jobs, like construction, where the work force is transient, and the worksite moves. He has a record of absenteeism and bad debts.
He may have deformed genitals, suffer from impotence, or be a stutterer. To compensate, he may engage in bodybuilding or martial arts.
He belongs to an extremist paramilitary group, but is neither a long-time nor devoted member.
He might own an older model muscle car or macho-image pickup truck.
•••
“You got a crystal ball?” It was a less profane judgment than Tanner anticipated.
“It’s an educated guess, Sheriff. However, I’ve been doing this for a long time.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Narrow your search and take it seriously if you question anyone who fits the profile.”
“Okay. Why couldn’t he be black?”
Northeast Arkansas was delta country, southern both historically and culturally. Tanner chose his words carefully.
“This kind of killer doesn’t usually cross racial lines.”
That had been changing lately, but he had a gut feeling about this one. The killer was Caucasian.
“So we’re looking for a psycho,” mumbled the sheriff. “But you don’t have anything in here about a mental asylum or anything.”
Like many people, Myers saw mental illness in mayhem. Tanner decided to use words that would resonate in the “Bible Belt.”
“This is evil, Sheriff, not insanity. He knows exactly what he’s doing. I doubt that this is his first murder. I can almost guarantee that he’s attempted rape, beaten a woman, or threatened to kill one. You might check for an initial sex crime back about ten years. That’s about the time he probably started.”