The Husbands

by T. J. Brearton

  “Okay.”

  The air was heavy, and she let everything settle a moment before she said, “You’re right, though.”

  “I’m right?”

  “Things that can happen to a projectile when it hits bone, mushrooming it, misshaping it, could make the striations hard to discern. Just like with Payton and Haig. So I don’t want to sit around and wait for ballistics matching. I want to work the people, work the killer.” She moved to the office door and had a look, then heard Severin’s voice float up from the basement before continuing in a soft voice. “We need a list of everyone who knew Ted Archer. Everyone he worked with, hung out with, his family members. The same for Payton and Haig. Then I want to cross-reference them.”

  “I’ve been working on that. I’ll hand you everything I got, but there’s nothing so far.” Broward started drifting back into the hallway.

  She followed him toward the large kitchen. Severin came up the stairs as they passed and gave them a look like he’d caught them doing something. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I’d like to see Ted Archer’s account of the phone call. Chief Broward said there was a notebook.”

  “That’s a waste of time. We work the gun.”

  “I’d like his phone, too.”

  Severin grunted a laugh and glanced at Broward before looking at her. “For what? We spent all day on it. There’s nothing you can get, nothing to trace without a number.”

  “And the texts in the actual phone.”

  “The phone got sent to the lab.”

  “This guy could call back, whether or not he’s pretending to be someone.”

  “Oh, come on. No one’s calling back.”

  They fell into an uncomfortable silence. Kelly asked, “Who knows about this?”

  “Well, the Shepherd family up the street there are in their windows right now, I’m sure. I already talked with them. They’re elderly, were both asleep, didn’t see anything.”

  “I think we should keep it quiet.”

  “Quiet? Ted has parents. Family members. He runs a business. Even if he . . . I don’t see how we can suppress this.”

  She stepped toward the local detective and Broward jerked into life, as if to get between them. She said to Severin, “He called, after the texts. They spoke. It says in your notes they spoke for almost five minutes. Get me the phone and Archer’s notes. Please.”

  Severin stared down at her with his bruised-looking eyes. Then he glanced at Broward again.

  Broward shrugged. “I think we should do it. Can’t hurt. If there’s nothing there, then it lends to the murder-suicide.”

  Kelly was still standing very close to Severin. “If Archer fake-called himself like you think he did, he would’ve used a burner phone account. There will be a record of that. Maybe there’s even a prepaid phone somewhere in the house.”

  Severin waved a hand as if to dispel the tension and stepped back from her. “Ah, he threw it in the woods. Or he smashed it and chucked it in the trash.”

  “Then we comb the woods, go through his garbage. I don’t see the issue — we look into the call he received and either your theory that Archer set it up is vindicated, or we get the service provider, have something to go on if someone else called him.”

  He walked away with his back to her. “And the service provider gives us thousands of people in the area? Good luck with that.” He opened the front door and stepped outside.

  When he was gone Kelly asked, “Is he going to do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, then I need to make a call.”

  She left him standing there in the Archer house with its pictures of a happy family, the rotten food on the table, the corpse in the basement.

  Kelly started up the rental car and blasted the heat, peeled off the gloves and tried to calm her nerves after the confrontation with Severin. Some cops were bullies. He’d tried to bully her in there. But Severin had screwed up. He’d known Archer had a gun which could match the killings but never searched the house for ammunition. Archer claimed the real killer called him, but Severin dismissed it, wanted to bag this case by pinning it all on Archer — to him it was a situation that had resolved itself and she was getting in the way of that tidy explanation.

  She phoned Genarro and watched the Archer home in the spreading light as she waited for him to pick up.

  “Roth? It’s six in the morning. I was going to have a cup of coffee,” he said.

  “It’s early, I know. I’m sorry. I need a couple of people.”

  “What happened?”

  She told him about the phone call and the suicide. “I’m requesting a firearms expert and a skip tracer for the phone.”

  “We can do that.”

  “I’ve got to talk to the other victim’s husbands. If Archer was called by the unsub, it’s possible they have been too, and not reported it.”

  “Why wouldn’t they report it?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe he’s coercing them, blackmailing them. Maybe promising them something.”

  Genarro didn’t say anything so she kept going.

  “Severin said Ted Archer had been torqued up. Like he was ready to go out and find this guy himself. Maybe this guy hooks them in and keeps them on the line thinking they’re going to get a piece of him. This could be part of the MO, part of the act itself — kill the women and children then mess with the husbands. Get them to implode.”

  “Severin think that too?”

  “No. He thinks Archer set this up. Or, I don’t know if he actually thinks that, but he wants to push it that way.”

  “So how does he reconcile the other murders?”

  “He doesn’t. Says they’re not his problem.” She paused. “I think Severin is going to stall on getting me Archer’s phone.”

  “No — you’ll get that phone. In the meantime, you go talk to the other husbands. If they admit to being contacted by the unsub then you’ve got a compelling line of inquiry. I’ll see if I can get Cal Wagner to do the ballistics report, maybe Rose or Blanchett for the phone stuff. When Wagner gets there and you’re ready, you pull everybody together, all these local departments, and you give them what you’ve got.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He paused. “How they treating you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re a thirty-year-old FBI agent there to solve a series of murders they can’t. How are they treating you?”

  “Broward’s not bad. You were right about him. Severin has got a chip on his shoulder. I haven’t met any of the others yet.”

  She saw Broward coming out of the house. At the same time a hearse pulled into the driveway and stopped behind the crime-scene van. “I gotta go, sir. They’re taking him out.”

  “All right. You’re doing good.”

  She got out and went over to Broward and they watched the bagged body get loaded into the back of the hearse. “After we consult, we’ll do a press conference and get a new tip-line going, one consolidated hotline for all three killings,” she said. “We’ll get everything from suspicious neighbors to alien abduction stories but that’s what we need.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “My supervisor is interceding to make sure we get Ted Archer’s phone in case this guy calls back. I’m going to Wheeler Road next where the Archers were found. Then I’m going down to Auburn to look at the Haig case.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Broward’s jaw was twitching again, circles beneath his eyes. It looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep either.

  “Something on your mind?”

  He looked sideways at her. “Just wondering if we’re going to talk about what happened yesterday afternoon outside the station?”

  The remark caught her off guard. “You saw that?”

  “I came out, asked them to disperse. You’d already gotten in your car. The reporter said you were a local. I didn’t know that. But we’re talking about discretion here — about Archer . . .”

  “It�
�s nothing,” Kelly said. “We can talk about it later. Right now I want to talk to Haig in person and get him to come in for a formal interview. I need you to get Roger Payton back and we’ll do the same with him.”

  He sighed and they watched the hearse drive off with Archer’s body.

  “Can you do that?”

  “I mean, Payton’s not going to want to come back. I’ve tried. We’d have to force him.”

  “Walk to my car with me?” she said, not looking at him. “That reporter might’ve been tipped off by the two guys you were talking to at The Post.”

  “Rutherford? Why?”

  “I might’ve gone to school with him. But this is what I’m talking about, keeping things tamped down. We absolutely should not publicize Archer’s suicide. Everything we say in the press conference has to be tailored to the idea that the unsub is watching.”

  “Maybe he already knows. He could be watching Archer somehow, so he knows about the suicide . . .”

  She saw a lighted window turn black over at the Shepherd residence. “It’s possible.”

  They got to the car and she opened the door. Broward looked guilty. “Sorry about those guys. If that was where it came from.”

  “Maybe it was them, maybe not. The press conference will help.”

  Broward nodded and put his hand on her door as she sank into the driver’s seat. He stared back at the Archer house. “How’s the guy get Archer’s cell number? Maybe he gets out after shooting the woman and her son, digs through her pockets, gets the cell phone and goes through her contacts? You asked about prints on Payton’s phone — that what you’re thinking?”

  “No. He’d be burning time. The whole point of this drive-by method is a quick escape, evade detection.”

  “So he just looks Ted Archer up in the phonebook or online? Most people don’t publicize their cell numbers . . .”

  “I think he plans these things out and he gets the number beforehand. If he did this with the others — if he called Roger Payton, he got Roger’s number maybe when Danica left it behind on the bar.”

  “The bar has video cameras.”

  “Going back to August? Or before?”

  He was shaking his head. “You’re right. I remember Faber asking about that and they said the video is deleted every forty-eight hours. It’s mostly so Roger can keep an eye on his bartenders, make sure they’re not giving away the inventory all night long, that sort of thing.”

  “But she left her phone behind at one point. The waitress picked it up.”

  “Yeah and she just gave it to Roger. Anyway, that was the victim’s phone, not her husband’s.”

  There was more there to mine but she let it go for the moment. “The bigger picture is this — I think our guy scouts these victims, does his homework. These aren’t random drive-bys — he’s waiting for the perfect moment when the victims are alone and isolated. And if he gets the cell phone number of a husband, he’s got to get close enough to do that.”

  She looked at the Archer house, thought of the cold inside, the life of an entire family stopped dead in its tracks. Over. Gone.

  “As far as any information we put out,” she said quietly, “we want the killer to think we’re fumbling around in the dark. We want it to look like we need the public’s help because we have nowhere else to turn. If this guy called the man whose wife and child he’d killed, I want to use that arrogance against him.”

  “Me too.”

  He stepped back and she closed the door and drove off into the lightening day.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He bought baby powder and a Sprite from the CVS drugstore. The baby powder kept his hands from sweating inside the latex gloves and the Sprite helped him to feel like a normal person.

  The mall was a good place. Crowded, anonymous, filled with possibility. He could stroll along and gaze in the shop windows or watch reflections of people in the glass. He could sit on a bench and observe as they came and went from the Apple store, the Build-A-Bear Workshop, the T.J. Maxx.

  This particular family was well-dressed. The parents looked older, like they’d had the child late in life, a boy of about three or four who held his parents’ hands as they walked down the corridor. The boy kept leaping in the air, but the parents weren’t paying attention — he wanted to swing; they couldn’t be bothered. The mother was laden with shopping bags. The father squinted at his phone.

  They came closer to the bench. He sucked his soda through a straw, watching out of the corner of his eye. The mall was crowded with weekend shoppers but he tracked the family easily enough. The father finally anointed his son with attention, hoisted the boy up, but the mother let go of the boy’s hand and hurried ahead.

  He let them pass through his field of vision and out of his mind.

  Ten minutes later, he was about to find another spot — maybe he would do some more walking first — but a family of four caught his attention. They left the CVS with the two little children chatting away, the mother and father listening attentively. The younger kid had a problem with his Halloween mask and they all stopped.

  He sat up a little straighter on the bench and set his empty cup aside.

  The father helped the boy with his Casper the Friendly Ghost mask, making sure the kid could see out the eyes. Their laughter drifted over.

  He was excited. It was hard to say why, but he just knew it when he felt it — they were the ones. You couldn’t think your thoughts before you thought them, anyway, couldn’t choose your feelings. These things arose out of the black soup of the mind and anyone who believed otherwise was deluded.

  People parted around the family like water flowing around a rock. Finished with the mask, the father picked the boy up and carried him. The little girl took the mother’s hand, holding onto her pointed witch’s hat with her other hand.

  He watched them go. In the river of people, the mother was led by the girl, the father carried the boy.

  For a split second he thought the boy had seen him over his father’s shoulder — the eyes behind that white ghost mask meeting his own — but then people got in the way and they were gone.

  He got up from the bench, threw his empty cup in the trash, and followed them.

  * * *

  Kelly drove to the Three Mile Bay Wildlife Management Area, where Megan Archer and ten-year-old Colton had been shot and killed.

  The crime scene and autopsies suggested the killer had approached from behind them, slowed, shot the boy first, who was facing the road — pop — then the mother from behind as she turned toward her fallen son — pop.

  Then the killer drove off, leaving Ted Archer knowing that in her last few seconds alive, Megan Archer had stared down at her dying son. And that Ted hadn’t been there to protect them.

  Kelly parked the rental car along the dirt shoulder opposite the crime scene. Two white wooden crosses marked the spot. She got out and crossed the road to a wall of trees. No sidewalks, nobody driving through so far. The mother and son had lain just out of sight for three hours while Ted Archer worked late at a construction site. About the time he’d started to wonder why his wife hadn’t texted about dinner, the hunters were rolling by.

  Flowers, a knitted scarf, and a teddy bear were placed around the wooden crosses, with weather-beaten sympathy cards pinned beneath a rock.

  Crime scene tape cordoned off an area about fifty square yards, sagging in places and broken between two trees. She was sure civilians had walked through it — curious kids on a dare and superstitious adults thinking maybe if they could see where it happened, they could keep their families safe.

  She matched up what she saw with her memory of the crime scene photos. The victims had fallen just beyond the dirt shoulder where wet, spongey earth sucked at her feet and the air smelled sour. No tracks to be had in the cold ground water. No size ten work boot. Just the two .30-30 cartridge casings found in the road, clean of any prints.

  The killer knew the routines of his victims. He killed them in places by water or marsh,
not to limit evidentiary material, but because they’d be alone. Perhaps the remote sites served a dual purpose — isolated but also extra psychologically taxing for those left behind. Dying alone.

  She pondered what it would take to find just the right victims with routines that fit such criteria. Probably everyone — especially in suburbs or rural areas — found themselves alone at least once a day. But these victims ventured further from the beaten path; Megan Archer and her son Colton had taken a scenic route home from Colton’s school; Danica Payton preferred to take walks down to the narrow, lonely section of Onondaga Park; Tammy Haig, the first victim, pregnant, liked to eat her after-class snack by Owasco Lake, perhaps unafraid of the darkness or solitude being that close to home in her quiet, safe neighborhood.

  The killer had studied his victims. Learned their habits. He sifted through a variety of potential victims to get down to just the right ones, Kelly was now sure of that.

  And he seemed to stick to what he was good at — one or two people only. The women were all married, the Archers were mother and son. Families.

  She gave the white crosses one more look and started back to the car, her boots leaving muddy tracks. She wondered if the killer would ever get bored, if he’d need something more — that bigger hit — and widen out, take on more risk. Or if he might eventually get sloppy and screw up. That was how most of them got caught.

  But she had her doubts. This guy was too exacting, too much of a planner.

  He might never screw up.

  * * *

  She decided to skip the morgue for this one; nothing to learn from the Archer victims she hadn’t seen with Payton. A quick meal would help before talking to Haig.

  She ate a poached egg on wholegrain bread at a diner in Auburn, with a side of hash browns she hadn’t even asked for. She eyed the greasy fried potatoes warily. She hadn’t always been in shape. The diet specialists called it eating your feelings, her therapist had called it post-traumatic stress.

  She considered victim traits. Only one was a child — two if you counted the fetus like Broward did. The killer might’ve known Tammy Haig was pregnant, might’ve not. Danica Payton hadn’t been a mother. It left the question whether child victims were important to the killer, or incidental.