Death Notice

by Lolli Powell

  “Unfortunately,” Buchan continued, “neither department has had any success so far. That’s why we’ve formed this Task Force, to pool the resources of not only the county and the city, but also those of several surrounding towns. I’d like to thank the officers from those towns for joining in this effort even though their communities haven’t experienced any killings.”

  He nodded at the men and women, most of whom were known to Jen. She counted representatives from five of the neighboring towns. All five communities either bordered the city without intervening countryside or were within five miles of it. Obviously the city fathers of all five recognized that a serial killer would be unlikely to respect such an arbitrary boundary as a city limits sign.

  “Additionally, we can consider ourselves fortunate that we’ve received an offer of assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I personally spoke with the Special Agent in Charge of the district office in Cincinnati, and he was kind enough to send these two men to our meeting today.”

  Buchan gestured to the man on his right.

  “This is Special Agent Donald Hawkins from the Cincinnati office.” He turned to his left. And this is Special Agent Will Anderson from the Chicago office. They’re assigned to our task force for as long as we need them.”

  Chicago? Jen was surprised. The FBI had a small office in Jefferson, the county seat, but she knew both of the incompetent turkeys assigned there. She had assumed that these agents were out of the regional office in Cincinnati. Why would the FBI assign a Chicago agent to southern Ohio murders?

  Jen looked up and into Agent Anderson’s blue eyes. He was looking at her as if they had just been personally introduced, seeming to ignore the other men and women in the room. He nodded at her, the corners of his lips curling upward again in that half-smile, before he slowly turned his attention to the rest of the room and nodded again.

  “Looks like you’re going to be working closely with the hunk,” Jamie whispered at her side. “That is, if he has anything to say about it.”

  “Hush,” Jen muttered through gritted teeth.

  Glancing at her boss, she saw Lonnie trying to hide his grin. He is going to make my life miserable, she thought.

  “I’d like to turn this discussion over to Agent Anderson now. He has some information that may be of interest to us in these cases.”

  Buchan took his seat, and Will Anderson stood.

  CHAPTER 2

  The FBI agent didn’t speak at first but took his time looking at each of the officers in the room, a smile of greeting on his face. Jen thought his eyes lingered a second longer on her than they did on the others in the room, but she might have been imagining it. Was it wishful thinking, she wondered and hoped that it wasn’t.

  “Well, I’m certainly glad to meet all of you, although I wish it could have been under better circumstances.” His gaze swung back to Jen, and one side of his luscious mouth twitched slightly. “Still, I’m looking forward to working closely—very closely—with you on this case.”

  Oh, my God, Jen thought, feeling her face redden again. No, she wasn’t imagining it. Can the man possibly make it any more obvious? He’ll probably proposition me publicly in about five more minutes and throw me down on the conference table and rip off my clothes ten minutes after that.

  What an interesting idea, she thought involuntarily and immediately suppressed it.

  She was fast become irritated with the federal agent. He was incredibly handsome and sexy. There was no doubt about it. But add that to the fact that he was an FBI agent, which most women probably found glamorous, and you ended up with a man who was in all likelihood insufferably conceited. He was probably used to women throwing themselves at him. So here he was, far away from home—and probably far away from a wife and a boatload of kids—and looking for a warm and willing body to keep him warm in his motel bed.

  Well, he didn’t need to think it was going to happen here. Maybe he could find someone on the task force who would fall for his charms—which were plentiful, she had to admit—but not this cop. After all, she thought with some regret, it won’t be the first time I’ve denied myself something that looked good.

  As if he realized he’d pushed it about as far as he could without making a scene, Anderson turned serious. He looked down at the files in front of him for a few moments, as if trying to decide how to phrase what he was going to say.

  “I’ve been with the Bureau a little over fifteen years,” he began. “Before that I was with the Minneapolis P.D., working my way through law school in my spare time.”

  So he hadn’t always been an FBI guy, Jen thought. He’d been a cop like herself. In a way, that fact made her even more uneasy. She wanted to be able to dismiss the man as another Ken doll, as many of the officers referred to FBI agents. It would be considerably harder to do now that she knew he’d once done law enforcement the down and dirty way.

  Of course, she’d never have mistaken him for a Ken doll anyway. She’d never seen a Ken doll with such a sexy smile. Or with such nice buns.

  “About a year before I left the P.D. and went with the Bureau, several killings took place in Minneapolis. The M.O. was almost identical to the M.O. in these cases. The victims were all females in their twenties or early thirties, they were all killed in their homes, and they had all been severely beaten before their throats were cut. They were found tied to their bed frames with a pillowcase over their heads held in place by a black satin ribbon.”

  An excited murmur ran through the room, as all the officers looked at one another, their faces hopeful. Jen held back, knowing somehow it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  “We sent out a teletype asking for any information of similar killings in other jurisdictions. We received positive responses from six cities widely spread over the country, all of which had had similar murders. Not only had none of the six made any arrests, they had never developed any good leads. In all cases, the killings stopped as suddenly as they’d begun, and after a while, the trail just got too cold.”

  He stopped for a moment, his gaze distant, as if he were seeing the events of nearly two decades past played out again in his mind. His body had tensed, and his face looked strained. There’s more to it, Jen thought suddenly. He’s not telling us just about an old murder investigation. Somehow it became personal, and it’s never left him.

  “Minneapolis was a little more fortunate,” he continued, his attention coming back to the present. “The sixth victim—or I should say intended victim—happened to be dog-sitting her friend’s Doberman on the night the killer broke in. She’d brought the dog home that day, so he hadn’t known the animal was there.”

  He grinned.

  “The dog was the sneaky type. Never opened his mouth once to bark, just waited till this psycho climbed through a kitchen window, then proceeded to chew his right leg through to the bone.”

  Appreciative laughter circulated through the room, along with several cries of “All right!” and “Good dog!” Jamie turned to Jen and commented that apparently dogs were also a woman’s best friend. Jen nodded absentmindedly, still wondering why the case seemed so personal to the man.

  “Wayne Kelty—that was the killer’s name—starts screaming his head off, which wakes the victim, not to mention the entire neighborhood, and he was ours. It wasn’t difficult to tie him to the other murders because there was one thing about his M.O. that was different from these killings. Our guy raped, then killed. Even without DNA testing, he left enough evidence behind to convict him. He got five life sentences—to run consecutively—with no possibility of parole.”

  He paused for a few moments. The assembled officers stared at him and then began looking at each other in puzzlement.

  “Wait a sec,” Lonnie spoke up. “Are you saying your guy might be our guy? What happened? Did he escape, or did some bleeding heart governor pardon the creep?”

  “No, my guy, as you call him, didn’t escape. At least, not in the conventional sense. He was killed in a fight two
years after he was sent up.”

  A loud murmuring coursed through the room. Buchan held up his hand for silence, his expression indicating he was irritated with his officers for their lack of patience.

  “A copycat?” Lonnie said.

  “Maybe,” Anderson admitted, “but I don’t think so, at least not in the sense you mean. Remember, the murders that took place in Minneapolis and the other states are old—over fifteen years for the most recent ones. Copycats are more likely to pattern themselves after today’s headline killers.”

  His gaze connected with Jen’s again. She was startled to see that the lust had gone out of it. In its place, she saw a look she could only identify as sadness that longed to be comforted away. She recognized it because she’d seen it in her son’s face too many times since his father had died.

  “Wayne had a son,” Anderson continued, looking away from her. “Fourteen at the time. We were never able to determine what happened to the mother. Wayne said she’d left the two of them six years before, and the boy backed him up. Personally I think Wayne killed her like he’d killed the others. So Wayne had sole custody of the boy from age eight on.”

  He looked at the officers, his blue eyes angry.

  “This maniac was responsible for raising a child, for instilling values in him and teaching him how to live in the world. You can imagine the job he did of it.”

  Jen shuddered, thinking of Brandon. Children were such blank slates. It was up to adults to write on that slate or rather to guide the child to do his own writing. In her years on the job, she’d seen too many instances of adults who had botched the assignment. But at least none of those misguided incompetents had been a brutal serial killer.

  “Wayne took his son with him when he killed. Taught him the ‘intricacies of the hunt’ was the way he put it when we caught him. That’s the way Wayne thought of the killings—a sport, only with bigger stakes.”

  He paused again. Jen could see that he was struggling to keep his emotions under control, and again she wondered what his personal involvement had been. Certainly it was a horrific story. The expression on the face of everyone assembled was proof that no one could hear what had happened to that child without being affected by it. Still, the agent’s reaction seemed to go deeper.

  “Both Wayne and the boy denied that he had committed any of the murders, and there was no physical evidence to tie him to any of the rapes. Apparently he had only been along for the learning experience.”

  Anderson’s voice was bitter. There were angry murmurings around the table. The pencil that Jamie had been holding tightly snapped under the pressure, and several officers jumped at the sound.

  “The boy became a ward of the state and was eventually placed in foster care. Three months after his placement, he was charged with raping his foster mother. He denied it, of course, claiming that she had been molesting him all along. He was prosecuted as a juvenile and sent to a maximum security juvenile facility. I lost track of him after that.”

  “Are you saying you think Wayne Kelty’s son is our killer?”

  Jen sucked in her breath in surprise. She hadn’t planned to say anything. The question had just popped out. What surprised her even more was her reaction to having spoken. She was not reticent by nature nor was she easily intimidated by anyone. Yet the handsome agent made her feel almost shy. If she hadn’t gotten so caught up in his tale, she would have waited for someone else to ask the obvious.

  He smiled slightly, but the smile looked sad.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope not. All I know is that after I caught the reports on your killings, I looked for Wayne’s son. He’s nowhere to be found.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The two of them were talking to one another, oblivious of the others in the room. Jen was uncomfortably aware that she had softened her usually brusque tone as she addressed her question to the man.

  “He escaped from the juvenile facility not quite a year into his incarceration. A warrant was issued for him. That was nearly fifteen years ago, and the warrant is still active. Wayne was dead by then, there was no other family, and as you can imagine, they didn’t have any friends. He simply dropped from sight.”

  “Until now.”

  He shrugged those gorgeous shoulders, the collar of his shirt gaping slightly. Jen’s eyes dropped involuntarily to his chest and then back to his face. From his expression, she guessed he had noticed.

  “I don’t know. I hope not, but it would make more sense than an unrelated copycat.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “If you’ve ever been to one of your class reunions and seen someone you haven’t seen in a long time, you know that the person can either look almost exactly like you remember or like a complete stranger. People age differently. Another thing is that he didn’t look like his father. I never saw the mother or pictures of her, but he must have gotten his looks from her.”

  “Weren’t there photos?”

  “He was photographed when he was booked into the juvenile facility, but that facility burned to the ground a year after he escaped. All records were destroyed, including the electronic ones—no backup system in place. I’ve got people trying to find a picture to run through age progression software but no luck so far. We’re still looking, but I’m not counting on finding anything.”

  Without further comment, he sat down, again turning his attention to the files in front of him. It had obviously been a strain for him to relate the events of the Kelty case, and again Jen wondered what made the case so personal.

  Buchan stood again and motioned for Mike Hardesty to join him at the head of the table. The two of them began detailing the ideas they had for the task force.

  Most were routine. Detailed checks had to be run on and interviews repeated with all the persons connected with the victims. No one believed that the killer was someone well known to the victims, but it was likely he had crossed paths with them in some fashion. The focus of the checks and interviews would be finding a common link. The detectives who had been working the cases would continue to do so, and the others would be available to help them in any way needed.

  Jen’s attention was divided between the discussion and the man at the other end of the table. He had withdrawn from the hubbub around him, occasionally responding when spoken to, but concentrating on the files before him.

  Ten minutes into the planning session, the phone on the conference room credenza buzzed, its light flashing. Buchan swung around and plucked the cordless handset from its cradle.

  “Buchan,” he barked into the phone in a tone that told the caller the interruption had better be important. He listened for a moment and hung up without saying anything else. He turned back to the assembled officers, and something in his expression stopped the hum of talk in the room.

  “That was dispatch,” he said. “There’s been another killing.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Jen didn’t know how Special Agent Anderson had managed to finagle a ride to the crime scene with Al and her but finagle he had. She’d stopped at her desk to pick up her notebook, camera, and digital recorder. When she caught up with Al in the garage, Anderson was lounged in the back seat of the unmarked, his shirt and tie loosened another notch. She saw Lonnie grin at her from the front seat of a sedan driven by Agent Hawkins and knew he’d probably had a hand in the arrangement.

  As she got into the passenger seat, she turned and accepted Anderson’s hand in an introductory shake. His hand was warm, the skin just a little rough as if he wasn’t afraid to do manual labor. She was surprised to find she wanted to hold onto his hand longer than appropriate for a shake and let go like she’d just felt something hot. I’m acting like a sex-crazed teenager, she thought with disgust, trying to hide the effect the man had on her.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Detective Dillon. I understand you go by ‘Jen?’ May I call you that?”

  “Of course,” she said cur
tly, facing forward.

  Anderson didn’t lean back in his seat after their shake. Instead, he folded his arms along the back of the bench seat, his chin resting on his clasped hands. He was so close she could hear his soft breathing in her left ear.

  “I expect you to call me Will.” His voice was low, as if they were alone, and he was murmuring in her ear.

  “All right. Will.”

  She knew if she turned her face, it would be only inches from his, so she sat rigidly staring forward, her heart doing double-time. Get a grip, Dillon, she chided herself. He’s just another pretty face.

  “So, you used to be a real cop, huh?” Al needled.

  She started when Will laughed, low and husky, his outrush of breath warm on her neck. Perspiration popped out above her upper lip. She squirmed a little, trying to relax, her slacks suddenly feeling tight in places they hadn’t been tight just moments before.

  “I know, I know,” Will said. “I used to feel the same way about the Bureau. But we’re really not as bad as the average city cop thinks we are.”

  “You really think our guy could be this Kelty kid?” Al said.

  Will was silent for a few seconds.

  “I do.” He sounded sad. “I think I’ve been expecting something like this for sixteen years.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Just a feeling. I mean, of course when a kid is exposed to what he was exposed to, it’s to be expected that he’d be screwed up. But there was something about him even back then that gave me a feeling that’s hard to put my finger on. Call it cop’s intuition. I just felt that he would end up like his old man.”