by Dale Mayer
“Right, and, of course, we don’t want to think that,” she said.
“Nobody wants to think that. Obviously it’s hard not to, but let’s try and keep to the facts,” he said.
And, with that, they carefully went through all four of these unsolved murders from thirty years back.
Damon noted, “They all had different jobs. One was a ski instructor. Tons of them in Aspen. One was a secretary for a local law firm. Another worked in a bank, and the last one was a seasonal worker who worked on the lifts.”
“Right,” she said. “So that doesn’t necessarily sound like my two roommates who are dead, although one was a secretary and the other a waitress, although she worked multiple jobs at times. It was hard to keep track, since I didn’t know either of them that well.”
“I don’t think the job title itself matters as much. But let’s confirm that.” As he looked up the details on the two latest murders, he said, “One worked at a restaurant, and one worked as a secretary.”
“So I guess it depends whether you call waitressing seasonal or not,” she said, tilting her head in thought.
“I wouldn’t think so,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, “so what else? What about characteristics, such as physical descriptions, things like that, which are consistent now and back then?”
“They were all relatively slim, all relatively average height, between five foot five and five foot seven. They all had either auburn, brunette, or darker brown hair.”
“So brown hair basically, just from lighter to darker shades?”
He nodded.
She frowned at that, thinking. “Well, both of the women from my apartment who died also had brown hair.”
Grimly, he nodded and added to his notes. “Same age category too,” he reminded her.
“Right,” she said, wincing. “Not a good time to be that age, is it?”
“Nope,” he said, “not really.”
“So, what’s next?”
“Back then, two were found at home. One was found out in the wild, and one was found on the mountain.”
She stared at him. “You realize the first two recent deaths were found at home, right?”
He looked up, and they exchanged hard looks. “Yes,” he said, “I did realize that.”
She took a long slow deep breath. “So one was found where?”
“Outside, beside a river,” he said, looking at his notes.
“That’s a little freaky.”
“Well, it is, particularly considering that you were outside along a river, and, if I hadn’t been there, you probably would have died of frostbite.”
She sucked her breath back and then slowly nodded. “I didn’t feel like I would die,” she murmured.
“No, but we don’t know that these ones did either.”
“Any witnesses?”
“None,” he said. “Not only no witnesses, nobody had any motivation that the cops could find back then. The original investigators found absolutely no reason behind the killings. The murders started, and then they stopped.”
She nodded slowly. “I know it’s an odd thing to ask,” she said, “but what are the chances of finding more cold cases like these some thirty years before them?”
He looked up and stared at her. “What?”
“I just wondered if we could have a pattern of every thirty years.”
“Well, that would make the killer extremely old now.”
She took a long slow deep breath. “Maybe,” she said, “it could also possibly mean something more otherworldly than what we’re prepared to really look at.”
“Are you back to the psychic and ghostly stuff?”
“It is a little odd,” she said, trying to work her way through it to think that somebody might have killed these women that many years apart. “But we also aren’t seeing any rhyme or reason for the deaths or any witnesses to any of it,” she said. “So, if what we have doesn’t make any sense, maybe we should look at what does make sense, and we do have an oddly strange psychic thing happening here.”
“If we believe any of the people involved in this.”
“Well, I personally would believe Stefan, although I understand that you have some reservations about that.”
“The reservations are the fact that this isn’t a field anybody wants to know a whole lot about,” he said.
“That’s not true,” she said. “I want to know.”
“Maybe, but we still need some motivation or reason for this.”
“Did you send any of this information to Stefan? Does he have any idea?”
“I didn’t ask. He didn’t ask either.”
She nodded slowly. “Is it possible to check if there were more cases older than this?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That goes back a long time. I’m not sure if our digital database covers sixty years or if I have to check the physical files.”
“Right,” she said, “well, I mean, the pattern should be theoretically the same. So you’d have to search for similarities.”
“I can take a quick look, when I return to the office,” he said. “Or …” He stopped, looked at his laptop, reached for it, and dragged it toward him. “I guess I can log in from here.”
She stood and gathered their dishes, then took them to the sink and began to wash them. She heard him in the background, muttering away. Finally she stopped, looked at him, and asked, “Finding anything?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Just maybe.”
She finished up the dishes, then sat down quietly, as she did not want to disturb his train of thought. Plus she did not want to be told that she had no part in this because she was so desperate to get answers herself. The thought that two more women could die, particularly in this violent way, was enough to make Gabby want to run for the hills. She didn’t want it to be Wendy or anybody else at this point either. She was just a little desperate to make all this go away, in a good way.
Finally Damon sat back and stared at her. “Huh,” Damon said, running a hand over his face. “It never occurred to me to look further in the past,” he said, “but there are other unexplained deaths about sixty years ago.”
“And?”
“Well, they seem similar but not exactly.”
“Is that normal?”
“The experts supposedly say killers don’t change, but we’ve all seen instances where they do, so it may be normal, or it may not be.”
She nodded. “What happened?”
“There were three murders, at least that I found. Of course, for police records, they are each given a separate file, yet I consider them one case as they were all at one crime scene.”
“And what did you find?”
“The husband was blamed for the trio of deaths, all found at his home. He committed suicide not long afterward, saying that he didn’t do it, but, because the murders were never resolved, the case is still open, with no witnesses, no suspects.” Damon frowned, focused on the data.
“What parameters did you use to find these?”
He shook his head, as if coming back to the present. “The flaying of the chest,” he said. “That seems like something that’s very indicative.”
“Yeah, it would be. So the breasts were cut off or something?”
“Yes, the breasts were peeled back off the chest with a sharp knife.”
“Decapitated?”
“Yes, but the heads were still there on site.”
“So, maybe the killer got better thirty years later,” and she winced even as she said it.
He looked at her with a wry smile. “I know what you mean,” he said, “but you’re not wrong. Serial killers often practice and improve as they go on.”
“But now we’re talking about somebody who was at least a teenager then. So, some sixty years later, in theory, would make them at least seventy-five right now.”
“Potentially, yes,” he said, still frowning. “But remember. This guy committed suicide at some point during the investigation,
though I don’t see a date for that.” He still frowned, leaning closer to the file.
“What is it?”
“His name’s been redacted. Even the names of the victims. He’s referred to as James Doe, with Jane Doe #1, #2 and #3 listed as the victims.”
Gabby raised her eyebrows. “That’s unusual for the police, right?”
Damon nodded. “Hell, yes.” The grimace on his face was evident. “This may be the originating file that the Cold Case clerk reminded me to not talk about. I can’t even ask him about it until he’s retired in a few more days.” Damon hesitated. “And my captain already yelled at me for pulling these files from thirty years ago. He’d probably fire me if I mentioned this one from sixty years back. Hell, he may fire me once he finds out I’ve been using Stefan. Though the captain did tell me to do whatever I needed to solve the current cases.”
“So what will you do?”
“I’ll keep working these old cases quietly, trying to get answers. Hopefully answers that don’t involve Stefan’s line of work.”
Gabby nodded. “Any other weird cases? Anything else that could even be close to this?”
“I don’t see anything at the moment,” he said, “but we do have a lot of cases, so I’m not sure.”
“And I guess the other problem is,” she said, “whether the killer would stay in this location. Or, in our case, our killer’s ghost.”
“Having found these cases,” he said, “I would say, yes.”
“Well, that’s a good place to start then,” she said.
“Maybe. We’ll pull this data and see if anything is compelling. Any sort of motivation, I guess, is what we’re looking for. What is the source of all this anger? What would make somebody repeat this every thirty years?”
“But I don’t understand—”
“Something started this, made him mad to begin with,” he continued, “and something instigates it all over again, every thirty years, it seems. Serial killers who go to sleep for so many years do so because something, some need inside them, has been satisfied. Then something happens to restart the cycle, and they deal with it all over again.”
“I get that,” she said, “but, at the same time, we must have a little more than that to go on.”
“We often don’t get any more than that,” he said. “Cases are often built on the thinnest of evidence, and we just keep following the trails, until it makes sense.”
She groaned. “But it’s not exactly something I can do to help you.” Then she held up her finger. “What about the three books you bought?”
“I have them, but I haven’t had a chance to read them.”
“Wait. Why don’t I take them and read them?” she said, bouncing to her feet. “You have work to do, I know, so I need to get out of your way, so you can do it. I’ve cleaned up the dishes. Let me just grab those books and go home and get to reading, see if I can make sense of anything.”
“I’m good with that,” he said. He got up, walked over to the side, and grabbed the books. “I haven’t even opened them, as you can see.”
“Perfect,” she said. “I was looking for something to read anyway.” And, with that, she turned and headed back out.
“Don’t you want to take some leftovers?” he called out.
She stopped, looked back at him, surprised, and said, “I forgot.”
He quickly split up the leftovers and said, “Here. You take these.”
She smiled and said, “It almost seems foolish, doesn’t it?”
“Well, we could eat these meals together,” Damon said.
“It’s much nicer that way,” she admitted.
“In that case,” he said, “if you’re good until dinnertime, come back around four or five.”
“Done,” she said with a big grin and ran out of the house.
Chapter Nineteen
With a fresh cup of coffee, Gabby crawled in front of the fireplace with the books. She’d browsed through a couple initial paragraphs in some of the beginning chapters without actually reading each one fully. Checking the Table of Contents, she immediately turned to the chapter covering the death of her boss’s wife. It seemed almost wrong to read about it, but what else was she supposed to do? Besides, if any information was to be found in here, they needed it.
In the back of her mind, she wondered if the wife was Gabby’s ghost, and that was kind of scary too. What would cause somebody like that to hang around and to torment people—or, in this case, murder people? Although Gabby didn’t think that was even possible. After all, how could her ghost pick up a sword and cut somebody?
It didn’t bear thinking about it because it brought up questions that she couldn’t even begin to understand, and anything she couldn’t understand was beyond what she wanted to look at. It was hard enough to understand the world around her without getting ahead into scary things along that psychic line. Finally finding the right chapter, she shifted her position, and the book closed on her.
Frustrated, she took another moment to get to the right chapter. This time she checked the page number, and, as she shifted her glance for a moment to look out the window, the book in front of her closed. Frowning, and much more aware of what she was doing, she opened it to the right page and waited. Sure enough, it slammed closed in front of her.
As far as signs went, it was hard to argue that this wasn’t one. But was reading this chapter so bad? She couldn’t imagine Stefan stopping this informal investigation on her part. Or would he? Otherwise, why would her ghost stop Gabby? Maybe the ghost is Andrea. She wouldn’t like the rehash of her death any more than Jerry did. This made more sense to Gabby.
Even so, fear choked the back of her throat, and she started to hyperventilate. She could almost hear Stefan’s voice in her head, telling her to calm down and to just relax. But she couldn’t relax because the damn book was closing. Was it a joke? Was somebody just playing with her? Was it Stefan testing her? Trying to prove something to her? What the hell was going on?
She slowly and carefully opened the book to the right page, yet again. And waited. This time nothing happened. Feeling like a bit of a fool for even believing that something paranormal was going on, she relaxed and started reading.
Jerry and Andrea had been out skiing all day.
They were celebrating a special event in their life, and this was her first free day. Gabby frowned at that because it talked about a child. Andrea had given birth just a few months earlier, had a tough time of it, and this day was a gift from his parents—looking after the child so the new parents could go up on the mountain for a day. Andrea had been a ski racer when she was younger and was very experienced too. They were out to spend the day up there.
According to the book, Andrea had experienced postpartum depression after the birth of her child, but nobody had any inkling that she might have been suicidal.
Gabby wondered what would make someone suicidal. But clearly, sometimes postpartum depression did, even though—once nutrition and hormones were balanced, with time, adequate rest, and support—recovery was to be expected. She frowned, thinking about somebody who had just given birth, then choosing to throw herself off the mountain. It didn’t equate as normal in her mind, but who knew? As she kept reading, apparently a good twenty to thirty witnesses were around Andrea. All had been interviewed afterward, but nobody had seen anything.
That was the part that really got to Gabby. How is that even possible? She understood how half of them didn’t see anything, but was it really reasonable to think that nobody saw anything? Of course, that’s where the doubts started to set in. Maybe Jerry had seen something. She didn’t know.
As she kept reading, she went through the factual statements from everyone else who had been there, and the eventual outcome was that everybody just saw her flying through the air. There was absolutely no rhyme, reason, or motivation that they could determine.
Although postpartum depression had been brought up, Gabby couldn’t imagine what Jerry had gone through. Not only to have
lost his wife but having to raise a small child on his own. Speaking of which, did the child die too? Jerry never mentioned a child, and Gabby knew of no pictures of Jerry’s child anywhere, so what had happened? Gabby didn’t know, and, as she sat here, she pondered the question of who would inherit the bookstore. It was an odd thing, but, as she continued to read, she found a lot of backstory to the case.
Much of it was interesting, almost like a fictional story. Apparently Andrea and her husband, Jerry, had had some difficulties, and the baby was supposed to be a way to smooth things over. Yet Gabby wondered how anybody could think that the stress or the additional expenses associated with having a baby could possibly make things easier.
But supposedly Jerry’s wife, Andrea, had wanted a child since forever, so getting the baby seemed to make her a lot happier. But then she suffered severe depression with the birth, which fueled the speculation of suicide. As it was, the chapter had nothing else to offer besides conjecture and rumors about Andrea’s life, friends, and family, but nothing more.
Gabby picked up her phone and quickly texted Damon. Did my boss have any children?
He replied with a question mark.
She called him back instead of texting. “According to this first book, Andrea, Jerry’s wife, had a baby not long before she died. The authorities were considering whether postpartum depression could have been a factor in the suicide theory.”
“I don’t remember any talk of a child,” he said. “Let me look into it.”
“Okay, talk to you later.”
Gabby hung up and went back to the book, moving on to another woman’s death. Gabby realized very quickly that it was a similar story, with the woman on the mountain, snowboarding with Andrea, but that this woman had died at home in particularly grisly circumstances. No conjecture about suicide, but it was also an odd death, saying that the police weren’t releasing any of the details because it was an open criminal case. She quickly texted Damon the name. Is Susan Volvod one of the four women from cold cases thirty years ago?
Yes.
She’s in chapter twelve.
Then Gabby kept on reading. Again, it was more conjecture than anything. The book was obviously written for the purpose of sharing salacious details about Susan’s private and personal life, rather than offering any meaningful clues about her death. And that was kind of sad—that people would profit off something like this, particularly when the author had nothing to actually say. Everybody had a theory, but nobody had any proof.