He kept trying to “explain himself,” which just wasn’t cutting it. Not at all.
She had to keep her focus on the case.
Glick walked up. “Any inspiration?”
“No,” Nicole replied. “This is when we need Kent.”
“He consulted on the other three and came up with squat, just like the rest of us.”
Nicole pointed to the fourth crime scene. “But with this set of murders there might be enough info for him to break it.”
“In theory,” Ruben muttered behind her. She swiveled her head, sending her partner an icy glare. He put his hands up in faux surrender.
Glick stepped closer, examining the murder board. “And at this point I believe that if Kent could break this case, so can you.”
“Thanks, Cap, but I’m simply not Kent.”
“Thank goodness,” Glick said as he walked back to his office.
Nicole took in a deep breath. She had to channel her husband since he couldn’t be there.
She looked at the work he had already done. He had tried to geographically profile the killers, but had come up with too large an area. Her husband had searched out all the cults in the area.
All had been cleared. The hippies. The anti-technology kooks. The survivalists. While all were warped, they were not the killers.
Staring at the map, Nicole realized the newest murders weren’t up there yet. Grabbing a pencil and piece of paper, she circled the murder site then drew a line against the edge of the page, transecting the other lines. It gave them a new epicenter.
* * *
Ruben studied Nicole’s work as she called Jimmi.
The point of a geographic profile was to try and determine where the killer’s home base was. The concept was that the killers would kill far enough away from home to keep their base secret, but not too far outside of their comfort zone.
This latest murder skewed the search area to the east. Somewhere they had never examined before.
“Thanks, Jimmi,” Nicole said, ending the call while Jimmi was still talking on the other side of the conversation. “We’ve got a cult called the Moon People. Sounds promising.”
Ruben was pretty sure she was more talking to herself since she hadn’t said a pleasant word to him since he’d put Kent in jail. Hopefully, one day she could forgive him. That was apparently not going to be today, as she grabbed her keys and headed out the door without a single word to him.
He grabbed his jacket and raced after her. He dare not get in her Mustang, so he headed to his own car and followed.
This really sucked.
And for what?
Sometimes he really regretted his decision to press charges against Kent, but then he remembered why he’d done it in the first place and felt a sense of calm. That didn’t make things between him and Nicole any better though.
He’d lost his fiancée to Kent, then his best friend because he’d made Kent pay for his crime.
There was just no winning.
The drive wasn’t far. And it turned out to be a beautiful scenic route. Ruben tried to let go of his angst on the long country roads. He had set events in motion. He couldn’t take that back. He just had to wait and see how they unfolded.
Nicole turned down a narrow dirt road. He followed the cloud of dust until she pulled to a stop in front of a large gate announcing “No Trespassing.”
Ruben parked next to her and followed her into the compound.
Then they both pulled to a stop.
No. Just no.
Nicole pulled out her phone. “Jimmi….”
CHAPTER 4
Joshua was nearly rolling on the ground. This had to possibly be the funniest part of any investigation. Ever.
“Hey,” Jimmi said. “I tried to warn you, but you hung up on me.”
Oh, Joshua would pay money to be there at the compound. For now, he had to be content with the feed from Ruben’s cop cam.
As it turned out the Moon People were well…nudists.
The car was a bit back from the fence, but as of now two men who certainly didn’t have six packs were walking up along with an elderly woman.
Joshua looked away before he had to witness that.
Better yet, the compound had over hundred members. They had all types of activities. Volleyball? Yikes.
He didn’t even want to see the nine-hole course they had to the north. Then hiking. Um? Wasn’t anyone worried about burrs?
Joshua knew he would be.
Jimmi hung up the phone. “I am so glad she wouldn’t listen to me earlier.”
“I know, right?”
Movement caught Joshua’s eye. There was movement in the infirmary. It looked like Kent was being moved from the medical wing to his new home.
Now this was going to be interesting.
Clearly Kent had a plan. One that included him landing in the infirmary, although Joshua seriously doubted he meant to get stuck in the oven.
Now what?
There was never a dull moment with Kent involved.
* * *
Kent nodded as the warden walked into the infirmary.
“You are going into protective custody,” the stout man said.
“The hell I am. I need to sign a request for such protection,” Kent replied, trying to sound convincing.
The warden shook his head. “There are conditions when my concerns outweigh your rights. Nearly getting baked to death is one of them. I have worries of imminent threats to your life. You still have the Black Panthers and Aryan Brotherhood to piss off. You are going into protective custody. And that is final.”
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyer,” Kent threatened, since it sounded good as the guards unshackled him from the bed.
The creakiness he felt was not faked at all though. That oven stunt had almost backfired. He had contact burns all over his body. They were minor, but still they hurt like a mother. And his ribs? A shock of pain whenever he tried to take a deep breath.
But it would all be worth it to get tossed into protective custody.
So far. So good.
Due to his burns, the guards had foregone the whole body chaining, so Kent walked freely down the hallway, through several dozen cellblocks to the lock down ward.
When he entered, Kent wasn’t greeted by jeers or cheers. This was the cellblock usually reserved for prisoners with a law enforcement background or prisoners considered at risk from the general population, like pedophiles and such.
Kent was marched down the entire row and then put into the last cell on the block.
A man, small in stature with wire-framed glasses greeted him. “Ah, finally a roommate.”
Kent put his hand out. “Kent --”
“Oh, I know who you are,” the man said as the guard locked the cell door. “You are one of the most efficient profilers in the world.”
“One of?” Kent countered, shaking the man’s hand. He knew everything about the man, but had to intentionally forget it all.
The man smiled that condescending smile that serial killers got. No. Kent had to forget even that fact.
“And you are?” Kent asked as the handshake ended.
“Martin Goodling,” the man answered. “A serialist of your caliber.”
“Really?” Kent said. “Haven’t heard of you.”
A blatant lie. Did he pull it off?
Martin didn’t seem to notice, but he was quite the liar himself. Not that Kent knew that fact about him.
“Long before your time, I’m afraid,” Martin said. “I have the top bunk.”
“You used to have the top bunk,” Kent said testing Martin.
The man squinted, frowned, but finally nodded. “Fair enough.”
“And no crawling up in the middle of the night offering yourself to me,” Kent commented.
Martin fidgeted with his glasses, moving them up the bridge of his nose. “Do not worry. I have no intentions of offering myself to you.”
Funny, that nervous tick of yours says otherwise
.
* * *
Nicole was trying very hard not to blush, but come on. This was ridiculous.
You couldn’t look right or left without seeing flesh. One woman’s breasts sagged all the way down to her belly button. And the men. Ugh.
She tried to keep her eyes up, but nudists were in the trees and she’d seen more twigs and berries dangling than she would ever like to admit.
Her partner was having no better luck.
Despite the circumstances, she actually felt a little sorry for Ruben. He was far more buttoned down than Nicole. He stammered and stuttered his way through the questions. His cheeks beet red.
“I am telling you,” the leader of the group stated. “No one from this organization is involved in these killings.”
“And what is the average age of your cult?” Ruben managed to ask as he loosened his tie.
“We are not a cult, young man,” the leader stated. “We are a community that live in perfect harmony with nature.”
Nicole couldn’t remember the man’s name. She didn’t want to remember his name. She did not want a name associated with this event.
“So all of your members are accounted for?”
The man nodded emphatically. “It wasn’t us.”
Nicole ran through their questions. Would there be enough on the report to make it seem like they had done their due diligence?
At this point, who really cared?
Ruben looked over at her. His eyes begged her to save him.
Nicole flipped her writing pad closed. “Okay, I think we’ve got enough. Thank you very much.”
Ruben beat a path out of there so quickly that Nicole had to trot to keep up, which was no easy task given her four inch heels and the dirt path.
Finally they arrived at the cars.
Ruben leaned over onto the Mustang’s hood and breathed in and out. “I don’t think I could have lasted much longer.”
She knew how he felt.
Nicole opened her car door. “Come on. We need to get back ASAP.”
“Why?” Ruben asked.
“So I can kick Jimmi’s ass.”
* * *
About the only good thing that came out of the nudist camp was that Nicole and he were on the same page again. Both of them were livid with Jimmi. They were actually talking as they walked from the garage to the station. They were mainly exchanging ideas on how to punish the technician for their latest mis-adventure.
They were still coming up zeroes on the case though. There was a cult. A fairly large one that had tipped into homicidal tendencies. You didn’t have to be a profiler of Kent’s caliber to know that in order for the leader to get his followers to do such heinous acts, he had to be charismatic.
Crazy charismatic. Jim Jones-level charismatic. Charles Manson charismatic.
High level psychotic.
Ruben hated these psychos. He just couldn’t understand them. Sexual sadists made more sense to him. At the least they had some kind of motivation. A perverse, twisted motivation, but one that Ruben could track.
These cultists? Raping, then killing groups of people. Then staging them to look like they were pious? If the Downers were so religious, why the rape? What kind of brain came up with that?
None that Ruben wanted to know.
He knew Kent’s perspective. That you had to follow the serial killer down the rabbit hole.
Sorry, Ruben wasn’t willing to do that.
Especially not after Paggie. He had lived with a sociopath. He knew there should be no shame in that. Sociopaths lived to trick people. Kent had known Ruben’s fiancée for months and didn’t call it.
Still Ruben felt deflated. That if he couldn’t see Paggie, how could he ever catch another killer? And the Downers felt bullet-proof.
“Ruben,” Nicole barked.
“Yes, sorry,” he reflexively responded, then cringed. That was one of the things that Paggie said that she hated about him. His habit of apologizing even if he didn’t know what he was apologizing for.
“Are you in or out?” Nicole asked, none too nicely.
He took in a deep breath.
He wanted out. Badly. He didn’t want anyone’s life in his hands any more.
Yet what came out of his mouth was “In.”
Nicole glared at him. “Really?”
Ruben had never wanted to be anything but a cop his entire life. Other kids were fascinated by firemen in kindergarten while he was busy reading Hardy Boys novels.
Paggie had taken too much of him already. He couldn’t let her have this too.
“Really,” Ruben replied. “So what is our next move?”
Nicole snorted. “You mean after we kick Jimmi’s butt?”
* * *
Jimmi paced in front of Joshua. “They are going to kill me.”
“Calm down,” Joshua urged.
“Yah, right. You’re not the one they are after,” Jimmi looked around the lab as if to find something he could physically defend himself with. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Joshua shook his head at his friend. The best way to get out of trouble with the detectives was to give them another clue in the case. If Jimmi had been thinking straight, that was exactly what he would have been doing.
Research.
But alas, Jimmi just wasn’t as tuned in as Joshua. He’d done his research and found something big enough to keep Nicole and Ruben off of Jimmi’s jugular.
“Stop sweating,” Joshua said. “I’ve got your back.”
Actually, Joshua had no idea how he would protect Jimmi, but it had sounded good and that was something that Kent had taught Joshua. Sometimes sounding good was all it took.
Then the door flew open and Nicole and Ruben charged into the media room. Nicole looked like a Viking Valkyrie and Ruben some kind of really pissed-off Aztec god.
This did not look good for Jimmi.
Nicole glared at Joshua first. He pointed to Jimmi. No matter what he said, Joshua couldn’t stand up to that much female anger.
Jimmi frowned, shaking his head at Joshua. Sorry, dude.
As Nicole turned to face Jimmi, her pupils dilated and she took a step back. “Kent?”
Jimmi frantically tried to kill the prison security feed, to no avail. Perhaps Joshua could save Jimmi after all. “Yes,” Joshua confirmed the man laying on the top bunk, was in fact Nicole’s husband. “Jimmi hacked into the prison’s feed to keep an eye on Harbinger.”
Nicole took several steps forward and reached out to the screen and touched Kent’s rather large cheek. Joshua did not think it was the time to scold the detective for getting skin oils on the monitor.
“How is he?” Nicole asked, all the anger bled out of her voice. Maybe Jimmi might survive today.
“Well, he almost got baked,” Jimmi commented. Jesus, didn’t the guy know when it was time for a nice little white lie?
Nicole spun around, that spark back in her eye. “Someone forced drugs on him?”
By now Jimmi must have realized none of this was going to go over well with Nicole, but he’d opened the door and Lord knew Nicole was going to go through it.
“No, I mean,” Jimmi stammered.
Joshua was going to take one for the team. “Nicole, Kent got into a fight with the Latin Kings and ended up trapped in an oven. He was nearly cooked to death.”
* * *
Nicole knew that her mouth hung open, no words coming out of it. But what exactly was her response supposed to be? She had expected a lot from Kent’s incarceration. Him being shanked, beaten by guards, his ‘eccentricities’ worsening. But getting baked? Actually baked? That one she hadn’t seen coming.
“Is he all right?” Ruben asked from behind her. She turned and gave her partner that “what do you care” look. To his credit he didn’t shy from it.
“He’s good, actually,” Joshua responded. “The doc checked him out and the good news is he has been remanded to protective custody.”
Joshua was correct. Something had to force
Kent into protective custody because he wasn’t going there of his own accord.
“Finally,” Nicole breathed out, sitting on one of the tech stools. She hadn’t realized how worried she’d been about Kent until he was in relative safety.
Ruben pointed to the screen. “But Kent isn’t alone in that cell.”
Nicole studied the feed closer. Ruben was correct, there was another man in the lower bunk. Protective custody usually meant solo bunking.
Jimmi nodded. “Yeah, they are a little overcrowded, so just about everybody is double-bunked.”
Okay, Nicole wasn’t as relieved as she had been a minute ago. “Who is he housed with?”
“Martin Goodling,” Jimmi responded.
Why did that name ring a bell?
“Who?” Ruben asked.
Jimmi didn’t answer, or more like wouldn’t answer. Nicole looked to Joshua.
“Well?”
Joshua cleared his throat and split the screen. One half still showed Kent in his cell, the other showed newspaper clippings of Martin Goodling.
“Martin was known as the Saturday Night Fever killer back in the 70’s…”
Nicole froze in place. Her breath froze in place.
Kent was bunked with one of the most vicious serial killers of all time.
* * *
Even though it was early in the day, Kent felt like nearly getting cooked to death warranted a nap.
Or at least the appearance of a nap.
Kent cracked one eye open to find Martin standing next to his bunk, studying him.
“Can I help you?” Kent sighed.
“You really don’t know who I am?” the man demanded.
“Should I?” Kent reflected back. No need to give the serial killer any more ammunition than was needed.
Martin crossed his arms. “I was one of the most prolific serial killers in history.”
Kent rolled his eyes before closing his eyelids. “Was, is the important word in that sentence. I only care about active serial killers.”
Martin wasn’t going to let it go though. The man sat down on the john like it truly was his throne. “You don’t study the greats?”
Kent snorted and turned over to face away from Martin. “If you are in here, you certainly aren’t one of the greats.”
2nd Cycle of the Harbinger Series: The continuation of the #1 Hard-boiled/Police Procedural smash Plain Jane Page 23