Trix

by Kate Morris

  “Is that part true?” Jack asked. “About being with one man? Seriously?”

  “Jack, I’m trying to lure him in. He wants an untarnished woman to prove that one actually exists.”

  “So, it’s not true?”

  Lorena groaned. “Seriously? My sex life is that important to you right now?”

  “Moderately important. Curiosity mostly.”

  She shot him an impatient look, “None of your business, Foster.”

  “I’m just concerned you’re playing too far into his sick obsession with you.”

  “Then why are you asking me how many people I’ve slept with?”

  “Trying to help,” he lied with a grin. Then he tried with, “It pertains to our partnership. I should know.”

  “Wanna’ talk about why you were just kissing your ex-wife?”

  “Ouch,” he remarked. “Too soon, Evans. Jesus.”

  Lorena grinned maliciously and said, “Now, let me get back to my love letter.”

  Jack screwed up his features into a grimace and said, “Have at it, Sylvia Plath.”

  “Like you’ve read Plath.”

  “Keagan does,” he answered. “She likes all that women’s lit crap.”

  She nodded in agreement, “Sounds about right.”

  “She’s a free spirit in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I’d need a seeing eye dog if I hadn’t.”

  How many women do you normally have at one time? I don’t like competition. I am curious as to why you do this, but I doubt you even comprehend it fully yourself. If you had me, you wouldn’t need anyone else. I know about Allie, too, and how she got away from you. How far did she run? Did you kill her by the river where she ran to or did you kill her at your lair? I would like to see the place where you keep these women. I could get away, as well, but our relationship must be built on trust. I will agree to meet you, but you must agree to my stipulations, as well. Bring me to your lair, share your story with me, and I’ll share mine with you. Tell me about your mother and where you went after your father was arrested for her murder. Did you end up in foster care, a boys’ home, or with a relative?

  I will meet with you. Tell me when and where. When you text the information, I’ll keep it to myself and not tell the FBI. It’ll just be me and you. You may be curious about me, but I need to know more about you. I want to have ample time to talk, so find us a place where the FBI won’t discover us. Bring me proof that Hailee is still alive or I won’t talk to you again.

  Your friend,

  Lorena

  P.S. Please give me your first name at least so that I can address you not as Trix but as a human being that deserves more respect. And don’t give me a fake name. You know mine and can address me directly. I’d like to do the same, please.

  “Are you crazy? Don’t tell him to find a place that’ll be hard to discover for the FBI. This is already dangerous enough, Evans.”

  “I don’t think he’s actually going to message me back with a place to meet him. He’s teasing. I’m just hoping that out of everything he’ll give us his name.”

  “What if he does proposition you with a place to meet?”

  “Then I’ll meet him.”

  He groaned in response.

  “We’re getting closer. We now know he went to the University of Florida in Gainesville. His father killed his mother. He’s old enough to have attended college before Google. We’re gaining a lot of insight into him now.”

  “Right but it’s going to take a while for him to respond again. He’s only texting once a day. At this rate, we’ll find Hailee next year.”

  Jack’s phone rang, and he answered it. “Yeah, sure. We’ll be there soon. Really? Alright, we’ll take a look at it. Thanks, man.”

  “Craig?” she asked.

  “Yep, got the art dealer at the airport. They’re bringing him to the headquarters for questioning. Guess he wasn’t very cooperative. He’s also sending over his record. Guess there’s more dirt in it than we initially found.”

  “Good,” she said and rose. “Could he have been texting us from Europe?”

  “Not sure.”

  “We’ll ask the feds. One of their geeks will surely know.”

  “Why don’t you go back to bed, sicko,” he suggested.

  “I’m fine. I feel a lot better since I got some sleep. You look like crap, though,” she pointed out. His hair was standing on end, but Lorena wasn’t sure if it was because his wife’s fingers had just been combing through it. That thought made bile rise in Lorena’s throat. She’d cheated on Jack and left him for another man. She didn’t deserve him.

  “Thanks, gonna hit the shower. Then we’ll go.”

  Lorena nodded and went to brew them coffee when her phone buzzed. Jack must’ve heard it because he zipped back into the room again.

  “Him already?”

  Lorena swiped the screen sideways and opened her text messages. Then she nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s him.”

  Go to the Wildwood Trail at 7pm. Walk three miles in until it veers off to the right. Do not take that path any further. I have a much more private destination in mind. Turn left instead. There is a large boulder at the top of the hill. From there, a narrow path will lead you down to a stream going west. I’ll see you there. By the water.

  Regards,

  Michael

  “This is dangerous, Lorena,” he said when he was finished reading it.

  He rarely called her by her first name or looked at her with such serious concern.

  “I don’t think we should tell the feds about this. I think we should tackle this just the two of us. If they all show up, even as stealthy as they think they are,” she said, rolling her eyes, “he’ll sniff them out. He’ll know the feds are there hiding. He’s not stupid, Jack.”

  He ran a hand through his hair with frustration and looked at the ceiling. Then he left without answering her. She heard the water come on a second later in the bathroom.

  She returned the message with:

  I will meet you at the assigned time and eagerly await our meeting.

  Yours,

  Lorena

  She was hoping to gain a deeper rapport with him by using her first name as Jack just had. It showed a more personal relationship. As she thought about it, she wondered why Jack had used it. Then she remembered him kissing his wife and quickly extinguished that line of thought. He obviously didn’t harbor anything more than a professional relationship with her. It was just her imagination working overtime.

  She went to her bedroom and stripped out of her sweats and donned khakis, a purple long-sleeved tee, a matching zip up hoodie and brown leather short boots. She didn’t care about appearances right now. Warmth, comfort, and the ability to move freely were more important. Plus, she didn’t need to go back on television for another ridiculous appearance, so she figured she’d rather be comfortable. Most of the clothing Jack had packed for her belonged to her beloved sister Cara, so it felt weird wearing them. She never even packed her sister’s items away because it seemed wrong. The other half of the closet still held many of her brother-in-law’s belongings, as well. It was just too painful looking at all of it. Maybe Jack had a point. Maybe she should start talking to Gracie about them. Perhaps it might help them both to heal.

  She brushed out her hair and pulled it back into a ponytail. They were going to question an art dealer for being a suspected creep, pervert, kidnapper and possibly a serial killer. She didn’t care what he thought of her hairstyle. She applied ChapStick to her dry, chapped lips and went to brew some coffee. As she moved around the kitchen, Lorena could feel the cold meds and heavy, medicine-induced sleep wearing off. She hated to admit it, but Jack was right. The sleep, shower, rest, and medicine was what she needed. Her body was just worn down. She also located another packet of vitamin C powder on the counter and mixed it with some water, downing it immediately. It didn’t taste great, and she doubted it would give her the boost that an energy drink would, but it mi
ght help her immune system kick her cold.

  Jack emerged dressed in jeans, a black blazer and matching shirt underneath. He looked more professional than her. He always did if she was being honest about it.

  “I think we should talk to Craig about this, Evans,” he said, returning to using her last name.

  “Maybe.”

  “Thanks,” he said as she offered him a travel mug of coffee made the way he liked it.

  She laced hers with cream and sugar and screwed on the lid.

  “Ready,” she said.

  “You sure?” he asked while narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “You can sit this out. I’ll go if you wanna’ go back to bed.”

  “No, that’s not going to do anything.”

  “You’re right. Sleep is overrated,” he teased with a wink.

  “If I wanted more beauty sleep, I should’ve taken a different career path.”

  “It’s all the fancy perks, Evans. The perks,” he said and held up his travel mug of coffee.

  She smiled, grabbed her leather jacket and followed him out the door. During the ride back to the headquarters, they discussed their lead suspects.

  “The Brit art dealer’s out, obviously,” Jack remarked. “Plus, I’m pretty sure he’s a puffer.”

  “Puffer?”

  “British slang for homosexual,” he joked.

  “Gotcha’,” she said and nodded with agreement. “Dermot Chambers, Skylar’s dad. I don’t think it’s him, either. Not sure, though. The conference call places him on the phone, but it doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have squeezed in time to kidnap her. It was from his cell phone, so that’s not the same as being at his house up north. He could’ve taken it with him. Craig’s getting info on that. We need to see if he was moving while on that call.”

  “I don’t get that vibe from him, either,” Jack mentioned. “Plus, his father’s alive and not a homicidal killer.”

  She flipped her notes, “Jeremy Titus, the feds’ biggest lead. I don’t know about him, either. Asshole. Druggie, probably a dealer by the looks of his place the other night. Pervert. No links to Hailee other than working the extra side job doing cement work. He has no property in his name. The girlfriend also said he didn’t have a hunting cabin, storage unit, nothing. He was just freeloading off of her. She’s probably relieved that he’s going back to prison.”

  “Hopefully she’ll get her life together,” Jack said. “Poor kid. She didn’t seem very old. Two kids. No husband. House full of losers around those kids. She’ll be lucky if CPS doesn’t take them away.”

  “Sometimes foster care isn’t the worst thing ever.”

  She was glad that Jack didn’t ask her about this comment and moved on.

  He said, “Archibald, he’s our best candidate so far. He was the last one to be around Stephanie Pearson that we know of. Verification came across last night that he clocked in at work an hour late. It definitely gave him time to do it.”

  “And motive,” Lorena added. “I don’t like him, but I’m not sure if he’s smart enough to be a serial. This guy is highly intelligent. I suspect he’s been at this a long time, not just the eleven or so girls that were recently found.”

  “I agree. And I figure he’s a lot older than the profile. If he was in college before the internet made searches easier, then he isn’t in his twenties. Hell, he’s probably not even in his thirties. Archibald is forty-one, so he fits the age bracket better than the others.”

  “He didn’t go to college in Florida, though,” Lorena noted. “He went to a local trade school for two semesters.”

  “Trix could be lying to us, leading us along with the Gainesville, Florida, and college information.”

  Lorena nodded. “True, but it seems that he wants to tell us things about himself, stuff nobody else knows yet. He wants to talk.”

  “To you. Not to ‘us.’ He wants to talk to you, Evans,” Jack pointed out.

  It made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want to have this connection with people like Trix or Juliette Nicholson or any of the other serials she’d busted. It made her question her own sanity sometimes since she so easily understood these wretches of society.

  “And with Archibald,” Jack said, “I can’t see a connection to Hailee yet, just Stephanie Pearson.”

  “Right.”

  She thought about that for a moment.

  “I have this uncanny feeling that he wants to be caught. He wants us to find him. He wants everyone to remember him, to know that he was this incredible monster that got away with so much for so long,” Lorena explained.

  “Then he should just turn himself in,” he said. “Make our jobs a hell of a lot easier.”

  “That’ll never happen, but I think we can draw him out enough to figure this out,” Lorena said as she reviewed her notes. “Why Hailee? That one I can’t figure out.”

  “We agree on the fact that he knew her somehow,” Jack said.

  “Teacher? Maybe he’s one of her school teachers at that private school?”

  “Didn’t you say that she studied French with a tutor or something?”

  Lorena dug through the file on Hailee. “I think that was just the lie, the cover so she could meet with her boyfriend before school.”

  “Yeah, but the school teacher angle probably hasn’t been looked into yet. The FBI was focused on Titus.”

  She flipped a page and found the photocopies of the pages of Hailee’s planner. Nothing of significance stood out. Doctor appointments, school events, the fake French tutor dates and times, cello lessons.

  “Here,” Lorena said. “She had cello lessons once a week.”

  “Music teacher?”

  Something in the case nagged at her. She always circled back to Allie Xiang for some reason.

  “Allie was an accomplished violinist, actually a prodigy according to her file,” she thought aloud. Jack immediately pounced on it, always on the same wavelength.

  “You think she had the same music instructor? Is that what you’re getting at? One studied cello. One studied violin. Same teacher?”

  “Maybe,” Lorena said, that feeling she got when she found something of importance in a case coming over her. “We need to talk to Craig about this, get him to track down the teacher. If the teacher is a man and taught both girls, then we need to get a hard look at him.”

  “Absolutely. We may have caught a break, Evans,” Jack said. “Good job.”

  “Don’t count your Frosted Flakes, Foster,” she reminded him, using the modified version they said to each other of “not counting chicks till they hatch.” A case was never over until they had someone in cuffs. This was a hard case because everyone involved didn’t want to talk to the police.

  “Elizabeth gave me a tip on someone new,” he confessed as he turned them onto a bridge to cross back over into the city.

  “Is that what she was doing?” Lorena said, getting in a dig at her partner for making out with his ex. “She has an interesting way of communicating.”

  “Uh…yeah. She came to tell me that.”

  “Didn’t look like a whole lot of talking going on,” Lorena joked. Only she wasn’t just teasing. For some reason, it bothered her that Jack was kissing his ex. She was a bad person. She cheated on him. She was vain and shallow. Lorena basically hated her.

  “Easy there, Evans,” he said. “You sound like a jealous girlfriend.”

  “If you were my boyfriend kissing someone else, I’d be more than jealous.”

  Jack glanced at her and said, “Good thing you’re not my girlfriend then, I suppose, right?”

  There was something in his question, something that wasn’t just joking and teasing and co-worker razzing.

  “R-right,” she stuttered and went back to her notebook. “Anyway, who’s the person your ex put us on to?”

  “Her brother-in-law,” he answered. “Christof Neumann. Runs the family business down in California. She thinks he had more than just normal loving uncle feelings for Hailee. She caught him taking some
pretty pervy pictures of her on the beach. She said she tried never to leave Hailee alone with him after that. She said she got a bad feeling from him.”

  “Feelings can be triggers in the mind that keep us safe, especially women. We should look into him.”

  “Got it. Text Craig and get him the deets on Neumann.”

  “Did you ever meet him?” she asked, curious about his life before.

  “No, don’t think so. I know Victor because of our connection with Elizabeth. After I found out about the affair, I started looking further into him. His family is in the importing business.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Good question. The more I dug, the more I found a lot of false leads and bullshit that I knew were fronts. I don’t know exactly what they import, but I know it isn’t legit. Victor was always traveling a lot for the family business.”

  “So we can assume that the brother does, too,” Lorena said.

  “I would think so.”

  Lorena nodded and tapped her pen against her notepad. “Yeah, so if this Christof travels a lot, then it would mean that he could’ve been dumping the bodies in the tri-state areas. From what I’ve found, it doesn’t seem like any of our other suspects other than the art dealer we’re about to meet could’ve taken the bodies out of state and dumped them. Nevada, Utah, California, up near the Canadian border in Washington. These are all far off locations for the most part. If say, Archibald were to do this, how the heck would he have been able to get back to work on Monday? That’s a long way to go to dispose of bodies to make it back to Portland to his regular job.”

  “It could be done. It’s not entirely impossible. I made the drive in a weekend down to northern California to a friend’s wedding when I lived out here. Took about six hours or so if I remember. Plus, if it was someone like Archibald or Titus, then they could’ve taken a three-day-weekend and took off Monday as a personal day or something.”

  “True,” Lorena conceded. “Still seems like a lot of work when there are plenty of places to dump bodies around Portland.”

  “Some of the victims were from those states, not just Oregon. If he has to travel occasionally for work, then it would be convenient to kill a woman here or there to throw off the scent.”