Colton Copycat Killer

by Marie Ferrarella

  The person holding the gun and issuing the demanding question was the same person she’d seen in the precinct more than an hour ago.

  Johnny Vine.

  Vine, looking a way she had never seen him look before. Not the laid-back, devil-may-care rootless boyfriend, but someone who was desperate.

  “I’m not going to ask you twice,” he warned, his eyes cold, flat. Dangerous.

  “What key?” Zoe cried. “What are you talking about? I don’t have any key that belongs to you.”

  “It’s not the key that belongs to me,” Vine retorted, succeeding in making the whole issue even more unclear to her than it already was. “Now where the hell is it?” He cocked the gun, his meaning crystal clear. She either produced the key he was looking for, or she forfeited her life.

  Desperate, Zoe took the only chance she had. She shoved the grocery bags in her arms at him with all of her might.

  Curses littered the air. The gun discharged but she was already running when it did.

  Because she was so shaken, Zoe reacted automatically and, still running, looked down at her torso to see if she was bleeding anywhere. Her adrenaline was ramped up so high, she doubted if she would have been able to feel the bullet if it had struck her. Not until she made good her getaway, at any rate.

  But she saw no blood. The bullet had apparently missed her.

  Relieved, more frightened than she’d ever been in her entire life, Zoe flew out of her house.

  Hitting the driveway, she just kept on running. She wasn’t going to even attempt to get into her car—which was right there—because she knew Vine would be on her before she ever got a chance to put the key in the ignition, much less start the engine and peel out of there.

  She might be faster than he was, but he was a great deal stronger. Her best chance to get away was to run. She’d been on the track team, both in high school and in college, and she’d never gotten out of the habit of running. Running was her way of relieving her stress. Some people drank, she ran.

  And she was never more grateful for keeping up that form of exercise than she was right at this moment, despite the fact that she was now covering ground in four-inch heels.

  No longer encumbered by grocery bags, Zoe’d flown out of her house like the proverbial bat out of hell. She continued going and ran out of her cul-de-sac and down a through street in her development, all the while trying to think of whose door to knock on in order to get someone to dial 911.

  She was still trying to decide, continually looking over her shoulder to make sure Johnny Vine wasn’t pursuing her, when the sudden screech of tires registered. From the sound, it seemed as if a car was making a sudden, unexpected U-turn in the middle of the street.

  Afraid Vine was now pursuing her in his car, she spun around and began to run in an alternate direction. The man whose eyes she’d looked into in her living room was desperate and would think nothing of running her down if she didn’t volunteer the location of a key she knew nothing about.

  Her lungs were bursting now as she poured it on.

  The car with the screeching tires was still coming after her, she could tell by the noise that was growing louder.

  And then, just like that, the car was cutting off her avenue of escape, pinning her in such a fashion that there was nowhere for her to go.

  Her heart pounding wildly in her throat, Zoe searched for anything she could use as a weapon. Seeing a garden gnome on the front of a lawn, she lunged for it. She held it up like a weapon as the driver emerged from behind the wheel.

  The gnome slid from her fingers onto the grass as her knees threatened to buckle right out from under her.

  “Sam!” she all but sobbed as she threw her arms around him. “Thank God it’s you! But that’s not your car,” she cried in confusion. She wouldn’t have kept on running like that if she’d known it was he.

  He’d had to switch cars at the station. When he came out, he’d found his battery had inexplicably gone dead despite the fact that it was only a year old. An equally inexplicable sense of urgency had him switching cars rather than waiting to see if his battery had indeed given up the ghost, or simply needed to be jumped.

  Seeing Zoe running down the street, he knew he was right to hurry back to her.

  “What the hell is going on?” he wanted to know, holding her to him. “You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  Now that Sam was here to protect her, she had to struggle to keep herself from falling apart. It took her a minute to catch her breath. “Johnny—Johnny was in my house.”

  He knew it. He knew he should have found some reason to keep Vine locked up until he could conduct a further investigation into the man’s dealings. He could have kicked himself for letting the man loose.

  Drawing Zoe back so he could look at her, he searched her face for telltale marks. “Did Vine do something to you?”

  She sucked in some more air and began to breathe a little more evenly.

  “He ransacked my house, just like he did Celia’s. I must have walked in on him. He was looking for some key,” she told Sam. “Demanded to know where it was.” Her mouth went dry as she went on to say, “He had a gun.”

  The look on Sam’s face went from compassionate to stone-cold. “Get in the car,” he ordered.

  She did, although by the look on her face, it appeared that she was operating on automatic pilot.

  He would have had her stay in his car and lock the doors while he went back to her place on foot, but he could get to her house faster with the car than if he ran, the way she had.

  Driving like a man possessed, he got to Zoe’s house within two minutes.

  “Stay in the car,” Sam ordered. “And call for backup.”

  Getting out of the vehicle, he tossed his cell phone on the seat next to her. It was easier that way. He didn’t have time to instruct her on how to use the radio in the car to call the station.

  His weapon drawn and the safety off, Sam approached her house.

  The door was standing wide open, just the way he assumed she’d left it when she’d flown out of the house. Sam entered, scanning the area as he inched his way into first the living room, then the kitchen and the family room beyond that. Because he had no backup, progress was torturously slow.

  He proceeded the same way throughout the whole first floor, taking care not to step or trip on anything. It was far from easy. Vine had done as thorough a job here as he had done in Celia’s condo, Sam thought.

  What was this key he was trying to find? And more importantly, what did it open?

  Weapon raised above shoulder level, Sam made his way up the stairs, then went through the bedrooms one at a time, alert for any noise, any sudden movements.

  Only when he had satisfied himself that he had cleared the entire floor did he allow himself to relax a little.

  Until he heard something coming from the first floor. Instantly alert again, Sam made his way quickly to the stairs, then down them, scanning the area relentlessly until it almost hurt his eyes to do so.

  When he saw the shadow cast by a figure in the living room, he came perilously close to shooting—until he saw the shadow belonged to Zoe.

  Furious over what had almost happened, he angrily snapped, “I thought I told you to stay in the damn car,” as he came down the last couple of steps.

  She didn’t back down in the face of his anger. “You were taking so long, I was afraid something had happened to you. I wanted to help.”

  “And you coming in and getting shot would have helped?” he demanded.

  The moment the words were out of his mouth, he regretted them. She was worried about him—when was the last time someone had actually expressed those sentiments? He’d been on his own and independent for so long, he couldn’t begin to remember the last time he’d felt someone cared about him.

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nbsp; “Vine’s gone,” he told her, abruptly changing subjects and his tone. “Do you have any idea what key he could have been referring to?”

  She shook her head. “Celia never said anything about a key, or about holding something for Johnny. That’s what this has got to be about, right? She had something of his and then locked it up, I guess. Either for safekeeping—or as an insurance policy to keep him from doing something to her.”

  Yeah, and look how well that turned out for her, Sam thought, but he kept it to himself. As for Zoe’s theory, it was plausible enough, he supposed.

  “Yeah, but what? And where?” He sighed as he heard the sound of approaching sirens. “One thing’s clear, though.”

  She looked at him, waiting for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she prodded, “What?”

  “You can’t stay here. It’s not safe.”

  She hated this. Hated the fact that Vine had made her afraid to stay in her own house. And Sam was right. She couldn’t stay here, at least not right now. Not while all of this was still up in the air and Celia’s killer was still out there. “I can get a hotel room for a few days,” she agreed. By then, her nerves should have settled down. “But after that—”

  “No hotel room,” he told her, vetoing the idea with finality, leaving absolutely no room for argument. “You’re staying with me. That way I can keep an eye on you around the clock. And when I can’t, I’ll have a guard posted nearby.”

  Not that the idea of having him so close didn’t sound lovely to her, but it also made her feel guilty. “You have work to do. You can’t waste your time being my bodyguard.”

  “I don’t consider that a waste of my time. Arguing with you about it, though, is a waste of my time,” he pointed out. “Go pack whatever you need to take with you—and leave any useless protests about it behind here,” he instructed.

  If she did have the notion to carry on any further discussion with him about it, it had to be tabled because the next minute, the house began to fill up with police personnel connected to the Granite Gulch PD’s forensics team.

  The head of the team, a twenty-three-year veteran of the force named Lieutenant Gary Reynolds, looked around at the destruction and debris that littered the small living room.

  He shook his head. Even for chaotic, this set a new high. “I see this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” the older man quipped.

  “I don’t make the messes, I just call in about them,” Sam told the lieutenant, holding up his hands as if he was literally surrendering as he protested his innocence. “And while you’re doing your ‘thing,’ Lieutenant,” he said, making a request of the other man, “see if you can come across a key.”

  “A key?” Reynolds repeated uncertainly. “What kind of key?”

  “Damned if I know,” Sam admitted, then hazarded a guess. “Like one for a gym locker or maybe a storage unit. Something maybe out of the ordinary, I’m thinking,” Sam elaborated for the crime scene investigator. “Better yet, bag and tag any keys you find and then have them sent to me.”

  While he was talking to the lieutenant, out of the corner of his eye he saw Zoe suddenly look very alert, as if she’d just had an unexpected thought.

  Had she remembered something?

  Had his innocuous instructions to the head of the crime scene investigation triggered something in her memory? He could only hope.

  Finished with Reynolds, Sam took Zoe aside. “You remember something?” he asked her gently.

  “Maybe,” she qualified warily.

  She didn’t want Sam to get his hopes up if she turned out to be wrong. And who knew, maybe she’d only imagined it. Maybe she was trying so hard to remember, to connect the dots, she was actually creating something in her mind that had never happened.

  Sam struggled to curb his impatience.

  “Now’s not the time to be coy, Zoe. Now’s the time to jump in, both feet first. As much as I like the idea of guarding that body of yours, both of us will breathe a lot easier once Vine is off the streets and behind bars where that piece of filth belongs.”

  “You’re probably right,” Zoe agreed. The more she knew about Johnny Vine, the more convinced she was that he was the type of person whose own mother wouldn’t vouch for him. “But there’s still nothing to tie him to the other two murders. And if there’s no connection, then he’s probably not the Alphabet Killer.”

  Sam wasn’t finished conducting his investigation into that and until it was completed, he reserved judgment on whether or not to absolve Vine of the annoying nickname the media had given him.

  “We’ll weigh the evidence on that when the time comes. Right now, I’ve got him for attacking you.” He took her chin in his hand and examined her face again, more closely this time. First one side, then the other.

  Zoe stifled her urge to pull her face away. Instead, she waited for Sam to finish examining it. “What are you doing?” she wanted to know.

  “Making sure there are no bruises,” Sam told her.

  “Johnny didn’t attack me physically,” she told Sam, thinking they had already established that fact when she’d initially told him what had happened. “He just pointed his gun at me.” And then she remembered something she hadn’t mentioned to him. “They’ll probably find a bullet embedded in something.”

  “He shot at you?” Sam asked, hardly able to contain his fury.

  She nodded. “In a way. The gun went off when I threw the groceries at him.”

  “Hold it. Back up,” he told her, holding up one hand like a traffic cop. “What groceries?”

  She didn’t think that was really important in the scheme of things, but since he’d asked, she elaborated. “I stopped at the store to pick up a few things—I thought maybe you’d come by after work and I knew you’d be hungry. I didn’t have anything decent in my refrigerator—just some leftover takeout that’s probably turning if it hasn’t already turned by now. Anyway, I picked up a few things.”

  He considered what she’d just told him. No one had ever put that much thought into his care and feeding. He could remember going hungry for more than a couple of days because of one thing or another during his days in foster care.

  And he could have lost her so easily just now. Lost her to a criminal’s bullet before he ever even had a chance to bring her into his life for more than a day at a time. All Vine had to do was shoot before she had a chance to throw anything at him to deflect the shot and she could have been dead.

  The very thought numbed him.

  “I guess it was lucky you were carrying groceries, then,” was his only comment. He didn’t trust himself to say anything further right now.

  He needed time to process the rest of it. But for now, there was still one question he hadn’t gotten the answer to. “What was it you just remembered?” he pressed.

  Getting caught up with Sam, she’d almost forgotten again. But his question brought it all vividly back to her.

  “Celia had a storage unit she rented,” she told him, adding hopefully, “Maybe that’s the key that Johnny is so desperately searching for.”

  Chapter 17

  Had Zoe’s house not been filled with crime scene investigators milling around in every conceivable room, he would have kissed her. Remembering Celia had recently rented a storage unit might just give them the break in the case they needed—or at least he fervently hoped so.

  Hell, the way he felt right now, he would have kissed Zoe if she’d just recited the alphabet and missed mentioning some of the key vowels.

  For his own peace of mind, Sam chalked up his reaction, as well as his feelings for Zoe in general, as being the way they were because this was all new to him, this feeling of lightness and hope that she inspired within him. New and different and after living in the darkness every day for so long, this was an incredible and more than welcome change
.

  But he couldn’t fool himself, Sam silently warned. He couldn’t allow himself to make more of it than it really was. To do so went against his nature, against everything he was and had ever been. Some people saw rainbows after a storm. He saw only a temporary break between two storms.

  Shaking off any philosophical bent, Sam forced himself to focus on the immediate problem: the case, not the internal tug-of-war he currently was unsuccessfully waging.

  “Great, now all we need to do is figure out where she rented her unit.” That meant it was time for some good old-fashioned police work. The kind that required shoe leather, patience and a lot of questioning.

  “She’s had the storage unit for about three months,” Zoe recalled. “Wouldn’t there be some kind of billing statement from the facility?” she questioned enthusiastically. It seemed only logical to her.

  But Sam was more guarded about his reaction. “She might have paid for the unit when she opened it, then given them the rent for six months, or maybe a year—cash, up-front,” he emphasized. “If she did that, there would be no paper trail.”

  Zoe looked at him, surprised he would say something like that. “You didn’t know Celia very well at all, did you?”

  “Why?” he asked sharply. He didn’t see where one thing had anything to do with the other.

  “Because if you did,” Zoe answered him patiently, “you’d know she never paid cash for anything. She wanted to sustain an illusion for herself that money was going to last her for all eternity.”

  She’d lost count of the number of times that Celia had “borrowed” money from her and then conveniently forgotten to repay it.

  “Celia paid everything with either checks or credit cards. She maxed out at least two of them, if not more, but what that means is that there had to be a statement from the storage facility somewhere and once we find it, we have the name of the place—not to mention the unit number and all that good stuff.”

  She stopped talking because she realized Sam was just staring at her. Feeling self-conscious, she asked him, “Something wrong?”