Chapter Seven
Danni was up early on Sunday morning making sandwiches and packing the cooler. She and Hannah were going to Whiskey River Springs for the day. They both needed it. Danni hadn’t taken any time off in a month, and some days she worked round the clock. Thank God her sister Mary was a stay-at-home mom and was willing to watch Hannah. Otherwise, Danni would have had to quit her job.
Hannah was a little lost without her mother around constantly correcting her, keeping her in line, and loving her to death. Dad lived in town but he was usually “tied up” with work or, worse yet, a new woman. Whiskey River Springs was Hannah and her mom’s special place. They’d swim and hike and just hang out together. They almost weren’t mom and daughter at the Springs. They were girlfriends.
The doorbell rang as Danni was filling the cooler with ice. She first checked to make sure she had her gun.
“Who is it?” she called out from a distance. Hannah was still asleep, but it didn’t matter. Even if she were awake, the rule these days was that Mommy always answered the door. Hannah was never alone in the house.
“It’s me—Allan.”
Even though she recognized the voice, Danni looked through the peephole to be sure. Maybe she was overly cautious, but whoever the murderer was, he knew she was on the case. And if he took her out, her daughter was defenseless. She finally opened the door.
“I don’t care what you’ve got, I’m not going with you. Hannah and I need this day.”
“I’m not going to take you away from your day. I just have some bad news,” Allan said.
“What is it?” she asked impatiently. She had no idea what was coming.
“Stacey Kincaid is dead. The St. Petersburg police contacted us early this morning. She was at a party and apparently went for a walk on the seawall. Some boy found her. She was stabbed twice: once in the abdomen, once in the chest.”
Danni felt like she had been stabbed in the chest herself. It was a totally different experience to find out about the murder of someone you knew. Danni had taken Stacey under her wing and given her motherly advice. They hadn’t known each other that long or that well, but they had touched. She didn’t want to show her emotion though, at least not to Allan, although she could tell he understood that this was different.
“Anything we can use?” she asked.
“Nothing. Nobody saw anything and there was nothing at the scene but the body.”
“It’s him though. Had to be. She was his loose end.”
“No doubt about it,” Allan replied.
Danni’s mood had dissipated somewhat by the time she and Hannah reached Whiskey River Springs. It was partially her own attitude adjustment and partially the springs themselves.
As for her attitude adjustment, Danni only needed to remind herself that every one of those victims had a mother and father, relatives, friends, and acquaintances who loved and cared for them dearly. The difference between Stacey and the others was that she, Danni, had been one of Stacey’s acquaintances and not just the investigating officer. Danni had to put her personal feelings aside and do for Stacey exactly what she had to do for those other girls and for future victims: Find the murdering bastard who killed them and who would kill again.
The other part of her mood change was Whiskey River Springs. Set outside the town of White Springs in northern Apache County, the underground springs were one of the many natural wonders of Florida that tourists who stayed on the main drag would never see. This was farm and ranch country, where the cypress, pine, and great oak, their branches littered with Spanish moss, sheltered and protected their hidden jewels, the spring-fed Suwannee, Ichetucknee, Crystal, and Santa Fe Rivers that meandered across the interior landscape of north central Florida like the fingers of a giant celestial hand.
Whiskey River Springs was actually a series of underground springs that fed the Santa Fe. You could rent a tube and float down the river from one spring to another, which Danni and Hannah often did, or you could just lounge at one spring as they were doing on this particular day.
Hannah at ten was like a fish in the water. Danni and Mike, Hannah’s father, had put her in lessons before she was a year old and it had paid off. She loved the water, especially the springs.
“How did they get here?” she had asked Danni not so long ago.
It was a teachable moment that Danni luckily was prepared for. “The springs have been here for thousands of years, honey.” She told her daughter how ordinary rainwater over thousands of years had carved out underground caverns and caves in the limestone. “As the water travels in these caves and caverns, it has to come out somewhere. The springs are where it comes out.”
They always carried goggles, and Danni had shown Hannah where the caverns were in each one of the springs. “Promise me you’ll never swim in there.”
“I promise, Mommy.”
Danni had firsthand knowledge of both the danger and the spectacular nature of the caves and caverns of these particular springs. She was a certified scuba diver, and she and Mike had explored these caverns years ago before Hannah was born and before she discovered that Mike was one of those assholes who needed more than one woman to satisfy his needs. She kept forgiving him and letting him come back home until finally he’d left her for a woman ten years her junior. There was no coming back after that, and the experience had soured her on men in general.
Hannah’s promise not to explore the caverns was enough for Danni. On this day, after about an hour of swimming in the crystal clear water, which was a constant seventy-two degrees year round, Danni retired to her beach chair to read while Hannah continued to play.
The springs were literally holes in the ground that you had to walk down into, and stairs had been constructed for that purpose. The cedar, the oak, and the pine formed a canopy above so that very little direct sunlight filtered in. Again, it was a Florida the ordinary tourist would never see.
Danni left her book every once in a while and walked over to the springs and looked down on her daughter who was having a ball. She had found a girl her age to play with.
While Danni was sitting in her beach chair reading and relaxing for the first time in months, her cell phone rang.
“Hello.”
“You lost your only witness, didn’t you?” the voice on the other end said.
“Who is this?”
“You know who it is.”
Danni could feel her blood pressure rising. He was getting pretty brave now. “You piece of shit. I’m gonna nail your ass.”
“You shouldn’t leave your daughter in a watering hole where you can’t see her.”
The words took a moment to register. Danni threw the cell phone down and raced for the water, not knowing what to expect. Was that son of a bitch down there? Had he grabbed Hannah?
Hannah was fine. She was still playing with her newfound friend. Danni took a long deep breath and exhaled. For just a split second her life had hung in the balance. Then the cop in her took over. She looked around. There weren’t too many people at the springs that day and most of them were women with their children. She couldn’t see him, but he had to be there somewhere. She ran back to the blanket and chair, retrieved her cell phone and called the desk sergeant at the Apache County Sheriff’s Office. She recognized Bill Rose’s voice right away.
“Bill, this is Danni Jansen. I’m out at Whiskey River Springs and I just got a call from our killer. He’s out here somewhere.”
“I’ll get some cars out there right away, Danni.”
“There’s only one road in and out of here, Bill.”
“We’ll set up roadblocks at each end. If he’s still in there, he won’t get out.”
Danni next called Captain Jeffries directly and gave him the news so he wouldn’t get his information secondhand over the radio.
“I’ll send a task force unit out there as well, Danni. Why don’t you take your daughter home. This could get a little hairy.”
Danni wanted to be there, but she knew that hi
s advice was sound. “I will, Captain. Thanks.”
Getting Hannah out of the water was no easy task.
“Come on, Hannah, we have to go.”
“We just got here, Mommy.”
“I know, honey, but we’ve got to go now.”
The sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene just as Danni and Hannah finished packing up. Everybody was ordered out of the Springs and checked out individually before being allowed to get in their cars and leave. Each car got a pass placed on the inside dashboard by an officer just before leaving, and the people inside received some verbal instructions: “Lock your door and don’t stop for anyone for any reason until you get beyond the police blockade. When they see your pass at the blockade, they’ll let you go.”
The cars left single file so there would be no way for the killer to stop one of them without somebody else observing. Danni and Hannah were in the last car.
The next morning, Danni called the office to say that she wouldn’t be in. She talked directly with Captain Jeffries.
“We didn’t get him,” Jeffries told her.
Danni wasn’t surprised. “Did you check out that phone number he called from?”
“Yes. It belonged to a woman who lives in White Springs. She was at Whiskey River Springs yesterday and she said she’d lost her phone. We’re checking her out, but she sounds legit.”
“He was probably at the Springs, stole the phone, and called me from the road as he was leaving.”
“That would be my guess,” Jeffries replied.
“Listen, he made a veiled threat against my daughter yesterday, and I’ve got to take care of that. It’s going to take me a couple of days.”
“Understood. Need any help?”
“Nope. The fewer people who know about this, the better.”
“I hear you. Let me know when you get back to the office.”
Danni accompanied Hannah to school that morning. They went right to the principal’s office where they waited an hour to see the principal, an elderly black woman named Mrs. Demps. Danni went into the office alone but not until she had one of the office ladies swear she would not let Hannah out of her sight for any reason.
“Not even to go to the bathroom.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom,” the woman repeated.
Inside the principal’s office, Danni revealed her plan.
“I don’t know if you know this or not,” Danni began, “but I’m a homicide detective with the Oakville Police Department. Yesterday the man who is killing these young coeds threatened my daughter directly. I have to take her out of school, and I have to take her out of this area and reenroll her somewhere else under a different name. I will need to take all her records with me.”
“That may take a few hours.”
“We have some packing to do, and I have some calls to make. I can come back in three hours.”
“Make it two,” Mrs. Demps said. “We’ll have the records ready for you.”
Danni had already called Mike’s cousin, Eleanor, who lived in a suburb of Denver. The two women had become friends during the marriage and had maintained that friendship after the divorce. Eleanor had two kids of her own. Her son, Tim, was fourteen and her daughter, Patricia, was twelve.
“Eleanor, I have a big favor to ask of you,” Danni began. “You are kind of off the radar in the sense that few people knew that we were friends and nobody knows that we are still, including Mike.” Danni then told her what had happened recently.
After picking up the records at school, Danni and Hannah took a very circuitous route to Tampa, making sure they were not followed. Late that afternoon they boarded a plane for Denver. During the drive to Tampa and the flight to Colorado, Danni drilled Hannah on the details of her new life.
“You can’t get close to anybody, honey, except Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Charley and Tim and Patricia. You are still going to be Hannah, but your last name is going to be Olson like Tim and Patricia. Do you understand?”
“Why, Mommy? And when am I going to see you?”
It was a process but Hannah was starting to get it by the time they landed. Eleanor was waiting at the airport. Danni spent the next morning making copies of Hannah’s school records, then altering the copies, then copying the altered documents until they looked as good as the originals. Early that afternoon she and Eleanor met with the principal of Parker Elementary School. Danni told the woman the whole story.
“Hannah can’t live with me while this maniac is free and she needs to go to school. I have her records here which show her name as Olson and show that she is a fourth-grade student.”
“I need to check with the school board before I can approve this,” the principal said.
“You can’t,” Danni replied. “I don’t want you to know. I don’t want anybody to know. If you can’t take my daughter under these conditions, then she’s not going to go to school while this madman is loose. I’ll sign whatever waiver you need just as long as you don’t show it to anybody until this is over.” She didn’t say what “over” meant, but they all knew there were several possibilities.
The principal, Mrs. Hoffman, thought about it for a long time.
“The child needs to go to school,” she said finally. “And nobody can fault us for doing what we’re doing under the circumstances.”
Danni was on a plane home that night. Every nerve in her body was on edge. Every fiber within her wanted to be with her daughter in Denver. Finally, she started to feel just a speck of what Stacey Kincaid’s parents and all those other victims’ parents had felt when they heard the news that their daughters were gone. My little girl is still alive, Danni thought.
We’ve got to find this bastard.
Chapter Eight
Danni didn’t get good news when she walked into the morning meeting on Wednesday.
“We’ve got another body,” Captain Jeffries told the group although most of them knew already. “A junior at the university; they found her on the north side of town. She’d been lying dead in her apartment for three days. Throat was cut. Can you imagine that? She was living in an apartment complex and nobody even noticed the smell. It’s like people these days live in cocoons or something.”
Danni was already making the connection. Three days ago was Sunday, the day she was at Whiskey River Springs. She didn’t say anything to the captain until the meeting was over.
His door was open when she walked in the office, but she knocked anyway. Captain Sam Jeffries looked up from the paperwork on his desk and smiled. He was a big man with broad shoulders and a gut to match, but he was a good leader and everybody on the task force respected him, including the FBI guys who had a tendency to respect nobody but their own.
“Good to have you back, Danni. Did you get everything taken care of?”
“Yeah, thanks. I appreciate your giving me the time off.”
“No problem. Family comes first. I know you’ve probably lost some sleep worrying about your daughter and all. What’s up?”
Danni and Sam Jeffries had worked on many cases together over the years and she considered him a friend. Danni had an idea and she needed his help. She hoped those years of friendship would come into play in their ensuing conversation.
“It’s about that murder, Captain. When did it happen exactly?”
“Sunday, late in the afternoon, about the time we were chasing around Whiskey Springs looking for our killer.”
“So he set us up.”
“Looks like it.”
“Why didn’t you tell everybody at the morning meeting? You weren’t trying to protect me, were you? I mean, I was the one who got everybody out there.”
“No, you weren’t, Danni; he was. He got us out there. And he could have used anybody to do it. It must have just slipped my mind at the meeting. The forensics from this recent murder don’t add anything to what we already know anyway.”
“She was a college student at the University of North Central Florida, wasn’t she?”
“Ye
ah. Just like all the rest.”
“Don’t you find it intriguing, Captain, that the murders are happening all over the city, including areas not necessarily associated with the college, yet only women who are students at the University of North Central Florida are the victims?”
“That’s pretty obvious. What’s the point?”
“These aren’t just random campus killings. The killer is setting out to kill just students from this university.”
“Okay?”
“Maybe there’s a further connection, a common class, a major, or a minor or something like that.”
“The FBI has looked into that. No pattern has emerged yet.” At least she was thinking outside the box. Besides, even though he was ten years her senior, Jeffries still enjoyed watching Danni pace back and forth in his office, her hands on her hips, her body bouncing with every step. It was more fun by a long shot than looking at the paperwork on his desk.
“Maybe it’s about him. Maybe he was a student, maybe he is a student, and some coed rejected him.”
Jeffries stood up at that point.
“The FBI has profilers looking into that type of stuff, Danni. We have to concentrate on good old-fashioned police work and find some hard evidence. Let them work on the theories.”
“We need a search warrant to get the proof.”
“What are you talking about? A search warrant for what?”
“Thomas Felton’s apartment,” Danni replied.
“Thomas Felton? Refresh my recollection. Do we have a file on him?”
“I do.”
“Get it.”
The file was on top of her desk. Danni had figured he might want to see it when she brought up the issue. She returned moments later and handed it to him.
“He’s the law student who was in Utah during the serial killings there, and he’s now here.”
“Didn’t we already check him out?” Jeffries asked.
“We spoke to him a couple of times but that was it.”
“Well, it says here that he went to undergraduate school in Utah and came here to go to law school. He came a year ago to establish residency because the tuition is cheaper here for in-state students than it is in Utah. Danni, you verified that his story was true. Isn’t that right?”
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