The Love Killings (Detective Matt Jones Book 2)

by Robert Ellis

  Matt leafed through the photographs until he found a shot that included all five victims. Stratton was leaning against the wall between his two daughters. Their eyes appeared fixed on Stratton’s wife and son. They were Baylor’s audience—they had to be Baylor’s audience—which would mean that the two girls would have been murdered just before Stratton. That left Tammy Stratton and her son. One of them had to be the first to go.

  He flipped the page over, then glanced at his laptop just as Get Buzzed faded up from black. Brown entered the room, placing two cups of coffee on Matt’s desk and staring at the screen. They were opening the show with footage of Matt chasing Day down the street. It turned out that the man with the video camera had been running behind them the moment Matt hit the corner. As Matt watched, his stomach churning, he realized that they were maximizing the drama by leaving the announcer out and letting the sound from the street carry the moment. Every bounce the camera made amplified the emotional context. Matt glanced at Brown, then turned back to his laptop. He could see himself tackling the reporter onto the floor, jamming his gun into the innocent man’s mouth. Then Ryan Day, fearing for his life, began stammering. Worse still, the gossip reporter was asking Matt if M. Trevor Jones, the King of Wall Street, was his father.

  Matt stood up, pried the lid off one of the coffee cups, stirred a pack of sugar into the brew, and took a first sip. He couldn’t watch anymore. He knew what it looked like because he’d seen the same shot so many times in so many cities over the past couple of years.

  It came off like police brutality. The chase and takedown had occurred over a period of three or four minutes. But the clip had been cut down to include only the worst moments. Everything about it came off harsh and overdone.

  He took another sip of coffee, watching Brown get out of her coat and sit down in his seat with her eyes still glued to the screen. He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. When he slid the lock open, he read the text message. It was from Wes Rogers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Philadelphia.

  We need to talk, the message said. Now.

  Rogers had included his address in the suburbs, and Matt committed it to memory. As he slipped his cell phone into his pocket, Brown gave him a look.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Rogers. He wants to see me. Guess I’m toast.”

  She shook her head. “That’s not his style, Jones. If you were toast, he would have said so. Rogers doesn’t keep people waiting.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Matt knew something was wrong the moment he saw the house number on the mailbox and gazed up the long drive. He pulled over and killed the lights and engine. When he fished through the glove box, he was glad the Crown Vic he’d been issued came equipped with a flashlight.

  But he didn’t switch it on. Not yet.

  Instead, he got out of the car and gazed at the silhouette of a large mansion on Fairfield Road. The windows were dark, and from where Matt stood on the frozen ground, all the exterior lights had been shut down as well. He noticed the wind finally, a hard wind whistling through the trees and knocking all the branches together.

  Matt dug his cell phone out of his pocket and double-checked Rogers’s text message. The house numbers matched, and so did the directions. He could see a school on the other side of Sugartown Road exactly where it was supposed to be. Wishing for a Marlboro, he pushed a piece of nicotine gum against his cheek and tried to process what he was seeing.

  Rogers didn’t live here, that much was clear. No one in law enforcement lived here. He was looking at an estate—a building so massive that it dwarfed the Strattons’ mansion on County Line Road. Matt took in the open gate and guessed that the six-foot-high wrought iron fence circled the entire property. As he scanned the grounds in the darkness, the length of the fence from the corner to the property’s end on Fairfield Road, the depth and proportion of the house, it felt like a lot of land—maybe ten acres, maybe even more. And the neighborhood was quiet. He hadn’t seen or heard a single car on either road since he arrived.

  He turned back to the mansion. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he could make out four three-story-high columns supporting the roof over a formal entrance.

  Everything about the place looked like trouble. Everything about what he was seeing felt wrong.

  He wondered who had sent him the text message. Who wanted him to be here? Who knew enough about what went down today to put Rogers’s name on it?

  He slipped the flashlight into his back pocket, drew his .45, and chambered a round. Then he started up the drive, slowly and carefully, hoping the moon would stay behind the clouds for another five minutes or so. There was a second building here, a two-story carriage house with five of its six garage doors open. In spite of the darkness, Matt could see a handful of vintage cars inside, along with a Land Rover, a Jaguar, and a Lexus SUV parked in the drive. He turned back to the mansion. It may have been below freezing tonight, the wind may have been howling, but none of that was on Matt’s mind right now. All he could feel as he reached the entrance and started up the granite steps was his heart beating heavy and hard in the center of his chest.

  One of the two glass doors was cracked open. Matt slid into an entryway that had to be three times the size of the FBI’s apartment on Pine Street. The ceiling was two stories up, the extra-wide staircase rising to a pair of French doors set above the entrance and finally making the turn with ten more steps up to the second floor.

  Matt didn’t move. Clearing his mind, he quieted his breathing and spent several minutes listening to the house. Moonlight suddenly flashed through the entryway, and Matt glanced at the French doors above his head. Then he lowered his eyes and composed himself with his gun still raised.

  He knew in his gut that he was listening to the sound of the dead. He’d heard it before, and it was always the same. A silence that seemed too silent. A stillness that appeared frozen and absolute. The house was beyond quiet. Not a clock ticking. Not a refrigerator stirring. Not even the fan from the building’s heating system. Just that eerie sound of the dead cascading through time.

  Matt pulled the flashlight out of his pocket, switched it on, and pressed it against the barrel of his gun. Working his way from front to back, he cleared the living room, a den, another sitting room, a library with a false wall that had been left open, an office, a room that looked just like an English pub, a game room, a powder room and two full baths, a gym with a steam room and sauna attached, a dining room, a washroom, and finally the kitchen and pantry. The entire back of the house appeared to be lined with windows that ran all the way up to the ceiling. Matt walked over to the door and peeked outside at an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Through a row of trees at the rear of the property line, he could see lights from another home or building. Still, they were a long way off. If Matt could trust his instincts, and he thought that he could, the doctor would have had no concerns about the sound of gunshots or his victims shrieking at the top of their lungs.

  He tried to shake off the image, the sounds of innocent women and children shrieking, but couldn’t. He knew where the dead bodies would be found. He realized that he’d known it all along.

  He found his way back to the front of the mansion and started up the staircase. When he reached the second-floor landing, he panned his light and gun across a sitting area that included a sofa and two reading chairs. There was a fireplace here, with a handful of small logs still burning. Matt moved to the center of the landing and turned around—

  And that’s when he saw them.

  Three were leaning against the far wall, a carbon copy of the crime scene on County Line Road. A father with his two daughters, stripped of their clothing, eyes open, and a small piece of gray-colored tape covering their chest wounds. All eyes were pointed at the woman on the floor with her son draped over her body. It looked like they were in the middle of making love. The only difference Matt could detect between the two crime scenes was the age of the son. In this case,
the boy looked a few years older, fifteen or sixteen years old.

  Matt took a deep breath and exhaled. As he gazed at the horror, it felt like his stomach was in his throat. He checked his hands and was surprised to find them so steady. He tried to pull himself together. It was difficult because his imagination always seemed to take over when the shock hit him this hard. He could never understand how anyone, no matter what their psychological issues might be, no matter what ordeal they may have faced, could take another human being’s life. Now he was standing before five corpses. Standing in the aftermath of a mass killing committed by a maniac.

  A memory surfaced. And while it had been more than five years since Matt was overseas, he could remember watching someone he’d shot take his last breath. A fifteen-year-old boy with a grenade launcher. He went out like a fish gasping for air, his mouth opening and closing, his eyes glazed. That’s when Matt heard the sound of death for the first time. A silence and stillness that had weight to it and wouldn’t go away. When memories like this flared up, he tried not to linger on them. If he could shut them down fast enough, they seemed to fade back into that pool of experiences that slept in the gloom. But tonight, looking at the woman with her arms around her son, their eyes meeting somewhere in the middle of a thousand-yard stare, he didn’t think he stood a chance.

  He tilted the flashlight down, the pools of wet blood glistening before his eyes. He moved closer, stepping around the puddles and streams until he reached the woman embracing her son. He didn’t have a pair of vinyl gloves with him, so when he knelt down and touched her forehead, he used the back of his wrist.

  She was still warm, still fresh. Minutes had gone by, not hours. He reached for his cell phone and slid the lock open.

  And that’s when he felt the muzzle of a gun poke him in the spine.

  He flinched, nearly jumping out of his skin. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

  “Hello, Matthew,” the doctor said in a calm and pleasant voice. “I see you’ve met the Holloways. They look like they used to be nice people, don’t you think? A nice family. And how ’bout this house?”

  Matt didn’t say anything.

  Baylor nudged him with the pistol and lowered his voice. “I’m gonna have to ask you for your gun,” he said. “And I’m afraid I’ll need your cell phone as well. No worries. You’ll have them back when I leave.”

  Matt wondered what kind of pistol Baylor was pressing into his spine, then figured that at point-blank range, it didn’t really matter, and the doctor couldn’t really miss. He passed back his .45, then turned around and handed over his cell phone.

  Baylor smiled at him, his blue eyes sparkling in the moonlight streaming in through the row of windows set above the staircase. Matt noted the chiseled face, the brown hair that had been lightened by the sun and appeared spiked, the energy still radiating from the man’s being. He had to remind himself that Baylor had been shot six weeks ago as well. He had to remind himself that Baylor was in his midfifties. He came off younger than that, stronger and better fit.

  Matt glanced down at the gun.

  The doctor was pointing a Glock 17 at him. The semiautomatic pistol seemed to have become a favorite in law enforcement these days, no doubt because of the nine-by-nineteen load it carried and the magazine’s capacity to hold seventeen rounds. Matt remembered reading about the pistol on the manufacturer’s website not too long ago. Safe, easy, and quick, the description said. Just what you need in high-pressure situations.

  Matt struggled to find a steady voice as he watched Baylor slip his phone into a jacket pocket.

  “Why don’t you let me bring you in, Doctor? Why keep doing this? What meaning could there possibly be in killing an entire family?”

  Baylor switched on a flashlight and shined it in Matt’s face, then smiled again like he hadn’t heard him. “Someone’s shut off the power, Matthew. I was looking for the circuit breakers when you arrived. My guess is that the box is somewhere near the kitchen. Why don’t you lead the way?”

  CHAPTER 16

  Matt switched on the circuit breakers, and the mansion came back to life as if hit with a defibrillator. Wires replaced veins as lamps snapped on, and the hum of the heating system took over the building.

  As Matt led the way back to the front entrance, he couldn’t help noticing how bizarrely the mansion was furnished. Every room they passed seemed showy and forced, and there was a certain ignorance to the way everything had been put together. Matt assumed that price was no object, yet the feel of room after room came off cheap and overdone. But it was the art on the walls that really stood out. The paintings were modern, mostly portraits rather than landscapes, and decidedly angry. It looked like most of the paintings came from the same artist, and that his or her psychological issues were a decade or two past neurotic. It was the choice of only using primary colors and the raw brushstrokes that gave the artist away. Every painting Matt looked at reminded him of a concrete wall he’d seen by Thirtieth Street Station last night. Every painting in the house came off like graffiti with no meaning, no subtlety, and no soul.

  Matt wondered how anyone could be comfortable living in a place like this. He couldn’t imagine waking up every day and thinking that he was still asleep and trapped in a nightmare. A world reduced to visual noise.

  They reached the entryway, and Baylor waved the Glock 17 toward the staircase. When the doctor spoke, his voice was riddled with sarcasm.

  “Nice art, don’t you think? You can’t buy taste, Matthew. That’s one of life’s secrets. You can’t buy class either.”

  Matt caught the wicked glint in the man’s eyes, the look of curiosity and amusement that wouldn’t go away, then started up the staircase. The power was back on, and his view of the crime scene would no longer be limited to the narrow beam of a flashlight. The second-floor landing would be just as it had been when the Holloways were murdered. The horror elements would be amped up. They had just passed the French doors. Matt counted ten more steps, and knew that he needed to prepare himself.

  The first thing he noticed was the lights on a large Christmas tree that stood between the fireplace and the five dead bodies. The second thing he noticed was the heads mounted on the wall. Big game heads. They were hanging right above the victims, and Matt couldn’t believe that he had missed them.

  Baylor must have noticed him gazing at Holloway’s trophies. When he spoke, his voice was muted.

  “They’re known as the big five,” he said. “The African lion, the elephant, a Cape buffalo, a leopard, and the rhinoceros. They call them the big five because these are the five most difficult animals to hunt on foot.”

  “Is that why you killed the Holloways, Doctor? Because this man shoots big game and you’ve got a problem with it?”

  Baylor laughed, then moved in for a closer look at the bodies. He seemed so fascinated by the horror, his eyes wagging back and forth through the corpses. He pointed his pistol at Holloway leaning against the wall with his two daughters. Beneath the coating of blood, they were naked and holding hands just like the Strattons had been found.

  “His name’s David Holloway, Matthew. He runs a software company, and before tonight, he was doing quite well. That’s his wife, Mimi, holding their son, Nicholas. He’s sixteen. The two girls are Sophie, age twelve, and Victoria, who’s nineteen. And yes, I have a real problem with people who shoot big game. They’re cowards.”

  “That’s why you killed them?”

  Baylor flashed a faint smile that came and went. “David didn’t hunt animals on foot. That would have been too risky. Too dangerous. And it would have made things difficult for the film crew he used to take with him. David had self-esteem issues and always seemed to need proof that he was on top. With every kill there was a video and a head, even if it had to be smuggled out. I was told by one of his macho friends that he used to wear makeup and a costume when he moved in for the kill.”

  “He fits your list, Doctor. He fits it like a well-tailored
suit.”

  “He does, doesn’t he. David Holloway was a real shithead.”

  Baylor took a step closer to the nineteen-year-old girl and knelt down to take in her body.

  “How did Holloway ever come up on your radar?” Matt said.

  The doctor’s eyes were still pinned on the naked girl. “He shot a lion a few years back. Not the one over his head. He shot a special lion. A tourist attraction that made money for an entire village. Holloway lured the animal off the reserve and then shot it and claimed he didn’t do anything wrong. Apparently, the lion experienced a tortured death. It ran off, wounded. They found its remains two days later. A pack of hyenas had dragged the lion into the brush and were feeding on it. It’s a real jungle out there, Matthew. And David Holloway was a lot more than a coward. Look at the size of the diamond he’s wearing in his right ear. The world’s better off without him. I’m glad he’s dead.”

  Matt’s eyes flicked down from the head mounted on the wall to Holloway’s pierced ear. The diamond was almost the size of a grape and appeared stupid and crass, even embarrassing. When he turned back to Baylor, it looked like the doctor was examining the girl’s teeth.

  “They were your audience, Doctor. You murdered the Holloways here because of the animal heads. Look at their eyes. It feels like they’re watching us.”

  “I think you’re right about that, Matthew. The Holloways were murdered here because of the animal heads. They witnessed the spectacle along with Holloway and his two daughters. It’s worth noting that the landing is out in the open. There’s no door. No expectation of privacy. No doubt, murdering them in an almost public space heightens the thrill.”

  Baylor’s words about the need for an audience struck a nerve. Matt had been thinking the same thing. It was about the order of the deaths. Holloway would be last because he needed to be punished. The two girls would go next to last because they were needed as witnesses. But who would’ve been murdered first?