Fatally Bound

by Roger Stelljes

  “I just bet your people will love us sticking our noses in this,” Wire remarked to the director. “That is, if we agree to do it.”

  “No, they probably won’t, but I don’t care,” Mitchell replied sternly. “I will take care of that issue and it will not be an issue.”

  “And I don’t think you just join the main investigation …” the Judge started.

  “No,” Mac finished. “If we did this, we would run a separate investigation, adjacent to the case, taking our own look at it in our own way.”

  “Right,” the Judge answered. “And out of the spotlight. We don’t want it looking like we’re sticking our nose into the investigation. So, to get started, the director has something for you.”

  Mitchell pulled two large red-rope files out of his large, black briefcase. “Entire case file, all three murders, forensics, profile, interviews, pictures, everything you need to get started and up to speed. I will get you linked to the electronic case file so you get every up to date piece of information we’re getting.”

  “Do your people know about this? About us?” Wire asked, thumbing through one of the red-rope files.

  “Not yet,” Mitchell answered.

  Wire and Mac both raised their eyebrows in annoyance.

  “I didn’t know for sure you were coming in,” the director answered. “Are you?”

  “Are we?” Wire asked, turning to Mac, “I mean, I will if you will?”

  Mac didn’t answer, thinking, sitting back in his chair, arms folded.

  “Come on, Mac,” Sally teased, walking to Mac’s chair, sitting on the arm and putting her right arm around his shoulder, “you’ve been bored out of your mind.”

  “I thought you liked I wasn’t detecting?” he replied, looking up at her.

  “One part of me does,” she answered. “I like that you’re home safe at night.” She reached for his hand. “However, the other part of me knows you could stop this guy. You went back to St. Paul to be a cop for a few weeks for something they really didn’t need you on. This is something you’re really needed on.”

  Mac looked to the Judge, smiling, “Ohhhh … you’ve taught her well.”

  The Judge sat back in his chair, a smile spreading across his wide face. “She’s a quick study. So what’s it gonna be?”

  “I’m in.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “When you’re the lead dog.”

  Wire, given her exhaustive schedule, hadn’t been by Mac and Sally’s Georgetown brownstone for a couple of months, so before they started, Mac showed her the recently finished kitchen. He installed all new white cabinetry, bringing the kitchen back to its original look, while also adding a center island, black granite countertops and wine refrigerator underneath the far end of the island. An eating nook in the form of a booth in the bay window overlooking the small backyard and patio was also added.

  “I love the all white cabinetry,” Wire remarked. “It makes the room look bigger,” she walked around a little more. “Maybe taller is the word I’m looking for.”

  “Visually you’re right. I’m not usually a huge fan of white, it shows fingerprints and can be hard to keep clean, but I wanted to restore it to its original look, with some modern conveniences, of course. It turned out quite well, I think.”

  “So what have you finished so far?”

  “I’ve finished the master bedroom and bath, living room and now the kitchen.”

  “The rooms you two spend all your time in then.”

  “Yeah, the place is really livable now.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I want to do a little work on the second-floor bathroom, make it a little better for guests. I’ll install a new sink, lighting, put on a new coat of paint and retile the shower. My mom is coming out to visit in October and I want to have it done by the time she gets here.”

  “So where do you want to work on the case?”

  “Let’s go up to the attic.”

  The brownstone had a spacious attic that Mac and Sally were using as an office. It had everything they needed: a large writing table desk, a wheeled whiteboard Mac bought at a surplus sale, a large blank white wall and a mini-fridge that had soda, water and a few beers. Mac removed some items from the desk, set a chair on the front side for Wire and put the files on the desk. “Let’s start digging through this thing.”

  Mac was, in one sense, impressed by the volume of information that the FBI collected, collated and summarized. In another sense, it was amazing that given all of the information collected over the three murders, the FBI was not any closer to catching the killer. In fact, the FBI was nowhere in catching the killer.

  There were now three victims. All of the women were killed in essentially the same way. The killer, which Mac refused to call “The Reaper,” at least for now, used a rag soaked in chloroform to subdue the women and knock them out. Once they were subdued, he then injected the women with sodium pentothal, an anesthetic.

  “Why the anesthetic?” Wire asked.

  “It gives him time, for one. The chloroform acts for a short time, but the sodium pentothal puts them out and lets him set up,” Mac answered.

  The setup was once the women were under anesthetic they were then bound to a chair. Once bound to the chair, and once the victims were awake, it appeared they were being interrogated and maybe even tortured. “What do you suppose the chair thing is all about?” Mac asked.

  “Maybe the verses tell us that.”

  “Reaping what you sow?”

  “Yeah, that he’s interrogating them about something and …”

  “Then, when he’s done, they reap what they sowed?” Mac finished. “So that begs the question, what did they sow?”

  “Who knows?” Wire answered. “The way he kills the girls, gutting them with the knife, leaving the biblical verses, it’s pretty …”

  “Demented? Sadistic? Cruel?”

  “Yes. You almost wonder if he’s more torturing them before he kills them, you know?”

  Mac looked at the photos, “Or he wants us to think that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Mac answered. “I’m just not willing to draw any conclusions on it just yet. I’m keeping an open mind.”

  Once he moved in for the kill, the victims’ abdomens were cut open in the shape of the Holy Cross, a long, deep, vertical cut was the killing wound. The killer would start below the woman’s navel and would twist the knife inside. Given the depth of the wound and the ripping nature of the wound, it suggested the knife was seven inches long with both a smooth and serrated edge leading into the hilt. The knife was thought to possibly be a Ka-Bar KB1214, a combat knife.

  “Nasty knife,” Mac noted, examining a picture of a Ka-Bar. “This knife has only one purpose: killing.”

  “Military type,” Wire added. “There was some thought the guy could be military by the way he hunts them.”

  “Possible,” Mac answered. “I’ve seen it before.”

  After the killing wound was complete, it was then extended from just above the pubic area up to the victim’s rib cage. After that, the killer made a horizontal wound that wasn’t as deep, more superficial, again, part of the symbolism of the murder. The slicing of the cross then led to the final physical act which was staging the woman in what appeared to be the fetal position, knees up to their stomach and arms wrapped around their upper torso. With all three victims, biblical messages of reaping what you sow had been left, causing the bureau to call the killer the Reaper. Apparently the killer was now aware of this, signing his last biblical message in blood on the wall with the name the Reaper.

  “Bureau moved pretty quickly to call this a serial,” Wire noted.

  “The staging of the body, the note with the biblical verse, all of that I think got the attention of the Harrisburg police and they called the bureau right away. It looks like the lead agent on the case, a guy named Gesch, was up there and the file indicates it was his view that this had all the hallmarks of a
serial getting started. He was obviously right.”

  The women were all found in the basements of their homes or of buildings. “Places where there’s privacy,” Wire observed. In two cases, the victims were in the basements of buildings, one an abandoned building, the other a basement of a bar.

  The first victim, Melissa Goynes, maiden name Melissa Ross, was killed six weeks ago in mid-May. A petite twenty-seven-year-old brunette, she was a waitress and manager at the Nittany Lion Sports Bar in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She was married with a three-year-old daughter.

  “She was found in the basement of the bar,” Mac mumbled, flipping through the pages of the police report, frowning. “She closed the bar with one of the bartenders, they talk for a few minutes in the parking lot at 2:20 A.M. or so. His car is parked closer to the building. After talking, he gets in his car and she walks the thirty feet to her car. Bartender says he saw her get into her car, start it and saw the headlights turn on. He then says he pulled away and drove home. His wife says he was home at 2:35 because she recalls him turning off the house’s alarm and coming up to bed. She looked at the clock before rolling over and going back to sleep, so the bartender was cleared. Goynes’s husband was home with their daughter, which the police confirmed. Their apartment building has cameras over the front and back door and he never left. No other suspects.” He scratched his head. “So our killer is waiting inside of the car?”

  “That’s what the Harrisburg police and FBI seem to think,” Dara answered. “Like you said, the bartender said he saw her get into her car, so the police’s theory makes sense.”

  Mac flipped to another page. “She had an older car, a 2002 basic Honda Accord that didn’t have a car alarm system, I guess, or if it did, the alarm didn’t work.”

  “Or he defeats it. So he gets in the car and hides in the backseat. He waits for the bartender to pull away and chloroforms her from behind. Then what, carries her back into the bar, down to the basement and goes to work on her?”

  “He would have had hours with her if that’s what he did,” Mac speculated, as he thumbed through the crime scene photos, laying them out on the writing table. “The photos aren’t bad, but without actually walking the crime scene around the bar, they don’t tell me as much. I think maybe we’ll need to go up to Harrisburg.”

  “See how our guy’s mind works?”

  “Exactly, try to get into his mind, anyway,” Mac replied. “I like to walk the crime scene and see the obstacles he had to overcome.”

  The second victim, Janelle Wyland, was killed two weeks later in Salisbury, Maryland. Salisbury was in the part of eastern Maryland across the Chesapeake and just below the southern border for Delaware. She was a twenty-seven-year-old redheaded insurance broker.

  “Janelle was busted in an old-fashioned way,” Wire smirked. “She was having an affair with her married boss. They went to a local hotel for a little rendezvous. According to the boss, he left the hotel at 9:30 P.M. and was home by 9:50 P.M., all of which was confirmed by his rather unhappy wife.”

  “Bet that was awkward,” Mac chuckled morbidly, and then added while admiring her photo, “I can, however, understand her boss’s attraction. Janelle was rather fetching.”

  “Have a thing for redheads, do you?”

  “I might have a type,” Mac answered. Sally was a fiery Irish redhead with a body that curved in all the right ways, just like Janelle. “Janelle’s fate was similar to Melissa’s,” Mac stated, showing a photo of Janelle Wyland, lying naked in a pool of blood.

  Wire grimaced. “Gruesome.”

  The final victim from two days ago, Hannah Donahue, was from Dover, Delaware. She was a twenty-seven-year-old, blond elementary school teacher.

  Mac placed the photos of each victim on the whiteboard with the vital information. To the right of the whiteboard, he put a large map of the five state area surrounding Washington, DC, and put pins up to mark the cities where the victims were killed, numbering the victims. He stood back from the wall and soaked in the information.

  “What are you thinking?” Wire asked, sitting at the desk, leaning back in her chair. She saw the look on his face as well.

  Mac looked at his watch, 5:22 P.M. “I’m thinking I need a beer,” he answered and walked over to the small brown fridge in the corner, “I’ve got Surly and Grain Belt Premium, fine Minnesota beers, or a Coors Light; what will it be?”

  “Coors Light,” Wire answered. She grabbed the beer from Mac, popped it open and took a long sip, “Ahhhh, the mountains are blue and the beer is ice cold.” She took another sip, “So what do you think?” she asked, gesturing with her beer towards their handiwork.

  “You ever work a serial killer case?” Mac asked, standing and turning back to look at the whiteboard, sipping from his Grain Belt.

  “Once. I was a young special agent. It was before I got into undercover work going after the mob. I was stationed down in the New Orleans Field Office and we had a serial. I was more or less a grunt on that one. We had a guy going around killing prostitutes. Once it was determined it was a serial and the bureau came in full throttle, we got the guy within ten days.”

  “Let me guess, turned out the killer’s mom was a prostitute, there was some sort of childhood trauma and he acted out on that.”

  “Something like that,” Wire nodded. “How about you?”

  “A couple,” Mac answered. “We had a guy going around killing working-class girls along University Avenue in St. Paul a few years ago who left ‘Have a Nice Day’ smiley face balloons at his murder scenes. His trigger was an ex-girlfriend who caused him to snap and get a medical discharge from the Marines. You know what’s common between your case and mine?”

  “The killer had a type?”

  “Exactly. In our case here,” Mac gestured to the board, “the killer doesn’t have a type, at least not that I can see—yet. Serial killers have a type of woman that they go after, whether it’s based on hair color, body type or profession, something that ties the victims together. There is usually something that serves as a trigger for the killer.”

  “We certainly don’t have that here,” Wire agreed, leaning back on her chair, putting her feet on the desk. “We have a blond, a brunette and a redhead.”

  “Goynes was short, whereas Wyland and Donahue were more medium height and weight. One is from Pennsylvania, one from Maryland and one from Delaware. I don’t see a type, I don’t see a commonality. That bugs me.”

  “So what do we know?” Wire asked.

  “He leaves messages, biblical versus that all relate to reaping what you sow. We have the following verses: Galatians 6:7—Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

  “Matthew 26:52—Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

  “And then two days ago: Job 4:8—Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.”

  “You’re the good Irish Catholic who regularly goes to church,” Wire asked. “Stringed together, do they mean anything to you?”

  Mac chuckled, “I go to church, but I’m no Biblical scholar. They all are a message of reaping what you sow, so I interpret that to mean he’s punishing these women for some reason. I suppose if we could figure out what that is, that gives you a better idea of maybe how he’s picking these women.”

  “The FBIs interpretation,” Wire remarked, “is that the verses suggest he’s a Mission-Oriented Killer.”

  “I know the type,” Mac answered. “They justify their acts as ‘ridding the world’ of people they deem undesirable, such as homosexuals, prostitutes or people of different ethnicity or religion.”

  “Yeah, they see themselves as attempting to change society or curing some societal ill,” Wire added. “I remember this from our behavioral science classes at Quantico. However, typically the mission-oriented killers have …”

  “A type,” Mac answered, sticking to the theme. “
The Zebra killers in San Francisco, you remember them?”

  Wire nodded.

  “They targeted Caucasians. The Green Valley Killer in Seattle targeted prostitutes. Your guy in Louisiana targeted prostitutes, my guy in St. Paul targeting working-class girls that reminded him of his old girlfriend. These guys are not psychotics,” Mac sat on the corner of the desk, “these guys are cold and calculating. They hunt these unworthy people and forge ahead on their mission, fully aware of the risks of doing so.”

  “A predator, stalking his prey,” Dara added. “However, this still brings us back to the question, what is it about these women that made them unworthy? What did they reap and sow?”

  “Damned if I know,” Mac replied, setting his beer down and grabbing a memorandum summarizing the victims. “Donahue and Wyland are college graduates. Goynes, on the other hand, dropped out of college. She was going to school at Robert Morris and then bagged it after two years.”

  “I’ve seen that before,” Wire suggested. “I had a couple of roomies at the University of Virginia who got sidetracked that way. They got into that bartending and waiting tables routine, all the cash and instant money with it, and they figure, I’ll finish school later.”

  “And later never comes,” Mac finished. “They weren’t criminals, it doesn’t look like. Goynes had a little issue nine years ago when she was ticketed for underage drinking. She was driving at the time she got herself into a little trouble.”

  “And our insurance broker,” Wire noted, looking through the same summary, “Janelle, was busted with some weed eight years ago when she was in college at Virginia Commonwealth. You scan her background and it looks like she was something of a party girl.”

  “BFD,” Mac remarked.

  “So what is this guy’s mission then?”

  “To punish women like these for their sins,” Mac answered. “So what is their sin? What is it that ties these women together? What did they do? What binds them together?” He took a sip of his beer, and tacked a different direction. “Is there anything in the autopsy reports?”