Fatally Bound

by Roger Stelljes

  “We have a theory,” Mac replied with a smile. “But a little background first. Goynes, Donahue and Faye were counselors at the AAHC Camp up on Lake Seneca in New York.”

  “Is that the Finger Lakes region?” Dominic Wire asked.

  “Yes, Lake Seneca is one of them,” Dara answered. “Lake Seneca is a half hour from Auburn.”

  “Saturday nights for the counselors was their free time,” Mac continued. “The kids from the previous week left by noon on Saturday and new kids didn’t arrive until Sunday, so the director at the camp said that the counselors often go out on Saturday nights. As for August 17th, that was the last Saturday of the summer for the camp. All the counselors would be going home the next day so they were free to do whatever they wanted that night. The camp director told us the counselors often went out on the town or to parties. It is vacation land up there, plenty to do on a Saturday night.”

  “Great,” Riles critiqued. “Again, what connects all of this?”

  “What if Goynes, Donahue and Faye, along with Wyland and Drew, were at this party at an abandoned farm near Auburn and somehow were involved in the hit-and run death of Johnson? Maybe some of them were in the vehicle? Maybe others were involved in getting her drunk and high so that she wandered off from the party? Witness accounts in the Johnson file indicate that while some locals recognized her, they didn’t really know who she came to the party with. Maybe she went to the party with a friend, maybe that friend was friends with our victims and then the tragedy ensued where Johnson ends up dead in a ditch a mile from the farm.”

  “How do you draw that conclusion?” Riles asked. “The dots still aren’t connected for me.”

  Mac took out photos of Johnson lying in the ditch. He put the photo of Johnson lying in the ditch, her rosary beads clutched to her chest, lying in the fetal position up on the whiteboard, next to the murder scene photos for Goynes, Wyland, Donahue and Faye lying in the fetal position, the Holy Cross cut into their chests. “How about now?”

  The room went quiet.

  Mac didn’t have to explain the relationship between the photos.

  “The symbolism of it,” Riles muttered, nodding, getting it sooner than everyone else. “The victims have been left staged in essentially the same way.”

  “Except instead of rosary beads …” Mac started.

  “He’s cutting the Holy Cross in their chests instead,” Riles finished, taking a sip of his beer. “Okay, Mac, I see how you’re getting there.”

  “Why the biblical verses?” Rock asked. “What’s that all about?”

  “A message,” Wire answered, standing up and putting each of the messages on the board, “maybe a couple of messages. These women are reaping what they sowed. They were involved in the death of Rena Johnson and didn’t report it, didn’t try to save her and didn’t dial 911. Instead they fled the scene and now they’re paying the price for it. ‘Actions have consequences’ as Mac said the other day. They’re reaping what they sowed.”

  “The killer knows they were involved in Johnson’s death,” Mac added, pointing to the victims. “This is a message to them, to everyone, that he knows.”

  “You said something about a couple of messages?” Lich asked, looking to Dara.

  “Johnson was religious, more of a bible camp attendee than a rave party attendee.”

  “And the killer knows this?”

  “That’s what we’re thinking. He knows her and he knows what happened.”

  “How does he know?” Riley asked. “I get the knowing Johnson part, but how does he know these women were involved? What does he know that you don’t? What does he know that the detectives investigating this seven years ago don’t?”

  Wire and Mac shared a look and shrugged. This was the answer they didn’t have. “We don’t know. But he knows, somehow … he knows.”

  “One thing we think he’s doing,” Wire mentioned, “is interrogating the women.”

  “Interrogating them?” Rock asked.

  “Yes,” Mac answered as he made some keystrokes on his laptop, pulling up some photos. “If you look closely in these photos of the crime scene for Goynes, as well as Donahue, you can see markings on the floor that look like they’re from the four feet of a chair, one facing the other. Goynes and Donahue had ligature marks on their ankles and wrists. They were found in the basement of a building and a house where he would have the isolation and time to interrogate them thoroughly.”

  “And as part of those interrogations, he learns who was involved in the death of Johnson?” Lich asked.

  “That’s what we’re thinking,” Mac answered and waved to Rock for another beer.

  “You sure?” Rock asked.

  “Yes, damnit,” Mac barked.

  “Okay, but that’s it,” Wire ordered sternly, having talked with Sally earlier who asked her to make sure Mac didn’t get into one of the usual drinking contests with his crew. “Dara, as much as I love those three oafs,” Sally had said to her, “I know they’ll get going into the beer and booze and will try to drag Mac along. They know how to push his buttons. Don’t let them.”

  Dara promised and two would be Mac’s limit. “You’re still on heavy meds. You’re now cutoff. Do you read me?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Mac moaned sheepishly. “Guess I’ll have to put a nipple on this one.” Everyone started laughing and the discussion of the case ceased for a bit, everyone grabbing more beer with small discussions breaking out.

  Riley moved next to Lich and started flipping through the Reaper case materials while everyone was taking a break and chatting. After ten minutes, Mac started drifting away from a conversation with Rock and the two Wires and focused in on Riley.

  For all of Pat Riley’s gruffness, drinking and general horsing around, the big man was an exceptionally capable detective and learned at the hands of Mac’s father Simon. Riles had successfully handled three serials over the years. A fourth he investigated with Mac’s dad went unsolved, although the bodies stopped dropping. Pat had been around the block more than once and was a savvy detective.

  Mac studied under Riles for years, learned from him, picked his brain and knew him like an older brother. Something didn’t add up for Riles, and Mac could see it in his eyes, in his facial expressions and in his posture. There was something in the files and conversation that was gnawing at him. After another few minutes, Riles closed the file, stood up and grabbed another fresh beer, popped the top off and took a long sip and came and sat back down next to Mac.

  “Mac, the first victim, something doesn’t ring true about her. I can’t put my finger on it, but …”

  Mac smiled because Riles brought up something that bothered Mac from the moment they made the connection at the camp. “Something has bothered me about it as well and it’s that …”

  “He just starts with Melissa Goynes in Harrisburg.”

  “Yes, and you’re asking …”

  “Why? Why Melissa Goynes?”

  “I’ve wondered that as well, Riles,” Mac answered.

  “To me that’s an important question,” Riles mused. “How does he start with Goynes? How does he know to start with her? Mac, is there anything in her background, history, photos, messages, anything that suggests why she’s victim number one? I don’t know if we classify your guy as a serial or not, but whatever he is he is on a mission, killing specific people for a specific reason. How does the mission start with a mother who is a bar manager and then he graduates to an insurance broker, teacher and daughter of a political power broker, then to a news anchor on the rise, and then a coffee shop owner?”

  “Doesn’t make sense, does it,” Mac answered. “Unless …”

  “Unless,” Riles smiled. They were reading each other’s minds. “Unless Goynes isn’t …”

  “The first one,” Mac finished.

  “That’s right,” Riles answered. “I can’t tell you why she isn’t your first other than she doesn’t make sense, she doesn’t feel right.” The veteran detective took a long sip of
his beer. “Mac, as you say, your killer is not your typical run of the mill sociopathic serial killer. She’s not compelling enough to be number one. There’s nothing in her past that says she triggered something in this guy. Look, I know the McRyan family commitment to the legal distribution of mineral spirits. Believe me, I’ve experienced it. However, in the case of Melissa Goynes, I doubt seven years ago when she was a bright college student attending that camp that running a bar in Harrisburg was her end all career goal. There is nothing about her that says she needs to be killed as an act of vengeance, that she would be the trigger. Now, if there was a true typical sociopathic serial killer on the loose, I’d say sure why not, she could be number one. But this guy isn’t the typical serial, if he’s a serial at all. He’s a killer out for vengeance and I just don’t see her being the first target, the one that gets him going. There is nothing that says I have to get Melissa Goynes first, she’s number one.”

  “If our theory holds that these women abandoned the scene, maybe it wasn’t her idea,” Mac suggested. “If we’re talking a conspiracy, then …”

  “Every conspiracy has a leader. She’s a follower, not a leader,” Riles answered. “Nothing about her screams leader, the mastermind behind covering this up.”

  “So you’re saying what, Pat?” Wire asked.

  “You don’t know who your first victim is, Dara. You started in the middle of the story. Melissa is the first you’ve identified or know about, but she’s not your killer’s first. You need to go back to the beginning and find your first victim, your true first victim. If you find the first victim, then you will find the pieces that bring this together.”

  “And,” Lich suggested, “you’ll probably find something to tie back to your killer. This Reaper fella might not be a serial killer, but how does he know that these women are involved in Johnson’s death?”

  “Because there is something about her that ties it all together,” Mac finished the thought. “Our first victim very well knows …”

  “Our killer,” Dara added. “I think they’re right.”

  “No question in my mind, Dara, they are right,” Mac finished.

  “Thing is, Mac, do you have any idea who the killer is?” Lich asked.

  Mac shook his head and went back to the file. “She has no immediate family. Her parents are dead, her brother, who was a cop and detective, died two years ago in a car accident. There’s a half-brother who is twenty years older who lives up in Rochester, New York, but he wasn’t close to her, is under six feet tall and is in his mid-fifties. The bureau has been through Johnson’s life, interviewing people who knew her back then. There was no boyfriend in her life that we’ve been able to find, so we don’t have a good lead on that yet. It’s the one thing that makes me question our theory, that if Johnson is the trigger of this thing, there should be someone in her past that makes sense as the killer, and there isn’t, at least not that we’ve yet identified.”

  “I’m amazed,” Dara suggested, “that given all of the pictures we have out there, we haven’t gotten a better lead on this guy. Someone has to have seen him. Someone has to have recognized him.”

  “Not necessarily,” Lich suggested seriously. ”People aren’t seeing it in context.”

  “And they may not be seeing him depicted in the way they’d recognize him,” Rock added. “I’ve seen these pictures too, Ms. Wire. We’ve been following this thing pretty closely because our boy here’s been on the case. This guy you’re after is pretty average looking, nothing special about him, nothing really striking. You can tell me he’s a monster all you want and I don’t doubt you for a second, but he looks like a chunky tubby guy you see every day. But what if he had longer hair before? Maybe he wore a different style of glasses, wore his beard thicker or maybe thinner, wore different clothing or had plastic surgery. I mean, it’s not like you have a dead-on straight driver’s license picture of this guy. Your pictures aren’t in hi-def. They’re grainy surveillance, from awkward angles, and sketch artist renderings.”

  “Exactly,” Lich added. “My point exactly, the photos are out of context. Find the right context and you’ll have a better chance of identifying him. At least, that’s what my mildly trained veteran less than sober detective mind thinks.”

  Mac sat back, nodded and looked to Wire. “We have to find victim number one, Dara.”

  “Well, Gesch said we need to go back to working parallel. This would be parallel, extremely parallel, off the grid parallel. Where do we even start looking?”

  “The thirst to kill comes from somewhere,” Rock mused.

  “It always does,” Dominic Wire agreed. “If he’s this proficient at it now, if he was that proficient when he killed Melissa Goynes in Harrisburg …”

  “He’s done it before,” Rock agreed and clanked beers with Dominic. “He’s killed before, because he has it down to a science. I mean, think about it, he stages Goynes perfectly as a first victim. He’d given it some thought. He’s done it before.”

  “So if this train of thought is right,” Dominic suggested, “it seems you’re looking for maybe a stabbing of a woman with a knife similar to the Ka-Bar our guy is using somewhere in the five- or six-state area here that occurred sometime in the months before Melissa Goynes was killed.”

  Mac looked to Wire, “And had some sort of relationship to one of our victims.”

  “I bet Gesch could put some resources on that,” Dara answered with a smile and reached for her cell phone.

  Mac snorted. He believed in his gut. It was usually right, and his gut told him the boys were on the right track and together they had all come up with some serious insight into the case. It was like being at home, like being in Patrick’s Room at the Pub. It felt good, felt right. He raised his nearly finished beer, “Man it’s good to see you guys.”

  • • • •

  Twelve-year-old Samuel Belanger lay on his back in his sleeping bag, scanning the ceiling of the tree house and the stars he and his nine-year-old brother Ethan had placed on the ceiling they’d painted black. The tree house was set upon thick stilts with a large branch from an oak tree weaving its way through a corner of the structure. The tree house was the envy of all the kids in the neighborhood. Sam, Ethan and two other neighbor boys were doing their first sleepover in the house since their dad, an engineer, constructed it in the spring. The boys had just returned from vacation where they slept out in tents overnight twice. Since they handled the tents on vacation, they figured they were ready for the tree house in the backyard.

  “Sam and Ethan, did you guys hear about the police shootout a few nights ago?”

  “Yeah,” Sam answered excitedly. “Police were chasing someone through the neighborhood, right?”

  “That’s right,” Johnny Franks answered. “We all heard them. The shots, they don’t sound like they do on TV. The shots don’t boom.”

  “What do they sound like?” Ethan asked apprehensively, the youngest of the group.

  Johnny thought for a second, “More like a popping sound, almost like popcorn. I didn’t really know what the sound was until my dad explained it the next day.”

  “And there were lots of cops?” Sam asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Ryan Snerk replied. “There were lots of lights and sirens and even TV trucks. It was waaaay cool.”

  There was a boom in the distance.

  “What was that?” Ethan asked fearfully. “Was that someone shooting?”

  “That was a boom, not a pop. That was thunder, bro,” Sam answered, smiling at his little brother who wanted to hang with the big kids and be brave, but was just a little bit scared. “It sounds like it’s a long ways away.”

  Five minutes later, as the boys still played with their flashlights and talked, a light rain started.

  “Sam, it’s raining, should we go inside?” Ethan asked.

  “Nah. It’s just a little rain, no big deal. I don’t want to run inside and have Dad tease us we couldn’t hack it. Because you know he will.”

 
A few minutes later, Ethan felt drops on his face. “Sam, water is coming through the ceiling.”

  Sam put his flashlight up to the ceiling and water was coming through from the roof of the tree house. “Darn it. I guess we will have to go back inside.”

  “But now we can give Dad a hard time. The roof is leaking,” Ethan said with a wry smile.

  The next morning, Mark Belanger climbed up into his sons’ tree house with Samuel and Ethan trailing close behind.

  “So where was this hole in the roof, boys?”

  Ethan pointed to the ceiling above where he’d been laying. “Right there, Dad. I can see a little light shining through.”

  Mark Belanger inspected the hole in the ceiling. “What the heck?”

  He’d built the tree house and put the shingles properly on the roof. Such a hole wouldn’t happen naturally, not within a month of completion.

  “The hole is cylindrical,” he said out loud. “Hmm.”

  He opened his toolbox and pulled out a long, thin, Phillips screwdriver and stuck the screw-end through the hole and looked the other direction. Embedded in the wall, just below where the roof met the wall, in a line of nail heads, was the larger nail, or was it? Belanger inspected it. A former Marine, he knew a bullet when he saw one.

  He took out his cell phone and dialed 911.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “There’s blood on it.”

  “Your insight serves you well, Mac,” Gesch answered in his best Obi Wan voice. Mac and Wire were eating ham sandwiches in the kitchen of McRyan’s Georgetown condo, having returned from the Virginia estate when Gesch called.

  After the brain storming session of the night before, Gesch, Delmonico and the rest of their team went about going through the backgrounds and reinterviewing family members and friends when late in the morning something popped. “A little over two years ago, in April, a friend of Janelle Wyland’s named Rebecca Randall went missing.”

  “Missing?” Wire asked, taking a bite of her sandwich.

  “Yes,” Gesch answered over the speakerphone. “She was last seen leaving a local shopping mall in Ithaca, New York.”