The two men locked eyes, and the brother in the doorway laughed dryly. “Sometimes it’s nice, Miss—”
She held out her hand and he took it. “Klein,” she said.
He released her hand and opened the door wider so she could go through. “Have a good day, Miss Klein.”
“Kyra,” she said, smiling up at him as she stepped over the threshold. “Call me Kyra. I’ve been trying to get your brother to remember that.”
He put his hand over his heart. “Kyra. I shall not forget.”
Charles brushed past Klein and the brother.
“I’m sorry, Chaz,” said the brother. “Didn’t hear you coming.”
Charles handed the doctor a file. “If you’re finished with Miss Klein, we’ve got two other patients waiting.”
Klein leaned back into the room and addressed the man behind the desk. “Almost forgot. What time exactly?”
He checked his wristwatch. “Is six o’clock too late?”
“Six o’clock is perfect.” Charles gave her a curious look as he stood at the doctor’s elbow with a file. She didn’t want the golf pro to get the wrong idea about this after-hours session. She added: “Not too much later, though. I have a date tonight.”
“Six sharp.”
“See you at six.” She gave a smile to the brother and the golf pro, turned back around, and went down the hall.
THE YOUNGER BROTHER turned to watch her go, a crooked smile lifting the right side of his mouth. “Kyra Klein,” he repeated under his breath.
As he exited the doctor’s office, Charles navigated around the grinning man and arched his eyebrows.
“What?” snapped the brother.
“I didn’t say a word,” Charles said.
“You were thinking it.”
“How long have we known each other?” the receptionist asked over his shoulder, and headed back to the waiting room.
“I can look,” the brother said defensively.
“Listen to Charles,” the doctor yelled from the other side of the doorway, his head down while he flipped through another patient chart. “Leave her alone.”
The brother shoved his hands into his pants pockets and groused, “I’m always being misjudged.”
Chapter 8
MENTAL ILLNESS. EATING DISORDERS. ALCOHOL AND DRUG addictions. Childhood rapes. Physically abusive boyfriends. Emotionally abusive parents.
Armed with a pen and a legal pad, Bernadette spent Wednesday in the cellar continuing the chore she’d started the night before at her kitchen table: immersing herself in the tumultuous lives of seven troubled women. As she plowed through the files taking more notes, the victims’ stories started blending together, becoming indistinguishable from one another. It was as if she’d spent too long in a massive art gallery: her head hurt, her eyes felt dry, and everything looked the same.
“I gotta get organized,” she muttered to herself, and pulled a pad of Post-its out of her desk drawer.
Going back over her notes, she transferred key points to the Post-its. Each victim got her own set of yellow squares listing name, age, date and place of death, college and field of study, emotional and health problems, and family issues.
When Bernadette was through with her transcription, she went over to the bare white wall on one side of her office door and started slapping yellow squares up on the Sheetrock. Each victim got a totem pole of notes, starting with her name and working down to the personal stuff at the base of the column. It wasn’t an organizational method sanctioned by the bureau, but it had always worked well for her.
Like a student fretting over a blackboard math problem, she stepped back and studied the squares, first taking in each victim’s story as she read from top to bottom, and then working across to compare each girl. Did they all share the same major? No, some hadn’t even declared one. Did they go to the same clinic? No, some had never been treated.
“This is depressing,” she said as she stood in front of the wall.
Creed peeked at her from behind his computer screen. “What are you doing?”
“Organizing my notes. Waiting for them to speak.”
“So what do the Post-its say to you?” he asked.
She blinked. “They don’t literally talk to me. You know that, right?”
He hesitated, then said unconvincingly, “Yeah. I know that.”
“This time they don’t tell me shit about shit,” she said, more to herself than to Creed. She sat back down at her desk and picked up a single slip of paper, a photocopy of something the first victim had penned:
Dear Mr. Underwood: I hate you. I can’t stand seeing your ugly face anymore. When you put on that stupid grin, it reminds me of the way you smiled while you were doing those sick things to me. All the crap you put me through, and I was just a little kid! Tell my mom thanks for looking the other way and doing nothing to help me. I’m leaving for good. When you drop dead, I’ll come back to take a dump on your grave.
Corrine
Bernadette found no evidence in the file that Corrine had ever pursued charges against the man. The girl had probably doubted that anyone would take her seriously, especially with her history of emotional problems. In addition to being treated for depression at the time of her death, she’d been hospitalized twice for anorexia nervosa. A slew of different doctors and clinics.
Police had labeled the letter a suicide note, but Bernadette thought it read more like a goodbye letter fired off by an angry runaway.
She repeated the words out loud: “‘When you drop dead, I’ll come back to take a dump on your grave.’”
Across the room, Creed stopped his typing. “What’re you reading?”
“A suicide note, supposedly.”
“Sounds more like something one Mafioso would say to another.”
“It was found resting under a bottle on the Washington Avenue Bridge after the body of the first victim was fished out of the river.”
“What was the gal’s name?”
“Corrine Underwood. No…wait…” She flipped to the front of the file. “Correction. Corrine Randolph. She hated her stepfather and never accepted his last name.”
“His future burial spot was the one threatened with desecration?”
“Yeah. He’d sexually abused her as a child.”
“Poor Corrine Randolph.”
Bernadette got up from her desk and went back to the yellow notes. Seven vertical stripes representing seven unhappy women. She ticked them off by order of death. “Then in May we had poor Monica Taratino. June was poor Alice Bergerman. July, poor Judith Powers-Nelson over in Wisconsin. August, poor Laurel McArthur in Wisconsin again. Back to the Twin Cities in September with poor Heidi DeForeste.”
“That’s quite a roll call.”
She stepped in front of the last column. “I don’t have a full file on her yet, but let’s not leave out poor Shelby Hammond. Miss October.”
“The girl killed over the weekend, in the bathtub.”
“The biggest oddball, really, because of where she drowned. Otherwise we’ve got seven women with similar, but not identical, profiles. All college students at one of two universities. All female. All messed up emotionally.”
“All dead by drowning,” said Creed.
She walked back and forth in front of the wall. “The two big connections are the colleges and their problems.”
“So the killer is a college prof who’s good at picking out fragile students.”
“Except we’re dealing with two different universities and students who run the gamut in terms of majors and years in school,” she said. “Undergrads. Grad students. I rounded up their class schedules and haven’t found any intersections. At no point were two of these girls in the same classroom at the same time. Nor did any of them share an instructor.”
“A medical professional who treated them. A doctor. A therapist. A pharmacist. Hospital orderly even. They were all treated in some way, shape, or form, right?”
“Wrong.” She ran her eyes ov
er the columns as she paced. “Some of them, their files indicate their parents wanted them to get help for their head or health problems, and they refused, or just never got around to it.”
“The ones who did have contact with a medical professional, was it the same clinic or hospital or whatever? Did the same doctor treat two different girls?”
“Not all the girls who got help had a doctor’s name or clinic in their file. We’ll have to get family members to cough up some medical info, if they even have it.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked.
“Some of these ladies were not on good terms with their folks,” she said.
“Of the ones that did mention a specific health provider…”
“None named the same shrink or clinic. I would have picked up on that immediately.” She stopped pacing and turned to look at her office mate. “What if it’s simply someone who favors troubled chicks, chicks who need to be saved, and he’s got a talent for picking them out of a crowd? He talks to a lot of different people. Listens.”
“A priest?” Creed offered.
“We’ve got a mix of religions and at least one atheist. Plus college kids aren’t the biggest churchgoers. I think that theory goes out the window.”
“A bartender?”
She smiled. “I like how you’re thinking, partner, but not all of them were into the club scene. Plus, he’d have to be a traveling bartender. Remember we’re dealing with drownings in two states.”
“Whoever he is, he prefers troubled women. Why?”
“How about because they’re easy to seduce or trick or overpower? Some of them had eating disorders. A lot easier to toss a skinny woman overboard than a chubby chick.”
“Since we’re on the subject of chubby, come over here and take a look at what I’ve come up with.” He checked his computer’s clock. “You missed lunch, I see, and that’s a good thing.”
“Forget about lunch,” she said, eyeing the office wall clock. “It’s almost time for dinner.”
“I’d wait until after the show,” he said, and tapped some keys. “This is not what I’d call good dinner theater.”
She stood behind him and gawked at what was playing on his screen. A plump blond woman was on her knees on a cement floor, her hands tied behind her back, while a power spray alternated between pummeling her breasts and her face. “Nasty,” said Bernadette.
“Revolting,” contributed Creed.
“Do people really get off on this stuff?” she asked.
“Apparently so,” he said as he called up yet another porn video.
A color image filled the computer screen. At first the only thing pictured was an outdoor hot tub with steam rising from the surface of the water. In the background were scraggly palm trees.
“Another fine art-house film from California,” Creed commented.
A curvaceous brunette wrapped in a towel walked onto the wooden deck surrounding the tub, her back to the camera. She dropped the towel and stepped naked into the water. Turning around, she faced the camera. The cameraman closed in for a tighter shot, eliminating the background and showing the woman lowering herself into the water up to her breasts.
“Those aren’t real, you know,” said Bernadette.
“How do you know?”
“They’re as round and overinflated as a couple of party balloons,” she said. “If you took a pin, you could probably pop them.”
A nude man stepped into the tub with the woman. He had a big gut and was hairy everywhere except for the top of his head.
“Now that’s disgusting,” said Creed.
Bernadette said, “The male leads all look like that, don’t they?”
“How should I know?”
The furry fat man stood behind the woman, planted his hands on her shoulders, and dunked her straight down into the water. At first the only activity under the water was the woman’s long hair floating over her head. Then she threw her hands up and waved them frantically, breaking the surface with her splashes.
“Not yet, baby,” the man croaked to the woman struggling under his grip. He pushed harder and forced her down deeper.
“This is scary,” said Bernadette.
Fat Man finally released the woman, and she popped up gasping for air, only to have the man dunk her again.
The video stopped abruptly.
“What happened?” asked Bernadette.
“That was a clip to tease you,” said Creed. “You want more, you have to pay.”
“I’ll pass.”
Creed punched on another clip. “This one is for the Houdini fans.”
The video showed a nude woman bound in rope and hanging upside down above a tall, clear tank filled with water. Slowly, she was lowered into the tank. After showing a full body shot while the woman fought against the bonds, the camera closed in on her face to highlight the air bubbles escaping from her nostrils. Finally, she was lifted out of the tank, dripping and coughing and gasping for air.
“That’s about all I can stomach for the day,” said Creed, exiting the site.
Bernadette took her hand down from his chair. “How did you find this?”
“I went to a couple of general porn sites and clicked on specific fetishes.”
“That would be—what…water sports?”
He laughed dryly and swiveled his chair around to face her. “No, I tried that phrase and discovered an entirely different fetish. Water sports has to do with—”
She raised her palm. “Is it relevant to what we’re investigating?”
“Not particularly.”
“Then I don’t want to know.”
He tipped his head back toward his computer screen. “These videos were listed under the heading of ‘water bondage.’ In addition to watching people trying to drown each other…”
“Do women also dunk men?”
“I’ve seen no evidence of that. Men do it to women, or females do it to each other while men watch.”
“Lovely.”
“In addition to that sick stuff, you can also view women wrestling in swimming pools. Women with their hands tied behind their backs and their faces held down in buckets of water. Women strapped into these medieval-looking torture chairs and repeatedly dunked backward into big tanks.”
“Did you find any local links to this sort of thing? Clubs around town? Web sites we can trace to someone in the Twin Cities?”
“Not yet,” he said. “That will require a little more digging. If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a break before I go another round with this smut.”
She wheeled over a chair and sat down across from him. “Am I right about this, Ruben? Are these drownings about sex?”
“Sex and violence. Violent sex.”
“What if I’m wrong? What if these were—I don’t know, something else? Robbery attempts gone sour or…I don’t know.” She looked at the yellow wall. “Maybe some of them were suicides. These women were screwed up.”
“No,” he said firmly. “You’re on the right track, Bernadette. After watching those disturbing videos, I’m certain we’re after someone who gets sexual satisfaction by drowning women.”
“Watching the videos is one thing, but taking it all the way and really drowning someone…I don’t get it. I don’t get how someone would get his rocks off by doing something like that.”
“Could be it started out as a game.”
“A game?”
“Playacting. Fake drownings, like in the videos. To really get off, he graduated to the real deal.”
“I guess that works. It’s just that this water fetish thing is so—I don’t know…I’ve never heard of it before.”
Creed nodded at the computer screen. “This might be new, but horrifically violent sex offenders are not. Some of them blame the porn.”
“Ted Bundy.”
“Yup. Maybe we need to talk to some shrinks,” said Creed. “Develop a profile of the sort of gentleman who would get his jollies by drowning women.”
“Sounds
like something for the folks in BSU,” she said, referring to the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico.
“We don’t need those big shots,” Creed snapped. “We can do it ourselves, Bernadette.”
She smiled, pleased that they were finally on a first-name basis. “Touché. Did someone try for a spot in BSU and get turned down?”
“I never bothered applying; I figured I wasn’t…different enough.”
“You’re different enough now.” She checked her wristwatch.
“Waiting for a call?”
“Garcia.” She wanted that scarf off him, and it looked like she wasn’t going to get it until Thursday.
“He didn’t show last night?”
“No. He got tied up, and he’s running around today.” She went back to the wall of yellow scraps. “There’s got to be someone we missed. Someone they all trusted.”
Creed looked at his screen again. “Someone who was into some really sick stuff.”
Chapter 9
“BRACE YOURSELF,” SHE SAID, CRACKING OPEN HER APARTMENT door and flipping on a ceiling light.
He ran his eyes over the messy room. “I suppose it doesn’t help if your roommates are sloppy.”
“I live alone.”
“Open mouth. Insert foot.”
She sighed. “Don’t worry about it.”
“You sound tired,” he said.
“Long day.” She took off her vest and tossed it and her purse onto a chair. “Can I get you something?”
He took off his coat and draped it over the back of the chair. “Sit. I’ll get you something.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Sit. I mean it.”
She kicked away some empty Chinese takeout cartons, picked a cat off the sofa, and lowered herself onto the cushions. “The kitchen is bad.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
“I’m going to use your bathroom first.”
“Down the hall,” she said, pointing.
She bent to pull off her boots. Heard the toilet flush and the bathroom door pop open.
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