by Blake Pierce
And most of them male.
In fact, she and Natalie were the only females in the small group of interns that had just arrived in the van. They all headed over to the bar, where sports events were playing on big television screens.
Shouting over the general noise, John said to Riley, “I’m thinking of ordering some chicken wings. Does that sound good to you?”
Riley nodded.
John asked, “What’ll you have to drink?”
Riley reminded herself that she mustn’t drink anything alcoholic.
She said to John, “Sparkling water will be fine.”
John looked a bit surprised, but he caught the bartender’s attention and made the order. When their food and drinks arrived, they followed the rest of the group into a nearby room with tables surrounding a dance floor. A few young people were dancing to a recent up-tempo pop song.
Natalie and the four guys were just getting seated at a table large enough for several more people. But as John and Riley approached the table, Riley was startled by the furious stare she was getting from Natalie. The other intern definitely didn’t want Riley there.
Riley hesitated. Were things about to get really ugly?
She was relieved when John gently tugged her arm. “Come on, let’s sit over here.”
He led her over to a smaller table, away from the rest of the group.
When they sat down, John said …
“Never mind Natalie. She’s a first class bitch.”
Riley forced a smile.
“Well, she seems to think rather highly of you,” she said.
“I guess,” John said with a shrug. “Believe me, the feeling’s not mutual.”
Neither Riley nor John seemed to know what else to say for a few moments. Riley noticed that John kept glancing over at the table where the other interns were talking and laughing.
Would he rather be sitting with them? she wondered. In spite of Natalie, would he rather be talking with his friends?
She hated to think that she might be ruining his evening.
Riley found herself struggling against rising tides of self-pity. Maybe she shouldn’t even be here. Maybe she should have just said she couldn’t come.
She seemed to be at odds with simply everybody in her life—Ryan, Agent Crivaro, and now her fellow interns. Looking at the cheerful group at the other table, Riley remembered happier times back at Lanton.
I used to have friends like that, she thought.
I used to enjoy going out with them.
Those days seemed like a long time ago.
Then she heard John say …
“I’m sorry. This ‘group expedition’ isn’t working out quite like I had in mind.”
Riley turned and looked at him and breathed a little easier.
He’s concerned about my feelings, she realized.
It felt really wonderful to have a friend right now—even one she didn’t know very well.
Riley looked over at the group again.
She shook her head and said, “I don’t seem to fit in very well.”
John let out a good-natured scoff.
“It’s not your fault, believe me,” he said. “Natalie doesn’t like you because—well, just because I like you. As for some of the others …”
He paused for a moment and looked at Riley intently.
Then he said, “Riley don’t you realize they’re kind of daunted by you? Hell, I’m kind of daunted by you. It’s like I told you when we first met, none of these interns has done anything like what you’ve done already. They’ve never actually worked on a real murder case, let alone pretty much solved one. And they certainly aren’t working on a real case right now.”
Riley winced a little.
Should she admit to John that she’d gotten a “time-out” from the case, and she might never get back to it?
Then John said, “You can’t blame them for being a little …”
He stopped again.
“A little what?” Riley asked.
“Jealous,” John said.
Riley shook her head and said, “Oh, John. Please don’t tell me you feel that way.”
John chuckled.
“Me? Huh-uh. Daunted, sure, but not jealous. I’m not the jealous type.”
Riley smiled, feeling a surge of warm and friendly feelings toward him.
John said, “The truth is, I’m sure I could learn a lot from you. Stuff that I’m not getting in any of the classes or workshops. I really wish you’d tell me what it was like—solving that case back in Lanton, I mean.”
Riley’s smile faded a little.
Did she really want to tell him anything about that?
He probably thought it had been like some kind of Nancy Drew adventure.
How would he react to the real horror of what she’d been through?
Would he get freaked out and wish he hadn’t asked?
Would he want nothing more to do with her?
Riley held his gaze for a moment, and then she realized …
I trust him.
I really trust him.
Maybe she was being naïve, but she felt like she could talk to him about anything. He really was a nice guy. He really didn’t have any hidden agenda.
Before she quite knew it, she was telling him the whole story—how she’d found poor Rhea Thorson’s body in her dorm room, her throat brutally slashed. She told him about the horrors of the next few days, including how she’d found her own best friend, Trudy, dead and bleeding in the room they’d shared.
She told him about how she’d become mistakenly convinced that one of the professors was the killer. And she told him of her harrowing ordeal when the real killer, another professor, took her captive and would have killed her if Agent Crivaro hadn’t come to her rescue.
But perhaps the most disturbing parts of her story had to do with her own discovery of her rare ability to get into the killer’s mind.
By the time she was finished, John’s eyes had widened and his mouth hung open.
He whispered, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all that.”
Riley felt a lump in her throat.
She felt an urge to tell him something else—something she barely ever talked about with anybody.
Slowly and carefully, she said …
“The truth is, I guess I was better prepared for that kind of thing than most people. You see, I …”
She hesitated, then added …
“I saw my own mother shot to death when I was six years old.”
John shook his head slowly and said …
“Oh, Riley.”
Riley felt a world of kindness and sympathy in those two words.
She realized how desperate she’d been for someone she could talk with openly and freely—especially since she and Ryan had been at odds.
Could she talk to John about all that had happened since she’d joined the program?
Was it OK for her to talk about the case?
She leaned across the table toward him and said …
“John, if I tell you what I’ve been doing with the Clown Killer case, do you promise … ?”
“I won’t say a word to anybody,” John said.
Riley wasn’t sure why, but she felt as though she knew for a fact that she could trust him.
More than that, she knew that she really needed to talk about it.
She started with Crivaro’s five o’clock phone call to her three mornings ago, and how he’d driven them to the field where Janet Davis’s body had been found. She described how shockingly the victim had been dressed and made up—and how, right then and there, Riley had correctly sensed that the sadistic killer had literally frightened the poor woman to death.
She told him about the darkroom and the costume store, and about her disturbing encounters with Janet Davis’s husband and Margo Birch’s parents. She described her continuing feelings of connection with the killer in the Birches’ back yard, behind the movie theater, and especially during her clande
stine trip to Lady Bird Johnson Park
She also told him about her rocky relationship with Special Agent Crivaro, and how he’d scolded her more than once. Finally, she described how her behavior at the carnival had gotten her taken off the case—at least temporarily.
Finally, she took the newspaper with the poem out of her purse and read it to him, explaining all the clues she’d found there.
John took the paper and read the poem to himself, then said …
“Wow, Crivaro must be crazy giving you a ‘time-out’ like that. It sounds to me like you’re doing a hell of a job. Cracking this poem is a really big deal. And what’s wrong with giving chase to somebody as suspicious as that guy at the carnival?”
Riley sighed deeply.
She said, “Crivaro says I’ve got to learn discipline and patience.”
John chuckled a little and said, “Sort of a Yoda, Luke Skywalker kind of relationship, huh?”
Riley laughed. She hadn’t thought of it that way.
She said, “Someday I’ll tell you about my Darth Vader of a dad.”
But John didn’t seem to hear her. He was gazing at the newspaper, apparently fascinated by the poem.
Finally he looked up at her and said …
“Riley, let’s solve this case. Just the two of us. Right here. Right now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Riley’s mouth dropped open. For a moment, she wondered if she’d heard John correctly.
She asked, “What do you mean, solve the case?”
John looked at her for a few seconds.
He stammered, “I’m—I’m not quite sure, I guess. Probably not really solve it, once and for all. But at least give it a try. Just as an exercise. Come up with a plan, but not something we’d really do.”
He shrugged and added, “Look, I’m just really fascinated with how your mind works. I could learn a lot from you. And maybe if we just brainstormed for a little while …”
His voice faded off.
Riley felt both flattered and intrigued.
Maybe this is a good idea, she thought.
Just as an exercise, anyway.
She asked, “How do you think we should start?”
John scratched his chin and said, “Well, where would you start? What would you want to do next if Crivaro let you have your way?”
Riley thought for a moment, then felt the tingling of an idea forming in her head.
She said, “I’d try to draw him out. The killer, I mean.”
“How so?” John asked.
Riley took the killer’s poem back from him and skimmed over it.
Then she said, “He loves riddles. He likes to make them up—and I’ll bet he can’t resist them when they come from others. Right now, maybe he even feels disappointed that nobody’s trying to match wits with him.”
John smiled eagerly.
“Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”
Riley sat thinking as she nibbled on a chicken wing. She took a sip of sparkling water.
Finally she said, “Maybe we could tempt him to return to the scene of one of his crimes, and we could be ready to catch him there.”
John exhaled sharply.
“Wow, that sounds like a tall order,” he said. “He’d have to be willing to take a huge risk.”
Riley leaned across the table toward him.
She said, “Yeah, but he’s already inclined that way. It takes a serious risk-taker to commit the kinds of murders he does. We just need to trigger that aspect of his behavior, make it work to our advantage.”
Riley kept looking at the poem for a moment.
Pulling her ideas together, she said …
“Right now, he can’t possibly know that anyone has cracked at least part of his riddle. He doesn’t even know if anybody has noticed the poem. For all he knows, he wasted his time writing it. So … we could tell him!”
“How?” John asked.
“With another poem!” Riley said, pointing to the poem in the paper. “I’ll bet he reads this feature daily—otherwise why would he have submitted his own poem here? We could print our poem right in the same space. We wouldn’t tell anybody about what we were doing—not even the newspaper editors. It would just look like another nice little poem, the kind they publish every day.”
John nodded and said, “But it would be a riddle like the killer’s poem—a riddle that nobody except the killer would notice, much less try to figure out.”
“That’s right,” Riley said.
She took out her notebook and a pen, then added …
“Uh, there’s just one problem.”
“What’s that?” John asked.
“I can’t write poetry.”
John laughed.
“I might be able to help with that,” he said. “I’ve dabbled in it all my life. I even got a couple of poems published in the university literary magazine while I was an undergrad. Come over, sit closer. We’ll write it together.”
Riley pulled her chair around next to his and sat down. It felt surprisingly comfortable to be so physically close to him. She offered him her pen and notebook and watched as he set to work playing with both of their ideas.
He said, “First, we need to think of a voice, a point of view.”
Riley’s brain was clicking away now. It was an exciting feeling.
She said, “What if we wrote it as if it were by one of the dead women, reflecting on what had happened to her?”
John squinted at her and asked, “You mean like a ghost? Do you think he’d believe that?”
“No, of course not,” Riley said. “He’d know it wasn’t really by a dead person, but that wouldn’t be the point.”
“It would sure get his attention,” John said with a nod.
“Right,” Riley said.
John’s pen sped along, jotting down Riley’s thoughts.
Riley said, “Maybe the woman could be thinking about the moment when he’d abducted her.”
John said, “Like maybe when Janet Davis got snatched from the marina at Lady Bird Johnson Park?”
“Exactly!” Riley said.
Riley described the photos Janet had taken at the park—especially the last one, with its blurred view of the marina.
She said, “I’m sure she was taking that one at the exact moment when he knocked her out cold and carried her away.”
John nodded slowly and said, “So in the poem, she could decide to go back to the marina at sunset to try to recapture that moment, to try to understand what happened. She’d say she was going at sunset that same day. That would give the killer a time and place to expect some sort of rendezvous. Still, I can’t help wondering … won’t he expect the police to be waiting for him there? I mean, I understand that he’s got a risk-taking personality, but …”
Riley said, “That’s why we’ve got to make this so intriguing that he can’t resist, despite the risk. We can make the poem read like it wasn’t written by the police or the FBI at all—just some mysterious private person who knows more than she should.”
As soon as the words were out, Riley realized …
I almost seem to be talking about myself.
After all, she wasn’t part of the case now.
What would Crivaro think if she knew what she was doing?
He’d probably hate it, she thought.
Worse, he’d probably tell her why it was a lousy idea.
But what did it matter? After all, like John had said earlier, this was just an exercise …
“Not something we’d really do.”
What harm was there in exploring it just as an idea?
Riley and John set to work. First they came up with a title …
My Lost Sunset
Then they worked on the poem itself. Riley supplied the ideas and images, which John shaped into lines and stanzas. Riley was impressed by his turn of phrase and how easily rhymes came to him.
Before Riley quite knew it, they had the whole thing written.
John read
it aloud …
The last things that I saw that dusk,
The waning of that day,
Were sparkling waters, calm and still,
And blurs of white and gray.
I let my lens fall from my hand
My shaking was to blame,
And then I slipped and lost that view;
To miss it, such a shame!
If I’d looked better, would I know
What shapes escaped from me?
Tonight when sunset comes again
I must go back and see!
“Wow,” Riley whispered when he finished. “That’s really good.”
John nodded and said, “To any ordinary reader, it would just look like maybe some schoolgirl was imitating Emily Dickinson. But it describes exactly what happened to Janet that evening—especially how she dropped her camera.”
John pointed to the last two lines and read them aloud again …
Tonight when sunset comes again
I must go back and see!
Then he said, “She’s telling him she’ll be at the marina that very evening, at the exact time of her abduction. But do you think it would really catch the killer’s attention?”
Riley felt a chill—a fleeting sense of the killer’s cunning, and also his curiosity.
“I’m sure of it,” she said.
Then Riley shook her head and said again …
“Wow.”
John continued, “But it’s got to be signed by somebody. We need to come up with a name for the poet herself—the person who supposedly sent it to the newspaper.”
Riley said, “The killer signed his name ‘Joey,’ and the picture he sent as ‘Joseph Grimaldi.’ They weren’t his real names. They were clown references. We should use a fake name too.”
Riley thought for a moment, then said …
“The victim’s name was Janet Davis. Could we maybe turn that into an anagram?”
“Great idea,” John said.
Together they started putting the letters together in different ways. Riley quickly realized that coming up with an anagram was going to be harder than writing the poem itself. But eventually they came up with …