A Perfect Obsession--A Novel of Romantic Suspense

by Heather Graham

  “You’re assuming that role.”

  “And don’t try psychology on me. I refuse to feel guilty. I asked you a question. You were quick to say that our missing woman was someone you had seen, but you didn’t mention her name, or that she was friends with Kevin.”

  “They’re not exactly friends, and I never did get her name. I didn’t know it until I was with you. The place was crazy busy last night. She and I exchanged a few words without the nicety of an introduction. As far as mentioning that she had worked with Kevin ages ago, I guess I just didn’t think about it. Half the people in the pub have met at least one of the members of the Finnegan family somewhere at some time!”

  There was an edge to her voice. She was trying to sound irritated.

  She wasn’t irritated.

  He knew her.

  She was afraid. And he knew, too, that Kieran’s fear was seldom for herself. When she was afraid, she was usually afraid for others.

  Off the highway, he pulled into a parking lot. She looked over at him, alarmed.

  “What the hell is it about your twin you’re not telling me?” he demanded.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  THERE IT WAS—flat out. And she sucked at deception because she hated lying, especially to Craig.

  But it wasn’t her place to share the information Kevin had given her. Especially since another man had gone on national television to announce that he’d been Jeannette Gilbert’s mystery lover.

  So what the hell did she say, especially with him staring at her?

  “Craig, please, I don’t know what you want out of me. I don’t know what you suspect Kevin might have done, but you know Kevin. You know all of my family, and you know that I haven’t a single sibling who would willfully hurt anyone. And beyond a doubt, no matter what the circumstances, they’d never commit a murder. So just what is it you want me to say? If you have a question, ask Kevin!”

  Kieran hoped that her bravado was strong enough. She kept her eyes on Craig’s, hoping that they didn’t fall. She damned the fact that she was in this situation.

  But she couldn’t betray her brother’s confidence. When she spoke to him, she could demand that he speak with Craig himself. Obviously, once Brent Westwood had stepped into it all, it had seemed a moot point to bring up Kevin’s name again. Sadly, it seemed that Kevin’s name was coming up no matter what.

  Craig stared at her a long while.

  So long that she was really, really glad that she wasn’t a crook and that he wasn’t really interrogating her at the moment.

  Then, to her relief, he pulled out of the lot and they were on their way once more, headed out to Newark, New Jersey.

  At the station they met with a detective, Donald Beck.

  Kieran was glad when Craig introduced her as his “colleague.”

  Beck, a seasoned and experienced detective with a crinkled face to show it, was quick and pleased to greet them. “Captain called me,” he told Craig, escorting the two of them to a small conference room. “For us, sad to say, the murder of Cheyenne Lawson has become a cold case. We worked every angle—boyfriend, ex-boyfriends, teachers, parents, every relation we could find.” He hesitated, deep in memory. “I was lead detective on the case. I drove the medical examiner and forensic experts on our team crazy. I was so frustrated. I’ll never forget seeing her body there. It was Saint Steven’s Memorial Cemetery. Very old, with graves dating back to the 1700s. Grim ones, you know, like the simple tombstones with the skull and wings and grim reminders of death—As I am now, so shall you be. Then, you come to the Victorian graves, very ornate. Stately family mausoleums, with cherubs and angels. And then the current ones, when only the good Lord knows what you might have. A fellow was buried in a Cadillac before some of the new rules on burials went in. Thing is, the place is kept up. Family members come here, and there are burials and entombments fairly frequently.”

  He tapped an envelope on the table. “I emailed what I could. But these are some of the original shots at the scene when we found her body. Still haunts me. I’ve seen bad shit around here—pardon my French. Really bad shit, bullet holes the size of grapefruits, knife wounds that have nearly severed limbs and enough blood at a crime scene for a bath. But there was something about this, something about the perfect way she was left that was more disturbing than all the horror. Killed, stabbed, a knife to the heart—but no blood. She was all clean, pure, beautiful. Cheyenne Lawson was a local homecoming queen. And the way that she was set out there...as if she was asleep on the grass. Like she should just wake up. But, then, of course, when you went closer, you knew that she’d never wake up again, and you started to smell the rot. It was all the worse because of the smell of perfume mixing with the decay. She was found in late spring. The sun was high in the air. It was bad.”

  Kieran leaned forward, chilled as she looked at the photographs that Craig laid out.

  The young woman, Cheyenne Lawson, had been beautiful. A wealth of curls were spread around her head and shoulders. She’d been dressed in white—a gown that might have been a wedding gown or a prom dress. Her hands were folded, as if she lay there in silent prayer. She’d been positioned beneath a gorgeous statue of a winged and weeping angel.

  Close-ups showed the young woman’s face—the brown spots where death was clearly showing, the sinking in of the cheeks.

  “Bugs,” Detective Beck said. “One of our best techs is a bug man. He could tell from eggs that had been laid and what had hatched just about how long she’d been dead. We estimated two weeks.”

  “Had she been reported missing?” Craig asked.

  Beck shook his head. “Thing is, she was killed soon after high-school graduation. Everyone thought that she’d gone on a trip to Eastern Europe with a friend. Her mom had been sick, so she wasn’t taking her to the airport. Cheyenne was getting an Uber. She wasn’t reported missing because she’d warned her family she might not report in for a while. I guess they were going to a lot of the countries that were previously part of the Soviet Union, and they’d been warned that hostel internet and phone communication kind of sucked. She was an incredibly responsible young woman, and her parents weren’t worried that she couldn’t handle herself—and the friend reported in from Georgia—the country, not the state.” He pushed another envelope toward Craig. “Statements from family members, friends, schoolteachers, authorities.” He shook his head, clearly upset. “She was ready to go on her trip. Her parents thought she had gone. Her friend just thought she’d been stood up. Six girls were supposed to go on the trip—only three made it.” He was silent a minute. “I can’t tell you how hard I tried.”

  “Was there a suggestion anywhere that she might have been meeting up with someone?” Craig asked.

  “There’s the one mystery I could never solve,” Beck told them. “According to the friend, Cheyenne had told her she was going to meet up with someone really exciting and her life might take a different path. If she didn’t show at the airport, no one should worry. And so no one did,” he said sadly.

  “Detective, do you know if her picture was in the paper at any time?” Kieran asked.

  “Of course. She was homecoming queen. And she made a national paper, too, for a history project she had done. There’s a copy of the article in the file I gave Special Agent Frasier,” Beck said.

  Craig looked at her with a nod of encouragement. Maybe her question had been good enough to make him a little less aggravated with her.

  “Do you have the time to show us where she was found?” Craig asked. “I’m sure we can find it, but—”

  “I’m at your service. This is it—the case that has haunted me for years,” Beck said, rising. “I’ll take you there right now. Actually, you can drive. I’ll direct. I go sometimes. My family is buried in the newer section. And every damn time I go and stand in front of that angel, and I wonder how
heaven could have borne witness to such a tragedy as that sweet girl’s death.”

  * * *

  Kieran was quiet and thoughtful as they drove. She was in the backseat; Beck was directing Craig from the front passenger’s seat. He kept up a steady stream of talk, telling them about the people he had questioned and how he had gotten nowhere. Cheyenne hadn’t just been a homecoming queen; she’d been a straight A student. She’d spent her weekends with Habitat for Humanity. She loved all kinds of music, and she was a nut for museums—the more unusual the better.

  Her father had adored her and had been working in Alaska on a pipeline—some good money coming in, but it would only go so far in providing for his family—when she’d gone missing and turned up dead. Her boyfriend had been in the military, joining right out of high school.

  “I’d think that she’d stepped out on the street and walked into a killer who worked on opportunity,” Beck said, “except for that last thing she told her friend. ‘If I don’t show up, don’t worry. I’m looking into something that might prove to be very exciting.’”

  “Did she want to model or go into acting?” Kieran asked from the back.

  “I don’t believe so, at least from what I know about her.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t let her murder go, even when new cases came in and we were told that we had to back-burner a case that led us to nothing more than dead ends. But I can’t be sure what was in her heart. Who knows with young girls? Maybe. But it didn’t sound like it. She was into math and science and history. She’d talked about going into medicine or teaching in a college. And she’d wanted to write a book.”

  “About?” Kieran asked.

  “How legends came about,” Beck said. “Why we do what we do, why we feel the way we do. She was fascinated with the stories like Bloody Mary and the Jersey Devil and such,” Beck said.

  They’d reached the cemetery, and Craig drove down the well-tended road. The cemetery was well laid out, as if an early colonial planner had known just how many people would die when.

  “Park here,” Beck suggested, and Craig parked.

  Kieran was quickly out of the car, looking over the cemetery. She spotted the life-size weeping angel at once and walked to it. She paused, and for a moment, Craig was afraid she’d lie down on the grass where Cheyenne’s body had been found.

  Don’t do it, don’t do it! he thought, tension filling him.

  She glanced at him, and he realized that she wasn’t putting herself into the mind of the victim, but, rather, she was thinking as the killer.

  She pointed to the trees and bushes behind them, across the roadway, right at the edge of the oldest section. “At night, no one would see you here,” she said softly. “And while there is a gate around most of the cemetery, at those trees, where there are buildings right behind, there’s no fence.”

  “Those are old warehouses. The oldest predates the cemetery,” Beck said.

  “He knew the cemetery. The killer knew the cemetery,” Kieran said. “He knew before he came exactly where he would lay her out. He meant for her to be beautiful and to appear to be sleeping. She might have been his first. I think I read about this in that article from Dr. Fuller. I believe that he tried working with mortician’s wax and other implements...but he failed. He met up with her somehow—lured her as he did the others—and he killed her to keep her. Because she was beautiful. But he couldn’t maintain her beauty, and he needed to show her off before the beauty was gone, before the artistry was no longer there.”

  Craig watched Kieran move about, as if she could retrace the killer’s steps, almost as if she could see what he had seen.

  “Others? More than one?” Beck asked. “We heard about Ms. Gilbert. But...”

  “Another woman in Virginia—Fredericksburg. Except she was found in another family’s mausoleum when it was time for grandma to go in,” Craig explained briefly.

  Beck shook his head. “We didn’t catch that one up here, but then, you’re a Fed. The Feds are first up when a killer is hitting different states, right?”

  “We have the ability to move around,” Craig said lightly. “I haven’t been down to see and hear what particulars I can glean from there yet, but I will go down now. I believe we are looking at a serial killer and that you had an all but impossible case before you because it was the first time the killer struck. Since then he’s moved on. Virginia next, and now New York City.”

  “You have to stop him,” Kieran murmured.

  “Is he still in New York, do you think?” Beck asked.

  “I think he might be,” Craig said.

  Kieran looked at him. “Because,” she theorized thoughtfully, “New York City may actually be his home. He’s respectable—living a day-to-day life where the people around him would be shocked to discover that he was a killer. He has the kind of job that would allow him or cause him to travel. He is interesting, or has ties to interesting employment.”

  “Photographer? Agent?” Craig murmured.

  “But, according to Detective Beck, Cheyenne Lawson wasn’t concerned about modeling. She was more of a scholar,” Kieran said.

  “She did need money. Her parents are working-class stiffs with four more children. Cheyenne knew she’d need to work her way through college. She had scholarships, but not enough to pay the whole tab of the kind of school she wanted to go to. If you suspect that there’s someone out there posing as a photographer or a modeling scout, I’d say she might have been intrigued to meet with such a man. She’d have been excited, not longing to be a model herself, but seeing it as a means to an end,” Beck told them.

  “Do you think there’s a possibility that this man now has Sadie Miller?” Kieran asked. “And that she could still be alive?”

  “Yes, it’s possible,” Craig said.

  Possible. But he didn’t have a good feeling. It seemed that the young women were killed soon after they were taken.

  And their bodies held.

  Kieran was watching him anxiously. And he knew that she had read his thoughts. That while it was certainly possible that the young woman was alive, it wasn’t probable. Not if she’d been taken by this killer.

  He turned to Beck and thanked him for his help. The detective promised to get everything he had on the case to Craig, including his thoughts or notes at any given time.

  When they returned Beck to the station and headed back to the Holland Tunnel, darkness had fallen. Silence fell over the car until Kieran’s voice broke it.

  “There has to be a way to find her!” she said.

  “FBI agents, hundreds of cops, and all other law enforcement in the area and the country are on the alert,” Craig said. “If Sadie Miller can be found, she will be found.” He hesitated. “She may still reappear, you know. Maybe something came up. Maybe she went out drinking. Maybe—”

  “He has her,” Kieran said softly. “But I do believe there’s a prayer of finding her.”

  “There’s always a prayer.” It was Saturday night; other agents were working the case. Police were working the case. But glancing at Kieran, he knew that she couldn’t let it go.

  Neither could he.

  Before he could make any suggestions, she turned to him.

  “Let’s head to Finnegan’s,” she said. “Please.”

  “Okay.”

  He drove to the pub, not pressing Kieran. When they arrived, an Irish band was playing to a decent-size crowd, but everything seemed to be working smoothly.

  Kieran disappeared almost instantly, heading into the crowd. He saw that she had woven her way through a number of happy gyrators on the floor—straight to someone.

  Kevin.

  Craig walked to the bar; Declan was behind it, listening to a tale an old-timer was telling.

  He gave Craig a quick, welcoming smile.

  Craig didn’t have a chance to
determine if he wanted a beer or a soda, when he heard his name called softly from the side.

  “Craig.”

  He turned. Kieran was there—with her twin, Kevin.

  “We need to speak with you,” Kevin said quietly.

  “Office,” Kieran murmured, and she moved ahead.

  Craig and Kevin followed.

  Kieran perched on the sofa, indicating that Craig should take the chair behind the desk and Kevin a chair before it.

  Craig was truly curious by then. Kieran didn’t speak, and he waited.

  “This has been eating at me, driving me crazy,” Kevin said at last.

  “And this is...?” Craig prompted.

  “I don’t know what this thing is with Brent Westwood,” he said.

  “A publicity ploy, if you ask me,” Craig said.

  Kevin nodded. “She didn’t dislike Brent. They’d met upon occasion. But Jeannette was far from in love with the man. They weren’t dating. They weren’t even friends.”

  And suddenly, of course, Craig understood completely. Kevin was an actor. Kevin was staggeringly good-looking, even from a heterosexual-male point of view. He was also a good guy. The only trouble he’d gotten into as a kid had always had to do with standing up for the little guy. That in itself was actually an admirable quality.

  There really wasn’t much not to like about Kevin Finnegan.

  “So you’re the real mystery lover?” Craig asked quietly.

  “If I’d known anything, if I’d have been able to help in any way, I would have spoken up. I loved Jeannette. Truly loved her,” Kevin said softly. “And when news came out that they’d found her, dead in that coffin, I was shocked, stunned...”

  Craig knew Kevin—and knew that he was telling the truth.

  He wasn’t, however, sure how others on the FBI or police task force might see it all.

  Kevin knew Sadie Miller, the young woman who was missing.

  Kevin was admitting to an affair with Jeannette Gilbert, one of the young women who’d been killed.

  And since they didn’t know the exact time of death, there was no way to know for certain if Kevin had been in New Jersey or Virginia when the other young women had been killed. New Jersey was a hop, skip and a jump away, except for traffic, of course. And Virginia? Easily managed there and back within twenty-four hours.