by Graham Smith
She had three credit cards in her name and drove a mid-range Mercedes provided by her father.
Remembering my own dalliances with her, I recall how she’d treated life as a game. There to be played either solo or as part of a team.
Perhaps she had commitment issues or hadn’t yet fallen for anyone, but the more I think about it, the more I realise her relationships had never lasted more than a month or two at most.
My own relationship with her was one of convenience and a sating of animal needs. Twice, maybe thrice a year she’d call asking if I was seeing anyone. If I wasn’t she’d arrive with a bottle of wine and no underwear. She’d be gone by midnight leaving an empty wine bottle and a smile on my face.
I’d seen her around town and she’d been in the Tree once or twice, but she’d seemed to be distancing herself from her old friends.
The girls I’d spoken with earlier had hinted they weren’t as close as they once were, without saying anything definite.
We are now relying on Alfonse’s technical skills to get us a break or a window into Kira’s life. Given time he’ll get her phone records, credit card and bank statements. For the meantime, he is delving into the information cloned from her iPad.
After finishing my coffee, I put on my jacket. ‘I’m gonna go look over her place. See what I can find out.’
Alfonse looks up from his laptop. ‘At this time of night? It’s nearly three o’clock.’
‘Absolutely. Farrage and his buddies’ll be sniffing about there tomorrow and I’d rather see it before they go around disturbing everything. I’ll check it out tonight and see you in the morning. About nineish.’
5
Armed with Kira’s address and keys, I navigate my way to Constitution Avenue and pull up beside the kerb. The house is a good one, in a decent neighbourhood. The kind of house a family will call a home.
All the elements are there. White picket fence, double garage, manicured lawn and floral curtains peeping round the edges of the windows.
It doesn’t seem to fit with her free-spirited lifestyle, but then again it may have been a perfect retreat for her when she wasn’t partying around town.
On the other hand, it may have been her father who chose the house; undoubtedly it will have been his money that paid for it.
I pull on a pair of gloves before opening the front door and listening for the tell-tale beep of an alarm. I hear nothing. Either Kira or her killer hadn’t set it when leaving the house.
I take a slow walk from room to room looking for signs of a struggle or a fight. Or the place where Kira had been murdered. Both Alfonse and I are sure she’d been dumped on Kangle’s Bluff after being killed elsewhere.
Each room is a picture of domestic normality. Magazines adorn the coffee table in the lounge. A vase of flowers and a bowl of fruit sit in the middle of the kitchen table and each of the bedrooms is made up ready for use. Nothing I find gives me information until I open the door to the basement.
I go down the stairs with my nostrils twitching at the smoky aroma of extinguished candles mixed with the strong pheromones released during sex.
My jaw and fists clench as I descend the narrow stairs. Whatever I find down here isn’t going to be good.
When I turn the corner at the bottom of the stairs, the sight that awaits me doesn’t meet any of my expectations.
The basement is filled with restraints, sex swings and many other devices used by people engaging in bondage games. A table bears a selection of whips and paddles. An open closet in one corner holds a variety of leather, PVC and rubber costumes.
I peer at the whips and paddles looking for traces of blood, but none are evident. A proper forensic examination may find some but there’s nothing visible to the naked eye. I repeat the process with the various restraints and toys in the room but find nothing that points to Kira being killed in a sex game.
I take numerous photos with my cell before going back upstairs. Nothing on the lower floor tells me why the basement is kitted out as a bondage dungeon, so I move back to the first floor.
First I try the master bedroom. I look at the clothes in the closet and the drawers. Again, nothing catches my eye as out of place or unusual.
When I check out the closets in a spare bedroom, I find a whole different set of clothes. These aren’t the kind of clothes most women would have in their house. Perhaps one or two of the dresses or skirts but not as many as this.
I take photos of a number of items in each closet and the drawers before moving on to the third bedroom, only to find its closets bare.
My finishing point is the bathroom. I examine the medicine chest and discover only non-prescription painkillers and feminine paraphernalia including the contraceptive pill.
With my search complete, I leave and head back to my apartment while trying to make sense of my findings. The message I send to Alfonse receives no reply.
6
He can’t sleep with the excitement from earlier still coursing through his veins. Mrs Halliburton being the one to find Kira Niemeyer has added a new layer to his project. A layer which adds familiarity.
Since observing her presence at Kangle’s Bluff, strong memories of her lessons have returned after all these years. He remembers the classes more than the tuition for she was a soft teacher. One who preferred to use inspiration rather than discipline or fear as a motivator for teenage minds distracted by the effects of puberty.
As he pads through his home, the Watcher can picture the layout of her classroom just as it was all those years ago. He can even identify who sat in which seat.
With one exception. There was one kid he never got along with. She didn’t deserve his attention. She didn’t deserve attention from anyone.
In his mind’s eye he can see the girl, all hundred and eighty pounds of her. That girl waddled her way through high school lonelier than a desert cactus. Sure, there may have been bigger girls at the school, but they didn’t have the acne, lank hair and suck-up attitude she had. They had fun personalities and more to do with their lives than hang on a teacher’s every word.
It’s just a shame the girl doesn’t fit his pattern. He could have some fun with her.
The pattern is everything though. Having studied many serial killers, he’s never encountered a selection process so simple yet so beautiful.
He wonders if anyone will connect the pattern before he is forced to stop. Or caught. Something deep within him hopes the selection process is worked out. That people learn of his methods while he’s still active.
The challenges presented by such knowledge will make the project even more interesting. He wants his name to go down in history with the greats. Ted Bundy. Jeffery Dahmer. Eileen Wuornos. John Wayne Gacy.
All he has to do is stay alive and free long enough to reach thirty plus victims and he’ll be immortalised.
He walks into the den, boots up his computer and begins to apply the pattern to today’s breakthrough.
Mrs Halliburton isn’t engaged in social media, so he switches to the electoral register and other government sites, which contain endless streams of data about people.
It is there he mines the first nuggets. The primary information needed to carry out the next mission.
After three hours of staring at the screen, tiredness threatens to overwhelm him. Lifting his wife’s picture from the desk he kisses it and tries not to think of what she’d say about the pattern. All those years spent away from her as he toured the world with the Marines now seem wasted. Three years after mustering out she was nothing but memories and worm food.
The essence of his life stolen by an incompetent nurse who used a dirty needle. A needle that held a three-letter virus.
He’d been away at the time. In Afghanistan.
Melanie had undergone a routine procedure to remove a polyp and came out with a death sentence.
Unknowing of the nurse’s stupidity and carelessness they’d lived their lives separately while planning for a future together. A future no
w denied.
When Melanie had failed to get pregnant they’d looked into IVF. Both had a range of tests. Both had passed every test except the one where a positive result was actually a fail.
A week after Melanie’s funeral he flew to Denver and bought a crummy second-hand pickup. He paid cash and gave the seller a false name. A half day’s effort in the privacy of his garage saw all identifying marks and numbers removed and false plates added.
Three nights later he used the pickup to force the nurse’s car off the road. When the car left the road it rolled down Hilker’s Gulch until it rested on its roof in Marton Creek. There’d been rain. The creek had been in flood, its waters swollen enough to engulf the Chevy.
He’d fled after torching the pickup in the woods.
Three days he’d waited and watched until the waters of Marton Creek shrank and the car was spotted. He saw the person who discovered the car and the pattern was conceived.
He later found out the nurse wasn’t in the car. Her husband had been driving it that night. Watching her grief as she struggled to cope with the loss of her husband was intoxicating.
The ironic symmetry between the nurse’s actions and his own wasn’t lost on him. All things considered, he was now pleased it had been the husband driving that night. Better than killing her, he’d given her years of suffering.
7
I knock on Alfonse’s door with mounting impatience. Just because I am a half hour early doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be ready to let me in. Given the first chance I get, I plan to steal his keys and get myself copies.
When he finally deigns to open the door, he is wrapped in a towel, his hair still wet from the shower.
‘I only got out of the shower because I know you’re enough of an asshole to keep banging on the door until it either breaks or gets answered.’ It’s fair to say Alfonse is not a morning person. ‘Why do you always have to be early?’
I step inside, careful not to slip on one of the wet footprints he’s leaving on the polished floor. ‘Didn’t you get the text I sent last night?’
‘Did I answer it?’
‘I wouldn’t be asking if you had.’
‘Question asked. Question answered.’
I leave Alfonse to get dressed and put my notebook on his kitchen table while I brew some coffee and look for his notes. I don’t find any, which is odd. Of the two of us he is the bigger note taker. Either he’s struck out or hidden his so he can gauge my reaction to his discoveries.
Within five minutes he is sitting opposite me, dressed in his usual attire of combat shorts and polo shirt.
I give him coffee and enough time to read my text then raise an eyebrow at him.
‘Wow! I never saw that coming but it explains a lot.’
‘It does?’
‘Yeah. I ran into a complete brick wall with her iPad and cell last night.’ Defeat shows on his face. I know he’s never before failed to get answers from a digital source, so I soften my expression. ‘She was on Twitter, but rarely used it. Her Facebook account has all the usual selfies and party photos along with mind-numbing posts about what she was having for dinner, where she was having her nails done, and a thousand other waste-of-bytes-worth of drivel.’
‘Anything about a man in her life?’
‘Nada.’ Unlike me, Alfonse fully embraces the American language and its slang forms.
‘Emails? Bank accounts? Apps?’
‘Looked at them all. Nothing untoward or underhand in any of them. Just normal everyday stuff for a girl living off Daddy’s dime.’ He takes a healthy slug of his coffee and grimaces. ‘Her monthly allowance from Daddy would keep you and I for a year, but she didn’t squander it. From what I could gather, she was spending a quarter of it, giving a quarter to some charities and saving the other half.’
‘What about her most recent credit card transactions?’
Alfonse hands me a printout of Kira’s bank and credit card statements. ‘The last ten entries are small beer. Groceries, hair salons and so on. A couple of meals out. Nowhere fancy, the kind of places we take dates.’
‘Were the transactions all here or elsewhere?’
‘Most were local, but there were a couple of things bought online from Amazon and other retailers.’
I stop questioning him while I think about what he’s told me so far. Kira Niemeyer had a privileged life, yet she only spent a quarter of the money she received on herself. That in itself was odd.
There were a number of girls in her position living in Casperton and they all spent money as if it were the last day of the sales. The clothes I’d found in Kira’s master bedroom had all been good quality with decent labels, but looking at her bank statements, I see she could have afforded better.
Yet the clothes in the other bedroom ranged from cheap to top dollar fashion. Some could be bought in a thrift store while others bore the fanciest of labels.
‘You see where her credit card was last used?’
Alfonse nods. ‘Of course.’
‘Do you think it’s him?’
‘I don’t know. Seems too simple to me. Everyone knows what a pervert he is, but I don’t know if he’s capable of killing someone.’
‘Those were my initial thoughts too, but all the same we’d better check him out.’
Alfonse is looking at me in a way that indicates he has more to say so I give him a nod.
‘She has secrets, Jake. She’s been doing something she’s determined to keep hidden. When I checked the files for her search history there were numerous occasions where I think she’s went InPrivate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With most operating systems there’s a way of going online without leaving an obvious trail on your computer or tablet. Husbands use it for looking at porn or emailing their mistresses without their wives being able to find out.’ He drains his coffee with a noisy slurp. ‘I went onto a hacker’s forum last night and tried to find out if there’s a way to get the data.’
‘And?’ I try to keep the impatience from my voice, but if his sour expression is anything to go by I’ve failed.
‘I was pointed to a program which I downloaded. It’s probing at her iPad now. When I looked before getting into the shower, it still had three hours to run.’
‘C’mon. Let’s go and speak with him now. If we’re in luck we’ll beat Farrage and his buddies.’ I reach for my jacket as I rise to my feet. ‘I’ll tell you more about what I found at Kira’s house on the way.’
8
I pull the Mustang into the yard adjacent to Casperton Auto Repairs and we go looking for Lunk.
The last use of Kira’s credit card had been here.
Alfonse leads the way into the garage. Lunk’s feet poke out from underneath an SUV.
I give his boot a gentle kick and wait until he slides out.
‘We need to talk to you.’
He doesn’t bother getting to his feet, he just lies on his back like an oil-soaked slug. Every inch of his overalls is a dull black where oil, grease and dirt have been ground in over countless months and years. The T-shirt underneath the overalls has the same disgusting patina. The unruly curls of hair sprouting from underneath his cap don’t look any cleaner, while his beard resembles second-hand steel wool.
‘Go talk somewhere else, Boulder. This is an auto repair place not a coffee shop.’
‘Get up, Lunk.’ I let a little menace creep into my voice as we don’t have time for his posturing. ‘This is a conversation you’re going to want to have.’
‘Whaddaya mean?’
‘You heard about Kira Niemeyer, right?’
He gives a slight nod before a lascivious look fills his eyes. ‘I have. Shame, she was a pretty little thing. A real animal in the sack.’
I shake my head at his bull. There’s no way Kira would have let this grease monkey lay a finger on her. ‘Really? AD Investigations has been hired to look into her death.’
I let Lunk bluster until he runs out of steam.
‘
That’ll interest Lieutenant Farrage and his detective buddies, because sooner or later they’ll get around to checking her credit card statement. We’ve already had a look. Can you have a guess as to where she made her last payment?’
It doesn’t take him long to make the obvious connection. He’s unhygienic, not stupid. As soon as realisation strikes, his whole demeanour shifts.
Fear shrouds his eyes while his shoulders droop. Watching his face, I can almost see the cogs whirring as he works out he might just end up as chief suspect when the police roll up.
For all his lecherous behaviour and bull he is no fool.
‘When was she killed?’
‘We haven’t spoken to the coroner yet but she was found yesterday evening.’ I shrug. ‘He’ll need to establish a time of death and we’ll need to check people’s whereabouts. As will Lieutenant Farrage.’
The wrinkles on his brow deepen. His hands shake as he spreads them wide. ‘I’ve been working my usual hours. You know how late I usually work, Jake. You can vouch for me, can’t you?’
I do know how late he works. His garage is across the street from the Tree and I often see his lights still on when I leave at the end of a night.
That doesn’t mean I can guarantee he is innocent. But it does mean I can stand as a character witness and state with hand on heart that Lunk can often be found working long after midnight.
It also means I can testify he is a night owl, who is often awake when the night is at its darkest. Perhaps he’ll be safer if he keeps me out of it. If asked in a courtroom about Lunk’s character, my honest answer would do his defence far more harm than good.
He hasn’t been allowed into the Tree since the time he left oil stains on a stool and grubby fingerprints on a barmaid’s ass. This doesn’t stop him hanging around outside so he can ogle the girls and try his sexist lines on them.
I can understand his fear. With no one at home to verify his movements he’ll have no alibi other than being seen to be working. Somewhere deep in his brain he must realise nobody believes a word he says and at best, the girls all think of him as a creep.