by Ruth Parker
Fletcher wasn’t so sure. A gap of fifteen years was a long time. Unless the killer had been in a different state or in prison, it would be hard for him to suppress his urges for that long.
Then Fletcher read through the case file. Even though the gap in time didn’t fit with a typical serial killer’s profile, Fletcher found himself agreeing with his dad.
The two Gates girls at twelve years old looked strikingly, eerily similar to the Clark girls. Just looking at the pictures, the girls could have been quadruplets. The only difference was that fifteen years ago, Laurel had gotten away somehow and her sister had not.
“It’s the same guy,” his dad had said. His father had been the sheriff fifteen years ago, but had since retired, letting Richard Stella take the top job. They sat at his father’s small dinner table and looked through the file together. There were sticky remains of meals long-since past on the tabletop and junk mail circulars stacked in one corner, next to the salt and pepper. The house was even starting to smell like old man: earthy and sour. His mother had left years ago, when Nelson was in high school. She’d gotten remarried and moved to Seattle.
“Who knows,” Fletcher had said. He hated to agree with the old man. “It’s possible.”
“Bullshit,” his dad said. “It’s him. He’s got some sick twin fetish. He botched it somehow when he was only able to get Leigh Gates. And he probably just never saw another set of twins that got his motor running until last week when he saw those poor Clark girls. He probably thought God was giving him a second chance.”
Fletcher had been thinking the same thing. He had done extensive studies on victimology, publishing articles and textbooks on the subject. You could tell a lot about a killer by studying the choice of victims. Most serial killers had fixations on certain victim types.
“You better get this guy,” his dad had said. “Go talk to the girl. Laurel. She works in the crime lab. She’s got answers, even if she doesn’t realize it. This wasn’t my only unsolved case, but it was the only one that didn’t sit right with me.” Fletcher had been away at college when Leigh was abducted, but studying the files now, it didn’t sit right with him either. “And after you solve it, you might think about staying. You could get hired at the Sheriff’s Department. Even after what happened at the FBI, they’d still hire you.”
“No,” Fletcher said. He did not want to be a county sheriff’s deputy. And despite what his father said, after what he’d done during that last arrest raid, he didn’t think any agency would trust him to carry their badge and gun.
“You can’t keep traveling around. You need to settle down. Put down roots,” his father said. They’d had this conversation twenty times.
“I’ll talk to the girl,” Fletcher said. He wasn’t having this conversation a twenty-first time.
Fletcher had left. He wanted to get out of his father’s house. Almost twenty years he’d been away from the house, away from the town, away from the whole state of Oregon—but the second he crossed the threshold of his childhood home, he felt the weight of his father’s authority close in on him. His dad was a prick, that much was for sure. To be a good cop, you had to be a prick—at least that was what his dad would scream at his mother when they fought.
At least, that was what Fletcher had screamed at his own wife when they had fought. No wonder the marriage hadn’t lasted long.
He took the case files and went back to his motel. He read them again. And again. He needed to talk to Laurel. He called the lab in the municipal building where she worked, but she wasn’t there. His dad had said that she still lived in her childhood home and Fletcher had the address right there in the case files.
When he got to her house, he rang the bell, but no one answered. The attached garage didn’t have any windows, so he couldn’t see if her car was parked inside. She had heavy-duty gates on each side of her house made out of thick reinforced steel bars. He could see down the side of her house. Each gate had a sturdy deadbolt. Fletcher recognized the brand name of the lock as a high-end, commercial grade, specialty item popular with security firms and government buildings.
When he called the lab, they’d said that Laurel was scheduled until five. It was already seven-thirty and she wasn’t home yet. It was entirely possible that she had gone out—she was an adult, after all—but it wouldn’t hurt to check her house to make sure she was safe. If the man who’d killed the Clark twins was the same one who took Leigh, then Laurel would be in danger: she was the girl who got away.
Considering that Laurel had high-quality, specialty deadbolts, Fletcher didn’t think she’d be the sort of person who’d stash a spare key underneath the doormat, but he checked all the usual places just in case. Under the doormat, on top of the roof beams, under the potted plants. He tried the door one more time, but there was no answer. He tried her cell phone number, but it went to straight to voice mail. Sure, she could be at the grocery store and her phone battery could have gone dead. But those were two big coincidences—two big risks—when there was an active killer on the loose.
He went to the side gate and pulled himself up and over, hoisting himself up easily. Ever since training at Quantico, he’d maintained a strict regimen of calisthenics to maintain his physical fitness. Once behind the fence, he tried peering through the window, but long, dark curtains blocked his view.
He went to the backyard. There was a large sliding glass door and he peered inside. He could see her kitchen table, stacked with books and papers, except for one small area in front of the chair that was cleared, where she would sit and eat by herself. She lived alone. He was starting to get worried. Then, a strong and angry voice startled him. “Hands up!”
He looked up and saw her. At least she was safe. Too bad he wasn’t.
Laurel was pointing a gun at him.
Considering her traumatic past, Fletcher assumed that she would have some problems as an adult. He was prepared for emotional regulatory disorder or maybe alcoholism.
He wasn’t prepared for a bad-ass bitch with a gun. He definitely wasn’t prepared for her to be so drop-dead sexy.
Her hair was in a sleek pony-tail, her eyes were alert and fierce. She was wearing a tight black tank-top and a pair of even tighter black spandex leggings, presumably what she wore underneath her scrubs and lab coat. She held her gun in the proper tactical stance, arms out, shoulders rounded, head down. Most girls held a gun like it was a dirty diaper, tweezed between their fingers, as far away from their body as possible. Not Laurel. She had obviously trained and she wasn’t afraid of a loud noise or hot brass. She had been a victim and was determined never to be one again. Fletcher had come across many victims like that in his case studies. Women like that were powder-kegs, volatile, likely to punish someone who didn’t deserve it.
He put his hands up and tried to explain himself. Laurel didn’t take no for an answer. She didn’t listen to a word he said. He’d have to play nice until the cops came and he could explain. It was probably his own fault, his glib attitude—or maybe it was the fact that he couldn’t stop staring at her tight body, the way her spandex outfit showed every curve. Maybe it was because he couldn’t keep the smirk off his face, amusement at her fierce stand against the one person who was trying to help her.
Either way, she’d gotten him on the ground and kicked the shit out of him.
After the cops came and he explained the mix up, Laurel relented and said she would not press charges, but her dark and untrusting eyes told him that she hated him.
That was just going to be too bad for her, because until this killer was caught, he was going to keep a very close eye on her. He just hoped that his ribs would be able to withstand any more abuse.
Four
Laurel got to the Sheriff’s Department well before the scheduled meeting time of nine. She hadn’t been able to sleep and was lying in bed feeling a dull ache in her head and restlessness in her legs. She needed to get out of the house. She went into the station, brushing past everyone, not stopping to talk. She neede
d coffee. She went all the way into the lab, which connected to the Sheriff’s department through a thick metal door equipped with a keycard reader. In the lab’s staff lounge, she poured herself a cup of coffee and dumped some cream inside. Every week, she personally replenished a gallon of heavy whipping cream in the staff refrigerator, holding firm to the belief that you could not trust anyone who put that white nondairy powder in their coffee.
She took her coffee back into the Sheriff’s Department and found the conference room already packed with detectives and uniformed officers. She wasn’t surprised when she saw Fletcher Reed at the front of the room, hooking up his laptop to the projector. In the light, after a shower and a tight binding around his ribcage, he was even better looking than he’d been last night in the shadows.
Still, she was not going to apologize to him.
He’d trespassed on her property, claiming that he’d been worried about her safety. She knew better. He wanted to interview her and just couldn’t wait until morning. She’d looked him up after he left last night. He was some hot-shit profiler. He wrote books, taught seminars, and ran his own consulting business. His area of specialty was victimology. He said he was worried about her, but Laurel knew the only thing he was worried about was writing up her experience for the next chapter in his book.
Although—she had to admit—it had all been worth it to be able to knock him flat on his ass.
“Hello,” Laurel said, because she had to say something. He was still fiddling with his laptop, not looking up at her.
“Sorry again about last night,” he said. “I really was just trying to find you. Seeing as how this murder is so similar to what happened to you and your sister.”
“What do you know about me and my sister?” she snapped, although it was his business to know everything.
“Enough to be worried,” he said. He looked at her with those dark eyes of his. She always heard the cliché about eyes being able to bore into someone’s soul, but now she knew the truth behind it. Those eyes—she could imagine that he knew every detail of her entire life.
Just then, Sheriff Stella barged into the room. He was wearing the same mud-smeared jeans from yesterday and a wrinkled Sheriff’s Department windbreaker. Without greeting, he said, “Where the hell is everyone?” He emanated a manic energy that was in stark contrast to yesterday’s morose demeanor. Someone must have given the Sheriff a pep-talk and half a pot of coffee.
“I can send a page through the intercom,” Laurel offered.
“Sure,” he said. She got up and went to the phone in the back of the room. She dialed the code and then the speakers overhead beeped.
“All staff assigned to the Clark murder case, meet in conference room three right now. Repeat, all officers on the Clark murder case, make your way to the conference room. Sheriff Stella reminds you that performance evaluations are next month.” She put the phone back in the cradle and sat back down.
“That’s minus five points for being a wise ass over the intercom,” he told her, but he was smiling. To Fletcher he asked, “You got anything for us?”
“Probably less than you’d like,” Fletcher answered.
“Well fuck, unless you got his social security number and last known address, you’re gonna have less than I’d like.”
“I have a rough sketch of the type of man we’re looking for.”
“Yeah, a crazy mother fucker,” Stella said. “I could have come up with that all on my own without giving you thousands of taxpayer dollars.” He sighed and sat down. “I can’t get over this. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Stella said, mostly to himself. “Gonna have nightmares.”
The rest of the officers started to trickle into the room, everyone eventually cramming inside shoulder-to-shoulder. They’d pulled a few detectives from other assignments as well as a handful of uniformed officers that would help with the routine but important tasks of canvassing the neighborhoods or watching hours of surveillance footage. When everyone was in, Stella stood up and got everyone to quiet down.
“Most of you were at the scene yesterday,” he said. “So I’m not going to tell you how serious this is or how deranged he must be or how much we owe it to those poor little girls and their parents. All I’m going to say is that we are going to get this asshole. It’s going to take long hours and attention to detail, but we’ll get him. We have a consultant to help us. He got rich writing tons of books about dead bodies and nutjobs, so I hope he has some insight on these dead bodies and the nutjob who did it. Many of you met him yesterday, some of you know his father, the old Sheriff Reed. His name is Fletcher and I’m going to turn this over to him. Then we’ll divvy up the tasks and get going. I hope you all like getting four hours of sleep, not seeing your families, and eating leftover pizza for every meal.”
Stella sat down and Fletcher stood up, turning on the projector. “Hello,” he said. “I have worked on many cases like this, with a perfect capture rate. I was an FBI profiler and now I work as a private consultant. I help out smaller agencies when—to use your boss’s colorful terminology—there’s a fucked up asshole in your midst.” He brought up a slide on the screen.
It was a picture of the grisly scene with two dead girls.
Laurel looked at the huge image on the screen. She was looking at two ghosts.
She gasped. She couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. The girls looked so much like Leigh. The untamed masses of dark curly hair. The pale skin. The lifeless eyes. A rush of fear and panic came over her.
The girls were wearing navy dresses with white gloves and hair ribbons. They were drinking tea.
A long, long time ago, Laurel had worn a navy blue dress just like that. She’d slipped tea with delicate white gloves over her little hands. With the gloves on, it had been hard to tie the ribbon in her hair. Leigh—in her own matching navy dress—had helped tie the bow in Laurel’s hair.
Laurel steeled herself. The urge to run was strong, but she was a professional, a scientist, not a scared little girl.
“In case you weren’t there, this is what we’re up against.” He paused to let the people in the room marvel at the macabre scene. “He’s posed the victims. We see two types of post-mortem body manipulation.” He bent to hit the button on his laptop to advance the slides. It was like being in a classroom. “Staging is the most common, where the killer tries to make the scene look like something else had happened. Most of you have first-hand experience with a staged scene. The killer puts the gun in the victim’s hand and forges a suicide note. Or he ransacks the drawers and takes some jewelry to make it look like a robbery. That’s not what’s going on here. Deliberate posing of the bodies serves to fulfill the killer’s fantasies, shock the public, taunt law enforcement, or retaliate in some way against the victim. The Black Dahlia victim, for example, was posed in order to shock the public and to degrade the victim.”
“Is that the one, she was cut in half with her pussy hanging out?” one of the officers asked.
“That’s minus five points for interrupting,” Stella said. “But, since you asked, yes, she was cut in half with her pussy hanging out.”
“To continue,” Fletcher said, “the girls were not in a public place and they were posed delicately—almost reverentially. The killer’s intention is fantasy fulfillment.” These points were underscored on his slide show display. Some detectives took notes, but Laurel just sat and listened. She’d read plenty of books on serial killers and behavioral profiling. She had stayed up many late nights trying to gain some insight—get some answers—about her sister’s disappearance. As far as she could tell, most profiling fell under the categories of No Shit or No Duh.
Laurel couldn’t believe how much the girls looked like her. The hair was the most obvious similarity. That dark, curly, crazy hair. Laurel had hair like that, if she didn’t straighten it and keep it pulled back.
This must have been why Stella had been so insistent yesterday, why he’d tried to stress the significance of the murder to her. Th
e Clark girls looked exactly like Laurel and her sister.
“The fantasy that he’s living out is anyone’s guess,” Fletcher carried on. “But it shows that he is ritual and methodical. He’s an organized killer, which means he plans and understands how to navigate within society’s rules. He’s a white male under forty-five years old. He’s got above average intelligence, though he probably did poorly in school, either didn’t graduate high school or was expelled. He thought school was a waste of time, that he was already smarter than everyone. He thought the teachers were unfair. He didn’t make friends and felt different from other kids his age. As an adult, he still has that same attitude. He has trouble keeping regular employment. He’ll be a laborer or a cashier, hopping around to different jobs. No wife or girlfriend. He’s a loner. If he kept the girls for five days, then it’s possible he’s living outside the city, in the woods or on a farm.
“He’s going to be in a fifty-mile area,” Fletcher said. “He was able to pose the girls in the woods before rigor mortis set in, which is usually after a few hours.” Fletcher advanced to the next slide. It was a map of Northern Oregon with an overlapping circle drawn in red. The Clark girls were taken here—” he pushed a button on his keyboard and a blue dot popped up on the map. “And we found them here.” A red dot appeared on the map. “We usually see killers like him operate in the same area with their abductions and disposals. I’d wager he grew up within this radius too.”
He went on to the next slide. “The preliminary exam shows the girls were not sexually abused. Cause of death is most likely drug overdose or smothering, something that doesn’t leave a mark.”
“No sexual assault?” Stella asked.
“The autopsy is later today, but the girls were given a preliminary examination. Both girls had their hymens intact and showed no signs of vaginal or anal penetration. Of course, he could have penetrated them orally. He could have touched them or made them touch him. But these findings coincide with my profile. A completed sexual experience is usually the end goal of this sort of ritualized murder. They are usually sexually frustrated. Their preferred sexual encounter is auto-erotic; they prefer to masturbate because being with a real woman does not come close to fulfilling the fantasy. They often can’t maintain erections or achieve orgasm without strict adherence to their fantasy.”