Once Shunned

by Blake Pierce

  Blaine started chattering away with Gabriela, half in English and half in Spanish, asking her about her champurrada recipe. As a master chef and the owner of an upscale restaurant, Blaine was always interested in hearing Gabriela’s culinary secrets. As usual, Gabriela coyly resisted saying much at first, but she finally gave him all the details about how to make the exquisite Guatemalan cookies.

  Riley smiled and listened as Blaine and Gabriela went on to discuss other recipes. She enjoyed hearing them talk like this. She thought it was remarkable how at home the three of them were together.

  Riley searched in her mind for the word to describe how things felt right here and now. Then it came to her.

  Cozy.

  Yes, that was it. Here she and Blaine were, lounging shoeless on the couch, feeling thoroughly cozy together.

  Then Riley felt a bit wistful as she realized something.

  One thing the situation was not was romantic.

  At the moment, Blaine hardly seemed like the passionate lover she’d sometimes known him to be. Of course, those romantic moments had been few and far between. Even when they had spent two weeks in a nice beach house this summer, they’d slept in separate rooms on account of their children.

  Riley wondered …

  Is this how things will stay between us if we get married?

  Riley stifled a sigh at the thought that they were already acting like an old married couple. Then she smiled as she considered …

  Maybe there’s nothing wrong with this.

  After all, she was forty-one years old. Maybe it was time to put passionate romance behind her. Maybe it was time to settle down to coziness and comfort. And at the moment, that possibility really seemed OK.

  Still, she wondered …

  Is marriage really in the cards for Blaine and me?

  She wished they could make a decision one way or the other.

  Riley’s thoughts were interrupted by her ringing cell phone.

  Her heart sank a little as she saw that the call was from her longtime BAU partner, Bill Jeffreys. As fond as she was of Bill, she felt sure that this wasn’t just a friendly call.

  When she took the call, Bill said, “Riley, I just got a call from Chief Meredith. He wants to see you and me and Jenn Roston in his office immediately.”

  “What’s going on?” Riley asked.

  “There have been a couple of murders up in Connecticut. Meredith says it looks like a serial. I don’t know any details myself just yet.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Riley said, ending the call.

  She saw that both Blaine and Gabriela were looking at her with concern.

  Blaine asked, “Is it a new murder case?”

  “It looks like it,” Riley said, putting her shoes back on. “I’ll probably head up to Connecticut right away. I might be gone for a while.”

  Gabriela said, “Ten cuidado, Señora Riley.”

  Blaine nodded in agreement and said, “Yes, please be careful.”

  Riley kissed Blaine lightly and headed on out of the house. Her go-bag was already packed and ready in the car, so she didn’t need to make any further preparations.

  She felt a surge of anticipation. She knew that she was about to step out of a world of coziness and comfort into a much-too-familiar realm of darkness and evil. A world inhabited by monsters.

  The story of my life, she thought with a bitter sigh.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Riley felt a sharp tingle of urgency in the air when she walked into Special Agent in Charge Brent Meredith’s office in the BAU building. The daunting, broad-framed Meredith was sitting at his desk. In front of him, Bill Jeffreys and Jenn Roston stood holding their go-bags.

  Looks like this is going to be a short meeting, Riley thought.

  She figured that she and her two partners would probably be flying out of Quantico within minutes, and she was glad to see that they’d all be working together again. During their most recent case in Mississippi, the three of them had broken even more rules than usual, and Meredith had made no secret of his displeasure with all of them. After that, she’d been afraid that Meredith might split them up.

  “I’m glad all of you could get here so quickly,” Meredith said in his gruff voice, swiveling slightly in his desk chair. “I just got a call from Rowan Sturman, Special Agent in Charge at the New Haven, Connecticut, FBI office. He wants our help. I take it all of you’ve heard about the recent death of Vincent Cranston.”

  Riley nodded, and so did her colleagues. She’d read in the newspapers that Vince Cranston, a youthful heir in the multibillionaire Cranston family, had died just last week under mysterious circumstances in New Haven.

  Meredith continued, “Cranston had just started his first year at Yale, and his body was found early one morning on the Friendship Woods jogging trail. He’d just been out for a morning jog, and at first his death seemed to be from natural causes—a cerebral hemorrhage, it looked like.”

  Bill said, “I take it the medical examiner came to a different conclusion.”

  Meredith nodded. “Yeah, the authorities have kept it quiet so far. The ME found a small wound that ran through the victim’s ear straight into his brain. He’d apparently been stabbed there with something sharp, straight, and narrow.”

  Jenn squinted at Meredith with surprise.

  “An ice pick?” she asked.

  “That’s what it looked like,” Meredith said.

  Riley asked, “What was the motive?”

  “Nobody has any idea,” Meredith said. “Of course, you can’t grow up in a wealthy family like the Cranstons and not acquire more than your share of enemies. It’s part of your inheritance. It seemed like a good guess that the poor kid was the victim of a professional hit. Narrowing down a list of suspects looked like it was going to be a formidable task. But then …”

  Meredith paused, drumming his fingers on his desk.

  Then he said, “Just yesterday morning, another body was found. This time the victim was Robin Scoville, a young woman who worked for a literary magazine in Wilburton, Connecticut. She was found dead in her own living room—and at first, the cause of her death also looked like maybe a cerebral hemorrhage. But again, the ME’s autopsy revealed a sharp wound through the ear and into the brain.”

  Riley’s mind clicked away as she processed what she was hearing.

  Two ice pick victims in one little state, over the course of just one week.

  It hardly sounded coincidental.

  Meredith continued, “Vincent Cranston and Robin Scoville were about as different as two people can get—one a wealthy heir in his freshman year in an Ivy League school, the other a young divorcée of markedly modest means.”

  Jenn asked, “So what’s the connection?”

  “Why would anyone want them both dead?” Bill added.

  Meredith said, “That’s just what Agent Sturman wants to know. It’s already a nasty case—and it’s liable to get a lot nastier if more people get killed this way. No connection of any kind has turned up, and it’s hard to make sense out of this killer’s behavior. Sturman feels like he and his New Haven FBI team are way out of their depth. So he called me and asked for help from the BAU. That’s why I called you three.”

  Meredith stood up from his chair and growled …

  “Meanwhile, you’ve got no time to lose. A company plane is ready and waiting for you on the landing strip. You’ll fly to the Tweed–New Haven Regional Airport, and Sturman will meet you there. You’ll get right to work. Needless to say, I want this solved quickly.”

  Meredith paused and leveled his intimidating stare at each of the agents.

  “And this time, I want you to do everything by the book,” he said. “No more shenanigans. I mean it.”

  Riley and her colleagues all sheepishly muttered, “No, sir.”

  Riley certainly meant it. She didn’t want to face Meredith’s anger again, and she was sure Bill and Jenn didn’t either.

  Meredith escorted them out of his office, an
d a few moments later they were walking across the tarmac toward the waiting plane.

  As they walked, Jenn remarked, “Two ice pick murders, two apparently unrelated victims—maybe even random. Does that sound weird or what?”

  “We ought to be used to weird by now,” Riley said.

  Jenn scoffed. “Yeah, ought to be. I don’t know about you two, but I’m not there yet.”

  With a chuckle, Bill said, “Look at it this way. I hear the weather in Connecticut’s lovely this time of year.”

  Jenn laughed as well and said, “It sure ought to be nicer than Mississippi.”

  Riley grimaced as she remembered the heavy, suffocating heat in the disagreeable coastal town of Rushville, Mississippi.

  She felt sure that late summer weather in New England couldn’t help but be an improvement.

  Too bad we’re probably not going to get much of a chance to enjoy it.

  *

  When the plane landed at the Tweed–New Haven Regional Airport, Special Agent in Charge Rowan Sturman greeted Riley and her colleagues on the tarmac. Riley had never met Sturman, but she knew him by reputation.

  Sturman was in his early forties, about the same age as Riley and Bill. In his younger years he’d been considered a promising, up-and-coming agent who was expected to climb high in the ranks of the FBI. Instead, he’d contented himself with running the New Haven FBI office. Rumor had it that he simply hadn’t wanted to move to D.C. headquarters or Quantico or anywhere else. His roots and family were planted firmly right here in Connecticut.

  Of course, Riley figured, he might not have had an appetite for the political maneuvering that could play a role in those power centers.

  She could relate to that possibility.

  Riley liked being at the Behavioral Analysis Unit because investigating strange personalities drew on her unique abilities. But she hated the way the power plays of higher-ups sometimes interfered with investigations. She wondered how soon that sort of thing would kick in over the death of an heir to great wealth.

  Riley immediately found Sturman to be warm and likeable. As he walked them to a waiting van, he spoke in a pleasant New England twang.

  “I’m taking you straight to Wilburton, so you can get a look at where Robin Scoville’s body was found. That’s the fresher crime scene, and I’ve called the local police chief to meet us there. Later I’ll show you where Vincent Cranston was killed. I sure hope you folks can figure out what’s going on, because my team and I can’t make any sense of it.”

  Riley, Bill, and Jenn sat together in the van as Sturman drove north. Jenn opened her laptop computer and started searching for information.

  Sturman said to Riley and her colleagues, “I’m glad you’re here. My team and I can only do so much with the skills and resources we’ve got on hand. We’re trying everything we can think of, though. For one thing, we’re contacting hardware stores throughout the region to get whatever information we can on recent ice pick purchases.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Riley said. “Any luck so far?”

  “No, and I’m afraid it’s kind of a long shot,” Sturman said. “At this point we’re not getting a lot of names, mostly only people who bought their ice picks with credit cards, or the storekeepers had some other record. Out of those names we’re not sure what we might be looking for. We’ll just have to keep at it and see.”

  Riley remarked, “Using an ice pick as a murder weapon seems kind of quaint to me.”

  She thought for a moment, then added, “On the other hand, what else is an ice pick useful for anymore?”

  Jenn scowled as she scanned the information that was appearing on her screen.

  She said, “Not much—at least not for a century or so. Back in the days before refrigerators, people kept their perishables in old-fashioned iceboxes.”

  Bill nodded and said, “Yeah, my great-grandmother told me about those. Every so often, the iceman would come to your house to deliver a block of ice to keep your icebox cool. You’d need an ice pick to break chips off the block of ice.”

  “That’s right,” Jenn said. “After iceboxes got replaced by refrigerators, ice picks got to be a popular weapon for Murder Incorporated. Bodies of murder victims sometimes had twenty or so ice pick wounds.”

  Bill scoffed and said, “Sounds like kind of a sloppy weapon for professional hit jobs.”

  “Yeah, but it was scary,” Jenn said, still poring over the screen. “Nobody wanted to die that way, that was for sure. The threat of getting killed by an ice pick helped keep mobsters in line.”

  Jenn turned the screen around to share her information with Bill and Riley.

  She said, “Besides, look here. Not all ice pick murders were messy and bloody. A mobster named Abe Reles was the most feared hit man of his time, and the ice pick was his weapon of choice. He’d stab his victims neatly through the ear—just like our murderer. He got so good at it that sometimes his hits didn’t even look like murders.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Riley said. “They looked like the victims died from a cerebral hemorrhage.”

  “That’s right,” Jenn said.

  Bill scratched his chin. “Do you think our killer got the idea from reading about Abe Reles? Like maybe his murders are some kind of homage to an old master?”

  Jenn said, “Maybe, but maybe not. Ice picks are coming back in style with gangs. Lots of young thugs are doing each other in with ice picks these days. They’re even used in muggings. Victims are threatened with an ice pick instead of a gun or a knife.”

  Bill chuckled grimly and said …

  “Just the other day I went into a hardware store to buy some duct tape. I noticed a rack with brand new ice picks for sale—‘professional quality,’ the labels said, and ‘high carbon steel.’ I wondered at the time, just what does anybody use something like that for? And I still don’t know. Surely not everybody who buys an ice pick has murder in mind.”

  “Women might carry them for self-defense, I guess,” Riley said. “Although pepper spray is probably a better choice, if you ask me.”

  Jenn turned the screen toward herself again and said, “As you can imagine, there hasn’t been much success passing laws to restrict ice pick sales or possession. But some hardware stores voluntarily ID ice pick buyers to make sure they’re over twenty-one. And in Oakland, California, it’s illegal to carry ice picks—the same as it’s illegal to carry switchblades or similar stabbing weapons.”

  Riley’s mind boggled at the thought of trying to regulate ice picks.

  She wondered …

  How many ice picks are there out there?

  At the moment, she and her colleagues knew of at least one.

  And it was being put to the worst possible use.

  Agent Sturman soon drove the van into the little town of Wilburton. Riley was struck by the sheer quaintness of the residential district where Robin Scoville had lived—the lines of handsome clapboard houses with shuttered windows, fronted by row after row of picket fences. The neighborhood was old, possibly even historical. Even so, everything gleamed with paint so white that one might think it was still wet.

  Riley realized that the people who lived here took great pride in their surroundings, preserving its past as if the neighborhood were a large outdoor museum. There weren’t many cars on the streets, so it was easy for Riley to imagine the town in a bygone era, with horse-drawn buggies and carriages passing by.

  Then it occurred to her …

  An iceman used to make his regular rounds here.

  She imagined the bulky cart carrying loads of ice, and the strong man who hauled the blocks to front doors with iron tongs. In those days, every housewife who had lived here owned an ice pick that she put to perfectly innocent use.

  But the town had experienced a bitter loss of innocence the night before last.

  Times have changed, Riley thought. And not for the better.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Riley’s nerves quickened as Agent Sturman parked the van in front
of a little house in a well-kept neighborhood. This was where Robin Scoville had lived, and where she had died at the hands of a killer. Riley always felt this heightened alertness when she was about to visit a crime scene. Sometimes her unique ability to get into a twisted mind would kick in where the murder had taken place.

  Would that happen here?

  If so, she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  It was an ugly, unsettling part of her job, but she had to use it whenever she could.

  As they got out of the van, she noticed that the house was the smallest in the neighborhood—a modest one-story bungalow with a compact yard. But like all the other properties on the block, this one was immaculately painted and maintained. It was a picturesque setting, marred only by the yellow police tape that barred the public from entering.

  When Riley, Jenn, Bill, and Agent Sturman entered through the front gate, a tall, uniformed man stepped out of the house. Agent Sturman introduced him to Riley and her colleagues as Clark Brennan, Wilburton’s police chief.

  “Come on inside,” Brennan said in an agreeable accent similar to Sturman’s. “I’ll show you where it happened.”

  They walked up a long wooden ramp that led to the porch.

  Riley asked Brennan, “Was the victim able to move around independently?”

  Brennan nodded and said, “Her neighbors say she didn’t much need the ramp anymore. After the car accident last year, her left leg was amputated above the knee, but she was getting around really well on a prosthetic limb.”

  Brennan opened the front door, and they all entered the cozy, comfortable house. Riley noticed no further signs that anybody disabled had lived here—no special furniture or handholds, just a wheelchair tucked away in a corner. It seemed obvious that Robin Scoville had prided herself on living as normal a life as she possibly could.

  A survivor, Riley thought with bitter irony.

  The woman must have thought she’d endured the worst hardships life could throw at her. She’d surely had no idea of the grim fate that awaited her.