by Stacy Green
Lennox had no intention of dancing, and I wasn’t sure if that scared me or gave me some sort of relief. Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill again.
“We need to see if we can locate Rollins’s family,” Todd said. “Maybe his sister is still alive.”
“A photo of Mary as a young woman would be even better,” I said. “We can show it to the sister–if she’s alive–and see if she can identify her.”
“Let me ask you something,” Todd said. “In all the research you’ve done the past few weeks, did you come up with anything that suggested she had any sort of close relationship with her father?”
I shook my head. “Do you remember her talking about him?”
“No, but I did everything I could to shut her out.”
“And yet we know she worked for him, according to John. We know from the tone of her emails she wanted to tell Chris about her family. And there’s this old man Lennox seems hung up on.”
“Exactly,” Todd said. “Which has me wondering about how many generations of crazy we are dealing with here.”
We picked Kelly up before driving the few meager blocks to the station. Walking to the conference room, I felt a buzz in the air, as if a fly had somehow survived the miserable winter and taken root inside my brain. My footsteps quickened, my fingers jittered. Kelly matched my pace. She must have felt it too.
“You guys got back just in time.” Ryan stood up from his computer, revealing the rest of his body to be as thin and gangly as his face. “So I found three different birth records that could be our gal. Three men named Alan were registered on birth certificates for daughters named Mary. None of them were Kent.”
“Could be another alias,” Todd said. “Or she didn’t have a birth certificate. If she was born in the 50s and in the poorer part of the state, it’s possible.”
“I managed to track down current addresses for two of the three women,” Ryan said. “Agent Lennox is sending field agents to interview them.”
“That’s not what has you so excited,” I said. “What else has happened?”
Ryan long body lurched to the left as he paced excitedly. This was likely the biggest case he’d been involved in. “There’s been a sighting of the older man from Jarrettsville a couple of hours south.”
21
Waiting for news made me feel powerless and far more imbalanced than usual. Our small group busied ourselves with more case files, searching for similar victims, but most were robberies and drug deals gone bad. A few missing girls, but no specific tie-in to Mary’s known assaults.
“So he and Mary didn’t start killing until 1980 when they moved to Lancaster.” Todd took off his glasses for the millionth time and rubbed his eyes. “Maybe it took longer to break John into submission.”
“Or they changed their M.O.,” I said. “Perfected it. If Mary Kent really is our girl, and she married and then killed Richard Rollins for insurance money in 1972, I can’t see her stopping there. Not with the way she likes to torture. She had to be active between then and the time she met John. No way is she able to put a lid on that kind of aggression.”
“I don’t think she did, either.” Kelly spoke for the first time since arriving back at the station. Her hands rested on the stack of records she’d been assigned, all prior to Mary and John Weston’s meeting. “At first I didn’t see any sort of pattern in these files. There’s several missing and murdered girls from two different states, with age their only thing in common. But then I pulled up a map on my phone, and it dawned on me that all of these cases occurred on Interstates 95 and 81, between 1972 and 1978. If her father was a long-haul trucker and she worked for him, is this possible?” Kelly finally lifted her eyes to meet mine and then realized everyone in the room was staring at her as if she’d just dangled a golden carrot.
“I need an atlas.” Todd jumped up, his chair banging the wall, and hurried out of the room.
“I can pull it up on the computer,” Ryan said.
“Sometimes a real map is better,” I said. “He can mark it up all he wants. Kel, tell us about these girls.”
She flushed, ducking her head down and pulling her short hair as far around her cheeks as possible. “So far I have four definite murders–meaning their bodies were found. There are three more girls still missing.”
“Jesus,” Ryan said. “That’s a long time to pray for someone to come home.”
It was, and it never ended, no matter how much time passed. The family members left behind always clung to the flickering hope their loved one might walk through the door again.
Todd returned with a beat-up map of Maryland and Northern Virginia as Kelly continued. “The four murdered girls were between fourteen and seventeen, three white and one black. From what I can tell, there’s nothing else they have in common.”
“And they’re not linked in the system?” I said. “Some detective didn’t make a note thinking this might be a serial?”
Kelly shook her head as Todd plopped down the map beside her. She jerked away, nearly bumping into me, and he flushed red. “Sorry.” He took a careful step back. “As for the cops linking these together, remember, this is the early seventies, before sophisticated computers and before serial killers were damned near cliché. It’s not a stretch that it didn’t happen. Can you tell me the locations so I can mark them on this map?”
Kelly nodded, allowing her body to uncoil. “In 1972, Connie Elway was found in a field about twenty miles from Richmond. She was from Bowie, Maryland. In 1974, Lena Moran’s body was found in a ditch just south of Dale City, which isn’t too far from D.C.,” Kelly said. “She was from Ashland, Virginia.”
Todd made his marks on the map, circling the locations with a red marker. “That’s close to Richmond. What about the other two murders?”
“Sarah Shelby in 1977, found in Triangle, Virginia. From McLean, Virginia.”
“A suburb of D.C.,” I said, stretching to see the map. “And it looks like there’s a bypass around it that connects to I-95.”
“But there might not have been a bypass in ’77,” Todd reminded me. “Kelly, go on.”
“Marie Smith, taken from Acadia, Virginia, and dumped southwest of Richmond in a town called Tuckahoe.”
Todd squinted. “That’s almost on I-64. You said there’s more on Interstate 81?”
“Yes,” Kelly said. “Those are still listed as missing.” She read off the names of four more girls who’d all disappeared just off Interstates 95 or 81. The cases stretched out in a pattern that was only easy to spot if someone was looking, but the police working the cases back then didn’t have the tools we did now. ViCAP might have saved some of these girls’ lives.
“Are there any missing or murdered off Interstate 64?” Todd asked. A fine sheen of sweat had broken out across his forehead.
Kelly flipped through her files. “I don’t see any…” She opened up the file on the bottom of the weathered pile. “Wait. I hadn’t got to this one yet. Where’s Lexington?”
Todd drew a circle on the map where Lexington nearly connected Interstates 64 and 81. “Right there.” He streaked a red line down one interstate to the next. “From Baltimore to Richmond on I-95 and then over to 81 via I-64. They took 81 back north and cut over to Baltimore at some point.”
He and I exchanged victorious smiles, but the color had drained from Kelly’s face. “What is it?”
Kelly swallowed hard. “Myra Weston. That’s the girl’s name. She went missing February 25, 1978.”
Cold sweat erupted on my back. Nausea flooded my system even as admiration for Mary’s brazenness sparked. “Tell me again when John met Mary?” I knew the answer. I just needed to hear it out loud.
“March,” Todd said. “March of 1978.”
We all sat in silence for several seconds, letting the information digest. Ryan, who’d remained silent during the mapping, broke the tension. “So Mary, who claimed to be working with her father when John met her in 1978, just happened to have the last name of one of the missing and p
resumed dead girls on this route? And then goes on to kill a bunch of girls? How similar are the crimes?”
Kelly took her time answering. “All of the murder victims were tortured and mutilated. Raped with inanimate objects.” She flipped through the files, looking for the autopsy reports, murmuring to herself. Finally, she looked up to meet my gaze. “Marie Smith died of sepsis, and one of the other girls had a similar infection, but she was strangled before it could kill her.”
The spoons. Mary’s favorite toy, something everyone had at home. Did she purposely not wash them? Was passing on the wicked infection just another form of torture?
Todd looked back down at the misshapen rectangle he’d drawn on the map. “We already know her father was a long-haul trucker in the seventies, which is the heyday of interstate commerce and trucker culture in general. Those guys were everywhere, and police had a hard time keeping up with the crime rate. Most were misdemeanors, but those trucks were the perfect traveling torture chamber.”
I thought of Aron, the boy I’d saved just a few months ago, and shivered. “And now we’ve got this old guy in Jarrettsville who suddenly appeared an hour south. You think it’s possible Mary and her father hooked up again?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Todd said. “She never mentioned family, but like I said, I tried not to talk to her.”
I pushed my chair away from the table. “Right now, the only way to confirm these murders were done by Mary or her father is to get a confession. And the only person besides Mary who might know the answer is John. Someone needs to try to talk to him again now that his son is missing.”
“You think he cares?” Todd asked.
“He gave Chris his stuff,” I said. “It’s worth a shot.”
“You’ll have to convince Lennox,” Ryan said. “He’s tried to talk to Weston several times with no results.”
“Any idea on when Lennox will be back?” I asked.
Ryan checked his phone. “He texted fifteen minutes ago he was on his way.”
Agent Lennox arrived alone an hour later, bringing a gust of cold air and frustration into the small room. We’d yet to find any more missing cases, but Ryan had sent a request to all state law enforcement agencies for missing or murdered females along our kill line, as we’d taken to calling it, between 1972 and 1978. “I doubt we’ll get anything until tomorrow,” he said. “Hopefully Agent Lennox can light a fire.”
“And why would I do that?” Lennox strode into the room, his dark eyes brooding. He didn’t stand quite as tall as he had this morning, and he walked like a man who’d just lost the race of his life.
“What did you find out?” I asked.
Lennox tossed a grainy, black and white picture onto the table. Obviously printed off security footage, the photo looked as if the printer had been running out of ink. I had to squint to make out the old man in the picture. Short and thin, with a shock of white hair and his weak chin ducked into his chest, he clung to the arm of an equally short woman.
“Mary.” I said to no one in particular. Wishing I had my reading glasses, I studied the grainy print. Her black hair had grown since the night I’d staked out her house along with Justin and Chris. That seemed like ages ago.
“This was taken from the security camera in a tiny gas station outside of Dale City, Virginia. That’s about 25 miles west of D.C,” Lennox said. “The town’s near Interstate 95, but this gas station definitely isn’t. I can’t believe it’s still operating. It looks like it hasn’t been updated since the Depression.”
“So either she knew it was there,” I said, “or she’s deliberately taking side roads and lucked out and found the station.” I didn’t think any of Mary’s success had to do with luck.
“Either way, this is a break,” Lennox said. “She might not have expected the place to have a security camera. So we know she was in Dale City less than twelve hours ago. The convenience store clerk positively identified her from her driver’s license picture.”
“She’s going by Martha Beckett in that one?” My head hurt from trying to keep the names straight.
“Yep,” Lennox said. “But of course, she paid in cash. This was taken this morning, and there was no sign of Chris, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. Detective Adams stayed to mobilize a new search, and I’m heading back down in the morning. What have you guys found out? We’re still interviewing the various Mary Kents you located. So far, they’re all accounted for and most certainly not our girl.”
Todd took the lead. “Kelly found a pattern, and we think it’s relevant.” He laid out the map and explained each case as we understood it, ending with the final victim, Myra Weston.
“Balls.” Lennox slammed his fist on the table, making it shudder. “They took the girl’s name. I wonder if they kept her longer than the rest too. Might be why her body was never found.”
“The only person who knows that we have access to is John Weston,” I said. “We need to talk to him. Before you go back to Virginia.”
Lennox looked amused. “Explain to me why you need to see him and why you think you can get him talking.”
I felt as if I’d stepped into a pig trough, but I didn’t have a choice now. “I can speak on behalf of his son on the chance he does care. And I can understand why he succumbed to Mary. I have an idea of what makes him respond, or at least, what used to make him respond to women.”
Lennox studied me with eyes that made me want to sit down and shut up. I felt as if he could somehow strip through the bullshit and get straight to the heart of it: I’m a manipulative killer just like Mary Weston. John and I have something in common. Let me at him.
And maybe that’s exactly what Lennox did, because after a long silence, he nodded. “We leave at 6:00 A.M. I need to be back in Dale City by afternoon.”
Kelly and I didn’t speak until we’d brought our cold dinners from the greasy diner into the hotel room. She sat down at the small table, staring at the takeout platter. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m not sure I’ve got a choice.”
“Lennox is gunning for you,” Kelly said. “He looks at you like some kind of conquest. Like he wants to break you down.”
I hung my coat in the makeshift closet. “I know.”
“And now we’re finding out Mary and her father probably killed together.” Kelly pushed the tray to the side. “I’ve been through some terrible things, but I can’t wrap my head around that.”
“Me either,” I said. “Not until I hear more of the story. And I think I can get it from John.”
“Because you keep identifying with Mary,” Kelly said. “I see it on your face every time her name’s brought up, but you’re not like her. Just because you have some skill to manipulate people and you’ve done some bad things doesn’t make you like her. She did those things for her own self-gratification. You were trying to help.”
I sat down on the corner of the bed. My head swam, but I needed to confess this sin. “That’s just it, Kel. Jake was self-defense. Riley? I felt guilt. Pity. But a rush too.” My throat tightened. I could stop there. I didn’t have to further mar Kelly’s opinion of me. But I needed to purge. “I enjoyed killing Preacher.”
The words burned my throat, but I kept going. “His fear was intoxicating. I could have watched him squirm all night. But killing him–that was special. I loved the control it gave me. So what kind of person does that make me?”
Kelly looked at me for a long time, sympathy in her wide, expressive eyes. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “But you’re not her, Lucy. Never allow yourself to believe that.”
22
I hated flying, and being stuck in a little twin engine provided by the FBI, with Agent Lennox on the prowl like a starving jungle cat, only heightened my dislike. We’d left when the sun came up, boarding the plane for Franklin Township, Pennsylvania. A four-hour plus drive shortened to a thirty-minute flight. I tried to tell myself this was a better alternative than being trapped in a car w
ith Lennox for most of the day, but his constant observance did nothing to ease my nerves.
“So.” He sat down across from me. “Before we took off, I heard from my field agents. All of the Mary Kents turned out to be nice, retired ladies. But one of my people turned up an Alan Kent with a very interesting history.”
I leaned forward, shoving the foreboding turbulence out of my thoughts. “Is it him?”
Lennox rubbed his forehead, smoothing the deep creases between his eyes. “I think it could be. This guy was born in 1934 and did a six-month bid for assault in 1954 after his wife died in childbirth. 1954 is the birth year for Mary Kent, born in Dale City, Virginia, and the age matches. So we’re looking for any DMV records that show an Alan Kent applying for a commercial vehicle license, but again, we’re decades ago. We might be grasping at straws.”
“Dale City again.” I stated the obvious, trying to connect the myriad of dots. “What about Social Security? He’s certainly old enough to draw it.”
Lennox nodded. “We’re checking on whether or not he’s been drawing it and where the checks are sent, but it’s a paperwork-filled process. I’m hoping to hear something by tomorrow.”
He glanced at his phone, his eyes scanning the screen. “One of my people spoke with Richard Rollins’s niece. She doesn’t remember her uncle or Mary, and her mother’s recently passed, so all of her information’s secondhand. Mary met Richard in Dale City while he was working at a small truck stop there as a cook. She told him she grew up in Dale City. Her mother died in childbirth, her dad was all she had. He drove a truck, and she liked to ride with him. That’s why she was at the truck stop. Her father’s name was Alan.”
“So pretty similar to the way she met John. But possibly using her real name,” I said. “And the story she gave him matches with the information on Mary and Alan Kent. But I don’t know how you’re going to narrow that down without official records or talking to someone who actually knew them.”