Killing Season

by Faye Kellerman

  “Safe?” JD wiped his swollen nose. “Is something going on I should know about?”

  Ben sat back. “Put it this way. The monster who murdered Ellen hasn’t been caught.”

  A long silence. JD said, “What are you saying?” When Ben didn’t answer, he said, “You think he’s coming back? Here?”

  “Maybe.” There was a long pause. “I believe my sister was murdered by a serial killer.”

  JD looked horrified. “A serial killer?”

  Ben nodded.

  “Jesus . . . how do you know? Shanks told you?”

  “No, I told Shanks.” Ben looked at him. “This is what I’ve been doing for the last three years . . . holed up in my room, looking for some answers.”

  “Christ!” A pause. “Any ideas?”

  “Some ideas, but no name.” Not yet. “The thing is, I may be getting closer, and that’s the problem. The killer might know who I am even if I don’t know who he is. Which is why I don’t want Ro associated with me anymore. Do you still own a gun?”

  JD was still digesting the information that had been thrown at him. “Yeah, of course.”

  “If you’re alone with Ro in the car, have it on you, okay?”

  “This is totally weirding me out.”

  “Sorry to lay this on you—”

  “No, no, it’s all good, I can take care of her, for sure.” A pause. “Do you carry a gun?”

  “In the glove compartment of my dad’s car.” Ben forced a smile. “Maybe now you can understand why I’m so protective of Haley. Just be vigilant, okay?”

  “Right.” A beat. “Although after tonight, I don’t know if Ro will talk to either one of us again.”

  “Maybe that would be a good thing.”

  “Does she know about this? I mean the serial-killer thing?”

  “She does.”

  “Wow.” JD made a face. “Should I be worried about my sisters?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s me he’s after although I don’t know why.”

  “It’s good you told me. I’m a good shot. If anyone comes close, I’ll blow his fucking head off.”

  “You’ll have to wait in line,” Ben said. “How’s your nose?”

  “Hurts. How’s your lip?”

  “Hurts.”

  “We’re cool?”

  This time Ben’s smile was real. “We are cool.” He turned to JD. “We’re so cool that we don’t need the cold war anymore. It’s officially over.”

  “Good to be talking again.”

  “I don’t remember that we ever stopped talking except recently.” Ben shrugged. “You cheated on her, she cheated on me, I embarrassed you, big deal. It’s high school. I mean, like WTF.”

  “I really like her, Vicks.”

  “She’s smart, she’s witty, and she’s stone gorgeous. But it’s not like you two are forever. Once you get to Duke, you’ll have to beat girls off you just to take a piss. Especially when they see you come alive on the field. Like, how many colleges and universities tried to recruit you before you decided on Duke? Like a billion?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Stop talking like a moonstruck little girl.”

  JD let out a laugh. “Yeah, you’re right.” A pause. “It’s all coming back. Why we were friends.”

  “As long as you were number one, we did just fine.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. I’m an egomaniac.” JD started the car. As soon as they pulled up in front of Ro’s house, Ben opened the door, but JD took his arm. “I want you to do me a favor, Vicks. For old times’ sake. For the last three years, I’ve been listening to the same shit from those morons day after day after day. I don’t mind being told I’m God, but occasionally, I’d like another opinion, if only to shoot it down. You’re at Remez, what—one day a week? Would it hurt your ass to sit at my table during lunch when you’re there?”

  “Fine with me. You’ll have to ask Ro.”

  “If you sit with me, she’ll sit with you.” A pause. “I know it doesn’t matter to you, but it matters to me. I like a posse. It’s all image, you know?”

  “That’s the JD I remember and loathe.” Ben shook his head. “How does that work? Do I sit next to Ro or is there like hierarchy?”

  “I’ll be on her right, you sit on her left. Give her something to tell her grandchildren about.” He made his voice high. “‘These two boys came to blows over me.’” Ben laughed and JD smiled. “That’s what she’s all about anyway. Attention.” He grinned. “So we’re really cool again?”

  “Yeah, yeah . . . as long as you agree that we’re both taking her to prom.”

  “Yeah, the vampire and the zombie.”

  “I think it’s the vampire and the werewolf.”

  “I don’t know anything about vampires or werewolves, but I do know a thing or two about zombies,” JD said. “Get your head out of the dead, Vicks. Come back and join the living.”

  Windstorm

  Prologue

  He didn’t start out this way. He didn’t wake up one morning and decide to be a sadistic sexual killer. It was gradual . . . very gradual.

  It didn’t have anything to do with the family (a “good” one) or being bullied in school (no one paid attention to him) or even the voices that he heard (he had learned to disregard them). It did have something to do with the screwed-up circuits of his brain. And opportunity.

  He had always liked to watch. He began looking through windows in his early teens. Binoculars allowed him to see details up close, and for the longest time, he was content just to watch. Until one day when he saw her stagger home completely smashed out of her mind from some kind of early Christmas party. It wasn’t even rape because she didn’t know what was happening—only that she was on the ground, her eyes rolling to the back of her head until she coughed up vomit and eventually passed out. He finished up while she was out cold.

  She was fourteen, and why should he feel guilty? Where the hell were her parents?

  He left her there sleeping it off, unnerved by what he had done, but also exhilarated by it. It had happened on the winter solstice, and since he knew that he couldn’t routinely go around doing what he did, he decided to limit his obsession to those four days of the year—the solstices and equinoxes. There was something nice about breaking in the seasons.

  The next one was also young, but not drunk. She had cut through the woods on her way somewhere. He saw her as he was driving, just as she ducked into a forested area rich with fall foliage. He wasn’t all that familiar with the neighborhood, but he salivated at the idea of tailing her. So he pulled over, parked the car, and followed her deep into the woods. She had fought him, but since she was young, he quickly overpowered her, tied her up, and gagged her. He fucked her. The whole thing took around ten minutes. And then he left her there, squirming in her own vomit and his semen while he ran back to the car and took off to the airport.

  He had learned a good lesson, though. It was easier to do it when they were knocked out.

  So the next time, in summer, he took a rag soaked in chloroform equivalent and threw it over her nose. After she went limp, he raped her and got the hell out.

  And so it went from season to season to season until the inevitable happened. They weren’t supposed to die, but he got a little rough, so it wasn’t that surprising. But, still, those girls weren’t supposed to die. And it was getting out of hand. He had to be more organized.

  And so the one in River Remez was his first planned attack. He spent hours digging the precise dimensions of the grave. He was meticulous, exacting, a little compulsive, and a very hard worker. He never shirked any assignment. He was the go-to guy if you really wanted something done, which made him very successful.

  When he was finished burying her, he was careful to camouflage what he had done with leaves and detritus, and he even put some animal droppings on top of the site. The night was inky black, and if it hadn’t been for the river, he probably would have been hopelessly lost. But he stepped lightly and
covered his tracks—literally—and eventually found his way back to civilization.

  He left the area the next day by car, dropping off the rental in Dallas and eventually going home, if you could call where he lived home. Home was always the same—an extended-stay motel—but it varied from city to city, depending on his whims.

  And he had a lot of whims. Whims were fun. They were the spice of life.

  Chapter 1

  They’d come full circle: starting out as a team, becoming a couple, then two individuals, and now they were a team again. It required some adjustment, but Ben remained focused even with the occasional wisps of sadness. There was still a chill in the air, so Ro had dressed in layers—a long pink sweater over black leggings and black Uggs on her feet. She blew on her hands. It was always freezing in Vicks’s room.

  “The cold keeps my senses sharp and my brain firing,” he explained. Papers were spread out all over the floor. He was at his desk while Ro was sitting on his bed, going through one of the many lists of names they had culled from the reams of data she had given him two weeks ago. Years upon years of hotel guests, thousands of entries, but they had narrowed it down to a couple hundred names. From that point, their work involved checking and rechecking and making sure they didn’t miss anything.

  “Who’s this guy?” Ben asked.

  “What guy?” Ro was distracted, clicking on her keyboard.

  “Meryl Horton. Did we check him out yet?”

  “I think Meryl is a woman’s name. Hold on.” She clicked away. “Yep, Meryl Horton is a woman. A senior scientist at Bell Labs.” She looked up. “That doesn’t sound like a national lab.”

  “Wrong lab, wrong sex.” Another name bit the dust. He crossed it off. If they found candidates that they liked, they studied their profiles and face images from the files they had created using Ro’s purloined information as well as the all-powerful Internet—and maybe a few files that Ben had hacked into. The names they were currently looking at involved a group that had come to Los Alamos around the time of the summer solstice about a year before Ellen’s murder.

  The next one was Kevin Barnes. Ben talked out loud to himself as well as to Ro. “It would help if these guys had more unusual names. There are a zillion Kevin Barneses.”

  “Who’s the first one that comes up?”

  “A singer . . . then a cornerback for the Lions and the Redskins. None of them seem to be scientists but there are a couple of engineers.” He pulled up images and put them in the file. As he sorted through the pile, he considered a Kevin Barnes who was a lawyer. He’d gone to Brown University and Columbia Law School. He was forty-four. For some odd reason—they were looking for scientists, not lawyers—he downloaded Barnes’s information and pulled up a grainy picture on image search. The guy’s eyes were downcast, which gave him a slightly shifty look. Ben kept staring at his face. “I might be crazy but I think I’ve seen this guy before.”

  Ro stopped. “Who?”

  “This guy, Kevin Barnes. He’s a lawyer.”

  “Why are you looking at lawyers?”

  “I don’t really know, but he looks familiar.” Ben showed her the picture.

  She studied it long enough not to dismiss it out of hand. “Maybe.” A pause. “If he’s a lawyer, why is he getting a Los Alamos discount?”

  “You tell me.”

  Ro bit her bottom lip. “Maybe the coding got messed up. What else do you have on him?”

  Ben delved further. There wasn’t much on Barnes the lawyer besides his schooling. Not even his specialty. “He’s kind of a cipher and that makes him interesting. I’ll start a file.” A pause. “Where have I seen him, dammit?”

  “If you relax, it’ll come to you.”

  She was right. He picked out another candidate. Jason Fillmore. “This guy’s a security analyst.”

  “A stockbroker?”

  “No, security as in ‘security guards.’”

  Ro stopped typing. “Like, as in safeguarding national labs?”

  “I don’t know where he works, but if he did work for the national labs, he’d be doing a lot of traveling between them.” He checked deeper into his personal information. “He’s forty-nine and he’s worked for the Chicago and Detroit police departments. Which means he knows how to handle a gun.”

  “The victims were strangled.”

  “But he could have used a gun to abduct them.” Ben read further. “He started his own company—Universal Analysis and Security—eight years ago, providing consulting and systems integration for big corporations. At least, that’s what it says in his bio. I looked him up on Facebook. Nothing personal but there’s a Facebook page for the company. It was professionally done. It says that his company has provided systems and has consulted for numerous government agencies.”

  “Anything about national labs?” Ro asked.

  “It doesn’t specify.” Ben thought for a moment. “Would a national lab farm out its security to somebody private? I’d think that the government would want to keep that kind of stuff in-house.”

  “He has a Los Alamos discount.”

  “That he does.” Ben pulled up an image. “He’s African American.”

  Ro looked up. “And that’s relevant because . . . ?”

  “The conventional wisdom is that serial killers murder within their own race, though that’s because it’s easier to find and stalk victims in their own neighborhoods. But I suppose if the guy traveled, he’d abduct whoever was convenient.”

  “Does he look familiar to you?”

  “No, I’ve never seen him. You?”

  “He does not look familiar,” Ro said.

  “He’d be pretty noticeable in this area. Not a lot of blacks.” Ben hit the print button. “I’ll start a file on him.”

  “You’ve started about twenty files. I thought we’re narrowing this down.”

  “One step forward and two steps back.”

  “You know you’re picking out every profession except scientists.”

  “I’m not being biased. I’m just selecting guys whose job assignments might include traveling.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “Santa Fe is the capital of New Mexico. Maybe Kevin Barnes does government business here. We know he isn’t local. Otherwise he wouldn’t be staying at the Jackson.”

  “But he could have an office here.”

  “Good point. I’ll see if he has a local address.” Ben pulled up an e–phone book with addresses. “Blank.” He continued searching the enigmatic Kevin Barnes with Yahoo! and Bing and DuckDuckGo. He tried deep search engines but still came away empty. Kevin Barnes, the lawyer, had assiduously avoided attention. Ben took his picture and clipped it to his information file. Maybe George Tafoya could help him out.

  Ben went down to the next name: Martin Feldman. “This guy has been to the area four times in the last three years.” He did a Google search. “And he’s a scientist: a radiation physicist from Boston with Mass General . . . oops. He’s seventy-two.” A beat. “Although I suppose that retirement could mean more free time to do damage.”

  “If he started with your sister, he would have been around sixty-nine. We’re going to have to do some probability assessment. I’d put him low down on the list.”

  “He could have started murdering before my sister—”

  “Vicks, the guy digs graves . . . deep graves. It’s hard physical labor.”

  “You’re right. I’m just thinking . . . about six years back, before my sister was murdered, prairie dogs were being shot and killed. It turned out it was a retired scientist who had worked at Los Alamos.”

  “That is creepy. Why was he shooting prairie dogs?”

  “God only knows.” Ben shrugged. “I know I’m going to have to narrow down the field, but I’m terrified of missing someone.”

  “Now you know how Shanks must feel.”

  “You’re right about that. I used to think if only the police would be more thorough, pay more attention to detail, more crimes would get solved. And
now I have all this information and I can’t even place a familiar face. If Shanks had this information, he could do more than we ever could. But since you acquired it illegally, we’re stuck.”

  “There has to be a way where we can turn it over to him and not get me into trouble.”

  “When you think of one, let me know.” Ben started an image search on the next name: Lewis Grady. “I don’t think prison blues are your style.”

  “On the contrary, they’d match my gorgeous eyes.” She flung her hair off her face. “How about we give him the list anonymously?”

  “He can’t use the information, Ro. It’s fruit from a poisoned tree. And you would be in serious trouble. So I’d have to take the fall for you.”

  She smiled. “You’d take the fall for me?”

  “Absolutely. Everyone would think it was me anyway. Hacking isn’t something that fits your carefully crafted image.”

  “Aw, you care, Vicks.”

  He sure as hell cared about her. He was sneaking glances at her when she wasn’t looking: her lithe body, her soft tawny hair that fell below her shoulders, her luminescent blue eyes. Just thinking about her naked sent an electric jolt through him. God help him if she noticed.

  They had been working for more than two hours—all business—when Ben heard the distinct rumble of an SUV pulling into the driveway. It idled for a few minutes, and then the motor shut off. Ro looked at her watch.

  “Wow. Where’d the time go?” Her eyes scanned the mess. “You want help cleaning this up?”

  “Nah, I’m gonna keep at it for a while.” Frustration was beginning to take hold. He needed a break. He got up and stretched. “So where are you and lover boy off to?”

  “Movies. Wanna come?”

  “No.” When Ro laughed, he said, “What’s so funny?”

  “We’re back at the beginning. You being a hermit and me being the envy of everyone in school. I like being queen of the hill but I’m not so sure that you’re in a better place.”