A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery Book 1)

by Mike Omer

  Tatum nodded and checked out the rest of the files. He glanced at Zoe. “You got copies of the Chicago murders?”

  “Yeah.”

  Andrea walked into the living room as Tatum was reading another of the Maynard case files. She handed him a cup of coffee.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going. I have a shift tonight. I’ll come back once I’m off.”

  Zoe glanced at her. “You don’t need to—”

  “I’m sleeping here. You might need me. This is not a discussion,” Andrea said. “Bye, Tatum. It was nice meeting you.”

  She closed the door loudly behind her.

  Tatum put down the folder and looked at the papers scattered on the table. They were handwritten; some looked aged, some fresh. He leaned forward to get one of them. Zoe nearly leaped at the pages, slapping her hand down onto them.

  “That’s private,” she said.

  “Is it?” Tatum asked calmly. He suspected he knew what these were. “I saw you writing down notes when you were doing the profile for the Chicago killer. That page over there looks suspiciously like those notes.”

  “I composed the profile into a report,” she said sharply.

  “You did.” He nodded. “But this is the raw material.”

  “So?”

  “I want to see it,” he said.

  “No.”

  He sighed. “Zoe, we were tracking this guy together. The only reason everything went to shit is that you didn’t tell me everything.”

  Her mouth tightened into a line so thin it was nearly two dimensional.

  “Listen,” he said, his voice softening. “I admit I didn’t really have a lot of faith in your . . . profession. But watching you work this past week opened my eyes. You’re the real thing. You can read a crime scene in a way I would never be able to.”

  Her face softened, her eyes widening.

  “But even you can make mistakes,” he said. “Can you please share your notes with me? We can talk them over. I promise you I won’t tell anyone about these notes, okay?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then took her hand off the pages. “This is the Chicago serial killer.” She pointed at three pages. “And those”—she pointed at the rest of the pages, some of them yellowed or crumpled—“are the notes for the profile I wrote for Rod Glover. Over the years.”

  He thumbed through the old pages until he reached the one that seemed most ancient. It was written on a page ripped from a spiral notebook. Her handwriting was more circular on that page, and there were doodles of cats on the bottom.

  He scanned it. Some sentences were underlined several times, like Lied about fire and about meeting Sarah Michelle Gellar. She had circled the words Durant Pond several times. And one of the bottom lines was Gray Ties!!!!!

  “That’s what I wrote when I was fourteen,” Zoe said. She looked uncomfortable, like a person whose secret poems were being read by someone else for the first time. “I keep it mostly . . . for sentimental value.”

  “Remembering the good ole innocent days when you chased serial killers?”

  “This was a mistake. Give that back—”

  “Sorry,” he said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic. I’m sorry.”

  She was letting him in, allowing him to read what was tantamount to a journal. This was no time for idiotic jokes. He began reading the other pages, confusion sinking in.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “You wrote these for Rod Glover. Some are more than ten years old. But I see you mentioning envelopes with ties, so how is that—”

  She stood up abruptly and walked off. “Wait here,” she said, not looking back. He heard her walking into another room and then something like a drawer being opened. She returned, holding a stack of brown envelopes. She dropped them on the table. Two slid onto the floor, and he picked them up. He opened one of them and looked inside.

  A gray tie.

  He checked two more. All had gray ties in them. Some of the envelopes seemed very old; some were newer. They had all been sent by mail, one to Maynard, several to Harvard, then to two different addresses in Boston. The top one, one of the two that had fallen to the floor, was addressed to the Dale Forest Apartments. All had Zoe’s name on them.

  “There are eleven envelopes here,” Tatum said, dumbfounded.

  “He sent fourteen,” she said, her voice firm, challenging. “I gave the first one to the cops at Maynard. They did nothing with it. When I started working for the FBI, I gave one to the agent in charge. She nearly stopped working with me because she thought I was obsessed with some teenage memory. I burned the third one. Then I began collecting them. I tried several times to check them for fingerprints and DNA. There was nothing.”

  “And every envelope has a gray tie?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said sharply. Then she added quietly, “Some had drawings as well. Of me, being violated. Glover is a pretty decent artist. I, uh . . . threw them away.”

  Tatum struggled with the sudden impulse to hug her again.

  “You can’t tell Mancuso about this,” she said. Her voice was cold, toneless, but there was desperation underneath. “I stopped reporting them because no one took me seriously.”

  He knew Zoe well enough to realize there was nothing she hated more than people not taking her seriously.

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “So . . . Rod Glover seems to be obsessed with you. Why?”

  “The very short version is that I suspected him, broke into his house, found the stash of mementos he had, and reported him to the police,” Zoe said.

  “I would be happy to hear the long version in a few minutes, but if that’s the case, why didn’t they arrest him?”

  “They didn’t believe me,” she said, her mouth twisting in anger. “They thought I was just hysterical about his porn stash. And they had a suspect. And Glover had a tight alibi for the last murder.”

  “How tight?”

  “Very. He was part of the search party that went looking for the third victim at the exact time she had been killed. My dad saw him there several times. Other people as well. I talked to several of them.”

  “And how do you explain it?”

  “I don’t know.” Zoe shrugged helplessly. “Maybe there was another murderer. Maybe he sneaked away from the search party, killed her, and came back. If the police had looked into it, they would have figured it out.”

  “All right,” Tatum said. “Now I want the full story, not the one-line abstract. How do you know Rod Glover, and what exactly happened in Chicago?”

  She told him everything, and he listened in disbelief as she described how, as a fourteen-year-old girl, she had gotten herself involved with this serial killer. It was almost surreal . . . yet it made sense with this woman. She outlined what had happened just before the attack in Chicago. He nodded.

  “Okay,” Tatum said. “One more question: Why do you think Rod Glover is the person who killed and embalmed those women in Chicago?”

  “What?” She looked at him in shock.

  “I mean, I get the superficial reasons. He left those ties at the body-dumping locations. He followed you. He tried to rape and kill you. But there’s nothing to connect the embalming to Rod Glover. The signatures in the last killings are very different—”

  “Serial killers change their signature all the time.”

  “Come on! Sure, they change it a bit, try new things, but nothing so radical.”

  “All the killings had something to do with water—”

  “No, they didn’t,” Tatum said. “Glover’s victims were in the water. The Chicago killer posed the victims near water. And Veronika Murray, the earliest victim of the embalming serial killer, wasn’t close to water when they found her.”

  “Maybe I was wrong about her. She hadn’t been embalmed.”

  “You weren’t wrong. This killer doesn’t care about water. He picked those locations because they were abandoned at night and because they fit the poses he gave the bodies.”

  “I’m right
,” she said. “Rod Glover is the killer of all these women.”

  “Look at your initial profile.” Tatum tapped the paper violently with his finger. “Remember this? Methodic? Obsession for control? Does this really fit your Maynard serial killer, who simply grabbed women who were wandering around in a remote location, raped them brutally, killed them, and left them in the same location?”

  She stared at him angrily, and he looked back at her, challenging. Neither averted their gazes.

  “Here’s what I think,” he finally said. “Rod Glover probably did kill those two women back in 2008. Hell, he admitted to killing one of them, with no prompting from you, right? But other than that, he’s messing with your head. He went to all those sites to leave those envelopes for you after seeing you in the news. He decided to follow you around, maybe hoping to get you in some alley. And to his delight, you went straight to one of his favorite locations, where he had already killed Pamela Vance. This guy who is killing women and embalming them . . . I think he’s someone else.”

  “You’re wrong,” Zoe said.

  “Why?”

  “Because my gut says you are,” she said sharply. “Yeah, sure. I’m good at what I do. But it’s not all experience and deduction. It has a lot to do with instincts, and my instincts say it was Glover.”

  “And I’m telling you that your instincts can’t be trusted when it comes to that psycho. He’s got an obsession with you—there’s no doubt about it. But you know what, Zoe? You’re just as obsessed about him.”

  “Go to hell.”

  He looked at her, saying nothing. There was nothing but fury in her eyes, the anger underscored by the blue bruise that circled one of them.

  Finally, he sighed. “It’s late,” he said. “Get some rest, okay?”

  She hardly moved as he got up to leave. He opened the front door and took a final look at her. Then he walked out and closed the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 58

  The idea popped into his mind as he was driving past another corner. A row of dead, empty eyes followed his car as he slowed down, voices calling out to him, offering unattractive short pastimes for little money. He no longer saw the potential in any of those women. He now knew them for what they were: conniving, lying bitches, ready to stab him in the back as soon as he looked away.

  His foot pressed the gas pedal, and he drove away, gritting his teeth in anger. They didn’t deserve his treatment, his eternal offer, his affection.

  He needed something else.

  He parked his car near a club. A line of teenagers stood outside, waiting to be let in. He stared at the young girls. Was this what he needed? Had his problem been the women’s age? After all, these young girls were still innocent. Some had probably never been with a man before. He gripped the wheel tightly, looking at one of the girls. No visible tattoos, barely any makeup compared to her friends, her skin smooth.

  He had already begun concocting a plan. He would wait outside until they left the club and follow her from afar. Either he’d get an opportunity to grab her tonight, or he’d find out where she lived.

  And if not her, there were others. Thousands and thousands of innocent young girls who were only looking for a grown man to—

  Her friend pointed straight at him, and she turned to look. Their eyes locked, and after a second, he gave her a bashful smile.

  She flipped him the finger, her face twisted in contempt. Panicking, he quickly hit the gas pedal, lurching into the traffic. A car honked at him and swerved to avoid collision. His heart thrummed in his chest.

  Innocent. Right. Damn whores.

  Maybe there wasn’t such a thing as real love. Maybe he had been wrong. Woman after woman, they had all disappointed him. Perhaps he should just take them for one night or two, silence them, and enjoy their company before the smell became a problem.

  The idea was attractive, but he fought it. He was better than this. He wasn’t one of those sad, empty people, swiping left and right on their dating apps, looking for a one-night release.

  He was searching for something real. Something that would fill the void, dispel the loneliness.

  It was then that it came to him. He was thinking about it all wrong. He was looking for a woman to be his companion for years to come. But a woman couldn’t really be enough. After watching all these happy couples on television and in real life, he should have figured it out long before.

  A woman was just another lonely soul, like him. Two lonely people couldn’t fill the void for each other. Such a relationship was bound to end in disappointment.

  What he really needed was a family.

  CHAPTER 59

  It was just after ten when Tatum got back to his apartment. He took a deep breath, prayed to the saint of lost apartments, and opened the door.

  The living room was almost its former self. One of the couches had a weird new stain, the TV had a three-inch crack in its top-left corner, and two potted plants were mysteriously missing. But other than that, the place was nice and neat, and the unholy horrors Tatum had seen the night before were mostly gone. The fish, the only model citizen in the house, swam in its aquarium, looking pleased. There was a strange item decorating the aquarium floor, and when Tatum came closer, he saw it was a beer bottle. The fish didn’t seem to mind, so Tatum left it there.

  He checked out his bedroom. The bedsheets were missing, and Tatum hoped someone had burned them. There was a sealed bag, and he could barely discern the shape of his brown shoes inside. He took the bag to the kitchen and threw it into the trash. Freckle sat on the kitchen table, a look of deep disdain in his eyes. Tatum made sure he had food and water. He tried to pet the cat, who morphed from calm feline into crazed scratch monster in less than a nanosecond. Tatum withdrew his newly bleeding hand.

  “Asshole,” he said.

  Freckle hissed at him and lay down, content to plot his evil plans undisturbed.

  Tatum walked over to Marvin’s bedroom and knocked on the door.

  “Hey, Marvin?” he said.

  His grandfather opened the door and grinned. “Welcome back,” he said.

  “Thanks for cleaning up the place,” Tatum said.

  “I didn’t clean it up. Are you insane? Did you see how it looked? I hired a nice woman to do it.”

  “Well . . . that’s almost as thoughtful, so thanks.”

  “Sure, sure. You want some tea?”

  Tatum nodded and followed his grandfather to the kitchen. Marvin stopped at the doorway, looking at Freckle, who stared back, narrowing his eyes.

  “Get out, Freckle,” Tatum snapped, still annoyed about his scratched hand.

  The cat stood up, stretched, bounced off the table, and walked out of the kitchen slowly, radiating contempt.

  “There’s something very wrong about that cat,” Marvin said, getting two mugs from the cupboard.

  “True,” Tatum said. “I noticed the fish was fine.”

  “Yeah.” Marvin nodded. “I think it’s happy in its new home. So how was Chicago?”

  “Not so good. I kinda messed things up.”

  “That’s some nasty killer they have there. I read about it in the paper. Is he the one you were investigating?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I also read that they sent a cute woman with you.”

  “Did the paper say she was cute?”

  “No, but there was a picture of you two at one of the crime scenes, and I determined with my own two eyes that she’s cute. Was she any good?”

  Tatum shot the old man a look and realized to his relief that it was an innocent question. Marvin was referring to her profiling abilities. “She’s . . . incredible, really.”

  “Then why didn’t you catch the guy?”

  “We got distracted,” Tatum said. “There was another serial killer . . . or maybe he’s the same guy. We’re not sure yet.”

  “Is there a serial killer convention in Chicago?”

  “Sounds like it, huh?” Tatum sat at the kitchen table.


  Marvin put a steaming mug on the table in front of him, then sat on the other side, drinking from his own mug. “So,” he said, “are you going to catch the guy?”

  “The police will probably catch him,” Tatum said distractedly, frowning. He was thinking over the story Zoe had told him about the Maynard serial killings.

  “There’s a place called Maynard,” he said.

  “Sounds like some kind of sauce.”

  “No, it’s a town. In Massachusetts.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Not surprising. It’s a small town.”

  “Like Wickenburg?” Marvin asked. There was distaste in his tone.

  “Yeah, I guess. Maybe just a bit larger. I thought you liked Wickenburg.”

  “Bah. At first it seemed wonderful. A peaceful, small town, a place where everyone knows everyone and people say hello to each other in the street. Sounds ideal, huh?”

  “I don’t know about ideal, but it sounds nice, I guess.”

  “The thing you have to understand, Tatum, is that when everyone in town knows each other, everyone also has an opinion about each other. And those opinions stick and sometimes spread. You get into one small argument with your neighbor, everyone knows about it. If your kid gets into a fight in school, it’s suddenly everyone’s business. And these things don’t go away—they accumulate. I was Marvin Gray when I got there, and by the time I left, I was Marvin Shouted-at-the-Town-Meeting-That-One-Time-and-Always-Argues-with-the-School-Principal Gray.”

  “That’s a long name,” Tatum said. “Was Dad such a problematic kid that you had to argue with the principal?”

  “He was a teenager. Occasionally, he was a bit stubborn. And he could never keep his mouth shut.” Marvin grinned, like he always did when talking about Tatum’s dad. “He was a good kid. But everyone formed their opinions about him. Never gave him a real chance when he grew up.”

  “Guilty until proven innocent, huh?” Tatum said slowly, sipping his tea.