by V. K. Sykes
“Are you new to the team?” she asked. “Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”
“Yes, ma’am. I just started about a week ago. They brought me in to help out Jimmie McCoy with the equipment.” Then his eyes lit up. “Look, I’ve got a team ID card. I’ll show you.”
He carefully placed the vase on the mat in front of the door and then gingerly pulled a thin wallet from a fanny pack. When he extracted a card and held it up close, Megan recognized the Palm Beach Cardinals logo right away. The card was identical to Heath’s, except for the name.
Albert Poole. Such an old-fashioned sounding name for a twenty-something. The card finally convinced her.
“All right, just a minute.” Megan turned the heavy deadbolt and opened the door about a foot. Poole took one step forward and handed her the bouquet—a colorful mix of blue, yellow and burgundy flowers. As he did, his left hand brushed hers, leaving a small streak of bright red blood. Stunned, she took a step back and stared at her hand.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” he said quickly, giving her a mortified look.
Megan set the heavy vase on the narrow table near the door. “Come inside. We’ll clean and disinfect that wound. You can head straight through to the kitchen.” She pointed down the hall. “I’ll be back in a minute.” She turned and hurried up the staircase.
“You’re real kind, ma’am,” he shouted up at her back. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it.”
When Megan came down with a bottle of peroxide and a package of Band-Aids, Poole had his hand in her kitchen sink, rinsing the wound under cold water. She reached into a drawer and tossed him a clean hand towel. He pressed it hard against the thumb, but as soon as he took it away, blood flowed again.
“That doesn’t want to stop, does it?” She poured a little peroxide onto a pad and applied pressure to the cut.
“Ouch. That stings a little, ma’am,” he said with a grin, his eyes traveling around the kitchen.
“You don’t need to keep calling me ma’am,” she said. “It makes me feel like an old lady. I’m Megan.”
He gave her another boyish grin. “I can’t help it. That’s the way I was raised. Young people respect their elders. Children respect their parents. Wives respect their husbands. All that’s in the Bible.”
“Right,” she said, but wondered what kind of stultified upbringing this poor guy had been subjected to.
The wound was deep enough that Band-Aids weren’t the best option. She told him to keep pressure on the wound while she ran back upstairs for some thick gauze pads and tape. When she returned, Albert stood in front of a framed photo of Heath in uniform that had been taken at the start of the season. “Heath’s a great ballplayer and a really good guy,” he said in almost a reverential tone.
“Hold out your hand,” she said, not interested in discussing her husband with a stranger. She wouldn’t say what naturally came to her lips—that her husband had become something of a self-pitying loser who’d been wasting his gift. Only in the last few weeks had Heath shown any sign of maturing. Despite his promotion to Double A, she still wondered if he’d ever make it to the majors. God help her if she had to spend the next ten years knocking around minor league towns.
As she applied a pad and wrapped his thumb with tape, Poole suddenly reached an arm around her back. In a blur, Megan found herself face down on the floor, crushed by his weight. He drove something into the center of her back with such force that she could barely breathe with the shock and the pressure.
She tried to scream, but only a muffled bleat emerged.
“Thanks for the first aid, Megan.”
It was the last sound she heard.
44
* * *
Wednesday, August 4
2:30 a.m.
Megan was a two-faced little whore, but he had to hand it to her. She had guts.
She’d been so nice, cleaning up his hand like that, bandaging it as if she actually cared. For a few seconds, it had almost made him think he’d made a mistake picking her out.
But then he thought of Heath and his golden arm. Heath had the raw skills of a young Randy Johnson, so powerful and talented. Potential out the wazoo. Maybe the promotion yesterday would snap him out of his funk, but he doubted it. Not as long as the bitch Megan ran his life.
Tough, hard little bitch. She wouldn’t beg for mercy. Wouldn’t admit she’d done anything wrong. She just screamed and swore at him, filth spewing from her thin lips in a toxic gusher.
He couldn’t reason with her. Couldn’t get her to stop screaming and listen. Not even after he gave her a little shot of thiopental. That had barely slowed her down. He didn’t want to give her another dose and risk knocking her out. He didn’t have all night.
Stupid whore. He punched her right in her pretty mouth, enjoying the thud of his fist connecting with her face. Her upper lip split open and her head rolled to the side until the collar snapped it back. That stopped her screams.
But maybe he’d hit her too hard. Her eyes clouded over, and even though she stared straight at him, he wasn’t sure she was even seeing him.
“Talk to me, Megan. Talk to me, or...” He pressed a gauze pad to her badly bleeding lip, worried that the blood flowing into her mouth could choke her. “Talk to me, or this is just the beginning. I can make this easy, or I can make it really, really hard. You have no fucking idea how hard.”
Her eyes seemed to clear, some of their fire returning. She twisted her head to get the pad away from her mouth and spat blood up at him. “Go fuck yourself.”
He smiled. He was glad, in a way, that she was putting up a fight. She deserved exactly what she was going to get, and it would feel so good to give it to her.
“Is that your final answer, bitch?”
45
* * *
Wednesday, August 4
11:10 a.m.
The call had come in at ten-twenty. Not more than five minutes later, Amy and Poushinsky hit the road for Canal Point, a town on Lake Okeechobee fifty or so miles to the west of the city. By eleven-ten, they were at Canal Point Park, where a couple of dozen onlookers gathered outside the crime scene tape, and more cars were pulling up every minute.
Not every day was a dead body discovered in the little lakeside town.
A diving team had been dispatched by helicopter as soon as a caller had reported that he’d dumped a body in the lake, near the boat ramp. Amy had listened to the recording of the call. It had lasted fourteen seconds. Hearing the killer’s confident voice had sent bile surging into her throat.
The bastard had kept his words brief, clear and matter of fact. He’d probably written a script for himself to keep it as short as possible. Communications had told Amy that the call had come from a cell phone, but they hadn’t been able to locate the origin.
As soon as she got back to HQ, Amy would have the recording sent to an accent specialist. With luck, they’d be able to zero in on where the killer was raised.
The divers had recovered the body quickly—it was in shallow water—and she and Poushinsky watched as they laid it out on the shimmering hot concrete ramp and immediately covered it with a white sheet. When the divers stepped back, Amy crouched and pulled the sheet down past the victim’s waist, revealing the word OUT on her torso, just below the breasts.
The victim was in her early to mid-twenties. Blunt force trauma—clearly from multiple blows—had turned her face into something of a horror.
Amy sucked in a breath as Poushinsky knelt beside her.
“Fucking sadist,” he grunted.
Amy clenched her fists as blood pounded through her brain. She’d failed, and another young woman had been slaughtered. Another baseball wife brutally killed.
She thought of M.L. again, as she’d been doing since the call came in. There but for the grace of God...
But there’d been no grace for Megan O’Neill.
The caller had brazenly identified his victim. Then he’d instructed the deputy who answered th
e phone to call Heath Harrison and tell him his wife was lying in Lake Okeechobee off the Canal Point boat launch. He’d said Harrison was in Springfield, Missouri, and that they’d find him by checking the hotels. At first, they’d been puzzled at that, because they knew Harrison was a pitcher with the Palm Beach Cardinals. But the killer had been correct. A deputy had started calling Springfield hotels, and found Harrison at a Holiday Inn Express. Amy got the number but decided to wait to call until she’d seen the body.
“Why would the killer phone this one in?” she asked, rising slowly to her feet. “This is the first time he’s told us how to find the body. What made this one different?”
Poushinsky pulled the sheet back up and rose. “And it’s the first time he’s dumped the body in a place where it likely wouldn’t be found immediately. But then he goes and tells us exactly where to find it. Makes no sense.”
“Maybe he changed his mind, deciding to taunt us,” Amy ventured. “He’ll take some risks, like letting us hear his voice. He’s feeling his power.”
Poushinsky shrugged. “Here’s the M.E.,” he said, looking past her.
Amy turned and spotted a deputy ushering Fina Marcantonio under the tape line. Fina exchanged a subdued greeting and pulled the sheet fully off the body to begin her examination. “Holy Mary,” she breathed as she stared at the swollen mass of purple that had once been the victim’s face.
After a moment, Fina carefully ran her gloved fingers over the victim’s skull and facial area. “Multiple blows—perhaps a dozen.” She paused again. “But that’s probably not what killed her.”
“Any needle tracks?” Amy asked. She and Fina both knew damn well what had killed this girl.
Fina rotated the woman’s left arm at the elbow and peered down. “Right here, just like the others.”
Amy had expected that answer, but that didn’t prevent her stomach from lurching. “His rage is building. Now, he’s hurting them more, beating them, disfiguring them. I suspect we’ll find that he didn’t give her much thiopental before he shot her up with the killing drugs.”
Just saying the words made her want to howl with despair. Those women had suffered beyond anything she could even imagine, even in her nightmares. The monster who did this, Brett Kozak or whoever he was, hated them. Hated them so much that he wanted them to experience the ultimate in horror and pain.
Three bodies in less than a week. Amy didn’t know if she could handle any more. She’d never forget a thing about these scenes, not if she lived to be a hundred.
Mentally, she slapped herself. She couldn’t afford those thoughts. She had to keep her mind clear and focused if she was ever going to bring down the beast.
“Robitaille, are you okay?” Poushinsky stared at her, his eyes narrowed in concern. “You disappeared for a few seconds there.”
“Yeah,” she said, unclenching her fists and shaking them out. “You’ve got the husband’s number, right?”
Poushinsky handed her a slip of paper with the phone number of Harrison’s hotel written on it. “Excuse me,” she said, and moved away from the boat launch.
She got lucky and reached Heath Harrison in his room. When Amy told him there was a strong possibility that a body found this morning was that of his wife, Harrison reacted immediately as most husbands did—he refused to believe his wife could be dead. Amy understood. No one thought something so horrible, so unthinkable, could ever happen to them. Not even in a case like this, when all the FSL players and wives had been warned, and were well aware of the killing spree. They probably figured the odds that tragedy would strike them were still extremely long.
Amy had gone over those odds herself about a hundred times already, almost desperately seeking some kind of comfort in mathematical probabilities. But she knew someone always lost, no matter how long the odds might be. She took no comfort in statistics. Not when her sister’s life hung in the balance. What had been the odds that Ariane would get picked up by a serial killer trucker? Yet that’s what had happened.
Amy had lost one sister to long odds, and damned if she was going to lose another.
Harrison told her he’d get the first available flight home. She asked him to call her when he arrived, and she’d arrange to meet him at the morgue. Since it would take a while for him to get there, the M.E.’s Office would have a chance to clean up the body.
Not that there was all that much they could do to lessen the horror.
46
* * *
Wednesday, August 4
3:00 p.m.
Before leaving Canal Point, Amy had called Scarpelli and asked her to work with Ryan and Washington to interview Megan O’Neill’s neighbors in Jupiter. Three hours later, Adrianna had called in to say they’d located a potential witness and were on their way back to HQ to report.
Amy dropped her office phone into its cradle, resisting the urge give a whoop of triumph. Maybe the killer had gotten sloppy. He’d struck three times in less than a week, a rate that didn’t lend itself to the kind of methodical planning typical of serial killers. And the three murders took place in the same geographic area—or, at least the abductions did. Carrie Noble, Ashley Rist, and Megan O’Neill lived within eight miles of each other, and within five miles of Roger Dean Stadium. On the surface, the murders had the feel of crimes of opportunity. The killer struck women near him, ones he could get at. Baseball wives he could get at, to be more specific. They had found absolutely nothing to connect the three victims other than the occupation of their husbands.
She tried to throttle back her excitement as she organized her notes for the upcoming meeting. The killer must still be in the area. Even though he’d dumped the body in Lake Okeechobee, about an hour away, the evidence strongly suggested that he remained in Jupiter or West Palm. And if they had a witness, then maybe they’d have a description, one that would hopefully match what they had for Brett Kozak.
The predictable explosion had detonated not long ago when an officer from Media Relations released a statement about the discovery of another body. Though the victim’s name wasn’t revealed, the TV and radio stations had no problem pumping out speculation that the baseball killer had struck again. Satellite trucks had been streaming into the PBSO parking lot all day. Talking heads and camera operators were camping out in front of the station.
Amy couldn’t blame the reporters for doing their jobs, but the way they went at it disgusted her. They’d soon be combing over Megan O’Neill’s private life, and would harass her husband, her parents and every other relative and friend they could unearth, causing even more grief and suffering.
Just like they’d done to Amy’s family.
In a few hours, she’d have to face the pack again. After she briefed her bosses on the crime scene, Cramer had ordered her to give the media a scrum out front as soon as she had a positive identification of the victim. As much as she hated it, the fact that Cramer had shoved her into the spokesperson role again was at least a vote of confidence. She didn’t want to admit how much she needed that.
She looked up from her notes as Ryan and Washington rolled in, followed a few seconds later by Scarpelli. Earlier, Amy had screwed up her courage and sent Beckett a text message, asking him to join the briefing. But he hadn’t acknowledged it. Not that she could blame him, but it stung anyway.
Along with Knight, her squad assembled in the meeting room outside the Floor. Ryan’s flushed complexion reflected the crushing heat and humidity outside. Scarpelli looked wiped. But Washington seemed pretty much unaffected, as always. He looked cool in a pale blue tropical shirt that hung loose over his tight jeans.
Ryan gulped down a long drink from a bottle of Dasani, motioning Washington to report.
“We got lucky,” DeSean said eagerly. “A few houses down from the victim’s place, we found a kid who claims he saw someone go up to her house. The kid—Kyle Harrington’s his name—remembers the guy because he was carrying a bouquet of flowers in a big vase.”
“How old a kid?” Poushinsky
asked.
“Seventeen. He told us he was walking home from his shift at a McDonald’s on Federal Highway when he saw a guy park his SUV a couple of blocks ahead, on the other side of the street. When he got a bit closer, Kyle could see the guy get flowers out of the back seat. He followed as the guy walked a block, and then turned down street where both the victim and Kyle lived.”
“Did the guy spot the kid?” Amy asked.
“Kyle doesn’t think so. It was dark, and the street’s not very well lit. When Kyle saw the guy going up O’Neill’s driveway, he thought maybe Heath Harrison had sent his wife flowers. The kid knows Harrison and his wife. Knew her, that is.”
Tabarnak . Would Megan have opened her door on a dark night for some man who strolled up the walk with flowers? After all the publicity about the baseball killer? “Did he see Megan answer the door?”
Washington shook his head. “He turned into his own yard as the guy approached Megan’s door. When he was inside, he went to his front window and looked out through the closed drapes. The guy was standing at the door, but nobody had opened it. Then Kyle stopped watching.”
“How did he describe the flower guy?” Knight said.
Washington glanced down again at his notes. “About average height, wearing a tee shirt and jeans, a ball cap and sneakers. A dark tee shirt, probably blue.”
“Any age estimate?”
“All Kyle said was that he walked like a young guy who knows how to takes care of himself. Sort of a swagger.”
“Please tell me the guy’s muscles were popping out his tee shirt,” Poushinsky said.
“Kyle didn’t offer it up. After we prompted him, he agreed that the guy looked like he worked out.”
“What about tattoos?” Amy asked.