Next Girl On The List - A serial killer thriller (McRyan Mystery Series Book)

by Roger Stelljes

  “Great answer, Mac,” Wire said, making a toast with her beer.

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Even Kroft liked that answer,” Sally added, patting Mac on the knee happily.

  The segment ended with Kroft asking Mac, “So how has this changed your life?”

  Mac laughed, lightly shaking his head. “Man, where do I even start? It’s changed everything. I was a St. Paul police detective, very happy with my fairly anonymous life. Now I’m living in Washington, DC. I have a best seller to my name. I’ve had the privilege of working on a few cases I’d have never seen otherwise, all because of who I now know. I’m here with you on 60 Minutes. None of this was on my life radar. I couldn’t even have imagined it. The case”—he shook his head— “the case has completely changed the trajectory of my life. And I suppose a lot of other lives too.”

  The segment ended.

  The room erupted in conversation, smiles, laughter and toasts. Mac and Wire were relieved. They’d both felt good about how the interviews went, but until you saw the finished product, how they arranged it, what they left in, what they cut out, you just never knew.

  “You did great, babe,” Sally beamed and then pecked him on the lips. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “That was great,” Wire said as she gave him a high five.

  “What a relief,” Mac answered, finally feeling like he could breathe.

  Their house phone rang.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Wire. He slowly worked his way across the living room to the phone. He smiled at the room filled with laughter as he picked up the phone on the fourth ring. “Hello?”

  “Is this Mac McRyan?”

  “Yes, it is. Who’s this?” he asked lightly, covering his right ear, trying to keep out the noise of the chatter in the room.

  “I’m someone who is once again going to change the trajectory of your life.”

  “Excuse me?” Mac asked, immediately on guard. It was in the tone of the caller, almost sinister in nature. And it wasn’t the caller’s real voice. It was being disguised. “Who the hell is this?”

  Sally approached, seeing the sudden change of his expression.

  “It’s game time, Mr. McRyan. Is Ms. Wire there with you?”

  Mac scanned the room to find her. “She is.”

  “Oh, so much the better,” the caller replied. The voice might have been disguised, but you couldn’t hide the taunting and dark nature of it. “Are you two ready to play?”

  “Play what?” Mac asked while finally catching Wire’s attention, urgently waving for her to approach. “What game are you talking about?”

  “You are now on the clock, Mr. McRyan. And you don’t have a moment to waste.”

  “Clock?” Mac asked as he walked into the kitchen and away from the crowd. Wire and Sally were on his heels, confused and alarmed, having heard the strained tone of Mac’s voice and seen the concerned look on his face. “Did you say clock?” he asked.

  “Yes. The countdown has begun.”

  “Countdown? Who the hell are you?” Mac asked, but something he read many years ago had him wondering if he already knew, and he instantly dreaded the thought of it.

  “I left you a little present,” the voice taunted. “You’ll find it hanging on your garage door. Once you find it, you’ll know what to do and then … our game can begin.”

  “Hello? Hello?” Mac asked urgently, but the line was now dead. “Shit.”

  “What is it?” Sally asked.

  “Mac, talk to me,” Dara asked, concerned. “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know, someone … something bad, I think. Something very, very bad.” Mac explained the call quickly while he took out his keys, opened a kitchen cabinet over the refrigerator, reached up high and extracted a silver metal box. He unlocked the box and resting inside were two 9mm Glocks. He handed one to Wire, who instinctively checked the magazine and then slammed it back in. Mac did the same, chambered a round and then grabbed two flashlights from the same cabinet, as well as a pair of rubber gloves.

  “Where are you going?” Sally asked.

  “To see what is hanging on the garage door,” Mac replied, moving toward the back door. Wire followed close behind, pulling her long black hair into a tight ponytail.

  “Shouldn’t you call the police?” Sally suggested worriedly.

  “We are the police,” Mac answered grimly as he handed a flashlight to Wire and said, “Cover me.”

  “Let’s go,” Wire answered, ready.

  He opened the back door and slowly walked down the steps, the flashlight in his left hand crossed underneath his right hand holding the gun, slowly and methodically scanning the small backyard, side to side and up and down. Wire covered him from behind as he approached the back of the garage and then the small gate in the privacy fence to the left. He flipped up the gate latch and pulled it open while Wire covered him from the corner of the garage.

  Mac looked back to Wire, who nodded for him to go.

  He guardedly slipped through the door and then turned right, facing the front of the garage, and pointed the flashlight at the garage door.

  Attached to the decorative handle was a large clear plastic Ziploc storage bag. The bag contained a note and a picture. The picture was of a larger woman, naked, lying over what looked like a portrait of some kind. The note read:

  Dear Mac and Dara,

  Lisa White lives on 11th Street NW in Washington DC. She’s number one. At the address, I’ve left you a hint for number two, and a timer counting down to when I shall kill her. As Sherlock Holmes often said: “Come, Watson, come. The game is afoot.” I wish you good luck.

  Rubens

  “Oh my God,” Wire gasped.

  “He’s back,” Mac muttered as he re-read the handwritten note.

  The trajectory of their lives was indeed about to change.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “By my count, that’s Wednesday night, 9:00 P.M.”

  “Jesus! Is it required that if you drive a Subaru, you have to slow everyone else down?” Wire barked as she speedily passed a green Forester rolling along five miles an hour below the posted limit.

  While Wire aggressively negotiated the traffic, Mac went into investigation mode and thought to make two immediate phone calls.

  The first was to Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) homicide detective Lincoln Coolidge. Coolidge was one of the best on the DC force and a man they both knew well and knew they could work with. Mac hurriedly explained what he had.

  “Rubens, really? He’s back?”

  “Looks like it.”

  Coolidge didn’t hesitate. “I’m out the door now.”

  Mac’s second call was to FBI Director Mitchell. Not many people had the director’s cell number, but Mac did. If it was Rubens, the FBI would have to be involved and nobody could get the gears of the FBI running more quickly than its director.

  “Mac, I’m on my way, but at that scene, you’re FBI,” Mitchell ordered.

  “Is she still alive?” Wire asked as she veered wildly around a Honda Accord, who honked in annoyance as they passed.

  Mac shook his head. “She doesn’t look alive on the photo. If this is him, she’s dead. Long dead.”

  “What do you know about Rubens?” Wire asked worriedly.

  “He started, I think, ten years ago and killed four women in Boston. Then he hit Chicago a few years later and then Los Angeles, I want to say … maybe four years ago. He killed four women in Chicago and then four more in Los Angeles. He calls himself Rubens after a famous painter and his victims are much like the voluptuous women in the artist’s paintings.”

  “Voluptuous?”

  “I think today’s descriptive term would be plus-sized. If I recall, the women are often described as Rubenesque.”

  “This is unbelievable.”

  “No, what’s unbelievable is he thinks it’s a game: four women, four quarters, a timer counting down to the next victim with a winner at the end—ei
ther him or us. That’s what we’re in for here. You should have heard him on the phone. I don’t care that the voice was disguised, it was freakin’ eerie. He was on a high, getting off on it.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him,” Wire suggested as she honked at the white Camry in front to move to the right lane.

  Mac shook his head, “No more than what I remember reading from when he was killing in Los Angeles. I was a pretty new detective at the time, solved a few cases and felt like I was hot shit and all, sitting there reading the news accounts thinking it might be really cool to go after someone like him.”

  “What do you think now?”

  “Now I know better,” Mac replied as Wire turned a hard left onto NW 11th. “If this is him, be ready to be consumed by this,” he counseled. “He’s going to taunt and haunt us. That’s what he does. He was already doing it to me. We’re going to get to our victim and there’s going to be a timer, counting down to his next victim. Supposedly, he leaves a clue or clues behind that identify the next victim but for the detectives in the other cases before us, it’s been like deciphering Zodiac’s Code. I don’t think it’s ever been cracked, or if it has, never in time.” Mac scratched his head, dreading what was to come. “There have been books written about him, I think,” he added. “It’s a big media circus for two or three weeks every time he strikes. And then, when it’s over, poof—he’s gone.”

  “And now he’s here in DC.”

  “Sure seems that way.”

  “Did we bring this on ourselves?” Wire asked.

  “You mean 60 Minutes. Electing to Murder. The Reaper case.”

  “Yeah, is he here because of all of that?”

  “I don’t know,” Mac answered. “It might just be a convenient coincidence. If his past is any indication, he’s been here a long time planning. We’re involved because we’re the flavor of the month. If we don’t show up, he probably picks on someone like Coolidge or someone from the Bureau.”

  Lisa White’s townhouse was set mid-block on 11th Street NW, on the west side between Columbia Road and Irving Street. Patrol units already on the scene flooded the front with light. Mac and Wire exited the Range Rover and quickly strode up to the front of the house.

  “Are you two McRyan and Wire?” one of the uniforms asked.

  “Yes,” Mac answered.

  “Coolidge says it’s your show. He’s on his way.”

  Mac took a look at the two-story townhouse and quickly walked up the steps, still wearing the white rubber gloves. He carefully tried the door, but it was locked. He peered in the side window to the right of the door but couldn’t see inside. As he evaluated his options for entry, Coolidge arrived.

  “Mac, is it him? Is it really him?” Coolidge asked, jogging up the sidewalk in black jeans, a black t-shirt and black leather jacket looking like Shaft.

  “We’ll find out soon enough, Linc, but I think so,” Mac replied, thinking back to the phone conversation and its authenticity. “The voice was masked but the cadence, the words and the tone—”

  “All said it was him,” Coolidge finished.

  Mac nodded slowly and then said quietly, “It was—creepy.”

  “You want to go in?”

  “Yes.” Mac turned back to the door and looked at the side window. He wanted to preserve the door for prints on the extremely long odds that the killer actually left them, so he took a chance. He pulled his Glock out from his waistline, flipped the butt end and hammered the glass to the right of the door. The glass shattered and created a jagged hole just large enough for him to carefully slide his right arm through to reach the deadbolt and twist it open. He cautiously pulled his arm back out and opened the door.

  “Wire and I, Linc and two men.” Mac led them inside.

  Straight ahead were a set of narrow steep steps up to the second story. Coolidge and two patrol officers went up with flashlights and guns drawn.

  “I’ll take the back,” Wire said quietly as she went straight ahead, down the dark hallway leading past the steps toward the back of the townhouse.

  Mac went sharp right, into the living room, and his flashlight immediately caught a long mirror in the corner of the living room near the curtains to the front picture window. In the bottom of the mirror’s reflection was a naked body lying on the floor, and resting above the body, striking in the darkness of the room, were the red block numbers of a timer counting down.

  Mac rotated left and held his flashlight high over the body of the victim, which was placed on top of what looked like a large portrait underneath the corpse as if it were a rug. To add illumination, he turned on a reading lamp in the corner of the room.

  With the light, he could better see the full exhibition of what Rubens left behind. “Sweet Jesus,” he muttered under his breath.

  In the portrait, there were three naked women, one in the middle with her back to the viewer, then one to the left and one to the right. The three women all had wide hips, large thighs, soft stomachs and large breasts, and visually they formed something of a circle.

  Lisa White was staged lying face down over the pose of the woman in what would be the middle of the portrait. Her head was turned slightly to the left so that you could make out the soft profile of that side of her face. Her right arm was stretched out from her shoulder so as to look as if it were placed gently over the shoulder of the woman to the right in the portrait. White’s left arm was extended to look as if it were wrapped around the upper waist and just under the right breast of the woman on the left. Around the perimeter of the portrait, screwed into the floor, was a large, ornate gold picture frame.

  Mac approached White, crouched down and gently reached to check for a pulse on her left wrist. There was none and he could feel that rigor had set in. She’d been dead for some time.

  “Oh my,” Dara gasped quietly as she stepped into the living room.

  “Oh my, is right,” Mac muttered as he stood up and swiftly worked his phone, typing in a Google search for Rubens and portrait. Fifteen seconds later he had his answer. “The portrait is The Three Graces.”

  “This is?” Wire asked, gesturing to the floor.

  “Yes, crude as it may be,” Mac replied as he showed Wire the photo on his phone.

  “That’s definitely it.”

  Mac crouched back down and examined what Rubens the killer had done with Lisa White. The way White was staged gave the whole portrait a haunting three-dimensional look. The whole morbid display, especially with the frame, took up a significant portion of the floor of the small, narrow living room.

  “This had to have taken him a lot of time,” Mac muttered as he stood up and folded his arms across his chest, taking in the detail of the scene.

  Coolidge came into the living room. “It’s all clear—whoa,” the detective said, stepping back in shock.

  “Seriously disturbing is what it is,” Wire replied.

  “And I suspect we now know how our other two victims will be posed,” Mac suggested. “I bet in the next two murders he has planned we’ll find the other two Graces. And,” Mac turned to his right towards the timer, “we have our time window.”

  Sitting on the ledge of a set of vertical built-in shelves was a timer, black with red digital numbers, counting down. The current count was 69:18:24: sixty-nine hours, eighteen minutes, twenty-four seconds.

  “That puts the next murder in three days,” Coolidge stated.

  Mac sighed as he set the countdown on his phone. “By my count, that’s Wednesday night, 9:00 P.M.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “There are more pictures in this house than the Louvre.”

  MPD as well as FBI forensics teams arrived on the scene along with the Chief Medical Examiner for the District. With the living room getting crowded, Mac, Wire and Coolidge removed themselves out to the front lawn. They were quickly joined by Alonzo Weathers, the Chief of Police for the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia and FBI Director Thomas Mitchell, who arrived later, having driven
himself to the scene.

  Mac explained the phone call he’d received and the scene they’d found inside.

  Mitchell and Weathers quickly made their way inside the house to take their own look. At the front door of the townhouse to the left of White’s, two uniform officers were talking to a smallish man dressed in a white golf shirt and pressed khakis. Mac and Wire made their way up the steps to join in. One of the officers introduced them to White’s neighbor, a diminutive man in a navy blue sweater vest named Casey Schmidt.

  “What happened to Ms. White?” the neighbor asked Mac.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Mac answered regretfully, “And it appears she’s been dead many hours, Mr. Schmidt. Did you see anything out of the ordinary around her townhouse today?”

  “No, sir,” Schmidt answered, shaking his head vigorously. “I didn’t see anything at all and I was around pretty much all day.”

  “How about last night?”

  Schmidt shook his head again. “Nothing that I remember, sir.”

  “Any noises?” Mac inquired, thinking of the frame screwed into the floor. “Say, like a power drill or a hammer, anything like that?”

  “No, no, sir.”

  “Any screams, shouts, loud noises?”

  “No, not that I heard,” Schmidt replied. “It was real quiet, kind of like it always is.”