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

by Roger Stelljes

  “Always is?” Wire asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Ms. White, she was a quiet lady.”

  “Did you know her well?”

  The neighbor shook his head. “No, not really other than to say hello, good morning and have the occasional chat here on the stoop or over the fence out back, stuff like that. She was pleasant and all, very polite and respectful, but kept pretty much to herself.”

  “Any boyfriends, things like that?” Mac asked.

  “I didn’t know her that well, so I don’t really know,” Schmidt answered. “I don’t ever recall noticing any gentlemen callers coming around for her. That’s not to say that there weren’t, I just don’t remember any.”

  “How about lady friends? Any of those ever come around?”

  “What kind of lady friends?” Schmidt asked with raised eyebrows.

  “Any kind,” Mac pressed.

  “Not many of those that I remember either.”

  “Tell me more about her,” Mac asked. “What was she like?”

  “There’s not much to tell, sir. She was quiet, very reserved but a nice, courteous neighbor.” Schmidt looked off in the distance for a moment. “She liked books—I saw her carrying books many times. And I know she enjoyed painting. When the weather is nice in the spring and fall, she was often out painting in her little garden in the back. I know she liked flowers, she has a number of planters out back and the two on the front stoop that she was constantly tending to.”

  “How about a job? What did she do?” Wire asked, taking notes.

  “She worked over at Georgetown University. I think she was some sort of administrator there.” The neighbor thought for another moment and then shook his head. “That’s about all I know.”

  There would be more to be learned about Lisa White, but for now, this gave them a little insight. Mac and Wire descended the steps of Schmidt’s townhouse just as Director Mitchell and Chief Weathers descended down the steps of White’s.

  “If this is Rubens, and I think it is,” Mitchell started, “this is number one. He has three more planned.”

  “Three more?” Weathers asked, concerned.

  The director nodded. “He generally kills four women of Rubenesque body type then disappears, or at least that has been the M.O. so far when he went on his three other sprees.” Then Mitchell turned to Mac. “I assume you saw the timer?”

  “We calculate that to be Wednesday night, 9:00 P.M.,” Mac answered, showing the countdown on his phone.

  “That’s what I thought too,” the director answered, then tacked in a different direction. “He called you?”

  “Yes.” Mac related the phone call.

  “He’s going to keep calling you,” the director stated. “That’s part of his routine. The other times he found one cop to call, torment and ridicule. This time, that looks like it’s going to be you, Mac.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You ready for it?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No, no, you don’t,” the director answered candidly. “So let’s get to it. How do you want to handle this?”

  Mac looked to Wire who replied, “How about like we did last time?”

  “That works,” Mac answered quickly.

  “What does that mean?” Chief Weathers asked.

  “We run it like the Reaper case. The FBI and your people, Alonzo, run a normal investigation, I put a special agent in charge to run it from the FBI side, give it a face, and you have your man,” Mitchell answered. “At the same time, Mac and Wire run their own investigation off to the side and coordinate with the agent in charge. There are two investigations, but when push comes to shove, Mac is in charge.” The director glanced back to Mac. “Will Galloway work?”

  “Yes, sir,” Mac answered.

  Mac and Wire worked with Senior Special Agent Don Galloway on the Reaper case. Galloway would be comfortable with the command structure, had a deft touch with the media and was an administrative wizard. With him handling all of that, Mac could just concentrate on the case. He could completely focus on Rubens.

  “Okay, then there is one other person we will call in—an FBI Consultant named April Greene who works with the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. She’s written numerous books on serial killers, including two on Rubens. She consults with us on cases that interest her. I’m pretty sure the return of Rubens will get her in the mood to help out.”

  “I think we’ll need all the help we can possibly get,” Mac answered. He had a friend on the FBI side in Galloway; he wanted one on the city side as well. He looked to Chief Weathers. “Chief, if I might, can I suggest—” Mac shook his head. “Wait, strike that. Can I make a request you put Coolidge in charge on your side? I know Lincoln—we’ve worked informally together. He’s a really good cop.”

  Weathers nodded. “Done. Lincoln is one of the best I got.”

  “It’s settled, then,” Mitchell stated. Then he looked to Mac. “What’s your first move?”

  Mac looked to Wire. “Thoughts?”

  She looked down at her watch and then back toward White’s townhouse. “For tonight I think we need to go back inside and take a longer look around,” Dara replied. “He leaves a clue about his next victim, right?”

  “Yes,” Director Mitchell answered. “But I have to caution you, it’s never been figured out ahead of time.”

  “Which is why we can’t bank on that,” Mac replied. “So, Director, first thing in the morning we’re going to need to see everything there is on this Rubens character. All the way back to the beginning,” he added. “Unless we catch a lucky break, the way we’ll catch him is to try to understand him, how he operates and how he identifies his victims.”

  “I’ll make sure that gets done. Did he call you on your home phone or cell?” Mitchell asked.

  “Home.”

  “We’ll get it monitored,” Mitchell answered as they all looked out to the street. While the police had taped off a wide area, the onlookers were gathering and media was on the scene, lights glaring, cameras rolling and pictures being snapped. The little confab they were all having was undoubtedly already on film and being reported.

  “And here I thought I was done with the media,” Mac moaned.

  “Chief Weathers and I will handle this tonight,” Mitchell stated. “You two start working.”

  Mac and Wire hurried back inside White’s.

  “I’ll go upstairs and look around. Who knows,” Wire mused with a wry smile as she reached for the stairway banister, “maybe she wrote down the killer’s name.”

  “Right.”

  “Hey, a girl can hope.”

  Mac went back into the living room. The medical examiner was evaluating the body and she looked up to see Mac.

  “Time of death?” Mac asked.

  “Preliminarily, based on body temperature and the amount of rigor, I’d say between eighteen and twenty-two hours ago, so last night between eight and midnight,” the medical examiner replied.

  “How did he do it?”

  The doctor pointed with her right index finger at White’s neck. Mac couldn’t see it in the dim light of earlier, but now with the body fully illuminated with portable lights he could see the bruising around her throat and neck.

  Mac crouched down next to the medical examiner.

  “It looks like he strangled her, both hands,” the doctor stated clinically. “Just basically choked the life out of her. At least that’s my initial thought as I look at this. I’ll know for sure once I get back and examine her at the morgue, but that’s my early unofficial diagnosis.”

  “Well, if you need any help on this, ask,” Mac counseled. “The FBI and MPD are working together on this one.”

  “No lack of resources then.”

  “No,” Mac answered. “If there is something you need, ask—you’ll get it. This case is high priority. Everything will be fast-tracked.”

  “Good to know.”

  Mac looked down to White one more time and something abo
ut the cause of death raised a question in his mind. How does he get up so close and personal without making a sound? The neighbor was home all night and didn’t hear a thing.

  Unable to solve that problem at the moment, he proceeded to walk around the small living room area of the townhouse, which was stuffed with a mismatched assortment of furniture. There was an oversized loveseat, two tall, soft chairs covered in a different and dated green, orange and purple floral fabric, four small end tables—two round, two square—a narrow but newer Talisman coffee table and three ornate lamps all with a different styled shade. All of the furniture was pushed to the sides of the room so that the killer could display White’s body in the center of the room.

  The neighbor was right about Lisa White’s love of books. White was definitely a zealous collector. The built-in bookshelves were stuffed with a mixture of hardcover and paperback books organized in no particular fashion. Mac enjoyed the peace of reading when he had the time. While he took in the occasional mystery, his interests trended more toward non-fiction historical books and autobiographies, and he was particularly drawn to anything about World War II.

  Lisa White’s tastes were far broader than his and her shelves were chock full of the works of the great authors. With just a quick inspection, Mac found the works of Hemingway, Salinger, Steinbeck, Dickens, Austen, Orwell, Chaucer, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Poe, Conan Doyle, and the list went on. She must have been a rare bookstore’s dream customer. It was an impressive collection that had obviously taken years to assemble. And the collection wasn’t limited to the classics. Intermixed with the classics were hundreds of fiction books containing a mixture of young adult, romances, mysteries and thrillers from all of the big names and far more from writers with which he was unfamiliar. It reminded him of Once Upon a Crime, the great little mystery bookstore back in Minneapolis that he occasionally frequented when looking for a mystery or thriller for himself or more likely for Sally, who loved nothing more than to escape the stress of her job by curling up with a good mystery and a glass of wine.

  As he moved around the room, he approached the small table in the corner, a table that didn’t appear to have been moved. On the table was a tall stack of books, topped by Go Set a Watchman. Mac sighed as he carefully flipped open the cover and read the inside flap of the book jacket. He couldn’t bring himself to read the new Harper Lee book. To Kill a Mockingbird was the best book he’d ever read, one of the few he’d ever read more than once. It was a masterpiece. He thought Atticus Finch was the most honorable fictional character he’d ever read. He didn’t want the new book to do anything to ruin his admiration for Atticus Finch or for Harper Lee. However, as he soaked in the vibe of the townhouse and his impression of White’s life, he sensed she spent many of her off hours in one of the soft chairs of the house reading.

  He turned back to the room and what drew his attention next was the vast collection of artwork. Well, at least some of it was artwork. In the living room, as well as the dining room and even the small segment of the hallway he could see leading back to the kitchen, the walls were covered nearly floor to ceiling with framed pictures, portraits and framed movie posters of all sizes. It did not appear that Lisa White believed in leaving empty wall space. She may have liked to paint but it was clear she had no interest in painting walls.

  As he began to slowly scan the walls, there were recognizable prints of Picasso, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Caravaggio to go with some popular American portraits from Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and John Singer Sargent, along with many other paintings from artists he’d never heard of all oddly mixed in with posters from some older movies he’d never seen, although he did recognize the faces of Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in one of them. If there was a small piece of empty wall space, it appeared that White filled it with a small painting or framed picture of some kind. He’d seen this type of decorating on maybe one wall in a house, like a collage, often on the wall of a long stairway, but not on what seemed like every wall of the house.

  Another thing he noticed was that Lisa White was also proud of her own work.

  There were several of her paintings, watercolors and oils interspersed with all of the other artwork, pictures and posters. He was sure there would be more upstairs. As he followed the hallway into the back of the townhouse, he found a small room off the side of the kitchen where he found her painting supplies, easels, brushes, paint tubes, smocks and the like.

  As he continued to examine the paintings and posters, he eventually made his way back to the living room when he found it placed between pieces from Picasso and Michelangelo: a singular painting from Rubens.

  The painting wasn’t The Three Graces but instead The Judgment of Paris, as Mac learned, returning to his earlier Internet search of Rubens paintings. The same women from The Three Graces were used but in a different fashion and there were additional small naked children and two men added to the scene. It hung to the left of where White’s body lay, oddly displayed amongst not only the Michelangelo and Picasso, but also a series of classic movie posters for North by Northwest, On the Waterfront and side-by-side copies of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Sabrina.

  “There are more pictures in this house than the Louvre,” Wire remarked seriously.

  “And more books than the Library of Congress,” Mac replied.

  “You should see upstairs. There are shelves full of books up there, and then more stacks on the floors.”

  Coolidge came inside. “It’s a zoo out there. Cameras, reporters, microphones and questions nobody would ever answer. Why do the television reporters throw out questions like that?”

  “Why do dogs bark?” Wire retorted.

  Mac looked around the room and then down to the dead body of Lisa White still lying on the floor. He’d done enough looking around; it was time to do some speculating and detecting. “So the medical examiner says time of death was sometime between eight and midnight last night. She says White was likely strangled with the killer’s bare hands. So how did it go down? How did he kill her?”

  “In this case, does it matter?” Wire asked.

  Mac nodded. “Every answer you get tells you something.”

  “Well then, I’d say it’s hard to know,” Wire replied, inspecting the room in her own right. Then back to Mac, “You’re the savvy homicide detective.”

  “And this isn’t your first murder scene, Special Agent Wire, so detect. What do you see?”

  “I’m sure the furniture was not arranged in this fashion. If there was a struggle, there isn’t a sign of it or if there was, he probably cleaned it up. I mean, was she even killed in this room?”

  “I’d bet on that,” Coolidge suggested. “Or at least she was killed on this level.”

  “Why?” Wire asked. “How can you know?”

  “I can’t know for sure, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Well,” Coolidge hesitated. “She was—big.”

  “Don’t you mean plus-sized?” Wire shot quickly back with a gleam in her eye, looking over to Mac, a knowing wink toward their earlier conversation.

  Mac piled on, “Yeah, Linc. Have a little respect. I mean Sports Illustrated just put a beautiful plus-sized model on the cover of the Swimsuit Issue. Get with the lingo.”

  “Uh…uh… yeah, sorry,” Coolidge replied sheepishly.

  “Voluptuous works too. That’s how the women in Rubens works are described,” Wire continued.

  “Or so Google told you,” Coolidge replied sarcastically, recovering quickly, giving a dig of his own. “The point is, however, that given her plus-sized, voluptuous nature, the killer probably didn’t move her very far.” Coolidge scratched the back of his head. “But that’s as far as I can get.”

  “But that does tell us something, maybe. Ms. White is a larger woman but I’m also betting she was fairly strong. So our guy is also very strong or …”

  Coolidge’s eyes lit up. “Or he drugged her.”

  “In fact, I’ll bet we’ll f
ind he uses drugs regularly,” Mac answered, nodding. “That would allow him to get his hands around her throat and choke her without any ruckus.” He thought about it for a second. “That makes some intuitive sense as well. The neighbor next door doesn’t remember hearing anything. If there was a fight, he might have heard something.”

  “If he put his hands on her, then maybe we get his prints, then?” Wire offered hopefully.

  Mac thought for a second then shook his head. “We can hope, and the medical examiner will check, but I really doubt it. If our speculation is correct and he drugged her, then as she’s falling into the drugged state he has time to pull on gloves so that he leaves no prints behind.”

  “But he could have left them elsewhere,” Wire replied.

  “He could have,” Coolidge agreed. “But if time of death is right he may have had all night to wipe the place down, removing any of his prints.”

  “And,” Wire nodded, picking up the thought, “if he planned it out this much, he then kept really good track of anything he might have touched, and—”

  “Wiped them away,” Mac finished. “All the same, forensics will print the whole place. The autopsy will give us a better idea if our suspicions are correct. Of more importance at the moment is to get an idea of what she was doing in the days before her death. We need people interviewing her friends, co-workers, family, other neighbors and anyone else who had any contact with White in the last month at least, if not longer. Was there someone new in her life? If so, did anyone see him? Did anyone get a name? How did he pick Lisa White? Why did he pick Lisa White? Linc, I need your people working the street on that. If anyone finds something, I want to know.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “We’re not doing that?” Wire asked.

  “We’re not doing as much of that,” Mac answered. “At least yet.”

  “What are we doing, then?”

  “Learning about our killer,” Mac replied. “First thing in the morning, we’re going to get to know everything there is to know about the killer, Rubens.”

  • • •

  Wire dropped Mac off a little before 1:00 A.M.