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

by Roger Stelljes

  “His type is Rubenesque, but also working class,” Dara observed, flipping back into the summary again. “Not necessarily blue collar—actually more white collar, but worker bee types. Three were administrative assistants of some kind, two were legal assistants at large law firms, one worked at a veterinary clinic and another at a library.”

  “Right,” Mac nodded. “Another two worked at museums, one at a sewing store, another was a bookkeeper for a small chain of greeting card stores. All honest and decent jobs and the victims were quiet, dependable employees. So why that kind of employee, why that kind of woman?”

  Dara sat back in her chair and kicked her feet up. “Because any woman who could handle a blue collar working environment is not the quiet and meek type. She’s tough and doesn’t put up with any shit.”

  “There are lots of women like that in white collar jobs too. Take you, for example.”

  “Yes, but take me for example. There is no way in hell this killer would approach me. I’m confident, outgoing, mildly attractive and—”

  “Definitely not Rubenesque.”

  “That’s right, but there are lots of very attractive, confident, incredibly successful, self-assured women who are what people consider voluptuous. And you know what, lots of men like a little junk in the trunk. Did I ever tell you that I actually had a man suggest to me one time at a party that I was too bony for him?”

  “No way,” Mac replied in disbelief.

  “Way. We’re having a nice conversation, he’s a good-looking guy and I was getting mildly interested, and then he just blurts out, ‘You know, you have kind of a boney ass.’ Can you believe that? Do I look too bony to you?”

  Dara was trim, in excellent shape, attractive and he suspected just a little freaky. Were it not for Sally, he’d have rushed Wire off somewhere for a long weekend to find out just how freaky. But one thing Dara wasn’t, was bony. She was a strong, tall, athletic, full-bodied tough woman who wasn’t to be trifled with under any circumstances. “No, Dara. As a man very much in love and looking forward to being married in a matter of weeks, I can say without being a pig that among your many very attractive physical features you have a very superb, non-bony ass.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. Now, leaving the topic of your exquisite ass and getting back to our

  victims—”

  “They were not confident women, at least not outwardly. All evidence says they were loners who worked and then all of them engaged in singular pursuits, such as books, painting, sculpture, gardening, pets, knitting, the kinds of things you can do by yourself for hours on end.”

  “And those were the kinds of women he focused on, lonely women of a particular physical makeup who were introverted and had few close friends. They wouldn’t have friends to warn them off of the guy, to get spooked by the guy,” Mac deduced and an investigative strategy started forming in his head with regard to Lisa White. “It looks like Lisa White fits this profile to a tee so we’re going to go through her life with a fine-tooth comb. We have to try and put ourselves in Rubens’ head. Where would he have first noticed her? Where could he have observed her in action for long enough periods of time so that he could get a sense that she fit his profile?”

  “Would it take that long?” Dara asked. “I mean, he’s probably good enough to spot them from a mile away. Would he really need that much time?”

  “Yes, yes he would,” a pixie of a woman in what looked to be her mid-forties with a stylish blonde bob haircut and wearing a sharp black pantsuit said from the doorway.

  “And you are?” Mac asked with a raised left eyebrow.

  “April Greene,” Wire finished, holding up the book at the other end of the table.

  Quick introductions were exchanged.

  “So why would he need a lot of time?” Dara asked.

  “Because to get as close as he did to kill them, to get into their apartment, townhouse or house, he had to have spent time with them. He got to know them to the point that they let their walls down and let him into their lives. Any two-bit killer can attack a woman in an empty parking lot. It takes someone entirely different to do what Rubens is doing.”

  Wire understood, nodding. “But to kill like this, and to make it into a masterpiece, you have to get close.”

  “Very close, if not intimate,” Greene added. “And that’s what Rubens does. He breaks down those walls and these women let him in.”

  “They don’t see it coming?”

  Greene shook her head. “No, they don’t. I guarantee you, when he kills them, they are sitting there wondering how did this happen? They know him, trust him and have absolutely no fear of him. Then boom, they’re dead.”

  “You wrote the book, tell us more about him,” Mac asked.

  “My read on him is that the man we call Rubens is a white Caucasian male of average weight, height and looks, such that you’d probably hardly ever notice him.”

  “Why do you say that?” Wire asked.

  “Because nobody ever really notices him,” Greene answered.

  “No solid description,” Mac added. “He blends in.”

  “Exactly,” Greene agreed. “Part of that comes from the fact that he has thought everything through. He is very intelligent and I think he is probably highly educated and well read. His victims are smart, intelligent people interested in literature, the arts, wine and culture in general. That says to me to operate so easily and effectively with these women, he has those interests and in my experience, people with those interests are characteristically highly educated. And not only is he smart, brilliant really, he also possesses an almost pathological need to constantly demonstrate that brilliance. Hence, the phone calls and taunting, which he’s already started with you. Am I right?” she asked Mac.

  “Yes, twice.”

  Greene nodded. “Rubens is smart, wicked smart. He knows it, he wants you to know it and he wants to dominate, intimidate and frustrate you with that intelligence. That, more than anything, is what seems to drive him, at least in my view.”

  “In other words, a gunner,” Mac suggested.

  “That term works,” Greene agreed. “That term works really well because he always wants people to know how smart he is. He needs to validate that intelligence. Just like a gunner does.”

  “Gunner?” Wire asked. “What’s a gunner?”

  “We used the term in law school,” Mac answered. “It applied to the people who always talked in class, who raised their hands constantly and wanted to argue with the professors and generally thought of themselves as lawyers, not law students. They were the ones who never stopped talking about how late they studied and how hard they worked. Gunners were the ones who hogged the professor’s office hours so they could try to discuss arcane and irrelevant legal issues in the cases we were reading. Typically, they were pretty smart people. However, they were often people so socially unaware and awkward that they would have made lousy lawyers. There were exceptions, of course. The valedictorian of my law school class was a gunner. He was ridiculously smart, annoyingly smug when correctly answering professors’ questions and begrudgingly I’ll admit has become one hell of a lawyer. But overall, in my time in school, he was the exception to the gunner rule. Gunners were most often people who were book smart but had no street smarts, and you can’t be a good lawyer without both.”

  “Such as?” Greene asked, not as a question, but to drive the conversation; she could tell Mac had an example to share.

  “There was one guy in my class who was a clerk for a district court judge in law school,” Mac explained. “When he graduated law school, he clerked for another year then ran for election as a judge. He was out of law school one year, had been nothing more than a law clerk and he thought he was qualified to be a judge. Needless to say, he lost. But it hasn’t deterred him. He’s run for a judgeship every two years ever since. He’s still a law clerk ten years later. His career is in the dumpster and sadly, he’s turned into something of a laughingstock. H
e had a modicum of book smarts but absolutely zero street smarts. There were plenty of people that were clueless like that in law school. We generally made fun of them behind their backs and played Gunner Bingo with their names.”

  “Gunner Bingo?” Wire and Greene asked in unison.

  “Yeah,” Mac replied, surprised. “Don’t tell me you two have never heard of this.”

  “Gunner, yes. Gunner Bingo, no,” Greene replied. “Tell me.”

  “It was simple, really. We put the Gunner names on a miniature bingo card and crossed their names off as they asked questions. Then if you got five in a row you had a—”

  “Bingo,” Wire said, laughing. “That is so awesome.”

  “The winner didn’t have to pay for beer or pizza after class.”

  “I suspect Rubens was a gunner,” Greene noted. “I bet he was mocked like that, or perceived it as mocking. He may not have recognized the mocking at first. In fact, he probably would have thought he was doing what he needed to do to fit in and earn respect in the environment he was in. However, to others, those very actions would have been perceived as gunner-like. As a result, he needs to constantly tell you how smart he is. He wants to measure up.”

  “That’s what these classmates were like in law school. They always wanted you to think they were so smart.”

  “Because perhaps they felt inadequate?” Wire asked.

  “Maybe,” Mac answered.

  “How about Rubens? Does he feel inadequate?” Wire inquired.

  “Probably,” Greene replied. “His behavior suggests to me an upbringing, a school experience or probably even later a professional experience where he never quite seemed to measure up somehow. Maybe it was to his parents, maybe it was as compared to a sibling or classmates, and maybe it was someone or many someones in his professional life, but I’ve listened to replays of his conversations with the police in Boston, Chicago and LA and you can hear it in his voice, the chip placed firmly on the shoulder. This is his chance to get society back.”

  “You say professional and you say he’s well educated,” Mac stated. “What kind of professional? What kind of education?”

  “That’s a good question,” Greene replied. “I’ve studied him for the better part of ten years and I’m not sure. There is nothing in the manner he kills the women, or in how he speaks when he calls, that tells us definitively what his background is or was. Whether it was business, law, science, medical, I’ve really never been able to figure that out.”

  “I’ve seen evidence that he uses drugs on the victim, so the background could be medical,” Wire suggested.

  “Maybe,” Greene answered. “But keep in mind he drugs them with a roofie. You don’t need a medical background to administer a roofie—you need sleight of hand.”

  “Are we talking college graduate or maybe post-college?” Mac asked.

  “I’d say post-college,” Greene answered. “He really profiles as quite intelligent.”

  “MD, PhD, JD, Masters, something like that?”

  “Yes, I suspect so.”

  “How can you know that for sure?” Wire asked.

  “I can’t. Profiling a killer before they are caught is to a certain degree a process of educated guesses,” Greene replied honestly. “But when I look at the varied backgrounds of all of his victims and their education levels, the victims were all well-educated, college degrees at a minimum. He seems to easily move in their worlds, talks their language and engages with them on the things that interest them most. It’s like I said, to get the victims to let down their guards to such a degree, to kill them in their homes, to kill them in ways they don’t see coming, in a place where they feel secure, he’s had to have been able to talk about whatever it is the victim was interested in. Books, art, culture, politics, entertainment, whatever their thing is. He knows this stuff. You could maybe fake it for one date but everything says he would have needed several dates with these victims and you just can’t keep a charade up for that long. It’s the only way I can explain him time after time getting as close to these women as he does. It’s because he can talk the talk and walk the walk in a way that is interesting to these women.”

  “However, unlike my gunner example,” Mac stated, “not only does Rubens have the education, he seems to have some street smarts.”

  “Certainly enough to have eluded us for ten years,” Greene agreed.

  “It’s like he knows our playbook,” Mac offered.

  “Are you saying he’s a cop?” Wire asked.

  “No, not necessarily,” Mac answered. “It’s just that he seems to know how we’re going to investigate these cases. You could learn a lot of this through education, research, searching the Internet or watching the literally dozens of criminal investigation shows on television. It’s clear that he knows that the longer we have to work a crime scene, interview witnesses, collect evidence, use the media, conduct surveillance, look at surveillance video, run cell phone records, the more likely it is the killer will be caught, especially a serial, because they usually keep going until they are caught. So what does he do? He compresses the time period of the investigation down to a few weeks. He applies all kinds of pressure with a countdown and phone calls making it a race against time, and most importantly he has the discipline to play his game, take the win, leave and then go into hibernation for a while. That takes a special kind of discipline and control.”

  “What does that tell you?” Greene asked.

  “It’s as much about the game to him as the killing,” Mac answered. “The preparation, the anticipation, the set-up and the time it takes to do that, that’s almost more important than the act of killing itself.”

  “So the killing is just one step?” Wire asked.

  “Yeah, it’s a component, an act,” Mac replied. “It might not be total bloodlust, although deep down you have to have the thirst to kill. But as much as it’s about that, it appears that it’s more about winning and beating everyone. On the call I had with him, he talked of the game, the clock and asked was I ready to play.”

  “You’re right about that,” Greene added. “I think when he first killed it was about killing, but over time, I think I’ve come to your conclusion, Mr. McRyan. It’s become more about proving he’s better than everyone, especially the police, and right now, especially you two. He called you and asked for Wire. You two are as much his target as any woman he will kill. You two are who he is playing the game against.”

  “Why is that?” Wire asked. “Why us?”

  “You two are the biggest game in town,” Greene answered. “Mr. McRyan, you were a hockey player, were you not?”

  “I was.”

  “Didn’t you always want a shot at number one?”

  “You bet.”

  “Ms. Wire, you worked organized crime cases for the Bureau years ago. Did you ever not want to go after the Don?”

  “No, it was always all about getting the top man.”

  “It’s the same with Rubens, I think. He wants to take on number one and right now, you two are the best game in town. You’re number one. That’s who he wants to play the game against.”

  “Then I better play the game too,” Mac answered while asking himself the key question. How exactly should he play the game?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “A little bit of luck and a little bit of obsession.”

  The questions of “how” gnawed at Mac all day.

  It started with the 9:00 A.M. meeting called by Galloway. The Senior Agent was the official lead on the investigation but everyone understood that it was Mac and Wire’s case, with Mac as lead. With that, Mac’s initial impulse was to jump right into the investigation and hit the bricks. He operated on the theory that you lead from in front, not from a desk. To solve a case, you had to be out beating the bushes, making moves and finding evidence. However, the sheer volume of the information on this case and the other jurisdictions both current and past that were involved caused him to put the brakes on his instincts. He didn’t know
why, but something in the back of his mind told him not to.

  So for now, he chose to sit still and give orders.

  “Detective Coolidge, you’re the lead for the Metropolitan Police Department,” Mac suggested. “This is your town. I want you and your guys hitting the streets around White’s townhouse. I want you talking to her colleagues at work and any family she has. I’m betting Lisa White had someone new in her life.”

  “If she did, we’ll find out. Do you think it’ll be that easy though?”

  “No,” Wire answered.

  “Tell me why.”

  “Because Mac and I read through the summary of all the past cases, and we’ve never had a consistent description of Rubens. In fact, we don’t ever have a witness who met the man in the victim’s life. Nevertheless, we need to know if there was someone new.”

  “And when and where he came into her life, if at all possible,” Mac added. “Linc, he hunts these victims, probably for a long time so it wouldn’t be within the last couple of weeks. It might have been a month or two back that he first showed up, maybe more.”

  “We need to go back awhile then?” Linc asked.

  “That’s our thought,” Mac replied and then looked to Galloway. “Don, while Linc’s people are hitting the street seeing if there was someone new, I want the Bureau going through her financials, her computer at work, at home and anything electronic on her. If the guy came into her life, when, where and what she was spending her money on may give us some insight as to when he did.”

  “I’ll coordinate that,” Delmonico replied.

  “Forensics is still working the townhouse?” Mac asked Galloway.

  “They’re still there,” Galloway replied. “I have an agent overseeing that and all the analysis is on the fast track.”

  “And the autopsy?” Wire asked.

  “Should have it by the end of the day,” Galloway answered. “We are offering any and all assistance to the Chief Medical Examiner.”