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

by Roger Stelljes

  “You tried,” Wire said, not turning to him. “We all did.”

  “I know,” Mac answered. “It’s just—maddening. You know it’s there but you can’t …”

  “Find it,” Greene finished, taking one last sip of coffee. “I know the feeling. Even now, knowing how this always goes, it still gets to me. Maybe even more now than it did ten years ago when he first started. It’s an incredibly helpless feeling.”

  “I don’t feel helpless,” Mac answered. “I just feel like we’re behind at this point.”

  “Do you feel like you’re gaining on him?” Greene asked in almost a clinical tone.

  “We’ll see. Sometimes you don’t know until you catch up,” Mac answered, keeping things close to the vest. He had an idea that had been running through his mind for two days now and he was nearly ready to try it out.

  “What’s your next move?” Greene pressed.

  “We wait,” Wire replied before Mac could answer. Dara sighed and flopped down face first onto the old orange couch. “We wait for the call,” she added with her back to them. Five minutes later she was out and Mac, with his legs up on the long conference table slipped into slumber a few minutes afterward.

  They’d all expected Rubens would call in the middle of the night, to both inform and taunt, but by 3:00 A.M., the call had not materialized.

  “You two should go home and get some rest,” Greene suggested, rousing Mac awake and then Wire. “Sleeping in here won’t do you any good. Go get in your own beds. You both need to be fresh.”

  They didn’t argue.

  By 3:20 A.M., Mac was in his own bed.

  At first, the ringing didn’t register with him; it was like something in the distance, like the garbage truck on Wednesdays, but his eyes popped open on the third ring, and he rolled right and grabbed his phone off the nightstand.

  It was 8:48 A.M.

  The number appeared on the screen, caller unknown.

  It was Rubens.

  “Mac, did you get enough sleep?”

  “I slept like a baby.”

  “Well, now so does Audrey Ruston,” and Rubens clicked off.

  Mac googled the name Audrey Ruston.

  “Son of a bitch, how was I supposed to see that,” he muttered angrily, thinking of the movie posters and Audrey Hepburn, the star of Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “It was staring at me the whole time in Technicolor.”

  Audrey Hepburn’s given name was Audrey Ruston.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “It’s time to make a move.”

  Thursday morning, 9:40 A.M.

  Mac, with slouched shoulders and his hands in his suit pants pockets, dejectedly looked down at Audrey Ruston.

  Audrey was posed as the left Grace in Rubens’ The Three Graces. Her long light brown hair, in addition to her height and body type, made her a perfect fit on the portrait lying on the floor of the living room on the second story of the duplex. The fine attention to detail was as Mac expected. Audrey’s hair was styled identically to that of the portrait. Her body was posed perfectly over the left Grace such that you could hardly see the painted Grace she was staged to look like on the poster underneath her.

  Straight ahead, resting on a little round table was the small black timer, counting down: sixty hours, twenty minutes and thirty seconds. Rubens planned to take his next one Saturday night at 9:00 P.M. Mac set the timer on his cell phone.

  Blocking out the buzz of activity around him, he stood trance-like in the expanse of the living room, deliberately scanning the room slowly left to right, soaking in the space’s details. Mac knew that if they didn’t somehow catch a break, in seventy or so hours he would be locked in this room searching for the combination of items that would give him the name of victim number three. So as he took in the surroundings, he made some initial impressions. Unlike the living room of Lisa White, this was a room of neat order, decorated and furnished with far greater care, deliberation and organization. Yet, despite the order, it was still another living room with built-in shelves full of books, walls adorned with what appeared to be a more carefully and less randomly selected collection of pictures, paintings and small mirrors, overstuffed furniture and a coffee table full of coffee table books. Mac wondered if all of Rubens’ women had the same decorating taste, if that was part of the profile he searched for. To a certain degree, it was something of a necessity if he were to leave behind obscure clues buried in the décor of the home. The irony was that most artists would prefer a blank canvas, but not Rubens.

  Wire snapped him out of his trance.

  “This must have taken hours to get right,” Wire suggested, standing to the right of the portrait of The Three Graces and the body of Audrey Ruston.

  “Well, he killed her last night around 9:00 P.M. and we didn’t find the body until an hour or so ago,” Mac answered. “That left him many hours to intricately stage this and clean up.”

  “And nobody hears a thing.”

  “I’m sure Coolidge is checking, but I sensed the first floor of the duplex is uninhabited right now,” Mac answered as he turned his attention to the medical examiner.

  The doctor was crouched down, examining the body, focusing on the area of Audrey’s neck and throat area.

  “What do you see?” Mac asked, moving to his left to crouch down to get a better angle.

  “Unlike Lisa White, I don’t see any bruising, so I don’t think he strangled her,” the coroner replied. “But … hmpf.”

  “But what?” Wire queried, seeing the change in the doctor’s expression.

  The medical examiner got closer with her flashlight and focused in on the area around the victim’s mouth. “See the skin around her mouth and nose?”

  “Yeah,” Mac replied quietly, leaning in closely, “it’s discolored. It’s white or whitish as compared to the rest of her skin.”

  “That’s what I see, too,” the coroner answered. “Plus in her cheeks there is some evidence of what looks like cyanosis.”

  “Bruising?” Wire asked.

  “Yes,” the coroner answered.

  “He smothered her?” Mac asked, looking up to the doctor.

  “Could be,” the coroner responded. “I will know better once I examine her back at the lab, but those signs suggest it’s very possible.”

  Mac and Wire both turned and looked to the couch on the far wall. “There were two wine glasses in the dishwasher,” Wire reported. “They are freshly clean.”

  “So,” Mac started, moving over to the couch. “So say this was a date. They’re sitting here on the sofa. Audrey and our guy are getting comfortable. She’s relaxing, warming to the moment because she and this guy have been getting closer to one another. They have some wine and …”

  “He spiked her wine,” Wire followed. “Lisa White had Rohypnol in her system. What do you want to bet Audrey will have it in hers?”

  “No bet,” the medical examiner replied.

  “A glass or two of wine is the perfect delivery vehicle for a roofie,” Mac stated. “It’s part of what he does to incapacitate the victim. So, let’s say she did get roofied.” He carefully sat down on the middle of the couch. “They’re sitting on the couch. It takes perhaps a half hour for Rohypnol to start taking effect. Eventually, she starts to show the signs—slurred speech, droopy eyes, loss of dexterity, and she starts to become incapacitated and he—” Mac looked to the pillow but didn’t touch it. “He grabs that pillow, or that one, and jumps on top of her and smothers her. The drug has largely incapacitated her so it wouldn’t be that hard.”

  “It’s possible,” Wire mused.

  “Indeed,” the medical examiner blurted, pointing the light of her flashlight up the nostrils of Audrey’s nose. “I think I see some strands of fabric in the nasal cavity.” With her gloved hand, the doctor pried open Audrey’s mouth and peered closely, using her flashlight. “And in the mouth as well.” To the forensic tech, she ordered, “Get pictures, nose and mouth.”

  There were two couch pillows. Mac dir
ected another forensic tech to bag the pillows.

  “But does that get us anywhere?” Wire asked. “I mean, it tells us how. Once he’s in, he drugs them and then kills the victims, but does that get us anywhere?”

  “Maybe not directly,” Mac answered. “But everything we learn could pay off somewhere. You just never know. The more information, the better.”

  Coolidge entered the room and looked to Mac. “What’s with the suit?”

  Mac was dressed in a sharp dark navy blue pinstripe suit. His cream-colored dress shirt was open at the collar. A sky blue tie was in the car. “It’s for later,” he answered, a comment that drew an interested look from Wire. To Linc, Mac asked, “So, what do we know about our victim?”

  “What I know so far is that she worked at the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum near the Capitol.” Coolidge flipped a page on his notebook. “Sewall-Belmont House and Museum is dedicated to …”

  “The women who’ve worked on Capitol Hill,” Mac finished.

  Coolidge and Wire gave him a raised eyebrow and even the medical examiner looked up.

  “What? Us kept men have a lot—a lot—of free time,” Mac answered. “I walked through it a few months ago and found it interesting. What else do we know about Audrey?”

  “She’s worked at the museum for ten years as an administrative assistant in their office,” Coolidge continued. “She was a model employee. Superbly reliable, never missed work and had lots of unused vacation time. So it was very surprising when she wasn’t at the office at 7:30 as she has been every day for ten years, or so they told me.”

  “What else?”

  Linc knew what Mac’s question really was. “Yes, her co-workers thought she was acting differently as of late.”

  “She had someone in her life?” Wire asked.

  “Yes,” Linc answered. “Or so they thought.”

  “Where have we heard that before?” Dara added with just a tinge of disgust.

  “In any event, they thought she did, which they’d generally thought, good for her. But then they thought of”—he hesitated— “well, they thought of her.”

  “They thought that their friend perhaps fit the profile of a Rubens victim—” Mac suggested.

  “Exactly. So about the time Rubens was dialing you, the people at Ruston’s office were calling her home phone and not getting an answer. They tried her cell and came up dry as well. So they went to her employee file and found the emergency contact card, which listed her neighbor two doors down. The neighbor had a key, came over and found what’s inside—our second Grace. So about five minutes after Rubens called you, the neighbor was calling us.”

  “What else do we know about Audrey Ruston?”

  “I’ve been digging on that and I must say, it helps to have Bureau assistance and resources,” the MPD detective answered. “She’s a native of Washington State but moved here ten years ago, in part to get away from her ex-husband. Apparently, he beat her to a pulp when they were married.”

  “Did we talk to the ex?” Mac asked.

  “Yup, I just did,” Linc answered and then shook his head in dismay. “He’s a real winner, that one. Dennis Lange, an over-the-road trucker who didn’t have anything kind to say about his ex-wife. I believe the phrase ‘the bitch probably deserved it’ was uttered more than once. He was not exactly distraught at her untimely passing.”

  “Nice,” Wire replied bitterly, shaking her head.

  “In any event, he hadn’t seen her since she’d left Washington and couldn’t have cared less about her, or his current wife, for that matter, whom I heard scream at him in the background. He could provide nothing meaningful about his ex-wife, about any family she may have had or of anyone else who would be worth talking to. If I were to editorialize, I envisioned him looking like one of those drunk and dazed husbands you see in a dirty wife-beater T-shirt sitting on a curb, cuffed in the middle of the night during an episode of Cops. He will be of absolutely no help to us.”

  More forensics people were arriving on the scene and two attendants from the medical examiner’s office were coming into the room. It was starting to get crowded. Mac led his group out of the living room and to the stairwell that had led up to the second level of the duplex.

  “So what’s the plan, boss?” Linc asked.

  “We stick to the plan,” Mac answered. “Linc, I want your guys working the house here, the neighborhood, talking to anyone and everyone nearby. I also want you going back and really drilling down on her history with everyone she worked with and anyone else you run across, for that matter. Cast a wide net, just like we’ve already been doing. Also, what did Audrey like to do, where did she spend her free time and what were her interests?”

  “In other words,” Linc suggested, “where did she meet our guy?”

  “Or at least, where could she have met our guy? We take her interests, add that to our financial analysis and maybe we get lucky.” Mac turned to Galloway, who’d arrived on the scene. “I want our people working Audrey Ruston’s financials. With the financials, we do the same thing we’ve been doing with White, going to every place Audrey Ruston spent money or used her credit card in the last four months. I want any and all surveillance footage. I want it reviewed by multiple people. I want the establishments interviewed—do they remember our victim and was any man ever with her or even talking to her. Coordinate that with Coolidge.”

  “Done,” Galloway answered, jotting down notes.

  “And what are you and Wire doing?” Linc asked.

  “Along with April Greene, we’re still working Rubens. And you asked about the suit, Linc? It’s time to make a move. It’s time to start taking the game to Rubens and later today that’s what we’re going to do,” Mac answered as he went into the contacts on his cell phone and found his one semi-friend in the national news media.

  • • •

  Once back to the FBI field office, Mac told the group what he wanted to do.

  “I like it,” Greene answered. “I wish I’d have thought of that twist before. In fact, I should have thought of that twist. How long have you been thinking about it?”

  “It wasn’t a fully formed thought until yesterday, although it was a question spinning in my head for a few days that eventually turned into an idea that became a move to make.”

  “I agree with April, Mac,” Galloway added. “And while I know the clock is ticking and every second counts, my thought is let’s let this simmer for a few hours. I like going before the press later in the afternoon. We’ll get maximum media exposure that way, including the evening news, and it’ll likely get us some nighttime coverage as well. We need all the coverage we can get.”

  Five hours later, at precisely 5:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the press conference started outside on the front steps of the FBI field office. Mac didn’t want a podium or any formality. He wanted a quick, informal media availability.

  • • •

  Wire needed to get some fresh air and decided to take in the press briefing from one-hundred feet away, sipping a Starbucks while leaning against her Range Rover. As she took a sip from her coffee, a small smile creased her face. She could feel him approaching.

  “For someone notoriously media shy, your boy is getting his fill this week,” Hugo Ridge noted as he stood close to her, leaning back against the truck, taking in the scene. “He’s about to get mobbed.”

  “I’m a little surprised myself he’s doing this,” Wire replied, turning toward the tall author. “People like you give him the hives.”

  “Then why do this?”

  “Because he does find you media types to be useful idiots on occasion,” Dara answered wryly.

  “I’m hurt.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “So what you’re really telling me is he has an agenda. What might that be?”

  Dara explained.

  “Interesting,” Ridge answered. “I wonder why nobody else ever thought to do this before.”

  “April Greene said the same thing a fe
w hours ago.”

  “I imagine she did,” the author replied with a snort. “So people like me give McRyan the hives. What about you?”

  • • •

  Rubens had done his research on McRyan and found his foil this time around to be something of a reluctant cop.

  The McRyan family of St. Paul was one dedicated to policing and Mac McRyan himself was the son of a revered detective. Yet much of what he’d found on the Internet while conducting his research revolved around McRyan’s athletic exploits back in his days as a hockey player in college at the University of Minnesota. After college, he obtained a law degree from the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. It appeared he’d been on another career path but then there was an abrupt change in direction.

  While never attributed directly to Michael McKenzie McRyan himself, one article indicated he’d reversed course and pursued a police career after the death of two of his cousins who were St. Paul officers killed in the line of duty. Then there was his rapid rise to detective. In his relatively short time working in St. Paul, Mac McRyan was the lead investigator on a number of high-profile cases. Then he caught the homicide of the political blogger at a seedy St. Paul Hotel, followed it to Washington, and in solving it played an indirect role in Governor James Thomson being elected President. That case led to the 60 Minutes segment. McRyan’s fiancée worked for Thomson. She followed the governor to DC. McRyan apparently followed her and in taking one look at Sally Kennedy, it wasn’t hard to see why.

  Rubens found it interesting that McRyan wasn’t working regularly. He couldn’t believe there weren’t opportunities, not for someone with his background and track record. He’d found three Internet articles that reported he’d turned down a position more than once with the FBI. Did he no longer want to be a cop? If so, why did he seem to keep winding up in investigations?

  In completing his research on McRyan, one other thing was very clear: the man didn’t like the media. He was reluctant to speak, whether in print or on television. In at least three different articles he’d run across, McRyan was described as extremely distrustful of the media. He found a YouTube clip of McRyan outside a St. Paul courthouse, acerbically quipping, “Sorry, no time for gotcha questions today,” when a reporter put a microphone in his face. McRyan said it not with a smile and a wink, but with an edge and look of utter disdain for the Fourth Estate.