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

by Roger Stelljes

  “But you chose her,” his partner answered evenly. “When you chose her the condo became the only real play for you, which is why I had you so well prepared. I thought there was a chance that clue would be too damn easy so you’re lucky, very lucky that I prepared you for that. I provided you a way out. You’re quite fortunate it worked.”

  Rubens nodded reluctantly. “That’s true but the heat is really on now.”

  “The plot has indeed thickened. It’s starting to get really good. This is the fun part, Maynard.”

  “Quit calling me Maynard.”

  “Sorry, but this is where the challenge lies. You’re not afraid, are you?”

  “No! No, I’m not afraid. I’ve never been afraid. But at the same time, we’ve never had this much heat on us. I mean, did it ever occur to you that if I get caught, you could get caught?”

  “I’m not the one out killing.”

  “Ah, but you have,” Rubens answered, wagging his finger. “Have you ever thought that maybe it might be good to just walk away now? Give it some time, reassess and maybe reappear a few years down the road again?”

  He was pushing back, a rarity in their discussions.

  “No. No, no, no. We can’t do that, not now. If you shrink away now, it won’t be the same. It’ll never be the same. When you came out of hiding next time, it would just be sad and pathetic, like a Spice Girls comeback. Your aura would be gone because you didn’t finish the job.”

  “Good thing we’ve changed up in several ways, then.”

  “You mean the fact you left without setting a clock or leaving a clue? Without McRyan having a way to find you?”

  “No, I mean my look,” Maynard answered, holding up the wig of long blond hair and the thick scruffy beard. “And the fact that I’m not Glenda’s new boyfriend. It’s been a slow burn over a longer period of time, which if you will recall, was my idea. We’ve not done that before. I’m not a new guy showing up in a woman’s life. There won’t be the suspicion from her because as far as she knows—”

  “You look nothing like all these Rubens images. And, at least as far as she knows, you’ve been out of town for a month.”

  “Exactly. So, McRyan’s warnings to women on that front are meaningless. He’s dead in the water.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Yet you watched him after you released him.”

  The FBI plane landed in Boston in the late afternoon. While on the flight, Mac and Wire dug deeper into the Boston murders attributed to Rubens. Like Chicago, Los Angeles and apparently Washington, Rubens stuck to four victims. The women all fit the overall profile of a Rubens victim. They were shy, reserved, had few friends and they all fit the voluptuous physical profile. There was the signature staging of the victims in tribute to famous Rubens paintings, although the setups were cruder and not nearly as detailed or dramatic as his later work.

  “He was growing as an artist,” Wire remarked.

  “Yeah, a homicidal one that kills very specifically.”

  “God, I’d love to know what it is about these kinds of women that make them attractive to him,” Wire remarked. “Why these women?”

  “Even April Greene doesn’t know,” Mac replied. “And this is what she does.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, what do you really think, Mac? Give me your uneducated guess. That’s better than most people’s educated guesses, even if they’re experts like April Greene.”

  “He had faulty brain wiring to begin with,” Mac answered. “Then all it took was some trigger, some life event at just the right time to set him off. You don’t wake up one day and decide to kill women in honor of Rubens. You decide to kill women like that and you use the whole Rubens thing to dress it up.”

  “So Rubens doesn’t matter now?”

  “Sure it matters, but the more I’ve thought about it, it doesn’t matter as much as whatever event triggered all of this,” Mac answered. “I asked Rubens why the tribute to Rubens the artist because I hoped maybe he’d let slip where he became such a fan of Rubens and if he said something, maybe we find him that way. That was the point of the question. I could care less about the artist Rubens. I simply was looking for a way to identify the killer who calls himself Rubens.”

  “And what about the helper?”

  “I didn’t know about the accomplice when I asked that question,” Mac replied, glancing up from the files. “I suppose it depends if the partner is the alpha or not.”

  “Is the partner a helper or—”

  “The one actually pulling all of the strings,” Mac finished. “In a relationship like this there is usually an alpha. One is the dominant and the other submissive.”

  “It’s not Fifty Shades of Grey,” Wire counseled.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “What, you think Rubens is killing under orders?”

  Mac shook his head. “No. I think he would be someone who was predisposed to do it to begin with. The partner, if the partner is the dominant, is the one goading him into it, pushing him to do it or maybe possibly using Rubens the killer to fulfill the wishes the alpha has.”

  “Why?”

  Mac slumped back into his plane seat. “I… I don’t know. Maybe they get off on manipulating someone into doing something. Think about it this way—when we interrogate a suspect, we manipulate them, don’t we? We maneuver them into telling us things they don’t want to tell us and trap them. And when we do it and it works, we—”

  “Get something out of it? In some cases, we get off on it.”

  “Right, we get something … mental, intellectual, emotional, whatever it is, out of succeeding. It’s the same thing with the alpha. The alpha gets something out of manipulating Rubens into doing what he does.”

  “Or they’re the helper.”

  “Or they’re the helper,” Mac replied. “But let me tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If it was the partner that was on the line with me last night while Rubens was running through that sewer line, that partner was one hell of an actor. That person was excited to be on the line. They were taunting, confident, arrogant and—”

  “And what?”

  “Having fun.”

  “Fun? Having fun?” Wire repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “Mac, that voice was masked. How could you tell?”

  “I could tell. Sure, the voice was masked so that hides the actual voice but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate the other elements like pacing, tone, emphasis and word choice. I could hear it in the voice. The person was having … fun. They were getting to do something they don’t usually get to and they were in the moment.”

  “Huh,” Wire mused, suddenly thinking she should take another listen to the call. “Not the voice of a helper then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Could have been acting?”

  “Make the voice an Oscar nominee, then.”

  The plane taxied to a stop as the sun was beginning to work its way down the western horizon. Waiting on the tarmac, leaning against a silver Ford Fusion sedan was a man they recognized from a photograph in the file as retired Boston Police detective Gavin Sullivan.

  After quick introductions were exchanged, Sullivan got right to it. “You’re really thinking it was Munger? How can that be?”

  Mac recounted the events of the prior night and then the intellectual leap to Munger.

  “Rubens has help, that’s the only way I get the call last night. I’m thinking if he had a partner last night, he could have had one ten years ago and Munger actually disappearing or being thought dead makes me think it is more likely, not less, that it is actually him. If Rubens reappears a few years later, don’t you think people would have started looking at Munger again? You don’t think people would have made at least a cursory check on him? But if everyone thinks he’s dead nobody gives him another thought.”

  Sullivan considered what Mac had to say. “If you’re rig
ht, how was I supposed to figure all that out?”

  “You weren’t,” Wire answered, shaking her head. “There is no way you would have known.”

  “It took them, assuming it’s a them, making a little timing mistake last night for us to figure it out ten years and fifteen victims later,” Mac added. “We got a break. There is no way that call was made by Rubens when it was. He was in that tunnel.” Mac switched Munger topics and asked Sullivan, “So you knew Munger, right?”

  “Not really well,” Sullivan replied, obviously still chewing on Mac’s theory. “But I did know him, I suppose, like any homicide detective knows a medical examiner.”

  “Tell us about him,” Mac asked.

  “Well, he was a quirky guy for sure.” Sullivan told them what he knew of Munger as he drove through the Callahan Tunnel into Boston and then veered to the north to the Zakim Bridge crossing the Charles River. “Maynard Munger, as I recall, was originally from Chicago, although his family moved to Connecticut when he was like fifteen years old. Munger went to school at Providence College where he studied pre-med and one other thing.”

  “Which was?” Wire asked.

  “He majored in pre-med but he had a minor in—get this: art history.”

  “Art history?” Wire asked, looking incredulously to Mac.

  “It’s legitimate,” Mac replied dryly, quoting the Brad Pitt line from Mr. & Mrs. Smith. “So when the bodies were staged like women in the paintings and you saw the art history minor—”

  “It was a little nugget that made us think maybe Munger looked good for it all. It’s not a huge intuitive leap to think that someone with an interest in art would stage murder victims as a tribute to a famous painter.”

  Sullivan went on to explain that after college, Munger graduated from the University of Connecticut Medical School. “He performed his residency at Massachusetts General here in Boston.”

  “Mass General?” Wire asked in surprise. “How does he go from Mass General, the best hospital in the country, to being a medical examiner?”

  “I remember asking him that very question ten years ago,” Sullivan replied. “He said he liked the science, the unique medical conditions, the interesting diagnostic cases, but not the patients.”

  “No bedside manner?” Mac asked.

  “No,” Sullivan replied with a light shake of the head. “He was social enough, but at the same time, he didn’t seem to have a lot of warmth to him. Corpses don’t engage in conversation and ask if they’re going to be okay. They only speak through the evidence and that seemed to work for Munger.”

  “Did you work with him often?” Wire inquired.

  “Often enough,” Sullivan answered casually, his right hand draped over the wheel. “He was a pretty decent medical examiner although when I look back on it, I always thought he was just a bit of an odd duck.”

  “How so?” Mac pressed.

  “Two reasons. First, he was always just a bit awkward,” Sullivan answered, looking away for a second. “He was just kind of a cold guy. I didn’t think much of it at the time. He was a medical examiner—they’re all a little off if you ask me. You go to medical school and then you spend all your time with dead bodies figuring out how and why they’re dead. I thought you became a doctor to save lives.”

  “What was the second reason?” Wire asked.

  “The one thing that seemed to really animate him was death,” Sullivan answered. “He loved murder scenes. Most M.E.s, they want to get the body back to the morgue and examine it. Not Munger.”

  “He liked the crime scenes?”

  Sullivan nodded. “He liked hanging around, overseeing evidence collection, looking at the evidence, offering unsolicited opinions on it, asking questions about it and trying to figure out what happened at the murder scene before he ever got the body back to his examination table. Even there, if you went and saw him, he would get animated, even excited in discussing the details and presenting his theories like he was Quincy M.E. from the old television show. At the time, I thought nothing of it other than he was just into it and had passion for his work, which in general is a good thing. We all like working with people who like their jobs. However, in retrospect, it probably should have been recognized as a sign of some greater interest than normal in death and murder.”

  Their first stop was Munger’s last known residence, a relatively modest apartment building resting on the north side of the Charles River. “Nicole Franzen, the first Rubens victim, lived two floors up from him,” Sullivan stated while they stood on the sidewalk looking up at the six-story apartment building. He pointed to the left side of the building. “Munger was on the second floor at the end. Franzen was two floors directly up above Munger’s unit.”

  “I assume you looked at people in the building right away?” Wire asked, walking past Sullivan as he held the front door to the building open.

  “We did,” Sullivan answered. “And we interviewed Munger. He, like all other building residents who were home at the time, said he hadn’t heard or seen a thing. At the scene itself, there was no physical evidence left behind, no forensic evidence that we found. Early on, we really didn’t have any leads.”

  “But then a few weeks later he showed up on surveillance video at 3:00 A.M., walking a few blocks away from the second murder scene,” Mac stated, leading Sullivan. “And then you had a lead.”

  “That’s right,” the retired detective answered. “We’re northeast of downtown right here. Bunker Hill Monument is two blocks east of this building. You could see it as we drove up here. Now the second victim, Paige Wetmore, she lived way over just west of Fenway Park.”

  Mac had been to Fenway a few years ago to watch the Twins play the Red Sox. “That’s gotta be like, what? Four miles from here?”

  “A tick over that, if you’re driving. And walking over there is a whole different story. You can add a good mile to that total just to get there, walking city streets and having to cross the Charles River.”

  “And he said he was out for a walk five miles from his apartment at 3:00 A.M.? He really said that?” Wire asked Sullivan.

  “Yes, ma’am. So, a guy who lives in the building of the first victim shows up on surveillance footage a block from the murder scene at 3:00 A.M., taking a ten-mile round-trip walk? What do you think, Agent Wire?”

  “I think that sounds very odd. I think that sounds like a very questionable excuse.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Sullivan answered. “Now the time of death was pegged between 9:00 and 11:00 P.M. and he claimed he was home at that time and didn’t leave for his walk until around midnight.”

  “Could he prove it?” Mac asked.

  Sullivan shook his head. “Nobody could verify that, but if you are home alone, who really could?”

  “Someone in the building saw him, perhaps?” Wire asked.

  “Nobody came forward to say that and he couldn’t give us anyone,” Sullivan answered. “So I went along with him and asked him what he was doing at home. That’s where it got really hinky because he wasn’t really able to give me the kind of answers you’d expect.”

  “Like what?”

  “It was simple stuff, Agent Wire. For example, and I remember asking him—I recall the exchange very clearly. I asked him what he was doing at home.

  “He said: I was watching television.

  “So then I asked him: Okay, what were you watching?

  “He couldn’t tell me what he was watching.

  “So I sat across the table and was silent, just kind of staring at him in disbelief and he picked up on that. So then he tried to tell me: Well, maybe I was reading.

  “So I asked: What were you reading?”

  “No specifics?” Wire asked, shaking her head.

  “He couldn’t remember what he was reading,” Sullivan answered. “He couldn’t tell me the book he was reading or the television shows he was watching.”

  Sullivan looked to Mac and then back to Wire. “You two have done this job a while. You
just can tell when someone isn’t on the level, when they’re full of shit.”

  “For sure,” Mac answered with a nod.

  “Munger—” Sullivan shook his head at the memory. “When we had him in the room he didn’t admit to anything. He didn’t crack per se, but you could just tell he wasn’t on the level.”

  “It was hinky?” Wire asked.

  “For sure, you get the hit off the guy that he isn’t being honest, that he’s hiding something,” Sullivan answered as he got them admitted to the apartment building. The tenant in Munger’s old apartment on the second level let them in to look around. “Thank you,” Sullivan said pleasantly to the tenant. “We appreciate your accommodating us and we shouldn’t be long.”

  “No problem. I’ll run an errand,” the tenant replied, grabbed his spring jacket and car keys and he was off.

  After the tenant was gone, Sullivan closed the door and picked the story back up. “So after we found Munger near victim number two, we looked at him much harder for the first victim, Nicole Franzen. Like I said, he told us he was home alone but nobody could confirm it.”

  “I saw a surveillance camera in the lobby as we came in here,” Mac stated. “Am I to presume that was not there ten years ago?”

  “Correct,” Sullivan answered. “There was nothing of the sort at the time.”

  “Okay, so how do you think he pulled it off?” Mac asked. “Assuming he did.”

  Sullivan took them back to the front door of the apartment, opened the door and stepped into the hallway and pointed to the left. “Munger has the end unit here. It’s fifteen feet to the end of the hall and there on the right is the entry into the end stairway well. When I was thinking Munger was the guy, I was thinking he went up that way.”

  They all went up the steps to the fourth floor. The occupant of the apartment was out of town but the building superintendent let them in to look around after seeing their government badges.

  “I can’t believe a neighbor didn’t hear or see anything,” Wire suggested, looking around the apartment while scanning the case file.