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

by Roger Stelljes

  “I hear you,” Sullivan answered. “However, at the time Nicole Franzen was killed, the apartment next door was unoccupied, awaiting rental, so nobody was there to hear anything. Also, conveniently, the tenant across the hall was out of town. So he had an easy way to get up here unseen and—”

  “None of the nearby tenants were home,” Mac supplied. “So how did he do it?

  With our victims in DC, he’s using a date rape drug to incapacitate them. I didn’t see any evidence of that in the toxicology report on her murder.”

  “Here’s what we thought happened,” Sullivan answered and moved toward the front door. “He came up here and knocked on the door and we think she let him in. There was no evidence of forced entry. I’ll get to it in a minute, but it turns out they did know each other and had some history. So we thought she let him in the apartment voluntarily.”

  “And then he did the deed?”

  Sullivan nodded. “There was a dating history although it was in the past. So this is total speculation but I thought perhaps he was up here trying to rekindle it and she rebuffed it. At some point, she asks him to leave, turns her back to him and walks over here to the door to open it so he can exit. Now,” the retired detective held up a crime scene photo of the interior wall to the left of the front door. “See the indentation into the wall here and the height of it?”

  “Yes,” Mac answered it immediately. “He came from behind and smashed her head into the wall.”

  “Right,” Sullivan remarked. “At which point she’s incapacitated, weakened, disoriented, concussed, whatever. It puts him in the power position and I think he then pushes her down to the floor, gets on top of her and—”

  “Strangles her,” Wire finished the thought, instinctively reaching for her own throat. “You think it was a crime of passion, spur-of-the-moment kind of thing.”

  “That was my thought,” Sullivan replied.

  Mac was taking a closer look at one of the crime scene photos, taken from low to the ground and noticed a picture in the background. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?” Sullivan asked.

  “The Judgment of Paris,” Mac muttered, holding up the photo. “It’s a painting of Rubens’. It’s on the wall in the background in Franzen’s apartment.”

  “Yeah, so?” Sullivan asked.

  “So maybe that’s why he chose Rubens. That’s the inspiration.”

  “What are you getting at, Mac?” Wire asked.

  “You and I were talking about it on the flight up. I’ve asked why Rubens and now maybe I know why,” Mac answered. “Detective Sullivan has described a potential crime of passion. Munger comes up here and Franzen rejects him, perhaps not the first time. This time, he gets angry and just snaps. Enraged, he smashes her head into the wall and then strangles her. It’s all over in a minute or two. But now he’s done the deed. She’s lying here on the floor and he’s thinking—”

  “What the hell do I do now?” Wire finished.

  “How do I deflect attention away from me because I had a history with Nicole Franzen?” Sullivan added. “That’s what he’s thinking. All of that is running through his head now that he’s killed her.”

  “Right, the oh shit moment,” Mac continued. “But he gets his wits about him. After all, he’s been around crime scenes before. He knows how you guys think. So he’s thinking that he needs to deflect and fast. So how does he do that?”

  “He makes it look like some sort of ritual killing,” Sullivan answers. “He makes it look like it might be the start of something.”

  “Right, so Mr. Art History Minor starts looking around the apartment and he sees The Judgment of Paris hanging on the wall and knows that’s a painting of the famous artist Peter Paul Rubens. He looks down and it dawns on him that Nicole is very Rubenesque in shape.” Mac moved around the apartment, looking through the crime scene photos, visualizing how the furniture and furnishings were laid out ten years ago. “So he sees the portrait and he sees his way to make it look like something other than a spurned lover. So he undresses Franzen and lays her nude in the middle of the floor of the living room here. He poses her body with her arms wrapped above her head and then winds the lacy blanket through her arms and around her body, finishing in the front.”

  “So when the police do discover her, they immediately start wondering about some sort of ritual, serial kind of killing because her body has been very specifically staged,” Wire speculated.

  “Which is what we kind of did,” Sullivan agreed, nodding. “When I saw her staged like this, with the picture in the background, I thought this might not be a singular event. We were on the phone to the FBI within a day or two asking for their take, so if that was his intent, it worked.”

  “But Mac,” Wire asked, “if this was a crime of passion, how does Munger go from that to wanting to kill again?”

  Mac folded his arms and thought for a moment. “I see your point. I guess if April Greene were here, she might speculate that killing once, seeming to get away with it, stirred something in him. That’s when the … transition occurs. He sits for days and obsesses about it, thinks about it more and more and how he got away with it and how he felt after, and he didn’t necessarily feel bad. Instead, the more he thinks about it the more he wants to … do it again. He wants that thrill again. Munger gets a thirst to kill again so he goes about planning and finding another victim.”

  “Or,” Wire offered, “he decided to kill another woman and stage her in a similar Rubens-like way to further deflect attention from himself for the Nicole Franzen murder.”

  “That’s not bad,” Mac replied. “That works, too. Might be a little of both.”

  “But under either of your scenarios he still screws up,” Sullivan stated, “because he gets himself caught on that surveillance footage over by Fenway. And once we questioned him and started looking into his history, we learned pretty quickly that he’d actually gone out on a few dates a year before with Nicole Franzen. Before it really got going anywhere, she apparently ended it. After it ended, there were a number of phone calls but those eventually stopped.”

  “Attempts to rekindle the flame probably,” Mac speculated. “Which might have been what he was doing the night of the murder.”

  “That’s what we were thinking. However, by the time he killed Nicole Franzen, assuming he did, Munger hadn’t called her in six months.”

  “So how did you discover that Munger dated her?”

  “A neighbor told us, but she didn’t mention it until after we’d picked Munger up and we were searching his apartment. That’s when she stopped down and dropped that little nugget on us. She said, ‘Well, you know Maynard and Nicole did go out on a couple of dates.’”

  “And he had failed to mention that, I imagine,” Wire suggested.

  “It did seem to have slipped his mind,” Sullivan answered with a wry smile. “When we were first here interviewing neighbors, he said he hardly knew who she was. Clearly, he lied about it. Why lie?”

  “To avoid suspicion, obviously,” Mac answered. “Which was really kind of dumb because that only raised suspicion on your part, which was silly because he also probably knew that you had no physical evidence tying him to the scene.”

  “That’s right. No matter our suspicions, we didn’t have near enough to charge him,” Sullivan answered. “Nobody placed him near this apartment and while it was extremely odd that he would have been out on a long walk at 3:00 A.M. it’s not entirely impossible either. People do weird shit sometimes, and Munger was an odd duck, and it was also true that he liked to go on long walks at night. So while it was an awfully incredible coincidence, in the absence of any physical evidence or any witnesses placing him at either scene, all we had was our suspicions.”

  “Did he ever ask for a lawyer?”

  “No, Agent McRyan, he never did, which I always thought was odd. But he admitted nothing and the clock was running. Because he’d hung around murder scenes and the police so much, and because he was a pretty smart guy t
o begin with, he understood how the process worked. We could only hold him for so long. The problem was that while we had him in custody victim number three went down. I get the phone call from the killer, if that’s who it was, telling me where to find the victim, Naomi Ratliff. With her time of death, it clearly happened while Munger was in our custody.”

  “So you let him go,” Mac stated.

  “We had to. How could he be the killer of number three if the girl was murdered when he was sitting in our interrogation room?”

  “Yet you watched him after you released him,” Wire stated.

  “Why?” Mac asked. He knew the answer.

  “Because he just seemed so right for those two murders,” Sullivan replied, shaking his head. “But then we got another call. The caller told us about victim number four, Katrina Wiggins. When the call was made, we had eyes on Munger, sitting in his apartment, casually reading a book. Two detectives were watching him at the time Wiggins was murdered. Heck, we had eight cops in total on him, covering every exit of this apartment building. He did not murder Katrina Wiggins.”

  “When you watched him, how did you know he never left the apartment?” Mac asked. “It couldn’t have been easy to see into his apartment.”

  “No, you wouldn’t think so,” Sullivan replied. “He left the curtains wide open and he was visible so there was no question, Mr. McRyan, he didn’t do it. And then that was the end of Rubens. I get the call from the killer saying nice try and that he was gone, and he was. After that the murders stopped, the calls stopped, everything stopped.”

  “You kept investigating?” Wire asked.

  “For some time, but the trail went ice cold. Munger eventually went back to work and actually showed up on one of my murder scenes two months later. He acted as if nothing had ever happened, but it was—”

  “Awkward,” Wire supplied.

  “Weird more than anything else,” Sullivan corrected, “because something wasn’t right about him. Then a few months later he resigned and was set to take a job somewhere else, which at the time I thought was probably best for all involved. Then another month or so later I saw the article in the Globe about him dying at sea and to be honest, until the call earlier today I hadn’t thought about him in years.”

  “Not even when Rubens reappeared in Chicago?”

  Sullivan shook his head and exhaled a sigh. “I tried to help those two Chicago detectives as much as I could, but Munger was not someone I thought one second about. I thought Munger was dead—hell, the whole world did. But now you’re telling me he isn’t.”

  Mac shook his head. “I don’t think he is.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “We’re meeting with his old boss, the Chief Medical Examiner, first thing in the morning,” Mac replied. “Until then, take us around to the other murder scenes.”

  “And what if all of that doesn’t help you?”

  “Then we have to think about going public about Munger and turn the heat up that way.”

  • • •

  Grace Delmonico worked her computer, continuing to save pieces of information into a separate file labeled Munger, which every so often she would forward to McRyan.

  At the moment, she was sifting through information the Chicago field office was putting together on Munger when he was a child. He lived in and around Chicago until he was fifteen when his parents then moved to Hartford. The documents included grades, individual pictures and class pictures from his elementary and middle schools. He seemingly was in a new school every couple of years, his parents having moved around a lot. Grace took a look at his fifth grade class picture with Munger wearing a mustard yellow and brown shirt with tufts of hair sticking out. “Your mom didn’t give you much of a chance with the girls, did she?”

  “Who didn’t have much of a chance?” April Greene asked as she knocked on the door.

  “Oh, nothing,” Grace answered and slyly switched screens on her computer. “What’s up?”

  “Any updates?”

  “Not much,” Delmonico answered disappointedly, slowly shaking her head. “Coolidge and his men are continuing to knock on doors and our tech guys are scrubbing video of the area from last night but there haven’t been any new developments.”

  “Where are McRyan and Wire? I haven’t seen them around all day.”

  “They’re working on something,” Galloway replied blandly as he walked into the office and dropped a note on Delmonico’s desk.

  “Like what?” Greene asked.

  “Mac doesn’t always share with us,” Galloway answered with a wry smile as he leaned against the wall. “That’s how the hierarchy of this thing is structured. He and Wire get free reign to do their thing. All I know is that they were back at Eleanor Eagleson’s earlier and they found something interesting to them so they’re following up on it. What it is they have not told me. I’m waiting to hear if there is anything they need Grace or me to do.”

  “And I assume that hasn’t happened then?”

  “The silence has been deafening,” Galloway answered.

  “It’s weird,” Greene noted. “I mean, it seems so quiet around here.”

  “So?” Grace asked.

  “Look, I’m not being critical, but it’s almost like we’re just waiting for the next victim.”

  “We’re not,” Galloway replied with a hint of defensiveness in his voice.

  “People are out doing their thing,” Delmonico added and then spoke to Galloway. “Do we have updates on our photo array of Rubens?”

  “We have some variations with blond hair, without mustaches and a few with longer hair. The local shows are going with it on the ten o’clock news and the cable networks have it and will slide it into their newscasts.”

  “Can I see?” Greene asked.

  “Sure,” Galloway replied and handed her a copy.

  “How’d you come up with these new looks?”

  “It was Mac’s idea,” Delmonico replied. “Remember, he thought Rubens might change up his look. These are possibilities. I don’t know if they help or hurt.”

  “How so?” Greene asked.

  “We’re mixing in speculation and pictures we don’t have with actual pictures and descriptions we do have,” Galloway answered. “There is a risk of diluting people’s ability to recognize him. However, as Mac said, we just need to get a break somehow so we put all this out there and maybe somebody calls and maybe that somebody is his fourth victim.”

  “I rarely say this,” Delmonico added with a wry smile, “but I actually feel bad for men tonight. If what we’re doing is working, women everywhere in Washington DC are looking at their boyfriends like they could possibly be killers. Suspicion is at an all-time high.”

  “Most men probably deserve it,” Greene replied sarcastically and laughed. “I mean, their lady friends will be looking at them funny and they’ll be thinking what does she know?”

  “Does she know about the other woman?” Delmonico stated with a laugh.

  “Does she know about the money I lost?” Galloway added. “Wives and girlfriends always know those things.”

  “Does she know about … whatever,” Greene added with a broad smile. “I’m with you, Grace. It can’t be a good night for men.”

  “Like you said,” Delmonico replied, smiling at Galloway, “they probably deserve it.”

  “And I’ll be leaving now,” Galloway said as he slinked away to the laughter of the two women.

  “We shouldn’t be laughing,” Greene said to Delmonico. “We really shouldn’t.”

  “No, no, we shouldn’t but … sometimes gallows humor is necessary.”

  “Indeed it is.” Greene checked her watch. “With it this quiet I think I may just head home. Call me if anything pops.”

  “Will do.”

  As she exited the elevator and moved toward her car in the parking ramp a familiar voice called to April Greene.

  “Any insights into the mind of our boy Rubens, Chief Brain Wizard?”

  April
spun around to find Ridge smiling at her, leaning against the building wall, a can of Diet Coke in his hand. “What’s going on, author?”

  “Not much, April. It’s been quite quiet today.”

  “Yet you’re still hanging around and looking for…let me guess. Dara Wire?”

  “Or you.”

  “Please,” April mocked. “Save it, Ridge. Don’t try to bullshit the mind reader. Your new girl isn’t around here, that I can tell you. In fact, I haven’t seen her or McRyan all day.”

  “Where are they?” Ridge asked, a look of surprise on his face. “Their cars are here but I haven’t seen them either.” It made him think back to how quickly Wire bolted out of the house in the morning. “Maybe they caught a break of some kind.”

  “I have no idea—they don’t report to me, Ridge. If anything, I suppose I report to them,” Greene answered, twirling her keys in her fingers, waiting for it.

  “Well, they’re not here, nothing seems to be going on and it’s getting late. What do you say you and I go get a beer and talk some shop?”

  Greene shook her head with a wry and knowing smile. “No, I think I’ll pass. I did that once, remember. I didn’t like where it ended up.”

  Ridge laughed, his turn to mock. “Oh come on, April, on those two nights you very much liked where it ended up.”

  “You flatter yourself, Hugo,” Greene replied with a smile and then turned to walk away. She looked back over her shoulder. “It wasn’t that great.”

  Ridge laughed back. She was mad he left before she woke the last morning, but it was great and she knew it.

  • • •

  As the clock approached midnight, Mac and Wire sat in a booth in the hotel bar having a drink. Not much was said as they both contemplated the case. Whatever momentum they thought they had earlier in the day seemed to dry up upon their arrival in Boston.

  “I’m not sure what it was we thought we’d find here,” Mac groaned. “We probably could have done all of this from Washington. Maybe we should have.”

  “Second-guessing yourself?”

  “I’ve been second-guessing what I’ve been doing every step of the way, Dara. I went home and puked a week ago when I said we had to play the clock, that I had three more bodies to work with. Three are dead and number four might as well be at this point.”