“I’ve been going through the Internet history,” the tech reported, looking up. “There are all kinds of interesting searches on here. In particular, I’ve found searches on Eleanor Eagleson, Lisa White, Audrey Ruston, Gwendolyn Waxe, Martha Schreiber and Glenda Richards.”
“That should confirm it, then,” Wire stated. “This was his place.”
As they exited the apartment complex, early evening was rolling in and he’d felt his phone buzzing in his pant pocket, undoubtedly Sally. His leg was starting to throb and he was getting tired. “Can you drive me home?” he asked. “In fact, I’ll feed you.”
Wire looked at her watch.
“I need you to play blocker on Sally from going off on me. I’ll get you out in plenty of time so you can catch up with Ridge, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Oh, all right.”
Wire did come inside and sat down and had dinner with her two friends. Sally served a chicken stir fry and poured Wire and herself a nice white wine.
“None for you there, buster,” Sally scolded when Mac held out a wine glass. “Wine doesn’t play well with those pain meds.”
“This just keeps getting better,” he groaned as he reached for his glass of ice water.
The three of them actually enjoyed themselves for an hour talking about politics, the White House, the wedding, anything but the case and Rubens. Mac hung in there until almost 9:00 P.M. Then the nonstop days finally caught up to him. Mac started nodding off at the table.
“We better put sleepyhead to bed,” Sally suggested.
“What?” Mac said, popping awake. “I’m good.”
The two women laughed uncontrollably.
“You are so not good,” Wire mocked. “Go to bed. Call me tomorrow and I’ll come pick you up.”
“I always wanted a chauffeur.”
Wire departed to go find Ridge. Sally guided him upstairs, fed him his pain meds and then tucked him into bed with the remote for the television. He was out in less than five minutes.
He slept.
It was the way it always went on a case like this.
Mac would go full out for days on a case but eventually he would experience the massive crash.
Now was that time.
He slept through Sally watching television, through a thunderstorm, through Sally getting up and getting ready for work. It wasn’t until 9:45 A.M. that his ringing phone finally woke him up.
Wire rolled by and picked him up at 10:45, and he was in the FBI field office by eleven feeling more alert and awake. The leg even seemed better, less throbbing and it was more of a minor annoyance. A long slumber would do that.
“Where is everyone?” Mac asked as he hobbled his way into the conference room.
“They’re sleeping, too,” Wire answered. “Delmonico and Galloway burned the midnight oil last night, along with some others, to collate all of the data on Munger.” Dara waved to the table. “We have ten more boxes of documents to sift through. In addition, Grace has created a huge computer database of information on him and there will be more to come.”
“Wow!”
“You asked for it,” Wire stated dryly. “You better start digging.”
“I guess I better do that,” Mac stated as he laid his crutches down onto the floor, pulled up a chair to the table and tipped the top off a banker’s box.
At 3:30 P.M., they snuck out for a break, going to a coffee shop for an iced coffee and late afternoon snack.
“How many boxes have you gone through?” Wire asked.
“Five so far,” Mac answered.
“Anything?”
“He was an outstanding medical student,” Mac replied. “Yet it appears during his time in medical school, he didn’t make many close friends. Agents have tracked down all of his classmates from his medical school class. As a person, they say he was crazy smart, harmless, nice enough and tried to fit in but apparently had a unique ability to be awkward around crowds and say the wrong thing at the wrong time. The same thing was true at Mass General—people said he was generally nice, but quirky, awkward and a social misfit but universally they all are surprised he was Rubens.”
Wire nodded. “Same thing I’m seeing. At Providence, it appears he didn’t really have any tight friends although he was remembered. He was the kind of guy who went to a party but nobody really talked to him. His first-year roommate said he and Munger spoke when they lived together, but hardly after. There was one guy from Providence who said he stayed in contact with him after college.”
“Any particular reason?”
“He thought Maynard was a guy who needed a friend,” Dara answered. “He said Munger was awkward, a little shy but really wanted to be liked and tried hard to be liked. He said if you got him out of his shell, got him to feel comfortable and you were open to someone who was a little odd, maybe off-putting, he wasn’t a bad guy to know. It was just that most people never seemed to give him that chance.”
“Sometimes really brilliant people are a little different.”
“That’s what this guy said about Munger,” Dara replied. “This friend became a doctor as well, practices in Cleveland. He said he also kept in touch for a few years because Munger was so smart but he just couldn’t fit with people.”
“Like the lead in the television show House?”
Wire nodded. “He actually made that reference. Not a massive over-the-top prick like Dr. Gregory House, but every bit as smart.”
“You know,” Mac asked on the way back, “if he was so socially awkward how did he become such a Don Juan to these women?”
“Maybe he didn’t need to be with these women, given their histories and backgrounds.”
“The theory being he was hunting people every bit as quirky as he was.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe,” Mac replied. “Still, he must have developed some game along the way.”
“It could be that the partner helped with that. If the partner was the dominant, then maybe he taught the pupil a few things.”
At the field office, they got back to work. Mac looked at the boxes and thought about what he’d looked at, which was all from adulthood. Instead, he changed up and first went to a file marked family. Munger’s father was an insurance salesman of modest success and his mother a homemaker. If mom and dad were modestly successful, their two children were exceptionally bright. Maynard wasn’t the only one to go to medical school. Maynard had an older brother named Elston who was many years his senior. Elston, too, was a doctor, who later married and started a medical practice in Portland, Oregon.
Unfortunately for Maynard and his brother, their parents both died young, his father of lung cancer, apparently a heavy smoker, and his mother of breast cancer. Tragically, just a few years later, nearly eleven years ago, Elston took his life as well.
“Talk about a tragic family,” Mac murmured.
“What?” Wire asked.
Mac explained what he’d just read. “No wonder Maynard was so screwed up.”
All of that might explain some of his odd behavior as an adult. The question Mac now pondered was if Maynard also an awkward social misfit as a child.
There was a box marked Chicago Schooling. Mac flipped off the top of the box, and inside were records sorted by his years in school. “Delmonico is an organizational machine,” Mac noted.
“She learned from Yoda Galloway,” Wire noted. “You want some coffee?”
“No, thanks,” Mac replied, “but I’d love a Diet Coke with ice.”
“I’m on it.”
Mac started in with Munger’s school records, starting in high school and working his way backward. In reading through the documents, it was apparent that Munger moved schools a lot. He went to school in a number of Chicago suburbs: Schaumburg, Wheaton, Aurora, North Aurora, Oakbrook and Lake Forest. As a child, he never got to stay anywhere more than a year at a time. No wonder he became socially awkward. He never seemed to stay in school long enough to make any friends or establish the re
lationships you need to develop confidence.
From a records standpoint, each year there was a new school, a whole new file with transcripts, report cards, yearbooks, and various other documents. It was tedious work, sifting through his grades, classes, and interviews with his high, middle and elementary school teachers. He kept working his way back, flipping through some pictures. “I got to hand it to Grace—she has his fourth … grade … class … whoa. That can’t be.”
“What?” Wire asked, as she came back into the room.
“Has anyone seen April today?” Mac asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Wire answered, holding Mac’s drink. “What? What is it?”
Mac pushed himself out of his chair, limping to the far end of the table.
“Mac, your crutches.”
“Screw it,” he replied as he dug through the stack of books on Rubens that had been resting on the end of the conference room table, largely ignored.
“What is it, Mac?”
“His fourth grade class,” Mac answered, flipping to the back of the book titled The Homicidal Artist. “I knew I’d seen this name somewhere else. Unbelievable.”
“What?”
Mac handed a picture to her. “This is Munger’s fourth grade class picture. He is in the middle row, third in from the left, mustard yellow shirt, hair sticking out in various directions, the typical fourth-grade-boy look. M. Munger.”
“Right, so?”
“Check out the cute blonde girl to his right.”
“A. Crandall.”
“Right.”
“Who is A. Crandall?”
Mac opened the book and flipped to the back page and the author biography. “Crandall is the maiden name of one April Greene.”
“What?” Wire answered, taking a closer look at the book. “No way.”
“She was born and raised in Chicago and North Aurora in particular. She married fourteen years ago and was divorced twelve years ago from a guy named Jason Greene. They were married just a couple of years. Cripes.”
“I can’t believe it. Are you sure?”
Mac sat down in a chair and put his face in his hands and shook his head. “That was a hell of an act she put on in that alley,” he muttered through his hands.
“In the alley…she wasn’t driving her SUV into Munger to save you,” Dara exclaimed, “She was doing it to—”
“Save herself,” Mac answered, completing the thought. “She took out the one person who could name her. And afterwards, the shaking, the shock, the horror on her face—it was all an act.”
“My God, it’s April,” Wire muttered in disbelief.
“We’ve been played,” Mac moaned, reaching for and throwing the book across the room. “We’ve been played all along.”
• • •
April Greene lived in Woodbridge, Virginia, south of DC, halfway between the Capitol and Quantico. Mac, Wire, Galloway and Delmonico leaned against a Suburban while an FBI team cleared the house.
The team leader exited the front door. “Agent McRyan, the house is cleared and she is not here. But—”
“But what?”
“There is something for you and Agent Wire inside, in the office upstairs.”
The group made their way inside the townhouse. Mac painfully climbed the steps with the crutches, with Wire right behind him. At the top of the steps, the office was to the left. Inside there was an old, immaculately maintained and polished cherry wood writing desk. Sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty desktop was a laptop computer, a flash drive, a pink carnation and a note reading: Mac and Dara, Play Me. -A.
Mac inserted the flash drive into the port on the left side of the computer. It was a video. Mac maneuvered the mouse to the play icon. April Greene appeared on the screen, dressed casually in blue jeans, gray top siders, a cream-colored, button-down collar shirt left open and a plain white t-shirt, sitting casually right leg over the left in a desk chair to the left of the sailing photos on the wall opposite of the desk.
“Mac and Dara,” she smiled at them, a knowing smile. “I knew the two of you would be my greatest challenge and you two, you did not disappoint. You were more than up to the challenge. When you found Maynard, I knew you’d eventually figure things out, especially you, Mac. When Dara talked about how you’d never let it go, that you would keep pursuing it, I knew my time as April Greene was likely at an end.”
Wire shook her head. “Me and my big mouth.”
The video continued, “So, how was it that you ultimately found me? I bet it was that fourth grade picture, wasn’t it?” Greene smiled and lightly shook her head. “I knew it. That picture, that terrible fourth grade picture was a track I could never completely cover.
“So, I’m sure you’re asking how and why?
“I’ve always been fascinated by the process of manipulating people ever since I was a little girl, even as far back as fourth grade. If Maynard was alive, he’d tell you that.
“Me? I was the original mean girl,” April said with an evil grin.
“I played those fourth graders like pawns. Even at that early age, I realized just how easy it was to manipulate people. The mind is truly an amazing thing.
“It can be molded and controlled in so many ways. You just have to know which button or buttons to push. Take Maynard, for example. Influencing him wasn’t hard. Once he killed and got the high from it, he was addicted to it and I just had to keep feeding him the drug.
“Now, I know one question you must have is why Maynard killed these women? Why these Rubenesque type women? It was pretty simple really. Nicole Franzen, the original Rubenesque type woman, dumped him, which of course you now know. Maynard—” April shook her head. “The poor boy really had it bad for her. But back then Maynard was so inept with women that he couldn’t hold onto her and not making it work with her was a huge disappointment for him. She had the hook in him something fierce, and that she eventually rebuffed him only made it worse. He just couldn’t get her out of his head. However, at that point, he wasn’t thinking of killing her, he was simply obsessed with her. But then, as with so many things in life, there was that triggering event that changed everything for Maynard. The event that ultimately brought Maynard to me. That trigger was his brother, Elston Munger.
“Maynard revered Elston. Elston was his senior by nine years but Maynard loved him very much, idolized him and spent his life trying to be like him. I think it’s why Maynard went to medical school, because Elston did.
“Sadly for Maynard, Elston committed suicide eleven years ago after his wife, a very Rubenesque-looking woman named Leslie up and left him for another man. His brother’s death, what caused it and who caused it changed something in Maynard. For a month after his brother’s suicide he stewed on that loss, on women, on the fact that his brother’s wife, that woman, that undeserving, overweight woman left his brother and so devastated him that he killed himself. Maynard knew that Nicole Franzen, failing with her, the same kind of woman as Leslie, was slowly tearing him up inside. She had the hook in him and he couldn’t let her go and wasn’t going to let her do to him what Elston’s wife did to him. Maynard was not going to end up like his brother. So he went to her apartment to give her one last chance. When she wouldn’t take him back? When she said there was no way in hell she would ever want to be with him? Well,” April shrugged and shook her head, “you know the rest of the story. He snapped and killed Nicole. But then, what he discovered after killing Nicole was that he liked the power of the kill and soon he felt the hunger, the need, the desire to do it again, and again.
“I was called up to Boston to consult on the case because of the ritualized nature of the murder, the staging of the body similar to The Judgment of Paris. Then Maynard was brought in for questioning. I watched from behind the glass when Detective Sullivan was interviewing him and I knew, I knew, Maynard was the killer.
“I could have offered Sullivan my opinion but their evidence was paper thin. They didn’t have enough, not near enough. And
besides, as I stood behind that mirror, looking in on Maynard, I had an epiphany. What I realized was that the person I really wanted to help was Maynard. I saw in him the perfect research tool. He was a brilliant doctor who also possessed a thirst to kill. So I decided to help Maynard and I killed the last two in Boston.
“After I saved him in Boston, I went to see him. He talked all about how he wanted to put it all behind him, move on with his life and career. Maynard claimed to me that he was innocent and that all he wanted was to get his reputation back.” April paused, smiled and lightly shook her head. “It was all a front. It took me two minutes and I could tell he wanted to kill, to keep killing. He had the hunger.
“I could see the thirst for it in his eyes. It was a rage that was not satisfied. It took me all of a half-hour to convince him of his need to keep going, that he wouldn’t be able to stop and that he would kill again. I told him I could relate to him, the power and satisfaction that killing provided. After all, I’d done it myself. I understood him. I wanted to help him. I was like him. When I said that, when I related on his level, when he saw that and understood it, he folded and then he was mine.
“So I wanted to see how far we could take it and how far I could push him. It took a few years but I worked with him on approaching women, so as to wear down those awkward edges and give him some tools with the ladies. Nobody had ever taught him anything along those lines but he was smart, a very quick learner and had a certain air of confidence he’d gained from his two kills. He was strutting a little bit, so to speak. So in addition to teaching him how to approach women, I gave him a little extra flair and panache, a timer and clues to heighten the risk and increase the excitement. I gave him the timing on the phone calls, or on occasion made the call myself, like in Los Angeles or here in DC.
“So for ten years, he played the killing game three more times. And in turn, I studied him for those ten years. What a fascinating subject he was. It was such a pity I ended up having to kill him. I’m sure you can understand that no artist wants to kill their muse.”
April crossed her arms and sat back almost studiously. “You know, in many ways, he was the perfect partner because he had enough impulse control that he could stop and then start killing again, much like BTK, Dennis Rader in Wichita. Maynard was able to have that control as long as he had other passions he could pursue, which for him was his art. He loved museums, galleries, libraries and he truly had a passion to paint and travel.
Next Girl On The List - A serial killer thriller (McRyan Mystery Series Book) Page 31