by Kylie Brant
The interest in his expression morphed abruptly from personal to professional. The swiftness of the change made her a little envious. And curiously relieved.
“You do? You should have said something. You could have shared it with the team.”
“I wanted to talk to you first.” Nerves demanded an outlet, so she turned to pace. “I stopped to see Dixon first. Gave him a copy. There’s an extra copy there to share with Captain Brown. I worked on this most of the night. At first I thought it was too far-fetched, but there are just too many coincidences.”
“And they are?”
She turned to face him again. “I didn’t see it at first. He doesn’t seem to be choosing them based on a certain type. He isn’t finding them in the same sort of occupation or location, aside from the city itself.” As she warmed up to the topic, she felt surer. But she knew Ryne was going to be tougher to convince. “We’ve looked at the victims as a group, trying to find patterns. But it’s when I started to really focus on each of them as individuals that it struck me.”
“Abbie.” She stopped abruptly at his gentle interruption. “What are we talking about here?”
She drew a deep breath, met his gaze steadily. “I think he’s choosing women who have some deep-seated fear or phobia. And then I think he’s carrying out the rape in a fashion designed to maximize their suffering.”
He was silent a moment. Two. “Okay. Most women have a natural fear of being assaulted . . .”
“No, it’s more than that.” She crossed the room to take the file folder out of his hand. Flipping it open, she extracted the top sheet. “Look at this. He went to a great deal of effort to dump Barbara Billings in the sound. Why? What’s the point? It’s an unnecessary risk of exposure for him. He had ulterior motives.”
Ryne frowned. “Yeah, he did. She had eighty-seven knife wounds on her body. Eighty-seven. Most were shallow enough to make sure she didn’t bleed out, but you know what saltwater feels like on an open wound? He’s a sadist. You’ve said it yourself. He just wanted to prolong the torture.”
“Exactly.” She nodded. “He wants to prolong the torture, but even beyond the time she’d be rescued from the water. He wants her to suffer all her life.” At his uncomprehending look, her voice grew urgent. “She’s terrified of water, Ryne. She watched her father drown when she was seven. She nearly drowned herself. She hasn’t so much as gone swimming in a wading pool ever since.”
“An unfortunate coincidence. But what you’re suggesting doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. She’s been reduced to sponge baths since the rape, did you know that? Her mother said just the sound of water running in the tub gives Barbara severe panic attacks.”
He was wearing that impassive expression that she remembered all too well. But she wasn’t going to let him close her out. Riffling through the pages in the folder, she withdrew another. “And Tracy Sommers. She’s suffered from claustrophobia all her life. Could barely manage elevators.” She shoved the paper at him, but he didn’t take it. “The perp placed a plastic bag over her head and repeatedly suffocated, then revived her. Now she can’t work. She can’t force herself to get in a car, an elevator, a stairwell . . . I’m telling you, Ryne, this is the link.”
“It can’t be.” He shoved back from his chair and rose. “He’s picking them because they fit some criteria of his, that’s what you said. Some element that intensifies his own sexual arousal. It was in your first profile. At least that made sense.”
She ignored the insult. “It still fits. Except the criteria that arouses him is the opportunity to inflict suffering that doesn’t stop. It doesn’t end when the assault is over.” Hearing it out loud, after mulling it over since yesterday, just cemented her certainty. “He thinks he’s suffered,” she said, half to herself. “He thinks he’s been traumatized in a way that can never, ever be healed.” Perhaps it took someone with personal experience of that kind of torment, who had been the recipient of that purposeful infliction of emotional pain, to recognize its presence in another.
“And now he’s found a way to make other people suffer profoundly. Maybe for the rest of their lives. His satisfaction doesn’t end when the assault is over because he ensures his victims long-term agony. And long-term pleasure for himself, because of it.”
“Bullshit.”
Shocked, she could only stare at him. Ryne had the grace to look embarrassed, but his next words were uttered no less emphatically. “I’m sorry. I don’t buy it. You’re crediting this guy with way more brains than he possesses. You really think Juarez is capable of this much thinking?”
“I don’t think it’s Juarez,” she shot back, furious. The hell with staying objective. If Ryne wanted to close his mind to options, then so could she. “Look at the profile. That’s all I’m asking. Richards fits the theory, too. Her mother started entering her in beauty contests when she was four. She was the favorite for the state title. So what’d our guy arrange for her?”
He looked unconvinced. “And Hornby? Give me one good reason the guy worked her over with crocodile clamps and a ball-peen hammer. Did she have an aversion to construction sites?”
She balled her fists at her side to suppress the temptation to throw a punch at his set jaw. The violent urge shocked her. Abbie Phillips didn’t lose control. Not anymore.
She shook with the effort, but somehow managed a dispassionate tone. “I don’t have enough information on Ashley Hornby to make a guess. Like I said before, she isn’t answering her phone, or her doorbell.”
“Look.” Ryne’s voice had gentled. “I realize you’ve worked hard on this. You’ve found some coincidences that we didn’t, so congratulations on that.”
“Fuck you.”
His jaw tightened. “I can’t say the thought hasn’t crossed my mind, but I’m guessing we aren’t talking about the same thing.”
Trembling with fury, she tossed the sheets toward him, let them float back to land on the folder. “Don’t you dare patronize me. I’m right. Do I have hard evidence? No. There isn’t going to be any hard evidence to support a theory like this. But the pattern is there, whether you want to close your eyes to it or not. It might not tell us who, but it tells us why. And that’s more than we had at this time yesterday.”
Their gazes did battle for a long minute, neither willing to give an inch. But then the ring of his cell had him looking away, reaching for it. And Abbie used the interruption as an opportunity to regain her equilibrium.
She was more than a little appalled at her loss of composure. In training, Raiker had challenged her at every turn, forcing her to form ironclad arguments to support her theories. She’d had law enforcement officials scoff at her contributions before; had had her skills belittled. It only made her redouble her efforts because it was infinitely sweeter to later be proven correct.
But none of those experiences had elicited this fiery flood of emotion, and it was all too easy to guess why. None of those men had been Ryne.
Her anger turned inward. She didn’t know how the man had been allowed to get this close to her. Close enough that his dismissal of her opinion actually hurt. But recognizing the emotion had all her defenses slamming firmly into place.
The greatest human suffering could only be inflicted by those allowed too close. Emotionally. Psychologically. Intellectually. The rapist they were hunting likely had reason to know that.
And so did she.
“Ah, shit.”
Reluctantly, Abbie looked at Ryne. He was rubbing the back of his neck, a bleak expression on his face. “Keep the place secured. Don’t let anyone else in but CSU and the EMTs. I’m on my way.”
Her stomach knotted with dread. Abbie moistened her lips, which had gone inexplicably dry. “Is it . . . has there been another rape?”
“No.” He was shoving the cell in his pocket, gathering up his folders from the table with barely restrained violence. “Ashley Hornby has been found dead in her home. Apparent suicide.”
Ryne im
mediately recognized the uniform at the door of Hornby’s house. Joe Gomez had been one of the officers used to canvass after the first rape, and the one who’d tipped him off earlier. He motioned the man over. “Who’s been inside?”
“The next door neighbor, Iris Knudson, called it in.” He indicated the older woman behind him sitting on a corner of the couch, staring blankly down at her tightly folded hands in her lap. Ryne hadn’t spoken to her after Hornby’s rape, but he recalled her statement in the report. She hadn’t been home the night of the attack because she’d been visiting her daughter in Biloxi. “Says the victim gave her a key a month ago and she checks in on her every few days. When I got the 9-1-1 call, I recognized Hornby’s name as one of yours, so I contacted you.”
Ryne nodded his thanks, and the man went on, “Other than CSU, no one else has been here except for the EMTs. They pronounced her and now they’re waiting for CSU to finish up. ME is on his way.”
Two EMTs were leaning against a wall of the living room, talking in low voices. Recognizing the CSU tech in the kitchen bent over the body with a camera, Ryne walked over to him. “Pat. You have some ideas?”
“I’m full of ideas, Robel.” The stooped, balding man straightened and set the latest Kodak photo on the counter. “Like my property taxes are too high, and no fault divorce is a femi-Nazi conspiracy to take over the world by putting all males in the poor house. No one ever asks me, though.” He shook his head sadly and, picking up a felt tip marker, labeled the picture, then dropped it in an evidence bag and labeled that. Six other photos were similarly arrayed, each a different angle of the very dead woman at the kitchen table.
“Intriguing. But I’m wondering about cause of death.”
The man gestured to the evidence bags next to the photos. Five held empty pill bottles and one an empty glass. “Looks like she swallowed the contents of her medicine cabinet, but we’ll have to let the ME make the final call on that. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s been dead a couple days.”
Ashley Hornby’s death hadn’t been any easier than the last months of her life. A dart of pity stabbed through Ryne. Her hands were still clutching the arms of her wheelchair, her head slumped forward on her chest. Dried vomit was caked to the front of her bathrobe, pooled in her lap, and speckled the table surface and floor. An overdose of medication would have induced first nausea, then possibly convulsions, before she slipped into a coma. The scene looked clear-cut, but only an autopsy would tell them for sure.
Abbie went over to the pill bottles, reading the prescriptions through the clear plastic bags. “Darvocet for pain, Pro zac for depression, Naramig for migraines—that prescription was dated almost a year ago—and regular aspirin and Tylenol. All the prescription bottles have her name on them.” She looked at the crime tech. “Did you find a note?”
“I didn’t. Patterson and Fowler are searching the other rooms, though.”
Abbie extracted a pair of gloves from her purse and put them on. Ryne reached into his pocket to get a pair to do the same. The suicide would be treated as a possible homicide, until proved differently. The fact that Hornby had been one of the rapist’s victims cast all sorts of doubts about her death.
“Has anyone checked her answering machine? Her phone?”
Pat Rogowski shook his head in response to Ryne’s question, sending his wire-framed glasses farther down his nose. “Not yet.”
Abbie went over and pressed the button on the machine, and the recorded messages began to play.
“Okay.” Ryne pulled a notebook from his pocket and jotted down notes. “I’ll get a request in to pull her LUDs. Cell phone records, too, if we find one.”
He headed back into the other room. Gomez was speaking to the elderly woman on the couch. She hadn’t moved since Ryne got there. With a slight inclination of his head, Ryne motioned for the man to join him near the front door. Lowering his voice, he said, “What’s her story?”
The officer consulted the notebook he’d been writing in. “Says she last checked on Hornby three days ago, about noon. Hornby didn’t open the door, but Clemons says that wasn’t unusual. She just asked if she needed anything and the victim said no.”
“I should have checked on her more often,” Clemons said, her voice quavering.
Ryne’s attention shifted to the woman across the room. There was obviously nothing wrong with her hearing, despite her age. He approached her and asked, “How often did you see or speak with her, ma’am?”
“A couple times a week, since the . . . the incident.” The woman obviously couldn’t bring herself to say the word rape. She was in her early to mid seventies, he estimated. Heavily applied makeup collected in the tiny facial wrinkles of a lifetime smoker. “Ashley was never an outgoing type. Oh, she was pleasant enough,” she hastened to say, as if not wanting to speak ill of the dead. “But she wasn’t one to neighbor. After she returned from the hospital, she wouldn’t see anyone. But every once in a while she’d let me come in to do something for her. I’d tidy up, dust, or fetch things.”
“How often did she leave the apartment?”
“Oh, she hadn’t left for . . .” Clemons pursed her lips. “At least three weeks. Said she wasn’t going to physical therapy anymore. That it was a waste of time. I know because someone from the hospital came to talk to her about it and Ashley wouldn’t let her in either. Not that I was listening, you understand. But I was watering my tomatoes and I couldn’t help overhearing.”
Ryne was willing to bet she “overheard” quite a bit that went on with her neighbors.
“She was just so alone.” Her voice broke on the last word, and she dabbed at her tears with a wadded-up Kleenex in her hand, leaving a dark smear of mascara under one eye. “She’d moved here this year after a nasty divorce. I’m not sure she even had any friends to speak of.”
“I’m sure she appreciated everything you did for her, ma’am.”
She nodded miserably. Ryne spied Abbie talking to another tech, so he left the woman to Gomez and headed over there.
“Look for any written correspondence she may have received,” Abbie was telling him. “Let’s check her trash cans. Find out when they were last emptied.”
When the other man moved away, Ryne murmured, “Are you thinking the perp reached out somehow? Would he do that?”
“He hasn’t contacted any of the other victims.” She’d been as angry as he’d ever seen her less than an hour ago, but there was no trace of that emotion in her tone, or in her expression. She was totally dispassionate. And he found he much preferred her fury to the remote air she now wore. “It’s always possible, but I’d be surprised if he contacted Ashley.”
“Not even to make sure she was suffering?” It was a cheap shot. But even realizing it didn’t prevent him from trying to provoke some reaction from her. He’d rather see her gray eyes go stormy again than have them regard him with that flinty stare.
“I think he pretty well assured that already, don’t you?” Not waiting for an answer, she went on, “She doesn’t have caller ID, but redial shows the last call made from her phone was to a nearby grocery store last week. I called and they confirmed she’d placed an order on Thursday, which was delivered at three p.m. that same afternoon.”
“And the messages on the machine?”
She consulted the notebook in her hand. “Aside from the ones I made to her, there were six others. One was a telemar keter. Four were from various hospital personnel—her physical therapist, her doctor, a nurse—all recommending that she continue her therapy. The most recent call was yesterday, from her sister. She’d just finally gotten the message about Ashley’s attack and was arranging a flight here. She’ll be in by the end of the week.”
Yesterday. And there had been no one to hear the message. From the pictures he’d seen, he’d concur with the tech’s assessment. Ashley Hornby had already been dead by then.
“I’ll get a warrant to follow up on the medical end. I want to talk to everyone from the hospital who had contact with he
r to see what we can learn about her mental state.”
Abbie nodded. “Her sister might get here soon enough to help out with that. As next of kin, she could grant us permission.”
She turned away to head back to the kitchen before he could say anything else. Which was just as well, because at the rate he was going today, he’d soon need to have his foot surgically removed from his mouth.
After taking a couple of steps, she halted. “Do we have any idea what used to be on those shelves? Or on the walls?” She pointed to the bookcase in the living room.
The shelves were jammed with books and CDs. In front of them were set the sort of knickknacks women seemed compelled to buy. Gaze narrowing, he noted the empty spaces she was indicating between the statues and vases, before his gaze traveled to the wall next to the bookcase. There were several framed posters of what might be Broadway plays. He’d be no expert on that. But there were several empty nails on the wall as well.
“I did that. The last time she let me inside.”
Ryne looked at Clemons. “What did you do exactly?”
“Ashley had me get a box from the bedroom and put a bunch of things away for her. Said she couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. I put the box in the spare bedroom closet.”
Turning on his heel, Ryne followed Abbie into the smaller of the two bedrooms. She already had the closet open and was on all fours, pulling out a good-sized box that had been shoved to the back of it. He squatted down next to her. “What do we have?”
Silently, Abbie drew one object after another out of the carton and handed them to him. Plaques. Medals. He read the engraving on one and frowned. “Princess Grace Award. What’s that?”
She put a framed photo in his hands in answer. He recognized a younger Ashley Hornby in the image, dressed in one of those frilly things dancers wore. The photographer had caught her in a gravity-defying leap.
“She was a ballerina.” Abbie spread the rest of the photos out on the floor next to them. “Or at least she had been. And judging from the awards, she was good.” She looked up at him now, and this time her face wasn’t expressionless. Bleakness had settled in her eyes. “An award-winning dancer reduced to a wheelchair. I think the UNSUB picked a great way to make her suffer, don’t you?”