by Ben Miller
Rita raised her glass in a toast. “And lesbians.”
Jack tried to stifle a surprised laugh. Jeff smiled and shook his head.
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” Jack admitted.
“It’s a joke, but I’m guessing there’s a lot about lesbians that you don’t know, Special Agent Byrne.” Rita took a big gulp of her light amber beer.
Jack smiled and raised his glass to return her toast. “I guess you’re probably right.”
“You were about to tell me about Cole Nierling,” Jeff interjected, still smiling.
Rita and Jack told him of their encounter with the Theistic Satanist at his store earlier that day, including their inspection of his temple. It was an open, bright, clean room, adorned with several small statues on the periphery. Pentagrams and goats again dominated the theme, but Jack did not see one upside-down cross. Three rows of wooden folding chairs sat neatly arranged in the middle. Jack noticed a small shelf of books he assumed were hymnals; he didn’t care to see or hear the incantations therein.
“I guess I have a lot to learn about Satanism,” Rita told Jeff.
“Satanism?” Jeff looked surprised.
“I wanted to get a sense if this could at all be related to the occult,” Rita explained.
“Yes, you had mentioned that this morning. An interesting theory.”
“I’m not so interested anymore,” she admitted. “I think that’s a dead end.”
Jack verbally agreed, and Jeff nodded. By Jeff’s quick concurrence, Jack sensed Jeff felt this way all along, but he had concluded that Rita would learn this best if she discovered it herself.
Jack’s cell phone vibrated on his hip. He recognized the number and reluctantly answered it. “Jackson Byrne.”
“Hello, Special Agent Byrne, this is Tim Rubell. I’m the on-call supervisor at Coffeewood Correctional Center.”
“Hi, Tim. What does Randall want?” Given the pause on the other end, Jack must have taken the correctional officer by surprise, but he didn’t feel like beating around the bush.
Eventually the officer cleared his throat and continued. “Mister, er, uh, Doctor Franklin said he had an urgent matter to discuss with you. About your, um, missing babies? Does that even make sense?”
“Yes, actually. Can you put him on, please, Tim? Thank you.” Jack wondered if Randall could offer something helpful, something concrete. He rotated the bottom portion of the phone below his chin. “Sorry,” he said to Jeff and Rita. “It’s about this case.”
“How are you, Jack?” Randall asked on the other end of the line.
“Fine, Randall, what do you need?”
“Wow. We’re just doing away with pleasantries now, are we?”
“Yeah,” Jack said flatly. “You said this is about our case, which means this is business. Please let’s get to business.”
“OK, very well, yes.” The proposition of working with Jackson Byrne on “business” seemed to excite Randall. “It’s about your kidnapper.”
“Yeah?”
“I was thinking we could go with The Baby Taker. Like baby maker. Get it?” After several seconds of silence, wherein Jack didn't know how to respond, Randall conjectured, “Too hokey?”
“Is this really what you called to talk to me about, Randall?” Jack made no attempt to hide his exasperation.
“No. Your kidnapper…”
“They're calling him the Piper.” As much as Jack liked to leave Randall dangle, he had grown sick of this tête-à-tête. He needed to move on.
“Ah, yes. Like the Pied Piper. Brilliant.” Randall took a moment to soak this up before returning to his original point. “He talks to the women—the mothers—before he attacks them.”
“He says, ‘Hey.’”
“Right,” Randall agreed. “Why?”
“A diversion. To try to snap their attention,” Jack surmised.
“No,” Randall said firmly. “Pure surprise would benefit him more. He talks to them because he knows them. There’s an air of familiarity. He knows them, and he almost wants to call them by name, but he doesn’t. And…he also knows they won’t recognize his voice.”
“You think he’s disguising his voice?”
“No. I think he knows them well enough to call to them, but not in a way that they know his voice.”
“I’m not sure that makes any sense, Randall,” Jack said.
“I think it does. It does to me.”
DAY FOUR:
SATURDAY
21
Fiona Evans pulled her Toyota Corolla into a spot in the Wal-Mart parking lot. She couldn’t believe how many cars filled the lot for a Saturday morning; she had to park like a mile away from the front entrance. She hated fighting the crowd in this shit hole, but not as much as overpaying for diapers at somewhere else. She couldn’t believe how much it cost for something you put on your ass and shit in. Ridiculous.
“You ready for this, little buddy?” She had set up a mirror on the headrest across from Tyler’s rear-facing car seat, which she could see through her rear-view mirror. She looked back at him and he flashed a smile. She reminded herself she would do anything for that little angel. Including wading through the fat-asses at Wal-Mart just for Pampers.
She got out of the car and walked around to the rear passenger side. She opened Tyler’s door, leaned in, and detached his car seat from its base. She thought she heard a voice behind her, but it was partially obscured by the click of the car seat.
“Hey.” She heard it again, an agitated voice that seemed as though it was directed at her. And it sounded familiar. Was that…?
She put the carrying handle of the car seat in the crook of her elbow as she turned around.
He was upon her, less than arm’s reach away.
“What do you—?” she began to say when he reached up and punched her in the throat.
FUCK!! She had never been punched in the throat before, but that hurt much more than she thought it might. She had never felt such pain, even when delivering Tyler. She tried to say something, but couldn’t. Her vocal cords refused to move. His arm jerked forward to punch her in the throat again, and the pain intensified fourfold. She staggered back against the car. She felt something wet on her left hand, her free hand. She brought it up and noticed bright-red drops on it. Something sprayed more thick spots on her hand, like it came directly from her neck.
He grabbed the car seat handle and took it from her. Took her baby from her. He ran away.
She tried to scream and nothing came. She put both hands on her throat and felt warm syrup gushing forth in spurts. Again she looked at her hands, and finally everything registered. He must have had a knife in his hand. He had stabbed her in the throat. Twice. Asshole.
Her legs suddenly grew weak. She slid backwards against the car and fell all the way to the pavement, landing on her side. Her consciousness slowly faded. Fiona’s last vision was her own blood rhythmically spraying on the concrete in front of her, each spurt carrying a little less distance than the previous one.
22
“Can’t I just get to my car? I just want to go home.”
Jack looked over his shoulder at the civilian standing about ten yards behind him on the other side of the makeshift barricade, talking to a uniformed police office. The man pointed to a faded Chrysler to Jack’s right, parked adjacent to Fiona Evans’ Toyota Corolla. Jack could hear the officer explaining to the Wal-Mart customer that his car was now part of a crime scene. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get to his car until the investigators and forensics team cleared the entire scene. The officer directed the man to a police liaison positioned under a canopy on the other corner of the lot, about fifty yards away.
Jack briefly made eye contact with Jeff Pine, who stood behind him, as he turned his attention back to the body in front of him. She had two gaping wounds in the front of her neck. An enormous amount of blood had pooled around her. Blood spatter covered much of the driver’s side of the Chrysler. Jack felt pretty confident that, if the whiny
car-owner had actually seen this side of his car, he would be thankful to the authorities for eventually wiping it down before returning it to him.
Jack stood up and looked inside the back seat of the Corolla, the door still ajar, revealing the empty car seat base strapped securely in place.
“This our guy? The Piper?” Rita Ferroni walked up behind them.
Jack stared at the car seat base and took a deep breath. “I don’t know.”
“Certainly a much different MO,” Jeff stated, “with the same result.”
“Why kill her?” Rita asked. “The Taser seemed effective enough so far.”
Jeff’s eyes didn’t waiver from the lifeless body in front of him as he answered. “The obvious answer is to eliminate the main witness. But I don’t know if that makes total sense.”
Rita concurred. “Our first two witnesses haven’t given us diddly-shit.”
Jack looked at Rita through the corner of his eye. While he could appreciate her critical thinking skills, he began to tire of her brusque demeanor. “That’s not entirely true. They may have given us more than we realize.”
“What do you mean?” Jeff asked calmly.
Jack turned to Jeff. “I’m not sure yet. I still think there’s something we’re missing. There’s more to this.”
“No hood this time.” Camilla joined them, along with Reilly and Amanda Lundquist. “No black pillowcase.”
“The MO is definitely not the same,” Jeff reiterated. “And the location is so disparate. So public.”
Camilla nodded. “The other two were so meticulously planned. This one seems less so. It feels spontaneous.”
“Perhaps it was,” Reilly piped in. “The perp happened to be at Wal-Mart and noticed an opportunity.”
Jeff turned to face the group. “I like the creative juices here, but let’s give forensics some space to do their thing, and let’s put together a game plan. Our conjecture will carry a lot more weight once we can put some substance behind it.”
“I have four officers conducting potential witness interviews and two more directing civilian flow,” Rita reported. “I’ll join them for interviews to keep this moving. We have a couple hundred people who were around at the time of the murder.”
“I’ll begin looking through surveillance footage,” Amanda Lundquist said from the back of the group as she pulled her notebook out of her shoulder satchel.
Since their introduction yesterday, this was the first Jeff had heard Amanda speak. Jeff glanced at Jack for some reassurance.
“Fantastic,” Jack said. “Amanda has a gift for fine detail. She’ll find whatever there is to find on those videos.”
“Fantastic,” Jeff repeated.
“I want to interview family,” Jack said. “Do we have info on next of kin?”
Jeff looked at Rita. Acknowledging this as her assignment, Rita said, “I’ll get it for you,” as she walked over toward the canopy.
“I’ll come with you,” Camilla said to Jack.
“Perfect,” Jack responded. Jack noticed Jeff studying Camilla briefly, as if deciding if this piece of the plan were acceptable. Quickly Jeff’s face relaxed.
Reilly’s face, on the other hand, tensed up. He had no interest in talking to a bereft family right now. Or ever. His eyes darted around the scene and small crowd, trying to find a place to land. They landed on Rita. “I’ll help organize and conduct interviews with Rita and her crew.”
“I’ll join you two,” Jeff said, pointing at Jack and Camilla with his index and middle fingers.
Jack nodded in agreement. “I’d like to find the victim’s family first. Then we’ll go interview the infant’s father.”
23
Kim Newkirk softly closed her eyes. A peaceful tranquility washed over her, through her. She cradled the weight in her arms, sensed all ten pounds of it. The gentle, subtle, metronomic movement of its breathing pressed against her arms with each inhalation, abated with each exhalation. She could feel the heartbeat, reverberating back into her own. She knew the infant’s pulse clocked at nearly twice the rate of her own, yet she felt a natural synchronization between them. She had only met this infant minutes before, yet she felt connected.
She could not begin to imagine the intense attachment she would feel with a child of her own.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the baby in her arms. He slept soundly, his mouth slightly agape. She focused on the light wisps of his blond baby hair. She brought a hand up to run her fingers through it, tenderly caressing the fontanel, feeling the gentle pulse underneath.
Convinced of her transparency to even a casual observer, she peeked at the door to the hallway, making sure no one was watching. A hot flash of guilt surged through her, even though she had no reason to experience shame. She took a deep breath and relaxed, refocusing on the moment.
This had become her favorite part of the week, these four hours every Saturday volunteering as a Baby Holder at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. Her therapist had taken a risk in recommending it almost a year ago, as she was trying to recover from their horrible incident with Madison Novak. The intervention easily could have backfired, worsening her longing for her own child. Instead she found it uplifting and fulfilling, even if only for a few hours. Some weeks it could carry her through, having such an enriching experience to look forward to on Saturday mornings.
She had suggested Stanton go through the process of obtaining clearances to be a Baby Holder too. She had thought it might help him, but he never did. She supposed everyone recovers in his or her own way.
Kim reflected on her interactions with Stanton over the past several weeks. He had seemed different, almost a little distant. Withdrawn. Secretive. While they had endured worse perils than most couples in their efforts to start a family, they had also lived through the normal ebbs and flows of any marriage. The past few weeks didn’t even rank in the top ten of difficult times, but she sensed a stressor of some kind in his life. She didn’t think it represented an issue with his work. Even though he had garnered much more exciting roles in the past—at one point even experiencing a promising upswing while voicing a popular but unfortunately short-lived cartoon character—he loved his current stable job. Money wasn’t an issue. Though Stanton earned a decent salary with ESPN, and he augmented it with infrequent freelance work, their financial stability came from the sizable settlement her late mother had received following her father’s accidental death as part of the research and development division of an enormous appliance manufacturer.
He had blown her off when she asked if something were wrong, and this did not come naturally to him. She could let him have his own issues, as she thought everyone deserved some privacy, even from one’s spouse. She just hoped it wasn’t something serious.
Baby Matthew jolted in her arms, drawing her attention back to him. He remained asleep. She recognized it as sleep myoclonus, a normal infant movement during slumber. She had read so many books on infants that she suspected little could surprise her. She had spent nearly all of her free time in the last half-decade preparing herself to raise a child. If only God—or somebody, anybody—could bring her one. Soon.
24
“I know it’s never easy,” Camilla said as she closed the car door, “but that was God-awful. This is, by far, the worst part of the job.” She blew out a deep breath.
Jeff Pine started the engine and began to drive away from Fiona Evans’ mother and stepfather’s house. Jack looked out of the passenger window at the small humble home. The quaint façade hid the emotional tumult inside. They left behind a homicide detective and a police liaison, both of whom had arrived nearly an hour before them to break the terrible news.
Jack found it fruitful to interview next of kin quickly after a tragedy, even though it often entailed waiting through a lot of sobbing and deflecting a slew of unanswerable questions. He wanted to extract as much information when those emotions were raw, when the memory of their loved one hadn’t even begun to fade. Though they aske
d aloud, most family members didn’t really begin to speculate on the how and why until after the initial shock wore off. This window usually provided open communication, without any guarding or manipulation. Later interviews proved valuable as well, and were thankfully much less emotionally draining. But they supplied different kinds of information from these early ones.
“It can certainly be very challenging,” Jeff responded to Camilla’s comment. “I try to look at it as an opportunity, a chance to provide empathy and even hope for people during the worst time in their lives. I used to dread it too, and—don’t get me wrong—I don’t look forward to it now. But I tried to change my perspective to help me deal with it emotionally, and I think it has, in turn, helped the families that I serve.”
Camilla again inhaled and exhaled deeply. “That’s good advice. Sometimes easier said than done.”
“Amen,” Jeff agreed.
“Are we going to Aiden Dolan’s place?” Jack queried.
Jeff nodded as he entered the address he had received from their office into the car’s navigation system. He pointed at the screen once he was done. “Fifteen minutes.”
Fiona’s mother and stepfather provided little information about Aiden Dolan. They had met him only once when he came to the hospital to visit baby Tyler. Fiona’s stepfather must have used the word “deadbeat” at least a half-dozen times when referring to Aiden. They conveyed the notion that Aiden had not taken naturally to his role as a father. As far as they knew, he had no relationship with Tyler.
“Will we be the first to arrive there?” Jack asked.
Jeff smiled. “You like to break the news sometimes. To look him in the eye and gauge a reaction.”
Jack looked over at Jeff, who remained focused on the road. Most people would finish that comment with a “Don’t you?” or “Am I right?” But Jeff Pine didn’t. He need not phrase it as a question, because he knew the answer. “Despite Fiona’s parents’ feelings about Aiden Dolan, I don’t think we’re considering him a suspect in all of this, but, yeah. I do.”