Michelle’s cell phone buzzed. They stared at her purse, lying on the desk next to the laptop.
“It might be somebody from my office,” Michelle said, but she made no move to retrieve the phone.
Rachel grabbed the purse and dug out the phone. The display told her the caller’s number was blocked. Michelle didn’t try to stop her when she pressed the button to answer.
“Did you get my message, sweetheart?” the whispery voice asked. “Did you—”
“Shut up and listen to me, you pervert,” Rachel said. “If you don’t leave my sister alone, you’re going to end up in prison. You’re not a real man, you’re a freak and a coward who gets his kicks by sneaking around and trying to scare women. No woman would want slime like you anywhere near her. You’re disgusting, you’re a sick little boy playing nasty games.”
She paused, gulped a breath, waited.
Silence.
“What’s the matter?” Rachel’s heart pounded against her ribs. “Have you run out of things to say?”
His voice was quiet, cold, flat. “Be careful, Rachel. Don’t get in my way.”
The connection went dead.
“Rachel?” Michelle gripped her arm. “What did he say?”
“Nothing worth repeating.” Rachel dropped the phone back into the purse. How could they stop the stalker if they had no idea who he was or why he was doing this? If Michelle had angered someone without realizing it, how could they track down her tormentor before he harmed her? “I have to get to work. Will you be all right in here?”
“Sure, I’ll be okay,” Michelle said, brushing her hair off her cheeks and forcing a smile. “Go see your patients. You don’t have to babysit me.”
“I’ll only be a few feet away if you need me.” Rachel turned to leave, but something caught her eye and made her freeze with a hand on the doorknob.
Three framed documents hung on the wall next to the door. Copies of her college degree, her doctorate from Cornell, her certification in veterinary internal medicine. They hung side by side as always, but all three frames were upside down.
“Is something wrong?” Michelle asked, a note of alarm in her voice.
“No, no.” Rachel stepped in front of the framed certificates, and before her sister could get a good look she set them right again. She fought to keep her voice casual. “These things are always shifting a little bit. I think it’s the motion of the air when the door’s opened and closed that causes it.”
“I’ve seen that happen too. It’s annoying.”
Michelle bought the simple explanation, but Rachel knew she have would panicked if she’d seen the frames wildly askew.
The creep had followed Michelle to Mason County, and he’d done it quickly. He had been in Rachel’s office during the night. And she’d just royally pissed him off. He was going to turn their lives upside down, like the frames on the wall.
Chapter Twelve
Tom yanked the cord to close the conference room blinds, blocking the reporters’ view from the parking lot outside. Twice as many were out there today. A news crew from a Washington, DC, television station had parked their truck so close to the building that they could aim a camera directly into the room if they had the nerve. And Tom was sure they did.
He motioned Detective Fagan into the chair next to his and tried to ignore Dennis Murray’s scowl across the conference room table. Brandon Connolly, beside Dennis, eyed the out-of-town detective with open fascination, as if he were an exotic creature in their midst.
With more formality than he would employ if no guest were present, Tom said, “Dr. Lauter has the preliminary autopsy report from Roanoke for us. Dr. Lauter?”
Gretchen, at the head of the table, handed off a folder of photos to Tom. “There’s nothing new in the pictures, but I thought Detective Fagan would want to see them.”
Tom flipped the folder open and, with Fagan leaning close to share the view, looked through them as Gretchen spoke.
“The pathologist confirms that Shelley Beecher has been dead for several weeks,” Gretchen said, “possibly since the day she disappeared. He believes the body was tightly wrapped from the beginning, and stored somewhere cool. In fact, he sees indications that the body was frozen for at least part of that time.”
“Oh, man,” Dennis muttered.
“The jargon’s all in the report,” Gretchen went on, “but that’s what it amounts to. The apparent cause of death was strangulation. Her neck bears the mark of a thick, semi-flexible ligature one inch wide, a leather belt or something similar.”
“Anything under her fingernails?” Fagan asked.
“Sorry, no,” Gretchen said. “No skin scrapings, no evidence of any kind. Her hands were completely clean, and so was her clothing. So clean, in fact—This is speculation on my part, but I’m inclined to believe her hands were washed and her clothes were brushed or even vacuumed to remove trace evidence such as fibers or hairs.”
“Shit,” Fagan said. “People watch too damned much television. They know exactly how to clean up after themselves, if they’ve got the time and the presence of mind.”
“This killer obviously had both,” Tom said. “He wasn’t in a hurry and he stayed calm. And he had a place picked out to hide her body. That’s not typical for a crime of passion—an angry boyfriend, say. This was planned.”
“I’ve thought from the start,” Fagan said, “that the killer is someone who knew her schedule. He picked the perfect time and place to snatch her without being seen. We haven’t found a single witness who saw or heard a thing. I don’t have any doubt she was abducted in Fairfax County, and she was probably killed there.”
“But we’re still left with the question of why she was dumped here,” Tom said. “The more I think about it, the more I believe the killer, or killers, put her in a place where she would be found right away.”
Fagan frowned. “Why would anybody expect her to be found right away? That spot’s pretty rugged. How many people go down into that ravine in an average week?”
“None,” Tom said, “but we’re not talking about an average week. Civic groups and high school kids do the road cleanup every year. This year’s schedule’s been posted in stores, on utility poles, all over the place, so anybody who wanted to help out could contact a group leader to volunteer. It wasn’t hard to find out a cleanup crew would be in that ravine on Saturday.”
“A crew led by the county’s chief deputy and acting sheriff,” Dennis pointed out.
“Hey, that’s right,” Brandon said. “You think the killer wanted you to find her, Captain?”
Fagan shook his head, a dismissive little smile on his face.
“You think that’s far-fetched?” Tom asked him. “You’d rather believe in pure coincidence?”
“Why would the killer want to put the victim in your path? Seriously. Why you?”
“If I knew that, I’d probably know who killed her. But there’s some reason he brought the body here. Why they brought it here. I think it’s possible more than one person was involved. If she was murdered in Fairfax County, they took a big risk in transporting her out here. They could have been stopped for a traffic violation, the vehicle could have broken down on the interstate, they could have had an accident. A dozen different things might have happened, and her body could have been discovered in the vehicle. For some reason he—they—were willing to risk it to bring her body here. And it’s possible they dumped her where they did because they wanted her found this weekend.”
“By you,” Fagan said. “I repeat, why? What’s your connection to this girl?”
“None in particular. I know the family, that’s all.”
“So this notion you’ve got about the killer wanting you to find the body doesn’t really hold water.”
“Not in terms of my having a special connection to her.” Tom tried to stifle his irritation with Fagan, but he heard it loud and clear in his voice. “They could have wanted a cop, any cop, to find her, for whatever reason, and it was easy to
find out where I’d be that day.”
“Yeah, right.” Fagan shook his head again. “For whatever reason.”
“If you’ve got a theory, I’d like to hear it.”
“Remorse,” Fagan said.
“Remorse?” Dennis asked. “Whose remorse?”
“The killer’s. He brought her close to home so her family would know what happened to her. So they’d have closure, a body to bury.”
Everyone sat silent for a moment. Then Dennis huffed a laugh. “We don’t come across a lot of murderers with tender hearts.”
Tom sensed Fagan stiffening, heard him draw breath to fire an answering shot. He cut Fagan off as the detective started to speak. “We’re just guessing at this point. We don’t have evidence to back up any theory.” He asked Fagan, “If her boyfriend and roommates all have solid alibis for the night she disappeared, who else are you looking at?”
“We need to widen our scope. Like I said, it was probably somebody who knew her schedule, knew where and when he could snatch her without being seen. That doesn’t mean he knew her well. He could be somebody who met her casually and got fixated on her, started fantasizing about her.”
“A stalker.” Tom’s thoughts jumped to Michelle, but he pulled his attention back to the case in front of him.
“Yeah,” Fagan said. “Maybe he never even met her, just saw her somewhere and started following her. But she didn’t get around much. She didn’t party, she went to school and she worked, and seeing a movie with her boyfriend was about the biggest social event on her calendar. We’ve looked at everybody who works in that business strip where the innocence project’s office is, and they’ve all accounted for their whereabouts at the time she disappeared.”
“I’ve got plenty of angles to work here,” Tom said, “but I want to go to Fairfax County and talk to a few people myself.”
“I’ve done that,” Fagan said. “I’ve filled you in. What else do you want to know?”
“I’d rather talk to people directly.”
Fagan shrugged. “Whatever suits you.”
Why was Fagan in Mason County? If he was sure his case was in his own county, why wasn’t he there working it? “We’ve got some departmental matters to discuss,” Tom told him, “if you don’t mind.”
Fagan’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You want me to leave?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Shaking his head, Fagan rose and walked out. As he pulled the door shut with one hand, Tom heard him jingling his keys in his pocket with the other.
“All right,” Tom said when he was gone. “Brandon, did you find out whether Skeet was working the day Shelley went missing?”
“He wasn’t. He called in sick to the lumber mill four days that week—before and after she disappeared. There was some bug going around at the mill, a lot of workers were out with it. Whether Skeet was really sick or not, I don’t know.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised.” Tom raked a hand through his hair. Instead of the excitement he’d normally feel when a suspect lacked an alibi, he felt sad. What would it do to the Hadley and Beecher families if it turned out Skeet was Shelley’s killer? Then there was the question of who helped him hide the body and place it in the ravine. “Was his dad at work that week?”
“Yeah, every day, regular hours. And Blake and Skeet both worked every day last week too.”
“The body was probably moved at night,” Dennis pointed out.
“I don’t think it was in the ravine longer than a few hours,” Dr. Lauter said, “so I would guess it was moved sometime Friday night, early Saturday morning.”
They all fell silent for a moment, and Tom knew everybody was dreading what lay ahead. Gathering criminal evidence against people they’d known all their lives was hard on all of them and would stir up a lot of anger in the community. Tom blew out a sigh. “See what you can find out about Skeet’s movements at night for the last week. I’ll drive to Fairfax County early tomorrow, but I don’t expect to come back with much that’ll help us.”
As they all rose to leave the room, Tom asked Dennis to stay for a minute.
Pulling off his glasses, Dennis held them up to the light for examination, rubbed one lens on his shirt sleeve, and slid them back on. “What’s up?”
“I want you to try to find out where somebody was when he made a phone call.”
“This something to do with the Beecher murder? I’ve already put in our request for her phone records, and I’m going to get a warrant for Skeet Hadley’s too.”
“No, this is…Some creep is stalking Rachel’s sister. He got into her office in Bethesda, and he’s been calling her too.”
“Oh, man,” Dennis said. “I’m sorry to hear that. Can’t the police where she lives—”
“She went to them, they didn’t offer her any help. Thought she was imagining things, I guess. Besides, she’s here now, staying with us. And she’s getting calls. I want to know where this guy called from, whether he’s nearby. Whether he followed her here. I’ve got Michelle’s number and the service provider information.” Tom drew a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Dennis. “If you need her signature on anything, I’ll get it.”
Dennis nodded. “This sounds like a bad time for you to be leaving the county, even for a day.”
“Yeah, it is. Can’t be helped, though.”
Tom’s cell phone rang. When he pulled it from his shirt pocket and answered, Rachel said without preamble, “I think somebody broke into the clinic last night.”
“What?” Tom said, jolted. “Was something stolen?”
Dennis frowned. “What’s happened?”
Tom raised a hand to silence him.
“You’re going to think I’m crazy.” Rachel spoke quietly, and Tom heard a blue jay’s harsh call in the background. She was outdoors, not in her office.
“Just tell me,” he said.
“My degrees, the ones on the wall in my office—” She broke off.
Her degrees? Where was this headed? “What about them?”
“They were all turned upside down and hanging at an angle.”
Tom took a minute, trying to process this. It didn’t make sense.
“Tom.” Rachel’s voice with urgency. “Say something. This is the same sort of thing that happened to Michelle in Bethesda. It started this way. Now it’s happening here.”
This quickly? How was that possible? “Did you see signs of a break-in? Did any of the locks look like they’d been tampered with? Any scratches or—”
“No. It’s as if somebody got in with a key. The only thing I’ve seen so far that’s not normal is the way the frames are turned on the wall.”
“Could the cleaning woman—”
“Oh, please, Tom, why would she do something like that? At the very same time my sister’s being harassed in the same way?”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Tom agreed reluctantly. “That would be a pretty wild coincidence. If Michelle’s stalker did it, he’s really on the ball. He knew she was coming to see you, and he was right on her heels. Okay, I’ll come over and—”
“Don’t come right now. Michelle’s here. I don’t want to upset her. She doesn’t know about this.”
“It’s a little late to start keeping things from her.”
Rachel sighed. “I know, but I have a lot of patients to see today. I don’t have time to hold my sister’s hand.”
“It’ll probably be pointless to look for fingerprints on the doors anyway,” Tom said. “So many people go in and out.”
“I’m the only one who’s touched the frames on my office wall, though. And I only touched the corners.”
“Good. Go on about your business, and let me know when you and Michelle leave for the day. I’ll come over after you’re gone and see if I can lift prints from the frames. In the meantime, get your locks looked at. This worries me, Rachel.”
“I’ve already called the locksmith. He’s on his way.”
Chapter Thirteen
Rachel hated the way he looked at her, as if he thought she might be a little crazy. She wished his father had come instead, but Jordan Gale Senior and his wife had just left for a two-week vacation in Florida. Jordan Jr., as he was identified by the embroidered script on the pocket of his gray shirt, seemed intelligent and knowledgeable enough, though. He’d taken a professional attitude toward checking the integrity of the locks. He was around Rachel’s age, early thirties, and good-looking in a wholesome country boy way, with large brown eyes that made her think of a cocker spaniel.
His frown deepening, Jordan asked, “What made you worry about the locks? Have you had some trouble? These locks can’t be picked. Nobody can get past one without a key, so if somebody broke in—”
“No, nothing in particular. Just being cautious.” The last thing Rachel wanted was a rumor going around about a break-in at the animal hospital. Small town gossip was enough to drive her batty.
“Well, you’ve got top-of-the-line hardware here,” he said. “And my dad installed it, so I know it was done right.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust the locks.” The truth was that Rachel had hoped he would find a glaring defect, something to explain how the stalker got into the building without leaving a trace of evidence. She’d wanted him to find something that could be fixed.
“Rachel?” Michelle had appeared on the other side of the glass door. She pushed it open a few inches and asked, “Is something wrong? Why are you having the locks worked on?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Another two minutes and the guy would have been gone without Michelle seeing him. She could tell Michelle didn’t buy her explanation. “Jordan, this is my sister, Dr. Goddard.”
Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 10