The Watcher (The Bigler County Romantic Thriller Series)

by Jo Robertson

  Slater knew he wouldn’t survive losing Kate. He’d never get over it. Max’s death and his wife’s betrayal had almost destroyed him. Losing Kate would finish him off.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The purple-eyed bitch hadn’t been easy to take. She’d fought like a she-witch, but she was light and a cinch to transport and carry down to the basement bunker. Though tall, she weighed barely more than most of the girls he’d taken.

  Afraid she’d die before he began, he’d given her too small a dose of the chloroform and she kept coming out of the drug. He had to put her back under several times, a practice which could be fatal.

  He didn’t want her to die on him. Not yet, anyway. Not until he found out the truth about her.

  After he fastened her to the wooden slab he’d dragged from outside and affixed to a concrete platform, he ripped off her outer clothing with utility scissors. She wore black, lacy underwear, and he flinched when he saw her undergarments. Where were the plain white panties she’d worn before?

  He hurriedly ripped the underclothes from her body and tossed one of the military blankets from storage over her. He left then. Seeing the grown-up parts of her unnerved him, and the hand that held the scissors trembled. He needed liquid courage for the rest of this.

  When he returned an hour later, he heard a moan and knew she was waking up. Applying another dose – careful, careful, not too much – he kept her under. He needed more time to screw up his courage. What was it Lady Macbeth said in the play? Something about screwing your courage to the sticking place.

  He giggled at the double entendre. Screwing and sticking. Ha, ha, that was funny. The girl-woman certainly was screwed and he’d stick her with the largest knife he had in his arsenal.

  Suddenly those purple eyes jerked open. He jumped inadvertently and then forced himself to draw closer. How exciting to have her helpless at last, how redeeming she would be. He felt her shiver as he whispered into her ear. “I’ve got you now, bitch.”

  Her eyes narrowed darkly, and her chapped lips fell apart. “They’ll catch you,” she said hoarsely. “They’re after you right now.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. No one will find you here. This is a much better hiding place than the cabin,” he gloated. “You won’t get away this time. This time, we’re going to have real fun.”

  #

  Between the two of them, Slater and Bauer literally tore apart the case documentation accumulated on the Bigler County Butcher case. They examined each file and notation for a clue, any scrap of evidence or testimony previously overlooked. Bauer searched the witness interviews and follow-ups while Slater reviewed the autopsy reports and the files from previous cases they believed were tied to their unknown suspect.

  Galt Police were keeping them apprised on the disappearance of Sheriff Marconi. Slater assigned a separate task team to get a warrant for his house and to liaison with Galt P.D.

  At the same time, deputies at the abduction site knocked on every house and apartment door within a five-mile radius of Kate’s duplex, trying to find anyone who’d seen or heard something. The crime scene unit methodically gathered and processed evidence from the parking lot. By unspoken agreement, no one wanted to make a mistake. This case involved two of their own, and everyone wanted to nail the son-of-a-bitch who had the balls to nab a county sheriff and Kate Myers from her own apartment.

  The three-hour time difference between the west coast and Virginia allowed them to access the FBI head-quarters in Quantico as early as 5:00 a.m. Slater decided to call in his markers, and began phoning everyone he or Marconi knew who owed them a favor.

  The payoff came by 7:30. In addition to the five previous cases, which Slater’s team had found, the feds had uncovered seven more connections to the unknown suspect. After days of ignoring them and refusing to get involved, the FBI showed interest in the Bigler County murders. Including the Chief and the two girls from Placer Hills, the total was nearly two dozen. The emerging pattern of kidnapping and murder appalled Slater. He was positive the UNSUB had Kate, but worrying wouldn’t help, so every time his imagination ran wild with images of this maniac hurting her, he forced it away. Stepped outside his body and willed himself to think of her as a stranger, just another case. He remained so calm and detached that when Patch Wilson entered the squad room later that morning, the doctor took him aside and forced Slater into a cursory examination.

  “Blood pressure’s shot to hell, Ben,” the coroner warned in uncharacteristic lack of sophistication.

  Slater knew he was in trouble when everyone from Bauer to Wilson continued to call him Ben with sympathy in their voices. That familiarity spoke of their deep concern and made him more afraid than anything else. Everyone else believed Kate was already mutilated and dead.

  The first break in Kate’s disappearance came at 11:13 a.m. when the computer expert from the state offices broke down the bogus email address from Sheriff Marconi and traced the source to the offices of Paxton-Bell, a local computer company that employed over five thousand people.

  The way Paxton-Bell’s system was configured made it impossible to tell which of their hundreds of computers actually sent the email. Slater immediately deployed deputies to check backgrounds of all persons hired at that company during the last twelve months.

  Making these contacts wasn’t going to be easy. Like many businesses, Paxton-Bell employed part-time or contractual employees to keep their benefits packages at a minimum. And they were very serious about protecting employee privacy. He’d been counting on the general willingness of citizens to assist in their murder investigation.

  Bauer and Slater remained at the command post, Slater pacing restlessly, stopping at intervals to stare at the notations on the major case board. Bauer cross-referenced names on the new-residents list with employee records provided by Paxton-Bell Human Resources and looked over the faxes sent by the feds.

  Slater glanced up to see Sanderson leave his post at the duty desk and walk back to the special investigations room. Under his arm he carried the purse the crime scene techs had found in Kate’s apartment parking lot.

  “Lieutenant, here’s the doc’s purse. The techs said the only prints they found on it are hers. Sorry man, no trace.” Sanderson hesitated in front of Bauer’s desk, the handbag gripped in his large hands. He shuffled his feet and stood awkwardly. “Should I put it in impound with the other evidence?”

  Slater halted in his pacing. “Yeah, sure.”

  Sanderson turned to leave for the basement archives where evidence, along with old case files, was stored. Slater stopped him. “Hold on a sec, Sandy. Let me take a look.”

  He rolled his chair close to the desk, sat down, and dumped the contents of Kate’s purse on the desktop. He picked up the items one by one and placed them back on the desk. Then he stood up, pursed his lips, and sat again, staring at the items that represented Kate Myers’ life.

  Compact, lipstick, wallet, cell phone, hand sanitizer. Slater smiled wryly. Kate didn’t like to get her hands dirty and was always using the stuff on them. He’d teased her about that.

  Kleenex, notepad and pen. No keys – not for the car, apartment or work. The suspect must’ve taken them. A zippered section in the lining, half open and brimming with papers.

  Bauer looked up from his list as Slater fingered the items on his desk. “What’s in there?”

  The inside compartment was full of scraps of paper, mainly receipts, a dry cleaners slip, several business cards. Slater took them out and unfolded them one by one, stacking them in separate piles. A single, lined sheet of paper ripped from a binder was folded in half, the edges loosely fastened with a paper clip.

  “I don’t know.” Slater unfolded the paper and laid it on his desk. “It looks like she’s written a bunch of dates and times, along with annotations of some sort. ‘Probate will,’ dash, ‘Shawn Fraley,’ and a reference that has ‘the’ followed by the letter ‘b.’ The bottom half’s torn off.”

  “Fraley, that sounds fam
iliar. A name or something? I think I remember seeing it somewhere.”

  “Wait a second.” Slater pulled the scrap of paper from his pants pocket where he’d stuffed it earlier after picking it up from under Kate’s car tire. He’d forgotten about it. Not very good detective work, he thought, but he’d been distracted. Smoothing out the wrinkles, he held the two segments together.

  The scrap was a perfect match to the piece of paper found in Kate’s purse. The binder paper listed a series of dates in her smooth, slanted cursive:

  15 August

  11 August

  4 August

  24 July

  21 July

  and below that:

  Shawn Fraley

  Probate will

  The b

  M

  The final line unclear. What did the incomplete letters mean?

  Sanderson walked back into the squad room at that moment.

  “Say, Sandy, you heard of anyone named Shawn Fraley?” asked Slater.

  Sanderson thought a moment and ran his thick brown fingers over his bald head. “Fraley, yeah, dude’s a lawyer in Sacramento, wills, probate, stuff like that.” He started to walk away, but turned back. “Uh, he called the Sheriff a couple a times.”

  “He called Marconi? Do you remember when?”

  “Oh, I dunno, mebbe four, five months ago.”

  Slater and Bauer looked at each other and both headed for Marconi’s office. Evidently Kate had found something that had meaning for her.

  And for the case.

  Chapter Forty

  The hard eyes mocked Kate. Narrow-slit pupils like a cat’s caught in a beam of light stared into hers. The maniacal gleam frightened her more than the tight bands which cut into her wrists and ankles. His features showed completely flattened affect, empty of all human emotion and empathy. She shuddered violently beneath the coarse material and knew with absolute certainty that she’d get no mercy from her captor.

  The man stepped back and stood erect, preening as he turned around in a slick pirouette, and she got a full look at his freakish, naked body. He had what she’d heard teenagers call man-breasts, his mammary glands swollen like a young girl’s budding chest. His hips flared below the waist and his belly was poochy and soft-looking like a woman who’d recently given birth.

  But lower than that was the truly grotesque part of the man. From a thatch of brown pubic hair protruded the tiniest beginnings of a male sex organ. The penis was either a vestigial organ or had been partially and ineptly removed during a penilectomy.

  The scientist in Kate became curious and momentarily held her fear at bay. As frightened as she was, the physician in her was fascinated by the oddity standing before her.

  She’d been right. They knew from the blood sample found on Alison Mathews’ pants that their perpetrator was an XXY male, but without clinical observation and testing, there was no way to tell if he were externally hermaphroditic or not. Even now, looking at the subject himself, she couldn’t tell if hormones, environment, or genetics had created the Gorgon in front of her. He might be a true five-alpha-reductase-syndromatic person or a pseudo-hermaphrodite.

  What a nightmare his life would’ve been. Without proper counseling and surgery, he had no chance at a normal life. Now a middle-aged man, he wouldn’t be a priority for reconstructive surgery, and during his childhood, few viable medical options existed.

  Many XXY persons never became aware of their condition. She remembered a case study of a female Olympic runner tested for steroids who hadn’t known she was physiologically a male until the test results came back. Most likely, the killer would’ve been raised female, and at some point during or after puberty, his male hormones would’ve kicked in.

  And chaos ensued.

  This man’s aberration was so obvious that no one could mistake his hideous malformation. He was the nightmare stuff of Victor Frankenstein, a thing that below the waist seemed to have been put together with the discarded flesh and organs of castoffs. Another look revealed the mass of adhesions around the man’s groin. Were the ridges of scar tissue from unsuccessful surgeries? Or were they new growth that’d failed, lacking proper hormone stimulation?

  Kate didn’t want to feel sorry for this creature that would’ve been a circus freak less than a hundred years ago, didn’t want to empathize with his suffering. She just wanted to survive, so she forced common sense to override sympathy and panic.

  Even though her body trembled, her heart pounded, and adrenaline pumped through her limbs at sonic speed, she spoke calmly. “My name is Kate. What’s yours?”

  A hiss combined with something like a snarl emanated from his mouth, and one large hand cuffed her on the temple. The blow made her ears ring and tears spring to her eyes. She felt her skin prickle with heat.

  “Shut – the – fuck – up,” he growled, spitting saliva onto her face and exposed chest.

  With one fluid movement the man-creature swirled around and stalked off, cutting out the light and leaving her in the emptiness of her dark prison. A respite, but for how long? Panic rose again in her throat and threatened to cut off her air.

  #

  The next break in the case came when Slater phoned the law office of Shawn Farley. All he got was an answering machine, so he called the Sacramento Telephone Company, identified himself, and got a home number for the attorney. Thankfully, Fraley answered on the second ring.

  At first, the attorney was reluctant to skirt privilege, but reconsidered when he was informed that Slater’s questions involved the disappearance of a county sheriff. After a short-lived wrestle with his ethics, Fraley rationalized that the information he had was a matter of public record anyway.

  According to the lawyer, Marconi’s long-estranged nephew had recently inherited property in the unincorporated town of New Haven, California, in the northern part of the state. He wouldn’t reveal the client’s name, just the relationship to Marconi.

  Slater knew the location because New Haven’s town council contracted with Bigler County for law enforcement services. It was a quiet little place just inside the county line, and his deputies got almost no trouble from up there. Slater guessed that the N.H. in Kate’s notes stood for New Haven.

  In the process of comparing the list of recent county residents with Paxton-Bell employees, Bauer also discovered the name of one Joseph McClelland, an employee newly terminated from service in Paxton-Bell’s mail department. M. for McClelland? There was no address on file in the human resources department, just a post office box, but there was a single reference.

  Xavier Marcus Marconi.

  Was the nephew Fraley mentioned this Joseph McClelland, new employee recently canned? If Marconi had any suspicions about his relative, wouldn’t he have mentioned it to Slater? What part did the Sheriff play in all this?

  The records showed that Marconi had been a sergeant at the time of the Mary Stuckey investigation, in fact, the sergeant in charge of the case. Did the “M” stand for “Mary” rather than McClelland? Slater wasn’t sure how all the pieces fit together, but he believed that coincidence had no place in the world of rational thought.

  This was their first significant lead and his immediate instinct was to rush up to New Haven after getting access to McClelland’s address. The hell with the law. Common sense, however, said he needed a search warrant and so far he had no probable cause.

  Within minutes he called Fraley again, who succumbed to a little pressure and revealed his client’s name and physical address: Joseph McClelland, 10935 Maidu Dam Road, New Haven.

  Slater ticked off the evidence in his head. Possible kidnapping of a law-enforcement officer investigating the abduction and violent murders of two previous victims. Blood and scuffle evidence indicating intent of physical harm. Disappearance of a county sheriff. Fingerprint evidence in Marconi’s vehicle connected to multiple homicides. Notes in Myers’ personal belongings showing a connection between Marconi and McClelland.

  Dammit, if this wasn’t enough, he’d go i
n with exigent circumstances on a warrantless search. Kate’s life and possibly Marconi’s, if he weren’t already dead or involved in the whole mess, were at stake.

  Judge Phineas J. Strickland was about to be roused from his peaceful seclusion at the Lake Tahoe cabin where he was enjoying the first family vacation he’d had in over ten years.

  Slater hoped the judge was in a good mood.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Kate thought she’d drifted off again, although she couldn’t be sure because time had little meaning in her concrete cage. Her body shivered from the damp chill that seemed to settle deep in her bones. Because of the moisture and musty odor, she thought her prison must be underground.

  The rumbling of her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten in a while. Lunch with Slater earlier today? Or was it no longer that day, but the next one? She couldn’t gauge how much time had passed.

  Her captor had come and gone several times now. Kate hoped that meant he was indecisive about what to do with her, that he might not kill her. Was that false hope on her part? A bubble of hysteria formed high in her chest, but she pushed it down. Now wasn’t the time to lose control. She needed a level head and a clear mind if she hoped to outwit her attacker.

  Think, Kate, think.

  She heard the man before she saw him. He padded forward on bare feet, a gleaming tool in his right hand. Lying helpless on the makeshift bed, she was certain the instrument heralded pain for her, torture and ultimate death.

  At that instant she vowed that she wouldn’t go gently to her end. Who said to rage at the dying light? Kate bit down hard on her lower lip to break off the scream that hovered there, to push back the hysteria that quivered at the edge of her sanity. Here she was at the precipice of death and she was quoting Dylan Thomas? She must be as crazy as her captor.