by Blake Pierce
“Like hell I don’t!” the man said. “I’m a reporter, and this is a major story. This is the fourth victim since May—not counting the woman who got away. And all of them got starved almost to death. What’s with that, anyway?”
He knew a lot of details. Riley guessed that maybe he’d been tipped off by paid informants among the cops.
“What kind of a statement do you cops want to make about it?” the man asked.
He kept moving around the corpse taking pictures from different angles. Riley hated it when vultures like this guy made up their minds that getting a sensational story was more important than an ongoing investigation.
Her own sudden fury took her by surprise. She pushed the man violently away with both hands.
“Hey!” the man yelled, almost losing his balance.
Riley pushed him again, and he fell to the ground, dropping his camera. She stomped on it, crushing it under her heel.
“That was a thousand-dollar Nikon!” the man yelled, scrambling to his feet.
“Was it?” Riley said sarcastically. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
He picked up the ruined camera and backed away from her.
“I’m going to sue your ass but good, you crazy bitch!”
“Over a little accident like this?” Riley snapped. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s your name, anyway?”
Riley flashed her badge at him. “Special Agent Riley Paige, FBI. That’s spelled p-a-i-g-e. Be sure to get it right.”
“I’m going to have that badge, lady!”
She was about to lunge at him again when she felt Bill’s strong arm on her shoulder.
“Back off, Riley. Let it go.”
Chief Franklin finally managed to lead the reporter away.
Riley called out to him, “Get some tape up around the perimeter! We’ll have reporters all over us before we know it!”
Chief Franklin nodded back at her.
“What the hell was that all about?” Bill asked Riley.
“What do you think it was all about?” Riley said. “Bill, you know how these reporters can make a mess out of things.”
“Yeah, but remember what you said to me about Dennis Vaughn? I could lose my badge, you said. Well, you could too. You know that Carl Walder’s just itching for a chance to fire you again.”
It started to dawn on her that Bill was right. Maybe the reporter wasn’t going to say anything about the incident. But she doubted it. It was a lot more likely that she was about to become part of the story. Walder would be all over her about it.
But there was nothing she could do about that right now. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself down.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m tired, and I’m not thinking straight. Let’s get back to work.”
She and Bill walked back over to the body.
“What’s his thing with hunger?” she asked Bill. “All the victims so far have been starved almost to death.”
Bill shook his head.
“Maybe he experienced hunger once himself,” he said. “Maybe this is some kind of revenge. Or maybe he just doesn’t bother to feed them. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
Riley felt sure that it did mean something—or at least that starvation served some kind of purpose. As she had done back in Mowbray, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine the scene from the killer’s point of view.
It started to come to her again—a strange feeling that the killer wasn’t acting alone. No, it wasn’t that a partner had been here at the crime scene. He’d come here alone with the corpse. But this killer struck her as somehow incomplete—unable to create these strange displays entirely on his own.
He’s following orders, she thought again.
But what were those orders? What was he told to do?
A hunch hit her hard in the gut, and her eyes snapped open. She looked at the emaciated corpse and its peculiar position.
“I know something, Bill,” she said breathlessly.
“What do you know?”
“I know what these images mean.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Riley took out her cell phone, eager to show Bill what she meant. She brought up a photo of Metta Lunoe’s corpse as it had been found back in May.
“Look at her arms,” she told Bill, pointing. “Her right arm is raised above her head with her hand pointed straight up, her left down at an angle.”
Then she brought up a photo of Valerie Bruner’s corpse.
“Then in June, this corpse was arranged a little differently. Her right arm and hand were the same, but her left pointed down over her abdomen.”
She followed with a picture of the victim found in the bandstand at Redditch. The FBI had identified her as a runaway teenager from Connecticut named Chelsea McClure.
“And on Monday, Chelsea McClure was found with her left arm and hand straight up and her right lower at an angle—a mirror image of Metta Lunoe.”
Finally Riley pointed at the body at their feet.
“And now we have Elise Davey—in the same position as Chelsea McClure, except that her right arm extends a little higher.”
Bill shook his head and shrugged.
“We went over all this before,” he said. “I still don’t get it.”
Riley sighed a bit impatiently.
“What did Meara say about the basement where she was held captive?”
Bill considered for a moment. Then Riley saw a dawning coming over him.
“She said it was full of clocks.”
Riley nodded enthusiastically.
“It’s all about clocks, Bill. The killer is obsessed with them. He’s even arranging his corpses to look like clocks.”
Riley ran through the photographs again, commenting on them one at a time.
“That’s right,” she said. “It looks to me like Metta Lunoe was five o’clock, Valerie Bruner was six o’clock, Chelsea McClure was seven o’clock, and now Elise Davey is eight.”
Bill scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“So he’s trying to tell us something about time,” he said. “But what?”
“That’s what we don’t know yet,” Riley said. “But he held Meara Keagan until she escaped, and he tried to take Sherry Simpson. He’s either still got captives, or he’s going to take another, or both. And he’s sure not finished killing.”
A new wave of tiredness came over her. Now she was feeling a few raindrops, and the thunder was getting louder.
Riley said, “We’d better get the coroner over here to finish things up and take the body away. It’ll be pouring any minute.”
*
Scratch peered through the rain as he drove along the Six O’clock Highway well north of Ohlman. He’d told Grandpa that he was going out to look for a new girl. It was true, but he had other reasons for getting out.
Grandpa’s complaining about his recent failures had become unbearable, and his back was too raw to whip himself anymore. Getting away from the house and the shelter was the only way to get away from Grandpa’s voice.
He’d been listening to the radio since he’d left home. The murders were in the news now. Even the FBI had been brought in, and there was some fuss about a female agent who had broken a reporter’s camera this morning.
At long last, the media had caught on to the fact that the killings were connected. It wasn’t going to make things any easier for Scratch. Women were being warned not to hitchhike, and all of Delaware seemed to be on alert.
But that wasn’t what bothered Scratch at the moment. Nobody on the radio was saying anything about the message Grandpa wanted to send. Was everybody so stupid that they didn’t yet understand? Was even the FBI that stupid?
There’s so much at stake, he thought. The whole world’s at stake.
Even so, Scratch was feeling pretty good. He was happy with the new car he’d just stolen. This Ford was classier than the old Subaru he’d been driving. He was always careful not to use his own car when he was searchin
g for a new girl. He was too smart to take the chance that someone would identify him that way.
Anyhow, it wasn’t hard to steal cars around here. People often left the keys right in them, tucked above the flap or beneath the seat or in some other obvious place.
And despite the rain, Scratch felt somehow hopeful that he’d find just the right girl. The one he still had in the cage wasn’t thin enough yet. She had been strong when he took her and hadn’t wasted away as satisfactorily as most of them did. He would use her later. Right now he needed someone more appropriate and after all the bad luck he’d been having lately, his luck was due for a change. But it was more than just luck. He felt a new presence around him—some kind of protective spirit that wanted to keep him safe, wanted him to succeed. He wouldn’t tell Grandpa about it. Grandpa would never believe it. Grandpa would never believe that he could do anything right.
One good thing was, it now seemed obvious that the Irish girl who escaped hadn’t told the authorities anything. According to gossip, she was in the local hospital and her room was guarded. But maybe she wasn’t conscious. Maybe she wasn’t even alive. Scratch now felt sure that he had nothing to worry about from her.
He’d even stopped worrying about the woman with the truck who had gotten away from him last night. Whatever she’d told the authorities, it hadn’t led them to him. Instead, they’d probably gone after the guy who owned the Subaru.
He giggled at the thought.
Serves him right for being so careless with the keys, he thought.
Just then, he saw that an expensive new sedan was pulled off on the highway shoulder. Its hazard lights were blinking in the rain. It had Washington, DC, license plates. As he slowed down and passed it, a woman’s face stared out the window at him.
My luck’s improving, all right! he thought.
He stopped his car in front of the sedan. It was too windy for an umbrella, so he slapped a cap on his head and got out. When he reached the other car, the woman inside rolled down her window.
“It’s about time you got here,” she snapped. “I called for help twenty minutes ago. You people are supposed to be efficient.”
Scratch bowed toward her and smiled. “My apologies.” he said. “We’re a little shorthanded tonight.”
“Where’s the truck?”
“It got delayed, sorry,” he said. “I can take you anywhere you need to go in my car.”
“Well,” she said. She seemed to think it over for a few seconds. “I’m certainly not going to sit out here waiting any longer.”
“Of course, you don’t have to. That’s why we’re here for you.”
“I’ll hold you people responsible for any damage to my car,” she said.
“Of course, ma’am. Our people will take care of everything for you.”
She got out of her sedan with her coat over her head. “Someone will have to answer for this shoddy service.”
“Someone surely will pay for this,” Scratch replied.
As he let her in the passenger side of his vehicle, he could see that she was extremely thin, as if she barely ever ate at all. His luck really was getting better and better. Some helpful spirit really was smiling down on him.
She’s ready any time Grandpa wants, he thought.
He wouldn’t have to starve this one before killing her.
“You’ll be just fine,” he told her.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Riley napped fitfully while rain fell outside her hotel room. She was exhausted from having gotten no sleep at all the night before. Even so, she was too worried to fall into a deeply refreshing doze. Whenever she did drift off, she saw clock faces with times on them …
Five o’clock … six o’clock … seven o’clock … eight o’clock …
But instead of regular clock hands, she saw emaciated arms pointed at the numbers on the clock faces.
What can it mean? she kept asking herself. What kind of message is he trying to send?
And how soon was another corpse going to turn up somewhere, pointing to yet another hour? Chelsea McClure girl had been found on Monday and Elise Davey just this morning, Wednesday. The killer was moving much faster now, and her experience had been that he wasn’t likely to slow down.
What could possibly seem so urgent to him?
Just when she finally felt herself slipping off to sleep, her phone buzzed. She saw that it was a call from April. When she answered, her daughter’s voice sounded agitated.
“What’s wrong?” Riley asked.
“I didn’t see Joel today,” April said.
For a groggy moment, Riley couldn’t remember who Joel was. Then it came back to her. Joel was April’s boyfriend. The one that Crystal, Blaine’s daughter, didn’t like. The one that Riley had never met.
“Well, lots of kids miss school sometimes,” Riley said, stifling a yawn.
April sounded almost frantic now.
“But he said he’d be there today,” she said. “He definitely said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
“When did he say this?” Riley asked.
“After school yesterday. We were … we had a snack together after school.”
Riley could hear a note of evasion in April’s voice. Somehow, she felt pretty sure that “a snack” wasn’t all that had happened after school yesterday. Her longstanding feeling that this boy was going to be trouble suddenly got a whole lot stronger.
“Have you tried to reach him?” Riley asked.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t answer my texts or messages,” April said.
Riley couldn’t restrain a note of dry irony.
“I know what that’s like,” she said. Maybe now April had a better idea of how it felt to be deliberately ignored.
“This isn’t funny, Mom,” Riley said. “This isn’t like him. Joel texts me all the time. I mean, like, constantly.”
Riley didn’t like the sound of that. Texting “all the time”—did that mean even during classes at school? Maybe Joel’s absence meant that he was finally losing interest in April. If so, Riley was glad of it. Still, April really sounded upset.
“It hasn’t been all that long,” Riley said. “I’m sure you’ll hear from him soon.”
“But what if something’s happened to him?”
“Like what?” Riley said.
April was almost crying now. “I don’t know. Something really bad. Mom, I need your help. Can’t you have somebody, some agent, check to see if he’s all right?”
“You know I can’t do that,” Riley said.
“Why not?”
Before Riley could reply, she heard knocking on her hotel room door. She was sure that it was Bill, and that he had some news.
“I can’t talk about it now,” Riley said. “I’m on a murder case.”
“Of course,” April said, bitter and angry. “It’s just my friend. Nobody important to you. Maybe if he winds up dead you’ll get interested.”
“April!” Riley said.
But April hung up. Now Riley felt emotionally rattled as well as exhausted. She got up and went to the door and let Bill in.
“We just got word that another woman has gone missing,” Bill said. “She was driving alone down the Six O’clock Highway. She called for road service when her car started making strange noises. They told her to pull over and stay in her car until somebody got there. When help arrived, the car was empty.”
Riley quickly tried to process this new information.
“Do we have any reason to think she was picked up by the killer?” she asked.
“No, but we don’t have any reason to think otherwise, either,” Bill said. “And there’s going to be a mega-uproar about it. Have you heard of Wyatt Ehrhardt?”
It took Riley a moment to remember.
“Isn’t he that new US representative from Minnesota?” she asked.
“Yeah, a real up-and-coming political star. He’s up for reelection next week. And his wife is Nicole DeRose, the heiress and former supermodel.”
Ri
ley gulped as she realized the seriousness of the situation. “And now she’s missing,” she said.
Bill was pacing the room. “Right. Lucy’s got a team checking various locations up and down the Six O’clock Highway, in case she just wandered off somewhere. But I don’t expect them to find anything. Ehrhardt is on his way down from Washington right now. We’ve got to get down to the police station to meet him. I’ll meet you out in front of the hotel.”
Bill left the room. Riley put on her shoes and splashed some water on her face. Her mind boggled at how much more difficult the case was likely to become.
*
Just when Riley and Bill got out of their car and walked toward the police station, Wyatt Ehrhardt’s chauffeured limousine pulled up. Ehrhardt stepped out, followed by a young woman with a briefcase. They entered the building quickly, and Bill and Riley followed.
A moment later, they were in the interview room. Riley, Bill, and Chief Franklin introduced themselves to Ehrhardt and the woman.
Cool and businesslike, the woman shook hands all around.
“I’m Rhonda Windhauser, Representative Ehrhardt’s personal aide,” she said.
Riley noticed that Ehrhardt was looking at the woman in an oddly proprietary sort of way. Rhonda Windhauser looked smugly pleased at her status. She was a voluptuous young brunette. Her dress was short and had a plunging neckline. In her gut, Riley felt sure that Rhonda Windhauser was more than just an aide—at least in the usual sense.
Ehrhardt was a youthful, energetic-looking man in his thirties. His tan and his coiffed hair were much too perfect for Riley’s taste. She was surprised at her own sudden feeling of dislike for the man.
Maybe it was because he was a politician. Her last experience with a politician had been anything but pleasant.
A few months back, Virginia State Senator Mitch Newbrough’s daughter had been murdered. Both narcissistic and paranoid, Newbrough had been convinced that the killing was politically motivated instead of what it really was—the work of a pure psychopath. He’d wound up wasting bureau time and resources on his wrongheaded theory. He’d also gotten Riley fired.