Until Dark

by Mariah Stewart

  “No complaints.”

  They stared at each other, former more-than-friends not-quite-lovers, for a long minute.

  “When John said he’d have a package delivered, I assumed he meant via some overnight mail service,” she said to break the silence.

  “Well, I was visiting my father in Pennsylvania when John called yesterday afternoon. He had the file delivered to me at my dad’s before dinner last night so that I could look it over before bringing it to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he wanted me to go over the case with you.”

  “I see.” She walked to an outside hose and sprayed a thin veil of water over her sandy feet. Lola came closer to investigate, licking at the spray. “John said he’s heading a special unit that focuses on serial crimes—abductions, rapes, murders. . . .”

  “Right. I guess you discussed all this with him.”

  “Not to any great extent. He just said he had a case he wanted me to work on for him. He’s pretty much a legend, you know, all those high-profile serial killer cases he worked on. So when you have a chance to work with him, you drop what you’re doing.” She resisted adding, Which in my case was nothing. “By the way, I did some work with one of your colleagues from the Seattle office while I was living in Washington state. Portia Cahill.”

  Kendra switched feet. Lola’s pink tongue followed the spray.

  “She’s worked with John, too, she said.” Kendra looked up at him and added, “She said she knew you.”

  “Portia and I were at Quantico together” was all Adam said.

  Kendra shot him an amused glance that let him know that she knew there had been more to it than that. Having made her point, she continued.

  “Anyway, I worked on a few cases with her while I was out there.” Kendra turned off the hose and slung it over the water spout in a loose O. “She’s working mostly with the terrorist unit now, did you know?”

  “I’d heard that.” Adam nodded. “Her sister, Miranda, was recently assigned to Mancini’s unit.”

  “Portia said she had a twin sister with the Bureau.” Kendra stood about five feet away from him, her hands on her hips, as if waiting. Finally, she said, “These cases, the ones John called about, they started as kidnappings?”

  “I think the local agencies held out hope that that was all they were. Until the bodies were found. Three, actually, that we believe to be related.”

  “John said there’d been two.” He had her total attention now, her wayward hair and wet cut-offs forgotten.

  “The third body was found this morning. John called again right before I left my dad’s.”

  “Three in how many weeks?”

  “The first was found almost a month ago.”

  “He’s been a busy boy,” she murmured. “How were they killed?”

  “Strangled. The body of the last victim showed evidence that she’d been roughed up a bit more than the first two before strangulation, but there’s no question in anyone’s mind that it’s the same guy.”

  “Why?”

  “Similarities between the victims, the nature of the crimes, the manner in which the bodies were disposed of, in such a way that it was clear the women had served their purpose, were no longer of any value to him. DNA from the first victim matched that found on the second. They haven’t had time to finish testing the latest vic yet.” He paused, then asked, “Did I mention that all three women had been raped?”

  She shook her head no.

  “The DNA was run through CODIS,” he added, “but there were no hits.”

  “Which only means he hadn’t previously committed a crime that would have put his DNA in the national database.”

  “True enough. Neither of the first two women had any other injuries, by the way. No excessive bruising, no marks that I could see from the photos, other than the strangulation marks at the neck.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Everyone seems to think so. Kathleen Garvey was found outside a little town called Deal, about twenty miles from Lancaster. According to the police report she’d last been seen talking with a man outside the sporting goods store in the center of town. Forty-eight hours later her body was found in the Dumpster behind the shop. An artist was brought in to prepare a sketch of the man she’d been seen with, but it isn’t all that great.”

  “Can we get copies of the statements from the witnesses to see how they described him? And a copy of the sketch?”

  “I have them.”

  Kendra glanced at the driveway and the shiny silver Audi sports coupe that sat there, sassy as hell with its top down.

  “Not exactly standard issue,” she noted.

  “I had a lot of road to cover in a short period of time. Standard issue doesn’t always cut it. Besides, I was on my own time when I left Virginia on Monday.”

  Kendra climbed the stairs to the back door, then paused on the top step.

  “Get your files and bring them in. Let’s see what you have.” She stepped into the house, letting the screen door close behind her.

  Adam crossed the yard in long strides, opened the trunk, and lifted out his briefcase. Lola, no longer distracted by the hose, followed behind, tail wagging, until a squirrel caught her eye and she took off in the direction of the dirt road.

  “This is a really interesting place you have here.”

  At six feet four inches, Adam had to duck as he passed through the doorway between the back porch and the kitchen.

  “Thanks.” Kendra watched Adam’s eyes gaze upwards as if to assure himself that he could stand up without the top of his head brushing the ceiling. “It was built by my father’s family.”

  “Must have been at least two hundred years ago, judging by the height of the ceilings.”

  “Very close,” she told him, “1768.”

  “Would it be rude to ask why anyone would have built out here in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, two hundred years ago? What was the attraction?”

  Kendra laughed.

  “Iron. My great-great-great-grandfather—there may have been a few more greats in there—had a forge that used bog iron to make cannon as well as cannonballs, some of which were used, the story goes, by Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. Back then, this wasn’t the middle of nowhere. Two hundred years ago, Smith’s Forge was a town of over five hundred people, though there are fewer than one hundred fifty now. “

  “I guess I blinked and missed the town on my way through.”

  “You didn’t have to blink. After the iron industry moved from the area, many of the towns were pretty much deserted. Over the years, the woods took over.”

  “What happened to all the buildings?”

  “Burned, many of them.” Kendra took two glasses from a cupboard and a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator. “We have an inordinate number of forest fires in the Pines. It’s just a fact of life here. And actually, some of the plant life here depends on it, needs the high heat to germinate. But once the fires start, they’re often difficult if not impossible to control.”

  “What saved this house?”

  “As the realtors say, location, location, location. We’re on the outer edge of the Pines, and on the opposite side of a large lake from the woods.” Ice clunked into the bottoms of both glasses. “We’ve come close a few times—that barn out back is actually the third one—but the house never caught. The one that’s there now dates from 1847 or 1857, I forget which. Before the Civil War, I know, because this house used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad. There were a lot of places here in the Pines that served as refuge to the runaway slaves.”

  She stood at the window and looked outside. “When I was little, I used to stand at my bedroom window at night and think about what it was like to be slipping through those dark, narrow waterways at midnight, holding your breath, your life in the hands of so many strangers.”

  “You must have had quite an imagination as a child.” He smiled at the thought of her in an upstairs window, staring into t
he night.

  “It was well-fueled by my grandparents, I assure you,” she said, laughing. “And once my little brother found the tunnel, he’d sneak in there and make all kinds of spooky noises to make us think there were ghosts in the house. So any imagination I had was cultivated by my family.”

  “There’s a tunnel?”

  “From the barn into the basement of the house, where there’s a hidden room with dirt walls and floor. It’s tiny and windowless, as I recall. I never went into the tunnel, myself. Too dark and creepy. Really creepy”—she hunched her shoulders—“spiders and mousies and bugs. Yuck.”

  Kendra poured tea into both glasses, then handed one to Adam. “Other buildings in the area weren’t always as lucky as we were. But you can still see remnants of the town proper about a mile or so into the woods on the other side of the lake.”

  “Only remnants? You make it sound like a ghost town.”

  “As I said, we get a lot of fires in this area.” She leaned back against the counter, sipped at her tea, and tried to decide how she felt about seeing Adam again.

  He was leaning against the opposite end of the counter, his long legs stretched out in front of him. She hadn’t for a minute forgotten the set of his jaw or the lines that ran along the sides of his mouth, though those, it appeared, had deepened since she’d last seen him. The tiny lines that were just beginning to settle in around his eyes four years ago were deeper now, too, a testimony, perhaps, to the nature of things he’d done and seen since they’d last seen each other.

  She raised a hand self-consciously to her own face, wondering how the stresses and strains of the past several years might now be playing out. Was he looking at her and seeing a different woman from the one he’d known back then? How much, she wondered, had they both changed?

  Baggage best dealt with at another time, she cautioned herself, and tucked that bit of business aside.

  “All right, then.” Kendra gestured for him to take a chair at the square enamel-top kitchen table that sat in the middle of the room. “Let’s see what you brought me. . . .”

  Chapter

  Two

  Adam placed his open briefcase on the table and thumbed through his files, looking for the envelope that contained the photographs of the victims.

  “Before or after?” He asked when he found what he’d been looking for.

  “Before, for now.”

  He slid a photograph of Kathleen Garvey across the table.

  “She was so pretty.” Kendra leaned over the back of a chair and touched the photograph with her right index finger. “How old?”

  “Twenty-seven. Engaged to be married next spring to Tom Alspacher. Age thirty-two. Both Tom and Kathleen had been married once before, two children each.” Adam didn’t need to refer to the file. The facts had stayed with him.

  “Where was he on the night his fiancée disappeared?”

  “At his aunt’s funeral in Rome, New York, hundreds of miles away. His children were with him, his parents were both in attendance as were numerous family members. Arrived in New York the day before Kathleen disappeared. Got back to Deal four hours after her body had been discovered.”

  “Maybe it was somebody local,” Kendra offered. “Maybe someone who knew he was out of town for a few days and thought she wasn’t likely to be missed . . .”

  “She was missed right away. She lived with her children and her younger sister, and apparently kept a tight schedule. Home from work no later than five forty-five every night. Dinner around six—her sister cooked and took care of the kids in exchange for room and board—and back out by seven three nights of the week. She was taking a course at the local community college. According to the sister, she always left work on time, always got home on time. Was never late for class.”

  “Why the stop at the sporting goods store?”

  “She was picking up a baseball glove for her eight-year-old son. The sister said that Tom’s son had given it to him but it needed to be restrung. Kathleen swung by on her way to school so that her son would have it for his game the next day.”

  Kendra studied the face of the woman in the photo, a woman with bright blue eyes and a brighter smile. A woman who could never have imagined what fate awaited her on a warm April evening when she would make what should have been one quick, routine stop.

  “No mention to the sister of any unusual occurrence that day? Phone calls? Visitors?”

  “No mention of anything in the report, but then there’s no indication that the question was asked either.”

  “Do you have the witness statements?”

  “Yes. Right here.” Adam sorted through his folders searching for the one that held his copies of the faxed pages the FBI had received from the state police earlier in the week. “And here’s a copy of the sketch their artist had done.”

  Kendra slid into a chair and began reading the report.

  Adam watched her eyes flicker from line to line, watched her expression change as she progressed through the report. She leaned one elbow on the edge of the table and rested her chin in her open palm. She looked exactly the way she’d looked that first time Adam had met her. He’d been sent to pick her up at her hotel and accompany her to interview a key witness in a kidnapping case. At first he’d thought he’d knocked on the wrong door. He’d expected someone older, more seasoned. The woman who had stood in the doorway had been delicate-looking and just shy of petite. Her light auburn hair had been piled casually atop her head and her eyes had been green and serious.

  Pebbles Flintstone, all grown-up had been his first impression.

  It had taken less than an hour of watching her at work to replace that image with one of a woman who was totally professional, totally absorbed by her work, totally sensitive to the subjects she interviewed. After all, who better to understand what family members were going through after a loved one disappeared than someone whose own family had suffered that same relentless pain?

  “So we have two witnesses who saw Kathleen standing in front of Fanning’s Sporting Goods at a little before seven o’clock on a Thursday evening.” Kendra spoke out loud as if to herself, as if she’d forgotten Adam was there. “Both witnesses describe the man she was with as a stranger, not someone from town. Tall, dark-haired. Black jacket, blue jeans. Glasses.”

  She picked up the sketch and studied it.

  “One of the witnesses, an eight-year-old boy, was riding his bike on the opposite side of the street. He noticed Kathleen because he knew her son. They played on the same baseball team. The other witness, Mrs. Sims, had come from the pharmacy, which is apparently next door to the sporting goods store, while Kathleen and the stranger were chatting. She claims to have taken little notice of the man, she was in a hurry.” Kendra tapped an impatient finger on the table. “So how did the artist manage to produce a sketch like this if it was already getting dark, the area was not especially well lit, one witness was across the street and the other admitted she barely noticed the man?”

  “I’m guessing he belongs to the ‘a poor sketch is better than none’ camp.”

  She frowned. A poor sketch could only do more harm than good.

  “May I see the rest of the photos now?”

  Adam passed her the tan envelope. She tilted it to let the pictures slide out, then studied them carefully.

  Kathleen Garvey no longer smiled for the camera. Black and blue halos rimmed her eyes, and her cheeks were abraided, with dried blood at one corner of her mouth. There was dirt on her chin and both arms, and the telltale bruising on her neck from her killer’s hands. Her clothing was torn but the remains hung from her body in sections, as if her assailant had ripped at what was necessary for him to rape her and did not bother with the rest. The body lay in situ where it had been found, in the Dumpster, amid empty cardboard boxes that once held shiny aluminum baseball bats from the sporting goods store and rotting produce from the small food market at the far end of the parking lot.

  “Discarded, as you said.” Kendra mutter
ed when she reached the end of the stack. “Tossed out with the trash.”

  “Exactly. A statement on his part. She meant nothing. Her life meant nothing.”

  Kendra returned the photos to the envelope, then placed it inside the file, which she slid to her left.

  “Let’s take a look at the second victim.”

  “Amy Tilden. Age thirty-five.” Adam had already pulled the file. “Mother of three, two daughters and a son. Divorced from Stan. Teacher’s assistant in the local elementary school where her kids were in grades one, three, and six. Left her house on Monday evening for Home and School Night. Visited each of her kids’ classrooms briefly—long enough to say she’d been there, but since she worked at the school, she stayed current with the teachers. She walked out the back of the building to get something from her car. Two days later her body was found dumped along the side of the road leading into town. No attempts had been made to hide it. The officers who found her said it looked like someone had pulled off onto the shoulder, opened the door, and shoved her out, as you’ll see in the photos.”

  “No one noticed anyone strange hanging around the school that night?” Kendra asked as she reached for the file that Adam held out to her.

  “No mention of anyone in the reports.”

  “The same lack of respect for his victim. And another pretty blond,” Kendra observed. “I wonder if that’s coincidence or preference. I guess we don’t have a picture of victim number three yet.”

  “Not as of this morning.”

  “How long between the two murders?”

  “Sixteen days.”

  “And between the second and the third?”

  “Thirteen days.”

  “Cutting his time a little. Wonder how he’s spending his time in between killings,” she said in an almost whisper as she opened the envelope holding photos of Amy Tilden’s body laying facedown and half off the shoulder of the road amid the newly green grass of early spring. A bag from a fast-food restaurant and an empty paper container that had once held french fries lay near her feet, which were still clad in shoes. The marks on her neck were identical to those on Kathleen Garvey’s.