Once Cold

by Blake Pierce

  “Help us! Please!”

  Riley’s eyes snapped open again.

  She was shaking even more than before, and gasping for breath.

  She remembered something that Paula Steen had said to her.

  “My daughter’s killer will never be brought to justice.”

  Paula had also said …

  “It was never your case to begin with.”

  Riley felt a new sense of determination.

  It was true—the Matchbook Killer hadn’t been her case before.

  But she could no longer leave it to the past.

  At long last, the Matchbook Killer had to be brought to justice.

  It’s my case now, she thought.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Riley had no more nightmares that night, but even so her sleep was restless. Surprisingly, she felt wide awake and energized when she got up the next morning.

  She had work to do that day.

  She got dressed and went downstairs. April and Jilly were in the kitchen eating a breakfast that Gabriela had made for them. The girls both looked sad, but not as devastated as they’d been yesterday.

  Riley saw that a place had been set at the table for her, so she sat down and said, “Those pancakes look wonderful. Pass them over, please.”

  As she ate her breakfast and drank coffee, the girls began to look more cheerful. They didn’t mention Ryan’s absence, instead chatting about other kids at school.

  They’re tough, Riley thought.

  And they’d both gotten through their share of tough times before now.

  She was sure that they’d pull through this crisis about Ryan as well.

  Riley finished her coffee and said, “I do have to get to the office.”

  She stood up and kissed April on the cheek, and then Jilly.

  “Go catch some bad guys, Mom,” Jilly said.

  Riley smiled.

  “I’ll be sure to do that, dear,” she replied.

  *

  As soon as she got to her office, Riley opened up computerized files on the twenty-five-year-old case. As she scanned old newspaper stories, she remembered reading some of them when they had first appeared. She’d been a teenager at the time, and the Matchbook Killer had seemed like the stuff that nightmares were made of.

  The murders had happened here in Virginia near Richmond, with just three weeks in between each death.

  Riley opened up a map and found Greybull, a small town off of Interstate 64. Tilda Steen, the last victim, had lived and died in Greybull. The other two murders had taken place in the towns of Brinkley and Denison. Riley could see that all the towns lay within about a hundred miles of each other.

  Riley closed the map and looked at the newspaper stories again.

  One banner headline screamed …

  MATCHBOOK KILLER CLAIMS THIRD VICTIM!

  She shuddered a little.

  Yes, she remembered seeing that headline from many years ago.

  The article went on to describe the panic that the murders had struck throughout the area—especially among young women.

  According to the article, the public and the police were both asking the same questions:

  When and where was the killer going to strike next?

  Who was going to be his next victim?

  But there had been no fourth victim.

  Why? Riley wondered.

  It was a question that law enforcement had failed to answer.

  The murderer had seemed like a ruthlessly motivated serial killer—the type who was likely to keep right on killing until he was caught. Instead, he had simply disappeared. And his disappearance had been as mysterious as the killings themselves.

  Riley began to pore over old police records to refresh her memory.

  The victims didn’t seem to be connected in any way. The killer had used much the same MO for all three murders. He’d picked up young women in bars, driven them to motels, and killed them. Then he’d buried their bodies in shallow graves not far from the murder scenes.

  The local police had had no trouble locating the bars where the victims had been picked up and the motels where they had been killed.

  As some serial killers do, he had left clues for the police.

  With all of the bodies, he had left matchbooks from the bars and notepaper from the motels.

  Witnesses at the bars and motels were even able to give fairly good descriptions of the suspect.

  Riley pulled up the composite sketch that had been created years ago.

  She saw that the man looked fairly ordinary, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. As she read witness descriptions, she noticed a few more details. Witnesses had mentioned that he looked strikingly pale, as if he worked at a job that kept him indoors and out of the sun.

  The descriptions hadn’t been very detailed. Even so, it seemed to Riley as though the case shouldn’t have been all that tough to crack. But somehow it had been. The local police never found the killer. The BAU took over the case, only to conclude that the killer had either died or left the area. Continuing the search nationwide would be like looking for a needle in a haystack—a needle that might not even exist.

  But there had been one agent, a master at cracking cold cases, who had disagreed.

  “He’s still in the area,” he had told everybody. “We can find him if we just keep looking.”

  But his bosses hadn’t believed him, and they wouldn’t back him up. The BAU had let the case go cold.

  That agent retired from the BAU years ago and moved to Florida. But Riley knew how to get in touch with him.

  She reached for her desk phone and dialed his number.

  A moment later, she heard a familiar rumbling voice. Jake Crivaro had been her partner and mentor back when she joined the BAU.

  “Hello, stranger,” Jake said. “Where the hell have you been? What have you been doing with yourself? You don’t call, you don’t write. Is that any way to treat the lonely, forgotten old buzzard who taught you everything you know?”

  Riley smiled. She knew he didn’t mean it. After all, they’d seen each other fairly recently. Jake had even come out of retirement to help her with a case just a couple of months ago.

  She didn’t ask, “How have you been?”

  She remembered his litany the last time she’d asked.

  “I’m seventy-five years old. I’ve had both knees and a hip replaced. My eyes are shot. I’ve got a hearing aid and a pacemaker. And all my friends except you have croaked. How do you think I’ve been?”

  Asking him would only get him started complaining all over again.

  The truth was, he was still physically spry, and his mind was as sharp as ever.

  “I need your help, Jake,” Riley said.

  “Music to my ears. Retirement stinks. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m looking into a cold case.”

  Jake chuckled a little.

  “My favorite kind. You know, cold cases were a specialty of mine back in the day. They still are, as a kind of hobby. Even in retirement, I can collect and review stuff that nobody solved. I’m a regular packrat that way. Do you remember that ‘Angel Face’ killer in Ohio? I solved that one a couple of years ago. It had been cold for more than a decade.”

  “I remember,” Riley said. “That was some good work for an over-the-hill old codger.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere. So what have you got for me?”

  Riley hesitated. She knew that she was about to stir up unpleasant memories.

  “This case was one of yours, Jake,” she said.

  Jake fell silent for a moment.

  “Don’t tell me,” he finally said. “The Matchbook Killer case.”

  Riley almost asked, “How do you know?”

  But it was easy to guess the answer.

  Jake was obsessed with past failures, especially his own. Doubtless he was keenly aware of the anniversary of Tilda Steen’s death. He’d probably also noted the anniversaries of the other victims’ deaths. Riley guessed
that they probably haunted him every year.

  “That was before your time,” Jake said. “Why do you want to dredge up all that ancient history?”

  She heard bitterness in his voice—the same bitterness she remembered hearing from him when she was still a young rookie. He’d been furious with the powers-that-be for shutting the case down. He’d still been bitter when he retired a few years later.

  “You know I’ve been in touch with Tilda Steen’s mother over the years,” Riley said. “I talked to her just yesterday. This time …”

  She paused. How could she put it into words?

  “It hit me harder than usual, I guess. If nobody does anything, the poor woman will die without her daughter’s killer getting brought to justice. I don’t have any other cases going and I …”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “I know just how you feel,” Jake said, his voice suddenly sympathetic. “Those three dead women deserved better. Their families deserved better.”

  Riley felt relieved that Jake shared her feelings.

  “I can’t do much without BAU support,” Riley said. “Do you think there’s any way I could reopen the case?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Let’s get right to work.”

  Riley could hear Jake’s fingers rattling on his computer keyboard as he brought up his own files.

  “What went wrong when you worked on it?” Riley asked.

  “What didn’t go wrong? My theories didn’t fit with anybody else’s at the BAU. The area was fairly rural back then, just three little small towns. Even so, along an interstate that close to Richmond, there were plenty of transients. The Bureau just decided it must have been some drifter who moved along. My gut told me something different—that he lived in the area and might live there still. But nobody cared what my gut had to say.”

  While he was typing, he grumbled, “I might have cracked this thing years ago if it weren’t for my shit-for-brains partner.”

  Riley had heard about Jake’s incompetent partner, who had been fired before Riley joined the BAU.

  She said, “I hear he screwed up almost everything he touched.”

  “Yeah, literally. In one of the bars, he handled a drinking glass the killer had touched, smeared up the fingerprints but good.”

  “Weren’t there any fingerprints on the napkins or the matchbooks?”

  “Not after being covered with dirt in a shallow grave. The guy screwed up royally. He should’ve been fired right then and there. He didn’t last long, though. Last I heard he was working in a convenience store. Good riddance.”

  Riley heard a pause in Jake’s typing. She guessed that he now had all his materials ready at hand.

  “OK, now close your eyes,” Jake said.

  Riley shut her eyes and smiled. He was going to put her through much the same exercise she had taught to her students. She had learned it from him in the first place.

  Jake said, “You’re the killer, but you haven’t killed anybody yet. You just walked into McLaughlin’s Pub in Brinkley, and you’ve just introduced yourself to a girl named Melody Yanovich. You’ve put some moves on her, and things seem to be going pretty smoothly.”

  She began to see things from the killer’s point of view. The scene playing out clearly in her mind.

  Jake said, “There’s a little bowl of matchbooks on the bar. In the middle of your pickup, you grab one and pocket it. Why?”

  Riley could practically feel the little matchbook between her fingers. She imagined herself tucking it into her shirt pocket.

  But why? she wondered.

  When the case had been open, there had been a fairly commonsensical theory about that. The killer had left matchbooks from the bars and notepaper from the motels on the victims’ bodies to taunt the police.

  But now she realized—Jake didn’t think so.

  And now she didn’t either.

  She said, “He didn’t even know he was going to kill her—at least not when he was in McLaughlin’s Pub, not that first time. He picked up the matchbook as a souvenir of his impending conquest, a trophy for the good time he expected to have.”

  “Good,” Jake said. “Then what?”

  Riley could clearly visualize the killer helping Melody Yanovich out of his car and escorting her into the motel room.

  “Melody was willing, and he was feeling confident. As soon as they got into the room, she went to the bathroom to get ready. Meanwhile, he picked up a piece of notebook paper with the motel logo—for the same reason he’d picked up the matchbook, as a souvenir. Then he took off his clothes and got under the covers. Soon Melody came out of the bathroom …”

  Riley paused to get a clearer picture.

  Had the woman been naked right then?

  No, not exactly, Riley thought.

  “Melody came out with a towel wrapped around her. Right then he started to get uneasy. He’d had trouble performing in the past. Was he going to have that problem again this time? She climbed into bed with him and pulled off the towel and …”

  “And?” Jake coaxed.

  “And he knew then and there—he couldn’t do it. He was ashamed and humiliated. He couldn’t let the woman get away knowing that he’d failed. A burning rage took him over completely. His fury wiped away his humanity. He grabbed her by the throat and strangled her in the bed. She died very quickly. His rage ebbed away, and he realized what he’d done, and he was seized by guilt. And …”

  Riley’s mind hurried through the rest of the crime. The killer had not only buried the victims in shallow graves, but he’d put the graves close to streets and highways. He knew perfectly well that the bodies would be found. In fact, he’d made sure of it.

  Riley’s eyes snapped open.

  “I get it, Jake. When he first picked up the matchbooks and pieces of notepaper, he was only collecting souvenirs. But after the murders, he used them for something different. He left them with the bodies to help the police, not to taunt them. He wanted to be caught. He didn’t have the nerve to turn himself in, so leaving clues was the best he could do.”

  “You’re catching on,” Jake said. “My guess is, both of the first two murders played out pretty much exactly that way. Now take a look at the local police summary of the murders.”

  Riley looked at the report on her computer screen.

  “How was the last murder different?” Jake asked.

  Riley scanned the text. She didn’t notice anything she hadn’t known already.

  “Tilda Steen was fully clothed when he buried her. It seemed that he hadn’t tried to have sex with her at all.”

  Jake said, “Now tell me what it says about the cause of death for all three victims.”

  Riley quickly found it in the text.

  “Strangulation,” she said. “The same for all of them.”

  Jake grunted with dismay.

  “That’s where the locals went wrong,” he said. “The first two, Melody Yanovich and Portia Quinn, were both definitely strangled. But I found out from the medical examiner—there weren’t any bruises on Tilda Steen’s neck. She’d been suffocated but not strangled. What does that tell you?”

  Riley’s brain clicked along, processing this new information.

  She closed her eyes again, trying to imagine the scene.

  “Something happened when he got Tilda into that motel room,” Riley said. “She confided something to him, maybe something she’d never told anybody else. Or maybe she told him something about himself he wanted to hear. She suddenly became …”

  Riley paused.

  Jake said, “Go ahead. Say it.”

  “Human to him. He felt guilty for what he was going to do. And in a twisted way …”

  It took Riley a moment to put her thoughts together.

  “He decided to kill her as an act of mercy. He didn’t strangle her with his hands. He did it more gently. He overpowered her on the bed and suffocated her with a pillow. He felt so remorseful that …”

  Riley opened her eyes.

  �
��… he didn’t ever kill again.”

  Jake let out a grunt of approval.

  He said, “That was the same conclusion I came to back in the day. I still think it. I believe he’s still in that general area, and he’s still haunted by what he did all those years ago.”

  A word started echoing through Riley’s mind …

  Remorse.

  Something suddenly seemed crystal clear to her.

  Without stopping to think, she said, “He’s still remorseful, Jake. And I’ll bet anything he leaves flowers on the women’s graves.”

  Jake chuckled with satisfaction.

  “Good thinking,” he said. “That’s what I always liked about you, Riley. You get the psychology, and you know how to turn it into action.”

  Riley smiled.

  “I learned from the best,” she said.

  Jake grumbled his thanks for the compliment. She thanked him and ended the call. She sat in her office thinking.

  It’s up to me.

  She had to hunt down the killer and bring him to justice once and for all.

  But she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

  She needed help just getting the BAU to reopen the case.

  She rushed out into the hall and headed for Bill Jeffreys’ office.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bill Jeffreys was enjoying an unusually quiet morning at BAU when his partner burst into his office. He immediately recognized the expression on her face. This was how Riley Paige looked when she was excited about a new case.

  He gestured toward the chair on the other side of his desk, and Riley sat down. But as he listened attentively to her description of the murders, Bill grew puzzled about her enthusiasm. Even so, he made no comment while she gave him the complete rundown of her phone conversation with Jake.

  “So what do you think?” she asked Bill when she finished.

  “About what?” Bill asked.

  “Do you want to work the case with me?”

  Bill squinted with uncertainty.

  “Sure, I’d like to, but … well, the case isn’t even open. It’s out of our hands.”

  Riley took a deep breath and said cautiously, “I was hoping you and I could fix that.”