by Blake Pierce
Maybe his instincts have gotten rusty, she thought.
They got into the car and Bill asked, “Where to next?”
“Let’s check out the motel,” Riley said.
As they drove across town to the Baylord Inn, Riley was struck by the change in their surroundings. The motel was in a pleasant wooded area. There was a three-story main house that appeared to be a bed-and-breakfast-style inn, with a number of quaint little cabins nestled alongside of it. They got out of the car and walked up the steps onto a broad porch with a white wooden railing and white wooden columns.
In the cozy lobby they found an elderly couple. The man was sitting at a table reading a newspaper and the woman was standing at the counter. They both looked up as the group entered. They were pudgy and cheerful and greeted Riley and her companions with broad smiles.
Riley could tell at a glance that they’d been happily married for many years. They probably had children and grandchildren, perhaps even great-grandchildren. She felt a tingle of envy. What would it be like to be in a blissful relationship for so many years? She couldn’t begin to imagine.
“Can we help you?” the woman asked.
Riley and Bill took out their badges and introduced themselves. The couple’s smiles faded a little.
“Are you the owners?” Riley asked.
“We are,” the man said in a charming Southern drawl. “I’m Ronald Baylord, and this is my wife, Donna.”
Riley gulped a little as she prepared to explain the purpose of their visit. She was relieved when Jake stepped forward.
“I don’t know if you remember me,” he said. “I’m Jake Crivaro, and I was with the BAU some years back.”
Ronald Baylord’s eyes widened.
“Why, I think I do remember you. You came around her way back when …”
His voice trailed off. Riley could see a painful realization in his eyes.
“We’re looking into a murder that happened here many years ago,” Riley said.
The couple wasn’t smiling anymore.
“Oh, dear,” Ronald said.
“We thought we’d put all that behind us,” Donna said. “The police and you other folks kept coming here again and again back in those days, asking all sorts of questions.”
Riley felt truly sorry now. But there was nothing she could say to make this easier. She showed them the composite sketch on her tablet.
“We think that the suspect might look like this now,” she said. “Do you think you might have seen him?”
“No,” Donna said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Me too,” Ronald said. “If we ever saw the man who came here that night again, I’m sure we’d recognize him. Not that there was anything special about him. He came in here alone and paid in cash. We didn’t see the poor woman at all until we found her …”
His voice faded again.
Riley said, “I wonder if we could get a look at the room where it happened.”
“Of course,” the man said.
The woman took a key from behind the counter and handed it to Riley.
“It’s cabin three. You’ll come right to it if you follow the path.”
Riley thanked the couple, and she and her companions walked out of the house. As they headed down the path among the trees, Riley was again struck by how different this place was from the rest of Brinkley.
Like it’s frozen in time, she thought.
She felt a familiar chill—the kind of feeling she got when she was about to get a true sense of how a murder had happened.
Jake was right, she realized.
There still was a trace of the crime here in Brinkley.
In fact, it was more than a trace.
It was beginning to feel like a palpable reality.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As Riley walked toward the cabin along with Bill and Jake, she felt a sharp tingle up her spine. It was connected with a flash of déjà vu.
Just yesterday on the phone with Jake, she had tried to visualize the murder of Melody Yanovich from the killer’s point of view. But her impressions then had been sketchy and possibly inaccurate.
Now she was going to try it again—here where it had happened.
And with Jake here to help her, her impressions were going to be much more reliable, much more vivid.
And much more terrifying, she thought.
With Bill and Jake behind her, Riley turned the key in the door and opened it.
She flipped on the wall light switch and stepped into the room. Jake stayed close to her, while Bill remained standing in the doorway.
Riley saw that the room was clean and cheerful, with elegant drapes, antique-looking furniture, Japanese prints on the walls, and one big bed with tall carved wooden posts at each corner.
“What’s the first thing he notices?” Jake asked.
“He notices how bright the room is with the light on,” Riley said.
“How does that make him feel?” Jake asked.
Riley paused for a moment.
“Uneasy. Unsafe somehow. He’s afraid of the light at times like this. It reveals too much. He knows that it’s crazy, but he’s afraid she’ll see inside him.”
“Afraid that she’ll see the heart of a murderer?” Jake asked.
Riley’s hands grew cold and her palms dampened.
“No. He’s never killed anybody. He’s never even imagined killing anybody. He’s afraid she’ll see his uncertainty, his insecurity. He feels like his whole body is emitting cold waves of self-doubt, a visible aura.”
A chest of drawers stood just inside the door to the room. There was a pad of paper there with the motel’s logo on it.
“He takes a sheet of notebook paper,” she said, carrying out the same action. “He puts it in his pocket with the matchbook he picked up at the bar.”
“As a souvenir?” Jake asked.
Riley paused.
She remembered playing out these moments with Jake over the phone. She’d figured then that the killer had picked up both the matchbook and the notepaper as souvenirs.
But now she was getting a different impression.
“Maybe partly as a souvenir,” she said. “But it’s mostly just a nervous gesture. A distraction from his insecurity.”
Then Riley reminded herself that the man hadn’t been alone in the room.
There was also the girl, Melody Yanovich.
She’d been a college freshman.
Riley said, “He notices how nervous the girl is—but how eager too. After all, she’s away from home for the first time in her life. And this is the first real adventure she’s had out in the world. Her eagerness makes him uneasy. She’s got high expectations. He doesn’t know if he can fulfill them.”
“Who makes the first move when they’re in the room together?” Jake asks.
For a moment, Riley wasn’t sure.
Does the man grab her and kiss her?
No, she thought. He’s too shaky and uncertain.
“She makes the first move,” Riley said. “She’s jumpy and excited and in a hurry to get things underway. She throws her arms around him and kisses him. It’s a clumsy, sloppy kiss that takes him off guard. She pulls away and giggles a little. Is she laughing at him? He’s not sure.”
Riley tried to relax, to breathe more slowly. But she couldn’t. Her breath came in short pants. That was a good thing. She wasn’t just seeing things from the killer’s point of view. She was viscerally feeling his experience.
“What does she do next?” Jake asked.
Riley paused again. When she’d played out this scenario with Jake on the phone, she’d been sure that the girl had gone to the bathroom right away and undressed, then had come back out with a towel wrapped around her.
But now that Riley was here in the actual room, events were playing out differently in her mind.
She remembered something in the police report.
When the girl’s clothes were found buried next to her body, a single button had been missin
g from her blouse. The button had turned up on the floor right beside the bed.
Riley sat down on the bed.
“She pulls him onto the bed. She grabs his hands and tries to get him to undress her. His hands are shaking all over the place. One of her blouse buttons is already loose and it falls off. He apologizes and reaches down to get it. She tells him never mind, it doesn’t matter. She undresses herself and he does the same.”
Riley pulled back the covers on the bed. She ran her hand over the crisp, clean sheet on the mattress.
“The girl scampers under the covers, still giggling. He gets under the covers too. But the sheets are cold all over his skin. He and the girl try to grope each other, but her body is cold, and her hands are cold too, and everything is …”
Riley gulped hard on the terror that was rising up inside her.
“Everything is wrong, nothing is right. He just … can’t. He apologizes. He’s ashamed.”
Riley tried to imagine the girl’s reaction to the killer’s impotence.
Does she tell him it’s all right, that she knows this happens, and maybe they should just wait for a few minutes and try again?
No, she’s too young and inexperienced.
She has no idea how to react.
She just lies there staring at him.
Riley said, “He’s wondering—why doesn’t she do or say something helpful? Doesn’t she understand how painful this is for him? Doesn’t she care how he feels? No, she doesn’t care, and he’s shocked at how shallow and self-centered she is, and suddenly he’s not cold anymore, his body is hot with rage, and without even thinking about what he’s doing he—”
Riley couldn’t say aloud what came next.
But she could feel the man’s hard fingers burrow into the girl’s soft throat.
She could see the girl’s eyes bulging, hear the weird croaking sounds coming out of her mouth.
She could feel the girl’s life ebbing away.
“In just minutes it’s over,” Riley said. “She’s lying there with her eyes open. She’s not breathing. He can’t believe what just happened. He wants to think it’s a nightmare that he’ll wake up from any second. But the horrible truth closes in around him like a dark fog.”
Jake nodded and said, “He knows he’s killed a human being.”
Riley was feeling lightheaded, a little dizzy.
She was gasping, almost in tears now.
“He’s thinking no, no, no, this is impossible! This isn’t him, he’s not a killer, surely he can make it right, but how?”
She closed her eyes, and the scene became still more vivid. She was the murderer, sitting upright on the bed, looking down at the naked body.
“Does he try CPR?” Jake asked.
Riley struggled to keep her panic under control.
“He thinks he should, but he’s not sure how. He remembers something about pressing down on the chest with both hands. He tries it once or twice.”
Riley could feel the woman’s sternum cracking beneath the killer’s outstretched arms.
“But then he stops and thinks. What if I do bring her back? What then? She’d contact the authorities. She’d tell them what he did.”
“So he can’t let her live,” Jake said.
“No,” Riley said. “Not now.”
She stopped to collect her thoughts—or rather the killer’s thoughts.
“He’s got to get rid of the body. He doesn’t know where, but that doesn’t matter yet. He clumsily pulls his clothes back on. And as he does …”
Riley reached into her own pocket, where she had put the piece of notepaper.
“The first things he thinks of are the matchbook and the piece of paper. How differently they feel to him now! They’re like tangible pieces of guilt and self-hatred. He knows that he’ll leave them with the body. Maybe someone will find them. Maybe someone will find him.”
Riley had reached into the killer’s consciousness as far as she needed to for now—and as far as she dared.
She opened her eyes and almost collapsed onto the bed.
She felt Jake’s comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Good work,” he said. “Now you own him. He’s yours. You’ll get him in the end.”
Riley pulled herself together, and she and her companions left the cabin.
“You scare me sometimes,” Bill said as they headed back to the main house.
Sometimes I scare myself, Riley thought.
But she knew that she had to learn more if they were going to catch this killer.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next stop for Riley, Bill, and Jake was the town of Denison. Riley took her turn driving there. She felt charged up and energized after her experience back at the Baylord Inn.
Jake’s right, she thought. I own this killer now.
And she was going to bring him to justice.
Or maybe not.
How could she be sure?
A case this cold presented challenges that Riley wasn’t used to. Fortunately, the criminal’s mind still seemed to be accessible after all these years. At least, if she wasn’t just misleading herself about her insight into him. She would keep going until she found out one way or the other.
Anyway, she and her colleagues weren’t going to finish solving it today. It was getting late in the day, and they had to drive back to Quantico after finishing their work in Denison.
As she drove, Bill and Jake were hitting it off really well, telling each other stories about old cases.
After a lull in the conversation, Bill said to Jake, “Hey, my older son Kevin’s got a swim meet tomorrow. Want to come?”
“Sure!” Jake said.
Riley found it odd to hear them making weekend plans. When was the last time she’d worked on a case that she and her team been able to take a break away from? There was usually a sense of urgency, a threat of impending disaster in the air, the grim possibility of a murder about to happen.
But not this time.
Not with a case that had almost been forgotten.
Riley was having trouble getting used to this unfamiliar situation.
Interrupting Riley’s thoughts, Bill said, “How about you, Riley? Do you want to join us tomorrow?”
Riley hesitated, then said, “Not this time, thanks. You guys have a good time.”
She knew that her mind wouldn’t be on the swim meet. Something else was going to be dogging her—Shane Hatcher’s mysterious promise to help her find her mother’s killer.
She remembered again his cryptic message.
“Deny thy father and refuse thy name.”
What could it possibly mean?
Did it mean anything that mattered?
She tried to push it out of her mind.
Keep your mind on your work, she told herself.
After all, she’d have a whole weekend to drive herself crazy trying to figure out Shane Hatcher’s riddle.
As they approached Denison, Riley sensed that this was going to be a very different town from the others. Denison was some fifty miles from the interstate. The countryside was markedly less plush than it had been around Greybull or Brinkley—and positively poor in comparison to Glidden’s surroundings.
This impression grew as she drove across the town line into Denison. Greybull had seemed suspended in time, and Brinkley had been alarmingly new. By contrast, Denison seemed sadly abandoned. There was shabbiness every way she looked—buildings, businesses, and houses in disrepair and near-ruin.
She drove past the Cozy Rest Motel, where Portia Quinn had been murdered. Riley saw that it was closed and boarded up. She’d learned that the motel’s owner had long since died. That part of the trail had definitely gone cold.
Was that going to be true everywhere in Denison?
She hoped not.
Soon they arrived at their destination—the Waveland Tap, where the murderer had picked up his second victim. As they pulled into the parking lot, Riley saw that the place looked especially rundown. For a
moment she was afraid that it had closed like so many other local businesses. But then she saw the faint glow of a neon sign through the dirty front window.
Riley, Bill, and Jake got out of the car and walked inside. Riley saw that what had once been a flourishing working-class bar was now nothing more than a dimly lit, gloomy dive. Only a handful of customers were sitting at tables and the bar.
A gaunt-looking old bartender was listlessly wiping the bar with a cloth. He looked up at the sight of the new arrivals. Riley and Bill showed him their badges and introduced themselves and Jake.
“FBI, huh?” the man said in a bored tone. “Well, I’m Pete Burridge, and I own this place.”
Then he looked at Jake and said, “Hey, haven’t I met you before? Yeah, you were here years ago, about that girl who got killed—Portia Quinn was her name. Did you ever catch that killer?”
“No,” Jake said. “That’s why we’re here now.”
Pete Burridge chuckled dourly.
“It’s sure taking you folks a long time,” he said. “I’d have figured you’d have given up by now. Haven’t you got fresher cases to solve? People keep getting murdered every day, I hear.”
Riley was a little startled by his attitude. Pete wasn’t shocked, saddened, or dismayed at the reawakening of this long-ago tragedy—not like the other people they had interviewed. Pete simply didn’t seem to care much one way or the other.
Riley pulled up the composite sketch on her tablet and showed it to him.
“We think the killer might look something like this now,” she said. “Do you think you’ve seen him?”
“No, I’m pretty sure I haven’t. In fact, you’re the first strangers to come into the place in quite a while.”
As Bill started asking Pete routine questions, Riley turned her attention to her surroundings.
Could she get any sense of the killer here?
She climbed onto a bar stool, imagining that she was him.
He was sitting next to Portia Quinn, a twenty-one-year-old local woman who worked at a local clothing store.
He was trying the same pickup line he’d used on Melody Yanovich back in Brinkley.
She smiled at him—an encouraging sign.
Does he plan to kill her? she wondered.