Dead Wrong

by Janice Kay Johnson

  He blamed himself.

  The doorbell rang, and he jerked, his eyes opening. Who in hell at this time of night?

  Eyes wide with instinctive alarm, Beth emerged from the home office at the back of the house, but Will, who had reached the front hall before her, said, "Let me find out who it is."

  Through the peephole he saw the dark green of sheriff's department uniforms. His sense of disorientation returned. Gillian?

  But when he opened the door, it was his mother he found on the porch, along with another officer. A young woman who appeared vaguely familiar.

  "Mom?"

  Her face looked drawn, her eyes tired. "Will, I need to talk to you."

  He backed up. Cold air rushed in with them. Or maybe the chill was inside him.

  "Hi, Beth." Mom tried to smile.

  "Meg." Beth pressed a hand to her breast. "Is everything all right? It's not Jack?"

  "No, no. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. No, everybody in the family is fine."

  But somebody, Will diagnosed, wasn't fine. Somebody Will knew, or she wouldn't be here.

  The wife of a cop, Beth knew, too. She looked Will's mother over with an experienced eye. "Can I get you coffee? Better yet, a bite to eat? I'll bet you haven't stopped, have you?"

  "I'm fine…" Meg stopped. She gave a faint laugh. "Actually, I'm starved. A snack would be great, if it isn't too much trouble."

  "Don't be silly." Beth shooed them towards the living room. "Coming right up."

  His mother pulled off her gloves, then began to shrug out of her coat. He took it and the other cop's, too, and hung them on the tree near the front door.

  He took a few steps into the living room, then stopped. "What's up?"

  "Detective Giallombardo, this is my son Will. Will, Trina Giallombardo. You may remember her from school."

  "You look familiar," he admitted.

  "I was a couple of years behind you."

  That would explain it. By his junior and senior years, he and his friends hadn't been interested in lower classmen. Maybe a really hot girl. This Trina hadn't been that. So he'd probably passed her in the hall without ever really focusing on her face.

  "Detective Giallombardo," he acknowledged, then faced his mother. "Tell me."

  "A girl you dated in high school was found murdered today."

  A sound escaped him. A profanity, maybe. He reached out and gripped the back of the leather chair.

  "Who?"

  "Amy Owen."

  He'd expected…He didn't know who he'd expected. But not Amy.

  "We only went out three or four times."

  "That's what Detective Giallombardo thought."

  This woman he didn't know, who had been two years behind him in school, was suddenly an expert on his life?

  "You're well-informed."

  Her returning gaze was expressionless. "You were the big guy in school. People talked."

  His irritation vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "Amy. My God."

  "Sit," his mother ordered.

  "Here's coffee," Beth said behind him.

  He sank into the chair, soul-sick. On the job, he dealt in murder often, but not the murder of people he knew. Only with Gillian had he experienced firsthand the horror and grief family and friends felt.

  Amy Owen, pretty, not smart but sweet.

  "I saw her last week," he said.

  "What?" Hand outstretched for a cup of coffee she hadn't yet picked up from the tray, his mother turned.

  "I saw her." Jeez, he wished he hadn't. He wished Amy Owen was no more than a hazy memory. "She was at J.R.'s when I went there with Gavin and Travis." No surprise—the sports bar was a favorite hangout for locals. "She was with Jody Cox. Remember her? And a friend of hers, a newcomer."

  "Another woman?"

  He saw what she was getting at. "Yeah, a woman. Karin. Don't remember the last name. I have her phone number if you want it."

  Will saw a fleeting expression of…something cross Trina Giallombardo's face. Another time he might have wondered at it. Right now, he was too wrapped up in the image of Amy jumping from the bar stool to wave at him.

  "Will! Will! Over here. Wow! Hi!"

  He guessed he'd flirted with her a little bit, because she'd been flirting with him, but it was her friend's phone number he'd quietly asked for before the women announced they were calling it a night.

  His mother sat on the couch facing him. "Did she tell you she's divorced?"

  "Yeah. Actually, her ex came in, too. Didn't look real happy to see her with a bunch of guys."

  "Did he say anything?"

  Will shook his head. "That's just my impression. He came over and she introduced him. He was polite."

  "Was he with anyone?"

  "Not that I saw." His mother was interrogating him, he realized. She'd even flipped her notebook open. The coffee and toasted sandwiches Beth had made sat untouched on the table.

  Her gaze was sharp on him. He could see her brain humming. "Did he stay around?"

  "Uh…I don't really know." He frowned. "Wait. I did see him a little later. Maybe half an hour." Appalled, he said, "You don't think…"

  "We don't think anything yet. No, he's unlikely. This didn't look like a crime of passion. Someone who'd loved her, however angry he was, would have felt remorse, regret. Treated her body with more respect."

  "Was it a bad one?" Will asked quietly.

  His mother looked older than she had since—damn, since he'd aged her with his accusations and wild rage.

  "Yeah. Will…"

  He wasn't going to like what was coming. Aware of both women watching him, he braced himself and waited.

  "We have a copycat. Will, this looked like Gillian's murder."

  He lurched to his feet. "What do you mean?"

  She rose, too. "I mean it could have been the same killer. The body was left in the same condition."

  An image of Gilly's body flashed before his eyes. Through gritted teeth, he asked, "Was she raped?"

  His mother's expression was compassionate. "Yes."

  In some part of his mind, he noted that Trina Giallombardo's dark eyes were only watchful. If she felt pity, suspicion, dislike, sympathy, she didn't show it.

  "Strangled with a jockstrap?"

  "Yes."

  He wheeled away to stand with his back to the women. He was panting as if he'd sprinted the last half mile of his daily run. Sweating. Sick. Gilly, oh Gilly. The women's faces overlay like a double exposure, both blond and fine-boned. Not Gilly, he thought. Not this time. Instead, some sick son of a bitch had raped and tortured pretty, sweet Amy Owen, then left her body as if she were a whore. Garbage.

  "Who?" he asked, voice guttural.

  His mother sounded grim. "We'll find out."

  "Was she in the same place?"

  "No." Gillian's body had been left right in town, among the willow trees in the town park on the bank of the Deschutes River. "Amy was left at the lava cone past the Triple B. A couple of kids found her."

  He turned to face them all of them, Beth in the background. "Why are you here?"

  His mother's expression changed. "What?"

  "Is my name going to come up?"

  She gaped. "Don't be ridiculous!"

  "Yeah? Why not? I'd be a logical suspect, wouldn't I?"

  Her mouth opened and closed like a fish's. He was glad to have disconcerted her for once, put her on the defensive.

  Detective Giallombardo said, "Your mother didn't want you to read about it in the morning paper. She thought the news would be better coming from her."

  Shame flooded him, as she'd intended. Will swore and scraped a hand over his face.

  "I'm sorry, Mom. God. I'm sorry."

  His mother gave a twisted smile. "It's okay. Of course you're upset."

  He saw in her eyes that he'd hurt her. As, he realized, he'd intended. And he didn't even know why he'd lashed out.

  "Mendoza…" He hated the taste of the bastard's name in his mouth.

>   "Is still at Salem." The Oregon State Penitentiary was in Salem, Oregon's capital.

  "A friend of his…"

  "That's a possibility we'll pursue."

  "But not a very good one."

  She didn't have to answer. Of course, it was unlikely one of Ricardo Mendoza's friends would commit a crime this savage, and why? What was the motive?

  For the first time, Will was thinking like the attorney and prosecutor he was.

  "What's the point? What's this scum trying to say?"

  "I have no idea," his mother admitted. "Maybe nothing. Maybe this guy just liked the idea. Thought wiping out her identity, metaphorically, by replacing it with a crude symbol of masculinity was funny."

  "Like he's saying, 'In your face'?" Will asked.

  She spread her hands. "Maybe he thought a jockstrap sounded like a handy murder weapon. Hard to trace, wouldn't hold fingerprints well, and, hey, you could carry it around in your pocket without exciting suspicion. You're on your way to the gym. What's the big deal?"

  "Have you ever before or since read or heard of a woman strangled with a jockstrap?" he asked.

  "No," she conceded.

  "Here we are. Small town. Not all that many murders, and ninety-nine percent of those are your garden-variety shoot-the-abusive-husband type. Biker brawls. Not the work of serial killers."

  They'd speculated back then that Gillian's murder was too "sophisticated" to be a killer's first. The savagery coupled with the care taken displaying the body, had seemed to be the work of someone who'd done this before. On the other hand, Mendoza had also done unbelievably stupid things: he was seen leaving the bar with Gilly, his skin was beneath her fingernails and his semen was found in her body. Evidence of grandiosity and disorganized thinking, everyone said. He'd felt invincible, never thought he'd be suspected. So what if he'd talked to Gillian in the bar? She'd talked to other men, too. Maybe he hadn't realized anyone at the bar could name him. It didn't matter—he'd been convicted on DNA.

  "So what are the odds that, just coincidentally, we have a second killer with the same idea?"

  She didn't have to answer.

  "Are you going to talk to Mendoza?"

  "Maybe. We'll concentrate on her movements yesterday first."

  "She told me where she worked." But, damn, he couldn't remember.

  "She was a hairstylist. She had a chair at Mountain High Salon."

  Beth made a sound. They all turned.

  "Was she tall and blond? With a mole on her cheek?" She looked from one of them to another. Pressed her hands to her cheeks. "Oh, no! She cut my hair the last time. And Steph's been going to her. I should have recognized the name! I hate to tell Steph. Oh, that poor girl."

  "I'm sorry," his mother said, uselessly.

  "Does Jack know yet?"

  "No. He hasn't called, and I figured there's nothing he could do, not tonight. I'll page him in the morning."

  Will's mother and Detective Giallombardo ate then, both gobbling as if they couldn't remember their last meal. He knew from experience that his mother would be lucky to snatch a few hours of sleep tonight. She'd spend tomorrow talking to everyone who'd know anything about Amy's last day. Meg Patton was dedicated. Just…sometimes soft, in his opinion. Wanting to do the opposite of whatever her bastard of a father would have done. She and Aunt Renee both had seemed to spend their careers trying to bury their father's legacy as Elk Springs police chief.

  The two women left, Will's mom promising to keep him informed. Then, he and Beth rehashed what they knew, Beth clearly upset.

  "That poor, poor girl," she kept saying. "She was your age?"

  "A year younger."

  "Twenty-eight, then. Only twenty-eight."

  He finally persuaded her to go to bed, in part by heading for his own. With the house quiet and dark, only his bedside lamp on, Will sat up against a heap of pillows and tried to read, but kept finishing the same page without remembering a word.

  He was tired, but at the same time wide awake. Antsy. Feeling as if he should do something. Fight or flight. Will recognized that he was in shock, reliving the hours after Gilly's body was found, when a thousand, if onlys and I should haves had run crazily through his mind as if he were on crack. Replay, replay. Change the ending. He'd kept trying, over and over, until he was crazy and slammed his fist into the wall. He hadn't even noticed he'd broken bones for a while, the pain nothing, nothing, compared to the agony in his chest.

  His book fell to the bedcovers, forgotten. He couldn't shut out the memories, the horror.

  Amy, face alight when she saw him, waving in delight. "Will! Over here!" Gilly laughing up at him, staring at him with hate that in his imaginings became terror. Her face, Amy's face, one and the same.

  Pulling himself back from the abyss, Will tried to remember how well Gilly and Amy knew each other. They hadn't become friends—nothing like that, but Amy was certainly part of the crowd he'd introduced Gilly to. They had looked a little bit alike. Both five-eight or -nine, leggy, boyishly slim, naturally blond. Neither blue-eyed. Gillian had had pale, almost sea-green eyes, Amy…He couldn't quite picture them. Brown? He flashed on Trina Giallombardo's brown eyes, assessing, accusing, judging, because he'd lost it with his mother. Angry at her intrusion, he shook his head and returned doggedly to his struggle to see Amy Owen. No. Not brown. Flecks of yellow and green.

  Dead. Because, like Gillian, she was tall and blond and willowy? But their killers weren't the same man. Couldn't be the same man. Mendoza was guilty, guilty, guilty. Scum who had no business hitting on Will's girlfriend in the bar, becoming enraged because she'd rejected him, raping, murdering, taunting.

  Had Amy been chosen precisely because she looked like Gillian? A copycat crime required a copycat victim. But who in hell would imitate something like this? Could Elk Springs really have spawned two monsters? Copycat monsters?

  It made no sense. None of it made sense. Gilly's murder by a man who'd hot-wired cars and fenced stolen goods but never committed a violent crime. This one now, six years later. Why six years? Why now?

  Why two women Will had known? A stranger, killed exactly like Gillian, would have been bad enough, but Amy! Less than a week after they met again, talked about old times, flirted a little.

  He went cold. Was that why she'd been chosen? Because he knew her? Because he'd flirted with her? Because, like Gilly, she'd once meant something to him?

  But that made no sense either. He'd dated her a few times. Kissed her. Had sex with her once—after they'd both had too much to drink at a party. So what? He'd dated and kissed a dozen girls or more in high school. Slept with several. Had a couple of girlfriends who lasted months. One nearly a year. He knew Nita and Christine both were still around. Why not one of them? Why Amy? Opportunity? Just because in a small town there were only so many look-alike blondes?

  Why? God, why? he begged, even as he knew he'd get no answer.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LIEUTENANT PATTON HAD somehow kept word of the murder out of the morning papers, but they all knew it would be on the five o'clock local news.

  The downside was that Trina had to be the one to tell many of Amy Owen's friends and co-workers about her death. The task was made worse by the fact that Amy was apparently liked by everyone. No secret delight, no affected shock.

  This particular friend, a plump, freckled redhead, turned milk-pale. "Dead?"

  Seeing her sway, Trina said, "Please. Sit down."

  "Murdered?"

  Gently taking her upper arm, Trina backed her up to the couch and pushed. Marcie Whittaker never took her stunned gaze from Trina's face.

  "How can she be?"

  How did you answer that kind of question? It implied that there was a rational order, a why for every action, a series of logical consequences. It suggested that if you took to heart all of your parents' warnings, you'd be safe, loved, prosperous. Trina had been a cop long enough to know that things didn't work that way.

  She and Lieutenant Patton had divide
d up names. Amy had had dozens of friends. After talking with the crew at the beauty salon, they'd each taken a list and started contacting anyone who might have spoken with Amy in the days leading up to her death, or who might have been with her yesterday. Since her vehicle had not yet been located, finding out where she might have gone that night was critical.

  Trina remembered Marcie from high school. She and Amy had been part of a pack of popular girls—cheerleaders, homecoming princesses, stars of the spring musicals. As remote from Trina's world as Will Patton had been. They'd walked down the hall in groups of three or four, laughing and tossing their long, shining hair, their clothes always perfect, their complexions glowing from a weekend on the ski hill. Money was never a problem for any of the popular kids, Trina had believed then.

  In the intervening years, Marcie had put on weight. She'd gotten married right out of high school and had two school-age children as well as a toddler. Trina had expected a fancy house and found her instead in a modest rambler on a street of mostly rentals. Marcie had invited her in with surprise and said, "My youngest is down for a nap. You want to talk about Amy? Why?"

  Now, in answer to the unanswerable, Trina said, "Amy may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's what we're trying to determine."

  "Was she…"

  "Raped?"

  Marcie bit her lip and nodded.

  "Yes, I'm afraid so." They'd decided to admit that much.

  "Oh God, oh God."

  "Did you speak to Amy in the last couple of weeks?"

  Tears oozed from Marcie's eyes. She nodded. "Excuse me. I need to—" She leapt to her feet and bolted from the room.

  Trina used the time to study the framed photos on the mantel. Most were presumably of Marcie's children, redheads all like their mother. Trina recognized the man who appeared in many only because Marcie had taken the last name Whittaker. In high school, Dirk Whittaker had been one of the swaggering jocks, a state All-Star tackle. Like a lot of brawny guys, he'd put on serious weight in the ten years since he'd graduated.

  What interested her most was that, displayed with the family photos, there were three framed snapshots, probably taken at several year intervals, of Marcie with her old crowd, including Amy Owen. In the first, all were recognizably the same people they'd been in high school—still slim, stylish, confident. By the next photo chronologically, although all were posing jauntily and laughing, some of the crowd had changed: begun to put on weight, quit expending so much effort on their appearances. Perhaps half were still sleek and beautiful. By the most recent photograph, the distinction was obvious. Some, like Amy, still looked beautiful, privileged and entitled, while others in the crowd showed the toll taken by jobs that didn't allow for hours at the gym, by scrimping financially, by the exhaustion of raising children.