Twisted Threads (A Cape Trouble Novel Book 3)

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “I was.” He tapped the hood with his knuckles and straightened. “Thanks for responding. I’ll let you be on your way.”

  She nodded and had started to walk away when she turned back. “You didn’t say what the man looks like.”

  Sean had to think about that. His one glimpse had been fleeting.

  Could be one of Saddam’s boys, or even ISIS. Larry had seen what he expected to see.

  “He’s no Iraqi, I can tell you that. Brown hair, probably close to the color of mine. Hard to judge height from the one look I got of him, but he moved like lightning. He was quiet in the woods, but not as quiet as if he’d been trained to move unseen and unheard. He wore camo. I think the butt of the rifle was painted in camouflage, too. I suspect he’s a good shot. He didn’t hit me because he didn’t mean to. It might be different next time a police officer tries to stop him.”

  She absorbed what he’d said and nodded. By the time he was behind the wheel and starting the engine, she was already pulling out, lifting one hand as she passed.

  Sean said a very emphatic obscenity and followed.

  *****

  “I mean, we all knew he was just joking around.” Red-faced, the boy looked down at his own, oversized feet. “You know.” He stole a look up at Daniel. “But I still didn’t think it was cool. He, like, picked on the kids everyone already made fun of.”

  “Did anyone report Mr. Roff to one of the counselors or Mrs. Grove?” Daniel asked. He hoped he didn’t sound judgmental. When he’d been fifteen or sixteen, would he have had the confidence to complain to an administrator about a teacher who made fun of students for things they couldn’t help? He truly didn’t know. Nobody had much confidence at that age.

  Mason Rose ducked his head again. “I don’t know. I guess I should have, but—” There was genuine anguish in his eyes when he nerved himself to look at Daniel again. “You think one of his students killed him?”

  “I don’t have any reason to think that,” Daniel said, and he was telling the truth. There were plenty of teenage killers, but they didn’t have the skill to slice a knife across a man’s throat without so much as a hint of hesitation, and do it while physically subduing him besides.

  Darryl Roff wasn’t a huge guy at five foot nine, lean to the point of skinny. That didn’t mean he was a weakling. According to fellow teachers, he played tennis summers and racquetball winters.

  He seemed to have been reasonably popular with them. Only a couple had hesitated before answering a question, or maintained an air of reserve. When Daniel asked to speak to some of his students, Linda had thought about refusing, but finally said, “I’ll send some in one at a time.”

  Thanks to Linda, Daniel had been able to talk to teachers over the weekend. For the students, he’d pretty well had to wait until Monday morning. In a murder investigation, every delay hurt. Plus, the kids had all heard over the weekend about their teacher’s death. Seeing their first reactions might have been interesting.

  He’d spent all weekend reminding himself that the murder was unlikely to be linked to Roff’s job. How could it be, and still tie to the killing of a defense attorney who had neither attended Cape Trouble High nor had kids who did?

  A forward on the basketball team, Mason was the sixth student sent in to talk to Daniel. Daniel had been to a couple of games this winter and had been able to tell that one of the cheerleaders was his girlfriend. This wasn’t a kid who someone like Roff would mock. Apparently Darryl had saved his savagery disguised as humor for a shy, especially buxom girl whose bra strap had broken in class. “Are you lopsided, Miss Dorrance?” he asked, according to another student, who said everyone had turned to stare and some of them had laughed, at which point she’d run crying from the classroom. Taunting a boy whose acne was so bad, the teacher had suggested they put some of the pus in petri dishes and see what grew.

  The guy had been a grade A asshole, in Daniel’s opinion.

  The question was what, if anything, that could have had to do with his murder.

  Daniel sent the kid back to class, after which the principal poked her head in the small conference room.

  “More?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Linda, you need to know what these kids have been telling me.”

  Middle-aged, sturdy and kind, she sat down across the table from him and listened, her expression increasingly dismayed.

  “I’d heard a few rumors,” she said. “I’ve talked to him a couple of times. But a lot of his students seemed to like him. Test scores have been good. There have been a few complaints from parents, but it’s a rare teacher someone doesn’t hate. I wish someone had told me. I’ve sat in on his classes, and thought he was dynamic. But if I’d known, I could have watched unobserved.”

  “He may genuinely have thought everyone was laughing.”

  She sighed. “Some of the best humor is cruel. But how could someone who chose to teach children of this age think it was fine to make the most vulnerable among them the butt of his humor?” Her mouth thinned. “It almost makes me—”

  Daniel smiled. “No, it doesn’t, and you know it. What you wish is that he was here for you to give him hell.”

  She laughed, if ruefully. “You’re right, of course.” A troubled look crept into her eyes. “But how can this be relevant, Daniel?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, “but my gut says it is. When someone is targeted the way he was, I have to ask myself why. Why him instead of another teacher or a neighbor? This is a possible why.”

  “You’re saying one of the students…?” She stumbled over the question.

  “Not a current one.” He mulled that over. “When did you say he hired on here?”

  “This was his fifth year.”

  “He taught elsewhere?”

  “Actually, no. This was a change of career for him. He did lab work at a hospital in the Portland area, but decided to go back for his teaching certification. He told me once that after a divorce, he’d done some re-evaluation of his life.”

  At Sean’s request, she copied Roff’s resume for him, although it was hard to see how anything that had happened to him before he came to Cape Trouble could be relevant, given the tie to the murder of another local man.

  Walking out to his car, Daniel reached for his phone. He wished he had something more useful to share with Sean. His first thought had been that the killer might be a former student, but Roff hadn’t been teaching that long, and most of his classes were for freshmen and sophomores, maybe a few juniors who were lagging. Which meant that the ones who had had him his first year at the high school were now, at most, twenty-one, maybe twenty-two.

  Daniel had a flashback to Darryl Roff’s body and the letters written in blood on the shower wall. Call him naïve, but he didn’t buy the idea that could have been done by a kid.

  They’d be a step closer to arresting a killer if they could figure out what BCD stood for.

  The minor miracle was that so far they’d kept a lid on that detail. Newspaper articles and TV coverage had all focused on the glass, carefully cut out of a window. The second killing had raised public alarm to near hysteria. The phone was ringing nonstop at the police station, to Ellie’s exasperation. She was doing her best to soothe fearful citizens, but nobody could escape the reality that every single one of them was vulnerable to a killer who could enter their houses in the night, unseen and unheard.

  He stopped at his car, but since for once it wasn’t actually raining or drizzling, he didn’t get in. He wondered what Sophie was doing right this minute as he dialed Detective Sean Holbeck’s number.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Another naked body, slung obscenely over the side of the bathtub. My bathtub, Sean realized in shock, just as the toes curled. Movement quivered up the legs and then the spine, as if the body was being re-animated from the soles up by some mysterious and monstrous means. Before his horrified gaze, the thin shoulders hunched; it pushed itself up onto its elbows and the head slowly turned, exposing the g
aping, bloody wound across the throat.

  He lurched backwards, suddenly finding the door had shut behind him, closing him into the bathroom with a zombie. Only then he saw the face, smiling at him. Emily. Oh, God, it was Emily. Blood ran down over her breasts. Why hadn’t he noticed her braid lying, sliced from her head, on the floor by her feet?

  “Emily!”

  His own, guttural shout pulled him out of the nightmare. He opened his eyes, discovering that he lay on his back in his bed, the room dark but for faint bands of light from the streetlamp seeping between slats in the blinds. He was panting and sweat-soaked.

  When he blinked, the sight of her, grotesque and bloody, seemed imprinted on his eyelids instead of fading as dreams and even nightmares usually did.

  “Shit,” he muttered, scraping both unsteady hands across his face. That was all he’d needed, an invasion on the little sleep he was managing to get.

  Emily. He stiffened. Had he heard something that triggered the nightmare? He launched himself from bed and ran to the window, yanking the cord to raise the blind. As usual, she’d left half the lights in her house on and every set of her blinds closed. He waited, unmoving but for the painfully fast thud of his heart, but nothing and nobody stirred.

  Sean swore again and turned back to his bed, glaring at his clock. He should have slept for another couple hours, but no way was he going back to bed. His skin crawled at the horror his mind had conjured.

  Hot shower, coffee. He had his laptop and could study his timeline and notes. Maybe some anomaly he had so far missed would catch his eye.

  He couldn’t call it a surprise that his subconscious had melded his fear for Emily with the two ugly murders that preoccupied him in between thinking about her.

  He shuddered and wondered if he’d ever sleep again.

  *****

  They needed ideas, and they needed them now. Sean didn’t delude himself that collectively they would be any smarter than they were individually, but nonetheless he’d made some calls yesterday to form an unofficial task force. They’d all agreed to meet this morning.

  Voices came from the conference room down the hall from the bullpen, so he knew some of the others had already arrived. Folder in one hand, coffee cup in the other, he had almost reached the doorway when he saw Wilcynski coming from the other direction. It seemed courteous to wait, but he was sorry when the lieutenant’s eyebrows rose as his gaze took in Sean’s face.

  “You look like hell. I hope you didn’t go on a bender.”

  “I don’t go on benders.” And, yeah, he let his irritation show.

  Hard not to, considering how on edge he felt.

  “This investigation getting to you?”

  “No.” Yes, but he wasn’t about to admit it. He knew he’d be cooler if it weren’t for the threat to Emily. Yeah, and it would help if he could sleep through the night.

  Like any detective, he’d investigated crimes he never solved. He didn’t like it, but it happened. The faces of those victims stayed with him even more than most. This time, his gut churned because he knew this killer wouldn’t stop until they caught him.

  And then there was Emily.

  The lieutenant didn’t move. He looked as if he had no plans to move out of Sean’s way any time in the foreseeable future. Close to Sean’s height, he was as solid as the broad bole of a giant Douglas fir.

  Succumbing to the silent pressure, Sean admitted, “Just…not sleeping well.”

  Understanding showed in those dark eyes. “Your neighbor?”

  “She had a home security system installed, but I keep waiting for a rerun anyway. Makes for restless nights.” He hadn’t told anyone that she’d stayed at his house for four nights – five, counting the hours after the break in.

  “You’re functioning?”

  “Yes,” he said shortly.

  With a nod, Wilcynski preceded him into the conference room, where Daniel Colburn sat talking to Jason Payne while two other men listened. Sean had invited Rey Mendoza, a detective with North Fork P.D., in hopes of building cooperation and giving him a head start in case murder number three happened in his jurisdiction. He and Sean had played basketball together over the winter, and Sean thought they could work together. As his name suggested, he was dark-haired and dark-eyed.

  Sean was glad to see that Alex Mackay was here. As sheriff, Mackay had been handling press conferences and media questions about Frank’s murder and its potential ties to Darryl Roff’s with practiced ease. In that role, he needed to stay on top of the investigation anyway, but beyond that, he was a knowledgeable, hands-on cop, not just a figurehead. Sean had found him to be professionally approachable even as, without ever saying so, Mackay made it clear he did not welcome personal questions. All Sean knew was that he had suffered a major injury that had ended his career with Portland P.D. Word was, he’d been inside or standing next to a car that blew up, although no one really knew for sure, only that he walked stiffly, appeared to be in chronic pain, and had visible burn scars above the collar of his shirt. If anyone in the department had done a search online for his name, Sean hadn’t heard about it. He hoped no one had.

  Mackay’s eyes, as dark as Lieutenant Wilcynski’s, surveyed Sean briefly and left him wondering whether his boss had employed skull-penetrating radar.

  The seat at the head of the table stood empty. Since it seemed to be expected, he took it. “Thanks for coming, everyone. I have no groundbreaking news. My intent is to keep everyone informed.” He had a thought. “Does everyone know Detective Mendoza from North Fork P.D.?”

  Wilcynski introduced himself. Apparently the others already had.

  “Good. Let me say first that, according to Frank Lowe’s law partner, Roff was never a client. He could have called, decided not to retain him, or they had an informal consultation, but it’s sounding unlikely. Otherwise, why don’t you start, Daniel,” Sean suggested. “Something in Roff’s life has to intersect with Frank’s.”

  Nothing Daniel had to say was new to Sean. The others listened intently, however.

  Before moving to Cape Trouble, Darryl had worked at Oregon Health and Science University’s Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland, where his research had focused on blood disorders. He’d claimed a divorce had triggered the career change. Daniel had managed to get in touch with the ex-wife, who was shocked to hear about his death and agreed that he had been getting bored with his job.

  “She insisted they had just drifted apart, no big betrayals. She did say he could be ‘mean’ when she annoyed him.”

  He repeated what he’d learned at the high school two days ago, then got up to write a list of Darryl’s hobbies and favorite hangouts. Everyone in the room studied them, then looked at Sean, who shook his head.

  “Frank Lowe and his wife liked fine wines and could afford them. They took long weekends to visit wineries in the Willamette Valley and over the Columbia River to Walla Walla. Their last real vacation, they spent a week in the Napa Valley, tasting and buying. They belonged to wine clubs. Beyond that, he was obsessive about doing the New York Times crossword puzzle every day, come hell or high water. Their friends were money market managers, county commissioners, the North Fork Hospital administrator. A cardiologist there.”

  “People with influence?” Mendoza suggested.

  Sean shook his head again. “People who liked fancy wines. Lieutenant, you saw the wine cellar.”

  Wilcynski grunted. “Basement, half again as big as the house. The house was custom built, and his wife says that’s why. There are hundreds if not thousands of bottles of wine down there, kept at a perfectly controlled temperature.”

  Jason’s lip curled. “Makes you wonder what some of the clients he didn’t keep from prison would think about it.” Evidently, he wasn’t a wine guy.

  “But how would they know about it?” Daniel asked.

  “Odds are, they wouldn’t,” Sean said. “Rita Lowe made it sound like a bank vault filled with valuable artwork. A few of their friends might have b
een taken on a tour. I doubt either of them mentioned it to anyone else.”

  “Do wines hold their value on a secondary market?” Mackay asked, sounding bemused.

  “No idea.” Sean looked around, and saw a lot of heads shaking. “It’s something to keep in mind, but we have to remember the killer made no apparent attempt to access the wine cellar or, in fact, to steal anything else. He didn’t hurt Rita.”

  “Lucky she didn’t wake up,” Jason muttered.

  “That’s safe to say.”

  “By the way, I finally found Barry Rollins,” Jason said. “Given the second victim, his whereabouts are probably irrelevant, but turns out a friend of his has been paying him to help work on a cabin near Crater Lake. The friend says they’ve both been staying there. I checked with the nearest small store slash gas station, and the owner remembers seeing them.” He shrugged, apparently philosophical about having wasted his time.

  Detectives wasted a lot of time following leads that ended up going nowhere.

  They discussed the timing – five days between the two murders. Did that mean they should expect another murder tomorrow? Since the spacing between only two events wasn’t enough to suggest a pattern, they moved on quickly.

  Sean shared his thoughts about the killer having a military background and told them about his encounter with the young guy wearing camo who’d scared Larry. Turned out they all knew Larry except Rey Mendoza, who both lived and worked in North Fork, which was apparently outside of Larry’s range, and Lieutenant Wilcynski because he was so new in the area.

  Nobody disagreed that the murders suggested a level of expertise beyond the norm, although Mendoza threw out the idea that the guy could be a surgeon, work at the morgue, even be a butcher at Safeway, Fred Meyer or Mist River Meat.

  “Farmers and ranchers must get kinda good at cutting throats, too,” Mackay offered. “Still, the timing when this new homeless man showed up is suggestive.”

  “Identifying him should be a priority,” Sean said.