“It just so happens I have some time on my hands right now. . . .”
“Then maybe we should make the best of it.” He kissed her again, and her head began to swim.
How long had it been, she asked herself, since she’d felt this rush of heat and pleasure and anticipation at the mere touch of lips?
She couldn’t recall, gave up trying to remember, and gave in to what he offered her.
Until her cell phone began to ring.
She sighed and dug the phone out of her purse and checked the caller ID. It was Annie.
“Hey,” Mara said as she answered the phone.
“Hey, yourself. What’s doing?”
“Aidan and I are in Ohio.”
“So John tells me. He says you might have identified our killer.”
“Looks like we might have.”
“They’re bringing in the best sketch artist we have to try to age the photo that Aidan is sending us.”
“I thought that was all done digitally these days.”
“It can be, yes. And they’ll do that, no doubt, as well, but John likes the human touch. And once we get a bead on this guy, the sketch can be updated with hard facts so it can be released to the media. I’m also going to take a good look at this guy Channing from a psychological standpoint, see if he fits the profile.”
“He’s had a horrific background.”
“So I understand. Listen, John told me that he asked you to hang with Aidan for a while. Is that all right with you?”
“Perfectly fine.”
“Oh? Perfectly fine?”
“Um-hmm.”
“Oh, my,” Annie laughed softly. “From ‘perfectly fine’ to ‘um-hmm’ in under ten seconds. Are you fraternizing with my almost brother-in-law?”
“Somewhat.”
“Somewhat fraternizing. Well, well, well. Who’d have ever . . .”
Mara could all but see her sister shaking her head and smiling while she did so.
“Mara, are you still there?” Annie asked.
“Yes, I’m here. It’s this damned phone.” Mara frowned as the connection grew fuzzy.
“Look, I’ll talk fast. I don’t think you should come back to Lyndon until we find Channing. Can you find something to do for a while until we get a handle on all this out here?”
“Sure. We can find something to do.”
The line fuzzed up again.
“Leave the phone on,” Annie told her. “I’ll give you a call when I reach Lyndon.”
“Okay.” Mara disconnected the call. “Annie’s on her way to Lyndon. They’re going to try to get a sketch artist to update the photo that you’re sending in. They’re going to release the picture in the hope of finding someone who recognizes Channing. Annie’s going to call back after she gets there. She doesn’t think we should go back just yet, though.”
“I agree with her.” Aidan nodded. “Keep a good distance between you and our Mary Douglas killer.”
“Do you think it’s Channing?”
“I think it would be an incredible coincidence if it were anyone else.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Let’s help them get the ball rolling by getting this photograph of young Curtis Channing over to Chief Lanigan so that they can work on the sketch, see if anyone steps forward to identify him, to confirm that he’s been seen around Lyndon. That’s the starting gate. Has Curtis Channing been in Lyndon? If we get a positive ID, one that places him there over the past month, then I’d say it’s damned likely that Curtis Alan Channing is our Mary Douglas killer.”
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
EVAN CROSBY CHEWED ON THE END OF HIS PEN AND stared at the computer screen in front of him. The call from Agent Cahill had been short and sweet and to the point. She would be in his office within the hour, accompanied by the FBI profiler, to help him break the Mary Douglas case. Even after he’d told her they had a suspect in custody, she’d insisted that unless their suspect was one Curtis Alan Channing, aka Curt Gibbons, the Lyndon PD had the wrong man.
Having spent the better part of the night interviewing the suspect, Crosby had to admit that he wasn’t convinced that Tom Mulholland was their killer, not by a long shot. Nothing about him—from his disheveled appearance to the disorganized mess of his small rented room—suggested that he was a man who could so coolly, so methodically, stage a crime scene. He just didn’t strike Crosby as a man who planned that far ahead for anything. And there was nothing neat or tidy about him. It was Crosby’s personal opinion that if Tom Mulholland ever killed anyone, it would be spur-of-the-moment, the scene would be utter chaos, and he’d be caught within hours because he’d leave his fingerprints everywhere and would, most likely, drop his wallet on his way out the door.
And Mulholland had sworn he’d never heard of Mara Douglas and never met a man named Vincent Giordano.
Crosby’d spent the past forty minutes going over his notes from the night before, trying to reconcile what he knew about Mulholland with what he knew of the killings, hoping to find the key before they arrived. Cahill had been just a little too cocky, a little too sure of herself.
He sighed and turned away from the screen, admitted that he wasn’t any closer to finding the truth than he was when this whole mess started. He bounced the pen off the partition on the opposite side of the room in disgust. Maybe Agent Cahill was right. Maybe she could help them to break it. Part of him hoped she could. The other part wanted to break it himself.
It was one thirty in the afternoon when tall, leggy Miranda Cahill walked into his tiny cubicle accompanied by Anne Marie McCall.
“I think you may have met Dr. McCall,” Cahill said by way of greeting Crosby, before cutting right to the chase. “We think we have a very strong lead.”
“Dr. McCall.” Crosby nodded to acknowledge the pretty blond psychiatrist. “How strong?”
“How strong would a name and a face be?”
“As you already know, Agent Cahill, we have a name and a face. In custody, at this very minute. What do you have that can convince me that we have the wrong man?”
Miranda dropped an envelope atop the pile of mail, papers, and files that littered the desk. From it she took a sketch that she passed to Crosby. “This is, we believe, your Mary Douglas killer. His name is Curtis Alan Channing. Our paths first crossed six years ago. I was part of a team that was investigating a string of murders along the Ohio–Kentucky border.”
Crosby studied the sketch. “Who did this sketch?”
“This was digitally enhanced from an old photo, aged to what the computer thinks he might look like now. The FBI is having a sketch artist work on a drawing, which we think will be more true to life, but we wanted something in hand quickly, and the computer gave us this.”
“Let me get my partner in here.” He punched the three numbers into the intercom. “Joe. Come in here.”
Joe Sullivan appeared in the doorway almost instantaneously. “What’s up?”
“You remember Agent Cahill? Dr. McCall? FBI?” Crosby nodded to the two women who were crowded into the small space. “They’re here to discuss the Mary Douglas killer.”
“What’s to discuss?” Sullivan shrugged. “The case is solved. Or didn’t anyone think to inform the FBI that we have a man in custody?”
“Agent Cahill thinks that Mulholland is telling the truth.”
Sullivan snorted. “And how did Agent Cahill come to that conclusion?”
She filled him in, ignoring his defensive attitude and relating what she’d already told Evan Crosby.
“These murders in Ohio, they were the same MO as ours?” Sullivan asked.
“No, but the same feel as yours,” she told him.
“The same feel?” The detective scoffed. “How did they feel?”
“Controlled. Organized.” Miranda took the high road and disregarded his sarcasm. This time. “Planned down to the last detail.”
“Victims stabbed to death?” Crosby asked.
“No, they were strangled.”
<
br /> “Then where’s the connection?” Sullivan turned on her. “Serial killers stab or they shoot or they strangle, but they don’t change their MO. Everybody knows that.”
“That’s not exactly correct, Detective.” Anne Marie spoke up for the first time.
“Then why don’t you set me straight, Dr. McCall?” Sullivan’s tone was condescending.
“I think that Agent Cahill is right on target. Serial killers don’t always follow the exact MO—although it might appear that way on the surface. If they’re active long enough, they often evolve over time, as the killer moves closer and closer to the ideal fantasy.”
“Fantasy? You think this is about fantasy?”
“It almost always is, Detective Sullivan. He’s following a script, as most serial killers do. But the script changes as he moves closer and closer to his goal.” Anne Marie turned her attention to Detective Crosby, who struck her as being the more receptive of the two. “His early attempts might include some aspects of his later, perfected work, but he won’t start out achieving perfection.”
“So what you’re saying is that his early killings might only exhibit part of what drives him, maybe his need for controlling the scene, but his method of killing might be different from what he does later on?” Crosby asked.
“Exactly.” Annie nodded.
“Explain to me why you think this guy is our guy.” Sullivan nodded toward the sketch.
Miranda took over. “When I interviewed him six years ago, I had felt very strongly that he might have been connected to the murders we were investigating, but we didn’t have anything to hold him with. When we tried to locate him for a second interview, he’d disappeared. Recently, when I viewed the scenes of your Mary Douglas slayings, the details—the face covered by the cloths, the clothing pulled down as if to hide the fact of the rape—I was reminded of that scene. We dug up that old interview and sent an agent out to check around his home town.”
“And you found him, just like that.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Gee, the FBI is swell.”
Miranda leaned into his face, a wicked grin on hers. “Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” she whispered. “I’m about to show you just how swell we really are.”
She turned back to the desk and picked up the photo. “This is the man I interviewed six years ago. Curt Gibbons, whom we now know as Curtis Alan Channing. Through some truly swell investigative work“—she glanced at Sullivan—”we’ve learned that as a young boy Curtis had the very unfortunate experience of watching his mother raped and murdered. Stabbed to death.”
She looked from one detective to the other, then asked, “Either of you want to guess how many times Momma had been stabbed?”
“I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess six,” Crosby said.
“Can’t put anything over on you, Crosby. Want to hear it all?”
He nodded. “Shoot.”
Miranda repeated the entire story as she’d heard it from Aidan Shields just hours earlier.
When she finished, the room was totally silent.
“Well, you could hear a pin drop in here right about now,” she noted with grim satisfaction. “Nothing to say, Detective Sullivan?”
“We already have a suspect in custody, and that”—Sullivan pointed to the sketch—“ain’t him. What do you have that says this guy has ever set foot in Lyndon?”
“That’s something we were hoping you could assist us in establishing.”
“Use the locals to do the dirty work?”
“Joe, that’s enough.” Crosby shot him a look.
Ignoring the rude remark, Anne Marie touched Crosby’s arm and asked, “What happened after the suspect was caught last night, Detective? Was the surveillance on the Mary Douglas homes terminated?”
Sullivan jumped in. “And why wouldn’t it be? Any fool could see that this guy—Mulholland—was lying. What’s the first thing anyone says when they’re picked up? ‘I didn’t do it, you got the wrong guy.’ ” Sullivan laughed darkly, then added, “But in Mulholland’s case, it was, ‘Oh, some guy I met in a bar paid me to break into this house. I wasn’t going to hurt her, I was just supposed to scare her.’ And her name just happened to be Mary Douglas? Right, pal. We got our man, Agent Cahill. If you think otherwise, you can track this guy—this Channing—all by yourself.”
“Joe, I think you have other cases that need your attention,” Crosby told him. “Go work on them.”
“Gladly.” He rose to leave the cubicle. “You’re wasting your time, Evan. She”—he pointed at Miranda—“obviously has her own agenda here. You know the Feds can’t stand not being the ones to make the bust. . . .”
“Joe.” Crosby’s face grew dark.
“Aw, they’re all yours,” he muttered as he walked away.
“Where did the Lyndon PD find him?” Anne Marie shook her head as Joe Sullivan’s footsteps faded down the hall. “He’s like a stereotype of every narrow-minded small-town cop I ever met. I honestly thought they stopped making them like that years ago.”
“Hey, he’s a good cop, but you just pushed a button.” Detective Crosby shrugged. “Sorry about that.”
“Accepted.” Miranda dismissed the departed detective.
“If this guy Channing is a serial killer . . .” Crosby swung slowly, side to side, in his beat-up chair, weighing what he knew against what he suspected. “What connects him to our victims? To Mara Douglas? To Giordano? I never heard of a serial killer who took contracts.”
“I don’t know how he became involved,” Annie admitted. “But I think the killings are right on target—in terms of escalation—with where Channing would be if he’d started out with strangulations. He watched the rape and murder of his mother. Now, he may have hated his mother for the terrible things she did to him—but she was still his mother. The police say that when they found him in the closet, he was covered with her blood. He’d been alone in the house with her body. According to the police report, the killer admitted raping her, admitted stabbing her to death, but he denied that he pulled her skirt down, denied having covered her face.”
“You’re thinking the boy came out of the closet and did that.” Crosby nodded slowly. “Covered her up . . .”
“I do. And years later, he’s repeating that scene over and over and over.”
“Why?”
“One, I think because the image was so strong in his head, and two, because I think he wished he’d done it himself, to end the abuse. It’s no accident that all Channing’s victims had six stab wounds in the exact same locations. I’m positive that when we get our hands on a sketch or a photo of his mother’s body, we’ll find that the placement of the stab wounds match up with those found on your vics. I think he watched the whole thing from the closet, watched the knife go up and down. He saw the wounds. He remembered exactly where they were.”
“But you said his early victims were strangled,” the detective reminded her.
“He wasn’t ready then to deal with everything as he remembered it. He repeated the rapes because that gave him control, power, allowed him to humiliate his victims, who were unfortunate substitutes for his mother.”
“Then why cover her face when it’s over? Why pull her clothes together, if intimidation was a goal?” Crosby asked. “Wouldn’t the exposure be humiliating?”
“Yes, but she was still his mother. He doesn’t want anyone else to see her exposed like that,” Annie said.
“And maybe he doesn’t want her watching him while he’s doing his thing,” Miranda suggested.
“That’s part of it, too,” Annie agreed. “I think he’s had this need to re-create his mother’s death, but it’s been a fantasy for years. It’s taken him a while to build up to the real deal. As he grew stronger, more comfortable acting out the scenario, he was able to recreate the stabbings. But I think it took him years to get to that point.”
“So let’s assume that Channing was hired by Giordano to dispose of several people in his life who had been major sources of irri
tation,” Crosby thought aloud. “But the actual murders—”
“Were Channing’s own fantasies.” Annie nodded. “I’d bet a bundle that Giordano had no idea of what he was getting.”
Miranda sat on the edge of her chair. “So, what we need from the Lyndon PD is, first and foremost, assistance in finding this man, this Curtis Alan Channing.”
“Where is your suspect now?” Annie asked.
“He’s meeting with his public defender.”
“Here? In the building?”
“Yes. I see where you’re going. And I agree. Let’s start with the suspect we have, see if Mulholland recognizes this man.” Crosby picked up the sketch. “We’ll give him a set of different composites. If he identifies your Channing as the man he met in the bar last night . . . well, we’ll take it from there. Agent Cahill, Dr. McCall, this way, please.”
Anne Marie and Miranda followed Detective Crosby to the room where a weeping Tom Mulholland was meeting with his attorney. From behind the glass, the women watched as Crosby laid the sketch of Curtis Channing, along with four or five sketches of other faces, on the table in front of the suspect.
“He knows,” Miranda murmured. “Crosby knows that Mulholland isn’t the killer. He barely even argued with us. . . .”
“Watch.” Annie pointed at the glass. “Watch Mulholland’s face.”
“That’s him,” Mulholland exclaimed without hesitation and before Crosby could say a word. He pounded a fist on Curtis Alan Channing’s face. “That’s Calvin. He looked a little different, a little older, and his hair was different, shorter, like a crew cut, and he had these dark glasses on, but that’s him, that son of a bitch. He set me up for this. He set me up.”
Crosby glanced at the glass wall and smiled. Still without having said a word, he picked up the sketches and left the room.
“Convinced, Detective?” Miranda asked.
“Mulholland went right to the sketch of Channing—did not hesitate, did not deliberate, as I’m sure you saw. I think we need to meet with our chief of police and the head of our county CID. We may want to get an artist in to speak with Mulholland, get a more current sketch.”
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