Twisted

by Laura K. Curtis

  “Maybe if you told me where the paper came from, I could come up with a reason?”

  “It was in the woods, not too far from this woman’s body.” Ethan tapped the picture of the blonde girl’s face. They had no name yet, but Scott Allenby and Cal Wilkes were working on an ID back at the station.

  “From the body?” Jed’s hands shifted on his desk—he was clearly unwilling to touch either the girl’s picture or the list—and finally grasped a letter opener. He turned it over and over, running his finger along the edge. Ethan would bet that sweat had begun to bead beneath his carefully styled hair.

  “I have to ask you, Mr. Martin. Where were you last night?”

  And just like that, as if a puppeteer had put down his crossbar, Jed Martin leaned back into his chair and relaxed. “Saturday night we’re open until nine, so I was here. After that, I went to play poker with Eric Allenby, Chuck Hemming, and Bob Redmond. We played until maybe one in the morning. Then I went home.”

  “Don’t suppose anyone can verify what time you got home?”

  “I don’t know. I have an alarm system. If the company keeps track of what time things are activated and deactivated, that would show it, but otherwise, no. I live alone.”

  O’Reilly had estimated the time of death between one and three in the morning. He’d have a more precise estimate after the autopsy. Martin could have done it. Ethan made a note to check into the alarm situation, but he doubted they’d have adequate records to conclusively prove or disprove the man’s guilt.

  “So, what do you think?” He asked Keith when they’d finished at the dealership and were headed back to Dobbs Hollow.

  “He’s hiding something, but I can’t say I peg him as the killer. He honestly didn’t seem to recognize the woman, but he’d seen the list of chores before.”

  Unfortunately, Ethan agreed. He’d have loved to solve his first murder in Dobbs Hollow in mere hours. Then he might feel as if he’d earned the citizens’ trust. He hadn’t had a clue what he was signing on for when he took the job, but it turned out that being Dobbs Hollow’s chief mainly meant breaking up meth deals, quelling meth-or-alcohol-fueled domestic disputes, or investigating the occasional burglary. Usually, that turned out to be meth-related, too.

  Murder, however, was a different situation entirely. And as much as he was glad to be sharpening long-unused skills, he was sorry for the situation that brought them to the fore.

  Scott Allenby called when they were on their way back from Jed Martin’s with an ID on the dead girl.

  “Her roommate called her in as missing,” he explained. “Her name’s Renee Josephs. Twenty-one. From Corsicana.”

  “Damn.” Ethan thought for a moment. “They’re what, half an hour from here? Forty minutes? You know anyone in the department there we can liaise with?”

  “Yeah,” said Scott. “Royce Beaton and I went through the academy together. I’ll give him a call.”

  “Do that. I’ll drop Cal at the station and head down there so we can break it to the parents.”

  Which was why, instead of having dinner with Lucy and Tim, at eight o’clock Ethan found himself in Corsicana, giving Mr. and Mrs. Josephs the news that their daughter wouldn’t be coming home.

  “It’s not possible,” Mrs. Josephs kept saying, though Ethan had shown her a carefully edited photograph that only revealed the girl’s face. “It can’t be.” She shook her head and refused to meet his gaze, as if seeing the truth there would destroy any protection she could pull around her. Her husband wrapped an arm around her, but they both swayed, and it wasn’t entirely clear to Ethan who was supporting whom.

  “I’m very sorry, ma’am.” Denial was natural, but he had to get beyond it in case the woman had useful information.

  “Why don’t we go in the kitchen and get you some water?” Detective Beaton asked.

  Mrs. Josephs looked up at him, her head still shaking slightly, as if she would say no, then she finally acquiesced. He led her away, leaving Ethan alone with Renee’s father.

  “She’ll never get over this,” the man said. He’d aged twenty years in the few minutes since inviting Ethan in. “Renee’s our only child.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. But I need to ask you a few questions. Just a few.”

  “Of course.” Mr. Josephs sat heavily in a slightly ragged easy chair and gestured for Ethan to take a seat on the couch. Leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees, Ethan asked the first in the endless series of questions.

  “Did your daughter have any enemies?”

  “No. She was popular. People liked her.” Mr. Josephs wouldn’t look at him, either, but Ethan didn’t figure the man was hiding anything beyond a broken heart. God, he hated notifications.

  “Maybe an ex-boyfriend?”

  “No. She didn’t date.”

  “Are you sure? She was a very pretty girl.”

  “I’m as sure as a father can be. She always had a lot of friends who were boys, but she never talked about one more than another. We were glad. Maybe we shouldn’t have been. Maybe if she’d had a boyfriend, he would have been looking after her. . . .”

  “Mr. Josephs, you can’t think that way. Seriously. What happened, well, it happened. It wasn’t your fault or Renee’s fault, or anyone’s except the man who took her. You and your wife need to remember that.”

  “We did our best.” But the unsaid portion echoed silently through the living room—it wasn’t good enough.

  “You did. And her roommate says she loved you and knew you loved her.” Adele, the roommate, had said no such thing, but Ethan figured she would have, and it would give the Josephs a little peace to hear it.

  “She also told us Renee was a waitress at Wally’s Tavern.”

  “Yes. She’d just started, but she liked it. She said the people were friendly and they tipped well. I was worried because she got off so late, but she told me the bartender always walked the girls to their cars.”

  “Did she drink?”

  “A bit. Like any college kid. But we taught her never to drink and drive. We told her she could always call and we’d pick her up, no matter what.” The tears that had filled the man’s eyes finally escaped and began to track long trails down his cheeks. He didn’t seem to notice.

  And the question Ethan hated to ask. “What about drugs?”

  For three full breaths, Josephs didn’t answer. “She didn’t do drugs. I know you have to ask these things, but no. She wasn’t that kind of girl.”

  “Okay.” He’d ask around a bit more, but the girl hadn’t looked like an addict or a drunk. She’d been beautiful. He thought about the word scrawled in blood on her abdomen. Had she been a flirt who’d angered the wrong man?

  “She never mentioned anyone giving her a hard time, did she? Like maybe someone who was jealous of her popularity?”

  Josephs wrinkled his brow. “She never said anything to me or to her mother. But you should ask Adele.”

  “We’ll do that.”

  Ethan rose as Detective Beaton came out with Mrs. Josephs, who was still shaky. She held a glass of water in her hand. Ethan helped her to sit in his place. A quick glance at Detective Beaton let Ethan know he’d gotten everything he thought he could from the woman.

  “Let me give you my card,” Ethan said. “Anytime you want to call, you do it. If you remember something, or have a question, or even just feel the need to know what’s going on.”

  “I’ll give you mine, too,” said Beaton. “I’m right here in town, and I can come over any time.”

  “You won’t . . .forget about her, will you?” asked Mrs. Josephs in a small voice.

  “No, ma’am,” Ethan promised. “We won’t.”

  • • •

  ON HIS WAY back to Dobbs Hollow, Ethan stopped into Wally’s Tavern, where Renee had been working. No one had anything negative to say about her, though mos
t admitted they didn’t know her well. She’d started less than two weeks before and had kept to herself. Men came on to her, as they did to all the waitresses—the women wore short shorts and midriff-baring tops—but Renee had been good at blowing them off without hurting anyone’s feelings. She hadn’t talked about having a boyfriend, and they hadn’t seen her with anyone while she’d been working. As Mr. Josephs had said, the bartender, a bruiser named Orel, walked the waitresses out to their cars every night.

  Dead ends. Everywhere. And every one sent the tension in his body higher. He pulled the cruiser to a stop in front of Lucy’s house. Okay, so he could have called in his apology. But TJ had discussed Lucy’s night visitor with him, and the drive-by pulled the knot in his gut too tight to be ignored.

  She answered the door in the jersey he’d seen her in the previous morning, this time paired with black leggings, and the knot in his stomach became hotter and more urgent. Her hair was up in one of those things that always reminded him of bat wings with teeth. He remembered his ex-wife calling them hair claws. Lucy’s pink-nailed toes were bare, and for once her hands were empty.

  He exploded. “It’s ten-thirty at night, a girl’s been murdered, and you answer the door without any kind of protection? What the hell are you thinking?”

  “Relax. Tim picked up a wireless camera when he was out. It’s set behind the motion-sensor security light. We have monitors in the kitchen, the living room, and at the top of the stairs. I knew who you were before you rang the doorbell, and told Tim he could keep on instant messaging with his friends.”

  He closed his eyes, scrubbed his face with one hand, and let out a long breath. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. It’s been a bitch of a night. I really only stopped by to say I’m sorry for missing dinner.”

  “Did you eat anything?”

  He had to think about it. “Not unless you count a PowerBar on the way out to Corsicana.”

  “Then come in. One of our dinner guests didn’t show up, so I just so happen to have a leftover steak in the fridge. I’ll fix you a sandwich.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know.” She reached for his hand, tugged gently. The feel of her soft skin against his, the honeysuckle clean scent of her after the grimness of the day—they entranced him. He almost missed her words. “Come on into the kitchen. You can tell me about Corsicana while I throw the sandwich together. That’s where she was from?”

  Ethan had learned during his brief marriage to keep the details of his work to himself, so he was surprised to find himself going over everything—not merely the facts, but the feelings and hunches as well—while he ate.

  “There’s so much we don’t know. She drove to work every night, but her car isn’t in the lot and it’s not at her apartment. So, where the hell is it?”

  “You’re thinking wheel-poppers? Like the South Dakota guy?” Robert Leroy Anderson had attempted to use the devices to flatten his victims’ tires to make them vulnerable. Once it had worked. Twice it had not. “He moved the car so no one would know where he abducted her from?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe someone came along, realized the car had been abandoned, and stole it. Either way, it’s gone. Until it’s found, we won’t know if there’s anything in it or on it to point to the killer.”

  “I take it there aren’t any like crimes showing up in ViCAP?”

  “No, although . . .”

  “Although?”

  “This isn’t exactly dinner-table conversation.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we’re not exactly having dinner.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich, getting his thoughts in order as he chewed and swallowed. “As you guessed, I had Keith put in a ViCAP request. Three, actually, with different levels of specificity. What I got back . . . I can’t explain it. Things fall through the cracks. God knows, that’s the point of ViCAP. And the first search, the one where I input all the parameters—the posing, the strangulation, and knife ­work—it didn’t return anything.

  “But the fact is, this part of the state presents a couple of statistical anomalies. First, we have too many missing females. Couple of teenagers, but the rest are grown women. They could have left their families, walked away on their own, but none of them have turned up, and a couple of them left kids behind. One, Beverly Jackson, lived right here in Dobbs Hollow and has been gone long enough to be declared legally dead. Her husband remarried last year.

  “And then, there is a rape pattern that appears in several cases from Adams and surrounding counties. But the women who were sexually assaulted weren’t killed.” He pushed the remains of his sandwich away, appetite gone.

  “It’s possible, of course, that those two sets of statistics have nothing to do with each other. Women disappear. Women get assaulted. The two don’t have to be related.”

  “Or the missing women might have been killed by the same guy who raped the others.”

  “The same guy or guys. I haven’t seen the reports themselves yet, just the numbers. Only a few of them made ViCAP as being pattern.”

  “What were the elements that made the pattern?”

  “First, abduction from a public place by a man or men. In three of the seven cases, the victims claim there might have been more than one man, and in all those instances the women were penetrated anally as well.

  “Second, the victims were blindfolded. Duct tape was used to keep the blindfold on for the whole time they were held. That amounted to several hours at the minimum, more than a day at the max. Between the rapes, the women were dosed with a drug that left their systems fast and left them extremely confused. Most of them don’t remember the abduction itself at all. The one who did said a smelly rag had been put over her mouth. Probably chloroform.

  “In each case, the man or men also beat the woman, and muttered the whole time, accusing her of being a whore.

  “Finally, all the pattern rapes took place outside, and the women were left bound, gagged and naked by the side of a highway.”

  Lucy nodded slowly, and Ethan examined her face, trying to get a handle on her thoughts. But it was oddly blank. “And how long has this been going on?”

  “The earliest one of the ViCAP cases was eight years ago. It’s been one a year ever since. Not on a regular enough basis to consider it predictable—not full moons, or the second weekend of September or anything—but pretty much one a year.”

  “And the others?”

  “We have ten years of data on hand without resorting to paper files. The numbers of missing women didn’t go up until more recently. Three years back.” He watched her closely, waiting for her to shrug off the crimes as unconnected to her mother’s case, but she did not. Instead, her face still inscrutable, she finally met his eyes. Something dark and haunted lurked behind her carefully composed features, but he didn’t dare question her about it. Not yet.

  “The ViCAP victims . . . did they look like Renee Josephs?” She rubbed absently at a spot below her left shoulder and his eyes followed the motion, noticing against his better intentions the way the cloth of her shirt shifted over her breast.

  He swallowed. “All different. Two blondes, three brunettes, a redhead, and a Hispanic woman. He might not have known she was Hispanic, though. She had very light skin. Which would mean he had at least a single racial/ethnic profile, even if the women had different hair color. All of them were slim, though, and pretty. The missing women, too, for what it’s worth. He has good taste.” Lucy frowned, her eyebrows drawing together. Had he gone too far?

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  But she surprised him. “Renee wasn’t bruised.”

  “Not much. She had one large perimortem bruise on the side of her head, probably from being knocked unconscious.”

  “But he didn’t beat her.”

  “You have a very analytical mind. No, he didn’t.”

  “So chances
are, it’s not the same guy, though it’s hard to tell, given that he crosses ethnic boundaries, which is highly unusual. Even so, the precedents are pretty clear: the change of MO is too radical for Renee to be the victim of the rapist or rapists. Assuming the missing women were abducted, and not by the rapist, why would Renee have been left to be found instead of being hidden like the other women? It seems more likely that her case is unrelated to the others.” She yawned.

  “I think you’re right.” He stood, and she followed suit. “I also think I’ve kept you up too late.”

  “You’ve probably had less sleep than I have. Are you okay to drive home? I don’t even know where you live. Maybe I should make you a cup of coffee?”

  “I’m fine.” And then, because she didn’t seem any more anxious for him to leave than he was to go, and because he’d been thinking about it since the moment they’d met, he reached out and cupped her cheek in his right hand, running his thumb across her full lower lip.

  Lucy’s eyes widened, pupils dilating as her gaze met his. Her entire body vibrated.

  Shock? Arousal? Fear? Ethan was lousy at interpreting women’s body language, and Lucy, recklessly bold in some areas, desperately shy in others, was more difficult to read than most. So he moved slowly, cautiously, allowing her plenty of time to pull away as he slid his hand to the back of her head and urged her closer.

  He’d intended the kiss to be slow, too, but when her lips parted beneath his own, his restraint shattered. His left arm locked around her waist, pulling her tight against him. He devoured her, sucking her lower lip between his teeth in a nip that caused her to whimper and writhe against him. All he could think about was getting her naked and listening to those little cries as he licked and sucked and nibbled his way down her body. God, they were going to be good together. Better than good.

  He palmed her breast through the jersey and she froze, a reaction even he could interpret. Lost in his own fantasies, he’d pushed her too hard, too fast. He loosened his grip, easing back slightly. She tried to wriggle completely free, but he kept her near. If he allowed her to step away, it would create a rift he’d never bridge.