Twisted

by Laura K. Curtis

  “Can’t blame a guy for trying. You and the sheriff seemed to be getting along better than I’d have expected.”

  Lucy snorted. “It’s an act, believe me. He probably hopes to keep track of what I find out.”

  “You think he killed your mother?”

  “No. I went to school with him and Drew Dobbs. I admit I hate them both, but I know where they were that day.”

  “So why would he care about your investigation?”

  “I don’t know. He probably sees his daddy’s lack of action as a stain on the family’s nonexistent honor. Or he’s covering for someone.”

  “He was what, eighteen? Awfully young to turn a blind eye to murder.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. He was already a thug and a criminal himself, even if he didn’t kill anyone.”

  “A criminal?”

  Dammit, she should have known Ethan wouldn’t miss that. She hadn’t intended to let it slip out, but his easy manner invited confidences.

  “Long story,” she said, laughing it off with difficulty. “I didn’t realize the two of you were so close.”

  “Nor did I. But Pike’s evidently concerned about Renee Josephs. She was killed in Dobbs Hollow proper, but the lake’s customarily not overseen by the DHPD. Because more of it falls under county supervision, and because she wasn’t a Hollow resident, he wants the sheriff’s department kept up to date on our progress.”

  “That doesn’t seem odd to you?”

  “Lots of things seem odd to me down here. As TJ reminded me just the other day, despite being DHPD’s chief of police, I’m not really a country boy. I’m accustomed to an urban police force with a whole different MO. Maybe it’s completely normal for the county to be kept in the loop on town investigations. Especially investigations of this magnitude.

  “But, of course, if the sheriff’s department is headed by a criminal, that changes things.” He paused, waiting.

  Tim chose that moment to appear, and Lucy hid a sigh of relief as she waved him over. He slid in next to Ethan, boxing the other man into the booth. Unable to call him on the transparent ploy, she gritted her teeth and smiled sweetly.

  “Did you get in touch with the boys and warn them to tidy the place up before we got there?”

  “I tried, but the phone was out of order because they burned the house down.”

  Lucy had to laugh. “Fine. I worry too much. Did you talk to them?”

  “Yeah. I told them I thought we’d be there around noon.”

  “You’re going home?” Ethan’s neutral tone revealed nothing of his feelings. Would he care if she left? Or would he be relieved?

  “I’m dropping Tim in Dallas. I’m going on to Palo Pinto.”

  “How long will you be gone?” Still that distance. Was he punishing her for refusing to tell him about her history with Billy? She had the childish urge to kick him under the table, hard, just to get a reaction. She restrained it by reminding herself that she didn’t trust him, that he’d been hired by Mayor Dobbs, and that he had admitted to having secrets of his own.

  “Depends on what I find out. I’m booked into a motel for tomorrow night, but I can extend it if I need to.”

  The young waitress stopped by to take their orders, and Ethan teased her gently. The girl’s crush practically screamed in her blush. Lucy could sympathize. Her mind drifted back to the previous night, and it took an act of will to subdue the heat in her own skin. She dropped her hands into her lap, twisting her fingers together.

  “Any progress in your investigation?” she asked in order to distract herself.

  “Not yet.”

  “Maxie’s here.” Tim jumped up. “I’m going to go ask her about that job.” With a little bob of the head in Ethan’s direction, he made his escape.

  “He doesn’t much care for your work, does he?”

  “He doesn’t understand it. He can’t see what compels me to tell depressing stories, much less why people read them.” She took a deep breath. She rarely tried to explain what compelled her to tell the stories she told, but it was something she could give Ethan, even if he never grasped how unusual it made him. “Here’s the thing: the newspapers, the television shows, they’re all about the killer. Take Craig Paxton. His twisted psyche was analyzed over and over. There were dozens of explanations of how and why he rationalized his bloodlust by pretending to believe those poor girls’ fathers needed to be punished.”

  “You think it was an act?”

  “I don’t care whether it was an act, which is exactly my point. All that time and energy, all that ink and air devoted to a man whose every act was destructive. It’s criminal in and of itself. He doesn’t deserve it. How do you think the friends and families of his victims felt when, every time they opened a paper or flipped a channel, they were confronted by another talking head spouting off about him? He killed those girls, but the media machine erased them.”

  “So you fix it.”

  “I can’t fix it. All I can do is create a tiny bit of balance, a little resistance.”

  “Is that what you’re doing for your mother?”

  “You don’t think she deserves it?” Her muscles clenched, but Ethan merely shook his head in patient resignation at her defensiveness.

  “That’s not what I said. But looking for her killer is fundamentally different from the work you’ve done before.”

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. “It is and it isn’t. I can’t tell her story without knowing the end, especially if she was more than merely a randomly chosen, convenient target for a killer.”

  “Because if the murder was planned, something in her life triggered it.”

  “Exactly.” She looked up at him, hoping the inquisition had reached its end.

  “What makes you believe the killing wasn’t random?”

  The throbbing behind her eyes increased. He kept pushing for more than she wanted to reveal. Guilt swamped her, tried to suck her under. But she couldn’t admit the part her own actions might have played. Not here. Not now. She shoved the thoughts away.

  “He killed her at home.” She might have left it at that if Ethan had let her, but he didn’t, simply waited for her to continue. “She never brought men home. A couple of nights a week she’d go out, and we wouldn’t see her until the next day. Occasionally, she’d go out and not come back for two days. But that wasn’t often. In any case, she never, never brought anyone into our house. She was careful with us, if not with herself.” She could feel the familiar ball of pain, anger, and frustration clogging her throat and coughed to clear it.

  “He stabbed her to death—a personal act in its own right—in her home in the middle of the afternoon while her kids were out. Nothing in that says random to me.”

  “No, it doesn’t. So, tomorrow you head for Palo Pinto. Any idea what you might find there?”

  “Maybe nothing. But Cecile grew up there. The town is so small, it’s still unincorporated—fewer than a thousand people live there. Someone has to remember her.”

  “Be careful.” He reached out and ran a long finger across the back of her hand where it lay on the table. She felt the heat of it right through her body and withdrew her hands to twist them together in her lap. “Call if you run into trouble.”

  “You have a murder to investigate.”

  “I’m not convinced my case isn’t tied to yours. The timing, the victim’s physical appearance, the wounds . . . all of it reeks of careful planning, not coincidence.”

  “They look alike, I’ll give you that. But knives are common around here, and there are so many differences: Renee was outside, far from home; she was younger than Cecile, with no children; she died of strangulation, not multiple stab wounds.

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, unless someone comes back with more bricks or paint bombs while I’m gone.”

  “Did it occur to you to take
the other night as a warning? To consider that maybe whoever did it hoped you’d take off before he had to go further?”

  “Of course it occurred to me.”

  “And Renee Josephs? Did it occur to you that she might be another warning?”

  “If he wanted to hurt me, he could have come after me. He didn’t need to go for a substitute first.” She tossed the words out, but gauged his reaction carefully. Loosen up, Lucy. Why do you always have to test people?

  “You’ve spent enough time around both cops and killers to know that’s not true. Renee Josephs didn’t come to town brandishing permits for two pistols and a rifle. She didn’t carry Mace, and she hadn’t had extensive self-defense training, which I’d wager you have.”

  “You’d be right. I don’t take chances.”

  He ran his hand through his hair, leaving long spikes standing up. The light glinted off a few silver strands she hadn’t noticed before. “Yeah, you do, but that’s not the point. This guy may have used Renee’s murder as a practice run because he found you too intimidating for a first victim. Or maybe he meant her as a warning. Or maybe even just as a diversion. Dobbs Hollow’s police department is small. If we’re all tied up investigating yesterday’s murder, we won’t have time to keep an eye on you or dig into a case seventeen years cold.”

  Chapter Seven

  My mother hated religion, called it the ultimate hypocrisy of men, but she took us to church every Sunday. “Because they don’t want us there,” she said when I asked her why we had to go. For years, that made no sense to me.

  from A Bad Day to Die by Lucy Sadler Caldwell [DRAFT]

  ETHAN RUBBED ABSENTLY at his throbbing knee. He’d learned the language of his stitched and pinned physiology over time; this particular ache signified nothing more serious than a shift in the weather. Still, he could have done without the reminder of his own weakness. For the first time in years, he needed to be strong.

  He had kept Keith and TJ on the ViCAP crimes, and the results lay stacked and centered on his desk, each file printed and given its own folder, though the cases were for the most part outside his jurisdiction. What would Billy Pike think of the folders should he decide once again to make free with Ethan’s office?

  Seven files. Seven women taken from places they felt safe—one even from a church parking lot—repeatedly brutalized, and then discarded. Every report mentioned hazy memories, which meant drugs, and one of the victims had a Taser burn among her many wounds. Unlike Renee Josephs, these women had lived, though he suspected they might not have considered that a favor. Had their abductor lived nearby? Did he get a charge out of watching them attempt to put their lives back together?

  Could he be a doctor? It would provide him easy access to drugs. Ethan pulled a pad over and made a note. The new hospital was five years old; where had rape victims gone for help before that? Had they all visited the same clinic or been part of the same recovery group?

  And if he wasn’t a doctor, who else would see rape victims? Counselors, nurses, cops . . . he needed to get hold of the names of everyone who’d come into contact with the women after their rapes.

  He pulled the folders on the two cases that had fallen, at least partially, under the jurisdiction of the Adams County Sheriff’s Department. The files were thick. Witness statements, interviews with friends and family, research into every aspect of the women’s lives.

  He couldn’t help comparing the mass of paperwork, the heft of the investigations, to the barrenness of Cecile Sadler’s file. Pike and his predecessor, Emmet Tucker, had done everything possible before letting the two rape cases go cold.

  He opened the folder for the most recent case and lifted a printout of a photograph of a twenty­-eight-year-old mother of two. Under the swelling and bruising, she had a kind of cheerleader’s prettiness, with a pert nose and high cheekbones. How much of that prettiness remained now, two years after her abduction from the parking lot of her local supermarket?

  He’d just started delving into the investigative details when a tap sounded at the door.

  “Come.”

  TJ entered, more papers in hand. “ME’s findings,” she explained, handing them over. “Keith watched. I didn’t.” Between them, Ethan trusted Keith Arlen and Bob O’Reilly to uncover any secrets the body might have. He’d been to plenty of autopsies, but whatever vessel had cracked inside him at the sight of that long fall of blonde hair forming a bloody conduit into the lake had prevented him from attending this one. Renee didn’t resemble Lucy in any real way, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to witness the Y incision, the removal of her skullcap, the many indignities both large and small that proved the woman she had once been was no more.

  Lucy wouldn’t thank him for his concern, and he didn’t understand it himself. They’d shared a couple of meals and a single, scorching kiss. Nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things. He’d spent a hell of a lot more time with other women and felt no connection to them whatsoever. Aware of TJ’s curious stare, he picked up the toxicology report.

  O’Reilly had pushed the lab hard. Or maybe things move faster out in the sticks, where the lab’s not overburdened with hundreds of potential homicides. In addition to being strangled with the type of rope available in any hardware store, Renee Josephs had been drugged, and heavily, with GHB. Her murderer, however, had left no trace of himself on her body.

  “Thoughts?” Ethan gestured for TJ, still standing in front of his desk, to take a seat.

  “He’s done this, or something similar, before. Maybe a lot of times.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But the cases you had us pull, there are major differences. First off, their rapist didn’t kill them. Second, he used chloroform, not GHB.”

  “GHB is easier to get, which is why it’s so popular as a date-rape drug. And only one woman remembered the chloroform. Maybe he realized it was more tightly controlled and could lead us to him more easily. Then, too, we do have another group of possibles to account for.”

  “The missing women.” TJ frowned. “I’ve been filling out requests for information all morning, but the results will take time to come in. I printed what I could get through the system, and drove around to other stations to get more, but some of these files are old. They’ve been relegated so far back that even going to the station houses and departments involved won’t bring a result. We just have to wait.

  “Keith went to talk to Rick Jackson, Beverly’s husband. Guy gave up last year and had her declared dead so he could remarry. She had pretty good life insurance, so Charlie Hobart, who sat in that seat before you, took a long look at Rick when she went missing, but he didn’t find anything.”

  TJ dug into the omnipresent tote bag hanging from her shoulder and pulled out a few files. And then more. And more. Christ, what a lot of missing women. He’d never worked missing persons in Houston, but he bet the guys who did started every day with stacks of files. As depressing as Homicide had gotten at times, he wondered now whether looking for all those people erased from their homes, their lives, their families wouldn’t be worse.

  “I don’t have a lot on most of these cases yet. But Renee’s different from them, too. If the same guy took them, why’d he suddenly decide he wants his victims found?”

  “Can’t say.” But he told her his theory about the man wanting to watch his victims struggle with re-assimilation. “Let’s say he has to kill a couple of them—he’s left semen on them, or there’s some way to connect them to him—and once he’s done that, he realizes he enjoys the murder part as much or more than the rape. Murder’s a bigger short-term thrill, but it doesn’t have that long-term benefit of watching the women struggle with life after the attack.”

  “That seems like a stretch.”

  “Yeah,” Ethan nodded. “I just can’t figure this guy. These guys. If the missing women are part of the pattern, then at least sometimes when he kills, he hides t
he bodies. Why would he suddenly deviate from that?”

  “Lucy said he thought of Renee as a billboard. Maybe he went for the rape and murder for the big high, then left the victim to be found so he could terrorize a whole community and watch them dance to his tune?”

  Ethan sighed. “Christ. What a mess.”

  He spent the rest of the afternoon with the cold files, making notes, and adding to them as TJ brought in more information. Keith returned from his meeting with Rick Jackson sweaty and disheartened. The AC in the Crown Vic had broken, and Jackson had given him little to go on.

  “The man was certain right away that his wife had been abducted,” he told Ethan, “but he said no one would listen. They had a kid, a three-year-old girl, who’d been diagnosed with autism less than a year before. He pointed to the daughter as a reason Beverly would never leave home; others said it’s what drove her away.

  “Jackson also said his wife had filed a police report about a month before her disappearance. She was convinced someone was watching her, thought it had to do with her community activism on behalf of autistic kids.”

  “I saw that in her file.”

  “Well, Hobart told her there wasn’t much he could do about it. And, to be fair to the guy, there really wasn’t. He increased drive-by patrols around her house and sent an officer to one of the meetings with her, but no one seemed out of place or overly aggressive.”

  So they’d let it go. They would have had to. Could Beverly Jackson’s stalker have abducted her, or had the woman merely felt unsettled in her new role as community leader? That had been Hobart’s take. Sick kid, mother not used to being in the public eye . . . to him, they were the ingredients for a nervous breakdown.

  “Who else do we have available to actually talk to?” Ethan flipped through the stack.

  “I’ve got a buddy in the Freestone Sheriff’s Department,” Keith replied. “I can see if he will run out with me to visit the Merrimans or the Axelrods. He’s been with the department going on eight years, so he might even have worked the Axelrod case.”