Fifteen Times a Killer

by Alan McDermott

  FIFTEEN TIMES A KILLER

  ALAN MCDERMOTT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, used with permission or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2021 Alan McDermott

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank Jeffrey Heinze, CYD, FBI, for his invaluable input during the creation of this story. Jeffrey works for the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs and was good enough to answer my many questions, enabling me to give an accurate representation of the Bureau’s procedures.

  I also want to extend my gratitude to Scott Bury for editing this piece, and to Kath Middleton, Kath Brink, Jacqueline Beard and Chris Hillier for helping to polish it to a high standard.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chapter 1

  After selecting the number from her list of contacts, Corrina Stone’s finger paused over the Call button.

  Are you sure you wanna do this?

  She wasn’t. Reigniting the flame that had once burned so fiercely could only end badly. The only alternative, however, was to rely on someone she didn’t know, and therefore couldn’t trust.

  Corrina hit the button and waited for the call to connect. The sound of the answering voice tugged at a string in her chest.

  “Loney.”

  Corrina’s words caught in her throat. She swallowed and tried to get some moisture into her now-dry mouth.

  “It’s been a long time,” she eventually said.

  Way to keep it professional, dumbass!

  “Hey, stranger. How ya doing?” McCrae Loney replied.

  “I’m good,” Corrina lied. “We just got word of a body up by Tuna Canyon Road and I’m gonna check it out. Wanna ride along?”

  “Sure,” McCrae said. “Maybe afterwards we can split a pizza, just like the old days.”

  As she cradled the phone to her ear, Corrina Stone smiled at the thought. She would like nothing more than to catch up with her old buddy from homicide, but she was afraid of where it might lead. He was married, happily so, and Corrina didn't want to be the one to change that. Besides, her babysitter was being paid by the hour, and this was going to make her late as it was.

  “I’ll have to take a rain check on the food, but I’ll bring coffee.”

  “I guess that’ll have to do,” McCrae said.

  Corrina thought she detected a hint of disappointment in his voice. Or perhaps that’s what she was hoping to hear. She missed McCrae, there was no denying it, but their relationship had been purely platonic. They had both been married at the time. It was only after she had transferred out of the LAPD and into the Bureau that her marital status had changed.

  But not McCrae Loney’s, she reminded herself.

  “Great. See you at Tuna Canyon trailhead in an hour.”

  Corrina stopped at the coffee shop to buy the caffeine hits. While they were being prepared, she called her babysitter to explain that she’d be late again that evening. Ideally, she’d be heading home within the hour, but the letter that had been delivered to her at the office blew away those plans.

  The FBI received many tip-offs each and every day, and while some were clearly hoaxes, each had to be acted upon. If just one rejected call turned out to be genuine, careers would end.

  What had piqued her interest was the fact that it was addressed to her personally at the office on Wilshire Boulevard, not to the FBI in general.

  It was one of the strangest tips she’d ever received: ///gentle.solo.join.

  Just three unrelated words, plus a warning that there were more victims to come.

  The significance hadn’t been obvious, so she’d entered the words into a search engine. That had been a waste of time, so she showed the note to a colleague who liked to do puzzles during his lunch hour. He recognized the format of the words right away, telling Corrina to download What3Words. That had given her a location in the woods just south of Tuna Canyon Road. It was a one-way road network, so she had to drive the long way around, toward Topanga.

  Sunset turned the autumn sky the color of blood as she took a right onto Fernwood Pacific Drive. Fitting, she thought.

  When she reached the trail head fifteen minutes later, McCrae was resting his butt on the hood of his car. He straightened when Corrina climbed out of her Ford.

  “Two years and you haven’t changed a bit,” McCrae said with a smile as he took the coffee from her hand.

  “Neither have you.”

  In fact, it was like seeing him again after a weekend off. Same suit that hugged the contours of his body, the same James Dean haircut, the same aftershave, subtle but heady…It wasn’t that McCrae was particularly handsome, but he’d drop everything to help a friend. Whenever Corrina needed cheering up, he’d been there for her.

  She could have used some of that recently.

  “How’s Jean?” she asked.

  “Aye, she’s fine. Still lecturing.”

  McCrae’s Scottish accent was barely noticeable, but he sometimes dropped an incongruous word or phrase into his conversations. His parents hailed from Glasgow, but had moved to California when he was a baby—or bairn, as he sometimes liked to say.

  “Lecturing? I thought she was a nurse?”

  “Yeah, and she lectures me every day on the dangers of sugar and saturated fat.”

  Corrina chuckled, but she knew McCrae’s wife didn’t need to cajole him into taking care of himself. He’d played football at school and college, and the worn equipment in his home gym suggested he used it regularly.

  As did his body, which she found herself staring at.

  “So, what did you drag me out here for?” McCrae asked, breaking the awkward silence.

  Corrina shook herself back to the moment and took out her phone. “This app is called What3Words,” she said. “I got a letter, addressed to me at the office, with the phrase Gentle.solo.join. I typed it in, and it gave me a location near here. The letter also said this was the first of many.”

  “And you think it’s real?”

  “No, but we have to check out every lead.”

  She went to the trunk of her car and took out a pair of disposable gloves, shoe coverings and a flashlight, then walked back over to her former partner.

  “Come on, it’s this way.”

  Corrina led the way down a dirt path. They climbed over a barrier an
d followed her flashlight beam for a couple of hundred yards until Corrina’s phone told her to take a left, into the trees.

  Corrina wondered if the killer had chosen to bury the body here for dramatic effect. Shadows danced as she played her light across the ground, giving her the feeling that something was hovering just outside her field of vision. A chill went through her as a nocturnal creature cried out, and she almost jumped when her jacket snagged on a bush.

  Get your shit together!

  They reached the spot a few minutes later. The marker on the app told her she was in the right location, and she played her flashlight along the ground as she walked, careful where to put her feet in case she obliterated any footprints that might belong to the killer.

  The light settled on two sticks that had been laid one on top of the other, forming a cross. What made them stand out was the pale color, the bark stripped away. The ground underneath them looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years.

  “X marks the spot?” McCrae raised an eyebrow. “A little cliché, don’t you think?”

  “What did you expect? A neon sign?”

  “A body would have been nice. Well, not nice, but you know what I mean.” He thrust his hands in his pockets. “Probably just kids messing with you.”

  Corrina was scanning the nearby area with the flashlight. “Probably,” she admitted. The beam fell on a bush, and something caught her eye. Something man-made.

  “Over here.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” There was a folded plastic stationery pouch lodged in the foliage, with what looked like a few sheets of letter-size paper inside. She used a pen to straighten the pouch. On the visible page was one line of text.

  Fifteen Times a Killer

  “Confession letter, maybe?”

  “We can only hope,” Corrina said. Much as she wanted to take out the pages and read them, there was a slim chance that the perp had left DNA samples or fingerprints on the paper. If there even was a body. It could be an elaborate hoax, but something inside her said this was the real deal. Better to let the lab guys work it up first. “Call in the field investigation unit.”

  “I’m on it.”

  McCrae had never been one to second-guess her, and she was glad that they were on the same page this time, too.

  While he made the call, Corrina looked around for further clues, but the area was clean. No footprints, no cigarette butts, nothing to suggest a killer had been there recently. Someone clearly had, though. The pouch didn’t look like it had been exposed to the elements for very long.

  She took out her phone and called her boss, Dean Travis. She explained what she had found and suggested setting up a task force. With few exceptions, serial killers usually operated all over the country, rather than staying in the same place. Which required a federal response. While local law enforcement processed the crime scenes, Corrina would oversee the entire operation.

  Travis gave her the go-ahead, cautioning that he would only kick things into motion once it was confirmed that they had a death to investigate.

  “I’ll head back to the car and guide the FIU in when they get here,” McCrae said, and Corrina nodded her thanks.

  When the sound of his footsteps faded, she felt more alone than she’d ever known. The woods seemed to constrict, compressing her in darkness. She tried to shake off the feeling, telling herself that it was no different than the many times she’d camped out with her father when she was a child. She’d loved those family trips, escaping the bustle of the city for the tranquility of the wilderness. Only, back then, she’d never envisaged demons lurking in the shadows.

  Perhaps that was because, as a young girl, she knew nothing of the monsters that roamed the planet. Not the gruesome figures that sprang from the minds of filmmakers, but real people who were capable of unimaginable cruelty.

  She felt as if she was in the presence of one right now.

  Twenty tense minutes passed before she heard McCrae return. With him was Alistair Birch, the FIU team leader, a man she’d worked alongside several times.

  “Corrina! Good to see you again. How’s life on Wilshire?”

  Birch was in his sixties, with a bald, liver-spotted head, though he had the energy and physique of a much younger man. He was a complete professional, never overlooking the tiniest detail. She couldn’t have hoped for a better person to process her crime scene.

  If it was indeed a crime scene.

  So far all she had was a few sheets of paper stuck in a bush and a couple of sticks on the ground. She suddenly felt foolish for asking Birch to interrupt his busy schedule.

  “You know. Has its upsides. It’s good to see you, too, Alistair. Sorry to drag you all this way on what might be nothing.”

  She shone her flashlight on the ground to highlight the makeshift grave marker.

  “Nonsense. You did the right thing.” Birch started directing his team to set up their equipment. One was a photographer, another an evidence collector. The fourth member of the team looked new, and judging by her clipboard, she would be documenting the evidence. A fifth was carrying the lighting equipment to illuminate the scene.

  “McCrae explained the situation over the phone,” Birch continued. “If you’d started digging to confirm the presence of a body, I’d have been very unhappy.”

  Corrina had witnessed what he called unhappy before. She’d have described it as a volcanic eruption. The young cop who’d incurred his wrath by touching a vital piece of evidence without wearing gloves had left the force soon after.

  “How long before you can confirm anything?” she asked.

  “Not long. We brought our new toy.” He pointed to a machine that looked like a cross between a child’s wagon and a lawnmower. “It’s ground-penetrating radar. If there’s a body and it was wrapped before burial, we should get a good hit.”

  “And if not?”

  Birch smiled. “Then we dig.”

  Corrina stood back while he set up the wheeled contraption over the marked area. He slowly played it back and forth, his eyes concentrating on the screen mounted on the handlebar.

  “We’ve definitely got something,” Birch said after a few minutes, his eyes fixed on the monitor.

  “Human?”

  “Could be. We won’t know until we get down there.”

  Birch passed the GPR to one of his colleagues and told him to erect the tent that would protect the scene from the elements. He then mapped out the area of interest by driving small pegs into the ground, using string to connect them and form a rectangle roughly the size of a dinner table.

  “This is going to take some time,” he warned Corrina. “If you need to be somewhere, I won’t keep you.”

  It would have been nice to head home and relieve the babysitter, but she was curious about the contents of the plastic pouch. She shone her flashlight on it. “I was hoping to learn a little more about this. You know, before I head home.”

  Birch stood and walked over to the bush, examined the pouch from a few angles, then called over the young woman with the clipboard. He gave her a serial number and wrote the same details on an evidence bag, then took the plastic folder from the bush, holding a corner between his gloved thumb and forefinger. He sealed it in the bag, checked that the technician had written the correct details, then handed it to Corrina.

  “If you wanna take that to the lab, I’ll call Trey and tell him you’re coming.”

  Corrina thanked him, then went to find McCrae.

  “I’m heading back to deliver this,” she told him, holding up the bag. “Alistair said he’s found something, but he won’t be sure for some time. You mind hanging around?”

  “Sure. I’ll get a few guys going house-to-house looking for CCTV. Whoever left that for us must have done it recently, and unless he lives close by my guess is, he drove here.”

  “Agreed,” Corrina said. “It must have been left in the last forty-eight hours, because we had rain two nights ago and there’s no sign of water d
amage.”

  On the drive to the lab, her mind was in overdrive, with so many questions demanding answers. Finding the grave after such a long time must have been hard for the killer.

  She remembered the treks she took with her father when she was a teenager. They would go into the woods up by Big Bear Lake every summer and camp out for a few days, always in the same place. Yet years later, trying to replicate those childhood memories with her husband and son, she’d been unable to find the campsite. The image of the giant spruce that blocked their view of the water, the one with the big knot that resembled an owl’s face, had been clear in her mind, but she’d never found it again. Had the killer marked the grave somehow, or written down the co-ordinates? Or did he—or she—visit the spot regularly? That would indicate someone active, therefore fit and energetic, not a couch potato.

  The killer’s profile would become clearer as time went on, especially if there were more victims.

  The document on the seat next to her suggested there would be plenty.

  Chapter 2

  Trey Cordell, a short man in his forties, was expecting her. His bald head and spectacles gave him the look of a stereotypical scientist, and Corrina wondered if some people were just born into certain professions.

  She, herself, felt self-conscious sometimes. She knew she didn’t fit the profile of an FBI agent. At six-two, she was taller than almost every other woman on the Bureau, and most of the men, too. Her trim figure and platinum-blonde hair cut in a side parting gave her the look of an Olympic athlete rather than a member of front-line law enforcement.

  Trey pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled awkwardly as he took the evidence bag. Corrina suspected that, like many men, he had a crush on her. It was something she’d become accustomed to, but the wedding ring on her finger usually kept them at bay. There were exceptions, but she’d learned over the years to deal with them tactfully but firmly. Mentioning that she had a seven-year-old son was the most effective way to end their interest.

  “Alistair Birch said you’d get on this right away,” Corrina said. “Mind if I hang around while you work?”

  “Not at all.” Trey beamed as he put on skin-tight gloves. He noted the serial number on the evidence bag and copied it to a clipboard, then cut the bag open. He carefully removed the plastic pouch and placed it underneath a mounted camera and took the first shot before writing the time on his sheet. He then removed the pages and took photos of each one in turn.