by Blake Pierce
“Look familiar?” Kate asked.
“Oh my God,” DeMarco said. “This is him, isn’t it?”
Kate didn’t have to answer.
In the picture, little Jeremy Neely held something in his right hand. He clutched it tightly to his side in a tight fist.
A blanket. A blanket with a pattern that Kate and DeMarco had gotten to know quite well.
Ethridge joined them again. There was an annoyed look of panic in her eyes. “They’re going to call me back. That’s considered private information and even in a situation like this, it has to be cleared. If he was wrapped up in a special-needs domestic abuse or criminal case of any kind, that might be why his name wasn’t on the original list of kids—if, that is, he stayed with Ms. Knight, the Nashes, and the Langleys. I pushed hard, though. What would usually take a day or so to get, we should have in a few hours.”
“Are you kidding me?” DeMarco said.
“It’s a trade-off,” Ethridge said. “On the one hand, it’s amazing that the government is so dedicated to protecting such information. But on the other hand, they don’t bend their rules for much of anything.”
“You said you have a partial list, right?” Kate asked.
“Yes, it should be there in the files…”
Ethridge reached in over Kate’s shoulder and flipped through the pages. She stopped six pages in and pointed to a section near the bottom. “Right there. It shows where there was a transfer from the Langleys to a group home. But that’s all I have. That must have been his first foster home.”
The Langleys, Kate thought.
It was more than enough to directly tie the Nashes and Monica Knight.
“If we haven’t heard from DSS by the end of the day, I’ll get our director to give them a call,” Kate said. “As for now, we have a name and that’s more than enough. Let’s find out where Jeremy Neely lives and pay him a visit.”
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
He sat on a large rock, just along the tree line. He stared at the house intently, but patient. He supposed if someone stood on the back porch and stared out in his direction, there was a slight chance that he’d be seen. But he knew their routines well. The only time they ever went out onto the back porch was for their morning coffee and when they grilled something for dinner.
But he knew they were not grilling tonight. In fact, they weren’t even home. They’d left two hours ago. He’d barely heard their voices as they’d made their way to the car, arguing between Mexican or Thai for dinner.
Since then, he’d been waiting. He’d sat on the rock, motionless. He was rooted there by the anticipation of what would be happening later. He knew he had a few hours left to wait but that was fine with him. He’d waited nearly twelve years so far…so what was four or five more hours?
This wasn’t the first time he’d sat on this rock, watching the house. He’d been here countless times before, watching and learning the ways of their lives.
The Colemans. Harry and Ruth. He had lived under their roof—the very roof he was currently staring at—for about five months at one time. They had been nice enough but, in the end, had not been able to keep him. He supposed he had been too much for them, too much of a hassle for their pretentious well-to-do lives. They’d had busy lives both in and out of the house. When he had come along, though, all of that had changed for them. Their weekend tennis matches: gone. Their Wednesday nights out with friends: also gone.
His eyes traveled from window to window. The one on the right on the second floor was their bedroom. He knew this because one night, they had neglected to shut the blinds as they had readied for bed. He had seen Ruth Coleman’s naked body standing right in front of the window for about ten seconds before she had been alert enough to close the blinds. There had been about fifty yards between them but he’d still been able to make out her shape, her curves, the smallish globes of her breasts.
For a woman pushing fifty, it had been quite nice. It was not the first time he had thought of Ruth in a sexual way. There had been one night, when he had lived with them—he had been about ten years old or so at the time—when he had stirred awake from a bad dream. He’d walked down the hall to their room to ask if he could sleep there but had stopped in the doorway when he saw the movement in the bed. Ruth had been sitting up on her knees with Harry beneath her. She’d been making noises that had sounded as if she was in pain but as they moved faster together, he realized that they were sounds of pleasure.
He had watched from the doorway, the door open about a quarter of the way, until they had finished.
He’d held on to that memory, often revisiting it whenever he’d felt the darkness invading his mind. It had almost been enough to make him change his mind about what he had to do.
His thoughts of Ruth’s naked body were broken up by the sound of an approaching car. He looked to the driveway and saw their Chrysler rolling in. They parked and got out, laughing. Harry waited for Ruth at the front of the car and took her hand. They walked into the house, giggling.
In the woods, he smiled. Maybe they’d had a few drinks with dinner, maybe just enough to be giddy and horny. Maybe they’d make love sometime in the coming hour or so. He hoped so. Maybe he’d find some way to sneak to a window and watch. Also, if they had been drinking, they’d be good and tired, depleted and conked out by the time he walked out of the tree line and up to their house.
He’d enter through the back door. He knew where the spare key was. He’d spent two hours looking for it one afternoon when he knew they had left for a weekend trip to see Harry’s brother in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was in the backyard, underneath one of the boards that served as the border of Ruth’s tiny herb garden.
He wanted to go now. He wanted to sneak in and maybe catch them in the act. He had never had sex and had never seen the appeal of it. But all the same, seeing Ruth’s body at the window that night had reminded him of his urges. He thought the act itself had to be gross but then again…
No. He had to wait. He knew that. He’d waited this long. No sense in screwing it all up now. He had to wait until it was dark.
As if to tide himself over, he looked into the little rucksack he had set on the ground next to the rock. It had little spatters of dried blood on it. He wasn’t sure who it belonged to. Honestly, the last two weeks had been a bloody blur.
He reached into the sack and stroked the handle of the knife.
He took out the scrap of old blanket and nuzzled it to his cheek. There was something reassuring about the feel of it, something that told him that everything was going to be okay.
Fully believing that, he placed the scrap back into the sack and waited.
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
The address Kate had gotten for Jeremy Neely was just on the outskirts of Roanoke, in a tiny little town called Deerborne. The drive itself only took about twenty minutes but because they had spent several hours in Dr. Ethridge’s office, it was closing in on 5:30 when Kate and DeMarco pulled up in front of Jeremy Neely’s home.
The house was an older two-story house. It was in a low-income neighborhood, the streets uncared for and the lawns mostly dead and gray. An air conditioner unit stuck out of one of the side windows like a rotten tooth about to fall out. It was running, making an awful racket as it leaked a trail of water down the side of the house.
They walked up the concrete stairs and onto the porch. As Kate neared the door, her right hand hovered over the handle of her Glock. She knocked with her left hand. Beside her, DeMarco had locked her legs, ready to spring if necessary.
After ten seconds, no one had answered the door. Kate knocked again, this time saying, “Mr. Neely? Are you home?”
“No car along the street,” DeMarco pointed out.
Kate had noticed this as well. She looked up and down the street, weighing their options. They had more than enough reason to believe that Jeremy Neely was their killer. And this had been confirmed as his address. Under any normal circumstances, she might just wait in the car
until Neely arrived home. But they were working against a clock here, with no idea whether or not Neely intended to kill again.
“Agent DeMarco, my knees aren’t quite what they used to be. Would you mind…?”
DeMarco looked both surprised and honored to have been asked. She drew her Glock, took a step back, and then delivered a hard kick to the door. It sprung open, taking a small portion of the frame with it.
They entered the house in perfect step with one another. Kate took the lead with DeMarco close behind. They stepped quietly, allowing each other to hear the silence of the place. Within a few seconds, Kate felt certain that they were alone; Neely was not here.
Still, they investigated the house with caution, guns at the ready. The living room was sparsely furnished and meticulously cleaned. It offered no clues of any kind. The kitchen was equally useless, revealing nothing more than the fact that Neely needed to do his dishes.
Being that they felt as if every moment wasted was a potentially deadly one for Neely’s next target, they skipped everything else in the house and headed directly for the bedroom. Nine times out of ten, that’s where clues about any case or suspect were found.
Like the living room, Neely’s bedroom was mostly clean and without much furniture or belongings. A queen-sized bed sat along the center of the far wall and a small desk sat beside the bed. Other than an old dresser, that was all there was. Kate checked the closet and found nothing but a few hanging shirts and an empty Amazon box.
When she turned away from the closet, she saw DeMarco crouched on the floor. She was looking under the bed. Apparently, she had found something because she started to reach under it.
“What have you got?” Kate asked.
“A shoebox.”
“Careful…”
DeMarco pulled the box out from under the bed. It was unremarkable, identical to just about every other shoebox that had ever been slid under a bed. Kate had done this for her entire life, keeping toys and love letters in it as a girl, and bills and checks as an adult.
They shared an uneasy look as DeMarco opened up the box.
There was only one thing inside.
“Holy shit,” Kate breathed.
It an old blanket—a blanket that had clearly been torn from along the sides.
The pattern and fabric was identical to what had been pulled from the throats of the victims. It was also the exact same as the blanket that had been held by Jeremy Neely in the photograph in Ethridge’s files.
“Call Duran,” Kate said. “We need him to bully whoever the hell is in charge of standing on that foster care information and we need him to do it now.”
DeMarco pulled her phone from her pocket and did just that. Kate, meanwhile, checked under the bed for anything else but there was nothing to be found.
But the blanket was enough. They had their man now. The only question, of course, was where the hell was he?
You know where he is, she told herself. He’s out targeting his next victim...some other family that tried to help him at some point in their lives and now are being rewarded by being killed.
On the phone, DeMarco was getting loud with Director Duran’s receptionist. “This is an emergency…one he will slaughter you for if you don’t get him right now. I don’t care who he is meeting with!”
That apparently did the trick, as DeMarco was put on hold. She was fuming, pacing around the room in order to do something with the pent-up excitement that was rocketing through her body.
Kate felt it, too. The excitement of knowing you were about to break a case…that the endgame was on the horizon.
And knowing that just one phone call separated them from not only apprehending the killer but also potentially saving two lives made it a maddening experience.
She looked back to that tattered blanket as a feeling of dread started to spread through her. Mingled with the excitement, it almost made her feel lightheaded. But the blanket actually helped to ease her mind, to steady her focus.
We’ve got him, she thought. We know his name, we know where he lives…we just need to know what other families cared for him as a kid.
All they could do was wait.
And hope that while they waited, two more people weren’t being killed.
***
Kate and DeMarco remained in Neely’s house while waiting for the call from Duran. Every minute that passed was excruciating. They both paced the floors, remaining mostly in the bedroom. Kate racked her brain for any other ways to find out who else might have kept Jeremy Neely but could come up with nothing.
“I just don’t understand how so many families kept him and no one saw this coming,” DeMarco said. “You’d think a murder spree like this one might have been prevented if someone had maybe just paid more attention to the way he acted as a kid.”
“You heard Ethridge,” Kate said. “No two kids are ever one hundred percent the same. For all we know, Jeremy Neely never showed any signs of doing anything like this.”
It reminded Kate of the old adage: It’s the quiet ones you need to watch.
Of course, in this scenario, that was absolutely correct.
When Kate’s phone rang, both agents went absolutely still for a moment. It had the same effect as a gunshot from the next room. Kate answered it with a jolt of adrenaline blasting through her body.
“This is Agent Wise.”
“Wise, it’s Duran. I got the list of families. You ready?”
“Shoot.”
“In order of appearance, we’ve got the Langleys, the Nashes, a single woman named Monica Knight, the Colemans, and the Vaughns. But he was only with the Vaughns for two days. He stayed with the Colemans for about five months.”
“You got names for the Colemans?” Kate asked.
“And an address. 174 Angler Drive, Moneta, Virginia.”
Shit, she thought. Not local.
Kate covered the mouthpiece on her phone and looked at DeMarco. “Plug Moneta into your GPS and see how far away it is.”
DeMarco did as she was asked. Kate turned her attention back to Duran and asked: “Is that all? No other families?”
“That’s it. You think the Colemans are next?” Duran asked.
“It’s an incredibly good chance.”
DeMarco showed Kate her phone. She had typed Moneta into her map app search bar. It was apparently a little lakeside town about thirty minutes away.
“Moneta is about half an hour away from us,” Kate said. “We’re headed there now.”
“Perfect. Good luck, Wise.”
With a nod of understanding between them, Kate and DeMarco sprinted out of the bedroom, through the house, and back outside. As she got behind the wheel, she heard DeMarco on her phone as she got into the passenger seat.
“Palmetto, it’s Agent DeMarco. I need you and a few officers to get over to Moneta as soon as possible. Agent Wise and I are headed there now with a strong suspicion that our killer’s next target is there.”
Kate pulled out into the road and sped forward while DeMarco filled Palmetto in. Dusk was slowly settling down, the horizon holding most of the day’s remaining light. When she came to the end of the street, she took a hard right, the back end of the car fishtailing. She felt like she was racing a clock and as far as she was concerned, her time would run out when night fell.
But with a killer so close to her grasp, she’d be damned if she’d let that happen.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Had she not been in a rush to potentially stop a killer, Kate thought she might have enjoyed the quaint and scenic little town of Moneta. It sat alongside Smith Mountain Lake, a lake cupped almost perfectly within the Blue Ridge Mountains. The fact that the sun had pretty much set behind the mountains added a whole new tone of beauty to the place.
As she passed by the central intersection of the town, Kate spotted the two police cruisers in the gas station parking lot to her right. Palmetto had called ahead to Moneta PD and asked for two units to be available for backup while the State PD hurr
ied along. Kate flashed her lights at them as she passed through the intersection and they fell in behind her.
Angler Drive was located within a small subdivision that was separated from the lake by only a thin strip of woodland that grew in size and spread out the closer it got to the mountains. As they crept closer and closer to the Coleman residence, Kate decided on the best approach in her mind. She figured that if Jeremy Neely was indeed there or on the way, there was no sense in scaring him away with blazing sirens and police cars pulling into the driveway. Given that, she elected to park her car along the side of the road just out of eyesight of the Colemans’ paved driveway. Behind her, the police cruisers did the same.
When she got out of the car and met one of the officers from the first car as he got out, she realized just how dark it had gotten. She could still see without the aid of a flashlight, but that wouldn’t last much longer.
“Thanks for the assist,” Kate said. “Agent DeMarco and I will go to the door. If everything is fine and good, that’ll be the end of it. We’ll inform them of the situation and then ask you to stay here until State PD arrives. You guys can work out the surveillance among yourselves. But if we get in there and find out that we were too late, we’ll call for backup.”
“Officer Palmetto said this guy has killed five people,” the cop said. “Is that true?”
Kate nodded, but thought: Let’s pray it’s only five…and not seven.
***
They made their way down the paved drive in a quick walk. They did not want to appear too rushed, nor did they want to seem too casual. As they closed in on the house, Kate noted that a light was on downstairs, shining through the largest window along the front of the house as well as one on the side. Probably the living room. Another one was on upstairs.
There’s one good sign, at least, Kate thought.
They ascended the stairs at that same pace but took a moment to collect themselves before Kate knocked on the door. She raised her hand to do just that but was stopped by a noise from somewhere inside.