Drained (10 page)

“I’m on until five tonight, but I’m sure I’ll be at our HQ later than that, wrapping up. We should have a case file before I leave for the night,” Andrews said.

“Okay. Either Agent Harper or myself will be by to pick up a copy if that’s all right.”

“Absolutely. I’ll leave it at the front for you if I’m out of the office by the time you make it over.”

“Appreciate that.”

He nodded.

I called Ball in Manassas and let him know we had another homicide. He was going to pull up everything he could on the woman and get it over to me as soon as possible. I dialed Beth, who picked up within two rings.

“Is it our guy?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I got the victim’s information over to Ball back at headquarters. Andrews was on the scene. He’s going to have a file ready for us to pick up by the end of the workday. Where are you?” I asked.

“Headed out from the FBI building now. I just picked up all of our records. It’s going to take me about a half hour to get to Jasmine Thomas’s mother’s place. Were you still planning on meeting me there?”

“Yeah. I just got in the car. Send me over the address.”

“Sure, you’ll see it in a second,” Beth said.

“I’ll be watching for it.”

“Okay. See you in a bit,” Beth said then hung up.

The address came from Beth a moment later. I pulled it up on my cell phone’s GPS app and hit the button to navigate. The robotic woman’s voice told me the drive would be thirty-five minutes. I followed the suggested route to what looked like a middle-class neighborhood. All the homes appeared to have been built in the nineteen seventies. Some still had dark-brown exteriors, some were brick, and others appeared to have been updated to keep with the times. I slowed when I saw Beth’s rental car parked along the road. Pulling in behind her car, I glanced at the home up the driveway to my right. Above the garage in black numbers was the address I was looking for. The home itself was a light-brick single story with black faux shutters around the exterior windows. A handful of mature trees stood in the yard—each wrapped with a small flower garden.

I grabbed the interview folder I’d put together and stepped from the car.

The driver’s door on Beth’s rental opened—I hadn’t even noticed she was inside.

“Waiting long?” I asked.

She looked at her watch. “A couple minutes. I figured I’d wait for you. It’s just going on ten now, so we’re right on time. You can fill me in on everything you got over at the scene when we’re through here.”

I nodded, and we made our way up the driveway to the front door. A mat under my feet read The Murphys. I looked through the front bay window to my left and saw a couple seated on the couch, staring at a television. I reached out and knocked on the door.

The seated woman looked at me through the window and stood. The door opened a moment later.

“Ma’am,” I said. “I’m Agent Rawlings, and this is Agent Harper with the FBI.”

The woman wore a light-colored patterned blouse and a pair of shorts. Her hair was brown and shoulder length. She appeared to be in her fifties. Her eyes were pink and puffy from crying. The woman was holding a tissue and pressed it against her nose. She sniffed and invited us in.

“I’m Cheryl Murphy.” She nodded to the seated man, who stood. “My husband, Tony, Jasmine’s stepfather.”

“Mr. Murphy,” I said.

The man wore a pair of blue jeans and a plaid long-sleeved shirt with breast pockets. His hair was finger length and white, and he appeared a few years older than his wife. He pointed at the television. “The body that was found in Englewood. Is it the same guy that…” His voice trailed off.

“It looks to be similar, yes,” I said. “We can’t say definitively yet. The investigation has just gotten underway.”

The couple didn’t respond.

Beth asked, “Did you want to talk in here, or…?”

“We can sit in the dining room at the table,” Mr. Murphy said.

We followed the wife through the living room and took seats around a rectangular dining table just off to the side of the kitchen. I noticed photos of the woman’s daughter standing in a corner bookshelf. The husband grabbed a box of tissues from the living room, set it in front of his wife, and took a seat beside her.

Mrs. Murphy pulled a few tissues from the box and dabbed at her eyes. “We’ve spoken with the police. We’ve already spoken with the FBI,” she said. “No one is doing anything—it’s been a week without as much as an update. And now there’s another murdered girl that might be related.”

Beth spoke up. “The local Chicago branch of the FBI requested us from Virginia to help with the investigation entailing your daughter. We met with the local branch yesterday and got everything they had on the case. We’d like to go over some of that with you firsthand.”

“They requested you from Virginia? What are you? Special special agents?” Mr. Murphy asked.

“You could say that. We work in a division that only handles these matters,” Beth said.

“You mean serial killers?” Mr. Murphy asked.

Beth dipped her head in confirmation.

“Anything we can do to help find whoever did this to our daughter,” Mrs. Murphy said.

I looked at Beth. “I’ll let you go first, then I’ll ask what I’d like to ask.”

“Sure,” Beth said. She looked at the couple. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to record our conversation,” Beth said.

“For?” Mr. Murphy asked.

“Just so I don’t miss anything.”

They gave her permission.

Beth thumbed the button to start her voice recorder and began gathering information on the couple’s daughter. Jasmine Thomas had been twenty-nine years old and divorced. She lived alone—no children. Her mother informed us that she worked some dead-end job in retail for an office-supply company. Her father had been deceased since Jasmine was eleven. The man listed as her father, whom Beth had called, was actually the man sitting in front of us, Tony Murphy. Jasmine had been single. The last conversation Jasmine had with her mother went like countless conversations before it—Mrs. Murphy said nothing seemed off with her daughter. Beth concluded her questioning and left the interview to me.

“Was your daughter close friends with anyone other than…” I looked for the name on my sheet. “Andrea Fradet. She’s the only friend we had listed.”

“I’m sure she had friends or acquaintances at work,” Mrs. Murphy said. “She mentioned a few people by name there during our normal day-to-day conversations. She never did anything with anyone outside of work, though. She mostly just sat at home, or if she did do something, shopping or whatever, it was with Andrea. Those two have been close since they were little.” She brought her tissue up to her nose and wiped. “Sorry, ‘had been’ close,” she added.

Her husband rubbed her shoulder.

I gave her a moment while I jotted down the details of the friendship in my notes.

“Have you spoken to Andrea yet?” Mrs. Murphy asked.

“No. But we plan to,” I said.

I flipped open my folder with the driver’s-license photos of the other victims. I pulled the pages out and handed them to the couple. “Do any of these women or their names seem familiar to you?”

The couple looked briefly and handed them back.

“No,” Mr. Murphy said.

Mrs. Murphy shook her head.

I put the photos back into the folder. “You said your daughter was single. Was she actively dating different men?”

“No. Not really. She saw a handful of different people occasionally. She’d mentioned the name Tom and another named Mark. They seemed to be passing things, so I didn’t keep up too much. If there was ever someone serious, she would have brought him over.”

I wrote the names of the men down. “Last names for either man?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“These men, how did she meet them?” I asked.

“She was on a dating website, I think. I couldn’t tell you which one, though,” Mrs. Murphy said.

“Do you think there would be a way we could find out?” I asked.

“We have her bank statements, honey,” Mr. Murphy said. “There might be something there.”

The wife nodded.

The man stood and walked from the kitchen.

I didn’t know if I should tell the guy we already had her bank records sitting in a box in the car. I figured Beth would have said something if she didn’t need or want him to go and retrieve them.

“We have all of her belongings from her apartment in the garage,” Mrs. Murphy said. “I haven’t brought myself to go through them yet.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I remained quiet.

Beth reached out and touched the woman’s hand. “We’re going to do everything we can.”

Mr. Murphy walked back in with three sheets of paper in his hand. He took a pair of reading glasses from the breast pocket of his shirt and put them on. Then he leaned against the kitchen counter facing the dining room where we sat as he flipped the pages. He ran his finger down the deposits and withdrawals. “I don’t see any dating services listed,” he said. Mr. Murphy looked at his wife. “You’re sure she never said what site she used?”

Mrs. Murphy shook her head.

The husband handed the sheets to me. I looked them over and glanced at the ending monthly balance of twenty-eight dollars. I thanked him and handed back the bank records.

“Were those current-month records?” Beth asked.

He looked at the sheets of paper and nodded. “Did you want me to make you a copy?” he asked.

“Sure,” Beth said.

“Just give me one minute.” The husband walked down a hall next to the dining room and turned into another room.

I looked at Mrs. Murphy. “Did she have a computer?” I asked.

“She had a laptop. It’s in the garage. I couldn’t tell you what the password is to access it, though,” Mrs. Murphy said. “Do you think that whoever did this maybe found her online somehow?”

“There’s no way for us to tell at the moment, but we’d like to find out,” I said. “It may help to get whatever computers the victims, including your daughter, had in the hands of our tech-department guys. You never know—there may be something there that we can connect the dots with.”

“Let me see what my husband says,” she said.

Mr. Murphy walked back into the dining room and handed me copies of the bank records, which I slipped into my folder. “Says about what?” he asked.

“They’d like Jasmine’s computer so their tech guys can go through it. They think there’s a chance they may be able to get some information from it.”

“Would we expect to get it back?” Mr. Murphy asked.

“If there is nothing on it that leads anywhere, absolutely. If there is, the computer would be used as evidence,” Beth said.

Mr. Murphy looked at his wife.

“Let them have it,” she said.

The husband went back to the garage and returned a moment later with a black laptop case. “The computer is inside.” He set it on the dining-room table.

I went through another half hour’s worth of questioning with the parents, just trying to get a better idea of the person their daughter was. Beth and I left their house a few minutes after noon and drove back to the hotel.

Monica’s body lay upon his embalming table. Brett had just slipped the needles into her thighs. A soothing calm came over him as he watched the blood flow. He knelt and watched it as it worked its way through the plastic tubing. The blood reached the end and ran out, into the drain in the floor. Brett took the tube in hand and let the blood flowing from the end cascade over his fingers.

He looked up. From his kneeling position, he could just see Monica’s left hand hanging off the side of the table. “I have to say, Monica, I guess I’ve always had a thing with blood. I don’t know when it really started—probably six or seven. I had to go live in a boys’ home for a bit. The place was a real dump. Rats would climb through the walls at night. I started catching them and killing them. I guess I was just bored. I found it enjoyable to watch them bleed. Then I got shipped off to live with some foster parents. They didn’t care for me all that much. All they cared about was getting the checks from the state. They never really noticed I was there until I twisted the head off of a pigeon that flew into the front window of the house. I squeezed the blood from its body all over the living-room carpet. The foster parents found me with it in the living room. I blamed it on the cat, said it must have dragged it in from outside. The cat’s name was Sprinkles. He was a gray tabby. I killed him the next day.”

He stood and poked his blood-covered fingers into the center of her forehead.

“Those foster parents shipped me back to the boys’ home. The people in charge there thought it would be right to have me see a shrink. I did and spent years in therapy. Care to guess the first human I killed?”

Monica, unconscious, didn’t respond.

“Nope. Not the shrink. I killed Sally Best when I was twelve. She was the same age. Another foster family picked me up and welcomed me into their home. I went to school, got okay grades. Sally was popular but seemed nice, though she’d never talked to me. Well, I mustered up the courage to ask her to the fall dance. I figured all the other kids were going and it would be the normal thing to do. I made her a little card with a heart drawn on it. I asked her to circle yes or no to the question if she’d go with me. She ripped up the card I made right in front of me.

She looked me in the eyes, laughed, and called me a creepy little weirdo. I can still hear her voice. The rest of the class joined in her laughter. Little Sally never made it home from school that day. Something happened to her on her walk: she accidently tripped and fell in front of a car.”

Brett went to Monica’s right arm and inserted a needle into a vein at her elbow.

“Do you want to know how many people I’ve killed?” Brett looked at her face.

The woman lay motionless.

Brett smiled. “That wall there behind your head is one of three. That’s not even close to all of them. The older I get, the more I perfect everything. I used to be reckless, killing every few months. Now I just do it in spurts—usually about five or ten at a time and then take years off. Give everyone enough time to forget about it, you know? I started with that after the wife and I got divorced. I was so happy with my newfound freedom that I went on a little rampage, turns out a bunch at once was just what the doctor ordered. Anyway, as I matured, I developed methods, systems, if you will. Hell, my business was created to allow me to do this. It surprised the shit out of me that it made me rich. Which only helps my system work better, by the way. Yup. I travel all over. I vary my methods every now and again but usually come back to the needles and tubes—it’s clean.”