FATAL FORTY-EIGHT: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mysteries Book 7) (14 page)

“He’ll drive somewhere else,” Kate said. “Then stock up again on cash and gas.”

“Keep an eye on those bank records, Jane.”

“Of course,” she said from the speaker, still sounding unruffled by Tim’s brusque tone.

She’s used to dealing with sleep-deprived field agents.

“Uh, there’s something else,” Jane said. “Right before the fifth victim was found last year, the New Haven police chief held a press conference.”

“I know. I was there. We objected because we knew it would probably scare the unsub into going underground, but the local chief felt that the need to warn the public was more important than catching the guy.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, then rubbed the back of his neck. “He was probably right. There were no more victims after that fifth guy, not in his town at least.”

“Well, I got my hands on a transcript of his remarks,” Jane said. “And I’m wondering if this one thing he said was why the creepo got scared off. The chief pointed out that people didn’t have to wait to report a missing person, that they should notify the police immediately, so–”

“Yeah,” Tim interrupted. “All that crap about having to wait forty-eight hours to report is a myth, especially since Suzanne’s Law passed.”

“What’s Suzanne’s Law?” Kate asked.

“That’s its informal name,” Tim said. “Named after a college student who went missing from the University of New York at Albany. It’s the same law that instituted the Amber Alerts for missing kids, but another provision prohibits jurisdictions from having a waiting period for missing eighteen to twenty-one year olds.”

Kate nodded, her tired brain trying to put the pieces together.

“It was signed into law by George W. Bush in 2003.” Tim grimaced. “A year too late for Carrie Delaney.”

Kate’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God! The forty-eight hours!”

~~~~~~~~

2:15 a.m. Sunday

Skip had parked just around the corner, but where they could see the house.

Rob was having second thoughts. What had he been thinking? He was a lawyer, for God’s sake, not an undercover operative.

“You should’ve gotten Manny to be your lookout, instead of me.” Rob didn’t realize he’d said it out loud until Skip glanced sideways from the driver’s seat.

“I wouldn’t ask him to jeopardize his brand-new PI license.” Skip’s voice was curt. “And you volunteered.”

Rob suppressed the small surge of anger at his tone. They were all irritable from lack of sleep. “I wasn’t chickening out. Just feeling…” He couldn’t come up with a face-saving word so he admitted the truth. “…inadequate.”

Skip glanced his way again, then returned his gaze to the house across the street. “You’ll be fine. Hopefully you won’t have to do anything except stay awake.”

Even that could be challenging
… Rob glanced at his watch in the dim light from a street lamp.
At two-sixteen in the morning.

He leaned forward to get a better look at the house–a small clapboard duplex, white with dark shutters. Despite its unassuming appearance, it hadn’t been hard to find. A White Plains police cruiser sat conspicuously at the curb in front of it.

A snort of derision came from Skip next to him. “Our perp’s not going to show his face around here with that idiot sitting there.”

Mac growled from the backseat.

Rose, sitting next to her husband, said, “Probably a rookie.” Her tone was neutral.

Rob figured she was more willing to cut the poor cop some slack. She’d been such a rookie herself once, and more recently than Skip had.

Skip turned a little in the seat to face him. “You got my cell on speed dial.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “You’re number six.”

“Keep your finger on that number. That cop gets out of his car, you dial it. Let it ring once and then hang up.”

“What if you’re close enough the cop hears the ring?” The suburban street was quiet. Noises would carry on the night air.

“I’ll have it on vibrate,” Skip said. “Don’t wait until the call goes through to get out yourself. Head his way and act like you’re a bit tipsy and have lost your way home.”

Rob nodded. He could do that.

Skip glanced over the back of his seat at Mac and Rose and pointed down the block away from the house. “We go down one block and circle around back.”

He hit a button on his dash to disable the overhead light. Then the three of them got out, closing their doors so gently Rob could barely hear the clicks. They melted into the darkness.

Rob sat back in his seat. He had cracked his window, hoping the cold air would help him stay alert. But the night was mild for late November. The air drifting through the crack was only slightly cooler than the inside of the truck.

He glanced briefly from the driver’s door of the police car to the house–the home of a serial killer–and tried to imagine what the others would find behind that innocent-looking facade.

He shivered, despite the unseasonable balminess of the night air.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

2:30 a.m. Sunday

They’d gone over the material Jane had sent and had gleaned nothing of value, except the more recent newspaper picture. Tim had enlarged it slightly and printed out several copies of it. Kate picked one up and stared at it again.

The photographer had been standing some distance away from Claude Delaney, who was surrounded by a group of his co-workers from Ameri-Syn Plastics. One big guy was slapping the new retiree on the back.

Delaney looked the part of a dapper, self-effacing gentleman. Hard to believe he was Sally’s abductor, a stone-cold killer.

But he was.

Cold dread sat in Kate’s belly like a brick. She turned her wrist to check her watch, then did the calculation. At most, sixteen hours left. Less if he’d started the clock from when he took her, rather than when she was expected at the party.

Please, God
, she prayed, unable to even think of more words.
Please, God, please.

She tapped the other printout sitting on the table, of the newspaper clipping–the one about the press conference when Delaney and his wife had berated the New Haven police for waiting so long before investigating.

“So his motive is…?” she said out loud.

Tim looked up from his tablet. “His motive is he gets his rocks off killing people.”

“Yeah, but what does he
think
his motive is? He’s on a mission, to raise consciousness about waiting periods for missing persons. When the police chief announces there is no waiting period, he stops killing there. Not because he was afraid of getting caught but because he’d achieved his goal.”

“And then he comes here,” Tim said. “But he didn’t do his homework.” He pointed to his tablet. “I’ve been checking. Maryland formed a task force in 2006 to study missing persons issues. The next year some new laws were passed, one of which prohibits mandatory waiting periods for MP’s of any age.”

Kate tapped an index finger against her upper lip. “But there’s still the issue of whether police take the case seriously right away. The uniforms who first responded to our call seemed underwhelmed by the circumstances. They assumed Sally didn’t want to party and had taken off on her own. If we hadn’t had a connection to Judith Anderson…” She trailed off, unwilling to think about that alternative outcome.

Tim sat back in his chair. “Sally was taken on a Friday. So was the Delaney kid, and, if I remember correctly the last New Haven victim, the guy, he was too. I wonder if any of the others were taken on the weekend?” He rummaged through the papers in front of him and pulled out the New Haven case files.

“He takes them on the weekend,” Kate said. “When police forces are particularly busy, and the victim’s life is less structured.”

Tim had stood up and was pacing across the room, leafing through the contents of one of the files. “So the cops are more likely to not investigate all that hard. They’d assume the victim was just doing some weekend activity and had neglected to tell anyone where they’d gone.”

Kate’s chest tightened with the now familiar ache around her heart for those lost souls. “Despite the fact that their friends and family protested they were responsible people who wouldn’t do that,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.

Tim paused in the act of skimming a finger down a page in the file. He looked at her from under bushy eyebrows, without raising his head. But otherwise he didn’t respond.

He rapped his knuckles against the file. “First victim, twenty-two-year-old college student. She and her roommate were going to a graduation party of a mutual friend, on a Friday. They’d planned to get ready together in their room. When the roommate got there, the vic wasn’t there. She didn’t answer her phone. Roommate went on to the party, thinking they’d gotten their wires crossed. But the vic wasn’t there either. After a couple more hours, the roommate called the police.”

Kate had read through the files several times, but hadn’t really put them in chronological order in her mind. “So the first victim was a college student like his daughter. Who was the second one again?”

Tim dropped the file on the table and picked up another one. “Thirty-year-old, Korean-American graduate student. Her fiancé was to pick her up, on a Thursday night this time. They were going to a concert, had bought the tickets months before. She was totally excited, he’d said. He showed up at her place but she wasn’t there.”

“Wasn’t she the one whose purse was sitting in the middle of her dining room table?” That similarity to Sally’s case raised goose bumps on Kate’s arms. She hugged herself, rubbing her elbows.

Tim shot her a concerned look. “Yeah, and her car was in the driveway of her house. Police took the report the next day, but they kept it out of the papers that they were investigating. What isn’t in this file is that her fiancé’s  parents had money, which is probably why the police took her disappearance more seriously. They were waiting for a ransom demand that never came.”

“So maybe the first victim reminded him too much of his daughter, so he goes for an older student, different race.”

Tim nodded and picked up another file. “Third vic. Twenty-nine-year-old newlywed, Caucasian. Husband was a new professor at Yale. He came home, on a Tuesday this time. House was empty. She had a necklace she never took off–a sapphire, her birthstone–that he’d given her when they were dating. It was lying on the kitchen counter.”

Kate’s eyes stung. Hearing the cases read out loud was making the victims much more real. She fingered the solitaire diamond at her own throat, a gift from Skip their first Christmas together. She too never took it off.

Tim smacked the papers in the folder with the back of his hand. “Bastard’s discovered that he likes killing, so he ups the ante. Gets more blatant, to make it more exciting.”

I could never do what he does, deal with these horrors day in and day out.

“He’s thumbing his nose at the cops,” she said.

Tim nodded without looking up from the file. “They connected the dots this time, but too late.”

He dropped the file on the table and picked up the next one. “Fourth vic was a complete deviation from everybody else. African-American, single mom, forty-three. An RN, worked the night shift so she could be there for her kids when they got home from school. But we’re back to a Friday. She saw the kids off to school that morning. When they came home, no mom.”

Kate recalled that the kids were fifteen and thirteen. She swallowed hard as she thought of Edie and Billy, imagined them as teenagers, losing either her or Skip to a murderer. “Those kids. They’ll be scarred for life,” she whispered.

“They’re living with their maternal grandmother now.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything about the dad.”

“I seem to remember he was a sergeant in the army, killed in Iraq.”

A small sob escaped Kate’s lips before she even knew it was there.

Tim raised his gaze from the file. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. “Just tired.”

He gave her a penetrating look.

She sat up straighter in her chair. “So the first three victims are young, white or Asian, and associated with the university. Then he completely shifts gears and goes after a black middle-aged nurse and a male prostitute.”

She shook her head. It didn’t make sense.

“We thought at the time he was changing victimology to throw the police off,” Tim said. “And sadly, it worked. The cops knew they had a serial killer on their hands by that point, but they didn’t realize the black woman was one of his victims until Sunday morning. And the guy, not until his body was found.”

Her head snapped up. “It became a game. Catch me if you can.”

Tim looked thoughtful.

“Consciously,” Kate said, “he viewed his motive as noble. He was trying to get the police to take the disappearances of young people seriously. Then he started mixing it up, enjoying the challenge of keeping the cops off kilter.”

“But when the police chief had his press conference, he had to stop–”

“Because if he’d kept killing,” Kate finished his thought, “he’d have to admit to himself that he was doing it for sheer, twisted pleasure.”

“I’ve never seen a case,” Tim said. “Hell, I don’t even remember reading about any cases where a serial killer showed no psychopathic tendencies until middle age.”

Kate sat back in her chair and laughed.

Tim whipped his head around and gave her a startled look.

“If this was
Criminal Minds
,” she said, “Spencer Reid would be quoting statistics about now, on how many late-blooming psychopaths there are in recorded history.”

Tim chuckled.

Julie Wallace burst into the conference room, startling them and bringing their levity to an abrupt halt.

“Where the hell’s Skip Canfield?” she demanded of Kate.

“What do you mean?” She tried to look innocent.

“Don’t play dumb with me. This whole operation, he and his people have been right in the thick of things. Now suddenly they’re gone. What are they up to?”

“He said something about having some other cases he had to attend to.”