FATAL FORTY-EIGHT: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mysteries Book 7) (22 page)

Kate gestured toward Tim. “Maria, this is Supervisory Special Agent Cornelius, FBI. Hopefully the answer to our prayers.”

Behind the interest in Maria’s brown eyes lurked a touch of anxiety, a residual from her youth spent in Guatemala, where the police were often corrupt and always to be feared by the common folk. “Please to meet you,
Señor
Cornelius.”

Tim nodded. “Likewise.”

“Skip will be here soon,” Kate said. “We need to talk about the case. I’m sorry but can you take the kids to the park?”

Hands on her hips, Maria gave her an exaggerated scowl. “You ’pologize one more time and I be
mucho
angry.”

Kate smiled.

It took a few minutes to corral the kids. Once Billy discovered a real FBI agent was in the house, he kept asking questions.

“Do you carry a gun?” Edie chimed in. “Our daddy carries a gun. But he keeps it locked up in the safe when he’s home,” she added in a solemn voice, “’cause it’s not a toy.”

Tim tried but failed to hide his smile.

Maria leaned down and snapped a leash onto the puppy’s collar. He promptly whirled in a circle, twisting the leash and almost yanking it out of her hand. She chuckled. “We take this one too. So he no drive you
loco
.
Vamos,
niños
.” She herded dog and children toward the front door.

Tim grinned at Kate. “Cute kids.”

She returned the smile. “Thanks.”

She headed for the kitchen to check the coffee maker. After pouring each of them a cup, she went about making a fresh pot. By the time the machine was gurgling away, Skip and the others were coming through the front door.

Rose produced a brown envelope and a pile of pages. She handed the envelope to Tim. “I wore gloves while handling it. We stopped at the agency office and made copies for us to look over.”

“Thanks,” Tim said. “Although I doubt we’ll be able to use this, since it was obtained via an illegal search.”

Rose didn’t respond. She turned to the big round kitchen table where the others were settling with mugs of coffee. She passed out clumps of papers, then lined pads and pencils. “We each have a different section of the journal. Read. Note down anything significant. We’ll confer when everyone’s done.”

Kate sat down. Tim remained standing for a moment. Then he took the empty chair between her and Rose.

Kate started reading.

He brought me more paper. I asked him why he was letting me write all this down. He said whatever makes me happy. I almost laughed out loud. He’s always going on and on about making me comfortable, as if being shackled to a bed could ever be comfortable
…

For the next half hour, silence reigned, punctuated by the scratching of lead on paper and the occasional sharp intake of air.

Kate was on the next to the last page of her section.

The bastard did it on purpose. He pulled out the gun as usual, when I said I had to go to the bathroom. Then he undid the shackles and I went in there. And when I came out, he was gone. I ran across the room. Well, to be more accurate I stumbled across the room. My feet weren’t working so well after hours of inactivity. I hit the lever to open the door. On the other side of that damned door is a bedroom. A real bedroom, not a hidden cell like he keeps me in. I ran toward the bedroom door, but then I spotted a phone on the dresser. I grabbed the receiver and punched in 911. A recording, a tinny voice saying, ‘All 911 operators are currently busy. Please stay on the line and the next
…
blah, blah.’ I couldn’t believe it. How could 911 put you on hold? Then he came into the room, tsk, tsking and shaking his head. ‘What a shame about those budget cuts. Not enough 911 dispatchers anymore.’ That was when I realized the voice on the recording was HIS voice!

Kate sat back in her chair and blew out air. She massaged her forehead. When she glanced up, three pairs of concerned male eyes were staring at her. Only Rose and Mac were still reading.

“You okay?” Rob asked.

“Yeah.” She didn’t sound particularly convincing, even to her own ears.

Tim’s cell phone buzzed. He checked caller ID, then put the phone on speaker and held it out in front of him. “You’re on speaker, Jane.”

“I’ve been looking for anything else that happened in New Haven,” Jane said, “that might have made him stop when he did. It had to be that press conference the weekend the guy was taken, when the police chief emphasized there was no waiting period for missing persons.”

“Thanks, Jane.” Tim disconnected and turned to the others. “As we suspected this is connected to that fatal delay, when the New Haven police didn’t take Delaney’s daughter’s disappearance seriously at first.”

Rob nodded. His face sagged with fatigue and sorrow. “That jives with some stuff he told her.” He pointed to the pages in front of him. “That she was being sacrificed to get the authorities to take missing person reports more seriously.”

“At least, that’s what Delaney’s convinced himself it’s about,” Kate said. “But then he started getting off on what he was doing to them. The man has a history of psychological abuse of his family.” She tapped her pages of the journal. “In here, she talks about him letting her think she’s escaping. He hooked a phone to a fake 911 recording, then came in and ‘caught’ her.”

Mac waved his hand at his section of the journal on the table. “The second morning, he brought her a countdown clock. The ticking drove her crazy.”

Rose nodded. “Toward the end, he hung a sheet on the wall. It had slits and holes in it.”

Kate sucked in her breath. “The template for the postmortem torture wounds.”

“Yup, only he doesn’t tell her what it is or that he’s not going to do anything to her until after she’s dead.” Rose ground her teeth. “He just lets her look at those slits, with dried blood around them, and those holes with scorched edges.”

Kate’s skin crawled.

Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and answered without checking caller ID.

“Where the hell are you two?” Judith Anderson barked in her ear.

“Uh, on our way to the precinct.” It was the truth. They’d just made a little stop along the way.

“You’ve been talking to Tolliver, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You think you can calm him down,
if
we can find him?”

“I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“We’re getting complaints. He’s going around randomly banging on doors.”

It only took an instant to put herself in the shoes of someone responding to such banging, and finding a big, out-of-control black man on their doorstep. Her hand flew to her mouth. “He’s gonna get himself shot.”

“Exactly. Meet me at York and Ridgely Roads in Timonium. That’s where the last report came from.”

“Ten minutes,” Kate said. She jumped out of her chair as she disconnected.

“They got a fresh lead?” Skip asked.

Kate shook her head. “No, Charles has lost it.”

She ran for the front door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

9:30 a.m. Sunday

Tim followed Kate to her car. The others piled into Skip’s SUV.

Once they were barreling through the mostly deserted streets of Sunday morning Towson, Kate wiggled around to get to her cell phone. She pulled it out and tossed it to Tim.

“Charles’s cell number is in my contacts.”

“No doubt the lieutenant already tried to call him.”

She took her eyes off the road long enough to give him a hard look. He started scrolling through her contacts list.

He punched
send
and held the phone to his ear. “Went straight to voicemail.”

“Shit!”

What the hell did that mean?

“He could’ve left his phone at home,” Tim answered the unspoken question. “Or the battery’s run down and he hasn’t noticed.”

“More likely the latter. He wouldn’t leave it behind when Sally or the kidnapper might be calling.”

She drove in silence for a few minutes.

“We’ve been too focused on rentals,” she said. “He bought a house in White Plains. He might have done the same down here.”

“I have Jane checking recent real estate purchases as well. But those records don’t tell us much about the owners. She has to track down their ages and physical descriptions elsewhere. So far, nothing that resembles our guy.”

Kate thought about that for a moment. “How far back?”

 “Closings within the last three months.”

“Go back further. Six months.”

Tim was already taking his phone out of his pocket. He passed those instructions on to Jane.

A few seconds later, Kate heard the woman groan, even though Tim hadn’t put the phone on speaker.

“Do the best you can to narrow that down.” He disconnected. “There were 24,934 real estate settlements in the Baltimore metro area in the last six months.”

“Ugh,” Kate said.

“We didn’t exactly make Jane’s day with that request.” Tim shifted in his seat and leaned a shoulder against the passenger window. “So you’re thinking he started looking for a place as soon as he killed that last guy in New Haven.”

“Yes. He’d gotten a taste for the kill, and what else does he have to live for.”

“So he moves on to another city. But he didn’t do his homework. Maryland had already passed a law prohibiting mandatory waiting periods for missing persons reports.”

Kate took her eyes off the road for a split second and glanced his way. “He doesn’t give a shit about that. It’s now just an excuse to play his game.”

“Yeah, you’re right. He’s careful, methodical. He checks out his victims thoroughly. Probably watches them for weeks before taking them. He wouldn’t fail to do his homework on the state laws.”

Watching carefully for other cars, she ran a red light. “Is there any significance to five kills? His predecessor, the guy who killed his daughter, kills five times. Then Delaney kills five people in New Haven.”

Tim ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. Maybe. But how would he even know about the other murders? We didn’t make the connection.”

“Yeah, but he might have. Would a father stop looking for his daughter’s murderer? He may have stumbled on those other cases. Realized his daughter was the victim of a serial killer, and that planted a seed.”

Will this guy kill five people here, and then move on?
She shivered.

She felt Tim staring at her, but she kept her eyes on the mostly deserted street in front of her.

“You should’ve been a profiler,” he said.

“Nope. What you said earlier, about being glad you hadn’t gone the therapist route. I absolutely could not do this on a regular basis.”

“So why did he come to Baltimore?” Tim said.

“Because we have one of the highest violent crime rates in the country. I think we’re about eleventh on the homicide scale at the moment. He figured the police would have better things to do than track down missing persons.”

Silence for a beat. She glanced to the side.

Tim’s mouth was quirked up on one end. “Yeah, our guy checked out Sally Ford. But he didn’t figure on her relentless friends who just happen to know a certain homicide lieutenant.”

“Exactly.” Kate gritted her teeth and clenched the steering wheel as she contemplated what would have happened if they
hadn’t
known Judith Anderson. Charles would’ve reported Sally missing Friday evening. But not much would have happened over the weekend. A detective would have made some inquiries on Monday, but she’d already be dead by then.

The corner of York and Ridgely Roads came up sooner than she expected. Her tires squealed as she made the turn. She braked and pulled to the curb.

Judith jogged up to meet them. “Come on. I’m not gonna let this asshole claim two lives today.”

Skip and the others were not far behind. They gathered on the sidewalk. Special Agent Wallace arrived as Judith was doling out assignments. She hung back on the edge of the group, keeping her distance from Skip and Kate.

“The neighborhoods you’ve been assigned are all ones from which complaints were called in about Tolliver,” Judith said. “Kate, you’re with me. Anybody gets a lead on where he might be, call me right away.”

Kate tossed her keys to Tim and climbed into the passenger seat of Judith’s unmarked police car. She barely had the door closed when Judith took off.

“Why’s he pounding on doors out here?” Kate asked.

Judith glanced over at her. “He lives in this general area.”

“So no rhyme or reason to it. He just couldn’t take doing nothing any longer.”

“Well, some rhyme or reason. The complaints are coming from neighborhoods out here that have had recent rentals. He must have kept a copy of the list he made for me. But he’s apparently pounding on every door on the street.”

Kate struggled to get her seatbelt latched. “So he’s working his way toward Towson.”

Judith blew out air. “More or less. Our officers hadn’t gotten out this far yet. He’d be helping if he wasn’t going about it so out of control. Let’s hope we find him before somebody thinks it’s a home invasion and blows him away.”

Judith careened around a corner and stomped on the brake. Kate was glad she’d managed to get her seatbelt buckled.

Judith pointed to the end unit of a group of brick row houses that looked like they’d been built in the 1950's. “That’s where the last report came from.”

They got out of the car, and Kate followed as Judith jogged up the sidewalk to a small cement porch.

~~~~~~~~

Sally woke on the carpeted floor. Her heart pounded as it registered where she was. How could she have drifted off and let precious minutes tick away?

She squirmed around until she managed to get herself into a sitting position, her back against the side of the bed. After more awkward maneuvering, she was on her knees. She carefully lifted one leg and put her foot flat on the floor. Shoving her back against the bed, she pushed upward.

And she was on her feet.

Okay, gotta remember how I did that, for future reference.

Suddenly she couldn’t breathe. A fist-sized lump had lodged in her throat. Her
future
consisted of less than ten hours.