T
he cabin was a good location. It was relatively isolated. The yard area around the cabin and detached garage was surrounded by dense woods with neighbors hundreds, if not thousands, of yards away, neighbors he’d made no effort to get to know. The garage was a double, a long unused fishing boat in the right stall surrounded by mounds of junk and his truck now snuggly parked in the left side, the garage door down.
The cabin was rustic but decently sized and usable year-round with running water, electricity, a functional fireplace and cable for his television and Internet access needs. The best part of it all was that the cabin wasn’t in his name and that was a good thing.
A new picture of him was on the airwaves now.
They were a little closer.
The cabin would be his home now. In his estimation, the apartment wasn’t safe anymore even though he’d made no effort to get to know anyone in his time there either. Now that the drawing of his face was out there, he simply couldn’t take the chance.
He saw the stories from two nights ago about the police taking Cedric Lewis into custody in Harrisburg. When the picture of Lewis was displayed, he instantly remembered him from the Nittany Lion. The mixed martial arts fighter, the guy who walked around the bar on a hair trigger, the kind of guy you avoided, and he’d made a point of trying to avoid Lewis. He didn’t want the attention. He thought nothing of it really at the time other than he was relieved nothing came of it. In fact, he was trying to do everything he could to not draw attention to himself. That was really the key all along, avoiding being noticed and just blending in.
Avoidance was the strategy at the busy and crowded Nittany Lion when he was prowling around after Goynes. He quietly sat in the shadows at the Nittany Lion for a few nights getting a feel for Melissa Goynes and her movements, whom she ran with, the hours she worked and the patterns she’d followed. A confrontation with someone like Lewis would have drawn too much attention and required him to move on and skip Goynes. That would have screwed up his plan before he’d ever really gotten started.
Initially, he was amused watching the footage of the police arresting Lewis and the cable networks going wall to wall that the Reaper was caught. Knowing the answer was wrong made it all the more pleasing to watch, knowing all the talking heads would have to walk the story back and that whoever was feeding the information to the networks would have significant egg on their face. It took all of twelve hours for that tune to change and the news channels and networks were forced to report that in fact the Reaper had not been caught and remained at large.
But now, it was clear that Lewis remembered him and was talking to the police, undoubtedly in the hopes of getting out of whatever trouble he was actually in.
The image was closer, a full face now. The beard was right for that particular time, although the mouth wasn’t quite right; he had larger lips and his jaw line was a little more square than in the picture, but this was much closer. He knew it was his face in the images. Now, he was actually looking at himself. Lewis had done an admirable job with the sketch artist.
“That’s me.”
CNN was continuing to display the image while recapping the story, playing the footage from the arrest and focusing on Lewis being put into the squad car, but that’s not what drew his interest.
What drew his interest was when the camera panned away from Lewis and instead focused on his pursuers, whom he recognized as Special Agents Aubry Gesch and Grace Delmonico. He researched them both. They were good agents with solid track records of closing cases, particularly with serials, although both had high-profile failures as well, cases still open, killers that were not found and victim’s families without final answers.
As he watched the video, Gesch and Delmonico were talking to two other people in plain clothes. One was a sturdy man with an athletic look about him, short blond hair and blood all around his face. The other was a woman, tall and athletic.
These two were new to the scene.
As of yet, he’d seen neither of them identified in the media.
They weren’t locals from Harrisburg.
An attractive woman like that would absolutely not be a cop in Harrisburg, maybe in Philadelphia or New York, but not in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The blond-haired guy with the bloody forehead never appeared when the investigation started nearly two months ago. But he was a cop. He acted like a cop, carried himself like a cop and had a gun on his hip. No doubt about it, he was a cop, but he was new on the scene.
As he watched and re-watched the footage, what he could tell was that Delmonico and Gesch spoke to the guy and the brunette as equals, which meant they were probably bureau people.
He was pulling out tomorrow to continue his scouting, having taken a break. With a face out there now, he needed to be careful about having too much exposure. Besides, a plan was forming in his mind on how to take her, one with a twist, but he needed to work out the approach and exit. There would be downtime while he did that. Time while she was working, sleeping, visiting with friends. That would leave him with some time to ascertain if there were some new people hunting him.
He knew what he was up against with Gesch and Delmonico. But if those two had help now, he wanted to know who the new players in the game were.
M
ac drove his X5 through the eastern Maryland countryside north on State Highway 50, having left Salisbury an hour earlier. It was four days since taking down Lewis in Harrisburg and ten days since Hannah Donahue was murdered in Dover, Delaware. Based on the Reaper’s history with his three victims, they were getting into the zone when he would strike again.
In the last four days, Mac and Wire methodically went back over the two crime scenes in the hope of finding something that was missed, something that would give them a foothold on the case. There was the extra day spent in Harrisburg after the sketch based on Cedric Lewis’s description was released. Mac and Wire reinterviewed her husband and family, went through the autopsy reports, searched her apartment, walked the crime scene in the daylight and even made the bartender who walked her to her car the night she was killed go through it again with them, at two in the morning. Mac and Wire both concluded that the Reaper was waiting for Goynes in her car, put the chloroform over her mouth and shot her up with sodium pentothal from the backseat and then carried her back into the bar and down to the cellar. It was the only thing that made sense to them.
Next, sticking with the order of the killings, they trekked south through Baltimore, then east over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and into southeastern Maryland to Salisbury for the second victim, Janelle Wyland.
Janelle was an insurance broker and was doing quite well for herself at the age of twenty-seven. She made over $100,000 in the year before her death. Janelle was single, never married and did not have children. She was last seen leaving a prime two-story motel on the outskirts of Salisbury, following a tryst with her boss, something the two were apparently doing for several months.
“Might explain the $100,000 plus in income in the previous year,” Mac speculated.
“Figures,” Wire replied tartly. “You think the only way a woman could make a hundred grand is by spreading her legs.”
“Hey, now, wait just a minute …”
Janelle was next found just before noon in the basement of an abandoned office building four blocks from the motel, her BMW the lone car parked in the cracked and weed-infested parking lot.
Mac and Wire went through her home, reviewed her financial and cell phone records, interviewed her coworkers and friends and even her boss. His alibi for the murder was he arrived home from their little gathering and was in bed with his wife at the time of death, which the coroner pegged at sometime around 3:00
A.M.
The police and bureau sweated Janelle’s boss, but his wife eventually backed his story. Of course, she then justifiably served him with divorce papers.
“Janelle’s boss had a very bad week,” Mac remarked when they left the apartment he was now living in.
“Janelle’s was worse.”
As with the others, they walked the crime scene, evaluating how it is the Reaper could get so close without being seen. In the case of Wyland, she parked behind the motel so as to not be detected. There was little lighting and no surveillance cameras. The motel, lightly populated on a midweek night, provided for no witnesses and Wyland wasn’t discovered until the following morning.
After dark, Mac stood in the back parking area behind the aging motel, which was a combination of gravel and cracked blacktop backed up to a wetland interspersed with trees. There was one solitary dim light to illuminate the back area, a good two hundred feet away. It was a dangerous place for an unaccompanied woman. “I’ve seen this location in a hundred movies,” he muttered. “It’s the cliché place where someone
always
gets killed.”
“Man, he finds these women at their weakest point,” Wire moaned. “They’re vulnerable, their guard is down and boom, he hits them.”
“What I can’t figure out,” Mac said, “is what did Janelle Wyland do to deserve this? What did Melissa Goynes or Hannah Donahue do to deserve this? I don’t get it.”
“Nothing,” Wire said.
Mac vehemently shook his head, “That’s where we’re wrong, Dara, they did
something
. I’m not saying they did something wrong, or evil, but they did something, whether they even knew it or not, they did something to set this guy off on them. They did something that this guy says they must reap what they sowed. I mean, I keep coming around to the verse he left on Janelle, Galatians 6:7—Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. I mean. did they witness someone get killed?”
“Or did the three of them together kill someone?”
“No connection between the three of them,” Mac answered. “If there were, then I’d start thinking something like that was the connection, given the verses. But these women did something, Dara. They did
something
. They have something in common that set this guy off.”
“There’s nothing in their backgrounds that ties them together,” Wire responded. “I mean, you’re looking at the same stuff I am. There’s nothing.”
“That’s where we’re wrong,” Mac answered as they approached Annapolis. “There is
something
, Dara. We just haven’t connected it or found it yet. I’ll bet you a thousand dollars it’s there. We just need that one little piece of information that somehow ties it all together. All the pieces we’ve found matter, we just don’t know why or how yet.”
“Problem is, Mac, will we figure it out in time?” Wire asked with a dire tone. They’d both been obsessing over the passing days on the calendar. “It won’t be long now.”
The media knew that as well.
A serial killer known as “The Reaper” was terrorizing the states around the nation’s capital. One of his victims was the daughter of a prominent political player. That and a twenty-four-hour news cycle led to the case garnering a certain amount of media coverage every day now. It wasn’t over the top coverage, and in many ways was tailing off, but it was nevertheless a story that was receiving follow-up inquiries and coverage.
As Mac and Wire operated out of the media spotlight, working away on the case, Gesch, Delmonico and FBI Director Mitchell found themselves on the front line of the media attention. Gesch and the director had suggested leaking the fact that Mac and Wire were working the case as a way to provide something new to report, instead of repeating the mantra of little progress. Mac and Wire successfully pleaded with them not to do that, at least yet. “Listen, give us a couple of weeks on this,” Mac begged. “Give us the time to work this thing without some reporter sticking a microphone in my face. I don’t do well with reporters. My typical reactions to their questions will bring attention you don’t want.”
The pictures and images generated from the sketch created from Cedric Lewis’s description were a constant presence, however, both because the media needed something to show and because the task force hoped that if enough people saw the images, something would pop. The images, as much as anything, kept the media’s attention.
The pressure from the media, not to mention the director and people like Bill Donahue, led Gesch and Delmonico to call Mac and Wire several times a day looking for updates. “God, Mac,” Gesch said, “I’d give my left nut for a break.”
“I’d give your left nut too,” Mac answered wryly.
The bright glow of Washington was appearing in the distance. Mac and Wire, going flat out for eight straight days, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, nothing but hotels, motels, coffee and bad food, desperately needed a break. He dropped Wire off at her place in Arlington and Mac knew she would be asleep before he reached the interstate. It was a little after eight
P.M.
when he called Sally, who was, naturally, still at the White House.
“I walked today,” she said. “Why don’t you stop in? The Judge would like to see you.”
“Do you mean to tell me that the Judge is still working at 8:00
P.M.
?” the man was in his mid-sixties. “Cripes.”
Mac dropped the X5 in guest parking. He took a look at himself in the rearview mirror. His hair was disheveled and his stubble was three days old now, almost stylish. His attire left something to be desired, a green and white checkered Polo button-down collar, a navy blue sport coat and dark blue jeans with dark brown slip-on loafers. It was not the attire to appear at the White House, but it was what it was. After the perfunctory chat and check through security, he found Sally working in her office.
She pushed up from her desk and came around and gave him a kiss and a long hug which he soaked in. After a minute, she stood back and took in his appearance.
“What?”
“Well, a few things,” she replied with concern, arms folded across her chest, analyzing him. “You look really weary,” then she reached and rubbed the right side of his face, “and you really could use a shave.”
He laughed. “Weary?”
“Yeah, your eyes look heavy, circles under them even though the bruising is gone or at least almost gone. You just look exhausted.”
Mac shrugged, “Yeah, well, a maniac is probably days away from killing another woman and after four straight days on the road, we really got nothing.”
“Nothing?” They both turned to see the Judge standing in the doorway along with another visitor. Well, in this building he wasn’t a visitor.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Mac greeted, standing up a little straighter, trying to look a little fresher and now really
really
regretting his appearance.
The president shook his head, “Mac, you look like shit.”
“Thank you, sir,” Mac answered crisply and everyone chortled.
“Let’s go over to the residence and have a drink and relax,” President Thomson replied, waving everyone to follow. “Mac, I want you tell me about the case. I’m getting the official line from Tom Mitchell. I want to actually know what is what.”
For the next hour, Mac, with Sally at his side, reviewed the case with the Judge and President Thomson while sipping smooth Kentucky bourbon. Mac couldn’t help but be amused at the oddity of the president of the United States getting up out of his chair and refilling his and Sally’s glasses. President Thomson had the common touch, a man who came from humble beginnings, built a business from the ground up, worked his way up the political ladder step-by-step and through hard work, a little luck and a fair amount of political instincts, won the ultimate job. But tonight, it was obvious he wanted nothing more than to sit around with three friends, have a couple of drinks and relax, just that it was in the White House residence. Mac was sitting where Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy sat and dealt with the world’s issues. It was another bucket list experience for him. He needed to start writing these down.
“So, Mr. President,” Mac asked, having answered questions for an hour, “how different is my version than the one you’ve been getting?”
“It’s a blunter, more direct and less sanitized assessment of the case for sure, which I appreciate, my boy. The director tells me the case is being worked hard, which clearly from what you’re telling me, it is. They tell me they have leads and they’re following them.”
“It isn’t a lack of effort, Mr. President, but in reality it’s actually a lack of
real
leads. We have an idea of what the guy looks like but as of yet, no clue as to where to look for him and we haven’t figured out what ties the women together,” Mac answered, taking a sip of his fourth drink and starting to feel the alcohol. Sally would surely be driving. “It is maybe the single most frustrating case I’ve ever worked.”
“Is there anything you need? Are there any more resources we can apply? Is there any more that we could be doing to help?” President Thomson asked.
Mac shook his head, “We just need that one break, Mr. President. We need luck, a mistake, a connection, something, and the case will start breaking, I think.”
“I thought the picture you got would have led to more,” the Judge suggested.
“Wire and I talked about that earlier, Judge. Fact of the matter is that this guy is very good at hiding. If people got a look at him, it was for a brief second and he didn’t register in any way with them. He was just a face in the crowd, a guy walking down the street, that you pass in a hallway or you see driving by in a parking lot. He’s blending, keeping his distance but he’s an ever present shadow in the lives of his victims, they just don’t sense or realize it.”
“You will catch him though?” the president asked.
Mac nodded. “We’ll get him, sir.”
“You just won’t guarantee me when?”
“Nor how many will die before we get there.”
• • • •
“Wallace, I got a voice mail from Helen.”
“And?”
“She thinks this killer, the Reaper, might be following her now. She’s seen a man meeting the general description a couple of days here now.”
“Is she sure?”
“No. She said it could be that she’s getting paranoid given what happened to Melissa, Janelle and Hannah. But she’s freaked. She can’t run and hiding completely is difficult with her job.”
“What does she want from you?”
“Protection.”
“Protection?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to provide it?” Wallace asked from behind his desk, pouring himself another glass of whiskey. “I can make that happen if you want.”
She thought for a minute, taking a sip from Wallace’s fine whiskey. “We could do that. Or,” she said as she took a long drink to finish the glass, “I have another thought.”
“Which is?”
“How close is the FBI to finding the Reaper?”
“From what I understand, not very close at all. Beyond the pictures, which are pretty rough, they have no idea who he is, how he’s identifying his victims or why he’s choosing his victims. The president got the FBI to put a couple of his people on the case and what progress has occurred has developed because of them, but even with all of their work, they’re not close.”
She considered that for a moment as Wallace filled her glass. “Logically, I’m the last target. He wants me the most so he’ll be coming for me last.”
“Agreed.”