There was an awkward silence as they waited. Micki and
Olivia looked at him and Jack with concern. Olivia’s partner, Kane, looked as
if he realized he’d missed something, but wasn’t going to push it because he
trusted his partner to fill him in later. Olivia and Kane had one of the best
working relationships of any of Abbott’s staff. Noah envied them.
Ian had been at Rachel’s scene and had worked the rest
of the night. He looked like hell. The only one at the table fully rested was
Carleton Pierce, but even he frowned as he checked each face around the table.
“What’s happened?” Carleton asked. “And I’m not
talking about the investigation.”
“We were too late getting to the victim’s house last
night,” Noah said. “She was already dead, by forty minutes.”
Carleton’s brows knit. “Who found her?”
“I did,” Olivia said. “And I missed the killer by ten
minutes.”
“I don’t understand. How did you know where to look?”
“We got another tip,” Jack said tightly. “From our
CI.”
“He knows, Jack,” Noah said. “Carleton, I know that
you went by to see her last night. We were able to figure out which of the test
subjects was next, but we got our signals crossed and now Rachel Ward is dead.”
“I see,” Carleton said, glancing at Jack’s stony face.
“I wish I didn’t.”
Abbott came in then. “Tell me we have something,
people.” He closed the door, his face almost as stony as Jack’s. “At least balm
for that ass kicking I just took. Ian?”
“I finished the autopsy. The victim had a blood
alcohol of 0.15.”
“Whoa,” Micki said. “That made her damn near pickled.
But I’m not surprised. We found a vodka bottle under the seat of her car. She’d
drained it dry.”
“The ket blood test isn’t back yet,” Ian said, “but I
found no puncture wounds on her neck. I did find the same swelling around her
elbows that Christy had, so I’m betting he used a straitjacket again. No
defensive wounds on her hands, although there were ligature wounds at her
ankles. She was tied to a chair while her feet burned.”
Noah remembered. The smell in the place. Burning
flesh. It still made him nauseous.
“He burned her feet?” Carleton said, hushed. “My God.”
“Burns on feet and calves,” Ian said. “Urine came back
positive for amphetamines.”
“Did she self-administer,” Abbott asked, “or did he
give it to her?”
“There was only one needle mark. I think he gave it to
her to counteract the booze.”
“He wanted her alert,” Micki murmured.
“So he could scare her senseless with fire,” Jack
said. “I checked her background. Five years ago her ex-husband found she’d been
cheating on him, so he followed her to the motel where she met her lover and
torched the place. The lover and two bystanders died. Rachel was trapped. She
had severe smoke inhalation and almost died herself.”
“That explains the old lung scarring I found,” Ian
said. “I wondered.”
“Where is the ex-husband now?” Olivia asked.
“State pen,” Jack said, “serving twenty-five to life.
And he’s still there as of this morning. I had the warden himself check the
man’s cell.”
“So this victim had a documented fear of fire,”
Carleton said. “The killer could have assumed this was her greatest fear.”
“Or he could have these.” Noah put a stack of
questionnaires on the table. They’d been delivered that morning. “Filled out
when subjects began the study at Marshall.”
“May I?” Carleton reached for the questionnaires. “ ‘
What
is your greatest fear?’ ‘Why do you think you have this fear?
’ Samantha
feared being buried alive because…” He flipped to the next page. “Interesting.
Her cousins buried her in the sand at the beach as a child and left her there,
with a snorkel in her mouth to breathe from.”
“So the killer buried her alive,” Abbott said.
“In commercial-grade potting soil,” Micki said.
“Available at any garden store. Oh, and he buried her in the bathtub. I sent a
team to the apartment where Samantha lived. It hadn’t been rented out yet. Or,
luckily for us, cleaned very well. We found soil under the edge of the grout
around the tub and a few particles in the drain trap.”
“What about Martha Brisbane?” Abbott asked.
“Afraid of water,” Carleton said, scanning the page,
then his face bent in sympathy. “Oh. Her father drowned. Martha saw it happen.
She was five at the time.”
Noah clenched his jaw. “You know, I keep thinking I
can’t hate this guy any more, but I keep finding a way. To have read that, then
to have used it…”
“He’s a sociopath,” Carleton said simply. “A sadistic
sociopath. He gets pleasure from the pain of others. Christy Lewis, phobia of
snakes… Just because.” He looked up with a shrug. “That’s what she wrote. ‘Just
because.’ ”
“So she didn’t have any kind of traumatic event?” Jack
asked.
“Or she didn’t want to share it,” Carleton said.
“There may very well not have been one. I see a lot of patients with snake
phobias and many can’t tell me why. Some of it is instinctive. Snakes are
dangerous and humans have developed a fear of dangerous things. Survival of the
fittest and all that.”
“And now Rachel Ward,” Abbott said. “With her fear of
fire. Does she mention why?”
“She says she’s afraid of right-wing Republicans,
which is a NOYB answer—none of your business. Subjects will use sarcasm when
they don’t want to tell you the truth.”
“But,” Olivia said, “he could have googled her and
found that out, like Jack did.”
“But it wasn’t that simple,” Jack said with a frown.
“Somebody had to dig. I googled her first, and didn’t get anything. I ran a
background, saw she’d used a different name five years ago and checked the
marriage licenses. I googled her ex to get the story.”
Noah met Jack’s eyes and gave him a “well-done” nod
and was relieved at Jack’s brisk nod back. “So,” Noah mused, “our killer
understood her right-wing Republican answer was just a ruse and dug deeper. I
find that strange.”
“Why?” Abbott asked.
“Exactly,” Noah said. “Why? Why not just accept it at
face value and pick somebody else? There are five hundred names on the list.
Why Rachel Ward?”
“Maybe because she was so available,” Jack said. “She
was online every night.”
“Possibly,” Noah said. “I talked to a few neighbors
last night who said she kept to herself, never went out, a real-world
introvert. In Shadowland she was a cabaret dancer who’d take home a dozen ‘men’
a night.”
“I don’t get the whole virtual sex thing,” Abbott said
with a frown. “Is it common?”
“Not
un
common, according to Eve. Not that she
gets it either,” Noah added hastily.
Abbott’s eyes rolled. “If Rachel had a liquor bottle
under the seat of her car and a BA of oh-fifteen, he probably met her at a bar.
Find out where.”
“Not many bars in town,” Jack muttered sarcastically.
“But it’s a start.”
“What about the car I saw last night?” Olivia asked.
“The brown Civic.”
“Nothing from the BOLO,” Micki said. “And Girard’s
wife’s car was in the garage.”
“I want to know what connection Girard has to this
guy,” Noah said. “He’s either faster than a speeding bullet, or Girard has a
serious enemy.”
“Who is Girard?” Ian and Carleton asked at the same
time.
“Axel Girard is the owner of the car that followed
Christy home,” Jack said flatly.
“His wife owns the plate I saw leaving Rachel’s
neighborhood,” Olivia added.
“He’s also an optometrist,” Abbott said. “And a model
citizen.”
“Every victim’s eyes have been glued open,” Ian said.
“Being an optometrist can’t be a coincidence. I assume he has an alibi or you
would have arrested him already.”
“He had a so-so alibi for Christy, but he had a hell
of an alibi for Rachel,” Noah said dryly. “As in two of our guys sitting in an
unmarked car a few houses down, all night long.”
“That is a hell of an alibi,” Carleton said. “Any
chance he sneaked out?”
“Possibly”—Noah shrugged—“but the timeline doesn’t
work unless he drove a hundred-twenty the whole way home.”
“So where is Girard now?” Carleton asked.
“I had him brought in,” Noah said, “more for his own
protection than anything else. If anything else happened, I’d know exactly
where he was. But I let him go this morning. We still have a car watching his
house.”
“Chat with Dr. Girard,” Abbott said. “Find out why a
killer has such a hard-on for him. There has to be a connection. This guy has
been too damn meticulous. If nothing else, I want to know if there’s any way
Girard had access to that list. What else?”
“Dr. Donner and Jeremy Lyons,” Jack said. “We need
their whereabouts. Right now they have the most access to study files.”
“You haven’t talked to them yet?” Olivia asked,
surprised.
“We couldn’t find Donner,” Noah said. “He never showed
up after morning classes. I met Lyons in the Deli with Eve, but when Jack and I
went back to the university, he was gone, too. Then we caught wind of Axel
Girard and spun our wheels for hours on him.”
“Go back today and get their alibis for Christy,
Rachel, and Martha,” Abbott said. “What about your panty pervert? Taylor
Kobrecki.”
“We checked with his pals,” Kane said, speaking for
the first time. “He’s in the wind.”
“His LUDs show calls from Bozeman, Montana,” Olivia
said, “as recently as this morning. If he’s with his cell, he couldn’t have
killed Rachel. We put Bozeman on alert.”
Kane shrugged. “But it wouldn’t be the first time a
perp had someone else take his cell out of area to establish an alibi.”
“I’d be surprised if he was that clever,” Carleton
said. “I checked him out. High school graduate, but barely. Special needs
classes, no organization. He doesn’t have the acuity to form a plan like this.
I think your resources would be best used elsewhere.”
“Agreed,” Abbott said. “Anything else?”
“Maybe,” Noah said. “Usage logs from the study show
another participant who went from heavy play time to nothing, overnight. Her
name was Amy Millhouse.”
Jack looked perturbed. “Was?”
“Yes. She committed suicide three weeks ago.”
“We checked all the suicide reports,” Jack said.
“Nothing looked like these scenes.”
“I know, that’s why I said ‘maybe.’ We should check it
out.”
Abbott gave Noah a pensive look. “Do it. Then find
Donner and Lyons. Check out everyone who knew about that damn list. Olivia,
Kane, find out where Rachel met him last night. Somebody has seen this guy.
Meet back here at five. Web, you stay.”
“I just found out about Amy,” Noah said when everyone
left. “I should have told you.”
Abbott leaned back and studied him. “Why didn’t you?”
“Eve called me this morning, after I’d talked to
Girard in holding. She was showing me the graphs and Millhouse’s obit when she
got a text, we think from Kurt Buckland. It was a quote from the guy who
assaulted her back in Chicago. She was shaken up.”
“I guess so. And?”
“And this Buckland’s been trying to pressure her to
give him details on this case.” He told him about Buckland’s visit to Sal’s and
the photos of him and Trina.
Abbott listened, frowning. “I’ll get somebody on it.
You focus on this case. Got it?”
“Yeah.”
“And next time, tell your partner about potential new
victims before the group.”
Noah bristled, but nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Wednesday, February 24, 9:10 a.m.
After Winters, Eve found the shower the place to cry
when people were around. The water covered the sobs and minimized eye swelling.
She’d taken a lot of showers then.
Very clean, she’d been. Very clean she was now as she
sat in a chair at the police department, waiting to file a complaint against
Buckland. His text had shaken her badly.
“I’m Officer Michaels,” the policeman said with a kind
smile. “I’ve seen you at Sal’s.”
“Bud Lite,” she said, forcing a smile of her own.
“Gotta watch that waistline,” he quipped, then
sobered. “What happened last night?”
Eve told him, watching his brow crease as she related
the details. “And this morning he texted me. Detective Webster has already
started a trace.” She frowned at Michaels’s expression of disbelief. “You don’t
believe me.”
“No, that’s not it at all. I’m just stunned. I know
Kurt and this doesn’t sound like him.”
Eve tugged at her sleeve, exposing the bruise that had
faded a little during the night. “He did this. And another cop, Jeff Betz, saw
the whole thing.”
“Of course I believe you. I just never would have
guessed it of Looey.”
Eve sat back, her own brow creased now. “Looey?”
“Yeah. That’s what some of the guys call Kurt. Don’t
ask me why. Before my time.”