Authors: Carolyn Arnold
“Don’t you think our time would better be spent speaking with the husbands of the women who didn’t belong to clubs at the time of their disappearance?” Paige asked.
Jack’s eyes snapped to Paige. They glazed over with a spark of anger. “Brandon and I will visit the husbands of those women.”
The way Jack’s jaw set, I knew he didn’t appreciate Paige’s attitude and, for a second, I felt responsible for it. I’m not even sure why. She seemed hurt, as evidenced in the way her eyes avoided contact with mine and the reddish hue to her cheeks.
Did she know about my going out with the female officer? Was she jealous?
If she were, she’d have to get over it. Paige and I would never be a couple, despite any feelings we might hold for each other. She reminded me of my past, not a future I had planned. On top of it, we worked on the same team. A relationship between us could jeopardize everything, and quite possibly lives, if given the ideal situation. I was also pretty sure one of us would have to leave the BAU.
Chapter 23
Paige loaded into the passenger seat of the SUV. She didn’t feel much like talking and was happy that Zach was normally good about not prying into her personal life. Today was definitely one of those days she preferred to remain quiet. It was about putting the hours in and calling it a day. While she was driven to find the truth, to bring justice to the victims, and hopefully save the recently missing women, she wasn’t naive about the likelihood they were already dead. Based on the short cool-down period, the unsub was likely stalking his next victim already.
He had carefully chosen his prior victims, picking women whose husbands were busy and away from home a lot, but, based on the speed at which he was abducting them now, he worked on impulse not logic. His world would be crumbling around him.
“I’m thinking once we get a name, if we do, that is connected to each of the clubs, we should inquire why he left. If we find out where he is currently working, if he is, we need to find out what his record is like. Is he on time? Is he a valued employee?”
Zach glanced over at her briefly before focusing on the road. It would only be about a twenty-minute drive to Woodbridge where Frank Wilson’s widow lived.
“I agree. He’s got to be falling apart. To take two women in the span of a week, a couple days really, when his record was approximately one every two months, he’s got to be losing control. The auditory hallucinations must be getting louder and taking over.”
“Maybe he’s not even hearing voices but just feeling the compulsion,” Paige said.
“Why?”
“Like we thought before, a father figure to him, someone he wants to please. We have yet to find out if that person is alive or if he is trying to please a memory.”
Zach pulled off the highway and followed the directions of the GPS to the house of Barbara Wilson.
Paige faced out the window when they stopped at a light.
“The thing I don’t understand is that Frank Wilson died two years after the first victim, Chase. The change in MO didn’t come until two thousand. What does Jack expect us to uncover with this woman?”
“Guess we’ll find out, but he’s the boss Paige so we do what he says.”
She let out a deep breath and shook her head. She didn’t need him to say the words, but she didn’t feel like herself today. She needed to rein in her feelings for Brandon before they destroyed the career she loved and had worked so hard for. What no one else knew, nor was privy to, she had shown up at the police station the night before and was told Brandon had left with a female officer by the name of Becky Tulson. Paige didn’t remember meeting her, but she already disliked her.
Chapter 24
We were quickly making our way through the list of five husbands. We were on our way to speak to the last one now—Justin Parks. His wife, Lindsay, disappeared back at the start of two thousand eight. She was last seen in the morning when he left to go to work.
Parks was a successful businessman who owned a prospering franchise business for lawn care and handyman work that reached into several states. It was known that while he no longer got his hands dirty with the day-to-day work, he never missed a day at the office crunching numbers and scheming new marketing avenues.
Perfectionist Landscaping was a two-story building located in Woodbridge on commercially-zoned property. Other corporations had nestled in the area, some larger than Perfectionist but with most of them around the same size.
The woman behind the counter was average-looking—the only distinguishable feature being a black mole on her right cheek. She offered a sincere smile. “Good day.”
Her soft tone indicated a shy nature. My guess was she hadn’t been at this post long and might not even be sure if she liked it.
“We’re here to see Justin Parks.” Jack flashed his creds.
“Oh, the FBI.” She smiled and stood up. “I love that show.”
I sensed Jack’s energy emanating in tidal-wave-sized proportions.
“This isn’t a show.”
Her smile faded. “I just respect what you do. You’re very intelligent the way you go about solving mur—” Her hazel eyes went between us. “Why do you want to speak to Mr. Parks?”
“That is confidential.” Jack gestured to the phone on her desk.
“Yeah, yeah, of course. I apologize. I’m getting carried away.” She dropped back into her chair and picked up the receiver.
Jack’s feelings about this woman were written all over his face. The receptionist was an FBI groupie, one of those people who idolized us but didn’t really know what we did.
“He’ll be out in a few minutes if you want to have a seat.” She pointed to a sitting area.
Jack turned his back on the receptionist and faced the front windowpanes.
“Thanks.” I offered a smile to compensate for Jack’s aloof response.
Light shone into the lobby from three of the four sides. The fourth side being what led back into the offices.
“Hello gentlemen.”
The man’s voice had both of us turning to greet him. He wore a brilliant blue collared shirt paired with black slacks. Despite my initial assumptions that he’d be a stuffy businessman, perched behind a desk, squawking out orders, Parks had the type of friendly air about him that instantly put people at ease. Most women, I imagined, would find him attractive. His physique was kept tight and lean, likely from a regular gym regimen. His dark hair had sprinkles of gray on the sides, similar to Jack, giving him a distinguished look.
Parks held out his hand to us.
After the introductions, he said, “Did you find her?”
I passed a quick glance at the receptionist, and her head turned quickly back to her monitor, as if she thought her rapt attention on us would go unnoticed.
“We’d like to talk with you in private,” Jack said.
“Of course. This way.” Parks led us to a conference room where he sat at the head of the table. We sat on each side of him.
“Your wife, Lindsay,” Jack began.
The smile that had been on Parks’s face disappeared.
“She went missing back in two thousand and eight.”
“Correct.” Parks clasped his hands on the table and leaned forward. He repeated his first question. “Did you find her?” His cheeks went ashen.
“No, we haven’t.”
Parks leaned back, his focus unfixed. “I had to move on with my life, but not one day goes by that I don’t think of her. Not one. Everything I do is for her.” Seconds passed with him studying us. “What do you want from me? I’m the one who had the report filed. I answered everything then. When I last saw her—”
“We don’t show that your wife worked out at a fitness club.”
“No.” He dragged the word out, skeptically. “Why would she? We had a gym in our home. I had it custom built for her. Lots of windows.” He smiled, apparently caught in a memory. “She loved sunshine. She thought it was God’s way of smiling at us and telling us that He loves us.”
“Did anyone come into the home, an in-house trainer, for example?”
I noticed how Jack skipped right over the mention of God, not that it surprised me. The man always withdrew at the mention of a supreme being. The pass being, when a person had seen what Jack had, it was hard to keep on believing.
“If she had, I didn’t know anything about it.”
“You don’t know if she had a trainer?”
Anger marked Parks’s expression. “Am I a suspect in her disappearance now? I file the report, and I’m told these are not actively investigated. In other words, my wife’s abduction doesn’t mean anything. Can you believe they tried to imply she was cheating on me and ran off with her lover?” His voice rose with each word. “Tell me how that makes sense. They’re not investigated, but I suppose it’s just like the innocent who end up behind bars because the eager cop is more interested in his record than the truth.”
“You mentioned abduction,” I said. It earned me a glare from Parks.
“Of course, I did. There’s no other way to explain it. Linds and I loved each other. Sure, maybe we had our small arguments, but what couple doesn’t? You get over it, move on with your life. It doesn’t mean you bed a third party.”
“There were never any ransom calls?”
“None.”
“Have you ever cheated on your wife?”
A small twitch tapped in Parks’s cheek. He disregarded Jack’s question and addressed me, “There are a lot of marriages with problems. Ours, mine, wasn’t one of them. Please find her so that my side of the story is proven the truth.” With the last two words, he looked at Jack. “Now, if that will be all.”
“Actually, it’s not.”
Parks raised his eyes to the ceiling and let out a deep exhale.
“You said you didn’t know if your wife had a trainer. How is that? You haven’t answered that question.”
Parks clasped his hands and leaned forward like he had when we first sat at the table. “She was given her own allowance, if you want to call it that.”
“She had her own bank account?”
“Yes. Between that and my working twenty hours a day, we weren’t together often.”
“You were a happy couple though.” Jack rose, and I followed his lead. He tossed a card across the table. “We will be in touch with a warrant for her financial records.”
“I could just give you a copy of her statements.”
Jack turned around. “Get them ready. We’ll be securing a warrant.”
I had a feeling he’d say that. As the FBI, we liked to do everything by the book. Everything ran through a local DA, any piece of evidence backed up by enough paperwork to keep hundreds employed.
Chapter 25
Barbara Wilson answered the door dressed in purple cotton pants and a floral t-shirt. Her white hair was worn short and permed. Deep creases traced her blue eyes, but the years hadn’t dulled their gleam.
“Yes?” Her voice was frail, as if her vocal cords would snap if projected beyond a low volume. They attested to her seventy-plus years.
“Barbara Wilson, we’re FBI Special Agents Dawson and Miles.” Paige gestured to Zach.
Wilson’s eyes scanned them, as if assessing whether they were who they said they were.
“Can we come in?”
The older lady looked behind them to the street with such intent that Paige turned around.
“I suppose.”
“Thank you Mrs. Wilson.”
“You are welcome dear.” She withdrew into the house and held the door open. She latched the deadbolt behind them. “The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.” Her eyes connected with Paige’s. “Not that I likely have to tell the FBI. What can I do for you?”
“We’re here about your husband.”
“Frank’s been dead for years now.” She moved toward a sitting area which suited her age group. She had likely bought the pieces when they were brand new. A gray coating of dust covered the end tables, a book case, and the television screen.
Zach remained standing, but Paige took a seat and crossed her legs.
“We want to know more about him.”
“Why? Why now?” She tapped a hand on the arm of the chair she sat in and then moved the lever on the side to recline. “All the police wanted to do back then, when that girl got murdered, was interrogate him. They accused him outright. Probably why he’s in the grave already.” Wilson performed the sign of the cross on her chest.
“Your husband drove for Straightline Trucking which frequented that stretch of highway.”
“He must have killed her then.”
“People say he had a bad temper and—”
“He never hit me once.”
Paige wondered about the mental state of the woman. Her eyes veiled over periodically as they spoke, and the records showed domestic abuse was a prevalent occurrence in her past. They would have to handle this delicately.
“He broke your nose. Do you remember that?” The words came out, and Paige wondered if she went about it tactfully enough.
Wilson laced her arms. “I…” A few seconds later, she picked up again. “I do now, come to think of it. He did that? Frank?”
Paige nodded, doing so with a skill she had acquired over time. It communicated empathy and established a common ground.
“No, he was a good man.”
“He may have been Mrs. Wilson—”
“Don’t be condescending to me.” She flipped the lever on the side of the chair and pushed the footrest down with her legs. “Out. I want you out of my house.”
“We don’t believe your husband killed that girl.”
Her movements halted. “Then why, why are you here?”
“We want to know if your husband had any close friends he worked with, anything he might have mentioned about any of them.” Paige knew it was unlikely that Wilson would recall even if he had. It had been many years.
“No, not that I can…”
“It was possible he mentioned something to you around the time he was being accused of the murder,” Zach said. “Can you think back to that time? I’m sure things were upside down in your lives.”
“You have no idea, young man.”
“Did he get along with his employer, his coworkers?”
Wilson chewed on the inside of her bottom lip. “He…”
“Why don’t you sit back down again? Relax. It will come to you.”
She gave them a look that said,
whatever you think, I’m not buying it
. She reclined back in the chair again.
“Now close your eyes.”
Wilson’s eyes pinched shut and opened, not even a fraction of a second later. “Oh, no, you don’t. Don’t you be hypnotizing me.”
“This process is not hypnosis. It is a relaxing of the mind so that it can recall certain things with clarity, even what you may not have considered to be important at the time.”
She didn’t seem to buy his line. “Not hypnosis?”
“No.” Zach reassured her with a smile.
“All right.” She closed her eyes, and the wrinkles in her forehead relaxed as she did.
“Think back to when the police first came and got your husband. What happened?”
“There were two police at the door, but a bunch of cop cars on the road. One drove up onto my front yard. I was so mad.” Wilson opened her eyes. “I had a beautiful garden started that year. He wrecked that.”
“Okay, move past that. Did your husband say anything to you?”
She closed her eyes again. “He said to call a lawyer. Oh, and he said, ‘I love you, sugar.’” Wilson smiled, but it faded quickly. “He said, ‘they have the wrong man.’”
“Okay, did he give you any names?”
Wilson kept her eyes shut but shook her head. “No…wait!” She paused for a second, and then opened her eyes. “He said Ladies’ Man.”
“Ladies’ Man?”
“Yeah, all the guys gave each other nicknames on the road.”
“Do you know the real name for—”
Wilson shook her head before Paige asked the full question. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have been more help, but it is what it is.”
“Did your husband bring home any friends from work?”
“No. He liked to keep work separate. He had a couple friends, but they rarely came over or went out.”
“What were their names?” Paige rubbed the flat of her hands on the top of her thighs and leaned forward.
“This is real important to you, isn’t it?” The older lady studied both of them. “Is this about those recently missing women and that body they found? You know my Frank’s been dead for years. He couldn’t have done it.”
“Your husband is no longer a person of interest in the murder of Melanie Chase, but we believe he may have had contact with the person who is responsible for recent abductions.”
Wilson gripped the top of her shirt, bunching the material in a nervous manner. “Dennis was a good friend of Frank’s. So was Ken.”
“We’re going to need to know their last names if you—”
“Smith and Campbell. Dennis has passed on, though. Ken is in a nursing home in town here. Not sure how helpful he’ll be. Alzheimer’s has left him stripped of dignity. He was a good man. It’s not fair what happens to us when we get older.”
Paige offered a sincere smile. She didn’t like to think about the future and what it held. She preferred living in the now and experiencing all that life brought her way. “Thank you for your time.”
The woman reached for the lever on her chair and seemed to spring from the seat to a standing position. While age may have affected her mind, it didn’t limit her mobility.
“Not really sure how much help I was, but it was nice having company.” She squeezed Paige’s arm.
The contact made Paige think of her own mother, and, in turn, her father. She had a good relationship with them, it just wasn’t cultivated often. She was busy on the road a lot with her job. Her parents had their clubs and interests that kept their time occupied. It had been at least six months since she saw them. She had only spoken to them via e-mail once or twice. It was pretty sad as they only lived a half hour away.
Paige pulled on the door handle of the SUV and got inside. “Curious why you used your hocus pocus trick. I thought it only worked on victims who escaped brushes with death or a life-changing situation.”
Zach put the key in the ignition, bringing the engine to life. “The process can be used to bring back anything from a traumatic situation. Her life may not have been threatened, but her way of life was. While she was used to police dragging her husband off on assault charges, murder was a new one. She was likely contemplating if she would have been the next victim. Either way—”
“I get it. Traumatic.” Paige smiled. “Well, now we know a couple things. We need to find a guy from the seventies nicknamed Ladies’ Man and speak to Ken Campbell.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be a fun day, that’s for sure.”
“Sure, if that’s how you see it.” Paige laughed. Her mind was no longer occupied with Brandon and their relationship, or lack thereof. It didn’t matter—it was what it was, and she would be fine.
The onboard system notified them of a voice mail message.
They had their cell phones on them, but a third was always connected to the SUV. Paige found it strange the caller used that one and not the phones they carried.
Zach hit play. Jack’s voice filled the car.