Drained (11 page)

Brett took the two remaining needles and tubes from the washbasin and slipped them into the carotid arteries on each side of her neck.

Monica’s body remained motionless.

Brett stood over her and watched. He followed the blood running from the tubes with his eyes for minutes. He dipped his head and placed his ear next to her nose and mouth. Her breathing was rapid. He swiped his hand down her arm—it was cool and clammy to the touch.

“Not long now,” he said. “What you’re experiencing is called hypovolemic shock. Do you know what that is?”

Monica, again, didn’t respond.

“I didn’t know what it was called at first either—I had to look it up when I started doing it this way years ago. Basically, it’s your body shutting down when the blood drains from it. I’d say you’re at about forty-percent blood loss right now.” He shook his head and bit his lip. “No coming back after a forty-percent blood loss.”

I took a seat at the desk in my room and set down the file box Beth had picked up from the local FBI office. Beth followed me in, and the door closed at her back. I caught the time. We had an hour and fifteen minutes before we had to leave for our next family interview.

“Why didn’t you tell the husband we already had the bank records?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They were offering. When someone offers up something, just take it. It allows the family to feel like they are helping.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Lunch, while you let me know what you got out in Englewood?” Beth asked.

I let out a breath. “I guess I probably have to eat since I missed breakfast.”

“Do you want to just hit the same place we did yesterday?” Beth asked. “It looks like we only have an hour or so.”

“Yeah, that’s fine. The food and prices were decent,” I said.

“Ready now?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I nodded toward the door and followed Beth out.

We walked the hall, and she thumbed the button for the elevator. The doors opened and we stepped inside.

“When I called back Hilary Wormack, the mother of Angela, and asked about Angela’s computer, she said she had it and will turn it over to us when we meet with her,” I said. “If we can get one from Kennedy Taylor’s family, it looks like we’ll have three for the tech guys to look into.”

“Perfect,” Beth said.

“Is that something that we send back to Manassas or have the local branch check out?”

“Local,” Beth said. “You said Agent Andrews was going to have a case file for us on the most recent by the end of the day?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll drop the computer or computers off then if we get one from Kennedy Taylor’s family.”

I nodded.

The elevator doors let us out into the lobby. We headed down the two flights of blue-carpeted stairs and outside. After leaving the hotel, we walked around the block to the restaurant. The hostess sat us in the exact same booth as the day prior. Beth and I quickly browsed the menus and put in our order. I ordered the same thing as the last time—the Philly cheesesteak sandwich had been pretty good.

“What did Ball say when you called him and told him we had another?” Beth asked.

“He said, ‘Your killer is there, and you two are there. Find him.’”

“That sounds about right. What was the scene like?”

“News vans and local PD everywhere. Agent Andrews had another guy and the FBI’s forensics team there with him. The body was gone, but I saw the photos that were taken of her while she was still inside the Dumpster.”

“And?” Beth asked.

“Woman in a Dumpster. Faint smell of bleach. Not much of any evidence. Close-up photos showed needle marks and bruising in the same locations. Ball is sending me everything he could get on the woman. Um, hold on.” I pulled out my cell phone and looked at the screen because I had a message from Supervisor Ball, probably my information on the deceased woman. I opened the e-mail. “Rebecca Wright. Twenty-six years old. Hair is listed as brown on her DL though it was dyed blond in person. Address is in Elgin. Single. Here, I’ll forward this over to you.” I clicked the prompts to send her the woman’s information.

Beth pulled out her phone. “Got it.” She opened the message and read over the woman’s information. “Do you think there is anything to how they look?” she asked. “Or maybe what all these women have in common?”

“Well, they’re all single. All thin. They’re all fairly attractive, I guess.” I thought about it further. “All in a small age range of between twenty-five and thirty. None of these women had kids, did they?”

Beth shook her head. “So our killer definitely has a type of woman that he’s after.”

“Appears so,” I said. “But since when? It looked like the past victims, from years back, were all over the place. I mean, they were all women, but the ages spanned into the forties, and it didn’t seem like body type mattered.”

“Yeah, that is true,” Beth said.

Our waitress passed, dropping off our drinks.

Beth held her straw like a knife and tapped it against the table to pull off the wrapper. Then she plunged it into her iced tea and took a sip. “So we have a type of woman that he’s after now. Besides that, what have we learned new since we’ve been here?”

“Not a ton,” I said.

“Well, we have their bank and phone records back at the hotel. We have a pretty good idea that our killer is dating these women in some form or another. I’d think if they all were on the same dating website, it would have been found by the local FBI when they went through the records. Maybe we have one man finding women from multiple websites,” Beth said.

“Plausible,” I said. “But I still think that it would have been found. Four dead women all on dating websites, whether the same or not, should raise a flag.”

Beth rocked her head back and forth. “Yeah, I guess that would be too big to miss. I still think our guy is a suitor somehow. It just makes the most sense. Usually, when something makes the most sense, it’s right.”

“I can’t argue with you there.”

Our food came a moment later, and we ate quickly and headed back to the hotel. Beth had her car brought up by the valet, and we left for our interview with Kennedy Taylor’s family.

I sat in the passenger seat, going through her information. Ms. Taylor was listed as living in Oak Brook, Illinois. “Parents said they were having some kind of a gathering there today?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“We’re not walking into a memorial or after-funeral thing for this girl, are we?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I spoke with her father. He gave us a time to come and just said that there would be people close to her there that we could speak with.”

I nodded but said nothing.

Beth exited the freeway and drove us into in affluent-appearing neighborhood. Each house appeared twenty or so years old, yet none of them looked remotely affordable. The cars in the driveways were all high-end, shiny and new.

“Guessing the Taylor family has money,” I said.

“If they live back here or, hell, anywhere in this town, they do. These are about the smallest houses around here, though. Still probably a million each,” she said. “Their house is going to be down the next street on our right.”

Beth made a right up the block. Two blocks down, I saw a line of cars along the curb. Beth slowed and parked behind the last car. “The address should be a couple of houses up on our right here.”

We stepped out of the car. I tucked the file under my arm, and we headed for the Taylor’s house. The home came into view behind a couple of large oak trees. The U-shaped driveway was full of cars. Set back from the street was a light-colored brick single-story home with an unusually steeply pitched cedar-shake roof. We walked up the driveway toward the house. I didn’t see a garage, but a part of the driveway stretched forward down the far side of the house. The home had six windows on the front, divided by a door in the center. To the left and right of the arched front door were a pair of rectangular windows in arched alcoves. The windows on each end of the house were square, with light-blue shutters matching the color of the front door. I thought the color of the door and shutters was an odd choice, though I couldn’t say it looked entirely bad.

Beth and I stepped up to the landing of the front door.

“Do you have a name of the girl’s father you spoke with?” I asked.

“Doug.” Beth reached out and thumbed the doorbell, and we waited.

A moment later, the front door pulled open, and a man stood before us. He appeared in his early fifties. He was roughly my size and weight—a few inches over six foot and around two hundred pounds. He had a strong dimpled chin and short dark hair with a bit of gray sprinkled in. The man wore a yellow polo shirt with khaki shorts.

“We’re here to see Doug Taylor,” Beth said.

“I’m Doug. Are you the agent I spoke with on the phone?” he asked.

Beth nodded.

“Why don’t you two come in, and we’ll head up to my office,” he said.

With that comment, the shape of the roofline made a little more sense—the home must have had a second story that faced the backyard of the property. We followed him inside. He led us through the foyer and toward the kitchen in the back of the house. Four women, seated and talking, surrounded a gray granite island in the center of the kitchen. Through the windows of the back of the house, I spotted about twenty people in the home’s back patio area. Mr. Taylor turned left from the kitchen and opened a door. He walked through and up a flight of stairs as Beth and I followed.

The upstairs was a single large office. A big wooden desk sat at the back of the room. One window overlooked the backyard. Miscellaneous awards covered the wall area behind his desk. A television took up the wall opposite the window, and a few lounge chairs and a small couch stood before it.

“You guys can have a seat here.” He gestured toward the couch.

Beth and I sat.

Mr. Taylor turned one of the lounge chairs toward the couch and took a seat. He clasped his hands in his lap. “We’re having a service for Kennedy at our church tonight.” He ran the knuckle of one index finger back and forth under his nose. “Friends and family from the area is who you saw downstairs and outside. Has there been any news?”

“We’re still investigating. Trying to gather everything we can,” Beth said. “It’s the reason for our visit.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you need.”

Though the guy was keeping up a good composure, I could see pain in his eyes—they had an almost hollow look, as if nothing behind them.

“We’d just like to know more about your daughter’s personal life. Little things that may not seem important but could maybe help us to connect her with some of the other victims. If we can connect them, it could lead us straight to the person responsible,” I said.

“Okay. Give me a minute. I’d like to go get my wife and daughter and have them come up.”

“Sure,” I said.

Doug Taylor reentered the office with two women in tow. “This is my wife Tanya and our daughter Cassidy,” he said.

Beth and I stood and shook the hands of the two women. The mother, Tanya Taylor, looked to be in her late forties or early fifties. She had blond shoulder-length hair and wore a white blouse and shorts with some kind of charm necklace around her neck. Her skin was dark—too dark for a natural tan.

The daughter, Cassidy Taylor, looked to be in her midtwenties. She had a thin face, big eyes, long dark hair, and glasses that she seemed to be hiding behind. She wore a small orange T-shirt and white shorts. Her tan was also dark yet not as extreme as her mother’s. The mother and daughter took seats in the lounge chairs beside the couch while Doug Taylor rolled his office chair from behind his desk and brought it to his wife’s side and took a seat.

“We we’re telling Mr. Taylor here that we would just like to get some more information on Kennedy’s personal life,” I said.

“However we can help,” Mrs. Taylor said.

The daughter, Cassidy, said nothing.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to record our conversation,” Beth said.

“That’s fine,” Mr. Taylor said.

Beth removed her voice recorder from her pocket and thumbed the button. A little red light illuminated on its side.

“Special Agents Harper and Rawlings sitting with Doug Taylor, Tanya Taylor, and Cassidy Taylor, the family of Kennedy Taylor.” Beth turned her attention to the family. “We would like to start by asking about the last time you saw Kennedy.”

Mrs. Taylor sniffed and wiped her nose. “Two days before she was found.”

“Um,” Beth said. “We had it as the prior day in our file.”

“She went to work on Thursday. Left here about ten in the morning for a lunch shift. Normally, she would be home by around five thirty, but sometimes she’ll work a bell-to-bell, which would mean that she wouldn’t get home until after midnight, when we’d normally be asleep. We woke up Friday morning, and she wasn’t here. We tried calling her but never got an answer.”

I looked through my file and didn’t notice anything that mentioned where she’d been employed. “Where is it that Kennedy worked?” I asked.

“The place is called The Pub. It’s a trendy restaurant slash sports bar about twenty minutes from here.”

I jotted it down. “Now, when you called her, did the phone go straight to voice mail?” I asked.

Mrs. Taylor nodded.

“Do you have her phone?” I asked.

“It was never found,” Mr. Taylor said.

I made a note of that. “Did you speak with anyone at her employer to see what time she was actually there until?”

“We did. We spoke with a couple people. She left around five o’clock, alone,” Mr. Taylor said.

Mrs. Taylor wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “They found her Sunday morning out in Elk Grove Village.”

“And her vehicle?” I asked. “We have it here that it was never located.”

“Still hasn’t been found,” Mr. Taylor said.

I nodded.

“What was Kennedy’s relationship status? Was she single?” Beth asked.

“She was. She lived with a boyfriend for a couple years. They split up about six months ago, and she moved back in here. She wanted to just rent her own place, but we were kind of pushing her to stay here for a bit, save a little money, and try to purchase a home,” Mr. Taylor said.