FATAL FORTY-EIGHT: A Kate Huntington Mystery (The Kate Huntington Mysteries Book 7) (20 page)

Sheez, I’ve been doing trauma work too long.
She was starting to think in terms of everything and everyone being a threat.

“Can I help you?” the young woman said through the glass of the storm door.

Tim held up his badge. “FBI, ma’am. We need to speak to you about the Delaneys.”

“Oh.” Her expression said she hadn’t given those people a thought in a very long time.

“We’re checking out a potential lead in their daughter’s case,” Tim said.

The woman examined them carefully, then unlocked the storm door. She pushed it open. Kate stepped back to let it swing in front of her.

“Come in.” The woman turned and led the way into a spacious living room furnished with a cream-colored leather sofa and two matching easy chairs. She gestured toward the sofa, then perched on the edge of one of the chairs.

Kate made sure there were a few inches between herself and Tim as they sat down.

“Ma’am, I’m Supervisory Special Agent Cornelius and this is Kate Huntington. She’s a psychologist who’s consulting with us on the case. We’re sorry to bother you so early, but time is of the essence. We need to get a sense of the Delaneys’ family life, to help us develop this lead effectively.”

The young woman looked from him to Kate and back again. She blinked her hazel eyes a couple times, as if she were still trying to get awake and figure out what was going on. “It’s been a long time,” she finally said.

“I realize that, ma’am. Anything you can tell us about what it was like to live with them would be helpful.”

Mrs. Cummings pushed back into the soft leather chair. She crossed bare legs and tugged on her robe to cover her thighs.

“What it was like to live with them,” she echoed. “A little creepy mostly.”

“How so?” Kate asked in a gentle voice.

“They treated me well enough. Fed me, clothed me, weren’t overly strict. But…” Her voice trailed off and she looked away. She stared into a corner of the room. “Mrs. D, she was quiet, self-effacing. She tried to be nice to me, but you could kinda tell it was an act. She let it slip one time that they’d taken me in mainly for the money, to save for their daughter’s college.”

She paused, flicked her eyes toward them, then back to the corner. “Carrie was sixteen when I went there. She was actually the nicest to me. Said she’d always wanted a little brother or sister, and now she had one.”

The young woman fell silent, continued to stare into the corner.

“What about Mr. Delaney?” Tim asked.

She turned back toward them. After a beat, she said, “He was the creepy one.”

When she didn’t elaborate, Kate again asked, “How so?”

Mrs. Cummings gave a little shake of her head. “Nothing all that tangible. He was always very polite. Too polite, like he was acting in some 1940's movie about the old South. But he had a mean streak. He’d do little stuff to get on people’s nerves, then get a smirk on his face, which he’d quickly wipe away as soon as they looked his way. I remember him doing that a lot after church, when we’d go over to the little hall next door for social hour. I didn’t understand most of the things he said to people, but I could tell from their faces that they were subtle digs. After a while I learned to make a beeline for the sweets table and stay as far away from him as I could get.”

Tim nodded, a sympathetic expression on his face. “How about at home?”

“Oh, he did the same crap there, mostly to Mrs. D. He’d act all solicitous, while he was actually tearing her down.”

“How so?” From Tim this time.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Why all the questions about him. You don’t think he killed Carrie, do you?”

“No, no.” Tim held one hand up in front of him. “Nothing like that. I can’t really go into detail about our lead. It would compromise the investigation. But we need to understand as much as possible about the family dynamics in the Delaney household.”

The young woman let out a soft snort. “Now you sound like my old therapist.” She looked toward Kate.

Kate just raised her eyebrows.

“I was in therapy for a while, after I got married. My husband insisted. Said I needed to deal with all that crap from back then. I wanted to forget about it and move on.”

Kate gave silent kudos to Mr. Cummings. There was no doubt in her mind that growing up in foster care, even in the best of foster homes, would leave some psychological scar tissue. If nothing else the circumstances that led to being in foster care had to be traumatic, along with the insecurity of not having a permanent home.

“What exactly did he do to Mrs. Delaney?” Tim asked.

“Oh, she’d ask him what he wanted for dinner, and he’d say anything would be fine, and then he’d complain about whatever stuff she cooked. But most of the time, they weren’t even straightforward complaints. He’d say things like, ‘That was delicious, dear, but you know how fried foods give me heartburn.’ One time, they were redoing the kitchen and she asked if he wanted oak cabinets or white. He said it was up to her but he kinda liked the white cabinets. Then after she’d had the people in to paint the cabinets white, he said he’d liked the natural wood look better.”

“Passive-aggressive,” Kate said.

“Yeah, that’s what my therapist called it. He did it all the time, and she never caught on. She was a sweet lady, eager to please. Very old-school. Her job was to keep her man happy. Well, she did that even though she didn’t think so. Making her miserable was what made him happy.”

Very insightful.

Kate wondered how much Cummings had figured out for herself and how much her therapist had contributed.

The woman had looked away again for a moment. Now she turned back to them. “Sometimes he was even nastier.”

“In what way?” Kate asked, keeping her voice neutral.

“Carrie had a pet gerbil. She wasn’t always all that good about cleaning its cage. One day we came home from school and the gerbil was lying in the middle of the cage dead. Mr. D said it had died because of nitrogen poisoning, from all the crap Carrie had let build up in the cage. But I looked at it before we took it out back to bury it. It sure looked to me like its neck had been broken.”

“How did Carrie react?” Kate asked in a soft voice.

“She didn’t. Not outwardly. She just pinched her lips together and helped me put the little guy in a shoe box so we could bury him.”

Mrs. Cummings’ eyes were shiny with unshed tears. There was more to the story.

Kate faked a big yawn. “Sorry. Haven’t had enough caffeine yet.”

“Oh, how rude of me.” The woman jumped up. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

Kate smiled at her. “That would be great. Let me give you a hand.” She glanced sideways at Tim as she stood to follow their hostess.

He gave her a small nod.

In the kitchen, Debra Cummings fussed with filter and coffee grounds.

“Where’s your husband?” Kate asked.

“Out of town, on business.”

Kate breathed a small sigh of relief. She doubted Mr. Cummings would be happy that they were stirring up the past for his wife.

Once she had the coffee maker going, Mrs. Cummings turned to Kate. “He’s done something, hasn’t he?”

Kate opted not to pretend she didn’t know who
he
was. “No. But we’ve got a new situation. A couple of cases that might be copycats of Carrie’s.”

That was probably more than she should have said, but she didn’t regret it when she saw the woman’s face relax into a more open expression.

“The gerbil wasn’t the only…incident. I had a cat. A stray I’d found while I was at the previous foster home. The Delaneys said no problem, bring the cat along. But a couple months after I was there, the cat disappeared. Then a month later, it was suddenly there again, on the basement floor, dead.” Her voice caught a little. She swallowed. “I didn’t get it at the time, but later… It was emaciated, dehydrated. Later, in therapy, I came to realize that he’d probably trapped it somewhere and let it starve to death.”

She looked directly at Kate. Her eyes flashed with anger. “The bastard was so sympathetic. ‘Oh, you poor dear. I know you loved that kitty so.’ But he had this glint in his eye.” Cummings turned away, busied herself with pulling mugs out of a cabinet.

Back in the living room, she handed Tim a mug and gestured toward the sugar bowl and creamer on the tray she had set down on the coffee table.

“Black’s fine,” Tim said.

Kate snagged the sugar bowl from the tray. She figured she needed the energy.

Tim took a tentative sip of coffee, then a bigger gulp and set his mug down. “You said Mrs. Delaney let it slip that they did it for the money. Had they told you some other reason before that, for why they took in a foster child?”

“They’d said it was for altruistic reasons, that they wanted to help out some kid who didn’t have a home, and they had the room. Which wasn’t really true. I bunked with Carrie, even though there were four bedrooms in the house. One was his den and one was full of exercise equipment.”

Kate and Tim exchanged a look. So the guy was into staying fit.

At least fit enough to haul bodies around.

“Mrs. D suggested moving that stuff to the basement, to convert that room into a bedroom for me, but Mr. D said no. Gave some bullshit excuse that we girls should room together so we could bond.” Mrs. Cummings paused to take a sip of her own coffee and let out a soft “ah” of pleasure. The furrow down the middle of her forehead relaxed.

It was back the next instant. She leaned forward, holding her mug in both hands. “But they did it for the money, for Carrie’s college fund. She was super smart and had her heart set on going to Yale.”

“What caused you to leave the Delaneys?” Kate asked. She hated to keep digging into what may be an only partially healed wound, but they needed to know as much as they could about this guy.

Mrs. Cummings gave her a long look. “There wasn’t any abuse if that’s what you’re asking, other than the passive-aggressive crap, and the pets.”

Tim raised an eyebrow at the word
pets
. Kate shook her head slightly. No point in making the woman go through that story again.

Debra Cummings wasn’t paying attention to them. She was staring into her coffee mug. “I’d slowly come to hate it there. It was just so creepy. I woke up every morning with my skin crawling, worrying about what would happen that day. The only relief was while I was at school. I finally asked my social worker if I could get emancipated. She said not ’til I was sixteen. I decided I couldn’t take it for another year and asked her to move me elsewhere.”

“Did she ask why?” Kate said.

“Yeah. I lied and told her that Carrie and I didn’t get along. Which wasn’t true. We’d become friends. The Delaneys didn’t object to my leaving. By then, Carrie had been accepted at Yale and had gotten a partial scholarship, so she was all set.”

The woman dropped her gaze to her lap. “We vowed to stay in touch, and we did for a while. Then she was busy with school, and I was out on my own, trying to make a living and going to the community college part-time…” Her voice trailed off. “I feel guilty about it but I was actually glad that we’d drifted apart. It didn’t hurt as much when she was killed.”

Kate had been trying to think of how to ask about the fitness equipment, without it being blatant that they suspected Delaney of doing something. But then, Debra Cummings had already figured that out.

She leaned forward. “The exercise stuff, who used that?” It was as neutral a question as she could come up with, and she wasn’t surprised by the answer.

“He did. We weren’t allowed to touch it. He was a bit of a fitness nut, although you couldn’t tell it when he went off to work. In a suit, he looked, well, harmless.” She took a sip of coffee. “I used to think he was like Superman. To the outside world, meek and mild Clark Kent. At home, Superman.” She snorted. “Or rather, his evil twin.”

They drank the remainder of their coffee in silence. “Is there anything else,” Tim asked, “that you can tell us? Anything that might be helpful?”

Mrs. Cummings was quiet for a long moment. Then she shook her head. “Get the bastard!” she said through gritted teeth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

7:45 a.m. Sunday

Once they were settled into Kate’s Prius, Tim said, “How much you wanna bet she didn’t mean the guy who killed Carrie?”

“No, she meant Delaney.” As Kate pointed the car back toward old Ellicott City, she told him about the other pet–the stray cat that had been the only continuity in a foster child’s life.

Tim cursed under his breath. “So not as much of a late-blooming psychopath as we thought.”

“No, more like slow-blooming. Gets his jollies by tormenting his wife and killing the family pets. Which is more believable. I was having trouble with the whole loving father to full-blown serial killer transition, and in ten short years. Not even the girl’s murder and his wife’s suicide quite explained that.”

“But those events could, and did, trigger his latent pathology.” Tim shook his head. “I thought I’d seen it all.”

They were silent for a few minutes–a comfortable silence again. Kate crossed the bridge and rounded the curve. She picked up speed on the country road.

“So we’ve got the pattern of escalation,” Tim said. “And the triggering events. But why the six month gap between New Haven and down here?”

“Could there have been other victims in between that we haven’t connected with him?” Kate asked.

“I doubt it. Jane’s pretty thorough.”

“Okay, back to the notes he leaves.” Kate’s tired brain was trying to wrap itself around a thought. “He takes his victims when he knows they will be missed right away, makes sure to leave a sign that they did not leave willingly, like Sally’s purse left behind. Then he holds them forty-eight hours. And leaves a note to the effect that someone should have been looking for them. That part at least was about the police not responding right away to the report that Carrie was missing.”

“Yeah, and then the last note was a little different. ‘You could have found me if you’d really been looking.’” Tim drummed fingers on his knee. “The police commissioner’s press conference had been that afternoon. I guess that’s why the wording of the note changed.”