Twisted (4 page)

Don’t be a wuss,
she told herself.

She took a deep breath and reached for her keys.

Mark prowled the chat room, searching for any trace of Death Raven or one of his aliases. He hadn’t found him yet, but it was still early, and many of these men were nocturnal.

Mark surfed. He analyzed. He scrolled through page after page of blather, scanning for a familiar handle or turn of phrase. As he entered his second hour of searching, the sites started to blend together and the words became a blur.
Only this and nothing more.
The phrase echoed through his head.
Tapping at my chamber door.
His brain spooled. His temples throbbed. He rubbed his eyes.
Tap-tap.

Mark looked up.

Tap-tap-tap.

He crossed the room and checked the peephole, even though he already had a good idea who he’d see standing on the other side.

He paused for a moment. Then he pulled open the door.

“Detective Doyle.”

She nodded. “Special Agent.”

For a few seconds they stared at each other.

“You need something?” It came out harsher than he’d intended, but she didn’t seem put off.

“I do, actually. You busy?”

“Yes.”

She leaned a palm against the door frame and looked him squarely in the eye. She wasn’t intimidated by his federal badge or his height or the hard stare he used on vicious criminals. His being busy didn’t seem to matter much, either, and he knew why she’d come to see him.

She stepped past him into the room and glanced around. His laptop sat open on the rumpled bedspread, and he’d forgotten to clear the screen.

She turned and folded her arms over her chest. With the leather jacket and the attitude, she looked more like a biker chick than an officer of the law.

Mark steeled himself. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

“You can talk,” she said. “I want to hear about Stephanie Snow.”

They went to Randy’s Pool Hall, which she claimed had lousy food but was one of the few hangouts in town not overrun with college students. The bar was dim and crowded. Doyle drew looks from some of the cowboys and truckers as she made her way to a small table in the corner, as far away from the noise as it was possible to get.

Mark eyed her tiny waist as she draped her jacket over the back of a chair and sank into it. He glanced around the bar and felt himself being scrutinized from beneath the brims of baseball caps. The women were much less subtle.

“I’m starving,” Doyle said as he pulled out the chair across from her. “You hungry?”

“Had a sandwich in my room.”

A waitress came over. She surveyed his Brooks Brothers shirt with suspicion, and he was glad he’d left the coat and tie behind.

After they’d given their orders, Mark leaned back and looked at the woman who’d brought him here. She’d left her dark hair loose around her shoulders and added
makeup to her hazel eyes—nothing flashy, but enough to announce her femininity to anyone who might be wondering. Female cops took a lot of crap.

“How’d you know where I was staying?”

“Small town.” She shrugged. “Not a lot of options.”

True, but he could have found something near the airport. That was in Austin, though, and he’d wanted to spend the night here, closer to the crime scene. Any extra time in a place gave him more data points to work with.

“You ever been here before?” she asked.

“Not until today.”

“And what do you think of our fine little town?” She glanced toward the bar, then back at him. She had the cop habit of scanning the room while she talked, checking out faces, looking for trouble.

“It’s not so little, really.”

“Depends how long you stay,” she said. “You stick around awhile, it feels small.”

The waitress delivered their beers and moved on to another table to clear empties. She had that efficiency of motion of people who worked on their feet all day.

“You know, you don’t look like a profiler.” Allison picked up her beer.

“What does a profiler look like?”

“I don’t know. Thin. Nerdy. Maybe wire-rimmed spectacles.”

“You’re describing Scott Glenn in
Silence of the Lambs.
”

“You look more like a jock.”

He couldn’t suppress a wry smile. It had been years since anyone had accused him of being a jock.

“At my age, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“What age is that, exactly?” She looked him over as she tipped back the bottle. Her tone was neutral, but he sensed an agenda behind the question.

“Forty-three.”

If the number bothered her, she didn’t show it. It bothered him—considering he was sitting in a bar with a twenty-seven year old.

Mark had looked up Allison Doyle. She’d joined the San Marcos police force right out of college and made detective at the tender age of twenty-five. Small-town politics? Token woman? He didn’t know, but he had a feeling he’d get his balls handed to him if he suggested either.

Her beef-vegetable soup arrived, and she dug in. He watched her eat, enjoying her gusto.

“Sure you don’t want anything?” she asked between spoonfuls. “It’s actually not half bad.”

“I’m good.”

“So, you were here meeting with Lieutenant Reynolds, I take it. How did it go?”

“Probably how you’d expect.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “You mean he didn’t welcome you with open arms and thank you for your thoughtful insights?”

“Not so much.”

“He doesn’t like outsiders butting in. Particularly federal ones.”

“I caught that.”

“And he likes our suspect—Joshua Bender.”

“Stephanie Snow’s ex-boyfriend.”

She nodded. “He’s got a sheet and she called the cops on him a few months ago, said he was harassing her.”

This was news to Mark. In typical small-town fashion, Lieutenant Reynolds had been territorial, defensive, and stingy with information.

“Define
harassing
,” Mark said.

“Showing up at her house. Following her out on dates. Calling her cell phone at all hours.”

“The ex who won’t let go,” Mark said. “We see it a lot.”

“But in this case you think there’s more.”

“I know there is.”

She pushed her bowl away and leaned back. “I’m listening.”

He studied her face. She was the only female detective on her squad, one of only four women on the entire police force. Just the fact that she was here said she didn’t mind going against the grain.

“This crime’s different,” he said.

“How?”

He weighed how much to tell her. It wasn’t her case, yet she was interested—interested enough to come looking for him after an unusually difficult day in order to pump him for information. He could tell she was smart. Plus, she was young, which could mean open-minded. Maybe she’d listen.

Or maybe talking to her was going to put the freeze on his already cool relationship with the local police lieutenant overseeing the case—a guy who probably didn’t want one of his people talking to the FBI behind his back.

But what the hell did he care about politics? He’d be on a plane in the morning, and he hadn’t managed to convince anyone who mattered to consider his theory.

Mark took a sip of his beer. He looked at her for a long moment.

“I work for the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit—BAU. You know what that does?”

“Profiling?”

“That’s what gets the most attention. We cover a lot of bases—counterterrorism, white-color crime, crimes against children, kidnappings. Sometimes we get pulled in on homicide cases if the local police think they’re dealing with a serial killer.”

She looked at him expectantly.

“In the fall of 2000, I got a call about a murder out in Shasta County, California.”

“That’s north of Sacramento, right?”

He nodded. “This was near Redding. The year before, a woman went hiking in a park on October thirtieth, never came home. Her boyfriend reported her missing that same night. Her remains were discovered in a shallow creek east of the park a week later.”

“Cause of death?”

“Sharp force trauma—her throat had been slashed.”

“Sexual assault?”

“Too much water damage to know for sure.”

“And lemme guess—boyfriend had an alibi?”

“Airtight,” he confirmed. “Then November nineteenth that same year, another woman went missing, this time from a dog park. Same county. Her remains were discovered in a ravine six months later.”

“Not a lot to work with by that point.”

“You’d be surprised. A forensic anthropologist examined what was recovered. Marks on the bone indicated another throat cutting.”

“So now the boyfriend’s off the hook and you’re looking for a serial killer.”

“
I
wasn’t looking for anything yet. They didn’t call me in until that next fall. Another missing woman, another body dumped in a remote area. Dara Langford. Twenty-three. She’d just graduated from college and found a job in Redding.” He visualized Dara’s smiling young face on all the fliers he’d seen tacked to lampposts and stoplights throughout the area. “She was living with her parents at the time. They reported her missing when she didn’t come home from a jog on October thirtieth.”

Allison tipped her head to the side. “So it’s the dates that match up, not just the MO?”

“Looks that way. That same year, we had another disappearance on November nineteenth. Sheryl Fanning, thirty-five-year-old mother of two. And another woman the following fall, Jillian Webb.”

“October thirtieth?”

“Yes.”

Her brow furrowed. “What do the dates mean?”

“Good question. I wish I knew.”

“Maybe some kind of Halloween connection? Day of the Dead, that sort of thing?”

“We looked into that. Came up with zip. Which isn’t to say it isn’t a factor; we just don’t know how it fits.” Mark gazed down at his beer and swallowed his frustration. He’d worked hundreds of cases, but this one stuck. For years he’d studied it, and still he hadn’t put all the pieces together.

He glanced up. She was watching him closely, as she had been all evening. He doubted she missed much, which meant she’d sensed this was personal.

“So five women.” Her eyes had turned somber.

“That we know of.”

“Were all of them found?”

“Sheryl Fanning—the mother of two toddlers—was never recovered. Some search dogs found her running shoe near the path, but that was it. They combed the area repeatedly, so we’re thinking she might have been taken someplace else.”

Allison gazed away, looking pensive. “Stephanie Snow went missing October thirtieth.”

She didn’t recite the rest. Many of the details—too many of them—had appeared in the local paper. Mark had read the articles online after catching a news snippet on CNN. Most murders didn’t get a mention in the national media unless there was something sensational about them. Stephanie Snow had been a swimming star at the University of Texas. She was a hometown hero.

The media hadn’t connected Stephanie to the killings in California yet. Maybe they never would. Maybe nobody would, and Mark was spinning his wheels here.

But he didn’t believe that. From the way Lieutenant Reynolds had reacted in their meeting today, he could tell there were some holes in the case against Stephanie’s ex-boyfriend.

And besides that, Mark had a hunch. This murder
felt
connected, and his hunches about cases often turned out to be right—mainly because they weren’t hunches, but predictions based on dozens of different factors, all viewed together through the lens of experience.

“So,” Allison said. “Three years in a row you get these close-together murders in Northern California, and the dates match up.”

“Also, the MO. The crimes are remarkably similar.”

“How?”

“You haven’t seen the case file?”

“It’s not my case.”

“Maybe it should be.”

She looked uncomfortable now, and he could tell he was touching on something that was going to make her life complicated.

But she didn’t mind complicated, or she wouldn’t be here, wearing a snug-fitting black shirt and drinking a beer with him.

“So, then what?” she asked.

“Then nothing. He’s been inactive, as far as we know, for a decade. Now this.”

Allison leaned forward on her elbows. “You’re the expert, not me. But I didn’t think serial killers worked like that. That they just stopped.”

“They don’t, usually. After about five years without anything similar popping up in ViCAP—that’s the database we use to track violent crimes—”

“I know what it is,” she cut in, defensive. He often had that effect on local investigators.

“After five years with no hits, we began to think he might be dead or in prison. By ten years, we were sure of it.”

“But now he’s at it again.”

“Maybe. Depends who you want to believe—me or your lieutenant.”

She eyed him silently, and could see the gravity of the situation sinking in. November 19 was two weeks away.

“I’d much rather believe Reynolds,” she said. “I just don’t think I do.”