Vengeance is Mine - A Benjamin Tucker Mystery (2 page)

I tapped the tip of her nose. “You’re a little too observant, munchkin.”

She smiled. “Plus, I heard Mom screaming at you. She can yell pretty loud, ya know. I can hear it all the way upstairs.” I cringed and looked around again.

“Don’t worry,” Julie said. “She left for work about twenty minutes ago.” She popped a piece of sausage into her mouth.

“I hope we didn’t wake Nora,” I said.

“I doubt Grandma heard anything,” Julie said, grinning. “She had too many cosmos last night, and she has another one of her headaches.” Roberta frowned again.

“Mom’s mad at you for helping the police, isn’t she?” Julie asked.

I raised one eyebrow and nodded.

Roberta pointed a large wooden spoon at me. “Miss Maggie’s right. This is pure evil, and you shouldn’t bring it into this house. Now even the little one is talking about it.” She walked over and kissed Julie on the head.

“I’m not bringing it into the house,” I said. “I’m just doing some research and trying to develop some theories.”

“Well, I think it’s cool,” Julie said, looking at me. “When you catch him, you’ll be a hero. Is it all right if I tell Joanie?”

“Sure. There’s no secret about it, but play down the hero thing. I’m only doing research.”

 “Poor Mr. Henry,” Roberta said as she glanced at the portrait of Maggie’s late father hanging over the fireplace. “He sees what’s going on here.” She pointed the wooden spoon toward the heavens. “From up there. He knows what you are and what you’re doing here. He knows.”

I swallowed and wiped my mouth with my napkin.

“I think Mr. Marshak would be happy that Maggie, Julie and I have become a family,” I said.

Roberta huffed. “Family?” She pointed the damn wooden spoon to the floor. “I tell you he turns in his grave. He turns in his grave as we speak.” Julie was smiling at the interaction, and I nudged her under the table with my foot. She nudged me back. Roberta crossed her arms, glaring at me.

“And did you speak with Jesus this morning?” Roberta asked.

“Roberta, please. I haven’t got time for this.”

“You haven’t got time for Jesus?” She slowly shook her head. “Poor Miss Maggie.”

I looked to Julie for an escape. “It’s getting late, munchkin. I’ll give you a ride to school.”

“Thanks, Ben, but Joanie’s mom is picking me up in a few minutes.” She carried her plate to the sink, and then gave Roberta a hug.

“Have a nice day, Miss Julie,” Roberta said.

Julie hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. “Bye, Ben.” Then she whispered in my ear, “But if you don’t talk to Jesus, you’re never getting out of here.”

CHAPTER 2

It was eight forty-five when I arrived at the Cary Police Department and parked my midnight blue Jaguar in the furthest spot from the building.

Lieutenant Netter was standing in the corner of the parking lot puffing on one of his stinking cigars and walked over to greet me. Netter and I had met two years earlier when I was writing a book based on the life of another local serial killer. Netter was then employed by the Holly Springs Police Department and was lead investigator on the case. My depiction of the investigators as experienced and dedicated professionals impressed him. In addition, I devoted a large portion of the manuscript to the human element of the investigators and to the killer, himself.

During the interview process, Netter and I developed an unusual camaraderie. We were like an odd couple. He was in his late fifties, overweight, gruff, and smoked stinking cigars like a coal-burning locomotive. I was twenty years younger, in pretty good shape, intolerant of tobacco of any kind, and I liked to think, much more refined. On more than one occasion, we met and downed a few more drafts than we should have.

The sun glistened off Netter’s gray hair as he admired my ride and exhaled a large cloud of blue smoke. “Christ, Tucker, nice set of wheels.”

“Yeah, it was a wedding gift from Maggie.”

“You’re shittin’ me. She gave you a Jag for a wedding gift?” Netter shook his head. “When I got married, my old lady gave me a TV. Six months later she left me … and took the fuckin’ TV.”

He looked at his watch. “Well, I guess it’s time to get this show on the road. We have a lot to cover.” He tossed his cigar on the pavement and crushed it with his foot.

“Isn’t that littering?” I asked.

“Arrest me.”

We walked into the building to a large conference room. Six tables were placed to form a large U, with the open end toward a wall with a projector screen. There were twelve chairs around the tables, and a twenty-chair gallery at the back of the room. Three-ring binders were placed at each chair.  The positions at the tables had folded name cards, reserving those places for key members of the task force. I was seated in the gallery.

The binders contained photographs of the two victims. They looked almost identical—like sisters. I shuddered at the striking resemblance to my own sister, Alex, and was relieved she lived nine hundred miles away in Illinois.

The room was almost full by nine o’clock. I looked around but didn’t recognize anyone except Netter, and Detective Frank Cox from the Wake County Sheriff’s Department. But I couldn’t miss a tall, attractive redheaded woman sitting at one of the tables, scrolling through something on her iPhone. 

The meeting began with Mayor Harvey Richards giving an opening statement of thanks to the task force members. Then Netter took over.

“You should each have a white binder,” he said. “Inside is the member contact list and their jurisdictions. This is a multi-organizational task force, but the lead responsibility for the investigation lies with the City of Cary. This is because the first victim, Renee Clancy, was murdered here in Cary. Also, we have resources here that many of our neighboring communities are unable to provide.”

Netter introduced the key members of the task force, who included investigators from the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, and Apex; and also Sheriff’s detectives and crime scene investigators from Wake County. Representatives from the Capital District of the State Bureau of Investigation, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, and the redheaded lady I’d noticed earlier, FBI Special Agent Lainie MacKenzie, were also seated at the table. Key members would meet each morning at nine o’clock, seven days a week. All other members were invited to attend on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

I thumbed through the binder and examined the remaining contents. Included were police reports from both homicide investigations, crime scene photographs, and medical examiner reports.

Netter displayed a photograph of a woman on the screen in the front of the room. “This is Renee Jean Clancy of 3812 Greentree Place in Cary. She was thirty-two years old. The photograph you’re looking at was taken on March 2.” He then displayed a crime scene photo showing Clancy’s nude, decapitated corpse. She was staged sitting up on the bed in the master bedroom with her hands holding an open Bible—her head was missing from the scene. “This is how she looked on Monday, March 16. Ms. Clancy’s live-in boyfriend, Jeff Walker, left for work at two-thirty in the afternoon and returned to find her in this condition at eleven forty-five that evening.” Netter then played an audio of Walker’s frantic 911 call.

Clancy wasn’t romantically involved with anyone other than Walker, who had been living with her for the past eighteen months. They’d met on the internet.

Walker worked as the front desk attendant at the Cary Inn, where his presence on the afternoon and evening of March 16 was confirmed by co-workers and hotel guests, as well as security camera video. His relationship with Clancy was stormy, but there was no indication Walker was involved with anyone else, and investigators didn’t find a significant motive for murder.

Renee Clancy had been divorced three years earlier after a six-year marriage. There were no children from the marriage, and the divorce appeared amicable. Clancy’s ex-husband currently lived in Miami and was remarried. According to him, he hadn’t spoken with Clancy for two years.

Clancy had worked as a sales representative for four years in the housewares department of the Sears store at the Cary Towne Center Mall. Her supervisor and co-workers said she was a very personable, hard worker. There were no known instances of unpleasant exchanges between Clancy and co-workers or customers. Still, investigators were reviewing the sales records credited to her over the previous eighteen months.

The home on Greentree Place had been purchased by Clancy three years earlier. She’d taken advantage of the drop in housing values and used money borrowed from her parents as a down payment. The surrounding neighbors were understandably shocked by her murder and couldn’t believe what had happened. They all said Clancy was a kind person, a good neighbor, and someone always willing to participate in community activities. None of them could provide any helpful information to the police.

Clancy’s head was missing from the crime scene, indicating that the perpetrator had taken it with him when he left. It was discovered on the deceased’s gravesite fifteen days later on March 31 by a groundskeeper at Resurrection Cemetery in Cary. In a final act of disrespect, the murderer had styled Clancy’s hair into a long braid and wound it around her neck. Details pertaining to this discovery had not been released to the media.

The circumstances surrounding the second death were presented by Detective Arnold Erikson of the Apex Police Department. The victim was thirty-five-year-old Carla Diane Knudsen of 233 West Pine Meadow in Apex. Erikson displayed a photo of Knudsen, who had the same physical characteristics as Clancy, including height, weight, hair color, and approximate age. He displayed a photo of the crime scene taken in the victim’s bedroom. Like Clancy, the remains were nude with the head missing from the scene. She was also staged sitting up on the bed with her hands holding an open Bible.

Her lifeless body was discovered on Friday, April 3 at seven thirty in the evening by her eleven-year-old daughter, Sarah. A neighbor found Sarah outside in front of the house, screaming hysterically.

Knudsen was divorced from thirty-eight-year-old Lester David Knudsen of Garner. The divorce was highly contentious, with the conflict centering on child visitation rights and the property settlement. Mr. Knudsen was ordered to pay eight hundred and fifty dollars a month in child support, plus he was forced to relinquish his interest in the marital home. In return, he was able to keep the retirement annuity he had accumulated through his place of employment, Garner Electric, where he worked as an electrician. He was current on his child support obligation.

Mr. Knudsen claimed to be at his home in Garner at the time of his ex-wife’s death. However, he was alone, and this could not be corroborated.

Ms. Knudsen was an agent for State Farm Insurance out of an office on north Highway 55 in Apex. Her co-workers liked her and knew of no incidents involving altercations with any of her clients.

Investigators could find no evidence that Ms. Knudsen had been involved in a romantic relationship since her divorce.

At ten o’clock, the task force took a short break to relieve those who had consumed too much coffee. I poured myself a glass of orange juice and walked outside. Netter was already standing on the sidewalk puffing on one of his hideous cigars and speaking with Detective Cox. As soon as I joined them, my cell phone buzzed. I pulled it out, looked at the caller ID, and shook my head.

“Uh-oh,” Cox said, watching my reaction, “looks like woman trouble.”

I returned the phone to my pocket. “It’s my divorce attorney,” I said. “I wonder what Jennifer wants now. She probably found a pimple on her ass and is blaming me for it. Why can’t this lunatic pay
her
a visit and do
me
a favor?”

“Christ, Tucker,” Cox said, “that’s pretty sick.”

He laughed and turned to Netter. “Hey, how ‘bout the babe at the table with the dark red hair?”

Netter exhaled enough smoke to pollute the city of Cary. “FBI profiler from Quantico,” he said. “She’s up to talk after the CSI lady.”

Cox raised his eyebrows “Whoa … no shit? All that and brains too. Well, I wouldn’t mind giving her
my
profile some night.”

“Now who’s the sick bastard?” I asked.

CHAPTER 3

When the meeting resumed, Dr. Stanley Huffman, the Wake County Medical Examiner, presented autopsy results on both victims. But I had difficulty concentrating on his presentation. He had an uncanny resemblance to Bela Lugosi and at two points, I almost burst out laughing. All that was missing was the cape.

But the crime scene photos quickly erased any trace of the humor I’d seen in the situation. The victims had been staged for optimal effect upon discovery. They had each been sexually assaulted, and seminal fluids recovered at the scenes would provide DNA identification markers that could be compared to potential suspects.

The heads were removed post-mortem. Thank god. “The crime scenes were grisly, but the amount of blood and spatter would have been significantly greater if the victims were still alive during the act,” Huffman said, before stepping down.

Angela Dreckmann, Chief Crime Scene Investigator for the Wake County Crime Lab, walked to the front of the room and began her presentation. She was a bland, very plain looking woman in her early sixties who exuded professionalism and technical competence.

Dreckmann started by saying no unidentified fingerprints were found, and then she went into a lot of CSI stuff—hair and fiber analysis, blood spatter, DNA. She displayed side-by-side enlargements of gray hairs found at the two scenes. “You’re looking at hairs of the variety
Felis Catus Coeruleous—
a common Chartreux house cat. Neither victim had access to such an animal, so it’s possible the perpetrator has a pet cat.”

Next she showed a slide of a potential tool that could have resulted in the markings that Huffman had discovered on the fourth cervical vertebrae of both victims. It was a DeWalt cordless reciprocating saw with a wood-cutting blade, twelve inches in length, with six teeth per inch. Dreckmann said the saw could be one from several manufacturers. However, chemical trace analysis of minute white paint and cobalt particles retrieved from the wounds of both victims was consistent with blades packaged and distributed under the Milwaukee brand.