Dark Truth (17 page)

Annie stopped to drink some of her tea, then continued.

“So while after the second murder Dr. Madden may have begun to wonder if the murders were not coincidental, in the long run, it wouldn’t have stopped him from pursuing what he was addicted to.”

“Between the first and second murders, seven months had passed,” Wes interjected. “Between the second and the third, there’d been four months. Between the third and the fourth, there’d been seven. Eighteen months in all.”

“I noticed that, Wes,” Annie replied. “The time frame seems off to me. I can understand the long stretch between the first and the second killings. If killing was new to him, it may have taken him a while to sort out his feelings, the guilt, whatever. Now, the shorter period between the second and the third is more telling—it tells me he liked it enough to kill again. Which makes the longer stretch between the third and fourth victims a little puzzling.”

She drummed on the mug again.

“You mean, he wouldn’t have waited as long to kill again, if he liked it so much,” Regan said.

“Exactly. I’d have expected him to have looked for another victim sooner rather than later.”

Mitch leaned forward and rested his arms on the table. “Of course, Stephen could have gotten spooked, and maybe didn’t jump right into another affair as quickly.”

“That’s possible. Of course, it’s also possible that the killer simply took the show out of town,” Wes told him. “I can guarantee, reports of similar murders would have gotten my attention.”

“Which means he went far enough away that they wouldn’t have hit your radar, or he hid the crimes well enough that by the time the victims were found, it was hard to tell exactly what had happened to them.”

“He was doing something during all that time,” Annie murmured. “By the time he’d killed his third victim, I think he was as much addicted to killing as Madden was to sex.”

“I’ll go into the Bureau computers and see what I can find,” Mitch told them. “I’m guessing once we start looking, we’re going to find a few bodies somewhere between here, Delaware, and Maryland.”

“What about the priest?” Annie asked Wes. “What was your impression of him?”

“He cared very much for Olivia, too. As a matter of fact, he admitted to having been in love with Olivia, but he more or less tossed it off as, every man who ever met Olivia was in love with her,” Wes said. “And he, too, was definitely not happy when I brought up Stephen’s name and the old cases.”

“So you didn’t really learn anything new,” Regan noted.

“Actually, I did learn something.” Wes turned to her. “I learned that he knows something he can’t tell us.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nina frowned. “If Father Whelan knew something about the murders, why wouldn’t he tell you?”

“Because I think whatever he knows, he learned from Olivia. In confession.”

He paused to let the words sink in.

Almost everyone at the table groaned.

“So even if she had known who was behind the killings, and she told Father Whelan, he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone,” Regan said flatly.

“Exactly,” Wes replied.

“Well, damn.” Mitch frowned.

“How would Olivia have known who the killer was?” Nina asked.

“Maybe he told her, bragged about it, even. ‘Look what I did for you. See how much I love you,’” Mitch said.

“Does anyone else think it’s creepy that Olivia could have known who the killer was, but didn’t tell anyone?” Regan frowned. “That she’d let her husband go to trial—face the death penalty or, at the least, life in prison—for crimes he did not commit?”

“If he’d been cheating on her for all those years, yes, she could have built up some big-time resentment,” Annie noted.

“She must have hated him a lot to have done that,” Nina murmured. “Funny, I never got a sense of that.”

“Maybe she didn’t hate him as much as she loved someone else,” Wes observed.

“Did she love her son, or her lover, enough to have sacrificed her husband?” Mitch asked.

“Well, here’s something else. When I told him that we were taking a second look at the Madden case because there were similarities between this latest murder and the earlier ones, he looked stunned. And he said, ‘Why would . . .’—then stopped and pretty much ended the interview by saying he had a meeting across campus.”

“Now, that’s an odd thing to say,” Annie said. “You would have expected him to say, ‘How could that be, Stephen died years ago,’ or something along those lines.”

Annie toyed with the ring on her finger.

“But instead, he said, ‘Why would . . . ‘”

“As in, why would someone do something?” Mitch suggested.

“Yeah, that was sort of what I expected to hear,” Wes nodded. “But whatever he knows, there’s no way we’re going to get him to tell.”

“Okay, so what do we have?” Annie said. “We have a killer who was close to Olivia, someone close enough that she’d let her husband go to prison to protect him. Someone was punishing Stephen for having hurt her. We’ve already talked about the killer’s need to take what was Stephen’s, to have power over him. The question is, who would have most wanted to kill Stephen’s women, then watch him go to prison for it?”

“The son, the priest, or the rival for his wife’s affections?” Mitch said.

“Why would he have killed this latest girl?” Nina asked. “If the whole purpose of killing the others was to destroy my father, why start killing again now?”

“I spoke earlier of how our killer may have developed a taste for murder. He could have gone outside the area to find victims, or he may have managed to keep it in check and control that urge for a long time. Others have done it. I worked a case recently where a man had gone on a killing spree seven years ago, killed nine women in nine different states over the course of a year, then just stopped. He was never caught.”

“How did they finally know he was a killer?” Nina asked.

“After he died, his son was cleaning out his truck to sell it, and found the souvenirs his father had kept of all his victims. Photographs, driver’s licenses. Locks of hair.” Annie sighed. “If the son hadn’t had the guts to call the police, we never would have known who killed those women.”

“So maybe this killer did stop . . . “ Nina said. “But why would he have started again?”

“There would have had to have been a trigger, something that set him off again,” Annie told her. “My guess is that Olivia’s death was the trigger.”

“That could have set off any one of the three. Emotionally, I’m sure each of them was affected,” Regan commented.

“If that’s true, then we need to work fast,” Wes told them, “or we’re going to have another murder on our hands.”

“I’m on my way back to the office.” Mitch stood. “I’ll get on this right away, see what I can come up with on Kyle’s background, and I’ll look for any other similar murders over the past fifteen, sixteen years.”

“While you’re using those amazing computer skills, maybe you could check into something for me.” Regan looked up at him.

“Sure. What do you need?” He reached down to her and pulled her out of her seat. “Some suggestions for a romantic weekend away?”

“Well, actually, I was hoping for a little something more on Eddie Kroll.” She smiled.

“Damn that Eddie.” Mitch shook his head.

Regan laughed. “I was trying to pull up more on his family but I’m afraid I haven’t been successful. I know he had an older brother named Carl, and a brother named Harry, but I was wondering if he had other siblings.”

“That should be a snap.” Mitch then turned to Annie. “Are you ready for the ride back?”

“I am.” Annie pushed her chair back. As she stood, she asked Wes, “What’s your next step going to be?”

“I’d like to explore the relationship between Madden and Overbeck a bit more, but it’s been hard to find someone who knew them both. The priest who’d pegged Madden to take over the department died some years ago, and except for Overbeck, there are only a few other professors who knew both of the men well. I’ve already spoken with those who did, but I didn’t hear anything I didn’t already know.”

“Were they aware that Overbeck was having an affair with Madden’s wife?”

“They didn’t seem to be aware of it.” Wes shook his head. “I haven’t been able to find anyone who claimed to have known Madden very well.”

“Did you speak with Mrs. Owens?” Nina asked.

“Who is Mrs. Owens?” Wes turned to her.

“She was the secretary Dad shared with Dr. Overbeck. Her office was between theirs. It was sort of a neutral area between the two.”

“I’ll see if she’s still at St. Ansel’s.”

“Father Whelan would know,” Nina offered.

“I’ll check with him,” Wes said. “It’ll give me an excuse to talk to him again.”

The entire group filed out the back door, and stood on the deck for a moment, saying their good-byes, before Mitch, Annie, and Regan walked toward his car, and Nina walked Wes to his.

“By the way, did you ever read the letter your father left for you?” he asked.

“Yes.” Nina nodded. “Unfortunately, there wasn’t really anything of any use to you on this case, other than the fact that he did say he was innocent.”

“Do you think he would have said otherwise?”

“I think if he’d been guilty, he’d not have said anything at all.”

“Maybe.”

When they reached the stairs, Wes went down the steps, while Nina remained on the end of the deck.

“Wes,” she called to him, and he turned back to her.

“I’ve been meaning to ask—what was the name of the book that was left at the scene of that last murder?”

“I don’t remember. Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Check the evidence list in the Maureen Thomas file. It should be noted there.”

“I don’t remember seeing it, but I’ll take another look.”

“Let me know if you can’t find it. I’ll look it up for you.” He could have gotten in the car then, but didn’t open the door. Instead, he said, “I wasn’t kidding when I said I thought you should steer clear of your stepbrother. I know you’re having a hard time accepting it, but he could very well be the killer.”

“I am having a hard time with that,” she admitted. “I still don’t think he’s the man you’re after.”

“When I met you the first time, I said something to you about hoping that you weren’t looking into the case to prove your father’s innocence, and you said you never doubted that he was the killer.” Wes opened his car door. “Why would you readily accept that your father was a killer, but not your stepbrother?”

“I guess I had never questioned my father’s guilt because I was so angry with him, so humiliated by his arrest.” She smiled grimly. “Yes, I know how childish that sounds, but I was just nineteen when all that happened, still angry with him for what I’d felt was his abandonment of my mother and me. I was angrier still when he married Olivia. That had come without warning, and it took me years to forgive him for that. So while I may be questioning it now, I didn’t question it then. We’d had an odd relationship, with the divorce, then the remarriage, then the arrest. I never felt I knew him very well, and most of my emotions as far as he was concerned revolved around anger. There’s a lot that we were never able to resolve between us.”

“Well, if you manage to help prove his innocence now, would that help?”

“It won’t replace what we never were able to have, but it would bring him justice, and yes, that would go a long way in helping me to forgive both of us.”

“Well, let’s see what we can do about that.” He got into his car and rolled his window down. “Are you going to be here through the weekend?”

“Yes.” She leaned over the deck railing. “At least through Sunday, then we’ll see.”

“Don’t forget to call me if you can’t find that evidence list,” he said as he pulled away.

She nodded and watched him drive off. When he reached the end of the lane and turned onto the road, she called to Regan. “Where did we leave the Maureen Thomas file . . . ?”

T
wenty

Less than two hours later, Wes’s cell phone rang. Nina had looked through all four boxes, but the evidence list wasn’t there.

“Could I drive over to the police station and pick up a copy?” she asked.

“Sure. I’ll be here for another hour or so.”

“I’ll be there in less than that.”

Wes was in the storage room looking through the files he’d just sent back a week or so ago when his cell phone rang again.

“It’s Mayfield. The chief is looking all over the station for you. Where the hell are you?” his partner all but yelled through the phone.

“I’m in the storage room,” he told her.

“Only place in the entire building we didn’t look.”

“So what’s the big deal?” He found the box he was looking for and knelt down to open it.

“Chief Raymond needs a briefing on the Mulroney case. The DA’s office wanted to know if there were any leads.”

“Sort of.”

“You tell him. I’m not even going to try to guess what a
sort of
lead is.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

Wes finished going through the box, and having found the file he was looking for, returned the box to the stack on which he’d found it, turned off the light, and closed the door behind him.

He rapped on the chief’s door with his knuckles, then pushed the door open. Chief Milt Raymond sat behind his desk, the phone in his right hand, a cigar in his left. He finished his call and hung up.

“Better not let anyone from the town council see that cigar,” Wes told him. “They voted us a no-smoking zone just two weeks ago.”

“I will wrestle to the ground anyone who tries to take my cigars away from me.” The portly man rested against the back of the chair. “What do you have for me on the Mulroney girl?”

“Practically nothing.” Wes leaned on the back of the chair that stood to the left of the chief’s desk. “No suspects. No witnesses. Nothing back from the lab yet.”

“What the hell have you been doing all week? Chasing your tail?”

“Interviewing people at the college, but no one saw anything, or heard anything.”

Wes was about to bring up the connection to the Madden case when the chief asked, “What’s in the file?”

“It’s the evidence list from the Maureen Thomas file.” As soon as the words were out of Wes’s mouth, he regretted them.

“Maureen Thomas?” Raymond frowned. “Maureen Thomas? From, what was that, 1989?” Without waiting for a reply, he asked, “What the hell are you doing with that?”

Wes began to explain the current interest in the old case, but midway through, the chief held up both hands and ordered, “Stop. I’ve heard enough.”

Chief Raymond stood, his eyes narrowed to slits, and Wes remembered why he shouldn’t have mentioned Madden’s name.

“Powell, you listen, and you listen good. I do not want one more second spent on this, you hear me? I personally led the investigation in the Madden case, and I know that sonofabitch was guilty as sin.”

“Chief, I felt the same way, but . . .”

“There are no buts here, Detective. That is a closed case, and it’s going to stay closed.”

“Sir, we have reason to believe that—”

“Who is
we
? What
we
? Who else is involved in this? Mayfield?”

“No, sir, actually, I haven’t even had time to discuss it with her. As I started to tell you, Regan Landry was the one who wanted us to take a second look. I remembered how you were such a big fan of her dad’s, so of course I pulled the files out for her.”

“Shit. Josh’s daughter?”

Wes nodded.

“She thinks there’s something worth looking into, so I figured I’d give her the files, and she’d see there was nothing there. No smoke, no fire.” Wes knew he was walking the line, but there was no turning back. “After looking into it, though, it appears there may be something there. She has a friend in the FBI who’s looking into it as well, so I knew we were going to have to stay involved. I’d hate to be reading about this in the
Washington Post
.”

The chief stared at him, and for a long moment, Wes thought the man was going to explode.

Finally, he said, “Christ. Now I’m not only looking for a killer, I’m playing nice with the feds and with Landry’s daughter.” He ran thick fingers through his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. “You keep an eye on them. Do what you have to do, but honest to God, Powell, I do not want one word of this to leak to the press, you hear me? I do not care what you have to do, but so help me God, if I get one phone call, or see one word written anywhere, or if I so much as hear Madden’s name, you’re out of here. You can get Landry’s daughter’s FBI friend to hire you, ’cause you won’t be working here.”

“Got it.” Wes nodded. “No leaks. No press. No mention of Madden’s name.”

“And I want this other case solved, hear? You play nice with Landry, but I don’t want any time taken from the Mulroney case.”

“Yes, sir.” Wes all but backed out of the room.

“Powell.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Why did you pull the Thomas file?”

“Someone asked for the name of the book that Stephen Madden had left in Maureen Thomas’s apartment.”

“Why?” The chief stood up and appeared to be getting ready to leave. “Who?”

“Madden’s daughter, sir. She just wanted to know what the title was.”

“Why?” he repeated with a heavy sigh.

“I have no idea.”

“Well, forget it. That’s just the kind of stupid stuff I don’t want going on. Takes you away from what you’re supposed to be doing. Tell her you can’t find it.”

“Too late. I already told her I had it.”

“Then put it in the mail to her and get back to work on the Mulroney case, would you?”

“She’s on her way to pick it up.”

“Fine. Make a copy of it and leave it at the front desk. I want a report on every interview you’ve conducted on Mulroney on my desk by eight tomorrow morning.” The chief opened the center drawer of his desk, grabbed his car keys, and followed Wes into the hall. He closed his office door behind him. “Eight
A.M
., Powell.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

Wes stepped out of the man’s way and let him pass.

There was a joke around the station that the extent of the chief’s agitation was always in direct proportion to the length of his stride. This afternoon, he was at the front door in less than six strides.

Wes held his breath as Nina walked through the front door. She smiled pleasantly at the chief and held the door for him. He touched his fingers to the side of his cap in a modified salute, his usual response to a pretty woman. Wes shook his head and tried not to laugh.

Nina came into the lobby and started to ask for him when she saw him in the hall. She smiled and waved.

Wes walked toward her, the file in his hand.

“Thanks so much for finding that for me, Detective.” She met him halfway.

“I thought we were doing first names,” he said.

“Right. Wes,” she corrected herself. “Is that the file?”

“Yes, but it’s the original. I’m going to have to make a copy. Want to come on into the back?”

“Sure. Thanks. I’m sorry to make you go through the trouble, but I couldn’t find the list anywhere.”

“It’s no trouble.” He held open the door to the small room that held the copy machine, the fax machine, and a bank of filing cabinets. He made the copy and handed it to her.

She skimmed the list until she found what she was looking for.

“This is the book?” Her jaw all but dropped. “
Hansen’s Guide to Literary Critiques
?”

He looked over her shoulder.

“Yeah, that’s the one. It’s still in the box. I just saw it.”

“Well, that makes no sense at all.” She shook her head. “Here I was thinking that he’d taken some book of poetry or something to her apartment. You know, to read love poems or whatever. Even some classy prose, but a reference book?”

“That’s what we found there.”

“If you were going to see your girlfriend, would you take a reference book along?”

“Depends. Maybe she needed to look something up. Or maybe he was loaning it to her.”

“She was a senior biology major. It said so in the file. There’s no way she would have been using that book. That was for his freshman class for English majors, the kids who tested out of the standard required freshman English course. Maureen Thomas would not have asked to borrow that book.”

“Then maybe he was taking it home with him.”

“Sorry, but no. For one thing, why take it out of the car? For another, he had a copy of this book in his office at home. I know, because I took that course from another professor, and I used his book.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “This just doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s the book we found there, Nina.”

“May I see it?”

“I don’t see why not.” He picked up his file and held the door for her, and then led the way back to the storage room.

He turned the light on and pointed to the box on the middle shelf.

“It’s right in here,” he told her as he opened the box. He took out the book and handed it to her.

She paged through it carefully, then stopped inside the front cover, to the place where Stephen Madden had written his name.

Nina stared at the signature, then looked up at Wes and said, “I can’t think of one good reason why this book would have been in that girl’s apartment, unless someone else put it there.”

“Who would have had access to his things?” Wes asked, then answered his own question. “At home, Kyle would have. At school, Dr. Overbeck.”

She nodded.

“I didn’t go into my father’s study when I was at the house. I wish now that I had.” She thought it over for a minute, then told Wes, “I can still do that. I’ll stop at the house on my way home and see if Kyle is there. I’ll tell him I changed my mind, and that I decided I do want to look over—”

“Uh-uh.” Wes shook his head. “There’s no way you’re going into that house alone. Not with Stillman a top number on our hot list.”

“Well, how about if I stop over now? I still have a key; if he’s not there, I’ll just go in. He’ll never know I was there.”

“And if he’s at home?”

She stared at him for a long moment. “Okay, how about if we do this. You follow me. I’ll stop at the house. If he’s not there, I’ll go in. If he is, you’ll see me go inside, and three minutes later, you ring the doorbell. If no one answers, break the door down.”

“I don’t like it, but I can’t stop you,” Wes told her. “Fine. I’ll follow you.”

“Good.” Nina looked down at the box. “What other sort of evidence is in there?”

“Everything from the clothes the victim wore that night to her personal phone book.”

She thought about that for a minute, then said, “Did you ever think of testing some of it for DNA and that sort of thing?”

“Frankly, no. And since we don’t have anything to compare it to, what’s the point?” He returned the box to the shelf.

“On TV, you always see the detectives using those little sticky rollers, the kind you use to remove lint from your clothing.”

Wes started toward the door, but Nina didn’t move.

“What if you rolled one of those over the clothing in the boxes now?”

“For what purpose?” He stopped in the doorway.

“To see what trace evidence is there. Hair, maybe. On TV, they always find hair on the rollers.” She stared at him, and he could have sworn he saw wheels turning behind her eyes. “Supposing we rolled the clothes from all four girls. Supposing we took the hairs we found there, and compared them to hair from the victims—you probably have something that has their DNA, right?—and from my father. Then we see if someone else’s hair is there.”

“First of all, we have no way of getting any of your father’s hair. Second of all, even if we found hair or let’s say even semen that doesn’t match your dad, how do we match that to someone else?” Wes let that sink in, then added, “We can’t force either Kyle or Overbeck to give samples, we have no probable cause.”

“We suspect that Dr. Overbeck—”

“Not good enough. We have a theory. That’s all.” He watched the disappointment on her face. “It’s a good idea, Nina, but I don’t know that we’d find anything.”

“You don’t know that we wouldn’t. And just FYI, the box of stuff that came from the prison had my dad’s comb in it. So we probably have his DNA, if anyone’s interested in testing it.”

Wes considered the possibility.

“We’d still have to get it analyzed. As backed up as the county lab is, there’s no way I could get this around the chief.”

“Mitch said if you needed help from the FBI lab, to just say the word.”

Wes was still thinking.

“What do we have to lose?” she whispered.

Only my job,
he could have said, but decided against it. It had been a long time since anyone had appealed to him as much as Nina did, and an even longer time since he’d gotten to play hero to anyone.

“I’ll be right back,” he told her.

“Where are you going?”

“To see if I have any of those lint rollers in my desk.”

Two hours and forty minutes and three sticky rollers later, Wes was still working on the evidence from Maureen Thomas’s case. He’d already rolled her clothing and bagged every sheet of sticky paper separately and was starting on the pillowcase and the bedsheet. They’d need more rollers and plastic bags in order to collect the traces from the other three case evidence boxes.

“We’re done for today,” Wes told her. “We can’t do any more until I get some more supplies. We’ve gone through every roller in the building.”

“So what now?”

“So tomorrow I’ll pick up some more lint rollers and a few more boxes of sandwich bags and I’ll finish the job.”

She watched him load the samples into several brown evidence envelopes.

“What about the sheet?” she asked.

He folded it carefully. “We’re going to have it tested, too. There are three stains still visible. They may or may not give us anything, but you’re right. Let’s test it all.”

Wes found a box to carry it all in.

“Ready?” he asked before turning out the light.

She nodded and followed him into the hall.

“Why not give that stuff to me, and I’ll ask Regan to get it to Mitch. I think she’ll be seeing him tomorrow night.”