Fatally Bound (24 page)

“And the killer knows this?”

“That’s what we’re thinking. He knows her and he knows what happened.”

“How does he know?” Riley asked. “I get the knowing Johnson part, but how does he know
these
women were involved? What does he know that you don’t? What does he know that the detectives investigating this seven years ago don’t?”

Wire and Mac shared a look and shrugged. This was the answer they didn’t have. “We don’t know. But he knows, somehow … he knows.”

“One thing we think he’s doing,” Wire mentioned, “is interrogating the women.”

“Interrogating them?” Rock asked.

“Yes,” Mac answered as he made some keystrokes on his laptop, pulling up some photos. “If you look closely in these photos of the crime scene for Goynes, as well as Donahue, you can see markings on the floor that look like they’re from the four feet of a chair, one facing the other. Goynes and Donahue had ligature marks on their ankles and wrists. They were found in the basement of a building and a house where he would have the isolation and time to interrogate them thoroughly.”

“And as part of those interrogations, he learns who was involved in the death of Johnson?” Lich asked.

“That’s what we’re thinking,” Mac answered and waved to Rock for another beer.

“You sure?” Rock asked.

“Yes, damnit,” Mac barked.

“Okay, but that’s it,” Wire ordered sternly, having talked with Sally earlier who asked her to make sure Mac didn’t get into one of the usual drinking contests with his crew. “Dara, as much as I love those three oafs,” Sally had said to her, “I know they’ll get going into the beer and booze and will try to drag Mac along. They know how to push his buttons. Don’t let them.”

Dara promised and two would be Mac’s limit. “You’re still on heavy meds. You’re now cutoff. Do you read me?”

“Yes, Mom,” Mac moaned sheepishly. “Guess I’ll have to put a nipple on this one.” Everyone started laughing and the discussion of the case ceased for a bit, everyone grabbing more beer with small discussions breaking out.

Riley moved next to Lich and started flipping through the Reaper case materials while everyone was taking a break and chatting. After ten minutes, Mac started drifting away from a conversation with Rock and the two Wires and focused in on Riley.

For all of Pat Riley’s gruffness, drinking and general horsing around, the big man was an exceptionally capable detective and learned at the hands of Mac’s father Simon. Riles had successfully handled three serials over the years. A fourth he investigated with Mac’s dad went unsolved, although the bodies stopped dropping. Pat had been around the block more than once and was a savvy detective.

Mac studied under Riles for years, learned from him, picked his brain and knew him like an older brother. Something didn’t add up for Riles, and Mac could see it in his eyes, in his facial expressions and in his posture. There was something in the files and conversation that was gnawing at him. After another few minutes, Riles closed the file, stood up and grabbed another fresh beer, popped the top off and took a long sip and came and sat back down next to Mac.

“Mac, the first victim, something doesn’t ring true about her. I can’t put my finger on it, but …”

Mac smiled because Riles brought up something that bothered Mac from the moment they made the connection at the camp. “Something has bothered me about it as well and it’s that …”

“He just starts with Melissa Goynes in Harrisburg.”

“Yes, and you’re asking …”

“Why? Why Melissa Goynes?”

“I’ve wondered that as well, Riles,” Mac answered.

“To me that’s an important question,” Riles mused. “How does he start with Goynes? How does he know to start with her? Mac, is there anything in her background, history, photos, messages, anything that suggests why she’s victim number one? I don’t know if we classify your guy as a serial or not, but whatever he is he is on a mission, killing specific people for a specific reason. How does the mission start with a mother who is a bar manager and then he graduates to an insurance broker, teacher and daughter of a political power broker, then to a news anchor on the rise, and then a coffee shop owner?”

“Doesn’t make sense, does it,” Mac answered. “Unless …”

“Unless,” Riles smiled. They were reading each other’s minds. “Unless Goynes isn’t …”

“The first one,” Mac finished.

“That’s right,” Riles answered. “I can’t tell you why she isn’t your first other than she doesn’t make sense, she doesn’t feel right.” The veteran detective took a long sip of his beer. “Mac, as you say, your killer is not your typical run of the mill sociopathic serial killer. She’s not compelling enough to be number one. There’s nothing in her past that says she triggered something in this guy. Look, I know the McRyan family commitment to the legal distribution of mineral spirits. Believe me, I’ve experienced it. However, in the case of Melissa Goynes, I doubt seven years ago when she was a bright college student attending that camp that running a bar in Harrisburg was her end all career goal. There is nothing about her that says she needs to be killed as an act of vengeance, that she would be the trigger. Now, if there was a true typical sociopathic serial killer on the loose, I’d say sure why not, she could be number one. But this guy isn’t the typical serial, if he’s a serial at all. He’s a killer out for vengeance and I just don’t see her being the first target, the one that gets him going. There is nothing that says I have to get Melissa Goynes first, she’s number one.”

“If our theory holds that these women abandoned the scene, maybe it wasn’t her idea,” Mac suggested. “If we’re talking a conspiracy, then …”

“Every conspiracy has a leader. She’s a follower, not a leader,” Riles answered. “Nothing about her screams leader, the mastermind behind covering this up.”

“So you’re saying what, Pat?” Wire asked.

“You don’t know who your first victim is, Dara. You started in the middle of the story. Melissa is the first you’ve identified or know about, but she’s not your killer’s first. You need to go back to the beginning and find your first victim, your
true
first victim. If you find the first victim, then you will find the pieces that bring this together.”

“And,” Lich suggested, “you’ll probably find something to tie back to your killer. This Reaper fella might not be a serial killer, but how does he know that these women are involved in Johnson’s death?”

“Because there is something about her that ties it all together,” Mac finished the thought. “Our first victim very well knows …”

“Our killer,” Dara added. “I think they’re right.”

“No question in my mind, Dara, they
are
right,” Mac finished.

“Thing is, Mac, do you have any idea who the killer is?” Lich asked.

Mac shook his head and went back to the file. “She has no immediate family. Her parents are dead, her brother, who was a cop and detective, died two years ago in a car accident. There’s a half-brother who is twenty years older who lives up in Rochester, New York, but he wasn’t close to her, is under six feet tall and is in his mid-fifties. The bureau has been through Johnson’s life, interviewing people who knew her back then. There was no boyfriend in her life that we’ve been able to find, so we don’t have a good lead on that yet. It’s the one thing that makes me question our theory, that if Johnson is the trigger of this thing, there should be someone in her past that makes sense as the killer, and there isn’t, at least not that we’ve yet identified.”

“I’m amazed,” Dara suggested, “that given all of the pictures we have out there, we haven’t gotten a better lead on this guy. Someone has to have seen him. Someone has to have recognized him.”

“Not necessarily,” Lich suggested seriously. ”People aren’t seeing it in context.”

“And they may not be seeing him depicted in the way they’d recognize him,” Rock added. “I’ve seen these pictures too, Ms. Wire. We’ve been following this thing pretty closely because our boy here’s been on the case. This guy you’re after is pretty average looking, nothing special about him, nothing really striking. You can tell me he’s a monster all you want and I don’t doubt you for a second, but he looks like a chunky tubby guy you see every day. But what if he had longer hair before? Maybe he wore a different style of glasses, wore his beard thicker or maybe thinner, wore different clothing or had plastic surgery. I mean, it’s not like you have a dead-on straight driver’s license picture of this guy. Your pictures aren’t in hi-def. They’re grainy surveillance, from awkward angles, and sketch artist renderings.”

“Exactly,” Lich added. “My point exactly, the photos are out of context. Find the right context and you’ll have a better chance of identifying him. At least, that’s what my
mildly
trained veteran less than sober detective mind thinks.”

Mac sat back, nodded and looked to Wire. “We have to find victim number one, Dara.”

“Well, Gesch said we need to go back to working parallel. This would be parallel, extremely parallel, off the grid parallel. Where do we even start looking?”

“The thirst to kill comes from somewhere,” Rock mused.

“It always does,” Dominic Wire agreed. “If he’s this proficient at it now, if he was that proficient when he killed Melissa Goynes in Harrisburg …”

“He’s done it before,” Rock agreed and clanked beers with Dominic. “He’s killed before, because he has it down to a science. I mean, think about it, he stages Goynes perfectly as a first victim. He’d given it some thought. He’s done it before.”

“So if this train of thought is right,” Dominic suggested, “it seems you’re looking for maybe a stabbing of a woman with a knife similar to the Ka-Bar our guy is using somewhere in the five- or six-state area here that occurred sometime in the months before Melissa Goynes was killed.”

Mac looked to Wire, “And had some sort of relationship to one of our victims.”

“I bet Gesch could put some resources on that,” Dara answered with a smile and reached for her cell phone.

Mac snorted. He believed in his gut. It was usually right, and his gut told him the boys were on the right track and together they had all come up with some serious insight into the case. It was like being at home, like being in Patrick’s Room at the Pub. It felt good, felt right. He raised his nearly finished beer, “
Man it’s good to see you guys
.”

• • • •

Twelve-year-old Samuel Belanger lay on his back in his sleeping bag, scanning the ceiling of the tree house and the stars he and his nine-year-old brother Ethan had placed on the ceiling they’d painted black. The tree house was set upon thick stilts with a large branch from an oak tree weaving its way through a corner of the structure. The tree house was the envy of all the kids in the neighborhood. Sam, Ethan and two other neighbor boys were doing their first sleepover in the house since their dad, an engineer, constructed it in the spring. The boys had just returned from vacation where they slept out in tents overnight twice. Since they handled the tents on vacation, they figured they were ready for the tree house in the backyard.

“Sam and Ethan, did you guys hear about the police shootout a few nights ago?”

“Yeah,” Sam answered excitedly. “Police were chasing someone through the neighborhood, right?”

“That’s right,” Johnny Franks answered. “We all heard them. The shots, they don’t sound like they do on TV. The shots don’t boom.”

“What do they sound like?” Ethan asked apprehensively, the youngest of the group.

Johnny thought for a second, “More like a popping sound, almost like popcorn. I didn’t really know what the sound was until my dad explained it the next day.”

“And there were lots of cops?” Sam asked.

“Oh yeah,” Ryan Snerk replied. “There were lots of lights and sirens and even TV trucks. It was waaaay cool.”

There was a boom in the distance.

“What was that?” Ethan asked fearfully. “Was that someone shooting?”

“That was a boom, not a pop. That was thunder, bro,” Sam answered, smiling at his little brother who wanted to hang with the big kids and be brave, but was just a little bit scared. “It sounds like it’s a long ways away.”

Five minutes later, as the boys still played with their flashlights and talked, a light rain started.

“Sam, it’s raining, should we go inside?” Ethan asked.

“Nah. It’s just a little rain, no big deal. I don’t want to run inside and have Dad tease us we couldn’t hack it. Because you know he will.”

A few minutes later, Ethan felt drops on his face. “Sam, water is coming through the ceiling.”

Sam put his flashlight up to the ceiling and water was coming through from the roof of the tree house. “Darn it. I guess we will have to go back inside.”

“But now we can give Dad a hard time. The roof is leaking,” Ethan said with a wry smile.

The next morning, Mark Belanger climbed up into his sons’ tree house with Samuel and Ethan trailing close behind.

“So where was this hole in the roof, boys?”

Ethan pointed to the ceiling above where he’d been laying. “Right there, Dad. I can see a little light shining through.”

Mark Belanger inspected the hole in the ceiling. “What the heck?”

He’d built the tree house and put the shingles properly on the roof. Such a hole wouldn’t happen naturally, not within a month of completion.

“The hole is cylindrical,” he said out loud. “Hmm.”

He opened his toolbox and pulled out a long, thin, Phillips screwdriver and stuck the screw-end through the hole and looked the other direction. Embedded in the wall, just below where the roof met the wall, in a line of nail heads, was the larger nail, or was it? Belanger inspected it. A former Marine, he knew a bullet when he saw one.

He took out his cell phone and dialed 911.

“Y
our insight serves you well, Mac,” Gesch answered in his best Obi Wan voice. Mac and Wire were eating ham sandwiches in the kitchen of McRyan’s Georgetown condo, having returned from the Virginia estate when Gesch called.

After the brain storming session of the night before, Gesch, Delmonico and the rest of their team went about going through the backgrounds and reinterviewing family members and friends when late in the morning something popped. “A little over two years ago, in April, a friend of Janelle Wyland’s named Rebecca Randall went missing.”

“Missing?” Wire asked, taking a bite of her sandwich.

“Yes,” Gesch answered over the speakerphone. “She was last seen leaving a local shopping mall in Ithaca, New York.”

“There’s that area again,” Wire remarked. Ithaca was forty miles south of Auburn, New York.

“It gets better,” Gesch added, “Rebecca Randall is originally from Auburn, graduated high school with Rena Johnson, and from what we’ve been able to learn, the two of them were very good friends.”

“Seriously?”

“Yup.”

“There has to be a connection then,” Wire added. “So what happened to Rebecca Randall?”

“She was reported missing by her husband the next morning after she was last seen. Her car was found four days later, forty miles south of Ithaca, pulled off into the woods. The body was found a day later lying in a ditch, barely visible due to all the high grass and cattails. A searcher practically stepped on the body when they found her. I’m e-mailing you the file now.”

Mac and Wire made their way up to the attic office and Mac’s laptop computer. McRyan opened the e-mail file and immediately started printing pages. At the time of her sad demise, Rebecca Randall was a recently married twenty-five-year-old manager at a local clothing store. Mac scanned the murder scene pictures of the shallow grave in the farm field and of her vehicle while Wire assembled the investigative file spewing out on the printer. The cause of death was stabbing. Her stomach brutally ripped open, although not in the shape of the Holy Cross, as with other victims, nor was she staged; she was simply dumped in the ditch. “She wasn’t killed in that ditch.”

“Why?” Aubry asked knowingly.

“Lack of blood, very little in the ditch or in the trunk of the car,” Mac answered. “She was dumped there but she was killed somewhere else.”

“That’s what the Ithaca PD surmised as well,” Gesch answered. “You’ll find it in the notes.”

“Did they ever figure out
where
she was killed?”

“No,” Gesch answered. “That remains a mystery.”

“Did they have any suspects?”

“Only the most obvious one when a wife is murdered—the husband, Kevin Randall.”

“I’ll bite,” Mac asked. “Other than the obvious, why the husband?”

“His alibi was just a bit on the squishy side, but the investigators didn’t have any physical evidence or real motive so they never charged him. From what I can tell in reading the file …”

“They didn’t think it was him but they had no other viable options,” Wire answered, thumbing the pages of the investigation. “He’d been out of town on a boys’ weekend. It should have taken him five to six hours to drive home and it took more like twelve.”

“What was his explanation?” Mac asked.

“He said he pulled off to a rest area and slept in his car for six hours since he was so exhausted from the weekend,” Dara answered, reading from a page. “Apparently the boys got after the booze pretty good. He said he was tired, weaving on the road and worried he still might blow over the legal limit. So he pulled aside to sleep and get himself right. The rest area he claimed he stopped at is unmanned and there were no cameras to verify him stopping there. It was a rest area, so some guy sleeping in a Toyota 4Runner isn’t exactly going to draw suspicion.”

“Which means good luck identifying anyone who stopped there and might have seen him during the time he said he was there,” Gesch stated.

Mac was flipping through the pages as well. “It doesn’t look like he was exactly beloved by his in-laws.” The file indicated Rebecca’s parents disapproved of the marriage. The two had been together since high school in Auburn, she being a cheerleader and he the football captain. She’d never really dated anyone else from what Mac could tell from the file, and Mom and Dad thought she ought to have played the field. Mom and Dad also thought Kevin might have played the field,
while with their daughter
. It appeared that her parents continued to suspect their son-in-law, even long after the police had moved beyond him as a suspect.

“Yeah, I saw the in-laws’ less than loving endorsement,” Wire answered. “So that put a target on him as well.”

“At least enough that the husband moved away from Ithaca, away from Auburn and away from everything he’d ever known,” Gesch replied. “A cloud of suspicion hovered over him and his reputation was totaled, so he left to start over. He wouldn’t be the first guy to do that. However, in the end, while the Ithaca PD didn’t rule him out completely, they moved in other directions. As of today, they’ve never found a killer, a motive or even where she was killed, just her car and where she was dumped.”

“And no forensic evidence from what I’m seeing,” Mac answered. “They really had nothing on the guy. They had nothing on the killer.”

“Which is why the investigation moved in different directions after its initial focus on Kevin Randall,” Gesch stated. “I suppose he’s technically still a person of interest, but in talking to Ithaca, the file is as stone cold as can be. So do you guys want to head up there and see if you can heat it back up?”

“No,” Mac answered.

“No?” Wire and Gesch asked in unison.

“Why not Ithaca, Mac?” Gesch asked.

“Because I don’t think the answer lies in Ithaca, at least not yet. It lies somewhere in Rebecca Randall’s past and who better to answer that than her high school sweetheart and widower husband?”

“Well, in that case, you’re going to Philadelphia.”

• • • •

Gesch updated the director on the Reaper investigation. “We’re continuing to work Germantown. We have agents picking up every piece of surveillance footage in that town in the two days before he tried to kill Drew. We’ve found nothing yet, but we’re continuing with that.”

“What about the Reaper himself?”

“The task force is continuing to go around with the photo array on this man.”

“And McRyan?”

“He and Wire are working their angle that we don’t have the first victim right, that there’s a different victim number one. They are on their way up to Philadelphia to work that.” Gesch laid the theory out for the director.

“You buy their theory?”

“You brought them in to take a second look at this case and run a parallel investigation. This is an outside of the box way of looking at the case. I don’t know that I fully buy that there’s a different victim number one, but I don’t dare discount it either. They may be on to something, and by now, I’ve learned not to question them.”

“You’ve come around on them,” the director noted.

Gesch nodded. “They’re both arrogant, cocky and overly confident, but the fact is they’re also really good. Those two are working this thing when almost anyone else in their conditions, who went through what they did, would be sitting on the sidelines. All they care about is solving it. I’ll work with people like that any day.”

There was a knock on Gesch’s door and Delmonico stuck her head in the door. “There is a call on line three from the police chief in Frederick. You need to take the call.”

Gesch ran his hand through his hair, “Chief, what can I do for you?” Gesch listened and then his eyes went wide.

“What?” Director Mitchell asked.

Gesch put his hand over the receiver, “They found McRyan’s eleventh bullet in the wall of a tree house.”

“And?”

“There’s blood on it.”

“It goes to the front of the line. I want to know who that blood belongs to fifteen minutes ago,” Director Mitchell ordered.

• • • •

“Ten minutes,” the pilot reported.

The FBI helicopter cruised hard north following the Delaware River, a hundred feet in the air, making a speed run. The downtown Philadelphia skyline was growing in size, viewable to their left to the northwest in the early evening light.

“You guys developed this lead,” Gesch stated a few hours ago, “you should follow it. Just keep your profile low, at least as long as you can.”

Their destination was a parking lot along the river in the Northern Liberties neighborhood just north of the downtown core of Philadelphia.

“I’ve never been to Philly,” Mac said, as he saw Citizens Bank Ballpark, the home of the Phillies, taking shape. The stadium was fully alight, the Phillies game in the early innings. “I always wanted to visit, see the sites, check out the Liberty Bell, say hello to Ben Franklin and maybe catch a Flyers game. Visiting like this is not what I had in mind.”

“I see Philly and I think of Hall and Oates,” Wire remarked with a smile. “Daryl Hall’s voice is just so distinct. I mean, you hear his voice, that tenor, and you just know that it’s Hall and Oates.”

“I’m partial to their early stuff myself,” Mac added. “For my money,
Rich Girl
and
She’s Gone
are their best.”

“You like Hall and Oates?” Wire asked, slightly surprised. “I thought you were strictly a Springsteen guy.”

“Not strictly,” Mac answered, shaking his head. “The Boss is the best, I’ve seen him too many times to count, but I like all kinds of music. I have three older sisters who grew up in the eighties. The stereo was on all the time upstairs. They loved Hall and Oates, Journey, Def Leppard, they even loved Duran Duran …”

“Rick Springfield?”

“
Jessie’s Girl
, heck yeah. So I love 80s’ music even though it’s really not
my
decade. But I know all the Hall and Oates songs. I have their greatest hits on my iPod.”

“I was always partial to
Kiss on My List
and
Private Eyes
myself,” Wire suggested.

“And they did a nice remake of
You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling
.” Mac smiled and started singing, “
Baby, baby, I get down on my knees for you
…” Mac riffed and Wire was amused and even the pilot smiled. “I love that song, although you can’t beat the original from the Righteous Brothers. My dad
loved
that song, sang it to my mom when she was mad at him.”

“Really?”

Mac nodded.

“Did it work?”

“Oh hell yeah, she always melted,” Mac replied with a big smile. “Ole Simon was a pretty smooth operator when he needed to be.”

“Tom Cruise gave a nice rendition in
Top Gun
too,” Wire recalled.

“Goose, she’s lost that lovin’ feelin’,” Mac mimicked.

Wire cackled. “I hate it when she does that.”

Mac and Wire were in Philadelphia less than two hours after the call with Gesch. As the chopper landed, they were met by a Philadelphia detective named Umland. After a minute of pleasantries, the three deposited themselves into Umland’s unmarked black Dodge Charger. “Kevin Randall lives five minutes away, over in the Northern Liberties neighborhood. He knows you’re coming.”