Kill Me Once (20 page)

Nathan’s ears rang as he watched the nurses fill their large styrofoam cups with steaming double lattes. No way in
hell
was this a coincidence. These two were safe enough, at least for tonight, but he knew of someone else who wouldn’t be quite so lucky.

Finally receiving his change from the Darwin Award-winning clerk, he hustled back to the BMW and logged on to his wireless MacBook Pro connection before accessing his membership at the Lonely Hearts Club and calling up the nursing student’s profile. His throat tightened as he read through it again with renewed interest.

He glanced at the note posted above her picture; saw that she’d be at the library tomorrow night before meeting up with some of her friends for a study session later on.

Absolutely fucking
perfect
. Especially with her friends along for the ride.

In the driver’s seat of the BMW Nathan felt his heart thrill with the possibilities. An electric charge ripped through his muscles as he put the car in gear and pulled out into traffic with the sounds of Ashley Ball playing Lecuona’s ‘Vals De Las Sombras’ on the stereo.

Goddamn, it felt good!

He was finally ready to spread his wings and fly like an eagle again, finally ready to recreate Richard Speck’s unforgettably sadistic crime once and for all.

With one very notable update, of course.

Next stop: Chicago.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Dana filled Brown in on the possible Richard Speck connection and asked him to arrange for details around all the major hospitals in Chicago.

‘It’s a shot in the dark, but we might just get lucky,’ she said. ‘Richard Speck’s victims were nurses, so I’m thinking that’s who our man will go after next.’

Brown looked at his watch. ‘When do you want to head out to the Windy City? It’s beginning to look like we missed him here.’

Dana paused. There was still work to be done processing the murder scene here in Wichita, and she wanted to make sure that the work got done the proper way. Only one solution. Brown probably wouldn’t like it – not now that he seemed to think he was personally in charge of her safety.

She took a deep breath. ‘I want you to stay out here for the next day or two and work the scene for me,’ she told him.

She saw him about to protest and cut him off. ‘I need you here. It’s important. I’ll head out to Chicago by myself tomorrow and start things there. First I’m stopping off at home in Cleveland to pick up my notebooks and take care of a few other things. I need to touch base with Templeton properly, for a start.’

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea, Dana? Going out to Chicago on your own? I don’t think I like the idea of you going out there with no backup. We could leave Sheriff Jackson in charge here. Seems like a pretty capable guy to me.’

Dana shook her head, touched by Brown’s concern but firm in her resolve. ‘No, I want you to do it. Jackson’s all right, but he won’t know what he’s looking for. You will.’

‘And what exactly
am
I looking for?’

‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ Dana said. ‘I have complete faith in you.’

‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Brown blew out a breath. ‘Well, OK, then, I guess. You’re the boss.’

Dana laughed and punched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Damn straight, buster, and don’t you ever forget it.’

Brown clicked his heels together and snapped off a stiff mock salute. ‘Yes,
ma’am
.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Once upon a time life had been very different for Nathan Stiedowe.

In the beginning things had been pretty rough – there was certainly no denying that. He
knew
that his parents were horribly abusive religious nutcases, sick people through and through. It was just that simple, not to mention a singularly odd thing for such a young child to understand.

His father was an overbearing prick who got off on dispensing Bible verses along with the stinging swats administered with a switch across Nathan’s bare backside for even the
slightest
infractions. A pilfered apple from the pantry, for example, would find young Nathan with his britches down around his ankles, barefoot in several inches of snow as he hugged the huge oak tree that stood bordering the woods of their secluded property. Over the years, Nathan would grow to
hate
that tree.

His father’s loud voice, a pompous mixture of sadism and self-righteousness, would boom out after every stinging lash of the switch. Apparently there must have been a terrible dearth of apples around the country at the time.

‘The thief cometh not but for to steal and to kill and to destroy!’ his father would proselytise. ‘Book of John, chapter 10, verse 10. Learn it, boy.’

The switch bit deep into Nathan’s flesh, raising a nasty-looking welt.

‘A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is His delight! Proverbs, chapter 11, verse 1. Make these your words to live by.’

Again with the goddamn switch.

‘In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by extortion and hast forgotten Me, sayeth the Lord God! Behold, therefore I have smote Mine hand at thy dishonest gain which thou hast made and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee. Ezekiel, chapter 22, verses 12 and 13.’

As the angry red welts popped up on his backside, the tears rolling down Nathan’s cheeks would sometimes freeze in the frigid winter air, but his father never showed any mercy. It just wasn’t in the old man’s nature. Seemed he was more of an Old Testament type of guy.

‘Tell me, son,’ his father would eventually ask, breathing heavily from the exertion as vapours of cold breath issued from his mouth. ‘Do you understand why I am punishing you?’

‘Yes, father,’ Nathan would manage to choke out, desperately fighting to keep his voice even. The old man
hated
displays of weakness, would attack it like a rabid dog that had glimpsed a flash of blood on a child’s throat. ‘I understand.’

‘Are you
sure
you understand, boy? A word to the wise here – think very carefully before answering me.’

Heart in his throat, Nathan would reply, ‘Yes, sir. Stealing is wrong. I understand that.’

It was the wrong answer.

‘You lying little son of a bitch!’

His father’s enraged voice echoed throughout the deep woods all around them, startling a family of rabbits from its winter burrow. ‘For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to their parents, unthankful and unholy! Two Timothy, chapter 3, verse 2. Never boast of knowledge you do not possess, you foul bastard.’

If Nathan ever cried out during these regular beatings, things only got worse from there. His father would take a mere whimper as though it were an impudent slap across the old man’s face – that was something he’d learned almost from the very beginning.

After one especially vicious blow during a lashing administered for forgetting some lines of a Bible verse he’d been expected to memorise, Nathan had instinctively yelped out in pain. Turning around, he immediately realised his mistake when he saw his father’s big, ugly face mottled with fury.

The switch continued in rapid succession from there.

‘Do not cry the false tears of hypocrisy, son! These are not genuine tears of repentance! You weep only because the Lord your God will not deliver you from your just punishment, not because of your sins!’

The old man shook his head in disgust. ‘You are simply
evil
, boy – an evil stalk sprung from an evil seed planted in a foreign field.’

That was dear old Dad.

His mother hadn’t been much better. An obese woman who didn’t bathe on an especially
regular
basis, Nathan always suspected she secretly
liked
to see her son punished. And the sour-milk smell always wafting from her armpits eventually turned his stomach to the point where he couldn’t stand even to be around her any more. To this very day the mere
memory
of her smell was enough to make his gorge rise.

Thankfully, though, his mother largely ignored him for the most part. Still, he wasn’t sure if that hurt even worse than the abuse his father heaped upon him. But in the end his mother was mostly content to spend her days eating everything in sight – even the precious goddamn apples – while paging through one of her well-worn Bibles with her chubby fingers. As near as Nathan could figure the sin of gluttony wasn’t a section with which she seemed especially familiar, but he’d never dared mention such an observation.

There had never been any hugs or kisses when he’d been a child, and he’d always had to tend to his own wounds after the beatings, which wasn’t very easy since they were mostly on his backside and the backs of his thighs, where the teachers at school and the parishioners at church couldn’t see them.

Amazingly, his parents seemed to get along just
fine
with one another. Nathan was always amazed and disgusted to hear their iron bed creaking late at night beneath his mother’s massive bulk, always wondering to himself how his father could bring himself to lie with such a foul woman. Then again, the old man wasn’t much of a prize himself.

As a child, Nathan’s chores had been many, but instead of trying to avoid them, as most children were wont to do, he quickly learned to lose himself in them. The chores were a safe haven for him, a temporary relief from the hellish existence of his daily life.

A floor in their rickety old log cabin, for example, was truly
scrubbed
when the task was assigned to him. And if he were ordered to organise the pantry, he’d carefully wash the dust off all the jars of preserves before neatly stacking them. Each label pointed outward and was perfectly aligned, the foods alphabetised and arranged for the most convenient access.

As he grew older, Nathan’s obsession with cleanliness eventually sharpened to the point where a mere
speck
of dirt beneath his fingernail was enough to send him scurrying for their outdoor shower to frantically scour his entire body from head to toe with the harsh lye soap, even in sub-zero winter temperatures.

Eventually, everything in his life – at least everything he had control over – had to be perfect.

Perfect and
clean
.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Four hours after leaving the horrific murder scene at the Otero house, Dana slipped beneath the covers at the downtown Wichita Hyatt. She’d just closed her eyes when the phone on her bedside table rang.

She fumbled in the darkness to pick it up and placed the receiver to her ear. ‘Hello? This is Special Agent Whitestone.’

There was a crackle of static, the trace of a garbled voice.

‘Hello?’ she repeated, sticking a finger in her right ear to cut down on the background noise. ‘Who
is
this?’

The line finally cleared. ‘Hello, Dana.’

Dana sat up straighter in bed. ‘Who in the fuck is this?’

The voice on the other end of the line was deep and robotic, computer-altered by a speech-masking device. ‘In good time, my dear. All in good time. But you
do
know who this is, don’t you? I’d hate to think you’ve forgotten about me already.’

Dana’s heart thudded in her ears. Tears pooled in her eyes. In a fraction of a second she was reduced to being four years old again. The adult Dana fought for control. She fumbled open her cellphone and attempted to text Brown – who was staying in the same hotel – to get him to set up a trace on the phone line, but she was too shaken up. The killer had caught her unprepared, just like always.

She tried to keep the fear out of her voice, her hands trembling as she held the phone to her ear. ‘Why are you doing this? Talk to me and maybe we can figure a way out of this trouble you’re in. Nobody else has to die if we work together.’ It was important to keep him on the line for as long as possible.

A robotic chuckle filled Dana’s ear. ‘Come, now, Dana. You know that’s not going to happen. Besides, I’m not the one who’s in any trouble.
You
are.’

Much as Dana didn’t want to talk to him for a moment longer, she had to keep hearing his chilling words. She willed herself to stay calm.

‘Fine, then just come after me,’ she said. ‘Leave everybody else out of it.’

‘Can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Patience, Dana. Patience, my dear. You’ll find out why not soon enough.’

There was a click as the connection was cut. ‘Hello?’ Dana shouted into the phone. ‘Hello? Are you still there?’

Nothing. Only silence.

Dana dropped the receiver and jumped out of bed. She had to move fast. She was pulling on a pair of jeans when the phone on her bedside table suddenly rang again, almost giving her a heart attack. She raced across the room and picked it up. ‘Hello?’ she screamed. ‘Are you there? Just talk to me, goddamn it!’

The static crackled again. Then a puzzled voice came on. ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Dana? Is everything OK?’

Dana’s heart slammed against her ribs. ‘Jesus Christ, Crawford. Where the hell are you, a wind tunnel? I have to clear this line. The killer just called me here at the hotel. Call me back on my cell.’

‘Did you set up a trace?’

‘Just clear the line, Crawford!’

The phone clicked dead. Dana’s cellphone rang ten seconds later.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Crawford asked. ‘Did you set up a trace?’

‘I’m calling Brown and meeting him in the lobby now.’

‘Call me back when you’ve got it done.’

Dana hung up with Crawford and punched in the number for Brown’s cellphone. She related the details as quickly as she could.

‘Christ, Dana,’ Brown said when she’d finished. ‘I’ll make some calls and get some people over here to trace the call. I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten minutes.’

Twenty minutes later the lobby was teeming with FBI phone techs from the Wichita office. A tall thin woman named Sandy Lecroix had two cellphones to her ear and a third line plugged into a conference call with AT&T. Lecroix fiddled with wires and pecked information into her laptop. After half an hour, she turned to Dana and sighed.