Killing Kate: A Novel (Riley Spartz Book 4) (12 page)

Acting the villain did not make him feel this powerful even when he lorded over their bodies. He attributed the rush of vigor to the witnesses, and pondered whether public credit for the killings would have the same impact.

Her vehicle plate and driver’s license were registered to the station address rather than her home. That’s why Channel 3 was the starting point. He had been waiting on that street corner to observe, not participate. To learn her pattern: when she came to work, where she parked, what door she entered. At the end of the day, he’d reverse the process. Then repeat. Such was research. The easy part about tracking this target was that geography made his time investment minutes, not hours.

All that talk of calling the police on her attacker was a bluff. He didn’t want 911 to have his cell phone number. And he sure didn’t want his name listed as a bystander in any police report tied to the TV reporter.

As it was, if anything happened to her, someone would probably
mention the man armed with eggs. And police would waste time investigating that lead. He wasn’t sure about the nature of her attacker’s complaint, but was horrified at how little finesse the man demonstrated.

“Good morning, Mr. Dolezal.”

The receptionist at the law firm greeted him cheerily, but he knew she was just doing her job. If their paths crossed elsewhere, he had no doubt, she would look right past him. Normally he just nodded, but this morning, feeling empowered, he hailed her by name, and asked if she had plans for the weekend.

What Karl Dolezal lacked in morals, he made up for in work ethic. And he had plenty of legal duties ahead today. Certificates to file. Documents to notarize. Clients to reassure. The best part of working in a law firm’s tax and probate division was that his kind were seldom considered suspects in violent crimes. Paperwork malfeasance, sure. But nothing gruesome.

Certainly, his colleagues, if pressed, would concede he had the necessary intellect for murder. Their surprise would be that he had the passion.

The year following his father’s atrocity, he shuffled between a couple of foster homes before a maternal grandmother, long estranged from his family, came forward to raise him to study long and work hard. She told him his surname, Dolezal, was Czech for “lazy man,” and he must constantly fight that label.

Always, she kept him busy. Constantly warning: “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

But as he recently discovered, busy hands can also do the devil’s bidding.

Dolezal finished his billing hours. Not wanting to risk another face-to-face encounter with the TV reporter, he avoided tracking her the rest of the day. Only five blocks separated their work-places, so there would be plenty of other opportunities.

Besides, he didn’t have permission to take her. No tortured deadline, yet, to anticipate.

So after work, he drove south . . . for hours . . . without stopping. The familiar road trip comforted him. It didn’t matter that it would be dark before he reached his destination. He preferred the obscurity of nightfall anyway. Just him and the stars before his altar.

For added company, he conjured up Kate’s face. Still vivid. Because his motivation for her was more personal than the others, her ambush was also more gratifying. He was tempted to close his eyes to savor the experience again, but he needed to watch the pavement before him.

“Taunting Teresa is tempting death.” Weeks earlier, that line had been Kate’s first hint of trouble. Now it was her last memory of life. From her eyes, he discerned that, unlike the others, she knew why he had come and that no escape was possible.

Again he uttered the words, alone on the road, under the moon. “Taunting Teresa is tempting death.”

Keeping both hands fixed on the wheel, he imagined the heft of the club. Then smiled and kept driving as he repeated his anthem over and over.

V
ali-Hi was one of the few drive-in theaters left in Minnesota, much less the rest of the country. The screen stood high off the ground on one end. Cars lined up in the dark waiting for the film to roll.

Earlier, the scene was a tailgating party of coolers, grills, and lawn chairs. Nick Garnett and I had missed most of that pre-movie action. I’d picked him up at the airport and we’d made a spontaneous decision to catch a flick outdoors instead of dining fine.

This was our weekend to catch up on each other’s lives. He’d been immersed in government security issues and didn’t know about the egg man humiliating me on a public street.

The van next to us had a couple of kids on a campy air mattress on the roof. The car on the other side had a young couple in the backseat not paying attention to the show.

Their moves reminded me of Desiree Fleur’s narrative. And since the movie wasn’t all that captivating anyway, I started filling Garnett in on my murder victim’s hidden author life.

“So you say her books are R-rated . . .
R
for erotica?” He made the lingo match our setting.

“X-rated would probably be more accurate,” I conceded.

“Maybe we should explore the difference. Cinematically, I believe
they are classified by full-frontal nudity. Wherein lies the literary line between
R
and
X
?”

He reached under my sweater, and I squirmed to shrug him away. Even though it was dark, and we had the car doors closed, I didn’t need any eagle-eyed news viewers blogging or tweeting about seeing me making out at the drive-in. Or even worse, nabbing an X-rated cell phone photo to post on my Facebook page.

“I have a morals clause in my television contract,” I reminded my date.

“I’m just trying to help research your story. The more I understand about the victim’s life, the more I can help.”

“Why don’t I just read some of her work to you,” I said. “Then you’ll get the true flavor of her writing.”

I keep a flashlight in the glove compartment for emergencies, and this seemed like one of them. Garnett blinked as the glaring beam caught his face while I scanned
Black Angel Lace
for an appropriate passage.

In a whisper, I read:
“Her lips trembled as his tongue navigated the terrain of her breast and his fingers caressed her thighs. Her entire bosom heaved with desire for his—”

“Does yours?” Garnett interrupted me.

“Does what?” I asked.

“Does your bosom heave with desire?”

“My bosom has nothing to do with this.”

Even in the dim light, his eye held a gleam. “I’m not sure that’s entirely true, Riley.”

I realized he might have a point, but knowing an off-duty cop patrolled the rows of cars at the drive-in made me feel more like discussing the murder investigation than exploring our physical relationship. Feeling that way made me wonder if I was using Garnett for his mind and if he might be using me for my body. And if that were the case, could we find happiness together if our goals were incongruous.

“Maybe reading wasn’t such a good idea.” I shut the book and turned off the flashlight.

“Maybe we could save it for later, for a bedtime story.” He leaned over and kissed my ear. “We could take turns reading to each other under the covers. One of us could narrate; the other, demonstrate. We could have our own private book club.”

To change the mood, I fumbled for my cell phone to distract him with the aftermath of Kate’s crime scene. True, once a detective, always a detective, but I underestimated his interest in the picture.

“Look at this.” I held the screen up to him. Even in the dark, the white outline where her body once lay was vivid. “Surprise . . . a chalk fairy.”

“What?” He reached for my phone and stared at the photo. “How did
you
get
this
?” His voice suddenly tense, all romance gone.

“I shot it.”

“That’s not possible.” He shook his head. “Come on, who gave it to you?”

“I shot it a few days ago. It’s the murder scene from the case I’ve been telling you about. Remember, my old roommate’s sister? I asked you for a biohazard company to handle the cleanup.”

“Hold off calling them.”

“It’s too late. They already finished the job.”

Even in the dark, his face looked pale. “Damn.”

“What’s going on, Nick? Was the crime scene contaminated?” If the case against her sister’s murderer was jeopardized because of an amateurish police screwup, Laura would be furious. She might even be willing to go on camera and fume.

Garnett stared at the photo as if he stood over the chalk fairy. Touching the screen, he traced around the shadowy figure.

“Minneapolis homicide processed the scene,” I told him. “They’re sure to have better photos.”

He still didn’t answer.

I tried to understand why he was so intrigued. I didn’t want to sound tacky, but the detective squad wasn’t acting like Kate’s was an especially important murder. Mostly the cops were sniggering about her day job now. Then it occurred to me that if one of their own had endangered the investigation, they might want to purposely downplay the crime and keep it out of the news.

I tried to imagine the headline possibilities if the truth were reported.

Cops Chalk Homicide Mess Up to Inexperience

Body Outline Kills Murder Case

No Happily-Ever-After for This Chalk Fairy
Publicity like this could do more damage to the police homicide department than when a college student went missing years ago after a Halloween party in a local bar and his murder was mistakenly called a suicide. On a certain level, the public expects occasional police misconduct. They’re even willing to overlook an unjustified shooting if the victim has a violent criminal record and might be deserving of a bullet in the back.

What they won’t tolerate is police incompetence. That’s the kind of thing that gets cops fired.

“The chief isn’t acting half as curious about this case as you are,” I said. “And I think I know why.”

“No, you don’t.” His words came without hesitation, and he seemed to have no interest in hearing my hypothesis.

“So what aren’t you telling me, Nick?”

He turned my phone off and looked me in the eye with the same intensity I recognized from his homicide detective days.

“Riley, the cops didn’t draw the chalk outline around the victim. The killer did.”

I
worried that parking outside Kate’s house, especially so late at night, might get my car noticed by the neighborhood’s ever curious mother-in-law. When we last spoke, she told me she was going to keep an extra close watch on the block because of a “feeling” she had that the killer might return.

“We can sort that all out later,” Garnett said. “I need a look/see now. A brief drive-by might even be enough.”

“Okay, we’re close, that’s it.” I pointed to the brick rambler—now tainted with a deadly past. All dark.

But sure enough, across the street a couple doors down, a light was burning. I noted to Garnett that it might be best if we remained inside the vehicle.

“They already arrested a guy she was dating.” I started to fill him in on Chuck, but he cut me off. “Not him.”

“How do know?”

But he didn’t answer. “Think back. What do you recall from inside the house? Beyond the specific crime scene. What about the peripheral details?”

“I didn’t really get the sense that she surprised a burglar,” I said. “No cut screens. And her TV and computer seemed untouched. A knife lay on the kitchen counter where she’d been chopping vegetables. So she didn’t feel startled, like she had to defend herself.”

“This wasn’t a burglary.” Garnett spoke with a sense of assurance. “He came after her. A stalker. Otherwise he could have grabbed a random victim in a city park. The question is: Why her?”

We talked about how some murderers often kill in the victim’s home for privacy and to avoid leaving her DNA in their own house or car. Of course, they have to be careful about what forensic clues they may inadvertently leave behind or take away. DNA testing is now so sophisticated that a single cell is enough to confirm an identity.

“Homicide toward the front of the house?” he asked.

“Yes, we almost stepped on the crime scene when we came in the door.” I remembered Laura’s revulsion that day.

“Might mean the victim let her killer inside, right through the front door,” Garnett said. “Or it might mean she was trying to escape.”

“Either way, he whacked her,” I replied.

“You’re sure about the cause of death?” he asked.

“Blunt trauma, according to the M.E. But the cops wouldn’t be more specific.”

Garnett nodded like that made sense. “Saving the weapon details as something only the killer would know.”

That ingenuity helps police sort out false confessions.

Garnett was being coy about why he thought Kate’s killer drew her body outline. I shouldn’t have been surprised, detectives prefer gathering information to sharing it. The opposite of journalists who like to shout news to anyone who will listen.

He was also reverting from his current security priority in
preventing
crimes back a couple of jobs to
solving
crimes. I’d put money down that he missed his days as a homicide investigator.

“Was the outline paint or chalk?” he asked.

“It was powdery, just like chalk.” I recalled fingering the white dust on Kate’s floor.

“I hope the forensics team took a sample.”

Just then headlights came around the corner, and a vehicle pulled up behind us. Red flashing lights.

“Just wait,” Garnett said. “Let him come to us. I’ll do the talking.”

Nearly a minute passed before a uniformed officer carrying a flashlight approached my side of the car.

I rolled down the window and waited for further instructions. I hoped he’d be content to glance at my driver’s license and not order me to step outside the vehicle for a pat-down. Although it couldn’t be any worse than going through airport security these days.

From her front porch, the mother-in-law watched.

“May I see some identification, Ms. Spartz?” The cop must have run my plates, and he probably recognized me from TV.