The Bedroom Killer (11 page)

CHAPTER
23

"Dr. Randall, thank you for meeting with me.
" Marcus stood on John's doorstep, shaking hands, and feeling anxious. Cold and anxious. It was seven o'clock and no more than forty-five degrees out. But it was worth it. For Marcus, meeting the doctor was the closest he'd come to getting inside the Bedroom Killer story. The doctor had been arrested for the crime. He most certainly sat inside one of the interrogation rooms, and he probably answered numerous questions from Detective Bell and maybe Detective Ash, too.

"Come in," John
said.

Marcus followed John into the kitchen and they both sat at the table.
 

"Coffee?
"

"
Sounds great."

John pulled the coffee pot from its stand and poured two cups
. He walked them over to the table and set one in front of Marcus.

"Sugar and cream are right there
." John pointed to the center of the table.

Marcus nodded and scooped one full teaspoon into his cup while John kept his black.

"So what exactly do you want to know?" John asked.

Marcus set his cup down and instinctively reached for his bre
ast pocket to pull out his notepad but hesitated. Was it too soon?

John picked up on all of this and nodded to Marcus
. "Go ahead."

"Habit
." Marcus removed the pad and placed it on the table.

"That's what you're here for isn't it?"

"Well, yes, but…"

"Let's talk
. I want to answer some of the silly questions that have been floating around out there."

Marcus nodded again and brought his pencil to his pad
. "Why were you parked in front of the Sharp house that morning?"

"I planned to kill myself
, and I couldn't figure out where to go to do it. I hadn't put much thought into it. It was sort of a spur-of-the-moment decision. I was driving through town and just sort of ended up there."

"And you didn't know the Sharps before then?"

"I still don't know the Sharps, although I did meet Mrs. Sharp that morning." John smiled.

"When she attacked you?"

"Yes."

"What happened during the attack?"

"She hit me with a baseball bat."

"Anything else?
"

"Like what?
" John scowled and his back stiffened.

Marcus
peered into John's eyes, waiting for the doctor to look up and to the left, which trained interviewers know is a sure sign of lying. John stared straight ahead at Marcus.

"Um, I don't know
. Did she say something to you?"

"She scream
ed at me. It was hard for me to hear. I had just shot my gun, and the combination of that loud sound in the cab of my car and the rain pouring down outside had made me temporarily deaf."

This was all stuff he'd already heard
. What would Morry do? Morry would throw his pencil at him and yell,
Ask a different question, dumbshit!
Marcus stopped writing, set his pencil down, and took a sip of coffee.

"Good coffee," he said after he set the cup back down
. "So why did you want to kill yourself?"

"I didn't want to live anymore."

A lump formed in his throat and Marcus sat up straight. Then he asked, "Why?"

John smiled
. " I'll leave that for you to figure out."

Marcus nodded
, but he already knew the answer. He'd asked around at Greenwood Memorial and learned that the doctor had lost his wife and son in a car accident a year ago, almost to the day. But he also learned that the subject of the doctor's family was off-limits. It probably had nothing to do with the Bedroom Killer story, other than the fact that the family used to live in Karen Sharp's house. That came out just after his arrest, when Karen Sharp's neighbors were quick to recount their individual stories of the young doctor and his wife pushing the stroller through the neighborhood a few years back, and how the doctor worked shirtless in the front yard on Saturdays. This particular part of the story was always followed by shy smiles from the ladies. They were nice people according to all reports—
Just a young family leading a typical white-picket-fence-life
—as one of the ladies described it.

"How were you treated by the police
?" Marcus asked.

"They treated me as anyone might when they suspect you of murder."

"Multiple murders
."

John stared at Marcus.

"
What's your impression of Detective Bell?" "He seems dedicated." John said in a slightly sarcastic tone.

"Dedicated
?"

"What do you want to hear?"

"Well, I suppose all homicide detectives are dedicated."

John's fist clenched and he leaned forward. "
You have to remember, I wasn't there to psychoanalyze the people who were asking me questions. I was about four hours past trying to kill myself, still intoxicated, and I couldn't imagine why I was there in the first place. I was supposed to be dead. Instead I went from getting stitched up by a close friend in a comfortable setting to sitting handcuffed to a steel table in a police station, staring across at a maniac and his partner who both think I kill young girls for a living."

John took a deep breath, leaned back in his chair, and said, "I didn't have much time to take in the scenery, if you know what I mean."

Marcus studied the doctor and took note of two things. His reaction to the question, and the fact that he called one of the detectives—probably Detective Bell—a maniac.

"I'm sorry
. I didn't think… It's just I have these questions rolling through my head all the time. It's my job to think of all types of questions and…"

John put up his hand
. "No offense taken. I shouldn't let it get to me. Like I said, it's part of the reason I agreed to meet you. And I must say, tossing your card into my doorway…smart move."

"I can't take credit for that
. Morry taught me that trick."

"Morry?"

"Charles Morrison. He's a reporter at the
Times,
and he's kind of my mentor. He has more tricks than Houdini."

"Sounds like a good guy to have on your side."

"He is."

They sat there for a moment, in an awkward silence, and Marcus knew he had to move on to his next question.
"What about Detective Ash?"

John looked at Marcus sideways
. "What about her?"

"Well
, I saw the two of you talking yesterday on your front lawn."

John leaned forward, placed his hands flat on the table.

"And?"

"What's your take on her
? What does she bring to the investigation?"

"
What kind of lame-ass question is that?" John said. "That's like those stupid reporters who ask the lady who just lost everything in a tornado, 'How do you feel about losing everything in a tornado?' If it were me, I'd punch that reporter in the face and then stand over him while blood gushes from his nose and say, 'I just lost everything I ever had, how the fuck do you think I feel?'"

Marcus just stared at John.

"I'm sorry. Why do you want to know about Detective Ash, and why would you think I have the slightest idea what she brings to the investigation?"

Marcus listened to the doctor
's questions and noticed his eyes drift slightly upward to the right, a sign of remembering an image, when questioned about how he would know anything about the detective.

There's something there
.
Morry would clamp his hand on my shoulder and say, see that—there it is.

So Marcus leaned forward, sliding his coffee cup out of the way, looking
John right in the eye and said, "I plan to keep writing about this investigation. But I don't plan on focusing on the killer and just the facts about the killings. I want to cover the people—from the victims to the mothers, to the neighbors, to the suspects, to the investigative team and the mayor. Everyone who is anyone in this chaos is fair game. I want to skin this story and lay it bare for all to see. I want it to be an all-encompassing, lives-that-have-been changed, six-degrees-to-Kevin-Bacon sort of story."

Actually Marcus had no idea what he was writing about and everything that just came out of his mouth was pure bullshit that he'd just made up on the spot
. All he really wanted to do was make his editor happy and get a story in on time.

John's reaction to the reporter's soliloquy was to fold his arms across his chest, lean back in his chair, and ask, "Six degrees of what?"

Marcus wasn't getting off to a great start.

***

After the meeting they said their good-byes and agreed to possibly meet again. John left it open as to whether he might answer more questions, but he was pessimistic about what new questions Marcus might come up with.
Would any of them exonerate him from being in the wrong place, at the wrong time? From trying to kill himself, for God's sake?
As he watched him walk away from his house, John felt a sense of brotherly pride for Marcus. He reminded John of when he was a struggling student trying to absorb the fascinating world of medicine. He would corner his professors in the halls with limitless questions, which frustrated some professors, but engaged others. John didn't care, he just wanted the information. His mother had taken to calling him "The Sponge" whenever she was talking with Paulette. It was an inside joke they shared, and although he never admitted it, he somewhat liked the nickname. Marcus was another sponge, and John wanted to help him, so if talking more about the case would help Marcus, he would do it.

Early Sunday morning,
John read through some of the serial murder books, taking notes. It wasn't until that afternoon that he noticed the three business cards again. He picked up Megan's and reread the note she'd written on the back. His mind flashed back to the hallway and how he felt her hand brush against his thigh and how her hips swung when she walked. It was time to make another phone call.

CHAPTER 24

It was Sunday morning and Megan made her way to the county's forensics lab to check on the progress of the DNA analysis of the hairs found stuck on Karen Sharp's baseball bat.

To get to the DNA t
he root of the human hair was cut and mixed with a detergent to remove the white blood cells and separate the usable DNA from the extra cellular material. The DNA material was then cut into variously sized specific sequences using restrictive enzymes that have sticky ends or blunt ends known as
restriction fragment length polymorphisms
, and were then placed into a gel and sorted according to size. These were only the first few steps in producing a DNA map and were as complex as they were time-consuming, which is why the tests were conducted off site at a special lab set up specifically for DNA testing.

Eric the lab tech was lecturing Megan on the finer points of Trichology, also known as hair analysis, and the history of DNA testing as he adjusted his microscope.

"So anyway,
" Eric continued in his best research scientist voice, "in nineteen twenty-eight, Frederick Griffith conducted an experiment using virulent pneumonia and mice. It was to be the first experiment, if you don't include Mendel and his peas, to consider
inherited genes
. Fourteen years later, Oswald Avery followed up on Griffith's experiment and discovered what he called transformation, or inherited genes, in the DNA. Then there was Chargaff, Franklin and Williams, then Watson and Crick, who won the Noble Prize, but really Rosalind Williams—"

"Eric!"

Eric jumped in his seat, hitting the bench with his knees and causing the county's 2 nineteen thousand dollar compound microscopes to shake on their mounts. Detective Ash reached over and grabbed the scopes to stop the shaking. He was doing it again, rattling on. He did it whenever Detective Ash showed up. He was in awe of her and wanted her to like him, and whenever he liked a woman, he got nervous, and when he got nervous he couldn't stop talking.

"What have you got
?" she asked.

Eric looked at her crossways and returned to the image from the microscope
. "Okay, we're at four hundred times normal size, we can see that this human hair is black, twenty-nine centimeters long, and wavy, as opposed to straight. I found two of them on the baseball bat, along with another human hair—brown and straight. I've already compared the brown hair with those taken from Dr. Randall and they are a match. I have no match for the black hair. It could belong to our suspect. If we find him, we—"

"
Once
we find him," Megan said.

"Once we find him
…we can pull some of his hair for comparison. If they match, we have concrete evidence placing him inside Rachel Sharp's bedroom."

This was the part of his job that he loved
. When he knew he was looking at evidence that could be used to convict a suspect; if he was ever caught. Eric had logged the hairs into the computer, collecting snapshots that could be uploaded into a national database and printed out, and blown up for courtroom use.

"It will take another couple weeks before we have a final printout
. Once we get it, I'll load it into CODIS and to see if we get a match."

The Combined DNA Index System—CODIS—was the FBI database for DNA fingerprints and tracking of known and suspected criminals. Megan knew that CODIS would be their best shot unless they found more evidence—or the killer suddenly got sloppy. Karen Sharp with her baseball bat was the best break they'd had thus far.

A
s Megan thought about how long it would take to get the CODIS printout, her cell phone rang. Like Pavlov's dog, Megan's psyche was conditioned for two opposing reactions to the sound of her cell phone; fear and lust. She excused herself from Eric and pulled her phone from her purse. She took a deep breath and stared at the screen.
Unlisted.
She frowned, clicked the button, and answered.

"Ash
," she said.

There was brief silence on the other end and Megan was ready to hang up when she heard a man's voice.

"Detective Ash?"

"Yes
. Who is this?"

"This is John Randall."

Megan's heart jumped and she caught herself looking over at Eric to make sure he wasn't listening in. He wasn't. Megan swung around and said, "Hello, Dr. Randall. What can I do for you?"

"I wanted to thank you for what you wrote on the back of your card."

She flashed back to John's front yard and tried to remember what exactly she had written on the card. John reminded her by saying, "I believe you."

"Oh yes
. Well. I do. From everything you said, what the other doctors had said—it was pretty evident. Besides, even Mrs. Sharp knew you weren't the one in her house."

A
nother silence that passed between them, then Megan said, "How would you feel about meeting for coffee?"

Silence again
. Megan suddenly flushed, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't be—"

"
I'd love to," John said, then added, "But I'd rather not meet in public. I hope you understand."

"Yes, of course
. How about my place?"

"How about the library?" John
asked.

"The library
…on Foley Street? I thought you didn't want—"

John cut her off, "I don't want to meet in a restaurant or coffee shop
. Room F. Second floor. I'll reserve it. It's a private room I used to study in. I'll bring the coffee."

"Al
l right then," Megan said, a bit bewildered.

This isn't how I pictured it
.

They agreed to meet the following night and when Megan hung up and turned back to leave
, she found Eric staring at her.

"Was that
the
Dr. Randall from—"

"Get me that DNA match, Eric,"
Megan said as she brushed past him and entered the hallway wondering what to wear to a library.