The May Day Murders (10 page)

“
I will,” Ann replied. “How
was the movie, by the way?”

“
Pretty stupid, really. We
went to see one of those sci-fi action movies—Bill loves them—and I
fell asleep. Dinner was nice, though. We went to
Angelino’s.”

“
I’ve heard that was a
pretty decent restaurant.”

“
It’s fantastic. Maybe if
you hook up with this Jerry fellow, we can double
sometime.”

Ann chuckled. “You are unbelievable,
Karen!”

“
I know it. Well, hon, I’d
better let you go. If I don’t talk to you in the meantime, I’ll see
you at the office tomorrow.”

“
Okay, Karen. And thanks,
again.”

“
No problem.
Bye.”

Ann hung up the phone and sat for a
moment, thinking about what Karen had said. Maybe she was right,
she thought. It wouldn’t hurt just to call Jerry Rankin up someday
and chat with him. She might even be glad she’d followed through
with it.

But right now she had a more important
call to make. She stood up and went over to the refrigerator where
the card with the emergency numbers was stuck to the door by a
pear-shaped magnet, and carried it back over to the phone. Then she
dialed the number for the Woodcrest Police Department.

CHAPTER 6

Sam stared blankly out the window at
the frost on the ground, the morning rays of sun just now beginning
to melt it away. As he leaned over the kitchen sink, he felt a
relentless throbbing in his head and wished to hell the coffee
would finish brewing and the aspirins he’d taken would start
kicking in. He had a hangover of mammoth proportions.

He hadn’t tied one on in a long time.
In fact, the last time he’d gotten that shit-faced was the last day
he’d stayed over at Roger’s place. Since then, he’d kept sober for
the most part—no more than a couple of beers before going to bed.
Roger Hagstrom couldn’t stop at two drinks to save his
life.

Sam had acquired this little house out
in the sticks for a number of reasons. He knew he could never go
back to the one he and his family had lived in before—the memories
and the ghosts would have made it unbearable. It had been a
handsome house—an old Cape Cod on the north end of town that he’d
renovated exactly to his and Ann’s specifications. It had been
their dream house, and they’d spent nearly as much money over the
years making it everything they’d ever wanted as they had on the
original mortgage.

Once the divorce proceedings began,
he’d moved in with Roger until he could find another place to live.
He had learned about this humble abode from one of the employees in
the advertising department at the
Observer
, and had driven
out here to the rural countryside to check it out. From the moment
he’d first laid eyes on the little cottage nestled in a hollow
between two steep hillsides, he knew he wanted it. The asking price
was a steal, especially taking into account that the deed included
ten acres of nicely wooded land. But the house had been in bad need
of repair. This hadn’t been a problem though, he had in fact looked
forward to a project that would help take his mind off the
divorce.

It was secluded here, and he liked
that. The only thing standing between his house and Route 52 was
his land and the road linking them together; a quarter mile of
winding, bumpy terrain. His closest neighbor was over two miles
away, as was the nearest convenient store—the only drawback to the
whole arrangement. But he’d learned to deal with it.

The coffee maker fell silent. He took a
mug out of the cupboard, filled it up, and carried it with him into
the den. Plopping down on the sofa, he took a cigarette out of the
pack lying on the coffee table and lit it up before stretching out
his long legs.

Sam spent a lot time in this room. Not
only was it bright and sunny, it afforded the best view in the
house. Outside he could see the brightly colored leaves on the
trees that sprawled up the north slope of the hillside and the
winding creek that cut between the hills through his backyard,
forming a natural boundary between his property and the state
forest. He peered across the room at the typewriter on top of his
cluttered desk. He had purposely left the last page of his
manuscript he’d worked on in the carrier as a constant reminder of
yet another ambitious project he’d started up and never finished,
hoping that some day he would feel the inspiration to take up where
he’d left off. Then he thought about Marsha Bradley’s murder and
the article he had to write for Monday’s paper, realizing that his
book would remain pigeonholed for at least one more day. Perhaps
even forever …

His thoughts shifted to Ann and Amy,
wondering what they were doing that very moment. Amy would no doubt
still be asleep, he thought with a grin. Ann would be awake
though—she was an early riser. He recalled how she was always the
first one up in the morning when they were still married, how the
coffee would already be brewed, and the way she would be puttering
around in the kitchen when he would finally saunter in, still half
asleep. And never once had she failed to greet him with her
familiar bright smile and cheery, “good morning, dear…”

Sam closed his eyes to blot out the
memories. Was he ever going to get used to this? he wondered.
Hadn’t he suffered long enough for his screw-up? Hadn’t he been a
good husband and father up until that one little fall from grace
with Shelley Hatcher? She had meant absolutely nothing to him—she
was just a young, perky temptation who had thrown herself at him
one too many times until he’d finally given in to his animal
instincts. What normal, red-blooded male could have
resisted?

This one should have. That was more
than obvious now.

He gulped his coffee and took another
long drag off his cigarette. Nothing good had come from his romp in
the hay with Shelley Hatcher. He had lost his family, couldn’t add
a single coherent sentence to his manuscript, and Shelley had ended
up losing her job at the paper and leaving town. He felt bad about
that—she hadn’t really done anything wrong. But McNary had wasted
no time in firing her from the
Observer
, citing that the
publicity of the affair was bad for business. After all, he
couldn’t continue employing a young woman who was a bona fide house
wrecker. It was a damn shame, too. Shelley had shown great
potential as a photojournalist. She was aggressive, creative and a
fast learner. Only problem was that she was a fast lay as
well.

He hadn’t slept with anyone since
Shelley. Six months, he counted on his fingers. Divorced and
celibate at forty. And now he was living like a hermit in the
sticks of Seleca County. What was his next move in life? Become a
monk? Or a hopeless drunk?

Sam gazed out the window again. A
squirrel sitting on a fencepost was cutting on a beechnut that it
held in its paws. The squirrel could see him but wasn’t intimidated
in the least. It merely sat there chomping away at his nut,
probably wondering how much longer before he had start to storing
the things away for the winter.

Sam stubbed out his cigarette, stood up
and went back into the kitchen to warm up his coffee. He plotted
out his day, deciding that after breakfast he’d take a shower then
drive into town to work on the Bradley story. He had just replaced
the coffee carafe when the phone rang. He went back into the den to
answer it.

“
Feeling crispy this
morning?” Roger’s voice asked, gruff but alert.

Sam feigned a groan. “I’ve felt better.
What in the hell are you doing up so early? I thought you worked
the afternoon shift today.”

“
Something’s come up. I
think you ought to come down to the station ASAP—you’re gonna want
to hear this.”

“
What is it?” Sam
asked.

Roger sighed impatiently. “We got a
call from the New York P.D. earlier this morning. It may be
something, or it may be nothing. I’ll explain when you get
here.”

“
Something to do with the
case?” Sam asked, feeling his pulse quicken.

“
Possibly. Just get your ass
down here and I’ll give you the details.”

“
I’ll be there in fifteen
minutes,” Sam said before hanging up the phone.

He drained his coffee, went into the
bathroom and washed up, dressed and was out of the house in five
minutes.

When he arrived at the Smithtown Police
Department, Sam could see Roger Hagstrom in his office huddled over
some paperwork. He walked up to the desk sergeant, Mark O’Brien,
greeted him and made his way over to Roger’s smoke-filled cubicle.
His friend looked the worst for the wear and apparently had been
rousted out of a coma-like sleep and ordered to come down to the
station by the chief. He was unshaven and still wearing the same
clothes he’d worn the night before.

“
Yo,” he greeted as Sam
strode in.

“
Rough night,
eh?”

Roger glanced up at him and grimaced.
“You don’t look so hot yourself. But it was a pretty decent drunk,
you gotta admit.”

“
Yeah, but we’re paying
dearly for it now. What’s going on?” Sam asked, sitting down on the
other side of the desk.

“
Do you remember Sara
Hunt?”

Sam thought for a moment then replied,
“Yeah. She graduated in our class at high school. Then her family
moved away not long afterwards.”

“
Well, she’s dead. Murdered
in New York City a few weeks ago,” Roger declared
grimly.

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Jesus! What
happened?”

Roger Hagstrom lit up a Camel filter,
glanced down at the report he had been reading and peered across
his desk at Sam.

“
Raped and
strangled.”

He studied the incredulous look on
Sam’s face before continuing.

“
I’ll give it to your from
the beginning: we got a call this morning from a Lieutenant Mancuso
of the N.Y.P.D. He told me that he was following up on a homicide
investigation he’s been working on and was requesting our
cooperation. He went on to say that Sara Hunt’s body had been
discovered in her apartment by her roommate at around 2:30 a.m. Her
assailant had entered her apartment, beat the shit out of her,
raped and strangled her, then left her apartment without having
been seen or heard by a single solitary soul in the building. Not a
single clue to his identity had been left at the scene. No prints,
no murder weapon, nothing. All the murderer left behind were a few
strands of hair and his semen, deposited inside and upon Sara’s
body.”

Roger took a drag, exhaled and resumed.
“Mancuso suspects that Sara had known her assailant. Although the
lock on the door of her apartment building had been broken and
non-functional for several weeks prior to her murder, the door to
Sara’s apartment showed no signs of being tampered with, indicating
that she most likely had invited her assailant inside.” He paused a
moment and yawned. “I need some more java. You want
some?”

Sam nodded. “So this Lieutenant Mancuso
thinks that Sara Hunt’s killer is the same guy who killed Marsha
Bradley?”

Roger stood up. “Hold your horses a
second and I’ll explain. Mancuso didn’t even know about Marsha
Bradley’s murder until I told him.” He walked over to the coffee
maker and poured Sam a cup, warmed up his own then went back over
to his desk.

“
I’m confused,” Sam
said.

Roger sat back down with a groan.
“Mancuso called us on a lark. He said that evidence has been so
scarce in the case that he and his men were scouring every
potential piece of evidence. They’d found a Smithtown High School
yearbook stashed away underneath Sara’s bed and hadn’t thought much
of it at first, but later on discovered that a page of the yearbook
had been marked with a tiny piece of paper tucked just out of
sight.” He shuffled through the papers piled in front of him and
handed Sam a couple of documents stapled together. “He faxed these
to me.”

Sam looked over the documents. In his
hand were copies of two consecutive pages of The 1970 Smithtown
High School yearbook depicting a couple dozen graduating seniors’
headshots in alphabetical order, beginning with “Jamison” and
ending with “Martin.”

Roger said, “Mancuso wants us to do a
background check on all of these people—the males, that is. He
wants to know where they are now, what they’re doing, and most
importantly, if any of them have a police record. It was after he’d
made this request that I mentioned the Marsha Bradley case, noting
the uncanny similarities between her case and Sara Hunt’s. He was
quite interested, to say the least.”

Sam looked over the individual names
and accompanying pictures, silently counting up how many were
males. “Nine guys,” he mumbled.

“
Yeah, and I can account for
five of them already. You probably can, too.”

“
Let’s see … Tony
Jamison, Bob Jones, Bill Kellerman, Dick Korns—they all still live
in Smithtown,” Sam said.

“
You forgot Harold
Justice—he works at the Seven Eleven in Milford.”

“
Didn’t know
that.”

“
So that leaves us with four
guys that we might have to do a little digging up on,” Roger said.
“Anyway, Mancuso admitted that the yearbook angle is a long shot
and the odds are slim that any of these guys are linked in any way
to Sara Hunt’s murder. But it’s definitely a good thing he followed
up on it, as it turns out. Otherwise, he may have never found out
about the Bradley murder, and we probably wouldn’t have learned out
about Sara Hunt. Now we have two murder cases that are not only
curiously similar to one another, but involve victims who we know
for a fact had at one time been Smithtown residents.”