The Psalmist (16 page)

 

Chapter 26

T
WELVE T
WENTY-­THREE.

Luke scrolled through the verses of the Twelfth Psalm.

But there was no verse 23.

Psalm 12 consisted of only eight verses.

He scrolled to the top and read the summary: “Man's Treachery and God's Constancy.” The author, once again, was David.

He read from the beginning, stopping after the third verse. Feeling a chill race through him. He looked at Amy Hunter, her light brown eyes fastened on his, rotated the phone and handed it to her.

“Psalm 12,” he said. “Verses two and three.”

He watched as she read.

They speak idly everyone with his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.

May the Lord cut off all the flattering lips And the tongue that speaks proud things.

Luke glanced out at the gray, scudding sky above the 1960s movie marquee and the slanted awnings and brick facades of Main Street. Hunter pulled the photo of John Doe's arm from the folder and looked at it again.

“Shit,” she said finally. “And it fits your theory, too.”

Yes
. It traced the pattern back one more notch: the earliest, and subtlest, of the four John/Jane Doe messages.
Progressively apparent
, as she had called it. Any lingering sense that this might be some bizarre coincidence had just evaporated, Luke realized. Clearly, they were dealing with a serial killer, someone who had carried out his crimes in a brilliantly methodical fashion.

“Shit!” she said again. “This is what he wants, isn't it? This is exactly how he wants us to discover this.”

“He?”

“The Psalmist. That's who this is. That's how he wants us to perceive him. He's playing us. This is really twisted.” Her eyes were wild with energy now. “And it's big, much bigger than Tidewater County.”

“What are you going to do?” Luke asked.

“I'm going to end the grand jury talk, first,” Hunter said. She pushed the photos back into the envelope and closed the folder. “Then call the FBI. Have a profiler come out. They'll bring in a team from Behavioral. It's a new game now. It'll be a federal case probably by tomorrow morning.”

“Okay.”

She stood. Revved up. Already off to somewhere else in her thoughts.

“Let me call you later, okay?” she said.

“Sure. All right.”

They shook hands, Hunter's grip firmer than before, as if she were more directly engaged with life now. Luke sat back down. He touched the stem of his coffee cup and thought about another bagel as he watched Hunter drive off, wheels spinning through the gravel.

Closing his eyes, he considered the four cases again. The same person had committed four murders. Leaving behind clues so subtle, clever, and interconnected that they would never have been identified individually. Why? Who was intended to see them, and for what purpose?

 

Chapter 27

H
UNTER STRODE DOWN
the long corridor to the state's attorney's office, her thoughts narrowed to this: four sets of numbers, four Psalms verses. It was the only evidence that seemed to matter anymore; they were like a blinking buoy light just before dusk, the thing you couldn't take your eyes away from.

Wendell Stamps's administrative assistant, Connie Elgar, with her jowly bulldog's face, looked up as she came in.

“Is Mr. Stamps in?” she asked.

“No, honey, I'm sorry. He's not. Do you have an appointment?”

“Could you ask him to please call me as soon as he gets in?”

Connie Elgar smiled, amused by Hunter's urgency, and lowered her eyes instead of answering. Hunter walked back to her office. She closed the door, hung her jacket on the coat stand and called the FBI field office in Washington. She left a message for John Marcino, saying she needed his help on a serial killer case. Marcino was a criminal profiler she'd worked with on two prior homicide investigations. She trusted him and wanted him to be her first point of contact with the federal government. Marcino was good about calling back; Hunter figured she'd hear from him within an hour.

He told her he would bring out a team and the Bureau would take the lead. She knew she'd have to accept that, though she felt deeply invested now and wanted to stay with the case. She wanted to see the investigation unwind; to learn what might have motivated someone to kill four human beings so elaborately and cruelly. Marcino would probably allow that. For now, though, she felt restless, involved finally in a complicated multistate case but at the mercy of other ­people's schedules, strategies, and whims. It was the part of her job she didn't like.

Waiting, unable to connect with anyone, Hunter reviewed all four of the killings. She studied the photos of the crime scene at Oyster Creek. Then those from the Methodist church—­wondering again what might have led this victim, and killer, to Tidewater County. She imagined, as she had many times before, how Luke had felt walking into the sanctuary early Tuesday and discovering the dead woman in a pew, thinking at first that she might be praying.

Then she saw the blur of the state's attorney, his navy three-­piece suit whooshing past.

Hunter put away the photos and walked back to Stamps's office. Before she had a chance to speak, Connie Elgar said, “I'm sorry, sweetie, he's on a call. I can have him phone you.”

“I'll wait.”

Lowering her eyes, Elgar pursed her lips disapprovingly. Hunter stood by the door of the state's attorney's plush office. “No, no, I understand,” she heard Stamps saying. “That's good work, Clay. Right. Let me go now. All right. Good job. Right-­o. Thanks, Clay.”

When he hung up, Hunter was inside his doorway. Stamps's impassive eyes widened, as if he were mildly amused by the intrusion.

“Hunter.”

“Talk?”

He nodded once and she sat.

“I just want you to know what's happening, sir. That our Jane Doe case is about to become a federal investigation.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. So whatever information the sheriff may have, or thinks he has, this is no longer a local crime. We've found connections now to three other homicide cases, in three other states. We're evidently dealing with a sophisticated serial killer.”

What might have been a smile flitted across his face.

“The numbers in the victim's hand were a calling card, not a red herring,” she went on. “We've found similar calling cards in those three other cases. We're just beginning to understand what it means.”

“Who's we?”

“The task force.”

“You and the pastor?”

“Sir?”

“No, I'm sorry.” He shook his head and lowered his eyes in a gesture of contrition. Very occasionally, Stamps did this—­breaking his neutrality to toss a barb, but then quickly backing off and apologizing, as if it had just slipped out involuntarily, like a stomach growl. It was rare enough to always throw her off.

“Hold on,” he said, swiveling his executive chair away from her. “Let me check something here first. Just a second.”

Hunter waited, glancing at the computer screen on the cabinet behind his desk. He seemed to be scrolling through his e-­mails. “Are you hearing me, sir?” she said. “We're dealing with a serial killer.”

“Here we go.” He hit several keys in quick succession. “Hold your calling cards for a second, Hunter, okay? We just got an ID a few minutes ago.”

“Sir?”

“On Jane Doe. We've just ID'd her.”

 

Chapter 28

W
EARING HIS FIXED,
unfathomable expression, State's Attorney Wendell Stamps slowly retrieved a sheet of paper from his printer and seemed to be studying it.

“Here we go,” he said at last. “Came in as a tip to the sheriff's office less than an hour ago. He just called as I was driving over here. You should be receiving a photo by e-­mail momentarily.”

He handed the paper to her and Hunter looked: it was the image of a woman's face. Clearly the woman from the church, although she appeared younger. Smiling slightly. Steady eyes. Still alive. A pleasant face.

“That's her, isn't it?” Stamps said, seated again.

Hunter read the identifying information below the picture.

The woman's name was Kwan Park.

Age thirty-­two. Almost exactly one year older than Hunter.

Resident of Sharonville, Ohio.

“Yes?”

Hunter took a breath and sighed, reminding herself that this was still her investigation. “Yes,” she said. “Okay. We'll need a briefing with the task force, then. Have local officials contacted her next of kin?”

“You'll have to follow up with Clay on that. Apparently, there's some problem there that's delaying the release of information.”

“What problem?”

“I don't know. You'll have to follow up with Clay on that,” he said again.

Hunter rose to leave, so enraged she felt the blood rush to her face. Stamps stood, too, and his frown seemed to become a smile. As if he could see that the game was changing in his favor.

O
VER THE NEXT
fifty minutes Hunter, Shipman, and Fischer assembled a rudimentary profile of Jane Doe, now identified as Kwan Park. They spoke with police detectives in Ohio, the manager of the convenience store where Park worked, three coworkers, and two neighbors. No one, it seemed, really knew Kwan Park. She was described by acquaintances as polite but aloof, almost a phantom presence in her neighborhood and at the store, a woman with no real friends, who'd left her family in Korea seven or eight years earlier.

Stamps forwarded a copy of the voice-­mail tip that had been recorded on the sheriff's nonemergency line. Male voice, with a slightly Southern accent: “I wonder if the woman found in the church is the same woman who worked at a convenience store in Sharonville, Ohio. If so, her name would be Kwan Park.' ”

He spelled it.

“Trace?”

“Phone company's on it. Clint Fogg's following up,” the state's attorney said.

It was, at first, difficult for Hunter to stay focused on Kwan Park, knowing about the muddy boots and the .22 caliber handgun found in Jackson Pynne's apartment and what she'd just learned about the Virginia and Delaware Psalm verses—­information that appeared to be of little interest to the state's attorney. For now, they seemed separate narratives; although, of course, they had to be connected.

But all the same, Hunter didn't want the details of the serial murders to be shared yet with everyone on the task force. It was all right to compartmentalize, she decided. To stay focused on the Tidewater case until after the victim's name was released to the public.

There was one detail in particular, though, that surprised her about Kwan Park. It surely would change the case in a way the state's attorney didn't see yet. Several minutes before the task force was scheduled to meet, she closed her door and called Pastor Luke Bowers.

It was something he needed to know.

S
UND
AY WAS
C
HARLOTTE'S
day off from writing, although she liked to work for an hour or two in the evening after they'd shared an early dinner, reviewing and editing what she had written the previous week.

After church, she dressed casually—­in her old Georgetown sweats, usually—­and often went on a long, early afternoon walk with Sneakers—­sometimes all the way down the beach to Conners Point, where in summer the three-­hundred-­year-­old Admiral's Inn served giant lump-­fin crab cakes and fried oyster fritters that were so delicious ­people would wait more than an hour to be seated.

Sneakers's tongue always wagged from the side of his mouth after these walks and he trotted across the kitchen to his water bowl as if he had just crossed a desert.

Afterward, Luke and Charlotte shared the
New York Times,
spreading it over the living room floor, swapping sections and discussing articles. Then Charlotte went to the kitchen and into her nearly impenetrable “cooking zone,” as Luke thought of it, listening to classical music as she prepared dinner. Tonight they'd have baked tilapia filets crusted with almonds, cooked with Dijon mustard. Sneakers, whom she'd appointed her “food taster,” parked himself contentedly at Charlotte's feet.

Luke was camped in the living room reading an article about Noam Chomsky when Charlotte came in with her laptop and plunked it in front of him; Sneakers trailed behind her with his head lowered.

“Did you see this?” she said. “They're applauding you.”

“Who is?”

The
Tidewater Times
website had posted a story:
PASTOR BINDS CO
MMUNITY.
There was a blurry photo of Luke at the top—­arms raised like a fundamentalist preacher, not really himself. Strange: he hadn't seen a photographer in the church.

He read:

Pastor Luke Bowers gave reassurance this morning to a community still in shock over the unexplained murder of the “mystery woman” discovered Tuesday morning at Tidewater Methodist Church.

Bowers, who discovered the woman in a pew, urged the overflow crowd Sunday morning to use this tragic event to draw closer together as a community.

Citing the many unanswered questions surrounding the killing, Pastor Bowers said, “As we wait for answers, let's take this opportunity to deepen our capacity for patience, faith, and understanding. And to deepen our commitment to this community, to our families, and to one another.”

Police, meanwhile, continue to pursue leads but are still unable to identify the woman or determine why she was at the church.

He stopped reading as the phone rang. Charlotte picked up in the kitchen. Sneakers languidly followed her back in, in case it was for him.

“You,” she said, handing over the phone. She didn't have to say who it was. Luke could see by her pinched expression.

“We have an ID!” Amy Hunter said.

“On?”

“Jane Doe. Name, background, the whole nine yards. It's all going to be released to the media in about an hour.”

“Okay,” Luke said. He was surprised that she'd be calling
him
, but listened with interest as she breathlessly relayed the known details about Kwan Park.

“And here's the thing,” she said. “You were right about Jackson Pynne. He did know her.”

“He did.”

“Yes, he was a co-­owner of the convenience store where Kwan Park worked. In Ohio. He sold his interest last year. Right about the time she started there, apparently. It's possible Jackson Pynne may have even been the one who hired her.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I just wanted you to know. That part's not for public consumption yet.”

Luke blinked at the darkening afternoon sky. He couldn't picture Jackson owning a convenience store.

“We're having a press briefing on the woman's identity at five,” Hunter said. “I'll have more later.”

Both Charlotte and Sneakers were staring as Luke walked back into the kitchen, the phone in one hand, Charlotte's laptop computer in the other. He placed the phone in the cradle, feeling stunned. Wondering again if he'd been wrong about Jackson Pynne.

“I think they're going to need to update this story,” he said, handing the lap back to Charlotte.