Without Warning (7 page)

A personal connection would be dramatic, no question about that, and it would make it a more interesting media story. But it would also increase the chance of making a mistake, of exposing himself to danger, and the Predictor was not about to do that.

Of course the plan was not carved in stone; it wasn’t designed to be. It was proactive, but also allowed for varying adjustments, based on the actions of the authorities. But whatever they did, he would be ready.

And he would be in control.

And eventually, the walls would come tumbling down.

But for now there was no sense looking that far ahead. The Predictor had too much to do; he had to turn up the heat.

There was only one way to do that, and the plan covered that very clearly.

Someone else was going to have to die.

King Eider’s is a restaurant-pub in a town called Damariscotta. It had a few things going for it as a place to take Katie for dinner and meaningful conversation. For one thing, it had crab cakes worth committing a felony for, and the best lobsters in the state. For another, it had what seemed like four million kinds of great local beer.

Lastly, and in this case most importantly, it was forty-five minutes from Wilton. We could sit in relative anonymity, which is exactly what I wanted.

We did very little talking on the way there, and nothing of consequence was mentioned. Katie was always a big Red Sox fan, so she commented on the three-game losing streak they were on at the time.

“That breaks my heart,” I said.

“Oh, right, I forgot. You’re a Yankee fan.”

I grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, an area where one is forced to choose allegiance to either the Yankees or the Red Sox upon exiting the womb. “Right. One of my most endearing qualities.”

She smiled. “Hard to keep track of them all.”

“I sometimes find it helpful to make a list.”

Another smile. “I’ve got one somewhere.”

As was the case with every woman I ever met, I had no idea whatsoever what Katie was thinking. Somehow in her case, though, that always took on added importance.

When we got to the restaurant, we asked for and requested an upstairs booth in the corner. After we ordered, Katie asked, “Look first, or talk?”

“Look.”

She opened a manila envelope she had brought with her and took out what seemed to be about thirty photographs. They were shots taken by the paper’s photographer, Jimmy Osborne, the day the capsule was buried in the ground. It was mostly posed stuff, town dignitaries holding a shovel or just standing next to the capsule. I’m sure very few made the paper, and very few should have.

Most of the pictures had spectators in the background, and it was them that I was most interested in. I knew who most of the people were, but not all. “Anybody here you don’t recognize?” I asked.

She nodded. “Maybe eight or ten. But we passed it around to everybody at the paper, and I think we identified everyone. Except the guy with the shovel.”

In a few shots was a man holding a shovel, actually leaning on it. I recognized him, from a missing person bulletin Hank had showed me earlier. “Samuel Votto,” I said. “He went missing around the time the capsule was buried.”

“So that’s him we … found…?”

“It’s being confirmed with DNA, but I’d certainly bet on it.”

She nodded, sadly. “I don’t see you anywhere. You weren’t there that day?”

It’s not the kind of event I would have attended; they could bury a thousand capsules and I’d miss every one. “No, I was probably off fighting crime.”

“Roger doesn’t seem to have been there either.”

I just nodded, and kept looking through the contents of the envelope. Also in there was a thick pack of copies of stories that Matt had written, in the two years prior to the capsule being buried. I could look at them later, and I put the stories and the photographs back in the envelope. “Thanks,” I said.

“Okay. What did we drive forty-five minutes to talk about?”

“Two things. First one is we’re reopening the case.”

I didn’t have to spell out which case; she knew very well I was talking about Jenny’s murder.

“So you’re saying that you think Roger was innocent.”

“I’m saying, only to you, that what was in the capsule, if it is shown to have been written prior to the murder, leads me in that direction.”

“But you won’t say it publicly?”

“If it comes to that, I will,” I said. “But we’re not there yet.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“I’m going to be heading up that part of the investigation, personally.”

“Why this time?”

I had made no secret of having recused myself from Jenny’s murder investigation the first time. “Distance, partially. I think I can be more objective now than I could have been then. But also because it seems to be tied into so much more now.”

She didn’t say anything. My guess is she was thinking about how no matter what happened, Roger Hagel was going to stay dead.

“I may need your help,” I said.

“How?”

“You were aware of the events that preceded the murder,” I said, trying to delicately mention the affair without mentioning it. “You were Roger’s wife, I might want to interview you as a person who might have knowledge of the facts of the case.”

“That won’t be a problem,” she said, and I let it drop there. She continued, “We want to go public with this. This is too big a story to sit on.”

“Fine.”

She did a double take. “Excuse me?”

“I think it’s a good idea. There might be people out there who know something. Which would be an improvement, because at this point we pretty much know nothing.”

“We want to get information first.”

“Fine.”

She couldn’t conceal her surprise, nor stifle a smile. “This is a very pleasant dinner.”

“There’s one restriction,” I said. “Maybe more later, but one right now.”

“I sense that it’s about to become less pleasant.”

“Not really. The only predictions you can reveal are Jenny, George, the Twenty-third Street Fire, and the one threatening Matt.”

“Why?”

“Because the others are too vague,” I said. “Half the people who read them will be sure that they are somehow the targets. I don’t want to create a panic, and I don’t want people taking the law into their own hands in the name of self-protection.”

She seemed to weigh this and consider it reasonable. “Agreed. Now what?”

“Now we order dessert. If you thought the crab cakes are good, they have a Grande Marnier crème brulee that is unbelievable.”

Considering the fact that we both dreaded reopening Jenny’s murder case, the dinner with Katie was surprisingly enjoyable. We talked about old times, meaning high school times, which seemed a lot safer than the years afterwards.

I actually would have liked for it to go longer, not so much because I was enjoying myself, but because it would delay what I had to do when I got home.

I was going to read my wife’s murder book.

I had never read it before. I doubt that I had even seen it, such was my discipline in staying away from the case. But there was no avoiding the need to go through it this time, and I had dug it out of the archives. It was locked in the trunk of my car, waiting for me to stop ordering additional cups of coffee.

Katie and I were mostly quiet on the way back to Wilton. She asked me to take her to the office, and I assumed she called a late meeting to update her staff on the possible results of our dinner. When I dropped her off in front of the building, she said a quick “Thanks, Jake,” and got out of the car.

When I got home, I opened a bottle of beer, turned on a West Coast Red Sox game for background noise, and opened the murder book.

The first thing I saw were the pictures of the scene, pictures that included Jenny’s bloody, naked body. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies, and while you never get fully hardened to it, I had learned to achieve a professional detachment.

Until that moment.

For a short while I thought I would not be able to breathe, and I was okay with that. Death by asphyxiation seemed preferable to having to continue looking through that book.

But I wouldn’t let myself look away, because if I did, I would not have been able to look back. I had to know the scene, every detail of it, because that’s what an investigating detective does. This wasn’t as good as being there when the murder was first discovered, but it was as close as I could get.

There were thirty-eight pictures in all, and I probably spent an hour going through them. I would like to say it became easier the longer I did it, but I’d be lying. It was awful from the very first moment, and remained that way.

The murder book includes every aspect, every detail of an investigation, and Hank had done a characteristically professional job putting this book together. The evidentiary records, the witness reports, his contemporaneous notes, it was all meticulously listed and recorded.

And it told a compelling story, one that had inevitably led to Roger Hagel’s arrest and conviction. He had been seen leaving our house the morning of the murder, and clothing with Jenny’s blood was found in his own house. The knife that had been proven to be the murder weapon was in a sealed plastic bag in a dumpster behind Roger and Katie’s house, wiped clean of prints.

Large sections of the book were devoted to Roger and Jenny’s affair and subsequent breakup, since that was considered a motivation for the murder. There was even a six-page interview with me, given at the time, detailing my knowledge of what had gone on between them, and how Jenny had broken it off.

In the interview I did not express an opinion about anyone’s guilt or innocence, and I remembered making a conscious effort to keep it that way. I certainly knew by then that Roger was a suspect, and though I had no direct knowledge of his guilt, I probably believed that he had done it. My opinion would have been of little value, however, because I was numb and not thinking clearly for weeks after Jenny’s death.

A longer interview with Katie was included in the book, and she did not display a similar reticence about giving her point of view. Her marriage to Roger had never really recovered from the revelation of the affair, and she openly admitted that they were likely headed for divorce.

But despite that, she was vehement in her belief that he could not have committed that crime. He was an adulterer, of that there was no question, but he was not a murderer. She had no explanation for the evidence against him that had been uncovered, but none of it seemed to shake her faith in his innocence.

And based on the capsule revelations, she was right, or at least that’s how it appeared.

The book was two hundred and forty-one pages, and because I needed to know and understand every detail in it, there was no way I would be able to finish it that night. I was slightly more than halfway through and about to put it aside, when I noticed something strange.

The page after number 128 was number 132.

There were three pages missing.

I debated with myself whether to call Hank and ask him about it, and then decided it could wait until I saw him in the morning. It was almost three o’clock, and there was no reason to wake him.

There was most likely a benign explanation for the missing pages, but I sure as hell wanted to hear it.

The milk in my refrigerator looked awful and smelled worse. I assume that’s what happens when the expiration date is three weeks in the rearview mirror.

That effectively ruled out cereal for breakfast, and there was no leftover pizza, since I had gone out to dinner with Katie the night before. My fallback position in a situation like this was to stop at Lisa’s Diner, where the coffee was great, and the French toast better.

I was anxious to get to the station, though, so rather than sit and have a meal, I told Lisa I would get coffee and a blueberry muffin to go.

“Busy day, huh?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“I can imagine. You gonna catch the guy?”

“What guy?”

“You know, the capsule thing.”

When I asked what she was talking about, she showed me the morning paper. Katie had more than chaired a meeting last night; she had supervised the breaking of the story. And the headline was

TIME CAPSULE REVELATION: A KILLER IN OUR MIDST

Matt Higgins had written the story, and although I skimmed quickly through it, he obviously had done a competent, professional job. There was little sensationalism, and none was needed; the substance more than did that job for him. The town would be talking about nothing else in the days and weeks to follow.

I quickly got out of there before other townspeople started showing up and trying to get me to talk about the case. I’ve always tried to be open and available to the local citizens. There’s a good deal of Mayberry in Wilton, and people see me as a friend as well as a police chief. But Andy Taylor never had to deal with a serial killer; if he had, it would have created quite a stir at Floyd’s Barber Shop.

I got to the station before Hank, and had the coffee and muffin at my desk while I read the newspaper story more thoroughly. Matt had left out a good number of details, no doubt with Katie’s concurrence. For instance, there was no mention of the fact that Matt was himself among the threatened, and Samuel Votto was not identified by name.

I knew why they did that, and it made sense. They were going to dribble the information out piecemeal, to keep readers coming back for more. There was no telling when they would be getting fresh information, and if they told everything they knew all at once, they ran the risk of their story going stale.

But while they were concerned with their circulation, I wasn’t. If I decided it wasn’t in our best interest to let them proceed that way, I’d speak to Katie about it. I would have more than enough leverage; I would simply threaten to give the details she had not revealed to a competing media outlet, so that they could break the story.

Mercifully, the content of the article was so important to Matt that he didn’t take the space to mention my war hero status. Even though it was Katie’s newspaper, they had usually included it, but this time they didn’t.