A Killer's Daughter

by Jenna Kernan

She sighed. “He’s resigned. He said he needed a change. Took a job in Lauderdale as a professor in the psychology department there.”

  Nadine felt the trap spring shut and glanced toward the exit.

  “You’ll be working with Detective Demko. He’s lead on this.”

  Nadine turned back. “I don’t know Demko.”

  “You will soon. He’s also new.”

  Why give such an important case to a new psychologist and a new detective? Her suspicions rose. Inexperienced employees made mistakes and convenient scapegoats.

  Did someone in power want them to fail?

  “So, he just got his gold shield?” she asked, clarifying what Crean meant by “new.”

  “No. He’s a new hire. He’s worked some tough cases in Miami-Dade. That place has built an empire. Have you been there?”

  Nadine shook her head.

  “One of the best-funded departments in the country. Murder investigation experts. We are lucky to have him.”

  “Then I doubt I would have very much to offer.”

  “He is not a psychologist. He’s asked for one. You will be taking Gilmore’s spot until such time as I tell you otherwise.”

  Nadine started to shake her head and then realized this was not a discussion, but a directive. She’d lost.

  Her jaw muscles relaxed, and she wiped the sweat from her upper lip. Crean gave her a once-over.

  “You can do this, Nadine.”

  That was what worried her.

  She smelled blood and her stomach heaved. Phantosmia, an olfactory hallucination, the stink of those garbage bags conjured by stress. Even at eight, she had recognized the difference between the scent of mud from a swamp and blood from a body. But she couldn’t grasp how to process it.

  Denial, her psychologist said. The fear that acknowledging the possibility of what was happening would place her in jeopardy, destroy her family and leave her motherless. Turned out that it did all three.

  Cover-up was how she thought of it, despite the courts holding her blameless.

  I wish I could do the same.

  As a profiler, she would be great. But hunting a killer was hunting people, the job she’d avoided all her life because it was what her mother had said she was born for. Taking this assignment put her one step closer to her demons.

  Giving a drunk a drink.

  Crean stepped around her desk and motioned toward the door.

  Now Nadine’s skin prickled with anticipation.

  This is how it begins.

  Rationalizing. Telling herself that she had no choice, when deep down hunting killers hiding in plain sight was exactly what she’d always wanted to do—if she were only brave enough. But the prospect scared her, brushing so close to what she most feared.

  Nadine rose. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will.” Crean smiled, satisfied at her win. “I’ll alert SPD and send out a memo on your new role in the department.”

  A quicksilver stab of worry cut through her. An internal announcement of her change in position would put her in the public eye. Some clever, industrious reporter would work it out.

  “I’ve told Detective Demko that you’ll be an asset. He’d like to meet with you at police headquarters this afternoon at one.”

  Crean glanced from her to her door. Nadine hurried away.

  At her office, she paused, head down, breathing hard. She’d spent her whole life striving to be different from her mother. But was she different enough?

  * * *

  Nadine returned to her office and tucked in behind her desk with her phone, pulling up a search browser.

  She focused now on filling in the blanks in her mother’s crimes, if only to eliminate the niggling suspicion that this double homicide shared certain commonalities with Arleen’s victims. Nadine would sleep better knowing her worries were baseless. An online search on her phone quickly exposed how little she knew about her mother’s crimes and victims.

  Arleen Howler was convicted in 2007 for the murder of four couples. Nadine knew that all the victims shared the distinction of being involved in adultery and all but one had been married.

  Back then, Dr. Nadine Finch had been Nadine Howler and, at fifteen, the star witness in her mother’s murder trial.

  Her memories of that time were vivid but incomplete. The lawyers and police had kept things from her. Before the trial, she’d been evaluated by a criminal psychologist, her first experience with that profession. Without that encounter, the therapy that followed and her aunt’s willingness to adopt Nadine, she feared where she might now be.

  She knew that the victims had been stabbed. The article said that Arleen had dumped all but one in the St. Johns River or a nearby lake. Most couples were recovered in the water, nude, with their wrists tied together with clothesline, which the prosecution proved Arleen had purchased. But they did not find the blade she used, nor the clothing or the wedding rings of her victims.

  But Nadine remembered the knife because her mother had used it to fit a remnant of beige carpet in the trailer where they all lived during much of her early childhood.

  Seeing all the women together on one screen, she was struck by the physical similarities. All the female victims were slim with shoulder-length dark hair and brown eyes. The men, however, did not follow any obvious physical type.

  Her mother killed Gail DeNato and Charlie Rogers in 1994, discovered afterwards to be Arleen’s supervisor and the head of sales at the carpet warehouse where Arleen worked as an installer when Nadine had been two. That was the year after her father had walked out on them, the trigger, the article claimed, to Howler’s first murders.

  Rogers had been incapacitated with several cuts to his legs before Arleen had opened the major blood vessels at his arms and legs. DeNato showed defensive wounds on her hands and suffered numerous gashes before her throat was cut.

  Nadine read on.

  The next couple had been murdered six years later. This was the only pair murdered at separate times and places. Lacey Louder had been first, kicked repeatedly until her ribs cracked and her trachea crushed. Then Arleen had sliced her with a knife. Like Gail DeNato, Louder had been repeatedly slashed with a blade.

  Nadine would never forget this death because it had been her eighth birthday. Arleen had come home late, striding into the trailer in wet underwear carrying a boxed cake so warm the frosted flowers had melted off the top. To this day, those innocuous cake boxes with the clear-plastic tops made Nadine’s stomach clench.

  The article reported that sheriffs recovered Louder’s nude body two days after her disappearance and her husband’s tearful pleas for her safe return. Her death was not immediately connected to the earlier double homicide, and her husband had been falsely convicted for her murder. Even when a forest ranger, Drew Henderson, had been found butchered in his vehicle with a length of cord on his wrist, matching the one tied to Louder, the connection was not made to Louder or the earlier unsolved homicides. Only after Arleen’s confession was Louder’s husband released from prison, his sentence overturned.

  The night of the discovery of Lacey Louder, Nadine had watched the news with Arleen, who had commented that homewreckers got what they deserved.

  Four years later, her older brother, Arlo, had moved out, and Nadine lived in a trailer with her mother and the latest man her mother had invited to move in with them. When he left, Arleen blamed her daughter.

  “No man wants to be reminded that someone got there before him. Can’t get any of them to stick with a sulking kid moping around.” Maybe she had been right because none of them stayed, and despite Nadine’s wishing and even praying, her father never came for her.

  This particular man had worked with Arleen at the marina in Deland. When he split, Arleen got mean. Nadine, then twelve, stayed at school long after class, hanging out at the basketball court where Arlo played and smoked weed.

  The article said that Arleen captured her next victims, Michelle Dents and Parker Irwin, in 2004. Michelle Dents,
the mother of three boys, ran the small marina, owned by her brother, where Arleen had been employed. The male victim, Irwin, was a mechanic who fixed the engines of the houseboats. Nadine had met them both. He was always in the restaurant at lunch where Michelle often worked as hostess. They were both nice to her. Michelle gave her the small boxes of crayons meant for the little kids who ate there, and Parker once bought her some fries.

  Her mother, whose job it was to clean the houseboats, told her later that she didn’t like cleaning the bedding after those two had screwed. She’d taken them on a Friday after work and kept them until Saturday night or Sunday morning. The article said she had tortured both, keeping Dents alive several hours after Irwin’s death. Then the bodies had been bound, wrist to wrist, and dumped in Lake Monroe. Arleen had returned the houseboat and cleaned the interior as always, removing evidence of the crime before disposing of their bloody clothing.

  What Nadine recalled was that her mother had come home late on Sunday, used the garden hose to wash herself and shoved her wet clothing in a large black garbage bag with whatever else was in there. Nadine had watched from inside the trailer, terrified. When ordered to throw that bag away, Nadine had done as she’d been told—suspicious, but refusing to look in the bag.

  Nadine had waited for the police to come and arrest her mother, frightened and hopeful. But they never came. If they even questioned Arleen, Nadine didn’t see them. Did they think a woman couldn’t do such a thing?

  They were wrong.

  Nadine scrolled down the page and was confronted with a photo of Sandra Shank, unchanged by the years. Her mother’s last female victim was Nadine’s math classmate, three years her senior, who liked to howl like a dog as Nadine passed. Back then, Nadine had been underweight, poorly dressed, often dirty and usually hungry because of her mother’s neglect. An easy target at school.

  But when Sandra went missing at the same time as her mother, Nadine refused to keep silent. After all, Sandra had come to Arleen’s attention because of her, so this was partly Nadine’s fault. The upperclassman’s disappearance that Friday, coinciding with her mother’s, tripped some switch in Nadine’s brain. Her fear of foster care, beaten into her by her mother, could not kill her determination that Arleen was a monster and that only she could stop her mother.

  Nadine had been too late to save either Sandra Shank or Stephen White, the older man Sandra had been involved with, and she lived with that guilt. If she had told that first night, instead of waiting until Monday morning, could they have saved them?

  The newspapers covered her mother’s trial and revealed that Nadine’s grandfather had also been a convicted killer, who murdered his boss with a forklift, and had died in prison serving his sentence; and that her great-grandfather had killed a man in a bar fight—and Nadine’s life had changed from bad to worse. Nadine’s photo had been on the national news and in all the newspapers. She was the famous daughter of the infamous killer. The girl who had turned her own mother in to the police.

  The guilt was the worst part. She’d been haunted by not reporting Arleen sooner and saving her mother’s final victims, while plagued with the guilt of turning in her own mother in the first place.

  Nadine survived, took her aunt’s surname and gradually disappeared into anonymity. Arleen had gotten the death sentence. Nadine thought her mother should have gotten eight.

  She closed the search browser and tucked away her phone. Now armed with information about her mother’s victims, Nadine was anxious to know more about the two victims recovered in the bay.

  Nadine pulled up to police headquarters with her lunch knocking about in her stomach as if engaged in a tennis match. She realized there was one other way out of this assignment. She could quit her job, ghost her colleagues and vanish. Disappearing seemed a better option than waiting for the newspapers to connect Sarasota’s new profiler to a serial killer’s kid.

  But who was better qualified to hunt a killer seemingly just like her mother?

  Since her mom’s arrest, she had worked to distance herself from the little girl whose image was televised on all news networks and on the broadsheets of every major newspaper.

  Sometimes she wished she didn’t have to hide. But she preferred it to being hunted by reporters again. Worse still, revealing who she was now would take necessary resources and attention away from this case. She wasn’t having that. Focus must stay on the victims and catching this killer.

  Nadine prayed that the similarities she noted in the manner of death in this double homicide did not signal the emergence of a copycat. It was too early to leap to this conclusion, but the seed of worry was firmly set.

  Meanwhile, her focus was on her meeting with the overqualified detective from Miami-Dade and learning why he’d opted out of a top police force in the country for Sarasota. If he was so smart, why was he here?

  After earning their gold shield, law enforcement professionals rarely moved. Had he screwed up over there on the Atlantic side?

  Nadine left the lot and hurried through the stifling muggy heat that was their normal summer climate. She passed through security in the lobby and spoke to an officer at registration who told her that the detective would escort her back to Homicide.

  After a few minutes, a tall man with an athletic build came down the corridor in her direction. On his belt winked a gold detective’s shield clipped beside the holstered service weapon. He was dressed in business casual, with a blazer, khakis and necktie, and a wrinkled shirt. The detective had a confident air and powerful stride. His strength both drew and repelled her. Being with someone stronger was dangerous. So, why was she moving toward him?

  He came to a halt before her and brushed his sandy-colored hair from his wide forehead, revealing a tanned face and deep blue eyes. He offered a smile and nod as he extended his hand.

  “Dr. Finch? I’m Detective Clint Demko. Thanks for stopping by.”

  She hesitated only a moment before taking his hand. His was broad and dry, hers clammy and wet. She got that immediate zing. His brows lifted. She drew her hand back, breaking the contact that they held a little too long. She would be working with this man, which made him off limits. Even without that obstacle, the prospect of a relationship that invariably would include sharing intimate secrets about her past made her stomach knot. There was too much horror and too much risk.

  His expression turned speculative and Nadine took a step back, widening the distance between them, ignoring the longing ache in her heart.

  “Let’s head to my desk,” he said.

  She followed him through an inner corridor to the elevators and rode beside him in the small compartment, smelling the enticing spice of his cologne while she stared at the floor.

  Nadine couldn’t resist a sideways glance. Demko’s physique appealed on all counts. His legs were muscular and his chest and shoulders broad. He needed a haircut and a shave. His jaw was square and there was a bump at the bridge of his nose. His mirrored sunglasses sat looped in the front pocket of his sports coat. Yeah, he was the complete package, which meant his flaws were internal. He sensed her attention and cast her a glance and a winning smile. She swung her eyes forward.

  The door drew open at their floor and he motioned her out. His eyes met hers, and she noted the dark smudges beneath his.

  The elevator began to close, and he stopped the doors with an extended arm. She brushed past him, then waited as he led the way. At his desk, he offered the chair reserved for witnesses and suspects. She’d sat in a similar one at age fourteen.

  The steel seemed to conduct coldness and desperation. She told herself not to shift but could not control the long swallow as he settled in his seat. Her mouth was too dry.

  Nadine glanced toward Demko, to find him staring at her with an appraising glance. She swallowed again.

  One of her superpowers was failing her because this detective made it clear, from his unwavering stare, that he did see her. She forced a tight smile.

  “Do you have contact informa
tion for me? I’d like to reach you outside of the office.”

  In a moment, she had her card out and scribbled her cell phone number on the front. “Here you are.”

  He accepted the card, glancing down.

  “Your card is wrong. Should say ‘Criminal Psychologist.’”

  “Well, that change just happened two hours ago and the department printer was at lunch.”

  His mouth turned up at the corners and he made a sound that might have been a show of appreciation.

  “I see. So…” He glanced down again. “Forensic psychologist. I thought you guys had a criminal psychologist.”

  “Who just took a teaching job in Fort Lauderdale. They have assigned me in his place.” Had he not requested her?

  “Well, Wernli says good things.”

  She had worked with Detective Wernli more than once and wondered how she could repay him the “favor” of his recommendation.

  The detective lifted his mobile phone and her card, typing something. Nadine’s phone dinged, showing a text.

  “That’s me. Now you have my cell number.” Demko brushed back a lock of hair. “What have you been working on recently?”

  “I’ve been here since mid-April conducting clinical work. Mostly psych evals on suspects, some competency and court hearings and a few depositions. Also evaluations of inmates.”

  His smile faded. Hers broadened.

  “I have zero experience in active criminal investigations, and I have never created a profile. What I do is paperwork. Occasionally I’m asked to sit in on an interview or interrogation.” Nadine left out her knack as a walking lie detector. “That is the total of my involvement with law enforcement.”

  If you didn’t count the Homicide detectives coming to her school to speak to her about her own mother, or the interviews that followed.

  Did she know? Did she suspect?

  Yes, on both counts.

  Nadine mentally shook herself. This guy was a Homicide detective, proficient at interrogations. He’d find the smell of deception irresistible. She forced herself to maintain eye contact, knowing that he was likely aware this was a technique used by liars.