Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  And maybe you would have just arrived at the conclusion that you needed to get back to the gym. Or maybe it had been something floating around in your thoughts for a bit, but this was the first time you took action on it. The ads would seem like magic: from conscious thought to mobile advertisement.

  But it would be nothing more than the magic of big data and predictive algorithms. People who bought exercise clothes would, with a certain degree of probability, go on to do one of any number of other behaviors, especially if there were other factors at play.

  Some would join a gym. Some would buy home exercise equipment. Some would give it up within a month.

  Good analysts and accurate algorithms could predict who would do what based on prior behavior, current trends, and available intel.

  My theory was that all of this could be put to use to predict murder: who, when, and where.

  There were limitations in testing my theory. I didn’t have access to big data, for one. My sample sets were smaller for another. A good thing overall, since I was dealing with murder, but not good for developing an accurate algorithm.

  There were a hundred and eight-point-six million credit card transactions a day; an advertising algorithm could get near instantaneous feedback. A murder algorithm would wait longer. Hopefully, a lot longer.

  And in my case, since I was working with cold cases, I risked inadvertently cherry-picking data to fit the algorithm. I had limited facts to start with.

  And that was a problem, too. Someone had chosen to publicize those facts – a reporter, an old friend, an investigating officer had already made the judgement that that data was relevant to the case. They’d decided other factors – factors I didn’t even know about – weren’t. Those biases would also show up in the finished product.

  So it was an uphill battle. Maybe it was something that wouldn’t ever get out of the testing phase. But everyone needed a hobby. This was mine.

  Now, I pulled my current investigation boards down, and took more foam boards out of storage. I kept a supply in the closet – my work office – behind the desk, just in case a project came up. Usually, that meant new information in a cold case I was already investigating, or a new cold case catching my eye.

  Now, it was Andy’s murder, and his murderer.

  I had just started to hang the clear boards when a loud, heavy rap sounded on the door, followed in quick succession by another, and another.

  I grimaced. I didn’t get many visitors, but only one of them saw fit to ignore the doorbell in favor of making war with the door itself: Edith McDermott, my neighbor.

  She was the eighty-year-old, ninety-pound flaw in my reasoning that owning property meant getting away from bad neighbors.

  I trudged to the door, without wasting mental energy trying to figure out what I’d done this time. Prior experience had taught me that that was an exercise in futility.

  The first year I moved in, she came to me with complaints about the color of my lawn. Was I overfertilizing it? That could be injurious to the local ecosystem. My response, that I didn’t fertilize it at all, didn’t get me out of the hot seat. I’d simply morphed from poisoner to slacker. Didn’t I care about the state of my yard, and the local property values?

  It didn’t get better from there. She’d come to me with complaints that the geese on my side of the street were too loud. They kept her up at night. It didn’t matter that they weren’t my geese, or that she lived next to a nature preserve. If it was her problem, it became mine.

  She didn’t like my vehicle. Its windows were too dark. It reminded her of something a criminal would drive. She didn’t like my lawn guy. She’d caught him staring at her property. He was probably some kind of thief – and if she got robbed, she would know who to blame.

  And on and on it had gone. I’d lost track of all the complaints across the years. I figured this would be just another one to add to the ever-growing list.

  Still, I unchained the door, then opened the deadbolt, and finally unlocked the door. She went on hammering away at it the whole time.

  I opened the door. “Mrs. McDermott.”

  “It’s about time,” she said. “You move slower than an old person.”

  “What can I do for you, Edith?”

  “First of all, I heard about your brother on the news. And I wanted to say I was sorry.”

  That was a little too human for the old battle axe. It immediately aroused my suspicions. Still, I nodded, and said, “Thanks.”

  “And secondly, are you moving?”

  Well, that was definitely a first. “Not any time soon. Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure, yes.”

  “So then why was there a guy here taking pictures this morning?”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Why,” she said again, louder and slower, “was there a guy taking pictures of your house and yard this morning?”

  “Taking pictures? Of my place?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “Me either. It doesn’t make sense.” She fixed me with a pointed stare. “Unless he is a realtor, and you are moving.”

  “I’m not moving. And I didn’t hire a realtor.”

  She went on staring at me, suspicion on her face. “Then why was he here?”

  “I don’t know. This guy: what did he look like?”

  “A guy. Not you.”

  “Young? Old?”

  She considered, then shrugged. “Not old. Young, maybe. I guess it depends on what you mean by young. All of you people are young to me.”

  “Was he older than me, or younger?”

  “How the hell should I know? I didn’t ask his age.”

  I tried to bite down on my frustration. Edith McDermott was probably the nosiest human being in Kennington. She knew more details about my life than I did sometimes. So how she couldn’t do better than this was beyond me. “Can you give me some kind of description?”

  “He was just another person. Male.”

  “White? Black?”

  “White.”

  “Tall? Short?”

  She shrugged. “Depends what you mean by tall.”

  “Did he look as tall as me?”

  “No.”

  “Was he taller than you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much taller?”

  “I don’t know.”

  For the love of God. “Okay. Do you remember what he was wearing?”

  “I don’t know. A jacket, maybe. Dark pants.”

  “Did he look like…a cop? A journalist?”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “You expecting cops, Owen?”

  “My brother just died,” I reminded her. “Maybe one of the detectives stopped by to talk to me.”

  “He wasn’t talking. He was taking pictures. Like a real estate agent might.”

  “He’s not a real estate agent.”

  She harrumphed. “If you say so.”

  “Did he come on foot?”

  “Walking, you mean? Of course not. He drove.”

  “Did you see the vehicle.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you remember what it looked like?”

  She thought for a long moment. “Some kind of car.”

  Car. Okay, that’s a start.

  “Or maybe a truck. I don’t remember.”

  “Edith, how can you not remember if it was a car or a truck?”

  “I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “Since when?”

  She frowned at me. “You know what? Next time I see someone prowling around your yard, I’ll just ignore it. I’m sure you know your business best. And I wouldn’t want to be a busybody.”

  It took five minutes of apologies and reassurances that I wasn’t actually moving out. But in the end, I managed to smooth things over. And it turned out that the world’s nosiest neighbor saw far more than she’d initially let on.

  My mystery visitor was a Cauca
sian male in his early to mid-thirties, with dark hair, light eyes. “And some kind of tattoo on the back of his neck. I couldn’t make the whole thing out. But it looked like a symbol or something. It wasn’t a name. Not in English, anyway.”

  He drove a dark, late-ish model sedan – not new, but not ancient. He had short hair that was longer on top.

  Edith seemed to think he was the Nursery Rhyme Killer. The tattoo, in her mind, was the clincher. The more she pondered it, the more she seemed to become convinced. It might be some kind of satanic rune. Maybe this whole business was some kind of weird murder ritual.

  I knew exactly who it was, though: Wyatt Wagley. The smug little shit had come to my house, probably right around the time he uploaded that video.

  Edith went away unconvinced of anything I said, with a burgeoning theory about Satanists. I shut and relocked my door, and went back to my office – hoping Wyatt Wagley would show up some time when I was home.

  I worked for hours, printing out victim pictures, and tracing contacts, looking for links between victims.

  Andy’s board, of course, was the easiest to start filling. I knew who his wife and kids were, who his ex-wife was; who his brother was. I knew his occupation and a lot of his contacts.

  I knew very little about NRK’s other victims or their families. Which is where I turned to my computer.

  I usually started with court records. Those could be searched easily enough via the official state websites. The results would be short on details, but I’d get a general idea of criminal charges, custody and divorce proceedings, and civil damages involving the person.

  Angela Martinez had a single citation on her record, for a traffic ticket that was later dismissed. Mason Anderson had three pages of details. That would take a while to sort through, and possibly prompt further follow up.

  A guy in his position, with as many drug related charges as he’d had, might have been persuaded to turn evidence on the wrong person to avoid a steeper charge, or time in prison. I’d have to note arrest and release dates in this first pass, so I could come back later and look for busts during the same time frame.

  In Judge Dandridge’s case, of course, I’d need longer. A lot longer.

  Shelby Dandridge’s career spanned two-plus decades, from her start as a prosecutor, through her climb all the way up the ladder, to her current position. A quick search pulled up thousands of records. Each and every one of them might have involved the Nursery Rhyme Killer, or their father or mother, sister or brother, husband or wife. She might have put NRK’s son or daughter behind bars. She might have refused a retrial.

  It would take a team of dozens a long time and a lot of foam board and wall space to create an evidence board that remotely reflected her situation: resources I didn’t have. So I’d have to approach Dandridge from a different angle.

  The judge’s demographics were more tightly locked down than most people’s. I got Angela Martinez’s family details from her Facebook page. Mason didn’t have a profile, but his brother Randy did, and it was wide open. I found Mason’s parents, and his sisters, and another brother. I found pictures and names of nieces and nephews. I even found the family dog: some kind of bug-eyed French bulldog mix named Buster.

  Buster apparently had the patience of a saint, since there were more pictures of the dog than the family across their various profiles; and the poor thing was wearing some different outfit in everyone. He had holiday outfits, and winter outfits. He’d had his picture taken among apple bushels and a stack of pumpkins; in a patch of flowers and by more beaches than I’d visited in my lifetime. He had some kind of doggy goggles for the car, and a stroller for walks in the heat.

  I couldn’t tell if he was spoiled as hell or remarkably longsuffering.

  But Judge Dandridge was far more circumspect with the details she shared. She had no personal social media profiles. Her husband used LinkedIn, but only in a professional capacity. He was an IT manager for a big health IT firm. His profile focused entirely on his profession. He shared articles about health informatics, and data breaches. He humble bragged about the awards his company earned. He posted job listings for high level staffers.

  And after fifteen minutes of stalking his profile, I still knew nothing at all about the man.

  I decided I needed to rethink my methods. Usually, I gathered as much data as I could over the course of years. I had boards I’d been working on for a decade.

  They were cold cases involving strangers, and I was an amateur. I could take a decade or a day to gather my data. It made no difference.

  But this wasn’t a cold case, and they weren’t strangers. Not all of them, anyway. I still needed data, but I had to figure out what data mattered, and what was statistical noise. I needed to sort relevant from irrelevant, important events from coincidence.

  I had four victims to work with, and three nursery rhymes. I had a lot of data about three of the bodies – where they’d been found, and in what state, and so on – and no data about the fourth.

  The sample set was too small for any kind of firm conclusions. But I had enough to start work. Maybe I had enough to figure out what drew the Nursery Rhyme Killer to his victims. Because that was the piece I really needed.

  These killings weren’t purely random. Humans weren’t capable of true randomness. We were guided by our biases, our nature and our nurture; our efforts to combat biases, or nature, or nurture; our perceptions of self and aspirations; by our gut reactions to external stimuli; and so on.

  Some killers chose victims for obvious reasons: anger or revenge, jealousy or a sense of betrayal. Some for less obvious reasons. The victim might remind them of someone. Something about the victim might trigger an insecurity or an unhappy memory. It could be as simple as someone’s perfume or their smile. It could have nothing to do with the victim at all. It might be the season, or the weather, or whether the killer skipped breakfast or not that morning.

  But nothing was ever truly random.

  So I just needed to find the thread that connected them all. My mind went back to the nursery rhymes. I wrote them out and pinned them to the boards by the victims. I scoured Google for the history and meaning of each.

  The rhyme left with the first victim, Angela Martinez, proved easiest to track.

  Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten

  Lying in bed with her eyes wide open.

  Sing, sing, oh what should I sing?

  Mary Ann Cotton, she’s tied up with string

  It was the story of a serial killer. Specifically, the story of her death. Mary Ann Cotton had been hung for the murder of her stepson.

  The historical account linked her to as many as twenty additional deaths, including those of her husbands and children.

  It seemed the connection to murder had to have significance, especially with a first victim. I was no psychologist, though I devoted more than the usual effort into understanding the field.

  But, in my inexpert opinion, I figured it at least had to have been a subconscious decision to focus on murder instead of accidental death for his first victim.

  His second had gone the opposite route, though. Mason Anderson’s death note didn’t specify any kind of deliberate execution.

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;

  All the King's horses

  And all the King's men,

  Couldn't put Humpty together again.

  I didn’t know what the implication to that might be. Indeed, I didn’t know what the rhyme actually referenced, for the simple reason that no one seemed to.

  Paradoxically, Mason’s rhyme was at once better known, but less well understood. There were plenty of theories, but nothing solid on who or what Humpty Dumpty was supposed to be. There wasn’t consensus on whether Humpty was even an egg. Scholarly debate ranged from Humpty being a fill-in for everything from Richard III to a cannon.

  Which made deriving any kind of meaning all the more difficult.

  N
ot quite as difficult as my brother’s rhyme, though.

  When I went up sandy hill,

  I met a sandy boy;

  I cut his throat, I sucked his blood,

  And left his skin a hanging-o.

  Everyone knew Humpty Dumpty, and plenty of people knew Mary Ann Cotton. But I only pulled up about a dozen relevant hits for this one. It was a riddle, but nothing to do with vampires.

  Not that the answer made much more sense. I found a group of internet sleuths on a forum where people, apparently, devoted a significant amount of time to unearthing and deciphering old riddles.

  Everyone needs a hobby, I guess.

  And according to some of these internet sleuths, the sandy boy was an orange.

  However, a message board user with the handle “LitNerd37” pointed out that there were similar ditties about alcohol. There was a riddle about someone’s sister Jenny, that concluded, charmingly, “I broke her neck and drank her blood and left her standing empty.” It apparently referred to gin.

  A variant with a sister Mary referred to whiskey. Mary’s head got lopped off in that telling, but otherwise the story went the same.

  Which of these theories were accurate, I had no way of telling. Both sides seemed plausible. Proponents on each side linked to sources. Both came with backup.

  But I took notes anyway. The killer might have picked it for nothing more than the mention of throat cutting: his chosen means of murder.

  Or maybe Andy had been wearing something orange on Monday. Maybe the killer had laid in wait for someone who sported the unlucky color.

  Of course, the killer might have liked the second interpretation. He might have found the reference to whiskey fitting.

  That would have required a knowledge of Andy’s past that was anything but random. But it wouldn’t have required any personal knowledge of him, either.

  Andy wore his struggle with alcoholism like a badge of honor. It was his personal testimony to God’s redeeming power: he’d sunk as low as a man could go, and Jesus had pulled him up and put him back on his feet anyway.