Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  That’s why he’d targeted civilians. That’s why he’d done his killings in secret, far away from view. To prove that he could. To prove that he had what it took.

  Now he knew he did. So he’d gotten bolder. He’d killed the judge’s kids in their home, and the old woman in her own pet shop. Those had been escalations. But he hadn’t stopped there.

  He’d gotten bolder, and more brazen. He moved on from kids and old women to cops. And he killed them in their own haunts. In their own home.

  Some speculated that he was driven by some kind of compulsion, a pathological need for admiration and even fear. They suspected that he, like so many other serial killers, had a grandiose sense of self. That he enjoyed the feeling of power that came with deciding who lived and who died. That it made him feel almost godlike, the giver and taker of life.

  Others saw some kind of plea for help in the escalations. He wanted to be stopped, but he couldn’t do it himself. The cops hadn’t done it yet, so he’d made it personal. He’d given them a reason to stop him.

  I figured they already had reasons enough.

  Angela Martinez.

  Mason Anderson.

  Terri Lange and the Dandridge kids.

  Charlene Fleming.

  And Andy Welch.

  But either way, something had changed. Something had moved the needle. But what?

  I started work again, though, admittedly, it wasn’t my best performance. I kept my office door – the closet door – open. I spent more of my workday staring at the boards than I did staring at my spreadsheets.

  There was something there, something I hadn’t noticed yet. I knew there was. But what?

  I heard from Clark less. No surprise there: her team kept getting bigger as her victim list grew.

  The feds were up to their necks in the case, but respectfully. They knew better than to provoke any kind of territorial war with the boys in blue. Not when two of their own had been murdered.

  More detectives joined the hunt, too. Most of the force was reassigned and shuffled around to canvass and recanvass neighborhoods, to talk to the families of the vics again, to dig into old leads, and so on. The TV shrinks were right about one thing, anyway: killing cops turned up the heat in the police department.

  The cop I’d seen trailing me disappeared too. Maybe Clark’s more thorough search of the place had got the suspicions about me out of her system. Maybe they needed him to follow up for more promising leads.

  Whatever, I didn’t see him nosing around my yard or my street.

  I didn’t hear much from Megan either. I called a few times. She didn’t answer most of the time. When she did, she was brief. She was fine, the kids were fine, but she really had to go; she had a meeting in ten, or she needed to get the kids from school, or she had homework to check.

  She didn’t mention Roxanne, or Missy, or Jon. She didn’t need to. The iciness in her tone conveyed everything she didn’t say anyway.

  Missy did call. We didn’t talk about Andy anymore. We talked about Jon, and how he was doing: okay, mostly. We talked about me and my investigation boards: as little as possible, when I could help it. But she was a hard woman to sidetrack, and she was worried about me.

  We talked about the dead cops, and the other victims. She told me they were all praying for a swift resolution. They loved me. She wanted me to know that.

  Jason texted a few times. He’d started to look for a job in earnest. He needed to move out as soon as possible. Awfully crowded, with everyone here. It’ll be better all the way around.

  The guy he sent to look at the truck cleared it with flying colors. It was in great shape, with not much rust and not too many miles. All the hoses and fluids looked fine. There were no cut brake lines, or suspicious fuel leaks, or anything else.

  I picked him up a few blocks down from the house to get it. “It’s probably better if Meg doesn’t see you right now,” he said. She wasn’t, apparently, very happy about Missy being at the funeral, or me being with Missy, or Missy interfering with her family reunification plan.

  She wasn’t happy that I had given my own grandmother a cold shoulder. She wasn’t happy that I was choosing hate instead of love.

  As for Jason, he liked the truck. He didn’t know how I’d wrangled it, but I was a wizard, and he owed me.

  At least, that’s how it stood between us until he showed up at my place Wednesday afternoon. I was just pulling myself out of bed.

  I’d half-reverted to my prior schedule. Instead of getting up at six, I got up around two now and started work at six. That gave me four daytime hours to make contact with people – Clark, the family, and anyone else who I needed to be in touch with.

  So far, it turned out to be more of a precaution than a necessity. I had had no breakthroughs, and no moments of inspiration. Consequently, I’d needed to contact no one at all.

  I was stretching when I heard the hammering at my door, hard and loud. Not Edith McDermott’s knock; too light for that. This wasn’t light, but it was lighter than the old woman’s.

  I checked my phone. No messages.

  I didn’t have visitors as a rule. McDermott was the only exception, and I knew it wasn’t her. Clark or anyone else who might decide to show up would have texted first.

  I eyed the nightstand drawer, where I kept my 1911. I thought about Tiny, probably stewing about how things had turned out. If he was still alive, anyway.

  But no. If he was still alive and in any kind of shape to cause trouble, he’d be on a tight leash.

  I thought about the Nursery Rhyme Killer, changing his patterns up; taunting the police with his audacity.

  I shook my head. Not likely. He was working his way through “This Little Pig.” He’d only covered two lines. There were three left.

  He might circle back to the families of previous victims eventually. That would certainly up his fear factor. It could even be the next thing on his agenda. But probably not before he wrapped up his current project.

  I left the gun and got the door. Jason was standing there, white in the face and glancing over his shoulder.

  He pushed inside as I started to speak. “Jesus, man, what did you do?”

  “What?”

  He ran a hand through his tousled hair. His pupils were wide as saucer plates. He was definitely high. “You didn’t say anything about killing him.”

  “Killing who?”

  He seemed not to hear me. He paced back and forth in the little hallway. “He was an asshole, but he didn’t need to die.”

  “Jason,” I said, my tone sharper than before, “what the hell are you talking about?”

  “Trav.”

  “Trav…the guy you owed money?”

  He nodded, a little frantically.

  “You’re saying...what? He’s dead? I killed him?”

  He blanched and waved a hand to hush me. “Oh my God, don’t tell me. No details. I did not hear that.”

  “I didn’t say I killed him.”

  “I know.”

  “No, you dumbass. I really didn’t. I was asking if you were accusing me of killing him.”

  He looked up at that. “Didn’t you?”

  “Of course not. I didn’t even know he was dead until two seconds ago. How do you know he’s dead?”

  He fumbled in his pocket and drew out his phone. Then he thumbed through the security and frowned. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “What’s your wi-fi password?”

  “Why?”

  “My service got disconnected the other night. I can only use it on the wi-fi.”

  I refrained from comment. “How do you know he’s dead?”

  “There’s an article about it, in the paper.”

  I headed to my office and my computer. Jason trailed me. “If you didn’t kill him, man, who the hell did?”

  I didn’t know. But someone certainly had. He’d been found in his Camaro in a deserted lot on the outskirts of town, shot twice through the head. There had been no evidence of a r
obbery, and no evidence of a struggle.

  “The guy’s a drug dealer and a loan shark.”

  “I’m pretty sure he sells stolen cars and illegal guns too. Or, sold. Not that I ever bought those from him. But that was the talk,” Jason agreed.

  “So he had enemies,” I said. “You don’t run a business like that without making enemies.”

  “I guess.” He looked me over carefully. “It wasn’t you, though? Would you, like, swear that?”

  “On a stack of Bibles, if that’s what you want. But no. It wasn’t me.”

  Chapter Forty

  The third cop was a Nicole Keats, a ten-year veteran with the department and an army veteran before that.

  She’d just put a pot roast in the pressure cooker. She was heading out to her garage, car keys in hand, to pick up her kids from school. Someone shot her three times, twice in the face and once in the throat.

  The school called her husband when she didn’t show up. He called her and got her voicemail. Then he called her work on the way to the school: the precinct.

  Cops showed up before he got home. Dinner was still cooking when they got there. Which was good, since the police presence meant the kids didn’t see their mom dead on the ground.

  The note read:

  This little piggy had roast beef…

  Coordinating killing with someone’s dinner seemed a tall order. So it might have been coincidence. The killer almost certainly staked her house out. He had to familiarize himself with her schedule, and probably knew her husband’s and kids’ too. He might have even known she’d put dinner on before heading out for the kids.

  But he likely hadn’t known exactly what dinner would be. He was smart, sure. But not omniscient.

  That wasn’t how it played out in the media, though.

  There are no coincidences when ratings are at stake. And Keats’s death brought great ratings. The ugly truth was, the story had all the right ingredients to sell really well. A woman, a mother, an officer, and a veteran: gunned down in her own garage. With dinner cooking away two rooms over. With her kids waiting for her to show up. With a husband eager to come home to her.

  It hit all the right sympathetic notes, almost as well as the judge’s kids burning to death. And the judge and her husband had kept completely out of the public eye after that.

  The Keats made the mistake of talking to the press. Understandably so. They wanted justice. Someone had to know something. And maybe the heartfelt pleas of the victim’s family could persuade a frightened citizen to come forward.

  So the channels pursued the grieving husband, the crying kids, the mortified in-laws and relatives. Some were respectful and full of sympathy. Some made fewer pretenses.

  Wyatt Wagley fell into the latter group. Which didn’t surprise me, except insomuch as he was even less smart than I’d figured.

  Harassing victims’ families in a town like Kennington was stupid. The cops didn’t take kindly to that kind of thing. But when the victim was a cop, a fellow officer – a sister in blue?

  Very stupid.

  So it didn’t surprise me when Wagley complained in his next video that he’d been pulled over for going one mile over the speed limit, or that he saw heightened patrols outside his hotel. He saw it as an attack on the free press. The cops should be doing their jobs and finding the killer; not persecuting Truthers.

  I saw it as an unsurprising consequence of his own actions.

  And his actions were fairly horrendous, even by his own standards. He’d decided to show what he called the true impact of the police’s failure to act. Which involved interviewing as many of the victims’ families as he could.

  Some interviews seemed willingly given. Mason Anderson’s family worried that their son’s murder wasn’t being taken as seriously as other killings, because of his history of drug use. “My son struggled with an illness,” his mother said through tears. “That’s what addiction is: illness. But he was no less human than anyone else. He deserves justice too.”

  Nicole Keats’s husband talked willingly enough, but only to say things Wyatt didn’t want to hear. He didn’t have criticisms of the police department. His wife and her colleagues had been working around the clock to find the killer. The FBI had been involved, for God’s sake. They’d done their best, despite guys like Wyatt getting in the way and making it harder. The only thing they hadn’t done right was arrest him for interfering with the investigation.

  So Wyatt had taken a different approach. He’d filmed the funeral procession. He’d gotten teary images of the kids. He used news clips. He hobbled together a narrative of a protective husband trying to defend the very department that had gotten his wife killed through their inaction. An angry man, grieving and desperate, lashing out.

  Of course Nicole Keats wasn’t to blame for her death. But where was Detective Clark? What was the chief doing? For that matter, what the hell was the FBI up to? Why hadn’t they stepped in and taken the case over?

  He padded the whole thing with footage of her kids crying, of Angela Martinez’s family sobbing. Of Terri Lange’s parents weeping, and the fresh dirt over Charlene Fleming’s grave.

  Of Maisie and Daniel and Ben, looking shellshocked.

  There were lots of things I wished I could do about the situation, and most of them involved breaking various parts of Wagley’s body, or forcibly convincing him to consume his damned camera. But I could do none of them.

  So I focused on what I could do: solve the case. Find the killer. And perversely, it was Wagley who gave me the break I was looking for.

  I was trying to focus on the case, but thinking instead about Wagley’s videos, and the itch in my knuckles for his face. I was wondering why anyone paid him any attention. He was an ambulance chaser, but worse. He made a living off other people’s grief and pain.

  Then I remembered Jason in the beginning, and how impressed he’d been when Wagley called the Breelyn Thayne killing.

  And I sat up straight out of my angry slouch. Wagley had said something in that video. Something profound.

  I pulled up his Facebook page, and scrolled through his slog of videos until I got to the right one. I loaded it and skipped ahead, past his summary of the case, past his speculation about Bret Myslinski’s whereabouts.

  And there it was. He was talking about how Breelyn’s killing wasn’t the work of the Nursery Rhyme Killer, how she didn’t fit his modus operandi. “With every single victim so far, the rhyme is about the victim and how they die? Rope, strangulation. Mason Anderson? Dismemberment. Andrew Welch? Cut throat. Dandridge’s kids? Arson.”

  I stopped the video, my thoughts racing. He was right, and he was wrong. The way I’d been right, and wrong.

  The rhymes were about the victims. But the Dandridge rhyme hadn’t been about her kids. It had been about her.

  I pulled up the nursery rhyme and read it and re-read it to be sure.

  Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,

  Your house is on fire,

  Your children shall burn!

  I was sure. The rhyme was about ladybird. Not her nanny, not her kids, but ladybird herself. She was flying away home. Her house was on fire. Her children burned.

  Just like Andy was the sandy boy, and Angela was Mary Ann Cotton, and Mason was Humpty Dumpty. Just like Charlene was the farmer’s wife, and Officers Cooper, Dorn and Keats were the titular little piggies.

  Except in all those other rhymes, the target died. But not Judge Dandridge. Her kids had died. Her nanny had died. But she lived.

  She lived.

  I glanced over my boards, and all the conclusions I’d tried to draw: the inheritance with Martinez, the entropy angle for Anderson, the alcoholism for Andy. I pulled the sticky notes down, crumpled them up and threw them in the trash.

  I put a new note by Dandridge. Just an asterisk on a bright blue square. She was different. She was the outlier.

  She was the target.

  I called Clark and got her voicemail. I left a message. “Call me, as s
oon as possible. I need to talk to you.”

  She did, half an hour later. She sounded tired – exhausted. “I’ve only got five minutes.”

  “It’ll take two. I was wrong, Detective. I was wrong about everything.”

  She didn’t seem surprised by that. “With the rhymes, you mean?”

  “Yeah. I was an idiot, no better than Wagley. I was inventing things to fit the facts I had. Making shit up.

  “The rhymes? They had nothing to do with any kind of secret meaning.”

  “We had pretty much ruled that out,” she admitted.

  “It was about Dandridge. The judge.”

  “How?”

  “Think about it: every rhyme dealt with the victims, right? Andy was the sandy boy whose throat was cut. Angela was Mary Ann Cotton, who was hung or strangled. Mason was Humpty Dumpty, who had a great fall and ended up in pieces. Right?”

  “Okay.”

  “But Dandridge was ladybird. Dandridge was the target. Ladybird doesn’t die. Everyone else dies, but she has to live – with the knowledge that her kids are dead. Burned to death.

  “That’s an escalation beyond anything he did to anyone else.”

  “It could be a coincidence,” she said.

  “No. No, Dandridge is the only one. He did weird stuff with corpses: dead mice, dismemberment, all of that. But they were all dead.

  “Ladybird wasn’t. Ladybird was flying home while it happened, just like the rhyme said. That’s too much attention to detail. And a big coincidence.”

  She said nothing for a long moment. “So Dandridge is the real target, and the rest of the killings are – what? A distraction?”

  I nodded, purely out of instinct since she couldn’t see me. “Exactly. It’s a smokescreen, Detective. We’re out here trying to figure out how these killings are connected, or what kind of secret meanings the killer is conveying.

  “But it’s all a smokescreen. It’s all cover, to distract us from his real victim: Dandridge.”