Mounted

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Has, um, has there been a lot lately?” she asked.

  “More than we’d like,” Duffield said. “Just know that the Oldham County Sheriff’s Office, as well as the local branch of the FBI, will be looking into this. Obviously, everything will be done, that can be, to locate your daughter.”

  I had mixed feelings about not being entirely truthful with the woman, but at the same time, telling a mother that a serial killer was murdering and mounting the heads of women that fit her daughter’s profile wouldn’t go over well—and we didn’t know if her daughter was a victim or not. I sat quietly in thought, hoping the girl had decided to run away on vacation or to leave the area otherwise on her own accord. However, the car parked at the daughter’s apartment, with her purse and phone inside, stirred a bad feeling in my gut.

  “I just want her back,” the mother said. “It’s not like her to do this.”

  “Your name, ma’am?” Duffield asked.

  “Patty Willard, Katelyn’s mother. This is my daughter, June.”

  “Same last name?” he asked.

  “Correct,” she said.

  I took the notepad from my pocket and wrote down the family members’ names.

  I looked over my right shoulder at the roommate. “Your name, miss?” I asked.

  “Jessi Bromley.”

  I requested a spelling and wrote it down.

  “Ms. Willard, when did you see or speak to your daughter last?” Duffield asked.

  The mother dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her beige shirt. “Katelyn came over Saturday after work. She stayed until around nine o’clock at night and then left to go back to her apartment.”

  “Roughly nine o’clock is your best guess on time?” I asked.

  “That’s going to be pretty close. It could have been a minute or two after. I record two shows that start at nine, which is kind of pointless if I’m home and in front of the television because my cable box can only record two at a time—it makes you watch one of the two programs while you’re recording. The television had just switched over to one of my shows.”

  “Okay.” I wrote the time down.

  “We have the apartment address, which I’ll give to you,” King told Duffield.

  Duffield nodded. “Do you remember what she was wearing?” he asked.

  “A pink hooded sweatshirt—it said love real big in black letters on the back—that and blue jeans. She changed out of her work clothes at the house. She still has me do her laundry. They have coin-operated at her apartment.”

  I wrote down a description of the clothing.

  “And you called in the report?” Beth asked, leaning forward and looking past me to the roommate, seated at my shoulder.

  “I called, yeah,” she said. “Katelyn didn’t come home Saturday night. I just figured she stayed at her mom’s. I didn’t leave the apartment at all on Sunday. I called her a couple times and sent her a few text messages, but she never responded. I thought it was weird but wasn’t really worried about it or anything. But then this morning when I went to leave for work, I saw her car in the apartment complex’s parking lot. I walked over to it. The window was down, and her purse was inside. I called her phone, and it rang inside of the car. So I called her mom, who said she’d left to come home Saturday night.”

  “I told her to call the police, left work, and went to the apartment,” Ms. Willard said.

  “What time this morning?” King asked.

  “Around nine in the morning,” the roommate said.

  “Okay.” King made a note of the time.

  “Does the apartment complex have video security?” I asked.

  “They have cameras in the parking lot there,” King said. “But we found out that they were inoperable when we got a hold of the landlord.”

  I tapped the tip of my pen on my notepad. “So no help there. Did Katelyn have a boyfriend or maybe a group of friends that she could have possibly decided to leave the area with? You know, just to get out of town for a few days.” I thought it a pointless question, with the purse and phone having remained in the car, but it still needed to be asked—if only to get names of potentials to contact.

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend,” the roommate said. “If she was going out of town for something, I would have known.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Beth asked.

  “Positive,” the girl said.

  “Maybe not a boyfriend per se but any male friends that could have picked her up? Something like that?” I asked.

  The roommate shook her head. “She was too focused on school. The last boyfriend she had was last school year, and I don’t know if I would even call him a boyfriend. They only hung out for a month or two.”

  “His name?” Beth asked.

  She gave it to us.

  We went back and forth with the family and roommate for another half hour, distributed a couple of business cards to them, and left the room for the hallway. King followed us out.

  I put my back to the wall of the hallway. “Where are you guys at on the investigation with this? Any leads?” I asked.

  King shook his head. “We had a look through the apartment itself and the grounds of the complex—nothing out of the ordinary. We focused on the car and the surrounding area. We didn’t see any signs of a struggle—nothing dropped, nothing that looked like it could have been from either Katelyn Willard or anyone else. Purse was filled with credit cards—some cash was still there. The keys for the vehicle were still in the ignition. The last I heard, they were moving the car back to our garages to start processing it in more detail. At her apartment complex, we door knocked every unit that would have had a visual of the area where her car was parked. We got nothing. If she was taken from there, it was a damn clean grab. We’re going to look into this guy she was seeing last year and get his whereabouts for Sunday. We put in for her phone and banking records, but it takes us some time to acquire those things. Maybe you could assist us in speeding that up a bit?”

  “We already put in for both banking and cell records,” Duffield said. “I should have something today yet, and I’ll forward it on to you as soon as I get it. Did you guys check the call log from the cell phone itself?”

  “We did. The last call was earlier in the evening, prior to her even going to her mother’s after work.”

  “Print the phone?” Beth asked.

  “They’re processing the prints lifted,” King said. “Just one set, the last I heard—probably hers. I have to ask, what is the FBI’s high level of interest in missing persons all about?”

  “It’s an open investigation,” Duffield said.

  “You’re not going to give me anything other than that, are you?” King asked.

  Duffield didn’t respond.

  King slowly nodded, seeming to accept the fact that he’d get no further information on the matter. “Are you guys done here, then?”

  “I’m thinking so,” Duffield said. “There isn’t really anything we can do here.” Duffield looked at Beth and me. “What are you guys thinking?”

  “Yeah, we’re set,” I said.

  “Okay.” Duffield reached out and shook the chief deputy’s hand. “I’ll get that stuff to you in a little bit. Let us know if anything develops with the old boyfriend.”

  “Sure,” King said.

  We walked from the sheriff’s office and stopped at the back of our rental with Duffield.

  “What’s going to be the plan of attack?” Duffield asked.

  “I’d like to dig into the victims that we know we have,” I said. “See the locations where they were taken from. Pound the pavement, knock on doors. Right now, we basically have nothing. There’s no way that one person out there didn’t see something.”

  “Agreed,” Beth said. “Did we do the usuals? Try to pull traffic-cam footage from around where they were taken, look for cameras in the areas, talk to friends and families?”

  “We did,” Duffield said. “Dead end after dead end after dead end.”

 
; “Well, let’s do it again,” I said. “Start from the top. Visit the scenes where the grabs took place and meet with everyone involved. I also wouldn’t mind stopping at this newspaper and getting a run-through of exactly how everything with this package transpired firsthand.”

  “Okay,” Duffield said.

  “Let’s head back to the bureau office and get organized, Beth said. “We’ll lay out how we want to proceed step by step—get our days set up.”

  “Sounds good,” Duffield said. “Do you guys just want to follow me back?”

  “Lead the way.” Beth headed for the driver’s door of our rental car.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  William, tape measure in hand, measured down from the drop ceiling of the den and then out from the wall on his right. He placed his fingertip on his spot, let the tape measure drop to the cushions of the sofa he was standing on, and took the hammer from the loop on his tool belt. William removed the nail he was holding in his lips and hammered it into the wooden paneling of the den. He stepped from the couch and replaced the hammer in its loop.

  “Wall time,” William said. “Let’s see how you hold up.”

  He scooped up Katelyn’s completed mount, which was resting against the side of the chair in the room and stepped back up onto the couch cushions. He slid the wood-backed mount down the wall until the cable on its back caught the nail head. He let the wall take the weight of the mount and adjusted it until it was straight.

  William stepped down and took her in, lined up next to the others. His eyes went from one to the next. From Katelyn to the first he’d hung, the skin of each woman’s face seemed to droop more and more. He walked to the far side of the room and stood before the mount of Kelly Page, his first try. The skin of her face sagged and hung from her chin line. The number one he’d written in marker on her forehead was barely visible. William could see bits of modeling clay and bone around her eye sockets, where the skin had shrunk and begun to pull back. William took the lamp from the end table that was directly beneath the mount, set it down on the floor, and stepped up onto the table to reach eye level with her. He examined her face and her skin from inches away. He sniffed and pulled his head back—her flesh was rotting. William reached out with his fingertips and touched her skin—it was squishy to the touch. The pressure of his fingers made more of her skin pull away from her eye, exposing an inch and a half more of her skull beneath.

  “Dammit,” William said.

  He pulled her mount from the wall, crouched, and placed it on the floor beside the end table—the mount would have to be taken to the burning barrel in the backyard and disposed of.

  William stood, and as his eyes went to the next woman’s mount, his anger built, for around her eyes, he could see effects similar to those on the first mount. William stepped from the end table to the arm of the couch to get an up-close look at the woman he’d marked number two, Jennifer Pasco. He put his nose to the side of her face and took in a deep breath. The odor of rotting flesh filled his airways.

  “Son of a bitch!” He ground his teeth together as his jaw muscles flexed.

  William put his fingertips to the bottom of the walnut base of the mount and swatted upward, sending the mount off its hook. The wood of the mount hit William in the side of the face as it fell, bounced off the corner of the end table, and came to rest on the floor. His simmering anger immediately turned into rage.

  William yanked the hammer from his tool belt and swung his arm back as he took a step on the couch toward the next mount. He brought the hammer down with everything he had into the side of the face of the next woman, Trisha Floyd—that mount flew from the wall, sending the next in line crashing to the ground with it.

  “None of you are good enough!”

  William took another two steps on the couch. He stood before Katelyn’s mount, which he’d just hung. He swung the hammer back over his shoulder and delivered it squarely to her forehead. The impact sent her right glass eye sideways. William swung again, and the end of the hammer crunched through her skull. He ripped back on the hammer to pull it out, but it was lodged into her skull cavity and would not come free. Pulling the mount from the wall with both hands, he turned on the couch and slammed his creation to the ground below with everything he had. The mount smashed into pieces—the hands came from the mount and bounced across the floor—the skull broke away from the fiberglass neck area, ripping from the bolts securing it to the bracket, and Katelyn’s head rolled across the floor.

  William stared down at the floor of the room, littered with pieces of rotted flesh, hands, and broken chunks of the mounts. He stepped from the couch and let himself fall back into the beige cushions.

  “They’re not right,” he said.

  William took his finger-length hair at the top of his head in both of his hands and pulled. He shook his head, sitting in silence for minutes. He closed his eyes and rubbed at his temples.

  “Think. Think, think. What can we do?” he said. “There has to be a good way.”

  William opened his eyes and stared at the bits and pieces of debris covering the carpeting. His eyes focused on one object and then another and then another.

  “The hands,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I sat over a plate of what was basically beef gnocchi though it had some spruced-up name when I’d ordered it. We’d gone back to the Louisville bureau office, spent a couple hours planning how we wanted to proceed on the investigation, and left for the evening. The time spent meeting with the mother and roommate of the latest missing woman, Katelyn Willard, in addition to plotting how we wanted to proceed in the coming days, had taken up most of the usable hours of our workday—the plan was to start bright and early the following day.

  “So I’m on friends and family tomorrow, and you’re on the grab locations?” Beth asked. She put a forkful of some kind of salad in her mouth, chewed, and awaited my response. She’d been mostly preoccupied with her phone over the course of our dinner.

  “That’s the plan,” I said.

  “What time are you going to take off in the morning?” she asked.

  I glanced at my watch—a couple minutes before nine o’clock. “I’ll probably be up by sixish, do my morning routine, and scoot out of here before seven. I took a look at how long it’s going to take me to get to the first stop—looks like about forty minutes. I figure if I’m in the neighborhood knocking on doors by around eight, I can catch any nine-to-fivers before they leave for work for the day.”

  “Good idea,” Beth said.

  “Did you get some times set up to meet with friends and family?”

  “A couple slots. I figure I can make some calls and try to get a couple more interviews set while I’m driving from location to location tomorrow. Any news from Ball?”

  “No. I just checked in with him,” I said. “I told him about the latest abduction and what our plans were, going forward. As far as back at the home office, nothing new going on there, other than what Bill and Scott were up to.”

  “The religious sect thing?”

  “Yeah. I guess they’re still poking around at it. They got some names.”

  Beth nodded but didn’t respond. She set her fork down and took a drink of her wine.

  “You know, I was thinking about something.” I jabbed at a piece of braised beef and a piece of gnocchi with my fork tines.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Okay, so we have a good idea that this guy is not a taxidermist, right?” I stuck my fork in my mouth and pulled it out clean.

  “Right,” she said.

  I paused to chew. “That doesn’t mean that he didn’t purchase the things he needed from one locally. Or online. The green human glass eyes can’t be that common. Plus, the wooden mounts were more than likely purchased from somewhere as well.”

  “Those could have been made.”

  “Could have, but I’d lean toward bought. There isn’t a ton of the general population that are craftsman and could make something like t
hat. I’m betting they could be had online for cheap, meaning it almost wouldn’t be cost or time effective to make them. Especially if you’re just experimenting with the girls.”

  “I’d have to think we’d have our best luck just focusing our efforts on trying to hunt down where the eyes came from,” Beth said.

  I took a sip of my gin and tonic, set it down, and pulled my notepad from my inner suit-jacket pocket. I wrote down green glass eyes and find out where to get them.

  “What else is sticking out at you?” Beth asked.

  “The mailbox that package was dropped into—too much of a coincidence that our killer just got lucky that they were out of town.”

  “Well, what do you think? The people who reside there checked out.”

  “That’s all fine that they checked out,” I said. “I just think our guy knew they were out of town.”

  “Okay. So spitball it. Who would know that they weren’t home?”

  “Friends, family, neighbors, coworkers.”

  “Duffield said they’d be back Wednesday?” Beth asked.

  “Wednesday morning, he said. If we could meet with this family and ask them who all would know that they were gone, and get some names, we might be able to spin something into a lead.” I tapped the tip of my pen on the notepad’s page and wrote down mailbox family leads.

  I looked back up at Beth. Her cell phone, sitting on the white tablecloth next to her salad bowl, was lit up. She grumbled and poked away at the screen.

  “Scott will not leave me the hell alone,” she said.

  “I thought you blocked him.”

  “I did. Now he’s sending messages through my messenger app. He just won’t stop. Like he doesn’t get the fact that I’m at work and I need to not be interrupted by him.”

  “He probably figures you’re done working for the day and now have time to interact with him.”

  “But he’s been doing it all day—nonstop. Well actually, he stopped for a few hours earlier, but still. I mean, what adult just fires off message after message after message when the person on the other end clearly doesn’t want to speak to you at the moment?”