by Kathi Daley
“I wish I could do or say something to bring you some relief,” I said. “It must be awful to have these dreams so many nights in a row.”
“I will admit that the dreams are beginning to affect my health and energy level. I wish I could figure out what they mean. They are all the same in that I am trapped and can look out and see and hear people while no one can see me. All the dreams end in darkness and death, but the other details are different. In the first dream, I was trapped beneath bleachers, in the second dream it was a locker, in the third a storm drain with a street-level grate, and the one last night a small room with a street-level window. I feel the locations could be important, but I’m not sure how. All the locations lend themselves to a very limited view of what is going on beyond the opening through which I can view the world, so I suppose that could be the important element. It’s been a long time since I’ve either attended a football game or been to high school, so I doubt the location is literal.”
“Maybe, but Sam’s victims have all been eighteen or nineteen, so maybe the high school aspect is important,” I said.
“Do you know how they died?” Clara wondered.
“No. Not yet. I’ll ask Rick if the lab has issued a cause of death for the first victim yet. It has been a couple of days since we found Jessica’s remains, so maybe he knows something by now. Do you think it’s possible you are seeing Sam’s victims in your dreams?”
“Not literally,” Clara answered. “I sincerely doubt that any of the victims were trapped under high-school bleachers. But the feeling of being trapped could be accurate if Sam held the girls for a while rather than killing them right away.”
I bit my lower lip as I considered this. To this point, I had assumed that Sam had killed the women on the same night they disappeared, but I supposed he might have held them for a time beforehand. The part of me that empathized with the women hoped that was not the case. Being murdered would be bad enough, but being held by your captor prior to that would be almost unimaginable.
“Will you let me know when you find out about the cause of death?” Clara said, interrupting my thoughts. “Maybe my dreams do have something to do with those girls. Maybe being trapped and then enveloped by darkness is a representation of what they went through.”
After I hung up with Clara, I called Brit. I wasn’t sure she’d had time to look into Patricia’s social media accounts yet, but if she had, it stood to reason that she might have found something helpful.
“Patricia was a social media addict,” Brit said. “She checked in pretty much every hour, she tweeted and posted about every thought she ever had, she lived her life as if what she portrayed online though social media was the most important thing to her.”
“Seems like a waste of time. Did she say anything important?”
“There are so many entries that it is hard to say. There might be a tweet about getting ready to go to work and then, ten minutes later, another one about heading out to the car, and then after that is a tweet about arriving at work, followed by one about rainbows. I’m not sure if she saw a rainbow that caused her to write the post or if the image of a rainbow just came to mind. She had an active Snapchat page as well as a cluttered Facebook page. She posted random thoughts about her customers but nothing that really stood out to me. It did seem, from some of her later posts, that she was certain she had a stalker. That seemed to be an ongoing theme in the last few days of her life.”
“Did she say whether she knew who the stalker was?” I asked.
“No. The posts and tweets were random. For example, there would be a tweet that just says, ‘Here she is again,’ followed on the same day with another one about having a shadow she can’t seem to shake.”
“Can you keep looking for references to the stalker? Maybe that can help narrow down who this person was or what she seemed to want. I don’t know if the stalker is the person who killed Patricia, but if she was, we’ll need to reevaluate what we think we know about Sam.”
“I’ll look around some more. I’ll text you later if I find anything.”
I called Kizzy back to my side and headed back to Jack. If the situation had been different, I might have enjoyed a road trip with Jack and Kizzy, but the way things were, I felt I was in a constant state of anxiety and fear. I could feel the stress taking a toll on my body. I was exhausted even though it was early, and when I remembered that there were eight bodies and we were only up to victim number three, I wondered how I’d make it through to the end. “How are things with Gus?” I asked Jack as the dog and I arrived where he was sitting.
“He has everything covered. I was sure he would have, but I feel better for having checked.”
“Anything on the man in the trench coat?” I asked.
“Rick is going to do some digging. I guess we will just continue to follow the clues Sam gives me. As soon as we think we have enough to answer his questions, I’ll email him and hopefully receive directions to the remains by the end of the day. If possible, I’d like to speed things up a bit. I’m not sure I am up to two full weeks on the road.”
“I totally agree. I’m already exhausted, but I feel like I am beginning to get a feeling for what these girls have in common, so maybe we will get our answers more quickly as we go.”
“Let’s hope that will be the case.”
“Brit found some tweets posted by Patricia in which she mentions someone following her. Let’s be sure to ask her neighbor if he knows anything about that.”
Chapter 11
Bob had said that nineteen-year-old Patricia had been friends with a man named Devon who worked at a community college, so I guess I imagined that he would be a twenty-something janitor or office aide of some sort. In reality, he was a forty-eight-year-old math professor who wore wire-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket despite the warmth of the day.
“Devon Levinson, I presume,” Jack said as he greeted the man. “My name is Jack Jones and this is my associate, Jill Hanford.”
“Happy to meet you.”
We all sat down.
“You said you had questions about Patricia Fields’s disappearance?”
Jack nodded. “I am a journalist and I am writing a series of articles on unsolved cases related to missing persons. Bob Jordan told us you were close to Patricia before her disappearance.”
Devon nodded. “We were neighbors. Patricia rented a room above my next-door neighbor’s garage.”
“Did she ever mention having enemies or being afraid of anyone?” Jack asked.
Devon shook his head. “Not really. Or I guess I should say not specifically. Patricia tended to tee people off. She was an absolutely gorgeous woman, but she was pretty self-absorbed. There were a lot of people in her life, but she didn’t have any close friends.” Devon thought about it. “I actually felt sorry for her.”
“According to her twitter feed, it seemed as if she felt she was being followed by someone. Did she mention that to you?” I asked.
“Patricia often thought that she was being followed or stared at, but there was this one woman she met at a restaurant who stands out in my mind as having caused her more anxiety than she usually dealt with.”
“Can you describe her and why she caused this additional anxiety?” Jack asked.
“A few days before she went missing, Patricia told me that she thought she had a stalker. She had stopped off to get a bite after work and both she and this woman, who was in the restaurant with her husband, were asked to wait for tables to become available. Patricia told me that the woman, who was standing next to her, said something that made her laugh. She couldn’t remember what exactly. The woman introduced herself and they started chatting. During that conversation, the woman shared that Patricia reminded her of someone she used to know. They chatted for a few more minutes while they waited, but once the lady and her husband were seated, Patricia figured that was that. Patricia said that she ran into the same woman at the grocery store the following day, and then a few days later, that same woman came in
to the store where she worked. The woman acted like it was a coincidence, but Patricia wasn’t so sure about that. Then, the day after that, Patricia noticed the same woman filling up at the pumps in front of the minimart. For some reason, the woman was making her uncomfortable. I asked if the woman had acted in an aggressive manner and she said no. She just said that it was weird how she kept popping up.”
“Bob mentioned that he observed Patricia arguing with a woman in the parking lot of the store the day she went missing. Do you think it could have been the same woman?” I asked.
Devon shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t speak to Patricia that day, so I can’t say for sure.”
“Did Patricia ever describe the woman?” I wondered.
“She said she was a ‘mommish-looking’ woman. I guess that must have meant she was middle-aged, maybe a bit rumpled-looking. She wasn’t specific as to hair color or anything like that. I guess I should have asked. When she told me she was being stalked, I didn’t take it seriously. Like I said, Patricia was pretty self-absorbed and often thought that everyone was looking at her.”
“Had she mentioned being stalked by others?” I asked.
“She didn’t use the word ‘stalked,’ but she was sure that one of her male customers was hitting on her whenever he came in. She told me that the guy who came in and refilled the soda machine had a way of staring at her that made her feel uncomfortable. As I said, Patricia was a beautiful woman. She attracted the attention of the men she came into contact with.”
Jack asked a few more questions about Patricia’s social life. Devon reiterated the fact that she was mostly a loner who dated from time to time but wasn’t serious about anyone. He had no idea what her life had been like before they met because she never talked about her past. He couldn’t think of a single person who would have wanted to hurt her, but apparently, someone had. I would have suspected the woman who seemed to have been stalking Patricia as her killer, but we already knew that was Sam, who I was pretty sure was a man.
“I know we’ve both been picturing Sam as a man,” I said to Jack after we left the restaurant and headed to a place to sit down where he could email Sam and then wait for the information leading to our next move. “But has he actually said as much?”
Jack frowned. “No. I guess not specifically. But Sam is generally a man’s name, and serial killers are usually men.”
“Yes, but Sam could be short for Samantha, and not all serial killers are men.”
“Is there a reason you are asking this?” Jack asked.
“It occurred to me that Patricia’s stalker would make a good suspect, but then I reminded myself that we already knew that the killer was male, but do we?”
“I guess not,” Jack admitted.
“I wonder what would happen if you offered Patricia’s female stalker to Sam as a suspect,” I said. “That’s if he even asks that question again. He may not. It seems like he might start to mix things up a bit. But if he does ask who we think the killer is, it might be interesting to see what his response would be if we offered a theory that is vastly different from anything we have put forth to date.”
Jack lifted a shoulder. “I’m game to try it to see what happens. The fact that he even asks me to take a stab at guessing who killed each woman is pretty odd, because, theoretically, I know that he is the one who killed all the women.”
“Yeah, the whole thing is odd to me as well.” I glanced out the window. “I guess we should mention all the possible suspects as we have before. That way Sam will know that you really did look into things.”
Jack nodded. “I agree that I should bring up everyone else before I mention the stalker. The way Sam is having me investigate these missing women before he gives me the location of their remains seems so purposeful. I would be willing to bet that in investigating the women, we are gaining information we may need later on.”
“I think the investigations have a purpose as well. So far, Sam has asked you who you think the killer is, but he has provided zero feedback as to whether the answers you gave are the ones he is looking for.”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe Sam isn’t looking for a specific answer. Maybe he just wants to be sure we are getting to know the victims to an extent before we dig them up.”
Jack sent the email from his phone and then we took Kizzy for a walk while we waited for a reply. It was still early, so if the remains weren’t buried too far away, we should have time to find them and then head out toward our next destination. Jack had spoken to his mother again and assured her that we would try to meet her for dinner on either Saturday or Sunday, so we needed to fit that in as well.
Sam emailed back within twenty minutes. Once again, he replied with coordinates and a roughly drawn map that would help us narrow in on the gravesite once we reached them. Jack then forwarded the coordinates to Rick and we started out toward a place that appeared to be not all that far from our current location.
“If there are eight victims and finding each one takes us two days, we are going to be away from home for a while. Do you feel like everything is covered at the newspaper?” I asked.
“Not really. We have time to figure out what to do about next week’s issue. I am sure that Gus can handle the printing and distribution on his own. Brit is usually willing to grab any photos we need. The ad copy shouldn’t change a whole lot, so I feel like I can manipulate what I need to with my laptop. The real issue is preparing the features and getting them formatted. I’ve been thinking about that, and I might ask George, Vikki, Brit, and even Alex to do guest features for the next edition. All we’ll need to add to that are a few bake sales and Little League game results and we’ll have a modest but acceptable issue. I’ll need one day back in the office to do the final formatting, so maybe we should plan to be home on Wednesday of next week one way or another.”
“Sounds good. I’ll talk to everyone about changing the Mastermind meeting to Wednesday night so we can all catch up.”
“Before you do that, let’s get through the next couple of days. The possibility exists that Sam might change things up at some point to alter the pacing he’s set.”
I glanced at the map on the dashboard. “You’ll need to turn right in about a mile.”
Jack nodded and slowed just a bit.
“You know,” I said, bringing the conversation back to the newspaper, “I bet Brooke Johnson would be willing to write a guest article for next week’s edition. She is always anxious to get the word out about upcoming events in the community, and there are a bunch of them scheduled for the summer. In fact, we might want to consider asking her if she wants to do a weekly column. If I had to guess, she would welcome the opportunity to reach the widest audience possible.”
“That’s a good idea. Why don’t you give her a call to ask her? She asked me about volunteering for the Beer and Brats festival the second weekend in June and the Wine and Jazz festival the weekend after that. I’m not sure what else she has planned for June, but the last time I glanced at the calendar it looked pretty full.”
“I’ll call her,” I confirmed, “after we find this body and the cell service becomes a bit steadier. I’m pretty sure the third weekend in July is reserved for the traveling carnival at the recreation center. I wasn’t a fan of the noise when they came through last year, but all those lights reflecting off the water was really magical.”
“Speaking of that, we’ll want to do a special edition for the last weekend in June, which will be the weekend before the Fourth of July.”
I glanced down at the notes Jack had jotted down when talking to Rick, who had pulled up a detailed map of the area before we set out. “You might want to slow down a bit and start looking for a private road off to the left. Your notes say that the road is a single lane after the bridge, which is about a quarter mile off the road we’re on now. Once you cross the bridge, we’ll need to look for a trailhead of sorts. It isn’t designated, more of a dirt area where you can park. The burial site will be down that trail about
a quarter mile.”
Jack turned onto the private road. He narrowed his gaze and began to search for the bridge. After we crossed it, we drove slowly down the narrow road until we found what we suspected was the dirt parking area Rick had pointed out. Jack grabbed the shovel and I let Kizzy out of the back, and we headed down the dirt trail. The setting really was lovely. I could hear a river in the distance, but so far, the water wasn’t visible. If I knew Sam and his preferences in burial sites, which I felt like I did, I would bet Patricia Fields would be buried somewhere on high ground with a view of the rushing body of water.
“I just had an odd thought,” I said to Jack as we walked along the narrow path.
“Oh? And what was that?”
“That Sam would most likely have buried Patricia on high ground with a view of the water.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Yeah, but the weird thing is that I felt a moment of affection for the guy. Like how nice it was for him to pick out such lovely burial sites for his victims. That’s crazy, right? I mean, what I should be feeling is outrage that he killed these girls in the first place, not affection that he went to the trouble to seek out such lovely spots to dispose of their remains.”
Jack took my hand in his. “I agree that outrage is the more appropriate emotion here, but the burial sites have been spectacular, and having a brief flash of appreciation for the fact that the guy took the time to seek out such peaceful settings for these women to spend eternity isn’t all that strange. He could have dumped them in a landfill, but he didn’t, and there is a part of us that appreciates that.”
“Do you think that the reason he is having us jump through all these hoops is so that at some point along the way we will actually begin to feel affection and sympathy for him?”
