Orzo continued, “Did you have any sort of relationship with Tammy Haig outside of the psychology class?”
“Huh? No.”
“Did you share any other classes with her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know. You got my schedule there, right? In the file? What does it say?” He brushed a thumb over his lip and acted like he was waiting for Orzo, off camera, to look.
Finally Orzo muttered, barely perceptible. “It doesn’t appear so.”
“All right then.”
“Looking at your schedule, since you brought it up — what are you in school for?”
“To get information. To learn something practical I can put toward the next part of my life.”
“And what is that? It’s not psychology?”
“Nah. People spend all of this time analyzing themselves, trying to figure everything out instead of just living life. I’m not in school for that.”
“I’m sorry but you still haven’t said what you’re in school for.”
“Does it matter?” Keesing seemed to tense up. “I never finished high school. I dropped out at sixteen and got a job. By twenty I had my first business — I sold vacuum cleaners, door to door. By thirty I had my cleaning business and I ran that for twelve years, franchised it, and then sold it. I don’t really ever need to work again, but I want to do something else with my life. So I got my GED and here I am.”
“Fair enough. Did you ever see Tammy Haig with another student outside of class?”
“Honestly I didn’t really notice her until this whole thing happened. She was just kind of . . . you know. Whatever. Then I remembered her.”
Orzo kept along his line of questioning. “Mr. Keesing, on the night of April twenty-fifth, you left class and went grocery shopping. You said you used a debit card and we’ve asked you for your bank records to verify this, but you have yet to turn them in.”
“That’s my bad, I’m sorry. I can get that over to you.”
Kelly made a note beside the laptop: Keesing, bank records, grocery store.
“As soon as possible,” Orzo said. “We just need to cross you off our list.”
“Yeah, that’s the line, right?”
Kelly’s attention sharpened.
“I’m not sure I follow,” Orzo said.
“You want to cross me off your list, you say. And how are you going to do that? You’ll ask me the same questions three or four times, see if I change my answer. You’ll act like you’re my friend, get me something to drink. You ask me if I’m interested in psychology. You’re poking around, looking for the spot. If I have any ideas that are, you know, shapes outside the cookie cutter, then I’m a suspect, right? That’s like thought police.”
Kelly felt a sweat break her skin. Most people were scared of authority but Keesing was ticking the right boxes — egotistical, belligerent. He oozed disrespect.
“For someone uninterested in psychology, you sure talk the talk,” Orzo said.
Good for you, Orzo.
“That course is a requirement,” Keesing said. “If what you’re saying is I sound intelligent, I’ll take the compliment.”
“I’m glad.”
“It’s a basic, freshman-level course, but most if it goes right over their heads. I don’t know about the youth these days. You see that video? About people being asked to name a book, just any single book, and no one can? Society is going down.”
Orzo said something inaudible. He was sputtering out. Keesing had taken over the interview and had control of the conversation.
“What’s that?” Keesing asked. “Do I own a rifle? No. You already asked if I hunted. I said no. If I don’t hunt, why do I need a rifle? Unless you mean for home defense. Nah. I can take care of myself. I don’t need a gun.”
Kelly suddenly wanted to ride out to wherever Keesing lived and tear through his house. Find the Winchester hidden in the walls or beneath a floorboard and put this guy in chains. But she kept watching. A cocky middle-aged student didn’t necessarily mean a killer.
Yet.
Orzo was still trying to recover. “Can you explain what you mean?”
“You need me to explain that? That I can take care of myself? I’m not surprised you guys don’t get it.” He sighed and looked at the walls. “That’s the point, anyway — endless talking gets us nowhere. The things that change people are raw and real.”
She didn’t even hear Orzo’s next question — she had her phone out, keying his number. When he answered she said, “Why haven’t I heard about Taylor Keesing?”
“Keesing?”
“Yeah. The Charles Manson-type forty-something student from Tammy Haig’s psychology class.”
Orzo took a moment. “Keesing?”
“I’m looking at your interview with him right now. Seven months ago. You had him in the box and he’s dishing it right out.”
“I remember him. He checked out.”
“Most cocky and aggressive suspect interview I’ve seen — wait, checked out how?”
“Debit card transaction. Keesing was buying beer at a store forty miles in the other direction during time of death. We pulled video from the store. We were quick enough and they still had it and Keesing was on camera.”
Kelly stared at the screen, feeling her stomach sink.
“Plus, Keesing’s an addict. He was all coked-up in that interview. Guy’s a mess. We busted him.”
She leaned in toward the laptop, studied him, looked at his clenched jaw. His fingers tapping the desk. How had she not seen it? She felt a wave of denial. “What about his phone records?”
“Yeah. We got those, too. He was between a rock and a hard place because his alibi led us to the grocery store — or I guess you’d call it a bodega — down in the city. He went in and bought a forty ounce but he’d been getting his dime bags down there. That whole place went down — drug taskforce between Syracuse and DEA.”
The video continued to play on her computer.
“Right now,” Kelly said, feeling edgy, “right now he’s daring you to accuse him of murder. I mean, you sure about this guy? Listen to him.”
She put the phone to the laptop speaker. “That’s an indirect question,” Keesing was saying. “All of these are indirect questions. There’s only one question that you want to ask, one question that means anything. I’m just trying to get you to come to the point so I can go home.”
She put the phone back to her ear. “I mean . . .”
“I wish I could tell you otherwise, but you’re not listening. Keesing couldn’t have done Haig, and he couldn’t have done Payton or any of the other murders after Haig either — he’s been in county for the last seven months waiting for his day in court,” Orzo said.
She slammed the laptop closed. “Fuck.”
“You probably can’t see it on the video,” Orzo said, “but he was sweating like a pig.”
She stood up abruptly and knocked the desk chair backwards onto the hotel room floor. “That’s why I want to do these in person.”
Calm down. Keep it together.
Orzo picked up on her frustration. “Not one of those spring semester students admitted to owning a hunting rifle. And I checked since this morning — not one of them owns a Jeep Cherokee or a Ford Taurus. Nobody on the new list, either. But I’m only about halfway through it. And nobody failed and took the class again.”
“It’s not Grumett. And if it’s no one from his spring class, could still be any student in that school. Someone who shared other classes with her.”
“Yeah, maybe . . .”
She could hear it in Orzo’s voice. He was humoring her because she was reaching. She stared at the closed laptop, thinking until a noise on the phone distracted her. “What’s that sound?”
“Sorry. Got an impacted molar. I can’t seem to stop poking at it.”
“The press is all over us now. Someone took a cell pic of all of us outside the church like it wa
s Waco and it’s gone viral.”
“I can see why you liked Keesing. Unmarried, no kids, financially independent.”
“He was just high.”
“No, you saw it — he was enjoying himself. Right up until I asked him about the purpose of his education or something then he went off on this jag about being a self-starter. You know who he reminded me of, a little bit — Billy Bath.”
“You worked that case?”
“I kept up on it like everybody else did. Some guys you can just tell, they’ve got this hate in them. I don’t think it’s directed at any one type of person or group. I’m Mexican-American, so I know all about that. I remember Bath coming out, they did the perp walk with him, and he’s not hidden under his jacket, he’s got his head up, and there’s just that poison in his eyes. You were probably a kid then.”
“Yeah. Fourteen.” She took a deep breath, let it out slow. She needed to relax. “You got kids, Orzo?”
“All grown up now. Genevieve teaches second grade over in Rockland County.”
“That’s a beautiful name.”
“Rockland? Yeah, it’s got a ring to it.”
Kelly laughed. Talking to Orzo was calming.
“My wife is French-Canadian — Eugenie.” He pronounced it ooh-shenny. “I call her Jeannie. She’s the one made the appointment for me to go see the dentist, figure out this thing in my mouth.”
“Probably a good idea.”
He grew wistful. “I used to hate going to work when they were little. We had our kids quick — bang-bang — two years apart. In the morning they’d be sitting around the kitchen table, Genevieve would spill her orange juice and Sasha would walk in it. Or she’d hide beneath the table and poop in her diaper. Don’t ever tell her I said that. But you’d lose track of her for a minute and look under the table and she’s got this look of concentration on her face because she’s taking a big dump right there.”
Kelly laughed harder, got up from the bed and opened the mini-fridge. She pulled out a bottle of water and drank. The laughter died in her throat when she thought about the killer, choosing young families. Families just starting out in the way Orzo described — full of potential and curiosity. But also busy, frayed, emotional. By the time her brother Rick had a job and she and Raquel were busy with friends and boys, her father’s melancholy had rooted down. Whole meals would pass without a word from him. He’d eat his food and drop his plate in the sink and retire to his study for most of, if not the rest of, the evening. He’d been in that study when the heart attack happened.
Striking them down in their prime, maybe that was the killer’s objective. Take a family full of promise, who displayed happiness and hope, and snuff them out. Leave the husband shattered and bereft, and then go to work on him. Drive him to suicide. Turn him into an unfeeling robot like Haig or a single parent like Spence. Make him an exile like Roger Payton.
She wanted to climb inside his mind to see what he wanted, where he was going with this. Because she had the sense — from the beginning really — that he had a plan, a purpose. Whether Dixon agreed or not, this was more than pathological need, more than faulty wiring. This guy had something to say; he was just about bursting at the seams with it. Grumett wasn’t just misdirection, no — she thought the killer really believed in the professor’s ideas, or at least thought he did.
After ending the call with Orzo she plugged in her speakers and opened iTunes, flopped onto the bed and let the music wash over her as she went over the case. Something they’d drilled into her at Quantico: always go back and review. Old things take on new meaning.
Number one, contact from the killer: Blanchett’s gear remained hooked up to Ted Archer’s phone but there’d been no more calls, and there probably wouldn’t be. He’d stolen Grumett’s phone and the cops had jumped for it. Archer’s suicide wasn’t public, so the killer had been watching the house. Maybe surveilling it — he didn’t need to know about the FBI putting a net around Destiny, only that they had the phone. He was improvising as events developed.
Dixon was monitoring persons of interest. Agents were sifting through the gun ranges, following tips from the hotline. The bodies of the victims had been taken apart and put back together, the crime scenes scoured for physical evidence, the projectiles analyzed.
Maybe Cal Wagner didn’t think he was military, or an expert marksman, but even with a scope the killer was pretty accurate. It made her think of safari hunters, big game hunters who went to Africa to shoot elephants and tigers from the safety of their Range Rovers. It also reinforced the idea that he’d taken a bigger chance on Jessica Carter-Spence, his furthest shot placement yet, like he was making do with unideal circumstances, finishing one task in order to move on to another. He’d almost missed his mark, too; another millimeter or two and the bullet might’ve just traveled around outside Jessica’s skull, leaving her alive.
Kelly mentally auditioned a new psych profile: you didn’t have to be ex-military to be a gun nut with surveillance capabilities. There were enough doomsday-preppers in the States and the FBI had a list of over 500 militia groups. Plenty of men had the means to carry out strategic serial killings with a professional’s touch. The shooter in Las Vegas had packed an arsenal into his hotel room and fired on a crowd of thousands like a sniper. Teenaged gunmen walked into schools with little more than hunting and target-shooting experience. Or even video games.
The killer had sat in a car to shoot his victims. According to the medical reports, each victim was killed instantly except for Jessica, who’d lived for another fifteen minutes. The bullet casing from the projectile which eventually killed her had been found thirty yards away from her body, plus the additional twenty yards from the parking lot — he’d retrieved the casing and thrown it into the park. Forensics were quick on the scene and bagged it before press arrived.
Casings had been left behind at all the scenes. They meant something. Either to taunt authorities or they held some other function.
Maybe to prove to the men he was speaking to that he was the real killer?
She sat up in bed, feeling her heart race.
Probably one of the things the killer wanted most was to be legitimized. And he needed to be, if his manipulation of the men and his poisonous words could take real effect. Knowing something the public didn’t proved he was who he said.
But had he told Archer about the casing? If he’d told Archer then Archer would have relayed that to the cops, who were doubting his story. Maybe that was the point then, after all — torture Archer by not giving him proof, but igniting his blind need for closure, for blood. The killer could have also wanted to see what Archer would do, see if he’d involve police.
If she was right, he’d called the other men — Blake Haig first, then Roger Payton.
She had no proof of that, though, and neither of them were coming forward with it.
She called Dixon and told him she wanted to talk to Roger Payton.
“I think it’s a good idea you talk to him. Who do you want to take with you?”
“Broward.”
“The chief? You two have really taken a shine to each other.”
“He knows Payton personally. And Broward was the one to fire the detective — Faber — so maybe that gives him a little leverage. Maybe Payton will talk to us. We’ll go tomorrow.”
“Sounds fun. Talk to you in the morning.”
* * *
The killer watched a few videos on YouTube before he clicked on the Channel Five coverage of Kelly Roth coming out of the police station in Liverpool and the intrepid reporter who wouldn’t let her off the hook.
The reporter had a round, pixie-like face and big fuck-me eyes. “Can you confirm an FBI presence here in Liverpool?”
Roth had harder features — still pretty though. “I am an FBI agent.”
“Is the FBI here because of a serial killer? Are you linking the Payton murder with the Archers and Tammy Haig? Is the Park Killer official?”
“As I said, we’ll ha
ve all that information for you soon.”
Pretty, sure — even looked like Tammy a little bit — but full of shit. Typical FBI, typical cop, placating the public. He paused the video and touched the screen, running his fingers across her face. Something about her though. He stared into her eyes as she looked off camera — calculating her escape, probably, or maybe seeing someone or something she recognized — and let himself enjoy what he knew about her, what a little bit of Google-searching had yielded without much effort at all.
A father dead when she was in her teens. That was one thing. An attempted rape not long after — that was another. Driven into the life of an FBI agent, probably by a need for control, a need to make sense of a world that had become alien and hostile in her youth.
She didn’t seem to ever have a man with her. She was alone in the universe, and she made the perfect match for him. They were the same. Fathers gone, mothers distant, abandoned to an indifferent world. The realization of that was so deep as to be arousing — she was the ultimate result, the effect of his cause, of events he had set in motion. Like a message in a bottle, and now he was found.
He couldn’t say when for sure he had started thinking like this. The first couple of eye-opening books in his youth had felt like secrets; he was coming to understand what almost no one else did.
All of these reporters and FBI agents and local police all running around, these medical examiners and forensic technicians and doctors and lawyers and whoever the fuck else cashed in on these kinds of things, they were all buzzing with ideas he had ignited. And just like everyone else on the face of the planet, each of them was ignorantly unaware of that fact, blithely believing that they were getting up each morning and deciding about their day, authoring their lives, being the heroes of those stories.
He switched to another website and read the headline from the Syracuse Herald. “Park Killer Strikes Again.” The article featured pictures of the playground and the people standing back behind the crime scene tape and police gathered around by the trees. All of those people there because of an external event setting them in motion. They would never forget it, either — for the rest of their lives they’d have that memory of the Park Killer, they’d look back on The Day The Woman Lay Dead Behind The Swing-Set, they’d be forever affected and influenced by it.
The Husbands Page 19
