by J. D. Barker
“All these other girls are similar in appearance. Pretty, long brown hair, close in age. For someone without a type, he sure seems to have a type. All but Barbara, the only blonde. She’s an anomaly.” Watson paused for a second before asking, “Were any of the girls sexually assaulted?”
Clair shook her head. “Not one.”
“Did any of the girls have a brother?”
“Melissa Lumax, Susan Devoro, and Calli Tremell each had brothers; Allison Crammer had two,” Clair said. “I spoke to them when I interviewed the families.”
Watson nodded, the gears churning in his head. “If we assume half these families had at least one son and he grabbed their children at random, one or two male victims should have presented. That didn’t happen, so there was a reason he took the daughters over the sons—we just don’t know why.”
Porter cleared his throat. “Honestly, I’m not sure that matters anymore. We don’t need to worry about his future victims. Like Nash said, he’s done killing. We need to focus on his last one.”
Watson returned to his chair. “I’m sorry. Sometimes my mind starts going down all these paths and I lose focus.”
“Not at all. This is why we asked you to join us. You’re a fresh pair of eyes on some old evidence and information.”
“Fair enough,” Watson said.
Porter picked up a blue marker and wrote EMORY CONNORS in large letters at the top of the third board. “Okay, what do we know about our victim?”
“According to the front desk at her building, she left for a jog yesterday at a little after six in the evening,” Clair said. “They said that was the norm for her. She ran nearly every day, usually in the evenings. Nobody saw her come back.”
“Did anyone know where she liked to run?” Nash asked.
Clair shook her head. “They only saw her come and go.”
“I might be able to answer that,” Kloz said. He was pecking away at a MacBook Air. “She wore a Fitbit Surge.”
“A what?”
“It’s a watch that monitors your heart rate, calories burned, distance traveled. It also has a built-in GPS. I found a program installed on her computer that recorded all the data. I’m accessing the information now.”
“Any chance the GPS is still active?”
Kloz shook his head. “Doesn’t work that way. The watch records the GPS data as you wear it, then syncs to the cloud with a phone app or by interfacing with a computer. She paired with her phone—that’s dead too, but I think I know where she went.” He flipped his Mac around so the others could view his screen. A map filled the display. There was a dotted blue line beginning at Flair Tower, which followed West Erie Street toward the river. At the water’s edge, the trail circled a large green space. “I found the same pattern nearly every day.” He tapped the screen. “This is A. Montgomery Ward Park.”
Porter leaned in close. His eyesight was going to shit. “Clair, you want to check it out when we finish up here?”
“Will do, boss.”
He turned back to Kloz. “Did you find anything else on her computer?”
Kloz flipped the Mac back around and pecked at the keys. “You gave me the opportunity to legally search the hard drive of a hot teenage girl. Needless to say, I was thorough.”
Clair wrinkled her nose. “Fucking sicko.”
Kloz smirked. “I pride myself on my sicko-ness, my dear. One day you will thank me.” He studied the screen for a moment. “Emory’s boyfriend’s name is Tyler Mathers. He’s a junior at Whatney Vale High. And”—all the cell phones in the room beeped simultaneously—“I shot you a recent photo, his cell phone number, and home address,” Kloz said. “They’ve been beau and boo for about a month. She thinks they’re exclusive.”
“And they’re not?” Porter asked.
Kloz grinned mischievously. “I may have taken a peek at his private Facebook messages, and our boy is a bit of a player.”
The group stared at him.
“Oh, come on! If you use your wife’s or girlfriend’s name as your password, you deserve to get hacked.”
Porter made a mental note to change his e-mail password. “Next time, wait for the warrant. We don’t need you mucking up the case.”
Kloz saluted him. “Yes, my cap-i-tan.”
Porter wrote TYLER MATHERS on the whiteboard and drew an arrow to the boy in the homecoming picture with Emory. “Nash and I will pay Tyler a visit this afternoon. Anything else on her PC?”
“Emory has a Mac, a very nice one at that. Please don’t insult such a fine piece of engineering by calling it a PC. Such insults are beneath you,” Kloz said.
“Forgive me. Anything else on her Mac?”
Kloz shook his head. “No, sir.”
“What about the three outgoing numbers on the landline?”
Kloz held up his hand and ticked off three fingers. “A pizza place, a Chinese place, and Italian takeout. This girl knows how to eat.”
Clair cleared her throat. “There’s a T. Mathers on the permanent guest list. The only other person listed is A. Talbot.”
Porter wrote ARTHUR TALBOT on the whiteboard with the word FINANCES? directly beneath. “I’m really curious to see what Hosman turns up on this guy. 4MK took this girl for a reason; I’m willing to bet the guy’s crooked.”
“Why not bring him in?” Clair asked.
“We bring him in and he’ll just lawyer up—we won’t get a thing out of him. If we need to talk to him again, I think it’s best to keep it an informal setting, try and catch him off-guard someplace he feels comfortable. He’s more likely to slip,” Porter told her. “He’s also a bigwig around town, buddies with the mayor and who knows who else. If we bring him in early, we may get nothing, then if we try to bring him back, he may call one of his buddies to run interference. Best to wait until we have something concrete.”
“This is interesting,” Kloz said. His eyes were fixed on his MacBook again. “The fancy elevators in that building record all the card traffic in and out.”
Porter groaned. “Are you operating under the same warrant you used to hack the boyfriend’s Facebook page right now? ’Cause if you are—”
Kloz raised both hands. “Come on now, do I look like a repeat offender?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Clair said under her breath.
“Fuck you too, Ms. Norton.”
She smirked and stuck out her tongue.
“The building manager was kind enough to provide access to us,” Kloz said.
“What do you see?” Porter asked.
He pursed his lips and squinted as he scrolled through a text file. “We’ve got Emory going down at 6:03 p.m. yesterday; she never comes back. All is quiet until 9:23 p.m.; then an N. Burrow goes up. She came back down at 9:06 this morning.”
“That’s only a few minutes before Metro arrived,” Clair said.
“I’m willing to bet that’s our missing housekeeper,” Porter said. “Can you run that by the front desk at Flair Tower? Ask if they can provide a full name?”
“Will do,” Kloz said, making a note.
Porter drew in a breath. “All right, that brings us to the man of the hour, our victim from this morning.” He told the group what they had learned from Eisley.
“Shit, he was dying?” Kloz said.
“Less than a month left.”
“Do you think he stepped in front of that bus intentionally?”
“I think we need to consider that a possibility,” Porter replied. He wrote 4MK on the board and listed the following:
Dry cleaner receipt
Expensive shoes—two sizes too big
Cheap suit
Fedora
.75 in change (two quarters, two dimes, and a nickel)
Pocket watch
Dying of stomach cancer
“I can’t believe the fucker was dying,” Kloz muttered, picking at something on his arm.
Porter tapped on the whiteboard. “What do the personal items tell us?”
“The dry cleaner recei
pt is a bust,” Clair said. “Aside from the number, there’s no identifying information, not even the name or address of the cleaners. It’s from a generic receipt book that can be ordered from hundreds of shops online. Half the cleaners in the city use the same one.”
“Kloz, I want you on that. Create a list of all cleaners within five miles of the accident this morning, and contact each one. Find out if they use this particular type of receipt. If they do, ask if number 54873 is active. Obviously, 4MK won’t be picking it up. Even if you find more than one, we’ll be able to narrow down the list as the other tickets get closed out. If you don’t find anything, expand your search grid. He was walking, though—I think the cleaners will be close.”
Kloz waved at him. “I accept your challenge.”
Nash scanned the board. “What do we do about the suit and shoes?”
“Kloz can check all the shoe stores while he’s running the dry cleaners,” Clair said.
Kloz raised his middle finger and stuck his tongue out at her.
Porter stared at the board a moment. “I’d rather Kloz focused on the cleaners. The size mismatch definitely bugs me too, but it’s just noise right now. We’ll keep the info on the board in case it comes into play later.”
“Coins aren’t much of a clue, either,” Nash pointed out. “Everyone in this room probably has a pocket of change right now.”
Porter considered erasing the seventy-five cents, then changed his mind. “We’ll leave that up there too.” He turned to Watson. “Any luck on the pocket watch?”
“I’ll head over to my uncle’s shop once we finish up here,” he replied.
Porter turned back to the board. “I think we’ll find him with this,” he said as he drew a line under DYING OF CANCER. “Eisley said he found octreotide, trastuzumab, oxycodone, and lorazepam in his system. Trastuzumab can only be administered by a handful of centers in the city. We need to reach out to each of them with a description of 4MK and hunt for missing patients.”
“I can do that,” Clair said. “How many fedora-wearing, cheap suit buying, expensive shoe owning stomach cancer patients can there possibly be out there? That’s where the clothing items will help us. He’d stand out walking into a treatment center dressed like that.”
“Good point,” Porter said. “Eisley also found a small tattoo on the man’s right inner wrist.” He loaded the image onto his phone’s screen and passed it around the room. “It’s fresh. Eisley said he probably got inked within the past week.”
Kloz studied it closely. “Is that an infinity symbol? Kinda ironic for a guy on his way out the exit door.”
“It obviously meant something to him,” Clair said, leaning over his shoulder to get a better look. “If you’re going to permanently mark your body, you put some serious thought behind your ink.”
Kloz grinned up at her. “Speaking from experience? Is there something you want to show the group?”
She winked at him. “You wish, geek boy.”
Porter reached into his pocket, removed the diary, and dropped it onto the table. “Then there’s this.” They all fell silent for a moment and stared at it.
“Shit, I thought Nash made that up,” Kloz said. “The fucker really had a diary on him? Did you log that into evidence? There’s no reference on the case log.”
Porter shook his head. “I don’t want the press to know. Not yet.”
Kloz whistled. “4MK’s handwritten manifesto? Hell, that’s worth a fortune.”
“It’s not a manifesto. It reads more like an autobiography, dating back to when he was a kid.”
Kloz leaned back in his chair. “What, like, ‘Today Becky Smith wore that little red dress I like to school. It made me happy. I decided to follow her home and ask her if she’d go steady with me. When she said no, I gutted her in her living room. Tomorrow is pizza day in the cafeteria. I like pizza, but not as much as burgers, burgers with cheese are—’ ”
Clair threw a pen at him.
“Ow!”
Nash nodded at the diary. “Okay, I’m going to ask about the elephant in the room. Have you flipped to the end? What’s on the last page?”
Porter reached out and gave it a little push. The book slid across the table, stopping in front of his partner. “Go ahead, take a peek.”
Nash’s eyes narrowed as he reached for the diary. The room had gotten very still. He turned the book over and opened to the last page, reading aloud.
Ah, good sir. Didn’t your mother ever tell you sneaking a look-see at the end of a good book before you’ve earned the right is a mortal sin? Authors around this great planet of ours are spinning in their graves, rolling their eyes in disgust, or flat out wishing ill will on you and yours. I would like to say I am truly disappointed in you, but that would be a lie. If circumstances were reversed and I were standing in your shiny loafers, I no doubt would have done the same. But alas, the answers that you seek are not to be found here at the end. I suggest you pour yourself a nice cup of joe, plant your posterior in your favorite chair, and turn back to the beginning. You really should start there, don’t you think? How could you understand how our story will end without knowing how I began? To know me is to know my reasons, and there are reasons. You only need to know where to take a gander. You need to understand how to read between the silly little lines. That’s half the fun, isn’t it? Learning how to play the game? Good luck, my friend. I’m rooting for you, I really am. This is all such fun, don’t you think?
Nash flipped through a few more pages before tossing the diary back onto the table. “Motherfucker.”
Porter shrugged. “Told you.”
Porter picked up the diary. “I’ve been reading this thing, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. It’s an autobiographical account of 4MK’s life, but so far I haven’t come across anything that will help us find Emory. All I’ve found are the ramblings of a very disturbed individual.”
“The fucker is dead and he’s still taunting us.”
“Maybe you should make some copies; if we all read it, we’ll get through it faster,” Clair said.
Porter shook his head. “We don’t have time to turn this into a book club, and I want all of you focusing on your assignments. I don’t trust anyone outside this room with it, so that leaves me. I’m a quick read—I find anything, I’ll get it out to you.”
“What about the camera at the scene?” Watson asked. “Has anyone reviewed the footage yet?”
“I put in a requisition, but Central hasn’t provided an analysis yet,” Kloz said. “I’ll chase it down.”
“At the very least, the video will tell us if he jumped in front of that bus on purpose, or if it was really an accident,” Porter replied. “If we’re lucky, we may get a good shot of his face.”
Nash shrugged. “My money is on suicide. Why else would he be carrying that book? He knew somebody was going to read it soon, or he wouldn’t have written that last page. He wanted to check out on his own terms rather than let the cancer eat him up. I’d be willing to bet he wanted us to find that book as a final fuck-you.”
“If he planned to kill himself, why do it before he even mailed the ear?” Watson asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to finish with the last victim first?”
“Serial killers aren’t the most rational members of the tribe,” Nash told him. “He may have held on to the ear, knowing it would help us ID him as 4MK.” He turned back to Porter. “Don’t forget to tell them about Eisley’s girlfriend.”
Porter nodded. “Yeah, almost forgot. Eisley’s got a friend at the museum who may be able to reconstruct his face from his skull. A female friend. If that pans out, we may get a usable photo.”
“Eisley has a girlfriend? Who dates a guy who works in the morgue?” Kloz wondered aloud.
“Sounds like she volunteered. I’m not going to turn down the help,” Porter said.
Watson was staring at the image of the tattoo again. “You know, this could all be about legacy.”
“What do you mean?�
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He set the phone back down. “He was dying, so he writes the journal, then he kidnaps his last victim and steps in front of that bus, knowing we’d identify him as 4MK because of the ear in the box. The infinity tattoo might mean just that—he plans to live on forever.”
“A tidy bow on a serial killer’s life,” Porter said softly.
“The really smart ones, the ones who skirt law enforcement for so long, eventually they want people to know. They want credit for their work. If you’re 4MK, would you want to die knowing the world would never know who you really are?” Watson shook his head. “Of course not; when you’ve eluded capture for as long as he has, you’d want to shout from a rooftop. We can’t touch him now, and he gets to go down in the history books.”
Porter knew the kid was right. “What does that mean for Emory?”
The room fell silent. Nobody had an answer.
* * *
Evidence Board
Victims
1. Calli Tremell, 20, March 15, 2009
2. Elle Borton, 23, April 2, 2010
3. Missy Lumax, 18, June 24, 2011
4. Susan Devoro, 26, May 3, 2012
5. Barbara McInley, 17, April 18, 2013 (only blonde)
6. Allison Crammer, 19, November 9, 2013
7. Jodi Blumington, 22, May 13, 2014
Emory Connors, 15, November 3, 2014
Left for a jog, 6:03 p.m. yesterday
TYLER MATHERS
Emory’s boyfriend
ARTHUR TALBOT
Finances?
N. BURROW
Housekeeper? Nanny?
ITEMS FOUND ON 4MK
Expensive shoes—John Lobb/$1500 pair—size 11/UNSUB wears size 9
