by Beverly Long
Which did not mean that Gabe had been lying.
She heard the garage door go up and stood so quickly that her chair skidded back on the ceramic tile. She didn’t want to be waiting like a dutiful wife. It was bad enough that she’d shopped and cooked.
She sure as hell didn’t want to be found searching for names that should mean nothing to her.
She almost ran back to the bedroom. Took off her blouse and slacks and pulled on yoga pants and a loose T-shirt. Pulled her hair back in a ponytail and wrapped an elastic band around it. She heard the door from the garage open, then Gabe’s footsteps. At the last second, she added a spritz of perfume, another gift from Gabe, to her wrists.
She sauntered down the hallway. “Hey, how’s it going?” she asked.
“Good.” He’d tossed his leather bag onto the table. He was looking down at the mail in his hands. “You’re home early,” he said without looking up.
She searched for some hidden meaning. “Yeah. And I got some chicken for dinner. Kabobs.”
That made him look up. “Okay. Do you want me to light the grill?”
No. I want you to kiss me, like you used to when you came in the door. “Sure. Whenever.” She chewed on her lip. “Good day today?”
He nodded. “I thought I said that.”
“Right.” She opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside. She was a very good interrogator. Maybe not as good as A.L., but better than most. And she didn’t have a clue what to say to him next.
Because she wasn’t sure she could handle the truth.
She pulled out the lettuce salad and set the bowl down hard on the granite counter. Then a small plastic container. She pushed it toward him. “There’s sauce to marinate the chicken while it’s cooking.”
“I’m going to change first,” he said, and walked out of the room. His phone, which he’d left on the counter, rang. Rena snatched it up and looked at the number. She hesitated for just a second before she answered.
“Hey, Danny,” she said.
“You’re answering the wrong phone,” he said.
“Gabe is changing clothes. What’s going on?”
“I need a favor. I’ve got to run back into work tonight, and my regular babysitter isn’t available. I need somebody to watch the boys for a couple hours.”
“We can do it,” she said. “Have they eaten?”
“No. But I probably have enough time to pick something up for them on my way over to your house.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll come get them, and they can eat with us. I’ve got plenty.” It wasn’t as if Gabe and she were going to have a romantic evening. He hadn’t seemed interested.
Maybe he’d gotten all the romance he needed this morning.
She was going to drive herself crazy. “I’ll see you in fifteen minutes,” she said, and hung up. She walked down the hall. Gabe had taken off his shirt, but that’s as far as he’d gotten before he’d collapsed onto the bed. He opened his eyes when she walked into the room.
“Your brother called. He needs somebody to watch the kids. I’m going to pick them up. Can you do the chicken while I’m gone?”
“Sure,” he said. “Is everything okay? You seem kind of off.”
It was her chance. A simple question and one explanation later everything would be cleared up. “Nope. I’m good.”
And a chickenshit, she added silently as she walked out the front door. Which meant there was too goddamn much chicken in the house.
When she got to Danny’s, both Josh and Tyler were watching television. “Hey, guys,” she said. Neither looked up, but Tyler, who had turned seven two months ago and lost both his front teeth, waved his arm in her direction. Josh, at ten, was too cool for that. They were both blond, like their mom had been, but had dark eyes, like Danny. And Gabe.
“Hey, gorgeous,” Danny said, coming from the back hallway. If he didn’t call her RB, that was the moniker she lived with. And usually, she didn’t even notice. But today, it felt good. Even if it was rote, it was nice.
“Hey, yourself,” she said. She opened her arms to give him a hug. Her own family hadn’t been huggers, had scarcely touched one another at all. But the Morgans gave out hugs like there was an infinite supply.
Danny was half a foot taller and two inches wider, and when he hugged her, he brought her in close to his body. “You smell good,” he said.
“Thank you.” It was nice somebody had noticed.
“You’re saving my bacon,” he said, stepping back.
She waved a hand. “It’s no problem.”
“I saw the article in the paper about the dead woman. Figured you might be extra busy at work.”
“Four in forty days.” She wasn’t telling any trade secrets.
“I worry about you,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to deal with scum like this.”
Danny had always been protective of Lindy, his wife. “I’m so much tougher than I look,” she said. “Got to be,” she added, “to deal with these two. Let’s go, boys. Chicken is cooking.”
“We wanted hot dogs,” Josh whined.
“Maybe next time,” she said. “Bye,” she threw over her shoulder.
“I’ll be by to pick them up by ten,” Danny said.
The boys would be a good distraction. There wouldn’t be any awkward silences between her and Gabe that she’d be tempted to fill.
Once they were in the car and away from the television, they were happy enough to have a conversation. They couldn’t wait for school to end for the summer, had big plans for the local pool and both were playing baseball.
It was good to hear the chatter, and it made her think that they were recovering from Lindy’s death about as well as one could expect.
“Dad had a date,” Josh said.
So Danny was also recovering. “Did you meet her?” Rena asked, switching lanes so that she could make the turn into her neighborhood.
“Nope. Too early.” This from Tyler. “Likely won’t go anywhere.”
She could hear Danny saying that. Reassuring his boys that him going on a date was no big thing. “I suppose that’s right. You guys okay with your dad dating?” See, she could ask the hard questions. Of everybody but Gabe.
“I suppose,” Josh said. “Mom left a letter and said that was what she wanted.”
The benefit of having a relatively slow death by cancer. Gave you time to pen a note to your kids and your spouse. “You know, even if your dad does start dating again, or gets really serious about somebody, you’ll always be the most important people to him.” It was true. Danny adored his kids.
“Oh, yeah,” Tyler said. “Can we play video games at your house?”
“You bet. After you eat some chicken and tell me how wonderful it was and that it was definitely worth the work I went to.” She smiled at them.
“Easy-peasy,” Josh said. “I say things I don’t mean all the time,” he added with a grin.
When he smiled, he looked so much like his uncle Gabe. Who was maybe also saying things he didn’t mean all the time? Like I love you and I want to have a child with you.
Tonight, after the boys left, she would ask about the woman.
Better to know than to let her imagination run free.
Seven
Thursday, May 12, Day 2
When A.L. got to work, there was a message on his phone from Sarah Waxell from the Downtown Association asking for a call back. It’s about the dead women. Those had been her parting words.
The call had come in at 2:57 a.m. Maybe she’d suddenly remembered something that she thought was important, or maybe she was a night owl.
He hoped it was the former. They needed to catch a break. He’d worked until midnight, painstakingly going over the files of all four women. But had found nothing that jumped out at him.
He dialed. She picked it
up on the second ring.
“Hello,” she said.
“This is Detective McKittridge calling you back.”
“Thank you. I thought of something that might be helpful to you.”
Door number one. “Okay, what’s that?”
“Remember I told you that I hoped Jane might become a regular donor to the Downtown Association because they’re kind of our lifeblood?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I found Jane through another charitable organization. I belong to several.” She paused. “The reality is that the people who give to one thing are more likely to give to another. So, I make a point to participate in other groups in hopes that I might convince donors to also give to the Downtown Association.”
She sounded apologetic. He thought the approach made sense. “Okay,” he said.
“It dawned on me that you might want to have a conversation with the organizer of that group. Just in case.”
“What’s the group?” he asked.
“Baywood Historic Preservation. They’ve been around for a while. And they’ve done some good work with saving and repairing some properties of historic significance in the community.”
He did not recall seeing anything in Jane Picus’s online accounts or paper records about the group. But any lead was better than no lead. “You have a contact name and number?” he asked.
Sarah rattled them off.
“Got it. Thanks for the call.”
“I hope you catch this guy,” she said. “It’s making everybody really nervous.”
“We will,” he said. The question was how many more women were going to die first.
None, if A.L. could help it.
He hung up the phone and saw Rena enter the department. Like always, she was carrying a cup of coffee.
“Got something,” he said, and filled her in on Sarah’s call. He entered the organization name into his computer and pulled up its website. “They operate out of a storefront just three blocks from here.”
“We could probably just call them.”
He looked over his left shoulder where Christian Faster was moving into Toby Kingman’s office. He was wearing a suit that probably cost more than A.L.’s first car and giving instructions to a guy from the maintenance department, pointing where he should park the dolly he was wheeling. It was stacked high with boxes. Like that was going to convince anybody that Faster actually did something all day.
He turned back to Rena. “Let’s get out of here.”
She drove, and he rode shotgun. It took them longer to walk from the parking lot behind the store than it had to drive there. Once inside, they followed the signs to a first-floor office. The door was unlocked.
There was an unmanned desk in the small lobby. Off to the right was a large room, with rows of folding chairs. A.L. counted thirty-six. There was a podium in the front. Off to the left was a hallway. Three doors on each side. All closed. “Hello,” A.L. called out. “Anybody here?”
They heard a click, and then a man, about fifty, with very little hair left on his head, came from the last door on the left, wiping his hands with a paper towel.
Great. They’d probably interrupted his morning shit.
“Sorry. Diane just stepped out for a minute. Can I help you?”
A.L. opened his badge, Rena did the same. “Detectives McKittridge and Morgan,” he said. “And you are?”
“Gavin Rice,” the man said. “I’m the director of Baywood Historic Preservation, or as we call it, BHP. What can I do for you?”
“We’re interested in obtaining some information about a few individuals who may have been donors to the group.”
The man nodded. “I’ll try to be helpful, of course.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rice,” Rena said.
“Please, just Gavin.”
“Okay, Gavin. Can you tell us if Jane Picus, Leshia Fowler, Marsha Knight or LeAnn Jacobs were donors?”
The man scrunched up his very large forehead, and A.L. was suddenly grateful for his still-thick head of hair. Traci teased him about the gray at the temples, but at least it was there.
“Those are all the dead women,” Gavin said.
Rena nodded. The Bulletin had rehashed all the names in yesterday’s edition under the headline Is Locking Your Door Enough? Couldn’t fault them for wanting to sell newspapers, and this was a hell of a bigger draw than a recap of a school board meeting.
“None of them are on our honor roll,” he said. “That’s a list of our biggest donors in the past five years.”
“Could they have made less-substantial donations?” Rena asked.
“Of course. That’s actually our business model. While some fund-raising organizations are interested in courting a few big donations, we’ve always leaned toward soliciting lots of smaller donations from a much larger group. For example, we want to make it easy for ten people to pass over a twenty-dollar bill versus one person writing a two-hundred-dollar check.”
“Do you track those twenty-dollar donations?”
“If they are made by check or by credit card. But at our events, we generally pass the hat for cash, and those donations aren’t tracked, of course.”
It was another brick wall. A.L. looked at Rena, to give her the high sign that they should wrap it up. But she was staring at the six-drawer filing cabinet behind the reception desk.
“Gavin,” she said. “Do attendees check in at your events? Maybe provide an email account?”
“No check-in,” he said. “But sometimes there’s a petition that we might be collecting signatures on. That’s always good evidence for the city council that we’ve got broad-based support for our issues.”
“Could we take a look at anything like that from the past twelve months?” Rena asked.
“Sure,” Gavin said.
He walked over to the filing cabinet, opened the drawer at chest level and pulled out a manila folder. He handed it to A.L.
A.L. opened the file. It had less than ten sheets of paper.
He didn’t need that many, because on page six, he found what they were looking for. It was a petition to save a building located at 470 Waterfront Street. He knew the general area. It wasn’t that far from the factory where his dad and uncle worked.
He wasn’t so much focused on the what but rather the who. Who had signed the petition? Leisha Fowler, their first victim, was the tenth signature down. Marsha Knight, their second, was on line thirty. His eyes moved down, and he felt a cold sweat break out on his body. LeAnn Jacobs had signed on line forty. And Jane Picus on line fifty.
Christ. They’d won the fucking lottery. “What’s located at 470 Waterfront Street?” he asked, working hard to keep his tone neutral.
“That’s the old Gizer Hotel,” Gavin said. “Opened for business in the early 1880s. Four different US presidents have stayed there, and it served as a set in a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in the early 1960s. There are some developers trying to buy the property. They want to demolish the hotel. We’re trying to save it.” He was leaning forward, trying to see the paper.
A.L. made sure he didn’t. “Can you give us a minute of privacy, Gavin?”
“Uh...sure.”
He paused, likely hoping that A.L. was going to tell him why. When that wasn’t forthcoming, he said, “I’ll be in my office. Knock on my door when you’re ready for me.”
A.L. waited until the second door on the left closed behind Gavin before jabbing the paper in front of Rena. “Start with line ten and go down from there.”
It took her just seconds. “Holy shit,” she said, her voice hushed. “This is it. The link.”
The signatures were not dated. Some were in black ink, some blue, some even in pencil.
Rena and A.L. locked eyes. “Ten. Thirty. Forty. Fifty,” he said.
“What happened t
o twenty?” She ran her index finger across the page. “Mia Franklin. Who printed her name in all lowercase letters.”
“The only one not to write her name in cursive,” A.L. said.
“That can’t be it. That can’t be a reason to skip her.” Rena looked up. “Oh, God. What if she wasn’t skipped? What if she’s dead—been dead?”
A.L. shook his head. “Timing doesn’t work. The four women were killed ten days apart. Ten is the pattern. Ten down. Ten days apart.”
“But Mia Franklin got skipped.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know why,” A.L. said. He pointed at line sixty. “Tess Lyons. She’s next.”
“Tess Lyons,” Rena repeated the name. “Tess is probably short for something. Theresa or Teresa, no H. Or Theodora, maybe?”
“Did her parents hate her?”
Rena smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Now that we have this, what the hell do we do with it?”
He understood the question. Of course, the easy answer was protect Tess Lyons. And, in the process, catch the killer. But how best to do it? “We’ll put a decoy in her house. And when the asswipe shows up on May 20, he’s toast.”
Rena nodded.
He knew what she was thinking. What if something went wrong and they failed?
That was too horrible to even contemplate.
“We need to tell Faster what we’re thinking. Before we take this to the task force meeting,” Rena said. “We would have told Toby.”
That was true, but Toby would have had good, insightful suggestions on how to proceed. Christian Faster would probably have to consult a manual. “That’s going to be a waste of time,” A.L. said. It was a token protest. They would have to tell Faster, because they were going to need resources to make sure Perp didn’t slip through their fingers.
He pulled his smartphone off his belt. Keyed in “Tess Lyons” and “Baywood, Wisconsin.” Pressed Search. “I think I’ve got her,” he said. “Lives on Prescott Lane. Not Theresa, Teresa no H, or even Theodora. It’s Tessera. Her parents definitely hated her.”
“Stop saying that,” Rena said.
“Jesus Christ, Morgan. Aren’t you happy? This is a big find, and we got it because you asked the right question.”
