by Blake Pierce
It then occurred to her that the only way Duran would have known about this was if one of the real estate companies had contacted Armstrong or even the FBI directly. Apparently, not everyone thought it was the best idea. She understood it on a professional level, but she also hated that she and DeMarco were being second-guessed. To be twenty-six years old and feel as if someone were tattling on you was not a great feeling.
“Wise, you understand how much fear that causes, right? From what I understand, there are agents that are afraid to go just about anywhere now because of this.”
“Maybe they should for now,” she said. “Look, if someone has spoken to you about that decision, then I assume you also know it’s a slow time for sales in the market. These homes have all been hard sales because now that the weather is turning cooler, no one really cares about looking for homes by the lake. All of these things were strongly considered before we made such a decision. And the only reason anyone cares now is because, aside from the dead agents, there is a fear that the murders will make the homes harder to sell.”
“Well, I also know that the governor isn’t happy. I had the displeasure of speaking to him as well. Kate, this is one of those cases that has the potential to turn very ugly and very public—very quickly. Do you understand?”
She had assumed this much but was really hoping it would not come to that. The fact that the last murder had occurred in a home the governor owned and was currently trying to sell made this case a hell of a lot more slippery.
“I understand.”
“Let’s get this thing wrapped. I’d really rather not have an entire team out there by the lake with the governor of the state of Delaware watching it all unfold.”
They ended the call, Kate a little taken aback by Duran’s demeanor. He was typically a down to earth man and was only ever disagreeable when he felt something was getting away from him. It made her wonder if he had been expecting more out of DeMarco and was regretting his decision to send her alone in the first place. Kate wondered if this had been an exploratory sort of case where he was trying to feel DeMarco out—maybe to see what sort of agent she’d be able to lead once Kate retired for good and DeMarco need to be paired up with someone else.
“How much of that did you hear?” Kate asked DeMarco.
“Enough.”
“I don’t know why he called me. Sorry, DeMarco.”
“I do. There are three bodies now and I’m a young agent without a lot of experience. It’s okay, Kate. You’re the smarter choice here. I’m a big girl and I know that. It’s okay.”
“Still…” Kate said, feeling like she had unintentionally pulled the rug out from under her partner.
“So what do we do now?” DeMarco asked.
“We need to light some fires to get those lists from the real estate agencies,” Kate said. “If we can get a complete list of every single person who had access to those houses, there has to be something there.”
“We’ve struck out with it so far,” DeMarco commented.
“So then we need to dig harder,” Kate said, pulling out her phone to make a call to all three of the real estate agencies in the area.
DeMarco headed back into the interrogation room with Regina Voss while Kate started making her calls. She felt as if the case had shifted in the course of the past two minutes or so, that Duran’s decision to call her rather than DeMarco had meant more than it seemed. It made her feel slightly guilty, but she could not let that get in the way of cracking this case. They could not assume that because all real estate showings were being placed on hold that the killer would stop.
It then occurred to her that perhaps the killer was only targeting real estate agents because they were easy prey. They typically ventured into nice homes by themselves in preparation for stagings or to take notes and pictures. Maybe now that they had made it much harder for him to target real estate agents, he’d move on to something else.
It felt like a flimsy theory, though. There had been three so far. It spoke of a connection, of some kind of grudge almost.
No, someone so committed would not be deterred because they had made it harder for him. Hell, someone like that might not even be aware that he was being investigated. To someone so committed, there might only be the murders in his life and nothing else. She’d seen it happen before and while some tended to think such a criminal would be easier to mind, it actually made them a little more elusive; they did not stick to ritual or schedule and were much less predictable.
If anything, it might get him thinking more creatively. And that could be the worst thing possible for the case.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He’d nearly had a panic attack when the woman had coming knocking at his driver’s side window. At first he’d just assumed she was nothing more than some nosy bitch, unable to stand seeing someone parked in front of a house and not knowing why. But within just a few moments, he had gotten the feeling that she had been there on purpose. She’d had the look of a woman who was looking for something.
He had watched her walk quickly away from his car, drawn away by something else. When she was around the corner and out of sight, he’d looked to his piece of lumber almost lovingly before starting the engine to his Taurus and pulling to the end of the street. When he spotted the woman speaking to two other women in a rather heated way, he turned left and drove away from them. He checked the rearview a few times as he made his escape and as far as he could tell, he was never followed.
With no clear place left to go, he drove around Estes for a while. He headed out toward the lake, driving slowly along the stretch of highway that etched itself along the water for about a mile and a half. It was oddly calming—which was exactly what he needed. He knew that some people preferred the ocean to the lake, but the lake had always calmed him. The lake was still and contained, whereas the ocean was endless and raging, its depths unknown.
He was well aware that his work was going to be much harder now. The police had been swarming for the past few days and while the Estes police force wasn’t very big and, in his opinion, not to be taken too seriously, he knew he could not underestimate them. After all, even a hornet’s nest looked mostly non-threatening if you were standing far enough away from it. But when it was stirred, things could get quite dangerous.
It made him wonder if the woman who had bothered him earlier was some sort of law enforcement. Maybe she was a detective, or someone sent in from the State Police to help the Estes force. The conversation she’d started with him certainly made her seem as if she had some sort of agenda. If she had been some sort of cop or detective or something like that, she had nearly had him. Had she not been distracted by something else, it might all be over for him right now.
The very idea made him nervous. It made him want to go ahead with his original plans, not worried that he might get caught. But really…of course he did not want to get caught. He just needed to calm down, needed to think. He had known from the start that it would get harder with each death. But he had not expected it to get so difficult so fast.
He couldn’t let this little setback discourage him, though. After all, so far he was in the clear. No one suspected a thing. He was reminded of just how well he had done as he stopped by a gas station and pumped a tank of gas. Someone he vaguely knew waved at him as they passed by. Not once did anyone look at him as if they suspected anything. No one knew what he was up to. No one knew how he was getting into the houses, sleeping there and studying the schedules of the agents and builders.
This sense of freedom and power gave him the nerve he needed to start working toward his next step. He left the road that ran along the side of Fallows Lake and headed deeper into Estes, where the lakeside community gave way to what started to look more like a typical well-to-do neighborhood. Taking a chance, he drove back by the home he had been parked in front of an hour ago when the woman had tapped on his window. The woman was no longer there, and the trio was no longer standing on the sidewalk. That made him feel much better, too.
Relieved, he headed back into familiar territory. He could have probably taken the route blindfolded. Within another ten minutes, he was pulling his car into the parking lot of Davis and Hopper Realty. The lot was L-shaped, the front portion used by the agents and clients, the side portion used by customers of the liquor store and marketing company that rented out space on the back half of the lot.
He parked on the side space, beside the green pickup truck. He’d been here enough to know that the green truck belonged to one of the owners of the marketing company. The truck always parked in the same space. By parking beside the truck, he could still see almost the entire lot over at Davis and Hooper. And because it was a fairly quiet part of town (hell, weren’t they all quiet areas in a town like Estes?), he had no fear of being seen. Even if he was seen, no one would think much of it. He was not memorable, though some people in Estes knew his face. He’d never been a memorable type. And while it was something he had felt sad about in his youth, it was paying off now.
The woman in charge of showing the house he had been parked in front of earlier in the day was named Monique Whorley. He’d been following her for just as long as he’d been following the other three, but she tended to show fewer properties. The ones she did show, though, were usually high-end homes. Of course, nothing really moved this time of year in Estes, so that meant she wasn’t getting out of the office much.
He’d been camped in front of her latest home earlier, fairly certain she was due to go by. When she had not shown up, he’d started to wonder if the agencies were starting to make adjustments, perhaps frightened by the likelihood of a murderer that seemed to be targeting agents. When the strange woman had knocked on his window, it had strengthened that suspicion. And now, the fact that Monique had still not made it out to the house made it a damn near certainty.
He sat there for another thirty-five minutes, eyeing the adjacent side of the parking lot. He sat bolt upright in his seat when Monique came out. She walked slowly across the lot, a slightly overweight African American woman with a bright smile. But she was not smiling today. In fact, she looked rather somber. Probably sad about the recent deaths. All of the agents knew one another. In fact, he knew that two or three of them were sleeping together, in some weird little love triangle. He’d heard two agents chatting about it last week while he’d been rooted down in the crawlspace of a house out closer to the lake.
He watched as Monique unlocked her car and opened the driver’s side door. He smiled as he watched her, wondering if it was really going to be this easy. He gripped the steering wheel in anticipation, feeling that familiar excitement sweep through him. If she was going to the house he had been perched in front of earlier, that would be it. He’d kill her and move on to—
A man came out of the Davis and Hooper building, hurrying to catch up with her. The two of them had a brief conversation over the hood of her car as he approached the passenger’s side door. He opened the door, got in, and the car slowly pulled away.
From his seat in his Taurus, he watched the car pull off. Disappointment and sharp anger overcame him. He hissed numerous curses under his breath, the words coming out with such force between his clenched teeth that spit came out, spattering the windshield. He felt himself starting to lose control but shut it down instantly. He pushed it all down; it felt like swallowing hot tar.
He could either lose his shit or he could follow her. So what if someone else was with her? So what if the recent swarm of police activity was going to make his work more difficult?
He thought of his mother and what she would think of her son, the quitter. Her son, the moron who shut down at the least hint of change and threw a hissy fit.
“To hell with it,” he said.
He cranked the car, peeled out of the parking spot, and followed after Monique Whorley and her passenger.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The complete set of lists came quickly, as the very real threat of having to shut down all real estate transactions for an unknown amount of time suddenly had all three agencies far beyond cooperative. With Regina Voss released and sent back home (still shouting threats of suing everyone under God’s bright yellow sun), Kate and DeMarco were left alone once again, scouring the lists and making calls while Armstrong worked with her small force to interview the local families and friends of the deceased agents.
“I suppose this could be much worse,” DeMarco said as she looked over the list that had been sent in by Crest Realty. “Can you imagine the length of this kind of a list in DC? Or New York?”
Kate made a whistling noise, not even wanting to imagine that kind of horror. It made her very grateful for the comparatively short list she now held in her hands. It was the list from Lakeside Realty and was only thirteen people deep. Actually, it should have been twenty or so people deep, but the names of several of the Sheetrock contractors could not be found; Kate wasn’t too surprised, as she knew it was nothing unusual to have undocumented workers on the manual labor front.
She crossed through the names they had already spoken to, and the fact that it left only eight names left her feeling hopeless. She knew that if there were no leads on this list, the case was going to be incredibly difficult and certainly be unable to solve on the quickened timeline Duran had given them.
“DeMarco, can I see that list from Crest?” she asked.
DeMarco slid it across the table to her. Kate saw that DeMarco had also already crossed through a few names on her own list. Hers was narrowed down to only five names, making it that much easier for Kate to see two names that were also on the Lakeside list. With a sudden childlike excitement, Kate drew an asterisk by each one.
“Two similarities on these two lists,” Kate said. She turned the papers around so that DeMarco could see them.
“You know, the name Roger Carr was on the very short list we got from Davis and Hopper, too.” DeMarco dug around in the several piles of paper they had accumulated, found the list, and checked it. “Yeah, right here. Roger Carr, the appraiser on most of the homes Crest Realty has sold in the last five years.”
“But this other name similar on Lakeside and Crest—Margie Phelps—she’s not on the Davis and Hopper list.”
“Correct. Phelps does staging, I believe. Still, two out of three seems legit to me,” DeMarco said.
“So, let’s go pay them both a visit,” Kate said. “At the very least, they might be able to give us some information about squatters. I’m starting to understand it might be a larger problem than I’d originally thought.”
Though she never felt truly effective when tracking down a lead that had been culled from a list, Kate managed to feel upbeat as she and DeMarco left the station and headed back out into Estes. While it might be a bit premature to get excited over one similarity between two of the Realtors, having two was too promising to ignore.
***
Roger Carr’s home was located less than ten minutes away from the police station. He lived in a small row of townhouses that, while not decrepit by any means, were easily on the lower end of residences in Estes. It seemed strange to Kate, as she figured an appraiser for homes in an area around a lake would be quite wealthy.
They knocked on his door and got no answer. After they knocked a second time, they stepped away as DeMarco used her phone to search for his business name and number. She called the number listed under Carr Appraisals and Estimates and placed the call on speakerphone as she and Kate got back into the car.
The call was answered by an older-sounding lady with a pleasant grandmotherly voice.
“I need to speak with Roger Carr, please,” DeMarco said.
“I’m sorry, but he’s out on a job right now,” the lady said. “He’s due back in a few hours, though, if you’d like to leave a message.”
“No thank you,” DeMarco said. “But I do need to speak with him quite urgently about a property in the area. Would you happen to know the address he is currently visiting?”
Kate grinned. It was smart of DeMarco not to
pull the FBI card just yet. An older lady in a small community likely had a sense of loyalty to her employer, and there was no telling how she might respond to having the FBI call, looking for her boss.
“Oh, I see! Well, hold on one second…the address is right here…ah, here we are. He’s out at 422 Hammermill. You know where it is?”
“Yes ma’am,” DeMarco said as Kate instantly started the engine. “Thanks so much.”
DeMarco ended the call and they shared a look that was almost the equivalent of exchanging a telepathic thought. In the end, it was Kate who spoke it out loud as she backed out of the lot.
“Hammermill is the same street Tamara Bateman was killed on.”
With it spoken out loud, the entire scenario felt more urgent. While there was no smoking gun just yet, Kate couldn’t help but feel that they were at least headed in the right direction.
***
To get to 422 Hammermill, they had to drive by the house Bea Faraday had been killed in. Kate was not superstitious by any means, but she couldn’t help but feel as if this was some sort of an omen. When they pulled up in front of the property at 422, it occurred to Kate for the first time that a community like this one must always be in a certain state of flux: vacationers coming and going, people with a midlife crisis on their hands, buying and then promptly selling lakeside properties, the unpredictability of the summer season. It had to be a slight nightmare for real estate companies and land developers.
And a surefire annoyance to residents like Regina Voss.
The house was a basic two-story with no clear style. The few cracks along the sidewalk indicated that it was not a new build, though the yard looked to have been recently mowed and it was clear to even Kate’s untrained eye that the siding had been power washed. They walked up to the front door with a sense of urgency. Kate wasn’t quite convinced that the killer might be inside, but she did feel that the coincidence of it all was far too much to be ignored.
