Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

“How was she going to get to the Hoover farm?” Dagny asked. “Did she have a rental car?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s a mystery. We figured she must have called for a cab, but we got her cell phone records, and there were no calls to a taxi company.”

  “Maybe she had the hotel call for her?”

  “We checked the call log for the hotel front desk and for her hotel room. Again, no calls to taxi companies from either.”

  “Uber?”

  “No Uber service out here, or Lyft.”

  “Well, she wasn’t going to walk from New Bilford to the Hoover farm. Someone had to be picking her up.”

  She played the video footage from the hotel lobby again. “No clerk at the desk?”

  “He was in the restroom when she left,” Brent said. “We talked to him. Says he never saw her or talked to her.”

  “What about the clerk who worked the night before?”

  “We haven’t gotten to him yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’ve had a lot on our plate, and we’re prioritizing.”

  “Maybe Jenkins had him call for a cab the night before.”

  “He didn’t. Remember? We checked the hotel call logs.”

  “He could have used his cell phone.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe he had the number of a cab company programmed in his cell, and it was easier to hit the call button than to dial all those digits in the hotel phone.”

  Brent seemed to be searching for a counterargument but came up empty. “Okay, you’re right. Let’s go talk to the guy.”

  CHAPTER 60

  The thin man tried to screw the video camera onto the tripod, but it wasn’t working. “Never done this before,” he said to Allison.

  It was good that he hadn’t done it before, she figured. It meant that he didn’t get off on filming his murders, so maybe he had something else in store for her. Her mouth was muzzled, so she couldn’t tell him that he was spinning it the wrong way.

  Finally, he tried turning the camera the opposite way, and it attached. “Rookie mistake,” he said. “I’m told this is a good camera and will get us good footage. Good enough for all the news stations, I hope.” He walked over to her and untied the scarf that covered her mouth. “You’re going to be famous, Ally. Famous all around the world.” After a moment, he added, “Almost as famous as me.”

  Her arms, torso, and legs were still tied to her chair. “Want to undo the rest, too?” she asked.

  He smiled, ran his hand through his greasy hair, and smacked her in the face. The blow stung her cheek. “There are a hundred ways this story could go, and you end up alive in only one of them. You should do your best to stay in my good graces.”

  She studied him as he fiddled with the camera, pushing buttons and adjusting the zoom on the lens. Who was this man? In her short career as a journalist, she’d had the chance to cover a few murders, but all of them involved family disputes or business deals gone wrong. This was her first serial killer. He was wearing a human body, but she was having trouble finding anything else human about him. “You know, I don’t even know your name,” she said.

  He smiled. “I like that you stay in reporter mode. That will work fine.” He pushed the “Record” button on the video camera, and a red light came on. Allison smiled—an involuntary reflex to a live camera. “I’m trying to get it so that we’re both in the frame. What do you call that?”

  “A two-shot,” Allison said. “I need to use the restroom again.” She hated to ask, because each time he watched her on the toilet.

  “After we’re done, if you do a good job.”

  “A good job at what?”

  “Making the world like me.”

  Tall order, she thought.

  He tore three sheets of lined paper from a pad and placed them on her lap. A series of questions had been scratched in childlike print. He had scripted an interview.

  “I need to test the sound,” he said. “Give me an introduction.”

  She took a deep breath and looked at the camera. “This is Allison Jenkins, live at the home of—”

  “Cut!” he shouted. “You need to bring the energy, Ally, or this isn’t going to work. I want this to feel like a real newscast.”

  She forced a smile and tried again with feigned enthusiasm. “This is Allison Jenkins, live at the home of the silo killer.”

  “Better,” he said. “I like the silo-killer thing.” He rewound the tape and played it back. Seemingly satisfied, he flipped the camera’s monitor around so that it faced Jenkins. “What do you think?”

  She looked terrible. Her hair was stringy and oily. There were bags under her eyes. Her cheek was still red where he had hit her. If she got out alive, it would make great footage for her reel. “Looks fine,” she said.

  He grabbed the remote for the camera, sat across from her, and scooted the seat forward so that he was within the frame of the shot. “I’ve written your questions,” he said. “They’ll take me through the whole story.”

  “I can’t turn the pages with my hands tied.”

  “I’ll turn them for you.” He smiled and tilted his head as he craned it closer to look down at the notes. “This is going to be great.” He pressed a button on the remote, and the red light came on. “Okay, Allison. Let’s start.”

  She looked into the camera and imagined that she was talking to the world. This time, she didn’t need to feign the enthusiasm. “This is Allison Jenkins, live at the home of the silo killer, with an exclusive interview.”

  It took a half hour for him to tell his story. He gave long answers to each of the questions she read, and though his words seemed rehearsed, they also seemed genuine. The first part of the story—the part before the murders—was heart-wrenching and powerful; at one point, he began crying, and, lost in the moment, so did she. This man had been wounded in an unimaginable way. The press should have reported what happened to him, but the press didn’t; it was one of those silent tragedies that no one ever knows, or at least it would have been if the man hadn’t started killing people.

  Any sympathy she felt for him disappeared as he described his descent into murder, which he portrayed alternatively as accidental, involuntary, necessary, impulsive, premeditated, cathartic, and never anything less than genius and poetic. He doted on the details of each gruesome death with a sickening pride. By the time he had answered the last question he had written, she was filled with such disgust and contempt for the man that she wanted to spit on him.

  The thin man smiled at her. “That was perfect, don’t you think? Now, everyone will understand why I had to do this.”

  She stared at him. “You didn’t have to do any of this.” The words bubbled out from the most human, least ambitious part of her soul.

  He leaned toward her, and his face filled with rage. “I just explained it as clearly as I can. You still don’t understand?”

  She’d made a mistake and had to undo it. “No, I understand. It does make sense.”

  “You just said it didn’t.”

  “I was wrong. It does.”

  The man froze for a moment, and then his body began to shake. “You know what? You’ve been a silly distraction, and this has been a waste of time.” He raised his voice. “I’ve given you all this attention, and the gift of my story, and all you’ve done is deceive with your beauty and your manner. I opened my heart to you!”

  He went to the closet and pulled a thick, coiled rope from the shelf.

  “Please, don’t. Please! I understand your story. I appreciate your gift.”

  He walked toward her with the rope. “It’s too late, Allison. We were having a wonderful moment, and you ruined it.”

  He looped the rope around her neck and pulled it right. It hurt her for a moment, and then it was over.

  CHAPTER 61

  “Okay, so how does this work?” Matthew Darrow wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Do I need a lawyer or something? Or do we just talk?”

&nb
sp; “We’re asking everyone at the hotel questions,” Brent said, patting the boy’s arm with a collegial charm that Dagny never attempted. “Just listen and tell us what you remember. It’s easy.”

  It frustrated her that Darrow hadn’t been interviewed yet. Anyone working at the hotel during Allison Jenkins’s stay should have been questioned immediately. Even in the largest investigations, things fell through the cracks.

  “You were working at the front desk the night before Allison Jenkins disappeared?” Dagny asked.

  “I was, yes.”

  “Did you see her that evening?”

  “She had trouble with her key card, so I had to recode it.”

  “Do you remember what time that was?”

  “No. Not too late.”

  “After dinner?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  “Can you remember what she said?”

  “The whole conversation?”

  “Yes,” Brent said.

  “As well as you can,” Dagny added.

  “She came up and had her card in her hand and said something like, ‘I seem to be having trouble with the key card.’ I explained that this happens sometimes, and that I would be glad to recode it.’ And then I did and gave it back to her.”

  She knew there was more detail to be had. “How did you know what room to recode it for? Did you ask her name?”

  “I didn’t have to. She’s on TV.”

  “Did you look up her room number?”

  He paused. “I don’t remember. I must have. Maybe I asked her.”

  “And then what?”

  “She went back to her room, I guess.”

  “Nothing else?”

  He shook his head, but then stopped. “Actually, she asked me to call her a cab for the next morning.”

  There it was. “What time in the morning?”

  Darrow folded his top lip under his bottom. “I’m not sure. Early, I know. Maybe four thirty.”

  “And then what happened?” Dagny asked.

  “She went back to her room, I guess.”

  “And did you reserve a cab?”

  “I must have.”

  “But you didn’t use the hotel phone,” Brent said.

  The boy shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Could you have used your cell?” Dagny asked.

  The boy pulled his phone from his pocket and scrolled through his call history. “I don’t see it here.” He handed it to Dagny. The only calls on the night in question were to “Mom” and “Tony.”

  “Who’s Tony?”

  “He’s a friend from high school. We met up at Steak ’n Shake when I got off that night.”

  “So you didn’t call a cab for Ms. Jenkins?” Brent asked.

  “I could have sworn that I . . .” There was a flicker of cognition in his eyes. “No, I didn’t call because there was a guy in the lobby who worked for a cab company. He said he’d make the reservation.”

  No one ever remembered the important stuff right away. “Who was this guy?” Dagny asked. “Had you seen him before?”

  “No, never.”

  “Did he say his name?”

  “No.”

  “The company he worked for?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What did he look like?”

  The boy scratched his head. “The only thing I remember is that he was real thin.”

  “Clothes? Height? Facial hair? Accent?”

  “I’m sorry. I just don’t remember.”

  This is okay, Dagny thought. “Where’s the security feed from that night?”

  “We boxed up their whole system and took it back to the high school,” Brent replied.

  It took them twenty minutes to drive back to Bilford High, and then another ten to sift through the file index to find the box that held the hard-drive recording of the Hampton Inn security feed. Brent pulled it down from the shelf, and they hooked it up to Dagny’s laptop in the gym teacher’s office.

  The camera showed the top and back of the clerk’s head and a clear shot of everyone who approached the counter. The time slider at the bottom of the video showed the length of the recording: nine and a half hours. Dagny wished the kid had a better recollection of the time he had talked to Jenkins. She toggled the playback speed until it reached 16x.

  At 8:11, a young, attractive woman approached the counter, followed by a man in a suit. “That’s Allison Jenkins and her producer, Jack McDaniel,” Brent said.

  Dagny paused the video and pointed to a man sitting in a chair in the lobby. His face was hidden behind a newspaper. “That’s the guy the kid was talking about.” She hit “Play” again, and they watched the clerk recode keys for Jenkins and McDaniel. When they left the frame, the seated man tugged down the bill of his Reds cap, folded his newspaper, and walked to the desk. The cap obscured all but his mouth and chin.

  “He’s thin, all right,” Brent said. “That’s the unsub.”

  When the thin man walked out of frame, she rewound the video until she found him entering the hotel lobby. They watched him grab a newspaper and head for a chair.

  Dagny scrolled slowly through the sequence again and found a frame where the thin man had tipped his head up a bit so that the bottom of his nose was visible. “Sadly, that’s as good as we’re going to do.” She took a screen capture and e-mailed it to the Professor.

  Brent rubbed his fingers on his chin. “So the unsub’s at home, watching coverage of his crime. Sees her on the news, develops a little crush. Follows her to the hotel, and then arranges to pick her up the next morning?”

  “He’d need to steal a taxi,” Dagny said. “He’d want her to get in the car willingly, so there wouldn’t be an altercation that a clerk might see.”

  “Maybe he’s a taxi driver. If he stole a cab, wouldn’t a taxi company report it to the police?”

  She tried to think of a scenario when it wouldn’t. The gruff voice of an octogenarian called out a possible answer. “Perhaps the driver owns his own car and was set to go on vacation.”

  They turned around to see the Professor standing in the doorway. “The NSA is still sifting through its data, trying to isolate calls from Diablo Rico to Ohio,” he said. “In the meantime, that taxi is our next-best bet. There are six taxi companies that service Bilford. Split up and find the taxi that’s missing.”

  CHAPTER 62

  The thin man had carried a lot of bodies over the past few months, but none were as light as Allison Jenkins. He tossed her over his shoulder and took her down the stairs of his house, scanned his front yard through the window, and carried her out the door to the back of the stolen taxi. Sliding the key into the lock, he popped the trunk, only to be overcome by the stink of a rotting body. The stench was so pungent that he dropped Allison to the ground.

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. He’d forgotten about the driver. It was a stupid and dangerous mistake. The thin man lifted the suitcases out of the trunk, reached into the cabbie’s pocket, and fished out his cell phone. The battery was dead. What did that mean? Could they still trace the phone to his home? That Snowden kid said they could track just about anything.

  The dead cabbie’s skin had developed a greenish hue, and his face looked bloated and grotesque. “You deserve this for what you’ve done to me,” the thin man said. Picking up Jenkins, he tossed her on top of the old man’s body and slammed the trunk shut.

  He jogged over to the front passenger door of his pickup, pulled a gun from the glove compartment, and holstered it under his arm. Bounding back to the taxi, he climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  His mind was spinning, and he lay his head on the steering wheel. Was the old man’s phone a problem? The government traced phones—he knew that. Were they tracing the taxi driver’s phone to his house? Were they coming for him right now? He turned off the engine and ran back into his house, flipped on the television, and sat down.

  A reporter was standing in front of the Hampton Inn, talking a
bout Allison Jenkins’s abduction. The station flashed to a video still of the thin man standing at the hotel’s registration counter.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit.” They knew about the taxi, and they’d be looking for it.

  It was time to move. The banks foreclosed houses ten times faster than they could sell them, and he knew of at least a hundred vacant houses in the county. Cycling through them in his mind, he narrowed the list to the most secluded.

  He ran upstairs and stuffed a duffel bag with clothes and supplies. That goddamn Dagny Gray was making him leave his house. It was the only thing left in his life, and now he had to leave it for good. She’d taken something important from him, and he was going to take something important from her. Seething with rage, he ran down the steps and out the front door, tossed the duffel in the back of his pickup, hopped into the truck, and set off to kill a man.

  CHAPTER 63

  The first two taxi companies were dead ends. No missing taxicabs, no thin drivers. Now it was dark. Dagny glanced at the dashboard clock. It was half past nine. Another day was almost gone. She checked her Weight Watchers app and saw that her point tally for the day was zero. Scrolling back, she saw that yesterday’s was zero also. Perhaps this system of weight management wasn’t built to last.

  She drove through a Wendy’s drive-through and ordered a Double with the works. She parked in the restaurant lot and ate it while flipping through e-mails and text messages. One text from her mother said simply: Call me.

  Dagny had texted her mom before, but this was the first time her mom had sent one. Something had to be wrong. She dialed her mother.

  “Dagny, I’m so glad you called. I figured your phone was broken, it’s been so long.”

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You texted me.”

  “Oh, yes. I can do that now. I got an iPhone.”

  “You bought an iPhone?”

  “Yes, and it’s a really good one. It has a Microsoft logo on it.”

  “That’s not an iPhone.”