Homecoming Homicides

by Marilyn Baron

  Luke’s face colored just thinking about it. He hadn’t been imagining it. Flippy had blatantly offered her body to him. She didn’t have to try very hard, either. He was so hungry for her he could hardly help himself.

  He should have known something was not right when she said she just wanted to have some fun and started to prance around her apartment performing a strip tease to an imaginary beat.

  Then the next morning she mumbled something about how she’d appreciate it if he didn’t tell anyone about any of this, forget it had even happened. A mistake, is what she had called it. She’d only acted that way (like a little slut), because she was getting back at her cheating boyfriend and she was drunk.

  Even then, he’d wanted to do it with her again, in the worst way, but hey, he had his pride. She was just filling in the blanks for a missing boyfriend. And he was nobody’s back-up plan.

  He had a job to do. He was assigned to pick her brain, find out if she knew anything important about the night of the homecoming pageant, anything that could help the task force break the case. And his chief had charged him with wrestling the case away from the rookie campus police—the “coed cops” the guys at the station called them—and back into the hands of the city where it belonged. The FBI had already been called in, but he figured they had about one more week before the Feebs totally took over. And then he’d be shut out and lose his chance to make things right.

  If he had been on the job, been where he was supposed to have been, he would have caught the killer before he killed Melinda Crawford. He’d been reduced to handing out parking tickets to students who were illegally parked on campus. His career was in the toilet. But then Chief Bradley had relented, had taken a chance on him by hiring him on the city’s police force, and agreed when he pleaded to be put on the Homecoming Homicides task force.

  Right now the city and the campus cops both claimed a weak jurisdictional right to the case, but as the death toll climbed and the grief of the bereaved parents bled into every living room in the world, their jurisdictional argument wasn’t going to stick—it was as transitory as ice cubes melting in a glass of warm beer on a sweltering summer day. And just as irrelevant, he knew.

  But they weren’t going to lose this case on his watch. Chief Bradley was counting on him, and he wasn’t going to let down the chief or the City of Graysville—or himself, for that matter. The chief had shown a lot of confidence in him, putting him on the task force in the first place, and he had given his word.

  One thing he was sure of. Flippy was hiding something. She could hardly look him in the eye. And he was damn sure going to dig until he discovered her secret, if he had to destroy her in the process.

  Chapter Four

  “Any news about Traci Farris?” Flippy asked nonchalantly as Luke sauntered back into her office, hefting a second cardboard box.

  “No, except she’s been missing for almost a week now.”

  Luke didn’t have to spell out the significance of that statement. She’d wanted Traci out of her life and now poof, she’d disappeared and was gone, maybe forever. Blinking back tears, Flippy avoided looking at Luke so he wouldn’t sense her discomfort. She knew she was partially responsible for Traci’s predicament. If it hadn’t been for her, Traci would never have run out of Jack’s apartment and straight into the arms of a serial killer. Flippy had gone over and over it in her mind. And every way she sliced it, she was the guilty party.

  Traci had been her shadow. Flippy had taken her former sorority sister under her wing, introduced her around to everyone. They had shared everything—even, it turned out, Flippy’s fiancé.

  Last week, when Flippy showed up unexpectedly at Jack’s apartment to bring him a pot of chicken soup and boost his sagging spirits, she’d caught the two of them in bed. Nothing that night about Jack’s spirit or his super-sized body part was even remotely sagging.

  She remembered standing there like an idiot because she couldn’t process the picture right there in front of her. Jack lying naked except for his lightweight knee brace, which ran from mid-thigh to mid-calf, and Traci only scantily clad in a Victoria’s Secret Plunge Multi-Way Bra and V-string concoction, doing multiple things to Jack that Flippy had never even done.

  “Jack?” She remembered calling his name, from what sounded to her like the bottom of an echo chamber, as she tried to work out an explanation in her head for what she was seeing. But the situation was exactly as it seemed. Shocked, Traci had shot out of bed, grabbed her clothes, and rushed past her into the bathroom without saying a word.

  Jack had just looked at Flippy, looked right through her, really. No explanation. No apology. His eyes were glazed over. Later on, in one of the gazillion rambling phone messages he’d left her, he maintained he was knocked out on pain medication and under the influence. But drunk, drugged out, or not, there was no acceptable explanation for what he and Traci had been doing to each other, or had done to her.

  Then she’d dropped it. Literally. Dropped the steaming pot of chicken soup she’d spent the whole day making, staining the creamy white carpet like a stream of urine. She had been so proud of herself. She’d found the recipe on the Internet and had gone to the grocery store to shop for fresh ingredients to make the broth from scratch. She’d lovingly cut up the carrots, onions, celery, and a parsnip, and even added a real roasting chicken, imagining how she would cook for Jack when they were married.

  In return, she’d been rewarded with a rude slap in the face. A wake-up call. Later, when she rehashed that scene in her mind, she was sorry she hadn’t poured the scalding soup all over the bastard’s head.

  Faced with the betrayal of her two best friends, Flippy was numb, heartsick, then flat out furious as the last few months of their relationship flashed through her brain like a B-movie. The agony she’d felt when she heard the announcer call the play-by-play when that defensive player came in low and took Jack out just as he was cutting back. The months of slavish devotion she’d lavished on Jack after his sports injury, during every stage of his long, hard road to recovery—the swelling, the surgery, the crutches, the physical therapy, the endless complaints that his career, and therefore his life, was over.

  Hearing, and ignoring, or discounting, the countless times Jack had told her how hot he thought Little Sister Traci was. Apparently her own sympathy wasn’t a big enough turn-on for him. He needed more adoration to pump up his sagging ego. Jack knew Flippy’s history with her father. He knew that cheating was the one thing Flippy would not tolerate. She could understand head-butting and jump-up body bumping during a football game, but she refused to put up with any ass-grabbing off the field. She was too smart to subscribe to the tired explanation that “boys will be boys.” How long had the betrayal been going on? What a laugh Traci and Jack must have had at her expense.

  If she’d stayed in Jack’s bedroom a moment longer she would have lost control. So, after she’d dropped the pot of soup, she turned around and walked out Jack’s door and dropped out of his life forever. That was the last time she had seen Traci. Traci must have been taken that night, probably in the process of either coming after her to try to explain or trying to put as much distance between them as she could.

  Traci would have left Jack’s apartment alone. Jack couldn’t have been much help in his condition. It was as if Traci had disappeared into thin air. No one had heard from her since that night.

  Jack wasn’t being accused of anything. The police had no reason to make a connection between Jack and Traci’s disappearance. No one even knew that Traci had been in his apartment. No one but Flippy. And she was still too traumatized, and too embarrassed, to talk about the incident. To anyone. Especially not to Luke.

  “Is there anything you can remember?” Luke’s voice invaded her thoughts.

  “Remember?” she asked blankly. That scene wasn’t likely one she’d ever forget.

  “About the pageant?” Luke prompted.

  What did she remember about the night of the pageant? Following the intermi
ssion, they had presented the Miss Congeniality award and announced the six finalists. After the judges posed additional questions to the finalists, they’d narrowed down the field to the top three contestants who would comprise the homecoming court. The three candidates would ride in the homecoming parade and round the field in a sports car at halftime on game day when they would crown the queen. That was to be the last ride the homecoming queen would ever take, except in a hearse to the cemetery. Next to die was the first runner-up, followed by the second runner-up. It wasn’t long after that the other pageant finalists started ending up dead too, one after the other.

  Flippy paused, trying to refocus her mind on the night of the pageant. As pageant director, she’d spent the final moments before the curtains went up backstage with the contestants, and she could still recall their voices.

  “Zip me up, Flippy.”

  “Help me with my pearls.”

  “Did I go overboard on the makeup?”

  “Do these earrings go with my gown?”

  “Flip, do these shoes make me look too tall?”

  She had been in their shoes. Now, calming fluttering nerves and backstage jitters was her specialty. Nothing out of the ordinary stood out in her mind, except the girls. They were all extraordinary.

  Suddenly another memory surfaced.

  “There were cameras, Luke. Someone was shooting a DVD of the show the entire time the girls were on stage. I’ve got a copy right here in my office, if you want to take a look.”

  Flippy could see by the way Luke’s face shifted he hadn’t known about the video.

  “Hell, yes, I want to see it. From now on, we share everything, got it? No secrets.”

  “Honesty works both ways, you know.”

  Flippy lowered her eyelids and bit her lower lip as she queued up the DVD. The memories broke like an avalanche in her mind. She thought about how agonizing it would be for the parents of the dead and missing girls to watch their beautiful daughters on screen, watch faces they would no longer see except in their memories—freeze-framed forever. Why did it always seem more tragic when the victims were beautiful?

  “Who produced this video?” Luke demanded. “I want to see the raw footage, the parts that were scrapped. Everything that was shot.”

  “The pageant office probably hired a firm or a freelancer to shoot the event. Let me call my contact there, and then you can run a search on the company and the person who shot the video.”

  Unbelievable. How could the Graysville city police, who had tried to wrestle the investigation right out from under their campus counterparts, have overlooked such critical evidence? What else hadn’t they thought of that was material to the case?

  “The video would have panned the audience,” Flippy said. “Someone in that audience is the killer or knows the killer.”

  “Fresh eyes,” Luke said. “I was right about you bringing a fresh set of eyes to the investigation.”

  “You had something nice to say about me to your chief?” Flippy said, her suspicions still lingering.

  “I’m not the bad guy here, Flip, and I think you know that.”

  Why was Luke being so cooperative all of a sudden? Was he planning to play nice and catch her off guard before he pounced? Luke made her nervous. He was always demanding something, something she couldn’t give, wasn’t ready to give. He hadn’t been so nice when he’d marched her down to police headquarters, hands jerked roughly behind her back, to be questioned like a criminal after Melinda Crawford’s murder.

  Even though Luke had screwed her in more ways than one, this case could make her career. And to do that she needed to cooperate, no matter how uncomfortable he made her feel.

  “Did you get a list of people who bought tickets to the pageant, so you can trace them back through their credit cards or checks?” Flippy asked.

  Most of the people in the audience had been VIPs or parents or friends of the contestants. Many had been from sororities or fraternities who sponsored the girls in the pageant. But one of those guests was a serial killer in sheep’s clothing who had joined an unsuspecting audience in the auditorium with the vilest intentions.

  “We’re on that,” Luke reported, “but what if the killer snuck in?”

  “No chance. That place was locked down tight. Security wasn’t letting anyone in without a ticket, even family members. I’m sure the video will give us some clues to help us solve the case.”

  “You’re probably right,” Luke agreed. “But like I said, it’s not your job to solve the case.”

  “If I’m going to be effective, I’ve got to live and breathe this case.”

  “Okay,” Luke relented, but Flippy could tell he was just placating her.

  “Luke, the guy knew a video was being made, probably ordered one, and got turned on watching the girls over and over, the girls he killed or is planning to kill. I’ll also get you the list of the people who ordered the video.”

  “That would be great.”

  Flippy turned out the lights, loaded the VCR, and she and Luke took their seats and started watching the video.

  As the lights on the screen went down, a ghostly hush fell over the auditorium as the music rose and the girls took the stage for their opening number. It was “Razzle Dazzle” from Chicago. They had rehearsed for two months straight. Flippy had taken a disparate group of sorority girls who each marched to the beat of her own drummer and drilled them into a top-rate dance troupe that would be at home on any Broadway stage. The girls, lock-stepping in their sleeveless, knee-length black crepe dresses and matching high-heeled shoes, twirled rhythmically around the stage in tandem, wowing the crowd.

  Any one of them could have made the cut to the final three and ascended to homecoming court. Of course, Flippy had her favorites. She knew what the judges were looking for, and though all the contestants had something, five or six of them had that special “It” quality, that grace, and enough style to take them into the winner’s circle. She knew it the moment they walked into the spotlight. Hard to believe that almost every one of her original top picks was already dead.

  And one, her own sorority sister and best friend, was missing and presumed dead. Even if Traci were still alive, the killer had her now and she was probably wishing she were dead. Any minute now someone would find her body. Flippy felt it in her bones. How had this happened? Why did it continue to happen? Since she was responsible for Traci’s disappearance, she needed to help stop this killing spree, and make things right between them again, if it wasn’t too late.

  “Philippa?” Luke’s serious voice cut into her thoughts and she felt his gentle tap on her shoulder. The video had stopped and she hadn’t been concentrating. She’d have to watch it again, scan the audience for something she might have missed.

  “Are you okay?”

  Flippy wiped away the tears she hadn’t realized she was shedding, cleared her throat, and tried to focus on Luke’s face. She didn’t want his pity. She had something to prove to him and to Chief Bradley and Director Beckham, who had placed such trust in her. She desperately needed to demonstrate some semblance of professionalism. But professionalism had gone out the door the day she got assigned to this case. The situation had become extremely personal.

  “Of course I’m not okay,” Flippy said. “And I won’t be okay until we find the man who did this. What motivates a person to do something like this?”

  Luke shrugged his shoulders. “Serial killers commit murder for almost any reason. Maybe our guy was rejected by a beautiful girl one too many times in his life. When it comes to human behavior, almost anything is possible. Maybe he wants to make a name for himself. He did leave a signature.”

  “A signature?” Flippy asked. “Is that like an MO?”

  “Signature is the thing the killer is trying to accomplish,” Luke explained. “MO is the method of accomplishing it. The MOs in this case differ as they often do in serial killings. He kills each girl in a different manner. But the signature is always the same. In this case th
e dump site. He always dumps the bodies in well-known locations on campus.

  “And in every case the left side of the victim’s face is burned, pre-mortem. Our killer may have been obsessed, but he didn’t take anything of real value from the victim. Not their money or their good jewelry. Maybe some trinket or keepsake we don’t know about. Just part of her face, her identity. In essence, he robbed her of her beauty. None of this gets out to the media, understood? We’re telling the public only what they need to know right now. We have to hold back certain facts that only the killer would know. That’s standard procedure.”

  “I know how the game is played. But it’s always best to be honest with the press. Once you realize there’s a risk, you should go ahead and put it out there. Otherwise both of our departments could get sued and we’d be putting more girls at risk.”

  “But first we have to figure out what is driving the killer,” Luke explained. “We have to determine if he knew his victims or if they were strangers. Even if they were strangers, there is probably a personal connection. Maybe the girls reminded him of someone he knew, or their behavior reminded him of someone or something he hates. You knew all the girls. What’s your take?”

  “It sounds like he hates beauty queens,” Flippy reasoned.

  “It seems that way,” Luke said. “But why? If we can figure that out, it could lead us to the killer. Let’s review what we do know.” Luke began ticking off the facts.

  One year later, another homecoming queen had been found dead in the stadium right before she was due to be crowned at the homecoming football game, and one girl from the homecoming court almost every week since had gone missing and then been found dead days later. It had stopped when the girls headed for home over winter break.

  “The killer could be a student,” Flippy said.

  “We thought of that.”

  Apparently the Graysville police force wasn’t too swift in the brains department. It had taken some time before the police even started putting the pieces together that all the girls were homecoming contestants. They had labeled the first death a random crime and the second a horrible murder. They were on their way to explaining away the third as another unfortunate tragedy when Flippy finally connected the dots and realized the murders weren’t coincidental or unrelated.