by Lisa Regan
Again, Wyatt’s heart tha-thudded hard in his chest—unusual for these occasions since his meticulous planning precluded any heart-pounding excitement. He went to the bathroom doorway and listened. He waited until he heard Deborah’s feet on the tile in the kitchen before creeping silently down the steps.
His mind raced. He paused at the bottom of the staircase to steady his breath. It would be okay. He’d sneak up from behind and tie her up. Blindfold her so she couldn’t see his face. It would be fine.
And it almost was.
Deborah never heard him. One moment she was studying the contents of her fridge and the next she was firmly in Wyatt’s grip. Her body went rigid. He looped one arm around her middle, pinning her arms against her sides.
He used his other hand to cover her mouth as he spoke into her ear. “Do not move.”
She squirmed initially. When she heard his voice, her body relaxed slightly, and she nodded. Wyatt released her mouth and reached into the back of his waistband for the Smith & Wesson. He pressed it into the small of her back. “Close your eyes.”
Together, they turned from the fridge. Wyatt looked around the room. The kitchen was large with faded green tile and yellow curtains that were probably meant to be cheery but clashed with the tile. “Do you have rope?” he asked.
Deborah’s voice was calm, as if she’d been through this very same experience a hundred times. “Michael has some in his shed.”
Wyatt sighed, shaking his head. “No shit,” he said.
Deborah’s coat rested on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Wyatt reached inside the collar and found what he was looking for. He used her scarf to blindfold her. Then he sat her in the chair. He watched her, trying to decide how to handle the logistics of this new development. Several minutes passed. She must have thought he had left the room. Her knees were pressed together, ankles crossed. Her hands were clasped together primly in her lap. She sat up straight, craned her neck first to the right and then the left. Listening.
“Michael?” she called. “Michael?”
Wyatt shook his head, announced himself with another sigh.
Deborah’s shoulders slumped. “Your husband is dead,” Wyatt said.
Her mouth made a perfect circle. “Oh,” she breathed. Wyatt thought he sensed a bit of relief in the word. He started looking in cabinets and drawers for anything he could use to bind her. He didn’t feel like traipsing her all over the house, and he was definitely not going out to that shed again. The hour-old memory of the pit still made his stomach turn.
Deborah’s voice started as a low murmur. At first, Wyatt didn’t even realize what she was doing. “Are you praying?” he said loudly.
His voice startled her momentarily out of prayer. She continued, the words smooth and automatic, picking up tempo with each murmured supplication. “Dear holy Jesus, I pray to you now that Michael has come home to you. Please commit his soul to rest and give him a glorious place in your kingdom, I pray to you most holy Lord…“
A tiny coil of anger sprang loose in Wyatt. He swept the toaster off the counter. The sound of it clanging onto the floor made Deborah jump. Her body went rigid again. The praying stopped.
“You’re praying for him?”
She turned her head toward Wyatt’s voice.
He paced before her. “Your husband murdered innocent women,” Wyatt said.
“They weren’t innocent,” Deborah said calmly.
Wyatt didn’t know what was more frightening—Michael’s collection of dead bodies or his wife’s absolute conviction that he hadn’t done anything wrong.
“Some of those women were pregnant,” Wyatt pointed out. “What kind of monster murders pregnant women?”
“Michael was doing God’s work.”
Wyatt couldn’t keep his voice from rising an octave. “God’s work? He killed a bunch of women because he saw them leaving reproductive health clinics.”
“Abortion is an abomination.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Wyatt said. “How did he know that those women were there to have abortions? Maybe they were getting checkups.”
“They were sinners.”
Wyatt felt the flush descend from the roots of his hair to his collar. The beast stirred. Fear made the fine hairs on the back of his neck spring upward. He had only been taking the Klonopin for a few days. It wasn’t long enough to keep the beast at bay. He couldn’t help but think of Kassidy and the baby she carried. What if it had been her?
“They were sinners? Your husband murdered those women. And when he did, he murdered their unborn children. So it’s okay for him to kill those fetuses, but abortion is an abomination? Are you fucking stupid?”
“Michael’s sins are already forgiven.”
“What?” Wyatt could not keep the incredulity from his voice.
“Once we have faith, once we accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior, all our sins are forgiven,” Deborah replied. “We’re born again in Christ.”
Wyatt stopped pacing and stared at the woman. “You’re using your religion to justify murder,” he told her.
“Not murder,” Deborah insisted. “God’s work. What you’re doing—that’s murder.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Wyatt said. “I’m not trying to hide it.”
“Michael has already been admitted into God’s kingdom. He was saved. Christ paid for all our sins with his own blood. If you accept Christ, your sins can be forgiven too.”
Wyatt stepped forward. The decision had already been made. The beast prowled and panted within. He knew he could not stop it, and for the first time in his life he did not want to. He pulled Deborah Bittler’s blindfold down and looked into her eyes. They were dull and brown.
“Then I’ve already been forgiven for killing you,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
KASSIDY
October 18th
TK called me a little after eleven p.m. I was still awake, lying in the darkness of my bedroom fighting off tears and a fresh wave of grief. For the third straight night I was unable to sleep. Instead of obsessing over the unknown details of Jory’s death, I was indulging in a fantasy in which Jory was alive—living in my house, sleeping next to me in my bed with our baby in the other room. A family.
The fantasy stopped there. I couldn’t let my mind go any further. My chest felt heavy. I could hardly breathe. My mind had not even scratched the surface of the full magnitude of what I had lost—of all the things I would never experience with Jory. As always, I was alone. When my cell phone rang, it was a relief. I tore it off the charger.
“TK? Is everything all right?”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah, yeah. Listen, we’ve got another For You murder.”
I flicked on my lamp. “What?”
“Yeah, we just got the call. It’s here, here in Manassas.”
I tensed, a flutter in my chest. “My God.”
“Yeah. Apparently, Prince William County called DC for some extra crime scene techs and someone in DC recognized the signature—that it was something we were looking for so they called us. The scene isn’t far from my house. I know you’re not due in till the morning, but do you think you’d be up for it?”
I was already pulling clothes out of my dresser. “Absolutely,” I said.
TK rattled off the address. “Bittler is the victim’s last name,” he added. “I’ll meet you there.”
“I’ll be there in twenty,” I said.
The Bittlers lived in a quiet residential part of Manassas, much like the Bennetts’ neighborhood. Single homes with sizable yards and one-car garages. Outside their home, a single streetlamp cast a dim yellow circle in the center of the street. An ambulance rested beneath it, silent and unmoving. Its two attendants leaned against the outside of it, sharing a cigarette and speaking to one anot
her in inaudible tones. I counted three police cruisers, one coroner’s van, a crime scene van and at least three unmarked police vehicles. They were all crammed around the Bittler residence. In spite of all the cars, there was almost no movement. No activity. It was eerily quiet. A uniformed Prince William County officer stood stationed at the Bittler’s front door. As I rounded the porch, he nodded at me and hooked a thumb toward the back of the house, indicating that everyone had congregated there.
In contrast to the calm silence at the front of the Bittler residence, the backyard was a sea of activity. I waded in, passing several uniforms, a half dozen crime scene technicians and at least two detectives. The Bittlers’ back door yawned open, admitting an elongated rectangle of light. Another uniformed officer stood outside the door checking IDs and badges as various people went in and out. TK’s height made him hard to miss. I saw his outline pass through the open doorway. He nodded to the uniformed officer as he joined me.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“About five minutes. I came through the front of the house. There’s one body in the kitchen, but I don’t see a signature. The uniforms said the local liaison was out here.”
Most of the activity seemed concentrated in front of a large shed that took up almost half the yard. Its double doors had been propped open. The exterior light by the back door did not quite reach the shed’s entrance, where three men stood, heads bent toward one another. They were grouped into a tight knot, obscuring the entrance to the shed. On either side of them, crime scene technicians were setting up flood lights. Someone had already begun snapping photos.
“Need more lights over here,” someone else shouted.
As we approached the shed, I saw that one of the men was the coroner, as evidenced by the bold yellow print across his back. I felt a little fumble in my step as the man in the center broke away and came toward us. “Agent Bishop, is it?”
TK looked at me with one eyebrow raised. I shrugged.
Just under six feet and muscular, the man was in his early forties with unruly brown hair and striking blue eyes. He wore jeans and a forest green jacket. He smiled in a way I was sure charmed the hell out of most women and turned their resolve all to mush. He was the kind of man who turned heads—the laugh lines and hard angles of his face made him look distinguished but rugged at the same time. He was the kind of man I would remember under other circumstances. Yet there was something understated about him.
He extended a hand and I shook it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Have we met?”
“Lieutenant Isaac McCaffrey. I’m with the Prince William County’s Criminal Investigative Division. We met before—in Baltimore—I was a detective there—”
“On the Nico Sala case,” I filled in.
He nodded. “You look good,” he said.
Considering Sala disfigured me, I thought. “I don’t remember you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
His smile remained in place, blue eyes sparkling as he took me in. Heat rose to my cheeks. I was glad for the relative darkness in the backyard. “That’s okay. I was one of many detectives who worked that case,” he said. “I left Baltimore a few years ago and took a job here in Prince William County. Is this your colleague?”
I introduced TK, who shook hands with McCaffrey as well. “What’ve you got out here?” TK asked.
We walked over to where the coroner stood with another man. The other man looked from TK to me and shook his head. “We’ve got a goddamn mess. I don’t know where to start.”
McCaffrey turned to him and said, “Well, let’s have a team out here and a team in the house. We’re dealing with two separate issues here.”
TK and I nodded at the coroner in greeting. McCaffrey introduced the other man as the head of Prince William County’s crime scene unit. Both he and the coroner looked pale and overwhelmed.
The coroner shifted his weight from foot to foot and blotted his forehead with a vinyl glove, which he pulled from his jacket pocket.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
McCaffrey motioned toward the house. “Your vics are in there.”
“Our vics?” TK said. “I only saw one victim in the kitchen. No signature.”
The other two men stared at us like children who’d broken a prized possession. No one wanted to tell us. No one wanted to talk about what they had seen.
“Your guy killed the homeowner and his wife,” McCaffrey said. “The signature is in the bathroom.”
“His wife?” I said. “He killed them both?”
“Looks that way,” McCaffrey said.
I stepped toward the shed. “So what’s in there?”
The coroner’s eyes widened. He stumbled forward and grasped my forearm. “Don’t,” he said.
I turned and stared at him. He released my arm and shook his head. “It’s just…“ he didn’t finish.
McCaffrey laughed. The sound was small and soft, rising up from somewhere unseen and tittering over the jagged edges of the crime scene, inappropriate and startling. The other two men looked at him, the horror on their faces barely concealed. TK remained stone faced, the only indication of his curiosity a small furrow in his brow.
“Gentlemen, this lady has seen more gruesome crime scenes than all three of us put together,” Isaac explained. “I’m sure they both have.”
The head of the crime scene unit looked at me. He remained ashen-faced and mute, as if he’d lost his ability to speak. The coroner looked angry. He shook the glove in his hand in the direction of the shed. “I’ve seen a lot of gruesome things too, Lieutenant. You can believe that. But what’s in there is pretty bad. Pretty damn bad.”
I met his eyes. “I’m fine,” I said coolly, but I wondered what was in the shed. A cold sweat broke out along the back of my neck.
He shook his head, turned and walked off into the house. The other man stood stuck in place, paralyzed, watching. I glanced at McCaffrey who smiled at me again. I considered asking about the contents of the shed before walking into it, but I wanted to draw my own conclusions. I looked at TK. He nodded. “Let’s have a look.”
Later I would wonder if photos of the scene in the shed would have bothered me less, but I could never be certain. The floor of the shed was wooden, with a trap door that had been left ajar, revealing a large patch of dirt—large enough for a mass grave, which was essentially what it had become.
It wasn’t the bodies being dug out of the dirt subfloor that got to me. All but one of them was so old that they were visible to me only as browned skeletons in tattered clothing, all their sinew and viscera having seeped away into the earth with time and decomposition. The last one was probably six to nine months old, and while it was a horrific and distorted facsimile of the woman it must have been in life, it was not what caused me to flee the shed, vomit rocketing up into my throat.
What made me sick were the small, embryonic creatures of varying sizes and development that Michael Bittler had cut from their mothers’ bodies and preserved in clear gallon jars which sat along a shelf above his “work” area.
Unfinished and unformed the small, pale creatures floated, suspended in clear, yellow-tinged fluid, sealed in gallon jars. There were six in all, lined up on a shelf which overlooked a work table. A long, fluorescent light was affixed to the wall above the shelf, and its light gave the specimens a translucent glow. The largest ones were no bigger than a golf ball but there was no mistaking what they were.
Babies.
I knew instantly that it was not the For You killer who had done this. I knew without being told that either Bittler or his wife or both of them had killed the women in the shed floor and cut their fetuses from their bodies to save and display, and that the For You killer had killed the Bittlers, possibly in retribution for one of the women they’d murdered.
I pushed TK, uniformed officers and
crime scene technicians out of my way as I sprinted out of the yard. I rounded the front of the residence at breakneck speed, barreling past the ambulance and stumbling with blind desperation toward my SUV with one hand over my mouth. Still, some part of my mind was already at work, processing the scene and making adjustments to the profile TK and I had already come up with, weighing the investigative possibilities and considering what was to be done next. This part of my mind seemed to exist independent of my body, and it was eager to get into the house and examine the rest of the scene even as I reached my Trailblazer.
I faced away from the house, body bent toward the ground, one hand on the window of my vehicle as the contents of my dinner splattered on the asphalt. The hot smell wafted upward, causing a dry heave. I coughed and my body spasmed in protest.
TK was behind me within seconds, his hand on my back. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I choked. “Just give me a minute.”
I heard Isaac’s feet crunch along the street. The first thing I thought was: they crunch, they don’t clack. I hadn’t noticed his footwear earlier. When his feet came into view, I saw he wore heavy black boots. I didn’t straighten up. Instead, I focused on those black boots, turning my head slightly so I could take them in. The toes were scuffed, the sides worn. The boots surprised me because most detectives wore shiny dress shoes, usually black, that clacked on pavement and floors when they walked. Jory had three pairs. All of them polished to a gleeful shine. The only evidence they ever showed of being worn were the heels, which bore scuff marks. Jory had small feet, I remembered suddenly.
Another dry heave. I spit gracelessly on the ground.
Isaac had large feet, and he said, “And here I told those guys it wasn’t your first time at a crime scene.”
“It’s not,” TK said defensively. “She’s fine.”
