by Lisa Regan
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Are you up for a trip?”
I had the sensation of falling in my stomach. “There’s been another murder?”
TK grimaced. “Cape May, New Jersey. Normally we wouldn’t get a call, but Detective Lane from Trenton put out notices to all New Jersey county police departments so we got the hit. They just found the body. They think she was killed this morning. The scene is fresh.”
I exchanged glances with Isaac. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said. “You can bring Agent Bennett up to speed on your way there.”
I looked back at TK. “Let’s go,” I said.
I briefed TK during the ride. It kept my mind from turning in on itself. My mother’s words echoed in my ears—answers to questions which seemed so innocuous and delivered to me in the same soothing voice that had chased away thirty-five years of nightmares but held the key to a serial killer’s identity. It was difficult to grasp.
Part of my mind refused to accept it. The other part, the agent, the analyst who was cool and clinical at all times had already begun sifting through the facts, putting the pieces together around me, until the puzzle was complete. Evette Gerst was another piece of that puzzle. The scene at her beachfront home was almost identical to the one we’d found in the Bittlers’ kitchen. TK and I stood in the kitchen doorway, taking in the scene. It was the only room in the house in disarray. Pieces of kitchen appliances were scattered across the floor. A bowl of fruit had been knocked to the floor. It lay overturned, apples, pears and a single banana making a trail along the point of trajectory. Jagged wooden pieces lay amid the wreckage, having splintered from the chair the killer used to beat Gerst to death.
Gerst’s body lay face down like Deborah Bittler’s had. A small circle of blood had pooled under her open mouth. Her upper dentures lay three feet from her body, broken evenly in half. Her short gray hair was dark with blood, one half of her skull caved in like a rotten cantaloupe. Her face was swollen, stretching the gashes on her cheek and forehead into obscene red mouths, gaping open, revealing bone and yellow tissue. Her hands had turned deep purple. One of her fingers was kinked backward. Another was strangely flat as if someone had taken a roller to it. Clearly all these blows had been inflicted while she was still alive. I was certain in this case the cause of death would be blunt force trauma.
Although TK pressed me on the drive, the name Evette Gerst meant nothing to me. I hoped something at the scene would jog my memory. Gerst’s son had called her earlier in the day but had been unable to get in touch with her. He then phoned a neighbor and asked him to check on her. The neighbor had found her front door unlocked, her body in the kitchen.
Two crime scene technicians were working the room, moving slowly and carefully. They looked around like men who had dropped a contact. They didn’t acknowledge us. TK snapped on a pair of gloves and slipped past me. He moved around the perimeter, working his way toward the body at the center of the scene in concentric circles.
“This is personal,” I said.
“They’re all personal,” TK said.
“No,” I said. “The others—they did something to the person this guy is killing for—to me. Evette Gerst—he knew her.”
“What about Deborah Bittler?”
“He didn’t know her. Deborah interrupted him. Michael Bittler was the target. His body—he was where we found the signature, and we know now that Michael was connected to me. Deborah was not. Like I said before, I think Deborah Bittler said or did something to send our killer over the edge.”
TK glanced around. “Speaking of the signature, where is it?”
“Table,” one of the techs said without looking up from his work.
We nearly had to step over Gerst to get to the table. Standing before it, I realized it was the cleanest part of the entire room. The oak shone in the afternoon sunlight. Only one item lay on it, placed in the center.
“A plaque?” TK said.
Before I could read it in its entirety, I knew who Evette Gerst was. “Oh my God,” I gasped.
“Do you remember her now?” TK asked. He leaned over and read the plague aloud: “Luzerne County school board in recognition of 30 years of excellence in teaching. Evette Gerst.”
“She was a teacher,” I mumbled. “My eighth grade teacher.”
“Well, someone besides you didn’t like her class,” TK muttered.
He leaned even closer to it, his face inches from its surface. “Looks like he carved it right into the metal. Probably with a knife.”
The words “for you” had been crudely etched over Evette Gerst’s accolades. “Sunderlin,” TK said. He almost touched the plaque. He stopped himself at the last second, his gloved finger hovering over the words. The gloves kept him from contaminating the scene, but it wouldn’t stop him from smearing any useable prints the killer might have left on the plaque—although we still didn’t have a suspect to match up with the prints. “I’d be willing to bet that our UNSUB is from your hometown.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
KASSIDY
October 20th
Isaac McCaffrey was an excellent interrogator. I might have known this from the Nico Sala investigation, but I couldn’t remember him. True to his word, he had waited until after midnight for me to return from the Gerst crime scene. He had joined me for moral support at a meeting with TK and Talia during which it was decided that I would be pulled from the For You case and work from home indefinitely. They wanted it to look like I wasn’t working at all. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how I’d gone from just meeting Isaac to using him as moral support in just twenty-four hours.
He promised to have some patrols from his own division drive past my house a few times during the night and to return himself the next day.
I tried to get a good night’s sleep, but I couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t stay in one position long enough to sleep. The pregnancy wreaked havoc on my body. As my uterus expanded, all the muscles and ligaments around it stretched. Shooting and stabbing pains assailed me when I least expected it. I’d just be drifting off to sleep when a sharp pain somewhere in my body would startle me awake. Then there were the crippling charley horses and a pounding headache I couldn’t shake. By morning, heartburn had been added to my litany of complaints.
I also had racing thoughts—the whirlwind of anxieties. A serial killer out there killing for me. My ache for Jory. The questions about his death. The poor, fatherless child growing inside me. Sleep came in fits and starts and always with nightmares.
When Isaac showed up at 10:00 a.m. I felt as though I’d been awake for a week. The dogs took to him instantly, and as we sat in my kitchen, he grilled me on every detail of the case until I got hungry and had to order a pizza. I picked up the phone to dial the pizza place and arched an eyebrow at him. “I guess you’re staying for lunch.”
He laughed and took off his jacket. “I like pepperoni,” he said.
“We’re having bacon.”
I got him a bottled water from the fridge and sat across from him again. “Pizza,” Isaac said. “It was a pizza boy who saved you from Nico Sala, wasn’t it?”
“In a manner of speaking. Can we get back to the issue at hand?”
“Your stalker,” Isaac said.
“Yeah. My Superstalker 3000 as my friend Linnea would put it.”
“Still have no idea who it is?”
I shook my head.
“Well, it has to be someone who knows you pretty well, knows your life—or at least has known you for a long time,” Isaac said.
“It’s not either of my parents, my friend Linnea, TK or my friend Dale so I doubt that.”
He rubbed his chin. “Well, at least four of his victims are straight out of your college years from what you’ve told me—Paul, Henderson, Sorenson and Bittler. Any
serious boyfriends in college?”
My brow wrinkled. “There was a guy,” I said. “I dated him for about a year, but it wasn’t serious.”
I had met him my first month at Temple University. He was a sophomore from a suburb of Philadelphia. He was kind and funny. The sex had been so-so. We’d liked each other, but we hadn’t been head over heels. Lexie was so depressed after the abortion that all my time was devoted to her. Our relationship had fizzled out. I only heard from him once after that. He’d sent me a card after Lexie’s death.
“What was his name?” Isaac asked.
I shrugged. “I honestly don’t remember—although my mother might. I don’t think it’s him. He came from a very nice, well-adjusted family. Plus our relationship was pretty passionless.”
Isaac didn’t look convinced, but he went along with my assessment. “All right. Let’s look at the other vics—your eighth grade teacher and your middle school bully. Bishop—this guy is going pretty far back.”
I shook my head, fighting off an involuntary shiver. “I know,” I said. “TK thinks he’s from my hometown. I guess he is, I mean I don’t even know how he—or anyone—could know these things otherwise. I mean I don’t even remember these people.”
“Well, he can’t know you that intimately or he would have known that it was Lexie, and not you, who had the abortion,” Isaac pointed out.
“True.”
The dogs broke into frenzied barking as they raced to the front door. “Pizza guy,” Isaac said.
I pushed the dogs out of the way and stepped onto the porch to pay the delivery man. When I returned to the kitchen, Isaac said, “This guy killed two people from your middle school years and four people from your college years. What happened to high school?”
The smell of the pizza was overpowering. I had eaten half a slice before Isaac stopped talking. He leaned back in his chair, eyeing me warily as if I might lunge across the table and devour him next. He looked like he was going to make a snide comment but thought better of it. Instead he said, “Didn’t anyone piss you off in high school?”
“Sure,” I said over a mouthful of pizza.
Tentatively, Isaac reached across the table and took a slice.
“It is odd though,” I said. “The gap.”
“Let’s go back to eighth grade,” Isaac said.
I reached for my third slice of pizza, but my hand froze over the box. It felt like all the blood in my body had drained away.
“My God,” I muttered. “If TK is right, that would mean he’s been infatuated with me for almost twenty-five years,” I said. “Who stalks someone for a quarter century?”
Isaac shrugged. “You tell me. You’re the behavioral analyst.”
“Yeah, but most stalkers try to insert themselves into your life. Predatory stalkers will typically not make themselves known, but their stalking period is usually short because they have a higher potential for violence. A predatory stalker would not watch from the sidelines for decades without making his presence known. That is a really long time to stalk someone, and I don’t think he’s ever tried to approach me. That is what is really unusual. If he’s been watching me all this time then why hasn’t he approached me? I mean, most people who are being stalked know they are being stalked. He’s never even sent—”
I had thrown the hyacinths away months earlier, but I looked at the trash can anyway as if they might still be there.
“What is it?” Isaac asked.
My voice was a croak. “The flowers. Someone sends me flowers on the anniversary of my sister’s death every year. No matter where I’m living, they find me and send the flowers. I’ve never been able to trace them. I bet it’s him.”
I stood up and paced the kitchen, suddenly feeling jumpy and cold. I hugged myself. The dogs watched me warily, their eyes following me back and forth. Pugsley whined. I looked at Isaac. “Is it really possible that this guy has been watching me for twenty years?”
Isaac shrugged again. “Anything is possible, Bishop. We’re not dealing with a stable or logical individual here. Maybe he hasn’t been watching you constantly all this time. It’s possible he’s just kept tabs on you. Either way, twenty years is a damn long time. Most marriages don’t last that long.”
“So basically, I’ve had this kind of benign wallflower of a stalker for most of my life who has just now decided to start killing people who have pissed me off,” I said incredulously.
“Speaking of that, it might help if you made a list of people who’ve pissed you off in your professional life, because once this guy is finished with people from your childhood and college years, he’ll probably move on to them.”
“I could,” I said. “But I don’t know what good it would do. I didn’t remember any of the people he’s already killed except for Evette Gerst. My long-term memory is useless. Ever since Sala attacked me, there are a lot of things I just can’t remember.”
Isaac smiled. “Like me.”
I returned a tight smile. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“I’ll get over it.”
Another thought came to me. “If this guy’s been watching me all this time, why didn’t he stop Nico Sala?” I said.
“Maybe he called the pizza guy,” Isaac suggested.
Those last hazy moments came back to me. I’d tried so hard to forget everything about that night, but there were parts that I just could not expel from my mind. I had been so delirious. I thought death was speaking to me. I felt the color drain from my face as I stared at my kitchen table. “Oh God,” I whispered. My stomach felt strange and airy, like I was on a roller coaster, permanently suspended on the downward track.
“What is it?” Isaac asked.
That night my legs had been so weak, every muscle in my body taut and trembling with the effort of moving after so many hours of being restrained, beaten and stabbed. His voice: “He’s coming. You have to do this. Listen for him.” Hands lifting me.
“He was there,” I said. “He was there that night.”
Isaac was calm and cool across the table, watching me.
Cold sweat broke out across my forehead. “He was in my house. He untied me and handed me my gun.” And in that moment, I had felt such relief and such absolute, unconditional love for that voice—for death—because it was releasing me.
“He didn’t shoot Sala?”
Again I felt the reassuring weight of my Glock as if it were still in my battered hands. “No,” I murmured. “I shot him.”
“That’s still pretty amazing considering what he’d done to you,” Isaac said. “Why didn’t he shoot Sala though?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t ready to reveal himself.”
“It would have been perfect though. What better way to reveal himself than by saving your life?”
I wiped the sweat from my brow and shook my head. “No, no. People like this guy live in a fantasy world and the reality is never as good as the fantasy. He wouldn’t want to ruin things by revealing himself before he was ready. Who knows how many years he was stalking me before Sala attacked me. All those years of watching me, his fantasy would have been building to the point where no possible reality could stand up to it. In his mind, it would have been too risky to reveal himself even under those circumstances.”
“That’s messed up.”
“I know,” I said.
I plopped into a chair. Smalls walked over and nudged my hand. I pet her absently on the head. “God, all those years. My whole life…“ I said, unable to finish. It was too much to take in. One person watching me for over twenty years. How had he done it? Why hadn’t I noticed? Where was he now? Outside? Had I spoken with him over the years and not known it? Run into him innocently not realizing that he was stalking me?
The room spun. I looked at Isaac and focused on his eyes to keep myself from getting
dizzy. Fear and exhaustion threatened to overcome me.
Isaac leaned one elbow on the table, resting his chin in his hand. With his other hand, he flipped the cap from my water bottle. He turned it on its side and used his thumb and index finger to spin it like a top. I watched his fingers as he spoke. It gave my mind something to focus on besides the panic threatening to overtake me.
“You said in your profile that this guy probably committed crimes before and didn’t get caught, or that he was a juvenile offender. What about the kids you went to school with in Sunderlin? Any violent offenders?”
The realization was like an anvil landing on the table between us. Both my hands flew to my forehead. Pugsley scurried over and sat on top of my feet, whining softly.
“Oh my God,” I gasped. “I know who it is!” I tried to recall the boy’s name, but it wouldn’t come back right away. “There was a boy in our class,” I continued. “His name was…it will come to me. I can’t remember it now, but he killed his parents when we were in high school. He went away. That could explain the gap in the victims—people from middle school but no one from high school.”
It came to me. I punched a fist in the air. “Blake! Blake Foster was his name.”
“So you think this kid Blake grew up to be your stalker and a serial killer?”
“It makes perfect sense,” I said, “Blake Foster was the kid whose own parents forgot to pick him up after school or after extracurricular activities. I mean this kid got picked on every day of his life as far as I can remember. I ‘saved’ him from one of the worst instances.” Briefly, I recapped the incident that I had told Talia about a few months earlier. “I was probably the only person who ever stood up for him. I think he was fixated on me.”
The cap flew out of Isaac’s fingers and shot across the table at me. I caught it and flipped it back to him. “When we were fourteen he tried to kill himself, and even though we never ever spoke to each other, he asked for me to visit him in the loony bin.”
