Fatally Bound

by Roger Stelljes

  Randall shrugged. “I don’t recall anything about Rebecca, or Janelle for that matter. Rebecca was always kind of reserved to begin with. She liked to have a good time and stuff, but she was always a little emotionally … what’s the word …”

  “Distant?” Wire suggested.

  “Maybe,” Randall answered. “She always kept things close to the chest and was always almost flatlined about things. I think that made her a good elementary school teacher. She never got too riled up about anything.”

  “How about Janelle Wyland?”

  “Mercenary.”

  “Mercenary?” Wire asked.

  “She was perfect for sales. In school she was totally focused, would do whatever it took to get ahead, even cheat on an exam, if that’s what it took. She wouldn’t let anything stand in her way and would do whatever it took to get ahead.”

  “Like sleep with her boss?” Mac asked.

  “Hell yes,” Randall replied with the first smile they’d seen out of him. “She slept with a professor once for an A. She’d do whatever it took to get ahead and had almost no conscience when it came to that. That’s why I call her a mercenary. Whatever it took she would do.”

  Mac and Wire shared an uncertain look. Was Rebecca Randall involved? Was she a Reaper victim? Some of the pieces fit. Others didn’t.

  “You mentioned changes in Rebecca,” Kevin stated, “emotionally or whatever. The only one I really remember was about six weeks before she was killed.”

  “Why is that?” Wire asked.

  “We had a break-in at our house. It was a Friday night and we were at a high school basketball game, I was an assistant coach back then. In any event, we get home and our house was completely ransacked. Our new flat-screen television was gone, along with another older television, our two school issued laptops, our color printer and our tablets were stolen. Our house was a disaster, boxes, clothes, everything was strewn all over our house. The burglars even went through our home desktop computer, looking for identity type information, but for whatever reason, they didn’t take it with them. In fact, I still have the computer. The police investigated the case, we had detectives go through the house, the computer, everything, and I remember, she was pretty shocked about the break-in and she was different after that. It affected her.”

  “How?”

  “Scared and a little skittish and I thought that, along with kind of our other problems at the time, she seemed a little off, which again, for someone like her, was a little unusual because she was always the calm one. I was always the more emotional of the two of us.”

  “Yin to her yang?”

  “Exactly, but after the break-in and interviewing with the police detectives, she was pretty rattled for a few weeks.”

  “Which is understandable,” Mac replied.

  “In any event, she was like that for like a month and then one day she seemed more normal again. Then …” his voice trailed off.

  “She was murdered.”

  Randall nodded, his eyes welling up, “Yeah, I think it was about two weeks later.”

  Mac looked over to Wire, who looked at her watch. Given the hour, it was time to go.

  “Kevin, it’s late. We’re going to leave you for now,” Mac stated. “We will probably have some more questions tomorrow.”

  “That’s fine,” Randall answered. “If her death is connected, I’d like the closure. I could finally show my face in Ithaca again.”

  An hour later, Mac and Wire sat exhausted at a table in the restaurant of their hotel, a pizza fully devoured. They each had one beer, both of them still on meds and still recovering.

  “What do you think?” Wire asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mac answered. “Some parts of what happened to Rebecca Randall fit, others don’t. So I just don’t know. It feels connected, there’s too much here for it to be a coincidence, but there’s no way you could really say for sure.”

  “She never told him about it if she was involved,” Wire noted. “I kind of feel like if there was anyone she would have confided in, it would have been him.”

  Mac shrugged, “Maybe, but then again, from what we can tell, none of the victims ever confided about it to anyone. If they were all involved in Rena Johnson’s death, it seems they all took some sort of pact to never talk about it.”

  “So maybe she’s involved,” Wire posited with a yawn.

  “And maybe she’s not,” Mac answered, frustrated and tired. “I don’t know. It’s almost 2:00 A.M. Let’s sleep on it.”

  • • • •

  5:30 A.M.

  Gesch rolled over on the uncomfortable, old, short, orange, smelly couch in the employee lounge, trying to get some sleep.

  There was a tap on his shoulder; it was Delmonico. She had a cup of coffee and a report, “We have a DNA hit.”

  “Do we have a name?” Gesch asked as he sat up and yawned.

  “Yes.” She handed it to him. “The DNA is a familial match.”

  “To whom?”

  “Read the report for yourself.”

  Gesch scanned the report quickly, looked at the picture of the man matched to the DNA and snorted. “The brother is not dead.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Someday is right now.”

  At 7:15 A.M., Mac was pounding on Kevin Randall’s front door.

  Randall opened the door with a yawn, his hair disheveled, wearing a robe. “Back so soon?” And then he read the look on McRyan’s face. “What? What is it?”

  “We need to talk more about that break-in at your house, a lot more.”

  Randall let everyone in and they once again convened in the family room. Wire carried in an extra cup of Starbucks coffee and handed it to Randall who gladly accepted.

  Mac got right to it, “Last night we talked about Rena Johnson?”

  Randall nodded as he sipped from his coffee, “That’s right. She was a friend of Rebecca’s. You think her death has something to do with Becca’s.”

  “Right,” Mac answered as he opened his leather folder. “Turns out Rena had a brother named Drake. Did you know she had a brother?”

  Randall shrugged, “I don’t recall one way or another. Like I said, she was a good friend of Rebecca’s and I just kind of knew her because of that.”

  “Well, her brother was named Drake Johnson, Ithaca Police Detective Drake Johnson.” Mac handed a picture of Drake Johnson to Randall, “Ring a bell now?”

  Randall bolted upright in his chair and scanned the picture closely, “He was one of the two detectives who worked the break-in at our house.” Kevin Randall read the leading look on Mac’s face. “Did he kill Rebecca?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. One thing we know for sure is Drake Johnson is the killer known as the Reaper.”

  An hour ago Mac found out that Drake Johnson’s blood was on the missing eleventh bullet. That blood was a familial DNA match to Rena Johnson, whose DNA was in the system due to her death seven years ago.

  Supposedly, two years ago Drake Johnson died in a one-car automobile accident on a snowy winter night. However, when Mac got the picture of Drake Johnson on his phone, it was the Reaper staring right back at him. There were some slight differences in appearance and Mac and Wire both suspected Johnson had a little plastic surgery to alter his appearance. “But it’s like Dick Lick said, when you see him in context, there’s no doubt, he’s our guy.”

  Johnson was a massive 6’3” tall, large round face with a shaved head and small beard around his mouth. He was the man they found on surveillance video, the man he and Wire confronted at Kelly Drew’s house, the monster they were after.

  He was an extremely dangerous monster. Drake Johnson was a cop. He knew their playbook. They were essentially chasing one of their own.

  Johnson’s record as a cop in Ithaca was somewhat checkered. He was a package of a lot of brain but also, unfortunately, too much brawn.

  As a uniformed officer, he’d been investigated for brutality on three different occa
sions, one time serving a suspension. However, he also had excellent instincts and it was thought he’d matured enough to be promoted to detective. He served as a detective for three years before he found himself in trouble once again.

  Johnson and his partner, due to uniformed cops working a local festival, took a call on a domestic disturbance. The husband drunk, in his bloodied white wifebeater T-shirt, was raging when Johnson and his partner arrived. It was not the first time Johnson responded to a domestic call at the house, having done so more than once when he was a patrol cop. This time was far worse, the beating far more severe and damaging to the man’s wife. A week later, the husband, having been released from jail, was found beaten within an inch of his life behind a local bar.

  The husband claimed he was beaten by Johnson, who he’d seen at the bar earlier in the evening. The detective’s alibi for the time of the beating was not iron clad and distant witnesses described someone fitting the general description of Johnson fleeing from the scene of the beating.

  Given his record and history of brutality, Johnson’s career as a police officer was hanging in the balance. And not just criminally; he was looking at a potential civil claim as well. This all occurred around the time of his investigating the break-in at the Randall residence.

  His parents had died two years earlier. Between life insurance, investments and selling their house and splitting the proceeds with his half-brother, Johnson had in the neighborhood of one million dollars to fall back on if he wanted to disappear. If he didn’t, that money may well have been lost to the husband in the civil suit.

  The car accident that supposedly took his life was staged two weeks later. He was Drake Johnson no more.

  “Aubry, if he wasn’t in that car, then who was?”

  “Who knows,” Gesch answered. “At the time, they identified Johnson with dental records.”

  “And let me guess, they got the dental records from his older half-brother in Rochester?”

  “Bingo. It took less than fifteen minutes for him to crumble under questioning. Drake told him he was looking to get out from under the brutality complaint and potential civil suit. So he flipped the dental records for Drake to match those of the body in the car, probably some homeless cadaver who was similar in height and weight to Johnson. The half-brother claims he had no idea his half-brother’s plan was to become a mass murderer.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “The Rochester PD seems to think he’s telling the truth, that he is appropriately freaked out by the whole thing. I’ve got people on the way up to interview him to get a second opinion on that, but from what I’m gathering, the brother helped stage his disappearance but had no idea what it would lead to.”

  “Has he been in contact with his half-brother?”

  “He claims no.”

  “And we’re going through the half-brother’s life?”

  “Yes. If he’s been in contact with Drake Johnson, or whatever his name is now, we’ll find it. So far, we’ve found nothing to suggest he has, but we’re working it hard.”

  “There isn’t much time, Aubry.”

  “Agreed. He’s got the money somewhere offshore. He’s going to finish this thing and then he’ll be gone.”

  So the plan was that while Gesch and his team hunted for Drake Johnson, Mac and Wire were to work Randall. It may have all started two years ago with Rebecca Randall. She was the true victim number one.

  “So what did Rebecca Randall have that set this all off?” Mac wondered aloud on the call with Gesch.

  “That’s what you and Wire have to find out and find out fast.”

  That was an hour ago.

  Drake Johnson was the Reaper.

  He was avenging the death of his sister Rena.

  Rebecca Randall played a role in Rena’s death and was victim number one of Drake Johnson. Why?

  Mac and Wire’s job was to find the answer.

  Mac explained all of this to Kevin Randall. “So my question to you, Kevin, is what did Drake Johnson find at your house? He must have found something.”

  Kevin Randall shook his head and shrugged, “Heck if I know.”

  “Tell me more about the robbery. I got the cliff notes version last night and now I have the file.”

  Randall explained the robbery once again. “It was a little odd,” Randall noted, “I never would have thought us a target for a home invasion, we didn’t really have much at the time, but the detectives told me there was a crew working the area and we were like the fourth or fifth house hit in Ithaca.”

  “Let’s focus on Detective Drake Johnson. What do you remember about him?”

  Randall sat back and thought, “He worked the case with another partner whose name escapes me. They interviewed us that night, took an inventory of what was missing and really spent a lot of time going through our house. I remember the crime lab people went through the house with a fine-tooth comb because, like I said, this was part of a string of robberies. They were trying to find any evidence that might point them in the right direction.”

  “Is there anything else you remember?” Wire asked, jotting down notes.

  Mac and Wire walked Randall through the break-in for another hour, picking and prying at Randall’s recollections of the break-in.

  “One thing I do remember now is the detectives took our home computer for a while because we were concerned some personal information could have been downloaded from it. We were really worried about identity theft. They tried to determine if we needed to be worried about that. In the end, a few days after the break-in, they told us to cancel all of our credit cards, change all of our passwords and monitor our credit score. We did all of that and I don’t think we ever had any issues, but it was still all pretty unsettling. I mean, someone goes through your whole life, your belongings, your pictures, records and computer and …” Randall shook his head. “It puts you off kilter. That’s what I really remember about the whole thing is that it put us off kilter, particularly Becca. The whole thing really had an effect on her.”

  “You’ve said that before,” Wire noted. “What do you mean by that?”

  “She had me put in a security system on the house. Rebecca wanted someone with her at all times if she wasn’t at work. She didn’t want to go out at night for a few weeks, she was really scared, almost paranoid, it seemed.”

  Mac had a thought, “Was that change in her right after the break-in or did it evolve over time?”

  “No …” Randall started to reply but then stopped and closed his eyes, trying to remember back. “No, it was after the fact, after we got the computer back and the detectives told us to check our credit cards and watch our credit rating. It was after that she seemed to get edgy and that lasted for a few weeks, and those were really bad weeks. But then she seemed to get over it. I remember asking her if I should skip my guy’s weekend and she said no. She told me to go ahead and have a good time, so it seemed to me that her period of being rattled had passed.”

  Mac and Wire shared a look that said they were thinking the same thing. Her paranoia passed because she thought Drake Johnson was dead. Mac looked right at Wire and nodded towards the kitchen. In the kitchen, Mac whispered, “So let’s say Drake Johnson stumbles across something while investigating the break-in that ties back to the death of his sister.”

  “Right, like maybe a picture,” Wire suggested.

  “That could be, or some notation in a file, an e-mail, a text, something he stumbles across.”

  “So while he’s still a cop, Johnson confronts her about it,” Dara suggests. “He does it one-on-one, off the record, no witnesses, no partner, just him and Rebecca Randall.”

  “Right,” Mac nods. “He shows her whatever it was that he found or put him onto her.”

  “She denies knowing anything about it. She claims to have no idea what he’s talking about.”

  “But he doesn’t buy it. He’s a cop, a detective no less, he reads her and he knows she’s lying,” Mac suggests. “And he knows
the case is ice cold up in Auburn. He knows that whatever he found isn’t enough to move the case forward. But he knows Rebecca knows something about his sister’s death but he has no leverage to make her give it up, at least not legitimately.”

  “Right, he can’t move the investigation forward on Rena’s death as a police officer, because as a cop you have to follow rules, procedures, and you have to have sufficient evidence through legal means to pursue a case,” Wire answers, pulling on the thread. “But if he’s not a police officer …”

  “If people think he’s dead,” Mac suggested.

  “Then the shackles are off of him, he can do whatever he needs or wants to get the answers he needs.”

  Mac nodded, “Right.” He opened the Rebecca Randall murder file and flipped through the report. “She’s abducted on Saturday night because the last anyone saw her was when she left the shopping mall. Nobody reports her missing until Sunday morning and she’s not found until Wednesday lying in the ditch.”

  “She was in that ditch by the time she was reported missing.”

  “But in that window of time, Johnson interrogates her. The autopsy reports revealed ligature marks on her arms and legs, like she was bound to something.”

  “Like a chair,” Wire suggested.

  “Like a few of our other victims, because he was interrogating them about the night his sister was killed,” Mac answered.

  “He gets what he needs from interrogating her and knows that she can’t be left alive, otherwise he’ll be going to jail.”

  “So he kills her, dumps her and goes away.”

  “And now he has some answers. He knows that Melissa Goynes, Janelle Wyland, Hannah Donahue, Sandy Faye and Kelly Drew, along with Rebecca Randall, were involved in his sister’s death.”

  “They were in the vehicle that hit his sister,” Mac stated. “He knows this, either from what he found in the wreckage of Randall’s house…”

  “Or from interrogating her.”