What Doesn’t Kill Her

by Max Allan Collins

  Phillip was frowning, or at least seemed to be—the face reminiscent of a burn victim made it hard to tell exactly. “Why did you lead Detective… Pryor, is it? Why did you lead Detective Pryor to believe that you had dismissed the possibility that Havoc was a good suspect?”

  “I knew it wouldn’t dissuade him,” David said, “and at that stage of the conversation, I was keeping from him that we were doing our own investigation.”

  “But later you did tell him. And invited him to visit our little group within the greater group.”

  “Yes. You think that’s a bad idea?”

  Phillip shook his head. “No. Not unless he tries to shut us down. Judging by what you say, I doubt he will—after all, his investigation is only lightly sanctioned by his superior. He can use all the help he can get.”

  “That’s my take on it,” David said, nodding. “And I think he’ll loosen up about what he knows.”

  Levi then shared the basic background information on Havoc that he had dug up while waiting for the others to arrive.

  “I’m afraid,” Levi said, finishing up, “I couldn’t ascertain whether Havoc was in the area when the Riveras were killed, or your family, David. He appears to have been in Cleveland for the Strongsville homicides.”

  “That information,” Phillip said, “is somewhere… even if it’s only on the school’s computer, or Havoc’s home one.”

  David asked, “Levi, what’s the size of Havoc’s coaching staff?”

  “Seven,” Levi said. “Two more are strictly office workers… I printed out all of the information available at his website.”

  The two men paged through the material Levi had provided.

  Phillip said, “Any one of those seven… perhaps even all nine… could be a viable suspect.”

  David nodded. “Yes, but Pryor is concentrating on Havoc.”

  “Why?” Phillip asked. “It strikes me as thin—that David’s daughter and Jordan took gymnastics at Havoc’s school may be a simple coincidence.”

  “Pryor did mention,” David said, “that he believes the ‘predator,’ as he calls him, may have committed murders in New York and Providence, and several others out west.”

  “Where out west?”

  “He wasn’t specific.”

  Now Phillip’s frown was definitely able to be discerned. “And he didn’t say how Havoc might be connected to any of these homicides?”

  “No. Frankly, he didn’t even imply it.”

  Levi said, “I think finding out the dates Havoc was out of town, and his whereabouts… where he was lecturing or judging or competing… may be vital.”

  Phillip said to Levi, “If he was making public appearances, there should be plenty of mentions online.”

  “Phillip,” Levi said, “Havoc is something of a minor celebrity. His name gave up over half a million hits. Sorting through them is going to take awhile.”

  “Understood,” Phillip said. “But worth doing.”

  Levi nodded.

  “In the meantime,” Phillip said, “I’ll look into Havoc’s staff.”

  “Where do I come in?” David asked.

  Levi could tell David was taken aback, just a little, at the way Phillip had asserted himself—before, David was always clearly the leader.

  “If I may be frank,” Phillip said, “what skills do you bring to the party?”

  The question obviously irritated the writer, and Levi stepped in: “David’s Internet skills are adequate at best, but he is one badass researcher. He doesn’t let go, once he latches onto something, dog-with-a-bone kinda deal. And he has contacts, including cops and forensics experts, all over the country.”

  Phillip unleashed a grotesque smile. “David, my friend, I meant no offense. May I suggest a plan of attack?”

  David, just a little stiffly, said, “Certainly.”

  “Those cases out west? Search online for murders, say, west of the Mississippi that may present a similar MO to our predator’s.”

  “If I may be frank,” David said, “that sounds like needle-in-the-haystack stuff.”

  “And time-consuming as hell,” Levi said.

  Phillip shrugged. “If it were easy, the FBI would be on the trail of this madman already.”

  David sighed, nodded. “No argument there.”

  Over the next hour, silence prevailed, as they dug into their respective tasks at their respective laptops. Levi continued sorting through the Internet mentions of Havoc, and then ran checks on two of the family homicide cases that were on his own list of possibles by their man.

  Finally, he spoke up. “Guys! Those two East Coast murders that Detective Pryor thinks Havoc is tied to? I think I have them. And something more.”

  The other two were looking up from their keyboards at him expectantly.

  “I’ve found gymnastics meets that put Havoc—or one of his staff—within driving distance. One in New York, one in Providence.”

  “Very good, Levi,” David said, smiling.

  Phillip said, “We really need a list, going back as far as possible, for the gymnastics meets Havoc and his people attended out of state, to track other crimes.”

  Levi turned to David and said, “All right, David, you and I will switch tasks.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve almost certainly pinpointed Pryor’s two murders out east. Now that I have the details, you go over those. You’re better qualified for that. And now that I know how to track what we’re looking for, I can tie any other murders to Havoc’s travel history.”

  “But we don’t have that yet.”

  “We will. Now those half-million hits don’t seem so overwhelming.”

  Phillip was nodding. “No, they don’t.”

  Levi went on: “Granted, this assumes Havoc goes to all or most of the big gymnastics meets, and takes his staff with him, at least some of them. If that assumption is correct, we’ll soon know where Havoc’s traveled, and I can look for crimes within, say… a hundred miles of a possible related homicide. We can broaden the search from there.”

  Phillip was nodding. “Excellent work, young man. Stellar work.”

  They went back to their individual tasks.

  Half an hour later, Phillip raised a hand, as if stopping a unit of soldiers trudging through a jungle. “Havoc may not be our predator.”

  Levi sat up, rolling his head around, rubbing sore neck muscles.

  David leaned forward, squinting in interest. “Why do you say that?”

  “Let’s start with the fact that Havoc’s assistant—one Stuart Carlyle—has been with the man from the very start of the school.”

  “How in hell did you find that out?”

  “I hacked Havoc’s payroll records,” Phillip said, as casually as if reporting the time.

  David frowned in astonishment. “And you managed that how?”

  Phillip shrugged. “It’s not terribly difficult with some of these small businesses. Really, their security is laughable. Figuring out the password is always the hardest part. The rest is strictly rote.”

  “You figured out Havoc’s password?”

  Phillip waved that off, as if batting away a bothersome gnat. “Most people who aren’t computer savvy use something they care about, something easy to remember. In Havoc’s case, it was something that applied to both gymnastics and money.”

  Levi and David traded a look that said they had no idea what that might be.

  “Balance,” Phillip said.

  David blinked at him. “Balance?”

  “Balance sheet, balance beam. Not exactly NSA-level encryption.”

  Levi, impressed, immediately started searching Havoc’s travel history. Within minutes, he said, “Oh yeah.”

  David and Phillip’s eyes were on him.

  “In 2008 in Boston, and 2010 in Hartford, Carlyle had a room in the same hotel as Havoc. With homicides in Providence and the Bronx, easy enough transits.”

  “So instead of one suspect,” David said, “there’s at least two.”
r />   Levi said, “We need to know how many possible suspects we have, out of Havoc’s staff.”

  “That may not be as difficult as you might think,” Phillip said. “The two office workers have been with Havoc for eight and ten years, respectively.” He gave Levi their names.

  After a few moments, Levi said, “Neither is on the hotel register for either Boston or Hartford.”

  “Which means,” David said, “we can probably eliminate them.”

  “Of the remaining six trainers,” Phillip said, “four were hired in the last two years.”

  David asked, “Has Havoc been having trouble keeping help?”

  Levi said, “He must be hard on the trainers. Anyway, they’re all ruled out because they weren’t employees when the two East Coast murders occurred.”

  David asked, “What about the other two?”

  Phillip said, “Bradley Slavens and Patti Roland.”

  “A female trainer in the mix now.”

  Levi said, “Both were on the Hartford and Boston trips.”

  “Jordan’s family was attacked by a man,” David reminded them.

  “If one killer is responsible for these atrocities,” Phillip said, “the woman is eliminated, as Jordan tells us the Riveras were attacked by a man. But ruling the Roland woman out entirely would be a mistake.”

  David cocked his head. “Why’s that?”

  Levi, who followed Phillip on this line of thought, said, “Bradley Slavens or Patti Roland could be working with Carlyle or Havoc.”

  David frowned. “A killing team? Like the Hillside Strangler pair? That’s rare. Particularly a male-female duo.”

  “But not unheard of,” Phillip said.

  “No,” the writer said. “There’s Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, Karla and Paul Bernardo, Gerald and Charlene Gallego.”

  “You do know your stuff, David. Yes, such teams go all the way back to the Honeymoon Killers, the notorious Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, and undoubtedly long before—Ahab and Jezebel, perhaps, in First and Second Kings.”

  Nodding (though he knew none of these references), Levi said, “Other than Jordan, no one has gotten so much as a glimpse of the murderer—why can’t he be they?”

  David nodded. “So, it could be Havoc or Carlyle or Slavens working alone…”

  “… or,” Phillip continued, “any one of them working with the help of one or more of the others. They were all in the right cities at the time of the murders in question.”

  David’s eyes were tight. “Finally we’re making sense of this.”

  “Are we?” Levi asked. “I still don’t get it. The why of it.”

  Phillip asked, “How so?”

  Levi floundered for the words. “It’s just that… killing families, destroying families… why? There has to be a motive—these may be insane acts but they are not random fits of rage, they are planned, they are stage-managed, and what the hell motive could Havoc, or any of them, have?”

  “An insane act,” David said, “by definition lacks a rational motive.”

  “But not a motive,” Phillip insisted. “To a madman, an irrational motive would seem quite sane.”

  “I mean, Havoc’s enjoyed success,” Levi said. “He came to this country, built something, made it thrive—what would possess him to attack families as a sort of… sick hobby?”

  David said, “There are individuals among us who are both highly intelligent and deeply insane. A sociopath, for example, essentially mimics behavior, like compassion and love, he witnesses in others. And plays that against those others.”

  Phillip said, “This is no sociopath.”

  “No. But he’s smart and he’s crazy. That much we know.” David sat forward. He got his cell phone out and gestured with it. “I think we should share what we’ve learned with Pryor, and right away.”

  The teacher was shaking a lecturing forefinger. “Your young detective is very inexperienced and prone to jumping to conclusions. If we don’t ground him in sufficient information, he’ll foul this up, and worse, he’ll turn his superiors against him and they’ll never listen to him again, much less us. We have to keep digging until we can give Pryor something more substantial than a longer suspect list.”

  Clearly, David didn’t like that, but Levi could see the writer’s face moving from irritation to acceptance. It was like watching someone go through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of death right in front of you.

  “Okay,” David said. “Let’s start with motive. How are we going to find that?”

  Phillip asked, “How would you shape a motive planning one of your thrillers?”

  David let out air. “I would determine what my villain was after, what he would do to achieve it, and what he had been through to get him to that point.”

  Phillip’s lipless smile was something Levi couldn’t quite get used to. “Is that what we’re up against?” the teacher asked. “A ‘villain’? Evil, in the Old Testament sense?”

  “Yes,” David said. “I guess so.”

  “Evil born that way? Or created by circumstance and experience?”

  “What’s the difference? Does it matter how a fire starts, once it’s raging?” Then David realized what he’d said, and apologized.

  Levi waved that off, then David said to him, “Are we going to find our villain on the Internet, do you think?”

  “Maybe, but we’ll start by digging into the lives of four people instead of just one.”

  David shook his head, smiled ruefully. “Fellas, you don’t suppose we’re in over our heads, do you?”

  “I don’t think it, I know it,” Levi said. “But nobody else is stepping up.”

  “Except one lone rookie detective,” David reminded him.

  Phillip said, “I admire you, and all the rest of our little team. It takes a lot of strength, and a good deal of tenacity, to do what you’re doing.”

  “Same back at you,” Levi said. “And we’re not the only ones with tenacity—our ‘villain’ has it, too. He’s been working at his ‘hobby’ for at least a decade.”

  David was staring into nothing. “You really have to hate people,” he said, “to be able to do what this predator does, for as long as he’s been doing it.”

  Phillip let out a raspy sigh. “The poor soul probably doesn’t even see them as people anymore. They likely became something else to him a long time ago. Something less than human.”

  “If not people,” Levi asked, “what are they to him?”

  “When we figure that out,” David said, “that’s when we’ll have him.”

  “Tall order,” Phillip said.

  “But we’ve made progress,” Levi said. “The three of us, a trio damaged by him or the likes of him. Sitting at computers, fighting back.”

  “True,” David said. “I’m something like encouraged. If our prey ever gets wind of us, though, it may take a very different kind of fighting back.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The moment Jordan ended the call with Mark Pryor, she knew he’d think she was stalling. But she’d told him she was on her way out, and that was true, throwing on a denim jacket over her T-shirt and jeans, pulling on her cycle helmet. Soon she was climbing onto her scooter, laptop computer in her backpack, ready to head to Kay Isenberg’s place.

  All the members of their support group spin-off team had long since exchanged last names and addresses. Having Kay’s address had given Jordan a new lead, and she had already done some preliminary research into the alleged murder-suicide of Katherine and Walter Gregory, Kay’s sister and brother-in-law.

  This allowed her to switch gears, gain a different angle of view, getting her out of her own head and away from the deaths of her family, and the lost loved ones of Levi and David. Although going from those tragedies to another was hardly a change of pace, it did provide an opportunity for her to look at something new that was possibly related, and with fresh eyes.

  Kay’s house was a modest bungalow in a clean, quiet neighborhood. Painted a light blue with flower
beds crowding the porch, a tiny tree providing almost no shade to its side of the postage-stamp lawn, the place exuded a warm, homey feel that belied any turmoil within. Jordan took off her helmet, shook her hair free, and strode up the short front walk.

  She rang the bell and Kay opened the door almost at once, a hint of a smile on the careworn face. She looked typically neat but not prim in a denim skirt and a pale blue blouse, her white-touched red hair in a loose bun.

  “So nice to see you, Jordan, away from group. Come in, come in.”

  “Nice seeing you, too,” Jordan said.

  Kay led Jordan into a smallish living room dominated by rows of shelved Hummel figurines covering most of one wall, the overflow in glass curio cabinets that straddled the archway into the dining area. Little eyes stared at them.

  Slightly embarrassed, Kay said, “I see you noticing the Hummels.”

  Jordan nodded. How could she not?

  “They were Katherine’s children, in a way. I say that because she and Walt never had any kids—they couldn’t have any… but she made a sort of family out of them.”

  “Oh.”

  “They kind of overwhelm my little place, don’t they? They looked nicer in Katherine and Walt’s place.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Funny thing is, I’ve kept buying them, you know, each year’s issue, since.…”

  “Well,” Jordan said, “they’re very nice.”

  “Let’s sit down, shall we?”

  The hostess gestured toward the small floral sofa and matching chair, near a coffee table across from a low-slung stand with a flat-screen television and cable box. A peace lily in a vase perched on another tiny table.

  Jordan sat on the chair, more comfortable than it looked, and set her backpack and helmet at her feet.

  “Something to drink, dear?”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  Nervously, Kay sat at the near end of the sofa.

  Jordan said, “We don’t have to do this. It can wait. Or we can never do it.”

  Kay sat silent for a long moment. Had Jordan’s bluntness offended the woman?

  Jordan said, “It would be good if you could. I just mean, we don’t have to.…”

  “I want to,” Kay said. “No. That’s not right… I need to. If we can talk about this, and find an explanation for why Walt would do such a thing to himself and Katherine… or even learn that perhaps he wasn’t responsible… then maybe I can start to understand… or to process it, or at least… accept it.”