“I’m glad you understand.” He relaxed and fought the urge to look at his watch. He was hungry, tired, and wanted to go home.
“I do. Thanks. I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.” She smiled and offered her hand.
He took her hand and held it for just a moment. He found he didn’t want to let go, but of course he did. He also found himself wishing they’d met under different circumstances.
Who am I kidding? he asked himself as they walked side by side down the path on their way back to the parking lot. I barely have time for Alec. I barely have time for a life.
“Nice park,” she was saying.
“What? Oh, yeah. It’s nice. They ice skate back there on the pond when it freezes.”
“Do you skate?”
“A little. Mostly I drag my son around, and after about twenty minutes, he’s cold, he wants hot chocolate, he has to go to the bathroom.” Wes couldn’t help but grin. That described his last time out on the ice with Alec to a T.
“How was his game?”
“What?”
“His soccer game last week. How’d he do?”
“They lost.” Wes shrugged. “He’s nine, and at that age they’re still learning to play.”
“I played soccer when I was in high school,” she told him as they reached her car. “A little in college, too.”
“Where’d you go to college?” He wasn’t sure why he asked. The question just seemed to come out of his mouth.
“Immaculata. It’s in Pennsylvania.” She opened the driver’s door. “You?”
“St. Joe’s.” He smiled. “I used to date a girl from Immaculata.”
“What was her name?” She leaned against the car. “Maybe I knew her.”
“Karen Michaels.”
“Tall, blond, leggy . . .”
“That’s the one.”
“She was a year ahead of me. She was nice.”
“I only went out with her a few times.”
Nina nodded and got into her car. He closed the door for her.
“Sorry I wasted your time,” she said as she started the engine.
“You didn’t waste my time.” He stepped back from the car and waved as she passed by.
He stood and watched the Land Rover merge into traffic at the light, and wondered why he had the feeling that, despite her having appeared to concede defeat, Nina Madden had not given up the fight.
Fifteen
“So you feel Detective Powell just brushed you off?” Regan asked Nina. She and Mitch had returned home from their weekend at the vineyard, and she now sat in the chair closest to the fireplace, her legs pulled up under her as Mitch stacked wood in the fireplace to dispel the afternoon chill.
“Oh, he definitely dismissed me. So I let him think I was okay with it, that I understood his position, and was leaving quietly.”
“And he bought that?” Mitch asked.
“I believe he did.” Nina nodded.
“Man has a lot to learn about women,” Mitch muttered.
“He did say he’d stop over for a copy of the letter, but I’m not holding my breath,” Nina added.
“Okay, so the locals aren’t willing to reopen the case. You asked, he answered. On to door number two,” Regan said. “We’ll just go on from there.”
“If I could just interject something here,” Mitch said from his place in front of the fireplace. “It may not be so much that this guy is uninterested, or unwilling. You have to put yourself in his place, ladies. The guy’s probably overworked, underpaid, and has more cases on his desk than anyone could possibly clear. Time is a real factor in a lot of folks’ lives.” He turned to Regan. “Except for your deadlines, which are generally well spaced out, from what you’ve told me, your time is pretty much your own. You set your schedule, you decide what you want to do on any given day. Most people do not have that luxury. Cops, in particular, have no luxuries at all, when it comes to their jobs.”
“I understand that,” Nina said. “And I’m not angry with him. I’m just going to move past him and find a way around him.”
“How shall we begin to—” Regan stopped and tilted her head to one side, listening. “Did you hear a car?”
“I heard something outside,” Nina told her.
Regan stood and looked out the window.
“Speak of the devil,” she said. “Guess he decided to play along with you after all.”
“Powell is here?” Nina frowned. She really hadn’t expected him to show.
“Yup.” Regan slipped on her shoes. “I shall invite him to join the party.”
“He doesn’t strike me as being much of the party type,” Nina told her. “He doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor, either.”
“Hey, he’s a cop. He doesn’t need a sense of humor,” Mitch said. “Cops don’t have time to be funny.”
Regan tossed a pillow from the sofa in the direction of Mitch’s head as she headed for the back door.
Nina stayed on the sofa, straining to hear the conversation in the next room, but could only hear soft, muffled words. A minute later, she heard two sets of footsteps.
“Detective Powell, this is Mitch Peyton.” Regan introduced the two men as she came through the doorway. Her face was pale, and she appeared shaken. “Of course, you know Nina Madden.”
Wes nodded to Nina and extended his hand to Mitch. “Your name is familiar,” he said.
“Mitch is with the FBI,” Nina told him.
“Oh. Right.” He nodded. “The agent you mentioned yesterday.”
“Detective Powell, I think you need to tell Mitch and Nina what you just told me.” Regan gestured for him to take a seat.
He sat on the sofa, at the opposite end from Nina.
“I guess there’s no good way to do this,” he told them. “There was a murder at St. Ansel’s last night. The body of a young woman was found in the Towers, one of the on-campus apartment buildings. She’d been raped, and stabbed multiple times.”
“Oh, my God . . .” Nina covered her mouth with her hand. “Do you know who . . .”
“No suspects. No witnesses. We interviewed the girl’s roommates and several of her friends. She wasn’t dating anyone, she just transferred here from another college.”
“Maybe someone from her old school, an ex-boyfriend . . . ?” Regan suggested.
“According to her friends, there was no ex-boyfriend.” Wes turned to Nina. “I don’t know what this means in the context of the discussion we had yesterday, but I was there, on the scene, in the apartment of the last of the Stone River Rapist’s victims sixteen years ago. I can tell you that the scene I just came from was eerily similar.”
“In what ways?” Mitch closed the fire screen and sat in the chair opposite Regan.
“Both girls were partially clothed, and left in the middle of the bed. Legs crossed at the ankles. Arms crossed over their chests. Head facing the wall. All the lights in the room were on—the overhead as well as a lamp on the table next to the bed and the desk lamp. These are details that were never released to the press, by the way.”
“I did notice that in the reports I read,” Regan said. “The bodies of all the victims had been similarly posed. I wondered at the significance, especially of the girls’ heads facing the wall. And the lights being left on.”
“A good profiler could nail that in a Broadway minute.” Mitch looked over at Wes. “I happen to know someone who—”
“Uh-uh. This case isn’t going to the Bureau.” Wes’s eyes narrowed and his jaw hardened. “Don’t think for a minute that we can’t handle this, or that we’re going to invite you in to take over.”
“Whoa. Slow down,” Mitch told him. “No one’s interested in taking your case. Especially if there’s a chance it’s connected to your old one. You caught it the first time around, you caught it now. End of story.”
Wes did not appear reassured.
“Besides,” Mitch continued, “I have more than enough files on my desk. That being said, if there’s
anything I can help you with—unofficially, of course—I’m happy to do that. If I can ease some evidence through our lab—hey, no problem. But I’m not interested in taking the case.”
“Sorry if I overreacted,” Wes told him.
“Hey, the Bureau has that reputation, I can’t deny it. In most cases, it’s well deserved. And if your chief requests that we come in, I’ll have no control over that. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s get back to the reason for your visit.” Mitch leaned back in his chair. “Unless it was just to let Nina know that maybe her father wasn’t so far off the wall after all.”
“Half off, at best,” Nina said. “Remember, he accused Olivia.”
“Yesterday, we talked about three possible suspects.” Wes turned to Nina. “I remember you mentioned Father Whelan, but I don’t recall the name of the other man.”
“Dr. Overbeck. Nathan or Nathaniel, I forget which,” Nina told him.
“He’s the man Kyle told you had had an affair with his mother?” Regan asked Nina.
Nina nodded.
“You said three suspects, Detective Powell. You and I only talked about Dr. Overbeck and Father Whelan,” Nina reminded him.
“I’m thinking we can’t discount your stepbrother,” Wes said. “I’m thinking his motive could be as strong as the priest’s or the professor’s. Maybe stronger.”
“Detective Powell, with your permission, I’d like to discuss this case—and the old ones—with one of our profilers. Just to get some insight into the type of personality we’re looking for.” Mitch realized his mistake as soon as the words left his mouth. “The personality you’re looking for.”
“What’s your interest in this?” Wes asked him bluntly.
“It’s sitting right there.” Mitch nodded in Regan’s direction. “She’s looking at this thing from a totally different perspective than you or I might. She’s looking at it through the eyes of her friend.”
Nina said, “I came to Regan after I read my father’s letter to Olivia because I had nowhere else to go with it. I knew she had experience investigating old cases, and I knew if anyone would be willing to help me sort through this, she would.”
“Didn’t it occur to you to take it to the police?”
“I tried that. Yesterday. You blew me off,” she reminded him.
“Ouch.” Wes rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess I asked for that.”
“May I ask what your plan is, Detective?” Mitch asked.
“I plan to talk to the two men Ms. Madden named as having relationships with her stepmother. Frankly, I don’t know that I’m convinced there’s anything to it, but it’s a starting point I wouldn’t otherwise have.”
“A minute ago I mentioned talking to one of our profilers, and you got your back up,” Mitch said. “I don’t know what you think profilers do, but I can tell you what our best one does.”
“Go on,” Wes said, resigned to listen as if he already knew what Mitch was going to say.
“She learns as much about the victims as she can, then she’ll study the evidence. There’s no voodoo to it, there’s no wild guesses or strange formulas. The woman I’d like to discuss this case with is a psychologist, and she’s the best in the business. She’ll do it unofficially for me—and for Regan—because she’s a friend, and she can’t turn away a friend. There will be no FBI file, there will be no report. She will tell you what she thinks, and not commit any of it to writing, so that her fingerprints won’t appear anywhere on the case. Understand?”
“I understand.” Wes shrugged. “But I have to be honest, I’ve never seen a profiler yet who wasn’t so full of themselves that they didn’t think they had all the answers.”
Mitch smiled and said, “You haven’t met Annie.”
“Go ahead. Bring her on.” Wes shrugged again. “What do I have to do?”
“Get Regan a copy of the reports—and the photos, if you can—and we’ll take it from there. Annie can look over the old files here or I’ll take them to her at her apartment, whichever she prefers. She’ll do this on her own time.”
“Are you sure about that?” Nina asked. “You’re awfully free with this woman’s time. Maybe she’s too busy right now.”
“Annie is never too busy to help a friend.” Mitch grinned. “Besides, she owes me big time on something I helped her with a few months ago. Getting her to look this stuff over shouldn’t be a problem.”
Wes nodded. “All right. I’ll get a copy of everything on this case as soon as it’s available. May not be till the end of the week, but you’ll have it when I have it.”
“You can call me and I’ll drive up to Stone River and pick it up at the police station,” Regan told him. “I’ll get it to Annie. It will be interesting to see what she thinks. She’s a really smart lady.”
“Well, we’ll see how smart she is.” Wes stood. To Nina, he said, “I apologize for the way I treated you yesterday. I still have serious doubts about this whole thing, but I’d be a fool to dismiss your theory in light of this new murder.”
He ran a hand through his hair, and all of a sudden he looked very tired.
“I have to tell you, I was totally stunned when I walked into that room this morning and saw that girl lying there like that. Took me right back.” Wes shook his head. “What are the odds, I kept asking myself.”
He looked at Nina and said, “It’s even stranger when you consider that you and I just had that conversation yesterday, don’t you think?”
A shiver went up Nina’s spine.
“It’s creepy,” she said. “The timing is just positively creepy.”
“It makes me wonder, Ms. Madden, what set this guy off? I mean, if it is the same guy from sixteen years ago, what’s set him off now?”
“That’s a question for our profiler,” Mitch told him.
“If she can nail that, she’ll make a believer out of me,” Wes said.
“I got twenty bucks says you’ll solve this case based on something she tells you.” Mitch leaned back against the fireplace mantel, looking amused.
“I’ve got fifty says I’ll solve it on my own.”
“You’re on, Detective Powell.”
The two men shook on their bet.
“Oh, the letter.” Nina stood. “You wanted a copy of that. I’m assuming you still do?”
“Actually, I would like a copy.” Wes nodded.
“Here, Nina, I’ll take care of it.” Regan held out her hand for the letter Nina was retrieving from her handbag. She took it and disappeared down the hall.
While they waited for Regan’s return, Nina asked, “Detective Powell, were you involved in the search of our house, before or after my father’s arrest?”
“Actually, I was. Why?”
“In the letter, my father says he’d found what she’d hidden, that he understood what the brown was on the handle. We know the victims were stabbed, so we’re assuming he’s referring to a knife. I was just wondering how thoroughly the house was searched.”
“Inside out, upside down,” Wes said. “Attic, basement, the entire yard, the cars, the garage. I can’t think of an inch of that place that we could have missed. We also searched Celestine Hall—his office, his files, his classrooms.”
“Then what happened to the knife?” she asked.
“Good question. The letter didn’t say where he’d found it, or what he did with it.”
“Since he assumed that Olivia had hidden it, and she rarely went over to the college, I think we could assume that he found it someplace in or around the house. Maybe he left it where he’d found it,” Regan said as she came back into the room. “Then later, the person who’d hidden it—the person who used it—could have come back and retrieved it, before the police searched the house.”
“Which of the three had access to the house?” Mitch asked.
“All of them,” Nina said. “Father Whelan was a frequent visitor. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dr. Overbeck was, as well, given his relationship with Olivia.”
“You’re forgetting the son,” Wes reminded her.
“No, I’m not forgetting.” Nina shook her head. “There’s no way I could believe Kyle could have done something like that. I saw the pictures in the files. He just couldn’t . . .”
“That’s exactly what everyone said about Ted Bundy,” Wes told her. “My advice to you, until we know for certain what’s going on here, is to stay away from your stepbrother. I’d really hate to see you end up like that girl we found in the Towers this morning.”
His facial expression softened.
“I’d really hate for the next victim to be you . . .”
Sixteen
Nina sat on her living room sofa with the worn cardboard box on her lap, the lid partially open, and asked herself for the hundredth time why it was so difficult to open the letter her father had left for her. What was she afraid of?
That she’d learn something about him she didn’t want to know?
Too late. She’d lived for sixteen years with the belief that he was a serial killer and an adulterer. What could be worse than that?
That maybe after all these years of telling herself that none of it mattered, that he’d taken her in after her mother died because he had to, that maybe she’d discover that it did matter after all?
Getting close.
That maybe after having convinced herself that she had no real feelings for him, she’d discover that she had cared for him, and him for her?
Or that he hadn’t cared at all? And that she cared more than she’d wanted to admit?
Bingo.
This is silly, she told herself. Stop making excuses and just open the damned envelope.
She reached into the box. She found the envelope under one of the shoes, and she opened it as soon as she removed it from the box. No more excuses. Just do it. Get it over with.
My dear Nina,
Well, what a sorry state of affairs this is.
I can only begin to imagine what a nightmare this has been for you. I saw you in the lobby the day I was arrested, and I have never felt such humiliation in my life. I can’t imagine anything worse than being led away in handcuffs, accused of the most vile crimes, with your only child watching. The others standing around—my colleagues—barely mattered. But my child. My daughter.
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