Thicker than Blood (Zoe Bentley Mystery)

by Mike Omer

  “I don’t necessarily need the secrets. A list of names will do.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “This is a murder investigation, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “Exactly. And none of the people we helped hurt Catherine. I can vouch for each and every one of them. Instead of wasting your time chasing and harassing men who are doing their best to leave their past behind them, why don’t you find the man who actually did this?”

  Zoe cleared her throat. “How exactly can you vouch for them?”

  Patrick frowned. “I know these people very well. I’ve spent hours talking to them, praying with them. These people are doing their best to change.”

  “Change how?”

  “They’ve embraced God. They want to be better people. They—”

  “Any of them ever convicted of sexual assault?” Zoe asked.

  Patrick blinked in surprise. “If any of them were, they’ve paid their dues to society. They’ve confessed and begged forgiveness. They—”

  “Catherine Lamb was raped before she was killed,” Zoe said. “Whoever killed her has done it before. If you have rapists in your congregation, we need to know. They may have confessed and apologized and all that, but repeat sexual offenders don’t change.”

  “Everyone can change,” Patrick said.

  “They can develop fear of getting caught.” Zoe shrugged. “But they’ll still want to rape.”

  Patrick folded his arms. “I’m done talking about this.”

  “Mr. Carpenter,” Tatum said. “It’s a common misconception that the police’s job is just finding the guilty person.”

  Patrick glanced at Tatum. “Well, isn’t it?”

  “Of course. But they also need to make sure he’s found guilty in court,” Tatum said. “You tell us you vouch for each and every man in your church. Let’s say I believe you. But when we catch the guy and get him in front of a judge and jury, what do you think will be the first thing his lawyer will say?”

  Patrick remained silent.

  Tatum answered his own question after a second had passed. “He’ll say, ‘My client isn’t guilty, and I know who is. It’s one of those ex-cons that Catherine Lamb worked with. The police didn’t even bother talking to them. They just went straight after my client.’”

  “He would build his whole case around it,” O’Donnell added. “And the killer would walk.”

  Patrick hesitated, then said, “I will talk to Pastor Lamb. We will decide together what I can divulge.”

  O’Donnell nodded. “Fine.” It was a start.

  “One more thing.” Zoe handed Patrick her phone. “Do you know this man?”

  He stared at the phone, and his eyes widened slightly. O’Donnell glanced at the screen. It was a picture of a man, his arm over a woman’s shoulder. O’Donnell could easily see a resemblance between the woman in the photo and Zoe.

  “Do you know this man, Mr. Carpenter?” O’Donnell asked when he didn’t reply. She already knew he did; it had been obvious the moment he’d laid his eyes on the image.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s Daniel Moore.”

  O’Donnell could almost feel the sudden jolt of energy that sparked among the three of them.

  “Is he a member of your congregation?” Tatum asked.

  “He was,” Patrick said. “He left a few months ago.”

  “Do you have a phone number? Any way you can reach him? We would really like to talk to him.”

  “No. He never gave me his number.”

  “Was there anyone in the congregation he was close to? Any friends?”

  “I don’t know. What’s this about?”

  “Daniel Moore’s real name is Rod Glover.” Zoe took her phone from Patrick’s hand. “He’s wanted for the rape and murder of five women. Did he confess and beg forgiveness, Mr. Carpenter? Did he embrace God?”

  “You’re wrong. Daniel is a good man—”

  “No, he isn’t. He’s a sadistic killer. But he’s a very good liar.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Zoe was hardly aware of her surroundings. The world around her shimmered, hazy and insubstantial, people’s voices muffled.

  Her brain felt on fire. Thoughts, ideas, and theories sparked through her mind at breakneck speed. Her focus was on the mental blizzard in her head, and she ignored Tatum and Detective O’Donnell completely, even when they talked to her. After a while she distractedly noticed that the three of them were walking, with her following Tatum, more out of reflex than anything else.

  Rod Glover, she was now convinced, was here. In Chicago. He was one of the two men who had murdered Catherine Lamb. He was the murderer she had earlier nicknamed alpha.

  It could be just a huge coincidence, but Zoe disregarded that option. The MO and the signature already pointed to him. The fact that he had definitely known the victim clinched it.

  As she stared out the car window, vaguely wondering where they were driving, a bitter taste filled her mouth. Her heart beat wildly. Was it fear? Or excitement? Maybe a bit of both. She’d been searching for the Maynard serial killer for so long, and now she’d come face to face with his handiwork. She could catch him. Andrea would be safe, and he would stop killing.

  The car engine died, and Tatum got out. Zoe stayed in the car, staring at the windshield, consumed by thoughts. After a few seconds, a sharp knock broke her concentration. Tatum, rapping on the window, looking exasperated. She opened the door and tried to get out, only to be yanked in. Oh, right, seat belt. She unbuckled it, got out, and followed Tatum into somewhere named . . . the Jackalope?

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Oh, you’re back,” Tatum said. “This is the Jackalope café. I told you we were going here. Twice.”

  “Why are we here?” Zoe followed Tatum inside. The Jackalope’s interior was an explosion of bright colors, pop art paintings covering the walls from side to side. A few mounted heads of rabbits with deer antlers hung on the walls—probably the mythological jackalope.

  “O’Donnell said it’s a nice place, close to the police station, where we could talk, remember? We asked if you had any objections, and you stared at us with drool running down your chin.”

  “There was no drool.”

  “I literally told you to wipe it.”

  “You’re just making that up.”

  O’Donnell sat at one of the tables, waiting for them. Tatum went over to the barista and asked for a cup of coffee.

  “What do you want?” he asked Zoe.

  “I don’t know,” Zoe said impatiently. “Sure, coffee sounds good.”

  Tatum paid the barista, and they sat down next to O’Donnell.

  “Okay,” O’Donnell said. “So your guy Rod Glover definitely knew Catherine Lamb. It’s likely that he was one of the murderers.”

  “It’s more than likely—it’s a certainty,” Zoe said. “He knew her. He must have developed an obsession about her, or maybe the obsession was from the other guy, and Glover reacted to it. I need to think it through, the other guy knew her as well, I think he did—no, he definitely did, because of the necklace, Glover wouldn’t have cared about it, and he actually collected jewelry as trophies, I’ve seen it at least once, so he wouldn’t have left it there, the other guy, unsub beta, he did that, and—”

  “Zoe,” Tatum said. “We need this to be an actual conversation.”

  “This is a conversation.”

  “No. This is you spewing your thoughts at us.”

  O’Donnell watched them both with apparent amusement. Then the barista said, “O’Donnell? Your order is ready.”

  While O’Donnell went to get her order, Zoe tried to frame her thoughts into concrete sentences. Glover’s accomplice went to the same church. Did Glover meet him there? Was Glover even religious? She recalled meeting him at church once or twice as a child, but she had never gotten the impression that—

  “Your coffee is getting cold,” Tatum said.

  “Oh!” She was surprised to see a cup of coffee in front of he
r. She sipped from it. It was fine.

  “I just told O’Donnell about your sister.”

  “What about my sister?”

  “She was in the photograph with Glover,” O’Donnell pointed out. “I thought it was weird.”

  Zoe nodded. “Yes. That’s what Glover . . . what are you drinking?”

  “Hot chocolate,” O’Donnell said and sipped from it.

  Zoe followed the mug’s movement intently. It was topped with whipped cream, cocoa powder sprinkled on top. Suddenly, Zoe’s own coffee seemed tasteless. She noticed O’Donnell had a sandwich as well. God, she was starving.

  “Hang on a minute,” she blurted and went over to the barista. She asked for hot chocolate and a sandwich named the Centaur. She waited by the counter, trying to marshal her thoughts, occasionally glancing over at Tatum and O’Donnell. They were leaning toward each other, Tatum talking in a low voice. Filling her in on Glover’s past, probably. That and his connection with Zoe.

  After a few minutes, the barista handed Zoe her hot chocolate and sandwich. Zoe carried them back to the table, sat down, and took a tentative sip from the hot chocolate. The sudden creamy sweetness filled her mouth and nose, sharpening the world around her, focusing the chaos in her head more than anything else. She let the chocolaty liquid run down her throat, warming her up.

  “I think both murderers knew Catherine Lamb,” she said. “We know Glover did, but he wasn’t the one who consumed her blood, or covered her body, or put the necklace on her throat. That was the other one. We can call him beta.”

  “That’s assuming Glover really killed Catherine Lamb,” O’Donnell said.

  Zoe took a bite from the sandwich. Either centaur meat tasted like turkey, or this was a turkey sandwich. “Detective, at some point you need to narrow your focus down to an actual suspect. I’m not telling you how to do your—”

  “I’m just saying nothing is final yet.” O’Donnell frowned, tilting her head slightly.

  Zoe glanced at Tatum, raising her eyebrows to make sure he saw that. He ignored the gesture.

  “Presumably Glover met beta in the church,” Zoe said.

  “Either that, or Glover knew beta before, and beta introduced him to the church,” Tatum suggested.

  O’Donnell finished her hot chocolate. “So Rod Glover returned to Chicago from Dale City a few weeks ago. From what I understand, he was wounded, and terminally ill, and needed a place to stay.”

  “And he had at least one friend who could help him,” Tatum said.

  “He might actually be staying with him.” Zoe spooned some foam off her hot chocolate. “It makes perfect sense that Glover would return to Chicago. This is where he feels safest. For the past decade he’s been building a life here. Now that he is ill and has no job, he came back to get help from his friends.” She licked the spoon but stopped when O’Donnell looked at her with a bemused frown.

  “He’s probably getting cancer treatment,” O’Donnell said. “We can get a warrant, check the hospitals for a patient named Rod Glover or Daniel Moore.”

  “We already did that,” Tatum said. “Got the warrants and had them look for him in hospital records. Nothing. We also showed his picture around, but there are over ten thousand cancer patients in Chicago, so it’s looking for a needle in a haystack. Not to mention that hospitals aren’t wild about divulging patient information. We have an analyst in Quantico still following up on that paper trail.”

  O’Donnell nodded thoughtfully. “If he’s been living here for a decade, that’s good for us. We can use the press, get his picture out there. Maybe someone saw him recently. And it might make his so-called friends come forward.”

  Zoe considered this. “I think that’s a good idea,” she said slowly. “Even if no one comes forward, it’ll increase the pressure on him and might cause him to make a mistake.”

  “What if media interest prods him to kill again?” Tatum asked.

  “That’s not likely. Glover never showed any inclination of responding to the press in that manner,” Zoe said. “He isn’t interested in fame.”

  “I’ll make sure the press get his photo,” O’Donnell said. “I’ll also talk to Patrick Carpenter and Albert Lamb again, see what more they can tell me about Daniel Moore, and check if I can get any names. What about the other man? This beta dude?”

  “It’s likely that he has a criminal record that starts with theft or harassment,” Zoe said. “The theft might include strange objects like women’s underwear, or shoes, or makeup.”

  “It’s called fetish burglaries,” Tatum said.

  “Glover wouldn’t partner with someone who would put him in serious risk, someone who’d attract suspicion, so this killer isn’t a gibbering madman or a serious drug addict. It’s likely he has some source of income Glover could leech.”

  O’Donnell raised her eyebrow. “I hoped for a more specific profile. On TV, you guys say stuff like, ‘The subject is twenty-five years old, white, thin, has a limp, and probably stutters.’”

  Zoe gave it some thought. “I don’t see why any of that would be particularly likely.”

  “We’ll try to create a more accurate profile of the other killer,” Tatum said. “We need to move fast, before they both act again.”

  “Again?” O’Donnell said. “You think they might attack another victim?”

  “Glover is dying,” Zoe said. “He knows he doesn’t have a lot of time left, and that diminishes his fear of being caught. As long as he is healthy enough, he will do this again. As for his partner, it’s too early to say. But he was there to drink the victim’s blood. That indicates a powerful obsession with blood consumption, and it is likely he’d want to repeat it.”

  “No pressure or anything,” O’Donnell said.

  Zoe blinked. Hadn’t the detective listened to what they just said? “There’s a lot of pressure,” she stressed.

  O’Donnell rolled her eyes. “I got that.”

  Zoe glanced at Tatum. “We need to update Mancuso. We can’t leave yet.”

  Tatum sighed deeply, doing his martyr impression. “Fine. I’ll talk to her.”

  “We’ll check ViCAP, see if there are any other similar crimes where blood was consumed or taken,” Zoe said.

  O’Donnell snorted as she stood up. “Good luck with that. No one in our department bothers with your ViCAP system.”

  Zoe gritted her teeth in annoyance. “If you would invest the time to enter your cases into the ViCAP system, it would make solving murders like this significantly easier.”

  “Well,” O’Donnell countered, “maybe if your fed buddies made the system easier to use, and I didn’t have to answer more than a hundred damn questions every time I tried to enter one of my cases, I would start doing that. You know, in this city, I have a very limited amount of time to investigate a murder before the next one lands on my desk.”

  Zoe sipped from her hot chocolate, watching O’Donnell as she left. “She doesn’t like me.”

  “She’s just very intense.” Tatum smiled at her. “Ready to leave?”

  “I’m thinking of getting another hot chocolate to go.”

  “Well, don’t rush into a decision you’ll regret later.”

  “It’s really good.”

  “I’m sure it is. Go get your hot chocolate. We have serial killers to catch.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Harry Barry was in a gloating mood that afternoon. There had been a huge cocaine bust in South Chicago. Everyone was talking about it—it was front-page material. And who had the story? Was it Nick Johnson, the Chicago Daily Gazette’s senior crime journalist? Nope! Guess again. It was Harry Barry. He was the one with the source in the team that made the bust. He was the one with the witness account. He was the one scheduled to talk to a suspect’s defense attorney. And Nick Johnson and his mediocre somber articles would have to watch while Harry basked in the glory.

  Harry’s mom had often told him as a child that gloating and bragging were things that “lesser men” did. But Harry qui
ckly concluded that it seemed lesser men had all the fun. And besides, his mom would brag endlessly about her silver cutlery set and about that one time she met Richard Gere in person. Even as a child, Harry was quick to spot hypocrisy.

  Just yesterday, Nick had sauntered over to Harry’s desk to tell him the Catherine Lamb story, which Nick had written, had been quoted in an online New York Post article. But now Catherine Lamb was old news, a two-day-old case with no solid leads. All Nick had today was an interview with Lamb’s dad. Harry had overheard that they’d told Nick to shorten the interview by three hundred words. He considered going over to Nick’s desk to ask him how it was going along.

  It definitely sounded like something a lesser man would do. And no man was lesser than Harry.

  His desk phone rang. He picked it up. “Harry here.”

  “This is Detective O’Donnell from Area Central,” the woman on the other side said. “I wanted to talk to the reporter covering the Lamb case.”

  “Oh yeah?” Harry said distractedly. “You got the wrong—”

  “We’re looking for someone who might be related to the case, a man named Rod Glover, and I hoped—”

  “You got the wrong guy,” Harry said, talking over her. “Here, I’ll transfer you.” He punched Nick’s extension and hung up.

  For some reason, his good mood had evaporated. The phone call had interrupted his internal gloating mechanism, and he was left with a sort of hollow sensation he couldn’t quite place. He shook his head, about to return to work, when it sank in.

  Rod Glover.

  How had he missed it? Was his head so far up his own ass? Rod Glover was Zoe Bentley’s childhood serial killer. He knew that; he was in the process of writing a damn book about it. And he’d just forwarded the call to Nick Johnson like a bumbling amateur.

  Rod Glover was related to the Lamb case?

  Harry stared at the half-written story of the cocaine bust. It suddenly seemed boring and trite. He’d quoted his source saying it was “another successful law enforcement success targeting major drug cartel activity.” Successful law enforcement success. Who was this Neanderthal? Now that he looked at it, he realized half of what his source had said was badly phrased drivel.