A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery Book 1)

by Mike Omer

  What else was there? She reached, grabbed a handful of other clothes, and pulled them out. Another shirt, a pair of underpants, and a pair of feminine underwear.

  She held up the underwear. They could be explained, of course. Rod Glover occasionally had a woman over.

  But there was a smudge of mud on the yellow cloth.

  She stared at it for long seconds, her heart pounding. It dropped from her fingers.

  She was becoming convinced she was standing in the bedroom of the Maynard serial killer. She had to get out of there. She bent to push all the clothing back under the bed, when something else grabbed her attention. A rectangular black shape under the bed. A shoebox. With trembling fingers, she pulled it out and lifted the lid.

  There was a clicking sound, and it took a second to register. The lock on the front door.

  She dropped the lid on the box, her mind in turmoil, and pounced at the bedroom door. She quickly shut it, taking care not to let it slam, just as she heard the front door opening. Had he seen? She leaned against the door, listening, hearing only the thumping of her own heart.

  And then, a cupboard opened. He was in the kitchen. She let out a shaking breath and looked around her. Quickly, she shoved all the clothing and the shoebox under the bed, her mind still processing what she had seen in it. A few pieces of crumpled female lingerie. A bracelet.

  She pushed the thoughts away. She couldn’t be distracted right now; she had to get out. Get out and call the police. They would handle it all.

  Moving slowly, she managed to get to the bedroom window. She removed the cloth that covered it. Would Glover realize someone had been in the room? Or would he assume it had just fallen? It didn’t matter. Just get out and call the cops.

  Carefully, she twisted the window handle. It was a bit stuck, and she had to push hard. She could hear Glover walking around the house and prayed he wouldn’t come into the bedroom right now. Just a few more seconds . . .

  She pushed the window, and it squeaked. Glover’s footsteps paused.

  She grabbed the window ledge and lifted herself out, tumbling, her foot hitting the pane, thumping. She quickly stood up and shut the window, the frame cracking as she did so. There was no way he didn’t hear it.

  She turned around and hurriedly walked away, crossing his yard toward her home and safety . . .

  “Zoe?”

  She froze, knowing she should just bolt, not able to move, her legs frozen in place. She turned around.

  “Hey,” she said, her voice shaking.

  He looked at her with confusion, his eyes narrowing. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why aren’t you at school?”

  “M . . . my mom said I could stay home today. She sent me over. She wanted to know if you had some sugar. But then I remembered that you must be at work.”

  “Right,” Glover said. His face was blank. His usual goofy grin was gone.

  His eyes flickered to something behind her. Zoe glanced over her shoulder. Mrs. Ambrose was outside, shoveling the snow from her doorway.

  “Hi, Mrs. Ambrose,” Zoe called, trying to sound nonchalant, her voice high pitched and hysterical.

  The neighbor raised her eyes and gave her a grudging nod. Zoe turned around and realized Glover was now much closer. He had crossed the space between them in less than a second. His jaw was locked tight.

  “I have some sugar,” he said. “How much do you need? A cup?”

  Zoe nodded hesitantly.

  “Come in,” he said. “Let me get it for you.”

  “You know what? I just remembered that I can’t . . . I can’t eat sugar. I might be diabetic. I . . . thanks.”

  She turned and strode away, her steps fast, wondering if Glover would grab her, pull her into his home, rape her, and kill her.

  “Zoe. Hey, Zoe,” he called after her.

  She kept walking, rigid with fear.

  CHAPTER 38

  Chicago, Illinois, Thursday, July 21, 2016

  The alley was lit by flickering red and blue lights shimmering on the brick walls that enclosed it. The body of Lily Ramos had been discarded on the ground. It was a tight space, and Tatum and the detectives pushed their way ahead of Zoe, who made no effort to get there first. She could see glimpses of the victim between the people who huddled around the body. A palm, facing the sky, fingers outstretched. The woman’s face, her eyes wide open and vacant, mouth parted. Her hair, disheveled, spread on the ground.

  “Do you have an estimate for the time of death?” Martinez asked.

  Someone answered, but Zoe couldn’t see past the wall of people in her way.

  “Time of death is between nine thirty and ten thirty.”

  Zoe assumed it was the medical examiner. She sighed and walked closer, shoving her way forward a bit until she could see the man crouching by the body.

  This body was not posed, and there was no mistaking it for a living woman. Her arms sprawled on the ground, her left leg bent at the knee, the other straight. She wore a shirt and underwear, no pants. There was a dark-crimson gash on her throat. The entire neck was covered in dried blood as well as some on the body’s chin. The blood had also trickled under her collar.

  “She was still alive at nine thirty,” Martinez said. “We know she was alive until nine thirty-seven.”

  “Unless it wasn’t her on the phone,” Tatum said.

  Martinez nodded, conceding the possibility.

  “Well,” the medical examiner said, “she didn’t die after ten thirty.”

  “And she didn’t die here, either,” Martinez said. “There’s no blood on the ground.”

  The detachment came over Zoe, as it always did. As far as her brain was concerned, the body on the floor wasn’t a dead woman. It was a collection of clues and indications. A footprint left by the killer. This was how her brain coped, and she knew it well by now. She also knew it was a temporary reprieve, that the body in the alley would haunt her later.

  But that was later.

  She crouched by the woman, looking at her intently.

  “This doesn’t look like the work of the same killer,” Tatum said.

  “Really?” Zoe glanced at the sides of the woman’s neck. “Why not?”

  “Well, she isn’t embalmed, her throat is cut, she isn’t posed, and we found her almost immediately after she disappeared . . . nothing is similar.”

  “She was tied,” Zoe said, indicating the woman’s wrists, which were scraped and bloody. “And I think she might have been strangled as well.” She pointed at a bruise on the side of the neck.

  “This looks all wrong for our killer.”

  “I definitely agree that this isn’t what he wanted.”

  “But you think it’s the same guy?” Tatum sounded very skeptical.

  “I think it’s too soon to tell,” Zoe said.

  “Why did he slash her throat?”

  Zoe chewed her lip. That was a very good question. Everything else could be explained by the fact that the victim had contacted the police. The killer had panicked, killed the woman, and put her in the trunk, fleeing the crime scene. Realizing there were roadblocks everywhere, he had driven up to the alley and dumped the body.

  But why slash her throat? It wasn’t his MO; he always strangled the victims.

  “I don’t know,” she finally admitted.

  “I think it’s a different guy, Zoe.”

  “Well,” she said, irritated, “you have a right to your own opinion, Agent Gray.”

  Tatum sighed and stood up.

  Zoe blocked the interaction with Tatum from her mind. The man was needlessly contrary and wasn’t helping. She focused on the body. Around her, others were trying to figure out what had happened, tracing forensic evidence, perhaps finding a breadcrumb that would lead to the killer. Their job was to look at the past. Her job was to study the past, sure—then look at the present and the future.

  What was the killer going through right now? What would his next move be?

  This had not gone as he had
planned. The body was not posed, probably not even embalmed. As far as this killer was concerned, the killing was not the point. It was the time after the killing that mattered. That was what he fantasized about.

  And he hadn’t gotten it. His fantasy had not been fulfilled this time. His need was still there. Perhaps even worse than before.

  Serial killers usually had a learning curve. The killer had a fantasy. He killed, trying to fulfill the fantasy, but it didn’t work as well as he hoped it would. It didn’t match the fantasy. So he would think of ways to improve his actions so that the next murder would work out better. Killed again. Improved his methods even more. Killed again.

  This was something people rarely understood about serial killers. Most people assumed killers had a constant signature. But often, the killer changed his methods and signatures to accommodate the elaborate fantasies in his mind.

  This killer obviously adapted. His techniques became more refined with each murder. How would he adapt this time?

  They’d nearly caught him. He was scared. He would need time to regroup, to understand what had happened and what had gone wrong. He knew the big screwup was leaving the phone with his victim, so they could be sure that wouldn’t happen again. But that wouldn’t be enough. Next time he grabbed someone, he’d kill her faster, not give her time to contact anyone. And he might change his target as well. He knew they thought he was targeting prostitutes. So he would search for a different victim—still vulnerable but not a working girl.

  “Hey,” Martinez said, crouching by her side. “Are you okay?”

  “He’s going to strike again,” Zoe said. “And he’ll adapt. We won’t be able to find him through his future victims anymore. We’ll have to find him by tracing the breadcrumbs he left in his past crimes. His past mistakes.”

  CHAPTER 39

  He gazed at the shower’s porcelain floor, watching the foamy water, pink with blood, swirling into the drain. There was something mesmerizing about it—the translucent white, pink, and red bubbles crowding the dark hole, sliding inside one after the other. A sob emerged from his throat, uncontrollable.

  It had all gone so wrong.

  He had thought that by the end of this evening, they would be together. Served him right for trusting a woman before the treatment. He should have finished her last night as soon as he had her. Instead, he’d decided to wait, and this was what happened.

  He was alone.

  Finally, the water running down his body became colorless, transparent. He switched the water off, stepped out of the shower, and grabbed his towel.

  The shirt and pants he had worn, soaked in that woman’s blood, were in a tied trash bag on the floor. He considered burning it, but that sounded like a hassle. Would anyone really go through a tied trash bag? He resolved to dump it in a public trash bin once he went out. Removing the evidence from his house was good enough.

  He still found it difficult to believe the cop at the roadblock had let him drive through with his clothes looking like that.

  He plodded to his room slowly. He could almost feel the oppressive emptiness of the apartment. No one but him in the bedroom. If he sat down to drink a beer, he would do so alone. No one to talk to about his day, to hear how he had evaded the police, slipped right through their fingers.

  He put on a pair of jeans and a plaid button-down shirt and took a look in the mirror. His reflection stared back at him. He looked closely at his face and neck, made sure there was no speck of blood he had missed. There wasn’t.

  That bitch. And the cops had been looking for her; he was sure of it. They knew he had taken her. How?

  Because they knew what he was looking for. Girls on the streets. Whores. Next time he stopped by a street corner, there might be a police stakeout waiting just for him. He felt a shiver of fear. And he wanted to talk to someone. Wanted a sympathetic ear, someone who would listen to his terror. There was no one.

  A visit to the fridge earned him a cold can of beer. He walked over to his apartment’s balcony and watched the view from above. It was hardly a luxurious home, but the view wasn’t half-bad, considering the rent. Chicago’s buildings blocked the view of Lake Michigan, but he didn’t care about that. You couldn’t really see the lake at night, only a black shape. It was much better to look at the windows, some of them alight even at this late hour. The city never really went to sleep. And somewhere in it, there was someone for him.

  CHAPTER 40

  Zoe’s eyes were wide open, staring at the motel ceiling. The paint peeled at several points, and a diagonal crack zigzagged across almost the entire ceiling. The light had a dusty glass cover in which two distinct dead flies could be spotted. But her brain hardly registered all that. It was too busy processing the image of a dead woman, her neck bloody, her eyes vacant. And the detachment was gone, as she had known it would be.

  Once she had a moment of quiet, a second to process, it always hit her. Her brain, wired to try to imagine everything, began working in high gear. What would the parents of this victim feel when they heard about it? How would her partner feel or children, if she had any? And, of course, how had she felt when it had happened? Scared? In pain? Violated?

  During Zoe’s fifteen minutes of fame, after helping catch one of the most infamous serial killers of the twenty-first century, she’d heard people talking about how clever she was. Her credentials would often be touted—PhD and JD from Harvard, top of her class, and so on and so forth. But they didn’t get it. What made her so damn good was her vivid imagination. When she tried to, she could get into the killer’s mind, imagine what he felt, what he saw. It was a double-edged sword because she’d also see things from the victim’s point of view. And she’d see them clearly.

  Tied by her wrists somewhere, trying desperately to tell the cops where she was, her mouth gagged. She’d been taken almost twenty-four hours earlier. Had she been tied that entire time? Probably. That meant her throat was parched; she was weak from thirst, hunger, and fear. Her jaw would ache from whatever had been shoved into her mouth to gag her, her shoulders throbbing in pain. And mix all that with the knowledge that death could be moments away, and then the killer came for her—

  A knock on the door startled her. She was breathing hard, her palms sweaty. She took a moment to steady her breath and got off the bed. She padded over to the door.

  “Yeah?” she said. She didn’t ask who it was. Who else would knock on her motel door at two in the morning?

  “Did I wake you up?” Tatum’s voice sounded muffled from the other side.

  “No, I was still awake.”

  “Can you open the door? I come bearing gifts.”

  Zoe considered this. She wore a wide, long shirt that covered her up to midthigh and a pair of underwear. She could go and put on a pair of jeans, maybe a bra, but it sounded like the worst sort of idea, and the glimpse of a dead young woman put the notions of modesty in a certain perspective.

  She opened the door. Tatum stood outside, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, holding a 7-Eleven bag in his hand. His eyes widened slowly.

  “Uh, sorry,” he said. “I just thought neither of us had anything to eat for dinner, and I figured—”

  “Come in,” Zoe said, opening the door a bit wider. He slid in, and she caught a whiff of soapy lavender from him. He had showered before coming. She was relieved. She didn’t want the smell of the crime scene in her room.

  He sat on the small couch in the room’s corner, putting the bag on the glass table. “I brought two meals. You can pick whichever you like. There’s a . . .” He pulled out the first box from the bag and read the label. “Buffalo chicken roller . . . and there’s, uh . . . something else . . . with cheese, I guess. And two hotdogs, with some toppings I selected randomly.”

  “You know how to spoil a girl,” Zoe said dryly, sitting on the other side of the couch, readjusting the shirt to cover as much as possible. “I’ll take the something-else-with-cheese.”

  “And also”—Tatum pulled two bottles of Honker’s
Ale out of the bag—“something to drink. Because I think otherwise there’s no way we can force this food down our throats.” He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and used one of them to remove the cap from a bottle. He then handed it to Zoe.

  Zoe took a bite from her something-else-with-cheese. It was stale and soggy and tasted like morning breath. She put it down and took the beer bottle. “Beer has caloric value,” she said. “I think it can be considered a meal.”

  Tatum chewed the buffalo chicken roller, his face far from a warm endorsement. “This is terrible.”

  “Here. Allow me,” Zoe said, holding out her hand. He gave her the roller, and she thrust it in the bag. Then she took the entire thing and dumped it in the trash. She bent by her suitcase on the floor and rummaged inside, locating the Snickers bars. It occurred to her that in this pose, dressed as she was, she was giving Tatum quite a view. She quickly straightened and turned toward him. He stared at the wall with fascination, his cheeks slightly red.

  “Here,” she said, handing one over. “I always pack a bunch of Snickers bars when I travel.”

  “Wise woman,” he said, tearing the wrapper.

  She unwrapped her own bar and took a bite. The peanuty crunchiness and the sweetness of the chocolate began tangoing in her mouth, and she shut her eyes, breathing deeply through her nose. She had tried yoga, meditation, running, and swimming. So far, nothing cleansed the soul better than a Snickers bar. It was the ultimate therapy. It was cheap, and it could be carried in her bag. She drank a swig of beer. The tastes meshed well together. She was enjoying this dinner of Snickers à la Honker’s.

  “Yum,” Tatum said in a muffled voice, chewing happily.

  Zoe smiled, her body relaxing. She was only half looking at Tatum, enjoying the first moment of serenity that evening.

  “So, about today . . .” Tatum said.

  “What about today?” Zoe asked, taking another swig from her beer bottle. She had finished half her Snickers bar, and her brain was mostly consumed by the complex process of dividing the Snickers bar bites evenly throughout the beer. She didn’t want to drink the final third of the bottle with no chocolate to accompany it. Bad planning of chocolate division was how things went downhill.