Next Girl On The List - A serial killer thriller (McRyan Mystery Series Book)

by Roger Stelljes

  That was a start. The meeting broke up.

  “So what are we doing?” Wire asked Mac.

  “Learning more about Rubens from the people who’ve gone up against him.”

  The first video conference of the day was with Gavin Sullivan, retired, formerly of the Boston Police Homicide Unit. “Every time this son of a bitch surfaces I’m taken back to ten years ago.”

  Sullivan was at Boston Police headquarters with the Rubens case file in front of him. “I had a good career,” he said to Mac and Wire. “I did a lot of good and carry few regrets, but this one? This one stays with me. The faces of those four women stay with me. I bet I take this file out once a month and look it over.”

  “I suspect even more often when he surfaces,” Wire suggested.

  “You got that right, Ms. Wire,” Sullivan answered.

  Sullivan ran through the investigation, victim by victim. “The murders took place over a period of five weeks. The first victim, Nicole Franzen, was murdered in her apartment just north of downtown.”

  “But no countdown, I noticed?” Mac asked.

  “No. That came later with the third victim.”

  “What do you make of that?” Mac asked.

  “The FBI profiler, April Greene. Have you met her?”

  “We have.”

  “Very sharp lady, even back then before she became kind of famous,” Sullivan stated. “As I recall, she thought it was a reflection of how he was figuring out the process and was getting more confident and cocky as he went along,” Sullivan answered.

  “Yeah, like killing victim number three while you had a suspect in custody,” Wire noted.

  “Correct, ma’am. That was his big fuck you to us. We take our guy into custody and then I get the call from him, from Rubens. He tells me I’ve got the wrong guy, that we’re nowhere on the case and that in twenty-four hours I’ll have another victim.”

  “Did you take it seriously when he called?” Mac asked.

  “Officially, of course,” Sullivan replied and then they heard a sigh. “Unofficially, I’m sorry to say we thought the call was bullshit because the guy we had in custody looked good for it.”

  “But then you had a third victim.”

  “Yes, twenty-four hours later, just like he said. Susanna O’Dwyer was a larger woman, a woman that was Rubenesque, I guess. Hell, there’s a phrase I never thought I’d utter. In any event, she was posed like the woman depicted in the painting titled Susanna and the Elders.”

  “Tell me about the scene,” Wire said, looking at a copy of the file on the murder of O’Dwyer.

  “He was sending a message with that one. It was a brutal murder. He hit her in the head with a wooden baseball bat. And that wasn’t the worst of it. Not only did we, as it turned out, have the wrong man, but he left that damn countdown clock behind, giving us five days. Then he called me and said I had one more shot at catching him and he was leaving a clue behind that told us who the victim was. I’ll be damned if the bastard didn’t kill Regina Dyson right on time and then call me to tell me about it.”

  “And then he was gone,” Mac stated.

  “And then he was gone.”

  “So what was the last clue?” Mac asked, the crime scene photos for the fourth victim in front of him.

  “Vacuum cleaners,” Sullivan replied. “There was an old Regina vacuum cleaner sitting right next to a new Dyson. You’ll see it in the crime scene photos—those two vacuums are in half the pictures. Can you believe that shit? I’m supposed to figure out my victim is Regina Dyson because there are two vacuum cleaners sitting side-by-side.” The retired detective disgustedly shook his head. “No way.”

  In the early afternoon, Chicago detectives Vic Wirtz and Paul Trazinski were on video conference. Wirtz was the lead and Trazinski was his partner when Rubens made his way to Chicago three years after Boston. Like Sullivan, Wirtz ran them through the entirety of the investigation.

  “It was a tighter timeline than in Boston,” Wirtz recounted. “Three weeks and two days and then he was gone.”

  “He announced his presence on the first victim, I see,” Wire stated.

  “He sure did. From what I’ve gathered from the news reports this morning, it was a similar scene to what you two found. The victim, Stella Krazny, was staged like a Rubens painting. In our case, it was Het Pelsken. He staged it right down to the fur coat wrapped around her and staged the body in the bathroom, right by the bathtub since the portrait was of Rubens’ wife wrapping herself in the fur after getting out of the bath. And he left a note saying he was in Chicago and that Ms. Krazny was first.”

  “And the clock and the clue?” Mac asked.

  “Indeed,” Trazinski replied. “And the media spectacle.”

  “I assume Ridge is who you’re referring to?” Wire inquired.

  “Him and all of the others. Ridge was on it pretty quickly. But the cable networks got onto it some, our papers and media got onto it big time. It was an intense three weeks.”

  “Tell me about the clues,” Mac asked.

  “We could never figure them out until after we found the victims, and in a couple of cases, it took a day or two after. For example, the second victim was a woman named Allison Cole Wheatfield. We found her dead in an abandoned office building on the second floor after he called it in. The clue about her that he left at Stella Krazny’s was a small portrait of a Kansas wheat field hanging over the toilet that was painted by an A. Cole, which was Allison Cole.”

  “So you needed to put together the wheat field with Allison Cole. That’s tough,” Mac remarked.

  “The clues were beyond obscure,” Trazinski replied.

  “To me, it was almost like they weren’t real clues,” Wirtz added. “They’re really intended to torture you and make you waste your time trying to figure them out. The clue is there but good luck figuring it out. He’s just jerking you around. After the fourth victim when he left Chicago I went back to the last victim’s house and stared at the clue.”

  “Is this the one for Joan Loch?” Mac asked, flipping to that part of the Chicago file.

  “That’s the one,” Wirtz replied. “The clue was a combination of a painting of Joan of Arc and the picture of Loch Lomond from Scotland. They were hanging side-by-side on the wall about five feet from the body of the victim. The wall and those two pictures hanging on it were in half of the crime scene photos, but …”

  “But?” Wire asked.

  “The clue was wasted on me and Trazinski,” Wirtz stated. “I didn’t know much about either Joan of Arc or Loch Lomond.”

  “We’ve talked about this case over beer for years. We’d have never figured it out. We’re street cops, detectives. We understand greed, sex, money, revenge, the typical motives for murder. This?” Trazinski angrily shook his head and smirked. “This was something we couldn’t comprehend. The FBI helped. There was a profiler, a woman. What was her name?”

  “April Greene,” Wire suggested.

  “That’s the one. She had some thoughts about Rubens, who he was and how he hunted. She tried to help but to no avail,” Trazinski confirmed.

  “The case will haunt me as long as I live,” Wirtz added. “It was the only time in my career where I felt completely inadequate to the task.”

  Trazinski concurred. “I was just happy when the guy and everything that comes with him left town. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that crazy wins.”

  In the late afternoon, they got on a video conference with Sam Walker, the lead detective with LAPD who handled Rubens four years ago in Los Angeles.

  For twenty-four days, Rubens terrorized Walker and his colleagues.

  “I’d handled five other serial cases, four before this one and one after,” Walker stated confidently. “We get a fair amount of them out here, but this one? This one was unlike anything else.”

  “The media pressure?” Wire asked.

  “To be honest, it wasn’t that so much,” Walker answered. “There was lots of that for sure but we
get lots of media attention out here. I’ve handled a couple of other high-profile cases, got a taste of the O.J. case, so that media element didn’t really bother me.”

  “What did?” Mac asked.

  “Rubens. He was … so different from anything I’d ever run across. Have you two investigated a serial case before?”

  “Kind of,” Wire answered. “You probably heard about the Reaper case a year ago.”

  “I did,” Walker answered. “But he wasn’t really a serial, was he?”

  “No, he wasn’t. He was a grieving brother avenging his sister’s death,” Mac answered. “I got involved on the tail end of a serial case years ago in St. Paul, although that ended up tied into another investigation I was working.”

  “So you’ve had a taste,” Walker replied. “Most serials tend to be pretty smart with an IQ of maybe bright normal. I think this guy is different. I think Rubens is way beyond that.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing. He has to be, the way he gets into these women’s worlds and talks their language,” Mac replied.

  “That’s what I thought too,” Walker answered, nodding. “Most serials, while bright, are not overly educated. Rubens is different in that regard. He is educated and highly intelligent on many levels. I also got the sense that, unlike most serial killers, he didn’t come from a broken home, nor was he abused as a child, either physically or sexually.”

  “Because it’s not manifested in how he treats the victims,” Mac answered.

  “That’s was my impression,” Walker answered. “April Greene, whom I’m sure you’ve met already, agreed with that assessment. There is no sex with the victim, at least when he murders them. If anything, odd as it sounds, since he’s killed them he then treats them with great care, staging them like works of art.”

  “So the killing is … just an act,” Mac suggested.

  “It’s just one part of the work of art,” Walker nodded. “The killing, that isn’t what necessarily empowers him.”

  “No. The power comes from dominating the whole game, from seducing the women and then the game of cat and mouse with us,” Mac answered. “That’s what he really gets off on. If it was the killing, there wouldn’t be the need for the clues, the clocks, the taunts and all of that.”

  Walker nodded his agreement. “I’ll tell you what—the son of a gun was fascinating to go after. If I didn’t have a stack of files three feet high, I’d jump on a plane and come help you. I’d love another shot at catching him.”

  “It looks like you almost did catch him,” Wire asked. “In the file, it says you got to the last victim just minutes after she died. How did you get so close?”

  “We solved the clue,” Walker answered.

  “How?”

  “A little bit of luck and a little bit of obsession. We were getting nowhere. The pressure on us was immense, that damn ticking clock just staring us in the face all the time. What we were doing wasn’t working so I changed it up. I went back to the apartment of the third victim, Leslie Merchant. I locked myself in there for nearly fifteen hours. My phone is ringing, the clock is running, the media is going crazy and I just ignored it all and holed up at the crime scene. I had to see if I could find it, the clue, the connection to the last victim. Now Leslie Merchant wasn’t a hoarder, but she had a pretty healthy shopping addiction. She had money, a combination of being an only child who inherited a fair sum from her parents and having a good-paying job at Universal Pictures. I think she filled her free time spending money and buying things. Her apartment was a treasure trove. It was full of pictures, posters, books, bobbles, electronic equipment, furniture and clothes. Oh man, did she love clothes, and she made Imelda Marcos look like she had only a couple pairs of shoes.”

  “The perfect environment for him to hide the clue,” Mac replied. “I’m looking at the same kind of scene right now. Pictures, portraits and books galore.”

  “That’s right, Agent McRyan. I went to her apartment at 6:00 A.M., knowing our deadline was 9:00 P.M. that night. I just sat there just looking around for combinations on the walls and on the shelves.”

  “What triggered it?”

  “I had the police radio on in case a call came in. The media knew when the deadline was. So people were calling in all kinds of tips, all of which were meaningless, except one. Literally a minute after 9:00 P.M., a tip came in that Ronda Hollister, a woman who hadn’t missed a day of work or ever even been late for work in fifteen years, hadn’t showed for work that day, wasn’t answering the phone and this person thought she fit the profile.”

  “So? How did you make the connection?” Wire asked.

  “The album cover for the Help Me Rhonda single framed on the wall,” Mac exclaimed, staring at a crime scene photo. “It was framed on the wall. And sitting right underneath it was—”

  “A Hollister shopping bag. I’d looked at that area a number of times while I’d been there and the minute I heard the name Ronda Hollister—”

  “You knew.”

  “I knew. We were in her apartment at 9:17 P.M. I think we missed her death and him by mere minutes. He didn’t leave the masterpiece behind. We found the dead swan for Leda and the Swan on the floor next to the body that was lying on a red tablecloth. That was the only time he didn’t get to stage things perfectly. He was forced to leave before he wanted to—I guess he heard us coming. I put the whole area on lockdown around her house and I mean lockdown. Twelve-block radius. We searched every house, apartment, store, warehouse, business, bus, dog house, tree house and every vehicle in the area but came up empty. I got a call later that night from Rubens congratulating me on coming so close. That was the last I ever heard from him.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Eleanor Roosevelt, she was quite a historical figure.”

  Rubens sat up in his small bed, drinking a cup of espresso while he took in the morning news reports, his reappearance appropriately taking its place as the news lead. He was quite satisfied with how things had started. The local media was in full frenzy and the national media and the cable networks in particular, were devoting significant time to his reappearance. He’d even seen the first pseudo psychological expert resurface and get some air time. You had to love the twenty-four-hour news cycle.

  By 9:30 A.M., he was out of bed and glancing out the window of the small apartment that overlooked East Capitol Street and the Anacostia River farther in the distance to the west. East Capitol Street was a main thoroughfare into the city from the east.

  It had started.

  He was energized to have the shackles off, to have his plan in motion and to be operating again. There was nothing like it.

  Once showered and dressed, he made himself another cup of espresso, poured it into a cheap travel mug and was out the door and settled behind the wheel of his non-descript, three-year-old black Honda Civic. The mid-morning was cool and damp, a light coating of moisture on the streets from the misty rain now dissipating as he pulled out of the parking lot behind the apartment building.

  Extra caution was required now that he had begun.

  He diligently watched his rearview mirror and inventoried the vehicles in front and behind him as he drove west across the Whitney Young Memorial Bridge and started working his way towards southeast DC.

  This wasn’t the shortest or quickest route to the office; it was just one of many possibilities. The quickest way would have easily been south on the Anacostia Freeway and then west over the 11th Street Bridge. However, even before the game started he’d taken precautions, never driving to the office the same way two days in a row, never wearing the same clothing or arriving at the same time. No patterns, no consistencies and no reliability. He didn’t want anyone to remember or notice him. If someone did engage him, he wasn’t unfriendly by any means for that would be memorable and noticeable. But he didn’t go out of his way to talk to people that he didn’t need to talk to. It was his goal to not register with anyone. He wanted to be anonymous, someone nobody would give a second thought to i
f they saw him. What he strove for was to be totally common-looking, of average height and weight, wearing standard clothes, driving a normal, compact fuel-efficient car and engaging in unremarkable behavior. When it was all said and done, he didn’t want anyone wondering where he went or what happened to him. He didn’t want anyone to remember him at all. People were to never know that Rubens had been in their midst.

  That was the discipline that was required.

  One slip could end it all.

  So there were no friends for the sake of having friends.

  No contact was initiated with anyone unless they proved useful for a reason.

  It was all about the mission, playing the game and winning it.

  For those reasons, the apartment was rented eleven months ago under one name. The car was purchased two years ago under another name and the office was leased for six months under yet a third identity. That was one thing he had an abundance of —identities. When it was all over, he’d walk away from the apartment and office, both leases expiring at the end of April. The car would be dumped for cash, if it was safe to do so, or just simply dumped, left parked on a side street with the keys in the ignition, if need be.

  At the end of April, he’d take another long vacation for a year or two and simply disappear.

  That was what he’d done previously.

  After Boston ten years ago, he made his way to London and traveled across Europe for a number of months before settling in Paris and finding work at the Louvre. It was two years before the States called him back.

  When Chicago was finished, he left the country and traveled to Australia and toured the country before settling in Melbourne for six months, picking up work at an art gallery. It was another two years before he was back and settled in Los Angeles.

  After the rush of Los Angeles, he’d slipped out of the United States and meandered his way to Argentina staying in Buenos Aires for six months before spending a year in Rio and making decent money as a street painter and artist, a trade he’d first learned in Paris and had been working on ever since. A trade that proved useful in seducing Lisa White.