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

by Roger Stelljes

  “The clichéd answer is that it was his mother who didn’t love him and she looked like one of the subjects of a Rubens painting. Another dime store theory is that maybe a woman he loved was Rubenesque and she spurned him and as a result, he’s taking his revenge on others. That would be the formulaic view of it.”

  “What’s your view?”

  Ridge took a sip of his beer and then grabbed a handful of popcorn and tossed two pieces into his mouth. “It’s not something quite that easy. For all my witty asides about this case, Rubens is a disturbed man who is pulling his motivation from some very dark place. I mean, to kill for this long? To go away and then come back again and again in some other city? Think about it—there is nothing impulsive about the guy.”

  “No, he’s methodical.”

  “And careful and selective,” Ridge added. “And the way he sets the women up?” He frowned. “It’s a level of ruthlessness that blows my mind. Obviously, the guy has some serious issues. But what the origin of that dark place is—” He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s an area best reserved for someone like April Greene. That’s her bailiwick.”

  “She’s pretty smart,” Wire noted. “Mac and I have been reading parts of her books on serial killers. She has some interesting insights.”

  “Lord knows she’s interviewed enough of them,” Ridge answered somewhat dismissively.

  “Careful, Ridge,” Wire needled. “Your competitive chauvinist side is showing.”

  He laughed. “Dara, honey. I’m no chauvinist. I love women.”

  “I bet you do.”

  “April’s smart, I’ll grant you that. She understands the killer’s mind, she really does. Now her books on profiling in general, those are the gold standard for that topic. She took what John Douglas did all those years ago and has taken it to a whole new level.”

  Wire could hear the tone in his voice. “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”

  “But if we’re talking strictly Rubens, her books on that topic are, in my opinion, only just okay. If you’re looking for insight on Rubens, you might get as much from the FBI files as from her first book. It was kind of milquetoast, a Joe Friday, ‘just the facts, ma’am’ approach.”

  “Too dull for you?”

  “Way too dull,” Ridge replied eagerly. “People want some excitement, some edge of the seat tension. Besides, these cases provide that with this nutjob’s clock and Rubens’ painting poses. But her first book—” He waved dismissively. “No flair.”

  “Not everyone wants melodrama, Ridge. Sometimes people just like the truth.”

  “They want the truth, sure, but not in textbook form. Adults read for entertainment first, knowledge second. A story on a subject like Rubens needs to be engrossing and intense so that it draws you in. It shouldn’t be painful, like a reading assignment for a class. People do that at work every day. No, if they go home at night, they want it with some panache, with some excitement. April’s books sold well and are required reading for cops and boring people. Mine might not get the seal of approval from law enforcement per se but they show up on the New York Times Best Sellers list.”

  “So did hers, Ridge.”

  “Her books came out in February and March—that’s the easy season for the best seller lists. I made it in the fall, the prime book selling season. I sold more books and held on the lists way longer.”

  “I suppose you think your dick is bigger too.”

  “You’ve spent a lot of time around cops, haven’t you?”

  “Far too much.”

  He moved the topic back to Greene’s books. “Look, April’s works are not as sensationalized, not as salacious. But like I said earlier, where I will give her credit, a ton of credit, is in her other books where she gets into the mind of the killers. She has a PhD in psychology and it gives her insight—insight she’s applied to unsolved cases. Her best work is Inside Disturbed Minds. You want to learn something, give that one a read. That one was really interesting, the one that really made her. I gained new respect for her on that one. And the one she put out last year was all about unsolved cases. It was what the police should look for and how these killers’ minds operate. It wasn’t a super long book, but she had seven or eight unsolved cases from around the country over the last ten or so years and picked them apart, picked the killer apart, giving a profile of what the police should look for. That book was fascinating. I read it on a flight from New York to London. It was a really compelling read.”

  “I suppose she did a hatchet job on the cops?”

  “No, not at all,” Ridge answered, shaking his head for effect. “The book wasn’t about what she thought the cops missed. Instead, she wrote it totally from the killer’s point of view—that’s what was fascinating about it. I swear I think she’s interviewed every jailed serial killer there is. She has a gift to get these guys to open up and spill the details. April really understands the mind of a serial and she applied what she’s learned to the unsolved cases. I think the police actually solved one of those cases after April looked at it, just on the basis of the profile and insight she provided. The case had been cold for like five years but they found the guy. In fact, she’s been able to write so prolifically and profitably that she now just consults with the FBI whenever she’s in the mood. This case undoubtedly has her in the mood.”

  There was another tone, and Wire followed up. “She ever get you in the mood?”

  “April?”

  “Yeah, you ever put the moves on her like you’re trying with me?”

  “I’m trying to put the moves on?”

  Wire gave him an eye roll.

  Ridge shrugged. “We had a moment or two. There were a couple of nights in Los Angeles four years ago when we were both covering the last Rubens appearance. We talked a little shop one night, had a few drinks and … well … you know. One thing led to another. April is not unattractive.”

  “I never said she was,” Wire replied. “She’s pretty enough.”

  “Now who’s being catty? That comment was like Obama saying Hillary was likeable enough.”

  Wire laughed. “Well, as for me, I wouldn’t get your hopes up. At least not tonight.”

  “Fair enough,” Ridge replied. “We’ll be doing this again.”

  “Presumptuous much?”

  He returned the eye roll.

  Dara swerved back to the case. “I’ve perused both of your books, Ridge, and scanned hers. I think you sell April short on her Rubens books. She isn’t completely without flair,” she stated.

  “No, she’s just not as entertaining as me.”

  “Speaking of entertainment,” Wire replied, “you’re writing fiction now. Now you just get to make shit up.”

  “It’s amazing what you can come up with when the shackles of facts and truth have been released,” Ridge replied with a big smile. “Rubens made me. That first book sprung me forward. Now I’ve got the gig with the magazine, I write the fiction books, I live in Manhattan and now my buddy Rubens is back and better than ever. Life is, as they say, really effin’ good.”

  At 1:30 A.M., they walked out of the small pub and to their cars. Ridge played it cool. No moves would be made tonight.

  “So I’ll see you around?” Ridge asked.

  “I imagine you will,” Wire replied, having decided he was charming and handsome enough that she wouldn’t mind if he did see her around.

  • • •

  Mac turned the chair at the end of the conference table around and stared at the whiteboard, sipping a cup of coffee, engaging in his ritual during cases. From time to time, the board would speak to him, give him an idea, a thread to pull.

  His father made an off the cuff remark one time, not long before he was killed, that in murder cases they always had more information than they thought. “Sometimes it’s just not in the right context, son. But if you put it in the right order, the right context, the right timeline, suddenly a case could read completely differently.”

  Mac often thought about that comment
when he was a homicide detective. It was often so true. It was why he always put the case up on a whiteboard or a wall. If he could see it all, maybe he could see the answer.

  Alas, the board was not talking to him, at least not yet.

  He was contemplating calling it a night when he saw the updated paper file that Galloway must have dropped on the table. The updated file had a report on Coolidge’s results, or lack thereof, in interviewing Audrey Ruston’s friends and neighbors. There were also the financials for Ruston for the last six months.

  “I’m disappointed to hear that the woman was a dead end,” April Greene offered, leaning against the door frame of the conference room. “That would have been a good break.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want it to be easy, now would we?” Mac answered as he started perusing the financial records.

  “Oh, heavens no,” Greene replied. “What would be the fun and challenge in that?”

  “Exactly,” Mac replied, looking up. “Besides, I don’t believe in easy anyway. When it’s easy, that’s when I get worried. That’s when I look for the floor to give way beneath my feet. So, Ms. Greene, what are you still doing hanging around here? I figured consultants keep nine-to-five hours.”

  “I usually do, but this is Rubens we’re talking about. And I liked the move you made at the press conference,” Greene stated. “Too bad it didn’t pay off.”

  “It still might,” Mac answered more in hope than anything else. “Sometimes these things take time. Investigations are a piece here and a piece there and eventually the puzzle emerges. So this move was a …”

  “Chess move.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals, huh?”

  Mac laughed at the Butch Cassidy reference, but deflected credit. “It’s not about being that clever, really. It’s just that I had an idea and the best way to get it out there was to use the newsies. Mostly they’re a pain in the ass but they can be useful at times.”

  “It is the quickest way to get information out there, that’s for sure,” Greene agreed.

  Mac nodded, sat back in his chair, sighed and closed his eyes.

  “What are you thinking about?” Greene asked.

  “Water,” Mac answered, “the deep blue of the Chesapeake Bay.”

  “Do you have a boat out there?”

  Mac smiled and shook his head. “I could. I have a twenty-six-foot speed boat back home in Minnesota. It could handle the Chesapeake, I think. I’ve thought about bringing it out here but just haven’t gotten around to it.”

  “I have a boat down in the harbor where I live.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes,” Greene replied. “I grew up in Chicago. My dad’s vice, other than running his investment firm, was his forty-foot Trojan Express Cruiser. He had it docked in a marina by the Navy Pier. We went out every weekend in the summer.”

  Greene’s book The Homicidal Artist was on Mac’s nightstand. Part of the motivation in Greene coming to the FBI was the murder of her parents during a home invasion twenty years ago. He could see the wistfulness in her eyes at the mere mention of her parents.

  “The real reason I was thinking of the Chesapeake is that I’m getting married in a month,” Mac stated, veering away from boating. “We’re having the reception at the Davidson House and it overlooks …”

  “The Chesapeake,” April answered with a little smile. “Very nice, Mac. I’ve been there and it will be a wonderful place for you. Maybe if we catch Rubens, or even if we don’t, maybe the two of you would like to come down and we can cruise the bay and you can check out the view of your reception hall from the water.”

  “That would be excellent!” Mac replied happily. “Sally would love it.”

  “Consider it done—we’ll do it,” April answered and then turned to the television in the corner of the conference room, tuned to CNN. “There you are again.”

  Snippets of the press conference were being repeated on the cable news channels and were all over the Internet, along with Twitter, Facebook and any other social networking site. It went viral, as intended. If Mac’s theory was right, there was someone out there who unwittingly knew who Rubens was.

  Greene also saw the deeper element of the move. “You weren’t just talking to the women, were you?”

  “No. I was talking to him as well. He has my number. His I don’t have.”

  “So this was your what? Bat signal?”

  “Something like that,” Mac replied, flipping through credit card records for Ruston. “So my hope is I can rattle him a little that way and then through some old-fashioned … police work we can … get … somewhere.” He focused in on the middle of a page of Ruston’s credit card bills.

  “What is it?”

  He stood up and found the file on Lisa White, opened up the folder with her financial records, scanned them and stopped with his finger in the middle of a page. “Huh.”

  “What?” April asked more urgently.

  “The financials,” Mac replied. “Lisa White and Audrey Ruston have credit card purchases ten minutes apart on the same day at a bookstore called Classic Books. It’s a bookstore here in DC.”

  “I know that store,” Greene replied, coming around to his side of the table. “I did a signing there once, maybe twice.”

  Mac reached for his laptop, made some keystrokes, found the video files for Lisa White and found the surveillance footage for the bookstore the morning of the purchase.

  The surveillance system for Classic Books had three camera angles, one focused on the area of the front entrance, a second one positioned over the cash register that also provided a panoramic view of the middle of the store and one focused towards the back half of the store, and the two small, comfortable seating areas situated opposite a stone fireplace.

  It took Mac a few minutes, but he eventually maneuvered his way to the right time on the video footage: 11:07 A.M. “Okay, there’s White making her purchase, and—” He fast forwarded the video ten minutes to where Ruston appeared, making her purchase at the register. “There’s Audrey Ruston ten minutes later.”

  Mac started scanning back in the video, looking for more glimpses of Ruston. The footage was in black and white but was of decent clarity. As the video played, Audrey Ruston entered the store. She walked inside and slowly walked right to left, checking the aisle markings. She disappeared from view of the first camera. Mac switched to the camera over the cash register. Ruston came into view, still slowly continuing to scan the aisle markings and then she turned to her right into the aisle straight ahead of the cash register. Ruston stopped mid-aisle and took a book off the shelf and started thumbing through it. She’d grabbed a larger book that he could tell contained both text and pictures. Mac couldn’t tell what specific book it was, other than it looked like a coffee table book.

  As he examined Ruston, Mac found that his attention was slowly drawn away from her. Standing five feet away from Ruston was a man, a man whose face seemed focused not on Ruston as she’d come up the aisle, but instead on the cash register. There was something about how he looked, how he was watching the cash register and his senses told him it wasn’t right.

  Mac rewound the footage back three minutes and let it run, now focusing solely on the man who was of average height, maybe five-nine or ten with a little weight around his mid-section. April Greene was to his right, watching silently but intently.

  “That man?” she asked.

  Mac simply nodded.

  The man wore dark-rimmed glasses and had a beard along with a light colored tam hat. Mac ran the footage back and forth three more times before he finally spoke. “April, look at what he’s doing before Ruston approaches him.” Mac pushed play. “Tell me what you see.”

  Greene moved closer, standing now, leaning down with both of her hands and watching. “Run it back one more time.”

  Mac did as instructed.

  She quietly watched again, moving close to the screen, sliding on her reading gl
asses that had been hanging around her neck. “Mac, he’s watching that cash register—he’s zeroed in on it. It’s not obvious—he looks very natural, comfortable, but if you’re looking close you can tell that he is.”

  “And who’s at the cash register?”

  “Lisa White.”

  “Yes, yes, she is.”

  Mac let the video run forward. The man continued to eye White. Then Ruston came down the aisle, stopped and took the coffee table book off the shelf. After a brief moment, Audrey Ruston’s presence caught the man’s attention. In fact, it seemed to have interrupted his concentration. Then the man took another look at the woman and his head snapped up.

  “Wait a second,” Mac exclaimed and ran the video back, pushed play and watched again. “You saw the head move, right?” Mac asked, pointing, rewinding and then playing the clip yet again. “See how his head snaps there, when he looks over Ruston.” He rewound the clip a fourth time. “Look, that head snap right there. You do that when you …”

  “Recognize someone,” Greene finished with a hint of excitement. “That moment when you suddenly recognize someone—a friend, an old schoolmate, something like that.”

  “Yeah, it is like he all of a sudden recognized Ruston, he realized this was … Audrey Ruston,” Mac agreed while lightly shaking his head. Was he seeing things or was this real?

  “He seems to recognize her, but does she recognize him?” April asked.

  “I can’t tell. I can’t see Audrey Ruston’s facial reaction—her back is to us.” Mac rewound the key clip and pushed play again. “As I watch this play out her body language doesn’t suggest she recognizes him, especially when he starts talking to her, gesturing at the book and moving a little closer.”

  “If anything her reaction seems to be one of … surprise,” April stated. “He’s the … aggressor, if that’s the right term. Maybe initiator is better.”

  Mac let the video play out and watched as the two of them started to converse. “He’s talking to her about the book.”

  “He is, like he knows the topic,” Greene agreed. “He’s in a bookstore, he’s talking books. But his focus has been diverted from White to Audrey. In fact, White leaves the store and he hardly seems to notice that.”