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

by Roger Stelljes

  Mac let the video play out. Over the next five minutes, Ruston and the man talk. As they do, they both seem to become more comfortable, their posture less rigid, more relaxed, as if beginning to feel at ease with each other.

  “The flirting has commenced,” Mac observed.

  “He just made her laugh,” April noted as Ruston threw her head back and the man smiled through the beard.

  After another few minutes, the man gestured toward the cash register and they both moved forward to the counter. Ruston bought the coffee table book and then the man bought the book he’d been holding in his hand. She paid with a credit card while he paid cash, pulling out a money clip that was thick with bills. “A little walking around money, I’d say,” Mac mused.

  “More like a pimp roll,” Greene quipped, making Mac laugh.

  Ruston and the man continued to talk as they both exited the bookstore. “Well, wasn’t that all friendly-like,” Mac stated. “That was a smooth pickup.”

  “It certainly seemed that Audrey diverted his attention from White.”

  “Uh huh,” Mac answered. “He had his attention diverted from our first victim… to… no. Come on… no way.”

  “What?” Greene asked.

  “This is a big intuitive leap.”

  “Go ahead,” the FBI behaviorist encouraged. “Intuitive is what I do.”

  “April, let’s stop dancing around this—we’re both thinking the same thing here. Let’s just say this is Rubens. Did he just get a two for the price of one here? He’s watching Lisa White and lo and behold, who walks in, but Audrey Ruston, another woman who perfectly fits his profile.”

  Greene grimaced and then slowly shook her head. “I see where you’re going.” April was wary. “What are the odds, Mac? Think about that. I know we’re talking Rubens, but do you really think that man is Rubens? Really?”

  “I’ve got my two victims in Classic Books. They both loved books, they’re both Rubenesque, they both fit the psychological profile of a victim. We have hypothesized—me for only a few days, but you for years—that he methodically hunts these women and finds them in places Rubens and his victims are comfortable. White and Ruston would have felt comfortable in this environment. In the case of White, her financials tell us she went there fairly often and was something of a regular, and this wasn’t Ruston’s maiden voyage to the store. If we’re right about our killer’s education, his love of art, museums, books, his level of education, he too would have been at home in this environment. He would not look or feel out of place.”

  “So you think he’s hunting?” Greene asked.

  “If you’re a fisherman, you fish where the fish are,” Mac answered and then turned back to the screen. “Let’s take this video footage all the way back and look at the whole time they’re all in the store together.”

  Mac rewound the footage back to when Lisa White first entered the bookstore, twenty-three minutes before Ruston. She moved from camera one to camera two at the cash register, to camera three and the last row of shelves near the seating area. On all three cameras, she was comfortably and casually perusing the shelves of the store. Two minutes after she’d entered, the man came into the store. He nonchalantly made his way to the middle aisle, the one straight up from the cash register. It was a location that also placed him strategically in the center of the store. He grabbed a book off the shelf and opened it in his hands.

  “You’re not reading the book,” Mac muttered about the man.

  “No,” Greene shook her head. “He’s not, he’s faking it.”

  “He’s parked himself. He can see the whole store from that position.”

  “Maybe,” April answered. “I have to admit it, Mac. He sure seems to be watching Lisa White as she takes her time moving around the store. As you flip between the footage for the three cameras, he’s clearly pivoting to change his perspective as she moves about the store. If she stops, he stops moving. If she moves, he slowly changes his body orientation with her movements. It’s sly—he looks down every so often, turns a page every now and then, turns his back, grabs a different book off the shelf, but he’s … watching her.”

  “You bet he is,” Mac affirmed. “It’s like he’s evaluating her.”

  “You can’t tell much about him physically,” April noted. “Thick rimmed glasses, tam hat and a beard.”

  “The glasses, beard and hat conveniently hide his face. But I do get approximate height, weight, body type and it gives us a picture to go with,” Mac answered, focused on the computer screen. “I know Audrey Ruston was five-seven and she’s in flats. That makes our guy two to three inches taller.”

  “So hypothetically we think this could be Rubens. Is this enough for you to go with?” Greene asked. “I mean, it’s a single video clip from a store. He’s creepy but this guy wouldn’t be the first one to creep around a store staring at women. Heck, I get kooky guys at book signings who stare me down. It gives me the willies but I don’t necessarily think they’re killers stalking me.”

  “They could be.”

  “I’ve never had an issue. I just thought the men were weird, is all. I was never attacked or stalked or anything like that at all.”

  “Fine, that was your experience,” Mac answered, undeterred. “But I don’t believe in coincidences in murder investigations. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that I have my two victims in a bookstore with a creepy guy giving one of them the eagle eye and then looking like he suddenly recognizes the other and then engages her in conversation.”

  “So what are you going to do? It’s pretty thin.”

  “We could start by showing it around and seeing what we …”

  “Mac! Mac!” Galloway bellowed, jogging into the conference room, an open laptop in his hands. “We have the surveillance footage from the area around the Vietnam Memorial.”

  “And?”

  “We’ve got something,” Galloway answered. “You have to check this out. We have footage of Audrey Ruston with a man at the memorial.”

  “Is your guy five-ten, Caucasian, with a beard, thick glasses, wearing a hat of some kind? Perhaps a tam hat?”

  Galloway looked gobsmacked. “Yeah, how did you—”

  “Know?” Mac waved him over and showed him the surveillance footage from Classic Books, explaining the connection he found in the financial records and that both White and Ruston were in store at the same time.

  “He’s similar, very similar in fact,” Galloway stated and made some keystrokes on Mac’s computer. “Check out this Vietnam Memorial footage.”

  The surveillance footage was in black and white of the sidewalk leading away from the Memorial, the panels visible in the distance behind them. “This camera is located near the southern end of the Memorial, by the flag pole,” Galloway noted.

  Audrey Ruston and the man were walking toward the camera. The man was now maybe an inch taller than Ruston, who now looked to be in heels. The man was bearded, wore dark-rimmed glasses and a tam hat again, along with what looked like grayish or khaki pants and a dark, either black or navy blue sport coat over a whitish dress shirt.

  “Is this all you have?” Mac asked.

  “So far,” Galloway answered. “We’re checking for more footage but oddly, cameras are a little scarce in that area so we haven’t picked them up yet on other footage. But we’re still hunting.”

  Mac toggled back to the Classic Books video again and then back to the footage at the Vietnam Memorial. The similarities were unmistakable. “There you are, you jackhole,” he muttered, but now with a satisfied tone.

  “As I said, the guy looks very similar,” Galloway mused.

  “Screw similar—it’s the same guy, Don,” Mac replied. “We have our first image of Rubens.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Greene cautioned.

  “There’s one way to start finding out.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “West side, gray hoodie.”

  Who was the man in the surveillance video?


  Was it Rubens?

  Mac was anxious to find out.

  In the very early A.M., Galloway and Delmonico began arrangements to release the video of the man at Classic Books and the Vietnam Memorial that they suspected was Rubens.

  Just before 4:00 A.M., Mac smiled and then dialed Wire.

  “What?” she answered angrily. “It’s 3:54 A.M. for crying out loud. You better have Rubens in custody or I’m going to kill you.”

  “I don’t have him in custody,” Mac answered. “I have pictures of him though.”

  “Huh?” she asked, half asleep. “Pictures, what pictures? Pictures of whom?”

  “Pictures, more like footage from surveillance cameras from Classic Books and in the vicinity of the Vietnam Memorial.” Mac quickly explained, providing a brief description of the man to Wire. “This is the real deal. It’s going to be released shortly.”

  “Okay,” Dara groaned, but now fully awake. “I’m on my way.”

  Wire rolled in at 4:35 A.M., her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail and with a tall gas station coffee in her hand. She found April Greene lying on the dingy orange couch in the conference room. “He even dragged you in this early?”

  “I was hanging around late last night when he found the image on the surveillance video at Classic Books and then when Galloway came in with the footage from the Vietnam Memorial. So I never left.” She rolled up and stretched her arms and then asked, “Does McRyan ever sleep?”

  “Welcome to working a case with Mac,” Dara said with a tired smile. “I’ve seen him go days without sleep.”

  “How?”

  “He’s wired differently.”

  Any possible break in the Rubens investigation was of immediate interest to the local television stations, not to mention the networks and cable. Rubens was now receiving nationwide attention. By 6:00 A.M. Eastern Time the video was out everywhere it could be.

  After watching the initial wave of coverage, Mac sat back in his chair and said, “Now— we wait.”

  He was fairly satisfied with himself as he leaned back sipping what seemed like his tenth coffee, rubbing his hand over his nearly two-day-old beard. The closest thing to a shower he had was splashing his face with water. He looked exhausted yet his body said he was anything but.

  “You look like a pig in slop,” Greene remarked.

  “I shouldn’t get juice from this,” Mac responded.

  “But he does,” Wire finished with a small yawn then spoke to Greene. “Like I said, he’s wired differently.”

  At 7:30 A.M., Galloway stuck his head into the conference room. “Mac, the owner of Classic Books will be there at 8:00. He has all of his staff coming in. I assume you’d like to greet them.”

  Mac looked to Wire. “Away we go.” To Galloway, he said, “If anything comes of all of this, call me.”

  “Will do,” Galloway answered with a yawn. Mac imagined the man would go to his office and close the door. Agent Galloway was an excellent agent, the true King of Administration. His gift of administration came from an overabundance of organization. However, people like that needed their eight hours of sleep a night; they needed the consistency of their schedule. A case like this had Galloway’s world completely off its axis. Delmonico was an able aid to him. A more traditional agent, she was more used to the varied hours. They worked well together.

  Mac and Wire arrived promptly at 8:00 A.M. and the store owner and his staff were waiting. They’d all seen the footage on television, both from their store and the Vietnam Memorial. Every single one knew Lisa White, one of their most dedicated customers. A few recognized Audrey Ruston. She wasn’t a regular customer but she’d been in from time to time over the years. These were their people who’d been murdered. They wanted to help, were desperate to help. The problem was the man in the footage didn’t register with anyone.

  “I know we’re a small bookstore but we really do have a lot of people come through here,” the store manager said defensively. “Now Lisa White, she came regularly, was a good customer and while she paid that morning, she also had an account that she settled up every so often. I didn’t know Ms. Ruston personally, not like my staff and I knew Lisa White, but she’d been in over the years.”

  “But what about the man?” Mac pressed one more time. “Anything, anything at all helps. If there is anything any of you could remember about that day, about this man, it would help us.”

  “It would help us find Lisa White’s killer,” Wire added.

  The store owner looked over at the disappointed faces of his staff and shook his head. “I’ve looked at him here. I looked at him when they played the footage on the morning show.” He waved toward his staff. “We all have. He just isn’t registering with me, with anyone, Agent McRyan.”

  Mac wasn’t entirely shocked. Rubens was in the store that morning in that disguise. If he’d been in the store other times, he probably looked different.

  Mac and Wire left Classic Books and found a small coffee shop. It was a beautiful, warm April morning so they leaned against Mac’s X5, sipping coffees and eating egg sandwiches.

  “The important thing in one sense,” Wire said, “is that they didn’t recognize him.”

  “He’s not a regular.”

  “He isn’t even someone who’d been in there occasionally. I watched their expressions, their eyes and he didn’t register with any of them in the least.”

  “Meaning that actually makes it a little more likely he’s our guy.”

  “Not for sure,” Wire cautioned. “We can’t know that for sure. But my gut tells me—”

  “It’s him.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s totally him. It’s Rubens.”

  “This is another piece, Dara. With those two slices of footage, we have height, possible weight, mannerisms. And while we don’t yet have identification, we have something that we can continue to go with and push. We have him, a picture—nobody has ever had that before. We’ve made women who fit Rubens profile paranoid, hopefully, and now we have someone for them to be paranoid about.”

  Mac’s cell phone started ringing. “It’s Galloway,” he reported to Wire and then answered. “Senior Agent Galloway, tell me good news. Uh huh…uh huh… Another one? I don’t really… So what makes this one seem on the up and up? Hmm. Okay, yeah, text me the address.”

  “Another what?”

  “Another woman who had a gentlemen caller for a while,” Mac explained. “She saw the footage on television this morning and said she thought he looked like a man she was dating who up and disappeared.”

  “Her name?”

  “Martha Schreiber.”

  Twenty minutes later, having weaved their way through the later morning rush traffic, they pulled up to the townhouse of Martha Schreiber on 8th Street NW between Randolph Street and Shepherd Street NW.

  “Look at that, she’s a half-block from a Fourth District police station,” Mac observed wryly.

  “Well, we know who to call for backup,” Wire noted.

  Martha Schreiber opened the front door before they could knock. “I must have struck a chord if it’s you two who showed up.”

  Martha fit the profile physically. After five minutes of interviewing her, she also seemed to fit the mental and personality profile for a Rubens victim as well.

  “So start at the beginning, Martha,” Dara started. “Tell us about the first time you met this man.”

  “Walter,” she replied. “Walter Olson.”

  “Right, so when did you meet Walter?”

  “The first time was at the Rogue Art Gallery two months ago at a show for local artists. I like to go to those, I like to support the struggling artists.” Martha looked away, as if assessing herself. “I feel like I know what it’s like to struggle.”

  “And what happened?” Mac pressed.

  “He struck up a conversation with me. I must have gone to events like that for years and no man ever spoke to me. Heck, no one ever noticed me. But Walter? He did.”

  “And what did yo
u talk about?”

  “Art. Local artists. Famous painters. We certainly were interested in the same kinds of things.”

  “Did this man, Walter, ever mention the artist Peter Paul Rubens?”

  “I thought you might ask that, Agent McRyan. I honestly don’t remember Rubens coming up. I remember Van Gogh, Cezanne, Michelangelo, all the famous names and paintings, but I don’t think Rubens ever came up.”

  “And what did Walter look like?” Wire asked.

  “He was, I suppose, five ten, probably two-hundred pounds, maybe a little more than that. He was, like me, a little overweight.”

  “What did his face look like?”

  “He wore a small beard. I guess what you would call a Fu man beard. It was just around his mouth.”

  “How about hair color?”

  “Black with some flecks of gray,” Martha replied, giving it some thought. “It was as if his hair was turning, you know. I figured he was in his forties age-wise so if he was getting some gray that seemed normal to me. He wore glasses as well.”

  “And how did he wear his hair?”

  “He wore it a little longer—he combed it straight back and it was a little long in the back.”

  “Like a mullet?” Wire asked, smiling. “Was it business in the front and party in the back?”

  “No,” Martha replied shaking her head, but with a small smile. “He wasn’t some hockey guy. It was just longer, and in the back, it ended at his collar and just seemed to curl up a little. It was a little like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. It was a little of the Gordon Gecko look, I guess.”

  “Okay, I get that description,” Dara replied, jotting it down in her notepad.

  “So what made you think the guy you saw on television this morning was Walter?”

  “He didn’t look exactly like Walter, but there were some similarities. What made me think it was him, though, was the way he moved in that video footage. Walter moved with just a slight hunch and a shuffle, like he took short steps. The man in the video walked like that. Then they replayed your press conference from yesterday. I was, as you asked yesterday, Agent McRyan, honest with myself and thought maybe I should call. It is better to be safe than sorry.”