The Piper (CASMIRC Book 2)

by Ben Miller

  Jeff slammed his palm down on the table beside him, created a deep reverberating roar in the small room. “Look at it!”

  Aiden jumped in his seat and looked at Jeff, eyes wide. He looked back at the photo, this time studying it. “No. No. Don’t know her.”

  Jack replaced the photo in his folder and pulled out another. “How about her?” he asked Aiden as he proffered a picture of Tina Langenbahn.

  Aiden examined it for several seconds. “No.” He looked at Jack. Jack saw genuine fear in his eyes. “Who are they?”

  “You stole their babies,” Jeff answered.

  Jack put the photo back in his folder and closed it. They would not need the material in there anymore. They were past the point of no return: no more waxing and waning tension, alternating nice and disparaging. Jeff would apply constant pressure to try to break Aiden down.

  “You walked up to them in broad daylight, you immobilized them, and you stole their babies. Just like you did with Fiona yesterday.”

  “What?! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Nonsense!” Jeff crashed his hand down on the table again, making even Jack briefly quiver involuntarily. “Were they used as a sacrifice in one of your sick devil-worshipping rituals?! We know all about that disgustingness!”

  “What?!” Aiden asked Jack, “What’s he talking about?”

  Jeff pounded again, jumping on Aiden before he could finish his question. “Or maybe they were just practice?! Working yourself up to the big prize—killing Fiona and taking Tyler?”

  Aiden was rendered speechless. His lower jaw bobbed up and down, but he couldn’t muster any words. He turned to Jack, looking for salvation. Jack offered none.

  “We know you wanted Tyler for yourself! You and Wendy. We know she was a part of all this.” Again Jeff paused, leaving space for Aiden to reply.

  He didn’t.

  Jeff stood up, bending over so that his face hovered just a few inches above Aiden’s. “Why the others?! How did you pick them?!”

  “I don’t…I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Aiden repeated.

  Jeff popped down into a crouch, his nose now even with Aiden’s. He leaned in even closer. He turned his volume down, and the pitch of his voice lowered almost to a growl. “What about the babies, Aiden? What did you do with the babies?”

  “I didn’t take any babies.” Aiden’s voice suddenly seemed hoarse. Jack noticed tears beginning to well in the corners of his eyes.

  “NONSENSE!” Jeff hit a new decibel high. “You’re lying, Aiden! What happened to Baby Portia and Baby Theodore?! What did you do with those babies?!”

  “Nothing! I don’t know anything about those other babies!”

  Jeff shoved the edge of the table, banging it into the wall. Aiden backed his chair up and put his hands over his face, finally finding a way to physically block Jeff out. Jeff stood up and angrily paced to the opposite corner of the room.

  Jack scrambled to find the next thing to say: continuing to ask about the whereabouts of the missing infants, or a new line of questioning, or honing in on something already said. Aiden’s last line echoed in Jack’s brain. The other babies.

  Before Jack or Jeff could decide where to go next, Aiden mumbled something through his fingers. “What’s that, Aiden?” Jack asked reassuringly. He might still be able to pull him in with some kindness.

  Aiden leaned forward. He put his elbows on his knees and cupped his hands around his face, still effectively blocking out Jack and Jeff. “I want a lawyer,” he said to the floor.

  Jack hung his head disappointedly. Jeff opened the door to the room forcefully and let it slam shut behind him as he stormed out.

  39

  Camilla Vanderbilt opened the door to the interrogation room slowly, but with purpose. She silently approached the metal table against the wall, lifted two of its legs off the floor, and twisted it around toward the middle of the room. The remaining legs skidded along the linoleum floor. Despite the resulting ear-piercing staccato screech that reverberated off the walls in the small chamber, Camilla did not flinch. She pulled a chair up and sat down at the table, placing her palms flat on the surface. She locked eyes with Wendy Jenkins opposite her and leaned forward.

  “I’m worried for you, Wendy.”

  Wendy’s cheeks scrunched, narrowing her eyes, attempting to show confusion but instead revealing fear. “What for?”

  “I think you got pulled into something and ended up way too far over your head.”

  “I’m fine.” She didn’t look fine. “I’m not sure what…” Unable to finish her sentence, she swallowed hard. Her larynx bounced up and down in her neck, as if a word had lodged there and obstructed any further passage of sound.

  Camilla had surmised she could break Wendy down with relative ease, but she hadn’t predicted it would be this easy. “Tell me again about yesterday morning.”

  Wendy stared at Camilla for a moment, her feeble brain trying to process the situation. “What about it?”

  Wendy was trying to buy time—time to think. Camilla guessed that Wendy tried to recall what she and Aiden had said yesterday, how that might play today, and what kind of fabrication she could produce to save herself. “Walk me through your morning. What time you woke up, who was there, what you ate, everything from the moment your eyes opened until Special Agents Byrne, Pine, and I came to visit you.”

  “Nothing. We woke up when you guys showed up.”

  “We? You and Aiden?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “No.”

  “Aiden was there the whole time with you? Any chance he could have gotten up and left without you knowing?” Camilla and Heath Reilly had found two neighbors who corroborated that Wendy and Aiden left his apartment early that morning, and a third who saw them return about two hours later. She also had at least one reliable witness—Whitey from Denny’s—who would testify to Wendy’s presence in that parking lot, driving Aiden and Tyler away from the crime scene. She knew Wendy had been with Aiden all morning, just not at his apartment. Wendy was lying to her. She needed to let her catch herself in her own web.

  Again Wendy paused for several contemplative seconds, shaking her head. She was about to reply in the negative when the door opened and Rita Ferroni entered.

  Camilla looked over her shoulder, then she turned back to Wendy. “This is Detective Rita Ferroni, from the Boston Family Justice Division.”

  Rita nodded, crossed her hands in front of her waist, and leaned against the rear wall of the room.

  Wendy considered Rita for a moment before letting her gaze wander. Wendy must have been processing the situation, realizing they had something on her. Perhaps seeing Rita—a local—brought more gravity to the situation than some far-off Fed. Suddenly her eyes opened wide, signaling a revelation coming to her. “You know what? We did leave that morning. We ran an errand.”

  Camilla tried to suppress a smile. She had watched the live feed of Jack and Jeff’s interview with Aiden. She knew she had just caught Wendy in a contradiction. “An errand? Where’d you go?” She tried to keep her tone conversational, but this grew more challenging as she neared dropping the hammer on Wendy’s deceit.

  Wendy faked a cough and cleared her throat. She knew enough about security cameras from her experience at the hospital that she now had to pick a place that couldn’t disprove her story with a video—a video in which she and Aiden would be conspicuously absent. “The donut shop. Over on Howell.”

  “Donuts? So that was your errand, then. Donuts.” Camilla could barely hide the incredulity in her voice.

  “Yep. We both got crullers and decaf. Came home and crashed again.” Wendy’s lip curled at one end, a self-satisfied half-smile. She seemed pleased with her tale.

  “And was that before or after you drove Aiden to Wal-Mart—parking at the Denny’s across the street—so that he could kill Fiona Evans and kidnap Tyler?” Rita asked from the back of the room.

  Wend
y’s smile dropped quickly from her face.

  40

  For the next fifteen minutes, Jack and Jeff watched on the monitor in the surveillance room as Camilla and Rita hounded Wendy Jenkins with further questioning. She refuted any claims that she had been near the Wal-Mart or Denny’s. She admitted to having heard about the attacks on Tina Langenbahn and Sara Gardner on the news, but denied knowing them or anything about what happened to their missing infants. She had no idea what had happened to Tyler all day yesterday.

  Eventually Camilla and Rita gave up, leaving Wendy alone in the interrogation room for the time being. They had no sooner joined Jack and Jeff in the small surveillance room when Will Frievogle, the detective from Rita’s Family Justice Division, poked his head in the door.

  “DA’s here,” Will announced.

  The pack of them filed down the hall to the larger incident room. Heath Reilly, who had just dropped off to Amanda Lundquist the discs of surveillance videos he had acquired from a number of businesses surrounding Wal-Mart and Denny’s, stood at the front of the room beside an athletic-looking, handsome black man in a tan-colored three-piece suit. Jack heard Reilly reciting some story about The Playground Predator while the man nodded continuously like a bobble-head doll, a tolerant look upon his face.

  Reilly cut short his diatribe to take the liberty of introducing them. “Hey, Jack, this is District Attorney Isaac McConnell.” The men exchanged handshakes, followed by the same for Camilla. Rita and Jeff seemed familiar with DA McConnell and didn’t waste time with pleasantries.

  DA McConnell pulled a couple of chairs from the front row to begin a semi-circle, and the others followed. Each of them eventually sat facing the center.

  “What do you have, Rita?” McConnell asked. He spoke quickly but clearly, his lips curling and twisting with every sound, enunciating every consonant perfectly. Jack supposed he could earn a career as a diction coach.

  “Appreciate the nod, Ike, but this is Jeff’s shit show,” Rita replied, a deferential hand toward Jeff.

  “We’ve got our guy,” Jeff began. He recounted the mounting evidence of eyewitnesses, alibi discrepancies, and video surveillance that implicated Aiden Dolan and Wendy Jenkins in Fiona Evans’ murder and Tyler’s abduction.

  “We need physical evidence,” McConnell concluded. “Juries love physical evidence. I’ll get you a warrant for both of their apartments, and for the car. But I think we have enough to make an arrest.”

  Everyone else in the room simultaneously released a collective, satisfied sigh. “Good,” Jeff said. “I think so too.”

  “The bigger question, of course, is: Is he the Piper?” McConnell posed to the investigators.

  At first, no one answered. Eyes oscillated between Jack and Jeff, awaiting one of them to answer. The two men looked at each other.

  “I don’t know,” Jack finally responded. “We think the first two could have been practice, working up to the final goal. But we have no idea what happened to the other infants. It would make sense that one person did all three...”

  “But?” McConnell asked. “There’s a ‘but’ in there.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense. I think we’re still missing a piece of the puzzle.”

  The puzzle, Jack thought, his own words echoing between his ears. An image flashed in his mind: Wendy Jenkins walking away from him down the corridor of the hospital, the two identical flat-screens in the hall, each showing a different channel. Two puzzles?

  Jeff studied McConnell’s reaction to Jack’s conclusion. “I think it’s him,” he added carefully.

  McConnell turned to Jeff. “Why?”

  “Too much coincidence. Looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. It’s a duck.”

  McConnell stood up, tugging on the bottom of his vest to straighten it. “Last I checked, the Duck Prosecution doesn’t hold water in court. Pardon the pun,” he smiled charismatically. “Arrest them both for the murder and kidnapping, and find me the evidence to connect them to the other two.”

  Jeff opened his mouth to affirm the order from McConnell, but he was cut off by the creaking sound of a door opening in the back of the room. All heads turned to see Amanda Lundquist lean her head in.

  Amanda’s eyes widened at the sudden onslaught of attention. She slipped through the threshold and let the door close softly. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “What’s going on, Amanda?” Jack queried eagerly. He knew she would be unlikely to come into this meeting without something of importance.

  “I did a little digging. I got sick of looking at grainy video—needed a break,” she confessed. “I think Aiden Dolan may know Tina Langenbahn. They share a friend on Facebook.”

  “Ahh,” McConnell exhaled, as if he has just swallowed down the final bite of a deliciously decadent dessert. “Well done, Miss Amanda. Ask and ye shall receive, right Jeff?”

  41

  Jack watched the slow parade of people entering the airplane from his window seat. As the line of passengers thinned, he glanced at the still empty seat beside him and let his excitement swell. He enjoyed flying but he hated the small talk some frequent flyers forced upon him. God forbid someone would ask him what he does for a living; that always led to an avalanche of macabre questions. If that aisle seat remained empty for the flight he could actually get some work done without fear of interruption. The final passenger, a middle-aged man in a wool suit and a Celtics hat, meandered past Jack’s row, and Jack’s sigh of relief followed him.

  Jack pulled a notebook and pen out of his carry-on. While he couldn’t keep his eyes open long enough to get anything done on the flight up here, he now felt energized to get some work done. He realized how much better he had slept the last two nights.

  He needed a visual schematic of the Piper crimes. At the top left of the first page he wrote “Tina Langenbahn.” He skipped several spaces and wrote “Sara Gardner,” and a few spaces below that he wrote “FIONA EVANS,” keeping her name in all caps to denote her murder as a different outcome from the previous two. On the right side of the page he wrote “Aiden Dolan” and “Wendy Jenkins.” He drew a line from “Aiden” to “FIONA” and wrote “ex-girlfriend” above it. He sketched a dotted line—signaling uncertainty, as opposed to the conviction indicated by a solid line—between “Aiden” and “Tina.” On that line he wrote “Sioban Meloy,” the name of the mutual Facebook friend.

  When he had left the police headquarters, Rita Ferroni and Heath Reilly were venturing out to find Sioban Meloy and ask her about her relationship with Aiden Dolan and Tina Langenbahn. Apparently Rita knew Sioban’s neighborhood of record quite well. Camilla had questioned Wendy Jenkins about her, but, not surprisingly, Wendy denied knowing her. She would have remembered someone with such a fucked-up name, she had said. They could no longer interrogate Aiden without a lawyer present, and none would be appointed to him until tomorrow.

  Jack dotted another vector from “Aiden” to “Sara.” Above this line he put an encircled question mark. His pen continued to trace the encompassing circle, allowing his mind to wonder about the possible connections. He moved his hand to the right and drew a short dotted line connecting “Wendy” and this middle dotted line. Perhaps the secret linking Sara to the perpetrators primarily involved Wendy rather than Aiden. Jack had no doubt that both Wendy and Aiden jointly had plotted to kill Fiona Evans and kidnap Tyler, so he should consider them each equally in trying to find an association with the victims.

  In the bottom left of the page he marked a large box with the label “MOTIVE” at the top. His first listing was “Practice,” which he quickly struck through with a straight line and replaced with “Rehearsal,” a more apt description, he decided. Next he wrote “Satanism/Devil Worship,” through which he placed another dotted line. His skepticism of this line of thinking had grown enough to almost eliminate it from the list entirely.

  Their only suspicion connecting Aiden to devil worship—that tattoo on his back—turned out to be bogus. Jack stuck around long
enough to see the booking photographs of Aiden following his arrest. What Camilla had thought could be a naked boy standing in front of a pentagram—which is usually an inverted star—was actually a naked man shielding his eyes from a large, neon-red, upright star inside a circle. Jack instantly recognized the tattoo as the iconic image from Rush’s album 2112, the Canadian trio’s 1976 opus about a dystopian future in which a young man discovers a guitar and incites a revolution in a world where music has been outlawed. Aiden was not a Satanist; he simply seemed to embrace a sense of geeky rebellion put forth by the kings of progressive rock.

  He jotted down “Money” as a possible motive. He decided another question mark was warranted beside that too. They had not seen any ransom note, nor could either mother be expected to pay even a meager sum.

  He created another box with the heading “UNANSWERED QUESTIONS” in the lower right corner of the page. “Motive” led this list. “Where are babies?” quickly followed. “Are mothers culpable?” he wrote next, remembering their conversation about Tina’s odd affect during their questioning. Remembering his most recent conversation with Randall for the first time in the last couple of days, he wrote “Hey!” on the next line in its own set of quotation marks. They still did not have an explanation for why the Piper called out to his victims prior to assaulting them. Randall’s point was well made—this vocal announcement seemed counterintuitive to a sneak attack.

  Suddenly Jack felt an urge to talk to Randall, and it instantly sickened him. He hated going to that God-forsaken prison and talking to that disgusting shithead. But maybe Randall was on to something. Perhaps he could shed light on this case, discerning details, motives, or nuances that Jack and his team had missed.

  Jack imagined arriving home, seeing Vicki and Jonah waiting for him to enter through the garage. For the first time since her kidnapping, he had been genuinely excited to see her, remembering her positive, playful mood the morning before he left. Despite how shitty it made him feel, if he were being honest with himself, he couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for seeing Vicki these last few months. He wanted to be with her, to show his love and support, and to try in any way to help her get better. He just couldn’t get too jazzed up about it. She carried her thick shroud of sadness, obscuring most of her formerly fun, enticing, loving self. And he knew it was all his fault. Randall had invaded their home and taken them away because of who Jack had become, because of his fame. Plus Jack still had the albatross of his infidelity hanging around his neck.