by Lisa Regan
“No shit,” Jade grumbled.
“Shhh,” Connor said.
“You’re looking for a loner who has some superficial friendships that are in place mostly to provide for any needs he might have. He will use his charm to get what he needs, but his relationships will have little depth other than that. He may be marginally employed, in some kind of unskilled job, but his sense of entitlement will prevent him from keeping a job for very long, and his ability to manipulate others will allow him to get by during periods when he is unemployed. He may have had some run-ins with the law as a juvenile. You’re likely to see one or all of the elements many consider the trifecta of serial killers: bed-wetting, cruelty to animals, and arson. But he is too young to have gotten into much trouble before this, so he doesn’t have a record. That’s why his prints aren’t coming up—assuming that the unidentified prints recovered from the first victim’s vehicle are his. He does not drive. He moves around by foot or uses public transportation. By virtue of his age and lack of assets, he has no transportation of his own, but this works to his advantage in committing these crimes. As I said, he’ll blend in easily in these areas. An attractive young male walking around a soccer field is not going to draw attention, and he can easily hop on a bus and be quickly out of the area after the crimes.”
Connor studied her list:
Male
Caucasian
Disorganized, impulsive
Age: 18–26
High school education
Drug/alcohol use
Likely not armed
Attractive, superficial charm
Hatred of women (mother figure)
Will blend in
Lives/works in Pocket
Single/recent breakup (triggering event)
On foot/public transportation
Unskilled job/possibly unemployed
He turned to Stryker, who stood on his other side. “You should get a few people to review all the footage you have so far. See if we can see this guy trolling for victims.”
Stryker nodded. “Yeah. I’m gonna put some more people in Pocket. We’ll go door to door if we have to. Hey, you live in Pocket. You haven’t seen anyone suspicious?”
“You’re funny,” Connor said. “You know I’m never home. I’m always here.”
Agent Bishop answered a few questions and concluded the briefing. “I’ll be in town until tomorrow if you have any additional questions or if anything comes up. Detective Stryker has my contact information.” She gave them a grim smile. “Good luck out there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Now come on,” Jade scoffed when they were back at their desks. “Do you really believe all that bullshit about the Strangler killing mommies because he was adopted?”
A large manila envelope sat atop the mess of paperwork on Connor’s desk, its contents so thick that the folds holding it together threatened to burst. In thick black marker, someone had scrawled “Webb/Parks” across the front. It had some heft. In the return address corner, tiny block print announced: “Tasker Greaves, OB-GYN.”
“Leah Holloway’s OB-GYN records,” Connor said. “Looks like someone put them on the wrong desk. How come these doctor’s offices will respond to a warrant within twenty-four hours on a weekend, but the chick at Globocell won’t tell me the last two numbers that called Holloway’s phone?”
Jade plopped into her chair. “Because the chick at the Globocell store is an asshole,” she said. “Open ’em up. We’ll split up the chart.”
Connor slipped a finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. “Why so thick?” he asked. “Her primary doctor’s chart wasn’t this thick.”
“She was healthy. No reason to see her family doctor, but she had three kids. Lots of visits to her OB.”
Connor handed her the bottom half of the chart.
“Speaking of the kids, I guess we can assume that both her boys will grow up to be serial killers, huh? I mean, since Mommy abandoned them when she killed herself. According to the profiler, right?”
Connor froze, Leah Holloway’s OB-GYN records in his hands. He stared at Jade, but she had already pulled her chair up to her desk, head bent to the pages in front of her.
“Jade,” he said. “I think you’re taking this a little too personally.”
She glanced up at him, a sardonic smile twisting her lips. “Personally? Please. I’m not taking anything personally. I—” She stopped, and her smile flattened out.
“Forgot you told me, didn’t you?”
Her cheeks colored. She looked away, flustered, riffling through the pages before her with sudden vigor. Connor sat down in his chair and wheeled it over next to hers, so close their legs were almost touching. Jade stopped riffling and hung her head. “It was the Baker case, wasn’t it?”
“Those were long, boring hours on stakeout,” Connor said.
“Fuck.”
“Agent Bishop wasn’t making a commentary on women who give their kids up for adoption, you know that, right? She’s just throwing out theories about what kind of person might be committing these crimes. You know as well as I do that not all adopted or abandoned kids grow up to be killers. Whoever this guy is, he already has issues. Shit, what might not even faze a regular kid is going to be totally different for this guy. Jesus, Jade. Some serial killers grow up in perfectly normal two-parent households. It’s not a predictor. This is not about you.”
She squeezed the bridge of her nose. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I’m sorry. I just …” She lowered her voice even more. “He’d be about the same age as the UNSUB right now.”
“So what? You think it’s him?”
Jade laughed. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just—it just brings it all up again, you know? This time of year always reminds me. It messes me up.”
Connor patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.
She shook her head, shrugged his hand away, and forced a smile. “I’m fine. It’s fine. Thanks for not being a prick.”
Connor winked and wheeled off to his own desk. “Not being a prick is my specialty.”
Silently, they paged through their respective halves of Leah Holloway’s OB-GYN chart. “I can’t even read this chicken scratch,” Jade remarked. “Seriously, you don’t need to know how to write to get in to medical school?”
“The nurses’ notes are better,” Connor said. He too could not make out anything the doctor had written. Hieroglyphs. But the nurses’ handwritten notes were excellent. They were mostly unremarkable. Yearly visits, all with normal findings except for her pregnancies, but even those were without complication.
Jade said, “There’s nothing here.”
Then Connor saw it. He had to read it three times to make sure he was getting it right. He wheeled over to Jade and handed her the nurses’ notes for the visit.
“Parks, this is from over a year ago.”
He pointed to the section that had caught his eye. “Yeah, but it is a pretty good indicator that things weren’t ‘fine’ in the Holloway household.”
Jade read it quickly. “I would not have pegged her schlub of a husband for a cheater.”
“Me either,” Connor agreed.
Leah had asked to be tested for every STD known to man. Husband had unprotected sex with unknown partner.
“All her tests came back negative,” Connor said. “So he didn’t give her anything.”
“Because he wasn’t the one having an affair,” Jade said.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Connor said. “I can’t see Jim Holloway carrying on an affair. I can see Leah throwing him under the bus, though. Image was everything to her. No way would she want to admit that she was the one cheating.”
“Still,” Jade said, chewing the tip of her pen. “Imagine what it would have taken for someone so worried about projecting the perfect image to have to tell a lie like that, then undergo all those invasive tests. It must have been so humiliating.”
“A month later, she�
��s pregnant.”
“Let me see the rest of the notes,” Jade said.
Connor retrieved the stack from his desk, and together they read the rest of the records from that visit. “This is when she found out she was pregnant,” Jade said. “At this visit. The same visit.”
“You think that’s why she didn’t leave him?”
“I think appearances were really important to her. She probably stayed so she wouldn’t break up her family.”
“Neither the husband nor the best friend mentioned this cheating stuff, the STD scare,” Connor pointed out.
“Hardly surprising she wouldn’t tell anyone. This is not something you want people knowing about, especially if you’re going to stay in your marriage.”
“Well,” Connor said. “We need to have another talk with Jim Holloway. He said everything was fine.”
Jade shrugged. “Maybe it is now. Maybe they worked it out. This record is over a year old. Maybe things got better after this.”
“Maybe. I mean we don’t even know if she was having an ongoing affair or if it was a one-time thing. Maybe the STD scare helped her get her head back on straight.”
The phone on Connor’s desk rang, and he wheeled back over and snatched it up. “Parks.”
“You gotta get over here now,” said Davey Richards of the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office.
“You got something on Holloway?”
Davey let out a low whistle. “Do I ever. Is Stryker there?”
Connor looked around and spotted Stryker across the room, talking on the phone. “I’m looking at him.”
“Bring him too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Davey fucking Richards,” Jade grumbled as she, Connor, and Stryker made their way into the coroner’s office. The coroner was housed in a large tan two-story building on Broadway with a rounded portico entrance. Meticulously kept foliage and greenery surrounded the building, its beauty in stark contrast to the death investigations that went on behind its walls.
Stryker hooked a thumb in Jade’s direction. “She sure complains a lot.”
Jade glared but Connor laughed. “She and Davey were involved for a while. It didn’t work out.”
Stryker shrugged. “Maybe it was for the best. Do you really want those hands on you after they’ve been cutting up bodies all day?”
Jade considered this. “Maybe that’s why he didn’t know what the hell to do with a real live woman.”
Stryker roared with laughter. “I’m telling him you said that.”
Jade raised a brow. “What’s that? Did you just say you want me to shoot you in the kneecap?”
That only made Stryker laugh harder.
“She’s running a special on kneecaps today,” Connor told his friend.
They all fell silent once they entered the autopsy area. It was a large, sterile, well-lit room with tan tiled floor and taupe walls. In spite of the sunlight streaming through the high windows, it felt cheerless and gloomy. Someone had brought in a handful of lush green houseplants and placed them throughout the room, but for Connor, they only made the space creepier. Especially hanging across from the scale he knew they used to weigh internal organs.
Then there was the smell. Not the coppery scent of blood like one might expect, but a combination of a fetid earthy odor and a chemical smell. It was enough to make Connor puke, and they hadn’t even seen anything yet. Lucky for all of them, Leah Holloway’s actual autopsy had already been performed.
“I called you after the exam was finished, you know, so you guys don’t actually have to watch,” Davey explained, with a wink at Jade. Connor wasn’t sure if the wink was meant to be some kind of flirtation or what, but he could tell by the disgusted look on Jade’s face that she too found it creepy as hell. Maybe Davey really was as inept around the living as Jade had intimated. With his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and his thick glasses, Connor still didn’t get what Jade had seen in the guy in the first place. He didn’t know Davey that well. They had only met a handful of times—all under these types of circumstances.
Leah Holloway’s body lay covered on the nearest slab. Connor could only see a tuft of blonde hair peeking out from the top of the sheet. The other stainless steel tables lining the room stood empty.
“You got something for me?” Stryker asked. “Or you just wanted to see my smiling face?”
Davey smiled. “You need to see this.”
Stryker and Connor exchanged a look but kept silent.
“First of all,” Davey said, “this lady is as healthy as can be. I mean, she’s a little overweight. She’s got a little bit of erosion to her esophagus, so she probably had chronic acid reflux that wasn’t being treated effectively. Because of the circumstances, we had a blood sample taken as soon as she came in yesterday to check her blood alcohol level.”
“Thought you couldn’t do that to a corpse,” Stryker said.
Davey shrugged. “Well, they’re not totally reliable. The body produces all kinds of alcohol byproducts during the process of decomposition. Plus, a body that’s been submerged usually shows a spike in its blood alcohol levels. But she wasn’t in the water long enough for that to be a factor. Wasn’t dead that long. I’d say the number we came up with is fairly reliable. In actuality, her level might have been slightly lower, but I don’t think there’s any question that this lady was drunk when she went into the water.”
“So she did drink the vodka,” Jade said.
“Well, yeah, she drank something,” Davey said. “That’s not what killed her, though. She died from asphyxia due to aspiration of fluids.”
“In English, please,” Jade snapped.
Davey smiled. “Drowning. She died from drowning.”
“What was her blood alcohol level?” Jade asked.
“Point one zero.”
“That fits,” Connor said. “She was stumbling around when she left the bathroom.”
“So there’s your answer,” Jade said. “Simple. She cracked under the strain of her perfect life, got drunk, and killed herself. Case closed.”
“But that doesn’t explain these,” Davey said.
Gently, he pulled the cover away from Leah’s body, folding it down, stopping just above her pubic mound. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. Aside from the coroner’s massive Y-shaped incision on her torso and the waxy paleness of her skin, she might only have been sleeping. Her large breasts fell to each side. Connor saw immediately what Davey wanted them to see. It sent an electric jolt through his body.
“Three bite marks,” Davey said, pointing to each one with a gloved finger. “One on the anterior aspect of the left shoulder, one on the lower, outer quadrant of the right breast, and one to the anterior of the right hip. From what I can tell, they are about three to four days old. I’ve already done the comparison to the four Soccer Mom Strangler victims. They are the same.”
Connor had never known his colleagues to be rendered speechless, but even he could think of nothing to say. Davey clapped his hands in the air, then waved in each one of their faces. “Did you hear me, Detectives? Leah Holloway has bite marks on her body that match those of the Soccer Mom Strangler.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jade found her voice. She pointed a finger at Davey, as though he were trying to sell them something. “You’re saying that in the last three or four days, Leah Holloway was attacked by the Soccer Mom Strangler and she survived?”
With gentle, loving care, Davey covered Leah back up. He shook his head. “No. I’m saying sometime in the last three to four days she had an encounter with the Soccer Mom Strangler, and he bit her multiple times.”
“An encounter?” Stryker said.
“You’re saying you don’t think she was raped?” Connor said.
“The findings are inconclusive in that respect. She has a couple of old rectal tears and some vaginal bruising that are consistent with rape, but could also just be from rough sex. The bites themselves aren’t as deep as the one
s on the Soccer Mom Strangler victims.”
“You think the encounter was consensual,” Connor said.
Davey pursed his lips. Connor could tell he was struggling. “No,” he said. “I personally don’t think it was consensual, but if I were called to testify in court, I couldn’t say with one hundred percent certainty that she’d been raped. She certainly does not have the type of bruising elsewhere on her body that I would expect to see in a woman raped by the Soccer Mom Strangler. That guy is angry as hell.”
“Agent Bishop, the profiler,” Connor explained for Davey’s benefit, “said that victimology is really important in cases like these. She said without realizing it, the victims may have escalated him by pleading for their lives for the sake of their children. Maybe Holloway didn’t fight back. Maybe she didn’t say a damn thing, just let him rape her, in hopes that submitting would save her.”
Jade’s brow furrowed. “That’s a stretch. She’s raped by the Soccer Mom Strangler and doesn’t report it? Doesn’t tell anyone?”
“It’s not that easy, Jade,” Connor said quietly, thinking about Claire. “It’s not that easy to report it.”
“Or her husband is the Strangler,” Stryker said. “Claire said this lady killed herself. She tried killing her own kids. If you found out your husband, the father of your children, was a serial killer, that would give you a pretty good reason to off yourself.”
They stared at one another. Connor exchanged a glance with Jade. They’d both gotten the same impression of Jim Holloway: at worst, he was simply useless.
“Hard to see the husband as the Strangler,” Jade said.
“He doesn’t fit the profile,” Connor agreed. “Too old, steadily employed, has a family.”
Stryker shrugged. “She said to let the evidence be our guide. Hell, she said any aspect of the profile could be wrong.”
“Well, he does work evenings,” Jade said. “Sleeps during the day.”
“I don’t think it’s him,” Connor said.
“Agent Bishop is still here. We can run it by her,” Stryker said. “But I think we should at least check the husband out. We can’t take any chances. It could be him.”
