The Watcher (The Bigler County Romantic Thriller Series)

by Jo Robertson

  “Don’t worry, Wendt, it also gives the guy’s height and weight. You’re off by five inches and fifty pounds.”

  There was a smattering of light laughter, and then subdued silence as the teams looked at the profile Myers had drawn up, contemplating the repercussions of her words.

  “Any other questions?” Marconi asked.

  “Yeah, I have a big one,” the gruff, red-faced detective sitting near the left wall asked. “Why?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question,” Myers answered. “If we knew the answer to it, our job would be much easier.”

  Slater wrapped up by explaining how the teams would post their notes on the case board after they turned in their daily field notes. He glanced at the wall clock. “We’ll conference again on Friday afternoon, same time.”

  He knew most murders were committed by someone who knew the victim. If they were lucky, that’d be the case here.

  God, he hoped they were lucky.

  Chapter Twelve

  The 1989 case notes on Mary Stuckey’s death were on Slater’s desk when he returned from the case conference. Armed with sandwiches and coffee, he and Kate headed for the basement archives where they could work in relative privacy.

  Charlie Wendt not so graciously ushered them to the rear of an enormous room which held row upon row of dusty boxes on equally dusty shelves. He hovered around them, obviously curious about their work.

  “If you guys don’t yell real loud or come up front, I can’t hear you,” he warned. “Sound doesn’t carry in this room. It’s like a friggin’ soundproof vault.”

  “We’re good here, Charlie,” Slater said.

  Kate watched Wendt shuffle off as she picked up the Stuckey case file. It was awfully light. That couldn’t be good. “Do you think it’s all here?”

  “If it’d been ruled a murder, it’d be thicker.”

  Kate felt hope start to flutter and plummet. “You don’t think we’ll find anything, do you?”

  Slater shrugged and dropped the box on top of a battered rectangular desk, large enough to fit a dozen chairs pushed up around its scarred, wooden edges. “You shouldn’t count on too much.”

  He’d requested an extra copy of the report so both of them had the same papers to riffle through and sat at the table end closest to the stacks. Chilled by the temperature in the basement, Kate tugged her jacket around her body. She could tell already that winter in Placer Hills would be damp and wet. The recent death of one of the community’s own, especially a young girl, added to the gloominess of the drizzle that assaulted the city too soon in the season.

  They spoke infrequently as they poured through the files, each engrossed in details that might link Jennifer Johnston’s death to Mary Stuckey’s. Kate now had the chance to inspect first hand the cold case she’d discovered several years ago in L.A., right after she’d set up her home and office computer programs to display hits with a number of common variables.

  Whether a multiple or single trait came up, the program automatically flagged it. The match from Bigler County had popped up: the drowning-death of an eighteen-year-old girl, one Mary Stuckey from Rosedale, California.

  The program responded to the file because the death involved a teenage girl. Kate had set the age parameter at fourteen to twenty, although she didn’t believe the killer targeted any girl under the age of sixteen or older than nineteen. She’d paid little attention to the case at the time of the hit because only the age variable and the bruising on the body matched the profile she’d set. Bruising on a drowned body wasn’t unusual, and although the case had been left open, in the minds of the police it’d been dismissed.

  Kate, too, had dismissed it.

  After an hour of intense scrutiny, Slater broke her concentration. “Let’s see if I’ve got the gist of this. Initially, the Stuckey case was ruled accidental, but after the autopsy, the medical examiner—let’s see—who was the coroner then?”

  Kate looked at the medical report. “Dr. Horace Jackson.” She shot an inquiring look Slater’s way.

  “He died last year.”

  “Great.”

  “We’ll make do with the report. The coroner first ruled the death an accidental drowning, but during the autopsy he found no water in the lungs. He said the body had been submerged after death.”

  Slater looked up at Kate. “Is it possible she drowned even if no water was in her lungs?”

  “If she took a breath at all, there’d be some water. What about the condition of the body?”

  “Bruises, some contusions, one on the back of her head. Dr. Jackson concluded she’d been battered when the waves pushed the body against the rocks.”

  “No ligature marks, no chloroform?”

  “He doesn’t list anything else. Just says, ‘bruising and contusions presumably caused by battering in water. Victim possibly struck head and accidentally drowned. COD undetermined.’ There was blunt trauma to the back of her head.”

  “What about a toxicology or histology report?”

  Slater shook his head. “He didn’t take any tissue or blood samples. Just opened the body, weighed the organs, sewed her back up.”

  “Don’t you find that odd? Or at the very least, incompetent?”

  At first he looked mutinous, but then conceded. “Yeah, strange. There’s no physical evidence, no nail scrapings, no skin samples, no chemical tests. Just the final notation of probable accidental drowning.”

  “Do you see why I thought cover up?”

  “Look, Doc, we may not be as fancy as you L.A. people.” He turned to face her. “Our resources are limited. The coroner might’ve been old, maybe a little sloppy, but I don’t think he deliberately ignored findings. He would’ve done the tests the D.A. or the lead investigator asked for.”

  Kate tried another tactic. “Did you know Dr. Jackson?”

  Slater shoved back in his chair. “Yeah, I did. He was a gruff old guy, but bluntly honest. He’d retired the year before I transferred here.”

  “Wasn’t anyone suspicious at all?”

  “Jackson’s notes indicate he figured Mary went swimming and died of natural causes in the water.”

  “A young, healthy girl?” she scoffed. “Maybe the coroner was just too old. Maybe, if he’d done a proper job, we wouldn’t be looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “Who knows? But we have to go with the facts we have and right now, Myers, we don’t have much of anything.” Abruptly he pushed out of his chair and stretched his arms over his head. “I’m ready for more coffee,” he said, holding up his empty cup. “What about you?”

  “Sure,” she answered, her eyes still on the report. “Make it black this time.”

  Slater returned a few minutes later, balancing two plastic cups of coffee in one hand and clutching a fistful of candy bars in the other. Myers had removed the pins from her hair and it fell in thick disheveled curls around her shoulders. She wrapped one strand around her finger and chewed absently on the end. Her shoes lay on the floor beneath the table, and she tucked her legs underneath her.

  From the doorway Slater observed her a long moment.

  Because she looked inviting, he cleared his throat and spoke quickly. “Fortifications.” He set the cups down and dumped the candy on the table.

  “Thank goodness,” she said, reaching for a Snickers bar. “Without chocolate, I was tempted to call it a night.”

  Slater gave a moment to thinking about how he’d known she’d want chocolate before he scooted his chair away from her and picked up a page from the table.

  After a few minutes of silent perusing, he found something. “Turn to page four of the responding officer’s field report. It says Mary Stuckey was fully clothed – ”

  “And Jennifer Johnston was nearly naked,” Myers interrupted.

  Slater glanced up from the paper. “Right, but neither girl’s panties were found.”

  “That’s three things in common.” She ticked them off in agreement. “Victim’s age, missing panties, and locat
ion.”

  “Still could be coincidence,” Slater ventured, “but – ”

  “Why wouldn’t someone question a missing article of clothing?”

  He swiped his hand over the bristle of his beard. “Maybe they thought the river washed them away?”

  Kate hadn’t known about the Stuckey girl’s missing panties and that detail confirmed it for her. Her face grew warm with anticipation. Her hasty trip to northern California didn’t seem as precipitant now.

  “Do you have autopsy photos?” Slater asked. “Finding a mark like the infinity sign would be damning.”

  Together they examined the pictures of Mary Stuckey, particularly the two where she lay on either side and the views showed the inside of both legs. They could barely make out the scraping high on her right inner thigh.

  “I don’t know,” Slater said. “It’s not a slam dunk. Could be just what Jackson said in his autopsy report.”

  “We might find more cases in the Bigler County files,” Kate suggested, “even if only one or two commonalities exist.”

  Slater frowned doubtfully. “Slim chance, but if you’re right, we’ve got our work cut out for us.” He stood, and by unspoken agreement, Kate grabbed her handbag off the chair back. It was nearly midnight, and they’d both been up since six o’clock this morning. “Let’s call it a day and start fresh in the morning.”

  They took the ancient elevator up to the first floor and exited the precinct doors into a chilly night fog. Slater walked Kate to her car and waited under the dim lamppost until she fitted the key into the door lock.

  As she turned to say goodnight, she found he’d stepped closer to her, and her nose nearly bumped his chest. He looked down at her a long moment with an inscrutable expression, but she felt he was assessing her again.

  “You’re something else, Myers.” He reached up with one finger to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes and tuck it behind her ear. After the long day, she knew she looked a mess, no makeup, hair out of control. Her breath went shallow.

  “You almost make me believe all your wild claims,” Slater murmured. He still had his fingers on the side of her face.

  Her breath hitched a little. “That’s good, right?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether or not you’re telling me the truth.”

  She jerked away impatiently. “Of course, I am.” The words didn’t seem like a lie. She was telling Slater the truth, just not the whole truth.

  She felt his warm breath on the side of her face and knew with that subtle intuition she’d always had with men that he was attracted to her. She let herself drift for the briefest second, imagining his mouth on hers, the smooth heat of it.

  And then his hands were on either side of her face, tilting her head downward, and touching his lips to her forehead in a chaste and brief kiss.

  She stared at his unbuttoned shirt and loosened tie, forced herself to look up into his calm gray eyes with wide-eyed innocence.

  “I hope so, Myers,” he said. Then he strode off towards his truck parked at the other end of the lot.

  Kate waited until he’d started his engine and then quickly jumped in the front seat of her small car. She rested her forehead on the steering wheel, the prickly heat of conscience making her suddenly queasy.

  #

  By the end of Kate’s first week, frustration set her teeth on edge. She moved her recently delivered furniture into a rented duplex on Cirby Way and furnished the rooms with the bare necessities.

  Her days settled into the tedious task of sifting through the county records dating back over twenty years. She gave an occasional profile update and followed whatever leads Slater threw her way.

  Thursday morning Slater split up the files between them, lugging one large stack at a time from the basement. They perused every homicide case file going back to the late eighties. The latter records were remarkably detailed, beginning when Ben Slater had joined the department, but the early ones were spotty. Even while she waded through the documents, Kate didn’t have much hope of finding anything.

  The crime scene techs confirmed the blood from the Pontiac was Jennifer’s. The lone fingerprint not belonging to the girl failed to match any database identification. The tire tracks yielded nothing but generic brand matches. Bauer, along with the rest of the team, continued pounding the streets, interviewing anyone who’d possibly come in contact with Jennifer Johnston before her abduction. The Johnston family alibis proved solid.

  Glancing through her open office door to the bullpen, Kate shifted uneasily in her chair, thinking about her deception with Slater. He was beginning to trust her, and trust was a dangerous weapon.

  She’d promised him the truth, but she hadn’t told him about the other three cases outside California that she’d already linked to this one. Today, she decided, she’d tell him today about the first two cases. She fiddled with her pen, turning it end over end as she stared at the wall. But not the other case, not the personal one. The truth was still a raw wound after all these years. How could she open herself up to that again?

  She couldn’t. Not yet.

  Surely the other two cases would be enough to show good faith. She’d give full disclosure on those two. They could nail this bastard with what they had. They didn’t need the case that still terrorized her dreams and haunted her waking hours.

  She looked down at the hand holding the pen and noted the faint trembling.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The department was surprisingly up-to-date in its linkage of their computer files to VICAP. The program connected victims to serial murderers throughout the nation. In addition to these files, Kate searched birth, death, and marriage records, deeds of property sales and transfers. By late Thursday afternoon, she was beginning to feel the search was a waste of time.

  Slater had left the office early this morning, explaining he and Bauer had regular county business. The routine of the department had to continue. In fact, Kate was glad they’d gone so she could analyze the data in peace. She’d never minded the tedious part of investigation, and Slater had a way of distracting her.

  She turned back to her computer. Her search of CODIS and AFIS yielded no matches to the Johnston or Stuckey cases. Either no trace evidence, fingerprints, or DNA had been reported, or the crimes were cold cases that predated database coordination. Most likely the latter. The top level of the CODIS hierarchy hadn’t existed before 1994, so the homicides committed by her UNSUB prior to that date wouldn’t be in the system. Which was precisely why she hand-searched the cases.

  So far she’d found no matches, but she wasn’t surprised. The success of CODIS depended on hundreds of local police entering a great number of DNA profiles in the forensic and offender indices. Unfortunately, small jurisdictions were notoriously backlogged in data entries. While Bigler County was current, most departments weren’t, and paperwork always took a backseat to active cases.

  She reminded herself that any future crimes committed by their UNSUB, even those not involving a felony, might yield evidence that could be linked to the other murders. The Preston crime scene evidence, stored in the Franklin County seat at Pocatello, Idaho, contained some degraded blood and samples. With new technology, she hoped those degraded samples might match trace found at the Stuckey or Johnston crime scenes.

  She’d just finished the Bigler County records and started installing her self-generated computer program on her office desktop when Slater poked his head in the door.

  “So, what do you think?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “You weren’t listening, were you?”

  “You just got here. Am I a mind reader?”

  “That’s a dangerous prospect. How about dinner tonight?”

  Kate’s mind reeled at the unexpected offer. What was Slater up to? She held both hands out, palms upward, as if weighing the options. “Let’s see. Maintaining a professional relationship with my boss.” She dipped the left hand down. �
�Or going to dinner.” She dipped the right hand down and added, “With my boss. What a choice. Probably not a good idea.”

  “You’re not hungry?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Myers, you don’t say much of anything.” He gave a lazy smile showing white teeth and long lines around his mouth that looked like giant dimples. “That’s what’s interesting.”

  Kate felt blood creep up her neck, warming her face beneath her tan. Damn it all, why did he have to complicate everything? “Interesting,” she scoffed, sliding out from under the compliment.

  “You know what I mean. Most women do.” A shadow clouded his eyes for a moment.

  “And you’ve had lots of experience,” she muttered sarcastically.

  “Some.”

  “I’ll think about dinner after I’ve known you better, Detective Slater.” She sounded prissy even to herself.

  She brushed by him to cross the bullpen and fill up her coffee cup. Without looking back, she knew that his eyes followed her across the room. She’d tell him soon about the other cases. If he stopped annoying her long enough.

  #

  Slater was thinking about Kate Myers’ secrets when they got the 911 call from Placer Hills High School, several hours after the students finished classes for the day.

  Sheriff Marconi lumbered in from across the hall. “Something’s going down at the high school,” he announced to Slater. “Get the doc a vest outta the armory. We need a negotiator.”

  Nestled at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, the school enrolled only 950 students, most from privileged homes. These children lived in gated communities like Granite Pointe on sprawling estates that sported swimming pools, tennis courts, guest houses, and beautiful vistas. These students of privilege were not used to being intimidated, but when three masked and armed teenagers from Foothill Heights, thirty miles to the southwest, stormed the school, the students felt vulnerable and unprotected for the first time in their lives. The few high school students left on campus were working on the Homecoming float. And they were scared shitless.