Child of Mine: a psychological thriller

by Chambers, V. J.

  “What? What killer?”

  “Oh, please, Isaac. Are you seriously asking me this?”

  “On… Barker?”

  “No, on the killer here, the one going after the girls.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Isaac. “But can you possibly be objective doing that?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Objective enough, anyway. If I can work up the right profile, then we can look for the real killer.”

  “We?” he said.

  “You’ll help, right? Can you get me details about the crime scenes? I only have what was released to the papers—”

  “Lorelei, if I give you that information, it could mean my job. You’re intimately connected with a suspect, and letting him know—”

  “No, if he were the killer, he would know everything anyway. So, I don’t see how it would really hurt anything. The only danger I can think of would be to allow him to confess to something he didn’t do, and I won’t let that happen. Trust me, Simon won’t see any of this. I want to keep it to myself. Can you do it?”

  He was quiet for a minute. “I could probably get the information, yeah. I think so.”

  “So, you will, right?”

  “Can you handle this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s a reason you stopped doing profiles. The nightmares. The drinking. All of that—”

  “I’ve quit drinking.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “You didn’t drink for one day and you’re cured? Shouldn’t you join a group with twelve steps or something? Don’t you need support? You could relapse—”

  “I won’t. I managed to sleep last night, and I can do it again. For my son, I can do anything.”

  “Sure. So, why haven’t you done it before?”

  “I was afraid before,” she said. “I’m still afraid now, but I’m more afraid of losing Simon than of those damned dreams and visions. I can face them. I have to face them. And I have to solve this case. Please say you’ll help me do that.”

  He was quiet again. Then, his voice was low but steady. “All right. I’ll do what I can.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  That afternoon, she began a preliminary workup for the case. She opened up a file on her laptop and just began to type into it, working through her thoughts as she did so.

  It was troubling that all three of the girls had been with Simon getting their pictures taken before they’d been killed. She didn’t know what to make of that, but she knew that she couldn’t let it take her down a path that implicated Simon. He was innocent, so she would simply have to treat it as a coincidence and see where the case took her.

  After getting their photos taken, the girls had been alone. She’d need to talk to Simon about their modes of transportation, she supposed.

  But it was possible that the crimes had been ones of opportunity. She knew that the pictures of Brittany and the other two girls had been taken in similar places—abandoned warehouses or factories on the outskirts of Woodbury. Maybe the killer had connections to that location. Maybe he’d seen the girls alone, and he’d pounced.

  Even if they’d had adequate transportation, like their own cars, maybe they simply hadn’t been able to get there in time.

  So, she needed to pin down that location, and she needed to find out who was there most of the time. Having a solid profile for him should help narrow things down once she had a pool of suspects to work from.

  She could start on the profile once she heard back from Isaac.

  And she did, later that afternoon.

  “You’re never going to believe this,” said Isaac.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t got the information for me.”

  “Oh, no, I’m emailing you everything,” said Isaac. “Actually, maybe it’s better if you just look.”

  “You have crime scene photos?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She took a shaky breath, and then she went to her computer and opened her email. She downloaded the attached files. “Okay,” she said. “Which should I look at first?”

  “Just click on the file for Brittany, I guess,” said Isaac.

  She did.

  “See the photos?”

  “I do.” She hovered her mouse over the first icon. Once she opened this and looked at it, she could never unsee it. She’d see it forever and ever. It would haunt her dreams and her nights. But she had to find this killer.

  She clicked on it.

  The picture filled her screen. Brittany, propped up against a wall—it looked like the same background from Simon’s photos, actually—hands lashed behind her back, feet lashed together. There was no visible blood, but there was bruising around her neck. Strangulation.

  But that wasn’t the most striking thing about the photo.

  Brittany was blindfolded, and there was a word on the blindfold, written in rust-colored blood. Slut.

  Lorelei gasped. “Isaac, this is—”

  “Ross, yeah,” he said.

  “Damn,” she whispered. “I was just… thinking about him.” Why had Dylan Wayne Ross been on her mind? Oh, yeah, Mia had brought him up. Mia and her fascination with serial killers. “This is just like his crime scene. We’re talking some kind of copycat, right? He’s locked up, isn’t he?” Her first thought had been that it was Barker, that he’d escaped and was coming after her for some reason. But what if it was another of the killers she’d put away? What if someone else was out for revenge?

  “That’s the thing,” said Isaac.

  “What?”

  “He’s not,” said Isaac. “He escaped. Weeks ago.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “You can’t be serious. How did we not know this?”

  “I’ve got us in to talk to someone at the facility he got out of,” said Isaac. “You want to go ask them that question?”

  * * *

  “It wasn’t our job to make a hullabaloo out of the incident,” said Twila Wood, who worked at the Stonebook Psychiatric Center, where Dylan Wayne Ross had been locked up for nearly eighteen years. She was sitting at her desk in her office, a roomy area with hanging plants and a window looking out over the grounds of the building. “We did our part. We reported the escape to the police. They’re investigating, and I know they’re doing everything they can to bring him back to the facility.”

  “He’s a dangerous killer,” said Lorelei, gaping at the woman. “You didn’t think someone should alert the public?”

  “Well, no one has died,” said Twila.

  “Actually,” said Isaac, “the reason we’re here is because there are girls being killed in Woodbury, who are being strangled, tied up, and blindfolded. The blindfolds have words on them.”

  “Oh?” said Twila, looking confused.

  “You are aware of what Ross did, aren’t you?” said Lorelei.

  “Something with a sorority,” said Twila. “An isolated incident. He’d never showed any violent tendencies before, only suicidal ones, for which he was being treated.”

  Lorelei knew all about that. Ross had been recently started on a new medication before the incident at his sister’s sorority, and there was sometimes a correlation between the onset of certain psychotropic drugs and violence, but that didn’t excuse Ross’s behavior. He had murdered six girls that night.

  “And anyway, I don’t even know where Woodbury is. Is that even in the state?”

  “It’s across the state border.”

  “Well, it’s at least a four-hour drive to the border. We don’t think it’s likely Dylan’s gone that far.”

  Lorelei clicked her tongue. “He obviously has. He’s killed three girls in the exact same way he killed them before.”

  “That can’t be,” said Twila. “He’s been evaluated, and the likelihood of his killing again is rated very low by several different expert doctors. Besides, he’s practically a vegetable. Even without meds. They took him off his regimen years ago in hopes of making some improvement, but it made
no difference.”

  “What?” said Isaac.

  “Well, we were all shocked he escaped. Shocked.” She shook her head. “He moves to feed himself and that’s about it. He spends all his time sitting in a chair by the window, staring outside. He never speaks. He’s…” She furrowed her brow. “You’re sure he killed these girls?”

  “Well,” said Lorelei, “I developed the profile that caught him for the first incident, and I can assure you that these new crimes match it perfectly.”

  Twila bit down on her lip, clearly distressed. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “So?” said Isaac. “How’d it go? Are they going to back off Simon now?”

  Lorelei slid into the passenger seat of the car. She was coming out of the police station in Pineville, where she’d been talking to an officer about Ross’s escape. “I don’t know.”

  “What? What do you mean, you don’t know? This clears Simon. It’s Ross’s M.O. He escaped. What more do they need?”

  Lorelei sighed. “You’d think.” She buckled her seatbelt.

  Isaac furrowed his brow. “Did you have to talk to that Jeremy guy?”

  “No, he’s off the case,” said Lorelei. “I talked to someone else. A guy named Winters. But they’re all on the same side. I don’t know if they really took me seriously.”

  “How could they not take you seriously?”

  “Well, they said that maybe I told Simon about Ross, and that he copied the scenes to blame him,” said Lorelei.

  “Uh, and Simon also let him out of the facility?”

  Lorelei spread her hands. “I know. That’s crazy.”

  They were quiet. Isaac started the car. They sat there, peering out the windshield for several moments.

  Then Isaac put the car in gear and pulled out of the driveway. “Of course, no one knows how Ross got out of the facility. Considering he never moved or talked, just sat and stared out the window.”

  “What are you saying? You don’t think that Simon—”

  “No, I don’t,” said Isaac. “I mean, obviously Ross was biding his time. He was playing everyone in the facility, making them let down their guard so that he could get away.”

  “Right,” she said. “Had to be.”

  “But it does look a little suspicious.”

  “So you agree with them?”

  “No, no, of course not. Simon didn’t do this. We both know that.” He gripped the steering wheel. “We’re just going to have to find some compelling evidence is all.”

  “Uh, we’re not really field operatives. I’ve never tracked a killer in my life. Neither have you. We get cases and we make profiles. Shouldn’t we stick to our strengths?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” said Isaac.

  “Was there any physical evidence recorded at the crime scene?” asked Lorelei. “Ross was sloppy before, right? That’s how they nailed him. Hair fibers.”

  “Yeah, he seems to have gotten smarter about that. Victims were scrubbed clean. And consistent with the scene from eighteen years ago, there’s no evidence of sexual assault, so there’s nothing there to collect.”

  “Damn it,” said Lorelei.

  “But we’ll find something,” said Isaac. “I mean, he can’t really think that without physical evidence, he’d go free for these crimes.”

  “Right,” said Lorelei, furrowing her brow. “And what does he have to lose anyway? He’s going to be locked up for the rest of his life regardless. Why’s he scrubbing the vics?”

  Another uneasy silence settled over them.

  “Look, we’re over thinking this,” said Isaac. “Ross is crazy. Who knows why he does what he does?”

  “Right,” she said. “Right.” She took a deep breath. “You’re right. We don’t have a choice. We’ll just have to keep digging.”

  “We’ll find something concrete,” said Isaac. “Ross did this. So, we’ll find the proof.”

  “Good.” She nodded firmly. But inside, she was feeling a little less than sure about everything.

  * * *

  Hailey Hall pulled aside the shower curtain and reached into the steamy bathroom for her bathrobe. It was evening, but she found it easier to shower now, instead of in the morning before classes. Even though the sorority house had lots of bathrooms and lots of showers, there simply weren’t enough when tons of college girls were fighting for them in the A.M. Finding her robe, she shrugged into it and padded away from the shower with wet feet.

  The sink was across from several windows. She hadn’t pulled the curtains tight because the windows overlooked the woods, and no one could see in. She opened the medicine cabinet and took out a tube of ointment which she began to liberally apply to her freshly shaved bikini area.

  It stung. She winced.

  She hated shaving down there, but she felt like she had to do it. Back when she was still in high school, she hadn’t, at least not all of it. She’d done a little swipe on each side and only when she was going to wear a bathing suit or something.

  But then she’d gone to that party and made out with Griffin Wells in the closet, and he’d put his hands inside her pants and recoiled. “Dude,” he’d whispered. “Don’t you shave?”

  After that, she did.

  Even though it was kind of a horror show, considering she was always getting painful ingrown hairs, which would create disgusting infections and leave nasty piles of scar tissue. Which would then create more ingrown hairs, making the process even worse. She’d tried every product out there under the sun for the problem, and she didn’t know what to do.

  She felt stuck. If she removed the hair, it was painful and ultimately unsightly. There was more than once that an ingrown hair had caused her not to go home with some guy or other because she didn’t want them to see what was going on down there. Sure, she probably would’ve regretted going home with the guys anyway, in the grand scheme of things.

  But all her friends were cheerfully promiscuous, sharing stories about dick size and the number of orgasms they had, and she often felt left out.

  It was her junior year of college, and she sometimes felt like her stupid bikini area was ruining her life.

  She wanted to just let it grow, but she didn’t.

  She asked guys, when she did manage to have a clear enough area down there to feel she could bare it in front of another person. “What if I didn’t shave down there? Would that bother you?”

  The answers varied a bit. Some guys said they could handle it, but they preferred the hair removed. Others were adamant that “a hairy pussy just turns me off.” Not one person said they didn’t care. Not one.

  She’d had a boyfriend freshman year. They’d been together for months, and she asked him about it at one point.

  “What if I just stopped shaving down there?” she said.

  “Seriously?” he said.

  “You don’t have to shave your pubic hair.”

  “You want me to? I totally will.”

  She’d tried different forms of removing the hair, but no matter how she did it, she still always ended up with ingrown hairs. Maybe it was a little less with waxing, but waxing required her to wait for the hair to grow back in before it was removed again, which defeated the entire purpose if you asked Hailey.

  She glared at her crotch. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, but she wished there was something she could do about it.

  She wiped condensation off the mirror. Maybe she’d just stop shaving down there. Screw it. If guys didn’t like it, then they could just have sex with other people. Probably, in the heat of the moment, no guy was going to turn down getting laid anyway, even if there was unsightly body hair. But she wasn’t sure. What if they did? Imagining the rejection made her feel horrified.

  She squinted at herself in the mirror.

  And then she turned, heart in her throat, to look behind her.

  Someone was standing at the window.

  She clutched her bathrobe tight around h
er body.

  The man at the window was in some kind dark long-sleeved monochrome outfit, like… like an escaped criminal. He wasn’t a college kid. He was older, maybe in his thirties, and he was staring at her.

  She locked gazes with him, stared into the depths of his empty eyes.

  He cocked his head at her, sizing her up as if she were something very, very curious.

  She screamed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “Hey, hey,” said Isaac, pushing his way into the sorority house, holding out his badge. “FBI, okay?”

  The police officer snatched the badge away from him and scrutinized it. “Hell, what are the feds doing here?” He nodded at Lorelei, who was behind Isaac. “And who’s this?”

  “She’s with me,” said Isaac. “We want to talk to the girl who called this in. Could be related to an ongoing investigation.”

  “Seriously?” said the officer, shaking his head. “Man, I never seen the FBI just show up like this, no warning. This is like on one of those damned TV shows, like Supernatural or something. You guys really from the FBI?”

  “You want to call someone and check up on me?” said Isaac, glaring at him.

  “Yeah, well, maybe you just got Bobby answering your fake phone number and saying anything,” said the officer.

  “Who’s Bobby?” said Lorelei.

  “Don’t you watch that show?” said the officer.

  “What show?” said Lorelei.

  “Can we talk to the girl who called this in or not?” said Isaac.

  “Sure, sure,” said the officer. “This way.”

  He led them through the foyer of the house, which was large and airy with a wide set of steps underneath a dangling chandelier, and back to a sitting room. A girl clad in a t-shirt and sweatpants, was sitting on a couch back there. Her hair was wet.

  The officer gestured. “Here she is. Hailey Hall.” He turned to Hailey. “These people are with the FBI. They want to ask you some questions.”

  “More questions?” said Hailey. “But I’ve been over it a zillion times already. There was some creepy guy at the window and he ran off. I didn’t even want to call 911, but my sisters made me.” She folded her arms over her chest.