Kiss Me, Kill Me

by Allison Brennan

  “I’m a private investigator looking for a missing teenager.”

  “How do I know you’re not some crazy asshole? You want information, you come down with proper ID, and I’ll tell you. I can spot a fake, so don’t be pulling any shit with me.” The clerk hung up.

  Sean didn’t much want to go to New York just to talk to a motel clerk when he didn’t know for certain that Kirsten had been there.

  Lucy shouted from upstairs, “Sean!”

  He took the stairs two at a time and almost ran right into Lucy as she stood in the doorway.

  “I wasn’t sure you heard me,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  “Kirsten emailed Trey.” She strode over to the computer. “And he responded.”

  Facebook threaded messages so you could see the original message and every response chronologically.

  Kirsten had sent Trey a message at 7:58 a.m.

  Trey,

  I don’t know where to start. I’ve been sick. I didn’t even know it was Thursday until I woke up this morning. I’m better, but I sort of can’t walk right now.

  It’s a long story, but I have no way of getting home. I lost my phone. Tell my mom that I’m OK. I have plenty of money and so, yeah.

  I don’t know what to do! I’m too scared to go home but scared to stay, too. Isn’t that silly? Jessie’s message was all wrong! And who would hurt her? I think they know me but maybe not. But don’t tell anyone where I am! Please please please. My head is foggy and I can’t think. But it’s all weird here and the news in the paper doesn’t explain anything. I already miss her maybe it was my fault I don’t know anything.

  Can you pick me up in New York when I figure out where I am? I’m somewhere very nice. It’s pretty and there’s a big bridge.

  So sorry everything you were right I was stupid about everything I want to play softball but now I can’t I want to

  Several of her sentences were incomplete, and her message ended there, unsigned. Trey had responded at 8:10 a.m. from his mobile phone:

  Kirsten, are you still there? What’s wrong? I’m leaving for New York right now. Email or call me as soon as you get this message. Are you in the city? Which bridge? It’ll take me at least five hours to get there. I’ll let you know as soon as I arrive. T.

  “He’s going to New York?” Sean was furious. “He promised he would call me if she contacted him!”

  “I’m worried about her,” Lucy said.

  “Because she was sick?”

  “Read her message carefully. There’s a lot of information there, but she must have a fever or maybe she’s drugged.” Lucy frowned. “She left on Friday?”

  Sean nodded. “Did you save that message?”

  “Yes, I have a screen capture and I emailed it to myself.”

  “She has a friend in New York, but when I tried the number it went straight to a generic voice mail. Patrick is running it now. She received a call from that cell number on Friday morning, and left Friday afternoon. She made several calls to the same number after she presumably arrived in New York.”

  “Where is she staying?” Lucy asked, more to herself.

  “She called a motel when she arrived in New York, but the clerk said he didn’t have her registered, under Kirsten or Ashleigh.”

  “Did you describe her?”

  “Didn’t get the chance. He hung up on me. I don’t think the motel has earned even one star.”

  Lucy said, “Did you see this? Who would hurt her? You need to ask her mother if she has a friend or relative in New York.”

  “As soon as I talk to Trey.” Sean dialed his number. The phone rang four times before bouncing to voice mail.

  “Trey, I saw the message Kirsten sent you. Don’t be an idiot. Call me.”

  Sean hung up. “Can we send Kirsten a message? A strange guy might scare her, but you—”

  Lucy nodded. “I understand.” Lucy logged onto her own account and sent Kirsten a message with her contact information as well as some advice.

  Call the police as soon as you can and tell them you need to be put in protective custody.

  NINE

  Suzanne and Detective Panetta had been sitting in the waiting room of CJB Investments for twenty minutes, watching the bustling staff. In the adjoining suite, the Barnett Family Trust offered grants and scholarships to young people for college or the arts.

  Suzanne spoke in a low voice, reading information off her BlackBerry. “Wade Barnett is twenty-five, works for his brother, graduated from NYU two years ago. No federal record. You?”

  “Two DWIs, that’s it. License suspended for a year. Some other stuff. Nothing official, but my boss said he’s been pulled in a couple times. Charges dropped.”

  “On what?”

  “Illegal gambling, drunk and disorderly at a nightclub when he was underage. A lot of spoiled rich kids get their hands slapped and sent on their way. The DWIs were more serious; they definitely stuck.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Upper West Side.”

  Suzanne said, “On the business side, the investment company is doing well. I put an inquiry into our White Collar Crimes Unit, and it looks like CJB is pretty clean. Ditto the charitable trust. According to my analyst, their last tax filing showed just over fourteen million in scholarships, with an operating budget of less than ten percent.”

  “Good management. I don’t think it’s Wade Barnett.”

  “CJ Barnett is the principal,” Suzanne said.

  “We tread lightly, Suzanne,” Panetta reminded her. “The Barnett Trust is well respected.”

  “I’m not looking to tarnish anyone’s reputation. Just want the truth.”

  An attractive young female came out to the lobby. “Mr. Barnett is available now. May I bring you anything to drink? Water? Coffee? A glass of wine?”

  Suzanne shook her head and Panetta just grinned. They walked into Barnett’s large corner office, which seemed incongruous with the rest of the office they’d seen. The expansive view of lower Manhattan was the first thing that struck Suzanne, followed by the opulent office space, which was bigger than her East Village apartment. The steel-gray carpets were soft and plush, the art trendy and local, and an entire wall a shrine to the New York Yankees. Being a Yankees fan scored Barnett points with Panetta. Suzanne preferred the Mets.

  Wade Barnett was lounging on his couch talking on the phone. His feet were bare, and he wore simple khakis and an oxford-style shirt with a tie, sleeves rolled up. His brown hair was thick and shaggy, in one of those styles where he could step out of the shower looking good. His poise and style suggested he knew he was attractive.

  “Gotta go, Jimmy. But we’re on for the Knicks tonight, right? I’ll swing by and pick you up at the bar in an hour.”

  He hung up. “It’s not baseball, but it’ll pass the time until April,” he said.

  Even Wade Barnett’s welcoming smile was charming, in an arrogant and privileged way.

  “I’m Special Agent Suzanne Madeaux with the FBI. This is NYPD Detective Vic Panetta. Thank you for taking the time to meet with us. We hope you’ll be able to help with a case we’re working.”

  “Shoot.” He sat up straight and grabbed a baseball off the table, tossing it between his hands. “Sit, please. What can I do?”

  Suzanne and Panetta sat in leather chairs across from Barnett. Panetta said, “We came to you because we heard you were familiar with underground parties in the city.”

  Barnett frowned. “I don’t care to talk about that.”

  Suzanne knew they would lose him quickly if they were too rigid. She said, “We’re not here about the parties specifically, we’re here about a murder. And because you’re in the know about the parties. I don’t really care at this point if you’re the one setting them up. What I do care about are four dead young women.”

  Barnett leaned forward. “Is this about the Cinderella Strangler?”

  Suzanne cringed at the moniker, but nodded. “We need to know who set up t
hose parties and how the guests found out about them. Whether they were open or closed. If there’s a formal invite list. Who’s in charge. Their families deserve to know what happened.”

  “I’d love to help, really—I feel rotten about those girls. But you should know the parties aren’t exactly formal. No one calls me to set them up; there’s no invite list, really nothing in writing. When someone sets up a party, word gets out and people show up.”

  “How do people hear about the parties?” Suzanne asked. Though Josh Haynes had explained how information spread, she wanted Barnett’s version.

  “Mostly online or text messages. Those who go know what to do, it sort of feeds on itself, they bring friends, and so on.”

  “Is there a specific website?”

  “No, not for all the parties. Different groups might have their own sites, you know, like a club or a fraternity or whatever. But there’s no central website for every party in the city.”

  “We were led to believe that there wasn’t an underground party in New York that you didn’t sanction.”

  “Whoa! I wouldn’t say that.” Barnett’s expression changed from helpful to wary. “Do I need a lawyer? My brother is a stickler about this kind of stuff. I got in trouble once for mouthing off to a cop, and I don’t want to be in trouble.”

  “And I want to stop a psychopath before he kills another young woman,” said Suzanne. “I’d think you’d want the same thing. If word gets out that a serial killer is targeting your parties, attendance might drop way down.”

  “Serial killer?” He looked troubled, but she didn’t know if it was an act. “I really can’t help. They’re not my parties. I just hear about most of them. Not all, certainly, but people tell me things. You know how it is.” He shrugged as if to say because I’m me.

  Suzanne bit back a snarky comment and instead said, “You keep your finger on the pulse of the parties, so to speak.”

  He nodded.

  “How many are there?”

  “A night? A week? A year? It varies. There are so many fascinating abandoned structures that are perfectly safe, left to rot by bankrupt companies or absentee owners. I’ve been buying some as I can, fixing them up, reselling or leasing them. I love the old architecture, the original designs, the fascinating history of some of these places.”

  Suzanne made a note to check on Barnett’s financials. He talked a good game, but Panetta had said that big brother CJ ran the show.

  “It would be helpful to us if we knew the extent of the parties. If we want to stop this killer, we need to know when and where he might strike again.”

  “There are secret parties every night, most relatively small. There’s a variety of party types—the raves, the frat parties, the drug parties, the sex parties. Sometimes a combination, but then there’re also the people who go. Some are all black, some all white, some race isn’t an issue. The big parties—over maybe two hundred people—are usually on the weekends. I wouldn’t say every weekend, but close to it. There’s something for everyone—not all of the parties are drugs and drinking and dancing. There’s a large black Christian church that has a huge revival-type party once a year, gospel rock, amazing food, and totally dry. They don’t have the money to lease a place big enough, so they find a building that fits their needs.”

  Every weekend? They had four dead girls in four months, but no specific pattern in location or date—only that they were killed late on a Saturday night, and the time between murders was getting shorter.

  Suzanne slid across the glass coffee table a list with the locations of the bodies and the estimated day the victim was killed. “We need to know who organized these parties. We think we know who put on the parties in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but the frat party here, and then the Harlem party, we need more info. Any ideas?”

  Barnett looked at the list. “The frat party is a college thing; I don’t know much about that. You should talk to Alpha Gamma Pi—they’re not the biggest frat at Columbia, but they’re on the ball.”

  Suzanne made a note, though she was pretty confident that she’d read in Panetta’s reports that he’d canvassed all the frats and didn’t get anything useful.

  Panetta opened a file and showed Barnett the photographs of the four dead women. They weren’t the morgue photos, but pictures provided by their families or the DMV.

  “Do you know any of these young women? Maybe you met them at a party, or through business or college?”

  Barnett stared at the pictures. His face was blank, almost impassive, but Suzanne noticed he swallowed several times.

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  Suzanne would bet her pension that he knew at least one of the girls. Maybe all of them. Maybe she was facing a killer.

  Panetta also picked up the strange vibes. He glanced at her and gave a brief shake of his head, and she concurred. They needed more information, and then they’d bring him in for a formal interview at the station.

  Suzanne stood and said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Barnett. If you think of anything else, or hear something that might help us narrow down which parties this murderer may be targeting, please call either myself or Detective Panetta. You have our cards.”

  Outside the door, Suzanne lowered her voice. “Something’s going on. He knows at least one of these victims.”

  “Absolutely. And either he’s surprised that someone’s dead or he’s surprised that we’re on to him.”

  “Either way, he’s a person of interest.”

  Suzanne talked Panetta into grabbing a drink at a bar to discuss the case. He agreed, provided it was near his subway stop. He called his wife and said he’d be an hour late. By the time he’d disconnected, there were two beers in front of them.

  They toasted. “To catch a killer,” Panetta said.

  Suzanne sipped her bottled Samuel Adams, a favorite of hers since college. Panetta drank Coors Light on tap. “Barnett,” she said.

  “Ballsy. Arrogant. Until he saw the pictures.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Of something. But murder? He doesn’t seem the kind of guy who’d kill a girl with a plastic bag over her head.”

  “He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d beat them to a pulp, either. Did you notice his hands?”

  Panetta laughed. “Manicured.”

  “Soft. No hard labor. He’s more the type of dude who’d push a girl off a bridge in a moment of rage.”

  “Really?” Panetta looked at her as if she were an alien.

  She shrugged. “I know, sometimes you can’t tell who’s a killer by looking at them, but I assess people by how they’d kill—if they were driven to it. He doesn’t appear to have the personality of a serial killer. But I’m going to run him up the flagpole, get a full background and psych profile on him based on what we know. Ted Bundy didn’t look like a serial killer on the surface.”

  “Do you think he was feeding us a line about the fraternity? Trying to steer us away?”

  She sipped her beer as she thought. “Maybe, but we need to follow up anyway. You talked to the frats, right?”

  “Hicks and three officers spoke to the president of each fraternity at Columbia, and all denied that they’d organized the party. But three of the four victims were college students, two at Columbia.”

  “It was the second victim who wasn’t a student, right?”

  “Erica Ripley. She was twenty-one, worked at a coffeehouse.”

  “Still, three of the four—”

  “Underground parties are a favorite of the college crowd.”

  “With how many colleges and universities there are in New York City, two of the victims were at Columbia?”

  “I can assure you that we followed up with what we had,” Panetta said, slightly defensive. “But we had shit. No one came forward. Of those we spoke to afterward, they were either surprised the victim was at the party, or they said they’d warned the victim that the parties were dangerous and to be careful. We have little p
hysical evidence.”

  “I wasn’t second-guessing your investigation.” Suzanne hoped she hadn’t come off as overly critical. “Just thinking out loud.”

  After a moment, Panetta said, “I agree, we should take another walk through the frats.”

  “We can split them up.”

  “I’ll get the list from Hicks.”

  “What happened to the roommate of the first victim?” Suzanne asked. “Did you say she dropped out and moved back home?”

  “Jill Reeves,” Panetta said.

  “You remember her?”

  “It was the first interview of the case. She took it hard. She and the victim had been best friends since they were kids.”

  Suzanne hadn’t been involved in the investigation at that point. “I’d like to talk to her, if you don’t mind. Now that we know more, maybe she’ll have additional information that didn’t seem important at the time.” The first victim, Alanna Andrews, had been killed the last week of October. The other three were all killed since the beginning of the year.

  The murders themselves stuck out because of the lack of violence. No rape, no blood at all. All the victims had sex prior to their murders, but not with the same men. It was theoretically possible for the killer to have used a condom and not left his DNA on the victims, but even with protection there would likely be hair and other trace evidence to match up. But until they had a suspect, getting any of those results was impossible.

  “Have the victims been tested for the standard date rape drugs?” she asked. “It might explain lack of physical evidence of rape.”

  “I don’t recall. I think not, because there didn’t seem to be a sexual component to the crimes. With the budget being so tight, the lab is being careful with what we order, but they’d preserve blood and tissue for future testing. If they were intentionally drugged, would that change anything?”

  “It might change the profile of the killer.”

  “Do you have a profile?”

  “Not officially.” When she first got the case she talked to Quantico, but they didn’t have enough information to develop a working profile. She should send the new information and physical evidence to them and see what they could come up with psychologically. “Would you mind if I contact the NYPD lab and have them send blood and tissue samples to Quantico to run a pattern of drug tests?”