Kiss Me, Kill Me

by Allison Brennan

  Sean read the article Lucy had found. Nowhere in it did it mention Party Girl or Jessica’s alter ego “Jenna.” Had the police made the connection but were keeping it quiet? Lucy was smart; she’d discover if there was a connection. If there was, maybe Kirsten had a legitimate reason to go into hiding.

  Sean understood people, but he understood computers and networks better. He might not be able to trace Kirsten’s steps after she checked into the Clover Motel, but he could retrace her steps on the Party Girl site; namely, all her contacts. Like Jessica Bell, there were probably others Kirsten trusted, people she could turn to if she was in trouble.

  Or, he thought, someone who was trouble. If Party Girl was the connection to the four murders, then a psycho was targeting girls from the site. Sean would have to turn that information over to the police, but first he wanted to check out the abandoned warehouse where Jessica had been murdered. He didn’t expect to find any clues to Kirsten’s disappearance, but it would help for him to know where she had been, and where her friend had died.

  He plugged the location identified in the newspaper into his GPS. The abandoned warehouse, a former printing supply chain, was only a few blocks from the Clover Motel.

  THIRTEEN

  Suzanne risked Friday afternoon traffic and drove directly to Whitney Morrissey’s place from Hamden. The twenty-four-year-old lived in Brooklyn, in a warehouse that had been converted into artist studios, with two businesses on the ground floor: an insurance agency and a rental company.

  She buzzed 3A, Whitney’s apartment, and waited. Then buzzed again. She had tried calling when she was driving, but there had been no answer. She hadn’t left a message.

  “Yeah?” A scratchy voice came through the intercom.

  “Whitney Morrissey?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Special Agent Suzanne Madeaux with the FBI and I have some questions regarding your cousin, Alanna Andrews.”

  Dead silence. A good thirty seconds later, the door buzzed open and Suzanne entered. She walked up two flights of stairs to the third floor. Whitney stood in her doorway. She wore an oversized NYU T-shirt and had long bare legs. Thick blond hair fell halfway down her back in a tangle of wild curls.

  “FBI?” Whitney asked.

  Suzanne handed her a business card. “I have questions about the month your cousin lived here.”

  “Here?” Whitney glanced behind her. Suzanne couldn’t see what or who she was looking at.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “I have a friend over.” She bit her lip.

  “I also have questions about the party in October where Alanna was murdered.”

  “Can we talk later?”

  “No, we can’t.”

  If the woman played hardball, Suzanne would have to get a warrant, and that took time and paperwork.

  Suzanne despised paperwork.

  Whitney sighed and shut her door, closing off her apartment. “You don’t mind talking out here?”

  Suzanne shook her head. Whitney would be more forthcoming without an audience. “How many of the underground parties did you take Alanna to when she stayed with you that summer?”

  “Two or three.”

  “And did she meet anyone?”

  Whitney looked at her as if she were an idiot. “They were big parties. I’m sure she met lots of people.”

  Suzanne didn’t like this girl. “I should clarify. Did she meet anyone at any of the parties who she continued to see afterward?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t tell me about anyone.”

  “Were you at the October thirtieth party in Harlem? The Haunted House?”

  She hesitated.

  “I’d like to state that this is an active police investigation and if I find out you’ve lied to me, I’ll keep digging until I hit the truth.”

  Whitney curled her lip. “I showed up for a while, but left early.”

  “How early?”

  “Two.”

  Two in the morning was early? “Did you see Alanna there?”

  “Yeah. For just a minute. She was with a guy.”

  “Anyone you know?”

  She shook her head. “I’d seen him around, but I don’t know his name.”

  “Were you at the Brooklyn party last weekend?”

  “The one near the docks? I heard about it, but I didn’t go. I had an art show that weekend and needed to sleep.”

  It had the ring of truth, but Suzanne made a note to follow up on it. “What kind of art?”

  “Charcoal drawings, mostly. Some watercolors.”

  “Would you mind showing me something?”

  She looked skeptical. “Why?”

  Suzanne shrugged. “Just curious.”

  Whitney opened the door and walked away but didn’t let Suzanne in. Through the narrow opening she saw one large room with a wall of small-paned warehouse windows left over from the original building. The far wall had an intricate painting directly on the wall in black and greens that looked like a mosaic of the New York skyline. She couldn’t see anything on the right except for a closed door. The place smelled like paint cleaner with a faint undercurrent of marijuana. Now Suzanne understood why Whitney didn’t want her inside.

  Whitney came back with a sketchbook and handed it to Suzanne, along with a postcard. “This was from my show. It was in Central Park.”

  “I remember,” said Suzanne, surprised. “I was jogging through the park when they were setting up on Saturday morning.”

  She glanced through the sketchbook, not really interested, just wanting something tangible to confirm that Whitney wasn’t making up the art show alibi. She couldn’t help but notice that Whitney had talent. Most of the drawings were faces, a few buildings, and New York landmarks.

  “You’re really good.”

  Whitney smiled sheepishly as she took the sketchbook back. “Thanks. But it’s hard to make money with these sketches. And the last thing I want to do is go into commercial art.”

  “Sometimes you have to make a living doing what you don’t particularly like so you have the time and money to do what you love to do.”

  “Exactly!” Whitney said. “Alanna and I weren’t really close, but I liked her and I feel bad about what happened. You don’t have any idea who killed her?”

  Suzanne didn’t answer the question, but asked, “You’re an artist and have a good eye for detail. Would you mind looking at three pictures and telling me if you remember seeing any of these women?”

  “You’re talking about the other victims.”

  “Yes.”

  Whitney nodded, but bit her lip.

  “Did you see their photos in the paper?”

  “Yeah—”

  Suzanne took out the folder and showed her the pictures one by one. Whitney recognized them, Suzanne was certain of it, but she didn’t say anything right away.

  “I may have seen them before, but I don’t know when or where. All three look kind of familiar, but I didn’t know them, like their names or anything. I’m sorry.”

  “I have a favor to ask,” said Suzanne.

  Whitney eyed her suspiciously.

  “The guy you saw Alanna with the night she died, would you be able to draw him?”

  “You think he killed her?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk to him.”

  Whitney closed her eyes. A moment later she opened them and said, “Yeah, I think I can.”

  “Call me when you’re done and I’ll pick it up. It’s important—the sooner you can do it, the better.”

  Suzanne left Whitney’s apartment and called her office as she turned the car around. She verified that the autopsy report from Jessica Bell was on her desk, and that the blood and tissue samples had been sealed and sent via courier from the coroner to the FBI lab. If anything came from them, the chain of evidence had to be preserved or the court would throw all the material out. Everything was moving quickly on her end, but anytime they were dealing with lab work, speed wasn’t
really an option, regardless of what the movies and television touted.

  She was talking to her squad’s chief analyst when Vic Panetta called. “I’ll call you back,” she told Chris. She clicked over to Panetta. “Got a lead on a witness. A guy the first vic’s cousin saw with Andrews the night she was killed. We’re working on a sketch.”

  “Good, but we have another problem. The security company overseeing the old printing warehouse in Brooklyn just called me about a prowler. Caucasian, six foot one to six foot two, dark hair, wearing jeans and a black jacket.”

  “I’m still in Brooklyn; I’ll check it out.”

  “The security guard, our ex-cop Rich Berenz, is on scene but he’s sitting back and watching. He’ll detain if the trespasser tries to leave.”

  “Call him back and tell him my ETA is six minutes.”

  She turned around again and headed straight for the warehouse.

  Killers often returned to the scene of the crime to relive their sick thrills, and Suzanne hoped that was the case this time.

  FOURTEEN

  Lucy methodically went to every apartment in Jessica Bell’s building looking for information on Kirsten. More than half the apartments didn’t have anyone home, but it soon became clear that among the college-age crowd, most knew Jessica and “Ashleigh” from a wild party on the top floor New Year’s Eve.

  She couldn’t help but think about Wade Barnett and his connection to both Josh Haynes and the underground parties. Coincidence? The police were looking into him, and Lucy trusted them to do their job. Later, she would turn over whatever information she found, but she believed exactly what she’d told Jessica’s boyfriend: The police would catch the killer; Lucy needed to focus on finding Kirsten.

  She walked two short blocks to a Starbucks on Broadway and booted up her laptop while sipping her mocha. She logged onto her fake profile on the Party Girl site and looked through Kirsten’s friends to see if she recognized the other three victims.

  There were so many beautiful young women endangering themselves, Lucy had to consciously close off her emotions to review each profile impartially. She saved a photo of each friend into a separate file, along with the person’s online name, to review more closely later.

  Almost immediately, she found the second victim, Erica Ripley. She was a pretty, short-haired redhead with big green eyes. She smiled seductively in the photo, pixie-like and coy.

  Lucy saved her profile and information, and continued her search. Ten minutes later, she found Heather Garcia, a light-skinned Latina, who posted on her profile that she was studying to be a teacher.

  Not anymore. They were both dead.

  These two victims were friends with both “Ashleigh” and “Jenna.”

  Lucy doubted the police had uncovered this thread. Otherwise why would they have kept the profiles up there? Unless they were using them to lure a killer, so he didn’t know the police suspected how he trolled for his victims.

  Still, she was disturbed to see three of the four Cinderella Strangler victims on the Party Girl site. She searched the site more broadly for the first victim, Alanna Andrews, but couldn’t find her. Maybe her profile had been removed, or she’d never had one.

  Three out of four of the Cinderella Strangler’s victims—and Kirsten, who was in hiding—were part of an online sex group. Their photographs and videos were there for anyone to see, and sexual predators fed on explicit images. Even though the girls had used false identities, they weren’t protected. Lucy’s sister, a detective in San Diego, had had a case years ago where a young man learned that a girl he had a crush on had an anonymous online sex diary. He killed her and two others before he was stopped.

  Lucy logged into Kirsten’s email, but there were no new messages from Kirsten or Trey. She checked the “sent” box, then went to the deleted files. Nothing.

  She created a chronological sequence of events, and incorporated the Party Girl profiles, the dates of the four murders, and the weekends Kirsten had left home.

  Though the spreadsheet created a clear time line, there was no clear connection between Kirsten and the four victims. The first victim, Alanna Andrews, didn’t have a Party Girl profile, but Lucy added a question mark in case she’d had a profile that was taken down. Kirsten was in New York when the last two college students were killed, but not the first two. Lucy searched Kirsten’s email for any messages from any of the victims. She found only Jessica Bell in her address book. After reading a few of the messages, Lucy realized they had become close friends and Kirsten was thinking of going to Columbia. They also had a lot in common—parents who’d gone through a nasty divorce and changing high schools in the middle of the year were two of the big similarities.

  Lucy felt for Kirsten and Jessica. She appreciated the close bond the girls had. There was no doubt in her mind that if Jessica was in trouble, Kirsten would drop everything and come to New York to help her.

  Lucy would do the same for her family, but she had no close friends. The friends she’d made in high school didn’t know how to respond to Lucy’s very public attack nearly seven years ago. Instead of staying in contact, they’d gone off to college, never emailing, never calling. At the time, Lucy didn’t much think about it because she’d been so wrapped up in Patrick’s coma and her own guilt and pain. It wasn’t until she was in her second year of college that Lucy realized how alone she truly was. By that time, she found it difficult to maintain more than superficial friendships. Her one boyfriend in college had told her she was emotionally cold and hard to get close to. He was right. She couldn’t warm up to anyone. She wasn’t skittish, but she was wary.

  Which made what was happening between her and Sean unusual and daunting and wonderful, all at the same time.

  Lucy logged out of Kirsten’s email and Googled Wade Barnett to see what popped up. She was surprised by the hundreds of results.

  Skimming the first ten links, she realized that Wade Barnett was a wealthy twenty-five-year-old investor. He worked for his brother, CJ Barnett, and had graduated from NYU. Both were die-hard Yankee fans.

  The third victim had been a student at NYU.

  Wade Barnett had thousands of mentions in social and sports articles. He’d majored in finance, but seemed to be drawn to architecture and real estate. He was in charge of real-estate investments for CJB Investments, and had bought several abandoned buildings in the city. Additionally, he’d donated a large chunk of money to a historical preservation society to restore several decaying landmarks.

  Barnett’s photo showed an attractive guy with an engaging smile. He obviously played to the camera. The police had talked about him with Josh Haynes, but based on what Josh said, he’d been the one who’d brought up Barnett’s name.

  Wade likely had met both Jessica and Kirsten at Josh’s party. Did he know the other girls personally through the parties in New York? If the first victim’s profile had been deleted from Party Girl, he could have known all of them through the site.

  Lucy logged back onto her own Party Girl profile. She searched the site for males, under thirty, in New York. One thousand profiles popped up, the limit that the site would allow for a search. She went back to Kirsten’s profile and looked at the profiles of all the men following her. She didn’t see any of the Barnett brother, but half the profiles didn’t have photographs.

  She thought she was onto something, but would need to spend more time on it than she had right now.

  She went back to her Google search and narrowed it to Barnett images. Maybe she could find a screen name he used, or an email address, that she could plug into the Party Girl site to find him.

  She didn’t expect to find a photograph of him with the first victim.

  It was early October, taken at a Yankees playoff game. The caption:

  Wade Barnett, real estate investor, celebrating Yankee win with latest girlfriend.

  Though only the young woman’s profile was in the picture, there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind that the girl embracing Wade Barnett was Alan
na Andrews. The picture had been taken four weeks before Alanna was murdered.

  Lucy’s heart raced. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, and she felt on the cusp of an important discovery. Maybe the police already knew about Barnett and Andrews. Maybe they were investigating him or following up on his alibis. But until the killer was publicly identified and in jail, Lucy feared Kirsten would stay in hiding.

  Sean needed to know about the Party Girl connection between the last three victims and Kirsten, and Wade Barnett’s connection to the first victim and possible connection to Jessica Bell and Kirsten. Lucy called him, but his phone went to voice mail after five rings.

  “Sean, it’s Lucy. I found something. Three of the four Strangler victims are Party Girl members. Wade Barnett, who was at the same New Year’s Eve party as Kirsten and Jessica, dated the first victim. I’m sending you a spreadsheet of everything I found. We need to call the FBI.”

  Sean couldn’t reach for his vibrating phone because a security guard old enough to be his grandfather had a gun pointed at him. The guy already had a shaky trigger finger, so no way was Sean going to startle him. He was standing thirty feet away. He probably wouldn’t miss if he fired.

  Keeping his hands up, Sean said, “Sir, my name is Sean Rogan and I’m a private investigator.”

  “Just shut up, the NYPD is on their way.”

  “Great,” Sean said. Dammit. He wanted to talk to the cops on his terms, not as a trespasser. They were more apt to take him seriously, as well as keep him in the loop, if he went to them with his facts and theories.

  The guard didn’t seem like an amateur. Instead, his squinting and shaking indicated that the man’s eye-sight was poor. He was scared of screwing up, Sean realized. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Just stand there. Don’t move.”

  “I’m not moving,” Sean said. He hated having a gun pointed at him. He’d been shot once before, but had been wearing a bulletproof vest at the time. Still, it had hurt like hell and given him a bruise that had lasted for weeks. His brother Duke told him he was lucky not to have a cracked rib. Sean didn’t want to compare the difference between being shot with and without the vest.