Once Cold

by Blake Pierce

  He said to his wife, “Honey, could you give us a few minutes alone?”

  Shanna looked worried now.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Please,” James Reed said.

  Shanna nodded and went up the stairs. James invited the agents into his living room, where they all sat down. James eyes darted guiltily among the three visitors.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked.

  His face looked positively ashen now.

  “Mr. Reed …” Bill began.

  Riley knew that Bill was about to ask him specifically about the murders twenty-five years ago. But on a gut impulse, she decided to take a different approach. With a subtle hand gesture, she signaled Bill to let her start the questioning.

  Then she asked, “Perhaps you should tell us, Mr. Reed.”

  James Reed hung his head and slumped forward miserably.

  “Maybe I should get a lawyer,” he said.

  Riley spoke gently and carefully.

  “You could do that. But I think you really want to tell us.”

  Reed sat in silence for a moment.

  Then he said, “I know this is … an appalling thing to say …”

  Riley’s senses quickened, hanging on his next words.

  Then he said, “I thought … the statute of limitations …”

  His voice faded off.

  Bill apparently couldn’t keep quiet any longer.

  “Statute of limitations?” Bill said. “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  The man looked up.

  “But it wasn’t murder. Not really.”

  Riley exchanged puzzled looks with Bill and Jake.

  James Reed made an imploring gesture.

  “It happened so long ago. I thought I’d put it all behind me. I’ve got a family now. A wife, grown children, grandchildren. I’ve tried to live a good life.”

  Riley stared hard into his eyes, trying to grasp what she was hearing.

  It didn’t make sense.

  In her experience, the kind of monster who killed three women wouldn’t show such open remorse. He might feel it, but he’d keep it buried deep inside. He’d never admit it to a living soul.

  Something’s wrong, she thought.

  Then he said in a choked voice, “I was giving a lecture at St. John’s College in Annapolis. I had drinks with students and faculty afterwards. I got pretty drunk. I could have stayed in a hotel that night, but I decided to drive the whole way home. It was stupid. Like I said, I was …”

  His voice trailed off again.

  “She—the girl—was riding her bicycle alongside of the road. I saw her clearly. But I just didn’t have full control of my car, and I swerved into her, and she went down in the ditch. I stopped and got out of the car and ran over to her body but she was already—”

  A sob rose up in his throat.

  “I didn’t contact the police. I drove on home. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my wife. I read about it in the papers the next day.”

  Then, with tears in his eyes, he looked around at Riley, Jake, and Bill.

  “But according to Maryland law … I mean, I looked it up … I really thought …”

  Jake let out a low growl.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “Maryland has a three-year statute of limitations on vehicular manslaughter or even homicide.”

  Riley could see that Bill and Jake looked as stunned as she felt.

  Like her, they didn’t know whether to believe his story.

  Might it be just a ruse to distract them from the murders he’d actually committed?

  Finally Bill said, “Mr. Reed, we want you to voluntarily give us your fingerprints and a DNA sample.”

  The man’s mouth dropped open with shock.

  “Why?” he said. “I just confessed. Why do you need evidence?”

  Riley knew that Bill was getting ready to ask him specifically about the Matchbook Killer’s murders.

  But at that moment, her eyes locked with Reed’s.

  And she knew …

  He’s not the killer.

  Before Bill could say anything, Riley said, “Mr. Reed, we’ll leave now.”

  She rose from her chair and saw expressions of perplexed protest in her colleagues’ eyes.

  “Come on,” she said to Bill and Jake. “Let’s go.”

  As soon as she, Bill, and Jake stepped out the front door and started walking toward the car, Bill started complaining.

  “Are you out of your mind, Riley? He might have been playing us back there.”

  “Bill’s right,” Jake said. “It would be one hell of a clever trick, making up an act of vehicular manslaughter as an alibi. But the kind of man we’re looking for might just pull such a stunt. We’ve got to check out his story. We’ve got to ask more questions. We’ve got to get DNA and prints.”

  Riley opened the car door and got inside.

  “He has his share of guilt but he’s not our man, guys,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “How do you know?” Bill asked.

  Riley shook her head.

  “Because of his eyes,” she said. “I could tell by his eyes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  A few minutes later, Riley, Bill, and Jake were sitting in a café arguing about her decision.

  “Let me get this straight,” Bill said to Riley. “He’s not our man because you don’t like his eyes?”

  Riley took a sip of coffee.

  “They don’t fit the witness descriptions,” she said.

  Jake let out a snort of disapproval.

  “Witness? Which witnesses do you mean? Crazy Roger Duffy, who saw light shooting out of the killer’s eyes? Or that postman who thought he saw a ghost when he was a kid?”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “Those witnesses.”

  Bill and Jake sat staring at her for a moment. Riley felt a wave of impatience with them.

  “Listen to me, both of you,” she said. “Has my gut ever been wrong about something like this? Ever?”

  Riley could see their expressions softening.

  They know I’m right, she thought.

  “OK, so where does this leave us?” Bill asked, breaking the silence.

  Riley thought for a moment. Then an idea started forming in her mind.

  “I’m going to call Sam Flores,” she said.

  She took out her cell phone and got Flores on the line, putting him on speakerphone.

  She said, “Sam, we need help. Those names you gave Bill didn’t pan out. But I think we should give it another try.”

  “How?” Flores asked.

  Riley thought for a moment.

  “Sam, you’re good at thinking outside the box. I think the killer’s name is a variation on the names we’ve got—James Reed and Reed J. Tillerman. Run another search. Try every possible variation you can get on those names.”

  Riley thought a bit more.

  Then she said, “Widen the search area. And give us images.”

  “OK,” Flores said. “How soon do you need results?”

  Riley almost repeated what she’d told him yesterday:

  “Tomorrow will be fine.”

  But no. It was time to solve this case once and for all. Justice had been delayed for twenty-five years. They mustn’t waste another minute.

  “Right now,” she told Flores.

  She ended the call. They all waited in silence, sipping their coffee and eating their sweet rolls.

  Riley found herself thinking about the irony of what had just happened.

  They had found a guilty man.

  James Reed just wasn’t guilty of the crime they’d suspected him of.

  And Reed was right—the statute of limitations on his crime had run out many years ago.

  Reed would never be brought to justice now, except in his own guilty heart.

  But maybe that was justice enough.

  Is anybody innocent anymore? Riley wondered.

  Then she shuddered a little as she thought a
bout herself—her forbidden pact with Shane Hatcher, her moments of vengeful violence, and a host of other crimes and sins. She especially remembered how she’d once killed a psychopath who had held her and April prisoner. She had savagely smashed his head with a rock, time and time again.

  James Reed has got nothing on me, Riley thought bitterly.

  Then her phone buzzed. The call was from Sam Flores.

  “Have you got something for us?” Riley asked.

  “Maybe. Just maybe. I ran across a certain R. James Tiller who lives in Cabot. I checked more carefully and found out that the R stands for Reed.”

  “What about images?” Riley asked.

  Sam brought up a year-old newspaper article with the headline, “Valedictorian Receives Societal Club Scholarship.”

  In a black-and-white photograph, two men were handing a certificate to a proud teenager wearing a graduation gown. According to the caption, the girl’s name was Sylvia Capp. The man on her right was the club president. On her left was R. James Tiller, the head of the club’s Service Committee.

  Riley couldn’t tell much about Tiller’s eyes, but his face seemed remarkably pale. He also looked a little like the aged composite sketch, except that his hair looked white rather than gray. But of course some men’s hair whitened at an early age.

  Riley asked Flores for Tiller’s address and ended the call.

  “It sounds like a long shot,” Jake said.

  “It’s all we’ve got,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  *

  Cabot was a suburb on the east side of Richmond. The drive took them around the city, quite some distance from where the crimes had been committed. But this didn’t raise any special doubts in Riley’s mind. She’d known all along that the killer had possibly moved away from the area. If Reed James Tiller really was their killer, at least he hadn’t moved out of state.

  Maybe we’re lucky this time, she thought.

  When Bill pulled the car up to the address Flores had given them, the house looked so perfectly ordinary that Riley checked the information again.

  It was a small, brick ranch house placed at the far side of a wide, well-trimmed lawn. It looked a lot like other houses they had passed as they followed a network of streets that ran through a neighborhood near the James River.

  It was the right address, but it looked like the last place in the world where one might expect a murderer to live.

  Riley, Bill, and Jake walked across the lawn and rang the doorbell.

  A short, chubby middle-aged woman answered the door. Riley detected that she had once been fairly pretty. But what struck Riley most was how extremely ordinary she looked—just like the house and the neighborhood.

  “Can I help you?” the woman asked with a smile.

  Riley, Bill, and Jake introduced themselves. The woman seemed surprised but hardly alarmed.

  Riley asked if J. Reed Tiller lived here.

  “Why, yes,” she said. “I’m his wife, Celia.”

  “We’d like to talk to Mr. Tiller, if that’s possible,” Bill said.

  “You should be able to do that any time now,” Celia said, still smiling. “He’s on his way home from work. He works in Richmond.”

  Looking a little confused, she added, “Has there been … some sort of trouble?”

  Riley didn’t want to alarm the woman.

  “No,” she said. “We just want to ask him a few questions about someone he might have known a long time ago.”

  The woman relaxed a little.

  “I’m sure James will be glad to help,” she said.

  “We’ll wait in our car,” Riley said.

  “Oh, no, that wouldn’t be comfortable,” Celia said. “Come on in.”

  She led Riley, Bill, and Jake into a cozy, neat, blandly decorated living room.

  “Let me call James and let him know you’re here,” she said.

  She picked up a phone and told her husband about his official visitors.

  She hung up and said, “James says he’ll be glad to help however he can. Could I get you anything? Tea, coffee, soda?”

  “We’re fine, thanks,” Riley said.

  Celia sat down, and so did Bill and Jake. Riley stayed on her feet, looking around at the almost uncannily ordinary living room.

  She heard Bill ask, “How long have you been married?”

  Celia said, “Twenty-two years. We have one child—a daughter, Lena. She’s away in college. It’s her third year at Bon Secours College right over in Richmond.”

  “Oh, a nursing school,” Bill said in a friendly voice. “I take it she wants to go into medicine.”

  Riley knew that Bill was launching into their familiar drill—keeping small talk going while Riley took in their surroundings.

  She looked carefully at framed family pictures on the wall. They showed the Tillers over the years, from when their daughter was a toddler to her high school graduation.

  Right away, she was struck by James Tiller’s appearance in all the pictures.

  The white hair she’d noticed in the newspaper photo had nothing to do with age.

  His hair had looked that way since he was much younger.

  But what most startled Riley about him was his eyes.

  They were a piercing light shade of blue.

  He’s an albino, Riley realized.

  It all began to make sense in her mind.

  He’d been described by witnesses as brown-haired with hazel eyes.

  He’d dyed his hair, of course—perhaps to disguise himself, but possibly out of simple youthful vanity.

  But what about those eyes?

  She remembered what Roger Duffy had told her about seeing the killer in the Waveland Tap in Denison.

  “He looked at me. His eyes weren’t human. Streaming blue light was coming out of them.”

  Riley got it now. To a schizophrenic like Roger, a man with those eyes must have come from another world.

  She remembered something else that Roger had said.

  “Then he went into the restroom. I sat here too scared to move. Finally he came out and he looked at me again. This time his eyes were normal—dark like everybody said.”

  Of course! Riley realized.

  The killer had been wearing colored contact lenses. Probably they had irritated his eyes when he was at the bar, and he had taken them out for a while. He’d gone to the restroom to put them back in.

  Just as Riley was putting these thoughts together, the front door opened and someone came in.

  Riley saw that it was Tiller himself—eerily pale, with white hair and cold blue eyes.

  He came into the living room.

  “Celia tells me you’re from the FBI,” he said with a smile. “What can I do to help you?”

  “We just have a few questions,” Riley said, still standing.

  Tiller sat down near his wife.

  “Celia, get these good people some coffee,” he said.

  “They told me they didn’t want any,” Celia said shyly.

  “I insist,” Tiller said.

  Tiller then asked his guests whether they wanted cream or sugar.

  “Go bring it, dear,” Tiller said to Celia.

  “Of course, James,” Celia said in a rather timid voice. Then she disappeared into the kitchen.

  This little exchange spoke volumes to Riley.

  It was clear that Celia had always been a docile, obedient wife—the only kind of woman that a man with such deep sexual insecurities could possibly stay married to.

  Celia quickly came back with the coffee, serving everybody like a perfect hostess.

  With a chill Riley realized that Celia’s docility was very likely the only reason he hadn’t murdered her. She posed no threat to him. He’d even been able to perform sexually with her—at least enough to have produced one child, and Celia hadn’t demanded anything more of him.

  For many years now, he’d lived his ideal life with his ideal mate.

  He thought he’d put his crimes behind him.
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  Until now.

  What surprised Riley most at the moment was his extreme self-possession.

  From having probed his mind several times, Riley knew that part of him was eaten up with guilt and shame.

  But over the years, he’d learned to mask those feelings from everyone he knew.

  She spoke slowly and deliberately.

  “Mr. Tiller, I see that you only had one child. Why is that? Didn’t you want to have more?”

  His white eyebrows pulled together.

  “I don’t understand the question,” he said.

  Now there was a note of defensiveness in his voice. Riley felt sure that she was pushing the right buttons now. She was subtly questioning his virility—and he couldn’t take that.

  Not if she kept pushing him.

  It’s time to tear that mask away, Riley thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  Sitting in the living room with his wife and the three FBI agents, James Tiller felt a sharp stab of fury at the woman’s question.

  The bitch, he thought.

  She had a lot of nerve, asking a question like that—about how many children he had.

  Her smile exasperated him still further.

  Then she said, “And you only had a daughter—no sons. Such a shame. Surely you wanted sons. If you’d only had more children, maybe one would have been a son. But you didn’t. I wonder why.”

  James felt his face twitch.

  He’d spent his whole life pushing women like this one away.

  When he was young he’d even killed two of them—that bossy college student in Brinkley, and that slut in Denison.

  As for the third girl …

  He still didn’t know quite why he’d done it.

  He remembered when they’d walked into the motel room and she’d quietly told him she was a virgin.

  Something happened.

  His heart had softened toward her.

  He didn’t want to hurt her.

  But he’d killed her anyway.

  Somehow, it had felt like an act of mercy.

  It was as if by killing her he’d be saving her from …

  … what?

  From life, he guessed.

  It was the only reason he could think of after all these years.

  But he mustn’t get lost in his memories now.