by Blake Pierce
“Well, I guess that all depends on how the next few hours go for you,” Jack said.
“I’ve done nothing wrong! It’s my God-given right to protest!”
And any woman’s God-given right to look into fertility treatments if they have no other alternative when it comes to having a baby, Rachel thought. She kept it to herself, however. She was starting to feel a very dangerous sort of irritation towards this case in general—toward a killer that seemed to be targeting women intent on doing what they could to have a baby.
The rest of the trip to the station was silent. Other than a few deep sighs and frustrated exhales from the back, Maria remained quiet. They escorted her into the building without incident and when they had her sitting in an interrogation room, they wasted no time. Perhaps sensing the growing tension in Rachel, Jack did his best to play the good cop, bringing Maria a cup of tea when they entered to speak with her.
Rachel had Maria’s file in her hand and it revealed nothing surprising. She’d been arrested one other time, two years ago, for being involved in a protest that got out of control. Other than that, though, her record was squeaky clean. Rachel knew this did not clear the woman at all, but it did make her job a bit harder.
“I ask this not out of spite, but admitted ignorance,” Rachel said. “As far as we know, neither of the clinics we spotted you at perform abortions. Can you tell us what, exactly, you were protesting?”
Maria looked to Rachel like she’d just asked an incredibly stupid question. “I’m protesting the idea that human beings think they know better than God.”
“I’m going to need you to explain a bit better than that,” Rachel said.
“If God makes it so that people can’t have children, that’s that. He is sovereign and knows what He’s doing. Getting a doctor to manipulate your womb or a man’s semen is blasphemy. Fertility treatments are an afront against an all-knowing Creator and are an abomination.”
Hearing Maria say this, Rachel was almost alarmed that she understood it. She did not agree with it, but it was easy to track. Of course, Rachel did not care for hearing anything about a sovereign creator of a God. It was apparently a God that also slipped in a tumor from time to time—to people that had been healthy up until that point. If that was the same God Maria was spouting on about, he was sort of an uncaring jerk. Rachel focused on this feeling for a moment, but only to identify. She could not allow it to alter the way she questioned this woman or things were going to get nasty.
“So based on such beliefs,” Rachel said, “I would assume you would agree with me that people should not murder, right?”
“Correct,” Maria said proudly. “Abortion is a—”
“No, not abortion,” Rachel interrupted. “I’m talking about straight out murder.”
“Same thing. It’s right there in the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not murder.”
“I take it you try to abide by the rules and regulations of the Bible, right?” Rachel said.
Maria leaned forward, clearly getting irritated. “We are all fallen. Even the purest of humans is a sinner. We all fall short of God’s glory. I have flaws. I’ve made mistakes. I’m a sinner just like you. Just like everyone.”
Jack could apparently tell that she was struggling to keep a civil tongue. He spoke up before she could and even his response was layered with subtle ridicule. “Are some of the sins you’ve committed perhaps behind the reason you thought it would be a good idea to run away from us today? If you were legitimately just protesting, I find it hard to believe you’d have any reason to get into a race with federal agents.”
Maria almost answered right away but them smirked at them. “You really think you’re going to lure me into that trap?”
“Here’s the deal,” Rachel said, now taking her turn to lean forward a bit. “I’m going to tell you what’s going on since you seem to take this whole ‘though shalt not murder’ thing so seriously. We are looking for a killer. We are looking for someone that has taken to killing women that are scheduled for fertility treatments. Three so far. Now, in the course of our searching, we have been led to two different clinics. And both times we have been to those clinics, we have seen you. That is why we approached you today. So now…how about it? How about now you tell us why you ran?”
Maria looked absolutely shocked. She tried to answer on two different occasions, but the words seemed to get hung in her throat. She slowly started to shake her head, whether in denial of the news itself or to signify that she had not done it. Rachel watched every movement of her head, every tic or twitch of the tics around her mouth. She wasn’t sure she believed the shock on the woman’s face but from a simple glance, it did appear to be genuine.
“Three nights ago,” she said slowly. “I was with some other protestors late at night. There was this other clinic…the one downtown that’s basically Planned Parenthood. It was just some spray-paint and bricks. We didn’t hurt anyone, though. Not a single person.”
Jack sighed and said, “You ran because you thought we were going to question you about that?”
“Yes, I swear it.”
Rachel wasn’t quite sure if she was telling the whole truth or not. But what she did know, though, that their first victim was being killed three nights ago. “Ms. Oliver, if we give you three specific times, would you be able to prove your whereabouts?”
“It depends on the nights and how late. I tend to go to sleep somewhat early.”
“When you aren’t defacing public buildings, you mean?” Rachel asked.
The comment seemed to have gone mostly unheard by Maria. Jack followed up, keeping things professional in the wake of Rachel’s cynicism. “If we have trouble proving your whereabouts and need your phone to help prove where you were at any given time, would you concede to handing it over?”
“What nights?”
“For instance, how about Tuesday night? Where were you?”
“Tuesday, I was at a friend’s house and I drank far too much wine. I had to take a cab home. I can show you credit card receipts for it if you need me to.”
It was a huge move in Maria’s favor, and it felt like a blow straight to Rachel’s heart.
“Can you provide similar proof of any other night?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” Maria said. “But if it’s any time after eleven or so, it’s going to consist of me at home, sleeping.” Something like clarity seemed to slowly fall over her as she looked directly to Rachel. “I swear, I would never kill anyone. I only protest these things because I want to keep God’s natural design in place. And murder like what you’re talking about…that was never part of God’s natural design.”
Rachel nodded and got to her feet. “Thank you. We’ll send officers in to corroborate your whereabouts on the night of each murder. If your alibis are tight, you’re free to go.”
As Rachel reached the door, Maria Oliver called out in a voice that was shaky and near tears. “I really am sorry I ran,” she said. “I was feeling very guilty about taking part in messing up that building. If I’d known what you were really looking for, I would not have wasted your time.”
Rachel nearly walked out without even acknowledging this comment. But knowing that she was being purposefully rude was only making her even angrier with herself. Yes, she kept telling herself that she would not feel sorry for herself but at the root of it all, that’s basically what was going on. She was throwing a little tantrum because the God that Maria Oliver so firmly believed in had dealt her a shitty hand.
She said nothing, but did manage to give Maria a nod of acknowledgement without coming off as nasty. She stepped out into the hallway, feeling as if she’d just dodged a bullet. Another few moments in there with Maria and she thought she may have ended up saying something that would have been considered “too far.” And the last thing she needed was for to Jack to have one more thing to add to his pile of ammo the next time he asked if there was something going on with her.
Jack stepped out a few seconds later, closing the
door softly and quietly behind him. She was almost certain he was going to ask what was wrong—what was bothering her so badly. Instead, he simply sighed and sagged against the wall.
“Initial thoughts?” he said.
“It’s doubtful it’s her. That, or she’s an Academy Award-level actress.”
“Her willingness to hand her phone over for location services is what did it for me,” Jack said. He had taken out his own phone and was typing something into it. “It certainly wasn’t going all holy-roller preacher and telling me how everyone is a sinner.” He said this as he started scrolling through something on his phone.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Checking local news to see if we can at least verify a clinic that has been defaced recently. Maybe I’ll check Facebook or social media posts with that specific search to find it if the local news reports aren’t’ enough.”
It all registered for Rachel right away, but one particular nugget stuck out. “Social media,” she said.
“What about it?”
“Maybe that’s how the killer was finding the women,” she said, the idea suddenly seeming brighter and brighter by the moment. “Maybe there’s no leak…maybe he’s just really dedicated and knows where to look on social media.”
Jack looked up to her, smiling as the idea of it fully ensnared them both. And then, without a single word spoken between them, they hurried to their workspace in the back of the building, already pulling up Facebook on their phones. They had a potential lead and, as was becoming more and more the case within the bureau, something as simple as social media may very well provide the answer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was a peculiar feeling that Rachel wasn’t sure she would ever get used to, and it had settled over her like a veil in the two hours following their initial interrogation of Maria Oliver. Over the past several years, it had become commonplace for a lot of research work to be conducted on social media. Rachel had personally spent hours on Facebook and Instagram, tracking the movements and chatter of suspected killers and small-town terrorists over the last three years or so. She knew such digging was becoming more and more effective, but it still sometimes felt like she was doing little more than goofing off on social media.
“Okay, so I’ve got two links between Gloria Larsen and Lucinda Masters,” Jack said, sitting on the edge of the tiny desk. “The first is that they both like Trader Joe’s. The second is a mutual friend by the name of Wendy Timmons. Looking at Wendy’s profile and some of her posts, though, I think it might just be a single, common shared friend from a local gym.”
Rachel jotted down the name Wendy Timmons and then went back to her own search. She found that Lucinda Masters had been a member of lots of Facebook groups—like a lot. She was a “fan” of at least twenty pages for various television shows, from a Friends fan group to a True Crime on Netflix group. She followed different chain stores, several celebrities, and local businesses, too.
She fished through them all, getting a rather widespread look into Lucinda’s life. It was both informative and creepy to be peering through the interests of a dead woman in such a digital and impersonal way. It paid off, though. In her search, she found two groups that jumped out to her. One was called Family Focus Fertility and the other was Baby Blues. She scribbled these down as well and then checked the profiles of Gloria Larsen and Hannah Kettleman. She wasn’t expecting much, as she could only imagine how many groups there were out there to help support and encourage women that were having trouble getting pregnant.
Yet it took less than a minute to find a connection. She double-checked just to make sure she was seeing it right and then sat forward at the small desk. “This could be pretty big,” she said, showing her phone to Jack. “All three of our victims were members of a Facebook group called Family Focus Fertility.”
“That could be big,” Jack said. “How many members?”
“Just over three thousand. And that tells me that three women, all in the same city, being a part of it…”
She left the comment unfinished, but Jack picked up. “If someone was targeting local woman looking into fertility treatments, this was basically a roadmap of how to get to them. I mean…is the group a public or private group?”
“Public. And right here, I’m looking at a post from Hannah Kettleman from eight days ago. She’s asking for prayers and encouragement because her first treatment is right around the corner. There are thirty-seven comments. And just randomly clicking through the people that commented, I’ve got one from Texas…one from Hawaii, one from Maine. These people are all spread out.”
“Except our three victims,” Jack said. “But the fact that this thing is a public page…there’s very little chance it will actually turn out to help us at all.”
“That’s true,” Rachel agreed. “But I think it’s a safe bet that this would be a very likely resource for the killer to hunt down these women. We know how he’s finding them, anyway.”
“So do we just go through this group woman by woman to see if there are any other in the immediate area?”
“Within twenty-five miles, at least.”
She said this with some distance, her thoughts starting to stray slightly away from the conversation. She could picture somehow scrolling through Facebook just like she was, locating their next victim with ease through groups like this. The next question then became: why? There could be countless answers to this, but she was leaning more toward something very similar to the sort of diatribe they’d just heard from Maria Oliver. But no…Rachel was quite sure there were no religious motives here. There wasn’t any symbolism, no outright message. It was murder, plain and simple. Sure there were reasons behind it, but she doubted they would be easily explained away by some sort of religious fanaticism.
Rachel found herself trying to slip into the mindset of a criminal profiler. It was a branch of study she’d nearly decided to follow shortly before her training in Quantico. She was decent at it but without the appropriate approach or any strong leads or motivations to consider, she just could not understand the mindset of this killer.
But you know who might…
The thought went through her head as quickly as a lightning strike. And with it came a face she had not considered with any real scrutiny for a few weeks….which was progress, as it had once been a face that had haunted her every single day. It was a stretch and probably a very bad idea but there was also something appealing about the idea that was currently taking shape in her head. There was something dark there, something she was not ready to call out, but she thought there might be something inside that darkness worth looking into.
Yeah, and that same person could probably help you with that, too.
She tried to keep the thought away, as well as the face that came with it. But she saw it, peering at her from across a blood-soaked bedroom. A butchered body on the bed and a leering face on the other side, staring at her through thick bifocals. She’d sensed it then, that darkness, and it had never fully left her. It had sat and festered, waiting to come out and to remind her of what the world was capable of.
Thinking of it as she sat at the desk with Jack, she wondered if that darkness had hibernated within her and evolved into something else—maybe a tumor.
You’re losing your damned mind, she thought.
Rachel started to stand up from the desk before she was even aware that she’d made the decision. “Jack, do you think you’re good here for a few hours?”
“I suppose. Why?”
“I have a hunch…something I’d really rather not take you along on. And something, quite honestly, you’d probably try to talk me out of.”
“Sounds promising. Where are you going?”
“I’d rather not say. Just…give me three hours, would you?”
He eyed her suspiciously and said, “Given the erratic behavior you’ve shown the last few days, please understand that I have to ask this: is it concerning this case?”
“Yes,
” she said. “I want to check on something…”
“Well then, I trust your instincts. I’ll look into this Facebook group, try to find some more locals. I might grab a car and head out to the crime scenes again.”
“Three hours,” she said, already hurrying away from the desk.
“And you’re okay?”
No, not at all, she thought.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m good.”
She turned her back to him and could not stand to look back. She was not only keeping secrets from him, but now she was being deceptive about what she was doing in terms of the case. She supposed she’d have to come clean with him about where she was headed and who she was about to visit before the case came to a close. But she would handle that when the time came. For now, she had to keep convincing herself it was a good idea…and that she would not be intimidated when she got there.
***
Rachel had been a special agent for three years when she’d been tasked with bringing in a man that had killed seven people between New Jersey and Virginia. All seven had been killed over a short period of just two weeks and there had been no apparent links to the victims. They knew the murderer’s name after the fifth victim due to three fingerprints left behind on the scene; the prints had been etched out in the victim’s blood: one on the bedroom door, another on the edge of a kitchen counter, and another on the front doorknob.
He was Alex Lynch, a fifty-three year-old welder with a small trucking company outside of Williamsburg, Virginia. Before he went on his killing spree, he’d never committed a single crime. He was a law-abiding, tax-paying, model American citizen. When Rachel and her partner at the time (and older gentleman that had since been given desk jobs after blowing out a knee on another case) finally caught up to him, he had just taken his seventh victim. The maniac had even applauded Rachel when she found him in the victim’s bedroom. Rachel often looked back to that moment, Alex Lynch clapping for her with the victim’s blood all over his hands.
