by Gregg Olsen
He was mute as he reached for the knife in his jacket and drove it through her chest. Lily Ann Denton barely gasped as the life drained from her blue eyes. She slumped to the ground and he sliced her flesh like the belly of a fish. Her organs, shiny in the glow from the parking lot lights, spilled onto the dirt.
This is messier than last time.
It bothered him that she’d thought he was going to rape her. He would never do that.
The last thing he did was snap the golden chain from her neck, careful not to let the two special letters fall into the clump of ice plant pooled with her already coagulating blood.
Now he had two such souvenirs. A very good start. Almost done.
Chapter Fifty-six
Dixon
Sometimes when investigators review the evidence in criminal matters they miss the most obvious clues and connections. Sometimes it takes a sharp young woman with a love of Google to find the answer that eludes the most seasoned investigators—even her own mother.
Jenna Kenyon had mourned the deaths of her sorority sisters Tiffany Jacobs and Sheraton Wilkes. She only knew Sheraton for a few hours, but she’d worked with Tiffany during recruitment for a new batch of pledges the season before.
Although Beta Zeta House had been cleared for the girls to return after 7 P.M., none did. Sororities across the Dixon campus opened their doors to the BZ sisters. Ten of the young women were too traumatized even for that kind of accommodation—they went home to their parents. The national office authorized a hotel room for Jenna and she checked herself into a Ramada Inn in downtown Dixon.
She got out her laptop and looked at the BZ message boards. Several sisters had offered “virtual” flowers in Sheraton’s memory. Bonita Rayburn of Tucson, Arizona, posted a message that chilled Jenna to the depths of her bones.
These are hard times for our BZ sisters. So much tragedy. First Lily Ann Denton, Tiffany Jacobs, and now Sheraton Wilkes. My heart goes out to their families.
Jenna stared at the laptop monitor. Lily Ann Denton? She knew Lily Ann. She and Tiffany Jacobs had worked with her for BZ recruitment at Cascade University.
She put “Lily Ann Denton” into the search field and clicked. One article came up.
SD Woman’s Body Identified
The body of a young woman found behind a rest stop near the San Diego County line was identified as Lily Ann Denton, 22, San Diego, the medical examiner announced today.
“I’m classifying this as a homicide,” Dr. Ken Jensen said. “But there are some irregularities that we’ll need to review.”
Dr. Jensen refused to deny or confirm police reports that Denton was murdered as a part of a black market human organs scheme out of Tijuana.
“I’m not going to go there,” he said.
Jenna looked at her phone for the time, and figured her mom would be home and probably getting ready for bed. She pushed speed dial number 1.
It rang and rang. Pick up. Pick up.
Finally, it clicked, and Emily answered. “Hi, honey. You caught me just as I was sliding under the covers. A nice way to end the day,” she said.
“Mom, I’m so glad you’re there. Something weird I wanted to tell you about.”
Emily could detect the concern in her daughter’s voice. Her words were tight, constricted. She’d had that kind of affect since she was a little girl. Jenna was tough, but when she was scared, her feelings could not be masked.
“Are you all right, Jenna? You’ve been on my mind all day.” Emily turned to look at Chris, who’d rolled over on to his side and snuggled next to her. He could feel her shift from romance to worry.
Jenna felt her heart start to race, as the fear welled up inside. She’d been unnerved a moment before, but the sound of her mother’s voice let her fear build. She let herself go, only in the way that a child can do for a mother she knows will always be there for her.
She fought tears. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Only my mom will understand. She didn’t want to cry.
“I’m fine. But, Mom, I was online looking at the message boards and someone mentioned that another girl, Lily Ann Denton, had died. Murdered, mom. Tiffany was murdered. Sheraton was murdered!” Her words came machine-gun rapid, firing across the country, cell-tower to tower.
“Slow down,” Emily said, now sitting up in her bed. “Lily Ann Denton?”
“Yes. I’m reading about her online. Mom, that’s too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
A couple of BZ sisters walked past and Jenna turned. She didn’t want them to see her cry.
Emily was on her feet then, reaching for her robe. She wanted Jenna to get out of Dixon as soon as possible. “I’ll call the Dixon Police and tell them what you’ve told me. Get the first flight out in the morning.”
Emily could feel her hands tremble as she held the cell phone to her ear. “Nationals doesn’t open offices until ten and I can’t get a reservation.”
“You still have your dad’s Visa card? You know the one for ‘emergencies only’?”
Jenna looked over at her purse. “Yes, I think so,” she said.
“Fine. This is an emergency.”
Emily set down her phone and looked over at Chris, under the covers in bed but no longer in either a sleepy or romantic mood.
“What was that all about?” he asked, sitting up.
“I told you about the Jacobs girl. The bones the Idaho police found?”
“Jenna knew her, yes. You told me.”
“There’s another girl, another BZ sister who’s been killed.”
Chris wasn’t really getting it and the puzzled look on his face made it clear he needed more information to connect the dots that Emily was firing at him. “You mean Sheraton Wilkes, right?”
Emily shook her head. “No, Jenna just found out that there’s been another of her sisters killed. This time a girl in San Diego.” She told herself to be calm. Jenna’s fears had become her own.
“Well, it’s got to be nothing more than a tragic coincidence,” Chris said.
Emily shivered. “I hope so. But, Chris, I have a bad feeling about this. You see, Jenna knew two of the three girls.
“Tiffany and Sheraton, right.”
Emily’s eyes suddenly widened in fear. “Sheraton was the only dead girl she didn’t know well. She knew the San Diego girl.”
That night, Jenna Kenyon packed her bags. She wanted to get out of Dixon as soon as first light. She was going to a place she felt safe—home.
The Sorority Killer, as the perpetrator was first dubbed by a Dixon Chronicle desk editor, was immediate fodder for discussion by talk radio hosts and psychologists with a lust for the red light of a TV camera. All agreed that the killer had sought a type of girl—young, pretty, privileged.
“Look,” one of the experts told Nancy Grace on her true-crime talk show, “I have no doubt a serial killer is at work, stalking young women all over the country. If I were a father or mother of a young pretty girl, I’d arm them with pepper spray and tell them to keep an eye out.”
The host batted her eyes and shook her head, asking the guest, a criminal profiler with a dubious curriculum vitae, what exactly they should be looking for.
“White male, very strong, probably in his twenties. I’m sure of it.”
That very thin description, of course, was the problem. The police knew just about as much. That description could fit half the men on college campuses across the country.
Dixon Police Detective Kellie Jasper had the case with the greatest hope for resolution. The Jacobs girl was nothing but bones and the Denton girl found near San Diego had likely been killed somewhere other than the rest stop. But the crime scene at the BZ house was Tupperware fresh. The detective was hopeful there would be some DNA or fibers found at the house.
The big problem was there was so much of it. The FBI combed through the scene of Sheraton’s murder and carted out a mountain of evidence. With more than fifty girls—not to mention all of their friends, family members, and sup
port staff—it was apparent that it would take months to go though the evidence to decide who left what. It was easy to exclude the girls living there, but not every person that came and went and left prints, hair, and fibers.
It’s almost one of those cases that once we know the killer, we can dig into this stuff and build a case against him, she thought.
That, of course, only worked if the perp was known. But as far as anyone could tell, the only connection the women had with each other was the sorority. Lily Ann and Tiffany knew each other from Cascade University. That was well documented. But while Sheraton Wilkes was a BZ girl, she didn’t know either one. At first, it was thought they’d been to the same Pan-Hellenic conference in Washington, D.C., but it turned out that Lily Ann had boyfriend problems and had stayed home.
Was it a coincidence that Jenna Kenyon knew well two of the three dead girls and just happened to be at the scene of the third girl’s murder?
Kellie Jasper didn’t think so. She got Jenna, now home, on the phone in Cherrystone.
“There has to be something here with you and Sheraton. Think. Think.”
“I’ve told you, we just met.”
Kellie pushed harder. She had to, there was nothing else. “But she’s in your sorority. You must have met her. You must have been connected.”
“There are three thousand girls nationwide who have pledged BZ.”
“Think. Please. We need to catch this guy before he kills again.”
Jenna could feel her blood pressure rise. “You think I haven’t thought of this, Detective Jasper? This is all I think about.”
“Fair enough. I’m sorry. But I’m counting on you.”
After the call ended, Jenna found her mother in the kitchen. She was making a chicken dish with olives and diced dried tropical fruits.
“It smells really good in here, Mom.” There was a flatness to Jenna’s voice.
Emily picked up on it and her smile faded when she looked up to see her daughter’s worried expression.
“What is it?”
Jenna let out a long sigh, one she meant to help her relax and lessen the stress of the call.
“The detective from Dixon called again,” she said. “She thinks that I must know something about Lily Ann, Tiffany, and Sheraton. There really isn’t anything to know, Mom. I don’t know what connects the three of them, beyond their pledge to Beta Zeta.”
Emily set down her spoon and put the lid over the chicken sautéing on the gas range. She lowered the heat, bending down to check the level of the blue flame.
“There’s a link,” she said. “Let’s talk some more at dinner.”
Chapter Fifty-seven
Cherrystone
Chris Collier had always been partial to the task of following the money in a criminal case. It was the surest way to catch a killer when insurance, payoffs, and, of course, murder for hire were the suspected motives, even though this time, neither he nor Emily suspected any of those scenarios. He’d done it more than a time or two as detective for the Seattle PD.
His most famous “follow the money” collar was made when he proved that the wife of a Seattle city councilman had hired a hit man to kill her husband. The scheme was as simple as it was dumb. She asked her brother to do the job (“nothing like keeping stupid in the family,” Chris told Emily over coffee the morning the case broke), promising a small down payment and a fat insurance check later. Chris worked the finance angle sorting out the multiple accounts and discovered ten checks of $500 all made out to her brother. She was convicted and given a life sentence for murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Now she was an inmate at Washington Corrections Center for Women in Purdy, where she taught accounting classes to other inmates.
Tricia Wilson’s recent influx of cash as related by Fatima was likely related to the lie she told about her ex-husband.
The question was just how? And, more important, who had given her the dough?
Chris drove his rental PT Cruiser on the highway to Spokane. As he looked out across the orchards and ranch-land and drank his coffee from Java the Hut, he grinned. It wasn’t the wet side of the state; it was green only where irrigation ditches and enormous sprinklers deigned it to be.
He was ready for a change. He hoped Emily was, too.
When he arrived in the parking lot at the bank in Spokane, Chris knew that without a warrant, getting any information at all would rest on who he selected to ask. He was tired from the night of wine and files, so charm would have to be forced. Not always a good mode in which to win over a potential witness.
As he entered the bank, he noticed a circular counter with a young woman named Britannia Scott smiling from the center of her Lucite and brushed-steel domain. She was the bank’s personal greeter. Her wide eyes and warm smile as much as her name-tagged role made her the best shot for the first approach.
The first approach without a badge to back him up.
“Good morning! Welcome to your personal banking center!”
Chris immediately returned her smile. This girl is over-drive-friendly. Good. That’s what I need.
“Hi, Britannia,” he said. “I see you have coffee there. Could sure use a cup. What have you got today?”
“Viennese roast. Let me pour it for you,” she said, walking to the other side of her circle and pumping the cinnamon-scented coffee from a black carafe.
“A real cup,” he said, as she handed over a blue ceramic mug with the bank’s name in silver. “This is better than Starbucks.”
“We try a ton harder than anyone. What can we do for you today? We have new rates on equity loans and free checking specials.”
“I’m actually here for some other kind of help.”
“What’s that?” Her tone was suddenly wary.
Chris slid a photo of Mitch Crawford toward Britannia. She looked at it, and it was clear she recognized the man.
“Are you a police officer? My manager can help you. I’m not authorized to do anything like that.”
“Well, I am a cop. But I’m not here as a cop. I’m here helping another jurisdiction with an investigation.”
“I can’t help you,” she said.
“All I need to know is whether or not this man is a customer of your bank.”
Britannia pushed a button on the console under the counter. For a second, it flashed in Chris Collier’s mind that she was activating a silent alarm and in three minutes he’d be on his stomach with a Spokane police officer’s gun bearing down on him.
Instead, a small woman with dark birdlike eyes, a sharp, pointy nose, and close-cropped hair that made her look like a boy—a bird boy—clacked over from her desk across the room. She looked completely irritated.
“What is it now, Britannia?” The woman was impatient before she even knew the problem. “I told you the helium tank is empty, a replacement is on its way from the Valley branch, and you’ll have to make do.”
Britannia shrank with embarrassment and Collier felt sorry for her. “It isn’t that, Ms. Davis. This man is seeking some information. He’s working on that case from Cherrystone.”
Chris hadn’t said where he was from and he knew that meant Britannia had ID’d the photo.
“Where’s your subpoena?” she asked, virtually spitting out her words.
“I don’t have one. Look, I just want to know if this fellow is a customer of the bank. What would that really hurt?”
“Either open an account or leave,” Ms. Davis said. “We might be the friendliest bank in town, but we follow every rule. And really, would you want to bank with an institution that didn’t?”
She calls this friendly? I’d like to see her when she’s not so congenial.
Ms. Davis spun around, and called over her bony shoulder, “Britannia, review the employee handbook. See the section on information requests. It starts on page thirty-two.”
Chris Collier returned to his car. He’d come so close. He knew that the young woman in the circle knew something. She’d mentioned Cherrystone. She had t
he unmistakable look of recognition on her face when she saw the photo. It was something. Not as much as he hoped. But better than a complete zero. As he started to back out, Britannia Scott’s lacquered nails rapped on the passenger’s window. He struggled to find the window release.
Damn rental car!
“I’m quitting this job Friday, so I don’t care if Ms. Davis fires me today. I’ve been here six months and that’s half a year too long.”
“No kidding. About the photo? You recognized the man, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I think so. I’ve followed the case from the beginning. I’ve seen Mitch Crawford on TV. That’s him in the photo, right?”
Chris pointed at the photo. “Is he a customer here?”
Britannia looked back at the bank’s front doors. “Like I said, I don’t really care if I get fired. But, no, he’s not a customer here. I see everyone who comes in. I’m in the ‘Customer Circle.’ I’d know.”
“Maybe under another name? Banking under a company name?”
She let out a sigh and shook her head in an exaggerated manner that was meant to drive the point of her exasperation to the moon. “That’s all I can tell you. I have fifty balloons to blow up. God, I hate this job.”
He thanked the young woman and she disappeared inside the bank. He could see Ms. Davis descending on the younger woman and giving her the “what for” for going outside to speak to him. Britannia’s eyes met Chris’s as she stood in the circle, being read the riot act by her boss. For a second, Chris caught a slight smile on her face.
Chapter Fifty-eight
Garden Grove
The desire to kill can gestate like an evil spawn. Michael Barton could feel his rage and hate grow, darker and deeper, the summer before the sorority girl killings started.
The summer he found his sister. The summer he lost her.
For those who kill for sport, it was easy to see why prostitutes are such an easy target. They’re always lurking in the shadows, as if just waiting to be killed. “Like shooting fish in a barrel,” a 1960s serial killer once famously said of strangling hookers. Michael Barton could see it. Hookers put themselves at risk every time they hopped into a guy’s car and slid over to complete the transaction that brought the customer relief and the hustler the dough. Unless they have a pimp that keeps them on an electronic monitor—as some of the more tech-savvy had started to do in South Florida—they do what they want, when they want, who they want. There’s no one to worry about them, no one to mourn them when they vanish.
