“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “You didn’t mean anything by it.”
Katie’s face had softened, somehow dimmed. The intelligence Stanton had seen when he first met her had waned, and she looked emptier now. She closed her eyes for a moment, feigning a blink. It took just a little too long, but when she opened them again, the hard exterior of her face and the intelligence in her eyes were back.
“I’d like to talk about your sister,” she said.
Stanton put his feet squarely on the floor and his hands on the arms of the chair—a posture that had been shown to invoke a sense of trust in those one was speaking with. A posture that exposed one fully to the other person and, on some primal level, the other person responded to. “Dental records?”
Katie nodded. “Yes. We were able to match fifteen of the sixteen through dental records. The last girl, Mindy Deuter, we identified by a spinal deformation she’d had since birth. We ran a search through missing persons for young girls that age with that deformity and got a hit on her. It didn’t matter, her mother had died during childbirth, and her father didn’t even care. You shoulda heard him. When I called to tell him we’d found his daughter, he had this disdain in his voice, like ‘How could you interrupt me just to tell me that?’ Really made me sick.”
“It matters.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said it didn’t matter that you identified her. It matters. She matters.”
Katie hesitated. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant only that we put in a lot of work identifying her and there was no one to tell.”
Stanton had seen a shift in many homicide detectives after a few years on the job. The horror of what they had to deal with wasn’t a horror people were meant to deal with. Human brains had not evolved to constantly think about death. Many cultures had developed ways to avoid having to think about death. When people were thrust into long-term scenarios where death was all they had to think about, the stress could manifest in many different forms. Alcoholism and sex addiction were two of the most common. Drugs, violent tempers, and suicide were others. To combat this, many homicide detectives simply turned off the empathic part of themselves. They kept the victim at a distance and treated the murder as a puzzle.
Stanton couldn’t do that. His mind wouldn’t let him. He felt every cut and break the victim felt when he looked at a crime scene and pictured what had happened. His mind had no barriers, and the horror seeped into everything else. Though he knew this made him a better investigator, sometimes there was nothing he wished more than to be able to detach as others could.
“Where did you…” He stopped, the words caught in his throat. He had to swallow and thought about asking for a glass of water but decided it would take too long, allowing him to dwell on the question. “Where exactly did you find the ring?”
“In a locked drawer of a worktable in the basement along with a few other things—gloves and stuff like that. The ring was underneath.”
“Were all the girls from the same school? The one Carter taught at?”
“James Moss High School? No. Three were; the rest were from surrounding cities and counties. It would’ve made more sense for him to choose all the girls from different cities. We don’t know why he chose the three he did.”
Stanton looked down at the cracked end of a sleeve on his leather jacket. “Because he couldn’t stop it. He saw them in class and started fantasizing about them. He became so obsessed with them that that’s all he could think about. His mind wouldn’t let him do anything else. And then one day he realized he had to take them or go crazy, so he took them. But he felt terrible afterward. I wouldn’t be surprised if he tried harder to hide those three. Maybe cut them up or attempt to disintegrate them with lime or acid. Something like that.”
Katie was silent a moment. “We found those three bodies buried in the backyard. They were thrust into barrels filled with water and sulfuric acid. He didn’t get the mixtures right and the teeth and bones remained intact, so we were able to get IDs.”
Stanton exhaled and leaned back in the chair. “I need to see it.”
“See what?”
“I need to go to his house.”
13
Reginald Carter had lived in Rosebud. Katie offered to drive, so Stanton sat in the passenger seat of her red Prius. He kept his eyes aimed out the window at the raindrops that spattered against the glass and then dribbled down to the door. He watched the neighborhoods as they passed. Buildings and businesses, homes and apartments… all of it built after he’d left. But the vegetation was something else: a luscious green, almost emerald. The farther they got from the city, the greener the leaves and bushes became.
“Did you know Reginald?” Katie asked.
“Yeah, my dad went fishing with him a couple of times. There aren’t a lot of people in Rosebud. Everyone knew everyone else.”
“Is your dad still around? I’d like to talk to him.”
“No, he passed away from a coronary. My mother died a couple of years before that.”
“Sorry.”
Stanton looked at her. She drove with her hands in perfect formation on the wheel: two o’clock and ten o’clock. She seemed rigid while she drove, nervous. “Have you notified all the families?”
“Yeah. Me and my partner, Thomas. We split the sixteen down the middle and did it in one afternoon. It’s the part of this job I like the least.” She glanced at him. “I read that you’re Homicide, too. That true?”
“It is.”
“Must be pretty laid back in Hawaii.”
“There’s actually quite a bit of murder, considering how small the islands are. Most are domestic violence related or drug deals gone bad, things like that. But California, for some reason, is a magnet for serial murderers. They usually stop going west once they hit there.”
When the car entered Rosebud, that familiar numbness in his stomach was back. Though the rain had stopped, the sky sucked light into its deep gray, giving the appearance of night falling though it was the middle of the day.
Katie remembered where Reginald Carter’s house was without having to look it up. It was a big place, at least for Rosebud—one Stanton had seen dozens of times in his childhood and never considered for a moment. Now he knew that Reginald had bought the larger home for the privacy a large basement would provide.
Katie opened her door. “You ready?”
Stanton inhaled deeply and let it out through his nose. He opened the door and stepped outside with his eyes never leaving the house.
A uniformed officer stood guard. Stanton glanced at Katie. “We’ve been getting people trying to steal things. Serial-killer groupies. They’ll take stuff and sell it on eBay. Some keep it themselves. The kind of people who marry serial killers in prison, I guess.”
Stanton stood in the small vestibule leading into the home. Plastic now covered some of the furniture, but he could still see a fireplace, a dining table with six chairs, a plant… everything in its place. Normal, except for the living room.
Most of the walls there had been torn open. Stanton guessed the police hadn’t found anything. The upstairs was the portion of the house Carter wanted presentable: his face to the world. The basement would be where he really lived.
Stanton passed through the living room and stopped in the kitchen. He wondered if Elizabeth had been dragged through this place and to the stairs leading down. If she had screamed and fought… Or had she been unconscious and carefully brought in late at night when none of the neighbors were awake?
The thoughts, for a moment, were detached curiosities. And then the pain of the images flooding his mind pierced him, and he had to stop, to turn it off for a moment. He closed his eyes and thought of the beach, of the surf breaking along the shore on a clear morning. Then he opened his eyes and continued through the house.
The stairs leading down to the basement seemed freshly carpeted. Stanton reached down and touched the carpet. It felt rigid, as if it hadn’t been use
d much, with no visible stains. The police hadn’t torn up the stairs yet. He would have to make sure they did that.
After a few steps down, he paused and looked up at Katie. “Did they find photographs or videos?”
“Of the girls? No. Why?”
“Those three you found in the barrels. I think he would’ve kept something more than jewelry or their school IDs. He would’ve wanted something that he could look back on and masturbate to.”
She was silent a second and then said, “No, nothing that we saw.”
“Huh,” Stanton said, turning back toward the stairs. He kept his eyes on the stairs until he was on the bottom step and then looked up. The pain of it stung him like a needle in the chest. Was this really the last place Elizabeth saw alive? It was so… depressing. Hanging lightbulbs that moved slightly with a breeze from an open window that had been painted black, worktables and benches, tools hanging on the walls, metal cupboards, a few hunting trophies—the heads of bucks—mounted and stacked against the wall. A place as dark and dreary as Stanton had ever seen. If this was the last place Elizabeth ever saw, she must’ve been absolutely terrified.
Stanton’s heart sank, and he felt the familiar dizzy sensation that preceded the tunnel vision and, occasionally, the passing out. He sat down on the bottom step, his chin in his hands as he took in every inch of the basement. Every corner, every crack in the cement floor, every nail in the wooden beams.
“Do you wanna see where we found the ring?” Katie asked from behind him.
“No,” he said.
This is my refuge, Stanton thought. This is my refuge and place of wonder. The one place in the world where I’m king. These girls wouldn’t give me a second glance during the day, but here, I am a god to them. They worship me… and I allow them to worship me. I keep them alive as long as I can, as long as they’re able, but I have to see it… I have to see the look in their eyes when they know they’re going to die. That look is what I live for. It’s what this is about.
Stanton rose. “I think he has photos or video of the moment they die. It’s gotta be somewhere here.”
Katie leaned against the wall. “I told you, we’ve torn the basement apart. Didn’t find anything like that.”
“What’s in that room off to the side?”
“Stacks of garbage. We’re still making our way through it all.”
“Some people keep a mess room where they dump everything that doesn’t seem to fit somewhere else. You see it a lot in the homes of drug addicts. Do you have a pair of latex gloves?”
She took a step down. “Jon, I appreciate that you’re a detective, and I’ll help you as much as I can, but I can’t let you go rifling through evidence. Even bringing you, the family member of one of the victims, down to the crime scene could get me in trouble if this ever went to court. Could you imagine what a good defense attorney would do with that?”
Stanton watched her as though she were a curiosity. How could she be so passive about this? This place had been hell to more than a dozen young girls. How could she not want to do everything in her power to figure out why this happened? It was something he never could understand in others. His wife used to beg him to quit police work because of the psychological toll it took on the family, and he couldn’t understand why she was willing to make that sacrifice. Maybe it was better not knowing what was out there, and they didn’t want that ignorance taken from them.
“Defense attorney for who?” Stanton said. “He’s dead, Katie. It doesn’t matter what happens now.”
She hesitated. “Just lemme make sure everything in there’s been photographed before you start going through it.”
14
The CSI unit had finished photographing everything in the house days ago, but just to be sure, Katie had a couple of forensic techs go through the mess room and take video and a handful of photos. When they were done, she got some latex gloves from them and handed them to Stanton, who snapped them on and stood over the pile of junk.
Stacks of envelopes, letters, discarded food containers, and empty cans and bottles took up the entire room. In the center of the room, the largest pile sat like some volcano ready to explode. Stanton got onto his hands and knees and began going through it. Something in this house would lead him to the photos or video he was looking for. He was certain of it. He’d bet anything on it. If he’d learned anything about men like Reginald Carter, it was that a little of something pleasurable wasn’t enough. They had to drag the momentary pleasure out as long as they possibly could. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the girls had been kept alive for weeks down here instead of days, and even then, Carter might’ve kept the corpses a bit longer.
Most of the envelopes were bills and advertisements. A few letters from old friends and family, people from another generation where writing a letter seemed like a practical way to give someone a message. Stanton read them all. One from Carter’s mother described her disappointment in him because he wasn’t married. She had a nice girl in her church congregation who’d be perfect for him. Another, also from his mother, asked why he hadn’t come to his father’s funeral.
“We haven’t catalogued it all,” Katie said, folding her arms, “but we’ve sifted through it. There’s no photos in there.”
“If you’ve searched the house and they weren’t here, they’ve got to be somewhere else.”
“Like a storage unit? We thought of that. Ran his name and didn’t find one.”
Stanton shook his head, though he wasn’t looking at her. “He wouldn’t use his own name.”
The pile seemed to widen as Stanton sorted through it. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead and trickled down, and he wiped them on the back of his arm.
Katie had left for a long time, and when she returned she said, “We should probably go soon.”
Stanton turned to her. “I’d like to stay if that’s possible.”
“No way. I can’t leave you here, and I’ve got to get back. I’ve got other cases…” She paused, probably remembering that she wasn’t just talking to a cop but to someone who had lost a loved one in this house. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to come off like that.”
“No, I understand. Can I just have five more minutes?”
She smiled sadly, as though catering to a child who didn’t understand how the world worked. “Sure.”
Stanton quickened his pace, going through every letter, every scrap of paper. Something was here. Something he needed. He developed a rhythm as he pushed envelopes around and threw advertisements on the other side of the pile away from him.
Nearly at the bottom of the stack, he saw an unopened envelope from a bank. He took it out and held it in his hand for a moment before carefully tearing the top and slipping the letter out. It was a statement for Reginald Carter’s credit card, from almost five years ago. Near the middle of the description of charges was one for four dollars to Alcatraz Storage. Stanton rose. He glanced back at Katie, who was speaking to one of the forensic techs about some training they had attended together.
Stanton folded the slip of paper and placed it in his jacket pocket. He turned around and said, “I’m ready to go.”
The forensic tech, a man with shaggy brown hair, said, “Nothin’, huh? I’m not surprised. The ME said one of the bodies was at least twenty years old. This dude got away with killing people for two decades. He had to know what he was doing.”
Stanton brushed past him wordlessly, and Katie said good-bye and followed him. When they were back outside and walking to the car, Stanton said, “You think there’s any way I could see the autopsy reports?”
“You know I can’t release that. The victims’ families could sue.”
“The families want this done with as soon as possible. If you want, I could call them and explain it. Have them sign a waiver.”
She got into the driver’s seat of the car and unlocked the passenger door for him. “I think it has to end here. I’m sorry. But I know what I’m doing, too. I’ll do everything I can to
find out why your sister’s ring was in that house.”
Stanton turned his eyes toward the road. “Thanks.”
15
Katie gave Stanton her card with her number written on the back before dropping him off at the precinct. She waited until he got into his Jeep and drove away then stepped out of her car and headed inside. She felt bad that this was how he had to find out about his sister’s final moments in some dark, wet basement. And on top of feeling bad for him, she could also sympathize with him. Part of the reason she wanted him gone was that seeing that pain in his eyes, that willingness to do anything and everything to get an explanation about his sister, brought up painful memories of her son.
Her partner, Thomas Garcia, sat in the bull pen, talking with other detectives. The laughter died down when she neared, and she knew they’d been talking about women.
“Where were you?” Thomas asked.
“Reginald Carter’s house. Just tying up some loose ends.”
“Why would you go back there?” he said, taking a sip of coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.
She shrugged. “It’s done now. I don’t need to go back again.”
Katie turned and headed to her office. Before she could even shut the door, Thomas was there. He stepped in and shut the door behind him.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing. Why?”
“Don’t bullshit me,” he said, flopping onto the small leather couch against the wall. “I know when something’s going on.”
She sighed and sat down at her desk, putting her feet up on the footstool she’d received as a Christmas present from her mother. “I took one of the victims’ family members there.”
“Seriously? What for?”
Mania - A Thriller (Jon Stanton Mysteries Book 9) Page 5
