The Collie Murders: A Serial Killer Crime Thriller

by Jared Paul

  THE COLLIE

  MURDERS

  A Crime Thriller By

  JARED PAUL

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: THE OBSESSION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART 2: REPERCUSSIONS

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  PART 3: MATCH MADE IN COLLIE

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  PART 4: THE RED WIDOW KILLER

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  EPILOGUE

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  PART 1

  ………………………………..

  THE OBSESSION

  CHAPTER 1

  ………………………………..

  Memories are naggers that wiggle and scratch at the back of the head for attention. They surface when they please and are no respecters of professional decorum. As Dr. Cornelia Lance bent over the industrial wash basin in front of her, breathing in slow and deep to control the nausea swirling in her stomach, she’d never been more aware of the effects of memory. For a moment, she tried to resurrect the professional side of her brain that would admonish her for this display of weakness. Though, all she really wanted was a can of Coke from the vending machine out in the hall.

  The door to the examination room opened and closed.

  “You okay?”

  Cornelia raised her head from the sanctuary of her basin, her features trying to clear of the green color she knew had flushed through the cheeks of her face. The man now leaning against the counter of her sink, filling out his jeans as if they had been custom fitted, stood out in contrast against the severe sterility of the room. His handsome face knotted in concern as he extended a hand with fingers wrapped around a sweating soda can. He must have seen the effects of her nausea through the hatched glass of the door’s window. Ex-brother-in-law Travis Harper, twenty-three and counting, was sin itself dressed in a candy wrapper. She was probably the only woman in town completely immune to his overwhelming charms, however this time she was glad for his special considerations of the opposite sex.

  Cornelia took the soda Travis offered and promptly put it to the base of her neck. She watched as Travis’ brows twitched their relief of her impending vomit’s derailment at her.

  She replied, “I’m fine. You?”

  Travis shrugged his square shoulders as he folded his arms to his chest. “Fine as a person can be given the situation. Not every day that we get calls for children. The momma’s out front hysterical. Blames herself, you know?”

  Cornelia glanced over her shoulder at the occupied examining table behind her. The body of the boy was incredibly still and yet beautiful in its serenity. Children were so very fragiletheir lives so precarious, walking nearer to death every second after birth. The boy had only been six years old.

  “Can’t believe how it happened. Kid musta hit his head when he jumped into the pool. Wasn’t five minutes before Jennie Kinsey found him.”

  “Travis, I know you’re trying to help out, but could you leave?”

  Cornelia didn’t think that the mellow-sweet tones of Travis’ voice belonged in such a hollow place, reverberating off the walls like cheerful music. The sounds rubbed on her already irritated nerves.

  Travis shrugged again. “Sure thing Cory. Just give me the cause of death and I’ll get to getting.”

  Cory closed her eyes imbibing the still-cold can against her skin. “Death by asphyxiation caused by drowning. I’ll list the death as accidental, and I’ll work up the release papers for the body before I leave for home.”

  Travis moved away from the basin, his defined muscles working their magic in his frame accordingly. “Thanks.” He moved off to the door, hesitated briefly and then appeared to reconsider something he‘d thought to say. He opened the door and was gone just as Cory was thanking her luck for small miracles. Even a man like Travis, apparently, could know when to keep his mouth shut.

  Sensing the return of her well-earned professional dissociation, Cory moved to her young patient and began to prepare him for his journey to the funeral home. She fought hard not to think about the mother’s expression as she’d wheeled her son into her parlor or how much that face had once resembled her own.

  Cory felt ragged by the end of her work day, and even more so because she knew that the only thing that awaited her was an empty apartment. At one time, she’d be returning to a smiling husband and an energetic, beautiful little boy, but that life was now a memory that mixed in with all of her other memories and was nearly too painful to tolerate. Happiness and grief didn‘t blend well.

  Cory had just made it to her car, feeling the lack in her life, threatening to drag her underneath the vehicle when Drew Nichols, her intern, caught her by the sleeve of her blouse, her face flushed in the rush to catch up with her.

  Cory let her eyes drift to Drew’s dull brown ones, trying not to go blind from the eager groupie light illuminating the shorter woman’s expression. Drew was an unimpressive specimen of womanhood, sporting a girlish appearance hung on her woman’s frame, and although she was the same age of thirty, she looked years younger. Her lackluster brown hair swayed with the wind blowing through the parking lot, and Cory tried her best to remain patient while Drew caught her breath.

  “Need something Drew?”

  Drew smiled, like a puppy whose master just said their name, and she nodded. “Sheriff Harper called for you about an hour ago. Said he wanted you to call him back and told me that it was important.”

  Cory felt her eyes rolling and wished they hadn’t. Jonathan Harper knew not to call her at work and yet a year and a half into their divorce he’d continued the habit in his predictable stubborn fashion.

  She sighed. The message could have waited, at least until she‘d gotten home and taken off her shoes. “Is that all?”

  Drew seemed to flinch, as if she’d been scolded, but then she straightened and replied, “I was going to offer to work for you tomorrow if you were wanting to call out. I’m sure I could”

  “I don’t appreciate you making assumptions based on your perception of my life, which you know nothing about.”

  Cory felt the prickles of irritation trying to commandeer her vocal cords and she swallowed it back down.

  “I’m sorry I”

  “Don’t apologize, just stay out of my personal life.” Cory interrupted, not in the mood to listen to a stream of backpedaling.

  Drew made a face as if she’d just been slapped and she recovered in the next instant by wiping her face free of expression. The lights went out so fast, her eyes literally darkened. She then turned and walked back toward the medical building as stiff as if someone had performed a drive-by starching.

  Cory shook her head in her intern’s wake, wondering for a moment at Drew’s shift from her normally quiet behavior. The woman kept to herself, did her job with competence, and never seemed to interject her concerns into the home lives of others. It was a mystery, why would Drew choose today to suddenly stick her nose into her life.

  Cory sagged into her car, shut the door and was seconds away
from turning her keys into the ignition when the sudden vibration in her pants coming from her cell phone rattled them right out of her hand onto the floorboard.

  “Now what?”

  Closing her eyes, reaching for the last reserves of her patience, she answered the phone. It was a mistake that she’d forgotten to check the caller I.D.

  “Yes?”

  “Cory?”

  The roll of her eyes this time wasn’t something she minded. “Who the hell else would it be?”

  Jonathan Harper paused a moment while he forced the tone that wanted to filter into his voice back into the cage he kept it in. He focused on his perceived mental image of the woman on the other end of the phone, a woman so radiant to him, that he felt warm whenever he’d looked at her, which had been every chance he‘d had.

  Beautiful, gorgeous those words in his mind couldn’t describe Cornelia Lance. Her features were evenly set on her face, her eyes wide and round lit from within by her green irises. Her smile could lift a soul, her frown could be heartbreaking. Slender curves balanced her woman’s frame, topped off with auburn hair that shone red highlights in the sun. When her attention had been directed at him, he had been the master of the universe.

  “Hello?”

  Jon blinked and the image of his wife vanished. “Yeah, I’m here. Look, I want you to be at the cemetery with me tomorrow. More than that, Cory, you need to be there.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Jon often wondered why he pressed Cory so hard. The grief that had destroyed their marriage was something that had begun its staged process with him, but had failed the recognition test with Cory. She couldn’t absorb the death of their son and every mention of him, especially near the big dates, shut her down.

  He replied, wanting to try despite the early warning signs of failure, “Cory, you’ve never even been to David’s grave. Tomorrow is the”

  “I know what tomorrow is. Tomorrow is the day after today.”

  The anger at her refusal to grieve had driven him nearly crazy without an outlet to vent it while they had been together, and it was obviously something he was still working on since the urge to yell at her over the phone was nearly too overwhelming to bother curbing.

  “Cory, please. This is important. How can you move on, how can,” and he stopped himself. He would have said the “we” word to her again. He had to constantly remind himself that there wasn’t a “we” where Cory was concerned.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Jon. You do whatever it is that you need to do. Go visit the cemetery, set the day aside to remember the most horrible moment in your life if you have to. But leave me out of it. I can’t.”

  Jon had words drifting from his lips before he’d registered the click of the cell phone signaling that Cory had hung up on him. He tossed his cell phone across the desk in his office and pulled open a drawer. He was off duty and inside, a flask filled with Jack Daniel’s couldn’t wait to greet him.

  Cory was surprised that she made it into the parking lot of her apartment complex, and ever further surprised that she managed to find her way up the stairs and inside where she could slump down against her front door and break into a fresh torrent of the tears she’d been shedding since hanging up with Jon.

  He wouldn’t ever understand why her mind fought so hard to keep herself from shattering against the pain of what she’d had and lost. She couldn’t protect her son or shield him against death, and she’d lost the one man she’d ever loved because he didn’t realize that if she grieved for David like he’d done and was still doing, that that would mean her son really was gone.

  David had been the most beautiful child, full of life and laughter and the bright spot in his parent’s lives. Cory hadn’t recognized the first of David’s bouts of illness as symptoms of something else, and it wasn’t until his first hospitalization that she began to worry. Even then, she’d felt as if she could conquer it, as if the cure to David’s sickness was just around the corner and in no time at all he’d be bouncing off the walls in his characteristic fashion.

  When the doctors told her that they’d exhausted their options, that the treatments they’d hoped would work were failing, Cory became numb to everything around her. She couldn’t feel, couldn’t think, couldn’t stop the thundering of the heart in her chest that protested David’s fate and which knew the hope she‘d been holding onto had been obliterated.

  Jon was indomitable. He’d looked at the doctors as if they didn’t know what they were talking about and refused to give up. He had needed to take David to every doctor that existed, and even when he’d heard the same verdict from each of them, he still couldn’t give up. It wasn’t until David took his last breath that Jon had finally been broken.

  After David’s funeral, dressed in black, Cory hadn’t shed a single tear. Her face had been worn, tired looking, but placid. Jon needed comfort, had wanted the warmth of another person to help him fight against the chill pain brings with it, but she’d only been able to sit motionless in a chair until even blinking became difficult. It had been as if nothing again would matter. When Jon finally went to bed, alone, the flood of tears that ensued were like a dam bursting.

  Cory pulled her legs up against her chest and hugged her knees. The bouts of misery induced crying came but rarely these days, but when they hit, there was nothing to do but to ride the waves and wait for exhaustion to claim her.

  CHAPTER 2

  ………………………………..

  Cornelia felt as if she had a hangover, as if during the night she’d been transported back in time and had revisited her wild days in college. The stiffness in her body was readily explained, since upon waking she’d found herself curled up on the tiled area of her doorway, though the pounding in her head remained a mystery. She brewed some coffee, nibbled on some toast and then hauled herself into the shower. By the time she was dressed, the world looked less like a glass of dirty water and more like an inviting vat of chilled iced tea.

  As she passed the house phone in her living room on her way out the door, she noticed that its message light was flashing. Vaguely, she remembered that the phone was what had her rising from the abyss of sleep and what had kicked off the headache she‘d had to endure all morning.

  Cory lifted her hand toward the phone, but stopped halfway. She knew it was another message from Jon, and since she was already feeling a lot better, there wasn’t a need to open up another can of Woe-is-me.

  ********

  “I went over your work regarding the Kinsey case. I guess it wasn’t something you could really make a mistake on, however I felt the need to take a glance myself to make certain. I want the secondary release papers and the death certificate on my desk by tomorrow.”

  Cory was glad that she was facing away from her Chief Medical Examiner. Randall Willis was a small man with an equally small mind whose views on the opposite gender needed a long overdue update. She could feel his beady little eyes staring at her from underneath his glasses and she wanted to slap the smirk of his face that was undoubtedly twisting his lips.

  “Do you understand me, Dr. Lance?”

  Cory put down the pen she was using to sign forms with and stared at the wooden patterns of her desk. She wasn’t surprised that Randall was harassing her; it was common for him to make the rounds at least once a day.

  She replied, “Yes sir, I understand.”

  “Good, and see if you can’t get that intern of yours to do something useful today. She’s a walking disaster looking for a place to happen.”

  Cory heard the door to her office open and then close. She looked up to the ceiling and wondered why she chose to put up with a man like Randall. She could have worked anywhere in the country, let alone a small town like Collie.

  She let her eyes drift from the ceiling to a framed photograph of a handsome man hugging the tiny body of a blond-headed boy. The boy’s green eyes seemed to twinkle at her, and she realized that she wouldn’t leave Collie because it was the place
David was buried and because it would feel like leaving him.

  “Liar,” she said as a lopsided smile crossed her face.

  At least in part, the reason that she couldn’t leave Collie was because of Jon. Shortly after their divorce she quickly discovered that the man didn’t function so well without her. She’d planned to leave, had her bags packed with a job lined up in a bigger city, but the knowledge of what that would do to Jon had her chickening out. She never thought to attempt it again.

  Cory shook her head at the smiling face of her ex-husband and stood to walk out of the room. She wanted to go check on Drew, since Randall’s latest rounds must have rattled her pretty badly. If she was this irritated by their latest battle, then Drew was probably huddled in a corner somewhere crying her eyes out.

  She had just enough time to set one of her toes out into the hall.

  “Dr. Lance! Dr. Lance!”

  Drew came running down the hall toward her, her face a contorted mixture of random flashing emotion before it decided to settle on panic. When she was just a foot away, she skidded to a halt and expounded.