Watching Their Steps

by Alana Terry

  Jordan cleared his throat and pulled his eyes away from me. “I would guess he watches the entire family, but he seems to fixate on the wife. Holly’s mother reported feeling like she was being followed frequently in public. She left the veterinary clinic one Saturday and found a note on the door describing how nice she smelled.”

  The killer had an odd fixation with the way people smelled and how their skin felt, and it seemed to carry over from people into the things they wore and touched. My stomach turned at the memory of him smelling my hair.

  “It looks like he stalks the families for four to six months before making his move, which is why we have so many witness sketches of him. He didn’t exactly blend in, but he didn’t stick around either. My dad looked into him, but if he was staying somewhere in town, he couldn’t find him. He moved completely under the radar.’’

  I stiffened when he said families. Had it been a slip of the tongue or did he mean to imply the killer had done this more than once?

  “He’s done this before,” Marx said, giving voice to my question.

  “He’s done this since,” Jordan corrected. “In all my digging, I couldn’t find any homicides before the Cross family that completely match up. A few similarities. But after . . .” He trailed off for a moment. “We’ll talk about that in a minute. Let me call Angie, the art teacher who did the original sketches for us, and see if she can smooth this into a single image for us. Then we’ll run it and see what we come up with.” He carefully slid it into a folder, trying not to disturb the placement of the pieces, and closed it.

  I was relieved not to have the creepy Frankenstein monster face staring back at me from the table anymore. He took it out of the room with him to one of the desks and made a call.

  Marx watched me as I started collecting the scraps of paper off the floor and table and balling them up in my hands. “How are you doin’ with all this?”

  I paused at his question. My insides felt like they were twisted into an ever-tightening knot. “I’m fine.”

  He gave me an incredulous look.

  I was at a loss to understand what I was supposed to feel or do. I was completely off balance with Jordan, this place, this new information, and my feelings were in a constant state of flux. “I’m fine,” I insisted. I walked over to the trash can and tossed the ball of paper scraps away.

  “Holly, you stormed out of the buildin’ not twenty minutes ago when Jordan told you about your mother.” I tried not to think too hard about what had been done to my mother; I may not remember her, but no one deserved to die like that. “So don’t give me ‘I’m fine.’”

  I gave a slow shrug, trying for indifference. “Bad things happen to people all the time.”

  “And if we were talkin’ about some random person off the street, you wouldn’t be afraid to admit that it was sad or scary. But we’re talkin’ about your family. And that closed-off expression on your face is the one you wear when you’re tryin’ to hide from what you feel.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “If we’re discussing how things make us feel, I bet you a chocolate bar that you won’t tell me what that phone call was about or how it made you feel.”

  He grimaced. “What kind of chocolate bar do you want?”

  Figures.

  Jordan opened the door to come back in and paused at the palpable tension in the room. “Am I interrupting something?”

  Marx sighed, “No, I think we’re done for now. Let’s get started.”

  I plopped down in my chair. I gripped the lukewarm mug of hot chocolate with both hands as I tried to mentally prepare myself for the uncomfortable conversation we were about to continue.

  Jordan cleared his throat and sat down at the head of the table behind his pile of folders. “I’ll try to keep this brief since we’re all tired. I’ve reached out and, unofficially, compiled a list of homicides that resemble the Cross family murders.”

  He slid another folder across the table to Marx, and I waited expectantly for mine. He gently slid a copy toward me, but he didn’t appear happy about it.

  I sucked in a sharp breath of shock as I looked at the list. “There are . . .”—I recounted just to be sure—”sixteen families on this list.” Not including mine.

  “And they’re all over the country,” Marx pointed out grimly. “How sure are you about this list?”

  “Very. I’ve been putting the pieces together for seven years now.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell somebody?”

  Jordan gave him a flat look. “You honestly think I didn’t? I’m a twenty-eight-year-old sheriff from a town no one has ever heard of, suggesting there’s a serial killer working his way across the countryside. On top of that, when they find out I was friends with the victims, they just assume I’m blindly jumping to conclusions because I’m desperate for answers. Would you have believed it before you met Holly?”

  Marx took a moment to consider that. “If I hadn’t met Holly and seen the killer’s handiwork myself, or if I hadn’t spoken to him on the phone, then no, I probably wouldn’t. You don’t have enough experience or education to convince me you discovered a serial killer.”

  Wow, he didn’t sugarcoat that at all.

  Jordan glared at him from across the table. “Then you see my point. And for your information, Detective, I did connect the dots and assemble this list on my own.”

  “My concern isn’t about how many names you pulled together on this list, but how many of them are accurate. Have you spoken to any of the detectives who worked these cases?”

  “A few. Not all of them were willing to speak to me. Either because they were too busy working on other cases or because they weren’t interested in sharing information.”

  “How many is a few?”

  Jordan looked as if he’d bitten into a particularly sour lemon. “Seven.”

  Marx tapped his fingertips on the open file in front of him. “So you’ve verified information for less than half of the homicides you’ve compiled on this list.”

  “I read the reports and reviewed the available evidence summaries. I don’t need a detective to help me interpret that information.”

  “Did you at least confer with the medical examiners who worked the cases?”

  “For some of the cases, yes. In others I had to consult our local coroner to get his opinion on the evidence and the state of the bodies. He was able to confirm that the manner of death for these victims is too similar to that of the Cross family to be ignored.”

  “Did you get access to witness statements?” Marx pressed.

  “Some. Enough to make the connection.”

  “Enough in your mind, you mean. It seems to me the reason no one has bothered to follow up on your theories is because you have too many holes that need filled. There’s no way what you have would stand up in a court of law.”

  “This isn’t New York City, Detective. I don’t have the world at my fingertips; information is a bit harder to come by, and I worked hard for every piece of it.”

  “You’re not a profiler, Jordan. You’re a small-town sheriff. You can’t even tell me with 100 percent certainty that all of these cases are connected because you don’t have all the facts.”

  “You’re here as a courtesy, Detective. I don’t need your help with this case,” Jordan shot back.

  “Seriously?” I asked, drawing their attention. They both seemed to have forgotten I was sitting there while they debated who was the better law enforcement agent. “You two bicker worse than teenage girls. When you’re done pulling each other’s hair, can we move on?”

  Marx’s mouth quivered as he tried to contain a smile. Apparently, he found me amusing, and I glared at him. “Okay fine,” he said, keeping his voice civil. “What makes these victims targets of the same killer? How are they connected?” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, waiting to be impressed.

  “Victimology: all the victims were heterosexual married couples in their late twenties to early thirties. All Caucasian. The male vi
ctims were all physically fit, successful, driven. The female victims were physically fit and attractive. The only variable was the children. Only six of the couples on the list had children, and given how little time the killer spent with them, his interest was not in the kids.”

  “Okay, how were the bodies found?” Marx asked.

  “From what I could gather, all the male victims were found tied to a chair, beaten, with their throats cut,” Jordan explained with a careful glance my way. “Each of the female victims was found in the same room as her husband. Unbound.”

  “That’s because he’s big enough to physically restrain the women,” Marx commented absently as he flipped through the file. “He’s six four and around two hundred twenty pounds. He knows he can control her while he hurts her. He also carries a knife, which is probably incentive enough not to resist. What about the children?”

  “It looks like he brings the children in last and just . . .”—Jordan hesitated and I saw pain in his eyes—”disposes of them in front of the father.”

  I cringed as I thought of Gin.

  “And the pattern?” Marx continued.

  “He stalks the victims and torments them in small ways leading up to the murders. Most of the families reported dead pets, belongings inside and outside of the house being slightly out of place as if someone had gone through them, the feeling of being followed and watched. He studied them, learning their schedules.”

  The killer had followed me for months, and he’d gone through all my belongings. He had, thankfully, left my cat alive. My cat . . . Jordan, with . . . the blue eyes.

  I glanced at the man at the head of the table with renewed interest. I wondered if a part of my mind had remembered him, and that was why my blue-eyed furry companion was named Jordan. That was a little weird.

  “So he stalks the family for months, memorizes their home inside and out while they’re away, and then lets himself in one night,” Marx summarized.

  “Yeah,” Jordan agreed. “In the six cases involving children, it looks like he used ketamine to pacify them, but the husband and wife were completely coherent.”

  I sat up straighter in my chair. “I wasn’t drugged that night.”

  “Neither was Gin,” Jordan confirmed.

  That didn’t make sense. I glanced at Marx, and he looked thoughtful. “My guess would be you were the first child to ever get out of bed and wander off, and he had no intention of lettin’ that happen again.”

  Jordan said the killer had known our schedules; he would’ve expected me to be asleep, but I had gotten out of bed for a drink of water in the middle of the night and ruined his plans.

  “He takes something from each of the victims. With the children it’s usually a piece of jewelry or a toy, some small item that reminds him of them. Gin had a bracelet with her name on it that Holly gave her. She wore it every day. It was missing from her body.”

  A mental image of her bracelet sharpened in my mind and brought a fragment of memory with it:

  I clipped the silver bracelet around her wrist and straightened it. I had worked really hard to scratch her name into it so she would feel special too.

  Gin lifted her wrist and gazed at the bracelet with wonder-filled eyes. She gasped, “It says Gin, Holly. It says my name!”

  The expression of pure joy on her face made me smile. “Yes, it does.”

  She snatched my arm off my lap and looked at my bracelet, comparing it with hers. Mine was professionally engraved and had been a gift from Jordan, but I hadn’t been able to do the same for her. The too-big, misshapen letters didn’t seem to bother her, though.

  “Now we both have one!” she declared. She threw her arms around me and squeezed me in a hug. “I love you, Holly. You’re my best sister!”

  I was her only sister, but I was pretty sure she’d meant friend. I hugged her back gently. “I love you too, Gin-Gin.”

  Jordan was still speaking when my mind snapped out of the memory and back to the present. “With the husband . . . well . . . I’m not sure on that one. Nothing of his ever appears to be missing, but I just assume it’s being overlooked somehow.”

  “He takes his wife and children,” Marx said grimly, and I noticed that he was toying absently with the wedding ring on his finger. “What more can you take from a man? That’s all the trophy the killer needs. What does he take from the wife?”

  “The attack on the wife is . . . obviously intimate in his mind. She’s the only one he tortures with the knife, and he always takes a lock of her hair.”

  I stopped breathing.

  “Holly,’’ Marx said, and I must have looked as terrified as I felt when I looked at him, because he asked, “What’s the matter?’’

  I hadn’t told him about my hair. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I gathered up my long waves in one shaking hand above my head, and the tuft of hair the killer had severed hung chin length on the right side of my face. He intended to kill me in the same gruesome way he’d killed my mother.

  Marx’s expression darkened, and he didn’t say anything for a long moment. “You didn’t tell me he took some of your hair.”

  “I didn’t . . . realize it mattered so much.” I let my hair fall loose down my back and wrapped my arms around myself.

  The muscles in Marx’s jaw flexed, and I knew he was angry.

  Jordan turned a shade paler. “I just assumed he would try to do what he originally intended, like with Gin, but . . .”

  “She’s not a little girl anymore. She’s a woman, and he’s made it perfectly clear he’s attracted to her,” Marx explained, and he sounded as if he were on the verge of snapping.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I offered, hoping it might cool his temper. I didn’t want him to be angry with me for withholding that information.

  He sighed. “I’m not angry with you, Holly. I’m angry at this man’s sick mind, that he thinks just because he’s attracted to a woman, it’s okay to do somethin’ like that to her. I’m angry that he’s even fantasizin’ about doin’ it to you.”

  I tightened my arms around my stomach and pulled my feet up onto the edge of the chair. I wished I could go home where I felt safe, but then I remembered that safety was just an illusion.

  Chapter 35

  I HUDDLED AGAINST THE wall in the narrow second-floor hallway of the bed-and-breakfast as an elderly woman showed Marx his room.

  I wasn’t sure how much more there was to discuss about the ongoing murder investigation, but after I showed the two men my hair, we had collectively decided to take a break for the night.

  Jordan had accompanied us to the bed-and-breakfast, but he didn’t intend to stay; he didn’t live too far down the road. Marx, on the other hand, was hovering like a papa bear. I glanced at him, and he arched an eyebrow at me as if to say, “What did you expect after that revelation?”

  The innkeeper pushed open the door to my room next and stepped aside. “There you go, dear,” she said in a voice that had grown brittle with age. “Everything you need should be in there, but I’m in that room just down the hall if you need me. You’re welcome to help yourselves to anything in the ice box. It’s well stocked.” She smiled sweetly and dismissed herself.

  I had a feeling I should know her . . .

  “There’s a deputy standin’ guard on the front porch and one around back, and I’ll be in the next room,” Marx explained.

  I nodded as I stretched my shirt sleeves over my hands and twisted them anxiously. I stared into the dark, unfamiliar room, and for once I was actually afraid to be alone. Despite the obviously cozy air of the old building, I felt very far from comfortable.

  My nerves must have been transparent, because Marx suggested, “Why don’t we go down to the kitchen and see just how stocked the refrigerator is.”

  I wasn’t hungry, but it would be better than trying to sleep. “Okay.”

  He smiled reassuringly and walked ahead of me. I followed slowly behind and studied my environment. It was an old house in a farmer’s style w
ith lots of rooms, windows, and plain but efficient features.

  I ran my hand down the smooth wooden rail as I silently counted the steps I descended. I peered through the vertical window by the front door at the bottom of the steps to see the deputy Marx had mentioned would be on the porch.

  “Either you’re easily distracted or your legs are shorter than I thought, because you’re awfully far behind,” Marx commented as he appeared in a narrow hallway.

  “Well, considering you thought I was five feet tall and I’m actually five two, it’s probably that I have the wandering attention of a squirrel.”

  A loud noise nearly made me jump, and Marx’s hand flashed to his gun before either of us realized it was just an old pendulum clock chiming the hour. And by chime I mean deep baritone dongs that reverberated through the floorboards.

  It was ten o’clock, and I stared at the clock as it continued to shatter the quiet. Six dongs, seven . . . “Can we shoot it?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” he said with a grimace. We were both on edge enough without strange loud noises making us twitchy. He turned around and walked toward the kitchen, and I followed.

  I could hear quiet voices coming from the kitchen, and I hesitated. “How many people are staying here?”

  “Six, accordin’ to the innkeeper, and while two of them are men, neither of them match our killer’s description. They’re just people visitin’ family.”

  Six strangers in one house. That was unnerving, and I was barricading my door tonight. We walked into the kitchen to find the innkeeper exchanging a few last words with Jordan as she was on her way out. I hadn’t even realized Jordan was still here. Conflicting emotions flickered through his eyes when he saw us.

  “Hey,” he greeted with a small, guarded smile. I stopped, unsure if he was going to try to hug me or trespass into my personal space again, but he remained glued to the counter.

  I gave him a polite but awkward finger wave from across the kitchen. “Hey.”

  “I figured you would be settling in to bed by now. The two of you had a long trip.” Between the frequent breaks and the nights we spent in hotels, it had taken us nearly four days to get here. It was nice not to be moving anymore.