“Let’s just see if it’s locked,” Hamill said. He tried the knob, twisted, and it turned.
“Alright, stop,” Dana said. “That’s enough.”
She started walking away.
“Listen,” Hamill called softly. “We’ll get the warrant. We’ve got this guy with due process as a potential boyfriend. We’ll get his number, we talk to him, we’re gonna find that he was the one that ran from us anyway. Which will give us more than the probable cause we’ll need to come back. Then they can search the shit out of this place and find anything we already did.” He stared at her, working her the way she knew only he was capable of doing. “We’re standing here right now, D, and he’s out there, hiding from us. What if he’s doing something else?”
He swung open the exterior door, exposing a second storm door. The dog was standing on all fours on the other side of it. It barked, leapt up and pawed at the glass, leaving greasy paw streaks. A lab, a shiny chocolate-brown coat, well-fed. Its tail wagged, despite the aggressive barking.
Hamill slowly pushed in the storm door, urging the dog back. “Hey, big guy,” he said in a soothing voice. “Hey there, fella.” He glanced at Dana, “Look at him, he’s starving. We may have saved a life.”
“Goddammit.” Dana followed him in. It grated on her, the idea of walking in there without a warrant. Anything they found would be inadmissible in court.
The lab hopped up on its hind legs and licked Hamill’s hands as he moved further into the house. Dana muttered another low curse as the storm door suctioned shut behind her.
* * *
The detectives stood in a kitchen. Beyond it was a hallway and Dana saw the bottom of a staircase. She looked around in the gloom. A clock on the stove flashed 12:00, the time not set. The air smelled faintly of something burned on the griddle. The refrigerator hummed and clicked. The dog circled at their feet, excited to see the two trespassing detectives.
“Hello? Detective Dana Gates with the state police. Anyone here?” She projected her voice towards the stairs at the back of the house. Hamill jerked his head to the side. It looked like another room, maybe two, connected to the hallway in the back. He disappeared into the dark. Dana went straight ahead, out of the kitchen, down the hall, the dog at her heels. She reached down absently and gave it a pat. She listened for the telling creak of a floorboard somewhere in the house. Just because it was ten o’clock on a Friday night didn’t mean some students weren’t in bed.
She entered the living room. Beanbag chairs surrounded an enormous TV. Video-game controllers littered the floor, the cords in a rat’s nest. Beer bottles and empty bags of chips. An internet modem and a wireless router gave off amber and green light in the gloom. The curtains were drawn.
It smelled like boys. Sweat, hamburgers, aftershave.
“Hello? State police. Anyone here?”
Hamill called out the same thing. Dana turned into a dining area that had been converted into a messy study, with books and papers spilling from two cafeteria tables pushed together to create a large desk. The tables were old and bowed in the middle. Hamill reappeared, stepping through the opposite doorway. The two detectives looked at the stairs next to the sagging tables, and Dana started for them.
“Easy, partner,” said Hamill from behind her.
“Hey . . . we’re here now.” She added, “I’m a big girl.”
He nodded. “The weight’s gonna come off, though.”
She shook her head at him. “Suck it.”
The dog remained by Hamill’s feet while Dana headed up the stairs. She called out one more time. “Anyone up there? I’m coming up.”
Silence. She paused to listen. Not even the ticking of a clock. Just the dog’s panting, and then a burst of muffled laughter from outside as another gaggle of students moved down the street. Dana carried on.
Upstairs, a cantered hallway fed into an old-fashioned bathroom and three bedrooms, each one messier than the next. She went through them, keeping her flashlight off, using the glow from her phone screen. It would be less noticeable from outside, if anyone was looking. This is stupid. This is insane. She passed the screen over a landscape of papers, books, DVDs, BluRays, sports equipment, and endless piles of clothing. She was looking for photographs, identifying material, but so far this house screamed all-boy rental, and most boys didn’t keep framed pictures of their loved ones around.
When she came to the third room, she slowed herself down. Even if this was a fucked-up way to come into the house, might as well make it worth the risk. The room had the same mess as the others but felt different. It was located at the end of the house, with more windows and greater light.
Dana squatted down by a pile of clothes. She reached into her breast pocket and took out a pen. She dipped it towards an item on the top of the pile.
“You find Jimmy Hoffa?”
The voice made her jump. The dog bounded across the space and leapt onto the bed, where it lay down.
“Christ.” Dana glared up at her partner and waited for her nerves to settle. “You know, nobody uses that joke anymore, Rob. That joke is twenty years old. ‘Jimmy Hoffa.’ Who says that anymore?”
She turned her back on her partner and stuck the pen back into the mound of clothing, lifting off the top item. She held it up in the air for him to see, and then shone her screen at it.
It was hard to make out the garment’s color; dark green, maybe blue. A leather jacket, sporty, fashionable. “A woman’s jacket,” she said. The dog cocked its head.
Dana dropped the coat to the floor and then pushed it open with the pen, flopping the sides back, exposing the lining. A tag was sewn into the material, but had no name on it. College students didn’t write their names in their clothes.
“I’ll bet it’s hers,” she said nonetheless. She continued to probe the jacket with her pen until she found one of the pockets. She pried it open to reveal a wallet inside.
She had no more gloves, so she shook the jacket and got the wallet to slide out. She and Hamill peered down at the college photo ID held in a plastic sleeve. It was the girl who had been found in the Clair River that afternoon.
“There’s Sonia Taylor,” Hamill said.
Dana looked around the room, still squatting. “And this is Perry Brady’s room.”
“Let’s be sure.” The dog put its head across its front legs again and watched them. Dana and Hamill did a more thorough search.
After about five minutes, Hamill said, “Okay, aha. Orgy of evidence.”
He was looking in one of the bureau drawers. Dana came up beside him and looked over his shoulder. Hamill pushed aside some boxer briefs to reveal a stack of photos. The detectives both shone their phones on them.
There was Perry Brady, and there was Sonia Taylor.
Sonia was naked.
“She looks happy.”
“Is that your professional opinion?” Hamill asked.
Dana felt rattled. Dirty. She didn’t like being in here. Not like this.
“I don’t know. Just looks happy. He does, too.”
“Can you see an erection? I didn’t . . .”
“He’s just as naked as she is.”
“Yeah. I get you,” her partner said, giving up the off-color humor.
“You know? I think they’re a couple. At least in her mind.”
Dana retreated from the bureau and stood in the center of the room. She looked out the window. The view was partly obscured by a maple tree. A streetlamp glowed, beyond the filigree of bare branches. “It was cold today,” she said. She remembered turning her collar up, approaching the covered bridge. “Just above freezing. Even for a college kid, it’s not the kind of weather you go outside in just a sweatshirt.”
“Yeah,” Hamill said, still poking around in the dresser with his pen.
“What was she doing down there? We haven’t found any cars. We need to check with DMV and see if anything’s registered to her. Or her parents. But there was nothing near the river. I pulled up next to the ambulanc
e. I was the first on-scene after the rescue team. She was just . . . there. What was she doing in Hazleton?”
“I dunno.”
Dana stared out the window. “Just shows up there. Thirty miles from here. She must’ve had a friend? Maybe the boyfriend’s family is there? There are no Bradys in Hazleton I know of.”
“I live in Lake Placid, my friend.”
“Jesus . . . I know you live in Lake Placid, Robert.”
Hamill lifted his arms and dropped them against his sides. He poked at something with his foot. “What class is this?”
Dana sloughed off the frustration and looked where her partner was kicking softly at a paperback book. Dana picked it up, with her hand wrapped in a plastic bag. She brought the book closer to the window and tipped the cover towards the light.
She read out the title, “Unraveling the Ancient Wisdom.”
“The what?”
She flipped it open, skimmed the first few pages. “Maybe history? Philosophy? World religions? Something.” She chose a random page and read.
“‘The Yuga Cycle doctrine tells us that we are now living in the Kali Yuga; the age of darkness.’” She paused and looked up at Hamill.
“Uh-huh.”
Dana flipped again and read out, “‘The Indian epic the Mahabharata describes the Kali Yuga as the period when the ‘world soul’ is black in hue. Only one quarter of moral virtue remains, and this dwindles to zero by the end of the Kali Yuga.’”
“Which is when? Tuesday?”
She continued to skim as Hamill went on. “So our boy here is a deep thinker, huh? I wouldn’t get that from the photos.” He jerked his thumb at the dresser drawer. “That Alexa chick from the party said he was an airhead.”
Dana read from another passage. “‘Men turn to wickedness. Disease, lethargy, anger, natural calamities, anguish and fear of scarcity dominate. Religious observances fall into disuse. Penance and sacrifices are forgotten. The libido is rampant in the existential vacuum. All creatures degenerate.’”
Hamill was nodding dramatically. “Yes, professor. All creatures degenerate. Isn’t that something. Any fun illustrations in there? People with their guts coming out?”
Dana fanned the pages with her thumb. “No drawings, no photos.”
She froze.
“Oh . . . fuck.” Dana felt that cold winding her insides again. She almost dropped the book. She held it out to Hamill.
“What?”
“We need a warrant. Right now. Wake up a judge. We can’t be here like this.”
Hamill yanked the book from her grip and looked at the inside back cover, contaminating the evidence.
“They’re scratched out,” she said. “Four names there, two of them struck through with a line. Like going down a list.”
“Holly Arbruster, Sonia Taylor . . .” Hamill squinted to read in the dim room. “Maggie Lange, Lori Stender.” His head snapped up. “Stender? That the chick you were talking to on the porch?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, but her name’s not crossed out.”
“Right.”
“Shit,” said Hamill. “What about this other one? Lange? That’s crossed out. That mean we’ve got a third victim? Jesus.”
Dana drew a long, slow breath through her nostrils. She let it out. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know.”
“It links the two dead girls. Something solid.”
“Yeah, it links them. And maybe, okay, maybe it gives us a third. Shit.”
“Well, let’s go. Fuck, let’s roll right now. Find Maggie Lange. We’ll have Perry spill his guts, get a location on her.”
Dana was staring at the ground, at the mess of clothes, at Sonia Taylor’s jacket. She held out an open hand. After a moment, Hamill got the message and handed her back the book. She held it up above her shoulder. “We found this by breaking into this place.”
“We’ll get the warrant.”
“I’ll say I can ID Perry Brady as the runner.”
Hamill gaped at her skeptically. “What if . . . ?” he started.
“What if it turns out to not be him? Yeah, I know. So what we need to do is find him. Just pick him up as the boyfriend, nothing more, get him talking.”
Hamill liked to argue. “Little while ago, you were convinced these were suicides . . .”
“Well,” Dana said, exasperated, “now I’m leaning towards the kid with the book of victims’ names crossed out.”
“That’s why I love you,” said Hamill.
CHAPTER NINE / Desperate Measures
Hamill hopped the curb and drove into the small parking lot. The detectives had forwarded the picture of Perry Brady to the troopers and the local and county police. Now Dana called again, indicating an extreme urgency to finding Perry Brady. He wasn’t home, he was probably the one who the detective had chased, and that chase had led them to a dead girl in the marsh. But they held off on putting out an APB for Maggie Lange — officially, they had no grounds. Questions would be asked before they could cut through the red tape and get a warrant. Despite the tough talk back in Brady’s bedroom, they were opting not to wake a sleeping judge on a lie.
Dana had been mulling over the oddities surrounding the Perry Brady lead. Why take the detectives practically to the spot where a girl’s body lay in the water, if he was involved in her death? The book in Perry’s bedroom, with two of the victims’ names crossed off, and two other names, one a roommate of Sonia Taylor’s, was damning evidence. The jacket and wallet were circumstantial, but two victims were clearly linked by this book. It painted a grim picture. It suggested Brady was a serial killer, working his way through the list. But what was happening with Brady? Was he cracking, growing a conscience? Or, was he toying with them?
The thought of a third victim out there made her feel sick. As they’d slowed for a red light, she’d spotted a local cop car parked in front of a convenience store. “Hey, pull in,” she’d said to Hamill, pointing.
They were on the main drag, populated with car dealerships, fast food restaurants, and endless stores. Almost no one walked the streets in this part of town. Traffic was thin, the night growing deeper.
The cop came out the shop. He was heavyset, carrying an armload of snacks to his car, sipping from a huge plastic cup. They watched him and waited. He passed without noticing. Dana put him at about twenty-five years old. He piled his snacks into the passenger side and rounded the car to get in.
Both detectives banged out of the Corsica and headed over. Dana rapped on the driver’s side window. He jumped, his face and wide neck turning red, and then rolled down his window. Dana pulled out the badge hanging from around her neck.
“Hi,” Dana chirped. “Detective Gates, with the state police BCI. Got a minute?”
The cop blinked up at her, then looked at Hamill, who waved through the windshield. Dana stepped back as the uniformed officer got out and set his drink beside the light bar. He stuck out his hand. “Mayhew,” he said. Dana took the sweaty grip.
Hamill came around and stood next to Dana. “You patrolling for Perry Brady?”
The cop’s gaze flicked back and forth between the detectives. “Oh, that’s you guys, huh? Yeah, we’re looking for him.”
Dana nodded. Hamill tilted his head at the store. “Find him in there?”
“Huh?”
“He’s just kidding,” Dana said. “We stopped for refreshments a little while ago too. Can I ask you a favor?”
Mayhew acted slightly bewildered. “Sure.”
“Let me borrow your MDT for a minute.”
He looked nonplussed, no doubt wondering why two detectives with all the resources of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation needed his mobile data terminal, but he stepped aside. “Sure. There you go.”
Dana offered a quick smile and slipped into the cramped cockpit of the cruiser. She started pecking at the keys on the board beneath the terminal screen.
“Buttons stick a little,” Mayhew said, ducking his head in. Maybe he’d gotten some don
ut frosting jammed in there.
Dana explained, “Ours is down. Need just a quick bit of information.” She sped through the commands, calling up the database and doing a search for Maggie Lange. The clock was rounding towards midnight. Unless they found Brady, they had no grounds for a warrant, no way to legitimately access that book and log it in. They could make something up about Maggie Lange; they could say that someone else mentioned her name, but that was dicey, too. And whoever lied and said they gave the detectives the name could be called up in a trial. She hadn’t wanted to go down this road, everything got more complicated.
She pulled a phone number and an address, but the address wouldn’t work — it was Iowa, probably Lange’s home state. Her records were out of date. Dana scribbled down the number anyway. They could get her current address from the school registrar tomorrow. She stuck her thumbnail in her mouth for a second, biting it. Then she ran the same search for Perry Brady, and found only the address — the house they had just been to. At least it was current.
Dana stepped out of the car. “Perry Brady rents a house near campus. I want you to sit on it all night. Can you do that?”
The cop was young, but not totally green. He must know that there were proper channels for this sort of request.
“Um, yeah, okay. I think I’ll check in with . . .”
“Good, check in, sure. I’ll call your chief myself right now. He’s assured us every cooperation.” Dana fixed the younger cop with a hard stare. “Officer Mayhew, we may have a serial killer in town. Okay? With more victims in mind. Maybe he’s got a taste for it now, like they say, and he’s out there stalking his next girl. Or, maybe he screws up, maybe he goes home first. Yeah?”
Mayhew nodded, sugary soda forgotten, eyes big and round. “Yeah.”
Dana clapped him on the shoulder and the cop jumped a little. “Good man.”
Dana sank into the passenger seat. They backed away from the convenience store, tore around in the tight lot and Hamill gunned it back onto the main road.
“And I thought I was the Joe Hardy,” he said.
“Only when I have to be,” said Dana, already dialing Lange’s number.
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 6
