by Dan Ames
“As you know, we were sharing a room and that officer looked through all of Charlotte’s stuff the other day.” She paused, waiting for an acknowledgement. I knew she was referring to Donovan and titled my head a bit in confirmation.
She continued, “But I forgot, we’re all basically the same size. I mean I’m a little bigger in the… bust, but Charlotte didn’t mind if I wore her stuff, even if I did stretch it out a little…”
I could see this was going somewhere, but it was also taking way too long for my patience. “And…” I prompted. “You found something?”
Her composure broke for a moment and she blinked rapidly. “That night, after we got back to the hotel, I was cold, so I grabbed a hoodie.”
“And this note was in the pocket?”
She looked surprised at my question. “Huh. No. But I think it must have been on it or near it or something and then when I grabbed the hoodie, it fell onto the space between the bed and wall or maybe it had been there. I found it while I was packing up her stuff.” Her breathing stuttered, and she held her breath for a second before letting it out slowly. “Her parents called, they’re on their way, and I didn’t want them to have to do that.”
It took a moment to process that Donovan had gone to the hotel, supposedly gone through the victim’s things and not bothered to check between the bed and wall. Probably not under the bed either.
I pushed my annoyance aside in order to deal with the questions at hand. “So, you think she came back to the hotel then? While you were still out? Or do you think this is from some other time?” The note seemed to contain a list of directions on how to get to a boat launch just north of Good Isle.
“That night,” Tiffany responded. “The reason I found the note is that I was looking for her swimsuit. It wasn’t anywhere. She must have come back to the room to change and lost track of the note.”
I acknowledged that Charlotte had been wearing a bathing suit underneath her dress instead of underwear. The news seemed to unsettle her a bit. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if she had a chill.
“Is this Charlotte’s handwriting?” I asked, smoothing out the plastic bag so the words on the note inside were more visible.
The script was rather unusual. The f, g, and d all had a strange flat looping quality to them, and the dot for the ‘i’s was a little slash rather than just a dot.
The writing also looked kind of cramped, and there were some ink smudges. I’d seen smudges like that before, in left-handed writers. Since their hand passed over the text they’d just written as they moved onto the next word, their hand could sometimes smudge the drying ink.
“No, that’s the thing,” Tiffany said. She dug into her purse and pulled out a full hotel pad, with some stuff scribbled on it. “This is Charlotte’s handwriting. I’ve seen it for years.”
Charlotte’s handwriting was slanted, and round, and her ‘i’s were dotted the usual way. There were no ink smudges either.
“You see?” Tiffany said. Her eyes were shining and hard, like diamonds. “That’s the guy’s handwriting. The guy she met at the bar. The guy she went off with.”
I stared down at the note in my hand.
The handwriting of a killer.
Chapter Fifteen
“Let’s do something different tonight,” Dawkins suggested when he stopped by my house that night. “Play tourist instead.”
With the girl’s murder heavy on my mind, I wasn’t sure if playing tourist was a horrible idea or a genius one. Maybe putting myself in that mindset would help me think of something that I hadn’t considered before. Or maybe it would just help me relax. Either way, it beat sitting in my house stewing on how little progress we had made on the case.
We headed downtown. It was nice, walking side by side as the sun set. Our fingers brushed as we walked, but we didn’t outright hold hands. Contrary to popular belief, not all women like to hold hands. Oh sure, when the time was right I would. But generally, I liked my space.
We stopped at an ice cream shop, one street over from the main street. This part of downtown had a blend of the hipster, cutesy, tourist-appeal shops with actual stores people who lived in town liked to visit. The general store, which was next door, combined both. Its big windows were decorated with red, white, and blue swag and the front half of the building pushed “made in Michigan” jellies, knitted scarves, and soaps. But in the back was an honest-to-God supermarket with everything from toilet paper to steak.
The ice cream shop tipped more to the tourist cutesy side with its name, The Scoop, and its decor of newspaper stories and selection of T-shirts with sayings such as I Got Licked in Michigan.
The ice cream, though, was simple, creamy, and just how ice cream was supposed to taste, like the homemade stuff my grandmother made in the hand-cranked mixer every 4th of July when I was growing up.
“You sure you don’t have anything better to do?” I asked, while we were standing in line.
My question wasn’t sarcastic. He was retired and spent most of his time fishing or renovating, but I didn’t want him to feel like he was obligated to spend time with me. In a way, he was my only friend in Good Isle. I was friendly with plenty of people but the only other person who’d been anything close to a friend was Maddie, and well…
It sometimes worried me that I was misreading this whole thing with Dawkins and that he was spending time with me just because he knew I was kind of lonely.
He shook his head. “When are you gonna accept that maybe I just like spending time with you?”
“Hmmm, I don’t know, I think you also like finding someone who’ll pay for your ice cream,” I replied, passing a bill over the counter to the teenage girl who was running the register.
“Hey now, I’ll have you know I like you for more than just your money,” Dawkins replied.
We exited the ice cream shop and Dawkins made to head right. I paused. “Um, this way?” I asked, gesturing in the direction of my house.
Dawkins shook his head, smiling at me. “We’re going this way.”
“But this isn’t the way to my house.”
Dawkins kept smiling. “We’re not going to your house, we’re going to Cirillo’s.”
“The Italian place?” I frowned. Cirillo’s had been around for ages. It wasn’t fancy, no cloth tablecloths or crystal glasses, but the food was great. It was also the go-to place for everyone in town, which meant it was usually pretty damn busy at night.
“I might have gotten us a table,” Dawkins said. “I know the guy who owns it. He’s a grandkid of the original people. We’re poker buddies, so I just let him know I had someone who had yet to spend a proper evening at the best restaurant in town and he was more than happy to help us out.”
“That’s… really nice.” Ice cream had felt safe. Friendly. But dinner at Cirillo’s felt real. Like a date date.
“We did just get ice cream, though,” I pointed out.
“You’re the one always saying that we should have dessert first,” Dawkins replied and started walking.
“Okay, fair point.” I laughed and followed his lead.
This time, as we walked, when our hands brushed I tangled our fingers together, squeezing slightly.
Dawkins squeezed back.
Chapter Sixteen
It was two in the morning when my cell phone began to buzz on the night table next to my bed.
“Rockne,” I said, answering the phone with my eyes still closed. Being police chief meant never getting to turn off my phone.
“We’ve got another one,” Donovan said. His voice was crisp for two a.m., but strained.
“Shit,” I said. “Another one? Another girl?”
“Yeah. A fisherman found her. The rope tied around her is the same, but there’s a cinder block still attached. Maybe that’s different, maybe it was heavier than what the guy used the first time, but she was still floating up enough that this fisherman’s line caught her. He dragged her to the surface thinking she was a huge fish or someth
ing.”
I swung my feet over the side of the bed. “Okay. Where are you?”
“Good Isle docks.”
“I’ll be there in ten.”
After a quick splash of cold water in my face, I did a quick toothbrushing and climbed into my clothes. They weren’t clean, but they would do.
With wallet, keys, badge, and gun accounted for, I made a beeline for the marina.
A second body. And under similar circumstances. Odds were definitely that this was our same killer at work. And if this was a recent kill… the guy was either local or hanging out here for a while.
A serial killer?
Labels weren’t important.
Catching this son of a bitch was.
Chapter Seventeen
The scene was already crowded.
“Back up, everyone,” I said. “Establish a perimeter. Peyton, Lewis, can you get on that?”
Peyton nodded. Danny Lewis, the most junior officer in the department, followed her.
I approached Donovan, who was standing beside the body. Off to the side I could see a fisherman, I think a part of Jake Lolly’s fishing crew.
Donovan shook his head at me as I approached. “Same as the first one.” He held both hands, revealing he was wearing plastic gloves.
I walked over and stared down at the body. She was wearing a dress like the first girl, but this one was more casual. Some kind of cotton. The type of dress women wore to lunch with other women or to visit a tea shop. Not slinky like the first girl. But this girl was also bound with a rope that pulled her arms behind her back and wound around her torso, just like the first victim. This time, though, the rope around her ankles still had the weight attached to it: a cinder block.
Cinder blocks were pretty easy to come by, so that probably wouldn’t help us much. The killer could have grabbed a cinder block from a parking lot. If it had been something a little more specific, an anchor or something, it might have helped us narrow down our profile.
“I’m no medical examiner,” Donovan said quietly, “but I’m going to guess that she drowned, same as the last. And if you look here…”
He pushed the girl’s dark hair out of the way, revealing the back of her shoulder. There was a puncture mark from a needle, same as the first victim.
“Roll her over,” I said.
Donovan rolled her over. It wasn’t someone I recognized. But then, I was still getting to know everyone in Good Isle. There was no flicker of recognition in Donovan’s eyes either. “Do you know her?” I asked, just to be thorough.
He shook his head. “She doesn’t look familiar.”
The water had given the girl an awful pallor, but I could tell that she’d been pretty. She had a sweet face, heart-shaped, like the first one. Her eyes were open and glassy, and the irises had gone milky. Long, dark hair framed her face—
My thoughts halted like a train with the emergency brake blown.
This poor girl hadn’t just been murdered in the same manner as the first girl or just dumped in the same way.
She also looked almost exactly like her.
Our killer had a type.
Chapter Eighteen
I gathered everyone in the station bullpen as soon as we’d finished with the crime scene.
“All right,” I said, addressing the room at large. There weren’t many of us. Just a handful of people compared to the station I’d had command over in Grosse Pointe, and even that group hadn’t been large by any means.
We were ill-equipped to deal with a killer like this. We needed manpower. But we didn’t have that, so we had to do the next best thing: play smart.
“I know that Counselor Gordon isn’t going to like me saying this,” I said. “So, this is going to stay just between us for now. You all are the only ones hearing this, so if word gets out to the papers or I hear about it on the Good Isle gossip grapevine tomorrow morning, I’ll know it was one of you who leaked it.”
There were a few nods around the room. I continued, “We have what could potentially be a serial killer on our hands. And this means, all hands on deck. No time off. No slacking. Everyone has to give 100 percent 100 percent of the time.”
There were some murmurs and some shocked faces, but nobody seemed to be complaining, not even Donovan. I think the need to catch this guy quickly was something we could all agree on, at least.
“I know we’ve only got two murders and commonly the police like you to wait and declare a serial when there’s three or more, but I don’t feel like waiting for a third body to pull out the stops, and I’m betting none of you do either.”
Grim faces and nods acknowledged my statement.
“Now, we’ve figured out that this killer likes a certain type. Female, mid-twenties. Small, brunette, brown eyes, and a young, innocent face. Both of the girls so far also had heart-shaped faces.”
I held up a picture of our first victim from when she was alive, and handed it to Donovan so he could pass it on for the others to look at. “That may be too specific, but it’s something to be aware of. I’m sure you all know the details but just to recap: we believe both girls were drugged, injected probably once they are on the boat, then he sexually assaulted them, then he dumps them into the lake still alive and leaves them to drown.”
One of the younger officers raised a hand. “Do you think he waits? Watches them?”
“Yes. It would make sense that at the very least he waits for them to sink, so he knows he’s in the clear. Plus, he enjoys watching them die.”
The room was silent.
“This means, though, that if he does kill again, it isn’t a quick dump and run. He’s spending some time out on the water, possibly raping them again before tossing them over and then waiting, at least as long as it takes the body to disappear. Maybe longer.”
They were connecting the dots that any boat sitting out on the lake could now be suspect.
“So, someone comfortable in the water, someone with access to a boat, probably one he owns or can borrow easily. Also the knots that he’s used to secure the weights to the bodies are sailing knots, and good ones at that.”
Another hand went up. “Are we sure it’s just one guy? Could it be two.”
“My gut says one guy. The ME hasn’t turned up any semen. And even if we found only one set of DNA on the bodies, there could still be someone else involved, driving the boat, or whatever. But we know that the first girl was last seen with a man who we still haven’t located. Right now, our best guess is he’s our killer and probably working alone.”
More nods. Maybe too many. I reminded them again though that we weren’t ruling anything out. “You see anything remotely out of place on the lake, you check it out.”
Grunts of agreement greeted me.
Moving on, I held up the handwriting sample and the composite sketch. “I have here a sketch made based on the eyewitnesses who saw this man talking to our first victim, Charlotte Richards, before she disappeared. As far as we know, he was the last person to see her alive. I also have a sample of a man’s handwriting, giving Charlotte instructions to meet him at a boat launch north of town. We think it is from that night as well and from him. I’ve made copies of both and paired them together. Don’t show the note unless you have someone who might recognize the writing. We don’t want the guy finding out we have the note and that we know what launch he used for his first victim. He may be moving to different launches, but he may not, and that area is a good place to start with the search. From there we will hit every bar and every restaurant on this damn lake. Go door to door if you have to. Somebody knows who this guy is, and I want to know too. Understood?”
There were nods across the bullpen. I looked over at Donovan. “Donovan’s your point of contact on this. He’ll assign areas, including a rotation to keep an eye on the launch that we know the guy’s used before. Report anything you find to him.”
Everyone murmured assent, and then moved as one in Donovan’s direction.
Donovan looked at me. It w
as obvious that he was surprised that I’d chosen him to be in charge. He was a pain in my ass, but honestly, he was also the best choice for the role. He missed things when out investigating by himself, but he was good at the big picture. Organized in a way a lot of beat cops weren’t. And my personal feelings for the guy weren’t going to get in the way of catching this killer.
Peyton came over. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said.
“Try me,” I said.
“We’ve already got an ID on the latest victim.”
Chapter Nineteen
The second victim was Emily Harper, twenty-three years old, born and raised in Ohio. She’d told her parents she was doing a road trip with a couple of friends before starting her master’s program in the fall.
Apparently, in a stroke of luck or fate, Emily was supposed to call her parents that evening. When she hadn’t called, they had called her. Her phone had gone straight to voicemail.
Seeing this as very unlike their responsible, studious daughter, they called none other than Good Isle police station. They’d left a description and the hotel she was staying at with one of our officers, but he hadn’t thought much about it. He’d figured the girl wasn’t as studious as the parents thought or that she had gone camping or something and forgotten to check in. She was an adult. That was allowed.
But the parents had called back this morning. This time the officer had asked them to send him a picture of Emily via email, and then passed it on to Peyton.
I could see the guilt on Peyton’s face. “She had missed one phone call to her parents,” she said. “He didn’t really think much of it. She could have been shopping and forgotten to call or gone hiking out of cell phone range.
Peyton was right. Under normal circumstances one twenty-something woman missing a call to her probably overprotective parents was not something the police needed to drop everything for to investigate. Sadly though, we were no longer in normal circumstances.
