Next to Die: A gripping serial-killer thriller full of twists

by T. J. Brearton

  Someone living answered in the ER.

  “Hi,” Bobbi said, “looking to see if someone came in yesterday or maybe during the night – Lennox Palmer. I work with him at DSS. Roberta Noelle.”

  “Hang on, Roberta, I’ll check.”

  Connor got Jolyon strapped in, gave him a drawing pad and some markers, shut the door, then started up the truck, rolled down the window. The roar of the V6 was loud; Bobbi drifted away to hear over the noise.

  “Roberta?”

  “Yes?”

  “No. Sorry, no one by that name.”

  “Any John Does? He’s about six foot two, forty-five years old, he’s got his hair back in dreds, he’s kind of skinny, dark complexion…”

  “No, definitely not. I was here all night, no one by that description. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Bobbi slipped the phone in her pocket, feeling a bit nauseous. Where else would Lennox go? She didn’t want to call Rachel back until she knew he was safe and sound. Bobbi knew a little bit about him, knew he was from Syracuse, originally, had moved to the Adirondacks after his father died to get his mother out of the city, bought her a place on the edge of Lake Haven around 2000. She was now in her late seventies, had trouble walking…

  Of course.

  Bobbi didn’t know her number, though. She called Rachel back, Connor staring through the truck windshield as she paced, waiting for Rachel to pick up. “Yeah? You find him?”

  “What about his mom’s?”

  “First person I checked. Last she heard from him was Thursday. Didn’t even know he was sick. Just like Lennox, not to tell his mother. Probably didn’t want to worry her.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I mean, I didn’t want her having another stroke or something, but I asked if he’d been there. When she said he hadn’t, I asked if she knew if he was feeling any better, and she said she didn’t know he’d been sick. I sort of left it there, telling her I was sure it was nothing. But yeah… shit, she’s going to be worried.”

  “Where else would he go?”

  “I don’t know, Bobbi. I don’t know.”

  It started to rain.

  * * *

  Mike pulled up to Lennox Palmer’s house, one of several around Moody Pond. The place was tiny, charming, engulfed by woods. Cattails swayed in the wind along the edge of the rain-chopped water. Mike jogged up to the front porch, met Lena Overton and the responding officer, Mullins. He found Bobbi inside, sitting at a small kitchen table with Rachel Watts.

  “Had a quick look around the place,” Mullins said. “No sign of forced entry.”

  “One of those cars sitting in the driveway is his?” Mike looked mostly at Bobbi and Rachel. They both nodded their heads. “Mine’s the other one,” Rachel said. “The Subaru with the big ding in it.”

  He asked Bobbi, “How did you get here?”

  “My friend dropped me off.”

  “Okay.” Mike turned back to Lena and Mullins to get the full story. Alarmed, Rachel had called 911 to report her missing friend, and they’d polled the call; Mullins had been closest and responded, prepared to take a report, not realizing yet who the man was. “As soon as I saw her,” Mullins said about Rachel, “I remembered her from DSS. Then I called Overton. Like I said, gave the place a thorough look. There’s no food left out, but the bed is unmade.”

  Mike went to the bedroom. Bedding was rumpled and the room smelled faintly of a menthol sports cream, or maybe Vicks VapoRub. A small window, probably not up to snuff with modern fire codes, let in a little light – the trees were close, the forest crowding the house.

  The closet looked full of clothes, an empty suitcase on the ground. He moved into the bathroom, which was tidy, the toilet lid open. On impulse, he peered in.

  “I’ve got a phone,” Mike called. Lena came in and he pointed into the toilet water, where a flip phone and a battery rested at the bottom. “Let’s get crime scene here,” he said. He looked around some more, left the bathroom, then saw a phone cord running along the baseboard and followed it. “He’s got a landline, too?” The cord led around the corner to a phone in the kitchen – he hadn’t seen it when he’d first come in, mounted to the wall beneath the cabinets.

  Bobbi and Rachel were seated at the kitchen table. Bobbi said, “Yeah, Lennox doesn’t use his cell phone much, usually just to make calls if he needs to.”

  Mike picked up the handset from the cradle. The phone was so old it had the pigtail-style cord.

  “Otherwise,” Bobbi went on, “he’s either at work or at home. Sometimes he goes walking, and he takes his cell with him.”

  Mike dialed *69 from the landline. He listened as an automated voice read off the number of the last call received, from just before one o’clock in the afternoon, three days ago. Mike relayed the number to the women at the table. “That’s DSS, isn’t it?”

  “Probably me,” Bobbi said, “calling to check on him.”

  “But you didn’t talk to him.”

  “No. I did earlier, I think – the day before.”

  “He was definitely sick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like what? A cold?”

  “Flu, I think.”

  “Did he say anything? Was he worried about anything?”

  “He was half-asleep when I spoke to him. There didn’t seem to be anything strange going on.”

  “Alright.” Mike faced Lena and Mullins. “Let’s get his description out, get the BOLO going.” He stared at Lena. “Pritchard?”

  “Has his bail hearing tomorrow, 2 p.m.”

  “What about Jamie Rentz?”

  She looked a bit stunned. “We still don’t know.”

  Mike snapped a look at Bobbi, pointed a finger. “Was he who was outside your apartment three nights ago? Have you heard from him?”

  “I don’t know. No, I haven’t.”

  Lena was frowning. “Mike…?”

  “Step outside with me, okay? Mullins, give us a sec, okay? Ladies?”

  * * *

  They huddled on the porch, the rain lashing in. Lena folded her arms in front of her, rolled her shoulders together. “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter is I want to talk to Judge Cheever and get into Lennox Palmer’s old cases.”

  “He works in child support…”

  Mike shook his head. “As soon as I heard from Bobbi Noelle I called over to DSS, spoke with Jaquish. Lennox Palmer used to be a caseworker, same as Harriet and Lavoie. A lot of them start out that way, then move into other positions.”

  “Ah, shit,” Lena said.

  “In the meantime, we need to look at Dodd Caruthers some more. A long, hard look.”

  “But Lennox wasn’t involved in his case that we know of.”

  “He could have been, but for some reason he’s not in the paperwork. Anyway, we know Dodd has ideas about white and black skin; that’s enough probable cause to warrant a little surveillance. So I’m going to stake him out. Tonight, early in the morning, all day long. But I don’t want any word to get around about it. Small town, people will talk – we gotta make him and everyone else think we’ve lost interest. I don’t even want Mullins to know right now.”

  Lena looked off into the rain, muttering, “Mullins’ cousin, Bob, is in the league. Hadn’t even thought of that…”

  “Yeah. The grass tells the bugs and the bugs tell the birds and the birds tell the king.”

  She pitched her head back, eyelids fluttering. “What?”

  “Everybody talks.” He thought about Caruthers some more and said to Lena, “I want this guy. Bad.”

  Twenty-Two

  He picked her up in the middle of the night and the rain was still coming down. A decent mid-summer soaker. Between all the sweat and rain lately, Mike thought he was never dry. He opened the door for Lena as she ran down the walk from her house, then jogged around and got behind the wheel.

  “Are we on a date?” she asked.

  He checked the cl
ock on the onboard computer – just going on 11 p.m. “Kinda late, don’t you think?”

  “Did you bring snacks?”

  “Right there.”

  She pawed through the bag as he pulled away from the curb. “Cheetos? You brought Cheetos to a stakeout? There are no napkins in here.”

  “Check the glove box.”

  She did, no napkins, so she started going through his belongings. “You’ve got an Adele CD? Mike, I didn’t realize…”

  “Hey, get out of there.”

  She ignored him and kept shuffling through the mess of items. “Where’s your Michael Bolton? Actually, you seem like more of a Johnny Cash guy… Okay, here’s your registration; looks good, very nice… and what’s this? Is this Kristen?” Lena held up the picture, which was getting old, a folding crease running through it. It showed Mike with a young woman beside a pale blue jalopy.

  “That’s her first car,” Mike said. “Thing had a cracked piston ring. She loved it though – kept quarts of oil in the car with her, topped it off every day.”

  “She’s beautiful.” Lena studied the picture. “You look happy here. When was this? Had to be seven, eight years ago?”

  “About that. Seven years. That’s the house there, too, in the background. We still have it. Five acres of land, there’s a creek in the back woods. Kristen hated the long bus ride, I mostly drove her to school once I got my schedule worked out.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  Lena lingered a moment longer then put it all back, snapped the glove box closed. Lake Haven wasn’t very big, and they were already coming up to Baker Street, where Dodd lived with his father.

  “So, nothing so far on locating Lennox Palmer,” Mike said. It wasn’t really a question.

  “Nope. Nothing.”

  “And Maybelle Spruce is coming tomorrow to officially identify her sister’s body.”

  “Yeah.”

  The rain drummed the roof of Mike’s Impala. He slowed as he neared Dodd’s home, doused the headlights, drove in the dark a little ways, pulled off behind another car parked on the street. Dodd’s house was four doors down. There was a light on in the living room, and Dodd’s truck parked in the driveway, plus two motorcycles.

  Mike reached beneath the seat and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He looked through the rain and got a better visual on the bikes. “Nice. Couple of Softtails.”

  “Harleys?”

  “Yup.” He passed her the binoculars.

  “Well, then Dodd is definitely our guy,” she said, squinting through the lenses. “Only bad guys drive Harleys.”

  “We’re just about to start week two of the Empire State Rally,” he said. “Motorcycles all over the place. I can hear them from my house, and we’re way back from the main road.”

  “There’s someone in the window,” she said. “Oh, and look at that. Light just went on in the garage.”

  He saw it without needing any magnification.

  “Now they’re having their Nathan Bedford Forrest séance.” Her joke was flat with disgust. Thunder rumbled, but it sounded farther off. The storm was moving on, the rain starting to let up.

  Lena set the binoculars on her lap, drew a long breath through her nose, rubbed her face.

  They waited and watched.

  * * *

  One of the men came out of the house and fired up the bike, shattering the midnight silence. He dialed the throttle to rev the engine; the modified exhaust pipes blatted like popcorn thunder. The man left it gurgling and went back inside.

  “What if Palmer is in there?” Lena asked.

  Mike had been thinking it, and he knew Lena had been thinking it, for over an hour.

  “I’m not sure if I hope he’s in there or I hope he isn’t,” Mike said.

  “Isn’t,” Lena said. She gave Mike a disapproving look, adding, “We could always go ask.”

  “Then we blow it, and whatever might be going on here, they scatter, and we never find him, maybe it screws up everything else, too.”

  She sighed. “But we’re… I don’t know. It’s true Dodd’s got a shaky alibi for the night of Harriet’s murder…”

  “Real shaky.”

  “… and Harriet and Corina Lavoie were both involved in placing his son in foster care, even if Lennox Palmer wasn’t, that we know of. So he’s got motive for them…”

  “Yup.”

  “… He’s local, he knows the area, knows DSS. If we can connect him to the Fullers, maybe that gives us opportunity.”

  Mike was silent, letting her talk.

  “Lennox Palmer was familiar to me from the beginning – the name. It’s a unique name. I want to go back to an old case of mine and have a look at something. Jesus, Mike, this thing…”

  “Regardless of whether Palmer was part of Dodd’s casework back then, he still works at DSS now,” Mike said. “So he’s not just connected by race. There is that overall through-line: these are all social workers, all civil servants.”

  “I hear you, but I don’t know… maybe we’re looking at this whole thing the wrong way…”

  “Here he comes,” Mike said.

  They watched the man mount the bike, knock away the kickstand, and walk the motorcycle down the sloping driveway to the street.

  “We need to follow him,” Mike said, and Lena went for the radio.

  Mike grabbed her hand. “Let’s keep it off the air, remember?”

  She withdrew. “I want to know where he’s going.”

  “Me too. Call Mullins on your cell.”

  “What about his cousin?”

  “Mostly I didn’t want the two caseworkers to know what we’re doing – Bobbi and the other, Rachel. I think we can let Mullins in.”

  Lena was already bringing up his contact info. “Thank God. I thought you were going totally rogue – Mullins is good; we can trust him to keep quiet.”

  Mike dropped the car into gear. “Have him come here, wait here. We’re going to follow.”

  “Alright.”

  Mike rolled out with the headlights off, giving the Caruthers house a look as they cruised by. He glimpsed a couple of shapes in the window and then they were moving on. The Harley guy made a right turn at the end of the street. Lena was giving Mullins instructions on the phone.

  Mike didn’t hurry, got to the stop sign, made the turn. A short street, connecting to another in just fifty yards. No visual on the Harley, but he could hear it – the guy had made another right. Mike popped on the headlights, followed, this time goosing the gas, catching up a little bit.

  The night was wet, everything glistening. The houses in the neighborhood were old, cure-cottage vintage, with big porches, small lawns. The streets were a crazy scramble, and Mike drove with his ears more than his eyes. Finally, they dropped down a steep hill and hit the main road through Lake Haven. He saw the Harley up ahead, passing the fire station, some cheap apartments, a sandwich shop.

  They kept rolling, the bike zipped through a stop light just as it changed from yellow to red. Mike hit the brakes. “Shit.”

  Not a lot of other traffic, but he didn’t want to run the red in case the guy was watching in his mirrors. The Harley slipped along, past the post office, past a restaurant on the river, the guttural gurgle of it amplified as it cut through the canal of storefronts. Mike was ready to bust the intersection – he didn’t want to completely lose visual contact; the guy could end up stopping somewhere in town, or park down by the river in the municipal lot, and they’d lose him.

  But the light changed, Mike hit the gas, they sped down past the post office, the sound of the Harley engine sinking into the night. Cresting the hill, the Haven Hotel was on the left, Main Street veered off to the right; they passed the bank, gift shop, bike shop, a couple of bars, no sign of the Harley.

  Mike felt a pulse from Newberry’s parking lot, thought he saw a couple of people standing around way in the back, on the edge of the dark. The Bark Eater was next, plenty of people out on the deck, drinks in hand, music clanging, the open fr
ont door throwing a sticky yellow light.

  “Gonna circle around,” Mike said. “Think maybe he stopped in for a drink.”

  He turned at the main intersection. The immediate left after it was a one-way, coming the other direction. No one was out on the road, Mike took the turn, sped up the hill going the wrong way, sensed Lena tensing beside him. The back end of the parking lot, though, fed out onto the one-way. Mike looked, no longer saw the people there, and whipped into the lot. He found a parking spot right away near the back and jerked to a halt.

  They stared at a row of about fifteen motorcycles, most, if not all of them, Harleys.

  He got out and walked along near the bikes, acting casual, going slow, pretended to pick at something in his teeth. The bike near the end of the line gave off some nice heat. The engine pinged once. That was their Harley. The guy driving it had definitely gone into the bar – nothing else was open for business.

  Mike returned to the Impala, dropped into the driver’s seat as Lena was getting off the phone. “Mullins is there,” she said. “Says all-quiet. Still one bike in the driveway, plus Dodd’s truck – he said now there’s music coming from inside.”

  “Poor Bill,” Mike said. “How does the guy get any sleep?”

  “It’s a shit world for an old man,” she mused. Then, “Are you kidding? He’s probably partying the hardest.”

  The way the parking lot was L-shaped, they had a view on the back, where a border of trees separated it from the residential street beyond. An alley cut through to the street, another one-way, and the Haven Hotel. Mike keyed the engine and rolled forward a little, tucked them into the corner, against the trees, facing out so they had a good view of the whole lot. The closest street light was far enough away that they were in the dark.

  “We’re not going back?” Lena asked. “This guy is just getting his drink on.”

  He showed her his palm, where he’d written down the license plate number of the Harley. “Let’s see who he is first.” He tilted the MDT monitor to face him a bit better, tapped the plate number into the small keypad.