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

by T. J. Brearton

  Drummond stepped back as Mike got out, feeling the stiffness in his back and neck.

  “Anything happen last night?” Mike peeled the lid and gave the coffee a sip, trying to look normal.

  “Nope; nothing going on. I’ve been driving by. She arrived at the house between nine and ten, lights went out before midnight. Hey, I got the bulletin for the missing guy – Lennox Palmer, right? He worked at the same place as your vic, yeah? Social Services in Pierce County?”

  Mike nodded. Drummond marveled, seemed ready to say something else, thought better of it, and shut his lips.

  Mike’s phone vibrated on the seat of the car. He saw Eddie Roth’s number when he leaned in.

  “Hey,” he said to the cop. “Sorry – gotta take this.”

  Drummond dipped his head in a nod and said, “No problem; good luck,” and walked back to his SUV.

  Mike answered. “Eddie? What’ve you got?”

  “Mike. I was told you were an early riser…”

  “Yeah, I’m up. What did you find?”

  “Well, we’re still looking. I heard this was ten months ago, Mike, and there’s been a winter.”

  “Good – snow and ice to preserve any evidence. This guy brought her out there, dead or unconscious. She could’ve been bleeding, leaving a trail, something.”

  “We’re looking, Mike. We’ve been through bogs, marshes, rivers…”

  “Seen any grouse?”

  Roth paused then said with a smile in his voice, “Oh yeah. Spruce grouse; saw some warblers, couple of black-backed woodpeckers.”

  “What about the boardwalk?”

  “Well, no. You gotta have a permit from the Conservancy to do the boardwalk. Spring Pond Bog is all a protected preserve. I mean, I can ask for a list of permit holders, I don’t know if they’ll go for it, but…”

  “Do that,” Mike said. “But you’re right – the body wasn’t within the boundaries, just outside. What else is around there?”

  “Well, not much. It’s several miles back to Tupper. There’s a few homes, a cemetery over on Haymeadow Road; that’s about it. Anyone coming in with a… I mean, you think this guy was carrying the victim, right? My guess is he pulls off on Kildare Road, you know, pretty rough in the spring, but by fall the frost heaves are all smoothed out – so that’s where we’ve been looking. Beer cans, soda cans, some snack wrappers… all that’s being given to your people. As far as broken branches, signs of a trail, I mean, you got deer runs in there, you got a lot of wildlife activity, Mike. I can’t tell you I found any blood.”

  “I hear you,” Mike said. “Thanks, Eddie. Keep me posted.”

  He rang off, crossed the road toward Bobbi’s apartment, turned instead and walked to the church. Went in the main entrance, slipped into the bathroom near the sacristy, took a leak, and splashed some water on his face. He lingered a moment at the back of the church, gazed over the empty pews, the different Biblical moments depicted in the big, stained-glass windows.

  Back outside, the rising sun was burning off the residual rainwater. The first motorcycles sounded somewhere on the road behind him, the one connecting Lake Haven and Placid. Second and final week of the Empire State Rally. Afterwards, the bikers would be going back to their lives, picking up a hammer, putting on a tie, maybe counting up coins for whatever little drug run they’d had going on.

  * * *

  Bobbi looked out to check the weather and saw Mike Nelson coming down the sidewalk from the church, coffee cup in hand. He crossed the street and out of sight.

  She stepped over Rachel, who’d managed to work her way off the mattress and onto the floor, like a little kid. No sense in waking her just yet. Rachel had been distraught, unable to settle down, unwilling to go home and be alone, terrified for Lennox. And for herself.

  Bobbi quickly finished dressing, descended to the first floor, and stepped out into the sunshine. Mike saw her coming and got out of the car. He was disheveled, his hair sticking up in the back, circles under his eyes.

  “Hey,” he said.

  They stood together off the street and she decided not to bring up that it clearly looked like he’d slept in his car, but she asked him if everything was okay.

  “Yeah, everything’s…” He seemed to chase around for the right words. “Came by to talk to you. How are you holding up?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “Rachel slept over. We spent all day yesterday looking for Lennox. Went to his mother’s house, checked all the hospitals in 100 miles, everyone he knew. No one has… No one knows anything.”

  Mike made a vigorous nod. “We’re looking. And that’s part of what I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about Lennox. You got time for a quick bite?”

  She hadn’t eaten anything besides ibuprofen yesterday. “Let me just grab my phone and wallet, leave a note for Rachel.”

  * * *

  They ordered breakfast from a downtown café, took their egg sandwiches to the municipal beach, unoccupied this early but for a teenage boy fishing off the dock. They sat at a bench beyond the sand, Mike not saying anything, so she opened the conversation. “I heard about a body that was found in the woods, Mike. The rumors are, a woman who used to work with DSS. Here, Pierce County.”

  Mike squinted in the sun shining off the lake. “I wish I could say something comforting. What I can say is that we have several leads on this thing, and one of them is about to break wide open any minute.” Then he said, “I’m just not sure which one.”

  “With respect, Mike, it’s not your job to comfort me. I’m not your daughter.”

  He gave her another look, seemed to weigh her words, and said, “No, you’re not. But I know this has been tough, and I wish I had been able to give you more definitive answers. What could help, though, is if you could clear something up for me.”

  “If I can I absolutely will.”

  “We’re going to pull Lennox’s old files, have a look at everything, same thing we went through with Harriet Fogarty. We were able to take a warrant and get into Harriet’s stuff because of what happened. With Lennox it’s a bit trickier getting into his files because there’s no evidence of a crime.”

  “You need me to say something? Talk to the DA with you?”

  “What would help me is if you can answer a question, point blank if you can. How good is the record-keeping at DSS?”

  She felt some relief, worried he was going to ask her a more pointed question about her ongoing cases, or say something about Jamie. “Well, that’s a good question. But I’m new. So I can only tell you what I’ve seen over six months. And I mean it’s supposed to have been improved, but we still write most everything down first, plug it into the system later. That hasn’t changed.”

  She looked from Mike to the water. “I’m sure Jessica would disagree, but from what I’ve seen, the record-keeping is not perfect. We lose files, lose kids, lose details. The case managers have dozens and dozens of cases, and we forget to document things. We just do, sometimes.”

  “You’re human.”

  “We’re overworked and underpaid, and the kids just keep coming.”

  “Lot of turnover?”

  “Oh, the turnover in this field is phenomenal. Each child, you know, they’ll often have several case managers during their experience in dependency. If you were to see a typical case file, it would be inches thick, with seven different handwriting samples, missing pages, documents hanging out the sides. Well, I guess you have seen them.”

  “I have.”

  “There’s this one girl – she was Harriet’s case – ten months old when she got placed in foster care, and four years old when she was adopted by the same foster parents. But during that time she had eight different case managers, four different child advocacy attorneys, and three different judges. Dozens of support workers that took her to visits, handled her staffings. Luckily, only one foster home. Have you been able to see the foster care placements on these cases? What does that take? Subpoena?”

  “Yeah. We di
d. We got the list of CPS adoption actions.”

  “So then you know, even if law enforcement can find a certain file and get access to it, it’s still not easy to figure out where the child was on any given day.”

  “It feels like it requires divine intervention.”

  She laughed a little. “True story: My parents had a baby for a weekend, placed by Lutheran Services on a Friday evening. This is back… I was nine or ten, I think. So the baby gets placed on a Friday evening, and on Monday morning the placement department from Lutheran Services calls my parents to ask them the name of the baby they had that weekend. They didn’t know its name.”

  “Oh, man.”

  Bobbi nodded then shook her head. “So, you know, everyone – and I mean everyone I’ve encountered – their hearts are in the right places, they’ve gotten into it for the right reasons, but it can be a total mess.” She tilted her head toward her sandwich and took a bite.

  Mike said, “So it’s possible a caseworker like Lennox – back when he was a caseworker, more than ten years ago – he could have been involved in something like a placement of a child into foster care, but not show up on the paperwork.”

  She swallowed and said, “I think, unfortunately, yes, it’s completely possible.”

  Mike seemed to think about it, took a bite of his sandwich, and cleaned his mouth with a napkin. “What do you know about Lennox?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what kind of… What’s he into? Who does he hang out with? Who are his friends? He ever go bowling?”

  “Lennox? No. Definitely not a bowler. He’s a homebody.”

  “You ever go out with him, though – after work, anything like that? Who does he socialize with?”

  She shook her head. “No. Never. I mean, he’s friendly with Yari Fennel, I think. And he hangs out with Trevor a little bit, that’s about it.”

  “Trevor – that’s your IT guy. Trevor Garris?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mike seemed to know what she was thinking. “We’re going to find Lennox,” he said. “There are state troopers out right now, going door to door, an organized search; we’re keeping watch on all the hospitals, hotels, jails. His cell phone looks like it’s totally ruined but we’re pulling anything off it that we can.”

  “Someone took him,” Bobbi said.

  “Someone might have.”

  “God,” she said. “I hope they don’t hurt him.”

  * * *

  Al Green was playing on the clock radio. The thing had just come on, like it was set to a certain time. Clay didn’t like it; that kind of music hurt his head, that crooning, romantic bullshit. And why the hell would anyone want to listen to something reminding them that they had no one and weren’t willing to do anything about it?

  “Who listens to this shit?” Clay asked.

  Lennox didn’t have an answer. He couldn’t have; he had the duct tape over his mouth.

  “The Doors,” Clay said to Lennox. “That’s the kind of music; it means something. Not this old horny lovesick shit. Or radio pop – ugh – this new stuff. You know what I mean? All that shit – and they don’t even sing in their real voices; they use auto-tune. Everything is supposed to be a party. Oooh-oooh! You listen and picture some movie with animated characters all singing along, talking about shaking their ass, and, uh…”

  He lost his train of thought. What was he saying? Then he focused on Lennox. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Lennox’s eyes were bulging; it sounded like he was gagging, really struggling for breath. There was snot coming out of his nose. Clay heard him trying to suck the air through his nostrils, but his nasal passages sounded clogged or something. Figured. It just fucking figured.

  Disgusting.

  First, he needed to kill that fucking music. He located the source – some old piece of equipment from Radio Shack sitting beside the bed. Classic. He bent and tried to make sense of the buttons, breathing hard in his mask.

  Snooze. That was the big button. Hit that and it just comes on again in a few minutes. Where the Christ was the off button? He grabbed the cord and yanked on it. But the cord didn’t just pop from the wall – he chased it along and found it snaked behind the bed, wrapped around the bed frame, so the tension kept the plug in the socket. He put a knee on the mattress, reached back, got closer to the plug, jerked it free, and the music stopped, mercifully, at last, cutting Al Green off in mid-sentence about being a helpless loser.

  He hefted the clock radio, examining it, thinking it was vintage like his cassette player in the car. Might be a nice souvenir when this whole thing was over with.

  But he got stuck again, like he was on pause, looking at the clock radio.

  Then he remembered…

  The cool rush of air. The bad smell, the sense that his brain was cooking from the inside…

  He threw the whole thing against the wall where it smashed and left a dent and a black smear. Fuck it. The home owner should have known better than to have left a stupid alarm clock on, tuned to oldies radio, or whatever it was.

  He moved back to where Lennox was tied up.

  “Oh, shit.”

  Lennox was bucking and thrashing in the chair, his eyes rolled back white, snot really streaming from his nose, eyes running. Clay leaned in and ripped the tape off the guy’s mouth just as he toppled over in the chair and his head hit the floor.

  Ouch.

  Clay lowered down to his knees, put his head to the guy’s face. Listened to the ragged, wheezing breaths. Lennox’s eyelids fluttered. He wasn’t quite passed out. Good – the whole thing would be pointless if Lennox died now. There’d be nothing for Bobbi to see, and her death wouldn’t be nearly as poignant.

  Grunting and cursing under his breath, Clay righted the chair, Lennox with it. Not much to him – he was pretty skinny, pretty pathetic. Probably a faggot. Typical.

  Eyes opened all the way, Lennox started to look at him in a different way, like his senses were returning, and then he spoke. Slurred, really, through his snot and tears and bloody lips. “Stop, man – please. You don’t have to do this.”

  Yeah, pure terror in his eyes. Good. Clay brought out the new rifle, laid it across his knees as he squatted down. Now Lennox knew what was up. “Yeah,” Clay said, “I do.”

  Twenty-Four

  Driving back from the morgue again. Another body on the table. Another tearful relative, not understanding who or why or what.

  Mike had shown Maybelle Spruce pictures of Jamie Rentz, pictures of Dodd Caruthers – but nothing. Just a broken woman who had now officially lost her last family member.

  He headed for Lake Haven, driving with the window cracked, feeling the anger creep in. The kind of anger he’d felt after Molly died. The kind that courted rage, insanity, and no turning back.

  He took a call from Lena.

  “Mike, got a woman from Lake Haven who says she saw Harriet’s Kia the night she was killed.”

  “She’s just telling us now?”

  “Name is Marcia Carroll. She lives up on McIntyre; it’s off River Street.”

  “Yeah, I know it. What did she see?”

  “She left town the next morning, was gone for that weekend and this past one, came back and heard all about it.”

  “Where did she go, to a cave?”

  “Camping. Turned off her digital life. Anyway, she was driving past at about 8 p.m. on the twelfth. Saw the car, last car in the lot. Thought she saw someone behind the wheel, it looked like they were waving.”

  “Jesus. She drove by right when it was happening.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “So what does that do? That just… We already got time of death. Did she say anything else? See another car? What about when she went up onto River Street? To turn on McIntyre, she goes right by the old house…”

  “Right. Exactly. I asked her that. She said she saw a car, that’s it.”

  “White?”

  “Nope, said dark blue. Said it looked like
a cop car. Like an unmarked cop car.”

  “Chevy Caprice, maybe an Oldsmobile Cutlass?”

  “Yup. Or a Buick LeSabre, something like that. From her description, I’d say late-nineties model; she said she thinks there was rust.”

  “And how close was it to the vacant house?”

  “She’s not sure, exactly. There’s that spot right in there, kind of a dirt area, no curb, she thinks it was there. I’m checking if anyone in that neighborhood owns a vehicle like that. Between that and calling these guys from the league, I’m pretty tied up here. What are you doing?”

  “You find out who posted Fuller’s bail?”

  “Yes. John Chapman. From the other night.”

  “No shit. Well, guess what we know about Chapman? He’s a chemist. Worked for North Country Labs, ’91 to 2004.”

  “I saw the email from Stephanie.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Mike said. “These guys are working on something; I’m ready to call in the DEA. Fuller, Chapman, Caruthers – Fuller’s already got the meth charge from your bust back when, Chapman’s a freaking chemist, and Caruthers has got the biker-gang-white-nationalist thing going; a perfect group of couriers or heavies or whatever.”

  Lena was glib. “It’s a party.”

  “Anyone on the league so far say they couldn’t account for Caruthers?”

  “Bob Hurley says Dodd actually disappeared for a little while. Had his alternate play a few frames for him.”

  “Fuck. There you have it. Who’s the alternate?”

  “Harland Pelky. You okay? You sound keyed up…”

  “I’m fine. You talked to Pelky?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “by phone. Either he didn’t know what Dodd was doing or he wouldn’t say.”

  “Any of these guys, these league guys, drive an old Caprice or a Cutlass or something? I mean, we’re close.”

  “I’m going to start checking.”

  Mike felt a twist of fear cut through the anger and ambition. “You’re just making calls, you mean…”

  “Are you worried about me?”