by Blake Pierce
So that eliminates the field of thought that the killer is only targeting couples, Kate thought. It’ll be interesting to see what we find out about the ex-husband.
She took a closer look at the victim. Based on the trail of blood that led upstairs, there had apparently been some kind of a struggle or a chase. While it seemed odd at first glance that Monica Knight would have chosen to try running upstairs to escape, Kate had seen similar scenarios multiple times over the course of her career. Sometimes the victim had a gun upstairs and chose to try to get to it in order to defend themselves. Other times, the killer blocked the doorway and the victim chose to run upstairs to lock themselves in a bedroom or bathroom—which, in the grand scheme of things—was a pretty good method. In the age of cell phones, it worked more times than not.
Looking over the body, Kate counted at least seven stab wounds in the stomach but it was hard to tell. They were all so close to one another that the area started to look like nothing more than a mess of flesh, cloth from her shirt, and blood. The closeness of the wounds spoke of quick movements, the killer working like a machine. But the one along the throat was not as exact or neat as the others. There was tearing in the flesh as well as slicing. That cut had been done with extreme force, likely out of a deranged anger that was apparently not behind the stab wounds they had seen out of him so far.
As Kate looked Monica Knight’s body over, DeMarco’s phone rang. She answered it and spoke in a quick and efficient manner. Kate was impressed. DeMarco was able to cut straight to the point without coming off like a bitch or as if she did not care at all about the person on the other end of the line. Kate knew full well just how difficult that was to do.
“Hey, you got something?” DeMarco said as she answered the phone. Her eyes wandered as she listened to the person on the other end. “And someone actually spoke with him? Yeah? Okay…and would he be okay if I called as well? Great. Thanks.”
She hung up without a goodbye and looked at Kate. “That was Palmetto,” DeMarco said. “Someone on the police force got in touch with Knight’s ex-husband. He’s alive and well in Nashville, Tennessee. When he was told that his wife had been killed, he was quiet but didn’t seem to care too much. But he managed to answer some questions satisfactorily.”
“We should still maybe reach out to him when the dust has settled. I don’t think it would be necessary to bring him here, but still…”
“Unless there’s reason to believe he did it. And if he lives in Nashville and is there right now, that basically rules him out. Monica Knight hasn’t been dead for much more than eight hours.”
Downstairs, someone knocked on the door. “Agents? We good to come in?”
DeMarco nodded at Kate. “Forensics. I sent them packing for a little while when I knew for sure you were on the way.”
Kate smiled. DeMarco had been by herself on the case for less than a day but was already running things as if it had been solely hers from the start. She was able to adapt and had the ability to make people respect her from the get-go; again, Kate knew how difficult this could be for a young, attractive woman as she had lived through it herself.
“Yeah, I think we’re good here,” Kate said to the man at the door below them. She took one final look back at the body, taking a mental picture.
She and DeMarco walked down the stairs as two more members of the forensics team walked into the house. They all passed one another with polite waves as Kate and DeMarco stepped out onto the porch.
“Who discovered the body?” Kate asked.
“Her boyfriend. They’ve been dating for about a year. His story checked out right away. He was on a plane, touching down in Raleigh, North Carolina, right around the time it’s believed she was killed. I already had the flight logs checked and it’s all legit.”
“Did he name anyone who might have had a beef with her?”
“Well, she was a lawyer. So really, there’s no shortage of people that might have something against her. But he was at a loss. Couldn’t come up with anyone who might have wanted her dead.”
“Who is Palmetto going to speak with today?” Kate asked.
“Two of her most recent clients. One was wrongly accused of abuse, or so the story goes. Seems it might be worth at least looking into and besides, Palmetto says he knows the defendant pretty well.”
“We know where her parents live?”
“In Charlottesville, which is about an hour and a half away from here. I have them on the list of people to speak with. You think it’s worth a visit?”
“I do. It goes back to the blanket. Something about including those scraps—shoving it down their throats—it seems personal in a weird way. I think if we get any leads at all on this, it’s going to be from people who knew the victims intimately. More than just a boyfriend of one year or a cheating ex-husband.”
And yet again, something she’d said to the assembled team in DC for the child abduction case repeated in her head: Maybe it was right there in front of you the entire time but it looked so mundane and ordinary that you looked past it.
“Yeah, that sounds legit,” DeMarco said. “I know you just got off of the road and—”
Again, she was interrupted by her phone. She looked at it and said: “Palmetto again.” She answered it with her same authoritative yet somehow warm tone. “Something else?”
Kate listened to one side of the conversation for about twenty seconds before DeMarco hung up. “Got something?” Kate asked.
“No. But it turns out we won’t have to go to Charlottesville. Her parents are coming to Roanoke to stay with Monica’s best friend while they plan for the funeral. They’re asking to speak to whoever is in charge of her daughter’s murder investigation right away.”
“I suppose that would be us,” Kate said. She looked back to the home of Monica Knight. There was a skeptical look on her face, as if she thought the house might be keeping a secret from them.
I’m missing something, Kate thought, growing more and more frustrated. But what?
Maybe speaking to Knight’s parents would push her closer to discovering what it was. Or maybe, just maybe, they were dealing with a killer just crafty enough to leave no trace. Of course, she knew that even the type of mindset that set a killer toward a super-obsessive and neat crime scene could be a clue in and of itself.
Maybe that’s where I need to look, Kate thought. Maybe…
“Agent Wise?” DeMarco asked. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Just trailing off with my thoughts,” she said. She headed for the car, knowing the house would not give up any secrets it might have. Instead, she was going to have to dig them up herself…and that just happened to be something she was very good at.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
While the parents of Monica Knight gathered their bearings and took care of all of the necessities once they arrived in Roanoke, Kate sat in the conference room she and DeMarco had been given at the Roanoke Police Department. She read through every available file and form the PD had on the Langleys and the Nashes while roughly a dozen pages were being printed out concerning Monica Knight.
She was thinking of the Frank Costello case—of the YMCA in particular. And that got her to thinking about this unidentified partner that could very well be at work, leaving little inconspicuous clues behind in the form of empty nut wrappers and spilled snacks. What was her spilled snack here? What was right in front of her but going unseen?
DeMarco entered the room with the Knight files and handed Kate a copy. They looked through the files together, bouncing findings and ideas off of one another.
“Her college transcripts show that she had originally gone to school to study psychology,” DeMarco said. “Namely early child development. Seems sort of creepy when you think of the blanket we’re been finding traces of in the victims’ throats.”
“That does seem ominous,” Kate said. “But what do you make of the two different requests to have fingerprints taken voluntarily, all within the last five years?”
DeMarco flipped through her pages until she came to this information. “That does seem strange. One of the requests is linked to an additional information request that she also sent to the Department of Social Services.”
Kate hung on to that bit of information, sensing that there was something else there, something that could maybe tie it all together. But there was one thing missing—something she could not yet place.
Something in the Langley file…something similar…
She started to reach for the Langley file when there was a knock at the door. One of the deputies poked his head in, a frown on his face. “The parents of Monica Knight are here. Should I send them in?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “Give us two minutes, please.”
The deputy nodded and the moment he was gone, Kate quickly thumbed through the Langley file. It didn’t take her too long to find what she was looking for.
“There’s a fingerprint request here for the Langleys, too,” she said. She tapped at a carbon copy of the fingerprints of Scott and Bethany Langley. “Right here. They had to be fingerprinted when they were going through the process to be approved as foster parents.”
“Maybe that’s why Monica Knight needed to get fingerprinted?” DeMarco suggested. “It would certainly align with the ties to an information request to DSS.”
Kate pondered this for a moment as she gathered up the files in front of her. The last thing she wanted was for a set of grieving parents to come in and see the life of their dead daughter crudely summed up in a series of pages. DeMarco followed suit and stuffed all of the paperwork into her laptop bag.
“Have you had to actively speak with grieving parents before?” Kate asked.
“A few times,” she said. “You never really get used to it, though. I mean, when I was working Violent Crimes, there were other agents that did that sort of thing. Agents with a knack for grief psychology. Makes me wonder how doctors manage to do it all the time.”
There was another knock at the door. This time when it opened, the same sad-looking deputy led an older couple into the room—Monica Knight’s parents. Kate thought the mother might normally look rather young for her age but the act of furiously crying over the unexpected death of a child had taken its toll on her. She looked around the room wildly, as if untrusting of everything.
As for the father, he was a tall gentleman who looked like he was sleepwalking. The redness around their eyes made it clear that they had spent the better part of the last several hours crying over their child. But Kate could also see determination in the father’s face; he was determined to be as strong as possible through all of this for his wife.
“This is Dean and Gloria Knight,” the deputy said. “With all due respect, Agents, they want to help in any way they can but they also have family local to the area they’d like to get back to as soon as they can.”
“We’ll be as quick as we can,” Kate said. “Thank you, Deputy.”
The deputy left, leaving the room in silence. Kate had been down this road a million times and had learned not to dwell too much on the recent loss. It was often best to cut right to the chase, not to dwell on the murders but to start looking for solutions. It not only eliminated the chance of one of the parents breaking down, but it also made them feel assured that they would have answers soon.
“I understand your need to get back to your family as soon as possible,” Kate said. “So we’ll get right to it. We’re looking for a connection between what has happened to your daughter and four other people in the area within the last four days. Up until Monica, we were under the assumption that it was just couples. And there are no direct links between the victims. So we were hoping you might be able to provide us with some insight. Any people that might be upset with Monica or anything she might have mentioned to you recently that threw up a red flag.”
“She never really spoke about the negative aspects of her work,” Dean Knight said. “But we’ve been asking ourselves the same thing. With her job, there would be far too many people that might have something against her, right?”
“The local PD is looking into it right now,” DeMarco said. “And if no immediate answers are found, we’ll also get bureau resources on it. For now, though, we’re trying to concentrate on areas that might not be so obvious—things that may make your daughter similar to the others.”
“That’s right,” Kate said. “We know that she was married at one time. And she had no children, correct?”
“That’s right,” Gloria Knight said. “In fact, I’ve always believed that’s one of the reasons her no good husband ran out on her. Monica always wanted kids. She used to joke about how she wanted to start trying to get pregnant as soon as her honeymoon. But her husband was never on the same wavelength.”
“She was going to adopt for a while,” Dean said. “But I think she started to get far too involved in her career.”
“Did she ever actually adopt?” Kate asked, starting to feel a thread picking up and knitting itself into the narrative.
“No,” Gloria said. “She did foster for a while. Just short-terms thing here and there, though.”
“How long did she do that?” Kate asked, thinking about those fingerprint requests and DSS paperwork.
“About three or four years, I suppose,” Gloria said.
Kate knew what she wanted to do next but measured the possible outcome for a moment. She and DeMarco shared a glance, both aware that they had perhaps stumbled upon something with the foster parent connection. The Langleys, after all, had served as foster parents as well. That still left the Nashes unconnected from it all, but at least it felt like they were getting somewhere.
“I’d like to show you something,” Kate said. She took the scrap of blanket that she had been holding onto ever since they had first met Palmetto. She did not set it on the table, but held on to it in the event that it did look familiar to the Knights. If they responded harshly, she wanted to be able to hide it away as soon as possible.
But she could tell right away that it meant nothing to them. Gloria Knight stared at the scrap of fabric so hard that Kate was pretty sure she was trying to make herself find some connection—anything to find answers about her daughter’s death. But after several seconds, she shook her head.
“No. Should it?”
“We don’t know,” DeMarco said. “But scraps similar to this have been found at all of the crime scenes. So far, it seems to be the only stable connection.”
“As for now,” Kate said, “I believe that’s really all we need. We’ll let you get back to your family, but please, if you think of anything—no matter how small or insignificant it may seem—please contact us.”
“We will,” Dean said as he slowly got up. He took Gloria by the arm and they walked slowly together toward the door. Gloria gave one hopeful look back and said, “Please find out who did this.”
She made her way through the door like a woman in a dream. The moment the doors were closed, DeMarco took the files and papers back out on the three different crime scenes.
“There’s nothing in the Nashes’ history dealing with foster care in any way, shape, or form,” she said.
“Well, maybe it’s something else, some other connection,” Kate said. “What about DSS? Any dealings between the Nashes and the Department of Social Services?”
“I don’t think so,” DeMarco said. “But I can get someone on the PD to look into it.”
“That might be our best bet for now,” Kate said.
DeMarco looked at her skeptically and smiled thinly. “Are you sure about that? You look like you’re hooked on some other thought.”
Kate nodded, not denying it. She was both impressed and a little uneasy that DeMarco already knew her tics and mannerisms so well.
“I’m choosing to focus on the painfully obvious,” she said. “We can’t find any one thing that connects all of the victims so far. But the killer himself is connecting them for us.”
“With the scraps of blanket,” DeMarco
said.
“Exactly. It’s like his calling card. And if it’s a children’s blanket, maybe it’s a relic from his childhood.”
“You think the killer knew this victims when he was a kid?”
“Possibly,” Kate said.
She’d worked with enough cases stemming from a killer’s childhood trauma in the past to know that she was no expert in the field. The good news for Kate, though, was that her career had pointed her in the direction of such experts. And it seemed like it was pointing her that way once again.
Only, with a killer still at large and a set of grieving parents having just left their presence less than two minutes ago, it seemed to be less of a pointing and more of an urgent push.
“How’s the Internet in this building?” Kate asked.
“Decent. Why?”
“Open up Skype on your laptop,” Kate said. “I need to make a call.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Kate had not expected Dr. Henrietta Yates to answer her Skype call right away. Kate had worked closely with Yates more than twenty times over the course of her career and knew that she was one of the most prominent psychologists in the field of early child development and behaviors. If the blanket held more meaning than Kate was able to decipher, Yates would be able to help.
Kate placed a call to Dr. Yates’s office and, after a few back and forth calls with her receptionist, was able to schedule an impromptu face-to-face via DeMarco’s laptop. In the time that passed, she took a picture of the ragged fragment of blanket and emailed it to Yates. DeMarco took the opportunity to put in an urgent request with the Records department.
When Yates’s face came onto the screen, she was quickly brushing her hair aside with one hand and sipping from a cup of tea with the other. It was apparent that she was in the midst of a busy day, making Kate feel guilty for interrupting her.
“Agent Wise,” Dr. Yates said. “It’s great to hear from you. It’s been what? At least two years, right?”
