Killing Spree (32 page)

Gillian smelled something she hadn’t detected last night while going through the apartment with the police. She smelled pine-scented disinfectant. If any blood was spilt, the killer must have cleaned up afterward.

The idea that Vicki might have been murdered here turned Gillian’s stomach. She wondered if the killer had stopped by downstairs and planted the saddle shoes before or after killing her neighbor. Vicki had never done a thing to hurt anyone. And she’d been mercilessly killed.

Sunlight came through the window above the kitchen sink. The pine scent was stronger in there.

“Your neighbor’s dead, Gill,” Ruth said, standing in the middle of the kitchen. She glanced around the room. “He killed her in here. I can feel it.”

Rubbing her forearms, Gillian walked around the room. She stared at the tiled floor, the cabinets and countertops, searching for signs of blood. Everything was spotless.

“I can’t remember right now,” Ruth said, sipping her coffee. “In your books, are there any murders that occur in a kitchen—in the victim’s home?”

Gillian didn’t want to think of how she’d contributed to Vicki’s death. She felt sick. “Um,
Flowers for Her Grave
,” she said. “The gardener uses a sickle to kill one of his victims in her kitchen.”

“Yes, I remember that scene now,” Ruth muttered. “It was awfully bloody.”

Gillian thought she might have to run to the bathroom and throw up. She clutched her stomach and glanced down at the floor. “But it’s spotless,” she managed to say. “He cleaned everything.”

“Not quite everything.” Ruth was gazing up at the kitchen ceiling.

Gillian saw what she was looking at: the dark red stains on the white ceiling—a pattern of two long streaks and several little dots.

“I think that’s off the murder weapon, not the victim,” Ruth said, frowning. “He hit her at least a few times. He was standing just about where I am now. That’s blood from the sickle when he raised it in the air for the second and third hit.”

Gillian was sick in Vicki’s bathroom.

After flushing the toilet, she slurped some water from the faucet and splashed some more on her face.

In Vicki’s kitchen, Ruth had used Gillian’s cell phone to call the police.

“Well, hon, more bad news,” she said, clicking off the line. She met Gillian in Vicki’s living room. “We’ll have quite a wait before the forensics gang can come in and take samples off the ceiling. Doesn’t your landlord live in California?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well, without his written permission—and without Vicki to allow it, the cops can’t come in here and collect evidence. It’s got to be official, which means a search warrant, which means a great big delay—especially on a Sunday.”

“But the police were just in here last night,” Gillian argued.

Ruth shook her head. “That was a favor to me. Officially, they never set foot in this place. Got that? And for the record, I told them you and I came up here just a few minutes ago, because it sounded like she’d left the water running.”

Ruth glanced over her shoulder toward the ceiling in the kitchen. “The detectives might not even get in here until tomorrow. But don’t worry. Those bloodstains aren’t going anywhere.”

She started down the stairs, and Gillian followed her. “I think we can definitely add to our list of suspects this Jason character I’ve yet to meet,” Ruth said. “He had at least an hour here yesterday afternoon. That’s enough time for him to kill your neighbor, clean up the mess, and leave those schoolgirl shoes in your closet.”

At the bottom of the stairs, Gillian stopped and shook her head. “I don’t know. He drove me around yesterday—and spent time alone with Ethan. If Jason wanted to kill either one of us, he had a chance.”

Ruth stepped out to the front porch, and then headed toward the side yard. The cellar light went on as they walked past the stairs down to the laundry room. The dog started barking. “Shut up, Eustace!” Ruth called. The barking ceased from inside the house. “Thank you, baby!”

“About this copycat,” she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s not about killing you, Gill. It may ultimately lead to that. But right now, this is a game for him. It’s kind of a twisted courtship. He enjoys terrorizing you. He might be close by, all the better to watch you squirm. I wouldn’t eliminate Vicki’s boyfriend from our short list of suspects—just because he’s been a perfect gentleman so far.”

Gillian had been focusing on Chase Scott and Todd Sorenson. She figured the copycat killer had to be someone from that class with Jennifer, someone she knew. Until the night before last, she’d never set eyes on Jason Hurrell.

But he could have very well been watching her for a long, long time.

Ruth sipped her coffee, and winced a little. “Hmm, cold,” she muttered. “Well, you’re the expert, hon. What do you think he did with the body?”

Gillian felt a chill, and she rubbed her arms. “In
Flowers for Her Grave,
the killer buried his victims in their backyards.” She gazed out at the ravine.

“Then it’s going to take a while to find your neighbor, Gill,” she heard Ruth say. “You have an awfully big backyard.”

After a while, Ethan realized he’d just been shaking his head over and over, and repeating practically everything his mother was telling him:
“This stalker guy has been killing people? He was actually in the house yesterday? That wasn’t just an attempted break-in? What do you mean, he probably killed Vicki? How would he know where Dad is?”

Apparently to keep from upsetting him, his mother had soft-pedaled everything about this psycho-case. Ethan had thought the dinner at O’Reilly’s with that policewoman had been about researching a book. He’d figured all his mother’s precautions were due to those hoods hanging around—and a few weird e-mails from some faraway stalker fan. Ethan had no idea it was this serious—and this terrible.

He sat at the kitchen table with his mother, while Ruth paced around the living room, mumbling into the cell phone. Ruth’s Jack Russell terrier kept his head and paws propped up on Ethan’s thigh. Ethan absently stroked the dog’s head while his mother carefully explained everything to him.

He started to tear up thinking about Vicki. She used to bring him these cheap little snow globes from different cities whenever she returned from her trips. He’d had a collection for a while. “That’s for guarding my home and all my priceless treasures, Ethan,” she’d say, handing him a new snow globe from a new city.

He couldn’t believe she was dead.

And now this killer was going after his father.

In so many ways, it didn’t seem real. It was like something was about to happen on the other side of the world somewhere. His father had been gone for two years. Part of Ethan had already given up hope that he’d ever see his dad again.

“Honey, in his e-mail, he talked about killing Dad
tonight,
” his mother was saying. “I wouldn’t expect you to break a confidence, but this is an emergency. If your father has been secretly communicating with you in any way, you need to tell me. It could save his life—”

“Oh, Mom,” Ethan whispered. “I haven’t heard from him at all since he left, I swear.”

She touched the side of his face. “Are you sure? I promise I won’t be upset with you if you’ve been keeping this a secret. We need to get to your father and warn him.”

“Honest, I don’t know where he is.”

He saw her eyes water up as she sat back in the kitchen chair. She looked so hopeless.

“Mom, I need to tell you something,” Ethan said. “I wasn’t at that football game yesterday. The guy who beat up Tate Barringer and that other kid? Well, I’d never seen him before until Friday. His name is Joe Pagani, and he wanted to get together and hang out. So he met me at the high school and we drove to Golden Gardens.”

His mother bit her lip as she looked at him.

“Anyway, it turned out Joe was just pretending to be my friend so he could pump me about where Dad might be hiding. He’s with that group Dad owes money to. He said they weren’t going to hurt him, just
talk
to him—or something like that.”

“What did you tell this Joe?” his mother asked.

Ethan shrugged. “I told him that I didn’t know where Dad was, and that you didn’t either.”

His mother shot a look across the room at Ruth, who was now off the phone and standing by the kitchen door. She’d obviously heard everything he’d just said.

“There could be a connection between this Joe and our copycat,” Ruth said. “But didn’t that e-mail this morning say he’d already talked with Barry? And yesterday afternoon, these hoods were still trying to track him down through Ethan—and with no luck.”

“Still, do you think it’s at least
possible
the copycat could be one of these hoods looking for Barry?” Gillian asked.

Ruth nodded glumly. “Yes, I suppose it’s possible—especially when you take into account that our list of potential suspects just got shorter.”

“What do you mean?”

Ruth sighed. “I just got off the horn with my friend in Bremerton. Now I know why you couldn’t get hold of Chase Scott today. He’s dead.”

Standing on a stepladder, Gillian searched for the small Tupperware container in the back of her bedroom closet. She knew it was there on the top shelf, somewhere amid the stacks of Barry’s old sweaters, some board games, and boxes of memorabilia.

She’d left Ethan in the kitchen with Eustace. Ruth was on the cell phone with her police connections, trying to get an update on Chase’s death.

Gillian had created his murder in
Killing Legend,
when the killer knocked out a colleague, dumped him in a car—then sent the vehicle careening off a bluff into a lake. She remembered questioning a car mechanic about how it could be done: rigging the gas pedal, blocking and unblocking the wheels, releasing the parking brake. She’d wanted to make it as real as possible.

And now it was.

Her copycat had taken it one better, with Chase’s car sailing off the front of a ferry. According to Ruth’s sources, there had been several witnesses to the “accident.” One ferry passenger, a young woman, had talked briefly with Chase. He’d claimed someone was following him and he was afraid for his life. But the police were still calling it an accident. No one on the car deck had seen anything suspicious.

The ferry had run over Chase’s car in the water. His Ford Probe was sliced up, and so was its passenger. So far, divers had recovered from Puget Sound several pieces of the automobile—along with a severed leg.

It was obvious to Gillian that Todd Sorenson was her copycat. The little bits she’d learned about his background today were right out of a serial killer’s profile: a trouble-prone teenager; a penchant for torturing pets; the abusive father. He’d stalked her, seemed smugly amused by the Schoolgirl Murders, and felt no one appreciated his genius. Now one of his classmates was lying in a coma with stab wounds, and the other was in pieces at the bottom of Puget Sound.

Something else besides Todd’s culpability was obvious to Gillian. She was almost certain that Barry was in Seattle.

She found the Tupperware container, and climbed down from the stepladder. Opening the container, Gillian spilled its contents on her bed. She looked at the sticks of gum, Lifesavers, Starlight mints, old
Racing Forms,
cocktail napkins, poker chips, matchbooks, and a couple of pens. Shortly after Barry’s disappearance, she’d collected all of these items from the pockets of his clothes. At the time, she’d been looking for clues to where he might have gone. But most of the paraphernalia came from local casinos, and she didn’t think he would be staying close to home with the police and those mobsters after him.

A couple of those cocktail napkins had women’s names and phone numbers on them:
Megan
on one;
Jamie
on another. Long ago, she’d wrestled with the notion that Barry might have been seeing other women as part of his secret life. Maybe it was another one of his
addictions
, she couldn’t be sure. At least the handwriting on the cocktail napkins wasn’t his. Maybe he hadn’t solicited the phone numbers, or perhaps he had. It didn’t matter anymore.

Gillian reexamined the cocktail napkins, poker chips, and matchbooks. Barry seemed to have a preference for three gambling spots in the area: the Emerald Queen Casino in Tacoma; the Tulalip Casino just north of Everett, and Club Royale Casino-Resort in Anacortes, Washington. She wondered if someone working at one of these casinos—a manager, doorman, dealer, or waitress—had seen Barry recently. He had to be nearby. The copycat killer had told her so.

Gillian had tracked his killing spree from New York to Chicago to Billings. And yesterday, he’d killed twice—in Seattle. He wasn’t about to backtrack and go to Las Vegas or Reno so he could murder her estranged husband. He’d talked with Barry recently, gained his trust, and made an appointment to get together with him tonight. That could have only happened someplace near Seattle.