Authors: Kevin O'Brien

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller

Terrified (14 page)

BOOK: Terrified

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“Nope, I’m cool,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “See you tomorrow.”

“It’s after nine o’clock,” she said. “You sure I can’t drive you?”

“We got our bikes … and our flashers … and our helmets. It’s cool, Mom.”

“G’night, Mrs. Keeslar,” Darren said, waiting near the front door. He was wearing the night headgear for his braces.

“Night, Darren,” she said, getting up from her computer. “Thank your mother for me. You boys be careful.…”

Standing in the doorway, she felt the night breeze ruffling her hair as she watched Josh and his friend hop on their bikes. They switched on the red flashers on the back of their seats, put on their safety helmets and rode off into the darkness.

Josh loved spending the night at Darren’s, whose divorced mom had a house in Wallingford. Apparently, Darren’s bedroom was in the basement—far away from the second-floor bedrooms of his mother and kid sister. The recreation room with the big-screen TV and Xbox was next door to his bedroom. As far as Josh was concerned, it might as well have been the mansion in
Entourage
—minus all the girls coming and going. It was a teenage boy’s dream.

Megan couldn’t have asked for Josh to have a better best friend. Darren was a sensible kid, and Josh never got into trouble when they were together. She had no reason to worry about him when he was with Darren. Still, whenever he was away for the night, she was the one who always felt homesick and lonely.

Megan stepped back inside and double-locked the door. The phone rang, and she hurried into the kitchen to answer it before it went to voice mail. Was it too much to hope it might be Dan Lahart, her cute, sandy-haired teacher date from last week?

She grabbed up the cordless phone in the kitchen on the third ring. “Hello?” she said, out of breath. Whoever it was, they didn’t respond right away. “Hello?” she said, again.

“Is Lisa there?” the man asked.

Her heart seemed to stop for a moment. She swallowed hard. “No, you—you have the wrong number.”

She heard a strange little snicker on the other end. “Sorry,” he said.

Then he hung up.

Pouring another glass of pinot grigio, she switched off the television and told herself once again that Lisa was a pretty common name. It was the first time in fifteen years something like this had happened. She’d had all sorts of wrong-number callers in the past. One of them was bound to end up asking for Lisa. Yes, it was weird how the man had chuckled before he’d hung up; but some people laughed nervously when they made mistakes.

Megan had been analyzing it while parked in front of the TV, half watching Goldie Hawn in
Overboard
, which was on Starz for the ninety-seventh time this month.

She’d received the call over an hour ago, and the phone hadn’t rung again since. If someone was trying to intimidate her, he would have called back by now. It was probably just what it had seemed on the surface—a wrong number, nothing more to it.

With the wineglass in hand, she returned to her computer desk, and then glanced out the big window in her living room. All she saw was her own reflection in the darkened glass. She looked sad—and frightened.

Megan couldn’t help thinking about the most recent garbage bag murder. The last thing she needed to see right now was that article in the
Seattle Times
from three weeks ago. Yet Megan pulled up
Google.com
. She paused before typing in the subject line. She couldn’t remember the woman’s name for a moment. They’d gone to the same gym, but Megan hadn’t known her. While at Sound Mind and Body, she was usually plugged into her iPod workout selection of eighties hits, tuning everything else out. But then one lunch hour three weeks ago, she’d overheard someone talking in the locker room: “Did you see on the news about that woman they found all chopped up in Hefty bags? She used to work out here. Her name was Paula Conlon. She was in my yoga class… .”

Megan had read about the murder, and it had given her nightmares. It was even more unnerving to learn she’d had a connection to the victim—remote as it was. First Jade ten years ago, and then this woman from her gym—what was the likelihood of it being a coincidence?

But there were others.

Megan typed in the subject line:
Paula Conlon, Serial Killer, Seattle Times.
Then she hit
Enter
. The headline she remembered came up at the top of the search result listing:

Does
Seattle
Have a New
Serial Killer
?
– The
Seattle Times
… grisly discovery of the dismembered remains of a Magnolia woman,
Paula Conlon,
37, who had been missing for over three months …

www.theseattletimes.com/news/082011/seattle-serial-killer.html

She clicked on the link, and it took a moment for the page to come into view. Though she’d seen it before, Megan still shuddered as she watched the headlines, photos, and map come up on her monitor:

Does Seattle Have
A New Serial Killer?

After 16 Years and 6 Victims,
A Gruesome Pattern Emerges

Six photographs were lined up in a row below the headline. They were portraits of the women who had been abducted, and later found with their neatly severed body parts in plastic trash bags, strewn in various locations around Seattle. The names, ages, and particulars for each woman were captioned beneath the pictures. They ranged from the first victim in 1995, Becky Mae Palin, the seventeen-year-old brunette from Federal Way, found inside two trash bags along the highway near Mount Rainier National Park, to Paula Conlon, thirty-seven, an ad agency receptionist whose severed remains were stuffed in four trash bags—three uncovered in Seattle’s Discovery Park three weeks ago, and the fourth bag twenty miles away in Lynnwood.

Jade Honeycutt was the apparent second victim in June 2001. Megan remembered almost feeling relief when she’d learned about Becky Mae’s death six years earlier—before she’d even moved to Seattle. As horrible as she’d felt about Jade’s murder, at least Megan had been able to convince herself that the barista’s death had nothing to do with her.

Hunched over the computer desk, she studied the Seattle area map. A woman-in-a-dress silhouette sign—the type used for airport restrooms—designated where each one of the six victims had been abducted. An X indicated where their severed remains were found. There were at least twenty Xs on the map—for the six victims.

J. T. Rooth, a thirty-year-old blonde from Sumner, had five different Xs on the map. The bags containing her remains had been discovered at various remote locations—mostly forest areas—on September eleventh and twelfth, 2001. But not many people read about it. On those two particular days, not many people had been interested in the death of a blond cashier from Sam’s Club who had been missing for three weeks. In fact, Megan hadn’t even found out about J. T. Rooth until years later.

She’d just started working at Destination Rent-a-Car in November 2007, when what was left of thirty-five-year-old single mother Taylor Dalton turned up in two trash bags at Golden Gardens beach in Ballard—and in two more trash bags seventy miles away at Evergreen State College Forest Reserve. Taylor had been missing for a month and left behind a twelve-year-old daughter.

Biting her lip, Megan read the article again. It referred to other Seattle serial killers in the past, notably Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway.
Though not as deadly prolific as his predecessors,
said the article,
this killer has shown patience, cunning and staying power. And he may be gaining momentum.
Unlike Bundy and Ridgway, the garbage bag killer abducted his victims and held on to them for weeks or months at a time before butchering them.

Cheryl Hardee had been missing for over two months when her bagged remains were discovered in three different alleyways in Pioneer Square.

Two days before Cheryl vanished in September 2009, she’d gone with her husband and two children to the Puyallup Fair, where she said a man calling himself Lyle tried to pick her up as she left the women’s restroom. She had told her husband the persistent man was good looking and in his early thirties and wore a jazzy-patterned sweater and she’d mentioned seeing him again the next day at the bank.

The following night, Cheryl Hardee had dropped off her daughter at a friend’s house for an overnight, and then disappeared. Her abandoned station wagon had been found on a dead end a half mile from her home in Kent. The rear right tire had been flat.

Puyallup police named Lyle a person of interest in the case, but he had never been identified or found.

Megan took another sip of pinot grigio and studied the photos of the women. Plump, brunette, and wearing too much makeup in her candid shot (perhaps to look older), the teenage Becky Mae didn’t quite fit in with the other victims. The rest were grown women, all on the slender side, all fair haired—except for Paula, who still shared the same delicate, refined features the rest of them had. Megan scrutinized the pictures, and it only confirmed for her what she’d thought the first time she’d read this article—with the exception of Becky Mae, all the victims looked like her.

Ted Bundy had had a certain type of woman he’d pursued: pretty, with long dark hair parted down the middle, around college age or slightly older. This new serial killer definitely had a type, too, and she was it.

Megan wondered if these serial predators went after women of a certain age. Even as the killers got older, didn’t the ages of their victims remain the same? Not this man. The women he butchered got older each time. And they were always around the same age as Megan when they died.

Was it possible Becky Mae had been murdered by someone other than this Lyle the police were looking for?

If Becky Mae’s death hadn’t been the work of this killer, it was too much for Megan to fathom. It meant all of the victims had looked like her and been around her age. One had served her coffee, and another had worked out at her gym. It meant that the killing started
after
she’d moved to Seattle.

Without Becky Mae in the equation, the murders became horrifyingly personal.

But if these killings were somehow connected to her, who was behind them? Glenn was in prison. It would have to be someone who had known Lisa Swann back in Chicago, someone who had followed her out here.

The police and the
Seattle Times
counted Becky Mae as one of the victims. Did Megan think she knew more than the police? They had at their fingertips all sorts of photographs, evidence, and endless computer files about similar killings. And all she had was a hunch.

She took another swallow of wine, draining the glass. “It’s got nothing to do with you,” she said to her reflection in the darkened window.

Yet she couldn’t shake the sensation that someone was watching her right now.

With a sigh, Megan got to her feet, treaded over to the window, and closed the drapes. Maybe if she worked on her love life—instead of focusing on these murders that had nothing to do with her—she wouldn’t have so many nights alone in her future.

Returning to the computer desk, she went to
Matefinder.com
. She tracked down the profile for Dan Lahart, the cute teacher who hadn’t called her back. She clicked on the
Contact
icon, and rattled off a quick note:

Hi, Dan,

I had a really terrific time meeting you last week.

You mentioned wanting to get together again. I’m all for that. I think you’re a nice guy, and I’d like to get to know you better. If the feeling is mutual, give me a call.

Thanks for a lovely night.

Take care,
Megan
206/555-5490

She clicked on the
Send
icon before she had time to analyze each sentence to death. Everything was spelled correctly, which was all that mattered.

She checked two more responses to her Matefinder .com posting. One man was seventy-two, “but I’m very active & often mistaken for a guy in his fifties,” he offered. A little closer to her age, the next candidate was forty-nine, had never married, and wondered if she had any allergies to ferrets.

“I’m not even going there,” she muttered to the screen, shaking her head. She clicked off the site.

She’d had enough scary news for one night.