Wren Delacroix Series Box Set Page 23

  “I’m getting married,” she said. “I wanted you to hear it from me. It shouldn’t affect things much with our schedule, but I may need to have Timmy a little extra during the wedding, but then you can take him when we go away for the honeymoon—”

  “How are you getting married?” he said, and his voice didn’t sound right. The pitch was off. “We barely got divorced, Janessa.”

  “I know it’s quick,” she said. “But, well, this is just how things worked out. I didn’t plan for it, I swear.”

  He was quiet.

  “Well, that’s all I called to say.”

  “When did you meet him?” said Reilly. “What’s his name? You’re going to be living with him? My son is going to be living with a strange man—”

  “Calm down,” said Janessa. “I didn’t think you’d be like this. You almost sound jealous, and we both know you don’t give a damn about me.”

  “When did you meet him?”

  “It was… recent,” she said. “It’s been a bit of a whirlwind, I admit.”

  “Admit it. You met him while you and I were married. You gave me so much shit about my affair, but you were having one too, and—”

  “No, that’s not true.” She was sharp.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “I know you, Janessa, and you would never get involved in a whirlwind romance and get married this quick. That’s not you. And honestly, I wouldn’t even care, except you screwed me out of so much in the divorce because of infidelity, and now I find out that you were being just as unfaithful—”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Admit it.” He gripped the phone tight, and now he had raised his voice, and Maliah poked her head out of her office, which was at this end of the hall. Damn it.

  “I didn’t have to tell you this, Caius,” said Janessa. “I was trying to honor what we used to have together, to honor the fact that you are my son’s father. But I don’t owe you anything. And I think I’m hanging up now.”

  “You think you can get this by me?” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “I am a police detective, Janessa. I’m going to find proof that you were unfaithful, and then we’ll just see if we can’t revisit some of those agreements you bullied me into.”

  But Janessa didn’t say anything. Because she’d hung up.

  Reilly glared at his phone. He shoved it into his pocket and tried to steady his breathing. He could not believe this.

  This morning, he’d been thinking good thoughts about how she was moving on, but this took the cake. He didn’t care that she was getting married, of course. He couldn’t give a fuck about that. It was just that she’d obviously lied to him. She’d been having an affair too.

  When he’d asked Janessa to marry him, she’d insisted that they wait another year before the ceremony because they’d only known each other for a year and a half at that point, and she wanted to “make sure” that they fit.

  Not that waiting had helped, of course.

  They’d gotten married way too young. They’d been kids. Everyone else their age had been going to bars and sowing wild oats, and they’d been getting pregnant. They should have waited longer.

  Of course, he couldn’t really regret it, any of it, because all his past experiences had made him into the man he was, and he wouldn’t change that.

  Anyway, there was no way that Janessa would consent to marry someone she’d known for barely two months. She’d been with this guy for longer, and that meant it stretched back into their marriage.

  He was going to prove it, too. He hadn’t been lying about that.

  Maliah came out of her office. “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “What?” sputtered Reilly, who couldn’t believe he’d heard the question right. “No, she’s getting married.”

  “What?” said Maliah. “To who?”

  “Well, she didn’t tell me,” said Reilly. “Maybe she would have, but I got pissed, and then she hung up the phone.”

  “Oh,” said Maliah, shaking her head. “No, not…” She pointed at Wren’s office. “Are you sleeping with Delacroix?”

  Reilly’s eyebrows shot up. “No. What the hell?”

  “You probably wouldn’t tell me if you were.”

  Reilly spread his hands. “How’s Jax, Maliah? Hmm? How’s your husband?”

  Maliah gave him the finger.

  He stalked down the hallway.

  Wren called after him. “Hey, Reilly, what was that about?”

  Damn it, had she heard Maliah’s question? It made Reilly feel twitchy to think of her hearing that. “Nothing, personal shit,” he called back. And then he hurried out of the building before one of the uniforms could come out of the bullpen and start asking questions.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The next morning, Reilly was at headquarters before the sun. He was waiting when the uniforms showed up. They were on loan from the department in Martinsburg this week, which meant they didn’t have a long commute to get there.

  He sipped his coffee and went through the paperwork they were working on until they showed up, and then he started asking questions.

  “What do we got on the ballistics of the gun?” said Reilly.

  “Well, they’re pretty sure it’s a handgun,” said one of the uniforms, “but the bullet we have isn’t in great shape. Can’t determine much more from it than that. No shell casings were found on the scene, which could mean it’s a revolver.”

  “Right, because the casings stay inside,” said Reilly. “But couldn’t the killer just have pocketed the casings?”

  “Yes,” said the uniform.

  Reilly rubbed his hands together. “Handgun. Hell, this is Maryland. That means we got a database of handgun owners. They don’t require registration for other kinds of guns, but it’s better than either West Virginia or Maryland, where there’s no registration at all.”

  “One step ahead of you,” said the other uniform. She held out her hand. “Margery Jaid.”

  Reilly shook hands with her. “Nice to meet you, Jaid. What do you mean, you’re a step ahead?”

  “Well,” said Jaid, “we’ve been going through the database. We have a list of people who would have had access to a handgun, and it includes her boyfriend, the janitor at the school, her history teacher, and the school principal.”

  “Nice work,” said Reilly. “You did all of this yesterday?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jaid. “Now, I know that in a serial killer case, it’s not necessarily likely that the killer is personally connected to the victim, but considering that there isn’t actually another body, it’s not really a serial killer case yet, is it? At any rate, eliminating the usual suspects like the boyfriend and the father, that’s got to be the first step, right?”

  “Right,” said Reilly. “That’s smart, Jaid.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d let me ride along for your interrogations?” she said. “The janitor… when I talked to him on the phone, I got a gut feeling. He just seemed really nervous.”

  “You can’t read too much into that,” said Wren’s voice from the doorway to the bullpen. The bullpen was a big room in headquarters where the uniformed officers that worked with the task force did paperwork and research.

  Jaid looked up. “Oh, hello, Miss Delacroix. Nice to see you this morning. I really admired the work you did to arrest Major Hill. Very impressive.”

  Wren lifted her chin, surveying the woman. “Uh, thanks.”

  “I know that people get nervous talking to the police,” said Jaid. “I would never say that we arrest that janitor on a feeling alone. But I don’t think that looking more closely into him is a bad move. He does have access to the right kind of gun, after all.”

  “True,” said Wren. “We will look into him, Officer Jaid. Thanks.”

  “Tell you what,” said Reilly to Jaid. “If we bring the janitor in for questioning, if it gets that far, I’ll be sure to loop you in, Jaid. For now, though, I don’t feel like I could spare you from here. You’re doing great work.”

  “
Thank you,” said Jaid.

  “Really, we’re kind of hampered by the fact that we don’t get people in here for longer than a week or two,” said Reilly. “So, I appreciate your digging in, going the extra mile.”

  Jaid beamed at him.

  Wren cleared her throat.

  Reilly turned to her. “What?”

  “Angela said you came in, but you didn’t get coffee for me.”

  “Well, it was early,” said Reilly. “I didn’t want you to have cold coffee.”

  Wren considered this.

  Reilly crossed the room to her. “That personal stuff from yesterday… I didn’t sleep well.” He’d started to work on looking for proof of Janessa’s affair, but realized he’d need resources he could only access back at work, and then he’d had a crisis of conscience about using taxpayer dollars to dig into his ex-wife’s affairs. Then he’d fallen asleep and had dreams about Janessa in bed with another man, which had bothered him more than he thought they would.

  He’d woken up and tried to go back to sleep, tried to reason himself out of it. It was a dream. He couldn’t help having dreams. He didn’t care about her moving on. He really didn’t.

  He didn’t think he did.

  He’d just come to work to try to get it out of his head, and he hadn’t given much thought to the tradition he had with Wren of always getting her coffee. He went into the hallway, motioning with his head for her to follow him.

  She did. When they were out of earshot of the bullpen, she said, “Look, this isn’t about, um, Hawk, is it?”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s not about anything.” He looked her over. “Listen, did you hear Maliah and I having a conversation yesterday evening, because whatever she said, it’s all her, it’s not me. I’m not thinking about… you know…”

  She furrowed her brow. “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Oh, good,” he said. “Never mind.”

  “You gonna tell me about this personal thing?”

  He stopped at the door to her office. “It’s just my ex-wife. It’s nothing.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  Reilly wondered how his life had gotten this complicated. Not for the first time, he wished he’d never gotten involved with Maliah in the first place. And the coffee thing with Wren…

  He decided to stop thinking about that. “Okay, so the uniforms have dug up some suspects who have access to a gun. We can dig in a little there, and if we get lucky, maybe we find some evidence, we get a warrant, bring in that gun, and they test it against the bullet, and boom. We’re done.”

  “Sounds blissful,” said Wren.

  “Yeah, probably too easy.” He chuckled. “Where are you on that profile?”

  She gave him a satisfied grin. “Actually, I might have had a breakthrough.”

  “Really? Do tell.”

  “Well, maybe you were right about beauty sleep. I don’t know. I’m sorry you slept badly, but I slept like a baby, and when I woke up, I had a thought.” She lifted her fingers into a peace sign.

  “Hippies?” he said.

  “Two,” she said. “Come on, Reilly.”

  “Two killers,” he said.

  “Think about it,” she said. “There’s a disorganized killer and another killer whose cleaning up and doing the videos and covering the trail. Maybe there’s dual motivations there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “Like, sometimes, with serial killing teams, there might be a dynamic. Like, if it’s a woman and a man in a romantic relationship, she might help him get the victims so that he can rape them. It’s a sort of sadistic sexual game between the two of them. Maybe he’s motivated sexually, and she’s motivated to clean up the evidence.”

  “You think a woman’s involved?”

  “I’m just throwing things out. I’m going to go do some research, see what I can put together. But what do you think?”

  “I think the idea of two killers makes sense,” he said. “It even helps explain the video. Maybe one of the killers left to go film and upload it while the other was cleaning the scene.”

  “Could be,” she said, nodding.

  “All right,” he said. “This research you were thinking of doing, can you do it on the road?”

  “Um, why?”

  “I think we should try to talk to some of the people who had access to the gun,” said Reilly.

  “Sure,” she said. “We can do that. I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  * * *

  Wren hunched over her phone, scrolling through search results on the internet. “I feel like the fact that the sexual molestation is happening post mortem with an object is pointing away from the male/female serial killer team.”

  “Why’s that?” Reilly asked from the driver’s side of the car as they sped towards Lingandale High School.

  “I don’t know. There could be various reasons for the perpetrator not using his own body to penetrate her. It’s quite probable that he couldn’t. He maybe wants to rape her, but then faces impotence when faced with the body. It would fit with a typical disorganized killer. If that’s the case, he’s not the sort of the man whose capable of forming a relationship with a woman. He’s probably frustrated about his lack of sexual prowess and he’s translated that into a need to dominate the victims to punish them for not wanting him.”

  “Okay,” said Reilly.

  “But there could be another reason. It could simply be about dominance plain and simple. The woman isn’t worthy of him actually having intercourse with her. He’s defiling her to further humiliate and destroy her. Either way, we’re talking about a man who’s probably not in a relationship with a woman.”

  “Makes sense,” Reilly said. “So, it’s two men?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I don’t think it’s two men in a sexual relationship, because then I think the victim would be male.”

  “Right,” said Reilly. “With you.”

  “So, these are probably friends. What I can’t figure out is how it’s all working out. Typically, in a relationship like this, you’d have a sort of alpha and beta thing going on, where one of the men would be the aggressor. He’d have more pronounced violent tendencies, and the other would be more of a follower. Like the Springson school shooting. Hampton was the psychopath. He took the lead. He manipulated Kemper, who was suicidal and malleable. Same kind of thing here. But in this case, it seems more likely that the alpha killer is the organized killer, and the beta is the one with the violent tendencies. One guy is killing and one’s covering it up.”

  “What if… there’s only one killer, but he has someone looking out for him that he went to help him clean it up? What if it’s like a parent-child relationship?”

  She sank back in her seat. “Oh, wow, I didn’t think of that. That could be. So, in that case, the killer killed the girl, panicked, called the other killer, who came in and cleaned the scene and uploaded the video?”

  “No, that doesn’t work,” he said. “Because, if I’m going to clean the scene, why not get rid of the body? Why upload a video that draws even more attention to it? Why claim it’s going to happen again?”

  “You’re right, that doesn’t work after all,” she said. “This is going to drive me crazy until we figure it out.”

  “Keep digging,” he said. “If we really need two profiles, that makes everything more difficult. Take your time.”

  She scoffed. “Right, right. I’m going to put money down that you’ll be asking me if I have a profile before the end of the day.”

  “No, I’m gonna back off,” he said. “I don’t want to put pressure on you. I think that’s a bad call.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” she said.

  * * *

  “This really isn’t something I was prepared for,” said the principal of Lingandale High School, Ned Faberton. “I’ve given a lot of thought to what we’d do if we had a shooter during school hours, but this?” He shook his head.

  Reil
ly nodded sympathetically. “It’s really a horrible thing.”

  “Just a waste,” said Ned. “She was a young girl. She had her whole life ahead of her. And the way they found her…” He made a face, looking both disgusted and horrified.

  Wren scrutinized the man. She wished she had a profile. If she had a profile, she could evaluate whether this guy fit into it or not. The truth was, she wasn’t really trained in investigating murder cases. That wasn’t the job of the FBI, that was the job of the police. As an FBI profiler, what she would have done was to scrutinize case files, look at crime scene photos, and decide what kind of person had committed the crime. She wouldn’t have been out here in the field, interviewing people.

  She lived and died by the profile, but it eluded her in this case. This case didn’t make sense to her.

  If she was looking for two killers, it was all the more confusing. Could the principal have been involved?

  “Well, I guess you got a call from someone at the task force?” Reilly was saying.

  “Asking me about guns I owned,” said the principal. “Yes, but I told them that I haven’t even gotten my guns out of their safe in over a year at this point. Before I became a high school principal, I had time for hobbies, like going out and shooting my guns once in a while. Hell, I even did a little hunting sometimes. But, um, well, now, I spend every waking moment in this place. There’s always something going on. Do you have any idea how many sports teams and clubs and musical groups we have here?”

  “No,” said Wren.

  “I don’t either,” said Ned. “And I’m the principal. It’s a lot. I don’t make it to half of the things associated with the school, but I try my best to make it to what I can. It’s good for the kids to see me out. And I don’t want to only be at the football games. I want to be at the school musical too. And at the cheerleading competition. And the debate club events. It’s… well, I do my best.”

  “You’re a busy man,” said Reilly. “That’s probably good for you. What we’re really trying to do, Mr. Faberton, is eliminate anyone we can. So, where were you the morning of the murder?”

  “Well, I was here,” said Ned. “I was the person who made the 911 call. But it was Jim Suede, who’s a coach and a P.E. teacher, who found her. He called me, and we called the police.”