Aberration Read online

  “Come on in,” she said, moving out of the doorway to admit him. He moved past her into the darkened living room. “What are you doing here?” she asked, closing the door behind her.

  Wyatt could not contain his annoyance. Although she made his job easy, he was astounded by her stupidity. He wondered fleetingly if she was really that dumb, or if she secretly enjoyed the anonymous harassment. What had his mother said to him and his sister when they had tried to tell their parents about the horrible things that his grandfather had done to them? She had accused them of lying to get attention. Even bad attention is better than no attention at all. Did Wilkins really welcome the threats? Was being the object of a stalker better than nothing at all?

  He turned to her and the change in his demeanor registered on her face instantly. She backed up two steps. “Now why did you let me in?” he asked.

  She stumbled a little, backing up and reaching for the door knob. Wyatt pulled his Smith & Wesson from the rear of his waistband and sighed heavily. He waved the barrel of the gun in the direction of her couch. “Forget it, forget it. It’s too late. You fucked up. You let me in, and now I’m afraid I will have to kill you just for being stupid.”

  Wilkins started to tremble. Her eyes were very wide.

  “Sit on the couch,” Wyatt said.

  She moved to the couch, her body staying as far from his as she could manage, pressed and sliding along the furniture and walls.

  “What is the matter with you?” Wyatt asked once she was seated on the couch.

  She didn’t answer. She just stared at him, her eyes glued to him, moving back and forth across the room. There was a slight tremor in her chin.

  “I have been harassing you for weeks. Weeks. I killed your fucking cat. I told you I was going to kill you. You had no idea who I was, and yet after all that, I knock on the door and you let me in without even asking a question. You don’t know me—”

  She stuttered. “But I—I—the diner—”

  He waved the gun at her in dismissal and shook his head again. “So you saw me at the diner a few times. So you chatted with me. You still have no idea who I am or what I am capable of. Why would you just let me into your home? Do you like it, Megan? Do you like being threatened?”

  She swallowed. She looked at him as if she expected him to answer his own questions. He stopped pacing and stared at her. Her brown eyes were blank—even her fear had a vacuous quality to it. He waited for some response from her—a question, the ubiquitous why that punctuated his work, some pleading, anything—but there was nothing. She kept looking at him almost as if she were watching a film and she was watching only to see what came next. As if she had no influence on the events, no part in them. She was just an audience who went willingly wherever the film asked her to venture. Irritation rose like heartburn and settled in Wyatt’s diaphragm.

  “Just forget it. Never mind. Let’s just get this over with.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the photo of Kassidy. He handed it to Wilkins. The photo shook in her hands. She studied it for a long time.

  Wyatt began, “I’m going to give you a chance to save—”

  Before he could finish, Wilkins lurched up from the couch and sprinted toward the kitchen, nearly knocking Wyatt off balance. He caught her just as she reached the doorway. He wrapped her in a bear hug from behind. In spite of her violent struggles, he wrestled her to the floor easily. Her frame felt insubstantial and frail. He straddled her, holding both her wrists in one of his hands. He pointed the gun at her head.

  She kept trying to wrench her hands free. Her legs bucked uselessly. “Stop,” Wyatt commanded. He repeated the command three times, but she seemed not to hear him. He glanced behind them and saw the photo had fallen face down on her living room carpet. He looked back at Wilkins. Her face was ash gray. Her body struggled, but her eyes stared at the barrel of the gun until they crossed. She spoke to it as if it had attacked her independent of its owner. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said again and again. Her voice started out a whimper but rose with each intonation until her words were a screech, like nails on a chalkboard. He could not risk her neighbors hearing Wilkins’ cries. Wyatt wanted to hit her to make it stop. Instead, he tossed the gun aside and put his palm over her mouth and nose.

  Then suddenly he was sitting on her couch, the gun dangling from his hand. Wilkins’ body lay a few feet away on the floor. The rank smell of feces singed his nostrils. He stood up abruptly. Had he suffocated her? Strangled her? He knelt down beside her. Her face was badly bruised. Had he beaten her to death or after her death like the others? On her shirt, the words were smeared in shit. For You. He looked at his hands but they were clean. In his jacket pocket he found a couple of balled-up latex gloves which had been turned inside out. It only took a sniff to know that he had used them to smear the shit onto Wilkins’ shirt. He always carried latex gloves with him, but where had he gotten the shit from?

  Wyatt’s hands shook. Fumbling, he put the Smith & Wesson in the back of his waistband and sat beside Wilkins’ body. He glanced around the room until his gaze landed on the clock hanging on the dining room wall. It said 7:45 p.m. He shook his head. That couldn’t be right. He’d arrived at her house at 5:45 p.m. It couldn’t have been longer than five minutes before she’d bolted for the kitchen. But he’d been there for two hours. Wilkins was dead, and Wyatt’s message had already been written at the scene.

  He ran out to the backyard and checked behind her shed where he had hidden a small aluminum baseball bat. It was his blunt object of choice. He usually bought one at a sporting goods store when he arrived in town—it had to be small enough to fit into a duffel bag or large backpack. After each murder, he cleaned the bat thoroughly and then dropped it off at the nearest good will. The bat he had bought for Wilkins was still there. He had put it in Wilkins’ backyard that day while she was finishing her shift at the diner. He hadn’t even used it. He went back inside.

  “Oh shit,” he mumbled.

  His heart pounded faster and faster until the sound of it thundering filled his ears. The smell of feces made him nauseous. He searched the downstairs for any evidence he may have left behind. He couldn’t think straight.

  “No,” he said aloud. “Not again.”

  But there was no denying it. He was losing time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  KASSIDY

  October 1st-2nd

  I worked late into the afternoon the next day, trying to catch up on my caseload and not think about how drastically my life was about to change or about how I would tell Jory that I was carrying his baby.

  When my office phone rang, I snatched up the receiver. “Bishop.”

  “What time do you get done?” Linnea answered.

  I glanced at the clock. It was almost six o’clock. “Very soon,” I said.

  “I’m lonely,” Linnea said.

  “What about Dale?”

  “Dale’s not around. He flew to Boston yesterday after you left for work. Business trip, he said.” A heavy sigh. “I already took your dogs for a walk, and I laid on your couch all day watching talk shows which I think actually made me dumber. Let’s have dinner.”

  “Okay. You leaving tomorrow?”

  “Nine a.m. flight. Wish I could stay for the weekend, but I can come back later, Momma.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “No, but you will need an ultrasound, and I am volunteering to be your baby’s daddy for that particular event,” she said. “You know, since you probably won’t have worked up the nerve to tell Jory by then.”

  “Volunteering?”

  “Okay, I’m forcing myself on you. When did your OB/GYN say you could get one?”

  “Two months from now,” I said. “I made the appointment this morning before I left their office. November 30th, I think.”

  “Okay,”
Linnea concurred. “I’ve marked it on my calendar.”

  I laughed. I was about to tell her she didn’t need to make the trip when TK appeared in my doorway. His face was a grimace. “Hold on,” I said. I covered the receiver with one hand.

  “The For You Killer is back. If we leave now, we can be there by late tonight,” he said.

  “The ‘for you’ killer?” I asked. “Where?”

  “Portland,” TK said. “We’re due at the airport in an hour.”

  He disappeared. I uncovered the receiver and spoke into it. “Linnea? Bad news.”

  We had a long layover in Chicago. Our connecting flight was canceled, and we ended up spending the night at the airport waiting for an a.m. flight. With Dale away and Linnea leaving, TK’s wife, Diane, had graciously agreed to look after my dogs. TK snoozed in a chair beside me while I fielded phone calls from Linnea and Jory. Linnea called to make sure I planned on telling Jory my big news once I arrived in Portland. Jory called to discuss the latest For You murder since he was the primary investigator. The next morning TK and I checked into our hotel and went immediately to the scene.

  Remy Caldwell met us there. Remy had twenty years on Jory and had been Jory’s partner in homicide for as long as I’d known them. He had also known about our affair and made it clear to both of us that he didn’t approve. Remy and I had endured our fair share of uncomfortable silences together, and today looked like it would be no different. Although he gave me a curt nod, he shook TK’s hand, but not mine. When he spoke, it was to TK, not me. As he led us through the front door, a technician vacuumed the carpet where Wilkins’ body had lain with a handheld unit designed to pick up any extraneous fibers or hairs.

  Megan Wilkins’ body had been removed from her two-story Portland home the day before. The crime scene remained largely intact except for items that had been bagged and removed by the crime scene technicians for analysis. In spite of the sunlight streaming down on Portland, Megan Wilkins’ house was dark inside. The mini-blinds were up, the living room curtains pulled back to let in the day, but little light filtered through.

  I stopped in the living room, wrinkling my nose. “I smell shit,” I said.

  Remy stood by the front door nodding. “Yeah, that’s what he used to spell out his little signature. It was on the vic’s shirt, but we can’t seem to get the smell out of the place.”

  TK shook his head and walked past me into the kitchen, then back to the living room. “Take us through it again, detective,” he said.

  Remy sighed and clasped his hands in front of him. He kept checking his cell phone and looking toward the door, making it clear that there were about a million places he would rather be than revisiting this crime scene. “Megan Wilkins, thirty-seven years old, divorced with two kids. One is seventeen, he lives with his father in Astoria. Her fourteen-year-old daughter lives here with her. Wilkins was a waitress at a diner about five blocks from here. Her daughter was at a friend’s house working on a school project. She says she saw her mother Thursday morning before she went to school. Came home about 10:30 Thursday night and found her here in the living room, bludgeoned with the words ‘for you’ written in feces across her shirt. We’re not sure where the feces came from. We’ve sent samples to the lab, but it will take a while to get any results.

  “The daughter also says her mother was being harassed recently,” Remy added.

  “By whom?” I asked.

  Remy shrugged. “Don’t know. Apparently even Wilkins didn’t know who it was, but the daughter says that someone has been fucking with her—the daughter’s description—for at least the last six weeks or so.”

  “Fucking with her how?” TK asked.

  “Prank phone calls, sending dead flowers to the house, slashing her tires, that kind of thing. The daughter also claims that whoever it was poisoned their cat.”

  “Any proof of that?” I asked.

  “The vet confirmed that the cat was definitely poisoned, but there’s no way to prove who did it. “

  “You might get somewhere with the cat,” TK pointed out. “If you can determine what kind of poison it was, where someone could have gotten it, how it was dispensed—”

  “It was arsenic,” I said flatly.

  Remy’s head shot up, and for the first time that day, he looked directly at me. “How did you know that?”

  I looked from him to TK. “Sorenson,” I said. “He poisoned him using arsenic. You won’t get anywhere with that. It’s too common, and clearly our UNSUB is bi-coastal. Was the cat an inside cat or outside cat?”

  “Daughter says mostly inside but that she let it out once a day for a few hours,” Remy answered.

  “There you go. He’s stalking the vic beforehand, getting an idea of her routine. It was probably pretty damn easy to poison her cat.”

  “The harassment, the stalking—that’s new,” TK said.

  “Yeah but it’s unique to Megan Wilkins,” I pointed out. “This UNSUB had a reason for harassing her. He deprived Georgette Paul, emasculated Boyd Henderson, got Sorenson to eat trash, and with this one, he harassed her beforehand. The things he does to his vics before he kills them is more important than the actual killing. Obviously, he has a reason for it. Those are the activities we need to be focusing on.”

  TK nodded, and I followed him past Remy out onto the sidewalk. Remy watched us from the Wilkins’ doorway. TK and I stood at the end of her walkway, looking up and down the street.

  I motioned to the other side. “Residential but with enough activity for someone to go unnoticed if he wanted to spy or leave something at the house.”

  TK nodded. Two story, brick twin homes lined Megan Wilkins’ block on either side. They all had porches and walkways, short flights of steps leading to the front doors. Alleys on either side. The street was two way so there was parking on both sides. It was busy even in the middle of the day. People walked up and down the block, some with their dogs. Cars passed continuously in either direction. While we stood there, a UPS truck stopped about five houses down and the driver jumped out to deliver a package. Large trees lined the edges of the sidewalk. Anyone inconspicuous enough could linger here without raising any alarms, particularly if they acted like they were supposed to be here.

  “See if the locals canvassed the street—someone might have seen this guy and just not know it,” I suggested.

  “That was one of the first things we did, Agent Bishop.” It was Jory’s voice. I heard it seconds before I saw him crossing the street. Sunglasses obscured his eyes, but his sexy megawatt smile was firmly in place. My breath suddenly left my body.

  He shook TK’s hand and addressed both of us with his back toward me. “We have a couple of people who think they saw a man lurking around in an older, light blue Honda Civic the day Wilkins was killed. One neighbor said she saw a man at Wilkins’ door around quarter to six, but she didn’t get a good look at his face, and she didn’t see him go inside. We’ve already arranged for composite sketches, but without more information, I’m not sure it will get us anywhere. We can’t prove this guy had anything to do with it.”

  I opened my mouth to speak but staring at Jory’s back the words wouldn’t come out. TK spoke for me. “You can always run it on the news as a person of interest.”

  Remy had come slowly down the walk when he saw Jory approach. “Yeah, but if this guy is the same guy and he’s all over the country, that’s not going to do any good,” he said. “I mean if he doesn’t live here…“

  Jory nodded but said, “Yeah, but what else have we got to work with? We’ll run it as soon as we have a decent sketch. Tell the media we think he’s a witness, and we just need to ask him some questions.”

  “I’d like to talk to the daughter,” TK said.

  “Sure thing,” Remy said. “Her dad is bringing her into town today to meet with us.”

  Jory s
lapped Remy lightly on the back. “Why don’t you take Agent Bennett over to the division now to meet them.” He motioned toward me. “We’ll meet you there later.”

  Unblinking, Remy stared at Jory until the moment grew slightly awkward. Then he sighed and uttered a gruff, “Come on,” to TK under his breath. He stalked off with TK in tow.

  I waited until they had driven off in Remy’s unmarked car before saying, “We need to talk.”

  Jory grasped the back of my elbow and steered me across the street to his car. I let him usher me into the passenger’s seat. I watched him move around the front of the car, my heart teetering a little at the sight of him, at being able to look at him without censoring myself or worrying who would see me do it. He was clean shaven, his hair trimmed perfectly, his suit crisply pressed. He smiled at me again as he got into the car, that old boyish smile, the one that made my heart flutter at thirty-six. The one that brought to mind adolescent doodles with our names joined together in a heart.

  We got three blocks from Megan Wilkins’ house and I said, “There’s something I need to tell you, but I think you should pull over.”

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  We rode in silence. I resisted the urge to wring my hands. He pulled up in front of the hotel where TK and I were staying. He took his sunglasses off and placed them on the dash. He reached for the door handle, but I put my hand on his forearm. Before I knew what was happening, I blurted out the news. “I’m pregnant.”

  I expected shock or tension—some indication from him that this news was indeed a complication in his already convoluted situation. Instead, he looked like he had just won the lottery. I expelled a long breath that I felt like I’d been holding for three months. Grinning, Jory gripped my face and kissed me hard on the mouth. He pulled me toward him, trying to hold me, but in the confines of the front seat of the car, it was awkward. He released me but kept one of my hands in his. “When are you due?” he asked.