Cold Truth

15

Regan was on her second cup of coffee when the doorbell rang on Monday morning. She glanced at the clock: 7:45.

“I’ve got some good news,” Mitch told her when she opened the door, “and some… well, some theories.”

“Give me the good news first.” She waved him in and he followed her down the hall into the kitchen. “Then you can give me theories.”

“The good news is that I have names for two more of the victims on your father’s mystery list.”

Mitch set his black case on the floor next to the kitchen table and took out a folder.

“May 21, 1983. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Elaine Marchand. Age twenty-nine.” He glanced up at her. “Want to take a wild guess on the cause of death?”

“Strangulation. After having been sexually assaulted.”

“The file didn’t specify the order, but that would be my guess.”

“What else do you have there?” She leaned over to peek, and he folded the paper to shield his notes.

“Depends. Are you going to drink all that coffee yourself?” he asked.

“Sorry. I’ll get you a cup.” She went to the cupboard and took out a mug. “You were saying…”

“ Charlotte, North Carolina. February 1, 1986. Raquel Sheriden.” He watched her pour the coffee and waited until she turned back to him. “Age…”

“Late twenties, early thirties. Raped and strangled.”

“You’re good at this,” he deadpanned. “Ever think about working for the government? I hear the FBI is looking for a few good agents.”

She smiled and handed him the mug.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that none of these murders have been solved.”

“You really are good at this.” He sipped the hot coffee carefully.

“Where did you get all the info?”

“From the Bureau computer files.” He poured half-and-half into the cup and stirred it with the spoon she’d used. “And that’s not all I got.”

“What else?”

“I have a list of over forty other uncannily similar, unsolved murders that have occurred over the past twenty-five years. Same MO. All different parts of the country. Heaviest in the south for several of those years, though. We’ll have to take a look at that.”

“Forty!” Regan’s eyes widened. “Forty…”

“And those were only the ones I was able to find with ease. God knows how many there might be that were never entered into the system.”

“So there could be more.”

“There could be way more,” he said soberly. “Now, of course, we have some work to do to determine if these others were in fact likely victims of our man. We’ll have to take a look at each case individually, but the coincidences are uncanny.”

“What about these other places…” She searched the table for the original list, found it on the bottom of the pile. “ Turkey, Panama, Croatia…” She looked up at him. “How do we find out about those places?”

“That will be a little trickier, but I have someone at the Bureau working on that. In the meantime, look here.” He took two maps from his case and spread one out on the table, moving the coffee cup out of the way. “This is a map of the United States. I’ve circled in red all of the cities we talked about, but it’s a little hard to see, so I bought some colored pushpins. Is there a place we can hang this?”

“How about over there on the basement door?”

“Works for me.” He tacked the upper corners to the door. “This will be fine, as long as no one wants to go downstairs.”

“Show me.” She pointed to the map.

“Let me get the pins in place. We’ll start by pinpointing the places on your dad’s list with red pins.”

“The known victims of the Bayside Strangler.”

“Right.” He proceeded to place red tacks into the map. “Now, for those murders along the Jersey Shore, I’m placing one red tack to represent all, since it was basically one place. Then we had Pittsburgh… Charlotte… Corona… Memphis…”

Regan stepped closer to take a look.

“Are we going to assume that the dates and places on that list represent murders?”

He nodded. “I think it’s a safe assumption. When you look at the whole picture, everything points that way.”

Mitch leaned back against the counter. “I think we agree the Bayside Strangler and the man who committed these other murders are the same person.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“And I think that whoever he is, and for reasons that we don’t yet understand, he wrote to your father over the years.” Mitch walked back to the table for his mug. “’Hey, Landry, remember me?’”

“He sent Dad notes to keep him up-to-date on his activities. Bragging about his exploits. And my dad started to keep a record of when he received them, and where they were postmarked.”

“We need to find the rest of your father’s files and see what he did with all of this information.”

“He would have turned them over to someone,” Regan said. “Something like this, so many victims in so many areas, he’d have gone straight to the FBI. He’d have kept copies of the letters, but he wouldn’t have kept this to himself.”

“I think we’d have better success searching the file boxes here than we would at the Bureau. Without knowing where he sent the information or to whom, or when, there’s no telling where it might be now. I’ll ask John Mancini to have someone there in the office look into it, but it’s such a long shot, it’s almost not worth the time. Unless an official investigation was started and documented, it will be impossible. With the passage of all these years, you have offices closing or moving, agents dying, retiring, or relocating. Your father’s files may be a mess, but we’re fairly certain that somewhere in the midst of it all we’ll find what we’re looking for. We have no such assurance relying on the Bureau records.”

Regan studied the list again.

“These dates range from the early eighties right through the late nineties. My guess would be that he passed it along as soon as he realized what was happening.”

“You think he understood that the killer was telling him every time he struck?”

“I think my dad would have figured that out. Remember that this was not unusual.” She waved the page at him. “He’d been contacted by killers many times over the past thirty years. Some wanted to confess to him, some wrote to taunt him. Others challenged him. Catch me if you can, that sort of thing.”

“Why your father?”

“It all started with a book he wrote in 1975. He’d interviewed a killer named Willie Miles, who was on death row in Florida for murdering his wives… that would be three former wives. My dad said he’d followed the case for the newspaper he was working for at the time, but thought it was a pretty interesting story.”

“Your dad’s background was in journalism?”

“Yes. Anyway, apparently Willie got chatty on his cell block and talked about how this writer from up north had come to see him, and how he was going to be famous because this writer was going to write a book about him, and one of the other inmates picked up on it. This second one wrote to Dad a few times. I guess he had told someone else there about it, and before my dad knew it, he was getting mail from other men on death row, too. Then some who were not yet on death row, and some from other states. And then some who had not as yet been caught.”

“Why do you suppose they reached out to him?”

“I think they thought he’d make them famous. Write a book about them, too. The press had picked up on the story, about my dad getting all this mail, and I guess everyone wanted their fifteen minutes. It did die down after a few years, but from time to time he still heard from inmates.” She smiled wryly. “Sometimes they wrote just to tell him how wrong he was about something or other he’d written. That’s how he came into contact with Curtis Channing, the serial killer who, ultimately, was responsible for his death.”

“The killer who put your dad’s name on the hit list that he passed on to someone else.”

“Archer Lowell. The man who shot my father.”

“And you’re certain-you are positive-that your father saved all this correspondence?”

“In one place or another. I’d bet on it.”

“Right. It all comes back to finding the right box.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“We can scour the boxes while we wait.”

“Wait for what?”

“For someone to respond to my inquiries. I sent a lot of emails and made a lot of phone calls yesterday to my office, as well as to several local police departments, state law enforcement agencies, whomever would have investigated these other homicides, asking them to fax over copies of their investigative reports.”

“All forty victims plus the four from Dad’s list?”

“Might as well take a look at the big picture. To that end, I have a bunch of bright yellow pins. We’ll use those to mark those other forty victims I tracked down on the computer.”

“Why segregate those?”

“Because we still have to put that list in order of date and integrate them into a master list. As we set up files on each of those, and confirm that they’re most likely victims of the same killer, we’ll exchange the yellow pin for a red one.”

“And when we have all red pins, we’ll have a complete list.”

“Until others come out of the woodwork.”

“Let’s take our coffee into the office and check that fax machine. I thought I heard it ring earlier.” Regan reached for the remote, and was about to turn off the television. “That’s that police chief from one of those bay towns…”

She increased the volume.

“… but you’ll have to ask the Hasboro Police Department for that information,” he was saying.

“Can you give us any information on the condition of the woman who was attacked last night? Has she been able to identify the man who attacked her?”

“I really can’t give you any information, Heather. This is an ongoing investigation…”

“But you can confirm that this woman did survive the attack?”

“One of the young women who was attacked over the weekend did survive. That’s all I want to say at this time.”

“Chief Denver, Bowers Inlet Police Department, we thank you for your time.” The camera switched back to the morning host. “We’ll be right back.”

“There’s been another one. Another murder in Bowers Inlet.” Regan frowned.

“At least one, apparently. Did you hear him refer to another police department? Started with an H.”

“I didn’t catch the name.”

“The Bureau sent an agent to Bowers to work with their department after the first four murders. Let me give him a call, see what’s going on.”

“While you do that, I think I’ll move all this paperwork of yours into the office. There’s some plywood in the barn, we can bring a piece in and pin the map on it, stand it up in front of the bookcases.”

She gathered up the files on the kitchen table and took them down the hall to the office. After setting the papers on the large desk, she raised the shade on the window and let the morning in.

“I had to leave voice mail for Rick. In the meantime, how about you show me where the plywood is?”

“It’s right over there, in the barn.” She pointed out the window, then opened the top desk drawer and took out a key, which she handed to him. “This is for the main door.”

“You’re not coming?”

She hesitated. “I’ll stay here and see if I can put this in order. Looks like someone was eager to share.” She pointed to the fax machine, where a pile of paper overflowed the receive tray. The red light blinked furiously, indicating it was out of paper and had more pages to transmit.

“Okay. I can go right out the back door?”

She nodded and reloaded the paper tray, then hit the Resume button. Within seconds, the fax began to print again. Page after page after page.

Regan looked out the window and watched Mitch stride across the wide drive to the barn. He unlocked the door easily and went inside. Less than five minutes later, he was on his way back, holding a large piece of plywood over his head.

“There’s a lot of good wood in there,” Mitch was saying as he came into the room. He lowered the wood and leaned it against the bookcase. “And a lot of caution tape. I’m sorry, Regan. I knew about what happened to your dad there, and I just wasn’t thinking.”

She nodded. “It’s okay. The tape is still in there?”

“Yes. Haven’t you…?”

“No. I haven’t been in there since the day he was shot. I just can’t bring myself to go in.” She smiled sadly. “It must sound silly to you.”

“Not at all. In a way, I’m surprised that you’re living here.”

“I hadn’t intended to. I came back to clean out my dad’s things, pack up my personal belongings, family things I wanted to keep, then have the property sold. I hadn’t planned on staying. But I saw the story about the women being murdered at the shore, and it reminded me of those notes I found…”

“And you couldn’t walk away from the story.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I can. Not until all of this is resolved.”

“Well, let’s see if we can make some progress here today, so you can get on with your life. Toss me that container of tacks, would you, please? Let’s get the map up.”

“You have a ton of faxes here,” she told him as they secured the map onto the plywood backing.

“That was fast.” He leaned the map against the bookshelf and reached for the pile of paper she handed to him. He leafed through, reading aloud, “Pennsylvania State Police. Alabama… Texas… New Mexico… and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation sure has a lot to say.”

He skimmed the fax messages that accompanied the various reports.

“ Leary, Georgia. Colquitt. Ideal…” He shook his head. “Apparently they’re still going through their records.”

“And there are more faxes coming through.” She pointed to the machine, where sheet after sheet slid into the tray.

“Let’s put these in order by date so we have a chronological- That’s my phone.”

He pulled the ringing phone from his pants pocket and answered it, then wandered to the window and looked out while he listened.

“I think we need to have a sit-down-and-share, Cisco,” he said after several moments. “There or here, doesn’t matter… Okay, sure, I understand. I can be there in…”

Mitch looked at Regan and asked, “How far is it from here to the beach?”

“ New Jersey has a whole coast made up of beaches.”

“Bowers Inlet.”

“Maybe an hour and a half. Depending on which way you go.”

“You know a shortcut?”

“Sure. I’m a Jersey girl. We never take the main roads.”

“Have lunch waiting for me,” Mitch said into his phone. “I’ll be there before noon.”

He folded the phone and slipped it back into his pocket.

“What’s going on in Bowers Inlet?” she asked.

“Seems the latest victim-the one the chief of police was talking about on TV?-is the cousin of the only detective in Bowers Inlet.”

“But she’s alive?”

“Alive, but still unconscious, so they haven’t been able to get any information from her about her attacker.”

Regan sat down on the arm of a chair and covered her face with her hands. “This is going way too fast. It’s way too big. I can’t keep up with it.”

“I’m sure the police in Bowers Inlet feel the same way.”

“Okay, we need a game plan.” She stood, her hands on her hips. “We have to keep this organized or it will get out of hand. We’ll lose sight of some information that might prove to be important later on. Let’s start by getting the map up. Put pins in all of the locations where we think there’s been a murder that could be connected.”

“Maybe you can do that while I drive down to meet with Cisco.” Mitch handed Regan the list and the box of pins, then began to gather all the faxes. “Maybe by the time I get back-”

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “I’m going with you. The deal with John Mancini was that I’d open my files to the FBI, but in return, I get information up front.”

“I’m not sure that up front means you get to tag along.”

“That was the deal.” More or less. “I can help you with this. For the past few weeks, I’ve been going through my father’s files. There may be things I’ve read that might mean something to your investigation.”

“Such as…?”

“Something I hear, or see, in Bowers Inlet might ring a bell with something I read in one of his files.”

Mitch searched his pockets for his keys.

“Besides, you need me.” She folded her reading glasses and searched for their case amid the papers on the desk. Finding it, she tucked the glasses inside and dropped it into her handbag.

“I do?”

“Sure. I know all the shortcuts.”