Killing Fear

THIRTY

Jim Gage spent all night reading and rereading the reports of all four crime scenes.

What had gone so wrong seven years ago? The politics of the time were such that lab priorities were directed from on high. And while the district attorney’s office didn’t oversee the crime lab, their priorities were the lab’s priorities. When a case was going to trial, everything else was pushed back so that the lab could focus on the immediate.

Overworked staff, limited resources, politicians directing priorities, everything conspired against him running a perfect lab. But it was still damn good and Jim couldn’t fathom that anyone on his team-people he worked with, socialized with, respected-could kill. Mistakes happened, more often than he wanted to admit, but killing to fix them?

He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence, the facts, showed that someone other than Theodore Glenn had killed Anna Clark.

But if Robin McKenna was the intended victim, then it was personal and not because some ill, misguided cop or criminalist was trying to right wrongs.

They’d talked around the issue earlier when he, Will, and Agent Vigo first discussed the possibility, but they had a more immediate concern than finding Anna Clark’s killer. Theodore Glenn was still a threat and the major focus of their resources.

But now, at night, with nothing else on his mind, Jim couldn’t help but think about the Anna Clark case and what happened. If Robin was the intended victim, then why?

He made a list of all law enforcement they’d identified, even those who had left the jurisdiction. It only made sense that someone with access to evidence had planted the hair in Anna’s hand. That gave them six suspects. It was a reasonable conjecture, but right there Jim saw holes in the theory. A good defense lawyer would point out that someone else had been convicted, that the M.O. matched perfectly-except for the initials which no one had noticed for seven years. Maybe they’d intentionally connected the slash marks to make it appear they were in the form of initials? Why hadn’t it been brought out at trial?

Jim could play devil’s advocate with the best of them. And the truth was, there was no physical evidence that anyone other than Theodore Glenn had killed Anna. Even if they narrowed the list, without a confession they couldn’t put the killer behind bars.

Something tickled the back of Jim’s mind. It was that page from Anna’s apartment to Will.

Will was supposed to go up to the apartment.

Was he supposed to be the intended victim? Who would want to kill both Robin and Will?

It brought him right back to Theodore Glenn, who had obsessed over the two of them. What if he-but the time line put him in the bar at the time Anna was killed. He couldn’t have made the call.

Jim wasn’t a profiler. He looked at the evidence, and the evidence just wasn’t there. But the beginning of an idea began to take shape. He called Will, his voice mail picked up.

“Will, it’s Jim Gage. I wanted to bounce a couple ideas off you. No rush, call me in the morning.” He hung up.

Thing was, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. Even though it was well after one in the morning on the East Coast, Jim called Dr. Dillon Kincaid at his house. Dillon was a private practice forensic psychiatrist who had consulted often with the San Diego Police Department until he moved to Washington last year.

Dillon answered on the third ring, half-asleep.

“Sorry to wake you,” Jim said. “It’s Jim Gage from San Diego.”

“Jim. What’s wrong?” He sounded more alert.

“Everyone’s fine,” Jim said. “I have a difficult case and wanted to run it by you.”

“Hold on.”

A minute later, Dillon picked up another extension. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“This is loosely related to the Theodore Glenn case.”

“Have you caught him?”

“No. It’s about his last victim. We think someone else killed her and framed Glenn.”

Dillon didn’t say anything for a long minute. “That would mean someone with inside knowledge of the case killed her.”

“Yes. A cop or a criminalist.”

“And how can I help?”

“Will is working with a Fed on this, Agent Hans Vigo. We had a talk this morning about the intended victim being Robin McKenna. It was her roommate who was killed, but Anna was supposed to be out of town the night she died.”

“Go on.”

“What I can’t get my mind around is that someone-either the victim or the killer-called Will Hooper at twelve fifty-five a.m. from the victim’s apartment. Anna was killed within thirty minutes of that call.”

“So she could have been dead or alive at that point?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I don’t know, someone to bounce ideas off of. I feel like something is here, but I can’t clearly see it.”

“Let’s backtrack. Tell me about Anna.”

“She was a twenty-one-year-old stripper at RJ’s. A lesbian, but most people didn’t know that. She’d been roommates with Robin McKenna for six months. Quiet, kept to herself. She’d apparently been molested by her father for years, according to Robin. Her mother divorced him, and she and her daughter were trying to work out a relationship, which is why Anna was heading to Big Bear for a weekend with her mom. But her mother was delayed, and Anna apparently turned around and came back to San Diego, though that’s conjecture.”

“And Anna knew Will?”

“She would have had his number because he interviewed all the employees of RJ’s during the investigation into the first three murders.”

“Where’s Anna’s father?”

“Back east somewhere. You don’t think he killed his daughter?”

“And planted evidence against Glenn? No, unless he’s a cop.”

“No. A middle manager at some computer company in Massachusetts.”

“What about Robin McKenna?”

“She was closing at the bar that night. She was delayed-when Will saw the lights on in the bar, he went there instead of the apartment across the street.”

“Wait-she was in the bar while someone else called Will from her apartment? Why did Will think that Robin had called him?”

“Because Anna was out of town.”

“And a cop would just go over to the house and not call back?”

“They were romantically involved.”

“Ah. So he gets the page and heads over there. I remember the Glenn case. He targeted strippers. Why couldn’t he have been the one to kill Anna? There was evidence, right?”

“Yes, but-we now have new evidence. An alibi for Glenn. It’s pretty tight, Dillon.”

“So you don’t think Glenn could have killed Anna.”

“No.”

“What physical evidence did you have?”

“Hair.”

“Easy enough to plant. What about the M.O.?”

“On the surface, identical. Multiple cuts with an X-ACTO knife, body doused in bleach, throat slit. But looking at the evidence more critically, the cuts appear shallower than the first three victims and there are fewer marks. We also believe that the marks were made postmortem, but that’ll be hard to prove at this point.”

“Why wasn’t that noticed at the autopsy?”

“If the coroner was rushed, it wouldn’t have been obvious. Again, we’re going off the crime scene photos on that one and it’s a close call, especially after the bleach.”

“Hmm.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“Was Robin the intended victim?”

“I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“Okay, let’s play this out. Anna Clark was supposed to be out of town. I assume this was common knowledge?”

“Yes.”

“So the killer would have every reason to believe that Robin would be coming home, alone, that night. So he breaks into the apartment, and either finds Anna there, or Anna arrives while he’s waiting for Robin. He has to kill her.”

“If Anna arrived while the killer was there, the killer would have to have called Will.”

“Was the phone dusted?”

Jim looked over the reports. “Yes. Only smudged prints.”

“That’s odd.”

Jim’s stomach sank. Why hadn’t he seen that before? There should have been clear prints from at least whomever used the phone last.

“The killer wore gloves. Called Will. Why did he want Will to find the body?”

“If Robin was the intended victim, the killer knew about Will’s relationship with her. Wanted Will to be the one to find her,” Dillon said.

“That’s almost exactly Glenn’s M.O.,” Jim said. “Glenn got his thrills first from making his victims suffer, then watching Robin’s reaction to the news when she learned they were dead.”

“But Jim, Anna’s killer hasn’t killed again, at least not in the same manner. Which suggests that this was a personal crime. A premeditated crime of passion.”

“Passion?”

“Look at Robin’s ex-boyfriends, other people at the time who may have stalked her.”

“It sounds too coincidental that she would have two stalkers-Glenn and this unknown killer.”

“She led a public life, exposed herself in front of thousands of men. I can see how more than one might be unbalanced enough to kill.”

“But to also be a cop?” Jim made a note. “At least this gives me something to go on. Thanks, Dillon.”

“Anytime, Jim. And I’ll think more on it. Call me if you have anything new, I’m happy to help. But you should run the scenario by Will and Agent Vigo. He’s a good guy, by the way. I’ve worked with him before.”

“Glad for the recommendation.”

Jim hung up, drew up a detailed time line and the list of suspects. He also made a note that perhaps someone in law enforcement who wasn’t directly involved in evidence collection had accessed the information. It wasn’t unheard of, and the evidence locker wasn’t restricted to law enforcement personnel. Anyone from the D.A.’s office to cops to the crime lab could go in there and simply sign in. They could easily lie about what evidence they were viewing. No one double-checked, unless they were removing it from the locker.

And something as small as a few hairs could easily be concealed.

Ten minutes later his doorbell rang. He rose from his desk, glanced out the peephole, confused more than concerned.

He opened the door. “You could have called.”

“I could have.”

Jim barely noticed the gun until three bullets hit him in the chest.