Double Vision Page 4

  She glanced at the photo of victim one in Porter’s hand. Twenty-six-year-old Wendy Ulrich had been found in the parking garage outside of her apartment complex in Fairfax. The brunette was shot three times in the chest. A receipt from Demetri’s Diner takeout shop was found with her. It had been ripped in half, one half placed over each eyelid. She had been customer number three hundred and thirty-three.

  Porter handed Jenna the picture of the second victim, Maitlyn O’Meara. The middle-aged woman had been killed at a rest stop off of exit 9B, just a town over from the site of the first victim’s murder. She, too, had been shot three times. From the wounds, the ME had determined that the killer most likely approached the victim on foot and shot her in the back when she ran. Blood smears indicated that she had rolled over, where he then shot her in the chest from a distance, then once in the head at point-blank range. He’d cut her driver’s license in half and left one piece over each closed eyelid.

  “You think the eye thing has to do with self-loathing? He doesn’t want the victims to see him, so he covers their eyes?” Porter said, now studying the third and last confirmed victim’s picture.

  “Could be,” Jenna answered, but something about the submissive blue she associated with this killer tugged at her. She pushed it away. That could be examined later. “But their eyes are closed under the pieces left on top of the lids. I seriously doubt all three victims died from gunshot wounds with their eyes already closed. He has to be closing them.”

  “That’s another difference from the Lowman’s shooting, then,” Saleda remarked.

  Porter held up a hand. “Wait, but if he’s closing their eyes to keep them from seeing him, why the pieces over the eyes? Could he hate himself so much he needs a double layer?”

  “Doubtful. It’s more likely he’s using the pieces as a calling card. After all, they do always point us to his motivation for the kill,” Saleda said. “The receipt for order number 333. Maitlyn O’Meara’s driver’s license, when he obviously targeted her because her license plate number was 33 3RBC. The keys on victim three.”

  Jenna’s gaze flitted to the photo Porter held of the third victim, Ainsley Nickerson. Her ex-husband had found her inside her apartment, 333J, where he’d come by after she didn’t answer his phone calls about picking up their eight-year-old daughter from her weekend visit. She’d been shot in her bathtub, and two keys were placed over her closed eyes. One was her apartment key, the other a key to her mother’s home. Both had been removed from her own key ring.

  Jenna imagined a faceless shooter bending over this woman he’d just shot thrice in the torso to ease her eyelids shut, almost as though she were sleeping. The gesture was intimate. Tender, even. The act of closing someone’s eyes after death made blue burn even brighter in Jenna’s mind.

  “The pieces might be calling cards, but closing the eyes of the dead is something someone does as a gesture of reverence, of sorrow,” Jenna said. She tried to force her mind to see the crimes in the carmine shade her brain reserved for the needless, horrific acts of violence often committed by psychopaths with no driving force other than to derive shock value, but the cool blue kept creeping in and washing over it. “This guy isn’t trying to draw attention to himself or taunt us. He’s remorseful.”

  Saleda shrugged. “It could fit. If he’s schizophrenic, he wouldn’t necessarily have complete control. Maybe he realizes what he’s done after the fact.”

  “So him not closing people’s eyes at the grocery store makes even less sense . . .” Porter said.

  “Except the time and date still point to him as our UNSUB,” Saleda replied.

  “But what would make him deviate so drastically from the current MO? Why seven people and not just one person who happened to be checking out at Lowman’s at 3:33 or whatever?” Porter asked.

  “Good damned question,” Jenna mumbled, taking the picture of Ainsley Nickerson from him. The redhead had two bullets in her chest, one in her right shoulder. If the shooter was facing her, that was consistent with the thinking that the Lowman’s shooter was right-handed. “If the shooter fired at Ainsley Nickerson standing about six feet away from the bathtub, he must’ve fired in rapid succession. That’s about the only way to explain the shoulder shot. Recoil. Someone military-trained—hell, even a redneck who spent every evening growing up in his backyard shooting—would probably hit closer to the same mark on all three shots, right?”

  “Unless he trained with a military that spends all their time playing Xbox instead of at target practice,” Porter answered.

  “More evidence this guy isn’t trained. Check,” Jenna said.

  “So what now?” Porter asked, looking to Saleda.

  Saleda let the folder she’d been skimming drop to the table. She removed her black frames from her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Locals still have roadblocks set up to cover a sixty-mile radius. I’ve got Irv cross-referencing the Triple Shooter’s known victims with the grocery store victims just in case we get lucky. I’m not really expecting a connection, but it’d be nice. In the meantime, Porter, you and I are going to comb these witness testimonies from Lowman’s and see if there’s anything we can hone in on that’s worth a follow-up. Teva and Dodd will keep poking around the crime scene a little more. Jenna, I want you to look over the Triple Shooter case file tonight, see if anything gives further insight into what might have caused his MO to change. Warning signs of escalation, patterns or cycles we’ve missed until now . . . anything.”

  Jenna gave her superior a nod. In other words, until something dislodged, it was up to them to pull leads out of thin air. The greatest kinds of cases.

  “It’d be nice if he just left us his address, phone number, and copies of all major credit cards,” Porter said, leaning back.

  “Now, where’s the fun in that? Where’s your sense of adventure, Porter?” Jenna laughed. She tucked the case file under her arm and made for the door.

  Porter sat up and watched over his shoulder as she walked away. “Hey, I didn’t say it couldn’t be fun! He could leave the phone number scrambled. Or hey! His address could be spelled in answers in a crossword puzzle.”

  Jenna opened the door. “So in other words, you’d like our next serial killer to be the Riddler from Batman?”

  Porter lifted both hands. “Perfect. Would that be too much to ask?”

  Jenna glanced at Saleda, and they shared an eye roll. Then she looked back at Porter. “I personally like my villains a little more Wicked Witch of the West. Easier to get rid of.” She shrugged. “See you guys later.”

  She let the door close behind her. At least this way, she might get to read Ayana a story before bath time, even if her brain was filled with images of dead bodies draped over produce bins and blood-smeared floors.

  Besides, she was dying to ask Yancy what his thought process was when he’d told her to find Molly Keegan. They were planning to go to dinner, so she’d have a good chance then.

  Murder, pictures of dead people’s faces, and drippy, romantic candles. All in a day.

  6

  He clawed at his head, but his fingernails were chewed so low that he could only feel his stubby fingers raking against his scalp. Itching, itching. Always itching!

  Focus!

  He sat on his hands on the bleachers. They wouldn’t find him here. Couldn’t get to him here. He was safe.

  But then, on the basketball court, there they were: the numbers. Oh, no. Not again! You swore they would stay away!

  He closed his eyes as tight as he could, shook his head. But no matter what he did, the numbers burned in front of him like they were branded onto the backs of his eyelids. He would have to follow her now. Just like always.

  No! He mustn’t! The police would find him if he did now!

  But if he didn’t follow her, they would find him, and they were far worse than others. He was their Hand of Justice, and he had to remai
n so.

  Maybe she’d done nothing. Maybe it was a false alarm, and there would be no reason for him to punish her. He would follow just in case, then go home safe and sound, sure they would have no reason to chase him.

  • • •

  Yancy jogged around Jenna’s Blazer and opened the driver’s side door. Just because a woman drove was no reason not to be a gentleman.

  He grabbed the door and yanked it wider just as she cracked it open. “Madame,” he said, giving a little bow.

  “You really don’t have to do that, you know. We’ve been dating, in some capacity, since last summer and sleeping together since Christmas Eve. I’m pretty sure the courting stage is over,” Jenna said.

  Yancy slammed her door, then reached for the duct-taped side mirror. He pressed down the end of the tape-job that was quickly losing its stickiness. “In that case, if you won’t let me pick up the check for dinner, at least let me take you to the hardware store and buy some Krazy Glue for this thing.”

  “Hey. Don’t insult the duct tape,” she replied, grinning as she gave him a playful smack on the arm. “It might not be perfect, but it gets the job done. Plus it’s made in silver for a reason. Silver is a classy color. Matches everything.”

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her into him for a quick hug. Damn, how had a gimp like him gotten lucky enough to end up with a girl like Jenna? Proof that the world works in mysterious ways. Some white-collar chump out there was sitting in his billion-dollar mansion, wondering why he was all alone, and it was really just because he was too busy making heaps of money to be at a theme park in the middle of the workweek when some deranged psycho decided to shoot up the place.

  Now if only Yancy could talk her into marrying him one of these days.

  She pulled back from him, but grabbed his hand and twined her fingers in his. “Come on. I’m starved.”

  Once they were inside the little Italian place and seated at a table in the far right corner of the hole-in-the-wall establishment, Jenna groaned her typical end-of-a-long-work-day sigh.

  “How was your day?” she asked.

  He sat back, gnawed on a breadstick. “Eh, typical. A couple of kids playing with the phone who got a nasty surprise when police officers showed up at their door, another guy who burned his ass trying to light his farts on fire.”

  “That’s typical?” Jenna laughed.

  “Nobody ever said the life of an emergency dispatch operator was boring. Got another domestic call from that same house again,” Yancy said, his heart plummeting as he remembered it.

  It was the third time he’d talked CiCi Winthrop through one of her husband’s drunken rages in the past couple of months, but it didn’t seem to get any easier. He did what he was trained to do while on the phone with her: take her information, get her to a safe place in the home if she couldn’t leave, and try his best to distract her while she waited for help.

  Unfortunately, that meant that over the course of three phone calls, he’d learned that when she was five, she’d wanted to catch a snail for show and tell, but her mother said they only came out at night. She spent the next couple of years unable to sleep in the dark because she was afraid giant slugs came into her room at night. He’d found out she was allergic to strawberries and that the only time she’d been to the beach was when she was ten. He now knew that even before he’d taken any of her emergency calls, she’d been in the hospital twice because her husband had beat her up, and the second time, she’d been nine weeks pregnant and was discharged after losing her unborn baby. Unfortunately, both of those occurrences hadn’t involved 911 calls. Just visits to the ER following bizarre “accidents” that no one could do anything about since the victim had, at the time, stuck to her stories of falling down stairs and bumping into shelves in the dark.

  “Oh, no,” Jenna said, frowning. “Not again. Did they arrest him this time?”

  Yancy shook his head, closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I hung up with her when the cops checked in at the scene, but I doubt it. The last two times there was no visible evidence of physical abuse, no children to check, thank God.” A lump grew in Yancy’s throat at this statement. CiCi wished there were. “No property harm at other calls, either. On the one hand, I’m glad he hasn’t hurt her again, but on the other, sometimes I wish he’d give her a good smack across the cheek so when they came, they’d have to see it and she wouldn’t try to tell them it was a false alarm.”

  Jenna tore a breadstick in half. “Has she ever tried for a restraining order?”

  Yancy raised his eyebrows. “This girl is the poster child for battered person’s syndrome, Jenna. She thinks the second she did that, her husband would be right there, know what she’d done, and kill her as soon as he could get his hands on her.”

  Jenna blew out a long breath. “I’ll probably work in psychiatry my whole life and never completely understand learned helplessness.”

  That’s because you have the opposite response to being a victim. When Jenna was barely a teenager, she had helped police catch her mother, Claudia, for killing multiple husbands. Before the cops arrested Claudia, though, Jenna’s intervention had culminated in a rampage during which Claudia stabbed Jenna’s brother, and she’d fought her mother off long enough for the police to show up. Then just last year, when Claudia had tried to kill Jenna and her dad again, Yancy had seen with his own eyes how Jenna had responded to her mother’s freakish tactics. Claudia had held Jenna’s daughter as bait, designed a twisted ploy so that the only way Jenna’s dad could live was if Jenna gave up the advantage of having Yancy in the cabin—which was supposed to have been a safe house—to fight. But Jenna hadn’t broken. Instead, she’d drawn herself up to her full height, her voice steady and calm as she’d said the two words he could still hear so clearly: “Yancy, go.” He’d carried Vern out of the cabin, and she’d faced Claudia alone.

  “Easy in concept, impossible to understand. Agreed,” he replied. “So, yeah. Call from that domestic, a couple of other simple fender benders. Oh, and some call from a kid . . .”

  Jenna rolled her eyes then looked at the table. She transferred the uneaten half of the breadstick from one hand to the other.

  “I’d ask you what went on today, but since I took the call, I probably shouldn’t,” Yancy said.

  She dropped the breadstick, bowed her head, and rubbed her neck with her right hand. She glanced upward at him. “Since when does knowing you shouldn’t do something ever stop you from doing it?”

  He smiled. “Never. I just wanted the invitation. So, tell me about it.”

  Jenna gave him the quick synopsis of what she’d seen at the scene, the conclusion that it had to be the Triple Shooter, and their subsequent findings from there. She shrugged. “And we have no clue where to go next. We obviously didn’t find him before, so what makes this time any different other than we have more than double the body count and a set of circumstances that make no sense at all?”

  “So we’ve got an untrained, redneck schizophrenic obsessed with the number three out there shooting people. What’s the problem?”

  “You have a sick sense of humor, Yance. You know that? Besides, I just said he’s probably untrained and possibly schizophrenic. I deliberately said he’s probably not a redneck. Try and pay attention to the details.”

  “Right, right. If he grew up shooting in his backyard, that would mean he’d be able to put fifteen bullets right between a possum’s eyes while he’s hanging upside down on the old tire swing, and all that. I listen, I just creatively interpret sometimes,” he said, smiling even though his thoughts trailed in their own direction at the mention of bullets. He could still hear little Molly’s voice as she told him about the shots fired. “I’m serious, Jenna. You need to know where to start looking for a guy who kills in threes. So you have to ask what might cause a crazy to latch onto the number three. Best place to go to think of reasons someone might be preoccupied wi
th a number is to the person involved in this case who’s fixated on numbers, too.”

  7

  “He seemed less than thrilled to hear from me,” Dodd said as Jenna coasted the Blazer onto the freeway toward the house where Molly Keegan lived with her mother and stepfather. When Jenna had told Saleda she planned to interview Molly a second time, Dodd insisted on coming with her. He’d found Molly at the crime scene, too, and since then, he’d seemed practically territorial regarding her. Whether or not the old codger was afraid Jenna might figure out the Triple Shooter before him, though, was irrelevant. As far as Jenna was concerned, they both wanted the same ending to this saga, so he could tag along all he wanted as long as he didn’t hinder her process.

  Now Liam Tyler’s concerned face filled Jenna’s mind, and an amber color flashed in. She pushed it back. No way she was going to try to interpret it at this point. It could mean just about anything in the color dictionary that was her brain, or it could imply something entirely new altogether. Intelligence, denial, caution, deceit, goofiness: all were represented by various shades of orange to Jenna, so what Liam Tyler’s orange said about him was anyone’s guess. At this point, the only association she made with him was his protectiveness of Molly, and for that she couldn’t blame him.

  “How’d you manage to get him to let us come by, then?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. He said a couple of choice phrases to me before the mom took the phone from him and told me to come on over. Said they’d do anything they could to help us catch the person who did this.”

  Rita Keegan’s limp form crossed Jenna’s mind. Molly’s grandmother had lain facedown in her own blood near the checkout line, the Triple Shooter’s unlucky sixth victim. Regardless of whether or not Molly’s mom wanted to keep Molly out of the mix, losing a parent was impetus enough to shoo away any misgivings you might have about letting your daughter talk more with police. Jenna should know. It was the same way she’d felt about police interviewing Ayana after Claudia had tried to kill her father last year.