No Chance, page 4
She loved Tom. But hiding her mental health issues from him had taken its toll, so much so that he had become distant. She didn't blame him. It was tough being engaged to an FBI profiler. Never knowing when she would be called away.
But Valerie had begun to suspect that Tom knew there was more. She was worried that his recent ultimatums had come from that knowledge.
Does he know I'll end up like my mom and sis? she thought.
A darker idea came after that. One that made Valerie momentarily consider that Tom was unconsciously trying to break them apart now because he knew how hard it would be to take care of her when she became sick.
“No,” she said to herself immediately. “He's better than that.”
Up ahead, Charlie indicated and took a right turn.
The sign for the farm was partly obscured by an overgrown bush. The rust on it made Valerie think of all the forgotten places she'd been to in the past. Sometimes a place could be so empty that it echoed with her thoughts and with her fears.
Taking the turn, she moved onto the single-track road and headed towards the farmstead. Stalks of dead corn, too many to number, flanked the car as she moved along the bumpy road.
Valerie had a memory from a previous case of chasing a suspect through such a place in the dark. She just hoped there were no similar struggles to come on this case, but she couldn't be sure of that.
The fields soon gave way to a farmstead up ahead.
Parking in front of a large farmhouse, Valerie stepped out to see Charlie and Will waiting for her.
"It's a shame there was a murder here," Charlie said, pointing to house. “This place might be run down, but it could be beautiful.”
The door to the house opened and then the screen door followed. Stepping out into the cold air and then walking towards Valerie was a broad-shouldered man in a Kerry County Sheriff’s uniform.
He looked rugged to Valerie, with strong features that suggested a tenacity. Whether that tenacity would be a help or a hindrance remained to be seen.
Charlie nodded towards a hill where a large barn cordoned off with police tape sat. "I always fancied buying somewhere like this if I could afford it. Minus the police tape."
"It is beautiful, in a bleak sort of way," Will said.
"Hi, I'm Sheriff Carter," the towering figure of the sheriff said, shaking Valerie’s hand. It was a strong grip, and he had a steely look in his eyes that told Valerie he meant business. A black mustache sat on his top lip, and he reminded Valerie of the old Texas Rangers she had watched on television growing up. The man also had a slight twang to his accent, and although Valerie couldn’t quite place it, she was sure he wasn’t originally from the area.
"Pleasure to meet you," Valerie said. "I'm Agent Law, this is Agent Carlson and Doctor Will Cooper."
"Doctor?" the sheriff asked sounding surprised.
"He's an expert in cases like these," Valerie explained. "Our unit specializes in serial killers."
"And catching them," Charlie added.
"That's good to hear," Sheriff Carter said. "I gotta tell you, we could use all the expertise we can get."
“Let me ask you, Sheriff,” Valerie said. “Do you believe these three murders are the result of a lone killer?”
The sheriff ran his fingers through his mustache. He then sighed, looked at the ground momentarily as if in deep thought, and then stared directly into Valerie’s eyes. “An evil has come to Kerry County, Agent Law. And I believe he's killed three of us already, and they'll be more up ahead."
Valerie nodded. She was glad to know that the sheriff was on her side.
“Let’s do our best to stop that from happening.”
Charlie looked up over to the crest of a hill and pointed to a tree near the barn and police tape. "Is that where they found her?"
"Yes, Agent Carlson," the sheriff said.
“Call me Charlie.”
The sheriff smiled for the first time, and Valerie thought that he was quite handsome in the bleak cold.
"Follow me," Sheriff Carter said.
They walked in relative silence together as they headed up an incline towards an old beat-up tractor. Valerie recognized it immediately as the place where the third victim had been tied up.
The body had already been removed from inside.
Valerie ran her fingers across a strand of police tape. It’s yellow hue and stark words fluttered in an icy breeze which hugged the side of the hill.
“Forensics been and gone then?” she asked the sheriff.
“Yes, Ma’am,” the sheriff answered. “They dusted for prints but didn’t find any, and nothing we could take DNA from, either.”
Valerie reached up to the old tractor and pulled herself up onto its step.
She looked through the Perspex of the cab. Dried blood had poured out over the seat and floor where the body had once sat.
She looked at the steering wheel, where the photographs of the crime scene had revealed that the victim had had her wrists tied to it. Tied with what Charlie had identified as a sheet bend knot.
Valerie stepped down from the cab with a sigh. “I don’t think there is much here to give us a lead.”
Another icy blast of cold air fingered its way through the dead tree nearby and rustled in the surrounding bushes. Valerie felt a bleakness to the place. It was as if the murder had stained the very fabric of this once peaceful farmstead. Even some of the tree’s branches were broken, like the place was decaying from the inside out.
“Should we contact the coroner who has carried out the autopsy?” Will asked.
Sheriff Carter let out a sigh of his own. He shook his head. “I’m really sorry about this, but the autopsy hasn’t been completed yet.”
“Why?” Charlie asked incredulously.
“Things tend to move a lot slower around here,” Sheriff Carter answered. “But I can hopefully have something for you by the end of today.”
This was not what Valerie wanted to hear. She knew that rural areas sometimes handled things at a more sedate pace than the FBI, but the clock was ticking. Jackson’s job and their unit were both hanging by a thread. She had to make a breakthrough.
“Sheriff,” Valerie said sternly, “we are working against the clock. We have our own pressures at the FBI and a schedule we have to keep to. But more than that, any delay, even an hour, means it’s one more hour with that murderer loose in your communities. We have to catch him before he kills anyone else.”
“I promise I’ll do everything I can to help, Agent Valerie. I mean, Agent Law.”
Valerie couldn’t help but smile at Sheriff Carter as he stumbled over his words. He had a certain charm to him. Behind that mustache, she realized for the first time that he was younger than he first appeared. And though he was probably experienced with the people in Kerry County, she sensed that he had never dealt with anything like this. Men often grew facial hair to appear more experienced than they were, and she wondered if that was what he was doing.
Either way, she decided not to be too hard on him.
“That’s okay, Sheriff Carter,” Valerie said. “If you are here to assist us as much as possible, I’m sure that will help us catch the killer quicker.”
“I just want to protect the people here.”
“In the report,” Will interjected, “it said that there was a witness?”
“Yes,” Sheriff Carter said. “The woman who owns this farmstead. Her name is Gina Connors. She bought the place from the Marlane family earlier this year.”
“Can you take us to her?” Charlie asked.
“Of course,” Sheriff Carter said. “She should be down this hill back in her farmhouse. I’ll take you.”
Valerie followed the towering figure of Sheriff Carter, glad to be putting the scene of that lonely tractor by the tree behind her for good.
But with no leads, she just hoped that the farm owner could give them some hint as to who the killer was.
CHAPTER SIX
Valerie passed a police officer guarding the front door and entered the farmhouse, noticing several red lettered envelopes on a sideboard as soon as she was inside. Two of the envelopes were adorned with the words “final notice”.
She immediately felt a sadness to the place. Looking at the mounting mail and patches of cobwebs, the otherwise cozy farmhouse spoke clearly to the owner’s financial worries.
Sheriff Carter led Valerie, Charlie, and Will along the rickety, old floorboards of the hallway until he stopped at another door, knocked, and waited.
“Hello?” a nervous voice said from inside the room.
“It’s Sheriff Carter, Gina.”
“Hold on,” the voice replied.
The sound of a click came, and the door unlocked. The wooden door pulled back to reveal the frightened face of a woman in her forties, her brown hair unceremoniously held up with a clasp, strands messily hanging from around it.
“You okay?” Carter asked.
“Yes … I … I think so …” She eyed Valerie.
“I’m Agent Law with the FBI, and these are my colleagues Agent Carlson and Doctor Cooper.”
Gina had the look of a rabbit stuck in headlights. She was not taking in the words exactly, this much was clear. She nodded vacantly and stepped back, letting them into a small office study.
More disorganized piles of papers were slumped on a small desk. Dusty bookcases reinforced Valerie’s impression that the woman was struggling with the upkeep of the place.
“We’re sorry to bother you,” Will began apologetically, “but we’re here from a special unit at the FBI, the Criminal Psychopathy Unit. We’re here to track down the killer, and we’re hoping you’ll be able to help us. Can you answer a few questions?”
Gina nodded vacantly again. Valerie felt uncomfortable at the motion. It reminded her all too much of her mother’s vacant head movements back at the psychiatric hospital at times.
“This has been a real shock to Gina,” Sheriff Carter said. “So, please go easy.” The sheriff ushered Gina into an old armchair and then brought her a glass of homemade lemonade from a nearby jug that had been kept cool on the windowsill.
The woman smiled. “Thanks, Glen.”
Sheriff Carter smiled softly. “Are you up for a few more questions, Gina?”
Gina took a sip of the lemonade. “It’s good stuff. Thanks for bringing it.”
Sheriff Carter looked almost bashful. He turned to Valerie. “I have a thing with making lemonade … eh … It’s …”
“Sweet,” Valerie found herself saying before snapping into a more professional tone. “Miss …”
“Please, call me Gina,” the woman said as Carter wrapped a blanket around her shoulders.
“Gina,” Valerie continued. “We were told you saw the killer. Is that right?”
“I don’t know what I saw,” she said, grimacing. “It … it moved like a shadow out there on the hill.”
“Was it a man, a woman?” Will asked.
“A man, I think,” she said, nervously. “But he was silhouetted against the sky. I just saw the shape of him. But I knew …”
She trailed off and looked distantly at a patch of peeling wallpaper.
Valerie felt so sorry for the woman. What she had seen had broken something inside of her. Trauma was often brought sharply into focus by shock.
“The man chased you?” Charlie asked.
“Yes …” she said, shivering. “I’m not sure, but I think he had a knife or something in his hand.”
“Did you see him interact with the victim at all?” Valerie inquired.
“No,” Gina said, letting out a slight sob. “He’d already done his dirty work.”
“So, you didn’t actually see him kill the victim …” Valerie pondered out loud.
“No,” answered Gina, sipping some more of the lemonade. “But you don’t have to be a detective to know evil when you see it. And whatever I saw up on that hill was evil, pure and simple. Have you never had that feeling with the FBI … I mean when you come face to face with a killer?”
Valerie knew exactly what Gina meant. It was an aspect of her work as a profiler that was usually brushed under the carpet. Agents weren’t allowed to have superstitious assertions about how they knew things. That had to be done with hard empirical facts.
But that didn’t change the fact that Valerie had felt evil before: in places, in people, and in events. She wasn’t sure if it was a force in the world, but she felt it, nonetheless. That wasn’t good enough for a courtroom, but that feeling had tipped her off on more than one occasion to a killer hiding in plain sight.
“I’ve felt it,” Valerie answered. “A few times. But we can’t rule out that the man you saw wasn’t just a passerby.”
“How did you get away?” Charlie asked, again pushing the questioning onto more solid ground as he always did.
“I … I don’t know,” she said. “I ran for my life. He definitely followed at first. But then …”
“What happened, Gina?” Will asked, gently.
“I saw a flock of white birds pass by me and then he was gone.”
“A flock of birds?” Valerie asked.
“I … I know it sounds silly,” said Gina. “But it felt to me like they were sent from heaven to protect me. I’m not one to be too religious. But they appeared, and he ran off, like he was frightened by them.”
“Ornithophobia,” Charlie mused out loud.
“Charlie,” Will said with surprise. “That’s correct. How do you …”
“On one of my tours in Afghanistan,” he answered. “I had a buddy who was terrified of birds. It didn’t come out until we were in the field, and it made him lose his mind. It’s crazy how something like that can break somebody. Something so irrational in an otherwise rational person.”
Valerie thought for a moment of her own illness, her own hallucinations. They had been kept at bay for the most part recently, but they were still lurking. Stress would bring them out. She couldn’t rule out the possibility that Gina’s flock of birds were precisely that: a hallucination brought on by stress.
“Are we really going with the killer is frightened by birds angle?” Sheriff Carter said, sounding unconvinced.
“We can’t rule anything out, I suppose,” Valerie said. But there was something bubbling away at the back of her mind. Something about Gina’s encounter. She would have to let the information ruminate a little before she unlocked what was wrong about it.
“Gina,” Valerie continued, “did you know the victim?”
“I didn’t recognize her at first,” she answered in a hushed tone. “But the more I think about it, the more I think she was a farmhand over at the Gleeson place.”
“Is that near here?” Charlie asked.
“Yes,” Gina answered. “It’s basically up over the other side of the hills. I don’t really get on with the owner, Mac, very well. But the girl, I’m sure she worked over there. I think I saw her during one of our disputes.”
“What kind of a dispute?” Valerie asked.
“Some of his sheep sometimes graze where mine are supposed to,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind so much, but the second any of my animals have strayed onto his property, he’s threatened to shoot them.”
Valerie’s heart quickened. “Gina, do you think it’s possible that Mac was the person you saw at the tree? The one who chased you?”
Sheriff Carter laughed.
“What’s funny about that?” Valerie said, turning to the Sheriff.
“Mac is eighty-eight years old and can barely get around without a stick, never mind running around killing or throttling people with his bare hands.”
“The victim was cut twice on the chest with a weapon,” Will interjected. “Not strangled.”
Something whizzed through Valerie’s mind at lightning speed—an image brought quickly into focus by Will’s and the sheriff’s conversation.
She stood up. “Gina, can you excuse us, please?”
“Of course,” the woman said, looking to her friend the sheriff with confusion.
Valerie rushed out of the room and then out of the farmhouse into the icy air.
“What is it, Valerie?” Charlie asked, close behind her. The others followed loosely in tow.
Valerie climbed the hill with speed, her heart rate quickening even more as she did so. She felt the push back of the hill against her feet, but once she reached the barn, she did not stop.
“Valerie?” Charlie asked again beside her.
But Valerie didn’t answer. She was caught in a daze. She couldn’t speak as the air burned in her lungs, pushing footstep after footstep up the incline.
Finally, she reached the tractor, momentarily gazing at the bloodied interior, but she still did not stop.
She walked past it and after a few meters reached the large, crooked tree she had seen before.
Finally, she turned to face her companions. Charlie and the sheriff were not out of breath, but Will was red faced and puffing.
“What … what is going on?” the sheriff asked. “Do you usually rush off like this?”
“Only …” said Will, catching his breath. “Only if she’s onto something. It’s … it’s annoying, isn’t it?”
“Look,” Valerie said, composing herself. She pointed up at the tree.
“What are we looking at?” Carter asked, sounding bemused.
“My word, you don’t think …” Will started.
“That branch is broken,” Charlie said, rushing over.
“I noticed it earlier,” Valerie explained. “But I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Charlie?”
Valerie knew the person for detail was Charlie. His abilities as a tracker and to evaluate a forensic scene for minuscule evidence were second to none.
Charlie crouched down beneath the tree and looked at the ground. He studied it.
Putting his hand in his pocket, he pulled out a small, plastic evidence bag and a pair of tweezers.
“What is it?” Carter asked again.
Charlie picked a small strand of something from the ground with the tweezers and put it in the bag. “Rope strands,” he said. “And I’m betting …”
He jumped up, holding onto a different, more robust branch. He pulled himself up with ease and then moved along it. In seconds, he was studying the end of a broken branch next to him.
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