Just Right, page 9
But why had that case not been more thoroughly investigated? Why so little information?
Was it just an incompetent agent, or was there more to it? After all, surely there was a reason why that file had had the malware added to it, ready to seek and destroy if anyone tried to access it?
She wondered again how much IT knowledge that agent had possessed, if he was the one who'd done this.
She put down her cell phone, then lay on her back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She felt emotionally drained. She lay there pondering this, thinking about the map, her eyes heavy, her mind unwilling to switch off.
She didn't think she would fall asleep, but she did, even though her rest was uneasy and punctuated by nightmares. In them, she was running along a long, dark corridor. She knew that Jenna was at the end. She was certain of it. But the way was blocked by a shadowy figure whose face she couldn't see. He had a menacing, aggressive presence, and he was not going to let her pass.
"Let me through!" she screamed at him. "Let me through. I need to find her!"
She began hammering him with her fists, trying to make him move away, hitting and punching him.
And suddenly, she was sitting bolt upright in bed, with gray light seeping through the blinds. The hammering was Connor, knocking on her door, calling out in a sharp, tense voice.
"Cami? We need to get going. There's been another murder just called in."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Cami felt a sick sensation in the pit of her stomach as she heard Connor's voice outside her door. Another murder. This killer was continuing his rampage. This was evil, pure and unadulterated. It was all the worse to have known that it was going to happen and to feel that she had somehow not been able to prevent it. Guilt churned inside her even though she knew it was irrational to feel this way.
"I'm coming," she called, her voice hoarse after her night of deep, though nightmare-infested, sleep. At least her mind felt sharper again.
Quickly, she pulled on her clothes and grabbed up her things. She hurried out of the room. Connor was there, looking grim. He was dressed in a black top and jeans, his gun in a holster on his belt, his FBI jacket slung over his shoulders. He did not look rested, and he was frowning, his face set in troubled lines.
"Let's go," he said.
"Where was the murder?" she asked, as they hustled downstairs and out to the car. The car clock showed it was five forty-five.
"On a small farm, a few miles south of Milwaukee, near the Interstate 94."
"And who's the victim?" Cami asked as Connor started up and drove out into the brightening morning.
"Her name is Sally-Anne Brewster," Connor said.
Feeling that this, at least, was something she could do now, Cami looked up the name.
"She also pinned her location regularly," she told Connor. "There doesn't seem to be a reason. She just seems to be someone who likes social media."
She was pretty, with a broad, open face and bright eyes. She had short, curly, blonde hair and she was smiling, happy. Cami felt a pang, knowing this woman was dead.
"If we could only have saved you, or caught him before he got to you," she whispered softly to herself, in apology and remorse.
Then, she read the brief bio that appeared next to the picture. Sally-Anne Brewster. Twenty-seven years old. Originally from Brooklyn, New York. She was living alone in a rented cottage on a small farm. That, she knew, was where they were headed now, but she felt a sense of frustration that the killer would have left the scene hours ago.
"I know it feels like too little too late," Connor said as if reading her mind. "But there may be something to be found here. Something this scene can tell us."
Ahead, she could already see the flashing lights and the emergency vehicles pulling up to the scene. This was a typical small farm, with a wooden ranch house and some outbuildings, including the quaint cottage. The air smelled fresh. Cami's gaze was instantly drawn to the water reservoir near the buildings. There were police and emergency workers clustered around it.
That must be where she'd been drowned.
Climbing out of the car, she surveyed the scene, piecing together the clues. The front door of the cottage was splintered. It hadn't been a strong door, but a cheap and flimsy wooden one. Not that she thought a strong door would have kept him out. It seemed nothing could keep him out. But without a doubt, he'd known she was inside.
Connor strode over to the reservoir, and Cami trailed behind, knowing what she would see, reluctant to face the violent finality that showed where a woman's life had ended.
He'd broken into the cottage. He'd struck her over the head with his weapon like he did with the others. Then he'd taken her to the reservoir. Were there any footprints? Cami doubted it. She guessed the police had already scoured the gravel path for prints and found none.
Knowing him, he would have worn gloves, she guessed, because they’d found no visible trace evidence at these scenes so far.
However, the low, white-painted concrete wall of the reservoir was spattered with blood that she guessed belonged to the victim. Her head wound must have been bleeding as he dragged her to the water.
"It happened last night," a man wearing gloves and a mask said, looking up from the examination of the body. "But it's difficult to give an accurate time in these circumstances. Around eight to twelve hours ago would be my guess. But we may be able to confirm it better in the postmortem."
"Who found the body?" Connor asked.
"One of the farm workers, arriving in the morning. He saw the blood and went to look," one of the police officers said. "The farmer and his family are on vacation, so she was the only one on the property last night. Unfortunately, that means there were no eyes or ears around to pick anything up."
Had this killer known that, Cami wondered, or had it just been a lucky coincidence?
She stood back, watching as the police and the forensics team followed their procedures. A small crowd of neighbors had gathered at a distance, watching. She turned her head away as the body, streaming water, was lifted carefully out of the reservoir and placed on a waiting gurney. The armband had already been bagged.
She noticed the woman’s blonde hair, looking darker because it was soaked from her long immersion.
They were all blondes. All the victims. This had to mean something! And they had all been dumped in water. Not just because the water was nearby, either. What Connor had said about scenes providing clues was true. This scene was showing her that the killer had had to walk a couple of hundred yards to get to that reservoir. It was not exactly convenient. Perhaps the tiny cottage hadn't had a bathtub, Cami guessed.
And this killer clearly had a compulsion to place his victims in water. Drowning was part of what he did.
Now, she needed to work out why. Why was he doing this? There was something about this scene, the way he had clearly carried this victim so far to dump her unconscious body in the water, that got Cami thinking.
This felt like a compulsion to her. He was being driven to do it. Blondes, water, drowning. Where was the link? Could she possibly find it?
Connor strode back toward her, his face grim.
"Connor, it's like he's compelled to dump them in water," Cami said, wanting to test out her theory.
"Like a ritual, maybe," Connor agreed. “Or else, he just wants to minimize the risk of trace evidence on the scene. So far, we've found no evidence of the murder weapon in the wounds. No splinters, no fragments. Could be due to the water."
"To me, it seems very intentional, very deliberate, but I wouldn't say it was to hide the evidence. He could have left her under the shower to do that, to wash out the wound. There seems to be something about water, about drowning, that's important to him."
"I agree," he said, finally acknowledging her point even though he’d tested it by arguing against it. "There's something about this that feels like it has significance to him."
"I wonder if we search online, whether we can find anything related to this," Cami said thoughtfully.
"Linked cases?"
"Yes, or even a traumatic event. Maybe—I don't know—maybe his blonde girlfriend drowned and that triggered him to start killing."
"Search." Connor spread his arms. "The more information we can find now, the better."
Cami turned to her phone.
Could she find some connection to the killer, some hint of why he was doing what he did, if she searched using the parameters she had in mind? Perhaps something would come up.
"I'll use apostrophe searches to narrow the parameters,” she said thoughtfully.
Connor stared at her blankly for a moment. "Yes," he then said. "I'm sure you will."
There was a note of dark humor in his tone. It was a hundred times better than the angry criticism that had characterized so much of their first days together.
Using the key words “blonde,” “drowning,” “Chicago,” and “Milwaukee,” Cami began to search.
When the results came up, she narrowed them by news. She looked again, scanning the fields quickly. She didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she guessed that it would check a few of the boxes, and that she would know more if she found it.
There had to be a reason why he was doing this, she told herself. Keep searching, keep searching. And then, her heart sped up as she found a result.
It wasn't just a result. This was significant. It was not a recent news report. It was about five years old, but it had very clear parallels to what they were dealing with.
"Connor!" she called, now feeling excited. "I've got something here."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cami and Connor crowded together in the car and Cami opened her laptop, calling up the news article on the bigger screen so that it would be easier to read. They needed details here because she was sure this article was gold.
"It's a family who died, driving off a bridge in winter," she said. "'Tragic Crash Claims the Becker Family,' it's headlined. The car slipped on ice when they were close to Chicago. The car went into a lake and all six occupants drowned."
She closed her eyes for a moment. That was a terrible tragedy, and there was something about it that chilled her blood. She could imagine what it must have been like to be in that car. To feel it start to slide on the ice. To have that terrible lurch of the stomach as the car lost control and went spinning off the road to land in the deep lake that looked icy and inhospitable.
"It must have been the scariest thing," she said. "Traumatic for everyone. And they all died? That's just terrible. I mean, it always seems that in these accidents, one person at least manages to survive."
"And I see that there was a big family in the car," Connor said, peering intently at the article.
Cami nodded. "The Becker family. There was a mother, two daughters, a son, a grandmother, and an aunt. The daughters were in their late teens. The son was twenty. And they're all blonde. Very blonde."
She called up a photo of the family, looking at their smiling faces, their platinum hair, so innocent of the fate that awaited them in the icy lake.
"They do look similar to the victims. The ones that I've seen anyway, so far. Is this man trying to kill this family all over again?"
"Who wrote the article? It could be that there were some other details," Connor said. "Perhaps there was another family member involved, perhaps a jealous boyfriend, a husband who suffered guilt because he wasn't in the car? That has clear parallels to what we're seeing here. Now we need to take it further and look for the links."
Those were all good suggestions. Cami read the article again, looking for details that might be relevant. But the article was very basic. It said that they had been on their way home from a shopping trip, and that their community was left devastated. There were several quotes from people who were bemoaning that the bridge was too dangerous and that this should never have happened. That was it.
Finding nothing that raised red flags, she looked up the writer. They'd need to contact him next. Hopefully, he'd have a lot of background research that hadn’t made it into this brief article, but which could provide them with a starting point.
"James McCallum, here's his name," she said. "I'm going to call him right now."
Quickly, Cami looked up James's details. But immediately, she saw there was a problem.
"Connor, look here," she said.
"What is it? Can't you find information on him?" Connor asked.
"I can. In fact, I'm finding too much. Take a look here. It seems that this writer had problems. And after he wrote this piece, these problems became serious. There's an article written on him, dated just a few months ago."
"Journalist Sentenced to Prison for Assault," Connor read, sounding surprised. "Journalist James McCallum, who worked as a freelance writer and reporter for a number of Illinois-based publications, recently was convicted for assaulting a colleague in a bar. This follows a string of offenses including DUI, petty theft, and additional instances of assault."
Reading on, Cami added, "'It seems that the strain of my job has ended up affecting my mental health.' That's what he said, Connor. That was his reason for going off the rails the way he did."
And he sure had gone off the rails. He'd committed a number of crimes that seemed to be escalating in seriousness. Topped off with a year’s prison sentence. That was significant, Cami thought.
"When did he get out of prison?" Connor asked.
"The article doesn't say," Cami said after checking it.
"Let me find out then."
Now, Connor turned to his own laptop, opening it and logging into the police database. Cami felt breathless with expectation as she waited. This could be the lead they needed. Perhaps it had been that family's death that had triggered James to change the way he had done. Perhaps it had caused a psychotic break, and he'd altered his mindset from a normal journalist to a psychopathic killer.
"He's been released on parole recently, there's a short paragraph indicating that," Connor noted.
"Being a journalist for online news sites, he would easily have the knowledge to identify and trace location pins," Cami said. "It's not difficult. He would have been able to track the victims that way, even with basic IT knowledge."
She looked at the photo of James, the writer.
He stared back at her from the shimmering screen. A man with a clean-shaven head, a frowning brow, and a cruel-looking mouth. Imagine if this was the man they'd been chasing so doggedly on his route south.
Was she looking at the killer? Had James decided to retrace or recreate the family's fate through a series of random murders?
She was sure that it was him. The more she looked at his dark, hooded eyes, the more convinced she became. He must have wanted to create his own legacy of death. And if they were right, then they were inside the mind of a serial killer.
"He looks like he doesn't like people," Cami murmured. "It all fits together. He was traumatized by the death of that family, and he suffered a mental breakdown. Then he went on a spree and killed anyone he felt deserved it." She took a deep breath. "And that's what he's doing now."
She could only imagine the darkness in this man's mind, the compulsion that he had to recreate a scene that had been so tragic, so traumatic, that it had caused his own psyche to crumble.
"Perhaps he's heading for that bridge again. If he's cutting a path due south, he might even be going back to it." She thought that was a brilliant suggestion, but Connor's headshake told her she was moving too far ahead.
"Don't jump to conclusions based on a photo," Connor warned. "He's got a long way to go before he gets to that accident scene. It's all the way south of Chicago, near the Illinois-Indiana border."
How many more kills might he need to make before he got there, Cami wondered with a chill, wishing Connor would be more open to her theory. He seemed to be far too restrained, given the urgency of the situation they were now facing.
"But it's obvious. He's working through the trauma that he suffered," Cami said, feeling frustrated that he wasn't as wedded to the theory as she was. Couldn't he see how clear the link was? "The trauma that caused this mental breakdown. He's using the people he kills to relive the experience of that family drowning. Reliving that trauma."
Connor nodded slowly. "He's a person of interest to us now, that's for sure. We need to take a closer look at him. We need to find him as fast as we can. And we need to speak to him, face to face. If he doesn't have an alibi for the killings, then we might have found our criminal."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"It looks like James McCallum went back to his original place of residence after being paroled," Connor said to Cami. She watched as he accessed the FBI database to get the latest address details for the troubled journalist.
"Where's his home?"
"I'm looking now." Connor tapped his fingers on the car's dashboard as the address loaded. They were sitting in the car, ready to go as soon as they had the information they needed. Cami was sure that he must live somewhere in the wider area. After all, he reported on local issues.
"I've got the address. We'll go there right away." Connor turned to her. "He lives west of Chicago. Seems like a normal residential suburb. And he lives alone. His divorce went through recently."
Cami guessed that the divorce had been a part of the downward slide that had seen James's life crumble around him. If he was the criminal they were hunting, she felt sorry about the circumstances and the trauma that had caused it, but it still did not justify him having become a relentless killer.
"It's about half-an-hour's drive. See if you can find anything else on him in the meantime," Connor directed Cami as he started up the car and headed to the main road.
Knowing his address and his locality made the research easier. Cami had a look, digging into the neighborhood, taking a look into the online groups she could access, seeing what mention there was of this man who had transformed from a seemingly solid citizen to a criminal.
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