Blake Pierce - Once Shunned

Meredith stood up from his chair and growled …

“Meanwhile, you’ve got no time to lose. A company plane is ready and waiting for you on the landing strip. You’ll fly to the Tweed–New Haven Regional Airport, and Sturman will meet you there. You’ll get right to work. Needless to say, I want this solved quickly.”

Meredith paused and leveled his intimidating stare at each of the agents.

“And this time, I want you to do everything by the book,” he said. “No more shenanigans. I mean it.”

Riley and her colleagues all sheepishly muttered, “No, sir.”

Riley certainly meant it. She didn’t want to face Meredith’s anger again, and she was sure Bill and Jenn didn’t either.

Meredith escorted them out of his office, and a few moments later they were walking across the tarmac toward the waiting plane.

As they walked, Jenn remarked, “Two ice pick murders, two apparently unrelated victims—maybe even random. Does that sound weird or what?”

“We ought to be used to weird by now,” Riley said.

Jenn scoffed. “Yeah, ought to be. I don’t know about you two, but I’m not there yet.”

With a chuckle, Bill said, “Look at it this way. I hear the weather in Connecticut’s lovely this time of year.”

Jenn laughed as well and said, “It sure ought to be nicer than Mississippi.”

Riley grimaced as she remembered the heavy, suffocating heat in the disagreeable coastal town of Rushville, Mississippi.

She felt sure that late summer weather in New England couldn’t help but be an improvement.

Too bad we’re probably not going to get much of a chance to enjoy it.

When the plane landed at the Tweed–New Haven Regional Airport, Special Agent in Charge Rowan Sturman greeted Riley and her colleagues on the tarmac. Riley had never met Sturman, but she knew him by reputation.

Sturman was in his early forties, about the same age as Riley and Bill. In his younger years he’d been considered a promising, up-and-coming agent who was expected to climb high in the ranks of the FBI. Instead, he’d contented himself with running the New Haven FBI office. Rumor had it that he simply hadn’t wanted to move to D.C. headquarters or Quantico or anywhere else. His roots and family were planted firmly right here in Connecticut.

Of course, Riley figured, he might not have had an appetite for the political maneuvering that could play a role in those power centers.

She could relate to that possibility.

Riley liked being at the Behavioral Analysis Unit because investigating strange personalities drew on her unique abilities. But she hated the way the power plays of higher-ups sometimes interfered with investigations. She wondered how soon that sort of thing would kick in over the death of an heir to great wealth.

Riley immediately found Sturman to be warm and likeable. As he walked them to a waiting van, he spoke in a pleasant New England twang.

“I’m taking you straight to Wilburton, so you can get a look at where Robin Scoville’s body was found. That’s the fresher crime scene, and I’ve called the local police chief to meet us there. Later I’ll show you where Vincent Cranston was killed. I sure hope you folks can figure out what’s going on, because my team and I can’t make any sense of it.”

Riley, Bill, and Jenn sat together in the van as Sturman drove north. Jenn opened her laptop computer and started searching for information.

Sturman said to Riley and her colleagues, “I’m glad you’re here. My team and I can only do so much with the skills and resources we’ve got on hand. We’re trying everything we can think of, though. For one thing, we’re contacting hardware stores throughout the region to get whatever information we can on recent ice pick purchases.”

“That’s a good idea,” Riley said. “Any luck so far?”

“No, and I’m afraid it’s kind of a long shot,” Sturman said. “At this point we’re not getting a lot of names, mostly only people who bought their ice picks with credit cards, or the storekeepers had some other record. Out of those names we’re not sure what we might be looking for. We’ll just have to keep at it and see.”

Riley remarked, “Using an ice pick as a murder weapon seems kind of quaint to me.”

She thought for a moment, then added, “On the other hand, what else is an ice pick useful for anymore?”

Jenn scowled as she scanned the information that was appearing on her screen.

She said, “Not much—at least not for a century or so. Back in the days before refrigerators, people kept their perishables in old-fashioned iceboxes.”

Bill nodded and said, “Yeah, my great-grandmother told me about those. Every so often, the iceman would come to your house to deliver a block of ice to keep your icebox cool. You’d need an ice pick to break chips off the block of ice.”

“That’s right,” Jenn said. “After iceboxes got replaced by refrigerators, ice picks got to be a popular weapon for Murder Incorporated. Bodies of murder victims sometimes had twenty or so ice pick wounds.”

Bill scoffed and said, “Sounds like kind of a sloppy weapon for professional hit jobs.”

“Yeah, but it was scary,” Jenn said, still poring over the screen. “Nobody wanted to die that way, that was for sure. The threat of getting killed by an ice pick helped keep mobsters in line.”

Jenn turned the screen around to share her information with Bill and Riley.

She said, “Besides, look here. Not all ice pick murders were messy and bloody. A mobster named Abe Reles was the most feared hit man of his time, and the ice pick was his weapon of choice. He’d stab his victims neatly through the ear—just like our murderer. He got so good at it that sometimes his hits didn’t even look like murders.”

“Don’t tell me,” Riley said. “They looked like the victims died from a cerebral hemorrhage.”

“That’s right,” Jenn said.

Bill scratched his chin. “Do you think our killer got the idea from reading about Abe Reles? Like maybe his murders are some kind of homage to an old master?”

Jenn said, “Maybe, but maybe not. Ice picks are coming back in style with gangs. Lots of young thugs are doing each other in with ice picks these days. They’re even used in muggings. Victims are threatened with an ice pick instead of a gun or a knife.”

Bill chuckled grimly and said …

“Just the other day I went into a hardware store to buy some duct tape. I noticed a rack with brand new ice picks for sale—‘professional quality,’ the labels said, and ‘high carbon steel.’ I wondered at the time, just what does anybody use something like that for? And I still don’t know. Surely not everybody who buys an ice pick has murder in mind.”

“Women might carry them for self-defense, I guess,” Riley said. “Although pepper spray is probably a better choice, if you ask me.”

Jenn turned the screen toward herself again and said, “As you can imagine, there hasn’t been much success passing laws to restrict ice pick sales or possession. But some hardware stores voluntarily ID ice pick buyers to make sure they’re over twenty-one. And in Oakland, California, it’s illegal to carry ice picks—the same as it’s illegal to carry switchblades or similar stabbing weapons.”

Riley’s mind boggled at the thought of trying to regulate ice picks.

She wondered …

How many ice picks are there out there?

At the moment, she and her colleagues knew of at least one.

And it was being put to the worst possible use.

Agent Sturman soon drove the van into the little town of Wilburton. Riley was struck by the sheer quaintness of the residential district where Robin Scoville had lived—the lines of handsome clapboard houses with shuttered windows, fronted by row after row of picket fences. The neighborhood was old, possibly even historical. Even so, everything gleamed with paint so white that one might think it was still wet.