Mariah Stewart - Cold Truth

“Just like that?”

“Hardly just like that, he’s had this planned for weeks. To give him the benefit of the doubt, he did say he’d planned on giving his notice early in the week, but we found the first body. Then the second.”

“I thought he seemed a bit off,” Cass said, recalling the way Spencer had held back and let her take the lead, not just that morning, but at the crime scene earlier in the week. “But I figured maybe he was just tired. You know, so much going on around here all of a sudden, and they have that new baby.”

“Well, he’s taking that new baby and leaving us holding the bag.”

“Did you ask him to stay for a few more days?”

“What would be the point? Mentally, he’s already out of here. Might as well let him go. He wouldn’t be much use to us anyway, not in the state of mind he’s in right now.”

Cass thought back to that morning, when Jeff had been late getting to the crime scene, and had been pretty much ineffective even after he arrived.

“So, I guess it’s you, me, and a couple of uniforms against our boy, Cass.”

Denver walked down the steps and didn’t turn back until he reached his car.

“Finish up with the car and with Tasha, then go on home and get some sleep. You never know what tomorrow will bring.”

Her newly found enthusiasm for healthy living having been inspired a few weeks earlier by a visit from an old friend of her father’s who happened to be a holistic physician, Regan Landry added a banana to the skim milk, yogurt, and assorted powders in the blender and hit the Pulverize button. The little appliance whirred noisily while she found a glass and searched for a straw. She hit Stop and a blessed silence followed. She poured her breakfast into the glass and sat down at the small round kitchen table and opened the newspaper. Bored after a few minutes of skimming the headlines, she searched under the paper for the remote control and turned on the television that sat on the counter across the room.

She changed the channel, searching for her favorite morning show, This Morning, USA. Once she found it, she turned up the volume and resumed her cursory scanning of the New York Times. An article about an upcoming auction of American antiques at Sotheby’s caught her eye, and she’d just gotten to the sampling of early Pennsylvania furniture when something on the screen caught her attention. She reached for the remote and increased the volume.

“… certainly of interest to anyone having plans to visit the New Jersey shore this summer,” Heather Cannon was saying.

The screen split, half now occupied by a man in a police uniform who looked uncomfortable in front of the camera.

“I feel your pain,” Regan muttered.

“Chief Denver, with the finding of a third body there in Bowers Inlet, the reports coming from the South Jersey area are telling us that the signs all point to the likelihood that this is the work of a serial killer. Can you confirm that?”

“You know, Heather, I hate that term, it stirs up so much…” The chief shifted in his chair.

“Will you confirm that there has in fact been a third victim?”

“Yes, there has been a third victim.”

“And that all three victims have been young women in their early thirties…” Heather addressed the camera directly so that the man she was interviewing by remote would feel she was speaking directly to him.

“Yes, all three victims have been young women, all local women. The first two lived in Bowers Inlet. The young woman whose body we found last night lived in nearby Tilden, but she was left on one of our beaches.”

“Now, the information that we have indicates that all the women were dark-haired and similarly built…” Heather paused and looked up from her notes. “Is there a significance to this similarity, do you think?”

“Right now we have no way of knowing. Yes, so far, there has been a resemblance between the victims, but whether or not we should read something into this, we just don’t know.”

“The most disturbing bit of information we’ve received is that you have correspondence from the killer…”

“Well, let’s just hold up here.” The chief was clearly agitated. “What we have are letters that were received after the bodies were found. I want to make that clear. They could have been sent by someone other than the killer, someone thinking to have a bit of fun with us. Right now, I don’t know for a fact who is sending the letters.”

“But they could be from the killer…”

“Of course they could be,” he snapped.

“And the letters are sort of a taunt, aren’t they?” Heather glanced down at her notes. “ ’Hey, Denver, did you find her yet?’ I understand was the first note. And the second was, ’Hey, Denver! Remember me?’ Both notes were comprised of letters or words cut from newspapers or magazines?”

“That’s right.”

“And was a note found after this latest victim?”

“There was.”

“May we ask what it said?”

“It said, ’Hey, Denver, have you figured it out yet?’ ”

“Any ideas on what you’re supposed to be figuring out?”

“A few.”

“Any you’re willing to share?”

“It would be premature.” The chief of police of Bowers Inlet stared stonily into the camera.

“So what would you tell people who are planning to spend a week or more in your community this summer? I understand Bowers Inlet has many rental properties and enjoys a population boom in the summer.”

“I’m telling the vacationers the same thing I’m telling our year-round residents. Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t go off alone. If you’re going out at night, go in a group. But you know, those are things you should probably be doing anyway, no matter where you are. You need to watch out for yourself. Have a cell phone with you or a can of pepper spray. If you think someone is following you, report it.”

“So, in other words, stick to the basic safety precautions…”

Regan tapped a finger on the tabletop, then rose and left the room as the interview concluded. She went down the hall to her father’s office and turned on the overhead light. Something that had just been said had caused a little bell to go off in her head.

Hey, Denver, did you find her yet?

Hey, Denver, remember me?

Where had she seen it…?

She pulled several files from a drawer and leafed through them. Not this one… not this one.

Then maybe here… Nope.

She returned the files to their places and opened the next drawer.

Here. Here it is.

Hey, Landry, remember me?

The note, on plain white paper, spelled out the message in letters of different sizes and colors-letters cut from magazines-giving a jumbled, schizophrenic appearance to the sheet of paper.

At the top of the page was a small circle with the number seven inside. Regan’s father had written that, she was positive. That was the way he numbered pages when he was setting up the earliest drafts of his work. He might take notes from several files and integrate them for a single chapter or project. The fact that this note was numbered-and the message indicated that there had been previous contact-made Regan think there were more notes from the same author. She pulled several files from the next drawer, and in the fourth one she went through, she found a manila file holding one more message, along with several pages of notes written in her father’s hand.

Hey, Landry, did you miss me? was numbered eleven.

Regan sat at her father’s desk and began to read through the pages he had written. She paused to flip the file over to read the notation he’d made across the top.