Kill Me Once Read online

  Dana shook her head. ‘No. I’ve been thinking the same, Jeremy, but it could be a student of his …’

  ‘It could, but would a student – say, like you and me – remember every little tiny detail enough to replicate them exactly?’

  ‘You’re right, and he’s the only one who knows every little detail of my parents’ murders – apart from me, that is.’

  As Jeremy voiced his own suspicions, the possibility that Crawford was their killer became horribly real. Dana respected Jeremy and knew that he thought things through carefully. If they had both reached the same conclusion, didn’t that point to the terrible truth?

  ‘So what do we do?’ she said after a beat.

  ‘Don’t know yet.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  She paused before asking the question that she already had a pretty good idea of the answer to. ‘What else did he leave behind this time?’

  ‘A red clown’s nose,’ Brown said. ‘Need a refresher course on what that probably means?’

  ‘No. So he’s going to copy John Wayne Gacy next? But he hasn’t done anything for David Berkowitz yet.’

  Brown leaned back in Dana’s chair and rolled his head on his shoulders. ‘That’s the problem. The letter is a play on David Berkowitz’s letter to Captain Joseph Borelli of the New York City Police Department. Practically word for word from the original. The obvious substitutions here are your name and the reference to Thanksgiving instead of Easter. Do we know anybody who’s a scholar on that kind of stuff?’

  Dana tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. ‘Did you find out what’s so interesting about tomorrow’s edition of the Sun-Times?’

  ‘No. Crawford said the managing editor told him he’d have to wait for the big reveal right along with the rest of the country.’

  Dana was incredulous. ‘He could subpoena him, for Christ’s sake.’

  Brown nodded. ‘I know, but Crawford said the paper would already be out by the time a subpoena made it all the way through the courts. Freedom of the press and all that shit. Said our hands were tied on this one.’

  Dana shook her head in disgust. In his entire career, Crawford Bell had never backed down to anyone, not even to the President of the United States. Now he was turning tail on a simple newspaperman? What was it that he didn’t want them to see? And where was he now? Off claiming his next victim?

  Her stomach churned. ‘So where should we go from here?’ Should they put a trace on Crawford? It was one thing for her and Jeremy to imagine the worst, but could they convince someone like Krugman? Did they have any real, tangible evidence to link him to the actual crime scenes?

  Brown shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Ahn Howser’s father said his daughter spent a lot of time online, so I’m looking for any possible links between all the victims. Other than that, I have no idea.’

  Dana held Brown’s gaze and told him about Crawford’s tumour. She didn’t owe her mentor any loyalty any more. She didn’t owe him anything any more. Not after what he’d done.

  Brown took the news in his stride, looking weary. He seemed much too tired to be surprised by anything at this point, not even by a bombshell like the one that Dana had just unleashed on him. ‘You’re going to have to tell Krugman, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Dana left the office and called Crawford’s cellphone. Maybe he could explain everything away. It was a long shot, but she had to give him that chance.

  He wasn’t answering.

  ‘Goddamn it, Crawford,’ she hissed under her breath. ‘Where are you?’

  She ducked inside the Starbucks half a block away from her office and ordered a large black coffee before settling down at an empty table. It was no good. If he killed again and she hadn’t said anything – well … And if they found him and she was wrong no one would be happier than her. She dug her cellphone out of her pocket and punched in a number. She couldn’t keep her suspicions a secret any longer.

  She needed help from the top on this one.

  A deep voice answered after six rings. ‘Bill Krugman.’

  Dana took a deep breath and sat up straighter in her seat. ‘Sir, I need to talk to you about Crawford Bell.’

  The FBI Director shouted something at someone in his office before coming back on the line. ‘Do you know where he is? He’s been out of contact since last night. I’ve been trying to reach him.’

  ‘No,’ Dana said. ‘I have no idea where he is. That’s the problem.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  Dana filled the Director in on her and Jeremy’s suspicions as quickly as she could. Everything from the copycat murders following Crawford’s introductory course to his failure to compile a profile to Crawford’s revelation that he had a brain tumour that would probably soon cost him his life.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Krugman said. ‘Hang tight, Agent Whitestone. I’ll be up there in a couple of hours. If you’re right about this – and I sure as hell hope you’re not – it’s a disaster … Either way, this case has just blown wide open.’

  Dana flipped her cellphone closed. At least Krugman seemed to take her suspicions seriously. And for him to come all the way up to Cleveland meant he must’ve been getting some real heat from the White House about the murders. Even though it was unheard of for a Director to become personally involved in a case that he could easily monitor from DC when an arrest didn’t appear imminent, the President himself must have weighed in on the matter and directed Krugman to Ohio.

  Dana sighed. What was his motto again?

  Oh yeah. Keep hope alive.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  On the north wall of his apartment Nathan had scrawled a message in black magic marker:

  AS LONG AS DANA WHITESTONE IS IN THE WORLD, THERE WILL NEVER BE ANY PEACE, BUT THERE WILL BE PLENTY OF MURDERS.

  He liked the look of his writing. It looked strange, demented.

  It looked… perfect.

  How he so desperately longed to be perfect!

  In the bedroom he’d kicked a hole into the wall. An arrow pointed inside the space. Beside it he had written another message:

  HI, MY NAME IS MR WILLIAMS AND I LIVE IN THIS HOLE. I HAVE SEVERAL CHILDREN I’M TURNING INTO KILLERS. WAIT TILL THEY GROW UP.

  The rest of the day was spent relaxing and reading from The Silence of the Lambs. Nathan admired Hannibal Lecter very much and wished he could assume the maniac psychiatrist’s identity for these next kills. But he knew he must restrict his activities to the real world so he simply sighed and turned another page.

  The weather outside was very cold. At exactly eight o’clock he dressed in his heavy black clothes, causing his forehead to break out into a profuse sweat. After placing the gun in the side pocket of his coat, he stepped out into the chill night air.

  The white Pontiac Sunfire had been stolen from a used-car lot in Strongsville. It would be days before its disappearance was noticed. Tonight he would abandon it in an east-side ghetto and steal another vehicle for his getaway.

  Nathan knew the streets around Cleveland very well. They were his streets. A left turn onto Wooster was followed by a right onto Center Ridge. Half a mile later he pulled into the crowded parking lot of the Westgate Shopping Mall in Rocky River, Ohio.

  This was where he would find them: the keys to finally recreating the Son of Sam’s deliciously heinous crime.

  He parked neither extremely close to nor extremely far from the mall’s entrance. From this vantage point he had an excellent view of the happy Christmas shoppers milling about and bleating at each other like a flock of mindless sheep as they blithely went about the pitiful routines of their pathetic little lives.

  Nathan shook his head in disgust, irritated at the inconsistencies in the script. The original Son of Sam had committed his murders in the sweltering heat of the summer of 1977 – back in the days when the chicks had been a hell of a lot tougher – but sometimes you just had to adapt to survive
.

  Still, very much like David Berkowitz – ‘The Wicked King Wicker’ – Nathan desperately wished that he could kill them all. And slowly, at that.

  But he knew better than to stray further from the script at this late stage of the game, so he simply turned off the car’s engine, logged onto his MacBook Pro and waited in total silence for his prey.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Despite his earlier promise of getting up to Cleveland in a couple of hours, Bill Krugman didn’t land at Hopkins until nearly eight p.m. that night. He hustled down the steps of the DOJ’s Gulfstream V and met Dana and Brown on the tarmac.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I got caught up in a debriefing session with the President. He’s really breathing down my neck on this one. I talked to some of the others. I even went over to Crawford’s house – no show. He’s not answering his phone. Looks like you could be right, Dana. Anyway, I’ve got an APB out for him with the local police and all the Ohio field offices. We need to resolve this fast. My job is on the line with this one. All our jobs are.’

  Dana nodded as the cold winter wind howled across the tarmac. For a moment she wondered if something might have happened to Crawford, but his tumour suddenly didn’t seem relevant any more. He had betrayed her.

  She doubted they’d ever find him. He’d obviously planned these copycat murders for years, and nobody in the world knew more about FBI search procedures than him. Hell, he’d literally written the goddamn handbook on the subject.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ Dana asked.

  Krugman glanced down at his watch. ‘We’ll start at daybreak,’ he said. ‘Right now we all need to go and get rested up. There’s nothing more we can do tonight. We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.’

  Dana frowned. ‘Can’t we start now?’ she asked. ‘Can’t we just—’

  Krugman cut her off before she could continue. ‘Wasn’t a request, Special Agent Whitestone. This isn’t your case any more. It’s mine. If you’ve got a problem with that, let me know now.’

  Dana shook her head and dropped her gaze to the tarmac. ‘No, sir, that’s fine. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  Fifteen miles west of Hopkins International Airport, Marcia Reynolds and her best friend Amy Wohlers were sitting together in the food court at the Westgate Shopping Mall munching on cinnamon sticky buns.

  ‘That’s a totally cool purse you got at the Gap,’ Marcia said. ‘Your mom’s totally gonna freak out when she opens it. Seriously, Aim, she’s gonna love it.’

  From their stylish clothes to their carefully plucked eyebrows, the girls were mirror images of each other. Both of them were tall and thin, and both had a coltish pubescent beauty. Each wore long auburn hair dyed at the same salon to make them look even more alike than nature had intended. They got a kick out of it when people asked them if they were sisters, always replying that they were fraternal twins.

  ‘You really think so?’ Amy asked. She removed the sleek black handbag from the shopping bag and inspected it again. ‘I don’t know. You don’t think it’s, like, too young for her, do you? She’s already thirty-nine, you know.’

  ‘No way,’ Marcia assured her. ‘Besides, that’s totally the style now. Everybody’s going for the young look these days. It started, like, out in California or something, and now it’s here. Trust me, Aim, she’s gonna die when she sees it. It’s totally rad.’

  Amy felt better about the purchase immediately. Of everyone she knew nobody had better fashion sense than Marcia. She could trust her, knew her best friend wouldn’t steer her wrong. If Marcia said the purse was cool, then the purse was cool. End of subject.

  The girls were both seventeen now, juniors at Magnificat High School and co-captains of the school’s cheerleading squad. Though the school was an all-girls institution – or perhaps because of that fact – they were even more boy-crazy than their co-educational-school counterparts, finding nothing more enjoyable than dolling themselves up for a night of hunk-hunting at the mall, a ritual they’d performed at least twice a week since the sixth grade.

  A young man wearing a pair of faded blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt that showcased the hard muscles in his upper arms strutted past their table.

  ‘Whoa!’ Marcia said when he’d passed. ‘Did you get a load of that? Total hottie, but totally conceited too.’

  ‘Definitely an asshole,’ Amy agreed. ‘I’ll take that sales guy from the Gap any day.’ She sighed dramatically. ‘I swear to God, Marcia. I’ve probably spent a thousand bucks in there over the past three months and he still hasn’t even looked at me twice yet.’

  ‘He will, Aim,’ Marcia soothed. ‘He totally wants you, I know he does.’

  ‘Well, then I wish somebody would tell him that. Shit, I’m gonna be, like, twenty, before he even asks me out at this rate.’

  Just then, Marcia’s BlackBerry beeped in her purse. She held up a finger to Amy and motioned for her to wait. ‘Hold on a minute, Aim. Incoming message.’

  She dug out the device and rolled her eyes at the message blinking on the screen.

  HEY BABY, WANNA FUCK?

  Marcia quickly pecked out her response.

  GO FUCK YOURSELF, ASSHOLE!

  ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ Amy asked as Marcia shoved the BlackBerry back into her purse.

  ‘Nothing – just some perv from the dating site asking me if I wanted to get it on.’

  Amy screwed up her pretty face in irritation. ‘What is it with all these jackwads online? I get that kind of shit all the time.’

  ‘Who knows, and who cares? They probably just get off on it.’

  Amy smiled across the table at her best friend. ‘Come on, bitch, tell the truth. You know you get off on it too.’

  Marcia Reynolds’s perfectly lipsticked mouth dropped wide open in the kind of shocked and disbelieving look that could only be pulled off with any measure of credibility by a teenaged girl. ‘Fuck you, you fucking slut! You’re the fucking perv!’

  They both laughed until they cried.

  Fixing their make-up and finishing off their cinnamon buns a moment later, they stuffed the wrappers into an overflowing trash receptacle and decided to take a final stroll through the mall before they had to leave. Amy had a strict curfew of nine o’clock, and it was going on eight-thirty already.

  ‘Come on,’ Marcia said, slipping her arm through Amy’s. ‘Let’s walk past the Gap one more time before we go. You keep looking straight ahead when we get there and I’ll look back to see if he checks you out.’

  They made their way past Radio Shack, Bath & Body Works and Waldenbooks before passing the clothing store where the object of Amy’s affection was busily folding sweaters on a display table.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Marcia squealed, grabbing Amy by the elbow and hustling her forward. ‘He totally checked you out, Aim! He was, like, undressing you with his eyes!’ ‘

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘I’m dead fucking serious. I told you he wants you. Next time we go in there you have to talk to him.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘I know so. But when he’s, like, your boyfriend and shit, you’d better not be dissin’ me to hang out with him all the goddamn time.’

  Amy Wohlers laughed happily. ‘Well, maybe he’s got a hot friend or something. That way we could all double date.’

  The girls discussed their game plan to hook Amy up with the hottie from the Gap as they walked out of the mall and into the crowded parking lot. Marcia had been given a red Ford Mustang convertible for her sixteenth birthday, and they got inside the car. Eminem’s ‘Crack A Bottle’ blasted from the cranked-up stereo system as they drove.

  ‘I think Eminem’s totally hot,’ Marcia shouted over the deafening music. ‘I’d fuck him any day.’

  Amy rolled her eyes. Both girls were still virgins, so it was funny to hear Marcia talk like she was so sophisticated when it came to sex. ‘You’re way too good for him, Mar,’ she shouted back. ‘He
’s a woman-hater. Don’t you hear all that shit he says about Kim in his lyrics? And he hates gays, too, you know.’

  Marcia considered this for a moment before snapping her gum and shrugging her shoulders. ‘Well, he’s totally hot and he’s totally rich. Besides, I’m not Kim and I’m not gay, so I’d fuck him anyway.’

  Amy paused, then burst out laughing. ‘I would, too. That dude is totally fucking hot!’

  They were still giggling as they drove past the post office and pulled up to the kerb in front of Amy’s house on Jamestown Avenue a few minutes later.

  Marcia downshifted to park and turned the music down before turning in her seat to face her best friend. ‘What are you wearing tomorrow?’

  ‘I think I’m gonna wear those new jeans and that black sweater I bought last week.’

  ‘Going goth on me now?’

  ‘Nah, just going for the mysterious look.’

  ‘Good – I’ll wear black too, then.’

  Amy opened the passenger door and stepped out. She leaned back in and grabbed her purse from the floorboard. ‘Call me as soon as you get home, OK? I want to make sure you’re safe.’

  As she leaned her reed-thin body back out of the car, the first slug caught Amy Wohlers just above her left ear, spraying her brains all over the Mustang’s passenger-side window. The second bullet ripped through her throat before slamming into the dashboard.

  The second girl was too stunned to scream. The headlights briefly illuminated the terrifying figure that Nathan cut in his black clothing as he calmly walked around the car to the driver’s side.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, though he knew she couldn’t possibly hear him through the rolled-up window. ‘And good night to you, as well.’

  Adjusting the white convenience-store bag over the .44-calibre handgun – a condom, David Berkowitz had called it – he lifted his arm and pulled the trigger twice.

  The first bullet shattered the glass before entering Marcia Reynolds’s heart and killing her instantly.