Without Warning (6 page)

“Jake, there’s no easy way to tell you this.” Jenny was certainly right about that, and she might have added that listening to the words was going to be a hell of a lot harder than speaking them. Even looking back on it from a vantage point almost five years later, my stomach clenches when I recall the conversation.

She went on to tell me about the affair she had had with Roger Hagel, as well as the fact that she had just broken it off. She was sorry, terribly sorry, had no excuse, and hoped that someday I could forgive her. “I still love you, Jake,” she had said.

“Why are you telling me?” I asked, since there was a reasonable chance I would never have found out.

“Because I couldn’t live with not telling. Believe it or not, this was the easy way out.”

I believed her then, and eventually forgave her, and never regretted that I did. She took full responsibility, but I knew I deserved some of the blame. I was newly installed as chief and fully wrapped up in it. No matter what was going on in local law enforcement, I wanted to be there, even if the people under me didn’t need my presence. And if I was there, then I couldn’t be home.

In addition to the fact that I still loved Jenny, there was another reason for my willingness to forgive. I had done the same thing, fairly early in our relationship, but had never come clean about it. The fact that her eventual lover had been Roger Hagel added an ironic twist, but one I never shared with her.

My one “indiscretion” had been with Katie Sanford.

It was at a conference in Augusta; Maine has a lot of conferences. It was attended by most of the important political and media figures in the state, which was why Katie was there. I was there because security had to be provided, and local law enforcement was called in to aid in the providing.

Jenny and I were six months away from being married, but that was not a point of information that I take moral refuge in. We were engaged, we were committed to each other, and what I did was as egregious as if we had been officially married.

Our relationship had always been a volatile one and continued to be until the day she died. As I remember it we had been in a “down” period, and were actually in the middle of an argument when I left for the conference. What the argument was about eludes me; certainly it was of no long-term consequence. Especially since Jenny and I never wound up having a “long term” at all.

Katie and I found ourselves ending the day in the bar of the Senator Hotel on Western Avenue, rehashing old times, peering through the vodka back to when we were young and thought we were in love. I can’t say I agonized about our going up to my room and rediscovering those days; it actually seemed fairly natural to do so.

I’m almost certain Katie didn’t feel guilt about it, since she would have had no reason to. She hadn’t even met Roger yet, so she was single and unattached. I don’t know if she even knew I was engaged, though in a town as small as ours she probably did. But that would have been for me to worry about and deal with, and in the moment I neither worried nor dealt.

We never talked about it again, and Katie met and fell in love with Roger a couple of months later. The couples became friends, and then Roger and Jenny became more than friends, and then Jenny, and eventually Roger, became dead.

I had separated myself from the investigation for obvious reasons, and Hank took the lead. I tried not to follow its progress, but I’m not that disciplined, and I became aware of the evidence. Hank had no doubt that Hagel was the killer, and the county prosecutor concurred. I saw no reason to question their judgment.

“Hello? Earth to Chief Robbins. Come in, please.”

It was Hank, who had apparently come in to my office while I was lost in the past.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was going down Memory Lane.”

“I can imagine.”

“Here’s the first thing on the list of what’s bothering me,” I said. “This thing wasn’t supposed to be opened for fifty years. Why bother to put all these predictions in there in the first place?”

“Looking for some kind of glory?”

“First of all, unless the perp is a high school kid, there’s a decent chance he’ll be dead in fifty years, and certainly a lot of his contemporaries will be too,” I said. “But let’s say you’re right. Then why not identify himself? What’s the glory if nobody knows who he is?”

“A fair point. Maybe the guy is just a fucking loon.”

“Always a possibility. You set the meeting for tomorrow morning?”

He nodded. “Eight o’clock. Before that we can go over some preliminary forensics that Martinez has. He’s going to take me through some of it tonight.”

“Okay. And tonight I’ll start thinking about the assignments. I want our people to each take one or two of the predictions, and track them down as best they can.”

“Got it,” he said.

“Hank, I’m taking Jenny.”

His reaction was immediate. “You think I got it wrong?”

“It’s nothing you did. But I wasn’t involved last time, so my eyes are fresh.”

“You think I got it wrong?” he repeated.

There was nothing else to do but say it straight out. “Yeah. Based on what was in that capsule, I think you got it wrong.”

He thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Me too.”

“That wasn’t red ink,” Danny said. “It was blood.”

“Human?” I asked, not anxious to hear the answer.

“No. Cow’s blood.”

Hank turned to me. “You got any idea what that means?”

“That we got a dead cow on our hands,” I said, demonstrating conclusively that there is no time I can’t make a bad joke, and then asked Danny what else he had.

“No prints on the pages; our boy was careful. Partials on the capsule match up with one Samuel Votto, from Lewiston. He was reported missing two weeks after the capsule was buried.”

“So he could be the killer?”

Hank shook his head. “More likely the kill-ee. The missing persons report describes him as a day laborer, moved around a lot. Last known location was Bangor. Record is mostly clean; got picked up for drug possession in the early nineties, but copped to a misdemeanor.”

“Get whatever we have on him and run it by Tommy McKinnon and his people. Maybe they’ll ID him as the guy they hired. Also see if Matt Higgins or Jimmy Osborne remembers him. What else you got?” I asked both of them. Danny had very little; the carbon-dating information wouldn’t be back from the state lab for quite a while.

“Probably won’t matter much,” I said. “If Votto was the guy who buried the capsule, then we’ll assume that he died that day. If the lab tells us otherwise, we’ll adjust, but for now that’s the theory we need to go by.”

It was becoming obvious that Votto had dug the hole, and after the few spectators left the ceremony, he was murdered and dumped on top of the capsule. All so the killer could put in an anonymous set of predictions that wouldn’t be revealed to the world for fifty years.

It made no sense.

I took Hank through the other predictions one by one, and the assignments I was going to give each of our officers. I also shared with him the unhappy conclusion I had reached. “Mostly we’re going to be spinning our wheels,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because except for the few we know about, they’re mostly vague. Like this one,” I said, and then read from the page, “Williams collected his last six percent.”

“That’s what real estate agents get,” Hank said.

“Right. So let’s assume for the moment that’s what it refers to. He’s going to kill a real estate agent named Williams. You got any idea how many there must be?”

“No.”

“I ran the numbers. Twenty-eight in Maine, a hundred and thirty-two in New England.”

“Any in Wilton?”

“No.” The problem was clear. In this case, we would look for an unsolved murder of a real estate agent named Williams. If we found one, then we’d work to see if it somehow connected to the other victims.

It was more likely that we wouldn’t find one, since our perpetrator had given himself fifty years to commit all the murders. And if he hadn’t gotten around to our friend Williams, then we wouldn’t come close to having the ability to protect all the potential victims.

“Think about it,” I said. “If George Myerson hadn’t died the other night, we’d be looking for insurance agents named George. I’ve got a hunch there’s more than a few of those.”

“But he was specific with the ‘Chief’s wife’ and with Matt Higgins.”

I nodded. “Apparently so. They were local; maybe he knew them better.”

We went into the department meeting, and I carefully laid out all that we knew. I could see the officers react when I told them about the threat to the “Chief’s wife.” Even the newcomers who hadn’t been on the force when Jenny died knew all too well what that meant.

We divvied up the investigatory work as I had laid it out the night before. I kept Terry Bresnick on the Myerson death, and I chose Billy Chapman to work with me on investigating Jenny’s murder.

Billy was a pit bull, though he didn’t look the part. He was short and thin, sort of wiry, and was forever spending his weekends running marathons. But if you assigned him to do something, there was no doubt he would get it done, no matter what the obstacles.

Billy would do much of the legwork on Jenny’s murder investigation, since I would obviously be spending a lot of time on the overall case. Hank was going to handle the threat against Matt, and he had an officer under him to help him do so.

“We have to operate under the assumption that most of the targets have not been hit yet,” I said, as I was wrapping things up. “In fact, it’s very possible that they’re taking place in the order in which they were placed. But George Myerson’s death may mean that the capsule getting dug up has accelerated the killer’s time schedule. So we need to move fast.”

I asked if anyone had any more questions, and no one did.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s get the son of a bitch.”

I’m not interested in “the public’s right to know.” I like it as a concept, especially at those times that I’m part of the public. But when I’m in uniform, and working on a case, I’m more interested in “the public’s right to be protected.”

In this case protecting the public meant catching the killer, so that’s all I thought about when it came to deciding whether or not to keep a lid on the situation. That, and trying to determine whether I had the ability to keep that lid on at all.

As a practical matter, secrecy was going to be a tough one. First of all, I knew that Katie was going to publish the fact that the dead body was found on top of the capsule. The rest was off the record, but she and Matt were good journalists, and since they knew what they were looking for, finding independent confirmation seemed inevitable.

Everybody in my department was already briefed, and there was certainly the possibility, maybe even the probability, that there would be a leak, either intentional or otherwise. That danger would only increase as we started to investigate more intensively.

But independent of our ability to keep the secret was the question of whether it was in our interest to do so. We were more than four years behind the eight ball, and except for the George Myerson murder, everything else was ice cold. Solving the case was going to be uphill all the way, unless digging up the capsule was going to set the perpetrator off on a killing spree.

I wasn’t inclined to root for that.

There was always the possibility that someone out there knew something that they would be willing to share. Perhaps they didn’t realize it was significant, but when the news of what was going on came out, they might put two and two together. It certainly seemed worth a try.

So I was coming down on the side of going public, at least within reason.

The decision itself would be harder than the execution. In the internet / cable news / social media world, there was nothing easier than getting a story out. And this was an interesting story; I could leak it to a copy boy at the
Yemen Gazette
, and it would be everywhere within the hour.

But an overseas trip wouldn’t be necessary; I had Katie Sanford. Her paper would more than suffice as the conduit to the world, and she deserved the position. The fact that her employee was specifically threatened would make the story even more appealing to the media at large.

“Katie Sanford is on the phone” were the next timely words I heard, and I picked up.

“Katie, I was just going to call you.”

“I’ve got the photographs from that day,” she said. “There are quite a few of them.”

“Good, can you bring them over?”

“Now?”

I looked at my watch; it was past seven thirty. Days seem to go faster when there is a serial killer on the loose.

“You hungry?” I asked, regretting the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Maybe even sooner … probably just as they were reaching my front teeth. Rehashing Jenny’s murder and Roger’s conviction was going to be difficult and emotional enough; I should have tried to keep it as professional as possible.

“Callahan’s?” she asked, suggesting a pub restaurant nearby.

“Someplace more private,” I said. If we were to be seen together at Callahan’s, it would be the talk of the town in a nanosecond. “I’ll pick you up in front of your office.”

“This is for you to look at pictures?” she asked.

“And for us to talk.”

The planning was nothing short of brilliant. He knew that he was assessing it accurately, without ego, even though he was the one who had done the planning. But he didn’t think of himself as “The Planner”; that wasn’t the name he would have given himself. And “The Genius” seemed a tad immodest.

Ironically, he almost revealed his preferred name to the world by putting it in the capsule. He even considered doing so again after the capsule had been opened. He thought about establishing a connection between himself and the cop, Jake Robbins, perhaps through e-mail, or hand-written letters, or some other form of communication. Had he done so, he would have signed the messages, “The Predictor.”

But there were a bunch of reasons he didn’t do so. First, and maybe most important, it wasn’t part of the original plan. And with things going so perfectly, there seemed no reason to deviate.