“I saw that the lock had been pried open,” Barnes said as he wheeled forward through his broken front door. Annalisa and Nick followed behind him, inspecting the doorjamb as they passed through it. “Looks like maybe a crowbar, but it wouldn’t take much to defeat the lock. It’s a cheap POS. Then I came in here and saw what he was really after.”
He led them to his living room, and Annalisa saw that the computer corner had been ransacked. The monitors were overturned and broken, the cables cut, and the computer itself was missing. The flat-screen TV, stereo, and speakers all remained in place. “Did you find anything else amiss?” Annalisa asked as she eyed the rope hanging from the ceiling over the computer desk.
“I haven’t checked,” Barnes admitted. “I saw that rope and got the hell out of here to call you guys.”
“Smart move,” replied Annalisa. “A place like this probably has security cameras, right? Maybe we get lucky.”
Barnes grimaced. “There’s one in the lobby and by the front door, but none at the back by the parking lot. You’re not supposed to prop that door open, but everyone does it anyway.”
“We’ll check it out,” Annalisa said. “Right now, we’ll just take a quick look around. You sit tight.” She and Nick both snapped on gloves as they went to inspect the remainder of Barnes’s apartment. She poked her head into the kitchen, which showed smooth countertops with only a coffee maker to disrupt the clean lines. The sink held no trace of dirty dishes. She flipped open a top cabinet and found it full of neatly lined cans and boxes of food, their labels pointed outward. She furrowed her brow as she studied the distance between the floor and the tall cabinets. Barnes rolled up behind her.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just wondering how you reach all the stuff up here.”
He smiled and picked up a metal rod with a kind of rubber claw on the end. When he squeezed, the claw contracted. “Can I offer you a cookie?” he asked as he took down a box of Nilla wafers.
“Thanks, I’m good. Let me know if you see anything out of place here, okay? It seems fine to me.” She checked the windows and found them locked. Their intruder had probably exited the same way he came in, through the front door. She went to the bedroom, where Nick had the closet door open. It revealed shirts and pants hung neatly on a bar that had been lowered from standard height.
“Anything of value?” she asked him.
He picked up a pair of beat-up sneakers, wrinkled his nose at them, and dropped them in the closet again. “No. The place looks like the maid just got here. The bathroom shines so bright you could use it in a toothpaste commercial. No footprints, no obvious fibers. If the intruder set foot in here, you can’t prove it by me.”
“We’re going to have to call in forensics anyway.”
“Waste of time. But yeah, I’ll make the call.” He took out his cell phone and went back out to the living room.
Barnes appeared in the doorway, watching as she peered into his bathroom. “I hope I remembered to put the seat down,” he quipped.
“Sorry,” she said as she exited. “I know it’s invasive.”
“No, having a serial killer come in and hang a noose in your living room—that’s invasive.”
“I’m just glad you weren’t here to meet him.”
He blinked rapidly behind his glasses, his mouth growing pinched. “Do you think he was here when we were at the church? That it was a lure to get us down there so he could break in?”
“It’s a distinct possibility, yeah.” She scanned the room again, taking in the blank walls and his tidy bed, complete with hospital corners. You can quit the military, but the military never quits you, she thought. She turned to Barnes. “Any guesses about why he wanted your computer?”
“Not especially. He took the external drives too, but these days, I back everything up to the cloud.”
“What about any correspondence you had with Grace Harper?”
“That’s over chat, mostly. Some emails. But again, those would live on the server, not on my hard drives. I can still access them.” He pulled out his phone and tapped it a few times. “Huh, that’s funny. I can’t seem to get into my email account.”
“He locked you out?”
“Maybe.” His frown deepened as he tried again to get into his email. “That’s so strange. Grace and I had a few conversations about the Lovelorn case, but nothing that stands out as particularly incendiary.”
“Maybe not to you. What did you talk about?”
He put the phone in his lap and ran both hands through his hair. “I’m trying to think. We talked about his psychology, mostly. Grace thought he probably had obsessive-compulsive disorder in addition to his psychopathy, given the precision of each murder. I think the narcissism is the more dominant trait. He wants to own these women, and he’s sure no one can stop him.”
“So far, he’s right,” Annalisa pointed out. “What else? Maybe something related to her theory about the storms?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What theory? She didn’t mention storms to me.”
“There must be something.” Annalisa’s frustration ticked up a notch. “He didn’t break in here to take your computer just for the challenge of it all.”
“I wish I could help you. I really do.” He rubbed his palms on his jeans and screwed up his face in concentration. “We disagreed also about O’Malley’s Bar. She made a lot out of that waitress’s story, the one who said she’d had an encounter with the Lovelorn Killer. Grace thought maybe the killer was hanging around the bar, listening in on what the cops had to say about the case. I said no way. Back in my drinking days, I spent way too much time in one of those neighborhood bars like O’Malley’s. You know the kind—far from anything else, draws mostly the local crowd. My hangout offered military discounts, and so any given night, you’d find a lot of us Army guys drinking cheap beers and playing pool till closing time. We knew everyone who walked through the door. If a stranger showed up, which happened from time to time, practically the whole place would turn to stare. I just can’t imagine the Lovelorn guy taking that kind of chance in a bar full of cops.”
He looked to her as if seeking her agreement or approval of his logic. She could think of one way the Lovelorn Killer wouldn’t have to worry about everyone staring him down at a cop bar, which was that he already belonged there. “Anything else? Anything she shared with you but not the others?”
“No, I don’t think so … wait. There was one odd incident a couple of weeks before Grace was killed. You know she, ah, borrowed some files from Chris’s collection?”
“I’ve heard, yes.”
“One of the items he had was a photo of Katie Duffy on the night she died. It was taken at the Halloween party, and it showed Katie with some guy’s arm around her. Probably the husband, but we can’t see his face. Over her shoulder, you can see someone walking around wearing that mask from Scream. The ghost face? Anyway, Grace couldn’t show the picture to the group or Chris would’ve blown a gasket, but she showed it to me and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if the Lovelorn Killer had crashed the party? Think about it—everyone’s in costume, so who would notice?’”
Annalisa’s stomach seized up at the thought, and she struggled to keep her expression neutral. “Do you have a copy of this picture?”
“I don’t think so. Chris would, though. He scanned everything.” He picked up his phone again and began tapping away. “Grace didn’t share the picture with the whole Grave Diggers group, but she did share her idea about the killer crashing the Halloween party. It generated a lively discussion about what kind of costume he might have picked. I don’t think anyone took it too seriously until this one member totally went off on us for discussing the idea. He said we were sick to joke about it, and that he was at the party and there was no way people wouldn’t have picked up on some stranger stalking Katie.”
“Do you recall this member’s name?”
“I can look it up. The whole thread is still up on the message board.” He logged on to the Grave Diggers site and called up the discussion for Annalisa to see. “Here you go.”
She scrolled through the thread until she found the angry poster. “You people spew this crap without any thought about who might see it and no idea what the hell you’re talking about! It was a neighborhood party filled with people who’ve known each other for years. No way some psycho puts on a mask to stalk Katie Duffy and none of us knows about it. Real cops would laugh their asses off over your little ‘theories.’ You’re a bunch of sickos, using real people’s deaths for entertainment!” Annalisa’s gaze slid over to the user’s name: RBrewster. “Okay, thanks. We’ll check it out.”
If R. Brewster was at the party, then her earlier hypothesis had to be true: this was Rod Brewster, Pop’s partner at the time and his neighbor down the street. She remembered his big barrel chest and the way his booming voice bounced off the porcelain stove in Ma’s kitchen. Rod and his wife, Carol, had been a fixture at the Vega family cookouts and Super Bowl parties, but they had no kids of their own, so Annalisa had confined them to her parents’ orbit. Rod had tossed the football around with her brothers on occasion, but he’d mostly ignored her. She recalled him rubbing her head and asking if she’d broken any boy’s heart yet. She had been about eight years old at the time.
Nick rejoined them in the room. “The forensics team is on the way.”
Barnes looked pale and stricken. “I didn’t believe her,” he murmured.
“Believe who?” Annalisa asked.
“Grace. When she said we could find this guy, I thought it would be an interesting intellectual challenge, a fun discussion. I never thought…” He shook his head. “I never thought we’d summon him.”
“Do you have somewhere else you can stay for a while? Maybe with friends? Or family?”
“Sure, but how could I even ask that right now? How can I be sure I wouldn’t be bringing all this along with me? He’s got to be watching us. I can’t risk dragging one of my other friends into this mess. I can take care of myself, anyway. I have my gun, and I’ll put in better locks.”
“We’ll speak to patrol,” she told him. “See about getting you some extra drive-bys.”
Annalisa and Nick waited long enough for the forensics team to show up, at which point they returned to his car. “You want to go back to the hospital?” he asked her.
She checked her phone and found a text from Vinny: Pops is in the OR. Should take 1-2hrs. “Not yet,” she said. “First I want to go rattle Chris Colburn’s cage.”
“Colburn? Why?”
“He was the only local Grave Digger not at the church last night. Also, he has a photo of Katie Duffy from the Halloween party that is among the evidence Grace Harper took from his place.”
“Haven’t you seen the files? We have a hundred pictures from that party.”
“Yeah, but it’s possible our suspect wants this one. I’d like to know why.”
They located Chris Colburn on a computer-repair job at a dentist’s office, and he wasn’t excited to see them again. “I’m kind of in the middle of things here,” he said. He stood over a computer that had its plastic casing removed, exposing the inner chips and wires like the guts of an autopsy victim. Meanwhile, the persistent whine of the dentist’s drill in the background made Annalisa’s teeth start to ache.
“We won’t take up much of your time,” she said. “We’re interested in a picture you have of Katie Duffy taken at the Halloween party the night she died.”
“You mean the picture Grace stole from me,” he said as he bent over his work again. “Check her place. I don’t have it.”
“We were told you have a scanned copy.”
“Oh, yeah? Who told you that? Barnes? He’s such a little know-it-all. He probably has a copy himself. Everything Grace did, she went running to him with it.”
“If he had a copy, it’s possible the killer took it.”
At this, Chris’s head snapped up. “What are you talking about?”
Annalisa explained about the break-in at Barnes’s apartment. She deliberately didn’t mention anything about the church scare from the previous night. “Where were you last night, say between nine and midnight?”
“Me? You think I broke into Barnes’s place?”
“You said it yourself. He probably has a copy. You wanted it back.”
“Hell yeah, I wanted it back, but I’m not going around breaking into anyone’s place for it, especially if it’s just a copy. Last night, I was online playing Original Sin with like six other people. I wasn’t anywhere near Barnes’s apartment.”
“We’re going to need names,” Nick said.
“Yeah, let’s see … there was Starfighter69, JugHead, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.… no one uses a real name. But if you check my ISP, you can see I was on.” He dug out his cell phone and played around with it for a moment. “As for the picture, is this the one you wanted? Doesn’t seem like much to me.”
Annalisa took the phone and saw the picture was just as Barnes had described. Katie Duffy, her dark hair in loose curls under her purple headscarf, looked directly at the camera, but her smile appeared strained, her mascara smudged. The person in the ghost-face costume was visible over her left shoulder. To her right stood a man out-of-frame, his hairy arm snugly around Katie’s shoulders. Annalisa enlarged the photo with her fingers so she could see the silver watch around the man’s wrist. “Where did you get this?” she asked Chris as Nick crowded in for a closer look at the photo.
“eBay. I picked it up maybe five years ago. Why?”
Annalisa returned his cell phone to him. “We’re going to need a copy of this picture and anything else that Grace Harper took from you that might be related to the Lovelorn case.”
He gave a smile that was somewhere between a smirk and a nervous twitch. “It’s a little late to file a stolen-property report, isn’t it?”
“Lucky for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The killer seems intent on tracking down whatever the Grave Diggers were working on that could be related to the case. You opted out of pursuing the investigation, and then Grace liberated your files. No reason for him to come looking for you.”
His chin dropped to his chest. “I’ll send you copies of whatever Grace took.”
“Thanks. If we run across the originals, we’ll make sure they’re documented as your property so that they eventually get back to you.”
He held up his palms. “You know what? Keep them. Keep it all. I don’t think I’ll need that stuff anymore.”