By the time Kate made it back home again, she was worn out, having knocked off seven more places. Twelve down. Another seven to go. She had really pushed it at the end, hitting a drive-through and picking up burgers as she drove on. Her destination was home for a shower and a good night’s sleep. She walked up into her apartment, unlocked it, and sat down, eating her burger. Just a few bites in, she stopped, burger in her hand, then shook her head and asked, “What the hell are you doing?”
She looked around at her sparse furnishings and noticed that dust had accumulated at least one-quarter-inch thick on the nearby bookshelf. She couldn’t pull a book from it because she hadn’t taken her books out of the boxes yet. She could be over at Simon’s right now, sitting in front of that incredible view, having a cappuccino or a fancy coffee of her choice, looking forward to a good night’s sleep.
Instead she came back here, alone. Why? She knew part of the answer had to do with the fact that Simon somehow centered her focus and made all the other things in life a greater priority. She found that dangerous when she was on a case, though everything about him was dangerous when she was on a case. He’d been a help in some ways, but she’d spent the whole damn day chasing down that stupid window. Although she’d seen plenty of them, there hadn’t been enough details in Simon’s paper napkin drawing to decide which window they truly sought.
That had become obvious because, very quickly, she’d recognized that, while all the windows were similar, they were definitely not exactly like the window in his picture. She needed something a little more definitive to add to his sketch. Yet what right did she have to call and to hound him for more information? And then she thought of the poor woman currently being tortured, plus the one she presently had in the morgue, with broken ankles, broken wrists, her vocal cords cut, not to mention the two cases she’d read about today in Alberta.
She picked up the phone and called Simon. When he answered, she stated briskly, “I need more details on the window.”
“Good evening, Kate,” he replied in a gentle voice. “Rough day?”
“Yes. I’ve been looking at churches,” she explained. “Twelve of them today. I have seven more to go. All of them had big windows and similar looks, but none were exact.”
“Well, of course not,” he agreed. “They had all been built in different areas at different times, so they would have been designed by different architects.”
“Which means I need more details in order to pinpoint a location.”
Simon was silent on the other end for a moment. “So the drawing wasn’t enough?”
“I just said that, didn’t I?” She knew her voice was overly testy. She didn’t mean it to be, but that calm, quiet voice of his was so very disruptive.
“You know I can’t just turn it on.”
“I know,” she replied. “I get that. And when it’s on, you can’t turn it off.”
“I’m working on that part,” he noted, and she heard fatigue in his voice.
“You know I wouldn’t ask—”
“You would ask for the moon if you thought it would save your victims.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “I guess I would. I just keep thinking about Chelice, our missing woman, and Cherry, the woman in the morgue, and the two cases I read more about from Alberta today. All like the one from many years ago, when Rick Lord’s sister was murdered.”
“Were they exactly the same?”
“Close enough that it had to be the same killer.”
“Or a copycat?”
“Or a copycat but it would have to be somebody who Rick shared very specific details with, and why would he tell anyone?”
“I’m not sure,” Simon noted. “Maybe to save his own soul.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not a shrink.”
“Do you have one at the station?”
“We’ve gone through a few,” she explained. “After I managed to uncover the one who had been there for a long time but who had two pedophiles for brothers, they haven’t yet hired a permanent replacement.”
“Right, I forgot about her.”
“Yeah, she’s got her own trials right now.”
“But you won’t have anything to do with that, will you?”
“Well, I will if I get called to give testimony,” she replied, popping the last of the burger into her mouth.
As she chewed, he asked, “Eating?”
“Yeah, I picked up a burger and fries.”
“Good God.”
“It was either that or come home and try to find something in my fridge.”
“I already know your fridge is empty.”
“There might be a few things moldy and growing inside it, but I haven’t had much time to take a closer look.”
“When you get into a case, you get into a case 150 percent, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she murmured, “and I have to. Otherwise we don’t end up saving anybody.”
“That’s not on you,” he reminded her. “You can only do so much.”
“No,” she snapped. “I need to do more. A woman is suffering right now.”
Simon hesitated for a beat on the other end. “What if I’m wrong?” he asked in a diffident tone.
She stopped and stared at her phone. “Are you?” She hadn’t even considered that. “You know that it says a lot about how far I’ve come,” she noted, “because I didn’t even question it.”
“I know,” he agreed, “but don’t worry. I do enough questioning for both of us.”
“The unwilling psychic,” she teased, with a bitter laugh. “You know what? So far, your information has been accurate, although I’m not sure about this church window. However, I suspect, whenever we find the crime scene or this victim, this window of yours will have some pertinence.”
“It might,” he agreed, “yet I could be wrong.”
“Because everything comes couched in might be and could be.”
“I really wish I could change that.”
“But you can’t. Look. I’m not in any shape to talk to right now, if you don’t have any messages or information.” She added, “I’m really tired, so I’ll go have a shower and hit the sack.”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned off her phone and got up. It wasn’t fair to Simon, and it sure as hell wasn’t fair to her, but, every time she talked to him, he made her want more. More than she could have. More information on this victim. More answers to the questions in her head. More of him. More time together. More of a life outside of work. Even though her work drove her, she didn’t want to end up losing her sanity over this job.
Every night she woke up seeing these victims. Every night she went to bed, desperate to let them slide into the recesses of her mind, so she didn’t go crazy. Then every morning she woke up vowing to get out of bed, determined to help them. And today, all day, what a waste.
She got up and headed to the shower. When she came back out, she threw on an old T-shirt, crawled into bed, and collapsed.
*
Saturday Morning
When her phone rang, she reached through the darkness for it and mumbled, “Hello.” She heard Rodney’s voice at the other end.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“What time is it?” she asked, yawning.
“It’s six.”
She shifted upright. “Is it?” She pulled her hair off her face and stared around at the dimness of the room. “Why are you waking me up?”
“I found two more cases.”
“Jesus,” she said. “When?”
“In the last ten years.”
“And where are they?”
“Saskatchewan.”
“Why the hell would this killer be doing this in one province at a time?”
“I don’t know,” Rodney replied, “but I did find one correlation.”
“What’s that?”
He took a deep breath and said, “You won’t like it.”
“Maybe not,” she agreed, “but, if it gives me a break in this case, I’ll deal with it.”
“The thing is, this kid that you think may be innocent, … he spent time in multiple prisons.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty common.”
“Well, he spent time in Alberta,” and, his voice deepening, he added, “and he spent time in Saskatchewan.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Please, God, tell me that he was actually in prison during these killings.”
“He was, from a cursory check. I’ll go deeper.”
“I’ll be in the office in twenty.” She quickly slammed down her phone. It took her eighteen minutes to get to the office. And she was the first one there. She looked around, wondering where the hell Rodney was. But she saw no sign of him, so she put on coffee and headed to her desk. He wasn’t in the bullpen and hadn’t been here yet, from the looks of things. Groaning, she grabbed her phone and called him. “Where the hell are you?”
“I’m at home,” he stated, “and, if you wouldn’t have hung up on me, I could have told you that.”
“Well, you could have texted me at least.”
“Or you could have asked,” he noted in exasperation.
“Well, I’m at the office at my desk,” she explained. “Nobody’s here, so maybe my brain can actually connect with something with no interruptions. Send me what you have.”
“Already did,” he stated. “I’ll be in in a bit. I didn’t get much sleep last night, so I’m not moving the fastest.”
“Who the hell sleeps anymore?” she muttered.
“You sounded pretty well asleep when I called,” he noted.
“And I was. Thanks for reminding me that you woke me up, and now you’re not even here.”
He laughed. “Didn’t say I was coming in either,” he teased. “You’re the one who assumed that.”
“Yeah, whatever,” she snapped. “At least I have a whole pot of coffee to myself.”
“Yeah, how about food though?”
“Don’t even know what the hell that is anymore,” she replied. “My stomach thinks my throat has been cut.” At that, she remembered what happened to these women and winced. “Oh, crap, poor choice of words. Never mind the food. I’ll just grab something in a bit.”
“Okay, I’ll see you in an hour or so.”
With any luck, she might be up to speed in an hour; she hated being behind the curve on information. If Rodney—or Reese and her two assistants or the IT techs or whomever—had found something that could potentially help with this puzzle, she needed to know every detail. She printed off all the info Rodney had forwarded to her, then grabbed her first cup of coffee.
As she headed toward her desk, she picked up her print job and dropped that on her desk, then sat down, her feet up on her desk, and started reading. Not a whole lot here, but enough that she had to start several searches. By the time she was done, she could confirm Rick’s location per murder site.
At the time of the two murders in Alberta, the kid had been in juvie. In Alberta. For the two murders in Saskatchewan, he was doing time in an adult prison. In Saskatchewan. She frowned as she thought about that.
He hadn’t had an easy time in prison either. Did he have people who moved with him? Did he have people he knew from the system? Where the hell was this going? She frowned and realized it was pretty damn early to be making phone calls, but if Rick Lord was going to work today, she needed to see this kid before work.
She phoned him, and, when she got a cranky voice on the other end, she identified herself and said, “We need to have a talk.”
“I’ve done all the talking I’m going to,” he snapped. “My mother has gotten a lawyer for me. You want to talk, you talk to the lawyer.” Rick promptly hung up.
She stared down at the phone. “Little prick.” At the same time, that wasn’t very helpful because he hadn’t given her the name of his new attorney. She called him back. “In order to contact your lawyer, I need to know who it is.”
He asked, “Really?”
“Yeah, idiot. How do you expect me to contact anybody if I don’t know who it is?”
“So you’ll actually talk to my lawyer?”
“If that’s what you want, yes. It makes you look suspicious as hell but whatever.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” he replied, “what do you expect? You said I wasn’t a suspect.”
“I said that we were doing everything we could to clear you,” she muttered, “so don’t go putting words in my mouth.”
He frowned. “That doesn’t sound quite like the same thing.”
“That’s because it isn’t, but, if you didn’t have anything to do with it, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he replied. “I listened to that shit last time, and look where I ended up.”
“You also confessed,” she reminded him, “a fact that you keep trying to ignore.”
“That’s because I don’t want to remember it,” he snapped.
“So have you got a few minutes now?”
“Maybe. What do you want?” he asked in a grumbling voice.
“When you were in juvie,” she began, “you spent time in Alberta, didn’t you?”
“BC and Alberta, and I spent a couple weeks doing some special research bullshit in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.”
“Did you go alone?”
“Sometimes my mom came,” he replied. “Sometimes my dad.”
“Anybody else?”
“Yeah, lawyers, probation officers, and scientists. Whoever it was who was trying to study my brain to figure out why I supposedly did this. You know they really could have saved themselves a ton of money and just listened to me.”
“Don’t forget that whole ‘you confessed’ thing. That in itself is something they probably want to study, to understand why you would confess. Especially if you didn’t do it.”
“What do you mean especially?” he snapped. “I told you that I didn’t.”
“And that’s fine,” she snapped back. “It would be nice if that was the truth because now we need to know exactly what did happen.”
“And remember the part about I don’t have a fucking clue?”
“Yep, I do,” she stated. “But we’ve also found two similar cases in Alberta and two similar cases in Saskatchewan.”
There was a moment of shocked silence from the other end. “What the fuck?”
“You heard me,” she said calmly.
“Well, it wasn’t me, and I’m sure somebody somewhere along the line should be able to prove that. And it also means,” he added, his voice rising, “that you now have the proof that I need to have my charges cleared.”
“Not so fast,” she replied. “Aren’t you the one who just told me that you spent months in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan?” And she wrote down a note to check Manitoba for similar cases.
“Sure, but I was always supervised,” he noted. “It’s not like, once you’re deemed a criminal, and you’re in the system, you get to walk around free and clear.”
“Did you get any day passes?”
“No.” Then he stopped. “Yeah, I mean. Fuck!” he said. “I don’t know. I had a couple day passes. I had a little bit of time out. Sometimes, you know, I was allowed to go visit my parents. When my mother had an accident, we weren’t sure she would live.”
“When was that?”
“It was in Alberta. You’ll have to ask her when. I don’t remember, honest to God. All that time in prison just runs into one nightmare after another.”
“What happened to her?”
“She got badly injured and was in the hospital. They gave me special permission to go see her, no thanks to you guys,” he snapped. “I fought like crazy and damn near had a complete breakdown when I wasn’t allowed to see her at first. It was some special dispensation that they gave me at the time, and I was pretty damn upset when I had to go back, believe me. I kept kicking and screaming, telling them I didn’t kill my sister.”
“And we’re back to that whole problem caused when you lied in the first place.”
“I get it. I get it. Do you think I haven’t regretted that all those years?”
“I’m sure you have,” she said gently. “So, when you were in juvie, was there anybody you were close to?”
“Yeah, a bunch of people,” he noted. “You asked me that before.”
“Sure, but at the same time you also told me that you didn’t have any friends.”
“Not now,” he stated. “Not when you’re free because everybody hates your guts if you can’t do anything for them. They all say they’ll stay in touch, but really all they want to do is hate you because you’re getting out, and they aren’t.”
“Did any of your friends go free?”
“A few of them, but I didn’t stay in touch. Again, it’s not a period of my life that any of us really want to deal with.”
“Do you know others who did stay in touch?”
“Not with me but with other people. They all seem to make friends pretty easily,” he murmured, with a jealous note in his tone. “I never had that ability.”
“In what way?”
“My friends all seem to be shit,” he replied. “I don’t know what it is. Everybody around me seems to have good friends, people they can talk to and can do things with, you know? I got into the drug crowd, and it seemed like all they wanted from me was what I could do for them, you know? Like drive a vehicle or go check out a store. They made it look like nobody would ever know who I was, so I was asking questions about what goods they were looking to buy. Shit like that.”
“Trying to further their crime area?”
“Exactly,” he said. “I never did make good friends in juvie. Most of the kids there were pretty upset, pretty pissy in their own right.” He shook his head. “I mean, obviously I made some friends, but it wasn’t easy, and I was just trying to survive.”
“I think that’s what everybody in juvie is trying to do,” she noted gently.
“Yeah, I’m sure they are, but it was not easy to do. Everybody’s got an agenda, even in juvie, and it could be just to survive the day.”
“Was that so hard?”
“Sometimes it was. A lot of the time it was just boring as all get out, following all the rules and instructions. Everything was structured so we couldn’t make many choices for ourselves. We had worktime. We had exercise time. We had computer time. We had some classroom time, like life instructions. We had everything that we needed, I guess, but what we didn’t have was our family, any real friends, or any personal freedom.”
“What about group coaching to make friends?” she asked curiously.
“Didn’t I just tell you that?”
She thought about the other murders. “Who would know that you were in these different prisons?”
“I don’t know. Anybody who could search the system or the database, I guess. Can people get a hold of that stuff?”
“Sometimes.” Her mind was thinking rapidly.
“Well, maybe you should talk to them. If you found other cases, I’ll talk to my lawyer about having my case cleared. And then you can bet this goddamn city owes me some fucking money for the years they incarcerated me.”
“And again, not so fast,” she said. “It could be the shoe is on the other foot.”
“What are you talking about?” he roared.
“Hate to keep saying this, but you confessed, which wasted a lot of time and money, not to mention that other people were killed afterward.”
“Jesus,” he said, “it would be just my luck to have it turn out that way.”
“And again, I don’t know how any of that works,” she admitted. “Let’s deal with one thing at a time. We need to catch a killer.”
“And what good will that do me?” he snapped.
“Well, for one, it’ll clear you. Two, you won’t be hounded by the police anymore, and you’ll have a halfway normal life maybe for the first time ever. A life where at least you can hold up your head and say you didn’t do this.”
“You think anybody will believe me?”
She thought about what she’d heard in his voice, when he had told her about his sister’s case. “You know what? I don’t think it would take very long. Once people realize the truth, the tide will turn in your favor.”
“Jesus, I hope so,” he said. “My parents have been through enough shit.”
“What about you?”
“I’m young, and I can handle it,” he stated. “At this point in time, I’m getting more and more bitter and worried about them. It was just my sister and me, and, with her gone and me in jail, there was nothing for them.”
“No, that’s a tough deal all the way around. How did your dad handle it?”
“He didn’t. How does any dad handle seeing his son go to jail for something like that?”
“Yeah, a tough deal. I’m sorry.” She didn’t really know what else to say. “I’ll look into your case and get the records for your transfers and when, and just see what we can come up with. But, if you think of anybody you spoke to about your sister’s murder, anybody who might have been a little too interested in the methodology used, I need to know their names,” she stated. “Somebody out there knows the details.”
“Yeah, but that could be any cop too,” he suggested. “Anybody who’s seen the case files would know the details.”
She hated to admit it, but he was right. “That’s one aspect, yes,” she agreed, “but there’s also the fact that it could have been somebody close to you, somebody you told, either in one of your therapy sessions or in some of your treatments, or when you guys were just joking around and trying to tell the world you were a tougher nut than the next guy.”
“Yeah, that happened a ton too,” he agreed, groaning.
“Of course it did. You were still kids with egos, trying to survive in a place where a hierarchy was even more important.”
“Well, if you didn’t survive that,” he noted, “you were pretty well stuck for later on in life.”
“Of course,” she agreed. “And, as much as we don’t like that aspect of society, it’s pretty common.”
“I think in any group,” he added, “even at work, I mean, there’s a hierarchy.”
“There is, indeed,” she agreed, “and that includes my work too.”
“And you’re at the bottom, I presume,” he said, with a laugh. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be calling me.”
“I don’t know about the bottom,” she replied. “No, I’m definitely not at the bottom anymore, but I’m not at the top either.”
“Do you want to be?” he asked.
Hearing a sense of real curiosity in his voice, she replied, “No, I’m doing what I want to do, and that involves being on the streets and handling these cases. I don’t do well with politics and all that bending and bowing that’s needed to make shit happen.”
“No, I don’t imagine you are.” He laughed. “Listen. I’ve got to go to work. So do me a favor. Maybe, this time, you guys could work to set me free instead of putting me away.”
“Do me a favor,” she replied. “This time, don’t confess to something you didn’t do.” And, on that note, she ended the call. She sat here, staring at her phone for a long minute. When she looked up, Rodney stood in front of her. She gave a start. “Jesus! I didn’t even hear you come in.”
“I came in around the back,” he replied, lifting the cup of coffee in his hand. “You didn’t even finish the pot.”
“Nope,” she murmured, “just got off the phone with the kid.”
“Are we calling him in?”
“I’ll do some research first to see if I can get a timeline on when he had visits outside.”
He looked at her and nodded. “Are we thinking he did these other murders?”
“No,” she replied, “but somebody knew his schedule, and somebody knew when and where was a really good time that Rick could be pinned for murder again.”
“And yet nobody looked at it at the time,” Rodney noted.
“No, and I’m thinking that’s probably because all these cases weren’t linked closely enough. But, at any point in time, like right now, when somebody finally got around to connecting all this shit, Rick does look like a really nice viable option.”
“Yet he was a kid and in juvie at first, right?”
“Yeah, but, like we know, he moved around to other prisons,” she noted. “Plus he did some therapy sessions in a special program in Alberta for eight weeks—over the same time period of those two Alberta cases.”
“So he was there at the time?”
She nodded slowly.
“Well, Jesus, let’s bring him in.”
“He was in jail though. Remember that,” she noted.
He nodded slowly. “So he didn’t have access then.”
“That’s where the problem comes in,” she added. “His mother was in a bad accident, when his parents came to Alberta for a visit, but the kid didn’t give me the details of what happened to her. Anyway she was in the hospital, and he eventually was given dispensation to go see her. But I can’t imagine that he was given enough free rein to go kidnap, torture, and kill somebody, much less two victims.”
“No, of course not,” Rodney agreed. “So either it’s somebody close to him or somebody who knew him.”
“We’ll have to run down everybody who handled his case and who brought him to Alberta for the counseling program and all that special dispensation for hospital visits.”
“Jesus.” Rodney shook his head. “Okay, I’ll start with the probation officer and see what he can tell me.”
“You think that’ll give you anything we don’t already know?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but we’ll have to go deep into his probation file to get something. So the probation officer might know more about it than we do.”
“Maybe, let’s see what we can dig out of these murder files. I wish they didn’t have just the basics,” she moaned.
“But it’s the basics that we normally need. When you start talking this kind of stuff, however, we need to go that much deeper.”
“At least it’s there, and it’s just a matter of digging for it,” she muttered to herself.
“Yep, it is—or it should be.” With that, he settled at his desk.
She picked up her phone and made a call to Dr. Smidge.
When he answered, his voice was as testy as usual. “You know that I just walked in the door.”
She grimaced, then checked the time on her cell phone. “Sorry, Doc. My colleague just came in, so I figured maybe you were at work too.”
“We’re not all night owls, you know?” he growled.
“No, but we pull enough all-nighters in our world,” she noted, “that sometimes it’s hard to determine night from day.”
“What’s happened now?” he asked.
“Two similar cases in Alberta and two in Saskatchewan.”
“How old?”
“All over the last fifteen years.”
“Then your convicted suspect couldn’t have done those, if he was in jail.”
“And yet,” she explained, “he was in those same provinces at the same time those crimes were committed.”
At that, the coroner whistled. “Well, that’s interesting.”
“That’s what I thought,” she stated, “hence the call.”
“What can I do for you?”
“From the files, clearly the injuries look very similar to our cases, but could you take a closer look at these related four and see if there’s anything here that would be different enough to suggest it was a separate killer or a copycat or something like that? I know I’m grasping at straws, but I don’t care because straws are what we need.”
“If nothing else,” the coroner noted, “we need to knock that potential off the list.”
“Exactly,” she agreed.
“Have you got the files?”
“I do,” she replied. “I’m attaching them right now.”
“You could just give me the case numbers,” he reminded her. “I’ve got access.”
“Oh, duh, sorry. I should know that.” She gave him the related case numbers.
“Fine then. I’ll get back to you.” And he hung up.
As she got off the phone, she looked over to find Rodney staring at her.
“Was that Dr. Smidge?”
She nodded. “I figured he should take a look at the other cases.”
“Good idea,” Rodney stated. “I wish some billionaire would provide enough money to make a full-on real-time database across Canada.”
She looked at him, shooting one eyebrow skyward. “Like you? Wouldn’t that be nice,” she joked. “I know it’s something that they’re talking about, and a certain amount is functional, but it’s not complete.”
“It’ll never be complete at this rate, and why the hell can’t we take DNA when kids are born? And I think that job would take deeper pockets than I have.”
“Uh, something to do with, … you know, their rights,” she said in a sarcastic tone.
“Their rights, until they kill someone,” he noted. “And then we’re all screwed.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” she muttered. But there was no point in arguing about their lack of tools.
“At least we have the kid’s DNA,” Rodney muttered. “It’s the first positive thing we’ve gotten, and yet there’s none in this case from last week on Cherry.”
“I know,” she admitted. “It also doesn’t make sense that the kid has been back here five years though.”
“Right. I agree.”
“More questions, no answers,” she grumbled. “It’s always this way.”
“Then one day it breaks, and we get to the bottom of it, and the pieces fall together, and it all makes sense,” Rodney noted.
“It’s the getting to the bottom of it that’s driving me nuts,” she replied.
He laughed. “What? You? You’re the persistent ferret that gets in here and digs into all this information until you find out what’s going on,” he noted. “We’re all learning from that, you know?”
She stared at him in shock. “Seriously?”
“Hell yeah,” he replied. “You’re the one who found those kids lost in a pedophile ring. You’re the one who hooked the suicides as assisted murders or whatever the final criminal charge will be. We didn’t see this.”
“Not at first, but you did soon enough.”
“Soon enough isn’t the same as being the one who saw it. You look at things differently,” Rodney stated. “Don’t ever change that. I get that you’re frustrated, and it’s hard at this stage, and it sometimes seems completely fruitless, but you have a knack for seeing things that we don’t. We need that on the team.” Then he fell silent and returned to his computer.
“You’ll make some phone calls?” she asked him.
He rolled his eyes. “And you’re very focused.”
“Have to be. A woman’s life is in danger.”
He looked over at her. “Do you think Simon is telling the truth?”
“I believe Simon is telling the truth as much as he understands the truth to be.”
At that, he started to laugh. “Isn’t that like hedging your bets?”
She gave him a half smile. “Definitely. But I also think it’s the truth. If he’s not telling the truth, then he doesn’t know what the truth is. This is the closest thing to the truth that he does know, which still doesn’t help.”
“No,” Rodney agreed, “it doesn’t.”
“But it’s all we have.”
“A lot of man-hours.”
“Don’t even go there,” she snapped. “I’m the one who spent all day yesterday running around, looking at bullshit windows.”
“I know,” he stated. “I thought that was actually a good thing for you to understand.”
“What? That all of this is bullshit?” she asked, with half a laugh.
“No, but, when you’re pushing for things—like Simon’s story to be believed—you also need to understand what the cost of the man-hours is in terms of wild goose chases.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “if that was part of the lesson, I got it, but it still sucks.”
“I know.” Rodney nodded. “We got it too. And you’re right. It sucks. But, at the same time, maybe something will come out of it.”
“While I still have however many more to go …” she muttered. “Seven, I think.”
Rodney nodded. “You could ask the sergeant for some assistance.”
She winced.
“See? You don’t even want to talk to Colby because it came from Simon.”
“I know, dammit, and yet it’s information, and something we need to follow up on.”
“What information?” came the question from the doorway.
She looked up to see the sergeant there. She frowned at him, and he frowned right back. “Just about the church windows.”
“So did you take a look?”
“I hit twelve yesterday, and there’s seven more.”
He nodded. “And? What do you want now?”
“We have two more cases found in Saskatchewan.”
He looked at her and asked, “Really? Why across Canada?”
“I don’t know, but there’s more,” she stated. After taking a deep breath, she explained about the kid’s travels while incarcerated.
He stared at her. “So the killings happened in the same towns where the kid was?”
She nodded.
“You’ll bring him in for questioning?”
“I’ve already spoken to him this morning. He’s gone to work.”
“And what’ll stop him from taking a run out of the country?”
“A, he doesn’t have the money. B, I don’t think he will because he’s hoping to get his case cleared now because, don’t forget, all the time, no matter where he was, he was in jail. It’s not like he could just sign himself in and out and run around without supervision.”
At that, the sergeant frowned and leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms. “Am I hearing a but?”
“Yeah, and it’s a big one. He also had day passes, and he had some free time.”
“So you’re thinking he just walked out of jail, did his thing, and walked back in? If these cases match up, it was a brutal crime and would have taken some time to torture his victims, not to mention planning.”
“I know, and he was doing some special training therapy research BS in Alberta in order for them to understand why his juvenile mind would have killed someone like his sister.”
“Oh, great. So what did they decide?”
“That he needed some, you know, special time with his family or something, so they went for a visit. Well, that was part of it anyway. At the same time, his mom was in a bad accident or was injured somehow. I need to confirm with her just what happened. Anyway Rick was allowed to go to the hospital to see her.”
“So special dispensation for good behavior or something?”
“He described it more like he pitched a fit, and they eventually gave in,” she explained, “but, at the very least, we have to see at what point in time those visits happened as compared to the murders.”
“But keeping in mind that these women were all tortured beforehand.”
She nodded. “And what I don’t know is how long of a torture this would be.”
The sergeant looked skeptical. “Could he have done something like this? Found a woman, kidnapped her, tortured her, then left her for days, only to not come back, and that’s when she was found? I mean, is that part of this?”
“I don’t know. I asked Smidge to take a look at the files.”
“Good, maybe he’ll have some insight into this mess.” And, with that, Colby turned and walked out.
She looked over at Rodney. “That didn’t go too badly.”
He stared at her. “You’re still alive, so that’s good.”
She nodded. “I know. He’s not too happy with this scenario.”
“None of us are,” Rodney noted. “Just, well, it’s rougher on some of us than others.”
“He didn’t work any of these cases, did he?” She had looked for the officers involved in the original case that sent the kid to juvie, then prison, but thankfully it wasn’t the sergeant. She didn’t recognize any of the other names either.
Before Rodney could answer her, Kate’s phone rang, and, when she pulled it out, she saw the call was from Simon. Wondering if she should answer the call, she got up, then walked a little farther away, ignoring the smirk on Rodney’s face. “What’s up?”
“Can you give me the addresses that you didn’t hit yesterday?” he asked in a tight voice.
“Listen. I can’t have you going in and causing any trouble.”
He snorted. “Let’s just say I had another vision,” he replied. “I think I might recognize the location if I could see it.”
“I’ll give you the addresses, but you can’t go in,” she stated. “Promise me.” There was a hesitation, so she pressed him. “I won’t give them to you then.”
“If you want me to find this woman, I have to get in there,” he replied.
“Fine, but again you have to promise that, as soon as you see the building that you think is the right one, you have to call me.”
“Fine,” he snapped.
“I’ll text them to you.” She raced back to her desk and sat down, then pulled out her list and copied the ones that were yet to be done. She quickly sent Simon those. When she sat back after hitting Send, she frowned, thinking about the wisdom of it. She should probably have gone with him. She looked at her watch, looked down at her phone.
Rodney asked, “What’s the matter?”
“It’s Simon. He’s had another vision, and he wants to see the possible addresses that I didn’t get to yesterday.”
“Interesting that he thinks he’ll recognize it. So, what’s bothering you?”
“Well, for one thing, I can’t have him going in and causing chaos, if he thinks he’s found it. I’m just wondering if I should go with him.”
“You have to trust your instincts,” Rodney noted. “If you think you should go, then get going.”
*
When Simon answered his phone, he was already in his car, heading to the first one on the list.
“Come pick me up,” she ordered.
He snorted. “Don’t you mean, Hi, Simon. How you doing? How about we go together?”
“No, it’s more like, I need to see these churches and the nearby buildings too. How about picking me up?”
“Well, that’s a little bit better. Less of an order, more of a request,” he explained, having already turned the corner, heading toward the station. “Did you eat breakfast?” he asked. He heard silence at the other end. “Then we’re picking up food on the way.”
“I don’t have a problem with that,” she admitted, “but I need to hunt down these places too.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” he noted. “I’m on the way.”
“How far away are you?”
“Oh, ten minutes maybe.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll get a coffee.” And, with that, she hung up.
He would tell her to get two, but she was who she was, and either she would or she wouldn’t. And he knew it wouldn’t be a reflection on how much she thought of him. It would most likely be a reflection of the fact that she was already focused and wouldn’t think past that. But he wouldn’t worry about it. When he pulled up, she was holding two cups.
He smiled as she put the cups on the roof of his car and opened the door before handing him one.
“I was sitting here, thinking that, if you were in a better mood, I could have asked you to get me one too, and I was thinking it was fifty-fifty as to whether you would think of it or not.”
She looked at him in surprise. “I was already there, so it was a simple thing.”
“It is a simple thing,” he agreed, “but you don’t usually think of it.”
She frowned, as she slammed the door closed. “Are you saying that I don’t think of others?”
“You do sometimes,” he admitted, “but generally our relationship hasn’t been all that open to thinking of things like that.”
She shook her head. “I’m still not exactly sure what you’re trying to say.”
“Not certain I am either,” he stated, “but how about I just say thank you and let’s move on.”
She nodded. “That works.”
But her voice was a little distant. He wondered if he had insulted her. It wasn’t something that he ever really worried about with her. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”
“Whatever,” she replied. “What church are you heading to first?”
He pointed to the map he had printed off, on the dash, with seven numbered circles noted thereon.
She grabbed it and nodded. “That should work.”
“Glad you think so,” he teased, shaking his head.
She glared at him. “Look. I’m just focused on one thing.”
“I know,” he stated. “I get it.”
She groaned. “But I don’t have to be a bitch about it. I get that too. Thank you for picking me up and for letting me come with you. It’s something I need to keep an eye on.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re not a cop, so you can’t go barging around doing cop things.”
“Well, I can,” he noted, “and I do on a regular basis, in case you didn’t know that.”
She stopped, looked at him, and asked, “What do you mean by that?”
He shrugged. “It’s hardly like I do any superhero type stuff. But, in my work, I see an awful lot of shit, and, if I can fix it, I fix it. If I can’t, I can’t. And, in this case, whatever you want to call this ability of mine, it is screwing up my life, so, if I can’t fight it, then maybe I need to join it and to just accept it.”
“That might be easier for you,” she stated cautiously.
He heard the tone of her voice and smiled. “Go ahead. You can insult me.”
“It’s not about insulting you,” she argued. “It’s about making sure that your perspective is squared away.”
He laughed aloud at that. “How can one have a squared-away perspective regarding psychics?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, with half a smile. “It just sounded right.”
“Says you.” He pointed up ahead. “Here’s the first one.”
As he drove around the block, she stared up at the top. “Well, I can see where the window is,” she noted, “but that looks like a pretty deserted building across from it.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No, actually it looks promising.” At that, she got out, studying the church. “It’s a similar window, but it’s not exactly like the other ones I saw.”
“Well, that’s the thing about church windows. I know vanity is supposed to be something that you don’t really want to encourage when you’re religious, but it seems like the churches were always these huge monuments to the god of their choice at the time.”
She nodded. “That’s not exactly the way most people would like to hear it described though.”
“Maybe not,” he agreed, “but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s pretty well what it is.”
She smiled. “At least in this case, we will do a quicker check because the building is empty.” She looked at it and asked, “Why don’t you just buy it?”
“Why? Do you think I have nothing better to do than buy more buildings?”
“Well”—she shrugged—“yeah.” And, with that, she laughed and headed toward the building across from the church window.
He smiled and followed. At least, she was in a good mood. Kate in a good mood was a dynamite force to be reckoned with. Kate in a bad mood was hell on wheels. Get out of her way, or she’d steamroll over you. But, man, she got the job done, and you had to respect that. You might not like it, but she got it done and got it done well.
All he could do was follow in her wake.