The Killing League

73.

Nicole

She double checked the address given to her by Mary Cooper, the private investigator. It was a residential neighborhood, just north of Los Angeles proper.

Nicole pulled the Acura to a stop kitty corner from the house where “Kurt” supposedly lived.

She took a deep breath. A part of her had wanted to forget it, just move on and ignore him. But Nicole had learned the hard way that sometimes it was better to initiate the confrontation on your own terms, at your own time. Yeah, she could talk to him at class, but then he would be prepared, he would expect to see her there. Now, she could catch him off guard, hopefully surprise him into telling the real truth.

And that was why she was here. The truth. She just wanted to know why Kurt had approached her and why he had lied.

Did he know about her past? Or was it just a typical game for him?

She got out of the Acura, locked it, and walked to the front door of the house. Nicole rang the doorbell and waited. She tried again, but no answer.

Nicole walked around to the side of the house and peeked in the garage’s window. Two cars were inside. Someone had to be home. She wasn’t going to just walk away now.

She turned back to walk toward the front of the house when she sensed movement behind her. Nicole ducked and turned, putting distance between herself and whoever was behind her.

Kurt lunged at her but she deflected his outreached hands, drove an elbow into his jaw, and a straight left into his kidney. He sank to his knees and reached behind his back. Nicole’s hand flashed to her ankle and the knife was in her hand and then at Kurt’s throat. He brought his hand back out.

It was empty.

“Honey?” a woman’s voice called. A pretty brunette peeked her head around the corner of the garage. She let out a little yelp when she saw Nicole.

“I’m calling 911!” she screamed. Her head disappeared back behind the garage.

“NO!” Kurt yelled. The woman’s head reappeared, but she looked only at Nicole.

Kurt looked up at Nicole as well.

“I can explain,” he said. Nicole wasn’t sure if he meant her, or the woman who was obviously his wife.





74.

The Butcher

When James Milford opened the door to his apartment, he immediately had a flashback. He wasn’t standing on the threshold of his cheap one-bedroom apartment, just back from a long day at the body shop. He wasn’t finally home, his arms and legs tired from the hard work with a backache from standing on the concrete floor all day.

No, he was back in prison.

His second day in prison, to be exact, when they finally came for him.

That day, James Milford had received no warning from anyone else in the yard. The only notice he received was from the bolt of terror that came directly from his nut sack, zipped up his spine and shot adrenaline through every part of his body.

He had turned and surprised the would-be attacker with his own shank. Word spread quickly among the population that James Milford was the real deal.

So when he pushed the door to his apartment open, the same electrical charge ran up his nerve center. Where it came from, he did not know. In fact, after the attack in the prison, he’d often wondered what had given him that moment’s warning. Was it God? Some ancient, primeval instinct?

He never came up with an answer.

Now, that same intuition took over. Somehow, he knew everything was wrong.

So he simply let go of his keys, opened his hands and watched the older man with the giant meat cleaver burst from the darkness of the apartment and swing at his head. Milford leaned back, saw the enormous knife blade whistle past his face. He heard the giant knife bury itself in the cheap hollow wood door.

The attacker looked at Milford, then at the knife.

Milford was surprised that he had no idea who this man was. He figured it would be a face from prison. Someone he had wronged. Or even the face of a family member, a relative of one of his victims.

But this man, with the slicked back hair, the weird face, he had never seen before.

The attacker lunged for the knife now wedged into the door. He tried to free it from the cheap fiberboard.

Milford, too, grabbed the handle of the knife, placing his hand over his attacker’s hand.

But with his left arm, he drove his elbow into the strange man’s jaw.

The man staggered. Milford wrenched the knife free from the door and swung it in a short arc, much smaller than his attacker’s haymaker. The blade entered the man’s cheek and cut through his mouth, severed his tongue.

Milford stepped in and swung again.

The real deal, he thought.





75.

Mack

Mack barely spoke to Adelia and Janice when he got back home. Instead, he went straight to his office, shut and locked the door, cracked a beer.

Bullshit. Utter bullshit. That’s what Whidby was full of and people would die because of it.

He slammed the beer like a triathlete chugging Gatorade after a sixty mile bike ride. F*ck it, he thought. He had to get this thing figured out.

Mack slammed the folders down on his desk and picked up the phone. Reznor had given him the files that had finally come through from Charleston Municipal Hospital and the Georgia Trucking Bureau.

On the flight down, he’d studied the hospital records. Of the employee information, he’d found three people that fit his profile.

Mack picked up the phone and dialed the hospital’s administration office and asked for the name of the person who had corresponded with Reznor.

When he got the person on the phone he told him what he needed. In short, he read the man the three names he had winnowed down from the major list. They fit his profile: the person would be at least thirty-five years of age, no more than fifty-five, most likely somewhere in the middle. The person would be a low-ranking employee, not a doctor or a highly skilled technician. The person would be single, with no children. The person would also have been at the hospital for at least seven years.

But most importantly, the person would have taken an abrupt and uncharacteristic leave of absence within the last few days.

The man promised to call Mack back as soon as he checked the details.

Mack looked at the files from the Georgia Trucking Bureau. This would be much more difficult and take significantly more time than the hospital information. The trucking bureau had names and records in the thousands. Plus, the records were incomplete and haphazard, unlike the hospital’s information.

Mack cursed Whidby again. If the man had just given him a team of junior agents to go through this kind of labor-intensive work, he could make some real progress in as short amount of time as possible.

The phone interrupted his thoughts and he thumbed the connect button.

Of the three names, two were currently working their shifts at the hospital. The third employee had asked for time off due to a family crisis.

She was a forty-seven year old nurse who was single, with no children. She had been a nurse at the hospital for nearly seventeen years.

The administrator gave Mack the name but it meant nothing to him.

Ruth Dykstra.





76.

Lady of the Evening

He had chosen a woman for her, and she knew the reason. It was a competition, after all. Amanda Dekins knew that she was good with men. Knew how to manipulate them. Trick them. Kill them.

So this time, the Commissioner had pitted her against a fellow female. She almost laughed. ‘Fellow female.’ What a stupid phrase. Yeah, she had a p-ssy. But she was about as far from what it meant to be a “woman” than anyone could imagine.

She wasn’t too worried. She’d read through the file notes of her target. The woman was a crime scene investigator — one of those tech geeks who on television were able to scrape some little bit of skin from the inside of a lampshade and catch the killer. Typical Hollywood bullshit.

Well, the woman, named Sophie Tarallis, hadn’t done anything that dramatic, but her extremely thorough work had helped catch a serial killer in Milwaukee nearly ten years ago. It had been her big claim to fame and she was frequently seen on television in a show about cold cases.

Amanda Dekins nodded. It made sense. This was Round Two.

The stakes were definitely getting higher.

She realized that pitting her against a woman actually made it easier, in some ways. Maybe what the Commissioner saw as a challenge was an advantage.

So Amanda Dekins chose to look at it that way.

The Tarallis woman drove home the same way every day from the Dallas Crime Center, except on Friday nights when she and two of her coworkers usually stopped at a trendy bar across the street and had a martini.

Dekins dressed in a simple business suit with sensible shoes and drove her rental car to a nearby park. She got out, locked it, and walked back to the street, about a quarter mile from the bar her target was most likely about to leave.

She spotted an apartment complex nearby and stood in the shadows. Fifteen minutes later, she saw the Honda Accord driven by Tarallis.

Dekins pulled the shirt from her waistband so it hung untucked, messed her hair and kicked off one of her shoes. She dashed into the street, directly in front of the Accord. The car skidded to a stop.

She went to the driver’s side window and screamed. “My boyfriend’s drunk and he’s going to hurt me!” She glanced back at the apartment complex, her eyes wide with terror. “Can you just give me a ride away from here? Anywhere?” she said. She started crying, although if the target looked closely, she wouldn’t see tears.

The woman gave a quick look at the apartment complex, then back at Amanda Dekins. Dekins saw she was a small woman, with salt-and-pepper black hair pulled back in a bun. The woman looked at dead bodies all day. No wonder she didn’t have much style.

Dekins knew what the woman saw. A woman still pretty, but clearly past her prime. Probably a divorced, legal secretary living in a shitty apartment trying to put her life back together. A woman who maybe had a pattern of choosing the wrong kind of man.

“Get in,” the crime tech said.

“Thank you so much,” Dekins said as they pulled away.

“I’m calling the cops,” the crime tech said. She had her cell phone pressed to her ear as she drove.

“No, it’s okay,” Dekins said. “Just turn up here at the next block, I’ve got a ride coming. But I couldn’t wait any longer, I think he was going to kill me.”

The woman thought about it, then snapped her phone shut.

“There’s a little park over here where I’m meeting my sister,” Dekins said.

Sophie Tarallis pulled her car off the main road, drove down two blocks and pulled up behind the main picnic area of the little park. Dekins saw her rental car about twenty feet behind them.

“Okay, this is perfect,” she said.

A moment later, Sophie Tarallis became the central piece of evidence in a grisly crime scene.





77.

Mack

Mack hung up the phone. He had just given Reznor the name of Ruth Dykstra. He’d explained his profile, what he’d found out about the woman.

He urged Reznor to order a search of Dykstra’s house and try to find the woman.

In the meantime, he settled back in with the Georgia Trucking Bureau’s records.

This was going to be tough. The profile he had developed would fit too many candidates. White male. Low education. Loner. Difficulty socializing with women. Probably in his late twenties to mid thirties.

Mack went at it for two hours, and quickly had a pile of at least twelve possible suspects.

He sighed, pushed back from the desk and cracked another beer.

He looked out the small window above his desk. He could just make out the peak of a neighbor’s house down the street. A few cirrus clouds streaked the sky, a star fruit tree swayed in the gentle afternoon breeze.

Mack’s eyes dropped to the small card on his desk. He had almost thrown it away, but had instead saved it for some reason.

KL.

What did that mean, anyway? He’d never gotten a call from a KL Landscaping or anyone else.

Mack thought about the people who had died in the last three days. He wanted to smash something. He looked at the beer bottle in his hand.

He’d been violated and he was suddenly enraged. Who’d been watching him? Who had installed the spyware on his computer? How long had they been watching him? What were they after?

Mack thought about the victims. Nahler. Tomlinson. Dragger. They all had violent crime in common, in one way or another.

But they had another thing in common.

Him.

He’d worked with Nahler. Had met both Tomlinson and Dragger.

He’d never met Judge Lyons, but had been in the same courtroom with him at some point. And Deborah Pugh had interviewed him for background on one of her books.

F*ck.

Mack’s eyes fell again on the card with the KL logo.

Images and words along with names crashed through his mind as he raced toward some kind of conclusion. He felt it.

The cases he’d been studying. He presented some of them at Quantico, during his lecture. He thought of his notes.

The Dragger murder and Nahler killing he could tie to two active serial killer cases.

Did the other killings also tie to some of the cases he’d been studying? If so, which ones? And that meant that more victims were coming soon.

Would they be related to Mack somehow? Who else had he worked with, been associated with him in terms of violent—

A shot of sheer terror ripped down his spine.

He jumped to his feet and raced to the phone. One name glowed before his eyes in blazing neon white.

Nicole.