Mark followed the older man through the cabin door. Wiped his boots thoroughly on the hooked rug just inside as he looked around. “This is cozy. How long have you lived here?”
“Since my retirement three years ago.” Sims’s tone was hushed. “We love it, although given the progression of Elizabeth’s rheumatoid arthritis, I’ve been making some improvements to the place.”
Two rooms opened off the hallway. On the right, dim light spilled through the half-open door. Mark could see a woman sitting upright in bed, holding a book in gnarled fingers, reading glasses perched on her nose. Her long, gray hair framed a face that from this distance seemed curiously unlined. Respectfully, he averted his eyes. On the left was a good-size family room with a small flat-screen TV and several photos adorning the walls. He recognized Sims and his wife in a dated wedding picture. A much younger Luther in an army uniform. The two of them holding up the respective fish they’d caught. And one that might be a somber Elizabeth Sims taken decades earlier.
“Let’s go to the kitchen, where we won’t disturb my wife.”
Mark followed the man down the hall, where it opened onto a good-size kitchen with a center island and a table and chairs. Luther pulled out a chair, waved Mark to it. It was a moment before he sat. “Pretty view. Better during the day, I’m sure.” The back wall was a bank of windows. The shades hadn’t yet been drawn, showing a deep lawn that was hemmed on three sides by tree line.
“We like it. Both Elizabeth and I enjoy the outdoors. At least,” the man said with a quick glance toward the bedroom, “she used to. She has to depend on the wheelchair more and more. And recently, she was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. It’s frustrating for her.” His smile held a tinge of sadness. “Still managed a couple canoe rides on our recent trip, though.”
Mark sank into the chair. The woman’s diagnosis would explain the locks discreetly placed below the handles on the kitchen drawers and cupboards. They’d done the same at his grandma’s house before the disease progressed, and she’d been placed in a nursing home. “Where’d you go?”
“Spent three weeks at Berlin Lake. The fishing wasn’t great this year, but the fall foliage was spectacular.” He seemed to stop himself then, chuckling ruefully. “Listen to me. Three years out of the agency, and it’s fishing, hiking, and canoeing that fill my thoughts. A far cry from my work days.”
Mark shot him an easy smile. “That’s what retirement is supposed to be about, isn’t it?”
Sims nodded. He was late sixties, Mark figured, and had kept most of his hair, although silver had heavily encroached on the brown. At five-ten, maybe one sixty, he hadn’t let himself go since leaving the agency.
“You look like you’re a good way from retirement, so let’s talk about what brought you here. You’re working the kidnapping over in Saxon Falls.”
“I am. Given its proximity to West Bend, we have to look for connections to the Kelsey Willard case, which you were involved in.”
There was a subtle shift in Sims’s demeanor. In his eyes. The relaxed look vanished from his expression, and he was a cop again. “Like you, I worked the special investigations unit, originally out of Athens. But the last dozen years or so, I was loaned out to any serial-crime investigation.”
“Because of your profiling experience.”
The man nodded. “My SAC asked me to attend the first couple of classes at Quantico. It was extensive training, and I studied even more on my own. The agency provided regular opportunities after that to keep up with it. It wasn’t something I planned, but it ended up defining my career.”
“You were the one who linked eight deaths. Attributed them to the same killer.”
“Unofficially, I attributed twelve homicides to the Ten Mile Killer.” The man’s correction surprised Mark. “I believe that eight of the bodies found in the last twenty years could be linked to him. Another I dismissed as the work of a copycat. There were subtle differences in the bruising around the throat, the costuming, and the way the victims were positioned. The other four girls I suspect he’s guilty of killing were never found. Kelsey Willard is one of them. At least, I haven’t heard that her body was discovered.”
Mark shook his head. “No. But it sounds like you were convinced the TMK was responsible from almost the beginning of her case. So there must be more than the final appearance of the bodies that link his victims.”
The man turned a hand. “I identified some similarities, yes. All females, ranging from fourteen to sixteen when they disappeared. There were physical resemblances—they were dark-haired and slender. Attractive. The bodies that were found were clad in leotards, tutus, tights, and ballet slippers, although some of the girls had dancing experience while others hadn’t. All had been manually strangled in the same way. The pattern of bruising on the throat was remarkably similar. None of them showed signs of sexual abuse, although not all of them were virgins. The body dumps were located in fairly remote areas within approximately ten miles of one another in the Wayne National Forest in the southeastern part of the state. And every one of them had a parent that was lacking in some way. Sometimes it was the mother, but most frequently the father.”
He took a breath, then gave a wry smile. “Admittedly, the last link is the most subjective. And evaluating parents who are in the midst of trauma is hardly fair. But the more you dig into the family dynamics, the more you discover about the relationships before the kidnappings. I was still working on strengthening that premise when I retired from the agency.”
A parent that was lacking in some way. Mark considered the words. If Starkey was to be believed, Brian DeVries had sex with a preteen girl when he was a teenager himself. If he’d carried a fetish for girls into adulthood, there had been nothing uncovered in his home or on his computer to suggest it.
But if Mark dug into that portion of Brian DeVries’s life, he might find that this secret from the man’s past had impacted his daughter in some less obvious way.
“Whitney DeVries’s kidnapper posed as a teenage boy from a neighboring town and lured her to a meeting place. Does that match with any of the other disappearances you linked to the TMK?”
Sims thought for a minute. “No. In the first two cases, the killer snatched them out of their homes, from their beds. In the other instances, the girls disappeared when they were out of the house alone. But as you know, MOs change. They reflect opportunity, and the offender can adapt and polish his MO to better suit his purpose.”
“The agent I was partnered with at the beginning of this case seemed to think there was some dissension about whether Kelsey Willard was a victim of the TMK.”