Detective Wade Jackson Mystery - 01 - The Sex Club (33 page)

But where had he done the deed? Jackson wondered. In the parking lot? In a car? So why hadn’t anyone at the apartment complex seen something? And what about the sheet fibers in Jessie’s nose? Then there was Nicole. How did she fit in? Was she also having sex with Fieldstone? Did the orange panties belong to her?

Oh shit. A new scenario hit Jackson like a slap to the head. His foot came off the accelerator, and the cruise control kicked off.

What if the mayor’s wife had killed both girls out of jealousy and revenge?

Jealousy was right up there with greed, lust, and revenge as a motive for murder.

He needed to interview Janice Fieldstone ASAP. And he would assign either Schakowski or McCray to check out her activities for the days of both homicides. Jackson could not believe that he hadn’t thought of the scorned wife before now. In retrospect, it seemed that he might have zoomed in on the mayor too quickly and ignored other possibilities. Jackson was not happy with his performance. Homicide investigators could not afford to be sloppy.

Jackson felt a familiar tightening of his chest, accompanied by a little burst of pain. He hoped it was just stress and not an artery.

Tuesday, October 26, 7:52 a.m.

Ruth pulled up in front of Kincaid Middle School, and Caleb hopped out of the car. “Bye Mom.”

Ruth willed Rachel, who was in the back seat, to follow suit without discussion. Her daughter didn’t move. “Rachel, you’re pushing my limits. You are going to school. Now get out.”

“Have some compassion. Two of my best friends just died. I really don’t want to be here today.”

Ruth turned and gave her a stern look. “I know you’re sad, but you must pray for strength. Your other friends need comfort too.”

Rachel started to say something, then thought better of it. But she couldn’t resist slamming the car door just little. Ruth wondered if she should let Rachel get away with it. Her daughter was grieving. Ruth had all day to decide about that, but for right now she had more important things to focus on. She needed to hurry home and get cracking on her timer while the house was empty and before her volunteer shift at the hospital started.

Ruth drove too fast on the way home, and she prayed she wouldn’t get a ticket. She was wound up and anxious to get this phase over with. Other faithful Christians had ended the lives of abortionists, and Ruth admired their passion and courage in doing God’s work. But many of them had paid the price. She had no intention of getting caught. She couldn’t do the Lord’s work from a jail cell.

Ruth hurried into the house and locked the door behind her. She stopped in the laundry room to pick up her new supplies, which she had purchased at the 24-hour Wal-Mart the night before. She carried everything to Sam’s office, the only room inside the house that had a lock. The idea of making a timer would have been intimidating to her a few months ago. But once she had connected with her mentor Josiah Stahl, Ruth had seen new possibilities for herself. And watching her first bomb detonate had been empowering. She could be God’s instrument here on earth. She could make things happen now.

Ruth, who had never even changed a flat tire, had been called on by God to keep fornicators from making their babies pay for their mistakes. The ease with which she picked up skills and adapted to her secret war tactics sometimes still surprised her.

She had easily located on the Internet the instructions she needed for making a bomb, then confirmed them with a phone call to Josiah. That such information was so readily available was handy for her, but also horribly frightening. Anyone could learn how to create high-impact explosives and then do a devastating amount of damage. That information in the hands of terrorists or anarchists could be deadly on a massive scale. If her work in saving God’s little ones weren’t so important, Ruth would start lobbying for laws to control what was allowed on the Internet.

From the bottom of Sam’s bookshelf, Ruth picked up a copy of
The Feminine Mystique
—something her husband had never, and would never, look at—and pulled out her instructions. She had printed them from a website called Ka-Boom!

First and always, she pulled on plastic gloves. Next she pried the backing from the cheap digital watch, then disconnected the alarm buzzer. The alarm itself would be set to serve as the timer. But first, she used a soldering gun to connect wire leads to the timing device inside the watch.

The phone on Sam’s desk rang, startling her. Ruth jumped and accidentally pulled the lead wire loose. “Damn.” She picked up the phone. “Hello. This is the Greiners.”

“Ruth, it’s Eva Strickland. How are you?”

“I’m good, Eva. But I’m in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”

“It’s important.” Eva’s tone dropped to indicate how serious.

Ruth tried not to be annoyed. “What is it?”

“I found a condom under a seat in the minivan.”

“Oh dear. What do you think that means?” Ruth looked at her unfinished timer and willed herself to be patient.

“I think John is having an affair.”

“Oh no. Perhaps there’s another explanation.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Have you talked to him?”

“Not yet. Do you think I should? Or should I try to keep track of his coming and going for a while?”

“You mean spy.”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Deception isn’t good for a marriage,” Ruth counseled. “You should talk to John. Get it out in the open and pray about it.”

“You’re right. Thanks Ruth. I know you’re in the middle of something, so I’ll let you go.”

“Take care, Eva. I’ll pray for you, too.”

Ruth hung up the phone and asked God to help Eva and John through their difficulties. God couldn’t do it by Himself though. Eva needed to keep a better eye on both her husband and her daughter. Calling her Angel didn’t make her one. Ruth remembered to thank the Lord for Sam and his faithfulness to her.

Then she moved back to her task at hand. After resoldering the wire lead, she grabbed the twelve-volt battery and started to work on the primer that would connect the timer to the pipe bomb. This stuff was easy if you took it step by step. The scary part would be attaching it to Kollmorgan’s car. But with a little duct tape and the cover of darkness, all she had to do was slide under the car and tape a little package under the driver’s seat. Rigging the bomb to the ignition would be more effective but Ruth didn’t have those skills, nor the time to acquire them. This could not wait. Kollmorgan was too dangerous. And God’s vengeance must be swift.

Ruth decided she would go out this evening on foot around 2 a.m. The abortionist’s house was within walking distance, and if anyone saw her or if Sam woke up, she could always claim she was out walking off her insomnia.

The timer alarm would be set for 8 p.m. sharp the following evening. Ruth planned to slip out of Wednesday night Bible study and call Kollmorgan from the pay phone across the street from the church. She would call at exactly 7:56, giving the target four minutes to grab her purse and get into her car. Ruth would pretend to be a pregnant teenager, desperately in need of help. She would beg the abortionist to come rescue her right away. Kollmorgan would not be able to resist such a plea. She would rush to her car and race out the driveway.

And it would be the last thing she ever did.

Tuesday, October 26, 9:46 a.m.

Nicole’s small pale nakedness against the stainless steel table, illuminated under harsh halogen bulbs, gave Jackson a sense of
deja vu
. He had experienced this same scene less than a week ago, and it was not any easier this time.

Ainsworth’s slow, methodical examination made him impatient. He wanted information now. He wanted to be back in Eugene, interviewing Janice Fieldstone and looking at Nicole’s phone records.

“No signs of rape,” the ME said after an examination of Nicole’s pubic area. “But she’s no virgin either. This girl has had vaginal and anal intercourse and shows faint scarring where I believe she was treated with liquid nitrogen sometime in the past month or so.”

“For genital warts?”

“Most likely.”

“So she and Jessie shared a sexual partner.”

“Possibly.” Ainsworth never made assumptions.

“But she was not sexually assaulted at the time of her death?”

“No.”

“Any trace evidence?”

“None in her pubic area. But there’s a small scratch on her hip that could have been made from someone pulling off her pants.” The ME used a magnifier for a closer look. “There’s a tiny piece of fiber stuck in the scratch. We’ll compare it to her clothes.”

She placed the fiber, which Jackson could not see, in an evidence tray and continued her examination, moving slowly up and down the body. “She has an odd scar on her right shin, possibly made from a dull razor used while shaving her legs.”

Jackson’s irritation escalated. “Can we look at her nose and lungs? I need to know if she was suffocated.

Ainsworth looked over her glasses at him but didn’t respond. She began to examine Nicole’s head and neck. She used tweezers to extract the piece of white plastic from Nicole’s earring. “Did Gunderson see this?”

“He thinks she was suffocated with the plastic bag her clothes were in.”

“Lab analysis will tell us if it’s the same material. But I’d say it’s a pretty good guess. This mark across her neck was made from pressure, and this bruise looks like it could have come from a thumb.”

Jackson had not noticed a bruise yesterday, but now Nicole’s whole face had a reddish tint. “Is the color in her face consistent with suffocation?”

“More likely strangulation. The blood vessels are slightly occluded from the pressure that was placed on her neck.”

“Was she moved after she was killed?”

“If so, not far. The lividity is all on the front side.”

“Any tissue under her nails? Did she fight her attacker?”

Ainsworth looked over her glasses at him again. “Patience. I’m not there yet.”

But when she examined Nicole’s hands, no trace evidence was obvious. The ME took scrapings from under the painted nails anyway. She also took scrapings from the girl’s heels, which were dark with dirt. The internal exam revealed that Nicole had eaten chicken and broccoli about an hour before her death—which had most likely occurred before Fieldstone was arrested—that she had a small amount of scarring from anal sex, and that she had died from asphyxiation.

Ainsworth declared the death a homicide, then emptied the bladder so the lab could test the urine for drugs, poisons, and other chemicals.

“Please compare her DNA with the secretions on the orange panties.”

“So is Mayor Fieldstone still your prime suspect?” The ME looked genuinely puzzled. “Do you think he’s psychotic or killing these girls to keep them from talking about the sexual activity?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Ainsworth also ran a comb over Nicole’s clothes while Jackson was there. From the girl’s dark purple T-shirt, she picked up an eight-inch blond hair that clearly had not come from Nicole’s brownish-black waist-length mane.

Jackson’s first thought was Janice Fieldstone.

“This shirt has some short hairs as well,” the ME mumbled. “Possibly feline.” Jackson did not remember seeing a cat at the Clarkes’ or the Fieldstones.’

Ainsworth noted a barely visible smear in the crotch of the pink panties. “Looks like menstrual blood,” she commented. “We’ll analyze it for DNA.”

“You’ll check for a pregnancy too?”

“Of course. But I have a budget meeting this morning, so the trace work will have to wait until this afternoon or tomorrow, unless someone else can get to it first.”

“Thanks for doing the autopsy right away.” Jackson made a mental note to send Ainsworth some flowers. “Call me as soon as you have anything to report.”

“We always do.”

He raced back to Eugene, pushing eighty most of the way without seeing a single state sheriff. A task force meeting was set up for 11 a.m., and Schakowski, McCray, Evans—and Fouts—were already in the conference room when Jackson rushed in ten minutes late. The detectives were relaxed, drinking coffee, and joking about an internal investigation into prostitutes’ complaints of sexual harassment by patrol cops. Jackson was not in the mood for sexual humor.

“Sorry to be late. I just got back from Nicole’s autopsy.” He turned to Evans. “Is Slonecker coming?”

“He said he’d try.”

Jackson looked at the dry-erase board with Jessie’s information still up there. “This is a first for us,” he said to the group. “Two homicides, less than a week apart, with similar victims, possibly—or probably—committed by the same person.”

Fouts spoke up. “Agent Morales will be joining this investigation today or tomorrow. I think we need the manpower.”

Jackson noticed the assumption of authority and ignored it. He turned to McCray. “Will you update the board as I talk?”

“Sure.” McCray moved toward the wall with a sluggishness that suggested he might be in pain.

Jackson summed up the new case, using his hands to track his points. “This is what we know about Nicole’s disappearance: She was last seen at home around 6 p.m. She exited her house sometime after that without any sign of struggle.