Killing Spree (13 page)

Heeding Ruth’s advice, Gillian had taken a taxi to class that night. She explained her battered appearance to her students by saying she’d gotten into a car wreck. The fabrication also helped explain why she was suddenly without a car.

After class, Jennifer Gilderhoff approached her in the corridor. She seemed nervous. “Gillian, it might be none of my business, but I wanted to tell you something.” She spoke in a whisper, and glanced around to make sure no one in the hallway could hear her. “I know someone who counsels abused wives, and if you need any help—”

“Oh, no, thank you,” Gillian said, with a little laugh. “That’s not how this happened. I really did smash up my car. But thank you for your concern, Jennifer.”

“Um, is your husband coming to pick you up?” she asked.

“No, that was the family car. I’m taking a cab home.”

“Oh, let me drive you,” Jennifer offered. “You shouldn’t be waiting around for a cab, not when they’ve posted those warnings all over the school. Plus, I could use the company. You know what they say—safety in numbers and all.”

Gillian accepted Jennifer’s offer. But she couldn’t help feeling there was something phony about her concern, something slightly condescending.

“God, it’s scary to think there might be someone around here abducting women,” Jennifer said as they stepped outside together.

Gillian felt a chill, and turned up the collar to her trench coat. In the dark, wet parking lot, it was hard to miss the red flashing police lights. Two patrol cars had pulled into the corner of the lot, near the forest. An old, beat-up Monte Carlo was parked between them.

“Do you think they caught somebody?” Jennifer asked. She started toward the squad cars. But Gillian hesitated.

“Don’t you want to see what’s going on?” Jennifer asked.

Gillian still had that feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach. Nevertheless, she followed Jennifer toward the police investigation site. They were about twenty feet away when one of the cops started shaking his head at them. “Ladies, please,” he called. “Go back. You don’t want to see this….”

“Oh, my God,” Jennifer whispered.

Gillian saw the rain-beaded windshield of the Monte Carlo. Then she realized some of those drops were red—and they came from inside the car. Slumped in the passenger seat was a young woman with blood matting down her blond hair and caked along the side of her neck.

They’d found Kelly Zinnemann.

Later, the details emerged. The Monte Carlo had been reported stolen five nights before. The coroner estimated that Kelly had been dead approximately eighteen hours before the police discovered her in the abandoned car. She’d been shot in the head execution-style. The clothes she wore weren’t from her wardrobe. Twenty-two-year-old Kelly had been dressed in a schoolgirl’s uniform—a blue blazer, madras skirt, and knee socks. Gillian found out from Ruth that the dead woman was also wearing saddle shoes, her size. Ruth’s police connections were pretty certain the killer had bought the shoes some time before abducting Kelly. He must have been watching her—and planning her death—for quite a while.

Kelly had been the first.

Gillian remembered that scary, lonely time from two years ago—with her husband deserting her, no car, and a serial killer roaming around the campus where she taught her night class. Two more women were killed, both of them shot execution-style, both of them dressed in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms. Attendance among female night students dropped by nearly a third as the college was held in the grip of fear for seven weeks. Women came to their classes with knives, Mace, or pepper spray in their purses.

They eventually caught the “Schoolgirl Killer.” But Gillian suspected they had the wrong guy when they arrested Boyd Farrow. He insisted he was innocent, and so did several people who knew him. But Boyd Farrow was never tried or convicted for the Schoolgirl Murders. He was found dead in his jail cell a month after his arrest.

Still, the killings stopped after his incarceration.

Now it seemed another set of killings had begun. Jennifer Gilderhoff lay in a coma in a New York hospital after being stabbed repeatedly. And in Montana, the body of a hitchhiker had been discovered with his heart surgically removed. Had he also been a student in her night class two years ago? Gillian wondered if there was a connection between this “copycat” and the Schoolgirl Murders.

Burt finished reading his latest entry from
In Pursuit of Sarah Lee,
and his classmates valiantly struggled to come up with some helpful positive criticism. After class, Gillian stepped out to the corridor and called for a taxi. They kept her on hold for ten minutes. Meanwhile, the school emptied out. The hallway got quieter and quieter—until the only sound she heard was the hold-music on her cell phone.

The taxi dispatcher finally came on the other end of the line. They couldn’t get a cab to her for another twenty-five minutes. “Never mind, thank you,” Gillian said into the phone. She switched off her cell, folded it up, and shoved it into her purse.

There was no one in the cold, gloomy stairwell, and she hurried down the steps to the first floor. Gillian passed the administration office window, and saw the darkened office beyond the glass. The hallway lights started to dim just as Gillian stepped out a side door.

The humming halogen spotlights gave the parking lot an eerie, otherworldly glow that was almost more sinister than the darkness. Gillian spotted a group of students headed toward the bus stop, and she followed them for a while—until they all piled into an SUV. Gillian kept walking at a brisk clip as the SUV pulled out of the lot. She didn’t see anyone else around—and very few cars. She glanced toward the forest—and the corner of the lot where they’d found Kelly Zinnemann in the abandoned car two years ago. No cars were there now.

And no one was waiting at the bus stop by the parking lot entrance. Gillian checked her wristwatch: 9:20. Then she consulted the bus schedule posted on the side of the shelter. She had another twenty-five minutes until the next bus came along. Hell, she could have waited for the damn taxi and arrived home sooner.

She sat down on the little bench in the shelter. The area was well lit by one of those humming halogen lights overhead. Across the street from the stop was an abandoned lot. About half a block down was a 7-Eleven, and beside that, a dump called Wok Like a Man Teriyaki Hut. Both places were just far enough away that she couldn’t expect a response if she screamed for help.

Gillian looked over her shoulder at the clump of bushes where they’d found Kelly Zinnemann’s purse two years ago. She shifted restlessly on the bench, then reached into her purse and pulled out her class list from two years ago. Looking at the first few names, she drew a blank. But she remembered some of them besides Jennifer. There were two older women writing romance novels; and Chase Scott, a somewhat pretentious, but talented young man whose real name was Scott Chase; and a sweet, chubby girl, Shauna Hendricks, writing a mystery. There was Glenn Turlinger, an old man with a three-pronged cane; his dry Civil War military saga bored everyone stiff. She remembered Todd Sorenson, a young, “tortured” artist-poet whose writing was a rambling, incoherent mess. He hadn’t gotten along with anyone in the class, and quit before the end of the semester. And of course, there was Ruth, working on her true-crime thriller.

She would have to ask Ruth if she remembered the others. The “drifter” murdered in Montana could have been Chase Scott or Todd Sorenson, or one of the two other men whose names were on the class list.

Perhaps one of them was the murderer. This copycat killer had gone after Jennifer Gilderhoff for a reason. Only someone connected to that class—or the school—would know that Jennifer had been one of her students.

Past the constant hum from the halogen lights, Gillian heard a rustling noise. She swiveled around and studied the bushes. She didn’t see anything.

She wished there was more traffic on the street. In all this time waiting at the stop, only about a dozen cars had driven by. Gillian took out her cell phone. She was about to call the taxi company again. But she hesitated and glanced at the phone numbers on the class list. They were two years old, but it was worth a try.

She tried the number to one of the men she couldn’t remember: Vincent G. Connelly.

A woman answered on the other end. “Hello?”

“Yes, hello,” Gillian said. “Is Vincent Connelly there, please?”

“
Vincent?
Is this a telemarketer?”

“No, I was his creative writing teacher at Seattle City Experimental College two years ago.”

“Oh, well, okay, just a second.” Then Gillian heard her call out: “Gary, telephone! It’s someone from that writing class you took….”

Gillian suddenly remembered.
Gary
Connelly was a stocky man in his late forties, with glasses, a dark cocoa complexion, and graying hair. He’d been working on a detective novel. Or was it a sports novel?

“Hello?”

“Gary, this is Gillian McBride,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Of course, I do! How the heck are you, Gillian?”

She now recalled Gary’s jovial disposition and his big, booming voice. “I’m fine,” she said, peeking down the street for a sign of the bus. “Um, I just wanted to touch base with a few of my old students. Are you still writing?”

“Oh, I take it out and dabble with it once in a while. I came up with a new title.
The Ballpark Murders
. What do you think?”

“Well, it—it’s got potential. Keep at it, Gary. Listen, I was wondering if you’ve heard from anyone else in the class recently.”

“Yeah, I got an e-mail from Jennifer What’s-her-name. It was one of those mass e-mails, announcing she’d gotten a book published. I fired off a quick congratulations, and didn’t hear back from her. That was about a month ago.”

“No one else?” she asked. “Chase Scott maybe?”

“Wasn’t he the pompous one who was writing some kind of thriller? I remember the pages of endless description. It took place down in Jamaica or someplace—with scuba diving and sex on the beach.”

“That’s right. You haven’t heard from him?”

“Oh, God, no. I think he said about two words to me the whole semester. He was kind of a squirrelly dude, almost as bad as that psycho-case Ted.”

“You mean Todd?” Gillian asked. “The one who left before the end of the semester?”

“That’s right, Todd,” Gary said. “Talk about strange. I think he was on drugs half the time. And how about the way he was stalking you?”

“Stalking me?” Gillian repeated, watching a car whoosh by.

“Yeah, didn’t you know? When I’d wait for my wife to come pick me up after class, I used to see him hanging around. He’d follow you and your friend out to the parking lot—and just watch you.”

“I had no idea,” Gillian murmured. Her cell beeped.

“What is that, another call?” Gary asked.

“No, my battery’s going,” Gillian said. “Um, are you sure Todd was stalking me?”

“Well, I remember once, one of the old ladies was wondering where you lived, and Todd piped up. He knew. He said, ‘She lives on Capitol Hill—in a duplex.’ Isn’t that right? Did you live in a duplex? I think he even mentioned that you had a front porch.”

Gillian felt a shiver pass through her. “That’s right.”

“I’m sorry, what did you say? You’re breaking up.”

“This battery’s going on me. Do you remember anything else about Todd?”

“Wasn’t he”—the line broke for a moment—“novel about a rock band in Tacoma or Fort Lewis—” The connection went out again. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. No one could.”

“Yes, it was a difficult story to follow. Listen, Gary, I better hang up. We’re losing the connection. I’ll call you later this week.”

He must have said something that didn’t go through, because all Gillian heard was an aborted “—from you too, Gillian. Bye.” Then the line went dead.

She clicked off the cell phone, and tucked it into her purse with the class listing. Gillian checked her wristwatch again. The bus should have come five minutes ago. She peered down the empty street, and sighed.

She remembered Todd Sorenson as crudely handsome with cold blue eyes and messy brown hair. He was lean, and dangerous-looking. He always wore the same torn black sweater to class. The chapters he turned in were usually on dirty, crinkled paper—with dozens of typos, scratch-outs, and notes in the margins. He used an old manual typewriter too. She recalled the slightly raised “e.”

His writing was more like stream-of-consciousness rambling, something he’d produced while under the influence. She remembered him looking a bit stoned during some of the classes, slouched in his chair, blue eyes at half-mast.

She couldn’t believe Todd had been stalking her. He must have been casing the place during those weeks following Barry’s disappearance. Todd, the cops, those hoods, and God only knows who else were all hanging around. Hell, with all the people out there watching from the shadows, she should have set up a concession stand and made a few bucks.

Gillian let out a stunned little laugh.

She heard the bushes rustling behind her again, and she stopped laughing. She stood up. Turning, she caught her reflection in the shelter’s Plexiglas wall. Merging with her own image, she saw some movement in those bushes. Her hand automatically reached inside her purse for the pepper spray. But her feet couldn’t move. They seemed rooted to the pavement.