Profiled (26 page)

“If you don’t want to do this interview, we don’t have to,” Lexie said from the passenger’s seat. “I could talk to Paul and use his background with Abby to gain the personal information I need. I don’t want to make your day any worse.”

How long had he been sitting here, the keys in his hand while Lexie waited for him to make a move? The killer consumed his thoughts, gaining control, and John wouldn’t let him win. He turned in the seat and looked at Lexie, beautiful, caring and loving Lexie. Reaching out, he touched her cheek, then he leaned over and brushed a soft kiss on her lips. “I appreciate your offer, but you and I both know it’ll mean more and produce a better image of Abby if I answer your questions personally.”

“It will, but—”

“No. No buts. I want to do this. Yeah, it’s been a rough day, but it’s been a rough day for you too.” He paused, then decided to go ahead and tell her what he knew she’d want to know. “Angel didn’t take it well.”

The sunlight of late afternoon filtered through the car and seemed to focus on her face, etched with concern. “Is she okay? Did—did anyone wonder why she didn’t take it well?”

“No. It was hard on all of us, and we tried to handle it like men, but we all knew Hannah and Logan. I’ve never been to a drop site when I’ve known the individual, and it’s different. Angel held it together throughout the excavation, but when they found the first body, then the second, she couldn’t.”

“I should’ve gone with her. I shouldn’t have come back to work.”

“No, I think she did the right thing telling you to work on the article. Going to the site is part of what she does in her job, to give her a better interpretation of the killer’s actions. And she knew the emotions involved with finding those bodies and knowing the same guy that put them there killed Beverly Truman would be too traumatic for the two of you to endure together. You may have inadvertently let your relationship be known, and we can’t afford for the killer to learn that the two of you are related, and that you saw him back then.”

“But Angel needed me, and I wasn’t there.”

“No, but I was.”

“You helped her?” Her eyes glistened, on the verge of tears.

“Yeah, I did. She only lost it for a few minutes. She also mentioned that tossing her lunch once again would help fuel the pregnancy suspicions and help her plan.”

“That’s Angel, ready to fight the world with a vengeance.” She gave him a slight smile. “I’m glad you were there.”

“Me too.” He waited a beat then, because he’d promised Angel he would and because he couldn’t keep anything from Lexie, he told her what he’d been dreading most throughout the drive from the Fellowship grounds to WGXA. “And there’s something else, something Angel wanted you to know, but she didn’t want to risk calling you at work.”

“What is it?”

“The location of the Fellowship gathering place. We never mentioned it in our meeting this morning, since most everyone there already knew. But after Angel saw where we went, she said you’d want to know.”

“Where is it?”

“About twelve miles outside of town, down County Road 42.”

She put a hand over her mouth then eased it away. “I thought it wasn’t on a main road. I’d assumed the woods, from what you described.” She paused, leaned her head back and whispered, “I never imagined it could’ve been the same place.”

“It is off the main road, or at least off of the county road. But Angel told me that your aunt took that road that day, when he stopped her and attacked her. We’re thinking he may have been there, at the place where he’d buried Hannah and Logan, before you and your aunt arrived.”

“It was a dirt road, covered in loose gravel.” She remembered the crunching sound of rocks
beneath his shoes when he neared the car. Then, because she couldn’t control the force of the memory, she remembered the look in her aunt’s eyes. Her screams. Lexie gasped. “We drove right to him. On the day he’d already decided to commit a murder.” Then she shook her head. “But he couldn’t have known we would, and he had no idea about her pregnancy until he got to the car.”

“Which was what Angel said today when she spoke to me about it. She believes, after viewing the Fellowship grounds and trying to determine how the man thinks, that he believed some spiritual force would show him the next victim he should claim. Then he left the gathering grounds and pretended his car had broken down on the road and waited for someone to stop.”

“The police said other people had seen a teenage boy broken down on that road earlier that morning,” Lexie said. “Some had even stopped to help, but he’d claimed he was okay.”

“I know. After Angel and I talked, I pulled the information out of our files and reviewed it again. If they could have identified the guy, the killer would’ve been stopped long ago, but I think the police didn’t believe a teen could’ve done what was done to your aunt, and they didn’t follow up with the witnesses like they should have.” He shrugged. “In 1985, I’m afraid the cops didn’t realize the killing instinct could occur prior to adulthood, or they didn’t realize someone could be that brutal if they were so young. But evil isn’t age-specific.”

“Or maybe he wasn’t a teen. Maybe he just looked young.”

“That’s a possibility too. But in any case, the police didn’t follow through, and the guy got away.”

Lexie turned, grabbed her seat buckle and snapped it on. “I want to go there.”

He didn’t have to ask where. Angel had told him Lexie would want to know for sure whether he’d attacked Beverly near Hannah’s body. As an investigative reporter, she wanted to know as much as possible about everything. But John dreaded taking her, because he suspected it had been twenty-eight years since the little girl called AJ had been on County Road 42. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He blew out a breath. “Okay. But go ahead and get out your tape recorder.”

She looked confused, but she followed his instruction and withdrew the tiny recorder from her purse. “Why?”

“If we’re going to confront the pain from your past, we’re going to confront mine, too. And we’ll do the two together, so I can help you deal with yours,” he leaned across the seat, touched a finger to her chin, “and you can help me deal with mine.”

Lexie bit her lower lip. “You’re ready to talk about Abby?”

“No, I don’t guess I’ll ever be ready, but I need to. Even though most of the town remembers her, or at least remembers her death. But they didn’t know her, and in order for them to care about each and every victim, they need to know them. You’ve stirred the emotions of everyone in Macon with these stories, let them know what the world lost when these women were killed. They deserve to know about Abby too.”

“Okay.” She pulled a notebook from her briefcase and flipped to the questions she’d asked each family member in the earlier interviews. She kept the questions the same to keep each consistent; however, the amount of information within the stories varied, dependent on what aspect of the victim had most touched the family member. Therefore, although each interview conformed to the rest, they were also unique, like the individuals described.

Since John had seen each of Lexie’s previous interviews, he knew what she’d ask, which helped. Some. However, he still prepared for the emotional onslaught of remembering how much
Abigail Tucker meant to him fourteen years ago.

Cranking the truck, he backed up, then started out of the parking lot. “Go ahead.”

Chapter Fifteen

Lexie’s interviews were done privately, with only the victim’s family member and her tape recorder present for the event. After they completed the interview, she composed the copy, submitted it for Paul’s approval then taped the segment. She’d never been more grateful for the procedure than right now. Lexie didn’t want to interview John on live TV. Too much emotion involved, on his part and her own.

She pressed the record button and scanned the basic list of questions that had proven effective with her former interviews. When she questioned family members about their loved ones, the list hadn’t seemed invasive. However, with Detective John Tucker on the responding end, it did.

She cleared her throat. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

Gaining her composure, she asked the first question. “How did you know Abigail Tucker?”

“Abby was my wife.” He seemed to relax in his seat and prepare for the round of questions.

“Can you tell me how the two of you first met?”

“Originally? Or when we started dating?”

“Originally.” The more she could tell her viewers, the better. They’d see the relationship Abby and John had developed and shared, and would care even more about the fact that she’d been taken from this world, along with her child.

“I met her the first day of seventh grade. Abby’s family had moved to Macon over the summer, because her father had taken a job teaching Social Studies at Central. She was kind of nervous about starting at a new school, and at that awkward age, twelve, where you want to be popular, but you don’t know how. I’d been elected the class representative for the Junior SGA, and one of my jobs was to make the new kids feel welcomed.”

“How did you do that?”

“I introduced her to folks, took her around the school and helped her learn the ropes. I tried to help her blend, but she was still pretty shy until lunch that first day, when I thought I’d help her out by carrying her tray.”

“You were flirting.”

“Hey, I was thirteen. It was in my nature to flirt.” He gave her a sly smile and Lexie found herself wishing she could’ve seen him back then trying to impress the pretty girl.

“What happened when you carried her tray?”

“So, I’m walking across the lunchroom with these two trays filled with hard tacos, limp salads and fat cinnamon rolls, and sure enough, someone had spilled taco grease on the floor.”

“Taco grease?”

“Yeah, that red stuff they try to make you think is taco sauce, but you know it’s just the grease they didn’t drain.” He laughed. “We didn’t mind, though. If you ask me, that’s what made them taste good.”

She could picture him, the confident teenaged SGA rep determined to impress every girl at school with his suave, debonair style. And falling up short. “So, what happened when you and your two trays of food had a run-in with the taco grease?”

“Kaboom.”

She laughed. “And Abby suddenly didn’t feel so bad about the first day of school?”

“How could she? This guy trying his best to impress her had ended up sprawled on the lunchroom floor covered in limp salad and taco grease. She felt pretty near perfect after that.”

Lexie realized they’d ventured off the original question, but her viewers would like the
personal story, and she planned to include the entire taco grease scene in her report.

“Tell me about your time later, when the two of you began a more personal relationship.”

“From that day on, we were always friends. Every now and then, we’d take a turn at trying out the boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but throughout high school, we were more friends than anything. She dated other guys. I dated other girls. But we always seemed to come back to each other when things didn’t turn out so great with other people.”

“Was she a member of the Fellowship?” This question had been added to the past few interviews, the ones conducted after they learned the killer had been a member of the group.

“No, which had a lot to do with why we didn’t pursue a more intense relationship back then. As a deacon, my father had no intention of me dating someone from outside the Fellowship.”

“But later that changed?”

“He was killed in ’88, around the same time that Brother Moses left and the group fell apart. After that, mine and Abby’s relationship grew into something more than friendship. Before long, we started seeing each other exclusively.”

Lexie honed in on the detail she hadn’t heard before. “You said your father was killed. How did he die?”

John’s mouth dipped down on one side, then he took a deep breath and answered, “A friend of his called him to his home, said he and his wife were arguing and that she had a gun. He asked Dad to come over and try to talk to her.”

“So he died answering a domestic disturbance call?” Lexie found herself amazed at the many layers of this man and at all of the heartache in his past.

“Yeah, but the call didn’t go to the station. The guy called my father at home.”

“What happened?”

“By the time he showed up, she’d shot her husband and waited on Dad. The minute he got out of the car, she shot him, then she turned the gun on herself.

“Oh, John, I’m so sorry.”

He swallowed, then cleared his throat. “After his death, Abby and I grew closer.”

“And the two of you married—when?” Lexie’s heart still ached from John’s loss of his father, but her mind realized he wanted the interview to move past that particular pain.

“We married in 1991.”

“So you’d been married eight years when she died?”

“Yes.” His jaw twitched, and his hand tightened on the wheel.

“And the child she carried, it was your first?”

“We tried to get pregnant before. Both of us wanted to have kids the minute we got married. We wanted to be young parents, but it just didn’t happen. We figured it was because of our stressful jobs, or that’s what we heard, that stress could cause things not to happen as easily. I worked homicide and Abby worked fulltime as a court reporter. Both are stressful jobs, of course.”

“But then she did get pregnant.”

His hand opened on the steering wheel, then gripped it again. “We considered going to a fertility specialist, but then she got pregnant.”

“And the two of you were anxious to have that child. Elated that your dream had come true, right?” She knew his response would touch her viewers’ hearts, as it would touch hers.

But she wasn’t prepared for his answer.

John reached over and pressed the stop button on the recorder. “This can’t go on the air, okay?”

“All right.” She wondered what could be worse than discussing what happened to his father and his wife. “What is it?”

“I’d have loved that child, no matter what. And if things had worked out between us, we’d have raised him or her as our own, but you know from the reports that Abby and I had separated. The stresses of our jobs had taken over, and she didn’t understand why I had to spend so many hours away from home working on the Sunrise Killer case. She—turned to someone else.” He inhaled, exhaled. “The baby was his.”

Lexie’s chest clenched. She hadn’t known. If she had, she’d have never put him through this interview, through having to relive not only the pain of losing his wife to a killer, but also the pain of losing her to another man. “I’m sorry.” She hated how weak the two words sounded in comparison to the heartfelt emotion behind them.

“Don’t be. I loved her, even after I found out. But the truth is, I didn’t even know about the baby until after she died. She never told me, and it’d been too long since the two of us had been together for the baby to have been mine.”

“Do you know who—”

“A cop, he worked with me on the case. We were friends. He left Macon though, after he confessed the affair to me. I haven’t spoken to him since.”

She nodded, not knowing what else to say.

“Do you have enough for the story?”

“Yes.” She did, more than enough.

“I didn’t mean to keep that from you, but I don’t like to talk about the problems Abby and I had, or the fact that she cheated. And if I hadn’t been so involved in that case, and spent so much time away—”

Lexie leaned across the seat. Starting at the tiny crinkles beside his eye, she brushed the backs of her fingertips down the side of his face, then moved closer to press her lips against his neck. “You can’t blame yourself for that. You were doing your job.”

His throat pulsed against her lips. She stayed there, close to him, giving him her warmth, showing him compassion for what he’d experienced by showing him she cared.

She had plenty of information to provide an accurate picture of Abby Tucker without sacrificing the private aspects that would remain solely with John. She closed her eyes, rested her head against his shoulder.

“Lexie.”

She opened her eyes, eased away from him…and viewed the very place that had been the backdrop of her nightmares for the past twenty-eight years.

“Pull over.” Her words came out scratchy and raw, and she swallowed past the instant fear that rippled down her spine. After all these years,
she’d
returned to the scene of the crime.

John steered to the side of the road and parked. The red and blue lights from the cops still on the Fellowship grounds flashed a constant reminder that hours ago, Hannah Sharp and Logan Finley had been found in the woods less than a quarter of a mile from where he now parked. “What do you want to do?”

“I’m not sure, but I need to get out, and I need to get closer to where we were.”

He nodded. He’d been around survivors before when they returned to a crime scene where a loved one died. Although detectives brought them back to the scene to learn whether they remembered any details of the crime, he knew why they hadn’t brought Lexie back to the scene so long ago. No way should an eight-year-old have to endure a forced memory of her aunt being murdered. Plus, she had already blocked the images from her memory. Even if the cops thought it might help solve the crime, they wouldn’t have been willing to sacrifice her sanity to do it, and one of those cops had been his father, a good man who would never do anything to harm a child.

Now, however, Lexie had matured into a knowledgeable woman ready to face the demons of her past. One demon in particular, the one who’d killed her aunt on this road.

“I’ll need to go clear this with the guys on the scene. They should recognize my vehicle, but just in case, I need to let them know I’m here.”

“All right.”

“Wait for me before you start trying to remember more. Stay in the truck until I get everything cleared. I don’t want you to do this alone.”

She chewed her lower lip, frowned at the road before her, and nodded.

John climbed out of the truck and hadn’t breached the boundary of the woods before running into Pierce. “I thought they were done. What are they looking for?” He indicated the CSI team, still scouring the ground they’d covered earlier.

“Agent Jackson wanted them to search again for anything the killer could’ve left behind. She has no doubt, and neither do I, that he’s been here. Someone cleared that brush. But I believe if he left any clues behind, they were destroyed when the team started digging. I thought she might be onto something, but I never dreamed we’d find them so quickly.”

“We wouldn’t have, if we hadn’t had so many members on the task force who’d once belonged to the Fellowship. It only made sense if he buried them here, they’d be at the spot for the altar.”

“Yeah, well, CSI came back to look, but I think we’re about to call it a day. We haven’t found anything new.”

“No one called me.”

“You’d have been called if anything turned up. But I knew you were working on the interview for the TV station, and that’s important as well, in light of the new bodies being found. I can’t help but think someone out there knows something.”

John nodded. He suspected no one knew anything at all about the killer except the woman sitting in his truck. However, although she may have seen him in the past, she couldn’t remember him now. And until she did, the fact that she’d witnessed one of the murders wouldn’t help the case.

“We’ll be out of here soon. Were you wanting to take another look around as well?”

“Yeah. I’ve got Lexie with me. She wanted an accurate depiction of the scene to describe for her story.” A half-lie, but he couldn’t tell the captain the truth, not until they caught the killer.

“Good idea. Elijah came earlier snapping photos of the area for the Telegraph. The newspaper will depict the scene; it’d be good for her to see everything herself too, though. You know, I don’t like to feed the media, but in this case, I agree with Jackson. The best way to oust this guy is to put his actions out there for the world to see. And this place, I’ve gotta tell you, gives me the creeps.”

John remembered traveling down this hidden path several times each week as a kid. He’d listened to countless sermons, learned endless rules, and experienced the fear of “all powers unknown” from Brother Moses upon this land. It’d been a combination of horrible and awe-inspiring at the same time. Right now, horrible claimed control. “It does the same for me.”