Spider's Web (11 page)

Mitchell knew there was no point in trying to help. This was just the kind of thing Jacob excelled at, and Mitchell should focus on what he did best. He put on his headphones, played an album by Franz Ferdinand to block out the noise, and kept on digging.

Her texts and private messages came next. Some tame sexting with the boyfriend. She had Snapchat, and he assumed the juicier content happened in there. Messages to and from her band mates. She messaged with her mother as well, though not with her father. Some promotional messages: a sale at a random online store, a used car salesman offering a hot deal on a car, a message claiming it could help her stop smoking within two weeks.

Her e-mail had some fan mail, and he took his time reading those. Fans could be obsessive—they could, potentially, be deadly—but he saw nothing that seemed alarming. Other than that, it was pretty much the usual: e-mails of confirmations of subscriptions and users, the occasional spam mail that somehow sneaked through the ever-watchful filters. Nothing seemed relevant. Her sent mail was not very illuminating either. He only read four months back. Her e-mail archive went back years, but when you were rooting through someone’s digital life you had to know where to stop.

He lifted his eyes, saw Friedman and Jacob shaking hands. The sketch artist was gone, hopefully having managed to draw something that satisfied the rabbi. Would the sketch be helpful? Would it perhaps match one of the faces Mitchell had just seen in the thousands of online photos he’d gone through?

Something was bothering him. He had seen something that snagged in his brain. It itched in his mind, like a mosquito bite in the subconscious. What was it? He scanned the topics of her last e-mails, trying to pinpoint whatever it was that had raised the alarm. No. It wasn’t an e-mail.

He frowned, his hand playing distractedly with the ring box in his pocket. It felt foreign to his touch, almost as if it belonged to a different life. He scanned the private messages again.

The last message was from Tamay’s boyfriend, asking if she was awake. She wasn’t. She never would be again. The message before it was from the car salesman. Mitchell suddenly noticed the time stamp of the message - 01:15 a.m. A message from a car salesman in the middle of the night? Mitchell opened it and scanned it once more, his mind finally registering what should have been obvious from the first second: There was an image of the car the salesman was advertising. It was a green Toyota Camry.

It was the vehicle that had run over Tamay Mosely twice only thirty minutes after the message had been sent.

Some hours later, Mitchell realized he and Pauline had scheduled a date for the evening—dinner at their favorite restaurant, Raggio Di Sole. This date, planned a week in advance, was supposed to have started five minutes ago. He jumped out of his seat and dashed out of the squad room in a state of acute panic.

He couldn’t find his car, and whirled around in the parking lot in desperation. Once he found it, he realized he had left the car keys on his desk. He took off in another hysterical dash, berating himself. He barged back into the squad room, nearly knocking Hannah down, grabbed the keys, and zipped out of the room again.

Finally, inside the car, he pulled out of the parking lot way too fast and almost ran over an old woman, who angrily thumped his hood with her cane.

There was traffic. Of course there was traffic. He began forming excuses in his mind. He could blame rush hour. That was his best bet. With a bit of luck, he’d encounter an accident or a blocked road, which he would be able to maneuver into his excuse.

He reached the restaurant twenty-five minutes past the time they had set. He explained breathlessly to the hostess he was joining a table reserved for Pauline. The hostess said that though the table had been reserved, Pauline had not yet arrived. Mitchell took a moment to process the information. Finally, he asked where the table was.

Pauline arrived three minutes later, her face flushed, and apologized repeatedly for being late. Apparently there was a lot of traffic. And an accident.

Mitchell said that it was fine, and reproachfully added that next time she could leave work a bit earlier. After all, there was always traffic around this time of the day.

“So, where did you disappear to in the middle of the night?” Pauline asked, after the waitress had taken their orders.

“A girl was hit by a car,” Mitchell said. “She died.”

“Oh, no!” Pauline said, covering her mouth. “How did it happen?”

“Someone hit her, then drove over her again when he fled the scene.”

“Oh my god! Was he drunk?”

“Don’t really know yet. We think not,” Mitchell said. “It seems intentional. There’s a really weird detail…” He hesitated, then pushed on. “Apparently he was trying to sell the victim a car. And then, for some reason, he ran her over with that very car.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know.”

“Did you catch him?”

“Not yet.”

“Then how do you know that he was trying to sell her the car?”

Mitchell told her about the message. He’d spent the afternoon trying to track down the person who’d sent Tamay the message. The number that the man had used was disconnected, and was unlisted. Mitchell had begun searching for assault and murder cases that were related to used car sales, thinking maybe this was some sort of pattern of criminal behavior. A used car salesman had been stabbed in Glenmore Park five months before, because of a faulty vehicle he’d sold. But that didn’t seem to be relevant to the case, and the perpetrator was behind bars. Nothing else even came close.

Eventually, Mitchell had sent an e-mail to Abram Simmons, a detective he knew in the Boston Police Department, asking if he had heard of any similar cases in Boston or anywhere nearby. It was a long shot, but Boston was a big place, and if this really was a pattern maybe it had started there.

He told Pauline about it, hoping maybe something would occur to him as he detailed the case thoroughly. He often discussed his cases with Pauline. He knew other detectives had problems in their relationships because they refused to talk about the job with their spouses. Jacob had told him about it once, saying Marissa often complained that she felt as if she wasn’t part of a significant portion of his life.

It was only as they were eating dessert, drinking their third glasses of wine, that Mitchell suddenly recalled the ring in his pocket. This was the perfect place for it, but he suppressed the urge to pull it out. They had just talked for over an hour about a girl who had been murdered.

It seemed like a poor prologue for a marriage proposal.

Chapter Ten

Mitchell was alone in the squad room the following morning. Jacob had gone to talk to Tamay’s boss at the Wild Pony, but Mitchell preferred to keep on searching the crime reports. He was already on his third cup of coffee, yet his eyelids kept drooping as he scanned report after report, looking for any missing links.

He jumped when the phone rang, then answered it. “Detective Mitchell Lonnie.”

“Lonnie, “ a gruff voice said. “This is Detective Simmons, from the Boston PD.”

“Oh, hey, thanks for getting back to me,” Mitchell said.

“Sure, no problem. So someone tried to sell this girl… Tamay, a car. Then later ran her over with the same car?”

“Yeah. I was wondering if you ran into a similar crime. Maybe an assault that happened when someone was trying to buy or sell a car, or—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I didn’t see anything like that about a car, but I have a really weird coincidence for you.”

“What is it?” Mitchell asked, doodling on his notepad. He wrote down
Used Car
and
Coincidence
, and then drew a small snake wearing a shoe.

“I have a man who was trying to sell a young woman a gun, and then later she was shot with the same gun.”

Mitchell’s doodling hand paused. “Really?” he said.

“Yeah. I’ll send you the case, you can check it out for yourself. A woman named Aliza Kennedy was shot to death on her way to work. The gun that was used to shoot her was found in a nearby dumpster. It was a Beretta PX4. Later, it turned out that someone was trying to sell her a Beretta PX4.”

“Are you sure it was the same gun?”

“No, but it’s too much of a coincidence.”

“Maybe,” Mitchell said, but he felt doubtful that it was related to his case. “Thanks for letting me know, I’ll check it out.”

“Yeah, absolutely,” Simmons said. “I’ll keep my eyes open for any car-related crimes.”

A moment later, the e-mail from Simmons popped up in Mitchell’s inbox. It was a scanned document of all the case paperwork. Mitchell opened the document on his computer and read it. There were several images from the crime scene. A young woman lay dead in the street, her shirt drenched in blood. There was a picture of the dumpster, the gun tossed inside—in clear view, as though someone didn’t care if it was found. According to the report, no fingerprints or any other trace evidence were found on the gun. Mitchell skimmed over the case’s details. Finally, he found what he was looking for. It wasn’t a simple gun transaction gone wrong, as he had previously assumed.

Aliza, the victim, had received a message half an hour before she was shot:
As we discussed, attached is a picture of the Beretta that I have for sale
. The attached image was of a Beretta PX4. Aliza had replied,
You have the wrong number. I’m not interested in purchasing a gun
. There were no further replies from either of them. The phone number had been traced to a disposable phone, which was disconnected.

Mitchell searched for Aliza Kennedy, and found some images of her easily enough. She had been twenty-two when she was murdered. She was Caucasian, blonde, with a perfect smile and a sweet, innocent face. She was uncommonly beautiful.

He opened Tamay’s Instagram page and looked at her pictures. One thing was clear: she was also young and incredibly beautiful.

Had Tamay really wanted to buy a car? She had never responded to the message with the Toyota’s image. Was it also a wrong number?

Both girls had been killed in the street. One going to work, one coming home from work.

Both phones, disposable and disconnected.

Mitchell looked up, his mind whirring, as Jacob walked into the squad room.

“The boss is a dead end,” Jacob said. “Also, I think he has a horse fetish. The entire place is covered with pictures of—”

“Jacob, check this out,” Mitchell said. “I think I got something.”

Jacob came over to Mitchell’s computer, and Mitchell showed him Aliza’s murder case, pointing out the similarities. Jacob grabbed a chair and sat down in front of Mitchell’s computer, reading the entire report twice. Mitchell remained silent, knowing his partner hated distractions when reading. Finally, Jacob leaned back and frowned.

“Maybe this guy makes a living selling stuff,” Mitchell said, trying to formulate an idea. “Except when he encounters young women, he—”

“He didn’t
encounter them
,” Jacob said. “He sent them messages. At least in Aliza’s case, it looks as if she wasn’t even searching for a gun to buy.”

“Yeah, but—” Mitchell stared at the ceiling. “This is really strange. He found out where they were. And somehow he had their numbers. Maybe he was tracking them through their phone somehow—”

“You kids and your technology,” Jacob said. “He didn’t find out where they were. He got them on a route they took regularly, between work and home. He was stalking them.”

Mitchell felt an idea beginning to form, something that would make this puzzle complete. “A route they took regularly,” he said slowly. “At a place or time where there were no people to see. And he was trying to sell—”

“It was never about selling anything,” Jacob said, his voice low. “It was about sending them an image of the murder weapon. An image of the way they were about to die.”

Mitchell stared at Jacob. Something clicked inside his mind. He suddenly realized what had eluded him two weeks before, as he’d stared at Buttermere Pond. Of course! How could he have been so blind!

“Oh, God,” he said. “Hang on, I need to check something.” He got up and strode out of the squad room, his jaw clenched tight. As he walked, puzzle pieces snapped together in his brain, forming a clear and horrible image. He kicked himself for not noticing the connection earlier. Aliza and Tamay weren’t the only ones.

At the evidence room, he asked for Kendele Byers’s phone.

The cop in charge found the phone quickly and handed it over, passing over the form Mitchell was supposed to sign. Mitchell ignored the form and turned on the phone, checking Kendele’s last messages.

A message from a tourist agency, advertising a lake trip, with an image attached. Except it wasn’t an image of a lake. It was a picture of a pond—Buttermere Pond. In which Kendele Byers had been drowned.

Kendele Byers had gone jogging four times a week, always at five in the morning.
Like clockwork
, her friend Debbie had told them. What you might call a routine, like going to and from work.

Aliza Kennedy.

Kendele Byers.

Tamay Mosely.

There was a serial killer in Glenmore Park.

Chapter Eleven

Jacob sat in Captain Bailey’s office, waiting patiently. The captain rummaged through the papers on his desk, muttering to himself.

“No rush, Fred,” Jacob said. “There’s just a serial killer out there, looking for his next victim. No biggie, he can wait.”