Stone Cold (32 page)

‘
I
was the affair,’ Kathryn sighed.

‘Okay, how did you end up in that storage–unit?’

‘I followed Stephen,’ Kathryn sighed. ‘When I realised that he was cheating on me, I started looking into his life. I found things out. So I engineered this scheme to try to force him into a position where he would have to come clean and admit to the other relationship. I know it sounds stupid now but I wanted him back, really I did.’

Maietta looked at her notes. ‘Okay, go on.’

‘Anyway, I noticed purchases by him on his credit cards and did what I could to track them down, see what he was up to. One of them was for a Triple A storage unit in town near the airbase on the east side. I figured I could go take a look, see what else he was up to. I’d made copies of the bastard’s keys, so it didn’t take me long to figure out which one was needed. That’s when I found her.’

‘Sheila McKenzie.’

‘Yeah, although I didn’t know it at the time. I was trying to untie her from that chair when Stephen showed up. He had a gun. Then…’

‘Then what?’ Maietta asked.

‘Then he attacked me, got me on the ground and stamped on my ankle so I couldn’t run away. He injected me with something so I couldn’t move. Then he put the gun in my hand, turned me around and shot the woman, Sheila.’

Maietta nodded. ‘Then what?’

‘He dragged me to my car, put me in the trunk and drove me out of the city. If Detective Griffin hadn’t showed up when he did, I’d have drowned.’ Kathryn looked at Maietta. ‘How did he figure it out?’

Maietta leaned back in her chair. ‘He was in a restaurant with his wife. Saw a picture of you with Stephen, or as we know him, Dale, on the wall. He figured you were about to become a victim and made his move.’

Kathryn sank back into her pillows. ‘Jesus, too close.’

Maietta nodded. ‘Just got a couple more questions for you. We’ve got traffic camera footage of your car in the vicinity of Sheila McKenzie’s house in the city just a few days ago. You been there, Kathryn?’

Kathryn nodded. ‘I drove past it more than once. Looks like a palace, doesn’t it, compared to my little apartment? I had to go into the city because I wanted to find a restaurant to take Stephen to, a nice night out to help woo him back to me. I figure now that it was a lost cause, because he had far more to gain by staying with that other woman.’ She shook her head. ‘I should have just tossed the asshole out and found somebody else.’

‘Serial killers and con men aren’t known for their emotional attachments,’ Maietta said.

‘Thanks for the head’s up.’

‘And all this was before Sheila McKenzie was abducted?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kathryn said. ‘After I’d last followed them I never actually saw her again until I went to that lock–up.’

‘Where Dale had been holding her,’ Maietta said. ‘She was alive?’

‘Yes,’ Kathryn said. ‘She’d been cared for.’

Maietta nodded. ‘Here’s the problem I have. Dale McKenzie abducts his own wife in return for a ransom. He then makes no further ransom demands for delivery of the money. Then, he uses you to kill her. Why? Why did he not make a ransom demand?’

Kathryn stared up at the detective. ‘You’re asking me to explain the motives of a psychopath?’

‘You’re the psychologist, Miss Stone.’

Kathryn sighed and shook her head. ‘I suspect that he had a plan, something more than just a ransom demand. I can’t be sure but my putting him, or rather
Stephen
, under pressure might have upset whatever delicate little scheme he had in play.’

‘So?’ Maietta asked. ‘Making a demand for the transfer of funds in return for Sheila’s life was the next logical step but he never made it. If he wanted the life insurances, then he would just have killed her and avoided the whole hostage charade.’

‘Like I said,’ Kathryn repeated, ‘I may have screwed up his itinerary. Maybe he figured he was better off just using me to kill her, framing my suicide and then sitting back and collecting the life insurances she had. He could go back to his airline job and his life with me would simply vanish into thin air.’ Kathryn sank back into her pillows. ‘I’m just glad you guys got involved when you did, or right now I’d still be ten feet underwater and that bastard would be sleeping it off back in his wife’s bed.’

Maietta closed her notebook.

‘You sure should be,’ she said, ‘because your ex is in fact a man wanted for four killings.’

Kathryn lay silent and still for a moment. She stared at the ceiling tiles. ‘Say that again?’

‘He’s been linked to four murders committed a decade ago,’ Maietta said. ‘Dale McKenzie used the identity of his deceased younger brother, Stephen, to court young women before drugging them with a sedative called
Pancuronium bromide
, same thing he used on you, to fake suicide scenes and take off with their money.’ Maietta gave Kathryn a serious look. ‘He targeted orphans, Kathryn. You, and Sheila McKenzie, were both victims waiting in line. He carried a lock–box around with him, which we found at the scene of your attempted murder. It contained jewellery and a lock of hair from both a victim from several years ago and Sheila McKenzie, and connects Dale to the four unsolved murders. Your hair was in there too.’

Kathryn felt a shiver ripple down her spine like the cold touch of death. She lay back on her pillows as Maietta looked at her notes.

‘So, how come you cleaned out Stephen’s bank accounts?’ she asked.

Kathryn smiled. ‘Our accounts,’ she replied. ‘Stephen has been lying to me about his earnings for years, and I’ve had to pay our rent and food. That bastard was ripping me off from the moment we met. I just took back what he owed me.’

‘You know that’s theft, right?’

‘It’s justice,’ Kathryn shot back. ‘So arrest me. I’ll fight for the right to the money in the courts.’

‘Easy tiger,’ Maietta said. ‘I ain’t sayin’ I don’t sympathise, but you can’t be running off with his money if you want to see him go down for life.’ Maietta scanned through her notes. ‘Anybody else in on this with you, Kathryn?’

Kathryn was about to shake her head when she suddenly gasped in horror.

‘Ally! Stephen might have…’

‘She’s fine,’ Maietta said, ‘a little shook up but she’ll be okay. Right now all you’ve got to do is rest. Griffin’s talking to Dale McKenzie right now. He’s screaming to high heaven that he didn’t abduct his wife and that he knows nothing about any murdered women, but I don’t think anybody’s going to buy it.’

Kathryn nodded.

‘He’s an expert liar, Jane,’ she said. ‘He had me fooled for years and his wife too. Don’t let the bastard worm his way out of this one.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Maietta said as she got up from her seat. ‘Time we’re done he’ll confess to starting World War Two.’

***

47

Griffin sat in silence as he stared across the table in the interview room.

Dale McKenzie sat opposite him, his wrists handcuffed to a steel restraint bolted to the table. His nose was bandaged with blood–stained medical dressing, as was his right eye which wept a thin trickle of blood down his cheek.

Griffin slowly placed a series of sealed, transparent evidence bags on the table between them. One contained the pistol used to shoot Sheila McKenzie; the next, a syringe; the next, a bottle of fluid labelled
Pancuronium bromide
.

McKenzie did not move, nor did his expression falter. He looked up expectantly at Griffin.

‘Anything you want to say, Mr McKenzie?’ Griffin asked.

‘I want my lawyer.’

‘Oh, you’ll get your lawyer,’ Griffin assured him. ‘But not just yet. Reason is, we have so much evidence here that it’s overwhelming.’

‘What evidence?’ McKenzie spat back at him. ‘I’ve never seen any of those things in my life.’

Griffin raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that so?’

‘Go to hell,’ McKenzie said. ‘You’ve been after me for abducting my wife ever since I came to you. Since
I
came to
you
! Don’t you find that a little odd, detective? That I would abduct my own wife and then come straight to the damned police?’

‘If you were a very clever, scheming man, then no I would not,’ Griffin replied. ‘And being as you shot her, I’m guessing that you didn’t care so much for her anyway.’

‘Shot her?’ McKenzie echoed. ‘What do you mean? I haven’t shot anybody!’

Griffin waved McKenzie down with lazy wafts of his hand. ‘Yeah, yeah, we hear you. You didn’t do any of it, right? It’s all just a big set up and you’re innocent of any crime.’

‘I am innocent!’

‘Yeah, that’s not what your wife says.’

McKenzie frowned. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Oh damn, didn’t anybody tell you? She survived,’ Griffin replied. ‘She’s fingered you for the shooter.’

McKenzie’s face flushed with rage. ‘I didn’t abduct her!’

‘Course you didn’t,’ Griffin agreed as he gestured to the bagged bottle, ‘just like you didn’t pump Kathryn Stone full of that shit and try to drown her in a faked suicide. Just like you didn’t attack Ally Robinson.’

McKenzie strained against his cuffs.

‘Kathryn was winding me up,’ he snapped, ‘and that Ally bitch was right behind her the whole way. They did it together, the two of them, set this whole thing up. I lost my temper, fair enough, but who wouldn’t after what they put me through?’

‘After what they put
you
through?’ Griffin echoed again. ‘Dale, all I want to know is the following; did you abduct Sheila, did she set the whole thing up, or were you in it together?’

McKenzie glared at Griffin.

‘None of the above. I’m innocent.’

Griffin smiled and the reached down into his lap. He took out four photographs, each an image of a woman’s face taken on a mortuary slab. He laid them down, slowly, one after the other in front of McKenzie, who looked down at them. Griffin saw the pilot’s jaw tense, saw his gaze flick from one lifeless corpse’s image to another.

‘Recognise any of these?’ Griffin asked.

McKenzie’s mouth gaped as he tried to speak. ‘I’ve never seen any of them in my life,’ he muttered.

‘Maybe not
your
life,’ Griffin said, ‘but how about in Stephen Hollister’s life?’

Dale glared up at Griffin as though to retort, but the words were caught on his lips and Griffin smiled.

‘Guess what, Dale? You’re busted. As we speak these four victim’s blood samples, saved in a cold–case chiller in a forensic laboratory, are being tested for Pancuronium bromide, the same stuff you used to incapacitate both Ally Robinson and Kathryn Stone. We also have here the flight plans from an airline you previously flew for, which places you in the same city, at the same time, as these women when they died. Moreover, Dale, how would you feel about letting us know how you came about the money that you used for your flight training?’

Dale’s eyes flicked up to meet Griffin’s, a flare of panic flickering in them as the detective went on.

‘You see, we were able to trace it all back to an account that was set up when you first applied to become a pilot. That account was opened with cash, with more filtered in over time from other accounts belonging to you. Thing is, those accounts trace back to money stolen from the bank account of this victim, Meredith Turner.’ Griffin tapped the photograph on the left. ‘You were living within a quarter mile of her house at the time, Dale, flipping burgers in Las Vegas.’

‘This is entrapment,’ McKenzie growled.

‘No,’ Griffin said, ‘it’s called beyond reasonable doubt, and it’s enough for a charge sheet and happy faces at the GFPD cold–case unit. You know it Dale, so forget the theatricals okay? You’re under arrest for the murder of four women, the attempted murder of three more, extortion, kidnapping with intent, assaulting a police officer, misdirecting officers of the law during an investigation…. You want me to go on?’

‘It’s all circumstantial,’ McKenzie hissed.

‘Is it?’ Griffin challenged. ‘Then maybe you could explain how it is that your alter–ego, “Stephen”, purchased a month–long lease on a storage unit downtown, the same one we found your wife shot half–to–death in?’

McKenzie’s jaw gaped open as he stared at Griffin. ‘I didn’t buy any such thing and…’ McKenzie’s eyes flared with alarm as a realisation flashed across them. Griffin thought he saw a glimmer of horror there. ‘Oh no.’

‘Not so much the innocent man now, are we?’ Griffin growled, and shoved another plastic–sealed item across the table in front of the pilot. ‘Strange, how this tablet computer was used to access the same website as that which
Stephen
used to buy the storage lease. This is
your
tablet, correct?’

Dale McKenzie seemed to shrivel as he stared at the tablet computer. Griffin reached down to the floor beneath the table and produced a small mahogany lock–box sealed in a plastic bag that he placed in front of Dale. The pilot looked at the box, his eyes drawn to it as though by some unseen force and his lips parted as he drew an intake of breath.

‘That’s right, Dale,’ Griffin said. ‘This one little box ties you to everything, doesn’t it? Four murders. You think a judge is going to have any problem with your conviction, based on the evidence we can put in front of them? Based on your little box of mementos here? You think a jury is going to shrug and say that we got it all wrong?’

‘I didn’t abduct my wife,’ McKenzie whispered, his eyes still fixated upon the box.

Griffin leaned forward and tapped the photographs.

‘I don’t give a damn about the abduction, McKenzie. Your wife will survive, Kathryn Stone is safe and Ally Robinson will also recover from what you did to her. The four women in these photographs will not and you’re in the frame for murdering all of them. What’s the chances Pancuronium bromide will be in their blood–work, Dale? And we’ve got sufficient motive for the abduction: that your wife was on the verge of bankruptcy and poor little Dale McKenzie didn’t fancy taking on the mortgage she had lumbered you both with in better days. Hell of a life insurance program you guys bought into. If Sheila was to die, all of those debts would just flutter away… Make this easy on yourself, Dale. Now’s the time to decide whether you want to spend the rest of your days in a cell or fry in a chair.’