They explained that the house had been recently rented to the Richardsons, a young couple from Newark. Mary was a night nurse at GW Medical Center. Keith was a day trader who was “deaf as a post” without his hearing aids.
The Richardsons had a Jack Russell terrier named Otto.
“Barked all night,” Jill said. “You could go over there and bang on the door, but if Keith had his hearing aids off, good luck.”
“Which was going on this afternoon,” her husband said. “I was trying to read, and the dog was barking, then finally stopped. I went over to talk to them about it and found their front door ajar. I looked inside and saw enough to call 911.”
Bree and I thanked them, then crossed the street to the uniformed officers.
“You been inside?” Bree asked.
“We figured you’d want to go in clean, Chief.”
“We do. Thank you, Officers,” she said and led the way up onto the porch where we paused to put on blue booties, disposable gloves, and surgical masks.
Bree pushed the door open. We peered into an entry with a staircase to our right. On the bottom step, the barking terrier was dead, apparently of a broken neck.
In the living area beyond the stairs, Mary Richardson lay on the floor by a large table. She wore green hospital scrubs, surgical gloves, and a heavy-duty respirator and visor. A blue-and-red rep tie was cinched tight around her neck.
Slumped in one of the high-backed chairs around the table, Keith Richardson was similarly dressed. The tie that killed him was a loud yellow-and-red paisley.
The table between the victims was set up as a repackaging operation for crystal methamphetamine. There was a typed note on the table in front of a kilo of the drug.
I’m usually as patient as a saint, Cross, but the damn dog would not stop barking, and these scum were selling to kids. Glad to be of service.
Chapter 61
It was long past two a.m. when Bree and I returned home. We’d had to wait for a hazmat team to come deal with the chemicals in the kitchen before any more of the scene could be processed.
These scum were selling to kids. Glad to be of service.
Bree said, “How did he know the Richardsons were moving meth?”
“I don’t know, but somewhere, I swear, he’s made a mistake.”
“Not so far,” she said, yawning. “I have to sleep.”
I did too, but sleep did not come easy. Every time I started to drift off, I’d flash on the stills of Pseudo-Craig, the blood of eight people bursting on my windshield, and the silk ties around the meth dealers’ necks.
The dead dog was in my restless dreams as well, as were the remaining boxes of the Edgerton files, everything spilled along a path through the forest that I followed as I chased M, a dark figure, smaller than I’d expected.
Strangling someone is no easy feat. It takes strength and size. So does cutting off someone’s head. And yet, my dream M was slight with narrow shoulders, and he could run and run and...
I woke with a start around five a.m. and heard birds chirping outside the window. Feeling dazed, I nevertheless remembered that slight, fast M who’d haunted my dreams and run past the Mikey Edgerton files in the forest.
The Edgerton files. I’ve heard it said that if fear is stopping you from doing something, you must take courage and do it anyway or be forever ruled by doubt and anxiety.
I got out of bed quietly and crept up to the attic.
After locking the door, I opened the final boxes of files concerning the serial rapist and killer I’d seen electrocuted a few weeks before. My tongue tasted sour when I began to read. Long-buried images of my past rose up, blurry at first, then gradually coming into focus, all of them deeply disturbing.
Chapter 62
Eleven years before
John Sampson looked over at me and shook his head. My stomach lurched. My throat burned with reflux.
“There has to be something here besides the neckties,” I said. “A guy like this? He has trophies somewhere.”
We’d been searching a three-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, that had an expansive view of the Potomac River and the Jefferson Memorial. The apartment belonged to Michael “Mikey” Edgerton.
After Kyle Craig killed Gerald St. Michel, the necktie salesman with a history of predatory sexual behavior, most people believed that St. Michel was responsible for the murders of the other young women, including Kissy Raider. But I had my doubts.
Evidently, so did M, because I heard from him for the first time about three weeks after Kyle Craig killed St. Michel.
The two-sentence message came typed on plain white paper in a plain white envelope with no return address: It’s not St. Michel. Thank me later. — M
I happened to agree with M, whoever he was, and set the message aside.
But then a man grabbed Gladys Craft, a young blond woman running late at night in Falls Church, Virginia. He used a necktie to bind her hands and then threw her in a van.
Craft managed to escape the van when he stopped at a light, and she was able to give police a rough description of her assailant and the last two digits of the van’s Virginia license plate.
When we heard about the necktie, Sampson and I got involved again. We used computers to sift for possible matches between owners of cars with plates that had those last two digits and criminals who had histories of sexual assault.
We got a resounding match on Michael Edgerton, who lived in Arlington, ran an office of his family’s import/export business, and had been a suspect in three assaults while he was in school at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Those cases had all been dropped at the request of the victims. Edgerton’s parents had bought them off. When we contacted the women, all buxom young blondes, they were reluctant to talk until we described the women who’d died.
The second we mentioned that the women were strangled with ties, each of them started crying because Edgerton had used silk ties to control them all.
We became convinced that Edgerton, not the dead tie-shop owner, was responsible for the rapes and murders of Kissy Raider and the other dead women. We put him under surveillance and kept digging into his past.
When we were able to place him in the vicinity of six of the eight victims around the times of their deaths, a judge granted us a search warrant. Which had led us to Edgerton’s apartment that day.
“I’m not seeing any trophies,” Sampson said.
“I know,” I said. “But he is our man. I know it in my gut.”
“I think so too. But he’s not keeping his trophies here.”
“Probably not,” I said and went into the bathroom.
The place was spotless for a man living alone. On the wall hung a photograph showing a younger Edgerton and his family on a sailboat, all of them beaming.
The whole family knew Mikey was a psycho even when he was that age, I thought. Mom and Dad had already bought off three young women by the time this picture was taken.
It made me angry to think that unless we found some evidence, and soon, this guy would get away with rape and murder again. At the very least, if we didn’t find something, it would be more difficult to obtain search warrants for other places he might have used to store evidence of his cruelty.
Before I knew exactly what I was doing, I pulled out a small plastic bag. In it was a single strand of Kissy Raider’s hair. I was drawing it out of the bag when Sampson came into the bathroom. He looked at the bag and the strand of hair.
“He’s hidden the trophies somewhere else,” I said, and I let the hair fall.