Birch watched her cry. He didn’t know what else to do. He’d wanted to bring her back and he’d failed. He stood up, utterly defeated.
“We’ll catch Maxfield,” Birch whispered. “I will bring him to justice.”
Ashley turned her tearstained face toward the detective. “What good will that do? My parents are dead. Catching him won’t bring them back.”
Larry Birch felt horrible when he left Ashley. He had a daughter. She was much younger than Ashley Spencer but he could imagine how she would feel if her parents were taken from her in such a horrible way, one after the other. Birch killed the sick feeling inside him by smothering it with anger. He knew that it was unprofessional to take a case personally but he hated Maxfield and wanted him dead. The detective liked Ashley. She was so decent, so innocent. Maxfield had murdered her too, just as surely as he’d murdered Norman and Terri Spencer. Maxfield had cut out Ashley’s heart and trampled her spirit to dust, and Birch swore that he’d make Maxfield pay for that.
But why had he murdered Tanya Jones and the Spencers, and beaten Casey Van Meter into a coma? Birch’s partner, Tony Marx, opted for the simplest explanation. He believed that there was no rational explanation for Maxfield’s crimes. He saw Maxfield as a psychopath whose motives made sense only in the killer’s twisted mind.
At first, Birch thought that Marx was probably right. Then, shortly after returning to the Justice Center, he received a call that led him to believe there was a rational motive for the crimes Maxfield had committed in the boathouse.
“This is Detective Birch.”
“Are you the detective who’s investigating the attacks on Dean Van Meter and Terri Spencer?” a woman asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Cora Young, Dean Van Meter’s secretary.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I only found out about what happened at the school this morning. I would have called sooner but it was such a shock. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Do you have some information that will aid the investigation?”
“I’m not sure, but yesterday afternoon, around four, Mrs. Spencer met with the dean at the school.”
“Do you know why?”
“No, but she seemed tense when she was waiting for the dean. I thought you should know.”
“Thank you. It might be important.”
“There’s something else. Joshua Maxfield had permission to use one of our classrooms for a writing group he was teaching. The class had nothing to do with the school. It was for adults. Terri Spencer was one of his students. They had their first meeting the night before Mrs. Spencer met with the dean.”
“Bingo!” Birch thought. The secretary had provided a connection between Maxfield and Terri Spencer, and Spencer and the dean.
“Am I speaking to Lori Ryan?” Birch asked after dialing the first name on the list of the writing students Cora Young had given him.
“Yes?”
“I’m Larry Birch, a detective with the Portland Police Bureau. I’d like to talk to you about Terri Spencer.”
“I’m so glad you called. Actually, I was going to call you. I read about the murder in the morning paper. Do you think Joshua Maxfield killed Terri?”
“He’s a suspect.”
“Did he really run away?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s…well, unbelievable. I knew both of them. We were together in the same room, just the other day.”
“That’s why I’m calling. I wanted to learn a little about Joshua Maxfield’s writing class. What exactly was the class for?”
“To help unpublished writers with their work.”
“I understand that there were six students?”
“Yes. We all had books we were writing. Mindy Krauss and I took the class together because we’re working on a murder mystery. I don’t know what Terri’s book was about.”
“And Maxfield helped you with your books?”
“Yes. We gave him our manuscripts and he read parts of them to the class. Then we critiqued what he read. That’s why I was going to call you. I thought that you should know about something that happened during the first class that upset some of the students, including Terri.”
Ryan told Birch about the chapter that Maxfield had read at the first meeting. He recognized it as one of the chapters in Maxfield’s manuscript that he had read at the cottage.
“I was sitting across from Terri when Maxfield read the part where the killer tortures those people. She looked terrible. I thought she might pass out. After I read the paper this morning it all made sense. The scene was so similar to what happened at her house.
“Terri was looking at Mr. Maxfield in a very peculiar way all the time he was reading. After the class, she questioned Mindy and me to find out if we’d written the chapter, and I think she asked one of the men in the class about it, too. I’m sure she suspected Maxfield of writing the piece and was eliminating the rest of us. I think she suspected Maxfield of writing about something he’d done.”
Birch talked to Lori Ryan a little longer before phoning the next person on the list. He got through to two of the other members of the writing class. They didn’t add anything to what Lori Ryan had told him but they confirmed her observation that Maxfield’s reading had disturbed Terri Spencer.
Birch was certain that he knew what had happened between the class and the attacks in the boathouse. Maxfield’s story raised a red flag for Terri. She’d come to see him to find out if the information about the snack had been released to the public. Once she discovered that it had not, she would have continued investigating Maxfield. Terri was a trained reporter. Talking to Maxfield’s employer would be a natural step. Casey Van Meter’s phone records revealed a call from the dean to Mrs. Spencer after their meeting. That’s when they would have arranged to meet at the boathouse. Maxfield must have discovered why they were meeting and attacked Spencer and Van Meter to keep them from telling the police about Terri Spencer’s suspicions.
“Larry.” Birch looked up and saw Tony Marx standing in the entrance to his cubicle.
Marx sat down. “I spent all morning reading Maxfield’s book and making notes on the different murders he describes. Then I called the FBI and read the descriptions of the murders in Maxfield’s novel. Remember how the killing in the novel is different from the killing in the Spencer house but there’s the snack and the duct tape?”
“Go on.”
“Well, the murders in the book don’t match any of the real murders that the Feds have linked to this guy, but they do contain details from the real murders, like the snack, that were never released to the public.”
Marx leaned forward. Birch could see the excitement in his eyes. “He can claim that the details are a coincidence, that he made them up. Maybe his lawyer would get away with that if there were only one, but we’ve got three gems, Larry. We’re gonna nail him. Joshua Maxfield is going to go down.”
Chapter Ten
Three days after her mother’s murder, sunlight streamed through the window in the Academy dormitory and woke up Ashley. She lay still, listening. Something was different. There was no noise-no early-morning hustle and bustle as there had been during the soccer clinic. Everyone connected with the clinic had gone home. Ashley was still in the dorm because no one could figure out where she should stay. Her house was out, because Joshua Maxfield was still at large. She didn’t want to stay there anyway. It would be a terrible place to be by herself. Too many ghosts, too many empty rooms.
Detective Birch had asked about relatives who might take her in but Terri and Norman were only children whose parents had passed away. Detective Birch had mentioned a foster home. That had made Ashley hysterical. Then Henry Van Meter stepped in. He said Ashley could stay in the dorm or move to his mansion. Either way, she was to consider the Academy her home until she decided what she wanted to do.