Chapter 6
Rodney was working on both right now. He walked in a few minutes later, a frown on his face.
She looked over at him and asked, “What’s the matter?”
“They don’t really have very much for us on Blake,” he began. “When I say, not very much, it’s pretty-much nothing.”
“Of course,” she replied in frustration, “because they just found him.”
Rodney muttered, “I presume so. Yet I have two things on the John Smith case. One, there are no working cameras around that whole block. Seems an outage took them all out. and none have been fixed.” Kate groaned at that.
“And the super’s background check was clean, except for one speeding ticket like nine years ago. ”
“What about the older case?” she asked him.
“Kurt Conner? We’ve got a little bit on that one. They seem to find the connection very doubtful, and I’m putting it nicely. So, that’s one thing.”
“But we don’t really have a whole lot to date, except for the specific details, which are starting to gather momentum,” she noted.
She continued to write on the whiteboard and then heard Colby behind her.
He asked what points she felt were indicative of this potentially being the same killer.
She pointed out the couple things she had so far.
Colby frowned, then scratched his slowly growing beard and nodded. “Those are definitely red flags.”
“I hate to even think that somebody could be out there doing this. We have two years between them,” she pointed out.
“Only now we have an escalation if it’s the same killer,” Rodney pointed out, “because we’re dealing with the one from a few days ago, John Smith, and now we’ve just got the newest one, Robert Blake.”
“True,” Kate agreed. “So I’ve asked Reese to dig a little deeper in her search, broaden it a little wider, just to see if we have more.”
“More?” Colby shook his head.
“Particularly around the holidays. … That’s one of the common things.
Kurt Conner’s death was two years ago, and we now have two more dead guys within days of each other.
Did we miss somebody who died the Christmas in between?
So I’m not sure if it’s the same person killing all three.
” She hesitated, then faced Colby, before adding, “Or the same group.”
At that wording, Colby’s eyebrows shot up. He dropped a hip onto the corner of the desk nearby where she stood and said, “Okay, I’ll need a little more information when you drop a line like that.”
She shrugged. “I don’t have anything to go on yet.”
“Except your gut,” he pointed out shrewdly.
She winced. “Yes, my gut.”
“Which is starting to sound a whole lot like a psychic,” Rodney supplied.
“No,” she snapped, glaring at him. “God, Rodney, let’s not be thinking that, much less speaking of it,” she muttered, as she turned her back to them. However, she could hear the two men talking behind her for a moment, before Colby returned his attention to her.
“Speaking of psychics, have you heard anything from Simon?” he asked.
“I’ve heard a couple things from Simon,” she replied. “Nothing connected to this yet.”
“But you’re saying yet.”
“Yes, I am,” she grumbled, turning to glare at him, “because there isn’t much.”
“You want to tell me what he has heard or seen or found that’s new?”
She gave him the little bit she had, and he stared at her in surprise. “And, from that, your instincts are telling you it’s a church group?”
“No,” she corrected. “I never said that.” His frown flashed again, and she raised both hands in frustration. “Let’s forget about Simon and focus on good police work.”
Colby’s lips twitched. “I never expected us to not focus on that,” he clarified. “Yet we’re also very aware that Simon has an impact, a helpful one, on many of these cases. So, if he’s got something to say, it would be a good idea to consider it.”
“I am not against considering anything he says,” she murmured. “I am against anybody thinking it’ll be better than what we can do. If he can tell me a direction to move, fine. … However, up until now, he doesn’t have that.”
“Interesting,” Colby replied.
She shifted to eye him shrewdly. “What’s interesting about it?”
He chuckled. “Just the fact that he connects to so many cases.”
“Or doesn’t connect to,” she pointed out. “Sometimes they aren’t even our cases. Look at the building he bought and what happened there.”
Colby shook his head at that. “That one still blows me away. I mean, those corpses had been hiding there for decades, their poor families having no idea where they were for all these years. Then Simon looks at a property and bam! Next thing you know, we’ve got more cases to open up.”
“Yeah,” she muttered, “that’s the story of my life with him. More cases to open up.”
He burst out laughing. “Yeah, good point. Okay, everybody just keep working away on what we have so far, and we’ll see where this goes.”
He headed toward his office but looked back and added, “I understand that somebody named it the Believe It or Not case, and I thought that was a ridiculous name—thinking something about a seasonal killer might be better. But now I see it’s not such a bad name for it. ” With that, he exited the bullpen.
“Outside of the fact that they all were gift-wrapped in Christmas decorations,” she noted, “I find their position at work to be a bigger common denominator.”
Colby stepped back into the room, his brows knit. “The insurance industry, you mentioned.”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Not necessarily the same company, but these three dead guys were all insurance adjusters.”
He frowned, studied her, and asked, “Are you thinking payback or anger over adjustments? Because, honest to God, I’m surprised we don’t have more insurance adjustors getting killed, considering they make such important and personal decisions for people.
Sometimes there’s just not enough money to handle everything destroyed in an insurance claim.
Denied insurance claims can have disastrous impacts on people and frequently do. ”
Kate nodded. “Tell me about it. I’m still going through that with my apartment right now.”
Both Colby and Rodney faced her, their eyebrows raised.
She shrugged. “They don’t seem to think the repairs should be covered because I’m a police officer. They contend that I had a greater chance of this happening, and apparently I didn’t let them know of this looming event.”
They both stared at her in shock.
Rodney snapped, “That’s absurd. You are held responsible for somehow knowing that somebody would come and shoot up your apartment because of your line of work?”
“Yeah, and that’s where the problem comes in,” she explained.
“Being in this line of work, they think I should have work insurance that would cover it, so they aren’t liable.
” She stared at him, chalk in hand, and shrugged.
“So, I can understand killing off some insurance adjusters, but I’m not sure the work that these men did was their cause of death. ”
“I don’t think it was either,” Rodney agreed. “They had clients, but I don’t think they were dealing with the end user of policies already in force.”
“Right,” she agreed, “that would be my take on it too.”
“So, who do you think it is?” Colby asked her expectantly.
She shrugged. “The easy answer is a very unhappy lover who found out each of our victims were playing the field, apparently openly, yet informing all the women in their lives,” she shared. “So, that’s definitely something consistent with all three cases.”
“Right, they were all considered playboys in a way, weren’t they?” Colby pointed out, nodding.
“Yes, but Kurt less so,” she stated. “When his engagement ended, even he was not thinking of settling down. We need to find out if any of them were ever married before they were killed. That could be the reason they didn’t want to settle down because they had already given it a try.”
Rodney picked up the stack of papers he had brought in. “This is what I’ve got for case files for the other two. At least what we have at the moment. No mention of prior marriages in here though.”
“Good enough,” she replied. “Put them on my desk. I’ll take a look in a few minutes. I just want to ponder this for a bit.”
At the doorway, Colby stopped again, then turned ninety degrees and looked at her. “You want to ponder it?”
Startled, she pointed to the murder board she was working on, then back at him. “Yeah, why?”
His grin widened. “You sound a little more like Simon every damn day.”
She glared at him. “You do know those are fighting words, right?”
He burst out laughing and headed back to his office.
Still, it all had her a little on edge. The last thing she wanted was anybody thinking that what she did, or would potentially do in the future, had anything to do with some psychic ability—hers or his.
She was all about doing a good job for the right reasons, in all the right ways, and that had nothing to do with any of the woo-woo stuff that Simon kept coming up with.
Yet it was hard to get it out of her mind now that both Colby and Rodney kept bringing it up.
Once that started, she couldn’t let it go.
She sent Simon a text, asking if he was okay.
Instead of texting back, he phoned her. “Normally you’re not concerned with my day-to-day. What’s going on?”
She frowned down at the phone, hating that he was as perceptive as he was.
When she didn’t answer right away, he asked, “The guys are on your case again?”
She sighed. “How is it you know that shit, but not the other shit that I really need to know?”
He burst out laughing. “One of the wonders of the universe, isn’t it? But, if I had all the answers you needed, you wouldn’t have a job.”
“I would,” she declared, “because these people would still need to be picked up and processed, and statements of all concerned would still need to be taken. So, actually, it would be great if you had all those answers.”
“I don’t,” he stated.
“Oddly enough, apparently most of my crew, including Colby, seem to think that you do.”