CHAPTER SEVEN
“It has to be the dogs,” Faith said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Yeah, I figured that,” Jessica said. “That’s why I knew you were going to be on the case sooner or later.”
The two of them were at Quantico Police Department headquarters.
Meyers had greeted them with an array of finger foods and a cooler full of drinks.
Faith was grateful for the sergeant’s hospitality and sympathetic to his emotions.
Quantico was home to the FBI Academy, a Marine Corps Base, this police station and a Stafford County Sheriff’s Office precinct.
If you sneezed in any direction, snot was going to land on someone in law enforcement or the military.
That was probably why their killer had opted for untraceable bullets. He was walking a thin line killing his victims here.
Turk rested on the floor, staring at the wall and dealing with his own emotions.
From time to time, Faith would head over to him to pet him a little and let him know she was here.
He responded gratefully each time, but he didn’t seek out further affection.
He was a lot like Faith in that he sometimes needed to be alone with his thoughts.
“I don’t think it’s a hitman, though,” Faith said. “It could be, but I feel like a hitman would have killed the dogs. Clubs are a lot harder to conceal than .22s. I don’t see a professional walking around with an eighteen-inch leather wrapped stick.”
“Then again, no one has seemed to notice anyone carrying an eighteen-inch leather wrapped stick,” Jessica said. “No one’s noticed anything suspicious.”
Faith frowned. “Yeah, that’s incredible to me. It makes me wonder if the killer is playing some sort of game. See how many I can kill before someone actually notices me.”
“Hmm.” Jessica bit her lip. “So, let’s say this has to do with the dogs. Why would the killer take their lives in front of their dogs? Could they have been abusing the animals?”
“I doubt it,” Faith said. “The dogs both stayed close to where their owners fell. They wouldn’t show that kind of loyalty if they were abused. Not to mention that Luna—that’s the dog from yesterday—was despondent when we saw her.”
“Jealousy thing?” Jessica suggested. “Like Jacob Moss?”
Faith shivered. Jacob Moss was a veteran with a traumatic brain injury who lost his working dog overseas and thanks to a combination of delusion and envy had decided that Turk was a reincarnation of his long-lost dog.
He had killed three people to punish them for crimes against working dogs and planned to kill Faith to steal Turk.
Thankfully, he had a moment of clarity before he went through with the plan and instead turned himself into the authorities so he could be incarcerated in a mental health facility and kept from killing other people.
“No, this isn’t like Jacob,” she told Jessica.
“Jacob was delusional, and his killings reflected it. This guy’s organized, but not ritualistic.
He’s very practical. He knows the victims frequent dog parks, he knows where there’s cover, he kills them, beats the dogs off, then leaves.
No time wasted staging bodies or leaving messages.
“How does he get away with it, though? Like, how do the dogs not warn their owners before they end up in danger? I mean, the killer has to be right up close. I feel like if this guy came after you, Turk would see him from a mile away.”
Faith tilted her head. “That’s a good point. I didn’t see Turk react to any unusual scents at the crime scenes, but maybe the killer had something in place to distract the dogs until he could get up close. Or maybe he masked his scent.”
“I’ll talk to Stafford County,” Jessica said. “Maybe their CSI picked something up.”
“Talk to Meyers too,” Faith said. “Quantico PD handled the Iris Caldwell scene.”
While Jessica stepped out to handle that, Faith dug into the personal lives of their two victims. She still didn’t get a personal feeling from this killer, but there was a reason somewhere in there whether there were hard feelings attached or not.
Iris Caldwell was a retired loan officer.
That career alone was probably enough to earn her a few enemies, but if so, none of them had bothered to declare their enmity on social media.
Her feeds were filled with friends, family, and coworkers sharing memories, laughing at inside jokes, and gushing about what an amazing person she was.
The bank, a major national chain, was paying for her memorial, which was not something companies did.
So, she must have been at least a decent human being.
Mark Patterson didn’t have quite so many friends on his social media, but by all accounts, he seemed to be a dutiful parks employee who genuinely loved his job and genuinely loved dogs.
Most of his pictures were of him and Beau on adventures.
He was an avid hunter, and if his annual pictures of downed bucks were any indication, a very good shot.
It was too bad he didn’t have his rifle on him when he was attacked.
Not that it would have mattered since he was shot in the back of the head, Faith reminded herself.
She leaned back in her chair and chewed on the tip of her pen.
She tried to create a basic profile of their killer.
He was tall and strong, confident too. He carried a club, so he knew he was going to have to protect himself from dogs.
That meant he had at least a basic understanding of his victims. No one had reported a suspicious presence at either park, so he probably wasn’t stalking them, but he knew they spent time at those parks.
Or he didn’t, and he just happened to show up and happened to pick a victim.
She shook her head and got up, pacing around the room.
That wasn’t true. He had distracted the dogs somehow.
He had chosen a murder weapon that required him to get close, and he had to have had something in place, at least temporarily, to keep the dogs from warning their owners. There was forethought here.
But then he just let them fall where they fell.
No staging the body, no moving it, no cleanup afterwards.
He didn’t even catch them to lower them gently to the ground, nor did he rough up or mutilate the bodies afterwards.
Were it not for the dogs, he probably would have been on his way out of the area before the victims even hit the ground.
Speaking of the dogs, he had stopped them but he hadn’t killed them even though he definitely could have. That was notable.
Okay, so he cared about dogs. Both Iris Caldwell and Mark Patterson cared about their dogs. So why did the killer want them dead? He didn’t steal the dogs, so it wasn’t some misguided rescue.
She was missing something. That was normal for the start of a case, but it never made it any easier to handle.
She sighed and rubbed her temples, smiling ruefully at Turk. “Any thoughts, boy?”
Turk sighed and looked at the wall. Faith knelt down and gave him a hug. “I know, boy. It’s tough. I’m not having fun either.”
Jessica returned, and Faith got to her feet. “So?”
“CSI didn’t have anything,” Jessica replied. “I spoke to a very sheepish investigator who admitted that they hadn’t thought to check for anything that might have distracted the dogs.”
Faith rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t get too angry. Turk hadn’t noticed any unusual scents at the crime scene either. It was worth a look, but it wasn’t the end of the world that they hadn’t found anything.
Tell that to Beau and Luna. Not to mention Aaron and Katie Caldwell.
“Okay. Then we need to start digging deeper into the victims. Nothing showed up on social media, so let’s check other sources. I’ll take Iris, you take Mark Patterson.”
“Sure. Any idea what other sources I should look at?”
“Everything.”
Jessica smiled slightly. “Fair enough.”
Faith began by calling Katie, Aaron’s sister and the only other Caldwell sibling who still lived in the area. She checked with Meyers first to make sure she had been notified of her mother’s death. She didn’t want this phone call to be the first Katie had heard.
It wasn’t. Meyers had called Katie earlier that morning. When Faith called her, she had just left the coroner’s office.
“Who did this?” she demanded, sobbing over the phone. “Why would anyone want to kill my mom?”
“That’s what we’re hoping to find out,” Faith replied. “I know this is an uncomfortable question to ask, but—”
“No. I don’t know anyone who would want to kill my mother,” Katie snapped.
As with her brother the day before, anger was quickly replacing denial.
“She was kind to everyone she met. Everyone liked her. Hell, I’ve had a dozen phone calls from her old coworkers and managers offering their condolences.
She volunteered at a soup kitchen every Thanksgiving.
Someone killed a literal saint, and it’s just… ”
Her voice trailed off for a moment as fresh sobs took over. Faith looked across the room at Jessica, who wore a similarly downcast expression as she talked to Mark Patterson’s family. This was always the hardest part of the job.
“Are you aware of any complaints at all against your mother? It could be as simple as leaving her garbage cans out a day too long, not cutting her grass…”
Katie laughed. “Do you hear yourself? You’re saying someone might have killed my mother because she didn’t cut her grass?”
“It’s possible,” Faith said and meant it.
“Right now, we’re in the fact-finding stage.
We need to gather every bit of data that might have anything to do with this case.
Then we’ll go through those bits and figure out which ones are important and which ones aren’t.
Oftentimes, seemingly meaningless things can become crucial to solving a case. ”
“Well, no one complained about her grass. Or her trash cans. No one complained about anything. That’s why this makes no sense. I just don’t get why anyone would have killed her.”
Faith sighed. “If you think of anything, please give me a call. Thank you for your time.”
Katie hung up without replying. Faith didn’t blame her for the rudeness. She wasn’t in a frame of mind to have to consider other people’s feelings right now.
“I take it you also got nothing from the family,” Jessica said.
“Yep,” Faith agreed. She leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand. “Check police records. No one’s perfectly saintly. There’s something out there.”
“We already confirmed they have no criminal records.”
“Not criminal records. Complaints. I was shooting in the dark with the grass-cutting question, but it’s not unheard of for neighbors to kill each other over simple disputes like that.”
“Boy, we are really grabbing at straws here,” Jessica said, picking up the phone to call Meyers.
“You know as well as I do that those straws could end up leading us to the answers we need.”
“Fair enough.” Jessica dialed the number, and a moment later, Meyers answered. “Hey, Detective. Can you find out if anyone’s made any complaints against our victims? We think this might have been a personal killing.”
“Really? Seemed oddly… I hate to use the word professional. Disconnected.”
“Just take a look,” Faith said. “If we’re wrong, we’ll let it go, but I have a hunch.”
“Sure thing. Do you want me to call you back or just hang out on the line?”
“We’ll stay here unless it looks like it’s going to be a long search.”
“Shouldn’t be. I’ll just plug their names in and see if anyone comes up.”
Faith focused on keeping her breathing slow and steady while they waited. She reminded herself that it was still early in the case, and it wasn’t the end of the world if they didn’t find anything right away.
Sure enough, though, Faith’s hunch was correct. After about a minute, Meyers said, “Well, how about that. Looks like they both received complaints about a month ago.”
“Yeah?” Faith asked, excited.
“Yep. Five weeks ago, someone reported Mark Patterson for letting Beau walk on a sidewalk without a leash. A week later, that same person called us about Iris for Luna’s excessive barking.”
“Who?” Jessica asked.
“Brian Meadows. And wouldn’t you know it, he lives in Iris’s neighborhood.”
And just like that, they had their first lead.