A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(38)

She slid back into bed, careful not to wake Andrea up. She picked up the list again and scanned it.

Parasitic lifestyle. She suddenly remembered the dozens of times Rod had dropped by to borrow gardening tools. Or small things like milk or sugar or beer. Often showing up during dinner, commenting about how tasty everything looked, receiving a belated invitation to join them from her parents. She had heard her mother muttering about it more than once, had always assumed she was just petty and cheap.

Slowly, she began to spot other connections, moments in the past aligning themselves with the list. It was far from a perfect fit. She had no idea if he’d had early behavioral problems or juvenile delinquency. In fact, she didn’t know anything about him beyond the fact that he had moved to Maynard three years before. Moved from where? Why? Did he have a family somewhere? The little things he had told her or her parents all revolved around implausible stories. Suddenly, his past seemed very foggy.

Still, what she knew began to click.

Was Rod Glover a psychopath?

Maybe. But that hardly made him a serial killer. One in every hundred people was a psychopath. A lot of them were mostly harmless.

She tried to imagine him crouching, waiting for Clara to come closer. With his big toothy smile and his ridiculous acts. His messy hair. Would a serial killer have such messy hair? It felt wrong.

What had he been doing at Durant Pond that day? Had he come because it was a nice place to stroll or because he was revisiting the scene of the crime? What had he been doing when she’d seen him there?

She had thought he was peeing.

She shivered, her fingers clenching into fists. She thought of his fast breathing. She felt bile in her throat. This couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be.

Except she knew it could. She would have to tell someone.





CHAPTER 25

Chicago, Illinois, Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Zoe sat at her temporary desk, reading the morning news on her laptop, her mouth twisted in distaste. The media was hyping up the serial killer. The involvement of the FBI was mentioned. There was a picture, the fuzzy faces of her and Tatum with Martinez at the crime scene enlarged for the reader’s enjoyment. According to “sources within the police department,” the murderer was probably a white male working in a funeral home.

She wanted to kill Bernstein. That sack of bloated self-importance had probably called every journalist and blogger in the city. He was probably appearing daily on several news shows, charging them a tidy sum for his “expertise.” She was willing to bet he wouldn’t turn up at the police station again. He had a better-paying, less ego-bruising gig with the media.

A stack of papers landed on her desk. She raised her eyes to meet Martinez’s face.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“A list of reports from the Department of Animal Care and Control,” he said. “Starting July 2014 and ending March 2016. A total of twenty-seven cases. Guess what they all are.”

“Animal embalming?”

“Well, the first six were taxidermies. But all twenty-seven cases are from West Pullman. That’s a neighborhood in the southern part of Chicago.”

“That was probably his initial plan,” Zoe said, leafing through the reports. “To taxidermy his victims.”

“Why did he change his mind?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a big expert on the difference between taxidermy and embalming,” Zoe said. “It doesn’t say any of those animals were embalmed, though.”

“Dead cats and dogs usually don’t undergo an autopsy. But you can see varying descriptions of rigidity and unnatural poses, which I am guessing is what happens when you embalm an animal.”

“Yeah,” Zoe muttered, reading through the report of a dog found lying on its side, dead and rigid as stone. “Were all these animals taken from the same neighborhood?”

“All the ones whose owners were located.”

“Did any of them see who took their pets?”

“Not in the reports, but Scott and Mel went to start interviewing them all and verify it. You think he lives in West Pullman?”

“Or used to,” Zoe said. “He was a lot more careless about discarding his animal carcasses than he was about his human victims.”

“He must have assumed, and rightly so, that Chicago PD wouldn’t start a major hunt for a pet serial killer,” Martinez said.

Zoe didn’t answer, flipping through the reports. Martinez walked away.

She opened the browser and did a quick search about taxidermy. She clicked WikiHow, her favorite guide site for dummies. She mostly loved it because of the illustrations, which were sometimes comical and absurd. The “How to Do Taxidermy” page wasn’t as funny as others, though. She quickly learned that taxidermy was vastly different from embalming.

According to the reports, he had taxidermied six cats and dogs before abandoning the idea. Probably reached the conclusion that it wouldn’t work well with humans. She scribbled the word Methodic on a half sheet of paper on her desk. Then she underscored the phrases Self-tutored and Fast learner she had written on the top of the page two days before.

She chewed her pen. Did he really abandon the idea? Or did he try it?

She got up and walked to Martinez. “Say, Lieutenant, did you find a taxidermied body of a young woman sometime between 2014 and 2015?”