A Killer's Mind (Zoe Bentley Mystery #1)(68)

The thumping on the door began again. “Open this damn door, you whore! You bitch! Open the door. Open it. Open it!”

“Help us!”

The light switched on in Mrs. Ambrose’s bedroom.

“Please help.”

The door juddered again.

Mrs. Ambrose moved slowly to the window. A woman who had all the time in the world, shambling over to check what the noise was all about. She peered outside, saw Zoe screaming. Her eyes widened.

“Call the police!” Zoe shouted.

Mrs. Ambrose hurried away. The woman picked up the phone in her bedroom. She dialed quickly and began to talk animatedly on the phone, glancing back toward her window constantly.

If they hurried, they could catch Glover in the act.

The house had gone suddenly silent. Glover wasn’t trying to cajole his way inside or threaten her or break down the door. He was gone.

Almost six months had passed since the night Glover had nearly broken into her room. It was early morning, and the summer sunlight shone through Zoe’s window. She gazed at the wall, holding one shoe in her hand. She had been in the process of putting it on when she’d become lost in thoughts and memory, her bare foot forgotten.

The nightmares were slowly fading. Only two, maybe three nights a week she’d wake up screaming, which was almost normal. Definitely better than the weeks that had followed that night, when she couldn’t sleep for more than four hours straight.

No more murders had transpired in Maynard during that time. And Glover was gone.

He had disappeared that very night. Her dad and the cops had come knocking on his door, but no one had answered. The bedroom had been mostly cleared. He’d left a few magazines in the drawer, but no gray ties, no shoebox.

No one believed he was the killer.

They believed he had come into the house that day, that he had yelled at Zoe. But the police assumed it was because he was embarrassed she had seen his porn collection. That she misunderstood his intentions, that he just wanted to talk. She’d even overheard one of the cops say, as he left their house, “That crazy girl scared the poor guy away.” Her mother had begged her to stop telling people that Glover was the killer. Especially now that they knew who the killer really was.

Manny Anderson had been arrested, suspected of the murders. The police had found a picture of Beth in his home and other “suggestive evidence.” What could this suggestive evidence be? His Dungeons and Dragons collection? He and his parents maintained his innocence while his face was plastered on the front page of all the local newspapers alongside the portraits of the three dead young women.

And then he had managed to hang himself with a bedsheet in his cell. Case closed. The Maynard serial killer was gone. People could sleep again. Zoe had cried for hours when she heard about it. She cried for herself as much as for him. With his death, the chance to prove his innocence and shine the suspicion on Glover was gone. Rod Glover had raped and killed three young women and had gotten away with it. She didn’t know how he had managed to get his alibi to stick, but he had.

She kept thinking that if she’d been older, if she had had a shred of authority, Glover would be in jail. Manny Anderson would still be alive.

She turned her eyes to glare at her bookshelf, brimming with books about serial murders, psychopathy, forensic psychology. She didn’t bother hiding them anymore.

She sighed and put on the other shoe. It was time to face another day.

Her mother was in the kitchen making breakfast. The smell and the sizzle of the bacon and the eggs in the pan made Zoe’s mouth water.

“Good morning,” her mom said. “I was just about to check up on you. It’s late. You need to be outside in five minutes.”

“Okay.” Zoe yawned. Five minutes was plenty of time. Eat bacon and eggs, brush teeth, wash face, comb hair . . . yeah, she could definitely make it in five minutes.

“There’s a letter for you,” her mom said, her tone slightly disapproving.

Zoe had started to correspond with a freelance private investigator and profiler a month before. She suspected he mostly enjoyed the adoring letters of a young teenager. She was milking him for every bit of knowledge that he had.

“Thanks, Mom,” Zoe said and approached the small stack of envelopes. Mostly things for her parents, bills and similar stuff. One brown envelope, addressed to Zoe Bentley. She opened the envelope and shoved her hand inside to pull out the contents.

She frowned. There was no paper inside. Only a smooth strip of cloth. She pulled it out and stared at it, feeling her insides grow cold.

It was a gray tie.





CHAPTER 49

Chicago, Illinois, Thursday, July 21, 2016

Zoe bit her lip and opened the drawer in the desk. The three ties were discarded inside, on top of the envelopes, as foreboding as three snakes. She would give them to Martinez tomorrow; she just needed to present the case in a convincing manner. If she went to him now and told him that the murderer hounding Chicago might be a man she had accused of being a serial killer when she was fourteen, he’d assume she was crazy. He would probably remove her from the case. Maybe Tatum as well.

She had to do her research carefully before talking to him. Find all the corresponding evidence. The important thing was not to present this as the guy she had been obsessed with as a teenager but as a dangerous man, one who’d killed many times before.

Had Glover really sent her those ties? She tried to think of alternative explanations. Could it be the reporter himself? But how would he have known about the former envelopes? And though she was not a forensic document examiner, the handwriting on the three new envelopes seemed very similar to the handwriting on the envelopes she had at home. Was it possible that the same person had sent her all the envelopes, but it wasn’t Glover? No. There was no way anyone else would know about the ties and their significance.