The Darkness of Evil (Karen Vail #7)(2)

“You were only fourteen. Did they believe you?”

“Not really. They brought him in and questioned him along with a bunch of other men from the area, to make it look like they weren’t targeting him. And they didn’t let on that I was the one who told on him. But …”

“But they didn’t arrest him.”

“They said they had no evidence.”

“Right,” Sabotini said, “but four years later, you found some more duct tape.”

Jasmine nodded, her gaze off somewhere behind Sabotini, into nothingness, like she was reliving the memory. “I found it in the trunk of his car. There was blood on the roll, on the inside, on the cardboard. I went back to the police and told them, again, that I was worried my father was the killer.”

“And they believed you this time?”

“No. But I told them I was not leaving until I talked with the detective. So I sat there for an hour and the detective finally came with a social worker because I wasn’t eighteen yet. I started telling him things my dad did over the years, times when he’d disappear for hours at a time, late at night. I’d wake up when he came home, three or four in the morning. I once came out of my room and asked him where he’d been. He didn’t smell like booze, so he hadn’t been out drinking.”

“What’d he say?”

“His favorite answer. ‘Don’t worry about it, darlin’.”

“Maybe he was having an affair.”

“Maybe. But it always happened the night before another body was found. I started writing all these things in a journal, just in case I was right, in case he was the killer.” “What other things were there?”

“Those are in my book, Stephanie,” Jasmine said with a wry smile.

“They are indeed. Let’s get back to that roll of duct tape you found. The second one. It later became key evidence.”

“Right. The DNA was contaminated, so that was a problem. But there was something else. An issue with forensic procedure. Chain of custody.”

“Even if it was considered ‘tainted’ evidence, why didn’t they question him?”

“They told me they didn’t want to tip him off. So they looked into his background and investigated without him knowing.”

Sabotini leaned back slightly in her seat. “But that still got them nowhere. Isn’t that when they called the FBI?”

“Their profiling unit. The police never could find much in the way of forensics at the crime scenes, so they needed someone to find another way to identify the killer. The agent gave them a profile that turned out to be very important.”

“Thomas Underwood,” Sabotini said. “We invited him to appear with you, but we were told he was unavailable. Instead, we’ve got his standin, Karen Vail, who’s going to join us in a few moments to talk about ways of keeping ourselves safe from people like your father.”

I’m a standin?

“Another three years passed before he was arrested,” Sabotini said. “How did you handle that, living with your father, someone you suspected of murdering eleven women and three men?”

“The police told me they couldn’t find anything linking him to the murders. The duct tape had only his blood and DNA on it. Bottom line, they said they had nothing proving, or even suggesting, he was the killer they were looking for. I believed them and started to relax. I started questioning everything. I was young, I told myself. Maybe I misinterpreted the things my dad told me. I realized, being older now, that there were different ways of taking what he’d said.” She took a deep breath. “It was only me and my dad. My mom had passed by this time, and you know, like I said, he always treated me like a queen. Even when I thought he might be the killer, it made me apprehensive—I really just wanted to know, one way or another. But I never felt like I was in danger.”

“What about after the police told you they had nothing connecting him to the murders? Did that ease your mind?”

“Well yeah, I felt relief, of course. But I also felt stupid.” She looked up at the ceiling, took a breath. “I felt like I betrayed my own father. Going to the police …” She shook her head. “I felt really, really guilty over that for a long time.”

“When the police came to your door to arrest him, what was that like?”

Jasmine hesitated a moment, looked up again, searching for an answer, the bright white lights reflecting off tears pooling in her lower lids. She came off as articulate, honest, and photogenic: an athletic blonde with Nordic features. Easy to promote, easier to book on TV, with a compelling story.

“I went through a range of emotions. Shock. Anger at the police for getting it wrong—I mean, he’d killed a lot more people since I first went to them. Then there was betrayal—I mean, Roscoe Lee Marcks, my father, my dad, the man who tucked me in at night and gave me hugs and kisses, really was a serial killer. He murdered people. Lots of people. And he wasn’t just any serial killer. He was the Blood Lines killer, a man who kidnapped women and men, tossed them into a panel van, tortured them, reviving them repeatedly, before slicing their bodies and cutting off their genitalia.” Her voice caught and she looked down.

Sabotini tilted her head in mock empathy, bit her bottom lip, and waited for Jasmine to compose herself.

Jasmine looked up and dabbed at her teary eyes. She cleared her throat. “It’s hard to explain what it feels like knowing that this coldhearted, brutal killer was my loving father. You start thinking, Why didn’t he kill me? Was I ever in danger? When he got mad at me when I broke his favorite watch, was I—was he thinking of killing me?”