Mac walked into the detail conference room at 8:00 a.m. and started the coffee maker. He imagined the crew would start coming in shortly, hungover to beat all. Having left the bar at a decent hour, Mac felt good.
It was clean-up day, time to file all the evidence in boxes and then take a few days off. A stack of unassembled bankers boxers already waited in a corner. Mac put a couple together and started working on the corkboard that had the St. Paul map. As he started pulling stuff down, Dan Patrick walked in.
“Good morning.”
“Ain’t nothin’ good about it,” Patrick replied, heading for the coffee. Mac chuckled quietly and went back to work on the board. He got to the pin for the body by O’Neill’s Bar, Jamie Jones. She was the one missing from Knapp’s board.
“Dan, you got the file on this Jones woman? The one you were so mad I didn’t know about.” Patrick gave him a “Go fuck yourself” look through bloodshot eyes and threw a folder over.
Jones was the CFO at Peterson Technical Applications, otherwise known as PTA, the single largest business and employer in St. Paul. They had a downtown headquarters plus research and manufacturing facilities around the state and across the country, and soon around the world. It was a diversified company as far as Mac knew, but their calling card was military hardware and communications-related equipment.
“She was CFO?” Mac asked.
“Yeah.”
She was thirty-five years old. “Kind of young for that, wasn’t she?”
“She took over last March for a guy. I forget his name now, but he was killed in an auto accident during a snowstorm. Over on Shepard Road.” Patrick responded as he threw a couple of aspirin in his mouth and washed them down with coffee. Shepard Road ran from downtown west along the Mississippi River over to the International Airport. For an inner-city road, it was notoriously dangerous in spots. Add a March snowstorm to it, and it wasn’t unheard of that a serious accident could occur.
“Let me guess, during the state hockey tourney.” Snowstorms during the state high school hockey tournament were an annual tradition in Minnesota.
“Yup.”
Mac leafed through the file. It was like the other serial-killer files with a picture of the victim, a couple of pages on the evidence tying her to the other murders and a back page, stapled to the folder, with background information, such as address, date of birth, and next of kin.
Jones had come to St. Paul seven years before. She owned a new condo down along the river. Mac recognized the address. It was one of those posh ones in the River Highlands development right on the river, part of St. Paul’s effort to take financial, meaning tax, advantage of the river front. Figures, CFO at a company like PTA should be able to afford digs like that.
She was different from the others victims. The other victims were, for the most part, working-class women-waitresses and a convenience store clerk. Even Linda Bradley, though she owned the bar, definitely had a bluecollar, working-girl feel to her. Jones didn’t. She was educated, a professional, lived in an expensive neighborhood and worked for a major corporation.
“Dan, PTA have any facilities along University Avenue?”
“Huh?”
“PTA. Do they have anything along or around University?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“It’s just that she doesn’t seem to have much in common with the other victims. How does Knapp stumble onto the CFO of PTA?”
“Don’t know, Mac. Some of that occurred to us as well. But, the murder matched all the others down to the letter. Strangled. Sexually assaulted and a Trojan condom was used. No pubic hairs or other physical evidence. Dumped in a vacant lot. Left with a ‘Have a Nice Day’ balloon.”
“Hardly impossible to copycat.”
“That’s true, except we kept a tight lid on all of the details. Very little got out. Think about it. If the media knew about the Trojan rubber, no pubic hair stuff, the van, they would have run with it. It never got out. We watched that very closely. The only thing that really got out was the balloon stuff, and that was pretty much unavoidable. Point is we’d have been able to tell if it was a copycat. No dice.”
Patrick had made a valid point. If it wasn’t Knapp, who was it? And if it was somebody else, they had to have the inside scoop to get it just right. Pretty unlikely. Nevertheless, something seemed odd about it all.
Mac touched his belly. Three cups of heavy coffee were getting to him. He grabbed Jones’ file and the sports page and headed to the can. The sports page offered little so he put it over the handicap arm lift and reached down for the Jones file. He flipped it open and started reading through the memo again. Jones was strangled with a nylon rope, yellow, might have been a water skiing towrope. She was sexually assaulted post mortem. There was the presence of Trojan condom residue, but no pubic hair or any other piece of evidence left behind. It was a spot-on match.
He flipped the memo up and looked at the background information stapled to the back of the folder. Jones was born in 1969 and raised in Bristol, Ohio. Her mother lived in Sun City, Arizona, now. Dad was deceased. Jones had apparently never married. She was a graduate of Duke University and had a masters from Northwestern. She obviously had brains to get into both of those schools. She worked in Chicago before coming to Minnesota. She had been at PTA for seven years, worked her way up the ladder, becoming a very young CFO.
Mac furrowed his brow. Something on the sheet registered with him, like he had seen it somewhere before, but he wasn’t sure what or where. He finished, got up and went to the sink to wash his hands. The door burst open. His cousin Paddy, in uniform, came in.
“Hey, cuz.”
“How you doing, Mac? Hungover?”
“Nah. Early night.”
“Ahhh. Sally.”
Mac smiled and nodded as he worked the soap on his hands.
“Hell of a run for you, cuz,” Paddy said, “Catching Knapp the way you did and Daniels…”
Daniels. Mac bolted from the bathroom, briskly walked down the hall and hit the stairs to the basement and the evidence room. A uniform cop, Jorgenson, was working the desk. “Hey, Mac, great job on Knapp-”
“Thanks. Say, I need to pull some evidence. Everything on the Daniels case.”
“Daniels? What’dya need that for?”
“Just want to check something out.”
“Okay, whatever you say.”
Jorgenson came back with a box with various pieces of evidence. Mac flipped the top off and started digging through evidence bags. And there it was, the 1987 Bristol, Ohio, high school yearbook. He opened it to the page he dogeared weeks ago that had Claire Daniels’, then Claire Miller, graduation picture, first picture on the left, top row. It was on the right page. On the left page halfway down, middle of the row, Jamie Jones. Mac did a rough estimate of the graduating class. There were probably forty or fifty students, a small class.
Mac checked the evidence out and went back up to his desk and started up his computer and did a Google search for Bristol, Ohio. Bristol, south of Youngstown, had a population of just over 1,200.
Mac sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. What were the odds that two women who graduated high school together from a tiny southern Ohio town would be murdered the exact same night in St. Paul, Minnesota?
He got on the phone and called Daniels’ mother, who he had spoke to once during that investigation. She wasn’t particularly helpful then and was no more so now. It wasn’t that she was difficult; she just didn’t know much about what her daughter had been doing with her social life. Apparently that was the case for her daughter’s high school life as well; she didn’t recall a Jamie Jones from Bristol.
Mac had never spoken to Jones’ mother, but there was a number for her in the file. Mac introduced himself to Ms. Jones, who spent two minutes thanking him for catching Knapp.
“Ms. Jones, I have one question for you. Do you remember a classmate of your daughter’s named Claire Daniels?”
“Claire Daniels… hmm… no, I don’t recall a Claire Daniels.”
Mac kicked himself, “Wait, it was Miller then, Claire Miller. Do you recall a Claire Miller?”
“Oh, I remember Claire. She was pretty popular when Jamie was in high school.”
“Were they friends?”
“They knew each other. It’s a small town, so everyone was pretty friendly.”
“Did your daughter ever mention running into Claire up in the Twin Cities?”
“Ohh, yes. Said she saw her on TV. I guess Claire was a reporter. Jamie said she gave her a call, and they got together for coffee or something.”
“Do you know when it was that they got together?”
“No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I think it was recently, at least recently before Jamie was killed. But I can’t be sure exactly when.”
Mac managed to get off the phone before Ms. Jones was able to ask too many questions. He needed to think. Had he found something or was his mind playing games with him? He got up and walked over to the pop machine for a Diet Dr. Pepper, popped the top and took a long drink, looking out the window over Interstate 94. He turned to head back to his desk, when he saw Sally walking down the hall. She saw him and walked over, “Hey.” She saw the look on his face. “You don’t look so good.”
Mac lightly grabbed her arm and walked her into a vacant interview room and closed the door.
“What’s up?”
“I got a bad feeling about something.”
“What?”
“Remember I mentioned last night that on Knapp’s wall, one of the victim’s was missing.”
“Yeah.”
“Kind of thought it was odd.”
“Yeah, so. He was nuts.”
“Maybe so. But have you ever heard of Bristol, Ohio?”
“No. Should I?”
“Not really. It’s a small town in southern Ohio.”
“So.”
“It’s where Jamie Jones graduated from high school in 1987.”
“Mac, I don’t see where your going with-”
“-It just so happens it’s also the high school that one Claire Miller, who became Claire Daniels, also graduated from in 1987.”
Sally’s jaw dropped a little. “Odd coincidence, I guess.”
“It get’s even odder. They were killed the same night.”
Sally’s jaw dropped completely. “What are the odds?”
“Very long, I think.”
“It’s probably still just a coincidence,” Sally said with little conviction.
“Maybe,” he replied skeptically. “But I spoke with Jones’ mom, and she confirms that the two of them had recently gotten together for coffee.”
Sally slipped into lawyer mode. “They’re from the same hometown. So what?”
“Murdered on the same night? That in and of itself makes you wonder. But there’re other things. I’ve looked over Knapp’s other victims. Jones doesn’t fit. She’s professional. The others are working class. Jones has nothing to do with the University Avenue area. She lives down by the river and works downtown. How does Knapp run into her? She does no business in the University area, and Knapp never was downtown once in the entire time we followed him.”
Sally sat down, looking away at the white, concrete wall of the interview room. Quietly she said, “If you’re right, this means the Senator-”
“-Maybe didn’t do Daniels,” Mac said, equally quiet. “And Knapp didn’t do Jones.”
“So who did?”
“Good question.”