Chapter 4

Kendra grabbed some croissants from Bagatelle on the way home. She figured she'd catch up on her emails and then see if Olivia wanted to come over after lunch. Then maybe she could have a long talk with her and find out what on earth was happening at the condo. After that, maybe she'd—

What the hell?

Kendra had opened the door of her condo to see that the place was a wreck. A repeat of Paula Chase's home, with almost every square inch of floor space covered with papers, silverware, and knickknacks from her emptied drawers, shelves, and refrigerator.

As she glanced over the mess, she saw that every item of value was present and accounted for.

TV? Check.

Laptop? Check.

Ridiculously expensive stereo system? Check.

She whirled around. One thing was missing.

The Morgan sisters' case files. Shit! There was no trace of them. The three file boxes and dolly were gone. It was clearly what her intruder was after.

Her hunch at the murder scene had been correct. Somebody really wanted to get their hands on those files.

But why?

An hour later, Detective Perry and a pair of uniformed officers were at Kendra's condo, trying their best to step around the mess in her foyer and living room.

Perry surveyed the scene. "After what happened to Detective Chase, I'd say you're lucky you weren't home."

"Maybe," Kendra said. "But now we've lost those files."

"We'll dust for prints, but our suspect probably wore gloves. That was the story at Chase's house." Perry looked at the three heavy-duty dead bolt locks on her door. "You're well fortified here. Good locks and a steel-reinforced frame. Difficult locks to pick, but that looks like exactly what happened."

"I think so, too. I was assured these were almost impossible to defeat."

"They usually are, at least to almost any sneak thief I've ever met. We work with a former burglar who speaks to neighborhood watch groups about the best ways to protect their homes. He recommends a couple of these same locks. You're pretty much doing everything right. If anything, this may be a bit of overkill. Three dead bolts?"

"I've had problems in the past. A couple of my investigations followed me home."

Perry made a face. "No wonder you're so reluctant to take on these cases. Anyway, Detective Chase also had good locks and even an alarm. Whoever this is, they know what they're doing. A far cry from your typical residential burglar."

Kendra looked down at the floor. "This is strange."

"Your condo getting tossed? I guess ‘strange' is one way of looking at it."

She walked from her living room to the front door. "No, I mean… That dolly with the files was heavy. The wheels would have made impressions on all the papers and photos on the floor between the living room and foyer. But I don't see a single mark."

He stared at the floor. "Neither do I. You think they moved the cart out and trashed your place afterward?"

"Why would they do that? It doesn't make sense." Kendra opened her door and walked down the hallway. Perry joined her. She pointed to the floor, where the fine carpet nap showed the path taken by the dolly's twin wheels. "It was rolled to the elevator."

"Yes. Then out the building's front door?"

She bit her lip. "There's a security camera in the main lobby. Why go that way when there are two other exits where it's easier to slip out unnoticed?"

"You said the dolly was heavy."

"Still not that difficult to roll down a step at a time. Our burglar seems too thorough to risk going out the front door."

"You never know. We'll look at the security cam footage. I'll talk to the building manager."

Something else occurred to Kendra. "Follow me."

"Are we going to the manager's office?"

"No."

Kendra led him into the elevator and punched the second-floor button. In less than a minute, she leaned out the door and looked down the hallway. "This is our stop."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

They followed the wheel marks on the carpet until they ended in front of a condo door.

"That's a surprise," he said.

"Not really." She knocked on the door.

After a moment, Olivia answered. "Good morning, Kendra." She cocked her head, obviously picking up Perry's breathing. "Who's your friend?"

"Detective Raymond Perry, SDPD," he replied.

"Oooh." She was still smiling. "Am I under arrest?"

"Only if you stole a dolly cart of files from my condo this morning," Kendra said.

"Guilty as charged." Olivia swung the door open wide to reveal the dolly and three boxes of files, with folders stacked all over the large wraparound desk that dominated the condo's living room area. A muscular young man stood in front of the desk, feeding a sheaf of papers into a scanner. "Though I don't think the charges will stick," Olivia said. "I have a distinct recollection that you wanted these to be scanned."

"Thank God," Kendra said, rushing toward the file boxes. "They're all here!"

"Of course they are," Olivia said. "I have some East Coast radio interviews today, so Zack came in early this morning. We went straight up to your place. You weren't home, so I let myself in with my key. I didn't think you'd mind."

"I'm overjoyed."

Olivia smiled. "That's a little extreme, but okay. We brought them up here and Zack started scanning everything. He's good. He's almost finished."

Zack smiled at them. "Only two folders to go."

"You are good," Kendra said. "When you two were down there, did you notice anything messy or out of place?"

"Like what?" Zack said. "It looked fine to me."

"What time was that?" Perry asked.

"About seven thirty," Olivia said. "Like I said, Zack came in early. What's this about?"

"Someone ransacked my condo this morning. I think they were after these files. The woman I got them from was murdered in her home last night."

"Holy shit," Zack blurted out. He looked apologetically at Olivia. "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. You're learning. ‘Holy shit' is entirely appropriate in an amazing number of workplace situations." She faced Kendra. "You're telling me that someone ransacked your place between the time we took these and now? And that person may be a killer?"

"Yes. You and Zack are probably the only reason they don't have these files right now."

Perry motioned toward the file folders. "We're going to take these. They may have some relevance to our murder investigation. We'll just gather them up, and—"

"After he finishes scanning," Kendra said.

Perry shot her an annoyed stare. "Did you just hear the part about this being possible evidence in a murder case?"

"I did." She turned to Zack. "Keep scanning."

"Do it," Olivia whispered to him.

Zack quickly fed another stack of file pages into the scanner.

Perry shook his head. "Look, I don't need your permission to take these right this moment."

"Maybe not, but you would need to get a warrant. It would be easier for all of us if you let Zack take a few minutes to finish his work. Then he'll repack each of those boxes exactly as he found them and send you on your way. That seems like a far more efficient use of your time."

Perry thought for a moment, the pause filled by the sound of Olivia's scanner whirring and drawing in pages from the feed tray. He finally smiled at Kendra. "My colleagues told me you were a pain in the ass."

"A compliment, Detective?"

"They didn't mean it that way."

"How would you mean it?"

"I don't know you well enough yet." He shrugged. "Okay, finish up here. I want to be out of here with those files in ten minutes."

Kendra glanced at Zack, who gave her a quick nod.

"Fine. We'll be ready."

As promised, Zack finished the scans in ten minutes, and Perry and the two uniformed officers carried off the file boxes.

"Come on," Kendra said. "You're not taking the big ugly dolly?"

"It's all yours." Perry hefted his box as he walked toward the door. "Thank you, Dr. Michaels."

And Detective Perry was gone.

Zack plopped down in one of the office chairs positioned around Olivia's large U-shaped desk. "Wow. I didn't expect this when I signed up to intern for a website."

Olivia pulled a USB memory stick from her desktop console. "Well, you can always go back to combing my mailing list for possible duplicates."

"Hey, I'm not complaining." Zack's square jaw and toothy smile gave him the appearance of an all-American quarterback. "I just didn't think I'd be helping out on a murder case." He looked at Kendra. "By the way, it's nice to meet you. I'm Zack Duffer."

"Kendra Michaels. Nice to meet you, Zack. I appreciate your help. You're a student at USC?"

"Yep. I graduate in May. I'm finished with my classes, but I need the internship to complete my degree requirements. Ms. Moore was nice enough to pick me."

"Nice had nothing to do with it," Olivia said. "I got your transcript. You could've had your pick of hundreds of internship programs."

Zack shrugged. "Maybe."

"See?" Olivia said. "He's not even going to try to deny it."

"I'm right where I want to be," Zack said. He turned toward Kendra. "I wanted to ask you… Have you actually looked at those files yourself yet?"

"Not really. I haven't had a chance."

"Olivia told me that they were put together by two women whose mother was murdered."

"That's right. They compiled these over a period of several years."

"There's some pretty graphic crime scene photos. Not so much of their mother's crime scene, but of other Bayside Strangler victims. Those women must have somehow gotten them from the police."

"It's not that hard if you know which palms to grease. And these are obviously two very resourceful women."

Olivia extended the flash drive toward Kendra. "Well, you can now carry all their work around with you. Do you really think there's something in here that got that retired detective killed?"

"I don't know, but it's strange that my place got tossed just hours later. I'm just glad whoever it was didn't realize you had taken them."

"You and me both. Now get out of here. Unless you'd like to join Zack in observing my Zoom meetings with advertisers?"

"I'll pass on that, thanks. See you later."

After making phone calls in the morning and early afternoon, Kendra returned to her studio for a typical flurry of after-school appointments. As her last client left, Kendra pulled the USB flash drive from her pocket and looked at it for a long moment. She was sure Detective Perry and his colleagues were already studying the files they had taken. What could she possibly see that they couldn't? Surely no more than Paula Chase, who had worked the cases herself.

Well, might as well take a look.

Kendra plugged the flash drive into her main console, which displayed the file contents on three large wall-mounted monitors she used for her music games and exercises. She paced across the studio with the remote in her hand, paging through the files. She was amazed by the quality, quantity, and organization of the Morgan sisters' research. Many of the files were dominated by transcripts of interviews conducted by the women themselves. They had tracked down the victims' family members, witnesses, and even several law-enforcement agents, all of whom were surprisingly candid. Kendra supposed that the sisters' own tragic connection with the case made their interviewees more open and accessible than they may have been with the case's original investigators.

She raised her remote and paced around the studio as she perused the file's opening case summaries. Five women were murdered in a four-month period, all of them strangled. The first two were physically disabled; the last three were not, perhaps as the killer gained confidence in his deadly abilities.

The first victim, Donna Shetland, was a multiple sclerosis patient and used an upright walker to walk back and forth from her job as a luxury hotel events manager in the Gaslamp district. She lived alone, and no one had noticed she was missing until she failed to show up at work one morning. A police welfare check confirmed she wasn't at home, and area security cameras indicated that she'd disappeared on her way from work the evening before, somewhere in the vicinity of Eleventh Avenue and F Street. Her body was found three days later underneath a tarp behind a Little Italy restaurant, and her walker was recovered at a nearby homeless encampment.

Alyssa Morgan was the second victim, and although Kendra was familiar with her story after speaking with Paula Chase, the summary included details Paula hadn't given her. Alyssa's condition was the result of a ski accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down, and she raised her two young daughters alone after her husband left the family just months after her injury. She harbored dreams of participating in the Paralympics as a wheelchair racer, and the hiking path was one of her favorite training spots. She disappeared from there on a weekday morning, and inexplicably, her wheelchair reappeared on the path four days later. She was soon found hanging from a tree forty yards away. She'd been dead several days and most likely placed there the same time her wheelchair was returned.

As Kendra read the detached and almost clinical summary, she was amazed to think that it was written by one or both of Alyssa Morgan's own daughters.

What in the hell happened to you, Chloe and Sloane?

The third victim was Leah McLane, a thirty-seven-year-old waitress at the Hot Ribs barbecue restaurant in Ocean Village. She left work at ten on a Sunday night, but her fellow employees noticed that her car was still in the parking lot Monday morning. They followed up that afternoon, but she'd vanished. Like the others, her strangled body didn't appear until several days later, lying in the restaurant's back patio hammock. She was bound by the same green-and-white rope as the previous victims, with the same distinctive knots. Only then did law enforcement publicly concede that a serial killer might be on the loose.

Kendra pressed her remote repeatedly, flipping through scans of the newspaper stories. She had a faint memory of this period of time, but as a teenager living and attending school outside the city, the case had little meaning for her.

She stopped to scan the details of the fourth victim, Greta Waters. Greta sang and played piano at Zephyr's, a popular bar with a spectacular bayside view. She was apparently abducted as she left her apartment for work around 4:00 P.M. Her strangled body didn't appear until almost a week later, in the bed of a stolen pickup truck parked within sight of her apartment building.

The fifth and final victim, Katrina Burge, was last seen jogging near Ocean Beach, and her disappearance brought unprecedented attention from the local media. Hundreds of volunteers turned up to help search for her in the days afterward, and police kept a round-the-clock watch in the hope of catching the killer's return of her body to the local area. Despite their efforts, the killer still managed to surreptitiously return Burge's strangled and bound corpse to the beach four days later, hidden in a dilapidated lifeguard station marked for demolition. It had been searched by both police and volunteers literally dozens of times in the days before the corpse's appearance.

But here, for the first time, a vehicle and possible killer were seen in connection to one of the killings. A white Toyota FJ SUV was spotted on a security camera near the beach on the evening of the corpse drop-off, and the figure of a large, husky man was seen loading a shopping cart into its rear hatch. Wheel marks in the sand near the lifeguard station were clearly from a shopping cart abandoned just a few yards away, and the depth of the tracks made it clear that this was the probable means of transporting the victim's body to the location.

Kendra stepped closer to the screen to look at the grainy still image of the man loading the shopping cart. The vehicle's license plate wasn't visible, and it was barely possible to determine the FJ's make and model. Unfortunately, the video brought investigators no closer to finding the killer, even after it was widely spread online and on television news broadcasts.

There were apparently no more killings after Katrina Burge's, although some investigators and journalists tried to make the case that the murderer was still active and had merely changed his locale or modus operandi. But most concluded that the Bayside Strangler's reign of terror had come to an end because he was now dead or perhaps imprisoned for unrelated crimes.

Wishful thinking, Kendra thought. And Chloe and Sloan Morgan clearly didn't believe it.

She saved the files to her cloud storage account and pulled out the memory stick. There were hundreds of pages left to peruse, but this was a good introduction to the Bayside Strangler. She owed it to Paula Chase to at least—

"Kendra…? Kendra, can you talk?"

The disembodied voice came from the speakers suspended above her monitors.

What in the hell?

"Kendra?"

She knew that voice, of course. But why was it coming from her studio equipment?

"Lynch, what in the hell is going on here?"

The screensavers on her monitors gave way to a video image of Adam Lynch. There was a grimy, dirt-marred wall behind him, and the dim lighting left half his face in shadows. He raised a water bottle toward her. "Cheers."

"You can see me?"

"Of course. You use this system for teleconferencing, don't you?"

She bit her lip in anger. "You've crossed a line here. You think it's okay to hack into my work computer?"

"If it's to talk to you, why not?"

"Because I work with my clients here. They have a right to their privacy."

"I didn't start using your camera until you talked back to me just now. I know your office hours, so I didn't tap into your system until I was reasonably certain you would be alone."

"So you saw what I was doing on my system?"

"I did."

"Not cool, Lynch. If you want me to share something with you, just ask. It's not okay for you to spy on what I'm doing. Got it?"

"Point taken. I'm sorry. I actually peeked in to make sure you weren't in the middle of a session. Instead, I saw some fairly disturbing murder scene photos."

"So you saw everything."

"Yes. I assume it's the files that the Morgan sisters put together. Pretty grim stuff. I also heard that your condo was broken into. I'm sure it's occurred to you that it was probably the same person who ransacked Paula Chase's home and murdered her."

"Of course. They'd have had these files now if Olivia hadn't taken them and had her intern scan them all. The police have them all now."

"Good. For some reason, those files might have put a big target on your backs."

"But why? That's what I can't figure out."

He leaned forward. "When I get back there, we can figure it out together. Will you wait for me?"

Kendra raised her remote toward the screen. "I'm about two seconds away from switching you off."

He laughed. "That's a more frightening prospect than the bullets I was dodging this morning."

"I thought I heard gunfire. Care to enlighten me?"

"After I get back. Just another day at the office."

"Office? You look like you're in a hovel."

He glanced around. "Actually, I think it's a kitchen. Or at least it used to be."

"In any case, I'm not waiting for you. The Morgan sisters need all the help they can get right now."

He paused for a long moment. "You really think they're still alive?"

"I don't know. I realize that their odds get slimmer with each passing hour. But there's a chance, you know? Those women are heroes. After all they went through, you have to admire the way they've been working so hard to find their mother's killer."

"I agree. I read up on their case after we talked last. I figured their mother touched a nerve with you."

"What do you mean?"

"The husband and father who left his family when his wife's injury got too much for him to deal with. How could it not make you think of your own family?"

Kendra was silent for a moment. She hadn't discussed this subject with Lynch, and he'd never pressed her on it. Until now. "Like my father, who left his family after his child was born blind? You're thinking I might be identifying with them. I never knew the scumbag, and I never want to know him. I was only a few months old when he left. I know it was hard on my mom, but she never let on. If you ask her about it, she'd say it allowed her to flourish. I think it did. Just like I think Alyssa Morgan was flourishing before she was murdered. She wanted to qualify for the Paralympic Games, and she might have done it. She was a special woman."

"Obviously."

"So maybe I'm not just doing this for Paula Chase or the Morgan sisters, but for that gutsy mom who was only just starting to come into her own."

He nodded and stared at her in silence for a long moment. "I can see that. Whatever happened to her daughters, they're lucky to have you on their team."

She shook her head. "It's my honor. I just hope I can be of some help."

"Hey, I'm sure you will be." He finished his bottled water and tossed the empty container aside. "I really wish I could drop everything and be there to help. But I have a couple of days ahead of me here."

"Stop worrying about me, Lynch. I'm pretty good at taking care of myself."

"I've noticed." Lynch turned sharply as the sound of men's voices rang in the background. "Gotta run," he whispered. "Literally. I'll be in touch."

Before Kendra could reply, he grabbed his phone and cut the connection.

Kendra stared at her now blank bank of monitors. And Lynch was worried about her?

She shut down her system.