serial killings, too.
After the murder in Chicago in 1995, Mama’s Boy took his trade to the Seattle area in 1997, and that was where he did the most damage, strangling eleven women in three years. He killed two young mothers in Oakland in 2000. Then there were the two possible “copycat” murders in Virginia in 2003 and 2004 that Jordan attributed to him. The most recent case in 2007 had occurred south of Portland. No one had called it a Mama’s Boy murder, not yet, but Jordan felt it had all the signs of one.
“I want to ask you about the scuff marks on the inside of your trunk lid,” he said, pacing in front of the worktable—like a TV lawyer in front of the witness box.
But this witness was stretched across the table, bound, shirtless, and shivering. His torn trousers only partially covered one leg. Leo winced as he studied him. Considering how long Meeker had been tied to that table in that same torture-rack position, his back, shoulders, and arms must have ached horribly. The guy had to be in agony.
But Jordan was relentless. “I think those marks were made by Rebecca Lyden after you locked her in the trunk of your car,” he said. “You remember her, don’t you, Allen? She was the young single mother from Eugene. Rebecca disappeared in 2007. I looked at the dealer’s slips in the glove compartment of your car. You bought that BMW in Seattle in 2006. Unless there’s another victim I don’t know about, Rebecca made those marks.”
“If you say so, yeah, sure,” Meeker grunted sarcastically. He didn’t even raise his head from the table when he replied. “You’re the expert; you know everything….”
“Rebecca vanished from a rest stop along Interstate 5 near Wilsonville, Oregon,” Jordan continued. “Her two-year-old son was found wandering around and crying outside the women’s lavatory with a clown doll in his hand. Was that your gift to him?”
Meeker didn’t reply. He just shook his head over and over.
“They never did find Rebecca’s body,” Jordan went on. “Maybe that’s why the newspapers didn’t call it a Mama’s Boy murder. You never bothered to hide the others too well. Why were you so careful with Rebecca’s corpse? Didn’t you want anyone to know Mama’s Boy was back?”
“Y’know, it’s bad enough you’re trying to pin the Mama’s Boy murders on me, and now you’re blaming me for all these other crimes. Jesus, pretty soon you’ll have me in Dallas, assassinating JFK in 1963.” Meeker let out a tired, labored sigh. “About the car, I load a lot of crap in that trunk. If there are scuff marks inside my trunk, I wouldn’t be at all surprised. But it doesn’t make me a murder suspect.” He glared at Jordan. “Let me tell you something. I don’t know nearly as much about the Mama’s Boy killings as you do. But I remember they were already going on when I moved from Chicago to Seattle in August 2000. I wasn’t even living in Seattle when the first several murders occurred. If you don’t believe me, you can ask my fiancee, Susan, or call up any one of my Chicago friends.”
“August 2000?” Jordan repeated. “Six months later, you must have been kind of sorry you’d made the move to Seattle.”
“Why? Was there another Mama’s Boy murder?”
“No, something else happened. Do you remember what happened in Seattle on Ash Wednesday, February twenty-eighth, 2001?”
Allen just shook his head.
“Around eleven in the morning?” Jordan pressed.
“I give up,” Meeker grumbled.
Leo took hold of the banister and slowly got to his feet. He knew exactly what Jordan was getting at. Next to September 11, it was the other where-were-you-when event for Seattleites that year.
“February twenty-eighth, 2001, is when Seattle had the second worst earthquake in its history—a magnitude six point eight. Everybody in the area felt it. But you don’t remember it, because you weren’t there.”
“Shit, that doesn’t mean anything—”
“The last known Mama’s Boy victim in the Seattle area was Candice Schulman,” Jordan spoke over him. “She was abducted in front of her four-year-old twin sons in their home on October sixteenth, 2000. You left the boys a couple of moldy hand puppets on the living room sofa. Some kids found Candice’s body two days later in the woods by Shilshole Bay. By February 2001, you’d already left Washington state. The day before the Seattle earthquake, you were in Oakland, killing Leslie Anne Fuller. You tore her away from her toddler son in the parking lot of the Emeryville Food Court. You left a stuffed animal on the hood of her car….”
“Not me,” he shook his head. “I’ve never even been to Oakland, damn it! I didn’t remember the exact date of the earthquake because I was out of town that week—in Spokane. I travel for my job—I already told you that! I heard about the quake, yes, of course. When I came back home that Friday, I was relieved because there wasn’t any real damage to my place.” His voice started to crack. “How do you expect me to know the exact date, for God’s sakes?”
“I knew it,” Leo piped up. “I remember it.”
“Well, good for you,” Meeker grumbled, tears brimming in his eyes. “Go to the head of the class, chum. You guys have already made up your minds I’m this—this heinous serial killer, and there isn’t anything I can say to convince you otherwise, is there? What do you want me to say? What? Want me to confess?” Wincing, he looked at Jordan and then at Leo. “All right, okay, I did it! I killed them all! I murdered your mother in cold blood—and the rest of them, too! Is that what you want to hear? So are you going to get the police now?”
Jordan slowly shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Meeker cried. He glanced at Leo, his eyes pleading. “He’ll never let me go. There’s nothing I can say or do to change his mind. I’m going to die down here….”
Leo swallowed hard. He stared back at Meeker and knew the man was right.
Moira’s eyes finally adjusted to the murky darkness inside the small, cold room, and dim images began to take shape. She was locked in some sort of storage room, probably a janitor’s closet. From the icy cement floor, she figured it was in a basement or on a ground level. The empty metal bookcase was pushed against the wall—close to the door. The thin strip of light under the door was barely discernible. Up in the corner of the opposite wall was a fan box. Tiny slivers of daylight peeked through the built-in slats. There were some capped-off pipe ends along that wall, too. It looked like there might have been a sink in the room at one time.
She kept hearing that flapping noise. Sometimes it grew very loud as the breeze kicked up. She’d listen to the wind howling—and feel a slight draft through the fan slats.
Moira took the tortoiseshell barrette out of the pocket of her jeans, crawled across the mattress, and hobbled the rest of her way to the door. She still couldn’t put much weight on her left foot without it hurting like a son of a bitch.
Catching her breath, she leaned against the door and slid the metal clip in the chink by the door handle until she felt the lock. She applied some pressure to it with the metal clip and rattled the knob, but it wasn’t giving at all. “C’mon, c’mon,” she muttered to herself, jiggling and jabbing the clip against the door lock.
She kept wondering about the woman who had owned this barrette. She must have been a hiker or big nature buff to be in those woods alone. Had the barrette fallen out of her hair when she’d plunged into that pit? Maybe he’d
Running her fingertips along the door frame by the knob, she could feel the wood was frayed there—as if someone had scratched and chipped away at it for a long time. Or maybe several people had, several women.
Moira imagined her photo and her brassiere as part of some maniacal murderer’s private collection. As terrified as she was of dying, she also dreaded what he might do to her beforehand. She was still a virgin, and even the idea of
Her hands shook horribly as she continued to wiggle the clip against the door catch. “C’mon, please,” she whispered. She missed Leo and wished she’d never argued with him. She was thinking of her mom and dad, too, and how much she just wanted to be home right now. The barrette clip bent, and she shifted positions, forgetting for a moment about her sore ankle. As soon as she put weight on it, sharp pain shot through her leg.
Moira let out an anguished cry and slid down to the cold cement floor. She banged against the bottom of the door. “Let me out of here!” she cried. Her voice was still hoarse from all of her screaming earlier, and her throat felt raw. “Please! My parents, they’ll pay you! If—if you just get me to a phone
