He stopped for a moment, his gaze distant, as if he were seeing the events of nearly two decades past played out again in his mind. His body had tensed, and his face looked strained. There’s more to it, Jen thought suddenly. He’s not telling us just about an old murder investigation. Somehow it became personal, and it’s never left him.
“Minneapolis was a little more fortunate,” he continued, his attention coming back to the present. “The sixth victim—or I should say intended victim—happened to be dog-sitting her friend’s Doberman on the night the killer broke in. She’d brought the dog home that day, so he hadn’t known the animal was there.”
He grinned.
“The dog was the sneaky type. Never opened his mouth once to bark, just waited till this psycho climbed through a kitchen window, then proceeded to chew his right leg through to the bone.”
Appreciative laughter circulated through the room, along with several cries of “All right!” and “Good dog!” Jamie turned to Jen and commented that apparently dogs were also a woman’s best friend. Jen nodded absentmindedly, still wondering why the case seemed so personal to the man.
“Wayne Kelty—that was the killer’s name—starts screaming his head off, which wakes the victim, not to mention the entire neighborhood, and he was ours. It wasn’t difficult to tie him to the other murders because there was one thing about his M.O. that was different from these killings. Our guy raped, then killed. Even without DNA testing, he left enough evidence behind to convict him. He got five life sentences—to run consecutively—with no possibility of parole.”
He paused for a few moments. The assembled officers stared at him and then began looking at each other in puzzlement.
“Wait a sec,” Lonnie spoke up. “Are you saying your guy might be our guy? What happened? Did he escape, or did some bleeding heart governor pardon the creep?”
“No, my guy, as you call him, didn’t escape. At least, not in the conventional sense. He was killed in a fight two years after he was sent up.”
A loud murmuring coursed through the room. Buchan held up his hand for silence, his expression indicating he was irritated with his officers for their lack of patience.
“A copycat?” Lonnie said.
“Maybe,” Anderson admitted, “but I don’t think so, at least not in the sense you mean. Remember, the murders that took place in Minneapolis and the other states are old—over fifteen years for the most recent ones. Copycats are more likely to pattern themselves after today’s headline killers.”
His gaze connected with Jen’s again. She was startled to see that the lust had gone out of it. In its place, she saw a look she could only identify as sadness that longed to be comforted away. She recognized it because she’d seen it in her son’s face too many times since his father had died.
“Wayne had a son,” Anderson continued, looking away from her. “Fourteen at the time. We were never able to determine what happened to the mother. Wayne said she’d left the two of them six years before, and the boy backed him up. Personally I think Wayne killed her like he’d killed the others. So Wayne had sole custody of the boy from age eight on.”
He looked at the officers, his blue eyes angry.
“This maniac was responsible for raising a child, for instilling values in him and teaching him how to live in the world. You can imagine the job he did of it.”
Jen shuddered, thinking of Brandon. Children were such blank slates. It was up to adults to write on that slate or rather to guide the child to do his own writing. In her years on the job, she’d seen too many instances of adults who had botched the assignment. But at least none of those misguided incompetents had been a brutal serial killer.
“Wayne took his son with him when he killed. Taught him the ‘intricacies of the hunt’ was the way he put it when we caught him. That’s the way Wayne thought of the killings—a sport, only with bigger stakes.”
He paused again. Jen could see that he was struggling to keep his emotions under control, and again she wondered what his personal involvement had been. Certainly it was a horrific story. The expression on the face of everyone assembled was proof that no one could hear what had happened to that child without being affected by it. Still, the agent’s reaction seemed to go deeper.
“Both Wayne and the boy denied that he had committed any of the murders, and there was no physical evidence to tie him to any of the rapes. Apparently he had only been along for the learning experience.”
Anderson’s voice was bitter. There were angry murmurings around the table. The pencil that Jamie had been holding tightly snapped under the pressure, and several officers jumped at the sound.
“The boy became a ward of the state and was eventually placed in foster care. Three months after his placement, he was charged with raping his foster mother. He denied it, of course, claiming that she had been molesting him all along. He was prosecuted as a juvenile and sent to a maximum security juvenile facility. I lost track of him after that.”
“Are you saying you think Wayne Kelty’s son is our killer?”
Jen sucked in her breath in surprise. She hadn’t planned to say anything. The question had just popped out. What surprised her even more was her reaction to having spoken. She was not reticent by nature nor was she easily intimidated by anyone. Yet the handsome agent made her feel almost shy. If she hadn’t gotten so caught up in his tale, she would have
