The Love Killings (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

Matt pulled his hand away from his nose, forcing himself to get used to the harsh odor. As he moved closer to the staircase, he could tell that the stench was emanating from either the second or third floor and drifting down into the foyer like a toxic cloud of death. And the ghosts were here—lots of them. He could feel their presence in the stillness of the house, the silence, the finality and fate of the five people who had once lived here, but were gone now and never coming back.

The lights to the foyer on the first floor were lit, the rooms dark. Matt didn’t bother looking for light switches as he made his first sweep of the layout and searched for anything that might stand out. To his right was a small sitting room with French doors opening to the pool. Directly ahead was a library with an entrance to the living room. Beyond the library he found a sunroom that spanned the length of the house and gave way to a formal terrace. Matt stepped into the living room, noting the high ceilings and another set of French doors that opened to the pool. A rich dusting of fingerprint powder seemed to coat every piece of furniture and doorknob in the room. He gave it a second look, then returned to the foyer and followed the hallway to the very end. The doors on the left opened to the house manager’s office and a powder room; on the right, a large dining room and kitchen. Matt shined the flashlight across the dining room table and through the doorway into the kitchen. Every room that he’d seen so far included a fireplace, and he guessed that he would find fireplaces in every room upstairs as well. But what struck Matt most about the building was the extensive woodwork. The paneled walls in the library that continued into the foyer and up the wide staircase. The ornate moldings and the fireplace mantels that were obviously carved by hand.

The woodwork stood out because he had never seen anything like it before and guessed that the art had been lost, and no one knew how to do it anymore.

But even worse, Matt guessed that no one probably cared.

He let the thought fade and tried to shed his disappointment. The first floor was clear. There were no signs of a disturbance. Although Matt’s initial walk-through had been brief, he hadn’t seen any blood or anything that seemed out of order. As he moved to the staircase and started up the steps, the harsh odor stiffened and became oppressive. When he reached the second-floor landing, he moved the beam of light over the walls and carpet, felt his chest tighten, and froze.

He had reached his destination and needed a moment to get a grip on himself. It wasn’t easy. His eyes swept over the pools of dried blood on the floor, the spatter almost completely masking the paint on the walls. A single gunshot to the chest could never account for what he was seeing. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he thought of Jackson Pollock, an artist who spattered paint on a canvas to create remarkable works of art that seemed bigger than life. Now, seeing it in blood, breathing the horror and stench into his lungs, he wondered if Baylor was trying to make some sort of demented statement.

A thought buoyed to the surface, then sunk back under before Matt could reach it. The idea felt like it might be important, and he realized that he needed to take a deep breath and settle down.

He remembered the crime-scene photograph Doyle had shown him in Los Angeles and moved closer to the pools of blood. A table and lamp had been dragged across the landing and pushed against the stair railing. Matt understood at a glance that Baylor had chosen this spot to stage the murders. But like Brown had said just ten minutes ago, the question was why? Why in a house this big did the doctor want to murder this family on a second-floor landing?

There had to be a reason, a purpose. With Dr. Baylor there was always a reason and a purpose.

Matt stepped closer and knelt down, panning his flashlight across the wall. There were three holes in the plaster about two feet off the ground. These would’ve been made by crime-scene techs as they removed the slugs and entered them as evidence. Matt thought about that photograph again. Stratton’s corpse, along with his two daughters’, had been found leaning against the wall, with their clothing removed and holding hands. Stratton’s naked wife had been laid out on the floor directly before them with her legs spread open. Her thirteen-year-old son was draped over her body as if they had been making love.

Their genitals were touching. The photograph may have been dark and shot from a distance to take in the entire crime scene, but Matt could still see it. Still picture it. And then that stray thought buoyed to the surface again, and this time Matt seized it.

If Baylor had been trying to make a statement, it seemed forced. It felt like he was straining. Obviously Baylor’s condition had deteriorated over the past month and a half and he’d lost control of himself. He was no longer just a serial killer, but had graduated and become a mass killer. He’d unlocked the door to his demons, and on the night of the murders, they all came running out.

But that still didn’t explain why there was so much blood on the walls, nor did it even come close to answering the key question.

Why did Baylor choose to kill these people here on a landing instead of a bedroom? Given the obvious sexual nature of the killings, the crime would seem to have been better orchestrated on a bed.

Why here?

Matt stood up and stepped through the doorway into the master bedroom suite. Like the first floor, fingerprint powder coated every object in the room. But the bed was neatly made, nothing had been disturbed or appeared out of place, and Matt didn’t see a single drop of blood. He entered the bathroom, shined his flashlight in the shower and tub, then passed through two dressing rooms and a study and out a second door onto the landing. When he noticed a door at the base of the stairs to the third floor, he swung it open and found what he thought might be a room dedicated to yoga and meditation.

He took the stairs to the third floor two at a time and made a quick inspection of each room; three were bedrooms for the Strattons’ children while the fourth had been turned into a rec room for watching TV and playing video games. The tubs and showers in the bathrooms were clean. Except for the fingerprint powder, nothing appeared to be out of order anywhere on the floor, and he didn’t see a single drop of blood.

So why the landing? Why do it on a carpet and hardwood floor when a king-sized mattress was right through the door in the Strattons’ bedroom?

Matt returned to the second floor. There was a window beside the meditation room, and he could see Brown in the car talking to someone on her cell phone. On the other side of the driveway and garage, a forest of trees covered the steep hill. Matt noted that they were pine trees and guessed that this was the north side of the property. From the forest’s size and density, it was a safe bet that the trees had been planted as cover and were as old as the house.

Why here? Why the landing?

He turned and noticed that he’d forgotten to close the door to the study off the master suite. Sidestepping the blood, he shut the door and glanced at the fingerprint powder clinging to his glove. When he noticed another door by the top of the stairs, he opened it to reveal the rear staircase and the door to one of the three guest suites. It was dark. Spooky. He could feel his mind chewing through everything he was seeing. He could feel a certain clarity and vision that he hadn’t experienced for a single moment since he’d been shot.

And then it happened—the sudden freeze right between his shoulder blades. This heightened sense of concentration. He could feel the ghosts in the house. They were closer now. They were watching him.

He turned sharply, counting all the closed doors as his eyes rocked through the crime scene.

Why had Baylor staged his killing spree on the landing?

The answer seemed so obvious now.

CHAPTER 7

The snow flurries had stopped with nothing more than a dusting on the frozen ground. As Matt climbed into the passenger seat, Brown switched off her cell phone and gave him a measured look.

“You okay?” she asked.

Matt shrugged. “I’m good.”

“Really?” she said in a voice laced with sarcasm. “I’ve already got you figured out, Jones. When you lie, your left eye twitches.”

“How long’s it gonna take to get the toxicology reports?”

“A couple of weeks,” she said. “You’re thinking they were drugged.”

“Yeah.”

He watched her pull down the drive and give the three cops in black uniforms a nod as they waved them through with their rifles. After making a right turn onto County Line Road, she took a quick glimpse at the media’s outpost on the lawn and coasted down the hill. There was a small bridge built over the stream here. Matt read the street sign, searching for the gatehouse he had seen earlier and realizing that it was too far down the road and way too dark. The entire area would have to be explored in daylight, and to Matt, it was important enough that he hoped he could return tomorrow.

Baylor had to have parked his car somewhere, and Matt knew with absolute certainty that it wouldn’t have been anywhere near the Strattons’ home. He would have parked his car where it wouldn’t stand out—maybe the train station—and hiked in through the woods. In a neighborhood like this one, it wouldn’t—

His mind switched back to the tox screen. “Were any puncture marks found on the victims during the autopsies?”

“No,” Brown said. “And the medical examiner made it a point to look for them. We already had the fingerprint match, so he read your reports and final statement and knew that Baylor had a history of using something to keep his victims docile. Something that works through the system quickly and was never picked up. He didn’t find any puncture wounds, but like he said himself, that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Baylor’s a plastic surgeon and would know where to hide them. We’re thinking he’s using Pentothal. It works quickly and they would have been helpless.”

Matt wanted to get his hands on the murder book. And he wanted in on the FBI’s website so that he could read through the chronological record they were keeping online. His mind was back, and he wanted to burn through it while the clarity lasted.

Brown made a left at the light. “I need to know how it went, Jones. Why do you think Baylor killed them on the landing?”

Matt didn’t say anything. After thinking it over, he leaned against the door and gave her a look.

“Because he needed to,” he said finally.

“What do you mean?”

“He needed to dampen the sound. Like we said before, it would’ve been a loud night. There would’ve been shrieks and cries for help, at least until he could get them sedated. How many gunshots were fired?”

“Five,” she said. “One for each victim.”

“Okay, so Baylor needed to dampen the sound of five gunshots. The landing is surrounded on every side by other rooms. The exterior walls are a foot and a half thick. The only weak spot is the window. When I looked outside, the angle was off and I couldn’t see the carriage house. All I saw were pine trees and a steep hill. It was breezy tonight. I could hear the tree branches when we were standing in the drive. If it was like this on the night of the murders, any sound that leaked through the glass would have stayed right where Baylor wanted it.”

She turned and met his eyes. “In the wind,” she said.

Matt nodded. “In the wind.”

It hung there, in the warmth of the Crown Vic on a cold night.

When Brown spoke, her voice was soft and low. “I’ll let Doyle and Rogers know.”

Matt settled back in his seat and yawned, the sleep he’d lost last night beginning to catch up to him. After a while Brown switched on the radio to KYW, a news station that sounded a lot like KNX, the news station in LA. Headlines began at the top of the hour, with traffic and weather updates recycling every ten minutes. But tonight there was only one story in Philadelphia. Because the media had been given so little information about the murders, the stories and interviews were with retired members of various law enforcement agencies and physicians from local hospitals who had nothing to do with the investigation and could offer little more than speculation.

Most thought that one of Stratton’s former patients committed the murders in an act of revenge that got out of hand. Had Matt not been aware of the physical evidence, had he not walked through the crime scene, he might have thought the same thing. Stratton had used his patients as cash cows, administering chemotherapy and radiation treatments even though they were healthy. His vulgar thirst for money and power, his greed, contaminated his entire being. Like most narcissists, Stratton had evolved into a monster. And that’s exactly what would have attracted Dr. Baylor. As Matt tossed it over, he couldn’t help thinking that the barbaric nature of Stratton’s crime was what sent Baylor over the edge. This had to be why Baylor wanted to destroy Stratton’s entire bloodline. The fact that Stratton had taken the Hippocratic oath and broken his vows as a physician would have resonated with Baylor in spite of his own personal history and mental decline.

Matt looked over at Brown’s face in the soft glow of the dashboard lights. She knew that he was tired and not in the mood to talk right now. And he liked the fact that nothing about his silence felt uncomfortable.

Traffic on the expressway was light, and the drive downtown to the exit at Thirtieth Street Station took less than half an hour. As Brown circled the train station, Matt realized that everything was beginning to look familiar to him again. The FBI’s apartment was located in a section of the city called Fitler Square and covered a number of blocks that included the Schuylkill River Park. Brown turned right off Market Street onto Twenty-Third Street, heading south and making the cut over to Twenty-Fourth. A few minutes later she made a left onto Pine Street and pulled to the curb before a pair of four-story apartment buildings that were set directly across the street from the actual square. Matt gazed through the wrought iron fence at the benches and fountain and all the trees that would be leafing out in the spring and providing shade on a hot summer day. When he turned back to the pair of buildings, he noted the same sign, “Fitler Commons,” over both entrances.

“You’re on the fourth floor of the building on the left. It’s a front corner two-bedroom apartment with a view of the square and Center City. The river’s only two blocks away, so if this were April or May and you jogged and had any spare time, you’d be in the right place.”

She was making a joke and had a look going.

“But this is December,” he said. “And so I’m not.”

She laughed. “You’re in a real nice neighborhood, Jones. Cafés, restaurants, it’s quiet here. Not a lot of traffic. You need any help getting your bags upstairs?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“The elevator’s a little shaky.”

Matt climbed out of the car, then opened the rear door and grabbed his duffel bag and briefcase. When he looked in on Brown, she was writing something down on the back of a business card.

“It’s my home number,” she said, “just in case. I live five minutes north of here in the museum district. Call me if you need me. My cell’s on the front with our office numbers and the address.”

“What about my cell number?”

“Doyle already gave it to me. Oh, and it’s supposed to get colder tomorrow. A real deep freeze. The office is on the other side of town. If I were you, I’d take a cab in the morning.”

“When’s morning?”

“Eight sharp.”

Matt thought about what he was wearing: a pair of slacks and a casual dress shirt. He hadn’t brought a suit and had forgotten to pack a sports jacket.

“What about the dress code?” he said. “I’m a G-man now.”

She gave him a quick look. “A temporary G-man who grew up in Jersey and lives in LA. With that kind of résumé what you’re wearing will do just fine.”

Matt closed the passenger door, and Brown lowered the window.

“Thanks, Kate,” he said. “Thanks for making everything so easy.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She smiled and nodded and pulled away from the curb.