The Love Killings (7 page)

CHAPTER 13

He found Doyle in Rogers’s office. They were watching a video on a desktop computer with a large screen. When Doyle saw Matt in the hallway, he waved him into the room and around Rogers’s desk for a look.

It was the video the gossip reporter had shot on the plane and at the airport with his cell phone. Day had posted it on his show’s website, along with the words “Why is LAPD Detective Matt Jones in Philly?”

Doyle gave Matt a look. “Did you know you were being photographed?”

“I saw him with his phone, but I wasn’t sure.”

“Who?”

“The gossip reporter. Ryan Day.”

Doyle seemed surprised. “Do you know him?”

A moment passed as Matt tried to think of the right words. When he noticed Rogers staring at him, he turned back to Doyle.

“We’ve met,” he said finally.

Rogers got to his feet and walked over to the window, shaking his head. Doyle sat on the end of Rogers’s desk.

“I thought we’d catch a break and keep Baylor’s name out of it for a few more days,” Doyle said. “But now the media knows you’re here and they’re pretty good at connecting the dots. Rogers, you’ll need to hold a press conference this afternoon.”

Rogers gave Doyle a look over his shoulder, then turned back to the view through his window. The Ben Franklin Bridge was just seven blocks away.

Matt stepped over to a chair, but remained standing. “Something just happened that you guys need to know about. None of it’s good.”

Rogers turned to face him, the distrust and suspicion in his eyes easy enough to read. Matt spent the next five minutes telling them exactly what had happened with Ryan Day and warning them that everything had been recorded and would be aired on tonight’s show. When he finished, he held on to the back of the chair and braced himself.

Rogers turned to Doyle. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. He’s jeopardizing the case. He could scare off Baylor.”

“You need to hold a press conference, Rogers.”

Rogers shook his head and pointed a finger at Matt. “Everything’s different now, Doyle. You’re the one who needs to hold the press conference. He’s your boy.”

Doyle turned to Matt, measuring him. “What do you have to say for yourself, Detective?”

“I thought he was trying to kill me. He followed me on the plane and at the airport. When I caught him on the street, I knew it wasn’t by chance. I didn’t know who he was, so I confronted him.”

Rogers narrowed his eyes. “Sounds like it was more than that, Jones. It sounds like it got physical.”

“It ended as soon as he identified himself,” Matt said. “It ended quickly.”

“What the hell’s that going to look like on national TV?”

Matt didn’t say anything. He could pack his bags in fifteen minutes and make it to the airport inside of an hour. He turned back to Doyle. The federal prosecutor was staring at the floor the way a chess player sits over a game board and decides on his next three moves. After a long moment, Doyle seemed to snap out of it and met Matt’s gaze.

“I think Rogers is right, Jones. I’ll take care of the press conference. Then we’ll let this gossip reporter air his dirty laundry and see what happens next. A word of warning, Detective. If this Ryan Day makes us look like fools, you’re the world’s next fall guy. If it looks like we’re taking on water, you’re going over the side.”

CHAPTER 14

Matt had the Crisis Room to himself and didn’t understand why. Given the lack of any plausible leads on Baylor’s whereabouts, he wondered how anyone calling themselves a special agent with the FBI could have packed it in and gone home. It was just 6:45 p.m. The only one still working was Brown, and she had walked up to a market on Walnut Street for coffee.

Matt glanced at his laptop and turned up the volume. He had been waiting for Ryan Day’s
Get Buzzed
to begin, but the network news had picked up on the Stratton murders. An eerie shot of the mansion hit the screen first, followed by pictures of the family. After a few seconds they cut to footage of Matt at the airport lifted off the
Get Buzzed
website, and then the money shot, the killer, Dr. George Baylor. After they set up the story, they cut to the press conference Doyle held this afternoon.

Matt studied the reporters’ faces. It was more than a story now. Everyone asking those tough questions looked frightened. Everyone knew Baylor’s history and the gruesome things he’d done to four innocent girls.

What exactly happened to Jim and Tammy Stratton and their three children? What is the FBI hiding, and why are they hiding it? Why are you going through so much effort to keep us out of the loop? How bad could the details really be? LAPD Detective Matt Jones was one of the lead detectives in the hunt for Dr. George Baylor, the serial killer who fled Los Angeles and New Orleans. Baylor’s first victim was the daughter of a United States congressman. There are rumors that the Department of Justice will be supervising the prosecution of the doctor in at least two trials if he’s captured alive. Why are you and Detective Jones in Philadelphia? Did Dr. Baylor murder the Strattons? Why are you here, Mr. Doyle?

Why are you here?

The segment ended. It seemed obvious to Matt that Doyle had a knack for speaking to the media. He’d remained calm, seemed to answer every question as best he could, and, in the end, had given the reporters what they really wanted. He admitted that Dr. Baylor was a person of interest in the Stratton murder case, and that LAPD Detective Matt Jones had recovered from his gunshot wounds and was joining the FBI’s special task force.

The only question Matt had was why Doyle used his name. Doyle knew that Matt was about to be smeared on a gossip show airing on national television later that night. So why did the federal prosecutor stick his neck out? He didn’t just mention Matt’s name, he underlined it.

Why?

Matt let the thought go and looked back at the murder book. He’d spent the last two hours reading the medical examiner’s report and studying what must have been more than one hundred photographs taken at the crime scene. It seemed clear to him that Baylor had planned the night the same way a film director might stage a scene in a movie. There had to be an order to things. With Stratton as his target, Matt had no doubt that Baylor would have saved him for last. The medical examiner confirmed that Stratton wore a pacemaker and that the device shut down at 11:35 p.m., so it was a safe bet that everyone else would have been killed prior to Stratton’s death.

Matt leafed through the photographs until he found a shot that included all five victims. Stratton was leaning against the wall between his two daughters. Their eyes appeared fixed on Stratton’s wife and son. They were Baylor’s audience—they had to be Baylor’s audience—which would mean that the two girls would have been murdered just before Stratton. That left Tammy Stratton and her son. One of them had to be the first to go.

He flipped the page over, then glanced at his laptop just as
Get Buzzed
faded up from black. Brown entered the room, placing two cups of coffee on Matt’s desk and staring at the screen. They were opening the show with footage of Matt chasing Day down the street. It turned out that the man with the video camera had been running behind them the moment Matt hit the corner. As Matt watched, his stomach churning, he realized that they were maximizing the drama by leaving the announcer out and letting the sound from the street carry the moment. Every bounce the camera made amplified the emotional context. Matt glanced at Brown, then turned back to his laptop. He could see himself tackling the reporter onto the floor, jamming his gun into the innocent man’s mouth. Then Ryan Day, fearing for his life, began stammering. Worse still, the gossip reporter was asking Matt if M. Trevor Jones, the King of Wall Street, was his father.

Matt stood up, pried the lid off one of the coffee cups, stirred a pack of sugar into the brew, and took a first sip. He couldn’t watch anymore. He knew what it looked like because he’d seen the same shot so many times in so many cities over the past couple of years.

It came off like police brutality. The chase and takedown had occurred over a period of three or four minutes. But the clip had been cut down to include only the worst moments. Everything about it came off harsh and overdone.

He took another sip of coffee, watching Brown get out of her coat and sit down in his seat with her eyes still glued to the screen. He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. When he slid the lock open, he read the text message. It was from Wes Rogers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s field office in Philadelphia.

We need to talk,
the message said.
Now.

Rogers had included his address in the suburbs, and Matt committed it to memory. As he slipped his cell phone into his pocket, Brown gave him a look.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Rogers. He wants to see me. Guess I’m toast.”

She shook her head. “That’s not his style, Jones. If you were toast, he would have said so. Rogers doesn’t keep people waiting.”

CHAPTER 15

Matt knew something was wrong the moment he saw the house number on the mailbox and gazed up the long drive. He pulled over and killed the lights and engine. When he fished through the glove box, he was glad the Crown Vic he’d been issued came equipped with a flashlight.

But he didn’t switch it on. Not yet.

Instead, he got out of the car and gazed at the silhouette of a large mansion on Fairfield Road. The windows were dark, and from where Matt stood on the frozen ground, all the exterior lights had been shut down as well. He noticed the wind finally, a hard wind whistling through the trees and knocking all the branches together.

Matt dug his cell phone out of his pocket and double-checked Rogers’s text message. The house numbers matched, and so did the directions. He could see a school on the other side of Sugartown Road exactly where it was supposed to be. Wishing for a Marlboro, he pushed a piece of nicotine gum against his cheek and tried to process what he was seeing.

Rogers didn’t live here, that much was clear. No one in law enforcement lived here. He was looking at an estate—a building so massive that it dwarfed the Strattons’ mansion on County Line Road. Matt took in the open gate and guessed that the six-foot-high wrought iron fence circled the entire property. As he scanned the grounds in the darkness, the length of the fence from the corner to the property’s end on Fairfield Road, the depth and proportion of the house, it felt like a lot of land—maybe ten acres, maybe even more. And the neighborhood was quiet. He hadn’t seen or heard a single car on either road since he arrived.

He turned back to the mansion. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and he could make out four three-story-high columns supporting the roof over a formal entrance.

Everything about the place looked like trouble. Everything about what he was seeing felt wrong.

He wondered who had sent him the text message. Who wanted him to be here? Who knew enough about what went down today to put Rogers’s name on it?

He slipped the flashlight into his back pocket, drew his .45, and chambered a round. Then he started up the drive, slowly and carefully, hoping the moon would stay behind the clouds for another five minutes or so. There was a second building here, a two-story carriage house with five of its six garage doors open. In spite of the darkness, Matt could see a handful of vintage cars inside, along with a Land Rover, a Jaguar, and a Lexus SUV parked in the drive. He turned back to the mansion. It may have been below freezing tonight, the wind may have been howling, but none of that was on Matt’s mind right now. All he could feel as he reached the entrance and started up the granite steps was his heart beating heavy and hard in the center of his chest.

One of the two glass doors was cracked open. Matt slid into an entryway that had to be three times the size of the FBI’s apartment on Pine Street. The ceiling was two stories up, the extra-wide staircase rising to a pair of French doors set above the entrance and finally making the turn with ten more steps up to the second floor.

Matt didn’t move. Clearing his mind, he quieted his breathing and spent several minutes listening to the house. Moonlight suddenly flashed through the entryway, and Matt glanced at the French doors above his head. Then he lowered his eyes and composed himself with his gun still raised.

He knew in his gut that he was listening to the sound of the dead. He’d heard it before, and it was always the same. A silence that seemed too silent. A stillness that appeared frozen and absolute. The house was beyond quiet. Not a clock ticking. Not a refrigerator stirring. Not even the fan from the building’s heating system. Just that eerie sound of the dead cascading through time.

Matt pulled the flashlight out of his pocket, switched it on, and pressed it against the barrel of his gun. Working his way from front to back, he cleared the living room, a den, another sitting room, a library with a false wall that had been left open, an office, a room that looked just like an English pub, a game room, a powder room and two full baths, a gym with a steam room and sauna attached, a dining room, a washroom, and finally the kitchen and pantry. The entire back of the house appeared to be lined with windows that ran all the way up to the ceiling. Matt walked over to the door and peeked outside at an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Through a row of trees at the rear of the property line, he could see lights from another home or building. Still, they were a long way off. If Matt could trust his instincts, and he thought that he could, the doctor would have had no concerns about the sound of gunshots or his victims shrieking at the top of their lungs.

He tried to shake off the image, the sounds of innocent women and children shrieking, but couldn’t. He knew where the dead bodies would be found. He realized that he’d known it all along.

He found his way back to the front of the mansion and started up the staircase. When he reached the second-floor landing, he panned his light and gun across a sitting area that included a sofa and two reading chairs. There was a fireplace here, with a handful of small logs still burning. Matt moved to the center of the landing and turned around—

And that’s when he saw them.

Three were leaning against the far wall, a carbon copy of the crime scene on County Line Road. A father with his two daughters, stripped of their clothing, eyes open, and a small piece of gray-colored tape covering their chest wounds. All eyes were pointed at the woman on the floor with her son draped over her body. It looked like they were in the middle of making love. The only difference Matt could detect between the two crime scenes was the age of the son. In this case, the boy looked a few years older, fifteen or sixteen years old.

Matt took a deep breath and exhaled. As he gazed at the horror, it felt like his stomach was in his throat. He checked his hands and was surprised to find them so steady. He tried to pull himself together. It was difficult because his imagination always seemed to take over when the shock hit him this hard. He could never understand how anyone, no matter what their psychological issues might be, no matter what ordeal they may have faced, could take another human being’s life. Now he was standing before five corpses. Standing in the aftermath of a mass killing committed by a maniac.

A memory surfaced. And while it had been more than five years since Matt was overseas, he could remember watching someone he’d shot take his last breath. A fifteen-year-old boy with a grenade launcher. He went out like a fish gasping for air, his mouth opening and closing, his eyes glazed. That’s when Matt heard the sound of death for the first time. A silence and stillness that had weight to it and wouldn’t go away. When memories like this flared up, he tried not to linger on them. If he could shut them down fast enough, they seemed to fade back into that pool of experiences that slept in the gloom. But tonight, looking at the woman with her arms around her son, their eyes meeting somewhere in the middle of a thousand-yard stare, he didn’t think he stood a chance.

He tilted the flashlight down, the pools of wet blood glistening before his eyes. He moved closer, stepping around the puddles and streams until he reached the woman embracing her son. He didn’t have a pair of vinyl gloves with him, so when he knelt down and touched her forehead, he used the back of his wrist.

She was still warm, still fresh. Minutes had gone by, not hours. He reached for his cell phone and slid the lock open.

And that’s when he felt the muzzle of a gun poke him in the spine.

He flinched, nearly jumping out of his skin. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

“Hello, Matthew,” the doctor said in a calm and pleasant voice. “I see you’ve met the Holloways. They look like they used to be nice people, don’t you think? A nice family. And how ’bout this house?”

Matt didn’t say anything.

Baylor nudged him with the pistol and lowered his voice. “I’m gonna have to ask you for your gun,” he said. “And I’m afraid I’ll need your cell phone as well. No worries. You’ll have them back when I leave.”

Matt wondered what kind of pistol Baylor was pressing into his spine, then figured that at point-blank range, it didn’t really matter, and the doctor couldn’t really miss. He passed back his .45, then turned around and handed over his cell phone.

Baylor smiled at him, his blue eyes sparkling in the moonlight streaming in through the row of windows set above the staircase. Matt noted the chiseled face, the brown hair that had been lightened by the sun and appeared spiked, the energy still radiating from the man’s being. He had to remind himself that Baylor had been shot six weeks ago as well. He had to remind himself that Baylor was in his midfifties. He came off younger than that, stronger and better fit.

Matt glanced down at the gun.

The doctor was pointing a Glock 17 at him. The semiautomatic pistol seemed to have become a favorite in law enforcement these days, no doubt because of the nine-by-nineteen load it carried and the magazine’s capacity to hold seventeen rounds. Matt remembered reading about the pistol on the manufacturer’s website not too long ago.
Safe, easy, and quick
, the description said.
Just what you need in high-pressure situations.

Matt struggled to find a steady voice as he watched Baylor slip his phone into a jacket pocket.

“Why don’t you let me bring you in, Doctor? Why keep doing this? What meaning could there possibly be in killing an entire family?”

Baylor switched on a flashlight and shined it in Matt’s face, then smiled again like he hadn’t heard him. “Someone’s shut off the power, Matthew. I was looking for the circuit breakers when you arrived. My guess is that the box is somewhere near the kitchen. Why don’t you lead the way?”