Flashback (Kendra Michaels #11)

“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.”