CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Laura sat down in front of Allan McLean at the table in the single interview room, next to Agent Moore, carefully covering her wince when the flimsy chair creaked. It looked as though this place didn’t get a whole lot of use. She put a cup of fresh coffee down in front of herself, far back enough to be out of reach of their suspect, and opened the folder she’d brought in with her to start looking over the case notes.
“I haven’t done anything,” McLean said, before he’d even been prompted.
Inside, Laura almost cackled with glee. He was one of those suspects. The ones who would talk to fill the silence. All she was going to have to do was give him room to speak, and he would end up incriminating himself—or maybe giving a full confession. Wonderful.
Outside, she remained stoic and calm. She shuffled through the pages a few more times, then finally deigned to look up at McLean. He looked nervous, sweat popping on his brow, his eyes wide and desperate. His dark hair was ruffled and out of place, even though his hands were cuffed in front of him.
“Let’s start with the motivation behind these murders,” Laura said, keeping her tone even and cool. Like they were discussing a known fact and there was no point in him even trying to deny it. “That’s what interests me the most. It’s all linked to what happened back then, isn’t it?”
She kept her words vague on purpose. She didn’t want to be accused of leading him into a confession; she wanted it to come from his mouth alone. But she gave enough that he would know what she was talking about. He would have to know.
“What?” He gaped, then shook his head. His eyes flashed wide with surprise and shock. “I don’t know what you mean. Back when? I don’t have any motivation, because—because I didn’t commit any murders! I’ve read about them in the paper but—but that has nothing to do with me!”
Laura sighed as if disappointed. “You know, you’ll get a much more lenient sentence if you cooperate now,” she said. “You have the death penalty here in Ohio, don’t you? But you can probably get it reduced to life in prison if you talk to us. The more you resist and deny, the more likely it is that you’ll get the worst possible sentence.”
“No one’s been executed here in years, anyway,” McLean muttered. Then his eyes flashed. “But that doesn’t matter, because I didn’t do it! I’m innocent—I am!”
“You know a lot about the Ohio criminal justice system, don’t you, Mr. McLean?” Laura said casually, leafing through her notes and bringing up the list of his prior convictions. “You did… let’s see… three years, five months in the state prison, didn’t you?”
“I…” McLean’s face darkened. “I did, but that was then. I’m straight these days. I haven’t been in trouble since I got out. I’ve been keeping my head down.”
“That must have been hard work,” Laura commented. “All that anger, that frustration—and I’m sure it was hard, getting back to life on the outside. Fewer opportunities for a man with a criminal record. So when all of that pent-up frustration came out, it must have really exploded. The kind of brutal violence that would impress even some of your old cell-mates.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, yes, it’s been hard. But I’ve been staying calm. I took anger management courses in prison. I’m a changed man. I know how to get rid of the aggression without using my fists now.”
“Right,” Laura agreed. “Using a scythe.”
“No!” he burst out, with a look of horror.
“Alright,” Laura said, casually, as if it didn’t matter to her either way. “Let’s talk about something else. There was a genealogy packet on your coffee table. You traced your ancestry recently and found out who your nearest relatives are.”
“Yes,” he said, frowning. “I didn’t think that was a crime.”
“It isn’t,” Laura said. “But it’s very interesting that you were looking up who was in your local area. Because three of the people listed in that packet are now dead.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” he argued. “There was a whole page of people in the area, and they’re all related to each other, too. It could have been anyone else off that list. It could even have been a coincidence. There’s a lot of farming families here have been around for a long time, generations get interbred and crossed. You could throw a stone in the center of town and hit someone who’s related to me.”
“Alright,” Laura said. “So, you tell me why you were looking up your ancestry, then.”
“Because I was curious!” he said. Then, seeing that it wouldn’t be enough of an answer from her expression, he shook his head in frustration. “There was this big thing—this ancestors reunion event. I got a call from my cousin asking if I was going, and it was the first I’d heard of it. Turns out I wasn’t invited because of my record. I just… I felt left out. I wanted to know.”
“You already have a cousin that you know,” Laura pointed out. “Why wasn’t that enough? Or why couldn’t you ask him to introduce you to people if it was that important?”
“He didn’t go either,” McLean sighed. “He thought it was dumb. But I… since my parents both passed, I don’t really have anyone. A couple of aunts, couple of cousins—but we’ve never been all that close. I just wanted to meet people who were like me. People who might want to get to know me. I wanted family. He’s a second cousin of mine, it turns out, and I just wanted to know him. “
“You circled a name in red pen,” Laura said, moving to put a piece of paper across the desk in front of him. It was a scan of the real thing—the sheet with all the names. “Can you tell me why?”
“He’s the one who responded to my messages,” McLean said. “He agreed to meet me for a coffee. That’s what we we’re doing today. God… he probably won’t want to know me now, either, after what you did!” He looked down at the table, as if upset.
“After what I did?” Laura repeated, and laughed. “What about what you did?”
“I told you, I didn’t do anything!” McLean protested.
“Then you tell me why an innocent man with nothing to fear saw the police and ran,” Laura said, leaning forward, propping her head on her hands as she eyed him keenly. This was the moment. She could break him here, she knew it. She could get him to tell her everything.
“Because…!” he exclaimed, then covered his face with his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was muffled. “Because I thought you were going to take me to jail.”
“How prophetic,” Laura said.
“No,” he said, raising his head again. “Not for that. Because… I missed my last probation check-in. I’m supposed to attend all of them or they could put me back inside. I thought you were coming to do that.”
Laura looked at him for a long moment. His posture was slumped, his shoulders down, his head lolling low on his neck. He was looking at the table. Not because he was trying to avoid her gaze, but because he was looking inward, feeling sorry for himself. If he was a liar, he was giving the best performance she had ever seen.
“Why did you miss your check-in, Allan?” she asked. “Were you too busy attacking other people from your genealogy packet?”
“No!” he said, wiping the heel of his hand stubbornly across one eye. He seemed resigned now. He probably thought he was done for no matter what, because of the probation violation. “I didn’t even know all the victims recently were related to me. They weren’t in the pack, not all of them. And I was just… I just slept in. I’ve got no one to wake me if I sleep through my alarm. I just slept in.”
Laura considered this, leaning back in her chair. She knew she had to make some checks. If he was telling the truth about the genealogy pack, then they would have a hard time using it as evidence. That was bad news.
Unless he was telling the truth about all of it, in which case they had a lot more work to do—and fast.
Laura got up, beckoning Agent Moore with her. She left the room, glancing back to see Allan McLean with his head in his hands, not even watching them go.
A short walk down the hall, where she didn’t think he would be able to hear them anymore, she turned to Agent Moore. “We need to check that packet right away, see if he’s right about the results not showing all three victims,” she said.
Agent Moore nodded. “I was going to check now,” she said. “It’s a lie, though, isn’t it? Or just a half-truth because he knew they were related anyway? It has to be, because he’s the killer.”
“Is he?” Laura asked thoughtfully.
“It all fits,” Agent Moore insisted. “He lives alone and he hasn’t been able to find work since leaving prison, so he doesn’t have any alibis for the murders. He has a history of violence and he had the information in his genealogy pack about who to target. We even caught him red-handed going after the next victim, about to lure him outside somehow so he could finish the job. And he has the right lineage for it. It has to be him.”
“Hm,” Laura said. She still wasn’t convinced, even if the rookie was. She needed more than that. So would a judge. A jury might see their way to connect the dots, but they might need more to even bring it to court. A smoking gun, so to speak.
Something that he couldn’t explain away with these coincidences and sob stories.
“Let’s look at that information packet,” Laura suggested. She moved to the nearest flat surface, a table which held a coffee machine and a tower of polystyrene cups, and laid her file on it. Sifting through the first pages which held information about Allan McLean and the murders, she found the photocopied packet and roughly divided the papers in half, handing one pile to Agent Moore.
“Here’s Janae Michaels,” Agent Moore said, after a few beats. They continued flipping through the pages in silence, each of them scanning every page.
“I’ve got Hank Gregory,” Laura said, setting the page aside.
They both finished their last page and then looked up at each other, waiting. “Nothing for James Bluton,” Laura said.
“Not in mine, either,” Agent Moore said, sighing with frustration. “Why? What does that mean? Is he not related to them after all?”
“No, it just means the ancestry service McLean used didn’t have his data,” Laura said. “He may have requested they don’t hold it, or it might just be a blind spot where they couldn’t find the right records to confirm his identity. Or, in fact—this is a list of local relatives, and didn’t that old farmer who found him tell us that he’d lived out of the area for a bit?”
“That’s right!” Agent Moore exclaimed, snapping her fingers. “Fine. But it still doesn’t rule him out, does it?”
“No,” Laura said, reaching to gather the papers again. Her head ached a little as she brushed her fingers over the edges of the pages—
She was there again, in the past. There was a feel to it that she was starting to recognize. A sense that she was looking into an old photograph, a sign like sepia toning or age spots, something to the quality of the vision that she could neither fully put her finger on nor explain. But it was there, and she knew where she was even as her eyes opened on the scene.
The farmers, the screams, the same as before. An old man chopped down with the scythe before he could manage to get up enough speed with his walking stick. Then a young man, and—
The vision changed from its previous course, taking her backwards. She flew over the head of the killer as he raced toward his next victim. She knew him now, a man with dark hair dressed in the same style as the others, a scythe wielded to deadly effect in his hands. A farmer like his victims—his family.
She soared over it, going backwards fast, over the body of the young man, over the body of the old man. Back, back, back, up over the hill that the killer must have come over, the place where the running farmers had first spotted him. Up and over, and then…
Back, over another field. There was a man lying on the dirt path, throat cut into a second smile that gaped horribly, front of his body slashed to ribbons. Strangely, Laura thought, he looked as though he’d been running in the opposite direction. Not away from the place the killer must have come from, but toward it. Why would anyone run toward a killer?
And then she soared over the body of the young woman and knew. His wife, maybe. His sister. Even his adult daughter—it was hard to gauge their precise ages through all of the blood.
Her vision soared up, up, up. Far in the distance she could see them, like stick figures and yet somehow also clear enough that she could identify what she was seeing. Like it would feel if she recognized someone she knew and loved at a distance, she supposed. She saw the bodies again where they had fallen. The young woman. The old man. The younger man. Far beyond him, toward the next homestead, there was another woman fallen, perhaps approaching her middle age. Then beyond her, the third man that Laura had seen running. Even he had not made it far enough away. Beyond him she saw the killer, soaked in blood, still marching determinedly toward his next victim.
She stopped inside the vision, hovering, looking over the scene. It was like her mind was telling her there was nothing else to see. That was it.
That was it…
Laura blinked, clearing her sight as she looked down at the pages of the open file.
“I have an idea,” she said, which was true, even if she couldn’t say where she’d gotten it from. “We need to talk to Alice again.”