He took a sip of his whiskey, felt it warm his gut. Then he adjusted a pair of reading glasses onto the tip of his nose. Usually he didn’t bother, but some of the print was pretty fine these days and his eyes, well, shit, not just his eyes, but his knees and damned back were giving him trouble.
Blanche Johnson had been butchered. She’d bled to death, her carotid artery severed with a serrated blade, probably a knife, the weapon as yet undiscovered. Mary Beth Flannery had been choked, bruises on her neck verified. Speculation was that her killer had been big and strong and had surprised her in the bath. She’d been submerged in the water after death and the fire had come later. Oliver Flannery had also died from having his oxygen supply cut off, the result of a slow hanging by a rope once used for the chapel bells. He hadn’t bled to death despite the cuts on his wrists, nor had he inhaled much smoke. On the other hand Ryan Carlyle had died of smoke inhalation, just before his body had been burned to a crisp.
All different modes.
Could they have been killed by the same person?
Carlyle’s death had been staged to look like an accident, but it had been done clumsily, almost as if the killer had wanted the police to know that the man hadn’t just gotten trapped in a forest fire.
Whoever the killer was, he wanted to show off.
And he had a specific agenda. Otherwise Shannon Flannery would already be dead.
So why the three-year gap?
What had started it up again?
You could have a different guy…You’re assuming the perp not only killed Carlyle but these people who were close to him.
Two people were unaccounted for: Brendan Giles and Neville Flannery.
It looked like Giles was, indeed, in Central America.
That left Neville Flannery. The missing brother.
But why return to take some kind of vengeance on his siblings? Had they done him dirt? Had he snapped? Could he be so twisted as to track down Shannon’s kid? Is that what took him three years? To find the girl and kidnap her?
Something bit at the back of his mind. Like a gnat gnawing. He looked at the pictures of the Flannery family that he had on file. All the boys had the Black Irish good looks, like their father; family resemblance ran strong, and those twins…spooky how much they looked alike.
He was crushing ice between his back teeth and stopped.
Was it possible that Oliver and Neville had switched places? Is that what was bugging him?
Paterno took a swallow of his drink, crunched more ice between his teeth as he considered. Why would the brothers trade places? It seemed far-fetched. Was the brother who had been hung indeed Oliver—the religious one, the soft-spoken one, the kind one?
And why had someone kidnapped the kid? To what end, he wondered, the ice cracking between his molars while he thought. To what damned end?
Who was the killer? And why such a long time between the first one, Ryan Carlyle, and the next one, Mary Beth Carlyle Flannery?
He frowned as nothing came to him.
Picking up the ME’s report on Ryan Carlyle again, he read each and every line. At the bottom he saw something that gave him pause. Stapled to the report was the identification form. He read it over. There had been a temporary ID made because a piece of a California driver’s license had been found at the scene, which had somehow escaped being completely destroyed. The license had belonged to Ryan Carlyle. His ID had later been confirmed by Patrick Flannery and Shea Flannery. Not his wife, Shannon. That was odd, Paterno thought, but then Shannon and Ryan had been separated at the time, she’d been in the process of filing for divorce. Still, she was next of kin. Identification would have been hard, the guy had been burned nearly beyond recognition. The pictures in the file were enough to make his stomach turn.
Still, something was off. He knew it.
And the only person who might be able to explain it was Shea Flannery.
The Beast was driving. And he was hyped up. Excited.
In the passenger seat Dani tried and failed to see much beneath the blindfold he’d pulled tight over her eyes. She was as frightened as she’d ever been in her life.
Somehow she had to find a way to escape, to get away. And soon.
The Beast had something major planned.
Earlier he’d forced her to get dressed, then, taking no chances, had tied her hands behind her back and bound her ankles together. She’d managed to slide the nail into her pocket and he hadn’t bothered to check, but it wouldn’t do much good now. It was a pathetic weapon at best and with her hands tied there was no way she could use it.
He was pissed at her.