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CHAPTER FOUR

Breakfast consisted of a Panera Bread drive-thru in Roanoke. It was there, while waiting in the small early-morning line, that DeMarco placed several calls to set up a meeting with Olivia Nash, daughter of the recently slayed couple. She was currently staying with her aunt in Roanoke and was, by her aunt’s own words, an absolute wreck.

After getting the address and approval from the aunt, they headed for the aunt’s house just after seven o’clock. The early hour was not an issue because, according to the aunt, Olivia had refused to sleep ever since having discovered her parents.

When Kate and DeMarco arrived at the house, the aunt was sitting on the porch. Cami Nash stood when Kate got out of the car but made no move to come meet them. She had a cup of coffee in her hand and the tired look on her face made Kate think it was certainly not the first she had enjoyed this morning.

“Cami Nash?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, that’s me,” she said.

“First and foremost, please accept my sympathies for your loss,” Kate said. “Were you and your brother close?”

“Pretty close, yeah. But right now, I have to look past that. I can’t… grieve right now because Olivia needs someone. She’s not the same person I spoke with on the phone last week. Something in her is broken. I can’t even imagine…what it must have been like to find them like that and…”

She trailed off and sipped down some of her coffee very quickly, trying to distract herself from the onslaught of tears that seemed to be rapidly approaching.

“Is she going to be okay to speak with us?” DeMarco asked.

“Maybe for a while. I told her you were coming and she seemed to understand what I meant. That’s why I’m meeting you out here before you go in. I feel like I need to tell you that she’s a normal, well-rounded young woman. In the state she’s in now, though, I didn’t want you to think she had some sort of mental issues or something.”

“Thanks for that,” Kate said. She had seen people absolutely devastated by grief before and it was never a pretty sight. She couldn’t help but wonder how much experience DeMarco had with it.

Cami led them into the house. It was as quiet as a tomb inside, the only sound coming from the hum of the air conditioner. Kate noticed that Cami walked slowly, making sure not to make too much noise. Kate followed suit, wondering if Cami was hoping the silence would help Olivia finally fall asleep or if she was simply trying not to alarm the already-fragile young woman in any way.

They entered the living room, where a young woman was half-sitting, half-lying on the couch. Her face was red, her eyes slightly swollen from recently weeping. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in about a week rather than just a day or so. When she saw Kate and DeMarco enter, she sat up a bit.

“Hi, Ms. Nash,” Kate said. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with us. We’re so sorry for your loss.”

“It’s Olivia, please.” Her voice was hoarse and tired—almost as worn out as her eyes seemed to be.

“We’ll make this as quick as possible,” Kate said. “I understand that you had just come in from college. Do you know if your parents had planned to have anyone else over that day?”

“If they did, I didn’t know about it.”

“Please forgive me for asking, but do you know if either of your parents had any long-standing grudges with anyone? People they might have considered enemies?”

Olivia shook her head firmly. “Dad was married once before…before he met Mom. But even with his ex-wife, he was on good terms.”

Olivia started crying noiselessly. A series of tears slipped from her eyes and she did not bother trying to wipe them away.

“I want to show you something,” Kate said. “I don’t know if it has any significance to you or not. If it does, it could be quite emotional. Would you be willing to take a look and let us know if it looks familiar to you?”

Olivia looked alarmed, maybe even a little scared. Kate really didn’t blame here and almost didn’t want to show her the scrap of fabric Palmetto had handed them—the scrap Kate felt certain was part of a blanket or quilt. A bit reluctantly, she pulled it out of her pocket.

She knew right away that Olivia didn’t recognize it. There was an immediate sense of relief and confusion on the young woman’s face as she looked at the plastic bag and what it held inside.

Olivia shook her head but kept her eyes locked on the clear plastic bag. “No. I don’t recognize it. Why?”

“We can’t reveal that right now,” Kate said. Truthfully, there was nothing unlawful about revealing it to the next of kin…but Kate didn’t see the point in traumatizing Olivia Nash any further.

“Do you have any idea who did this?” Olivia asked. She looked lost, like she did not recognize where she was…maybe not even herself. Kate couldn’t recall the last time she had seen someone so clearly detached from everything around her.

“Not right now,” she said. “But we will keep you posted. And please,” she said, looking from Olivia and then to Cami, “contact us if you can think of anything that might help.”

At that remark, DeMarco withdrew a business card from the inner pocket of her jacket and handed it to Cami.

Perhaps it was the years she had spent in retirement or feeling guilty for having to abandon her post as grandmother last night, but Kate felt awful when she left the room, leaving Olivia Nash to her intense grief. As she and DeMarco made their way out onto the porch, she could hear the young woman let out a low moan of distress.

Kate and DeMarco shared an uneasy glace as they headed to the car. From within her inner pocket, Kate could feel the presence of that scrap of fabric and it suddenly felt very heavy indeed.

CHAPTER FIVE

As Kate left the small town of Whip Springs and headed for Roanoke, DeMarco used her iPad to pull up the case files on the first set of murders. It was nearly an exact copy and paste of the Nash crime scene; a couple had been murdered in their home in a particularly gruesome fashion. Preliminary results turned up no likely suspects and there had been no witnesses.

“Does it say anything about anything left behind in the throats or mouths of either of the victims?” Kate asked.

DeMarco scanned the reports and shook her head. “Not from what I can see. I think it’s maybe a—no, wait, here it is. In the coroner’s report. The fabric wasn’t discovered until yesterday—a day and a half after the bodies were discovered. But yes…the report says that there was a small piece of fabric lodged in the mother’s throat.”

“Does it give a description?”

“No. I’ll give the coroner a call and see if I can get a picture of it.”

DeMarco wasted no time, making the call right away. While she was on the phone, Kate tried to think of anything that might be able to link two seemingly random couples, given what had been found in the throats of the females. While Kate had yet to see the piece of fabric that had been taken from the throat of the first female victim, she was fully expecting it to match the one that had been found in the throat of Mrs. Nash.

DeMarco’s call was over three minutes later. Seconds after she ended the call, she received a text. She glanced at her phone and said: “We’ve got a match.”

Approaching a stoplight as they inched their way further into the city of Roanoke, Kate looked over to the phone as DeMarco showed it to her. As Kate expected, the fabric was soft and blue in color—an exact match for the one found in the throat of the Nash mother.

“We’ve got pretty extensive records on both couples, right?” Kate asked.

“Decent, I suppose,” she said. “Based on the records and case files we have, there might be some stuff missing, but I think we’ve got quite a bit to go on.” She paused here as the GPS app on the iPad dinged. “Turn left at this light,” DeMarco said. “The house is half a mile down this next street.”

Kate’s mental wheels were turning quickly as they neared the first crime scene.

Two married couples, slaughtered in a brutal way. Remnants or scraps of some sort of old blanket found in the throats of the wives…

There were many ways to go with the clues they had been given. But before Kate could focus on a single one and put it together, DeMarco was speaking up.

“Right there,” she said, pointing to a small brick house on the right.

Kate pulled up alongside the curb. The house was located on a thin side street, the kind that connected two main roads. It was a quiet street with a few other small houses taking up the space. The street had an almost historic feel to it, the sidewalks faded and cracked, the houses in a similar state.

Faded white letters on the mailbox read LANGLEY. Kate also spotted a decorative L hanging on the front door, made of aged wood. It stood out against the bright yellow of the crime scene tape that hung from the porch railings.

As Kate and DeMarco headed for the front porch, DeMarco half read, half recited the information they had in the reports on the Langley family.

“Scott and Bethany Langley—Scott fifty-nine years of age, Bethany sixty-one. Scott was found dead in the kitchen and Bethany was in the laundry room. They were found by a fifteen-year-old boy who was taking private guitar lessons from Scott. It’s estimated that they had only been killed a few hours before the bodies were discovered.”

When they entered the Langley residence, Kate stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the layout of the place. It was a smaller house, but well kept. The front door opened into a very small foyer which then became the living room. From there, a small bar top counter separated the kitchen from the living room. A hallway stood off to the right, leading to the rest of the house.

The layout of the house alone told Kate that the husband had likely been killed first. But from the front door, there was pretty much a clear view into the kitchen. Scott Langley would have had to have been quite busy not to notice someone walking through the front door.

Maybe the killer came in some other way, Kate thought.

They entered the kitchen, where bloodstains still stood out prominently on the laminate floor. A frying pan and a can of cooking spray were sitting by the edge of the stove.

He was about to cook something, Kate thought. So maybe they were killed right around dinner time.

DeMarco started for the hallway, and Kate followed her. There was a small room immediately to the left, the door opening to reveal a crowded laundry room. Here, the blood splatter had been much worse. There were bloodstains on the washer, the dryer, the walls, the floor, and on a load of neatly folded clean clothes sitting in a hamper.

With the bodies already removed, there seemed to be very little the Langley residence could offer them. But Kate had one more thing she wanted to check. She walked back out into the living room and looked at the pictures on the walls and atop the entertainment center. She saw the Langleys smiling and happy. In one picture, she saw an older couple with the Langleys posing by the end of a pier at the beach.

“Do we have a breakdown of the Langleys’ family life?” Kate asked.

DeMarco, still holding the iPad in her right hand, scrolled through the information and started to read out the details they had. With each one, Kate found that the hunch she had been sitting on for a few minutes was likely true.

“They were married for twenty-five years. Bethany Langley had a sister that died in a car accident twelve years ago and neither of them have any surviving parents. Scott Langley’s father passed away recently, just six months ago, from an aggressive form of prostate cancer.”

“Any mention of kids?”

“Nope. No kids.” DeMarco paused here and seemed to catch on to what Kate was speculating on. “You’re thinking about the fabric, right? That it looks sort of like a kid’s blanket.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. But if the Langleys didn’t have kids I don’t think there would be any obvious connection to be found.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an obvious connection to anything,” DeMarco said with a shaky little laugh.

“That’s true,” Kate said, but she felt like there had to be one here. Even with the seemingly random victims, there were a few things they did have in common.

Both couples were both in their mid-to-late fifties, early sixties. Both were married. The wife of each couple had a piece of what appears to be a blanket shoved down her throat.

So yes…there were similarities, but they were leading to no real links. Not yet, anyway.

“Agent DeMarco, do you think you could make a call or two and make sure we can get some office space at the local police department?”

“Already done,” she said. “I’m pretty sure Duran handled all of that before we even arrived here.”

He thinks he knows me so well, Kate thought, a little irritated. But then, on the other hand, it appeared that he did know her pretty damned well.

Kate glanced around the house again, at the pictures, at the bloodstains. She was going to have to get deeper into the details of each couple if she wanted to get anywhere with this. And she was going to need to get some kind of forensic results on the fabric pieces. Given the similarities between the two scenes, she assumed some good old basic research more than anything would uncover some leads and clues.

They returned to the car, Kate again reminded that they had started this day ridiculously early. When she saw that it was just after ten in the morning, she was somewhat invigorated. They still had most of the day ahead of them. Maybe, if she was lucky and the case broke the way she felt it might, she’d be back in Richmond by the close of the weekend to see Michelle one more time—if, that was, Melissa would allow it.

See, some wiser part of her spoke up as she got back behind the wheel of the car. Even in the midst of multiple bloody murders, you’re thinking of your granddaughter—of your family. Doesn’t that tell you something?

She supposed it did. But even as she stepped foot into the later quarter or so of her life, it was still very hard to admit that there was something more to life than her work. It was especially hard when she was on the trail of a killer and knew that at any moment, he could be killing again.

CHAPTER SIX

A small conference room in the back of the City of Roanoke Police had been set aside for Kate and DeMarco. Once they arrived at the station, a small portly woman at the front desk led them through the building and to the room. As soon as they sat down and started to set up a makeshift workstation, there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Kate said.

When the door opened, they saw a familiar face—Palmetto from the State PD, the somewhat curmudgeonly man who had met them in front of the Nash residence much earlier in the day.

“I saw you guys headed back this way while I was signing all of my paperwork,” Palmetto said. “I’m on the way out, driving back to Chesterfield in a few hours. I thought I’d check in to see if there was anything else I could help with.”

“Nothing big,” Kate said. “Did you happen to know that there was also a scrap of that same fabric discovered in the throat of Bethany Langley?”

“I didn’t until about half an hour ago. Apparently, one of you called the lab to ask them to send a picture.”

“Yeah,” DeMarco said. “And it seems to be a match with the one you gave us.”

At the mention of the scrap of fabric, Kate set the plastic bag Palmetto had given her on the table. “As of right now, it’s the only solid evidence we have that links the murders in any concrete way.”

“And forensics found pretty much nothing on that one,” Palmetto said. “Aside from Mrs. Nash’s DNA.”

“The forensic report I’m seeing from the scrap from the Langleys offers up nothing, either,” DeMarco said.

“Still might be worth a trip to the forensics lab,” Kate said.

“Good luck with that,” Palmetto said. “When I spoke with them about the Nash scrap, they were clueless.”

“Were you at all involved with the scene at the Langley home?” Kate asked.

“No. I came in right after it had happened. I saw the bodies and checked the place over, but there was nothing. When you talk to forensics, though, ask them about the stray hair found on the clean laundry. It didn’t seem to belong to Mrs. Langley, so they’re going to run some tests on it.”

“Before you go,” Kate said, “do you want to offer up any theories?”

“I don’t have one,” Palmetto said dryly. “From the digging I’ve done, there seems to be absolutely no link between the Nashes and the Langleys. The fabric in the throats, though…something that personal and explicit to the killer has to link them somehow, right?”

“That’s my thought,” Kate said.

Palmetto gave the door a playful slap and then Kate saw him smile for the first time. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. I’ve heard about you, you know? A lot of us on the State PD have.”

“I’m sure,” she said with a smirk.

“Mostly good things. And then you came out of retirement to bring someone down a few months ago, right?”

“You could say that.”

Palmetto, seeing that Kate wasn’t going to just sit there and soak in accolades, gave her a shrug. “Give the state boys a call if you need anything on this one, Agent Wise.”

“I’ll do that,” Kate said as Palmetto took his leave.

When Palmetto had closed the door behind him, DeMarco playfully shook her head. “You ever get tired of hearing people sing your praises?”

“Yes, actually,” Kate said, but not in a rude way. While it was uplifting to be reminded of all that she had done throughout her career, she knew deep down that she had always just been doing her job. Perhaps she done her job with a bit more passion than others had, but it had been just that—a job well done…a job she could not seem to leave behind her.

Within a few minutes and some help from the station’s systems administrator, Kate and DeMarco had access to the station’s database. They worked together, looking into the pasts of the Nashes and the Langleys. Neither family had records of any kind. In fact, both families had records that made it hard to imagine anyone having a grudge against them. As for the Langleys, they had served as foster parents for a few years of their lives, so they’d had to undergo rigorous background checks several times throughout the course of their lives. The Nashes were heavily involved in their church and had been on several mission trips in the past twenty tears, most notably to Nepal and Honduras.

Kate gave up after a while and started pacing the floor. She used the conference room’s dry erase board to jot down notes, hoping that seeing everything written down in one place would help her to focus. But there was nothing. No link, no clues, no clear course of where to go.

“You, too, huh?” DeMarco said. “Nothing?”

“Not so far. I think maybe we just go with what we do have rather than trying to find something new. I think we need to reevaluate the fabrics. While the forensics tests came up with nothing, maybe the fabric itself can point us somewhere.”

“I don’t follow you,” DeMarco said.

“That’s fine,” Kate said. “I’m not sure I do, either. But I’m hoping we’ll know it when we see it.”

***

Kate felt the first true pangs of fatigue as she and DeMarco drove from the police station to the forensics lab. It was a stark reminder that she had not slept in about twenty-seven hours and that her work day had started insanely early. Twenty years ago, this would not have bothered her. But with fifty-six staring her right in the face from a few weeks across the calendar, things were different now.

The drive to the lab was only five minutes, located in close proximity to a little network consisting of the PD, the courthouse, and a holding jail. After showing their IDs, they were escorted past the front desk of the forensic sciences lab and into the central laboratory area. They were asked to sit in a small lobby for a moment while the technician who had been in charge of the fabric swabs was paged.

“You think there’s any chance the fabric is just some kind of calling card for the killer?” DeMarco asked.

“It could be. Might not have anything to do with the why of the case. It could just mean something to the killer. Either way, right now it seems that the fabric—from a blanket of some kind, I feel quite sure—is our only real connection to him.”

It made Kate recall a gruesome case she’d once been a part of early in the nineties. A man had killed five people—all ex-girlfriends. Before killing them by choking them, he had forced each one to swallow a condom. In the end, he had no real reason for doing so other than his hatred for wearing condoms during sex. Kate could not help but wonder if these fabric fragments would turn out to be just as insignificant to the case.

Their wait was a short one; a tall older man came hurrying out of a door directly across from them. “You’re with the FBI?” he asked.

“We are,” Kate said, showing her ID. DeMarco did the same and the man studied each one quite carefully.

“Nice to meet you, Agents,” he said. “I’m Will Reed, and I ran the tests on the fabric from the recent murders. I assume that’s why you’re here? Agent DeMarco, I believe you are the one I sent the picture to earlier?”

“That’s right,” DeMarco said. “We were hoping you could shed some more light on those scraps.”

“Well, I’d be more than happy to assist with whatever you need, but if it’s about those two scraps of fabric, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can offer. It seems that the killer not only went through great lengths to shove the fabric into the mouths of the victims, but that he was also quite careful about not leaving any traces of himself behind.”

“Yes, we understand that,” Kate said. “But without any firm physical results to go on, I was wondering if there’s anything you could tell me about the fabric itself.”

“Oh,” Reed said. “That, I can help with.”

“I’m of the opinion that both scraps came from the same source material,” Kate said. “Most likely a blanket.”

“I think that’s a safe bet to place,” Reed said. “I wasn’t too sure until I saw the second scrap. They fit together rather well—color, texture, and so forth.”

“Is there any way to tell how old the blanket might be?” Kate asked.

“I’m afraid not. What I can tell you, though, is what the blanket is made up of. And it stuck with me because as far as I know, it’s an odd fabric combination for a traditional blanket as you’d think of one. The vast majority of the blanket is made of wool, which, of course, is not uncommon at all. But the secondary material used in the fabric is bamboo cotton.”

“Is that all that different from regular cotton?” Kate asked.

“I’m not positive,” he said. “But we see a lot of clothes and fabric-related material come through here. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve come into contact with something with noticeable traces of bamboo cotton. It’s not a very rare material but it’s just not as widespread as your basic cotton.”

“In other words,” DeMarco said, “it wouldn’t be too hard to locate companies that use it as a primary material?”

“That, I don’t know,” Reed said. “But you may be interested to know that bamboo cotton is present in lots of fluffier blankets. It’s quite breathable from what I’ve seen. You’re probably looking for something on the pricier side. As a matter of fact, there’s a warehouse just outside of town that manufactures the very sort of thing I mean. Pricy blankets, throws, sheets, that sort of thing.”

“Do you know the name of it?” DeMarco asked.

“Biltmore Threads. They’re a smaller company that nearly went belly up when everyone started buying everything online.”

“Anything else you can tell us?” Kate asked.

“Yes, but it’s sort of grisly. With the Nash woman, I believe the fabric was shoved so far down that she nearly vomited, even that close to death. There was stomach acid on the fabric.”

Kate thought about the amount of force and effort it would take for someone to do that…about how much of one’s hand would go into the victim’s mouth.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Reed,” Kate said.

“Certainly. Let’s just hope I don’t see a third piece to that blanket anytime soon.”