Morris decided he wasn’t in the mood for coffee after all. Without any further procrastination, he walked back to his office, sat down behind his desk, and opened the Nightmare Man folder. The first page was a police drawing from 1984. The witness lived in the same apartment building as the victim and saw the suspected killer when the man was leaving through the building’s back door at three a.m. carrying a large gym bag over his shoulder—a bag large enough to hold a rat cage. The parking lot behind the building was poorly lit, and the witness, a twenty-three-year-old man by the name of Levi Bergdahl, was standing in the shadows and wouldn’t have been seen by someone leaving the apartment building. The suspect’s face, however, would’ve been lit up enough by an exterior doorway light for Bergdahl to have gotten a clear view of him and be able to provide the details he’d given to the police sketch artist. Bergdahl had been drinking that night for several hours before coming home, but he insisted he wasn’t drunk, and Morris’s dad decided he was credible. The sketch was shown to the other residents in the building, and nobody knew the man, so he had either broken into the building late at night to kill Denise Lowenstein—the Nightmare Man’s fourth victim—or to burglarize another apartment, except none of the apartments other than Lowenstein’s were broken into that night.
It had been over fifteen years since Morris had last looked at the police sketch, but the image was still vivid in his mind. A long, narrow face lined by deep grooves. No beard or mustache. In the darkness of the night, the witness couldn’t tell whether the suspect’s hair was black or a shade of brown, or even whether it had any gray, but insisted it was cut short and that some kind of hair gel had been used to slick it back against the skull and keep it from touching the suspect’s ears, which were long and had thick lobes. The nose, like the man’s face, was long and narrow, and possibly bent as if it had once been broken and never set properly. The drawing looked to Morris like the face of an ex-convict who’d done hard time. Bergdahl further claimed the suspect wore a dark gray jacket, dark pants, and gloves. He had watched quietly from the shadows as the suspect left the building and fled down an alleyway to an adjoining street. While Bergdahl thought the man was suspicious, and was in fact frightened by him, he didn’t contact the police until after he found out Denise Lowenstein had been murdered by the Nightmare Man.
Morris’s dad had had the same thought about the police sketch looking like an ex-convict and had gone through stacks of prisoner mugshot books without any luck. The convicts he found who resembled the sketch were either still in prison when the murders took place or had airtight alibis.
The next sheet of paper in the folder was a drawing Morris had made that aged the 1984 suspect by seventeen years, and like his dad he had spent dozens of hours looking at mugshot books and prisoner photos without any luck. Morris gave this drawing only a cursory look before moving on to the police and medical examiner notes and the profiler reports. He read all of these carefully—both the notes and reports from 1984 and 2001. When he was done, he picked up the crime scene photos, his jaw muscles tightening as he steeled himself to look at them. Carefully, methodically, he studied each of the photos, even the ones that showed how the rats were used, as he hoped to glean a nugget of useful information that might’ve escaped him and the other police and FBI investigators over the years. It was as painful this time as it had been every other time he had seen them, and as in the past, no hidden secret was revealed.
Once he was done, he arranged the thick stack of pages into a neat pile and placed them back into the manila folder and, instead of hiding it in the back of his closet, he left it on top of his desk. If Levi Bergdahl’s witness account was worth a damn and the person he had described was the Nightmare Man and not a random burglar, the killer would be in his eighties today. And that would only be if he were still alive. But what if Bergdahl was wrong? Or even if he was right? Couldn’t an eighty-year-old psychopath still kill, especially one as depraved as this killer and who’d been waiting seventeen years to take more lives? The odds were the Nightmare Man was gone forever. Logically Morris knew that, but he still couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling deep in his stomach that they weren’t done with this maniac yet.
He absently drummed his fingers against the surface of his desk, then made a phone call. After four rings, Hadley answered, his voice gruff and exasperated as he demanded to know why Morris was calling.
“Do you know what day it will be a week from today?”
“I’m busy,” Hadley grumbled. “If you got something to say, spit it out.”
“October second.”
“You don’t think I’ve got a calendar and can see that?”
“It will be the seventeen-year anniversary of when the Nightmare Man started killing again.”
There was a fat second of silence, then Hadley’s frog-like voice croaking, “So?”
“You don’t think you should be doing something about it?”
“Like what?”
“How about warning the public? Or maybe sending out extra patrols and checking alleys for anyone collecting rats?” Morris could hear his voice growing harsher as he added, “Or following up on the idea my dad was working thirty-four years ago, and what I wanted to try seventeen years ago.”
“You won’t give up on that, will you? Forget it, Brick, I’m not wasting departmental resources chasing a ghost. If this maniac is still alive, he’s a feeble old man rotting away in either a prison cell or a nursing home. And if you think you can use this to drum up business for your pissant little firm, forget that also. I swear, Brick, if you start showing up on TV worrying the public about this, I’ll find a way to pull your license and shut you down. And don’t even think about calling your slick Boy Scout friend at the mayor’s office.”
“Martin, women could be dying soon. In the worst possible way.”
“Yeah, well, that’s my headache if it happens, not yours.”
Hadley disconnected the call from his end.
A soft groan came from the floor. Morris looked down to see Parker stretching all four legs, the bull terrier’s eyes open as he waited to see what Morris would do next.
What he wanted to do was forget all about the Nightmare Man, but he didn’t think that was possible, at least not entirely. Maybe if October second came and went without the murders starting up again.
Morris checked his watch. A little before five. He got Greta on the phone. Two more insurance fraud cases had come in that day. They still had their share of corporate investigations, divorces, and occasional missing persons, but the insurance fraud cases were becoming their bread and butter. Not the worst thing in the world, and much better than thinking about serial killers. But the work could wait until tomorrow. He used the point of his shoe to lightly rub Parker’s chest. The bull terrier lifted his head to give Morris a questioning look.
“What do you say we cut out early and I take you to the dog park?” Morris asked. “See if we can work off some of that rich food you mooched off me?”
Parker answered by flipping himself onto his feet, his thick, ropy tail wagging steadily.
Chapter 6
Morris called his wife from the dog park. A minute ago Parker had been playing tag with a newly made friend, each dog taking turns grabbing the baseball from the other, then chasing the opponent until they could grab the ball back. The other dog was faster than Parker, but the bull terrier was significantly stronger and could tackle the larger dog if he got close enough. The other dog also couldn’t take the ball away from Parker if he didn’t let him. After twenty minutes of this, Parker either got bored or winded. Whichever it was, he let the baseball drop from his mouth and wandered off to sniff some bushes. Likewise, the other dog trotted off to join her owner.
Natalie asked about lunch with Stonehedge. “You didn’t let Parker mooch up all the food, did you?”
“Not all, but I was weak,”