Page 56 of M for Murder

‘No, I never saw her again.’

Joel Hickok tried to read into the black eyes. Was he telling the truth?

He flipped the page of his notepad over, glanced briefly at what he had written down then he locked eyes with Lawrie Parker again and asked, ‘How well did you know Rufus Lind?’

Rebecca didn’t leave work until late Thursday night, staying until all of the files on the original victims had been thoroughly reread. She had spent the latter part of her afternoon trudging around in the sewer with Vic, Sutton and a few of the other officers after a call had come in from the college reporting a female student missing since Saturday night. Within an hour they had recovered two bodies, both within a hundred feet of one another, both naked and carved, and both serving as a stark reminder that the killer was starting to strike with increasing regularity. If they didn’t catch him soon it was inevitable that several more students were likely to lose their lives.

Vic hadn’t shared her enthusiasm for working late and had long gone, claiming to have arranged a date with Jill, and although Hickok and Sutton were both still there, they had spent much of the evening in the office that Krigg had provided for them, locked in discussions and talking on the phone.

There were now only the files on Boone himself left to be reread and those she and Vic had on their desks ready to tackle the following morning. Although they hadn’t found any leads in the files on the victims so far, Rebecca was convinced they were missing something.

As she drove home, she mulled over what she had read. Danielle Adams: Popular student. Strangled.

Patrick Bell: Surfer. Strangled.

Lydia Chapman: Grade A student. Suffocated.

Jonah Devlin: Popular student. Strangled.

Erika Estes: Cheerleader. Strangled.

Willard Frey: Footballer. Strangled.

Pamela Gilcrest: On the Student Committee. Suffocated.

Marcus Hyde: Editor of the college paper. Strangled.

They had all been popular or prominent figures around the campus and they had all been killed by methods of asphyxia and in alphabetical order.

There had to be something that they had missed.

Marcus Hyde had been Boone’s last victim before he had disappeared. At least, the last victim who had died.

Maybe that was it. Perhaps it wasn’t the eight dead victims they should be looking at, but instead the one survivor.

Victim I.

21

JUNIPER, OREGON. SEPTEMBER 1988 – JULY 1989

T he first semester of college had turned out to be a much more pleasant experience than she had dared hope.

That last week of summer, the one week she had never wanted to end, had finished all too quickly, and then she had been left with only a handful of good memories and a sickly feeling of fear about the future. Fear about leaving home for the first time, fear about whether or not the long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, Michael, would work, and fear about fitting into her new life.

Those fears had been mostly unfounded.

Leaving home had at first been difficult. Those first few days had been strange, waking up in a strange bed in an unfamiliar room, knowing that she would be eating breakfast with a group of strangers, sitting on plastic chairs around a plastic table in a large echoing cafeteria, instead of with her family in the comfortable surroundings of her own home.

Her roomie, an energetic blonde named Miranda Ingram, proved to be a lot of fun and was also very popular with the other students, which meant Jennifer had no problem making new friends. Miranda also seemed to know all of the best places to go in town and was constantly finding new things for them to do, which didn’t leave much time for being homesick.

The only thing that hadn’t worked out was Michael.

At first she had tried to keep the relationship going, mainly wanting to keep a part of the past with her, but he hadn’t been good at writing and, in time, she had come to realise that he wasn’t that important to her. He had, like many other things, become a memory. A nice memory, but nothing more.

There were other guys on campus that held her attention now and, whilst she had no intention of playing the field, it was fun to copy Miranda and flirt a little.

In fact, she had copied Miranda in more ways than one, all at her roommate’s request. Hip clothes, more make-up, her long brown hair cut into a shorter, more fashionable style. Miranda smoked and drank and partied all night, and her influence didn’t take long to rub off. Soon the old Jennifer Isaac, with her plain looks and demure personality, had gone, and a new, more confident, brash and flippant model had appeared in her place.