Delusions With Murder: A Rilynne Evans Mystery Read online

  Delusions with Murder

  Book one of the

  Rilynne Evans Mysteries

  Jenn Vakey

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Deception with Murder

  To Matt, Your endless support

  and love has gotten me further

  than I ever could have imagined.

  Chapter One

  There was not a cloud in the sky. With the heat wave they had been having, a little overcast would have been nice. Nearly two hours had passed since Rilynne had made the phone call instructing them where to come. She knew her location was a bit off of the beaten path, but she hadn’t expected it to take them this long to find her. Checking her watch again, she began to worry. It would be dark soon, which would make their jobs much more difficult.

  As she was pulling her phone out of her pocket to find out where they were, she heard the sound of tires rolling up the rocky path behind her.

  “Sorry officer. We took a wrong turn,” she heard from behind an opened door at the back of the van. “How did you even find him all the way out here?” he asked as he slammed the door and made his way towards her.

  He was handsome in a boy next-door kind of way. His dirty blonde hair seemed to dance as the warm breeze hit it. She didn’t normally find longer hair attractive on men, but it seemed to suit him.

  “It’s detective, actually. Rilynne Evans,” she said, holding out her hand. He fumbled with the cases in his arms as he reached out to return her greeting, dropping both of them. “Ben Davis. And this is Dr. Andrews,” he motioned to the older man coming around the van behind him.

  She couldn’t help but think that the stout little man looked a little like Santa Clause with his white, fluffy hair and full beard. His cheeks even seemed to have a rosy look to them as he waddled towards her. “You must be our new detective. I was wondering when our paths would finally cross. It’s a shame it had to be under such gruesome circumstances. How on earth did you find him all the way out here?”

  Not waiting for an answer, he walked towards the arm that was barely visible under the brush littering the ground. “Have you found the rest of him?” he asked while scanning the area. “There’s a leg behind the boulder to your right, and his other arm is a few yards to your left at the base of that large oak tree,” she pointed to the freshly uncovered limbs.

  “Are you sure it’s him?” asked Ben as he sifted through his cases.

  “The tattoo on the right arm matches the tattoo he had of his daughter’s name. Dr. Andrews, can you determine the time of death?” She asked as a second vehicle pulled up alongside the medical examiners van.

  Ben had just finished taping off the scene and was snapping pictures when a tall, slender red headed investigator joined him and began documenting all of the evidence. “Approximately 8 hours.” Dr. Andrews called back to her after examining the leg in front of him. She already knew the answer but she also knew it was a question that had to be asked.

  This was the eighth victim they had discovered in the last eleven months. All had been held for exactly one week before being killed and their bodies dismembered. The perpetrator always left the same six body parts hastily covered; the head, which was always shaved, the torso, with a freshly pierced right nipple, two arms, the left leg, and the right thigh. The medical examiner was able to determine that, unlike the rest of the cuts, the lower portion of the right leg, cut just above the knee, was always removed before the men were killed. Based on the evidence of healing, the right leg of all of the victims appeared to have been removed shortly after the men were taken. All had also been fed the same meal shortly before death, consisting of spaghetti noodles with a mushroom and shrimp cream sauce and red wine. The first victim was the only one that had not been strangled. Instead, he had died of anaphylactic shock due to a severe shrimp allergy.

  Due to the leg amputations, as well as the alterations the perpetrator made to the victims’ appearances, the press had dubbed him the Pirate Killer.

  Rilynne was slowly working her way out from the center of the crime scene. If the pattern held, there were still three body parts hidden within a close proximity. She had just lifted a branch revealing the torso when she heard Ben call from the other side of the clearing that he had found the head and the right thigh.

  Other than the body parts, the killer left the crime scenes meticulously clean. The only piece of evidence that they had discovered over the last eleven months was a single carpet fiber left in the first victim’s nose. This scene was no different from the last seven. They had found this body quicker than any of the others, though, so Rilynne couldn’t help but hope that the body itself might hold some clues.

  Dr. Andrews had finished bagging all of the body parts, and was loading them into his van when he called out again. “Detective Evans, you never said how you were able to locate him.” She gave him a small grin accompanied by a simple answer. “I just got lucky.”

  That was not exactly true. She had spent her morning combing over maps searching for that exact spot. She knew without a doubt it was where she would find their most recent victim. She even knew where to find the first body parts when she arrived, because they were exactly where she had seen them buried. Rilynne had watched as he took his last breath, and even watched the knife slice into his lifeless body. She had seen it all that morning as she was taking, what should have been, a relaxing shower to start her day.

  It was just flashes in her mind; the breath and the knife, and then the road sign and river that helped her find her way. But seeing these things in your head does not make you a valued detective as far as most people are concerned. Instead, it makes you either crazy or a suspect. So she hid it, never telling anyone what she could do.

  Chapter Two

  Rilynne was six when she first realized the funny little pictures she saw in her head were not just her imagination, but flashed from other people.

  She would see her teacher grading her homework, or things happening to her classmates when they were at home. It wasn’t until tragedy struck during her winter break that her mom, Amber Evans, realized what was going on.

  Rilynne had just sat down at the table for breakfast that morning when she started screaming and crying about her little friend Jessica. She told her mom that a bad man had taken Jessica and was hiding her. Trying to reassure her daughter that it was just a bad dream, Amber called Jessica’s house.

  To her horror, she was told by a police officer on the other line that Jessica had vanished from her bed during the night. Amber convinced herself Rilynne had seen the story on the news, and held her daughter all morning trying to console her. Then Rilynne stopped crying abruptly and told her mother that it was ‘all better now’. She stated a pretty police lady found Jessica-still in her princess pajamas-in the snow covered shed and she was on her way home.

  Amber did not want to tell her daughter that she was wrong, so she just let Rilynne get up to play. It wasn’t until an hour later that the story aired on the news stating Jessica had been found in the shed of the family�
��s pool man, and had been returned to her family shaken but safe. The picture they showed nearly made Amber fall off her chair. It showed a female police officer holding Jessica’s hand as she ran towards her mom. Jessica was wearing a pair of bright pink pajamas with princess crowns all over them.

  She couldn’t move; she didn’t know what to think. Amber knew her daughter had not watched the television since she heard about the abduction. Rilynne had even told her mom what happened around the same time they had stated the officer found her. She thought back through the years to all the other things her daughter had told her that she had just assumed were her imagination. Was it just a coincidence? She knew the only thing she could do was talk to her daughter about it. Rilynne informed her mom she just saw pictures in her head that showed her what happened.

  Amber didn’t know what to do, but she knew it was something she didn’t want other people to find out. She was not ashamed of her daughter, but she knew at the same time other people would not be so accepting. She wanted, as all mothers do, for her child to have a normal, happy childhood. Hiding what Rilynne could do was the only way that could happen.

  As time went on, they came to realize Rilynne would only get flashed from people she was personally connected to in someway or another. Amber saw it as a blessing, because there were so many things in the world a growing child did not need to see, or even know about. She would see things related to the people she knew, or things that she started to pay special attention to. In a way, she could choose what she was open to seeing.

  If there were a crime on the news she wanted to see things about, she would just need to read enough about it, and try to figure out what was happening herself. She wouldn’t get a full view of what had happened most of the time, but she would see bits and pieces. Most of the time Rilynne would only see things that were happening at that moment, or that had happened shortly before. Sometimes she could see further into the past, but very rarely could she ever see anything before it happened. When she did, it was never more than a few hours prior to the event. She liked it that way. What fun would it be if she always knew what was going to happen?

  There was no question growing up what she wanted to do after school. She had played her little games for years, trying to solve crimes herself, and occasionally was able to sooner than the police could. She knew if she had the resources the police did, instead of just what she could get from the news, she would be able to solve the crimes that others couldn’t.

  So after college she joined her local police department, working her way up quickly. After just a year on the force, she made detective. She had studied profiling while at school, and would pass off her visions as hunches based on suspect behavior. She had the highest solve rate in her department, and was often asked by other departments for her opinion on their tougher cases.

  It was two years after making detective that the Pirate Killer started his work. She followed the case after the third victim was taken, but as it was across the country, there was not much she could do about it. After the sixth victim she knew she could not sit on the sidelines any longer. So she put in for a transfer and was put on the task force shortly before the eighth victim was taken.

  Chapter Three

  Rilynne was the first person in the following morning. The conference room they were set up in had white boards covered in pictures and information about the victims lining three of the four walls. They still had not been able to find out what the victims had in common, or how the killer was picking them.

  She studied the boards, trying to make herself see something she might have missed. The victims were all Caucasian males ranging in age from 24 to 40 and had different economic backgrounds. Two were married, three had kids, two were ex-cons, one was a wealthy vacationer and one was even a police officer. The only glimpses she had seen so far were of the victims being killed and disposed of. She was sure the more she learned, the more she would be able to see. And hopefully she would be able to see something that would help them stop this man before there was a ninth victim.

  Rilynne was so lost in her thoughts that she didn’t hear the door in the corner swing open.

  “Detective Evans,” a familiar voice called from behind her. “I didn’t think anyone would be in yet. I was just going to drop these off.” Ben handed her a file full of the photographs from the scene. She turned towards the boards again and started adding the new pictures.

  “Not bad for your first couple of weeks here. How were you able to find the dumpsite so quickly?” he asked, looking around at the pictures already hanging around the room. “That site seemed pretty well hidden.”

  She had anticipated the questions that would come, but even after all the times she had to make up stories explaining how she came upon things, she still hated lying. It always made her a little nervous. “I spent the last few days plotting all of the other dumpsites and making a list of other locations that were similar. It was the third place I went. Too bad I didn’t get there earlier, or I might have caught him in the act.”

  Her mind drifted back to the pictures as she hung them. The victim, James Edwards, had dropped his four-year-old daughter off at her pre-school class, and then was never seen again. His wife reported him missing after the school notified her he had failed to pick their daughter up, and they had been unable to reach him.

  His car was found abandoned just three blocks down the road from the school. Although the driver side door was left slightly open, there appeared to be no sign of struggle at the scene. In fact, the only thing out of the ordinary at all was the note left under the driver’s side windshield wiper. It was a small piece of black paper with the number 8 written on it in silver ink. These same notes were found at the other abduction sites. The perpetrator seemed to be showing off, and making sure people were taking a correct count of the victims he claimed.

  The look on Mrs. Edwards face when she was told about her husband’s abduction was a look Rilynne knew she would never be able to forget. Mrs. Edwards, who was eight months pregnant with their second child, had a look of both terror and foreboding. The gruesome murders had been well publicized, and she did not have to be told of her husband’s fate in the hands of this killer.

  The thought of it seemed to be too much for her body to take, and shortly after her interview with the detectives began, she had to be rushed to the local hospital in labor. Four hours later, Rilynne was informed by the hospital she had given birth to a little boy. She had named him James after the father whom she was sure he would task force, walked in that she realized Ben had left. The room slowly started to fill up, as the fourteen chairs around the large, oblong table were filled. Detective Wilcome, a well built man in his mid-forties, was the head homicide detective. He had been with the case from the beginning, being the detective who investigated to the first murder. The fact that they had yet another victim, and were still no closer to finding the perpetrator than they had been after the first victim was discovered, seemed to be taking a toll on him. His sky blue eyes, which had been engaging during the interviews Rilynne had seen him do after the second murder, were now veiled behind dark circles, and he appeared to have lost close to ten pounds. It was clear to Rilynne that he had put simple pleasures such as sleeping and eating on hold until they caught the killer.

  Just as Detective Wilcome was about to speak, someone else entered the room. “It’s good to see you, Madam District Attorney,” he said kindly. “Would you care to join us? We were just about to discuss the case.” Kristin Greene was the youngest district attorney Rilynne had ever worked with, having been appointed at the age of thirty. Although two years later, she still did not look a day over twenty-five. She had long, sleek brown hair that flowed down her back and large green eyes that seemed to twinkle.

  “Perfect. I was hoping for an update. Please continue,” she replied.

  “Well, if he sticks to his pattern, we have three weeks to find him before he takes another victim. Based on the medical examiner’s report, the victim
was strangled with a thin rope like the others,” he said. “Finding the body as quickly as we did helped us to narrow the disposal window to around two hours after death. Given the amount of time the killer put into cleaning and dismembering the body, it means the killer traveled no more than an hour to get to this site. Assuming he traveled the speed limit and he knew where the site was prior to disposal,” he pointed at the map, “he’s somewhere within this forty mile radius.”

  Although the site where they found the victim’s body was well out into the woods, the land backed up to the city, which still left them with a third of the population to consider. “Like the others, this body was washed in bleach after being dismembered. The medical examiner did find this black sliver of plastic,” he held up a small evidence bag, “ caught in a jagged cut on the left arm. This tells us he’s more than likely transporting the parts in black trash bags to the site before unwrapping them to bury. Other than this, the scene was clean like the others.”

  Wilcome turned to speak with the district attorney, but stopped just short. He let his head drop while he took a long, deep breath, though he did not turn back around to face the group. “It has been a long week. Spend today with your families; we will start fresh tomorrow.”

  It had rained all morning, leaving the ground coated with a thin layer of water as Rilynne jogged the three blocks back to her apartment. Something about the way her feet sounded slapping against the wet sidewalk always seemed to calm her. By the time she reached her apartment, she was surprisingly relaxed.

  Despite moving in several weeks earlier, the long wall in her living room was still lined with boxes. She hated unpacking, but knew eventually she would have to get around to it. After grabbing a bottled water out of the kitchen, she sat down on the floor and pulled the box labeled “Books” towards her.

  Her collection mainly consisted of crime stories, both fact and fiction. When she reached the bottom of the box, she pulled out a large pale green photo album. She stared at it for a few moments before opening it. It was filled with her achievements in life: college memories, graduation from the police academy, newspaper clippings from her solved cases, and awards she received. The last page held a wedding photograph from seventeen months before. She stared at the smiling couple for what seemed like an hour before closing the book and placing it in the bookcase with the others. She would finish unpacking another day.