The Suicide Killer Read online

  “Greg, calm down.”

  He saw it in her eyes. She was on the verge of completely losing it, and he was making it worse by getting as upset as she was. They couldn’t both lose it. One of them had to at least act strong for both of them.

  “Okay. You keep searching out here. I’ll check inside.”

  Greg ran to the cafeteria. That was where the students waited until their parents pulled up in front of the school and they called their names over the speaker. The room was empty. He ran around looking under all the tables. After he cleared the room, he ran back into the hall and headed for the library. She always said it was her favorite place to go, even more than recess.

  Greg rounded the corner and busted through the library door like he was crashing in on a murder suspect. High-pitched screams and cries greeted his intrusion. The after-school program was in the library, and he’d sent all the kids scrambling for cover.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and put his hands on his knees. “Has anybody seen Hope Burns?”

  After a few stunned seconds, the children and teachers realized he wasn’t going to hurt them, and they all told him no. Greg turned and walked slowly out of the library. They couldn’t find his daughter anywhere. It wasn’t like her to go with anybody she didn’t know. The teachers sent her outside when they called on the intercom, and then nobody else saw her after that. The only way they would have called her name is if a car were in the parent pickup area with her name on a sign. Somebody picked her up, and the school sent her out to them. Greg ran to the front of the school where Shelly was talking to the principal.

  “Somebody has her,” he yelled.

  “Mr. Burns, we don’t know that. There are still a few buses we haven’t been able to get in contact with. She may be with a friend.”

  “No, she’s not. She was in the cafeteria, and they called her name over the intercom. The only reason that would have happened is because a car out here had a sign with her name on it. So, you let her get into the car with a complete stranger.”

  Shelly burst into tears and dropped to her knees. She looked ashen gray, as if she’d aged twenty years in twenty seconds. The color left the principal’s face.

  “I have to call this in. I’ll have the whole damn department looking for her,” he said.

  Greg pulled his phone out of his pocket. Before he could dial dispatch, the phone rang and “Home” popped up on the caller ID screen. He looked at the phone like it was an alien tool he had never seen before. The principal and Shelly were watching him, waiting for him to make some sort of sign as to why his ringing phone confused him.

  “He…Hello?”

  “Hey Daddy, I’m home. Where are you?”

  Greg’s legs turned to rubber, and he fell on the wood bench outside the principal’s office.

  “Hope, are you okay?”

  Tears ran down his face.

  “Of course I am, silly. I thought you were going to be here when I got home?”

  Shelly wrapped her arms around Greg’s neck, still crying. Her tears soaked through his shirt.

  “How did she get there, Greg? This doesn’t make any sense,” she cried.

  “Hold on, Shelly. I’m trying to find out. Hope, how did you get home?”

  Greg pulled away from his wife. It would be hard to find anything out if they were having two conversations.

  “The policeman you sent to pick me up brought me home. Tell Mommy I said hey.”

  “The policeman? Is he still there with you?”

  Greg’s heart sank, and he jumped from the bench.

  “Yes. He’s really nice. He said he would stay with me until you got home. I wish he was your partner instead of Mr. Don. He doesn’t ever laugh.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He said he needed to go to the bathroom.”

  “Don’t go anywhere with him. Stay at the house. I am on my way. Try to hide if you can, baby.”

  Greg was already running out of the school with Shelly chasing after him. He hopped into the car and was about to leave when Shelly started beating on the window.

  “Greg, I don’t understand. What is going on? Is she okay? Who took her home?”

  “She’s fine. There is nothing to worry about. I just need to get home and find out what is going on. Just get your car and meet me there. I have to hurry.”

  Greg sped off toward his house. He’d never sent a cop to Hope’s school before. Somebody posing as a cop picked her up from school. There was only one person he could think of who would want to screw with him like this.

  A dangerous killer gave his daughter a ride home from school and was now waiting for him to get home. At least, that’s what the guy told Hope. He hadn’t told anybody the killer was calling him. If something happened to his daughter, it would be his fault. If the guy really was waiting for him, he may be able to arrest him before anybody else got hurt. He was being hopeful, but Greg didn’t expect the guy to be there when he got home. If he were already gone, Greg would be okay with it, as long as his daughter was safe.

  Greg pulled into his driveway. The few neighbors who were home during the day were looking out their windows at all the commotion. He drew his gun and ran up the steps to his house. Hope sat on the porch swing, kicking her legs.

  “Hey, Daddy. Why do you have your gun out?”

  “I’m trying to protect you, honey. Where is the man who brought you home?”

  Hope jerked her head back and squished up her nose.

  “You don’t have to protect me from Stephen. He is a police officer, like you.”

  Hope didn’t seem to be in distress, but Greg needed to know everything about ‘Stephen’ without loosing his temper or scaring his daughter.

  “Where is he?”

  Greg lowered his gun, but didn’t holster it.

  “We were sitting on the porch, and when he heard your sirens, he said that you would be home in a minute, so he needed to be going.”

  Hope’s eyes never left his gun.

  “Hope, I need you to think very hard about this. What did he look like?”

  She closed her eyes and crinkled her nose.

  “He … He was as tall as the hook holding Mommy’s summer wreath,” she said, and closed her eyes again. “His hair was brown.”

  “Okay, that’s good. Was he young or old? Was he skinny?”

  “He was young like Jimmy and was skinny like him too. He wasn’t fat like you, Daddy,” she said covering her mouth trying to keep her giggles in.

  “Hey, I’m not fat. You better watch it,” he said.

  Greg was able to decipher Hope’s description for a decent outline of the guy who picked her up from school. He estimated the guy was the same height as him. If both of their heads came to the bottom of the hook, then the man was about 5’10. Jimmy, who lived down the street, was between twenty and twenty-five years old and probably weighed 170 pounds or so. He cut their grass every week. Hope had a crush on him. She would sit on the porch watching and waiting for him to finish so she could offer him something to drink.

  Shelly pulled into the driveway. She left the car running and the door open when she ran and picked Hope up. New tears flowed down her cheeks.

  “Why are you crying, Mommy?”

  “She’s just happy to see you. You two stay outside. I’m going to check the rest of the house.”

  The door was locked. They had to have gone inside at some point to use the phone. He let her call and came back outside, and he made sure to lock up before he left. Shelly must have left the door unlocked when she went to the school to pick Hope up. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have gone inside. He saw it as an invitation and let himself in.

  “Greg? Who was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? She says a man in a police car picked her up, and you don’t know who it is? You better find out, and it better not be somebody playing a joke on you. That’s cruel.”

  Greg didn’t know what to tell Shelly. He couldn’t tell her that
it was probably a murderer he had been chasing, but they were lucky because he left, and she didn’t end up dead in a suicide pose with a note from the killer. He also couldn’t let her think that it was an actual cop playing a joke on him. She would burn down city hall until she got to the bottom of it.

  “I don’t know who it was. I do know it wasn’t a cop prank. They don’t ever involve the families, and they certainly wouldn’t kidnap a child. I want you to take Hope and Jared, and go stay at your mother’s for a few days, and I’ll have all the locks changed.”

  “I want a security system with cameras before we come back home.”

  “I’ll call today. Just go get packed.”

  Shelly picked Hope up and held her tight against her chest.

  “Am I going to get to see Stephen again, Daddy? He was nice.”

  “I sure hope not, baby.”

  Greg sat on the top step, watching, looking for any sign that the guy who called himself Stephen was still around. He didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. There was nothing different about the day. After the sirens were off, and nothing was happening, the neighborhood went back to its normal casual existence. Greg heard the distant ringing of his phone rise to full volume.

  “This is Burns,” Greg tried to say, but in his distracted state, it came out, “This Burns.”

  “I’m sure it does, Detective.”

  Greg jumped to his feet when he heard the killer’s voice. He walked around his front yard, looking at all the houses, and in the trees.

  “You missed my first two calls. I sure hope that Hope … Wow, that’s a mouthful. I trust that Hope is okay. I would hate to think that I scared her.”

  “You stay the hell away from my family. They have nothing to do with this.”

  Greg walked through his side yard. The killer expected Greg to show up with the cavalry and wouldn’t wait around for a rookie to get lucky and catch him in a neighbor’s yard.

  “I was merely trying to help you out. I knew you would be tied up at that bloody crime scene for most of the day. She was definitely a bleeder. Anyway, I thought you might need somebody to pick Hope up, so I helped you out.”

  “I will kill you if you come near her again.”

  Greg needed to calm down before he lost it. It wasn’t like him to get so emotional when dealing with a killer. But that was before he messed with his family. The coolheaded detective was gone and replaced with a pissed off father who had failed to do his most important job.

  “I highly doubt it, and I would never hurt a child.”

  “Oh, is that beneath you?”

  “Yes, of course it is. Detective, I really thought we were starting to become close. You know, friends.”

  “You’re seriously messed up in the head.”

  Greg walked around the house and down the street past two of his neighbor’s houses.

  “That’s a bit harsh. You seem to be breathing hard. If you’re running around trying to find me you’re not going to. I am nowhere near you. I had to return the car that I … borrowed.

  “You expect me to just believe that? You like to hang around and watch.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, and as I said, I had to return the car. It all worked out perfectly. I found a decommissioned police cruiser in the Wal-Mart parking lot. I know you guys sell the old cars to make extra money, but do you also sell them because they still look like cop cars, and you want people to think there are more of you on the streets? That’s clever. And don’t worry. Hope was never in any danger. As luck would have it, this car already had a car seat for her.”

  “You just took the car back and expected the owner to never know?”

  There was a pause followed by a loud thundering laugh. Greg had to pull the phone away from his ear. He put the phone closer but did not put it back to his head until the laughter calmed down.

  “You’re going to love this story, Detective. I dropped the car off at the Waffle House next door. The owners looked so confused when they came out. They were pushing their buggies around the entire parking lot. I couldn’t believe they had been in there the whole time I was gone. And then … oh, this is the best part, listen. And then when they found it, they loaded up their groceries and came inside and ordered. I sat beside them the whole time. They were confused as hell and blamed each other for moving the car.”

  “Sounds like you were having a good time, while I was consoling my daughter.”

  “More like she was consoling you and your wife. She’s a sweet child.”

  Greg’s head ached. The sustained high blood pressure caused a migraine to form behind his eyes.

  “Why are you calling me? Just to torment me? To prove you’re smarter than I am?”

  “There’s nothing to prove, Detective. I needed to blow off some steam, so I thought I would have a bit of fun. Now it’s all out of my system. I promise.”

  “If you come near her again, I will kill you.”

  An exaggerated breath of air like a chided teenager blew through the phone.

  “Come on, quit with the empty threats. It’s unbecoming a man of your position.”

  Greg seethed with anger. His threats were not meaningless or empty. For the first time in his career, he wanted to kill. There was no question that he would break his oath to serve and protect. The guy brought his family into it, and he was laughing about it. Laughing in his face, because he thought he was better than Greg. This was all a sick game to get a rise out of Greg so he would make a mistake and leave another series of unsolved cases. He wanted to destroy Greg.

  Greg sat on the top step of his porch and ran his hand through his hair. He was tired.

  “How did you pick up my little girl from school and then get into my house?”

  “Ah, I thought you’d never ask. But don’t sound so down. You sound like I’ve already beaten you. It was all a bit too easy.”

  The complete glee he got from telling Greg what he had done and how he did it infuriated Greg even more. He shouldn’t have given him the satisfaction and hung up on him. But he wanted to know, and he would probably be telling the truth, mostly.

  “Finding out where you lived was easy. I’ve known for a while. I followed you home from Rachel’s house. Then I saw the sign in your wife’s car with your daughter’s name on it. I just had to create my own sign, and they pretty much delivered her to me. The car looked like your car, so no questions were asked.”

  Greg shook his head. It had been too easy, and he only did it for fun. What would he do if Greg pushed him to react?

  “How did you get into my house? My wife wouldn’t have just left the house unlocked for you,” Greg asked through clenched teeth.

  “No worries there. She locked everything up tight. However, I must say, leaving an extra key under the doormat. Come on, Greg. That has got to be the most cliché place to leave a key. Really, you were asking for it. I’m surprised more people haven’t invited themselves into your house. Don’t worry. I put the key back before I left. However, I would suggest finding a new hiding place.”

  Greg told Shelly countless times that they needed to move that key. Under the doormat would be the first place somebody would look. He should have moved the key himself, but he assumed it would find its way back under the mat, so he didn’t bother with it. Even if he had left the key, Greg was still changing all the locks in the house, while he waited for somebody to install a security system.

  Shelly and Hope walked out of the house with their luggage.

  “We’re about to go and pick up Jared and go to my mother’s. I’m serious, Greg. I’m not coming back until we have an alarm on the house,” Shelly said.

  Greg hesitated at the mention of his son. Until now, he hadn’t thought about the killer going after Jared when he left the house.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Greg. Have no fear. Little Jared is safe and sound. But, it seems like you need to tell your family goodbye, so I’ll let you go for now. I’ll talk to you later.”

  There was a click, a
nd then silence. He didn’t have time to worry about him. He had to send his family away. Greg loaded the suitcases into the trunk and fastened his daughter into her car seat.

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  “Love you too, Monkey. Take care of your mother and make sure she calls me when you get to Grandma’s house.”

  Greg shut the door and Shelly backed out of the driveway before he could get to the other side and tell her bye. She blamed him for what happened. She would be beyond mad if she found out Greg had been talking to a murderer for days and had not told anybody about it. He could never let her know who gave their daughter a ride home from school. It would be the end of his marriage and the end of his career.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bobby thought playing a game with the detective would be fun and get his mind off Danielle. He was right. The entire time spent thinking about how to get Hope Burns away from her school without anybody noticing, and the time he spent looking for a car, he never thought about Danielle—or Emily—for that matter. He poured everything into the game. He couldn’t afford not to. One miscalculation, and he’d end up in jail.

  But as soon as he hung up the phone with the detective, the game was over. He spent a bit of time gloating and celebrated with an All-Star Special.

  Now all the fun was over. When he got in his car, he wanted to go home but drove around aimlessly instead. The windows were down, and the hot breeze blew in, threatening to suffocate him. He fought to push all the thoughts out of his head, but he was fighting a need he could never ignore or sate. He turned the radio on. The deejay’s velvet voice swam through the river of humidity, swirling around his head until it whirlpooled into his ear and bore into the abyss of his thoughts.

  This is Monica Mayhem on Rock 104.4, the only place for today’s new hard rock and the only place to hear the truth. It was her Bobby.

  He jerked back to reality and almost jerked the Bronco off the road. He was hiding in a dark and quiet place with no thoughts. Running on basic instinct like people do when they arrive home, but do not remember the route in which they drove. His body went cold with fear.