The Lion, the Lamb, the Hunted: A Psychological Thriller Page 3

  I found the phone and dialed his number.

  Jack Sullenfeld was my best friend in college and probably the smartest guy I know. He works as an Intel analyst for the F.B.I., and he’s my go-to guy when I’m on the hunt for sensitive data, information normally unavailable to the public.

  Sully answered on the second ring. “Well, if it isn’t—”

  “I need your help,” I interrupted, mindlessly rolling the necklace between my fingers.

  “You sound funny.”

  “I’m under a little stress.”

  He paused, then spoke his words slowly, “Okay. What do you have?”

  “Need you to look at missing persons or murder cases around 1976. Possible victim’s initials: NAK. The location might be in or near Stover, Illinois.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe female. Just whatever you can find, okay?”

  He paused a beat. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying my best for a more casual tone. “Just working some leads on a story and feeling the pressure.”

  I hung up the phone and decided to do some searching myself. Fired up my Mac and logged onto Infoquest, the magazine’s subscription newspaper archiving service. Warren was a congressman back then. If he was in Stover, chances were the press might have been there, too. A search for Stover, Illinois, Warren Strademeyer, 1976 netted me a direct hit with a story from The Black Lake Courier, dated July 5, 1976. Apparently, Warren was in Stover studying emergency response systems after a tornado leveled the town. The story showed a photo of him walking through the rubble and talking to authorities. That would explain why the phone lines were down. Did another search, this time for murder, Stover, Illinois, missing, body, St. Christopher Medal, 1976. Came up with a string of stories from the Stover Journal, but one in particular caught my interest: a nineteen-year-old woman named Jackie Newberry, reported missing two weeks before the tornado hit. Last seen walking to the community college but never arrived there. A search of the neighborhood and outlying area proved futile. Authorities suspected foul play.

  But her initials didn’t match those on the St. Christopher medal and no mention of a necklace.

  I toyed with the idea that maybe the necklace had nothing to do with this, but if that were true, where did it come from? Again, nobody I knew with those initials. A dead end, and I was dead tired. It was after midnight. I’d been up for hours, was suffering from jetlag, and quickly losing steam. Exhausted, frustrated, and troubled, I decided to call it a night, hoping some rest might help bring new answers.

  I fell asleep with a pad and pen on my chest after writing defiance fifty-seven times.

  Chapter Six

  I sometimes felt like a ghost walking through that house, my needs so often going ignored that it was as if they barely existed. As if I barely existed. And the saddest part, the most tragic, was that I bought into the neglect. I thought it was normal, that all mothers put their own needs before those of their children. I had no way of knowing otherwise. Ours was a world ruled by contradictions and inconsistencies, painted only in shades of gray. I wouldn’t have known black or white if I’d seen them.

  Then one day, a glimmer of hope.

  She came running into the living room, shrieking with excitement. “You won’t believe it! You just won’t!” she said, clutching a handful of pamphlets against her chest, her face lighting up with delight. “The raffle! The one at church for the vacation! In the Cayman Islands! I won!”

  “No way!” I bolted from my chair, leaving my book behind. “Really?”

  “Really!” She tossed the pamphlets onto the coffee table, threw her arms around me, lifting me straight up in the air. “We’re going to the Cayman Islands! Can you believe it?”

  I couldn’t believe she was hugging me so hard.

  She grabbed one of the pamphlets and held it out in front of her, admiring the photos, practically out of breath from all her excitement. “I just never imagined I could... and with so many people entering and all…I just…this is the dream of a lifetime! We’re going to the Cayman Islands! Seven nights, all expenses paid! It’s so exciting!”

  It was beyond exciting. It was wonderful.

  “We’ll be staying at a resort,” she said, and spread a brochure open to show me the photos. “Four swimming pools! Four! And the food, oh, the food! Buffets every night! She let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. “It’ll be the perfect family vacation. Just the two of us!”

  The two of us. Family.

  “Now, we have several choices when we can go,” she said, her voice now taking on a practical tone. “What do you think? Next month? It’ll be December. We’ll be there during Christmas and come back with gorgeous suntans. How great would it be to have a suntan over the holidays! They’ll be so jealous! They’ll just be seething! I love it!”

  “That would be great! Let’s do it, Mom!”

  Suddenly she froze, staring at me oddly, lowering her brows. A peculiar smile slid across her face, and then she began laughing.

  I laughed a little, too. “What?”

  She was still laughing, catching her breath. “Oh, that’s so funny.”

  “What is?”

  “You are, silly! What gave you the idea you were going?”

  “But you said…that it was the perfect family vacation, just the two of us…and…”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Giggling now, “I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about your uncle Warren and me. Why in the world would I take you?”

  Chapter Seven

  I woke the next morning clawing at my covers, sweat dripping down my face, heart pounding like a hammer inside my chest.

  The dream again. The boy in the woods.

  The nightstand clock said 9:02 a.m. Next to it was my notebook. I found comfort seeing it there, knowing I might need it.

  I have a problem that I keep secret from the world. I make lists, the same word repeated over and over. I’ve been doing it for as long as I could write. On average, they take up about a page, but they can be longer than that. Much longer. I once wrote havoc more than sixteen hundred times. Filled about thirty pages. I was having a bad day.

  I don’t know why I do it, but I usually feel better after…at least for a while. It’s kind of like having an itch—when the urge hits, I’ve got to scratch or it’ll drive me crazy until I do. Well, actually, it’s like a mosquito bite: the more I scratch, the more I have to keep scratching. That’s why I need to be careful; otherwise, it can become, well…obsessive.

  Of course, I haven’t missed the irony: a writer trapped by his own words. Sounds like a cruel joke. It’s like I’m straddling two parallel worlds, one I love and another I hate. I work like hell to hide it, but it keeps popping up at the most inopportune times. And I detest that I do it; I’m embarrassed as hell that I can’t stop. But I’ve got to do it, have trouble functioning if I don’t.

  So I do.

  That’s not to say I always hide it well. There have been close calls. I’ve accidentally left my lists out for someone to find—Samantha being one of them—but I’ve developed strategies, have learned to shift into damage control when that happens. I tell people it’s something I do to deal with writer’s block, and that seems to end all speculation. After all, a neurotic writer isn’t too far a stretch.

  9:03 a.m. Time to stop obsessing about the dream and my lists and get moving. I jumped in the shower, shaved, then dragged a comb through my hair. I was halfway down the steps, when I heard the phone ringing.

  “Not feeling the love, Sully,” I said.

  “And a good morning to you, too, Mr. Sunshine.”

  “Sorry. Rough night.”

  “I’ve got two NAKs for you. Both around 1976, but nothing from Stover, and no females.”

  I grabbed a pen and an envelope to write on. “Give it to me.”

  “A forty-six-year-old male from Lester, Missouri by the name of Neil Adam Kershaw. Found strangled in his car outside a hog farm in the wee ho
urs. You can do a search and get all the info.”

  I wrote it down. “What else?”

  “A three-year-old boy from Corvine, Texas by the name of Nathan Allan Kingsley. Went missing from home. Never found.”

  I was already reaching across the counter for my laptop. “Thanks, Sully. Call you later.”

  “That’s all I get?”

  “Thanks Sully. You’re the best. Call you later.”

  I heard a groan before he hung up.

  I logged in on Infoquest, started searching for Lester, Missouri, Neil Adam Kershaw, strangled. Several articles came up. I clicked on the first, dated August 6, 1976, from the Lester Star Tribune.

  Authorities Identify Man Found Strangled Outside Hog Farm

  By Reggie Adamson

  The county coroner has released the name of a man found dead in his car on Tuesday. Authorities say forty-six-year-old Neil Adam Kershaw was strangled. His body was found inside his vehicle parked in front of Sampson’s Hog Farm in the two-hundred block of Dunbar Lane around three a.m.

  Authorities have no suspect but are asking for any information that could lead to an arrest.

  And it looked like they got some. Apparently, Kershaw was quite the lady’s man. Had a wife, plus a girlfriend on the side. Unfortunately, the girlfriend had a husband, and he was none too thrilled when he found out they’d been carrying on. He killed her, then went after Kershaw. Authorities were able to link both crimes and make an arrest.

  Case closed.

  Next, on to Nathan Allan Kingsley. Infoquest brought me a story dated October 10, 1977, from the Observer in Corvine, Texas.

  Arrest Made in Case of Murdered Toddler

  By Frank D’Alessandro

  Corvine authorities took 23-year-old Ronald Lee Lucas into custody last night, charging him with the kidnapping and murder of three-year-old Nathan Allan Kingsley. Detectives say they discovered evidence in Lucas’s apartment linking him to the crime, which occurred more than a year ago. An anonymous tip led them to the suspect.

  Nathan Kingsley disappeared from his home in June of last year, leaving parents Jean and Dennis Kingsley devastated and officials bewildered. Mrs. Kingsley had just returned home from the grocery store with Nathan when she stepped outside to check the mail. When she returned to the house moments later, the boy was gone.

  Lucas is being held without bail in the county jail pending arraignment.

  I narrowed my focus on the photo and felt my gut tighten. The boy was wearing a necklace—the necklace. I was pretty sure of it.

  I pulled up a few more articles. Authorities believed Lucas buried the body in the desert. As large an area as that was, chances were slim they’d ever find it.

  Stop worrying. Everything is taken care of. Trust me, that’s one body they’ll never find.

  Words from Warren to my mother—words that were now haunting me.

  According to the story, they’d found plenty in Lucas’s apartment linking him to the crime, evidence that sealed his fate: a sneaker and underwear belonging to Nathan, and a knife—all with the boy’s blood on them. Genetic testing wasn’t a reality yet, but blood typing was, and they’d scored a match.

  I shivered.

  If all that hadn’t been enough, Lucas was a paroled sex offender, and if that wasn’t enough, a witness later surfaced, a mailman, who reported seeing Lucas in the neighborhood at the time of the kidnapping. With no viable alibi, Lucas didn’t stand a snowball’s-chance-in-hell of escaping conviction. He spent several years on death row in Huntsville, Texas, then died in the electric chair December of 1983.

  And there was more tragedy. Shortly after the murder, Jean Kingsley began spiraling into series of mental breakdowns that took her in and out of a psychiatric hospital. During her final stay there, she hanged herself.

  I thought about Dennis Kingsley losing his only son and then his wife—grief piled upon grief, everything that mattered to him gone in an instant. Left alone with nothing but his sadness.

  I pushed on and found an interview and photo of the parents. From what I could see, an all-American family: Jean Kingsley, attractive and petite, and Dennis, large with short-cropped hair, a thick neck, and arms like oversized rolling pins. He worked at the local cannery. Both appeared young, probably in their early-to-mid twenties. And desperate. “I only left him in his playpen for a minute,” Jean was quoted as saying. “Only a minute!”

  Just like that. Vanished.

  No word anywhere about the necklace.

  I held it up to the light and let it dangle: criminal evidence in my hand, and even worse, from a kidnapping and murder.

  Next came more questions. Should I turn the necklace over to authorities? I considered it, but there was a risk. The possibility my own mother might have had a hand in it certainly raised the stakes. Not that it mattered; she was dead. But Warren wasn’t, and it looked as though he was just as involved as she. A man who wielded considerable power. No way I should go traipsing off to authorities, necklace in hand, until I at least knew more.

  Time to apply some of the basic principles from journalism school. I had the what, where, and when. What I didn’t have was the who. But I knew where I might find it: Corvine, Texas.

  I went back online for airline tickets, then once again packed my bags. The revolving door to my apartment was about to take yet another spin. I looked around, realizing I’d only actually been here a few days this month. Then I frowned.

  I hadn’t missed it one bit.

  Chapter Eight

  I arrived in Corvine later that evening and found a room at the Surfside Motel in the middle of town. No surf, just an empty old swimming pool that looked as though it hadn’t held water in a number of years.

  The next day, I went out to familiarize myself with the place. While it had probably changed some though the years, I got the impression that Corvine hadn’t grown much since the kidnapping. A smallish-looking desert town, about as nondescript as they come. Desolate, too. The downtown area consisted of nothing more than a series of outdated strip malls filled with shoestring operations: an Amvets store, a five and dime, and a hat shop that looked as though it hadn’t seen a living head for quite some time.

  Who lives in places like this?

  CJ Norris was a reporter for the Corvine Observer who had written a number of stories about the Kingsley case through the years. The press likes to do that; follow-ups, we call them. We’d revisit the birth of Christ if we could squeeze a new angle out of it. I called the main switchboard. After several rounds of punch-the-number-to-get-the-department-you-want, I got a female voice that sounded rushed.

  “Norris.”

  I heard keyboards clicking in the background. Glancing at my watch, I understood why: it was 4:47 p.m., crunch time in the newspaper biz. Even small towns have them. I hadn’t thought about that. I should have.

  “Patrick Bannister here,” I said, “and I’ve just realized what a lousy time it is to be calling. You’re probably chasing a deadline.”

  “You sound like you’ve got some first-hand knowledge there,” she said, still clicking away.

  “Guilty.”

  “Reporter?”

  “News World.”

  “Ah,” she said, “nice.”

  “If it’s a bad time...”

  “Sweetie, it’s never a good time, you know that, but I can always spare a moment for a comrade. What can I do for you?”

  “Well…I’m actually in town.”

  That made her stop typing. “In Corvine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Far as I can tell.”

  “Can’t be for pleasure, so it has to be business.”

  “It is …”

  “Yeah, well we don’t have much of that around here, either.”

  “I’m working on the Kingsley case.”

  “Nathan Kingsley?” A pause. “You know you’re about thirty years too late, unless there’s something new going on there?”

  “Not that
I know of.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Just hmm, is all…”

  “Can you expand on that?”

  “Oh nothing…just seems a little odd. You being from a national news magazine, calling me out of the blue about a kid who’s been dead for a long time.”

  “Is there some rule against doing stories about dead people?”

  “Well, no, I just—”

  “And you do follow-ups on it yourself from time to time, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I’m local. I have to do them. You, on the other hand, well, you’re from somewhere out in the real world.”

  “Define real world.”

  “Anyplace but here.”

  I laughed a little. Funny gal, this Norris.

  She went on, “And last I checked, you folks in the real world have plenty of missing and murdered kids to chase after. So what gives? Talk to me.”

  I thought about how to answer that, searching my mind for a logical response, knowing full well what a horrible liar I am.

  She cleared her throat. “Still with me there, Pat?”

  “Still here, yeah.”

  “So…the Kingsley case. Why him?”

  “I’m actually doing a story about missing and exploited kids, and we’re looking at several cases. Kingsley just happens to be one of them.”

  “I see,” she said, sounding less suspicious but not completely convinced, either.

  “So I was hoping maybe we could meet and you could get me up to speed on the case.”

  “I can do that, sure.”

  “How about after work? Got some time?”

  She paused, and then, “You sure seem in a hurry.”

  “Just to get out of here, is all.”

  “I’m feeling you there, Pat. I’ve been trying to do that for years. Okay, there’s a bar. The Sports Page, right across the street from our offices. Order me a Tom Collins. I’ll probably need one.”