The Rule of Threes: A Novella

Chapter 1

Wednesday, September 20, 6:30 a.m.

Nothing to do but . . .

His mind can’t quite finish the sentence.

Sitting on the edge of the double bed, he looks at the low sunlight slanting inward through blinds that were white when installed. The sun hits the knife blade and bathes his face in reflected light nearly as pure as the original source, a million miles away.

Nothing to do but . . .

Out of bed, he lays the knife on the nightstand, showers meticulously, scrubbing, scrubbing.

Then into a pressed shirt, pressed slacks, pressed jacket that is the beige shade that matches his flesh. The shag carpet lifts away every noise but a heartbeat and a hum in the ears, a soundtrack to the edginess that enwraps the heart.

After walking to the window of his rigorously ordered apartment, he looks at the development, populated by middle manager school administrator auto dealer star salespeople senior bookkeeper residents. It’s earlyish. Soon they will be leaving for their jobs. Heading out into the world, taking on tasks lined up like hurdles, some low as curbs, some thigh-stretchers.

Some to trip you up and smack your head to the asphalt, maybe to race again. Maybe never to rise.

Nothing to do but . . .

Joseph Ray Whelan makes coffee with boiling water and a drip cone. He sits at his kitchen table. One sip. Two. Three.

He pours the rest out.

Three is magic. Three consumes him.

On his music app a song is looping. The “Queen of the Night” aria from The Magic Flute. In the opera, the main character, Tamino, is rescued by three governesses, servants to the queen, and starts his journey to enlightenment. He is guided by three young men. The opera is written in a key that has three flats.

Nothing to do but . . .

Birth, life, death . . . There’s three for you.

It’s almost three minutes to seven.

And time to go.

He gets the knife from the bedroom. And from the kitchen table he collects his gun and the roll of gray duct tape. Everything goes into his backpack. There are a few other items inside too, making the total more than three.

This doesn’t bother him. He’s crazy, yes, but not to the point of being weird crazy.

Finally he pockets a handheld compass, not an electronic one. Nobody uses traditional compasses any longer. That’s foolish. For one thing, there’s no GPS trail of where you’ve been.

For another, the North Pole never runs out of juice.

He slings the backpack over his shoulder and walks to the door. Three deep breaths.

Then outside into the damp end-of-summer day, in which there is nothing to do . . .

. . . but get to work and end a life.

Chapter 2

Just past 2:00 p.m., following a hard drive from Springfield, Constant Marlowe passed a sign.

CLARK VALLEY

YOUR KIND OF TOWN . . .

FOUNDED 1789

She continued along Route 27 for several miles, through farmland, some crops harvested, others on hold. When she came to a brown Sheriff’s Office cruiser, low roof lights flashing, she slowed and turned onto the dirt and gravel road that led into Lone Ridge Park.

Two well-tanned sheriff’s deputies waved her to a stop about a hundred feet into the place. They’d be stopping all civilian traffic and she was in her personal car, clearly not law enforcement. The Honda was orange, a shade the vehicle was not born with. Marlowe had needed an undercover set of wheels to pursue a particularly unpleasant meth retailer and bought the sedan with her credit card. After the operation—and the successful collar—she decided to keep the thing.

It never broke down and the one bullet fired at it in the past week had missed the vitals—hers and the engine’s—and ended up in the headrest. She’d been meaning to cut it out.

She now nosed the vehicle into the low grass, killed the rattling engine and climbed out.

The taller deputy was shaking his head, seeing a woman in blue jeans, a white tee and black leather jacket, brown hair in a severe ponytail.

Thinking civilian.

Though perhaps wondering about the three-inch scar on her forehead.

His expression changed when she pulled aside the jacket, revealing a gold badge, sitting aside her small black pistol.

“Sheriff Tremain?” she asked.

The shorter of the deputies pointed to a clutch of vehicles and men and women in uniforms, the khaki of the Bowman County, Illinois, Sheriff’s Office. They were at the edge of a hundred-by-hundred-yard picnic and recreation area.

The man said to Marlowe, “He’s the cowboy one.”

She nodded and started toward them, over mown grass and then through rampant grass.

Fiftyish, Frank Tremain was tanned, veins prominent on hands and temples. His face was etched. He was trim everywhere but in the belly, which jutted. Though tight at the beltline, his trousers were baggy and his shirt partly untucked in the back. His weapon was not an efficient autoloader like every other cop in the universe sports, but a wheel gun, a revolver that held six rounds at most, maybe five. His boots were pointed and scuffed. His long face was lined not from age but from the out of doors.

Cowboy one . . .

He was chewing something, as, squinting, he looked around the park, face astute.

Then, briefly surprised to note her presence, he went still and his eyes remained on her as she approached.

“Well, the famous Constant Marlowe.”

The heads of those around Tremain turned. Marlowe nodded to them.

“All the way from Chicago.”

She’d been in Springfield. She didn’t correct him.

Tremain stepped past the others. His long face remained expressionless. “That’s it for me, hm? We fumble and BRK strikes again. So they bring in the big guns.”

“Nobody fumbled.” She said this because she might need him, not because it was true. “I’ve had experience, these sort of things.”

The man now offered some emotion, a look that might mean: keep your condescension to yourself, woman.

“Joint task force?” he asked.

“No.” Sealing his demotion.

It was tobacco, not gum. He turned and spit into the grass.

“K. I got stuff to do. You’ll need somebody local. Princess!” he called, his raspy voice rising in volume.

A sturdy woman of about thirty, in a deputy uniform, turned and gave no reaction to the blunt summons. She had a round, pretty face with large, dark eyes and a dusky complexion. Black hair, ponytailed.

He didn’t introduce them but left it to the two women.

“Watseka Eventide. I go by Zosette. Or Zo.”

“Constant Marlowe.”

“Brief the expert,” Tremain muttered angrily. “And don’t forget EB.”

“Yessir.”

He wandered off, to handle whatever “stuff” needed handling.

“Sheriff,” Marlowe called. She wasn’t here to cut off the snake’s head. She had questions for him and needed advice, thoughts.

“Princess’ll help you.” He waved a hand, spit and hiked to his car.

“He’s sort of that way sometimes, Agent Marlowe,” Eventide said.

“‘Princess’?”

“He started calling me that on the phone before he knew I was Indigenous. Then after we met, he decided—I’m guessing—that if he stopped calling me ‘Princess,’ that’d be racist. I could care less.”

“Call me Constant.” Without an explanation for the name. “I wanted to ask him about the forensics.”

“Done. Report should be at the office by now.”

Fast for a small town. The other question, which she kept to herself: Were the results any good?

“What did he mean by ‘EB’?”

“Eagle Brotherhood. A neo-Nazi crew. They hover around Morgantown. More Nazi than neo.”

“I read the NCIC on Monday’s murder.”

Today’s was the second victim of the perp the press had labeled BRK, Bludgeon, Rape and Kill. The first, Abigail Bills, had died three days ago.

Marlowe continued, “The MO is not survivalist/skinhead behavior.”

“I know. I took CE courses in profiling at the academy last year. Quantico.”

FBI.

Members of extremist political groups, even those inclined to commit deadly hate crimes, tend not to profile for homicidal sexual assault. In fact, it’s those crews that can be counted on for prison yard justice when it comes to sex offenders.

Eventide explained, “But Frank’s been looking for an excuse to put the leaders in Alton Max. His theory is it might be one of the Hitler Youth went renegade and he’s BRK.”

Marlowe was doubtful. “Abigail and Kelly . . .” The victims here. “They were white and the surnames don’t sound Jewish.”

“No, but Frank’s convinced himself they’re the go-to source of bad in the county.”

“Any leads linking the Eagles to either crime?”

“No.”

“Bottom of the list.” Marlowe wondered how Eventide would feel about taking orders from a newcomer. No problem apparently. She jotted a note and looked up cheerfully.

“TOD?” Marlowe asked.

“We make it noon, give or take.”

“Who found her?”

“She was jogging. Over there . . . You’ll see. Man on lunch break from Cargill, out for a run himself . . . I know, I know: not unheard of for the perp to report it.”

If you’re unhinged enough to commit murder, you’re unhinged enough to behave in either irrational or searingly narcissistic I’ll-never-get-caught ways.

“He had a platinum alibi. But even before I checked I knew. Easy to read.”

“Kinesics?”

“Body language? No. Well, yes. I guess. He puked. He took me to the body, looked at her and puked.”

Not easy to fake, Marlowe assumed.

“And where is she?”

“Medical examiner released her, but she’s still at the site.” Eventide nodded to a van, BCME printed on the side. A middle-aged woman in overalls leaned against the dented metal. Reading her phone, she was smoking. Marlowe used to. Tough to give up.

Marlowe looked to the eastern half of the parking lot, roped off by police tape. A half dozen reporters stood dutifully behind the line. In small towns, unlike cities, journalists don’t shout and bluster and jockey for camera position. Refreshing.

“Any description, the unsub?”

“Six feet, dark hair, size ten and a half shoes, weight one eighty to two ten. White. That was all crime scene. No witnesses.”

Marlowe said, “Kelly’s body. Show me.”

They started through a large swath of grass and trees that had been cordoned off with yet more yellow tape, here fluttering hypnotically in the breeze, like those optical-effects banners outside used car dealerships.

As they walked, Deputy Eventide said, “So this’s number two in three days. People’re worked up. Mike’s Gunshop’ll be out of ammo and pepper spray by closing time tonight.”

As they approached the site, Marlowe saw that the crime scene team had been good. They’d roped off the entire jogging path for a hundred yards on either side of the corpse, far more than most CSUs would have searched.

She paused, studied the forest around her and then stepped forward.

Kelly Nader lay under a green plastic tarp.

Donning gloves, Marlowe crouched and pulled the covering away.

The young woman, about five six, Marlowe’s height, lay face up on the path, face to her left—toward Marlowe. Her unseeing eyes were aimed at a purple flowering plant whose species the agent did not know.

This crime was similar to Monday’s—Marlowe had listened to the report on the drive here, via a pdf reading program. The killer had struck Kelly from behind on the crown of her head with a heavy object about an inch and a half in diameter. Several more blows resulted in her death by blunt force trauma. The cracked bone had horribly deformed what would have been quite the pretty face.

Her sports bra and T-shirt were tugged up. Her spandex shorts, black and purple, had been pulled off, as had a pair of off-white panties. One Adidas running shoe was on a white stockinged foot; the other was some feet away. She wore rings and a necklace. It held a diamond. Robbery was not one of the motives.

“The ME have an opinion?”

“Penile rape, not a substitute. Condom. Crime scene already has the brand—from the lubricant.”

Marlowe rose and made a 360-degree circuit, carefully studying the scene. Large swathes of dense forest were to the south, north and west. The park—with parking lot and picnic area and expanse of mown grass—was east. That clearing ended in a line of forest and, beyond, what seemed like marshland.

Impossible to see if anything had been disturbed, given the foliage. If one were intent on murdering someone and not leaving visible signs of approach and escape, this would be ground zero.

A final glance at the poor woman. Then Marlowe covered her again and rose.

A momentary thought: Tremain wouldn’t’ve called her in after the first killing—he’d keep his kingdom wrapped up tight—but someone at IDCI in Springfield might have.

This was exactly the sort of crime Marlowe made her specialty. She would have dropped anything and headed to Bowman County; if she had, would she have gotten leads to BRK sufficient to collar him, or at least gotten close enough to make him rethink today’s attack?

And avoided Kelly’s death?

For that matter, she herself could have scoured the wire, as she sometimes did, looking for crimes involving perps like this.

But she hadn’t.

Blame, though, had no place in investigations.

“The jogger who found her. He see anything at all helpful?”

“No vehicles, other than hers. No people. Oh, and the alibi? I pulled GPS from his car. He was in Anderson. His cell provider geolocated the phone right where he said he was. I confirmed it was him on the phone because I got a voice print of a message he left at 12:02. It matched his vocal profile.”

Well, Initiative Girl . . .

Marlowe was again looking around the cluttered woods, viny and stoked with leaves, saplings dying from encroaching parents, which stole sustenance and blocked out the sun.

“Where?” she said softly.

Eventide looked her way.

“How did he get to her? That’s the key.”

Where always was.

Where the perp lived, where they found the victim, where the would-be victim escaped . . .

Where got you who.

Sometimes it got you why but that didn’t interest Constant Marlowe much, and in this case, there wasn’t much doubt as to motive.

Where?

The forensic team would have good imagery of the tread of his shoes and that might prove to be of some help. What Marlowe was far more interested in was his vehicle, where tire treads and wheelbase and, occasionally, oil and gas and antifreeze leaks can lead directly to unsubs’ front doors.

She wanted to know: Where had he parked to start his hunt?

In her mind Marlowe made a chart, as she often did when considering the geography of a crime scene.

North

West Crime Scene Parking Lot East

South

She explained this technique to Eventide, who lifted an eyebrow, as if memorizing the idea. The deputy said, “Plenty of soft dirt in the parking lot and we didn’t find any of his shoe prints there. Or the stream. So he didn’t come that way.” She pointed.

At the eastern side of the park was a tributary that ran north and south. The muddy banks were three or four feet wide; no one could have crossed without leaving prints.

“South?” Eventide continued. “We searched a hundred yards both sides of where her car was on the pull-off. No Cross-Fits.”

“What was the ground like there?”

“Some gravel, some asphalt. Mud in a few places. If he really wanted to avoid leaving prints, he could’ve found a way to track her without leaving sign.”

Sign. The word hunters use to mean tracks left by prey.

Marlowe asked, “North and west?”

“We haven’t looked there. Not yet.”

So the “where” chart had been modified.

North (To be searched)

West (To be searched) Crime Scene Parking Lot (No) East (No)

South (Unlikely but possible)

Eventide said, “Oh, and if you’re wondering, our Public Affairs officer’s putting out a request for witnesses.” She shrugged. “We know how that goes, but maybe somebody’ll surprise us and step up.”

“I need a gas station, the closest.”

Eventide said, “That’d be Dunham’s. But BP’s a dime less. Five miles but definitely worth the drive if you fill up.”

“No. I’ll go with Dunham’s.”

Smiling, Eventide said, “That’s good of you.”

Marlowe looked at her quizzically.

“Supporting local. Not the chains.”

Oh, retail loyalty. An idea that had never occurred to Constant Marlowe.