When I saw the address Mira sent me, I cursed. Motherfucker. I hate it when I’m right. Turning the car on, I rolled my neck, cracking it, as the stress I’d woken up without started to build back up.
Then I headed for the ice skating rink where the 2010 state championship team used to practice.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mal
I was standing backin the conference room, staring at my whiteboard.
I could see it. It was so simple and yet so diabolical. There were still missing pieces, but I could see it all.
On Thursday, February 18, 2010, a young high school student in Atelihai Valley, Holly Marteen, was attacked by her fellow students. After being raped, she was found by the high school janitor, Jason Kadeer, locked in a pillory and naked on the auditorium stage. He called 911. Responding EMTs, Parker Shah and Cordelia Young, rushed her to the hospital, where Dr. Peter Sorgin and Nurse Roberta Quinn performed a sexual assault forensic exam and contacted the police. Sheriff Clyde Renfrew arrived with two other officers, Myles Hansen and Troy Allis. There, he took the statement that would never make it into an official report.
Something had prevented the sheriff from filing charges against the students she’d named as her attackers. I didn’t know that specific detail yet, but for the time being, it didn’t matter. The rape kit that was thought to be destroyed was actually secure in Sheriff Renfrew’s lockbox, along with all the photos thehospital had taken of young Holly. The rape kit was now on its way to the FBI’s forensic lab.
Money was placed in Genelle and Allen Marteen’s bank accounts and the upside-down mortgage on their house was paid off within weeks of the attack.
The sheriff’s notes from his lockbox stated that there were fourteen students who attacked Holly Marteen, but I had already proven that to be false. The man had left his own son off of the list. The micro-SD card from a cell phone registered under Sheriff Renfrew and his wife, Annabeth, was also discovered in the lockbox. On the card was all the evidence needed to condemn Emmet Renfrew as not only one of the rapists, but the instigator of the attack.
Ten of her attackers were on the hockey team scheduled to participate in the state championship tournament the following weekend. Now that I had names and ways to look into their lives, I recognized the pattern of their deaths. They were dying by their worstfears. While five of the hockey players’ bodies had been discovered, only four had been identified.
Christopher Harrow had a fear of spiders and his body was covered in tarantula bites. His heart had literally given out on him. Further evidence of the connection between the two cases, Harrow’s body had been staged on the exact same auditorium stage where fifteen years ago Holly Marteen had been discovered. It was a good chance he’d also been in the same pillory, but forensics had yet to confirm that suspicion of mine.
John Wise had a fear of dogs. He’d been leashed like one before being strung up in a Piquet. Then staged to make it look like he was being attacked by dogs. I was not surprised that real dogs were not used in his torture, as it had already been proven by Cordelia Young’s dog miraculously escaping her apartment the night of her carbon monoxide leak that the killer was not interested in hurting animals.
Wyatt Butler had a severe banana allergy. Based on Dr. Robinson’s report, he’d recently had a number of anaphylactic shocks. He had also been alive when he’d been glued inside that gorilla suit and had died from having an exorbitant amount of scolding hot banana pudding being poured down his throat.
Andy Martell had a gluten allergy. His body had been near emaciated from starvation and then he’d been submerged in beer, where he drowned and remained for a number of days. Dr. Robinson would even go as high as a week.
The one from this morning had been discovered stuffed inside a metal box a grown human male shouldnothave been able to fit inside and placed in the center of the Atelihai Valley’s biggest ice rink, where the high school team still practiced to this day.
I looked at the now completed list of—I paused. It churned my stomach to call them ‘victims’. It seemed like a dishonor to Holly Marteen to use that term. Instead, I mentally called them ‘rapists’.
I’d bet my extensive bondage collection that the man inside the box was not Emmet Renfrew. My gut told me, as the instigator, he would be further down the list.
Of the missing, the choices were Roman Fitzwilliam, Sam Keene, or Jesse Ritter-Hogan. One of their names was about to go from the middle of my board to the left.
My eyes landed on Amber Jamison’s picture. There were fifteen attackers, despite the former sheriff’s notes that there were only fourteen. The gang mentality of the hockey players was not the first in history, which did not excuse their actions in the slightest. However, I could not wrap my head around the fact that five of Holly Marteen’s attackers were girls.
From the video and pictures on the SD card, I knew that the girls had not raped her. In a fucked up twist, the girls had actedas if they were the audience of a hockey game. They’dcheered. They’d applauded.
I held no sympathy for Amber Jamison, who had been nearly cooked alive before her throat had been slit. Nor did I feel bad for Hannah Terwilliger, whose picture was still in the middle of my whiteboard.
Nine down, I thought.Six to go.
Alicia Cohen, Jerome Roberts, Rachel Steiner, Kaylee Collins, Jerald Kelly, and Emmet Renfrew.
The killer was over halfway done.
I looked to the right of my whiteboard. I had erased my initial column header ofSuspectsand had relabeled it asFirst Victim.
Holly Marteen’s ninth grade yearbook picture now hung in the center, enlarged and staring at me with aquamarine eyes. She was beautiful. So young, carefree. When this picture had been taken at the beginning of the school year, she had been fourteen. Long, thick brunette curls with a pink bow in her hair. Her smile was pure and innocent, completely unaware of the horror she would soon be facing.
The only accurate fact about the rumor my brother had told Mira and me about was that the high school girl had been pregnant prior to committing suicide. To the left of Holly’s picture was an old picture marred by liquid stains of a sonogram.
I didn’t know what happened to the baby. If he or she was alive, they would be fourteen years old. But I found no record of a birth. I did, however, find the death certificate for Holly Taylor Marteen. She’d hung herself in her bedroom on the year anniversary of her attack.
She’d been sixteen years old.
