Ten Plagues

When she got off the phone, Paul said, “I’ll bet you anything a gnat lands on someone from PETA, they swat the itchy little pest just like everyone else.”

“Who’d have thought you could order a case of gnats.” Keren shook her head in wonder. “This really is a great country, isn’t it?”

“Let’s get the paperwork in order and start tracking this down. It’s possible he’s ordering from out of town, so we’d better find out quick if we need to expand our search.”

“O’Shea’s out trying to narrow down the exact location where Melody Fredericks got hit. He’s hoping to find a witness. It’s up to us to check out the labs.” Keren grabbed her last clean blazer off the back of her chair. She had to go shopping, and she wasn’t spending money on good clothes ever again. “Let’s head for the first one. The search warrants will be waiting for us by the time we get down to the front desk. I’m getting unbelievable cooperation on this case.”

She shoved her arms into her blazer. Paul helped her slip it on, then he lifted her hair out of the collar. She had put it in its usual messy bun this morning, but she had a nagging headache after breathing formaldehyde all through the autopsy. She’d let it loose, hoping that would help. It hadn’t.

But finding out this company might have an address on their perp did. She glanced over her shoulder. “Thanks. I get used to being treated like one of the guys.”

Paul rested his hands on her shoulders. “We’re due a break in this case. Maybe this is it.”

They picked up the search warrants and headed to the police parking garage. Paul’s phone rang. They both froze. It was the first call they’d gotten from Caldwell since they’d found Melody Fredericks’s body.

“Let me call Higgins.” Keren had the agent on speed dial. “Maybe we can get a trace on this loon.”

Paul backed against a cement block wall while his phone rang and Keren talked.

“Do you have the recorder ready?”

She took a glance at Paul when she heard the detached tone in his voice. He was in full cop mode. Keren finished talking to Higgins and pressed the required buttons on her phone.

Paul stared at his LCD panel. “Caller ID says he’s using a new number. Why don’t people keep better track of their phones?”

She remembered the last time he’d talked to Caldwell in this mood and dreaded what she was going to hear. “Higgins said to try to keep him talking. Tracking a cell phone doesn’t take long.” She took a deep breath and said, “Okay, answer it.”

Paul flipped the phone open. “Morris.”

Keren listened on her own phone and stepped closer to Paul, as if she could protect him from the oily voice that was taunting him.

“You have been a very bad boy, Francis.” Paul didn’t sound like he needed protection.

Keren gave him a frantic shake of her head. Of course, it was too late.

There was an extended silence on the phone. Finally, when Caldwell spoke, it wasn’t with his usual cultured tone. His voice had the snarl of an angry beast. “So you finally figured it out, did you? I suppose it was inevitable. But you proved to be so stupid before, I really doubted if you’d ever identify me.

“There you were, ranting and raving about my careless driving.” Caldwell’s voice lightened as he reminisced. “What a pathetic excuse you were for a policeman.”

A laugh erupted from the phone so shrill Keren jerked the phone away from her ear.

“The truth is, I planned for your wife and child to die months before I finally killed them. I thought of every detail. I savored watching them and learning about them. Your wife was very careless about closing her curtains, you know. You could train her to be more modest, if she were still alive. I even arranged for you to be living away from home. I planted the evidence your wife found that made her throw you out of the house. You got angry when she accused you of being unfaithful, but you never asked yourself where she got that idea. I watched the two of you fight. A few times I watched … when you didn’t fight.”

Paul’s eyes were neutral, cool. He didn’t react to this sick invasion of privacy.

“I’m surprised you could stand to touch her, Reverend,” Caldwell went on. “Your wife was not a nice woman. She deserved everything that happened to her. I created the whole thing … the car trouble, the battery failing on her cell phone. I slipped in behind her at the dance recital, got her purse from under her folding chair, took her battery out, and returned everything. No one saw me in the dark auditorium. I even took pains to keep you away from that school program, so you wouldn’t be there to help. Having her husband be a policeman made it all the sweeter. Even then, I was controlling you like a god.”

“Why them?” Paul sounded angry now, but it was a cold kind of anger, all the more frightening for the depth and control he exerted over it. “Why kill my wife and daughter?”

“Your wife worked at the art gallery where I wanted to display my work. She humiliated me, when she should have been kissing my feet for doing her the honor of choosing her.”