Chapter 4: Paranoia

Day 8, Friday

The receptionist looked up at the man who came in through the heavy plate glass doors. He looked a little disheveled, but it was late in the day and maybe he was running late for a meeting. “Welcome to Passionate Allure. How can we help you?” The receptionist said.

Roger Drebin said, “I want to speak to Jacqui Watson.”

“We don’t have a Jacqui Watson here, sir. Did you make an appointment to meet somebody?” Kelsey Miller answered,

“I want to speak to Jacqui Watson! She’s one of your writers. Where is she?” the man demanded.

“Sir, nobody here is named Watson. You say she’s one of our writers?” Kelsey knew that many of the authors for Passionate Allure wrote under pseudonyms, and she didn’t know all their pen names.

“Yes! Where is she?”

“Sir, our authors don’t work here. They mostly work at home and send their work in. We simply handle editing and publishing.” Something sounded off about this guy.

Drebin leaned over the receptionist’s desk. “Where is she? I want to see somebody! I want her editor!”

“Mister Reedling has gone home for the day. It’s late, sir.” She reached under the desk and hit a button to call Security.

“What’s his name?”

“Sir, I have to ask you to leave. We are closing for the day, sir.”

Drebin grabbed what looked like a printed phone directory off her desk. Harrison X. Reedling was listed as a senior editor and had an extension printed. Seconds later, however, it was torn from his hand by a large and powerful man in gray trousers and a blue blazer. Passionate Allure Publishing didn’t have a major security problem, but you didn’t work in a Manhattan office complex without having a security office and plan. There were just too many nuts out there. “You need to leave, sir!” The guard effortlessly twisted Drebin’s arm behind his back and moved him out the door. A second security guard, similarly dressed, stood guard at the door while the first took Drebin to the elevator and rode with him to the ground level. He was pushed out of the front door and the guard told somebody at the front information desk not to let him back in.

Roger Drebin needed to find Jacqui Watson. His wife was constantly reading her books and it was obvious that Watson was sending her secret messages. Watson had told Teresa to have four abortions and divorce him. He had already taken care of the fucking shrink and his fucking wife. Now he needed to take care of the fucking writer. If the secretary was right, Watson could be anywhere. He needed to find the fucking editor. Once he explained it to him, the editor would tell him where to find the writer. Where would he find Reedling?

The days of finding a New York City phone book and looking up an address were long gone. Phone books had gone digital. He needed a smart phone. Drebin walked down the street until he saw a woman walking into a parking garage. She would have a phone. He could explain the problem to her. He waited until she went to a late model Sonata and walked up behind her. “Excuse me, I need your phone.”

The woman turned to face him. She had been talking on her phone and not paying attention when a wild-eyed man came up behind her. “Go away.”

“I need your phone!”

“Get away from me!”

“Give me the phone!”

“HELP! HELP!”

Why wouldn’t she help him? He needed the phone! The woman wasn’t very big, so Drebin simply hit her and knocked her down. He didn’t really notice that when she fell, she hit her head on a steel-and-concrete post. She had been talking on a Bluetooth earpiece and that became dislodged. He rooted through her purse and found the phone. That was when he noticed she wasn’t moving. SHIT! Why weren’t things working out right? He found her key fob, hit the button to open her trunk, and dragged her around to the rear. It was a pain, but he lifted her up and tossed her inside. Then he went back to the driver’s door and got inside. He needed to leave before some nosy busybody got involved.

Drebin drove a few blocks and pulled into an empty spot in front of a fire hydrant. He took the phone and called up a phone directory. He couldn’t find a Harrison X Reedling in New York City. There was a Harrison J and a Harrison L, but no Harrison X. Still, a lot of people lived outside of Manhattan and commuted in for work; they called it the bridge-and-tunnel set. He expanded his search, first to the upstate area, then to Connecticut, and finally to New Jersey. He hit paydirt with Harrison X. Reedling of Chatham, New Jersey. He selected the address and called up a map app. Then it was off to New Jersey. He simply needed to explain to Mister Reedling that he needed help.

Day 12, Tuesday

Detective Sergeant Bryce Yancey couldn’t blame the Morris County Sheriff’s Deputy for losing his lunch. At least he had been able to run from the house before tossing up a week’s worth of meals; he hadn’t contaminated the crime scene. Scenes, actually. This was a messy one, and messier than the deputy knew.

The deputy got involved on Tuesday morning when the Chatham Borough Police Department received a call from Harrison Reedling’s employer asking for a wellness check on one of their employees. The department was small and didn’t have the manpower, so they kicked it to the Morris County Sheriff’s Office. It wasn’t that unusual a request, and usually involved somebody on a bender sleeping it off. Still, a two-day bender was a bit more than the norm, so a deputy was routed to the address. Chatham Borough was one of the more expensive suburbs in a state filled with expensive suburbs, with the average house price being over a million dollars. The employer was in Manhattan, so whoever this Reedling guy was, he was probably pretty senior. Nobody needed the grief.

The deputy parked and looked around. There were two cars in the driveway, a new Lexus, and a slightly older Sonata with New York plates. He walked up to the front door and hit the doorbell and knocked but didn’t get a response. He tried the doorknob and was surprised to find it unlocked. He entered, calling out that he was a police officer, but still got no response. Then he saw a blood spatter in the hallway. He pulled his service weapon and slowly moved closer. The spatter was near a door that looked to go to the basement. He opened the door slowly and look down the stairs, to find a crumpled body at the bottom. That was enough to call it in, and then he slowly went down the stairs.

A man’s body was taped into a chair, and it looked like he had been tortured. Blood was everywhere. It reminded him of a summer job he’d once had in a slaughterhouse, a job he’d quit after the first day. He ran out of the house and vomited onto a hedge.

The deputy’s sergeant took one look at the scene and told his lieutenant, a man who trusted the sergeant’s judgement, to call in the State Police. That wasn’t an unusual request for the troopers, who were used to backing up smaller towns and counties. A trooper took one look and called in a sergeant and detectives from Troop B. Then it got worse. While walking the perimeter, he heard buzzing around the Sonata and smelled something he didn’t want to smell. He delayed doing anything until the reinforcements arrived, and then popped the trunk. They quickly closed it again. A woman was decomposing inside.

Day 14, Thursday

It was up to Bryce Yancey to sort out, and it wasn’t going to be easy. It had been two days since the bodies were discovered, and all that had been discovered were more questions. A rush priority was assigned to the medical examiner. The man tied to a chair in the basement and tortured was Harrison X. Reedling, 57, a senior editor at the publishing house in Manhattan that had called in his disappearance. The ME said he died Friday evening. The woman at the bottom of the stairs was his wife, Madeline Samantha Reedling, 56, an executive with Verizon who had been in Chicago for two days. There were several texts and voicemails from wife to husband requesting he pick her up Friday evening at Newark airport, growing increasingly insistent as the evening went on, followed by her ordering up an Uber to take her home. The driver remembered her as being very pissed at the failure of her husband to pick her up. The driver was questioned about his schedule, but he had a fare at the time the ME was figuring for the husband’s death, so unless there was a second killer, he was innocent. Finally, the woman in the trunk was Tracy Marie Schoenstein, 34, of Ramapo, New York, in Rockland County. She had gone into Manhattan to see friends, but they hadn’t seen her. The ME had determined that she had probably been killed before the Reedlings, though a weekend cooking in the trunk of her car made that more questionable.

The crime scene itself had almost as many questions. The Reedlings had three children, but they were grown and living on their own. Since they weren’t at home any longer, who had been living in the second bedroom? When the technical division finished their investigation, three sets of fingerprints were found, both the Reedlings and a third set. That third set was identified when Yancey ran it through the NCIC national database and found they belonged to Roger Drebin. Drebin had killed two people on Long Island the week before and then had disappeared. What did two people in Nassau County, a housewife from Rockland County visiting Manhattan, and two people in Morris County, one of whom worked in Manhattan, have to do with each other? What did a book editor do that involved being tortured to death?

It was time to kick it up to a higher level. Yancey called the FBI field office in Newark. It was either going to involve the Newark office or the much larger New York City office in Manhattan. Still, when they needed assistance, they usually called Newark.

Unlike on television, the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not normally get involved in murder investigations. They did not have elite teams of superagents who flew in on sleek jets to help the silly and stupid locals. They normally didn’t even get involved in murders. Murder was almost always a state crime. There were exceptions, of course, such as a murder of a federal law enforcement officer or a federal official, or when a murder was committed during a federal crime, such as a bank robbery. Otherwise, they simply provided support to the local police force by managing the NCIC and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, the people who investigated serial killings. Still, whoever this Roger Drebin character was, he had killed five people in three counties in two states. At a minimum, that made it unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, a federal crime.

Special Agent Clarence Bellinger of the Newark office was assigned the task of sorting out the mess. The Manhattan office considered themselves too important to handle a mere five murders; they handled international terrorism and organized crime. Murder was left up to lesser agents in the lesser offices. Bellinger rolled his eyes as his boss informed him of the attitude at the New York field office; it wasn’t something either man hadn’t heard before. Bellinger went back to his office and called up the files on the five murders, and then contacted an analyst at the NCAVC in Quantico.

It was obvious to both men, that the first two deaths were related. A nut case decided to go off his meds and then killed his psych worker, followed by his ex-wife. Then there were the last two deaths, the Reedlings. The husband had been tortured and killed before his wife. Her death seemed to be because she came home while Drebin was still there, so he simply killed her to keep her quiet. What was the link between the first two murders with the last two? Why did he kill Schoenstein? Was it a carjacking? Did she have something to do with the other four? Why did Drebin stay in the house for two days after the torture and murder? The evidence was clear that he stole Madeline Reedling’s Mercedes Monday morning and drove away. It had been found abandoned at a bus station in Princeton.

The analyst, Doctor Richard Guarino, in Quantico didn’t have any immediate answers for Bellinger, but he was able to eliminate some possibilities. Drebin had no history of sexual violence or deviancy before this. Most serial killers had a specific type of victim, maybe all young blonde women in their mid-twenties who frequented a specific type of bar or club, or young male prostitutes in their teens. There might be a specific weapon or method of killing, a type of location or occupation, or means of disposal. Whatever was driving Drebin was not one of the standard motivations.

Bellinger and Guarino did have an interesting conversation discussing the linkage between the murders. Guarino asked, “Did you find Schoenstein’s phone? Any indication where she was staying or parking in Manhattan? That’s not a place noted for lots of parking spots.”