Finnegan sat at his desk reviewing file after file. He had read each one several times. He had a complete, if devastating, picture of a woman who had been killing people since she was a teen. The techs had found more deaths surrounding her life. Three children had gone missing from her high school during the time she was enrolled there. Their bodies were found in fields and woods but the only conclusion from the local police was that they had a deranged killer preying on their children.
Finnegan had called and talked to an officer who was involved in the investigations at the time and he did not remember anyone thinking it might be a child doing these killings. A dead end. He asked how the children had died. One was found with a rope around his neck. Another was found tied to a tree with a piece of plastic wrapped around his head covering his mouth and nose. The third had been found totally naked with a stick shoved so far up his rectum that his stomach had been pierced. He had bled to death and died in obvious agony. All of the victims had been fourteen year old boys. Yes, the officer did believe a wily, athletic young girl could have had the strength to do the killing provided she could charm the boys into doing what she wanted.
Circumstantial. Still, the count was now at five hundred and one. 501. Finnegan felt it in his bones that he was not crazy. These murders were all related. Somehow a demented little girl had escaped notice and grown up into a raging lunatic of a woman who went about perpetrating who knows what horrors on innocent people. He thought about the three husbands who were murdered and amended his thought. Innocent people except for whatever perceived thing they did to Brenda. He was sure she had a reason for every one of them. They had all done something to deserve her notice. That notice had gotten them killed
Brenda Welsh had been taken to a foster home and it put her in another school district. While the killings ceased back at her old school district, two students were killed in her new one by the time Brenda graduated. A sixteen year old boy in her junior year and a seventeen year old girl in her senior year. Both had been found naked and lying in displayed positions at a local teen hangout by a lake. Both were assumed to have been sexually active because of their reputations around school and both had been genitally mutilated after being asphyxiated by some means not readily apparent at the autopsy. Both had been left with one foot in the water and one out as thought the killer was trying to make some statement relative to their deaths.
503. Finnegan tried looking at the cases from the point of view of the locals and decided he would not have seen the link either. There was nothing in the cases to link the first school killings with the second school killings so there was no reason to look for their killer with regards to being at both places. Brenda had been lucky as well as smart, if she had perpetrated all these killings, which he was more and more convinced she had.
Two years later, Brenda was working in a hair salon. One of her co-workers went missing. Maybe not damning evidence to some, but to cyber geeks on the hunt it was a red flag like waving a red cape in front of a bull. They dug until they discovered bills that had the missing woman's name on them and a young man's name. That same young man's name turned up a few weeks later on another billing with Brenda Welsh's. The geek's report suggested they had no doubt the missing woman was dead and that Brenda had killed her, hidden the body and consoled the grieving boyfriend.
504. Finnegan was growing weary of the count. He wanted to take action but had yet to receive anything actionable by a legal standard. He could have brought the woman in for questioning but had to admit to the captain that he didn't truly believe she would give up anything. The captain had forbid him to contact the woman without some kind of solid evidence. He knew the captain was being careful. But sometimes a little cage rattling got results. Again, though, he admitted to himself he was not sure he could rattle the cage of a woman who had killed over five hundred people.
The geeks found a reference to a suicide pact at a residence where Brenda Welsh was recently listed as abiding in. Seems she had moved out a week before her two roommates committed suicide. Finnegan called the officer in charge of the investigation and was promptly put through to a man who obviously did not believe the two girls had committed suicide.
Rat poison was found in a box of cereal the girls were eating. The box was only recently opened and pressure to close the case caused a hurried decision to call it a suicide pact since both girls had just lost their boyfriends in a car accident. Yes, the officer had talked with Brenda Welsh. Yes, he had gotten a good picture of the young, straight forward, driven woman he had met. From his description, Finnegan believed he had gotten more than just Brenda's name for the interview. The man was obviously a fan of hers, smitten no doubt by the beauty others had described her as. A characteristic that had sidetracked more than one investigation where her name came up.
When asked why Brenda had moved from the house, he said she said that her roommates were always getting into her food. The officer on the other end could not see Finnegan's eyebrows raise at the obvious motive. Well, at least obvious to the man who was researching a temperamental killer who killed as wantonly as others changed their socks. With no reason to suspect her the officer had done what everyone would have done. Admired the beautiful young woman, taken her statement and moved on to important things. He was tempted to ask the officer if he had ever dated Brenda but thought better of it. No need to know, really. Besides. The man was still alive. Chances are he did not.
When the geeks researched the accident that killed the two boyfriends they found another police station involved in another town. That officer did not remember the accident at all. He did send Finnegan his file on it, though. A straight froward accident. Two young men in a car traveling at a high rate of speed. Both were thrown from the car when they went off the road and hit a tree in a dense section of woods outside of town. They were on their way back from a job they did for a local merchant every Saturday. The only anomaly reported was a small pile of hay in the road just before the scene of the accident. The report indicated that farmers sometimes used the road to move their equipment and such. It suggested that maybe a farmer had been in the road on the tight turn and the boys had skidded off the road to avoid an accident. A subsequent questioning of local farmers turned up nothing. None of them were out on that road that evening. There was one witness who had come forward to say they had seen a truck with hay on it when they drove on that road earlier. Nothing was ever discovered to say the truck was there or not. Besides, the timing would have put the hay truck on the road at least an hour before the boys came down it.
508. Maybe. A week ago Finnegan would have had a problem tying such circumstantial evidence into one of his investigation. Not now. Too obvious. Brenda Welsh had a pattern too easy to see in hindsight. Everyone who got in her way or slighted her ended up dead. She was the proverbial woman with no enemies. She killed them all. He wondered if the boys had done something to anger her or if they were just a way of getting at the girls. However it came about he had no doubt the boys had been forced off the road by some obstacle at a point where they would have been inclined to travel too fast for the blind conditions of the roadway. Finnegan marveled at the planning that was needed to think up such a murder. Brenda was no ordinary killer. She reasoned things out, planned them and then carried them out with a precision that would make a general proud. Too bad she was a criminal.
He contrasted Brenda's planing against Daniels letter. Daniel claimed to not be a planner. Maybe he was distancing himself from his mother in that characteristic. More than likely she had told him he was not a planner to further show how good she was at it. However it went, Daniel was not his mother. The interesting thing is that Daniel seems to have some awareness of his mother's activities and continued to think of himself as the perpetrator. That was very strange to Finnegan's way of thinking.
Soon after the girl's suicide, Brenda had met Freddy Morgan and that's when Daniel finally enters the picture. Brenda had spent her life controlling things
even if it meant killing people. With Daniel's birth she had a new thing to control. Finnegan wondered if she ever loved the boy. He wondered if she was capable of love. He hoped for the boy's sake that she had her moments. Otherwise Daniel had lived a tormented, fruitless life as the pawn of a ruthless killer who somehow put off her ugly acts on her son. He could not imagine what it was like living with such a knowledge in his head. Daniel, a passive, non aggressive young man from all accounts, would have been driven crazy just trying to balance whatever his mother was telling him with how he really felt about things. It made Finnegan mad. As much as she destroyed those she murdered, she tortured Daniel for her own ends. Despicable. He had to find a way to make her pay. He had to balance things out. He had to make this make sense. For himself, if not for Daniel.