Page 104 of Stalker

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Cassandra

Another woman had been killed.

She’d been kidnapped from her office, taken to an undisclosed location, bound and kept, eventually found dead. That had come from the morning news. It was both what hadn’t been said and what had been assumed that was even worse.

Her body had been brutalized with no details given and fingers were pointing that Drew Monahan couldn’t be the killer.

There was no reason for me to place any credence into the thoughts racing through my head, the ugly concept that Wilder had something to do with the crimes. That wasn’t him. Then who was it and why did I have a terrible feeling that the murders had everything to do with the Blackwell brothers?

Nightmares.

I’d slept very little after my confrontation with David. I’d even considered confessing my sins to my boss, but instead, I’d gone into the office as if nothing was wrong.

Between the experience online the night before and David’s threat, I remained on pins and needles. I’d even thought about what other cities I could move to so I could get another job. It was crazy. I wasn’t a quitter, but my ex had meant what he’d said. I just needed to figure out how best to handle the news when it surfaced.

My only ammunition was doing so with grace and truth.

Then I’d kill the man.

Ha. Wouldn’t that be an illustrious addition to my career?

Right now, I was concentrating on learning everything I could about the Blackwell brothers. It had suddenly become a vendetta, a need so strong I’d given up sleeping at three and had spent a few additional hours surfing the internet and going through the files once again with meticulous precision.

I pulled my car down the woman’s street and sighed.

It was funny how people reacted to being threatened with prosecution if they didn’t provide what I was looking for. I’d done so many times over the years with great success, even if my threat had been empty.

Most people didn’t want to get into any kind of trouble, just like so few ever stepped in to stop a victim from being hurt or worse. The excuse was they didn’t want to get involved, but I knew it was something much darker, their inner psyche hungering to taste the outcome. They craved to experience a moment of heinous activity if only from afar.

Yet they never allowed themselves to be put in a place where they could be caught doing so.

I’d successfully used the tactic once again in my effort to discover if any of the original case or social workers from the foster care system remained alive and in the area. There’d been a single name I’d found buried in the paperwork provided by Mr. Wells.

Jeanine Franklin.

Jeanine had been a young woman early in her career when the three Demarco children had arrived in the system. That had been six months before a petition had been placed in front of a judge to legally change their surnames to their mother’s birth name. Under the guise of protection of course.

Sadly, from what I’d been able to piece together, even though the judge had locked down the children’s files, as usual, people talked. It had taken me hours, but I’d found a single article out of the dozens written on Cain Demarco that had divulged the three children’s names and that they’d been taken into foster care.

That had set up a tragic set of circumstances in which people came out of the woodwork to foster them.

So many under the guise of protecting them while exploiting them instead. When the fifteen minutes of fame had passed, the first set of ‘parents’ had grown bored and additional families had stepped forward. Then onto a third. While the documentation from there was sketchy based on another judge getting involved, that’s when trouble had started.

In almost every case, something tragic had occurred within the foster families, the father figures either disappearing or dying. However, the circumstances were so sketchy, the few police reports that had been issued providing nothing but circumstantial information. Not even evidence.

In other words, people had swept the entire nasty business under several rugs.

As I headed down the cracked sidewalk toward the quaint house with lovely pots filled with flowers and a nice swing on the front porch, I couldn’t help but wonder if the children had ever experienced a normal family situation.

My guess was they hadn’t.

Jeanine lived outside the city, the forty-minute drive filling my head with more questions than I’d had before.

I rang the bell, immediately hearing the bark of what sounded like a small dog. The woman answering the door appeared slightly haggard, the fluffy white dog I’d heard barking up a storm behind her.

“Yes?” Her cheeks were gaunt, her eyes filled with sadness, and her expression was wary.

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