Page 56 of Roark
“And I wasn’t keeping any. I told you everything that was going on, up until last night. It’s ten in the damn morning, man. Cut me some slack.” Roark may have been asking for slack, but really, he wasn’t giving Ridge much choice. He wasn’t going to defend himself against not telling him about the explosion again; the explanation he just gave would have to suffice.
“I think we have more serious things at stake,” Pierce stated evenly.
“Yeah,” Cade said, brushing his hands together because he didn’t have a napkin. “Here’s the thing. Our profile described Kaymen as an organized serial arsonist suffering from a psychotic break. Now, while we’re clear on the car accident/fire forty-five years ago. And the fact that his friends left him for dead in a burning car. That’s the central incident. But we still haven’t closed in on what the most recent stressor was that took him from just being angry at his friends to wanting to see each of them dead.”
“Okay, give me a second to catch up. The last status email I got from Roark was yesterday morning, and all it stated was that the fire investigator’s mother admitted she knew Mum and that you two had figured out there was a group of friends from college that connected Mum to the victims of the most recent fire. Now, we know who the killer is and we’re just sitting around here talking about it instead of going out to arrest his sorry ass.” Ridge was still angry.
“There was another fire in London last week, and it killed two more members of the group of friends. That’s how we know who the killer is.” Pierce was obviously irritated that he’d had to go over that part again.
“His name is Kaymen Benedict,” Roark said. “Does that ring any bells for you? Have you ever heard Mum talk about him?”
Ridge frowned. “No. I’ve never heard that name before.”
“Okay, you’re all caught up,” Pierce snapped. “Last night’s explosion is out of character for the killer we profiled.”
“What? He left a bomb with the hopes of killing my sister and my aunt. How is that out of character?” Roark asked.
Cade shook his head. “He doesn’t do bombs. He starts fires, and that’s probably because a part of him died in a fire. That explains why he wants his former friends to watch as he burns them alive, because they left him while he essentially did the same thing.”
Roark sighed. “I get that, but—”
“Changing his methods isn’t part of the profile,” Pierce said.
“Unless he’s devolving,” Cade added.
Ridge frowned. “He’s what?”
“Unraveling, rapidly losing all grip on reality because the scenario he set up to avenge his grievance is starting to go wrong. Sandra didn’t die in the fire he set at the cottage.” Cade’s expression was serious as he continued. “Then when he went to kill Ronnella McCoy, he stumbled across his other friend, Tony Graves.”
“How do you know he didn’t already know Graves was there with her?” Roark was listening to his cousin and to Pierce, trying to follow their line of thought.
“Because after I left the MPD yesterday, I drove to Hyde Park and questioned some of Ronnella McCoy’s friends. They said she wasn’t dating anyone and she wasn’t even supposed to be in town on the night of the fire. She’d been booked on a cruise but had cancelled for some reason. I checked out the cruise logs, and she was booked on a three-week Mediterranean cruise. My friend at the MPD had already performed a data dump on Ronnella and Tony’s phones. They’d been in contact on and off for the past three months, but almost every day in the past two weeks. Tony called her an hour before she was supposed to leave for the airport the morning of the cruise.”
“So she cancelled a cruise for a date and ended up dead.” Ridge rubbed a hand over his jaw. “What the hell is going on?”
“We’re thinking that maybe if your mother warned Lemuel and Sandra Rayder about Kaymen being alive, she would’ve also warned Ronnella and Tony. Now, they may not have believed her, just as the Rayders didn’t take it very seriously. But, there’s no way Ronnella wouldn’t have heard about your mother’s death; even if, by chance she and your mother had no other contact with each other, they lived close to each other, and news of the fire was in the local papers,” Pierce added.
“You think they were talking about the fires, wondering if it were Kaymen?” Roark asked.
Cade shrugged. “We’ll never know, but whatever was said on that last call made Ronnella cancel her trip and put both of them literally in the line of fire less than twelve hours later.”
“Now wait, you’re saying this guy is angry with his friends why?” Ridge asked. “I mean, who gets angry enough to go around killing people he hasn’t seen in however many years?”
Cade and Pierce looked to Roark and Roark sighed.
“Mum, Dad and their friends, they got drunk one night and there was an accident. They all got out of the car and ran away from the scene because they were underage. Kaymen Benedict didn’t get out.”
“What? You’re saying our parents, the ones who wouldn’t tolerate us even lying about not eating broccoli, left someone to die and never said anything.” Ridge was speaking the very thoughts Roark had yesterday after the conversation with Sandra.
“They were young and they all thought he was with them,” he said but then stopped because there wasn’t any more he could provide by way of an excuse. It was an awful thing to happen, but nothing they did or said at this moment was going to change it.
“Our current issue is figuring out Kaymen’s next move. His endgame,” Pierce said.
“He’ll want Sandra dead. She’s the last one, the only mistake he made. He’ll come for her,” Cade told them. “Now, whether he plans it to be a murder/suicide or he thinks he’s gonna walk away and somehow feel better about himself, I don’t much give a damn. My priority is to keep Sandra alive.”
“If his plan is to walk away, won’t he just kill again? Shouldn’t the plan be to kill this bastard?” Ridge asked.
“He’s only killing those who wronged him. For all intent and purposes, the killing should stop once Sandra’s gone.” Pierce didn’t sound convincing at all.
