“I’ll have to run a check on those,” she said.
“Considering there were only about a hundred students in the entire high school, the odds of something like this happening by chance are astronomical. There has to be another connection. I doubt our guy is out to just kill every kid he went to high school with. If he were a serial killer, there would be a pattern, similar deaths in a contained area, most likely. Whoever is behind this is trying to make them look like accidents or suicides, for the most part.”
“Maybe Warren’s threatening Tommy Zapata offered the guy an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, Tommy and Mimi, while shifting the suspicion to Warren,” Cookie said.
“And since the others were ruled accidental, someone is getting away with murder.”
“You know,” Cookie said, studying the roster again, “Mimi’s name isn’t on here. This roster must be from after Mimi moved.”
“Okay, let’s do this,” I said, thinking aloud. “You search the Ruiz police records for anything amiss from the time Mimi moved, working backwards to about a month or two prior. Although the odds are against it, something could have landed on the sheriff’s radar.”
“Got it. I’ll also run a check on the married names of some of these women, just in case.”
“And while you’re at it,” I said, piling on the work, “you might call and see if you can get an earlier roster.”
“Yep, already have that down. Hey, what are you going to do?”
Reyes had a sister in a screwed-up, kidnapped kind of way. When Kim was two, she had been dumped on Earl Walker’s doorstep by a drug-addicted mother mere days before the woman died of complications due to an HIV infection. I could only hope that had Kim’s mother known what kind of monster Earl Walker was, she would never have left her daughter with him, suspected father or not. And while Walker didn’t sexually abuse her as I’d feared, he did the next best thing. He used her to control Reyes. He starved her to get what he wanted out of him. And what he wanted from Reyes was all kinds of evil.
“I’m going to go talk to Reyes’s sister, Kim.”
Cookie’s expression transformed to one of hope. “Do you think she knows where he might be?”
“Sadly, no, but it’s worth a shot.”
“Are you going to contact Mistress Marigold?” she asked with a teasing grin. “’Cause that if-you’re-the-grim-reaper thing is just too weird.”
“Tell me about it. And I haven’t decided yet.”
“How about I do it for you? Holy cannoli,” she said, glancing at the roster again.
“What?” I hopped up to read over her shoulder.
“Mimi went to high school with Kyle Kirsch. I just made the connection.”
“The congressman? The same congressman who recently announced his plans to run for a seat in the U.S. Senate?”
“Yes. His first name is Benjamin. It’s listed as Benjamin Kyle Kirsch. The Benjamin threw me. He must go by his middle name.”
I leaned in, leveled a pointed stare on her. “The same congressman who announced his plans to run for the U.S. Senate one month ago?”
Cookie’s jaw fell open. “Holy cannoli,” she repeated.
She had a way with words.
* * *
A congressman. A freaking congressman. Somebody, and I wasn’t naming any names, but somebody had at least one major-ass skeleton in his closet. Like King Kong major. A skeleton he didn’t want to escape. Possibly ’cause nothing was scarier than giant skeletons running amok. And my money, all forty-seven dollars and fifty-eight cents, was on Kyle Kirsch. Congressman. U.S. Senate hopeful. Murderer.
Then again, it could all be some wild coincidence, some bizarre chain of events that just happened to revolve around a group of teens from Ruiz, New Mexico, and a man who just happened to announce his candidacy around the same time his classmates started dropping like fruit flies in September. And I could be crowned Miss Finland before the year was out.
Now, thanks to Kyle Kirsch, I had one more conundrum wreaking havoc on my innards. What the bloody heck did this guy do? Unless he’d partaken in ritualistic sacrifice to a dark overlord or had been an Amway rep at any point in his life, I really couldn’t justify his murdering innocent people.
He had to go down. Preferably hard.
I pulled into Kim Millar’s Pueblo-styled apartment complex and knocked on her turquoise door.
“Ms. Davidson,” Kim said when she opened the door, her eyes wide with worry. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside. “Where is he?” Her auburn hair was pulled back into a harried ponytail, and dark circles lined her silvery green eyes, making them look large and hollow. She’d looked fragile the first time I met her. Now her porcelain exterior seemed on the verge of shattering.
I took her hand into mine as she led me to a beige sofa.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” I said when we were settled.
The glimmer of hope she’d been hanging on to tooth and nail fled, placing a hairline fracture in her aura. A grayness descended, a misty overcast darkening her eyes.
I didn’t know how much to tell her. Would I want to know if my sibling were essentially committing suicide? Damn straight I would. Kim had a right to know what her pigheaded brother was up to.
“He’s very mad at me right now,” I said.
“So, you’ve seen him?”
I realized how hard their arrangement must be on her. They had a zero-contact contract. Reyes didn’t want her hurt because of him ever again, and she refused to be the leverage that got Reyes hurt in turn. No one, not even the state, knew what she was to him. Though not actually blood related, they were siblings through and through, and I had a feeling Reyes would come un-superglued if he knew I was talking to her.