Killing Red by Henry Perez Read Free Book Online Page A

little in the way of useful information from Dominic Delacruz, Chapa was tempted to go work on something else, or maybe call up a buddy and see if they could get together for lunch. His common sense was telling him to get away from this story and all of the baggage that came with it. One call and it would become the feds’ problem.
    But his instincts were telling him something else, and he couldn’t shake the memory of that craven smile on Grubb’s face, or how sure of himself the killer had seemed. So instead of ringing up a friend or going into the office to grab another story, Chapa turned north on Route 59 and headed toward West Chicago. Though it had been more than a decade, he still remembered the Sykes’ street address.
    That area had grown up over the past several years as farmland gave way to subdivisions and strip malls. It was hard to imagine, but Grubb might’ve had something to do with the growth.
    He’d been born Kenneth Lee Dresder in a rural Kentucky town to a mother who could never be entirely certain about the identity of the boy’s father, and the man she’d coaxed into marriage four months earlier. At age sixteen he ran away for the third time, winding up in a dusty corner of Arkansas. He drifted back home a little over a year later. By then, the man he’d long hated calling “Dad” was dead. His mother had taken back her maiden name, and also changed his younger brother’s to match. So Kenny asked his mom to take him to court and change his last name as well. It was his way of shaking free from the man who had brought him nothing but violence and pain. The change made him feel like a new person, at least for a little while.
    When he was in his midtwenties, Grubb got his realtor’s license at the urging of his mother after she saw a commercial about it while watching her stories. A few months later, the realtor who was handling the development of several new subdivisions in DuPage County took a chance on him.
    By all accounts, Grubb was the kind of realtor who could sell a new house to a man in hospice care, and he experienced a great deal of success in his new profession. But what Grubb really liked about the job was how people would let him walk through their homes, sometimes unattended. When the police searched his house after arresting Grubb they found a large plastic bin of children’s clothing and small toys. There were photos, too, each with his nickname for the child written in marker on the back.
    He lost his job after one client too many complained about the amount of attention Grubb paid to their child. At first, he figured that he would hook on with another realtor, but that didn’t happen after word quickly spread throughout the industry. Grubb tried to make a go of it as an independent, but all of the established realtors made that tough to do. The only steady job he could get was delivering baked goods to various businesses in the area.
    That job also came with its own set of what Grubb considered perks, in the form of three elementary schools and one junior high on his route. He collected candid snapshots of many of the kids at the schools. When police found the photos they assumed that Grubb was stalking those children and had plans for several of them at the time of his capture. The pictures themselves were not lurid, but the fact that he had them at all, tucked neatly into a photo album, was enough to keep any parent up at night.
    Annie Sykes was a student at one of those schools, but hers was a crime of opportunity. Driving down some of the same streets that Grubb once cruised as a predator, Chapa thought of how many easy opportunities a creature like that must have had.
    As Chapa turned north off busy Roosevelt Road, he was surprised to see colored lights flashing in his side-view mirror. A tap of the patrol car’s siren punctuated the moment.
    “What the hell?”
    It had been some time since Chapa had been pulled over. Then again, he hadn’t been in this area for a