The Killing Kind by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page B

at. Randi had been so mobile over the past few months that it was hard to track her down to any one spot.
    “We could not find her,” Shellie recalled.
    Shellie and her husband returned home near midnight. As the time passed, Shellie went through a roller coaster of emotions.
    “My mind was telling me she was all right,” Shellie said. “But my heart was telling me something different.”
    Shellie’s and Randi’s mother had severe heart problems. She’d been struggling with those issues for many years. Shellie didn’t want to concern her mother, but she did want to tell her what was going on.
    It was the tattoo. Shellie kept seeing it in her mind.
    That . . . coincidence.
    “Listen, Mom,” Shellie told her mother that night, “they found a girl over at the [park], and I cannot find Randi.” Shellie’s voice told her mother how concerned she was that her sister was not around and she hadn’t heard from her.
    “Oh, Shellie, she’s all right,” her mother said. “You worry too much.”
    Shellie stood with the phone in her hand. She felt a “pit,” as she described it later, in the middle of her stomach. “And I knew,” Shellie said later, “that it was not all right.”

CHAPTER 15
    T he following morning, Shellie woke after a night of tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling. She immediately called Crime Stoppers. She wanted more information about the tattoo and the girl found in the woods. Shellie knew Randi had a second tattoo of a sun with a smiley face on the right side of her upper back. If she could confirm that the girl found in the woods did not have that same tattoo, she could go back to her life and stop worrying.
    “I cannot share any of that information with you, nor do I know,” the Crime Stoppers operator said. “But I can have an investigator call you back.”
    Shellie figured it would take forever. Something also told her that when Randi found out all the trouble Shellie was going through in searching for her, “she was going to be really pissed off at me.” There was a little angel of optimism whispering in Shellie’s ear that Randi had run off somewhere and would find out about all of this and become angry with Shellie for inviting the cops into her life. Yet, it was a risk that Shellie was willing to take to curb the anxiety of thinking that Randi was in the morgue.
    “At the same time, however,” Shellie admitted, “my heart was telling me something was wrong. I just knew.”
    Within five minutes, an investigator called Shellie back. This was exceptional, Shellie knew.
    Five minutes?
    “Can we speak to you in person?” the investigator asked. He wanted Shellie to meet him and another investigator.
    “Sure, sure . . . ,” Shellie answered. “I’m on my way.”
    And with that, Shellie recalled, she breathed a sigh of relief. She honestly now believed they had found Randi. They had located her in a jail somewhere and Shellie needed to go and bail her out. It was actually a weight off Shellie’s shoulders to hear the investigator say he wanted her to meet him downtown.

CHAPTER 16
    D r. Sabrina Gast was overseeing the autopsy of the latest girl found in the woods. Here it was a few weeks later and now two women had been found. The attending pathologist on this new case was Dr. Nicholas I. Batalis. He would conduct the autopsy at the Department of Pathology, on the University of South Carolina campus.
    As Batalis got to work, unlike in Heather Catterton’s case, it became clear within no time at all that they were dealing with a homicide. The cause of death, undisputed among doctors, was strangulation.
    From a careful observation of the body and how it had been burned, the doctor determined that the woman’s killer had wrapped her in a comforter. The burns were postmortem, most likely, which gave everyone some relief that she had not been burned alive.
    Portions of a burned comforter, Batalis noted, accompany the body and are on the left side of the face, under the