Read Online Blind Rage by Terri Persons - Free Book Online Page A

you doing?”
    “Organizing my notes. Waiting for them to speak.”
    “So what do the Post-its say to you?” he asked.
    She blinked. “They don’t literally talk to me. You know that, right?”
    He hesitated, then said unconvincingly, “Yeah. I know that.”
    “This time they don’t tell me shit about shit,” she said, more to herself than to Creed. She sat back down at her desk and picked up a single slip of paper, a photocopy of something the first victim had penned:
     
Dear Mr. Underwood: I hate you. I can’t stand seeing your ugly face anymore. When you put on that stupid grin, it reminds me of the way you smiled while you were doing those sick things to me. All the crap you put me through, and I was just a little kid! Tell my mom thanks for looking the other way and doing nothing to help me. I’m leaving for good. When you drop dead, I’ll come back to take a dump on your grave.
    Corrine
     
    Bernadette found no evidence in the file that Corrine had ever pursued charges against the man. The girl had probably doubted that anyone would take her seriously, especially with her history of emotional problems. In addition to being treated for depression at the time of her death, she’d been hospitalized twice for anorexia nervosa. A slew of different doctors and clinics.
    Police had labeled the letter a suicide note, but Bernadette thought it read more like a goodbye letter fired off by an angry runaway.
    She repeated the words out loud: “‘When you drop dead, I’ll come back to take a dump on your grave.’”
    Across the room, Creed stopped his typing. “What’re you reading?”
    “A suicide note, supposedly.”
    “Sounds more like something one Mafioso would say to another.”
    “It was found resting under a bottle on the Washington Avenue Bridge after the body of the first victim was fished out of the river.”
    “What was the gal’s name?”
    “Corrine Underwood. No…wait…” She flipped to the front of the file. “Correction. Corrine Randolph . She hated her stepfather and never accepted his last name.”
    “His future burial spot was the one threatened with desecration?”
    “Yeah. He’d sexually abused her as a child.”
    “Poor Corrine Randolph.”
    Bernadette got up from her desk and went back to the yellow notes. Seven vertical stripes representing seven unhappy women. She ticked them off by order of death. “Then in May we had poor Monica Taratino. June was poor Alice Bergerman. July, poor Judith Powers-Nelson over in Wisconsin. August, poor Laurel McArthur in Wisconsin again. Back to the Twin Cities in September with poor Heidi DeForeste.”
    “That’s quite a roll call.”
    She stepped in front of the last column. “I don’t have a full file on her yet, but let’s not leave out poor Shelby Hammond. Miss October.”
    “The girl killed over the weekend, in the bathtub.”
    “The biggest oddball, really, because of where she drowned. Otherwise we’ve got seven women with similar, but not identical, profiles. All college students at one of two universities. All female. All messed up emotionally.”
    “All dead by drowning,” said Creed.
    She walked back and forth in front of the wall. “The two big connections are the colleges and their problems.”
    “So the killer is a college prof who’s good at picking out fragile students.”
    “Except we’re dealing with two different universities and students who run the gamut in terms of majors and years in school,” she said. “Undergrads. Grad students. I rounded up their class schedules and haven’t found any intersections. At no point were two of these girls in the same classroom at the same time. Nor did any of them share an instructor.”
    “A medical professional who treated them. A doctor. A therapist. A pharmacist. Hospital orderly even. They were all treated in some way, shape, or form, right?”
    “Wrong.” She ran her eyes over the columns as she paced. “Some of them, their files indicate their parents wanted