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THE PROFILER

HYPERION

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................IXNOTE TO THE READER..........................................XIPREFACE.....................................................XIIIINTRODUCTION................................................11. ANNE: THE MURDER.........................................52. A LIFE CHANGED...........................................273. WALT: THE SUSPECT........................................444. A NEW CAREER.............................................695. SARAH: MURDER BEHIND THE BAR.............................856. VICKI: A KNOCK IN THE NIGHT..............................1177. MARY BETH: A METHOD OF OPERATION.........................1368. DORIS: THE UNLIKE LY VICTIM.............................1639. MISSY: A CHILD'S NIGHTMARE..............................18110. JIMMY: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THIS...........................20111. DONNELL: A QUESTION OF MOTIVE...........................21712. SABRINA: THE MIND OF A TEENAGE GIRL.....................23913. BRIAN: WHO PULLED THE TRIGGER?..........................24714. BOB AND CHRISTINE: DOUBLE MURDER........................26215. LAST WORDS..............................................279

Chapter One

No one had ever been murdered in my town.

The community's first house-my house-was built in the 1700s on rolling Maryland farmland. Many interesting things happened here over the centuries, but the town had never experienced a violent homicide.

Anne Kelley, a brilliant government intern from the Midwest, would have the unfortunate honor of being the first.

I WAS OUT of town until Sunday. When I returned that morning, I was at home for only a few minutes when the horrific news reached me. The phone rang and it was my best friend, Terry, who lived just a couple blocks away.

"Did you hear?" she asked, incredulously, dismay in her voice.

"Hear what?" When I had taken the turn onto Sixtieth Street, nothing seemed out of place. There were no fire trucks or ambulances on the street. The town appeared serene. The only activity was a slight breeze, which hardly affected the oppressiveness of the heat on that early sultry summer day, the third of June.

"A young woman was found murdered in the stream by the softball field."

"WHAT?"

"Oh, it's just awful. One of the men playing softball in the league game this morning chased a ball across the path into the water and found a woman's naked body floating right at the edge."

I felt sick. My first thought was that it might be someone I knew, an area resident, a friend, or the mother of one of the local children.

I took a deep breath. "Do they know who she is?"

"No, not yet. I heard she was young, maybe in her late teens or twenties. They found her clothes and a Walkman; it seems she was jogging. The police figure she was killed yesterday, probably at dusk, because no one saw her there during the daylight. She doesn't seem to be a town resident."

It was a tiny relief to hope she was not someone I knew.

I hung up the phone with a nagging, uneasy feeling that I was somehow more connected to this situation than I should be. For a minute, I placated myself with the idea that it was just the shock of hearing about such a tragedy that made me feel this way. Or maybe it was the fact that this gruesome murder happened right at the ball field where I spent so many happy hours cheering on my son and his baseball team. But it wasn't that kind of feeling; it was something more eerie. Something was not quite right in the house; a malignant spirit was residing with us now, and it wasn't the ghost previous residents claimed they had seen on the third-floor landing. I made lunch for my kids and tried to distract myself. The children ate their sandwiches and went out to play. As I put the dishes in the sink, our latest boarder, Walt Williams, came down the stairs from his room into the kitchen. The feeling of anxiety increased.

Walt. It has something to do with Walt.

YEARS LATER, I would dig out the picture of Walt Williams that I had once shown to the police and stare at it. It was the photo I took on a church trip to Six Flags in the suburbs of Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. The snapshot was dated May 13, 1990. Walt, a twenty-four-year-old African American, was dressed in blue-checked shorts and a white, short-sleeved T-shirt. He was holding the hand of an adoring, giggly prepubescent girl who looked to have a crush on him. He was grinning smugly, looking away from the girl, his chin up in the air. He seemed either arrogant or goofy, depending on how you read the picture, with his boyish face and slight pudginess.

My children were in the picture, too, which made me cringe a bit; my eight-year-old daughter, Jennifer, with her frizzed-out, fly-away hair, courtesy of the gene blend of her blond mother and Jamaican father, and my son, David, age six, who looks rather Hispanic, causing Latinos to state matter-of-factly, "Oh, your husband is from Mexico!"

Walt, our new renter of one week, made the trip to the amusement park rather reluctantly. Although he expressed initial enthusiasm when asked to help chaperone the church teens, that morning when my husband, Tony, and I were ready to depart, he made himself scarce. He had not come down for breakfast nor had I seen him in the hallway.

"Walt?" I called up to his room above the kitchen. "Are you coming?"

"Oh." I heard a muffled voice through the door. "I was sleeping."

I was not one to let people who had made a commitment off that easily.

"Well, hurry up. We leave in ten minutes. We're waiting on you."

My husband rolled his eyes. He hadn't been enthusiastic about Walt's moving in, but it was that or take on a second job to pay the bills. He never liked the idea of anyone living in the house who wasn't family, but he tolerated our cash-paying international students. Tony was more uncomfortable with the idea of Walt living with us because he thought a working man of his age shouldn't have to rent a room. He also thought Walt was way too old to be obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and comic books.

"Well, he is kind of immature," I offered during our discussion of the new boarder, the present beau of my girlfriend Kim. A few weeks earlier, Walt had applied for a mail room job at her company, and she was the person in human resources who reviewed his application and hired him. Now she was dating him and she asked if we would rent him a room. Walt was looking for a new place to live; he wanted to attend our church and be closer to Kim's home. Kim was a soft touch, the kind of woman who always tried to help people improve their lives. She told us he didn't do drugs, didn't drink alcohol, and didn't smoke. He was honorably discharged from the air force and had a good work record. We really needed the income from the rental room, as I was a stay-at-home room, so I agreed to go ahead and interview him. He came across as a pleasant enough fellow, and because my husband and I were in the process of adopting Jeremy, a six-year-old boy from the Delaware foster care system, we also had to have Walt fingerprinted at the local police station. He consented without any hesitation, so we decided to let him move in.

"He's weird," Tony said a few days...