Stay in Touch
Chapter 25
Kate chews on the end of her finger. "Rick, it looks like we have two leads, but they converge. The article you dug up about the woman reporting her friend missing, gives her disappearance as happening in roughly the same area the truck driver saw the masked killer. There were also woods nearby, like the terrain where you saw him as a kid. He could have switched states but staked out similar hunting grounds. I think the first thing we need to do is go up there, talk to the truck driver and if we can locate her, the woman in the story you found."
"There can't be too many people named Mia Culpepper. She should be traceable in public records, the kind you can access online for the low, low, bargain price of $39.95."
Kate can't help smiling at the first Castle quip she's heard him make since she arrived. "You're feeling better. And as a cop, I can check if the DMV has anything on her. After tomorrow, I'll be off duty for a couple of days. We should both have our information by then, and we can go upstate together. But I need you to promise that in the meantime you'll take care of yourself. You have to eat, and you have to sleep.
Rick raises his right hand. "Writer's honor."
The truck driver, Harry Lowell, lives on a small farm. It barely qualifies as one. He keeps a few chickens and raises goats whose milk he can sell at a premium, but transporting produce to the upscale restaurants in the city from the organic growers surrounding his few acres pays the bills. He was able to get someone to come in to take care of his livestock while he was laid up in the hospital, so he still has products to sell, but he lost a lot of income while he wasn't driving. He can't really spare the time to talk to a city cop and a writer, but at least someone is still looking for the madman who stabbed him, so he'll do it anyway.
Kate Beckett doesn't look like any cop he's ever seen, more like someone on one of those reality shows about models. He caught Richard Castle on Letterman once, so he recognizes him, but he's taller than he looked on television. Harry has no idea what a mystery writer would be doing with a young, gorgeous, police officer, but the two have a vibe between them that's hard to miss.
He invites them to take seats on the screened porch at the front of his house. Beckett may be beautiful, but she's all business, as she begins to quiz him about his encounter with the masked maniac, particularly about the woman who had flagged him down. Harry closes his eyes trying to picture her. "I don't remember her as being tall, maybe five foot five, at most. Her hair was brown, but I wasn't close enough to see the color of her eyes."
Rick leans forward in his well-worn rattan chair. "Did she have any marks on her face?"
Harry shakes his head. "No, but there was a long scratch on her neck like that crazy might have held his knife to it."
"Do you remember anything about the man who attacked you, besides the mask?" Kate queries. "Hair or skin color?"
Harry rubs his jaw. "It all happened so fast. He was white, I remember that, but his skin was shades darker than that mask."
"The mask was pale, like porcelain?" Rick interjects.
Harry nods.
"What about his voice?" Rick presses. "Did you hear him say anything?"
"When he stabbed me, he told me to go to hell. He sounded raspy."
"Like someone with a sore throat, or a chain smoker?" Kate offers.
Harry's eyes widen. "Oh!"
Rick springs out of his chair. "You recalled something else!"
"Yes," Harry confirms, "when officer Beckett mentioned chain smoking. He smelled of tobacco but not cigarettes, cigars. I had an uncle who smelled just like that. He smoked the little ones, cigarillos. I don't remember the brand, but the package had lightning bolts on it. Could that help?"
Kate chews her bottom lip. "It might help a lot. Thank you, Mr. Lowell."
"Will you let me know if you find out anything else?" Lowell asks as Kate and Rick are leaving.
"Count on it," Rick promises.
"That was more than I'd hoped for," Kate confides as Rick starts the car. "Not many people smoke cigarillos - or anything - anymore. Your demon would have to buy them somewhere, and there can't be too many stores around here that would have them. Maybe Mia can add even more pieces to the puzzle."
Rick grips the steering wheel tightly as he pulls out of the drive leading to Harry Lowell's home. "I hope so."
Mia Culpepper's face is lined beyond her years. She ushers Kate and Rick into the small living room of a cottage, adjacent to the church school where she teaches. "You are the first people in years who've asked about Kirsten. The police had a working theory that she ran off somewhere with a guy - except Kirsten didn't like guys. And she wasn't irresponsible enough to just take off. She studied botany and had a job taking care of gardens around here. She wouldn't leave anyone in the lurch. At the very least, she would have lined up someone to take her place. And she never would have left without saying goodbye to me."
"Tell us about the time leading up to her disappearance," Kate urges.
"I already went through a lot of that with the police before. She didn't have any family to visit. Her parents were killed in a car accident when she was 16. All her other relatives live in Europe, and she wasn't in touch with them. She wasn't worried about anything. She wasn't having any money problems. She did tell me she wanted to have her pickup looked at because it stalled out on her a couple of times. The battery kept losing charge."
"So she might have gotten stuck on a road somewhere?" Rick speculates.
"It's possible. But she had a regular route that she followed for her work. The police checked it out after she disappeared and there was no sign of her truck."
"What's along that route?" Kate inquires.
"Houses and farms. None of them are very close to each other. Most people live out here because they like to have some land."
"Do you have a picture of Kirsten?" Rick asks.
Mia walks over to a bookcase a pulls out a slim volume. This is our college yearbook. There's a picture of her in here. There's a Xerox® machine at the school. I can go over there and make you copies."
"We'd appreciate it," Kate replies.
"I'll only be a couple of minutes, Mia promises.
Rick turns to Kate while Mia is gone. "Farms have barns and outbuildings. Houses with lots of land around them have sheds to store maintenance equipment like lawn tractors and snowblowers. You've seen the one I have in The Hamptons. If Kirsten's pickup stalled again, her kidnapper could have given it a jump to give it enough juice to get it undercover in anything like that on her route.
Kate picks up his train of thought. "But the police wouldn't have had enough probable cause to get warrants to search for it. That means that whoever took Kirsten must have lived near her clients or at least had access to property there. That's still not a direct tie to Harry Lowell's attacker, but it gets us closer."
The screen door slams and Mia returns and hands them each a copy of a picture. Rick traces his finger over the lines of the image. "Kate, Kirsten could be a doppelganger of the woman I saw in Hollander's Woods. Our quarry profiles his prey."