Page 43 of Vengeance of Childhood Proportions (Till Death Do Us Part #7)

Chapter Thirty-Three

Mal

I was standing back in the conference room, staring at my whiteboard.

I could see it. It was so simple and yet so diabolical. There were still missing pieces, but I could see it all.

On Thursday, February 18, 2010, a young high school student in Atelihai Valley, Holly Marteen, was attacked by her fellow students.

After being raped, she was found by the high school janitor, Jason Kadeer, locked in a pillory and naked on the auditorium stage.

He called 911. Responding EMTs, Parker Shah and Cordelia Young, rushed her to the hospital, where Dr. Peter Sorgin and Nurse Roberta Quinn performed a sexual assault forensic exam and contacted the police.

Sheriff Clyde Renfrew arrived with two other officers, Myles Hansen and Troy Allis.

There, he took the statement that would never make it into an official report.

Something had prevented the sheriff from filing charges against the students she’d named as her attackers.

I didn’t know that specific detail yet, but for the time being, it didn’t matter.

The rape kit that was thought to be destroyed was actually secure in Sheriff Renfrew’s lockbox, along with all the photos the hospital had taken of young Holly.

The rape kit was now on its way to the FBI’s forensic lab.

Money was placed in Genelle and Allen Marteen’s bank accounts and the upside-down mortgage on their house was paid off within weeks of the attack.

The sheriff’s notes from his lockbox stated that there were fourteen students who attacked Holly Marteen, but I had already proven that to be false.

The man had left his own son off of the list. The micro-SD card from a cell phone registered under Sheriff Renfrew and his wife, Annabeth, was also discovered in the lockbox.

On the card was all the evidence needed to condemn Emmet Renfrew as not only one of the rapists, but the instigator of the attack.

Ten of her attackers were on the hockey team scheduled to participate in the state championship tournament the following weekend.

Now that I had names and ways to look into their lives, I recognized the pattern of their deaths.

They were dying by their worst fears . While five of the hockey players’ bodies had been discovered, only four had been identified.

Christopher Harrow had a fear of spiders and his body was covered in tarantula bites.

His heart had literally given out on him.

Further evidence of the connection between the two cases, Harrow’s body had been staged on the exact same auditorium stage where fifteen years ago Holly Marteen had been discovered.

It was a good chance he’d also been in the same pillory, but forensics had yet to confirm that suspicion of mine.

John Wise had a fear of dogs. He’d been leashed like one before being strung up in a Piquet.

Then staged to make it look like he was being attacked by dogs.

I was not surprised that real dogs were not used in his torture, as it had already been proven by Cordelia Young’s dog miraculously escaping her apartment the night of her carbon monoxide leak that the killer was not interested in hurting animals.

Wyatt Butler had a severe banana allergy.

Based on Dr. Robinson’s report, he’d recently had a number of anaphylactic shocks.

He had also been alive when he’d been glued inside that gorilla suit and had died from having an exorbitant amount of scolding hot banana pudding being poured down his throat.

Andy Martell had a gluten allergy. His body had been near emaciated from starvation and then he’d been submerged in beer, where he drowned and remained for a number of days. Dr. Robinson would even go as high as a week.

The one from this morning had been discovered stuffed inside a metal box a grown human male should not have been able to fit inside and placed in the center of the Atelihai Valley’s biggest ice rink, where the high school team still practiced to this day.

I looked at the now completed list of—I paused. It churned my stomach to call them ‘victims’. It seemed like a dishonor to Holly Marteen to use that term. Instead, I mentally called them ‘rapists’.

I’d bet my extensive bondage collection that the man inside the box was not Emmet Renfrew. My gut told me, as the instigator, he would be further down the list.

Of the missing, the choices were Roman Fitzwilliam, Sam Keene, or Jesse Ritter-Hogan. One of their names was about to go from the middle of my board to the left.

My eyes landed on Amber Jamison’s picture.

There were fifteen attackers, despite the former sheriff’s notes that there were only fourteen.

The gang mentality of the hockey players was not the first in history, which did not excuse their actions in the slightest. However, I could not wrap my head around the fact that five of Holly Marteen’s attackers were girls.

From the video and pictures on the SD card, I knew that the girls had not raped her. In a fucked up twist, the girls had acted as if they were the audience of a hockey game. They’d cheered . They’d applauded.

I held no sympathy for Amber Jamison, who had been nearly cooked alive before her throat had been slit. Nor did I feel bad for Hannah Terwilliger, whose picture was still in the middle of my whiteboard.

Nine down , I thought. Six to go.

Alicia Cohen, Jerome Roberts, Rachel Steiner, Kaylee Collins, Jerald Kelly, and Emmet Renfrew.

The killer was over halfway done.

I looked to the right of my whiteboard. I had erased my initial column header of Suspects and had relabeled it as First Victim .

Holly Marteen’s ninth grade yearbook picture now hung in the center, enlarged and staring at me with aquamarine eyes.

She was beautiful. So young, carefree. When this picture had been taken at the beginning of the school year, she had been fourteen.

Long, thick brunette curls with a pink bow in her hair.

Her smile was pure and innocent, completely unaware of the horror she would soon be facing.

The only accurate fact about the rumor my brother had told Mira and me about was that the high school girl had been pregnant prior to committing suicide. To the left of Holly’s picture was an old picture marred by liquid stains of a sonogram.

I didn’t know what happened to the baby. If he or she was alive, they would be fourteen years old. But I found no record of a birth. I did, however, find the death certificate for Holly Taylor Marteen. She’d hung herself in her bedroom on the year anniversary of her attack.

She’d been sixteen years old.

Name after name, face after face, my eyes traveled from the window on my left to the whiteboard in front of me.

The attack, in and of itself, was cruel and heartbreaking, the senseless act of hormonal boys. They all deserved what was coming to them as far as I was concerned. Rape was never a ‘one and done’ crime. It was never victimless .

What I did not understand was the coverup.

The logical conclusion was that the hockey team couldn’t play in the tournament if ten of their players were sitting in jail.

But it wasn’t like this was the NHL team with millions of dollars on the line.

This was a high school team. Sure, there were college scouts at those tournament games, but was that enough to cover up a gang rape?

A murder ? Because as far as I could tell, every single one of the fifteen had had a hand in Holly Marteen’s death.

They might as well have put the noose around her neck themselves.

I looked to the window and saw the photos of Atelihai Valley’s suspicious deaths for what they were: practice runs. Whomever the killer was, they’d been seeking vengeance for Holly’s attack far longer than recently. They’d just been a lot quieter about it.

My eyes went down the line of photos. All the people who should have protected Holly.

Even if they couldn’t have protected her from the initial attack, they should have been with her every step of the way afterwards.

Guiding her, helping her heal… But they hadn’t.

From the medical personnel who had treated Holly to her own fucking parents, all had failed her.

And for what? A fucking state championship trophy?

I couldn’t swallow that. There had to be more to it. There had to be. I would lose my faith in humanity otherwise.

I noted the missing names from the window where I had the pictures of the people who were already adults at the time of the attack.

I could think of three more that were not yet reported dead: Gary Hagley, Clyde Renfrew, and Jason Kadeer, the janitor.

I knew where Hagley and Renfrew were, but we were still looking for information on Kadeer.

I looked over my shoulder at Holly Marteen’s yearbook picture, an apology on the tip of my tongue. She was dead and buried, her life cut too short by the selfishness of her peers. She wasn’t around to avenge herself, but someone else was.

From what I’d discovered about Holly, she’d been a quiet girl, shy to a fault. Her old Facebook page had the occasional post, but it was mostly about the books she read. If she’d had a boyfriend at the time of the attack, I couldn’t find evidence of it.

I turned back in front of me. Her father was dead.

This should have been his crusade, to avenge his little girl’s life.

But it wasn’t. I didn’t believe he’d shot his wife before turning the gun on himself, but I did believe that he hadn’t done anything to help his daughter.

Her fucking father! I didn’t have kids and I didn’t want them, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would kill for my daughter.

Who was left?

Was it one of the fifteen attackers? Had one been so wracked with guilt that he or she had decided to pay penance for their actions?

A teacher, maybe? Who would do all this, go through so much time and energy for Holly?

I did not doubt Holly was worth the blood being spilled in her name.

I would never claim she was only ‘one person’ to all these faces currently staring back at me.

I did not believe that her life was valued less because she’d been a shy, nerdy girl compared to the adults who were once the popular kids and were dying now.

Those thoughts never even crossed my mind.

To me, Holly was the true victim. The rest were finally having to pay the piper.

That we knew of, no one else was getting hurt.

The killer had not killed any spouses or children.

Hell, he’d saved Cordelia Young’s dog before killing her.

They were slow, methodical, and brilliant, every action planned down to a fault.

I was of a mind to let them continue, but the badge in my pocket demanded otherwise.

Who the hell loved Holly Marteen so fucking much that they would do all of this to avenge her?

I looked at the sonogram next to Holly’s photo. If the child had survived, they’d be the perfect suspect, but there was no way a fourteen year old could do all of this. Especially when the first practice-run murder happened when they were four years old.

No, it wasn’t the kid, if he or she was even alive.

A grandparent, maybe? An uncle? Who was left from Holly’s life?

I needed to know more. I needed to know everything from the moment Holly Marteen had been born to the second she stepped off that chair in her bedroom with a noose around her neck.

Tapping on the glass door behind me had me turning in time to see Mira poke her head into the room. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

Fuck. I wanted to be back in bed with my little owl, but that didn’t seem to be a current option. “Bad news.”

“Two more are missing. We sent agents to collect everyone, but they came up empty.”

I turned back to my board. “Which ones?”

“Alicia Cohen and Jerald Kelly.”

I nodded slowly. “The other four?”

“Well, get this, Kaylee Collins has been under house arrest for the past four months while awaiting trial. We have to wait for a court order to bring her down, but I have agents on her as we speak.”

That was interesting. “What are the charges?” I asked.

“Sexual assault of a minor.”

My head turned so quickly to my right that it made an audible crack . “The fuck?”

Mira nodded. “She’s accused of molesting her seven-year-old niece. Evidence is circumstantial enough that the judge allowed her to be put on house arrest instead of in jail to wait for her day in court.”

The disgust in Mira’s voice was inconsequential compared to the amount running through my soul. What the fuck?

My temple was starting to throb again. “What the fuck is the good news then?”

“Roberts, Renfrew, and Steiner are currently waiting in interrogation for you.”

I stood up, rage warring with anticipation. I walked up to Holly Marteen’s photo on my board and pulled it down. “Excellent.”

It was time to get some fucking answers.