Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (8 page)

14

As the crowds began leaving the bar around two in the morning, Sarah finished her side work and wiped everything down. Bottles were replaced, the tills were counted, and she helped some of the other staff make sure the tables were clean before the maintenance crew came in the morning to clean the floors.

“You doin’ okay?” Trevor asked from behind the bar, where he was filling in a spreadsheet.

“I’m fine.” Sarah used a fresh rag to wipe down a table.
“Why?”

“I know you visited Jeannie. Do they know what happened?”

She stopped what she was doing and sat down, moving the rag aside. “She was raped.”

“Shit.” He grabbed a bottle of whiskey and brought it over to the table with two tumblers. He poured a couple
of fingers in each and pushed one toward her. They clinked glasses and downed the drinks.

“Do they know who?”

“This guy she’d been seeing for a couple weeks. She’s pretty beat up, Trevor.”

“Did they find the guy?”

“I don’t know.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand
that urge, man. To beat up on a woman. I mean, how could you feel good about yourself doing something like that? I just don’t get it.”

“That’s because you’re a good person. It’s hard for good people to understand how bad people think.
” She exhaled loudly. “I’m gonna go if you don’t need anything else.”

“I’m good. Thanks for covering.”

“Yup. See ya tomorrow.”

Sarah left the bar and sat in her
car for a few moments. She debated going home but then started her car and did a U-turn, heading toward the hospital.

When she got there, parking was wide open
. She stopped in front of the building and stared at it. There was no telling how Jeannie would react this time. But Sarah didn’t care. This was what friends did.

The hospital wasn’t busy
, and the quiet was the most unnerving thing. Sarah could hear the televisions that were on in various rooms, the beep of machines, the creaking of a cleaning cart as it rolled down the hallway.

She found Jeannie’s room and poked her head in. No one was around to stop her
, and no one asked questions. She wondered if that was normal for this time in the morning or if the nursing staff that was supposed to be watching the front desk had stepped out. Sarah had no experience with hospitals and didn’t know. She’d only been to one once, two years ago after a car accident. It’d been the oddest experience of her life to have machines hooked up to her.

When she was young, about two
years old, she’d almost gone to a hospital. She’d had a fever so high that her parents thought she might die. Her mother wanted to take her into town to the hospital, but her father refused, saying it was God’s will that she be sick. She didn’t remember the incident, but her mother later told her that she had, briefly, died. That her heart had stopped and they’d thought they’d lost her. And then, just as quickly, she gasped for breath and screamed.

Jeannie was asleep. Sarah didn’t want to wake her but didn’t want to leave
, either. Taking quiet steps, she came next to the bed and sat in a chair, staring at her friend. Some of the bruising had actually increased around her face, though it was dark and Sarah couldn’t really tell, but her face did have a sort of shadow over it. Sarah gazed at it a long time before she noticed that Jeannie’s eyes had opened.

“How did you know?”
Jeannie asked, in almost a whisper.

Sarah fidgeted, wishing she had something other than her car keys to roll around in her fingers.
She stared down at her hands. They appeared rough and scarred compared to other hands she’d seen on girls her age. Since the time she was six years old, she’d been working on the farm and in the home.

“It’s just something I’ve always had, Jeannie. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to stop you.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I didn’t listen. I thought that… I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m so fucking stupid.”

“No, you’re not. You hear me? This is not your fault in any way.”

“I don’t think anyone else will see it that way. I was in his hot tub. I would’ve had sex with him. I was planning on it. And then I passed out. When I woke up, I was naked in front of this hospital. He broke my arm, my nose… I had to get stiches everywhere, Sarah.”

She
looked up at her friend and then back down at her hands. “I know.”

“I just feel so stupid.” She began to
cry softly, and Sarah reached out and held her hand. After a minute, Jeannie stopped but didn’t have the strength to wipe the tears away. Sarah did it for her.

“Did you call the police?” Sarah asked.

“No. Who would believe me?”

“I believe you.”

She shook her head. “I’m not going through that. They’ll tear me apart in court. I was drunk and naked and willing to have sex with him. And I can’t look at him—to see him sitting there smiling at me…”

Sarah dipped her head low. She couldn’t think of anything to say. No other words seemed to come to her
, so she just said, “You’re stronger than you think you are.”

Jeannie looked
at her. “What is it exactly? This thing you have?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, what do you do with it?”

“Nothing.”

“Seriously? You don’t play the lottery, or go to Las Vegas, or anything?”

Sarah grinned. “How about you get better and we’ll go get rich in Atlantic City
?”

Jeannie chuckled softly. “I don’t think I want to do anything but lie in
my own bed for a long time… I’m sorry I said those things.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

Jeannie closed her eyes and took a deep breath, gripping Sarah’s hand tightly. “You should do something with it, Sarah. I don’t understand it. But you could’ve helped me if I would’ve listened to you. You should be helping other people.”

“It doesn’t… It’s not a pleasant experience for me.”

“When is helping people ever easy?”

With that, Jeannie seemed to drift off. The only sound in the room was the soft hum of the machines and the beeping of her heart monitor.
Sarah rose, bent down, and kissed her forehead. She left the hospital with her hands in her pockets and her head down. Something in her pocket poked her finger. She pulled it out. It was the FBI agent’s card. Looking it over, she slipped it back into her pocket and went out to her car.

15

Arnold Rosen woke up to the sound of his iPhone playing soft ambient music. He loved modern technology. He remembered the old days of waking up to the horrendous beep of a regular electric clock, or even worse, the ringing bells of the old alarm clocks before digital took over the world.

He turned his alarm off and
got out of bed. The first thing he did was go to his dresser and slip on his wedding ring. He stared at it a moment and then went about gathering his clothes before his shower.

The water was hot
, and it steamed up the bathroom the way he liked. His wife used to yell at him and tell him that it would cause mildew, but she never told him to stop. She would just come over quietly and open the door to let the steam out, pecking him on the cheek before she left. Now he left the door open anyway.

He toweled off afterward
, dressed, and went down to have breakfast. He cooked a few sausages and some eggs in a frying pan and ate quietly at the table before getting his sidearm and putting on his suit coat. Even though he preferred not to wrinkle the coat by driving in it, he had never been a big gun person and didn’t feel it appropriate to show off his gun in public. No matter how responsible the gun owner, a gun out in public made people anxious, and he didn’t want to impose that on others.

As he was driving down to the field office, his phone buzzed. A number he didn’t know. He answered after turning down his stereo.

“Hello?”

“Agent Rosen?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Sarah King. I would like to come down and speak with you today if that’s okay.”

“Of course. I’m at the DC FBI field office. Do you need the address?”

“I can google it. Around noon okay?”

“That works.”

Rosen hung up. He didn’t ask any questions
as to what changed her mind. That’s not what he needed right now. All he needed was her in his office so he could show her the photos of the girls.

When he got
to the field office, he rode the elevator up and was buzzed in. A receptionist sat behind bulletproof glass and waved to him. He waved back. He walked past the cubicles where the younger agents set up shop and found his office. The first thing he did was pull out the photos of the six murdered girls, all labeled across the top with the title “Blood Dahlia”—a play on the original Black Dahlia killer but even more vivid and gruesome.

He hung the photos up behind him with
Scotch tape, exactly where someone sitting in front of him would be looking. Then he cleaned up what little clutter was on his desk—just a few papers— leaned back in the chair, and decided he needed a few minutes of quiet before anything else. Though he had a few other cases assigned, they could wait. It was best to focus on one case at a time, though limited resources sometimes made that impossible.

Giovanni poked his head in. “Hey.”

“Your top button’s undone.”

“I know
. I button it when we go out. Don’t like things right against my throat.” Giovanni walked in and sat across from him. “You sure you want to look at those every day?”

Rosen glanced back to the photos. They weren’t the autopsy or DMV photos. The FBI had collected recent photos from the families, primarily headshots, and all the girls were smiling and appeared full of life.

“They’re not for me. They’re for Sarah King. She’s coming in at noon to meet with me.”

“For what?”

“I think she’s changed her mind about helping us.”

Giovanni glanced over the photos and then looked quietly at Rosen
for a moment. “You sure you wanna do that?”

“Why?”

“It seems weird.”

“It is weird. But what the hell about our job isn’t?”

Giovanni shrugged. “Have you run it past Kyle?”

“No.”

“I think you should.”

Rosen leaned
forward. He picked up a pen on the desk in front of him and began tapping it against his wrist. “Probably best to inform him after we’ve made the bust.”

“I’d feel a lot better if we informed him now.”

Rosen exhaled. “I’ll do it when Sarah gets here.”

Giovanni raised his eyebrows as though too lazy to shrug his shoulders
, and he stood up. “Up to you. I think it’s a mistake, though. We’ll look desperate, consulting a psychic.”

“Do you have any idea who the Blood Dahlia is?”

“No.”

“Then we are desperate. Because I guarantee you he’s got the next victim picked out
, if he doesn’t have her already.”

“I’m just sayin’.”

Rosen watched Giovanni walk out.
The kid was right
. He had to be losing it to bring in a psychic. That’s the kind of stuff dinky sheriff’s departments in the South did, not the FBI.

But Giovanni hadn’t seen the bodies yet
—what the Blood Dahlia did to them. Rosen, in his nearly twenty years with the Bureau, had never seen a killer this bad before. He didn’t care how desperate it looked. He would work every angle he could.

The day
ground by slowly. Rosen found himself working his other cases but glancing at the clock every fifteen minutes. He’d been writing a supplemental narrative on the murder of a young boy in Richmond, Virginia, and realized he’d misspelled the word “trouble” as “treble.” He stopped typing and saved the document before getting up to go find some coffee.

The break room was stocked well
, and he found some coffee, cream, and a croissant. A few other agents were milling around, joking about a case they were working. They nodded to Rosen but didn’t say hello. He took his coffee and croissant back to his office and ate at his desk.

By the time noon rolled around, he felt a ball of anxiety in his stomach. He didn’t know what to expect. Was this just crazy? Should he just
phone Sarah and call this whole thing off? Before he could decide, the front desk buzzed him.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Sarah King here for you.”

“Send her back, please.”

A minute later, one of the staff led Sarah back to his office. Rosen stood and shook her hand. “Glad you could make it,” he lied. He wished suddenly that he hadn’t visited her.

“I want something for my help,” she said as she sat down.

Rosen sat down across from her. Sarah’s eyes didn’t even glance up at the photos. He felt foolish for putting them up.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you want?”

“I want a job. A real job. Something that can turn into a career.”

He nodded. “Well, what can you do?”

“I can find the people you’re looking for.”

He leaned back in
his seat, thinking that if he acted relaxed he might actually feel relaxed. “Why the sudden change from not wanting anything to do with us to wanting to work for us?”

“I don’t want to end up a bartender when I’m sixty. I want something more. I left my entire family, my entire people… I want that to mean something. I have no education and no skills… except this. This is the only thing I can do.”

“I’m still not exactly sure what
it
is. Do you hear things? See things?”

“
It’s different all the time. Sometimes a bunch of pictures come to me. People, places—things like that. There’s sound sometimes, and other times there’s not.” She looked down at the desk, shifting in her seat. “And sometimes I see people that have… crossed. And they tell me things. But not always. Sometimes they try to attack me. Others just cry. It’s different for each one.”

Rosen didn’t say anything
for a long time. “Are there… some here?”

“Yes.”

Rosen swallowed. “In this room right now is a dead person?”

“
Not really a person anymore, but yes. I can push them out of my mind when I want to, if I really concentrate. But I’m not right now.”

An icy chill went up Rosen’s back. He didn’t want to know who was in his office. “Sarah, I think this may have been a mistake.”

She looked at him incredulously. “You bring this to me, and then when I say I want to help, you’re turning me away?”

“I just don’t know how it’s going to look. People might start questioning me, maybe even questioning other cases I’ve worked. This isn’t accepted practice.”

“You put those pictures up there for me to look at. Which means you wanted me here at some point. What’s changed?”

“I just have had time to think about it. I don’t think it’s the right fit.”

She nodded and rose, glancing over the photos. “You know they’re alive when he cuts their faces off, don’t you?”

He was silent a moment. “No, that’s not accurate. The autopsies all said they were done postmortem.”

“No. He stops their heart first so no blood pumps in their body. But he does it in that minute afterward while they’re still conscious. They feel it.” She glanced over the photos one more time. “Goodbye, Agent Rosen.”

Sarah turned and left, leaving Rosen looking up at the photos. He rose and quickly took them down.