Me, Myself and Why? (11 page)

“Brush your teeth with strawberry douche, see if I care. Come on.”

“Well. That wasn’t very nice at all, you know, and—George?” Wow, he was really putting some distance between us. I had seen him like this only on the day the little group of skinheads he’d spent nineteen months tracking down were acquitted of murder charges. Oh boy. He hadn’t been able to get the blood out of his carpet and ended up moving to a new place—
and
losing his security deposit. Shiro (of all people!) had helped him move to his new condo near Riverplace.

“George? Hey, wait up! I’m not doing all this paperwork, you know. You made the mess;
you
fill out the forms. And get Michaela to sign off on them. And the next time Shiro sticks anything tobacco-related in
my
mouth, could you kindly bust her in the ribs?”

With a final, defeated retch, I managed to recover from my near-death experience and hurried after my partner.

Chapter Twenty-six

We got a cell call as we jumped into a taxi. Federal agents, hailing a cab—nothing like a fresh humiliation in the middle of the workweek. What we heard was even worse news than Shiro’s long-term plan to kill me with lung cancer.

There was
another
ThreeFer crime scene. Two in twenty-four hours? Awful, awful to contemplate. This wasn’t escalation; it was lunacy. What the heck was going on?

We were told where to go and we promised to get there pronto. I groaned inwardly because I’d have to cancel my date with Jim Clapp. I knew he’d still be at the Cop Shop, so I dialed his direct number.

“Homicide, Clapp.”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Cadence?”

“Yeah, listen—I’ve got to hit a scene. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cancel.”

A perplexed silence on his end; I was about to repeat myself, louder and slower, when he said, “But you already canceled our date.”

“What?” When had
that
happened? I realized Shiro must have done it when she came forward at the earlier scene. Drat that girl! She had a lot of nerve, canceling
my
dates. I didn’t cancel hers! Not that she’d had a date since . . . uh . . . hmm. “I mean, uh, right. Right! But maybe we can reschedule.”

“Uh-huh,” Jim replied, sounding puzzled and amused. “Sure. Call me whenever.”

I disconnected the call and glared at my reflection in the taxi’s backseat window. “If you can hear this,” I muttered, “you stay out of my dating life, you hear me, sis? Just stay
out
.”

There wasn’t an answer. Not that I’d been expecting one.

I sighed. The taxi driver shifted into third and put the hammer down. Traffic was light, so we would get to the new scene in just a few minutes.

Chapter Twenty-seven

We pulled up outside a steak house in South Minneapolis with the amusing name of the Strip Club.

We saw the taxi off, flashed our IDs at a clearly amused uniform, and joined her in the doorway. “Is it?”

“Looks like.”

“Two in one day?”

“Yup. Pretty nasty in there.” The uniform, Officer Baylor, a trim brunette with big dark eyes and the cheekbones of royalty, shook her head. “Luck.”

“Thank you, Off—”

George swore in the middle of my gratitude. “He’s clearly escalating, the jerkoff. I had tickets to Jim Gaffigan, damn it!”

“Escalating?” Officer Baylor asked. That was too mild a word, kind of like describing the sun as “shiny.”

I guess I better hold up a sec and explain. The more serial killers kill, the more they want to kill. It’s like getting high. The first couple times you smoke or snort or whatever, it’s more than enough. But eventually, you have to do more and more of your drug of choice to get back that first, intense high.

Serial killers are no different. They can start out killing one or two victims a year . . . and then every six months . . . every month . . . every week. It proved to be the downfall of several of them, notably Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. Escalation led to sloppy thinking and worse.

Now here we were with two crime scenes in one day.

Two crime scenes in the city where I lived and worked.

This was the best time to catch serial killers. They weren’t as careful. They made mistakes. Too bad that the whole time they were being careless, the body count was racking up like pins in a bowling alley.

One of the problems with escalation is that it doesn’t work. It’s not a quick cure; it’s not any kind of cure at all. It merely makes everything worse. So the killer—honestly puzzled by this—takes more lives. And is enraged and confused when that doesn’t work, either.

It’s important, if difficult, to keep in mind that serial killers honestly feel cheated out of what’s theirs. That the cops have no business messing in their private lives. As Ann Rule put it in the awesomest true-crime book ever, “What Ted Bundy wanted, Ted should have.” So glad I didn’t have to work any of his crime scenes; may his soul be shrieking in hell for a million zillion years.

They don’t stop trying, either. They really think that if they can kill just the right person, they can be normal. Be
real
. If it weren’t so aw-ful, I could feel sorry for them. But it is awful, and I don’t.

“We caught a break, though,” Baylor was saying. “There’s a live victim.”

“What?”
Try as I might, I couldn’t keep my jaw from sagging. “Are you kidding?”

“She’d better not be,” George offered. “I never kid when I’m forced to miss Jim Gaffigan. D’you know I bought these tickets over six months ago?”

“The victim, George. Focus, please.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Baylor continued. “She locked herself in the pantry while our adorable li’l ThreeFer was going to work on victims one and two.”

“Is she hurt?”

“She says not, but she won’t come out.”

“Does she know I have Jim Gaffigan tickets?”

Officer Baylor merely stared at George, a not uncommon reaction.

George prodded me. “Go on in, Cadence. Work your good-girl magic.” He managed to say this without gagging, luckily for him. “I’ll stay out here and—Nance!” Baylor and I jumped as George shrieked loudly enough to shatter windows. “I see you over there, Nance! Turn out your eight zillion pockets now!” Jerry backpedaled, alarmed, as George marched over to him.

“You guys.” Officer Baylor was certainly getting an eyeful today. “You, uh, have your own way of doing things, huh?”

I shrugged. “So, you want to show me?”

“Sure.”

So Shiro fights. And Adrienne hurts. Me? I am good at talking to people. I love to talk to people. Which has come in handy on more than one occasion.

Like now! Oooh, I couldn’t wait to talk to the poor thing. Finally, finally, finally a break.

I fell into step behind the officer, catching a few glimpses of body bags and the ME, Dr. Gottlieb. She was crouched over a zippered bag, stripping off her gloves and tossing a casual wave in my direction.

Officer Baylor led me to the kitchen and showed me the (locked) pantry door.

“It locks from the inside?”

Officer Baylor nodded.

“Why would somebody want to lock herself inside a pantry?”

“You mean, besides avoiding the psycho hacking people up in the dining room?”

“Well. Yes. Besides that. Never mind, Officer, I’ll take it from here. What’s her name?”

Baylor shrugged, tugged off her hat, and ran her fingers through her short brunet hair. “She won’t say.”

“Oh. Okay, thanks.” Yes, you’ve been
loads
of help, Officer; don’t know what I’d have done without you. I better not say it out loud, though. Being surrounded by death and blood and misery (not to mention Dr. Gottlieb’s perfume) was no excuse for being mean.

I rapped on the pantry door while around me the hustle and bustle of crime-scene processing went on. “Ma’am? My name is Special Agent Jones; I’m with the FBI. Can I speak with you?”

“Go away!”

“I can’t, ma’am.” My partner wrecked our car and our cab left two minutes ago. Hmm. Prob’ly should keep that to myself. “Are you hurt?”

“What if he comes back?”

“Then my partner will shoot him in the face,” I promised. It wasn’t a lie, either. George considered a day without a civil rights violation the worst sort of lost opportunity.

Silence. Then, “
You
come in. By yourself.”

“Sure. D’you have any crackers in there? I skipped lunch.”

Another pause, broken by the snick of the lock being disengaged.

I stepped inside and prepared myself to meet the first live victim after more than a dozen attacks.

Date? What date? Now I was glad Shiro had canceled for us. Maybe I’d leave her a thank-you note somewhere.

Or not.

Chapter Twenty-eight

The pantry was cool and dry and well lit, with shelves of dry goods going back at least eight feet. The as-yet unnamed victim was crammed as far away from the door as she could get—understandably.

I flashed what I hoped was a friendly and sympathetic (but professional—mustn’t forget that) smile. “Hi. I’m Cadence Jones. You’re having an awful day, aren’t you?”

The victim, a dark-haired, brown-eyed woman of average weight and (I was pretty sure) height, made a sound halfway between a bark and a giggle. She looked like she was in her late forties, but my estimate could be off by as much as ten years, depending on what the stress of the day had done to her face. “You could say that.”

“D’you mind if I sit?”

She shook her head, further messing up her hair, which had probably been pinned back in a neat bun when she left her home that morning. Now it fell around her face in dark straggles.

I sat cross-legged across from her. My gun dug into my hip and I grimaced and moved it over an inch.

“D’you want to tell me . . .” Everything? What happened? What did he look like? Why did you survive? Did you know the other two victims? Tell me tell me tell me
every single thing.

Whoa. Calm down, Cadence. I tried to get a grip on myself. The
last
thing I needed was Shiro thinking I needed rescuing. She was a disaster at interpersonal relations, and would scare this poor woman worse than she already was.

I took a deep, steadying breath and asked, “Can you tell me your name?”

“Tracy. Tracy C-Carr.”

“And how did you come to be here tonight, Ms. Carr?”

“Dinner. I was supposed to meet a blind date.” She laughed, the sound not unlike breaking glass. “Everybody knows blind dates aren’t any fun, but I never dreamed—I never thought—”

“Sure, sure. Prob’ly would have been a good night to watch reruns, or empty out your TiVo account.”

A ghost of a smile, gone so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it.

“So you came here to meet a date . . . ,” I prompted, already needing to find out who set her up, whom she was supposed to meet—a thread which might turn into nothing. Or everything. Puzzle pieces, puzzle pieces . . .

It was so great to have a live victim. I vastly preferred chitchat to meetings in the morgue. We needed to find out everything about her—who she was, where she lived. Her job. Her friends, her family, her boss. Her blind date. Her family physician, her minister, her book club. Her dry cleaner, her car wash, her Jiffy Lube. Her grocery store, her vacation plans, her pets. Same old, same old—but we were getting there. I knew it. I think the others did, too.

“And then—and then I was in here, calling 911 on my cell phone.”

I blinked. Surely not another woman who lost time. Of course, trauma could certainly account for her not remembering the actual attack.

“So you called for help . . .”

“And I waited.” Her big eyes were shiny, almost glassy. Shock, of course. She was either in it or getting there. “And then—then I could hear the police. And then you were knocking on the door.”

Nuts. A memory gap of at least forty-five minutes. Well, maybe there’d be something on her clothes, under her nails. Caught in her hair. In her purse. On her iPod. Anything. Puzzle pieces, puzzle pieces . . .

“Well, Ms. Carr, I’m going to ride along with you to the hospital. We’ll have a guard on your door 24/7.” I hated how overused those numbers were, except when it was the literal truth. Ms. Carr wouldn’t be blowing her nose unobserved for the next several days. “We’ll get you checked out, make sure you—you’re okay. Do you want me to call somebody?”

“No.”

Definitely distant. Pulling away from reality. Boy, could I relate.

“Ms. Carr?”

“Mmm?”

“We’ll get him.”

She blinked at me slowly, like an owl. “Promise?”

“Oh, yes.”

Her lips trembled and she was finally able to force out, “Thank God. Thank God for that.”

God? Prob’ly not. BOFFO, though. They’d do the trick.

We would, I mean.

Chapter Twenty-nine

The next morning I lurched out of bed (I woke up alone, thank goodness) and staggered to the bathroom. What with processing the scene, escorting Tracy Carr to the hospital, going back to the office and filing paperwork, I’d been home for only about—

I peeked at my watch and groaned. Three hours. Ugh. I badly wanted more sleep. Or at least a long, hot bath. Unfortunately, it was the second Tuesday of the month.

Oh—right. I forgot you didn’t know. Cathie and I have been having breakfast at the Eagan Perkins once a month for the last ten years. With her traveling schedule and my career, if we didn’t have a set place and time, whole months could go by without us hooking up. Thus, the second Tuesday of the month was inviolate unless it was something important, like arresting a killer or needing stitches, or really really bad menstrual cramps.

So imagine my surprise when I walked into the restaurant to find Patrick—and only Patrick—at our table.

“Eh?” I said.

“Articulate even at such an obscene hour,” the baker said, closing his magazine (
People’s Most Fascinating People
) with a brisk snap. “Marvelous.”

My, my. He certainly was a handsome one. I could see him from only the waist up, but he was wearing what I suspected was a designer suit. It didn’t have that boxy look that bespoke retail.