The Rapture of Omega (2 page)

Present

“The National Weather Service has just confirmed a powerful cell forming off the coast of South Africa, expected to reach hurricane status within days. The remaining Florida residents are already making plans to evacuate. If the expected path reaches the coast of Florida by next week, Hurricane Stephen would make the fourth major hurricane to devastate the Florida coast in the last six weeks. Florida governor Randall Jimenez is expected to order a mandatory evacuation for affected areas beginning Friday. In other news…”

I reached over and turned the radio off before tossing my half-smoked cigarette out the window. I didn’t need to hear any more depressing news about other parts of the world. I had enough here, in Mansfield, Ohio, to keep me occupied.

Just thirty feet from my car lay the remains of a murder victim—young, pretty, and savagely brutalized. I’d say that allows me a significant amount of depression. Fifteen years of looking at bodies never gets easier. I’d give a number on this particular murder, but I quit counting a long time ago. Most people assume that I, Sergeant Detective CeeCee Gallagher, am made of steel. After
reading newspaper accounts that have deemed me the ace detective of the Richland Metropolitan Police Department Major Crimes Division, they tend to look genuinely surprised when I show any type of emotion toward a victim. That fact alone disturbs me. I don’t want to be perceived as a coldhearted bitch that was born without tear ducts, or a soul, for that matter. But then again, why should I care what they think?

The warm stream of sweat that slowly made its way down the side of my face alerted me that the air-conditioning in my car had just conked out. I sighed.

“You gonna come out and look at this, or are you hellbent on losing forty pounds while you sit in there and melt?”

So deep in my thoughts, I hadn’t noticed that my fellow detective, and dear friend, Jeff “Coop” Cooper, had walked up to my window. Boyishly handsome, and devilishly funny, Coop was married to the boss—Captain Naomi Cooper, formerly Kincaid. Naomi was on the riverbank with the others, processing the body and scene. Coop began running his fingers through his dark hair and fanning his shirt out.

“Jesus! I thought it was supposed to cool down a little today.”

“It has. We have officially
cooled down
to a balmy ninety-one degrees.”

I whipped my long, sweat-soaked blonde hair into a ponytail before grabbing my briefcase off the passenger seat. Coop opened the door for me, still whining about the temperature.

“Ninety-one degrees, my ass. I think this sucks.”

“Ah, the pleasures of global warming.” I slammed my car door shut and nodded toward the embankment. “What have we got down there?”

“Prepare yourself. She’s only been there about two days, but the heat has accelerated decomposition something awful. It’s not pretty, and you can only imagine the smell.” He crinkled his nose as if I needed a visual. “Coroner says it looks like some type of crude abortion. She bled out.”

I stopped walking, already smelling the body. “What? Is she young?”

“Not really, late twenties. A group of Boy Scouts on a nature hike found her. I remember doing that…” He paused briefly as if to reflect. “Of course I was only in Boy Scouts for a year until my dad found out the leader was some homo—”

“Coop, please.” Sometimes he needed to be redirected.

“Yeah, right, sorry. Anyway, the coroner said she bled out here so this is probably where the murder occurred. It’s not just a body dump.”

“Good, at least we don’t have to deal with any secondary crime scenes. Everything we’re looking for should be in this one spot.”

Entering the crime scene, an embankment along the Mohican River, I absorbed the familiar sight. Evidence technicians wearing their rubber gloves and holding their evidence bags were everywhere. Some were taking photographs, and some were on their hands and knees in search of the most miniscule piece of fiber or hair that could prove to be the sole piece of evidence leading us to our killer. Yellow crime-scene tape was strewn between the trees along the embankment while other detectives, including Naomi, stood inside.

It was a beautiful day, really. The region was known for its scenic value, usually traveled by tourists who wanted a leisurely stroll down the massive river’s banks to observe the rolling Appalachian foothills. It was disturbing to see
a death scene mar a perfectly picturesque place. Of course, inside the mind of a murderer, things like that don’t matter.

Naomi waved me over. She was statuesque, blonde, and stunningly beautiful, but she and I had a rocky past. We had smoothed things over throughout the years and had become good friends. It was a rare occasion that my husband, FBI Special Agent Michael Hagerman, and I went out to dinner or a movie without Naomi and Coop. We were like a family.

“CeeCee, what took you so long?” Naomi asked as I teetered around an evidence technician bagging a pile of leaves.

“Sorry, Isabelle and Selina both have soccer games tonight, so I had to wait until Michael got home.”

“Sorry you’re gonna miss the games.” She tried to be sympathetic.

“Don’t worry, I’m used to it. So are they. What’ve we got?”

“Twenty-six-year-old white female, apparently had a crude abortion performed before she was drowned.” Naomi started to lead me to the body.

I stopped walking. “Drowned? Coop didn’t say anything about that.”

“It’s just a theory right now. The coroner said it would’ve taken a while for her to die from the bleeding and she’s got marks on her wrists where she was tied up. It’ll have to be confirmed in the autopsy, but it looks like her face was put in the water to drown her after the abortion was performed.”

I had a thought. “How do we know it was an abortion?”

“Just another theory because of the vaginal bleeding. She’s covered in blood from the waist down, and the coroner said that’s what it appears to be.”

“Any identification yet?”

“Yes, believe it or not, her purse was found three feet from the body. Empty, except for her driver’s license inside. It’s almost as if someone left it there on purpose so we’d know who she was. Her name is Kelly Dixon, and she’s from Shaker Heights.”

“Shaker Heights? That’s in Cleveland.”

“I know.”

We stopped at the embankment where the body lay. Coop was right; she looked awful. The decomposition, mixed with the water, had bloated her face and stomach. I’ve seen bodies like this before and they always reminded me of the old Kewpie dolls whose eyes and stomachs popped out when you squeezed them. Bodies like this never looked real. It was as if some Hollywood special effects company came in and decorated a department store mannequin to suit their upcoming horror flick. But it
was
real. The pungent odor that permeated throughout the area proved that to all of us.

The only part of the victim that indicated it was a female was the long dark hair that lazily swayed in the water. There was only about an inch of white material at the bottom of her pants that wasn’t blackened by the horrendous amount of blood. The ground underneath her and at her sides was just as black.

“Good Lord…” I murmured.

“I doubt the Good Lord had anything to do with it.”

If we only knew then just how right she was.

I hated when I began to get into the mind of a victim; it served no useful purpose other than to cause me grief. Getting into the mind of a killer was different. To think his thoughts could, as it had in the past, keep me one step ahead of him—most of the time.

But when you look down on the lifeless body of a woman whose future has been shattered, as a human being you can’t help but think about it. For her, the daily worries are gone; worries of health, future, maybe a forbidden love or even bills that needed to be paid. These worries were now irrelevant.

I remember once, as a small child, I was sitting in school while the teacher drew pretty pictures in different colored chalk on the blackboard. She made each one of us come to the front of the room and draw a picture of one of our happiest moments, using all the colors we wanted. When we were done, there wasn’t a speck of black to be seen. The board was a kaleidoscope of different colors and images, a project the teacher called, “The board of life experiences.” I remember afterward watching the teacher take a wet cloth and wipe the board clean before rolling it into a nearby supply closet; the experiences gone forever, never to be filled again. Life was like
that, kind of. Kelly Dixon’s board had been wiped clean and put away. The only worries were that of the living, and what lay behind the board.

As silly as it sounded, I felt a wave of chills rush through me just the same.

“CeeCee, did you hear me?”

“No, I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“Let’s go over and talk to J.P. and head back to the office. Everything is pretty much done here.”

J. P. Sanders, the assistant of the Richland County Coroner’s Office, was sharper than the coroner himself was. Although the coroner was an elected position, there hasn’t been one within the last twenty years that could have survived without J.P. He was a man that could walk into a crime scene and within five minutes tell you with intricate detail what happened. He had an outrageous sense of humor, so it was best to be on your guard whenever you were around him. He had gotten the best of me on more than one occasion.

His silvery hair and inch-thick glasses could sometimes be a sight for sore eyes when at the end of your rope during an investigation. Seeing him grin widely as he watched Naomi and me approach, I braced myself for an oncoming joke that I hoped wouldn’t go over my head.

“There’s the dynamic duo. CeeCee, if you get any more gorgeous, y’all are gonna be carrying me out in one of these body bags after my ticker quits. Just let me know when you get rid of that agent husband of yours. Speaking of which, how are those beautiful little daughters?”

“They’re good. It’s nice to see you, J.P. How are you?”

“Still gettin’ an erection. Wanna see?”

I laughed and waved my hands in front of me. “I’ll pass.”

“It’s your loss, but just remember, if you ever have to
carry me out in a bag someday, you have my permission to take a peek at the little guy. You, too, Naomi.”

Naomi groaned. “I’ll remember that. So, how long do you think it’ll be until we get the results from the autopsy back?”

“It may be a while. This damn heat is getting us back-logged from all the elderly dropping over, and we’re still not done with the Shiloh bodies yet. Goddamn global warming, never thought I’d live to see it.”

He was right. Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) officially declared the world in the throes of the warming feedback loops—the warming phase of global warming. It terrified everyone, even though most of us had known it was coming. You’d have to be blind, deaf, and living in the bottom of a coal mine not to know about it.

Within the last year and a half, there have been more catastrophic weather occurrences than ever recorded. They were now becoming commonplace, at least in our minds. The hurricanes this year that have literally devastated the East Coast made Hurricanes Katrina and Rita look like small thunderstorms. The winds of these particular hurricanes registered so high, above 300 mph, the National Weather Service quit numbering the Saffir-Simpson Scale, and merely referred to those as “Category X Hurricanes”—completely catastrophic, without a doubt. Over one million people have died from those particular hurricanes. And, from what I heard on the radio earlier, another was on its way.

Most of the coastal regions in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi had lost more than half its surviving population. The hurricanes caused a massive population shift into the northern and Midwest states. In my county alone, the population has
skyrocketed by almost 60 percent in the last two years. As law enforcement officers, we were overwhelmed and understaffed by the influx. Even though the president signed a bill ordering the appointments of 200,000 more police officers, it didn’t seem to make a dent.

The West Coast had its own share of catastrophes. The wildfires that raged through California and Florida six months before had yet to be contained, and they told us that this is only the beginning.

To make a bad situation much worse, during the session in which the IPCC made their declaration, the United States immediately withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol and began reinforcing its borders. This obviously caused major tension in our relations with governments worldwide. Since the United States and Australia were the only countries with the resources to survive global warming, mass immigration occurred. But those people were turned away; no one was allowed in at all.

I remember watching the news clips of the coast guard pulling bodies out of the water, people who had drowned trying to make their way into our country, or were shot down by our own military. Somehow, someone had obtained video of a pilot crying from inside the cockpit of a military airplane after he had been ordered to shoot at twenty or so boats that were trying to make it in, boats that were half-filled with children. The media splashed the video everywhere it could think of, but, like everything else, the hype died down. Thousands of people were dying daily in third-world countries and we needed to protect our own citizens—or so they told us.

The United States even threatened to renege on a 1944 treaty with Mexico that allowed water from the Colorado River to flow down. But considering scientists’ predictions that in a couple years the cooling phase of global
warming would occur and essentially everything would freeze, they decided they may need Mexico in the future and kept the treaty. Wise choice.

Right now, living in Ohio, I was in a good place, except for the bugs, which had become unbearable, and the tornadoes. Never could I have imagined suntanning on my back porch swatting at mosquitoes in January, but it happened. Personally, I thought a lot of what was being said was hype. I did my own research on global warming, and I think we’ll be okay. The cooling effect they’re talking about is a drop of ten to fifteen degrees, so, in about three or four years, I’ll have to go to South America to get a genuine suntan. If that’s the worst, I’ll deal with it. When I was a child and the term “global warming” came up, it meant the end of the world, the apocalypse. We were led to believe the world would erupt into a huge fireball before completely exploding. It always used to scare me.

When it came to the subject of the end of the world, the most terrified I can ever remember being was when I was ten. There was a lot of media attention and speculation surrounding an upcoming made-for-TV movie,
The Day After.
The movie was about a nuclear war in the United States, and my parents wouldn’t let me or my older brother, Tony, watch it. Even at ten years old, my curiosity got the best of me. I snuck downstairs and peered around the corner, watching the television just as the scene where several nuclear warheads disintegrated Kansas City. I swear I didn’t sleep right for six months after that. Plus, I got grounded for sneaking around. The movie had been on several times since I’ve been an adult and I have never even considered watching it.

It’s funny how resilient we become to the inevitable. I forever pictured myself in the throes of a nervous
breakdown if confronted with real global warming, but here I stand, doing my daily business and only bitching because it’s hot.

The bodies in Shiloh that J.P. was talking about were from the Shiloh tornado. A small village in the northern part of the county that was situated in the middle of Amish farmlands, Shiloh was always referred to as “the armpit of Richland County.” As law enforcement officers, we used to joke how the best thing that could happen to the village was an F-5 tornado to wipe out the rednecks. Unfortunately, two months ago when an F-5 tornado
did
wipe out the village, we all regretted our words, especially when we pulled the bodies of small children out of their homes during the recovery. Four hundred people out of seven hundred died, and the village was gone completely. More tornadoes have come and gone, but the Shiloh tornado was Richland County’s own catastrophic event.

“Just get me the autopsy results as soon as you can, J.P.,” Naomi requested.

“Will do. I forgot to ask you, CeeCee, how’s your father doing? Any sign of retirement?”

“You know better than that. Thirty-eight years as a police lieutenant and no end in site.”

My father, Mitch Gallagher, and his brothers, Max and Mike, are the longest-standing officers of the Richland Metropolitan Police Department. It has to be their stubborn Irish blood that keeps them on; there’s no other explanation. Whenever I prod my father, a night-shift lieutenant of road patrol, to retire, he merely laughs at me.

“I’m still having fun, Cee. When I don’t have fun anymore, I’ll leave.”

He always said that. However, there wasn’t enough fun
in the world to keep me at this job for thirty-eight years. Once I hit my twenty-five years, I’m gone.

“Well, tell him I said hi when you see him.”

“Will do, J.P.”

I threw my briefcase into my car and wiped more sweat off my forehead when I remembered to call Michael. He should be back from the game by now. Michael’s son from a previous marriage, seven-year-old Sean, was coming for his weekend visit tonight and I wanted to make sure he had plans to feed the three kids. My own daughters from my first marriage were six and thirteen years old so Michael had his work cut out for him. I assumed they’d order pizza. He answered on the second ring.

“We were gonna order pizza.”

I assumed right.

“Save me some. I’m probably not going to get home until late. Do you think you’ll be up?” I was hopeful.

“Of course, I haven’t seen you all day and I miss that beautiful face. You feeling okay, Cee?”

“I’m fine, Michael, quit asking me that. See you tonight.”

I had suffered a miscarriage six months ago; I had been nine weeks along. It would have been our first child together and Michael had been treating me with kid gloves ever since. Granted, I took it hard, but was truly doing okay now. Michael and I had been through so much together that when we first learned I was pregnant, it was like a miracle. Now I’ll never be able to have children again. The doctors never gave me a definitive answer on the cause of the miscarriage and called it “just one of those things.” Still, I found myself periodically thinking of the fact that the baby would be about a month old now. Those were harsh, invasive thoughts that I didn’t care to have. Some days I had to physically shake them
from my head. Today, however, Coop took them away for me.

He had been standing nearby, talking to a woman in a maroon car. As I was getting into my own, Coop walked away from her and came at me waving his hands.

“Hold up, CeeCee, don’t leave yet.” His face showed an unfamiliar look of concern.

“What is it? Who’s that lady you were talking to?”

“We just found out the victim has a daughter. That’s her babysitter over there.” He nodded toward the car and I saw the woman inside was crying. “She heard on the radio a body was found and drove down here with the baby. She said she hadn’t heard from the mother for two days and had already filed a missing persons report.”

“Did you confirm that? Do you think she’s a suspect?”

“The report was taken and I believe it’s highly unlikely she’s a suspect. She’s just a neighbor of the victim’s that watches her kid once in a while. She’s in her fifties and cleans houses for a living.”

“How did she hear about this all the way up in Shaker Heights?”

“She lives here, and apparently so did the victim. They live in an apartment complex off Cook Road. She said the victim only moved in a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, I’ve got children services on the way—the sitter said she can’t keep the baby, and we’ll have to go check out the victim’s apartment.”

I thought for a second. “Why don’t you go on to the apartment, I’ll wait here for the caseworker.”

“You sure? I got a few more things to ask the coroner and then I’ll go.”

“Yup, let me know if you find anything out.”

I walked over to the babysitter’s car and peered through the back window. Snuggled up safe and secure in her car
seat was one of the most beautiful babies I had ever seen—outside of my own children, naturally. Around two years old, she had curly blonde hair, a rich complexion, and full chubby cheeks that puffed in and out as she sucked on her pacifier. She was sleeping soundly. I had to resist the urge to pick her up and squeeze her.

“How old is she?” I asked the woman.

Standing next to the car door, she hadn’t seen me walk over and appeared confused for a moment until she realized I was talking about the baby.

“Lola? She just turned two a week ago.”

“Kelly has no living relatives at all to take care of her baby?”

“No, no.” The woman shook her head before wiping tears away with a tissue. “It was just her and Lola. Kelly is—was—a wonderful mother. Lola was her life. All I know is that Kelly used to be a nurse. She didn’t talk much about her past except to tell me there was no one else in her life.” She began to cry again.

The thought of this beautiful child being thrown into the Richland County foster care system sickened me. I’ve reacted to plenty of children while I’ve been investigating cases, but not like this. This baby, just by looking at her, unequivocally pulled at my heart.