The Shoulders of Giants (4 page)

Just before six a.m., I was rudely awakened by the phone. I had fallen asleep on the couch, the television still on. My suit was crumpled and my mouth felt like a cat had gone to sleep in it. I reached for the phone, more to stop its noise than to speak to anyone. The voice I heard was Scott’s.

“I’m in a parking garage on Dearborn. Think you should get down here.”

“Scott, it’s not even six o’clock yet.”

“We’ve found your girl. She’s dead.”

Chapter 6

My bathroom light seemed brighter than usual, and at first I didn’t recognize my face in the mirror. My left eye had almost swelled shut, and the puffy area around it was already turning a dark shade of blue. Standing in front of the mirror, I eased myself out of my shirt and pants and examined the bruise on my hip. It matched the one on my face. Although I’d only been hit a couple of times, my whole body ached, and I moved towards the shower, shuffling like an old man.

As I drove to the address Scott had given me, my mind was reeling. I was feeling guilty, disappointed, excited, selfish and angry all at once. I wondered if Susan Patterson would still be alive if I had found the right people to speak to or asked the right questions. I wondered if anything I had discovered so far might help lead the police to her killer. And I wondered if I would have to give three days pay back to her father, or if perhaps I should give him a full refund. It was one hell of a first case. Less than two days after I start looking for the girl, she turns up dead. This would not look good on my résumé.

It wasn’t until I arrived that it occurred to me I might be looking at a dead body. My first. I was glad I hadn’t had time for breakfast. The stench hit me as soon as I got near to the Medical Examiner’s black van.

“Jesus Christ, how long has she been here?” I yelled in Scott’s general direction. “She’s only been missing three days.”

A uniformed officer saw me approach the yellow crime scene tape, and held one hand out to suggest I stop, while the other hand went to rest on his gun.

“Can I help you sir?” He asked, forcefully.

By this time, Scott was beside the officer, holding the tape up, for me to walk under. “That’s alright, Marquez,” he said.

“Do they always smell like this?” I asked.

“Holy crap, what happened to you?” he countered. I think he’d noticed my eye and hand, and the fact I was still walking like I had lead trousers on.

“You should see the other guy,” I bluffed.

“Why? Did you break his fist with your nose?”

“It’s a long story,” I said, not wanting to distract from the moment. “What are you even doing here? You aren’t on duty for another two hours.”

“I was on call. It’s our guy again.” Scott hung his head. It took me a moment to process this.

“You mean the drowning thing?”

Scott nodded. I turned to see Susan laid out on a plastic sheet on the floor, the EMTs getting ready to put her in the body bag. She looked gray and there were flies all around her, but otherwise she was recognizable from the photo her father had given me. Her feet were bare and, even from this distance, I noticed something else. On the sole of her left foot was a cut in the shape of a Z. I turned to Scott, and he knew what I was going to ask before I did.

“Yeah,” he said, “that was on the others too. It’s why we think it’s the same guy. This is confidential information, OK? You can’t tell anybody.”

“No problem” I said. Who was I going to tell? “You got any suspects yet?”

“Yeah, Don Diego De La Vega. Unfortunately, he’s fictional, so officially we’re still looking. Has your investigation turned up anyone with that initial?”

“No. I’ve got a mystery W, but no Z. Has her father been told?” I was hoping the job wouldn’t fall on me, although in a way I felt I had a responsibility to break the news myself.

“Not yet. We’re going to head over there when we finish up here.”

“So, what’s the story?”

“How much do you want to know?”

I was itching to use ‘Just the facts, Ma’am.’, but I felt it might be seen as trivializing the situation, so I just shrugged.

“There’s not much yet. She was found in the trunk of that car.” He pointed to a battered old Volkswagen, which was being hooked up to a tow truck, presumably on its way to the crime lab. “M.E. says she’s been dead at least forty-eight hours. Car’s been here since mid-afternoon yesterday. No license plates, so we’re running checks on the VIN, and going over the car for physical evidence.”

“Cause of death?” I asked, as if I did this every day.

“Not established yet. Looks like she was injected with something. Dilated pupils could suggest narcotics, although I understand she was out partying before she disappeared, so maybe that’s nothing to do with it. Looks like the cut was peri-mortem, like the others.”

“Peri-mortem?”

“Around the time of death. M.E. says the first victim, West, was probably cut before he was killed, cause he had bruises around his ankles like someone had held them still while they cut his foot. The girl on the beach and this one don’t have the bruises, so probably he killed them first then cut them. Either way, it was right before or after. We’ll know more after the post.” I heard the zip of the bodybag behind me and spun round. The zip was fully closed, and the medical technicians loaded her into the back of the van.

“Listen,” said Scott, “I’m telling you this stuff because you’ve been working the case, and because we’re friends. Now you need to tell us everything you’ve found out about her. Where she went, who she was with, everything.”

“Sure, why don’t I come down to the station and write it up? I’ll need to swing by my place and pick up my notes.” I was putting off having to go and see my client. I imagined him opening the door to a pair of detectives, men he had worked with, men who hated him for what they believed he did, but who took no pleasure in what they had to tell him. That his only daughter was dead.

An obese man in an ill-fitting security guard’s uniform came towards us with a video tape in his hand. “I got it.” He said. “You can’t see much.”

Scott introduced him to me as Mr Hagerty, the security guard who found the body.

“Yup,” said Hagerty, “We open at five, and this car hadn’t been paid for today, so I came along to put a fine on it. That’s when I noticed the smell. I jimmied the trunk, and that’s when I called you guys.”

We were joined by Scott’s partner, Sgt. Al Freedman, to watch the fuzzy black and white security video. The car we had just been standing by drove into a space on the left hand side of the picture, and ended up facing away from the camera. In my mind’s eye I could see what was in the trunk, but on film it was just any other car. After what seemed like a long time, the driver’s door opened, and someone got out. They were wearing a fleece jacket with some kind of logo on it, driving gloves and a baseball cap. Their face never turned towards the camera. In a few steps they were off the screen, and that was the end of the show.

“I can’t find him on any other tapes.” said Hagerty.

“We’ll still need to take them all, just to be sure.”

The tape ran again.

“Can you zoom in on this section here?” I asked, pointing to the logo on the jacket.

“What do I look like? CIA? I’m a security guard. This is a VCR. No, I cannot ‘zoom in’.”

“That’s fine,” said Scott, jumping in, “We’ll take it from here.”

As I got into my car, I promised Scott I’d see him later at the station to tell him what I’d learned. Freedman and I nodded goodbye to one another. We had met a few times, but we never really hit it off. I had a feeling my new profession wouldn’t help matters. He was a third generation cop, with little time for P.I.’s.

I decided to be unselfish, and face up to the fact that I had to see Gregory Patterson. There was never going to be a good time, and putting it off was only making me dread it more. So perhaps I was being selfish, after all. Either way, after driving around for about an hour, I headed over to his house.

He greeted me at his door with red cheeks. He had been crying, but there were no tears in his eyes now, only anger. I searched for the right words. “I’m sorry” was all that came out. I expected he would hear that phrase a lot in the days to come. Discovering that Susan had been dead since before he hired me had eased my pain a little, but I doubted if it would do much for his, so I remained silent.

“What’s your next step?” His question took me by surprise.

“I have to go tell the police everything I’ve found out so far.” I said.

“No, I mean how do you plan to catch this bastard?”

I sat, stunned, trying to figure out if he was in shock, or if he was serious.

“You hired me to find Susan. She’s turned up.” God, that sounded insensitive. “What I mean is; the police are way more qualified than me to find a killer. I don’t have the experience, or...”

He cut me off. He hadn’t been looking at me. I’m not sure he was even aware I had been talking. “The two badges who came to tell me she’d been found, mentioned it may tie in to some other homicides. I know how these things work. I don’t want Susan to become a number on a casefile, just one more victim of some nutso. There has to be a reason, and I want you to find out the reason. If nothing else, at least it’s one more man out there working the case.”

It occurred to me that he was trying to cling on to the last thing he had. Then he confirmed it.

“I don’t know if you remember from the newspapers. My wife, Carol, died back in 2002. I made Captain two months before we found out she had cancer.”

He paused. There didn’t seem to be anything to say, so I didn’t say anything.

“She fought it. There were times when we dared to hope she was winning, but mostly it just consumed her, bit by bit. Susan was in school. She knew what was going on, and we talked about it some, but I gave all I had to Carol, and there was nothing left.”

He didn’t look up to check I was listening. I was, but I figured he was telling me this as much for him as for me, so I stayed quiet.

“The job suffered. I was a bad Captain, way too wrapped up in myself to be effective. The squad had to be self-sufficient for far too long. The brass gave me a lot of leeway. I guess they figured they couldn’t fire me. ‘You’ve got to let Greg do what he can. His wife’s dying.’ They tried to get me to take some time off. I was all ready to give in, and then Carol died. I knew it was coming, we all did, but when it actually happened it shocked the hell out of me. After that, the last thing I wanted was to be at home, so I went straight back. I worked extra hours, and they practically had to fire me to get me to take a week. I couldn’t face Susan. She reminded me so much of her mother, I just couldn’t...” He shook his head, and a tear rolled down one cheek. He wasn’t quite cried out, after all. “I took it out on her and she ended up staying with friends a lot. I threw myself into the department, and that’s how it was right up until New Year’s Eve 2004.”

Now he lifted his head, and for the first time since I had arrived, looked straight into my eyes.

“It took my whole world falling apart, Mr Abraham. That’s what it took for me to realize what was really important. I tried to make it all up to Susan. Tried to build bridges where I’d burned them down. It took a long time, but she was beginning to trust me again. She was beginning to love me again. Now she’s gone.”

I couldn’t imagine how painful it was for him to have lost everything in a few short years. I thought about mentioning my run in with Muscles and his friend, but it seemed petty compared to what he was going through. OK, so I didn’t have the experience or the resources of the police. Maybe I was arrogant to think I could make a difference, but I figured I owed him my best efforts.

Scott and Sgt. Freedman, however, may not be happy.

Chapter 7

I drove back to my apartment and made myself eat some breakfast while I watched the morning news. There was nothing about Susan. Nothing about the first two victims. There was plenty of tragedy to fill the time, nonetheless. When I felt almost human again, I got my notebook out, and skim read it to see if there was any obvious point I’d overlooked which pointed to the killer. If there was, I still couldn’t see it.

When I arrived at the station on the corner of Belmont and Western, I told the desk sergeant I had come to see Detective Bales. He pointed me in the right direction. Scott and his partner were standing in front of a large cork board, pinning the crime scene photos of Susan next to those of two others, who I assumed to be Richard West, and the girl found on Oak Street Beach. There was a lot of room on the cork board for more photos.

Scott took me into the coffee room, and offered me a donut, a Coke, and a yellow legal pad.

“So, what’s going on with your face?” Scott asked again.

“Couple of guys warned me off the case. They were quite enthusiastic about it.”

“Do you know who they were?”

“We didn’t swap business cards”.

“After we’re done here, we’ll go over it together and get a composite done. See if we can get an I.D.” I started writing what I knew on the legal pad and he started pacing.

“I went to see Gregory Patterson.” I said after too much silence.

“How’d he seem to you?”

“He’s angry. It’s only just beginning to hit him.”

“Give it a couple of days.” We both knew what it was like to lose someone close to us. When his brother died, Scott didn’t really start to grieve until after the funeral.

“He wants me to stay on the case.”

“That’s ridiculous. You told him no, of course.”

“Actually, I told him I’d do whatever I can.”

“Jesus, Jake. This isn’t a game. We’ve got a serial killer here. Leave it to the professionals.”

“Maybe so, but you’ve never gone up against a serial killer, either. Way I see it you could use all the help you can get.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. I don’t need your help. I’ve got the resources of a whole department behind me. Hell, a whole government!”

“The Feds are involved? Have there been other cases out of state?”