Wild Card (22 page)

“And did you prove it then? The poison?”

“Yeah. I nailed it.” Her eyes shone.

“What happened to the neighbor?”

“Huh?” She blinked. “Oh. The neighbor had died a couple of years before. It wasn’t the point any more. I’d gotten over the dog, but I’d found something else. Something really important to me. You know why I joined CSI?” she said. “I need to know. Like other people need to breathe. What, why, who. The facts. Can you understand that? It’s more important to me than anything else.”

I nodded. I had a good idea what was coming next, and this time I was right.

“So when a mysterious, ex-special forces, rookie policewoman starts asking questions about some oddball murders and then suddenly takes out the three guys allegedly responsible, I notice. When those bodies then disappear off the slab into some military cloak and dagger facility, I’m pissed. When I’m refused any follow-up information…”

She laughed; a short, sharp sound without humor, before continuing.

“I went looking, and the more I looked, the more I found. Interestingly, almost nothing about you, or those three guys, or for that matter, the secret squirrel army facilities.”

“Must have slipped a cog in your brain, speculating what it was all about,” I said.

“I don’t speculate,” she said, as if I’d suggested she ate children.

“Melissa, you’ve got to realize that I can’t tell you all the things you want to know, no matter how much you think you need to know them.”

“Yeah?” She smiled. “We’ll see.”

We walked on for a minute, while I reflected how bizarre my life had become when I had conversations like this and they seemed almost normal.

“You were at the murder scene in Wash Park last night,” she said abruptly.

“How would you know, if you’re suspended?”

“I listen to the police radio. Morales and Edmunds getting involved is like waving a huge red flag to me,” she snickered, “especially when they start talking in code.”

“Okay, so I was there. What about it?”

“FBI threw you out, and slapped one of their labels on it. Pattern A, whatever. Meaning a homicide where there is apparent evidence of a large canine being involved. They think it’s some cult thing, you know.”

“But you don’t.”

“It may or may not be a cult. It certainly isn’t an animal.”

“I thought you didn’t speculate?”

“I’m not.” She rolled her shoulders and did some side stretches as we walked. “Tell me, what evidence do you think points to animals?”

Of course I had a string of cases, some where there had been paw prints, but I wasn’t going to admit knowing anything other than this case.

“The bite.”

“The thigh bites.” She laughed. “All those cases that Morales had copied off and given to you. They mention paw prints, too.” She sniffed. “Not a single one mentions any evidence of animals, no DNA for instance.”

There seemed no point in hiding my knowledge of these cases any more.

“But there’s a whole report by consultants about what kind of animal,” I said. “Teeth patterns, jaw strength and so on. Those guys were experts.”

“Yeah. Those guys had their heads up their asses. Too smart for their own good. What kind of canine makes one or two specific bites, in exactly the same location, every time? No evidence of chewing, no bites on other bones. Just crunch, crunch.” She demonstrated with a hand imitating a bite on her neck and thigh. “No others. Not one single instance where the ‘animal’ that did those two bites bit anywhere else. There were other bites on the bodies, but they were all way post mortem. They were little scavengers that couldn’t break a thigh.”

I didn’t have all the facts memorized, but I’d take her word for it.

“There was damage to ribs at the scene last night,” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t speculate,” she said, enjoying herself, “but cast your mind back to the details if you can and tell me if the bone was broken cleanly or shattered.”

I thought. “Clean.” Strangely, abruptly severed. She had me going here. The ends of the ribs and the shortened breastbone looked odd. Certainly not chewed or fractured.

She shrugged. “Not a bite, then.”

“Okay,” I played along. “Not all bodies had neck bites. Those that did, the neck bites were killing bites, and those were like an animal might make.”

She nodded and shrugged.

“So if those might be a genuine animal, you’ve got some theory about the other bites—the ones on the thighs?”

She huffed. “What, in the simplest observation, is the thighbone in comparison to the other bones in the body?”

“The biggest.”

“Yup. The biggest,
toughest
bone. The thigh bites were a test or demonstration of strength. Nothing else.” She peered at me. “That doesn’t sound like an animal to me.”

It sounded obvious once she’d said it. But why would a Were keep testing its jaw strength?

“Tell me something else about last night,” she said.

The image of the body was too fresh in my mind. “The abdominal organs were all missing.”

“I knew that when you mentioned the ribs. Something else.”

“She was tied down. Marlin spikes were driven into the floor.”

“And left there? Oh.” Her nose flared and she nodded. “Well, that fits well with my theory.”

“Okay, you’ve hooked me,” I said, frustrated. “Tell me your theory.”

“He’s just flipped them off. That was his goodbye.”

I had a vague idea where she was going. But she was wrong, though proving that to her would mean giving her more information, and just as I had with Noble earlier, I was getting really worried about how much I gave away when I didn’t mean to.

“What’s your reasoning?” I asked her instead.

“You’ve seen cold cases going back five or six years?” She looked at me inquiringly and I nodded. “All of them with some indication of canine involvement? Well, you would have been better off trawling the whole cold case murder list.”

Her words chilled me.

“There are more?”

“Lots more,” she said. “He’s prolific, and I predict there will be even more that we haven’t found and most of them, we never will. The other thing you could have trawled is the missing persons files.”

“But why are you adding all these unsolved murders together? That sounds like speculation to me. What if it’s more than one killer, for instance?”

“Serial killers are rare. Prolific serial killers are even rarer. Long-term prolific serial killers…The odds against having more than one operating undetected in Denver are huge.” She frowned. “Although I grant you, that’s an argument for this being some kind of a cult.”

“If this isn’t speculation, there must be a pattern you’re working on?”

We walked on a ways as she thought it through.

“I started with three types,” she said. “The apparent canine attacks, attacks involving ritual and attacks with evidence of almost uncontrollable rage. Then I added the canine to the ritual, because those bites are evidence of a ritual in themselves. Finally, I added the ones involving rage, because I believe the rage was caused when something went wrong. That’s the weak point. I’m not a profiler, I’m a forensic scientist, and it frustrates the hell out of me that I can’t find a link to prove that gut feeling.”

She saw my frown.

“The ones I labeled rage died without any indication of a ritual or bite marks. My theory is they died too early, and the killer went berserk. There was evidence of 140 stab wounds, all post mortem, on one body.”

That was a chilling image of rage. Not uncontrollable, not out on the street, but pent up and discharged in hiding. But I needed to focus on the big picture, not this one bizarre element.

“Melissa, you
are
speculating. Is there a provable common thread, apart from the fact that none of them have been solved?”

“That fact is part of it. The killer is fanatically methodical and highly knowledgeable about modern forensic science.”

“But there’s nothing in the news. This wasn’t even a topic of speculation in the police last year.” I’d listened out when I worked patrols for the PD. Admittedly, I hadn’t been listening for this kind of case, I’d been listening for any hint of vampires, but still, I would have registered this.

“The ones we’ve found are the marginals. No one’s interested. No one is pushing for them.”

“But—”

“But nothing, Amber. You know how it works. The PD doesn’t want to link up murders because it would highlight that it should be solvable. If they say the murders are all unrelated then everyone can just throw their hands in the air and spout about how awful society is becoming when there’s all this random violence. And the politicians encourage them. No politician wants to go to the polls with a serial murderer rampaging through the city. But random violence, hey, part of modern America. They set up some useless outreach initiative to show they care, and get on with winning their election.”

It was on the extreme side of cynical, but it wasn’t without basis.

“And the thing that will blow it all up,” she said, “is if we find one, just one, of the high profile missing cases and link it in.”

“We?” I raised an eyebrow.

“The question you need to ask yourself isn’t whether you use me or not, it’s how to make best use of me.”

“There are some huge assumptions in there. I’m a PI. Why do you think I’m responsible for hunting down this murderer? You say you don’t speculate and yet you’ve linked up cases by picking facts that fit your theory. You’re just guessing.”

“I’m right though, aren’t I? You are working on it.”

“You’re crazier than I am.”

“Maybe. But I have files and files that I know you want to see. Stuff that isn’t even in the police records. Ideas on where and how. Contacts with people who’ve looked into this.” She saw my sudden sharp look. “Not the FBI.”

We reached the Country Club and stopped. Melissa would be heading back to the parking garage behind the mall. I would be going around the club to get back to Manassah.

“Don’t forget, I am a trained forensic scientist as well, if you should come across some evidence. And I have all the equipment we would need.”

I looked skeptical.

She shrugged. “They update their equipment in CSI every couple of years. They sell the old stuff for a song.”

“What do you want from this, Melissa?”

She gave an awkward half-laugh. “You weren’t listening. I need to know.” She turned her face away, looked down at the creek. Her voice was strained. “I need to know like some people need their fix. I need it to be me that finds out.”

I needed all the help I could get. I’d contemplated hiring her when I heard she’d been suspended, but I wasn’t sure if this was the help I wanted, given the problems that came with it.

It was dangerous territory; Barbara Green’s murder and the message that sent to me made that plain. Having Melissa work with me meant I would have to look out for another person.

But if I wasn’t working with her, and she did stumble across proof of the paranormal secrets on her own, there wouldn’t be anything to stop her from broadcasting it. I’d have failed the paranormal community and, according to David and Pia’s predictions at the Assembly about uncontrolled Emergence, the whole world.

And there was one other thing that I’d need to be sure on with Melissa: I wasn’t hunting the killer to prove his guilt and hand him to the justice system. I was hunting to kill. What would she think of that?

There was a lot to consider.

“I’ll call you,” I said, and trotted off home.

Chapter 23

Back at Manassah, in the study, my mind was in a whirl as I looked at the maps. It felt as if they’d grown since this morning, like some strange mold spreading across the walls. Their blankness was accusing.

They needed to be covered in pins, according to Melissa. Could I trust her? Would her ‘evidence’ just confuse everything?

How could he get away with this for so long?

By being very clever, and incredibly careful.

I had to be cleverer, painstaking and quick. And I had no idea where to start. No feeling for it.

Overwhelmed by how much needed to be done, I distracted myself checking my emails. Full of trash as usual. There was even one that was gibberish—letters and numbers. My finger hovered over the delete key.

The colonel hadn’t been in touch, and this was one way he used.

I ran my eyes down it. Embedded as randomly scattered digits was a phone number. Possibly. Or I was seeing things.

I swapped my sim card for an unused one and called, wondering if I’d started to get delusional. I hadn’t. Yet.

“Hi,” he said. He sounded very tired.

“We have to stop speaking like this. Why don’t you come on over?”

“I would love to. We better keep this short rather than cryptic. I don’t know what they have in the way of scanners, but I’m running out of time.”

“Okay. Where are you?”

“A couple of hours east of you, hiding in an old barn a few miles off US 36.”

He was out on the high plains, where you can see in every direction for miles, but to be hiding, there had to be a reason beyond visibility.

“They know where you are?”

“Roughly. They got a hit on me somewhere near the Nebraska border. They know the car and they’re patrolling the roads. They know I’m somewhere between I-70 and I-76. Of course, they know where I’m heading now as well.”

“That’s a lot of area to cover. And you know all this how?”

I could hear him snort gently. “I picked up a TacNet node when I left, and I’ve got all their codes. I’m listening to them.”

I grunted. The TacNet would link in with their Ops 4 group radio command circuit, as long as it was provided the right codes. They couldn’t have known that the colonel had the hardware itself, but they were being sloppy if they hadn’t realized their codes were compromised .

Or maybe they were being rushed. The pressure from the FBI had to have rattled them. Their behavior in Denver—killing their own team members—indicated they were panicking.

“They can’t cover every little road coming in from the east.”

The farmland had a grid of blacktops and dirt roads that ran like dusty veins between endless fields under a cobalt sky. There were too many to patrol. Sure, dirt tracks would kick up dust and attract attention, but he could always move at night.