Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  Glancing to my right, I spot the intel group immediately.

  It’s no surprise where I find them. The table where they sit may as well be branded with their names, because on Wednesday mornings they own it.

  Dex calls out my name as I approach, prompting similar calls from Kevin and Thom. The ruckus raises a few heads around us, but the other patrons quickly return to their own conversations and coffee, finding me of little account.

  Thom steals a chair from a neighboring table before I’m halfway across the room, placing it between himself and Kevin.

  After a few minutes of catching up, which includes the latest on a recent murder-for-hire that didn’t go so well for the suspect, Dex notices the DVD in my hand and lifts his chin toward it.

  “Is that a Christmas present?” he asks with a grin.

  “Only if you’re a masochist,” I reply, handing the disk across to him. Over the next ten minutes I lay everything out for them, starting with the police chase and ending with the discovery of Murphy’s body at Falls View.

  “Now, that’s a case!” Thom says in a sober voice when I finish. The words seem to capture the sentiment of the entire group.

  “The disk holds video and some stills from the jail parking lot,” I tell Dex. “It’s pretty far away and grainy, but I was hoping you could do your magic and give me an idea of what kind of vehicle I’m looking for.” As I speak, I dig into my pocket and extract the thumb drive, which I place in the center of the table.

  “Well, this gets more interesting by the moment,” Kevin says, shifting his gaze from the thumb drive, to me, and then back at the thumb drive.

  “More vehicle images?” Dex guesses.

  “Photos of the death masks,” I reply.

  He gives me an odd look, so I quickly explain.

  “A while back, you mentioned that the Department of Licensing had just purchased facial recognition software, which they can run against millions of images in their system.”

  Dex nods. “Anyone with a driver’s license or ID card issued by the state. We had some success with it last month on a fraud case, but”—he pauses to look at me—“you seriously want to run photos of death masks through facial recognition?”

  “Why not?”

  He shakes his head but doesn’t seem to have a good answer. Eventually he shrugs. “I guess it might work. The software uses an algorithm that analyzes the size, shape, and relative position of facial features. As long as the lighting isn’t skewed and there’s no excessive emotion or exaggerated expression on the face—”

  “Is there an emotion for dead?” Thom asks, only half serious.

  “I’ve seen emotion on dead faces,” Kevin chimes in. “Most of the time you can’t really tell what they were feeling, but other times…” He shakes his head. “I’ve seen fear, shock, anger, even peace—frozen right there on their faces clear as a winter’s day.” He taps the table. “I had a suicide a couple months ago where the guy hanged himself from a beam in the garage with an extension cord. I just remember the stubborn look on his face, like he was absolutely determined to be dead.”

  “Sounds like he got his wish,” Thom quips.

  “He did. Unfortunately, it was his kids who found him.”

  Thom shakes his head and clicks his tongue, saying, “That’s just wrong.”

  “I don’t know about all that,” I say, “but Murphy Cotton sure seemed surprised to find a bullet hole in his forehead.”

  “There you go,” Kevin says, as if I just proved his point.

  “As far as the facial expressions and lighting,” I say, turning my attention back to Dex, “they mostly have slack looks on their faces with their mouths mostly closed. We had the Evidence Response Team with us, and it was one of their guys who took the photos, so they should be good images.”

  Dex nods, seeming more comfortable with the idea. “Facial recognition has advanced a lot in the last few years,” he explains, “especially with companies like Google and Facebook jumping into the game—not to mention the banks and security firms.”

  As he continues to speak, the words take on the reflective tone of internal dialogue, and for a moment it appears as if his mind has wandered down a side alley and left the rest of us behind. “The nodal points are based on rigid bone and tissue areas like the eye sockets, the nose, and the chin,” he mutters, “all features that a death mask would capture. If the images are straight-on, that is.” His expression is briefly troubled, but then he continues. “Though the FBI photographer would have made sure of that … that’s what they train for.”

  He lets the words linger, and then seems to come to a conclusion. His mind returns from wherever it had strayed, and he fixes me with a thoughtful gaze. “All things considered, the likelihood of a positive recognition should be pretty good.”

  “Which is all we need,” I reply. “We might get a DNA hit off the clothing, we might not. I just want to have other options.”

  “I don’t know,” Kevin says, setting his iced latte on the table and then wiping the condensation from the side with a napkin. “If they’ve been missing more than a couple months there’s a chance their DNA will be in CODIS.”

  “Provided someone reported them missing,” I agree.

  He nods his understanding. “You think they’re the type that doesn’t get reported.”

  “It’s just a hunch,” I say. “Murphy kept saying they were broken, but never explained how or why. When you think about the victimology and the serial nature of the crimes, my guess is they’re mostly prostitutes.”

  “What about the one from the trunk?” Dex asks.

  “Charice Qian,” I say. “Diane found some minor arrests for shoplifting, possession of stolen property, and theft, but she’s also been arrested for heroin. Worked a drug court plea on the first arrest and did twelve months on the second. I wouldn’t have pegged her for a heroin user, at least not a regular user. She’s not hollowed out like your typical addict.”

  “Maybe she’s been on the wagon and recently slipped,” Thom suggests, drawing a unified murmur of agreement. It’s something they’ve all seen a hundred times before. You don’t have to work in law enforcement long before you come to understand that addiction consumes one’s resolve like fire takes to paper. It’s a truth that becomes gospel with repetition.

  When the thought has marinated long enough, Thom brings forth another truth: “Thieves and druggies tend to run in the same circles as prostitutes,” he says, “and let’s face it, prostitutes rarely get booked.”

  “Well, we should have DNA profiles from the clothes later today. Either we get a CODIS hit or we don’t. In the meantime…” I tip my head toward the thumb drive in the middle of the table.

  Reaching out, Dex picks up the small drive and weighs it in his hand, as if the gigabytes within hold the actual plaster masks and not just their images. “We’ll need a subpoena,” he says at length.

  “I can have one in a few hours.”

  Dex hesitates only a moment. “Okay, let’s give it a try.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Janet Burlingame is an eleven-year veteran of the FBI’s DNA Casework Unit, based in Quantico, Virginia. In my five years with the Special Tracking Unit I’ve met her in person twice: once right after the unit was formed, and then again three years later while we were working on a case west of Quantico.

  In her mid to late thirties with striking red hair, stylish glasses, and a trim, athletic build, she’s naturally attractive, yet wickedly dangerous. As Jimmy tells it, she has black belts in three different forms of martial arts. I never found out which ones because, honestly, when someone can kill you seven hundred different ways, does it really matter?

  Needless to say, my conversations with Janet are always cordial.

  * * *

  When the call comes early in the afternoon, Diane transfers it to the conference room and then joins us as we greet Janet over the speakerphone. After some friendly banter, she says, “So, some good news and some bad.” />
  “Give us the bad first,” Jimmy says, ever the pragmatist.

  “Well, they kind of go hand in hand,” Janet replies. “We came up with seven distinct female profiles from the clothes, as you suspected, but only one of them was in CODIS, a woman by the name of Erin Clare Yarborough. Her DNA is associated with the sixth mannequin. We got a match on both the mask mold and the clothing.”

  “The one in the bedroom with the paperback copy of Misery,” I say to Jimmy, and then realize that it doesn’t really matter where she was found, leastwise not to Janet. Still, for some reason it’s important to me. I suppose it makes them more real, and right now I need them to be real.

  Murphy did something far more insidious than simply destroying the women’s bodies, he supplanted them with mannequins dressed in their clothes and wearing their faces.

  “What do we know about Miss Yarborough?” Jimmy asks.

  “She was entered into NCIC two years ago after she went missing in Seattle,” Janet replies. “The only reason we have her DNA is thanks to her sister. Apparently Erin made a number of suicidal threats, which escalated to an actual attempt when she took a fistful of pills and washed them down with whiskey. Paramedics got to her just in time. Anyway, it was after this last incident that her sister picked a bloody bandage out of the trash after Erin tossed it away. You know—just in case.”

  “Yeah, just in case,” Jimmy echoes in a somber tone.

  “Where there’s smoke there’s usually fire,” Janet continues, “so I imagine there’s more to the story, but with HIPAA rules being what they are, we don’t have ready access to her medical records.”

  “Do you know which hospital she was taken to for the overdose?”

  We hear papers shuffling, and then Janet says, “Harborview Medical Center.”

  As we speak, Diane is already logging into LInX, the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, to run more in-depth analysis of Erin Yarborough.

  Created by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), LInX allows jurisdictions to share access to their databases. In this case, it’ll give us access to the records of almost all the police departments and county sheriff’s offices that Erin may have come in contact with.

  “Can you make sure the unidentified DNA gets linked to our case number?” Jimmy says as the conversation winds down. Janet assures him it’s already done and then calls out a cheerful goodbye before ending the call.

  Pushing his chair to the right with his feet, Jimmy scoots up next to Diane and peers at the laptop screen over her shoulder.

  “Contacts begin about four years ago,” Diane says without looking up, “mostly with her as a victim or contact. There are a few local arrests where she was cited and released, plus those Janet mentioned, the ones where she was booked.” She does a quick count in her head: “Seventeen incidents in all.”

  “Any others that might be suicide attempts, overdoses—”

  “Prostitution,” I suggest.

  Jimmy points his index finger at me, as if to underscore the word.

  “There’s a suspicious circumstance where she was contacted in the car of a known pimp. She claimed not to know his real name, only that he went by Stain, and Stain was nice enough to give her a ride so she could meet her uncle.”

  “That’s nice,” I say in a singsong voice. Then, elbowing Jimmy, I say, “That’s nice, right? Stain sounds like a great guy, giving her a ride to meet her uncle like that. And they say there are no more nice guys.”

  Jimmy just snorts, and Diane ignores me outright.

  “The officer noted that she was dressed the part—of the hooker, that is, not the adoring niece—and that they were idling in a casino parking lot.” She says the last words slowly and with more emphasis, as if Jimmy and I don’t know that casinos are havens for prostitution, even in the Pacific Northwest.

  Diane continues to open the seventeen reports linked to Erin Yarborough, finding additional incidents of possible overdose, suicidal actions, and drugs. The casino incident was the only one that hinted at prostitution, though it wasn’t the streetwalking variety, the type most vulnerable to predators.

  When Diane finally gets tired of us peering over her shoulders, she shoos us from the conference room like farmyard chickens, and then locks the door behind us. She’ll spend the better part of the next hour crafting a comprehensive report on the young woman once known as Erin Yarborough. Her life story will be told not in pictures of vacations and baby showers and family gatherings, but in police case numbers and mug shots. Her relatives will be presented not as a concerned sister or worried parents, but as next of kin. Their phone numbers and addresses will be attached for notification purposes.

  As Diane reclaims her seat in the conference room, I watch her through the glass wall and wonder about Erin Yarborough, about the person she was before she started down the road of bad decisions.

  Will she be missed?

  In the end, I suppose that depends on how much damage she did before she went missing, how many lives she disrupted and overturned. Exactly how many bridges do you have to burn before no one cares?

  I don’t think anyone has the answer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Dex—talk to me,” I say, answering the call on the first ring.

  “Hey, Steps. I suppose I should congratulate you,” the crime analyst begins. “The facial recognition paid off in a big way—better than I would have imagined. Helped that you have straight-on images of the faces; usually we get shots of the subject looking one way or the other and it’s more difficult to match points.”

  “How many matches?”

  “Nineteen possible hits,” he replies, “but the details get a bit complicated, so let me start with the easy part, because I also finished the analysis on your suspect vehicle.”

  “And you know what it is?”

  “Without a doubt,” he replies. “It’s a seventh-generation Honda Accord, which was manufactured for model years 2003 through 2007. Now, the thing about Honda is they like to swap out the taillights on their vehicles every couple of years. In this case, the change came for the 2006 model year, where the taillights are significantly different from the 2005 and earlier models. That means you’re looking for a 2006 or a 2007.”

  “That’s great,” I say.

  “Not really,” Dex replies hesitantly.

  My face sours, and Jimmy leans closer to the phone, asking, “Why’s that?”

  “Sorry to say, but Hondas are a dime a dozen—particularly the silver ones. If I ever take to a life of crime, I’ll drive a silver Honda,” he quips.

  Jimmy purses his lips and then gives a quick nod. “What about the facial recognition?”

  “Right,” Dex says, shifting gears. “We have nineteen possible matches on the seven masks. None of them are a hundred percent, but we have some that are in the high nineties. I just sent a PDF with names, dates of birth, and photos to your email.”

  “Any hits on mask six?” Jimmy asks.

  We hear pages turning, and then Dex says, “Three hits.”

  “Is one of them Erin Yarborough?”

  It takes a second, but then Dex’s voice returns with a mystified, “Yes, she’s here,” followed by, “How did you know?”

  “DNA,” Jimmy replies. “We got the results back a couple hours ago. Unfortunately, Erin is the only one we were able to match.”

  “The good news,” I say, “is that the facial recognition obviously works, since it picked her as a possible match from the database. That means we should have luck with the rest of the list. We just need to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff.”

  “Meaning we separate the missing from the living,” Dex observes.

  “Exactly.”

  “Need any help with that?”

  “Yes,” I reply immediately, “but if we don’t let Diane have a crack at it first, she’s liable to skin us both alive.”

  “Well, if Diane’s on it, you probably won’t need my help,” the crime analyst replies.
“But you know where I am.” With that he ends the call.

  * * *

  With Diane on a late lunch break, Jimmy and I take it on ourselves to print out three copies of the PDF and then try to open the digital version on Diane’s laptop, which is still in the conference room. Neither of us is surprised to find the computer password-protected, and we’re so engrossed trying to guess her password that we don’t notice when her silhouette appears and then lingers in the doorway.

  Jimmy has already guessed macadamia, Hawaii, and Outlander—her favorite food, place, and series of books. I’ve guessed Einstein and Gabaldon, the latter being the author of the Outlander series.

  None of them work, of course, because they’re the kind of passwords Jimmy or I would use, not Diane. She’s spent too much time working with and around hackers to go light on security. Most likely it’s a seventeen-digit combination of letters, numbers, and special characters that have no relevance to one another, an impossible jumble no one would guess.

  The figure in the doorway clears her throat.

  “Heyyy,” I say, drawing the word out as I move away from the laptop.

  “Umm,” Jimmy says, pointing meekly at the keyboard. “We were trying to pull up the facial recognition report on your … computer.”

  Diane gives Jimmy the stare-down before turning her disapproving gaze my way. After a penetrating moment that leaves me feeling slightly violated, she turns her eyes back to Jimmy. “Try Steps and Jimmy, all run together as one word, all lowercase.”

  Jimmy thinks she’s toying with him, but types it in anyway. A moment later, the screen comes to life and he quickly opens the PDF and links the laptop to the large-screen TV on the wall.

  With arms crossed, I study the screen as Jimmy starts to scroll through. Diane moves up beside us and I say in a low voice, “Really—Steps and Jimmy?”

  “Better than Lord Humungus,” she whispers.