Shadows of the Dead--A Special Tracking Unit Novel

by Spencer Kope

  “That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s something else going on that we’re not seeing. Charice said that she was raped once—and that was the day before he dumped her in the woods. So why would he keep her almost two weeks and then rape her once and discard her? The abduction-rapists that we’ve dealt with before have all raped their victims repeatedly throughout their captivity. So why’s this guy different?”

  “And you think smell has something to do with it?” Jimmy confirms.

  “I do. Charice says she was fed well while she was held, but it was always fruits and vegetables. No meats, not even fish.”

  “Please don’t say he’s vegan,” Diane practically groans.

  I shake my head. “That’s not what I’m saying. But what if there’s a certain smell he’s going for—or one he’s trying to eliminate? If we were able to talk to the other victims, I bet they’d tell us the same thing, that they were fed a special diet and held for a week or two before being raped and dumped in the woods for Murphy to find.”

  “The guy’s a freak,” Jimmy says impatiently. “How does that help us catch him?”

  I hesitate and then grudgingly admit, “It doesn’t.”

  Jimmy studies me a moment and then motions for Diane to continue with her review—and then something occurs to me: “It means we have time,” I interrupt. Turning on Diane, I ask, “When was Melinda taken?”

  “Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.”

  “Don’t you see? If he repeats the same ritual with Melinda as he did with Charice, he’ll keep her a week or two before killing her or handing her off to another Murphy Cotton.”

  “So, she’s alive, but maybe only for another five or six days,” Jimmy says.

  I’d like to say for certain that she’s still alive, but I haven’t seen her shine yet. Nonetheless, I’m sure the theory is correct, so I nod my head, and with as much conviction as I can muster, I say, “She’s alive.”

  * * *

  The discussion about Melinda Gaines is downright depressing, but the meeting takes on a different tone as Diane starts detailing the BrightPath Wellness data. It turns out that all the victims except Sheryl Dorsey had been treated by BrightPath.

  We can’t tell Diane that we’re not surprised, that we figured she’d be different. We can’t tell her the Onion King was a frequent guest at Sheryl’s house, because how would we explain that? Instead, we just nod at the interesting deviation and tell her to keep looking for a link.

  The problem with the BrightPath Wellness connection is that most of the women used separate clinics, some of them hours apart. There are two exceptions.

  “Debra Mata and Erin Yarborough went to the same clinic in Seattle,” Diane says, “and during the same general time frame. I couldn’t find any overlapping appointments, so it’s unlikely they ever met, but they did share the same counselor, a Dr. Jeffrey Mills.”

  “Jeffrey?” Jimmy says, looking up sharply. “Didn’t Nate say that Melinda’s friends thought the sniffer introduced himself as Jeff?”

  Diane scans the report quickly and confirms.

  “Could it be that simple?” I ask.

  “Why not?” Jimmy says. “BrightPath has seventeen clinics, but it’s still only one company. They probably move staff around, just like any other business. That would explain the different locations. After all, we’re talking about, what—a three-year period?”

  “Six or seven different clinics,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s a lot of moving around, even over three years.”

  “And that’s assuming it’s him,” Diane says. “I’m guessing the counselors aren’t the only ones who move around and fill in for other employees.”

  Jimmy nods his understanding.

  “What about that other name I gave you?” I ask Diane.

  “I was wondering when you were going to ask about that.” She pulls a stapled batch of pages from the back of the BrightPath folder and hands it to me.

  “What other name?” Jimmy asks, leaning over and trying to peek at the pages.

  “It was just a hunch,” I tell him, “but it looks like it paid off.” Realizing that I can either spend the next ten minutes reading the report or have Diane summarize, I hand the papers back to her and give her a nod.

  “What name?” Jimmy says again, more irritated this time.

  Before answering, Diane tucks the pages back into the manila folder and places it on the table in the exact spot she removed it from. Finally, agonizingly, she brushes her pants smooth and clasps her hands in front of her.

  “I’m afraid your partner has outdone you on this one,” she acknowledges, giving me a princess-like nod. “He figured out something that you missed.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “How the Onion King picked Murphy Cotton.”

  Jimmy is silent a moment, digesting the statement, and then it dawns on him. “He was a patient at BrightPath?”

  “He was, but at the Port Orchard branch.”

  “But Murphy said he’d never met the Onion King; he was adamant about it, probably would have pissed himself if he had.”

  “I’m sure that’s what Murphy believed,” I say, “but what if they had met and he just didn’t know it? What if the Onion King was his counselor, or a fellow patient, or—I don’t know: the receptionist? The other option doesn’t make sense.”

  “What other option?”

  I rise from my seat and start pacing the floor. “The Onion King is smart, right? Or at least we think he’s smart based on how he operates. So why would he recruit someone off the dark web, someone he hadn’t vetted, and have him dispose of his victims? Seems kind of risky, don’t you think? Wouldn’t he want to know everything about Murphy before approaching him? In fact, he’d have to know Murphy pretty well if he wanted to tap into his—what did you call it—delusions of grandeur?”

  “No, I think that was Star Wars.”

  “Right, but it was something like that.”

  “I can’t diagnose Murphy—” Jimmy begins.

  “Yeah, yeah, we know,” I say, cutting him off. “But you thought he might have some rare type of mental illness.”

  “Grandiose delusional disorder.”

  “There it is,” I say, as if I’d just extracted a bullet fragment from the depths of a four-hundred-pound cadaver. “So how did the Onion King know about Murphy’s disorder?”

  “You’re assuming he did.”

  “He played into it pretty well. In fact, he pushed all the right buttons, didn’t make a single misstep. How’d he do that without knowing Murphy’s condition?”

  Jimmy doesn’t want to admit it, but it’s starting to make sense.

  “And if the Onion King is an employee, as we suspect, he had access to that kind of information—or at least he had ways of accessing it.” My next words come out quiet, contemplative. “I guess breaking a few HIPAA laws doesn’t mean much to a serial kidnapper and rapist.”

  When Jimmy raises his eyes again, his entire focus is on Diane. “This Dr. Jeff you were talking about, did he ever work at the Port Orchard branch?”

  She presses her lips tightly together, perhaps thinking, and then shakes her head.

  Diane takes another ten minutes to wrap up the presentation, and then we all sit around the table in silence, staring at each other. The eyes of the dead women peer out from the photos before us, silently demanding justice that has so far been denied.

  One thing has become crystal clear in the last half hour: BrightPath Wellness is the key to this investigation.

  We just don’t know what door that key opens.

  * * *

  By ten A.M., Jimmy and I are preparing to head south once more, though with a different agenda this time. Extracting a Glock 26 from the gun locker in his office, Jimmy slaps in a loaded magazine and chambers a 9mm round. When he holds the Austrian-made handgun out to me, I grudgingly take it, hoping I won’t have to use it. He hands me two spare magazines and then closes the locker.

  Diane
walks us out to the parking lot and tells us to be careful. The sight of Jimmy handing me a gun has her on edge, though she’ll never admit it. She’s still standing there as we pull out and head for I-5 south.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  I’m a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes, and hold Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a gifted and visionary writer. The observant and analytical detective he created was truly one of a kind, unassailable in his ability to outthink and outsolve any investigator from his day to ours. I can say this because I’ve met a lot of talented investigators and analysts over the years, but not one rose to the impossible standard of Sherlock Holmes.

  Without the services of such a brilliant consulting detective, those of us in his shadow must plod along, solving crimes with the tried-and-true methods handed down through a hundred years of policing. In the end, every investigation comes down to two things: evidence and interviews.

  In the case of the seven mannequins, the evidence part is almost complete, but the interviews, research, and polygraphs are still under way. It’s said that detectives chase the lie, meaning they look for the blatant mistruths, the omissions, and the conflicting stories—any round peg that doesn’t fit into the square hole opened by the investigation. It could be anything, but there’s always something.

  That something—whatever it may be—is like a big fat burrito to the detective, and once he wraps his fingers around it, good luck convincing him to let go.

  Our brilliant but simple plan today is almost identical to the brilliant and simple plan we used yesterday: mainly, we’re going to hit the pavement and investigate. The only difference between the two days is that today it’s all about BrightPath Wellness.

  Jimmy will chase the lie, while I chase the shine.

  Starting in Everett with Jennifer Holt, we plan to work our way south. We don’t need to stop at all seventeen BrightPath clinics, just the handful frequented by our victims. Seattle has two clinics, but we’re only interested in the one in the Fremont neighborhood.

  After Seattle, it’s on to the clinic in Burien. It’s there that I saw the Onion King’s shine, though not enough of it to suggest he’s a staff member. This time we’ll be talking to the manager and employees. It’ll be easy enough to eliminate them as suspects, but that won’t help us determine if the Onion King is one of their patients.

  Amber Bartlett and Abitha Jones attended counseling sessions there about a year and a half ago but missed each other by a month. Perhaps that’s how the Onion King discovered them.

  Tacoma will be our next stop.

  Diane talked to Larry Gaines last night, the ex-husband of Melinda Gaines. Apparently they’re still on good terms, and Melinda lives in a basement apartment attached to the house that Larry bought after their divorce. They talk often, and though we didn’t learn about Melinda in time for the warrant, Larry confirmed that she has regular sessions at BrightPath. Her primary counselor is a Dr. Mariah Crawford.

  If time permits, we’ll visit Charice Qian’s clinic in Olympia, and Murphy Cotton’s clinic in Port Orchard.

  That’s the plan.

  There’s nothing sexy or Sherlock Holmes about it, it’s just grunt police work. There’s an unwritten recipe for solving crimes and it’s pretty simple: collect the evidence, follow the leads, ask the questions, and peruse the shine. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s Crime 101.

  * * *

  Jimmy and I are feeling pretty good about our prospects when we pull off I-5 at Everett and work our way toward the Navy base. As the dot on the GPS draws closer to our destination, you can almost taste the adrenaline seeping out into the cab of the SUV. We’re already amped up, almost walking on clouds.

  The problem with walking on clouds, of course, is that they’re illusions, just water vapor disguised as tangibles. They seem so much like mountains in the sky, yet they crumble in the wind and eventually weep themselves into oblivion. The fool who walks on clouds soon finds the earth, and it’s not the fall that kills him, but the abrupt stop.

  When the BrightPath theory suffers a setback at the Everett clinic, I feel this firsthand; my gut feels like I’m free-falling from ten thousand feet. Ironically, I’m staring down at the earth as this happens, because that’s where the Onion King’s shine should be but isn’t.

  He’s never been here—ever.

  Jennifer Holt’s shine is abundant. It comes at the building from every angle, from parking spots along the street, to others in the adjacent lot. It leaves a crisscrossing network of tracks that reminds me of a poorly constructed spiderweb.

  But there’s no sign of the Onion King.

  We walk around the clinic twice, checking and rechecking all the doors and windows for his distinct shine, but he’s just not here. We stand in the parking lot and stare at the building, as if we were orphans staring into the warmth of a family home. There’ll be no comfort for us here, and we don’t bother going inside for a look around. What’s the point?

  Back in the familiar warmth of the SUV, Jimmy sits behind the wheel with his hands instinctively at the ten and two positions, even though he hasn’t bothered to start the engine. He’s leaning forward a little, his back straight, almost as if he’s sitting at attention behind the wheel. His face looks like he just fell off a cloud and experienced an abrupt stop.

  “We have a missing woman and we’re wasting time,” he mutters to himself.

  He’s no quitter, so the words surprise me.

  “We’ve got nothing else to go on,” I remind him. “Unless Haiden comes up with some brilliant new evidence from Murphy’s hard drive, or Diane suddenly discovers that she missed something, which doesn’t happen often, this is what we have to work with. That’s just the way it is.”

  “Our whole point today is to confirm that the Onion King was present at the same clinics the women frequented,” Jimmy replies. “If his shine isn’t at Jennifer Holt’s clinic, and she never attended any others, the theory falls apart.”

  “Theories are fluid,” I remind him. “They change with discovery. If this particular theory is broken, let’s see if we can modify it.”

  Jimmy and I often take turns playing cheerleader. If I’m feeling pessimistic about something, he’s quick to dredge up some optimism; if he’s beat-up and shuffling toward the chasm of hopelessness, I do my best to yank him back from the brink. This mutually assured nondestruction works pretty well … until it doesn’t.

  Then we have a problem.

  Right now we can’t afford a problem, not with so much at stake. Instead of wallowing in the mire of my own inner dejection, I embrace Zeno and his philosophy of Stoicism, resigning myself to fate. I’m not going to tell Jimmy that I’m just as disappointed and washed-out as he is. Instead, I smile and pretend it’s just a minor hiccup, something that’ll make sense down the road.

  And as I try to convince him of this, I try still harder to convince myself. I remind myself that we’re still in the grunt-work phase of this investigation, and the thing about grunt work is that you keep at it until it’s done. You leave no stone unturned, as tedious as that can be.

  Despite his misgivings and my assurances, there’s one thing we both know but won’t say. I’ve felt it since yesterday, that tickle at the back of my brain telling me to open my eyes and look, open my brain and think.

  We’re missing something … something significant.

  As Jimmy starts the Expedition and begins the return trip to I-5, the drooping gray sky comes to life. It casts down raindrops the size of cherry pits, which drum against the roof and windshield with relentless fury.

  When we get to the interstate, to the stoplight where one sign points north to Bellingham and the other points south to Seattle, Jimmy takes a turn to the south. As we pick up speed and enter the freeway, I’m suddenly aware of the countdown clock in my head: Tick, it whispers; tick, it cries; tick, it screams.

  We’re running out of time.

  * * *

  The Fremont neighborhood in north Seattle is an eclectic hub of gentrification,
replete with hipsters, quirky shops, and interesting architectural statements. Basically, everything you imagine when you think Seattle, but wrapped up in a smaller package.

  The self-proclaimed “Center of the Universe,” Fremont is perhaps best known for the eighteen-foot troll under the Aurora Avenue Bridge, and the equally tall bronze statue of Communist leader Vladimir Lenin that stands at Fremont Place North and North Thirty-Sixth Street.

  Fremont’s motto is Libertas Quirkas: Freedom to be Peculiar.

  It’s a sentiment they indulge.

  * * *

  The BrightPath clinic is just three blocks from the Lenin statue, and we find it with little trouble. When I slip off my glasses, the Onion King’s shine pops, looking like neon footsteps; hundreds, even thousands of footsteps. Oddly, the tracks are all clustered near the front door. As I look around, I can’t find a single set of footprints leading in from the parking lot or the street.

  All of the Onion King’s activity seems to emanate from five parking spots directly in front of the building. This would make sense if he was an employee, but as we circle the building we find an employee parking lot in the back … and no sign of the Onion King.

  “So, the Onion King is a client…?” I say to Jimmy, unconvinced.

  He just shakes his head and gives a hapless shrug.

  After a few polite words at the front desk, an escort guides us through the building. There are eleven rooms in all, counting the employee break room and the large supply closet filled with shelves of pens, paper, toner, and other office necessities. The supply closet also houses a high-end modem mounted on the wall that feeds Wi-Fi to all the computers, printers, tablets, and other devices required of such a business.

  The only thing not in the supply room is the Onion King’s shine.

  Six of the rooms we visit belong to counselors. Each is decorated in a similar fashion, right down to the inspirational pictures mounted on the walls. The framed images scream at you from every angle; things like, “What you do today can improve all your tomorrows,” or “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” The only thing not in psychological lockstep seems to be the desk and the wall of shelves in each office. The furniture is identical, but each has been adorned and personalized with trinkets, photos, collections of this or that, awards, books, and memorabilia.