by Dale Mayer
“Great,” she said. “When do we ever get a full night’s sleep?”
“Not tonight, that’s for sure,” he said, “I’ll meet you at Drake and Howe again.”
“Shit, another one there in that same area?” She closed her eyes at the thought. “Please tell me that it’s not a kid.”
“It’s not a kid.” And he hung up on her.
She still didn’t have time for a shower, so she hopped into the rest of her clothes, picked up her harness, buckled in her weapon, grabbed her jacket to cover it up, and wished she had time to even make coffee, but she didn’t, which considering she had yet to get to a grocery store it wouldn’t have made any difference. She walked out of her apartment, locking it behind her, hopped into her vehicle, and headed to the location. Parking was easy at this time of the night—early morning really—but she made sure that her vehicle could remain easily in her line of sight, as she inspected the crime scene. She stepped out to see street cops putting yellow tape around the area to keep the growing crowd back. Where had they all come from at this hour?
When she walked over, she noted Rodney standing by the body; he lifted a hand in greeting. At his side, she looked down. “Homeless man?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “What would make you think that?”
“Clothes are too big. Boots are too long. Coat doesn’t fit either.” She added, “Looks like he hasn’t shaved in a couple days.”
“But the clothes are well-made,” he said. “They are pretty high-end.”
“Yeah, he used to afford them, but now he can’t. So either these are somebody else’s clothes or from a secondhand shop.”
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t even see that the pants were too big.”
“And they hang down too long. The back of the pants scuffed along the sidewalk.” She walked around the victim, looked at him, and asked, “Strangled?”
“Looks like it. No bullet wounds, no bleeding, and no blood splatter anywhere.”
“Coroner?”
“On his way.”
Just then the vehicle pulled up. She looked up to see Dr. Smidge.
He got out, glared at her, and said, “I told you to stop bringing me work.”
“Well, I was trying to stop bringing you children,” she said, “but I’m not able to stop the flow of work. That’s beyond anybody.”
He gave a sad smile and nodded. He looked down at the victim. “Interesting.” And then he crouched beside him, pulled back his eyelids.
Kate asked, “Petechial hemorrhage?”
“Absolutely. Finger marks all around the neck too. Looks like two hands.”
“That’s not easy,” she said. “Takes a bit of strength to manually strangle someone.”
“No, it isn’t easy. Using something—like a wire, a scarf, anything—would be easier.”
“He is a big guy,” she said. “What is he? Six-one, maybe six-two?”
“Possibly, I’ll know more when I get him on the table.” He stood, sighed. “Interesting time of night for it.”
“Yeah, as in, what was he doing out here? Time of death?”
“Probably not more than a couple hours,” he said looking around. “Which means, at first estimate, knowing you can’t quote me on this, I’ll say since two o’clock.”
“Restaurants and pubs?” she asked, turning to Rodney. “This area, this day of the week, when do they close?”
“At one-thirty a.m.,” he said, “but there are a couple coffee shops that stay open late around the place.”
She nodded. “Good enough. We’ll start knocking on doors and see if anybody saw this.”
“Cameras? We need to check the street cams,” Rodney said, as he stopped to look around.
“Yeah,” she said. “This is an alleyway though, so I’m not sure there will be any coverage.”
“Not far from here is a good restaurant,” the coroner said. “It’s open all night long.”
“That’s good to know. I’ll check it out.”
“It looks like he’s still got particles of fries and hamburger in his mouth,” he said, “and I can smell it on him.”
“I’ll head back to the street and take a look then,” she said. “ID?”
“I’ll check that for you.” He pulled out the wallet from the back pocket of the dead body and handed it to Rodney.
“Ken Roscoe,” Rodney said, and he gave her the driver’s license. She quickly wrote down the number and handed the DL back. “Let me see the rest of that wallet.”
Rodney laid the contents on the victim’s belly, so she could photograph it.
“Cash totaling fifteen eighty-two, one credit card—but it’s expired, at least in his real name—and that’s about it.” She looked up at Rodney. “Like I said, he was down on his luck.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Message received.”
“Doc, does he have his own teeth?”
The doc checked, his finger inside the victim’s mouth and nodded. “Appears to be.”
“And they are in good shape, aren’t they?”
“They are,” he said. “What are you getting at?”
“Just makes me wonder how recent his fall from grace was,” she said, as she straightened up. “Check the back of the coat collar for a brand name. Some places in town still customize and even tailor jackets,” she said, “and that’s very high quality, that one.”
“It is,” the coroner said, and he tugged the collar to the side. “It says, Custom Made for James.”
“Too bad his name isn’t James.”
“Anything in his pockets?”
They checked the coat pockets, pulled out a few more bits of change, and that was it.
She sighed. Nothing useful. She watched Smidge check the body over. She stopped and leaned closer. “What’s on his wrist?” Holding her phone’s flashlight over the dead guy’s wrist, highlighting the shadows, she could barely see. “Please don’t tell me that’s the same mark.”
He looked closer, then at her, back at the mark, and said, “Damn it. You know something? I think you’re right.”
“What mark?” Rodney asked, blustering forward.
She held the wrist in such a way that he saw. “This mark,” she said. “It’s been on every one of those child victims.”
*
Saturday Late Afternoon …
Simon walked into the casino, more unsettled than he wanted to acknowledge. Something was seriously wrong in his world, and he didn’t know what had happened. He’d been a different person these last few days, and he didn’t know who or what to blame. But he wanted a target, so he could beat it into little pieces.
His grandmother’s voice slipped into his mind. Once you start down this pathway …
“Screw that,” he snapped. Ne pas y aller. He shrugged away that voice and the other messages, all pounding inside his skull, as he squeezed the yellow ball in his pocket, like some stress ball. He didn’t even know why he felt compelled to phone in that first murder of the hopped-up husband killing his wife with a knife. Except that Simon knew for sure that it was a murder and that the asshole husband could get off scot-free if Simon didn’t tell the cops. But he’d seen other assholes in the past do things that he knew needed to be turned in, so why hadn’t he back then?
Everything was different now, and he didn’t know why. Since when had he grown a conscience? And here he was, tonight, trying to shake it off and to lose himself in what he knew was comfortable and normal for him. As he walked through the carpeted craziness, with games going on around him, a friend of his called out.
“Simon, over here.”
He looked over to find Reggie, sitting at the bar, having a drink. Feeling like that just might be the perfect answer, Simon walked over. “Hey, I haven’t seen you in months. What? Six, seven, or more?”
“Maybe,” Reggie said, with a tilt of his head. “It seems like you’re here, and then you’re gone. I don’t know what the hell you’ve been up to lately, but you are never really here.”
“I’ve been to a few private games,” Simon said, with a shrug. “But, other than that, I’ve been busy.”
“Busy doing what?” Reggie asked, with a smirk. “You don’t work, just like I don’t work.”
“How the hell did we end up getting a lifestyle like that?” Simon asked, as he turned to the bartender and cocked his finger to get a whiskey.
“You hitting the hard stuff right off the bat, huh?” Reggie noted.
“It feels like a whiskey night,” Simon said. In fact, that might be the fastest way to get drunk. And he was up for that. Anything to help him forget the changes in his world.
“Obviously something is wrong,” Reggie said, snickering. “You only hit the whiskey when things are bad.”
“Oh, well now, that’s really nice,” he said, mocking him. “Come on. It’s the drink of choice in the evenings.”
“Yeah, but you are not at home. You are not in your own bed, and you’re sure as hell not tucked up and ready to go to sleep.”
“No,” he said recklessly. “I’m here to play and to play hard.”
“Poker?”
He thought about it, and he didn’t even want that anymore. Typically it was his game; it was how he won. He looked at the craps tables and said, “Maybe I’ll try that tonight.”
Reggie’s eyebrows shot up. “Wow, it must be a really bad time in your life. You’ve always been very adamantly against the craps table.”
“Maybe that’s because I haven’t tried it,” he said. He didn’t want to lose a ton of money tonight, but, at the same time, recklessness rode him hard. He walked over to the front table and watched the game go down. With Reggie at his side, they both placed bets, and, when Simon won, he snatched up the money, placed more bets indiscriminately. He won half, lost half, until he saw a sequence to the pattern, and he started playing more strategically. As he won more, the crowd behind him grew. Again and again and again.
Finally he placed it all on one number, staring at it because he knew it was the detective’s badge number, the badge of the very cop who wouldn’t leave him alone. The detective who was on his mind when he went to sleep and the same detective who was on his mind when he woke up. He’d memorized her badge number when she had flashed it for him: 9726. He placed everything on black 26 because he knew, as sure as hell, that one would be dark for his soul.
And when he threw the dice, the crowd erupted all around him. He stared in shock because he’d just quadrupled his earnings and had made more money tonight than he’d made in the last six months.
Reggie said quickly, “Damn. I don’t know what the hell got into you tonight, but that was some serious craziness.”
“It was,” he murmured, just as unsettled now as he had been when he had arrived, only now he was disturbed for a completely different reason. He needed to get out of here and fast. He looked over at Reggie and said, “I was planning to stay and to close down the place, but I think I’ll head home instead.”
And again Reggie just studied him quietly. “Anytime you want to talk, you know you can, right?”
Simon gave a hard nod. “Thanks, I’m fine.” He quickly handled the money aspect, getting a cashier’s check in his name. Then left the place and, instead of walking, hailed a cab. He didn’t want to take a chance with the check in his pocket. As he headed back to his place, he tipped the driver generously, got out, and walked into the front foyer. The doorman quickly opened the door, before he got there. “You weren’t out long, were you?” Harry said. “I figured you wouldn’t return until after my shift was over.”
“I wasn’t expecting to be back this early either.”
“Well, that cop was here looking for you,” Harry said.
“Which cop?” he asked cautiously, but he knew. Darn, he already knew.
“The one who was here before, Detective Morgan or something.”
“Ah,” he said, “did she say anything?”
He shook his head. “She said she would phone you later.”
Simon nodded. Maybe that was partly what drove him, what had him so edgy. Maybe he knew that call was coming.
The problem with having a strong intuition, as he called it, was that it was just enough to get you in trouble, yet not enough to get you out. He would cheerfully never use his abilities again, if he could. But the fact of the matter was, something was going on, and his abilities had suddenly gotten stronger—and a little bit wilder. He had a connection to her that he hadn’t seen and didn’t know what to do with.
As soon as he got inside his penthouse apartment, he put away the cashier’s check and reached for the open bottle of wine but stopped midway. Frowning, he walked over to the decanter on the side and poured himself a stiff whiskey. He headed to the couch, put down his glass, and threw himself atop the cushions.
“What the hell?” he said, reaching out both hands and rubbing his face. “It’s like I’m not even the same person anymore. But, if I’m not the old Simon, who the hell am I?”
Because he’d spent his lifetime being multiple Simons: the one the public saw, the one his foster family saw, the one anybody with any psychic energy saw, and then the one the business people saw. He hid behind different personalities in order to make his world move. But the one personality he didn’t let anybody see was the one deep inside. Even his girlfriends and ex-fiancée hadn’t seen that one. And, speaking of which, he pulled out his phone and sent Caitlin a text, asking if her nephew had been found. The response came back brutally No.
“Shit,” he said. He tossed his phone on the coffee table and stared blindly outside his windows at the lights of the night.
Chapter 14
Sunday Morning
The next day, Kate tore out of bed early, had a hot shower, and walked to work. Thankfully she only lived a couple blocks away. As soon as she got in, she realized how damn early it was. Not a soul was here. She perked up at that idea, headed over to put on a pot of coffee. She stood beside it to make sure nobody would come in and steal it from her. As soon as it dripped enough to fill her cup, she strolled back to her desk. She grabbed the new notebook she had been using and headed to the board, where she had posted all the names and related data from the other cases. This was a duplicate of the one she had at home.
With those details up, she added a couple new ones, including the one regarding Ken Roscoe, the subject of her recent conversation with the coroner. That one made absolutely no sense. And it really bothered her. There were ever-so-slight differences between the tattoos, but his was so faint that it was hard to see. It’s almost as if there was a line differentiating some of them. She studied them for a long moment, hating the feeling that she was missing something obvious here.
Finally she stepped back and sat down at her desk. The autopsy reports weren’t in on the little girl nor the adult male. She shook her head. But the new case bothered her. And what was with that little girl? Until Kate got the autopsy report, she didn’t have anything to move on. Street cops had canvassed the area, and nobody had seen anything. But then, nobody ever sees anything, she mused.
She sat back and checked on the night shift details. A peaceful night, thank God.
In a big city like Vancouver, fewer murders happened here than one often suspected, but still an awful lot of unexplained deaths occurred, so they had to check them all first, until the facts were ascertained, and the forensics were in. She also couldn’t shake off the 9-1-1 call, reporting a man who had stabbed his wife to death. And that had been weeks ago.
According to all the neighbors, they had a decent relationship, and, every once in a while, they had some really bad fights. Nobody seemed to be surprised at the death, but some people seemed to think he had done it deliberately. Yet, until the forensics or coroner’s reports came back, it was hard to say. She wondered how anybody ever managed to close their cases, since nobody ever saw anything.
Just then Rodney walked in. He stopped, took a look at her, and frowned. She frowned right back. He grinned. “You’re getti
ng pretty cheeky.”
“I am?” she asked quizzically. “I didn’t do jack shit.”
“Nope,” he said, “you’re just being you.”
“What else is new?” she said.
“Being you is a good thing,” he said. He walked over, poured himself a cup of coffee, and said, “There is some advantage in you getting in early. At least there is coffee.”
“Not necessarily,” she said. “Depends on how much I drink before you drag your sorry ass in.”
When he returned with his coffee and sat down at his desk, she got up and refilled hers. As she hit her desk again, the others started to file in. She studied their faces; Andy and Owen looked like they had had very bad nights. Lilliana was bright and chipper, as always.
Kate sat back down, when Colby walked in and called a meeting. “Look, people. We need to get onto this missing child mess,” he said. “We need answers before the press crucifies us.” He stopped, looked down at Kate. “Do you have any update on the other cases?”
“Only in that Reese found two more,” she said in a quiet voice. “The adult DB we picked up yesterday has a similar mark on the wrist.”
At that, the rest of the room stilled. “The same mark?”
“Close enough,” she confirmed. “It’s more faded, so it’s harder to see, but the coroner showed it to us. Rodney was there with me,” she said, turning to look at her assigned sidekick.
Rodney nodded. “It appears to be so, yes.”
“They are all exactly the same?”
She turned to Colby and shrugged. “No,” she said. “Not exactly. They are at the base, and then some of them have an extra line or two on them.”
“Have any idea what that means?”
“Not yet,” she said. “But I will.”
“He’s actively connected to how many other children’s cases?”
“We have found nine unsolved,” she said. “Reese is still looking.”
“Sounds like there might be a whole lot of cases we can close then,” Owen said. “Providing we actually solve these.”
She turned to him and frowned. “Not unless we have DNA that convicts him.”
