Her Silent Shadow: A Gripping Psychological Suspense Collection

by Edwin Dasso

  3

  From my privileged position on the lake, I watched the Special Agent’s jet ski tow my latest gift. She seemed out of it, probably the cold water lapping over her feet, dropping her body temperature to dangerous levels. I hoped she would stay on course. If the jet ski veered away from the line she had taken to the shore, well this was a hell of a big lake. And the further out she went, the colder the water would be. Worst-case scenario would be for her to slip off the jet ski and go under. She would probably never regain consciousness. My floating package might keep her from sinking down to the dark depths. She was not all that heavy and I had removed some of the body bits, so maybe she would pull it under too.

  I can hear the motors of a big boat rushing nearer. The Coast Guard have finally arrived. I had better get out of here before people start asking awkward questions.

  4

  Carter sat in the Ford as Brandt drove back to Sacramento. She glanced at the wing mirror, watching the M.E’s van following a few car lengths back. They had decided to take the body to the Bureau’s Headquarters so the same Forensic Services team could examine the remains and any additional evidence that had dealt with the three preceding victims.

  So far, the press had not linked the murders, which suited Carter and Brandt just fine. Investigating a serial killer case always brought more public attention and politics to distract them from the business of catching the killer. That also meant, for the moment, no one had baptized their unknown subject with a catchy name. Within the Special Investigation Team that Carter and Brandt belonged to, the killer was known simply as ‘X’. Disappointingly, after three homicides in as many months, they had almost no information about who ‘X’ might be, how he chose his victims, why he chose them, in fact, anything useful that offered a line of investigation that would bring in fruitful results.

  They had tried profiling the killer, but their profile had stopped once they had the ‘White, male, mid to late 30s, loner…” lead in. If truth were told, even those three qualifiers were suspect.

  ‘X’ was good. Good at leaving no forensic traces, good at holding to his own timetable with no sign of acceleration in the timeframe, good at not contacting the cops or press to brag about his prowess as a killer. No, he just let the bodies be discovered toward the end of each month, in different places, by different people, all over the State. True, the first one had been in Sacramento as though to draw the attention of the Bureau, but then number two had been found in Redding, three in Elk Grove, and now the last in Lake Tahoe. Carter hoped the month would pass with new evidence pointing to a specific perpetrator taking center stage. Someone they could put a name and face to; could dig out all kinds of background information; could put under surveillance. Especially, someone they could prevent killing another victim as the month drew to a close.

  Feeling, in the form of pins and needles, fiery cramps that forced involuntary winces, was returning to her feet and lower extremities. She had passed out. At least that’s what she had thought. There was an episode of a few minutes missing time. She could remember constantly looking back at the bundle she towed, resisting the urge to twist the throttle and get the journey done. The fishing line had held. She still felt its phantom presence around her waist, as though she was somehow linked to the package of death she had brought onto dry land. Brandt had asked several times about it being over the line. Perhaps he would be happier if Nevada cops took over the case and dealt with any new corpses. He had a couple of years to go before retirement, so he was in no hurry to be involved with one of those cases that haunt you for years. That meant either finding an excuse to pass the case onto some other jurisdiction or catching the killer before he killed again.

  Carter prayed the body bag had done its job of keeping all the evidence intact; that the hole the cop had made had not let in too much water; that ‘X’ had been careless this time and had left them a clue that would lead to his identification. Was it asking too much?

  There were too many questions that needed answers. Too many aspects of the case that did not fit with normal homicides. Why ‘deliver’ the corpses in body bags? That was the first thing about which everyone remarked. Why would a killer make life easy for the forensics trace staff and M.E. by packaging their kills, neatly and efficiently, in a hermetic, sterile container? Body bags were easy to come by; you could even buy them on Amazon. Was it that ‘X’ wanted to be caught? Did he want his fifteen minutes of fame? Did he want to spend the rest of his life in prison? What was his goal here?

  The victims. All female. Different cities, jobs, ages, income brackets, sexual inclination. There seemed to be no pattern in ‘X’s choice of targets. That made it almost impossible to predict who may become a future victim, where they could bait him with someone who fit his profile. ‘X’ did not have a profile; at least one that was worth a damn. White, male, late thirties! That was next to useless.

  Carter had a gut feeling they were missing something. She resolved to spend the next couple of days reviewing every one of the cases while they waited for the forensic and autopsy results to come in. She knew Brandt would go along with her plan as it meant a couple of days sitting in a chair in their dedicated case room instead of running down leads that turned out to be a huge waste of time and energy.

  The darkness of night had descended on Sacramento when Brandt dropped her at her apartment. They would meet up tomorrow at the Bureau’s headquarters. He was considerate enough, noting her silence perhaps, to ask if she was okay. Did she need to see a doctor?

  She replied that she was just tired. It had been a long, eventful day, and she was sure a good night’s rest was all she needed. He made her promise that if she felt anything but one hundred percent, either during the night, or upon wakening, she would call him and he would drive over and take her to the E.R.

  Alone in her apartment, she used her right hand to unhook her holster and gun, dropped them with a dull clunk on the low coffee table, threw off her jacket, kicked off her sand-streaked shoes, and flopped down on an over-stuffed couch, her feet finding their regular position on the cushion at one end of the coffee table. The only other items on the table were a bottle of Jim Beam and a clean glass. She reached over, poured herself a generous three fingers, and downed half of the spirit in one gulp. The alcohol, together with whatever was in the coffee the kid had supplied at Lake Tahoe, was probably going to plunge her into a deep slumber sooner than later. That was fine with Carter. Before imbibing any more, she had to eat something, then set an alarm call for a time that would allow her to take a long, hot, leisurely shower before she had to leave to meet Brandt in the morning.

  5

  Choosing a victim was not something I put much thought into. I was playing a longer game. Female, yes. Youngish? Didn’t really matter as long as the name fit the game. The curious, and thus far overlooked, fact in this serial killer’s modus operandi was that the victims didn’t really matter except for one small detail, which, when and if they discovered it, would help them find the hidden clues. And I had just realized I needed to change something because I was already halfway through my ‘spree’ but they still had not picked up on any of the important clues I had left.

  To be honest, I hadn’t really expected Brandt to slam his palm on a desk and shout Eureka to whoever was in the operations room. It was not his style. No, he was more of a plodder. One solid step, leading to another solid step, and don’t ever think of transferring weight to move ahead unless those footfalls were on unquestionable solid ground. Sometimes it seemed he was trying to do the job of the prosecutors, rather than his own. Still, he did not have long to go.

  As for Erin, well… I was disappointed. She was better than this. Not that my clues were easy, No, I didn’t want them to get suspicious too soon. I had one chance at making this work. I couldn’t afford to blow it. Slow and steady. Plan and prepare.

  I reviewed my next step. I had slightly less than thirty days to put it into effect. Should I choose Needles, Newport Beach, National City, New
ark or Norwalk. They all had one thing in common; one thing that interested me, that is.

  6

  The sound of Brandt’s hand slapping the desk was almost instantly drowned out by his Aha! moment cry, badly imitating Archimedes and Einstein.

  Carter had been daydreaming, eyes leaden after a lousy night’s rest. She could not understand what was going on with her body of late. Maybe it was these serial murders; maybe she was harboring some hidden illness. She made a mental note to call a doctor, running through an imaginary conversation about her symptoms when Brandt’s double-barreled explosions yanked her back to the present.

  “What the…! Brandt, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

  He ignored her, stepping up to the whiteboards that lined one side of the room the Special Investigations Team was using.

  “Look! Can’t you see? There is a pattern. We’ve got this all wrong!” He started to pull all the images off the board. “Help me clear this, will you?”

  Carter levered herself out of her chair with an effort that surprised even her.

  “I need some more coffee before we continue. You?”

  “Yeah,” replied Brandt absently, grabbing a microfiber cleaning cloth and attacking all the notes and arrows left on the whiteboard with vigor.

  When she returned, the single, long desk in the middle of the room was now covered with small piles of photographs. Brandt was nowhere to be seen. She cleared a small area with her elbow and claimed it for the coffee cups. Carter flopped back into her chair, staring at the empty white space before her, battling her tiredness with scalding sips of her black coffee, three sugars. She had also picked up a couple of energy bars from the machine in the break room and fished one of these out of her jacket pocket. Using her teeth, she stripped the wrapping off the glucose-laden treat. A large bite devoured over half of the bar. She chewed, interspersing her jaw movements with more supping from the fast-dwindling liquid caffeine. She finished the first of the energy bars just as Brandt burst back into the room, unfolding a map, as he almost ran over to the whiteboard.

  “Hey, grandpa. What you got there?” she said. “You know there’s a thing called Google and it has maps ‘n’ everything.”

  A sharp glance from the older investigator.

  “Okay,” said Carter. “Old school, it is.”

  Brandt finished spreading the map in the middle of the whiteboards, using several magnets to hold it in place. Next he took one of the marker pens and tested if it worked on the paper by drawing a small black line under the word SACRAMENTO. He nodded with satisfaction, then drew three more lines under REDDING, ELK GROVE and the large expanse of water that had centered their attention yesterday.

  Before he could continue, Carter, who had experienced this manic focus from Brandt several times in the past couple of years, spoke up.

  “Slowly, Brandt. Explain it to me from the beginning. Slowly. Like I haven’t been working this case for the last three months.”

  Another icy glance in response. Then he cleared his throat, took a long pull from his now lukewarm coffee refill, grimaced, placed the cup back on the table and grabbed a blue marker. He moved to the left side of the map.

  “Okay. So we have four murders…”

  “That we know of,” interjected Carter.

  “Yeah. Good point. But I reckon there’s no more yet. He’s working on a monthly schedule for some reason.” He paused, turned to the board and wrote the dates of the first three murders as their autopsy results indicated. “We’re gonna have a problem with this last one. The temperature in the lake will have slowed decomposition so it could have happened a few days ago and we would not know. So, just for now, we will use yesterday’s date as the provisional date for the killing at the lake, okay.”

  “We don’t know where the body was dropped into the lake.”

  “True, and it might be irrelevant.”

  “Hell, Brandt, we don’t even know if the killer dumped it from the Nevada side.”

  “Despite my wanting this to be an interstate case and turn it over to the Feds, let’s just go with our man operating only in California for now.”

  “You know, some old detective told me once that unfounded assumptions were the get-out-of-jail-card for any felon.”

  “And I was right then, and still am now. We’ll circle round to that later.” He turned his attention back to the whiteboard and wrote next to the first date ‘Donna Cordoba’. “I think we agree this victim was deliberately chosen to call attention to this killer. A relative of the Attorney General. Now, ask yourself, what if the victim had been someone else; somebody random? What would have happened?” He looked over at Carter, though she was unsure if he expected a response or was just checking she was still awake.

  “Well, first off, we wouldn’t have been assigned this case right at the start of the killer’s run. It would probably have gone to Sacramento P.D. Even when the Elk Grove body turned up, that might have gone through their Police Department before being bounced to the Sacramento District Attorney. That would still have meant the two cases were not necessarily related. If Sacramento P.D. kept with theirs, Elk Grove with their case in the D.A.’s office, and the Redding P.D. case still with them, it could have taken months before someone connected these to the same killer. So, what are you saying? The first victim was chosen deliberately to get us involved?”

  “Which would somehow tie the killer to us. He could be someone with a grudge against the Bureau.”

  “…or he may even be someone who works here.”

  7

  They exchanged glances, both wondering who it might be, who they could trust.

  “A serial killer here, in the Bureau? I’m not sure I could buy into that. Sounds like something from that TV show a few years back.”

  Brandt nodded absently. He turned once again to face the whiteboard and wrote the names of the victims of the second and third homicides alongside the dates of their demise.

  “Identifying the latest victim is going to take a while. The killer removed the legs and the hands, smashed in the teeth too, so dental work couldn’t help put a name on the corpse.”

  “Okay, I can understand the teeth and hands, but why the legs? The only time I’ve ever had my feet printed was when my twin and I were born.”

  Brandt paused before answering, knowing he was wandering into sensitive terrain.

  “How is your brother? You don’t talk much about him of late.”

  “He’s okay. We still speak on the phone once a week.”

  “What do you find to talk about? He’s been in that Psychiatric hospital since…” He stopped himself from completing the sentence, well aware he had overstepped.

  “It’s okay, Jim. The past is the past and I was seven when it happened. He’s been locked up since then. He reads a lot, so we talk about books, most of which I don’t have time to read myself. I tell him about my day-to-day life. Unimportant, routine boring stuff. The world has changed enormously since he’s been inside and he finds all the new technology we use fascinating. I remember telling him about the new cell phone I’d bought a few years ago, and when I spoke with him a week later, he’d read everything he could find about cell phones and was almost an expert on them. He has access to the Internet so I don’t think he gets bored.”

  “But he’s in there for life, right?”

  “Yes. Though he was only seven when he killed our father, the psychiatric report presented to the court pretty much convinced the judge that he would kill again if he regained his freedom at some point. He spent a lot of time in solitary, even back then, because of all the trouble he was constantly getting into. When he became an adult, they transferred him to a State Hospital. That seemed to calm him down. He still keeps to himself most of the time. They let him have Internet privileges because they didn’t want him becoming a recluse, though of course, all social media sites are blocked and he can’t send anything from the computer, nothing like messaging, chats, emails, phone calls over the Internet. He gets to
make one phone call every week, but never uses it. Instead, he waits for me to call him, whatever time of the night it is when I get back from work.”

  “You don’t harbor him any resentment for making you an orphan?”

  “No, not really. I was lucky with the foster home where I was placed. They were good people.”

  “Were?”

  “Yes, they have been gone for a few years now. I still miss them.”

  Brandt paused again.

  “You know, Carter, this is the most we’ve ever talked about you and your twin.”

  “Well, you must have caught me on a good day, Brandt. It won’t happen again.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that…”

  “I know. Gotcha!”

  Brandt’s cell phone danced across the tabletop propelled by vibrations before the tone started. He picked it up, glancing at the screen. M. E. he mouthed.

  The call lasted several minutes and Carter tuned out. She was tired, ragged from so many nights where rest and sleep were not, apparently, synonymous. At least the migraines she had suffered for so many years earlier in her youth had stopped. However, the constant drowsiness she felt now reminded her of the lethargy that took over her body following the strong analgesics she had taken for the debilitating attacks. One day, she had realized she had gone a full two weeks without a migraine. They never returned. Neither she nor her doctor could understand why, but more importantly, the pain had seemingly gone forever. In the last twelve years, she had not had one migraine attack, or, for that matter, even a headache. Hangovers, yes, but given how she filled her spare time, that was understandable.

  Brandt hung up, placed his phone back on the table, walked over to the board and wrote. He stepped away, allowing Carter to see he had added the fourth name.