Within Plain Sight

by Bruce Robert Coffin

  Nugent exchanged a quick glance with the officer to make sure he had picked up on that information. He had. Nugent watched him make a note.

  “What makes you say that, Destiny?” Nugent asked.

  “’Cause he started coming around all the time. To the apartment we shared on Brackett Street.”

  “To see Dani?”

  “Yeah. Bothering her. Acting really weird. To tell you the truth, I never really cared for the guy.”

  “Do you have any recent photos of Dani or Morgan?”

  “Yeah, sure. Hang on and I’ll pull up my Facebook page.”

  The Egg and I was a small chain restaurant located at the end of a L-shaped mini strip mall on Route 1 in the town of Scarborough. Billingslea had backed into a parking space in the corner of the lot, farthest from the entrance, facing the building so that he’d see Crosby drive in. He checked his watch. Crosby was ten minutes late. He was contemplating calling him back when somebody violently slapped the roof of his car.

  Crosby opened the door and jumped into the passenger seat.

  “Ha. Scared you, didn’t I?”

  “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry I’m late, honey.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Next lot over. You didn’t expect me to just drive up next to you so we could swap spit, did ya?”

  Billingslea despised this man. “You said you had something for me.”

  “Yup. But first, you know the drill.”

  “Lunch?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where to?”

  “Subway. I feel like eating good in the neighborhood. Get it?”

  Billingslea started the car and drove through the lot. He thought about correcting Mr. Full of Himself by explaining that he was using the Applebee’s motto, but kept it to himself.

  Crosby leered at him. “So, you want to know all about the mysterious body, huh?”

  Byron and Stevens found Gabriel Pelligrosso standing beside the nude body of their victim on the opposite side of the table from Ellis and Nicky, the doctor’s peculiar lab assistant. Pelligrosso and Ellis were chatting. Nicky, who wasn’t much of a conversationalist, stood silently brooding.

  “Top o’ the afternoon, detectives,” Ellis said. “We were beginning to wonder if we’d have to undertake the procedure without you. I trust your meeting with the new chief was a smashing success, Sergeant?”

  Byron glared at Pelligrosso accusingly. The flat-topped evidence tech was unsuccessful in his attempt to suppress a grin.

  “We got stuck behind a traffic accident,” Stevens said.

  “A far sight better than being a part of it,” Ellis said.

  Byron and Stevens removed their blazers and donned the same disposable Tyvek garments Pelligrosso was wearing, required clothing whenever they intended to be up close and personal during an autopsy.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever performed a post without need of the neck stand,” Ellis said proudly as he surveyed Jane Doe’s remains. “Should go quicker.”

  Postmortem examinations are a key aspect of every homicide investigation. Establishing the cause and manner of death is paramount to proving that death was the direct result of the actions of another and not by natural or self-inflicted means. Byron accepted this. What he’d never been able to accept was the science behind finding that truth. In this case, the victim had already suffered the ultimate indignity, having been murdered, decapitated, then put on display for all the world to see. The process of being systematically disassembled by Ellis, like some college biology experiment, only seemed to compound the disrespect.

  The victim’s body was toned and tanned. No cuts, abrasions, or bruises. As a matter of procedure, Pelligrosso swabbed under the fingernails, but there were no obvious signs that she had put up any kind of struggle.

  “It looks like our Jane engaged in sexual intercourse sometime shortly before death,” Ellis said after he swabbed the vaginal cavity.

  “Forced?” Byron asked.

  Ellis shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it. No signs of trauma. Unless she was drugged, it was most likely consensual.” Ellis waited while Pelligrosso snapped photos of the pubic region.

  Byron made a mental note to check with Murray regarding any semen or DNA samples that might have been collected from the Boston victims.

  Ellis bent down to re-examine the neck wound. “Have a look at this,” he said.

  “You find something?” Byron asked.

  “Nicky, hand me the tweezers,” Ellis said. Nicky did.

  Using a hemostat to grasp the loose skin near the edge of the cut, Ellis pulled the flap away from the neck. He probed inside with the tweezers, carefully removing a tiny dark-colored triangle shaped object.

  “What is it?” Pelligrosso asked.

  Ellis gently placed the object on a stainless-steel tray then rinsed it with saline. He twisted the high intensity magnifying light attached to the tray stand until the object was illuminated properly. “Looks like a tooth.”

  “A tooth?” Pelligrosso said.

  “From a saw blade,” Ellis said as he poked at it then turned it over with the tweezers. “There’s shiny flecks attached to it as well.”

  “Diamond?” Byron asked.

  “Looks like,” Ellis said. “I’ll double down on my original guess and say that whoever removed her head used a reciprocating saw with a diamond tipped blade. The ultimate turkey carver. Certainly would explain the rough uneven cut and the saw marks on C4 and C5.”

  “Like they couldn’t decide where to make the cut?” Stevens asked.

  “Or the blade was bouncing around on them,” Ellis said. “Not exactly a precision instrument.” He continued his search, locating three additional teeth, each smaller than the first, handing them to Pelligrosso.

  Over the next hour the detectives watched as Ellis methodically went about his work, painstakingly removing, examining, and weighing each vital organ. The only thing Ellis couldn’t examine was the missing head.

  When he had finished, Ellis removed his gloves and protective gear, a signal to Nicky that he could begin closing. Byron studied Ellis’s face. The doctor looked troubled.

  “What gives, Doc?” Byron asked. “Can you give us a cause of death?”

  “No.”

  “Pending tox?” Pelligrosso asked.

  “Goes without saying, my boy. But if it comes back negative, I will be forced to list cause of death as unknown.”

  “You’re serious?” Byron had never known Ellis to arrive at an unknown conclusion.

  “I am. Decapitation was not the cause of death. My initial assessment about the head being removed postmortem was correct. The victim was a healthy active woman in her twenties. Good heart, lungs, everything. I couldn’t find any evidence to support illegal drug use. In short, there’s no obvious medical reason she’s dead.”

  They all watched as Nicky made quick and silent work of sewing up the chest cavity.

  “Something stopped this girl’s heart from beating,” Ellis continued. “But I’ll be damned if I know what it was.”

  Chapter 6

  Wednesday, 11:45 a.m.,

  July 12, 2017

  Byron and Stevens pulled out of the parking lot onto Hospital Street and headed toward Gardiner. Byron’s mind was racing. The bright sunshine of the day had all but been washed away by the macabre hand they had been dealt. Ellis’s words still echoed inside his head. Decapitation wasn’t the cause of death.

  Who was this girl? Could she be Danica Faherty? Pelligrosso had scanned the victim’s fingerprints and, assuming there was a record in the AFIS, Automated Fingerprint Identification System, database, they would quickly locate a match. But if not, well, they’d jump off that bridge when they came to it.

  Byron’s stomach grumbled, a not-so-subtle reminder that he hadn’t eaten. Up before the dawn call-ins meant coffee only and Byron was confident that caffeine didn’t qualify as a food group. He looked over at Stevens. “You
hungry?”

  “As weird as that is, yeah, I could eat. Whatcha thinking?”

  “Something greasy?”

  She grinned. “After what we just saw? Of course.”

  “Jimmy’s it is.”

  Davis Billingslea felt his excitement building as he drove back toward Portland. His meeting with Kenny Crosby had yielded some great information, though the drug sergeant ate like a horse. Their trip to Subway had cost Billingslea nearly twenty-five dollars. Even worse was watching him talk with a mouthful of food, spraying lettuce onto the passenger seat and floor of the Honda.

  “The body was decapitated,” Crosby had said, wiping chipotle sauce from his chin with the back of his hand.

  “Decapitated? As in—?”

  “Yeah, numb nuts, as in no head.”

  Billingslea took the Franklin Street off-ramp from 295. As usual, the ramp was backed up due to the Marginal Way traffic light. While sitting in traffic, sucking the diesel exhaust from the seafood delivery truck idling in front of him, he read over his notes again. He uncapped his pen and repeatedly underlined the last two words he’d written on the page. The Horseman.

  Jimmy’s Diner was basically an oversized shed. Situated in the center of a dusty hardpan lot on the side of Route 126 in Gardiner, several miles from the highway, the clapboard-sided building with its multicolored layers of peeling paint, the outermost of which was supposed to have been white, wasn’t much to look at, but the food served inside was always fresh and hot. A faded and grease-stained cardboard sign tacked to the wall proclaimed Jimmy’s hand-cut fries to be the best in the state. Although their French fries were excellent, Byron had always wondered who decided such things. And what would Jimmy’s have to do to be stripped of such a lofty title?

  The detectives placed their orders at the counter, then carried their soft drinks to an empty corner booth and sat down. As usual, Byron commandeered the bench that faced the door.

  “You used to come here with Ray Humphrey, didn’t you, Sarge?” Stevens said.

  “Yup. After every autopsy.”

  “Must bring back a few memories, huh?”

  “Not really,” Byron lied. “There’s only so much nostalgia you can connect to a place like this.”

  It wasn’t true, of course. Byron thought about his old mentor a lot. Jimmy’s Diner only worsened the ache. The surroundings and scent of fried food dredged up memories and pushed them to the forefront. And the violent way Humphrey’s life had ended had notched a deep and painful mark in Byron’s life. Like an indent marks a paragraph, losing Humphrey had been like losing a father for the second time.

  “Why do you think he cuts the heads off?” Stevens asked absently as she thumbed away at her cell.

  Byron considered her question a moment before answering. “You’re asking if I think it’s the same person responsible for the Boston murders?”

  Stevens nodded and sipped from her straw. “From what I’ve seen on the news, they’re all female victims, dumped in the lots of abandoned businesses, and beheaded. And we don’t get too many of those.”

  Byron couldn’t deny the obvious similarities, but it was way too soon to jump to the conclusion that the person responsible for Jane Doe’s death was connected to the others.

  “Suppose you’re right,” Byron said. “What makes you think it’s a he?”

  “Would’ve taken a lot of strength to carry the body to where we recovered it,” she said.

  “Or more than one person,” he countered.

  He pictured himself seated here with Diane Joyner doing the exact same dance. Diane had been his partner on several homicide investigations, before her promotion to sergeant placed her in her current public relations position. Byron considered the PR job a waste of manpower at the best of times, but particularly in Diane’s case. Diane was a born investigator. But now here he sat with Melissa Stevens who, if he thought about it, displayed many of the same traits as Diane. Tenacious, inquisitive, and relentless, Mel had all the makings of a career homicide detective.

  “Or someone with a vehicle,” Stevens said after a moment, making his point. “Maybe they drove in with the body. Maybe that was what the effed-up padlock was all about.”

  He sipped from his soda as he considered it. Aside from the obvious case similarities, and the unusual nature of decapitating one’s victims, if this was the same killer, he, or she, seemed to have broken their modus operandi by moving north into Maine. Murray had said that the profile they were working from suggested the killer may have known the victims. Perhaps even studied their schedules. Suddenly migrating to Maine didn’t square with that. If it was the same murderer, and not some one-off, or copycat, clearly something had changed. Byron hoped this wasn’t the beginning of a serial nightmare for the Pine Tree State or, for that matter, New England.

  Stevens looked up from her phone. “The Portland Herald already has the body recovery story online.”

  “Tell me there aren’t any details, at least,” Byron said hopefully.

  “Nope. Just says the police recovered a body from an abandoned waterfront business. Then it just goes on about the pending sale of the property and the possibility of a hotel being constructed.”

  “Food’s up,” the woman behind the counter said just as Byron’s cell chimed with an incoming call.

  “I’ll get the food, Sarge,” Stevens said, jumping up.

  “Thanks. Grab some extra napkins, would you?” He pulled the phone out of his pocket and checked the caller ID. It was Nugent.

  “Sarge, you headed back?” Nugent asked.

  “Mel and I are grabbing a quick bite. What’s up?”

  “Just got a look at a photo Danica Faherty texted to Destiny Collins last week.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a picture of Faherty’s manicure. Pretty sure it’s her, boss. Right down to the lacy silver band on her right ring finger.”

  Byron and Stevens took their lunches to go. Nugent provided them with the Brackett Street address for the apartment that Faherty and Collins had once shared. While en route to the potential victim’s residence they each made phone calls. Stevens contacted the victim/witness advocate and asked her to be on standby while Byron tasked Tran with digging up contact information specific to Danica Faherty’s next of kin.

  Byron pulled to the curb in front of a three-story unit on Brackett. Nugent was standing on the sidewalk talking with a deeply tanned middle-aged man wearing blue jeans, a khaki-colored T-shirt, and a Boston Red Sox baseball cap.

  As Byron and Stevens climbed out of the unmarked Nugent approached them, leaving the other man alone.

  “That the landlord?” Byron asked.

  “It is. Name’s Wescott.”

  “He knows why we’re here?” Stevens asked.

  “Missing-person case is all I told him.” Nugent pulled out his phone and brought up a photo, holding it out for Byron and Stevens. “The picture I told you about. Faherty sent this to Collins after getting a manicure on Friday.”

  It was a photo of freshly manicured hands, hands that looked a lot like the ones belonging to the corpse lying in the M.E.’s examination room in Augusta, right down to the tangerine-colored nails with white tips. Also depicted was an intricate silver band encircling the right ring finger.

  Byron nodded. “Where’s Destiny Collins?”

  “Back at her condo. I figured having her here wouldn’t help anything. Especially if we locate a scene.”

  “Good thinking,” Stevens said.

  “Does she know about the body?” Byron asked.

  “Haven’t told her yet. Figured you’d want to be the one to do that. By the way, that’s Faherty’s car parked over there,” Nugent said, pointing to a silver Nissan Sentra parked in the driveway. “Wescott identified it. I ran the tags, it’s hers.”

  “Anything visible?” Stevens asked.

  “Nothing obvious through the windows or on the exterior, it’s locked up tight.”

  Byron paused a moment as he ran several sc
enarios through his head. The car being in the driveway increased the probability that whatever had happened to Danica Faherty might well have occurred inside her residence.

  The three detectives approached Wescott. “You must be the landlord,” Byron said.

  “I must be,” he said, offering up his hand. “Earl Wescott.”

  “Sergeant Byron and this is Detective Stevens. Thanks for your help. You have keys?”

  “Right here. Miss Faherty lives in the second-floor apartment,” Wescott said.

  “How many units in the building?” Byron asked, noting Wescott’s use of the present tense.

  “There’s actually three, counting the attic, but the second floor is the only one currently occupied. My first-floor tenants moved out last week.”

  “Mr. Wescott, I’m gonna need you to wait out here with Detective Nugent while we check the apartment,” Byron said. “May I borrow your key?”

  “Sure thing.”

  After entering the building, out of Wescott’s sight, Byron and Stevens both donned latex gloves. They still had to clear the apartment but doing it without contaminating a potential scene was always preferable. Slowly and methodically they trudged up the stairway to the second floor, eyeing everything carefully as they went, searching for visual evidence of foul play. They found nothing out of the ordinary.

  Upon reaching the landing, Byron activated the flashlight on his cellphone and inspected the exterior jamb of the apartment door casing for signs of a break-in. Seeing none, he tried the knob. Locked. Stevens stepped back to allow Byron to unlock the door using Wescott’s key.

  Byron and Stevens unholstered their weapons and stood on either side of the doorway. They exchanged silent nods then entered the apartment, Byron first followed by Stevens.

  The door opened directly into a furnished living room.

  The first thing Byron noticed was the thick stuffy smell of a closed-up space. No lights were burning. The apartment was illuminated only by the diffused daylight spilling in through the sheer curtains. The air was still and hot. They passed through the living room to the kitchen, where an unpleasant odor hung in the air. Something had spoiled. Garbage perhaps. The sink was clean save for a single bowl and spoon that had been left to soak. On the counter beside the stove stood a green-and-red canvas shopping bag full of dry goods. Byron made a quick mental note to find out where and when Faherty had shopped for groceries.