Body of Evidence

by Joan Elliott Pickart

  So, the hunk has a sweet tooth, she thought.

  “It’s a weakness,” he said rather sheepishly, and for an instant she feared she’d spoken aloud. “Baked stuff. Can’t help myself.”

  She found that rather endearing. “Did your mother bake a lot?”

  “No. She was all thumbs in the kitchen. But my stepmother, now she can whip these up with her eyes shut. Cakes, cookies, you name it. She always joked she had to run five miles a day to keep from weighing a ton just from sampling.”

  Darien grinned. “Sounds like my kind of woman.”

  “She’s great. I was ten when my mom died, so when my dad brought her home a couple of years later, she stepped into a pretty difficult situation. She did a great job, though. Even if I didn’t really appreciate it until much later.”

  That he appreciated it now said a great deal about him, Darien thought. “You’re close, still?”

  “Yeah. My dad was killed in an accident three years ago, but we’ve stayed close. She’s the mother I lost, and a friend, too.”

  She gave him the warmest smile she could, and he shrugged as if embarrassed and turned his attention back to his own treat. In short order, she finished her own.

  “I’d better get back to this. Use the sugar rush,” she said wryly, knowing the crash when the sugar burned off could be ugly.

  She hadn’t spent a lot of time trying to break coded files, but she knew the basic approaches and she had the software to run them. She had tried them all, so far with no results. So now she was starting on combinations, knowing she was shotgunning, hoping a few pellets would hit.

  “I wish I knew how you thought,” she murmured.

  “Gardner?”

  She nodded without looking up. “Then maybe I could figure out what he would have done to protect these files.”

  “Well, you know he both hid them and encoded them,” Waters said.

  “Yes. That right there tells us something, I guess. But I would think the complexity of the code itself would depend on the importance of the information.”

  “That makes sense,” her partner agreed. “If this is a list of his girlfriends, it would likely have less protection than, say, if he was dealing drugs or something like that, and those were his contacts.”

  She glanced at him. “If there really is a connection between these files and his death, then we know this is dynamite. Of some sort.”

  “That’s a big if,” Waters cautioned her.

  “I know. So I’m just going to break this sucker so we can either act, or move on.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  She smiled at him. “You just did it,” she said, indicating the crumbs that were all that remained of the cinnamon roll. “That’ll keep me going for a couple of hours, at least.”

  And it did, Colin thought later, watching her with amazement. She might be everything he stayed away from in a woman, she might have the kind of looks that had Neanderthals like Palmer guessing she’d slept her way here, but Colin had to admit now that she not only had good instincts, but she had the dogged determination the job required.

  Looking up, he saw that the brass was filtering in. He knew it was only a matter of time before they came calling; on a high-profile case like this, no one had any peace until it was resolved. And every day that passed only increased the pressure.

  “Brace yourself,” he told his partner. “The powers that be are starting to arrive.”

  She glanced up, frowning. “Rats,” she muttered. “I need a little more time, quiet time. I’m almost there, I know it. I can feel it.”

  “I’ll try to keep them off you,” he said.

  “That would help,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t do what you’re doing, so I might as well do what I can.”

  “Thanks,” she said, her voice carrying a little more gratefulness than he would have expected for the simple offer he’d made.

  He looked up and saw the commander headed toward them. Colin stepped out of the cubicle and went to head him off.

  “What progress?” Portman asked, dispensing with any amenities.

  Quickly Colin outlined the interviews they’d conducted, both in person and on the phone, and his own business search.

  “Suspects?”

  “We’ve got a lot of possibles,” Colin admitted. “Just as you’d expect with somebody as rich as Gardner. A couple that stand out, but nothing I want to hang the name on yet.”

  Portman scowled. “You know I’m fending off the media over this. They’re getting impatient. I need something to give them.”

  “Surely the usual ‘We’re investigating all avenues’ will hold them for a while longer, won’t it?”

  “Not much, not when it’s a Gardner who’s dead.” He turned as if to go, and Colin sighed inwardly in relief; he didn’t want to mention the computer files, not until they had something solid. But then Portman turned back. “How’s your new partner working out?”

  Colin was glad now he hadn’t complained at the time. “Fine. She’s got good instincts, I think, and she’s working as hard and long as anyone.”

  Portman nodded shortly, then turned and headed back to his office. Colin went back to the cubicle where Wilson was still working.

  “That should hold him for a while, but—”

  She didn’t look at him but threw up a hand to hush him. Startled, he shut up. He noticed then she was leaning forward, eyes glued to the screen, and he wasn’t quite sure she was breathing. He took his cue and kept quiet, and less than a minute later he heard her hiss under her breath a triumphant, “Yes!”

  He stood up and took a step toward her. “Yes?”

  “Got him!”

  He stepped around to look at the screen, and saw the rows and rows of gibberish morph into lines of readable text. He let out a low whistle. “You go, girl,” he said.

  She looked up at him and smiled. And he thought suddenly that was the kind of smile that started—or ended—wars. And that she was the kind of woman men fought them for. Or alongside. That scared him, and he backed away to a safer distance, retreating to the edge of his desk again. The moment he realized what he’d done, he swore silently at himself. You are not going to do this! he ordered himself.

  She turned back to the screen and began to read. After a moment her smile faded, then a crease appeared in her forehead.

  Uh-oh, he thought. “It didn’t work after all?”

  “No, no, it did,” she said without looking up. “It’s just that…this makes no sense. Unless Franklin Gardner was going to some kind of dating service or something.”

  Colin snorted inelegantly. “Not likely. Guys with his looks and money have to beat them off with sticks.”

  “But he’s got lists of women here, broken down by month, with physical descriptions, and odd little notations like ‘jock’ or ‘schoolgirl.”’

  He frowned. “Do they all have notes like that?”

  She read further, and nodded. “Here’s one that says ‘girl next door.’ Oh, and here’s a nice one, ‘brunette and trashy.’ But the strange thing is, the physical descriptions are really vague.”

  Colin went very still. “Vague how?”

  “Like…well, maybe general is a better word. Like this one. ‘Blonde, five-two to five-six, voluptuous, hidden assets, innocent look.”

  Colin stood up, slowly this time, in contrast to his racing thoughts.

  “And this one,” she went on, her voice rising slightly, “this one’s sick! Listen to this! ‘Redhead, pigtails, freckles, no more than five feet, immature body, must look no more than twelve.’ What is this?”

  “It sounds,” Colin said grimly, “like a shopping list.”

  Even with the questionable help of Palmer it took them another hour to track down the reports—but only moments to match up the physical descriptions on four of the missing females to the list Darien had decoded on the computer. Palmer finally seemed to wake to the possibilities, and dug out three more repo
rts that had been filed as open but not active. Those matched up with three more of the entries in Gardner’s file.

  Even more damning were the dates; it was Colin who first realized that in only one case was there more than five days between the date of Gardner’s entry and the date of the missing persons report. And that one case was a sixteen-year-old who had already been gone several days, but hadn’t been missed due to her propensity for disappearing for days at a time anyway.

  “Are all these girls runaways?” Darien asked Palmer, for the moment setting aside her dislike of the man.

  “Yes,” Palmer said, apparently also focusing on business for now.

  Colin gestured at the files. “They only got reported because somebody noticed they weren’t showing up at their usual hangouts anymore. Only one was reported by the family.”

  “Not many care what happens to these kids,” Darien said. “I guess these are the lucky ones, to have friends with enough nerve to call the police.”

  “Hey, there’s also the fact that these kids are runaways and don’t want to attract any attention,” Palmer said defensively.

  “Palmer’s right,” Colin said. “And there are probably a dozen who never got reported for each one of these.”

  And some that someone tried to report, Darien thought, but got shined on because it was just another runaway among hundreds, if not thousands. But she knew she’d gain nothing by speaking the thought. At least, not in front of Palmer.

  But when he had to go back to his own cubicle to take a phone call, Waters opened the subject himself, saying thoughtfully, “I wonder how many on Gardner’s list might be among those unreported missings?”

  “You mean the girls who were shrugged off as just another street statistic?”

  He didn’t pretend not to understand, which gave him points in her mind. “We’re not perfect. But there are only so many of us, and so many hours in a day. Things get kissed off.”

  “Like girls who are addicts or thieves, or have taken to selling themselves on the street out of desperation, so their disappearance isn’t worth the effort?”

  He looked at her silently for a long moment, and she wondered if she’d gone too far. Then he spoke softly. “I had a cousin who ran away and disappeared into the wilds of Los Angeles. I didn’t expect L.A.P.D. to find her. Even then I knew L.A. was too big, and she was just one girl among thousands.”

  She was surprised at the personal story, but couldn’t help asking, “What happened to her?”

  “She turned up dead six months later.” He grimaced. “Ironically, not drugs, or killed by a john, or anything like that. She got hit by a car. Stupid, huh?”

  “I’m sorry.” Not knowing what else to say, she turned back to the matter at hand. “So, what do you think this means?” she asked. “Why would Franklin Gardner have a list of women who match the descriptions of missing runaways?”

  Colin gave her a surprised look that gradually changed to one of sympathetic understanding. “Guess you wouldn’t hear much about this kind of thing out in the country.”

  “What kind of thing?” she asked, trying not to sound defensive at being called, in the gentlest way, a country bumpkin of sorts. “And why did you say it looks like a shopping list?”

  “Because it looks like Gardner was taking orders for particular types of girls, and then filling them.”

  She felt a bit slow. “Orders?”

  “Probably from some overseas client with a picky customer base. Some men are very particular about what they want.”

  Darien’s eyes widened, and suddenly she did feel very much a country bumpkin. “You mean…some sort of white slavery thing?”

  “Some call it that, yes. We’re guessing these girls were kidnapped, very specifically, and sent off to be used as prostitutes somewhere where nobody asks questions.”

  “My God,” Darien breathed, stunned. She’d heard of such things, of course, but they had always seemed the stuff of lurid documentaries, nothing she would ever encounter firsthand.

  “What I don’t understand,” Waters said, “is why somebody like Franklin Gardner would be involved in something like that. With his family name, and they already have more money than they could possibly spend in a lifetime.”

  “Some people aren’t content to treat their own women as property,” Darien said, rather fiercely now that she knew what they were dealing with. “They look at all women that way.”

  He gave a half shrug, half shudder, as if he were trying to shed a distasteful idea. “Hard to believe he’d risk it.”

  “Or his partner in crime,” she said.

  Her own partner went very still. “His partner?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you see who the files were copied to?”

  “No.”

  “Here, it’s in here,” she said, pointing to the lines still in gibberish—or what had looked like it to him—at the top of the list. In the middle of a long string of characters he saw D.Reicher@gardnercorp.com.

  “He’s in this, too? Damn, I knew he had snake eyes.”

  “All I can say positively,” she warned, “is that he got sent copies of the list, and—”

  She stopped suddenly as another thought struck her.

  “What?” Waters asked.

  “I was just thinking. If they were both involved in this enterprise, maybe there was a falling-out among criminals?”

  “One that occurred at Gardner’s penthouse, and ended up with Gardner dead? Yeah, that thought has occurred to me.” His grim expression lightened suddenly, and he gave her a crooked smile. “You might just have nailed our killer, partner.”

  The words warmed her beyond rationality. “Thank you…” She hesitated, then risked it. “Colin.”

  “You’re welcome, Darien.” He said it so easily, yet it was pointed enough to acknowledge the change.

  Now we’re partners, she thought with satisfaction. Just the tiniest bit of anxiety tinged that satisfaction as she acknowledged that Colin Waters was a very unsettling associate. He would be for any woman, she told herself, not just her.

  And managed to ignore the fact that how it would affect other women didn’t matter because she was the woman being unsettled.

  While waiting for the search warrant they’d requested, they had attended the funeral. Mrs. Gardner had apparently made enough noise to enough important people that the autopsy had been rushed to a finish and the body of her son released. There had been a side benefit, to them anyway, in that the autopsy report had been completed faster than they could have gotten it no matter how hard they’d pushed. Ironic, she thought.

  But they’d learned that the injury to the back of the head had indeed been the fatal blow, with the stab wounds inflicted postmortem. And who knew what Benton and Sutter would turn up when they analyzed the autopsy that might open up new avenues to pursue, she added silently as she stifled a yawn.

  Waters had indicated with nothing more than a nod and a whisper, Detectives Benton and Sutter, present at the funeral for the same reason they were: to see who showed up on the chance their killer was among them. Given the size of the funeral, and the upper crust of society who were present, it only added to the nightmare size of the investigation. The three remaining Gardners of course were there, wearing very expensive black and suitably grim expressions. However, so were the mayor and several other high-powered notables, and Darien wasn’t sure they’d learned a thing. Other than that she still hated funerals.

  By the time they returned, the search warrant was ready. They got it for Reicher’s home, since they doubted he would be foolish enough to store information like that on his office network. It had taken so long because they’d been fighting to make it as broad as possible in case they stumbled across anything else incriminating besides the matching computer files they were hoping to find. They’d encountered the resistance they’d expected, but not nearly as much as Gardner’s maid had given them, and Colin wondered rather cynically if it was because Reicher was a less-than-kind employer.

>   His residence was a condominium both larger and flashier than Gardner’s penthouse, with stark, modern furnishings and lots of exotic lighting. The servant who answered the door had taken one look at the warrant and welcomed them with ill-concealed glee. Colin doubted Reicher would find out about this from that quarter.

  “This place is as cold as his eyes,” Darien had said, and Colin couldn’t argue with her.

  They’d found two computers, one laptop and one desktop, and confiscated them both to be inspected in depth at the station. And now that she knew how they’d been hidden, Darien was able to find and decode the files in relatively short order once they got them there.

  “Got it,” she said, and Colin saw the same change from garbled text to a match for the files they’d pulled from Gardner’s computer.

  “Looks like we’ll need to go chat with Mr. Reicher again.”

  Colin stood up, but before he could reach for his coat Darien said, “Wait a second. There’s more here.”

  “More? More on the list?”

  “No. Another file. Hang on….”

  He waited, knowing she’d tell him when she could.

  “There. Dates and times and some sort of abbreviations.”

  He leaned in to look over her shoulder. He studied the new list she’d uncovered for a moment, but it didn’t mean anything to him. A couple of the abbreviations seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place them. After a few fruitless minutes, he walked to a cubicle across the aisle and up one.

  “Palmer? Can you come here and take a look at something?”

  The man lumbered over. If he noticed Darien pulled back so there was no way they could even brush, he didn’t say anything.

  He looked at the new list. “I don’t know. Doesn’t mean anything to me. Unless there were events scheduled at each place on those days. I could check, if you want.”

  Colin stared at the detective and asked carefully, “Each place? What places?”