Jack Daniels Six Pack

by J. A. Konrath

  “Did the can have a lid?”

  “Yeah. One of those push lids that says ‘Thank you’ on it.”

  “So you reached into the push slot . . .”

  “Uh-huh, but I couldn’t find it. So I lifted the whole lid up, and there part of her was.”

  “What part?”

  “Her, uh, ass was sticking up.”

  He gave me a nervous giggle.

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I couldn’t believe it. It was like, it wasn’t real. So I went back into the 7-Eleven and told the guy. He called the police.”

  “Mr. Donovan, Officer Robertson is going to have to take you into the station to fill out a deposition. Do you need to call your parents?”

  “My dad works nights.”

  “Mom?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you live in the neighborhood?”

  “Yeah. A few blocks down on Monroe.”

  “Officer Robertson will give you a ride home when you’re done.”

  “Do you think I’ll be on the news?”

  On cue, a network remote truck pulled into the lot, faster than the crappy weather warranted. The rear doors opened and the obligatory female reporter, perfectly made up and steely with resolve, led her crew toward the store. Benedict walked out to meet them, halting their advancement at the police barricade, giving them the closed crime scene speech.

  The medical examiner pulled up behind the truck in his familiar Plymouth minivan. Two uniforms waved him through the barricade and I nodded a good-bye to Robertson and went to meet the ME.

  The cold was a shock, my calves instant gooseflesh. Maxwell Hughes knelt down next to the tarp as I approached. His expression was all business when I caught his eye, drizzle dotting his glasses and dripping down his gray goatee.

  “Daniels.”

  “Hughes. What do you have?”

  “I’d put her death at roughly three to five hours ago. Suffocation. Her windpipe is broken.”

  “The stab wounds?”

  “Postmortem. No defense cuts on her hands or arms, and not enough blood lost to have been inflicted while she was alive. See how one edge is rough, the other smooth?” He used a latex-gloved hand to stretch one of the wounds open. “The blade had a serrated edge. Maybe a hunting knife.”

  “Raped?”

  “Not from what I can tell. No signs of semen. No visible trauma to the vagina or anus. But this isn’t an autopsy.” Max was fond of adding that final caveat, though I’d yet to see an instance when the autopsy didn’t corroborate every one of his observations.

  “The mouth?”

  “No apparent damage. Tongue intact, protruding slightly. Consistent with strangulation. No bite marks. The blood in the mouth seeped up through her throat after she died. That coincides with the pooling of blood in her face. She was stored upside down.”

  “She was found face-first in a garbage can.”

  Hughes made his mouth into a tight thin line, and then reached into his pocket for a clean handkerchief to wipe the rain from his glasses. By the time he tucked it away, the glasses were wet again.

  “Looks like you’ve got a real psycho here.”

  “We’ll need the report on this one right away, Max.”

  He opened up the yellow plastic tackle box that housed the tools of his trade and began bagging the corpse’s hands. I left him to his work.

  More cops and newsies and gawkers arrived, and the carnival atmosphere of an important murder got into full swing. It would offend me, if I hadn’t seen it so many times.

  Benedict finished his impromptu statement for the media and began selecting uniforms for the door-to-door witness search. I went to pitch in. It boosted morale for the men to see their lieut pounding pavement with them, especially since it was probably futile in this instance.

  The killer had dumped a body in a public place, where it was sure to be found. But he’d done it without attracting any attention.

  I had a feeling this was only the beginning.

  Chapter 2

  MORNING. THE STALE SWEAT THAT CLUNG to me and the sour taste of old coffee grounds were constant reminders that I hadn’t slept yet.

  As if I needed reminders. I have chronic insomnia. My last sound sleep was sometime during the Reagan administration, and it shows. At forty-six my auburn hair is streaked with gray that grows faster than I can dye it, the lines on my face shout age rather than character, and even two bottles of Visine a month couldn’t get all the red out.

  But the lack of sleep has made me pretty damn productive.

  Spread out before me on my cluttered desk, a dead woman’s life had been reduced to a collection of files and reports. I was combining all the information into a report of my own. It read like a test, with none of the blanks filled in.

  Twelve hours had passed and we still didn’t know the victim’s name.

  No prints or hairs or fibers on the body. No skin under the fingernails. Nothing solid in the door-to-door reports. But this lack of evidence was evidence in itself. The perp had been extremely careful.

  The victim wasn’t sexually assaulted, and death had resulted from suffocation induced by a broken windpipe, as Max had guessed. The lesion around her neck was six millimeters thick. It didn’t leave fibers, which would indicate rope, and didn’t bite into the skin, which would imply a thin wire. The assistant ME suggested an electrical cord as a possible weapon.

  Ligature marks around her wrists and ankles bore traces of twine. Staking out every store in Illinois that sold twine wasn’t too clever an idea, though it was mentioned.

  The stab wounds were postmortem and made by a thick-bladed knife with a serrated back. There were twenty-seven wounds in all, of varying depth and size.

  We were unable to pull any fingerprints from the garbage can Jane Doe was found in. Even Mike Donovan’s prints had been washed away by the rain. The contents of the can were an average assortment of convenience store garbage, except for one major item.

  Mixed in with the wrappers and cups was a five-inch gingerbread man cookie. It was heavily varnished, like an old loaf of lacquered French bread that gourmet restaurants use for decoration. An elite task force of two people was assigned to Chicago’s hundred-plus bakeries to try and get a match. If they failed, there was an equal number of supermarkets that sold baked goods. Double that figure to include the neighboring suburbs. A huge job, all for nothing if it was homemade.

  If this weren’t such a somber situation, the image of two detectives flashing around the picture of the gingerbread man and asking “Have you seen him?” would be pretty funny.

  I took another sip of some coffee that the Gestapo could have used for difficult interrogations, and felt it bleed into my stomach, which didn’t approve. The caffeine surging through my veins left me nauseous and jittery. I gave my temples ten seconds of intense finger massage, and then went back to my report.

  She was killed roughly three hours before Donovan discovered her body at 8:55. Depending on how much time the perp spent with her corpse, he could have killed her anywhere within a hundred-mile radius. That narrowed it down to about four million people. Take out women, children, the elderly, everyone with a solid alibi, and the 20 percent of the population who were left-handed, and I figured we had maybe seven hundred thousand suspects left.

  So we were making progress.

  Pressure from the mayor’s office forced us to involve the Feebies. They were sending up two agents from Quantico, special operatives in the Behavioral Science Unit. Captain Bains played up the technical end, extolling the virtues of their nationwide crime web, which would be able to match this murder up with similar ones from around the country. But in reality he disliked the Feds as much as I did.

  Cops were fiercely territorial about their jurisdictions, and hated to have them trampled on. Especially by bureaucratic robots who were more concerned with procedure than results.

  I went for another sip of coffee, but the cup was mercifully empty.

>   Maybe one of the leads would pan out. Maybe someone would identify the Jane Doe. Maybe the Feds and their super crime-busting computer would solve the case moments after they arrived.

  But a feeling in my gut that wasn’t entirely coffee-related told me that before we made any real progress, the Gingerbread Man would kill again.

  He’d done too much planning to make this a one-time-only event.

  Herb walked into my office, carrying an aromatic cup of hot Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, a dark roast by the smell of it. But the way he poured it greedily down his throat made it apparent he hadn’t brought it for me.

  “Got the serum tests.” He dropped a report on my desk. “Traces of sodium secobarbital found in her urine.”

  “Seconal?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  I nodded. I’d researched every insomnia remedy going back to Moses. “I’ve read about it. Went out of vogue when Valium came around, which went out of vogue with Halcion and Ambien.”

  I hadn’t ever tried Seconal, but had given the others a shot. The depression they caused was worse than the sleepless nights. My doctor had offered to prescribe Prozac to combat the depression, but I didn’t want to go down that slippery slope.

  “Needle puncture on the upper arm was the entry point. ME said two ccs would put a hundred-and-fifty-pound person under in just a few seconds.”

  “Is Seconal prescribed anymore?”

  “Not much. But we caught a break. Only hospital pharmacies carry injectionals. Because it’s a Control two class drug, every order has to be sent to the Illinois Department of Professional Regulations. I got a list of all recent orders. Only a dozen or so.”

  “Also check for thefts from hospitals and manufacturers.”

  Benedict nodded, finishing his coffee. “You look like a bowl of crap, Jack.”

  “That’s the poet in you, fighting to get out.”

  “You keep pulling all-nighters and Don is going to hit the bricks.”

  Don. I’d forgotten to call him and tell him I was staying late. Hopefully he’d forgive me. Again.

  “Why don’t you go home, get some rest.”

  “Not a bad plan, if I could.”

  My partner frowned. “Then go spend some time with your gentleman friend. Bernice is constantly on me about working too much, and you’re here twenty hours a week more than I am. I don’t see how Don puts up with it.”

  I met Don in a YMCA kickboxing class about a year ago. The instructor paired us up for sparring. I knocked him down with a snap-punch, and he asked me out. After six months of dating, Don’s apartment lease ran out, and I invited him to move in—a bold move for a commitaphobe like me.

  Don was the polar opposite of me in the looks department; blond, tan, with deep blue eyes and thick lips that I would kill for. I took after my mother. Not only were we both five feet six inches tall, with dark brown eyes, dark hair, and high cheekbones, but she was a retired Chicago cop.

  When I was twelve, my mother taught me the two skills essential to my adult life: how to use a liner pencil to make my thin lips look fuller, and how to group my shots from forty feet away with a .38.

  Unfortunately, Mom relayed very little information when it came to the care and feeding of a boyfriend.

  “Don goes out a lot,” I admitted. “I haven’t seen him in a couple of days.”

  I closed my eyes, fatigue working slender fingers through my hair and down my back. Maybe going home would be a good idea. I could pick up some wine, take Don out to a nice lunch. We could try to openly communicate and work out the problems we’d been avoiding. Maybe I’d even score, as Mike Donovan had put it.

  “Fine.” My eyes snapped open, and I felt a surge of enthusiasm. “I’m going. You’ll call if anything shakes loose?”

  “Of course. When do the Feebies show?”

  “Tomorrow, noonish. I’ll be here.”

  We nodded our good-byes, and I stretched my cramped body out of my chair and went to go make a sincere effort with the man I was living with.

  After all, the day could only get better.

  Or so I thought.

  Chapter 3

  HE HAS THE WHOLE THING ON video. It’s playing right now on his forty-inch screen. The shades are drawn and the volume is maxed. He is alone in the house, sitting on the couch. Naked. The remote is clenched in a sweaty fist.

  He leans forward and watches with wide eyes.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he says on tape.

  The girl screams. She’s on her back, tied to the floor, jiggling with fear. Completely his.

  The light in the basement is clinically harsh; his very own operating theater. Not one freckle or mole on her nude body escapes his attention.

  “Keep screaming. It turns me on.”

  She chews her lips, her body shaking in an effort to keep quiet. Mascara leaks down her face, leaving trails of black tears. The camera zooms in until her eyes are the size of bloodshot volleyballs.

  Yummy.

  The camera zooms back out, and he locks it into position on the tripod and walks over to her. He’s naked and visibly aroused.

  “You’re all the same. You think you’re hot shit. But where’s all that confidence now?”

  “I have money.” Her voice cracks like puppy bones.

  “I don’t want your money. I want to see what you look like. On the inside.”

  She screams when he picks up the hunting knife, fighting against her bonds, her eyes bugging out like a cartoon. Nothing but an animal now, a frightened animal fearing for its life.

  It’s a look he’s seen many times.

  “Please-oh-God-no-oh-God-please . . .”

  He kneels down next to her and wraps his free hand in her hair so she can’t turn away. Then he tickles her throat with the edge of the blade.

  “So pretty. I’m only giving you what you deserve. Don’t you realize that? You’re an example to the others. You thought you were famous before? Now you’ll be even more famous. The first one.”

  She trembles before his power, fear radiating from her body like heat. He sets down the knife and fetches the extension cord.

  This is the good part.

  “Beg for your life.”

  More screaming and crying. Nothing coherent.

  “You’ll have to do better than that. Do you even remember me?”

  She catches her breath and stares at him. The moment of recognition is like candy.

  Sitting on his couch, he pauses the tape on the scene, eating up her terror. Fear is the ultimate turn-on, and this is the real thing. Not an actress in some fake S/M porno flick. This is the genuine article. A snuff film. His snuff film. He lets the tape play.

  “You can’t treat men like that. All of you think you can do that to me and get away with it.”

  He twists the cord around her neck, pulling it tight, getting his shoulders and back into it.

  It isn’t like in the movies. Strangulation isn’t over in fifteen seconds.

  She takes six minutes.

  Her eyes bug out. Her face turns colors. She bucks and twists and makes sounds like a mewling kitten.

  But slowly, sweetly, the fight goes out of her. Oxygen deprivation takes its toll, knocking her out, turning her into an unconscious blob.

  He releases the cord and splashes some water on her face to wake her up.

  She’s even more terrified when she comes to. She fights so hard, he thinks she might break the twine. Her voice is raw and painful-sounding, but the screaming goes on and on.

  Until he strangles her again.

  And again.

  He does it four times before something in her neck finally gives and she can’t breathe even when he takes the cord off.

  She writhes around on the floor, a private death dance just for him. Wiggle and twitch, gasp and moan. Her eyes roll up and her tongue sticks out and she turns colors.

  He climbs on top and kisses her as she dies.

  Though excited and aroused, there is still more work to do
before he can fully enjoy her. He goes off screen and comes back with the plastic tarp.

  This next part is messy.

  He uses the hunting knife like an artist uses a paintbrush. Slowly. With care.

  Then he adds his signature.

  He’s out of breath, slick with sweat and blood.

  Satisfied.

  For the moment.

  “One down, three to go,” he says to the television.

  All in all, a successful production. Perhaps a little quick, considering the weeks of careful planning it has taken to get to this point. But that can be blamed on excitement.

  With the next one he will pace himself better. Make it last. Do the cutting while she’s still alive.

  He’ll grab the next girl tomorrow and try out some new things.

  In the meantime he rewinds the videotape to watch it again.

  Chapter 4

  DON, I’M HOME.” I hid the wine bottle behind my back in case he was sitting in the kitchenette next to the front door.

  He wasn’t.

  “Don?”

  I did a quick tour of the place. It didn’t take long, because my apartment was about the size of a Cracker Jack box. Except there was no prize inside.

  But I wasn’t discouraged. If he wasn’t home, I could catch him at the health club. Don had vanity issues. True, he had a good body, but the amount of time he invested in it seemed disproportionate to the benefits.

  I went to chill the wine, when I noticed the note on the fridge.

  Jack,

  I’ve left you for my personal trainer, Roxy. We just weren’t right for each other, you were too into your stupid job, and the sex wasn’t very good.

  Plus your tossing and turning all night drove me crazy. Please pack up all my stuff. I’ll pick it up Friday.

  Thanks for fixing those parking tickets for me, and don’t worry. Roxy’s place is about ten times bigger than yours, so I’ll have somewhere to stay.