Cold-Hearted Concept

by Whitley Gray

  Zach pulled out the doctored photo and handed it over to SJ. “This is a modified version of Jane Doe 114’s picture. I’d like to get this to the media outlets and see if someone can identify her.”

  “How will that help?” SJ tilted her head and stared at the photo.

  “If we ID her, we’ll get more potential leads about the Follower.” Zach had considered it might be low-yield, but they were running out of things to pursue.

  Beck narrowed his eyes. “Wouldn’t Omaha have a better shot?”

  “Not necessarily,” Zach said evenly. “Perny was living here, yet he was left in Omaha—”

  “Near his own dumping ground,” Beck said. “Some sort of poetic justice to leave him where he’d left others.”

  “I don’t disagree with that. My point is JD 114 doesn’t have to be from the Omaha area. She could have come from somewhere else. Anywhere else.”

  Beck shot him an oh my God, are you fucking kidding me look.

  “Where do you want to start?” SJ asked Zach.

  “If it’s okay with you, I thought we could start with Channel Nine and Matt Unger.”

  SJ nodded. “Beck?”

  Beck nodded. “Fine. I’ll contact him.”

  * * * *

  Beck waited at his desk for the arrival of the Channel Nine team. God, what a disastrous case. It had come down to having the media display their Jane Doe to generate leads.

  It won’t help.

  It won’t hurt.

  He and Zach had worked out what information to give and what to hold back. The excised heart was one of the holdback details, as well as the link to the Follower. Time to roll the media dice.

  Matt Unger had been intrigued enough to meet and discuss whether the photo could generate sufficient interest to justify airtime. It was, after all, a cold case in another state. How would the story grab their Channel Nine viewers?

  If the photo show fell on its ear, they’d have nothing. But Beck had promised Zach he’d make a valiant attempt to sell Unger on the idea.

  The door to robbery/homicide swung open, admitting the ex-Bronco and his entourage. The anchorman’s gaze swept the room and landed on Beck.

  Showtime. Beck strode to the Channel Nine contingent and shook hands with Unger. A wave of spicy cologne engulfed him. He must buy it by the case. Beck nodded at the other three. “We’re back here.”

  The television team looked around with the curiosity of the never-arrested. Not much to see; most of the detectives were in the field, and no dangerous-looking suspects sat handcuffed to chairs. In other words, not like on TV. Beck led the way to an empty conference room with blank dry-erase boards.

  Zach sat at the table, nursing a cup of coffee. A thermal carafe and a raft of cups formed a centerpiece along with fixings. He gave a generic smile to the media crew. In Beck’s opinion, he looked too serene for the upcoming discussion.

  Once everyone had taken a seat and introductions were made, Beck stood at the head of the table to lay out background.

  “This is a young female victim, age twenty to twenty-nine, found in Omaha, Nebraska—”

  “Wait a minute.” The female producer had dark hair put up in a messy bun. “Omaha? I thought this was local, Matt.”

  “It has a local tie-in, Cinda.” Unger patted the air. “Hear the man out.”

  Beck waited. When everyone quieted, he resumed. “She was found in Omaha, Nebraska, at the dump site of a serial killer—”

  “Serial killer!” This time it was a young man with smudged glasses. “Oh my Gawwwd!”

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. Fists on hips, Beck delivered a control-your-people look to Unger.

  “Let’s listen to Detective Stryker.” Unger’s voice was low and growly. He had a pinched look around the mouth. “No interruptions.”

  For the count of five, Beck waited. The slurping of coffee seemed to indicate the minions had their mouths full. Okay. “She was killed last October. No one in that area came forward to identify her. We believe establishing her identity may help with a case here.”

  Silence.

  “Okay. Dr. Littman is sending copies of the photo around. Keep in mind this is a morgue photo that has undergone computer enhancement.”

  The man with the grimy glasses swallowed and looked a tad green. He glanced at the picture and flipped it facedown on the table.

  Next to him, the dark-haired woman studied her copy, turning it this way and that. “I don’t know her, that’s for sure.” She said to Unger, “I’m confident we can blow it up to use as a backdrop for the piece.”

  The third member of Unger’s retinue, a man with a neat blond goatee, held the photo up to his nose and pulled it away in small increments. “She doesn’t look real.”

  Unger took a copy of the picture and stared in silence. Faint lines appeared between his brows. “I need to talk to the detective and profiler alone.”

  What?

  Grimy Glasses whined, “But Matt—”

  “No. Out. Now.”

  Beck glanced at Zach, who watched with equanimity, as if he saw men exhibit diva behavior on a regular basis. Hell, maybe he did.

  The producer said, “Matt—”

  “Now, Cinda. Please.” He gave her a shark’s grin.

  Whoa. That must be the expression he used on the offensive line.

  The three TV workers exited the room, leaving the copies of JD 114’s picture on the table. The latch clicked closed. Unger stared at the image.

  Beck decided standing might be the best posture, given Unger’s size and current temperament.

  Zach kept his seat, looking on with interest. “What happened there, Mr. Unger?”

  Unger looked at Beck, then at Zach, and shook his head. “I think I know her.”

  ZACH HELD BACK his excitement. It was probably a fluke, an unconscious desire on Unger’s part to help because of what had happened to his daughter. What were the odds of him knowing the girl? “Who do you think she is?”

  “Vicki Hightower.” Unger continued to stare at the picture as if it might come to life at any moment. He dropped the photo and rubbed his face. “Damn.”

  It hit like a ton of bricks, stealing Zach’s breath. Ho-lee shit.

  Beck dropped into a chair. “You’re…you’re sure?”

  “Pretty damn sure.”

  Zach snatched a copy of the photo. The altered image was close, just not close enough for someone who hadn’t met her in person. Zach knew the Darling case files, but he’d never met the only survivor of Xav’s reign of terror.

  That poor girl. To survive one nightmare and end up in another…

  Xavier Darling had carried out his first abduction while working as an executive chef at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. The victim, Carrie Schemmel, had disappeared overnight from her apartment on Denver’s south side. No evidence of forced entry. Darling had utilized a drug cocktail and transported her to his grandmother’s abandoned cabin in the Rockies.

  After three days of rape and torture, Xav slashed her throat, removed her right pinkie finger, and harvested her heart.

  They’d never found the body. Darling had disclosed the murder, but not where he’d left the girl.

  Over the course of the next year, four more young women vanished. All were educated, with good jobs and safe housing. All were known to be cautious—no risk-taking behavior. The police had no leads. The FBI had done a profile from Quantico to no avail.

  The sixth victim, Vicki Hightower, managed to escape. Before Zach had done his ill-fated interview with Darling two years ago, he’d reviewed the tape of Vicki’s debriefing. He could still hear her say, “He left to get a knife. I got the tape off my ankles and ran. It was a miracle I made it through the trees to the road, and a miracle that a car came along just then…”

  Beck had paled. “She was the one who got away. The one who helped catch him.” He raised solemn eyes to Zach. “How did this happen to someone who’d survived what she went through with Darling?”

  Because
there’s pure evil locked up in Supermax, and it’s found a way to reach out. Zach’s head ached just thinking about it.

  “Tell me how you knew her,” Beck said to Unger, voice tight.

  “After the—I don’t know—rescue? I interviewed her. Human-interest piece. Good triumphs over evil, victim lives to be an even stronger person after the calamity. That sort of thing.” Unger took off his sports jacket, releasing a whiff of cologne. “I think we met a half dozen times, and that might have totaled six to ten hours.”

  “That’s a lot of time,” Beck said.

  “It takes a lot of chaff to get to the wheat, know what I mean?”

  Yeah. Bet the winnowing wasn’t much fun for the survivor. After a gulp of coffee, Zach found his voice. “Where are these interviews now?”

  “The station will have the footage—at least the finished portions. They could have the outtakes, but I wouldn’t count on it.” Unger crossed massive arms behind his head. “So where does this leave things?”

  At this delicate juncture, Zach didn’t want to lose Unger, but he needed a private conversation with Beck pronto. “I’m going to have to get back to you.”

  Unger’s eyebrows shot up. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” Beck said, “that we have to talk. If you’d like to wait outside—”

  “Hold on there.” Unger’s palms smacked the tabletop. “I just gave you a huge bone—a fucking ID of your Jane Doe—and you want me to wait outside?”

  “Not everything about this case is for public consumption,” Beck said. “I’m sure you know that, because you sent your people out of the room before you told us. If you want an exclusive on this story, you’ve got it. You want credit for the ID, you’ve got it. But I still have a murderer to find and prosecute. Not everything can be part of a media smorgasbord.”

  Well, that about sums it up. Beck has an iron pair today. Now if Unger would just accept it and give them some space.

  “Exclusive.” Unger’s expression wasn’t friendly.

  “Exclusive.” Beck’s eyes were steely. “But that doesn’t mean right this second.”

  “Then what can I use?”

  “You can say a Jane Doe from Omaha has been tentatively identified, and the police are withholding information pending confirmation and notification of next of kin.”

  “Aw, c’mon. That’s a crock.”

  Beck leaned his arms on the table in front of Unger. “We didn’t put your little girl’s ID out there on TV so you could find out that way. We confirmed the identity and then told you in person. Don’t you think Ms. Hightower’s family deserves the same?”

  The former lineman backed down, with hands off the table. After a moment, he muttered, “Yeah.”

  * * * *

  Zach paced around the task force room while Beck escorted Unger out. The Follower had killed Hightower. Sickening. Frightening.

  If Darling was involved, the ramifications were huge. Zach’s gut said Darling had a role. What the role was, and how it was carried out, remained to be seen.

  Beck came in and closed the door. “Glad that’s over.”

  It’s just begun. Zach said, “I believe we’ve got a murder by proxy.”

  “Whoa.” Beck’s voice was cautious. “What do you mean, ‘by proxy’?”

  “The Follower killed Hightower. There’s no way she was a random victim. Somehow, the murdering son of a bitch tracked her down and completed what Xav had started, using the same methods.” It was a staggering leap to declare the Follower was the weapon of an incarcerated man, but there wasn’t any other logical explanation. “Darling is behind this.”

  Beck’s expression became unreadable. “Why does it have to be Darling pulling the strings? The Follower could’ve done it all on his own.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe he’s one of those people who derive morbid enjoyment from the exploits of serial killers. Some nutcases write to those crazy bastards. Maybe the Follower took it one step further.”

  “Reading about it, sure. Writing letters, fine. But actually killing a particular individual in tribute? I can’t see it. It takes a certain mind-set to kill someone in that manner. There’s nuts…and then there’s nuts.” Zach twirled a finger next to his temple. “This guy kills like Darling. He takes the little finger like Darling. It’s too much of a coincidence for the Follower to begin his work with Darling’s final victim—the girl who escaped. He finished Darling’s series. Somehow, Darling is involved.”

  Beck gave him a long, skeptical look. “How could he be?”

  How indeed? “Maybe Perny passed along the instructions.”

  “Why wouldn’t Perny kill Hightower? He damn well had the right mind-set.”

  “It wasn’t his style. He was very rigid with his kills. I can’t see him agreeing to do it.” Zach rubbed the back of his neck. “And you heard what Kurzweiler said about criminal procedure. Perny was knowledgeable. He wouldn’t do something that could potentially get him caught.”

  Beck’s eyebrows rose. “So Perny said, No, thanks, I won’t kill her, but I’ll find someone who will?”

  “No.” Zach sighed. He needed Beck on board with this. “Perny wasn’t the middleman, at least not knowingly. He was a victim. Darling may have ordered Hightower and Perny killed.”

  “How did Xav discover the Follower?” Beck crossed his arms. “Or did Perny find the Follower? How did the Follower locate Hightower? There are too many moving pieces.”

  “Look at it this way. Wherever he came from, the Follower began by completing Xav’s work. That was his initiation.”

  “‘The numberless one,’” Beck said slowly. “The Follower didn’t consider her part of his series. That’s why there was no number—she belonged to Xav.”

  Relief washed over Zach. “Yes.”

  “Then he moved on to Perny for number one? He died a couple of weeks ago. Annika Unger died five months ago. We’re back to her not fitting either, unless she was zero. That seems unlikely.”

  “True. We may need to reconsider whether Annika is a Follower victim or a Perny victim.”

  “Before we get too carried away, we need to get a firm ID on JD 114. Prints, dental records, or DNA to confirm she is Vicki Hightower.” Beck drummed his fingers on the table as if trying to decide on a direction. “She was found in Omaha, but where did she live?”

  “She was from Denver originally, but that doesn’t mean she still lived here,” Zach said.

  “I’ll pull her up in the system and check for a last known address and see if she had a record. If she did, her prints will be in the data bank.”

  “If you don’t get a hit, Unger probably has contact information.”

  “True. I’ll contact missing persons, see if anyone filed a report.” Beck gathered the copies of the photos into one pile. “We might have an ID. You did good, Littman.”

  Zach stifled a grin. “Let’s hold the accolades until we get a positive ID.”

  “Hogan needs to know,” Beck said.

  And Sands. It was an interesting development. “Tell you what. I’ll query the FBI databases while you do your information search. We can dial Hogan later on speakerphone.

  “Deal.”

  * * * *

  “Nothing.” Beck looked up from his computer. He’d let himself hope, and they were nowhere. No prints for Vicki Hightower, no missing-persons report under that name, no ID. “Did you get a hit on anything?”

  “No.” Zach reached for his coffee. “Still not in the FBI’s fingerprint ID system, at least under that name. She’s in the National Crime Information Center as an unidentified victim, not as a missing person.”

  “I don’t see any living family.” Beck tapped the keys. The excitement of the identification had fizzled. Of course things couldn’t be simple. “If we come across Hightower’s prints in some database, we can compare JD 114’s prints to confirm her ID.”

  Zach steepled his fingers under his chin. “Did Hightower have elimination prints ta
ken at the time they processed the crime scene?”

  Beck rocked back in his chair. “If they did, the card was destroyed after the lab finished processing evidence. Darling’s prints were on everything.”

  Earlier, they’d hauled thirteen dust-laden boxes containing the Darling case records up from storage and had waded through the Hightower section. It was a multijurisdictional mishmash; determining the lead organization had been a challenge.

  Beck scanned the report. “Many of the surfaces at the cabin were reportedly coarse and didn’t hold prints well.”

  “Any DNA? We could get a match there.” Zach didn’t sound hopeful.

  “Since she was alive, there wouldn’t have been a compelling reason to get DNA other than a rape kit.” Beck flipped through more pages. “I don’t see any DNA for Hightower. Only for Schemmel and Darling.”

  It had been a hideous crime scene. The photos documented a living nightmare. A makeshift graveyard outside, blood seemingly everywhere inside. Xav had put cutlery to uses for which it was never intended. With the exception of the first abductee, Carrie Schemmel, the deceased victims had been ID’d without the need for DNA. Schemmel’s body had never been located, but DNA had confirmed her demise. Her heart had been among those found in Darling’s refrigerator.

  Talk of Darling’s particulars had given Zach a half-stressed, half-nauseated look. He said, “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  Beck tended to agree. “Let’s get the team in here and call Hogan.”

  * * * *

  Hogan was less than enthusiastic about Jane Doe 114’s probable identity. Flat response.

  Beck hadn’t expected him to turn cartwheels, but he had expected excitement. If the ID held, it would suggest Darling might know who the Follower was—not that he’d give them anything useful about his acolyte.

  Ernie reported he’d checked into websites obsessed with Darling, but found no one who seemed overinvolved. No one was selling Darling letters online.

  The security-camera analysis was a slow go. Ernie had looked bleak while explaining the lack of data from the Country Club neighborhood the past December. The memorial-service video had more useful information; there had been a couple of older vehicles with temporary paper licenses. Ernie said good night and left them in the conference room.