“There is,” he interjected.
“—then I’ll be there.” Walking toward the squad room, she deliberately didn’t look at Brannigan. “Now, let’s see if your man was successful in turning up any of Anthony Pagliotti’s relatives to talk to.”
Hunter laughed quietly. “I don’t think Valdez will like being referred to as ‘my man,’” he commented.
“I’ll refer to him any way he wants me to as long as he’s come up with some kind of a lead,” Kenzie answered.
Crossing the threshold into the Missing Persons squad room, she made her way toward the small back room they’d been allocated.
“You’ve made progress,” Hunter commented as he and Kenzie walked in. His eyes were immediately drawn to the bulletin board. There were photographs on it now. “Either that, or you’ve decided to liven the place up with illustrations.”
There were a few photographs lined up in a row at the top of the board depicting the victims who had been identified. John Kurtz was first. Next to him was a somewhat faded, blurring photograph of Anthony Pagliotti—in and out of costume. There were also a couple of pictures beneath the deceased opera singer.
Next to the two victims who had been identified was a third photograph on the board.
“Who’s this?” Kenzie asked, making her way over to it. It was of a man whose hair was cut so short, it almost looked nonexistent. It was so blond that it looked practically white. He had spent way too much time in the sun and it had left its mark on his skin, turning it into tanned leather. His face was a mass of wrinkles.
“Meet William Kelly,” Choi told her. “That picture was taken just prior to his tattoo phase.”
Kenzie smiled at her partner, pleased. “You identified the guy with the Madonna and Child tattoo?” she asked.
“Yes. Well, I didn’t,” Choi modestly backtracked, “the database did. Did you know that the FBI has a very extensive database listing people who have unusual or interesting tattoos on their bodies? They did it to help them identify criminals and terrorists,” Choi added, pleased with the result of all his digging.
“How did you get access to that?” Hunter asked, curious.
Choi’s dark eyes slid over Kenzie and returned to Hunter. “The less you know, the better,” Choi told them. “Let’s just say I have friends who would rather remain anonymous who are also willing to share certain pieces of information.”
“Okay.” She was willing to let that go. She wasn’t a stickler for staying on the straight and narrow as long as it got her what she needed. What mattered right now was identifying the man, not how that identification was accomplished. She assumed that Choi didn’t stop digging when he learned the man’s name. “What do we know about William Kelly?”
Choi thought for a minute, organizing the information he’d managed to find. “He went missing around last December. His brother filed a missing person report on him, then withdrew it, saying Kelly probably took off for Vegas.”
“What made him say that?” Hunter asked.
“Well, it was what he assumed when he found out that Kelly had emptied his bank account,” Choi said. “The bank forwarded a notification that the account was officially closed. His brother found it in Kelly’s mail when the landlord called to say he was evicting Kelly because he hadn’t paid his rent for a couple of months.”
“Hold it,” Kenzie said. “Back up. Kelly emptied his bank account?”
“That’s what the brother said,” Choi told them. “Why?” Choi looked from Kenzie to Hunter. The latter two detectives had the same expression on their faces. “Does that mean something to you?”
“Might mean there’s a pattern,” Hunter speculated. He turned toward Valdez. “Valdez, why don’t you see if you can look into Pagliotti’s finances. Find out what opera company used his services. See if you can find out where they might have sent his checks. If we can find out what bank he used—”
“You’re thinking that maybe he emptied out his bank account before he died, too?” Valdez guessed.
Hunter inclined his head. “I’d say that from what we’ve seen, there might be more than a fifty-fifty possibility that he did, yes.”
A fragment of an old saying crossed Kenzie’s mind. “You’re thinking this is a case of a fool and his money being soon parted, aren’t you?” Kenzie asked, rewording the old phrase.
“I think in this case,” Hunter said grimly, “a fool and his head were soon parted. Whoever is doing this is obviously doing it for the money and then eliminating the main witness.” He looked soberly at the three people in the room. “Let’s see if we can find some names for these other victims.” He turned toward Kenzie but the instruction was for all of them, including himself. “Why don’t we pull all the unsolved missing person cases from the last ten years. Narrow the candidates down to just single or widowed men fifty or older.”
He looked around to see if there were any objections or other suggestions. For now, there weren’t.
“It looks like we just might have ourselves a real black widow,” he said. “Except that it doesn’t look as if she marries her victims. But she does kill them like a black widow.”
Kenzie looked at him. “So you do think a woman did this?” she asked, wanting to get a clear understanding of what he was thinking.
“What is that old saying?” Hunter asked, his eyes meeting hers. “Something about the female being deadlier than the male?”
Choi appeared unconvinced. “Still, she would have to kill them, cut them up and then haul them away to bury them. That’s a lot of work and effort, don’t you think?”
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s not impossible. And our ‘black widow’ could be working with someone else. She lures the victim, entices him and then her partner kills them. Or,” Hunter continued, “she could be doing it all on her own. There’ve been female serial killers,” Hunter reminded the team. “And that woman we saw on the surveillance tapes from the bank,” he said to Kenzie, “she looked as if she could more than hold her own if the occasion arose.” Hunter looked at her for a long moment. “Some women are not the delicate, helpless creatures that they pretend to be.”
Her eyes met his. “Keep that in mind,” Kenzie told him. But it was obvious that his comment amused her more than it goaded her. She considered the task ahead of them for a second. “I’d say we’ve got our work cut out for us. The chief of Ds said we could get more help if we needed it and going through those open missing person files is going to take time. I say we get help,” she told Hunter.
“Great. You have anyone in mind?” he asked Kenzie. She knew the people who worked in her group far better than he did.
“Dylan O’Hara just closed a case yesterday,” Choi reminded Kenzie.
“O’Hara works well under pressure,” she commented. “Get him before someone else does,” she told her partner. Turning toward Hunter, she asked, “Do you want anyone else?”
“Let’s see how much headway we make with an extra set of hands,” Hunter suggested, and then asked her, “That okay with you?”
She liked the fact that Brannigan asked her for an opinion, that he hadn’t just forged ahead and taken over the team the way another detective might have. She decided that Brannigan was really making an effort, even after she’d been less than congenial toward him from the onset of this joint task force.
Kenzie supposed that she owed the man an apology. She had allowed her past relationship with Billy to affect the way she looked at everything—and specifically the way that she had treated Brannigan.
She was going to make more of an effort to be fair to the man, Kenzie silently promised herself.
* * *
Although, she thought as they got started after they had recruited O’Hara into their group and filled him in on what was happening, it wasn’t going to be easy. There was just something about Hunter Brannigan that made her want to shout “No�
� whenever he said “Yes.”
No doubt about it, Kenzie grudgingly thought. The man had skills. Valuable police skills that definitely proved to be an asset in this joint effort of theirs. She had to keep that in mind and not allow her prejudices—specifically inspired by Billy—to make her see things in a negative way.
Things, she thought, that she should be viewing in a positive light.
* * *
Kenzie sighed. “I never realized that there were this many men in the state who went missing and just never turned up again,” she commented to the detectives she was working with. They had all been going through the open cases well into the next day.
Kenzie was still relatively new to the Missing Persons Division.
She had been transferred from Robbery approximately two years ago because the Missing Persons Division had lost two people because of retirement as well as losing one because he had moved to another state. The division had been seriously shorthanded when the request had been put to her.
Kenzie willingly went wherever she was needed and could do the most good. At the time she was still getting over the breakup that she had initiated and welcomed the diversion of learning something new.
In a way, she was still getting the hang of it, although that was something she wouldn’t admit to anyone except herself—and even that not so readily.
But trolling through the various reports, searching for missing males who fit the profile, had suddenly made her keenly aware that there were a startling number of men who went missing and stayed that way.
It didn’t seem right somehow.
* * *
It was another two days before they finally got through all the reports that were currently on file within not just the Aurora database, but the one for the state of California, as well.
“Okay, I’m done,” Hunter declared like a marathon runner who had finally made it across the finish line. “This is assuming that our black widow and her possible accomplice haven’t branched out to include any other states,” he added, taking in a deep breath.
“There’s a chilling thought,” Kenzie commented, shivering. She leaned back, having just finished herself. “Okay, Brannigan, how many did you come up with?”
He glanced at the total files he’d pulled. “A hundred and ten.”
“I’ve got a few more to review, but so far it’s eighty-three for me,” Choi answered.
“I’ve got almost two hundred in my bunch,” Valdez said. “Does that make me some kind of winner?” he asked grimly.
“Only in a backward world,” Kenzie answered. “I’ve got seventy-four unaccounted-for missing men,” she announced, then looked at the newest member who had joined their task force. “O’Hara? How many open missing person cases do you have?”
O’Hara frowned, looking up. “I only found sixty-eight.”
“Only,” she repeated. In this context, it was a distasteful word. “You add up all those numbers and there is no only about it,” Kenzie said. “That’s a hell of a lot of missing men. I really hope that our black widow didn’t cross most of their paths.”
“Well, she had to have crossed at least ten of them because that’s the number unidentified of what we found,” Hunter reminded her, thinking of what the medical examiner had told them. “A total of twelve headless torsos.”
“And one man without a body,” she added.
That honor belonged to Connie’s father. The crime scene investigators had gone back to the site twice but no more body parts had been found and it appeared that of the torsos that were found, none belonged to John Kurtz.
“That is one sick person if you ask me,” O’Hara told the other people seated at the table with him.
“Nobody here is going to argue with you about that,” Hunter assured him. “Okay, everyone here worked hard to put together this list. Now, let’s try to narrow it down a little.”
“How do you propose that we do that?” Valdez asked.
Hunter took out a manila envelope and deposited its contents on the table. A bizarre collage comprising four-by-six photographs of headless torsos rained down onto the table.
“I had one of the crime scene investigators take photos of the torsos they found. We’re going to try to match the descriptions of the missing men we came up with to the torsos in the morgue.”
Choi winced. “Do you have any idea how gruesome that sounds?”
“Well, gruesome or not,” Kenzie said, speaking up, “that’s what we’re going to have to do. If we had fingerprints, it would be a hell of a lot easier. But these men have no fingers, so we’re out of luck. We owe it to these victims not to let our personal feelings get in the way of trying to find out who they are so that they—and their families—can have some kind of closure...or at least something close to that.”
O’Hara sighed, surrendering. “You’re right. This is the job. It’s not always all glamour,” he quipped.
Laughter followed, mercifully relieving some of the tension.
“Anyone hungry?” Kenzie asked. “I thought I’d order up some food.”
“Food?” Valdez repeated as if it was a foreign word. “What’s that?”
“I hear that it involves chewing,” Hunter told his partner.
“Then I guess I’m in,” Valdez answered.
“Me, too,” Choi said.
“And me,” O’Hara chimed in, holding up his hand as if there was a head count being taken.
“Looks like you found a way to lift their spirits,” Hunter commented to Kenzie with an engaging smile. “Nice work.”
It took her a moment to look away and place her call. It took her longer to bury the warm feeling that had popped up in response to his smile and started to spread out within her chest.
Chapter 15
Progress was painfully slow.
Implementing a process of elimination, which took almost another four slow-moving days, the task force managed to whittle down the all-but-overpowering list of names from 531 possible victims to a hundred.
A hundred missing person files that were hiding the identities of the ten unidentified of twelve torsos that had been uncovered in the park.
“Damn,” Valdez complained, still undecided whether or not to eliminate the person in the form he had just spent the last twenty-five minutes reviewing. “This just doesn’t get any better, does it?”
“Nobody said this was going to be easy,” Hunter reminded his partner.
Choi met his statement with a moan that seemed to come from his gut. “Yeah, but nobody said it was going to be like looking for a needle in a stack of needles either.”
Hunter looked across the length of the table at the other detective. “You want to quit?”
“No, I just want better vision care when the time comes,” he grumbled.
“Don’t worry, I’ll spring for a pair of contact lenses for you if it comes down to that,” he told Kenzie’s partner.
Turning toward Kenzie, who seemed totally absorbed in carefully reviewing the stack of possible matches that still remained, Hunter raised another point.
“Have we heard anything from your cousin about a match using that facial recognition database?” he wanted to know.
“No,” she answered, then added, “And to be quite honest, I’ve been afraid of calling her because I just am not up to hearing any negative news.”
Nodding, Hunter rose from the table. He was going cross-eyed himself and could definitely use the break. “I’ll go and pay her a visit.”
“No,” Kenzie said, on her feet instantly. “She’s my cousin. I’ll go. Besides, if I sit here another hour I’m going to wind up growing roots into the floor.” She shifted her shoulders and had to stop herself from wincing. “How can a person get so stiff doing nothing?” she marveled.
“That’s one of the age-old mysteries of life,” Hunter replied with a laugh.<
br />
Kenzie began to walk out and saw that he was coming with her. She wanted him to stay here, working with the others.
“You don’t have to come with me,” she told him. “It doesn’t take two of us to ask Valri if she’s found a match.”
The elevator was right there and Hunter got on behind Kenzie. “Just think of me as your moral support,” he told her.
“Well, there’s a first,” she quipped. “I don’t think that anyone has ever thought of you in that light before, Brannigan.”
He grinned at her and for the first time, she became aware of the fact that he had a dimple in his cheek. “You’d be surprised,” he told her.
The elevator door opened and she hurried out ahead of him, but there was no outpacing the man. “Yes, I would be,” Kenzie answered honestly.
Anxious now, Kenzie forced herself to wait until she was practically on top of Valri’s desk before hopefully asking her cousin, “Any luck?”
Valri glanced up to see who was talking to her. “Lots of luck,” she told Kenzie. “Some good, some bad.”
“We’re talking about matching the woman in the video’s face to someone in your database,” Hunter specified.
Just then, the printer in the far corner came to life, methodically spitting out one page after another. Valri smiled at the two detectives at her desk.
“Funny you should ask about that,” she said. She got up from her main desk and walked over to another computer, the one that was currently running the facial recognition program. The results of that search were still coming out of the printer. “I think we might have some answers for you.” Valri quickly scanned the pages that had been printed. “Looks like your suspect really led a very full life and liked to get around.”
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