“Oh, damn.”
“O’Hara, you all right?” Hunter called out, hurrying to join the man. He looked at the detective, not inside the outhouse. “You look green.”
Unable to speak, O’Hara waved his hand at Hunter to step back even as he had turned away. O’Hara was able to take a couple of steps to the side before he suddenly retched and wound up purging nearly half the contents of his stomach.
Concerned about him, Kenzie came rushing over. “O’Hara, what’s wrong?” she cried.
And then she saw what had caused the detective to throw up.
Kenzie sucked in air, struggling to keep the dizziness at bay.
There were body parts in the outhouse as if it was some sort of storage unit. There was an assortment of heads and severed hands. All the parts that had been missing from the torsos they had found in Aurora Park, she thought.
Hunter looked at Kenzie. Realizing that she was about to go in, he caught her arm and forcibly turned her away from the outhouse.
“Kenzie, go get the crime scene investigators,” he told her sternly, trying to break through the protective wall she had erected around herself. “Tell them to stop what they’re doing and get in here.”
She hardly heard him.
“This is where they were stashed,” she said, her words coming out in almost slow motion, as if, if she let them out at a faster rate, her voice was going to break.
Although Hunter was trying to draw her away and he was strong, Kenzie wasn’t going to let him. Struggling against the grip he had on her wrist, she kept looking into the small dark structure. Seeing the heads that couldn’t look back.
“This was her trophy room,” she said in a still voice. “This was where she could come in and gloat over her kills.”
“You don’t know that. We still don’t even know if the killer’s a woman. Maybe this was just a convenient place for the killer to separate the identifiable parts from the rest of the body. Pragmatic,” he concluded.
“No,” Kenzie insisted, shaking her head, her eyes fixed and staring into the dark interior. “That’s too practical and too pragmatic. No, this was her trophy room,” she insisted almost breathlessly. “I can feel it, Hunter. We’re dealing with a monster.”
“Well, you’re not going to get an argument from me on that count,” Hunter told her. “Anyone who can kill that many people, who could carry out what amounted to that many death sentences, can’t be called anything else except a monster.”
O’Hara had returned with the four crime scene investigators. All four—three men and a woman—had been on the job for years. Summed up, the total number of years came to a little less than twenty-nine.
But even they paled when confronted with carnage of this magnitude.
“Wow. This is going to take us a while,” Lawrence, the senior investigator, told Hunter as he took in the number of heads and hands inside the outhouse.
“Take your time,” Kenzie said, pulling herself together and doing her best not to sound as if she was sick to her stomach. “The chief will want you to be sure not to miss a thing.” Turning toward Hunter, she said, “We have to find out who this cabin belongs to. It had to have been registered with the county at some point in its history. Someone’s name has to be on the deed.”
Hunter nodded. “We can start at the county registrar,” he told her. “They have to have a record of ownership,” he reasoned.
“That doesn’t mean that the owner of the cabin is also the one who owns that head collection,” Kenzie said grimly.
“Maybe not,” he agreed. “But knowing who owns the cabin or who initially owned it might get us one step closer to finding out the identity of the person playing the mad butcher of Aurora.” He looked down into Kenzie’s eyes. “Remember, the Son of Sam got caught because of a parking ticket. We’ll get this SOB,” he said with confidence.
Kenzie hung on to that piece of wisdom for a long, long time.
Chapter 22
Dr. Rayburn grunted when he looked up and saw both Kenzie and Hunter walking into the morgue the following morning.
“I just want you to know that in all my years as a medical examiner, this has to be the most gruesome case I have ever had the dubious ‘privilege’ of working on,” he told them. “Hands down,” he added wryly.
In the interest of time, Kenzie, Hunter and the other two detectives with them had spent the previous day helping the CSI team collect and catalog all the evidence that had been discovered in and around that small cabin and its accompanying outhouse. In the end, twelve heads, twenty-four hands, and Kurtz’s torso, were all separately bagged, labeled and brought to the morgue yesterday evening. Rayburn had left for the day before the “shipment” had arrived.
Coming into the morgue this morning and being confronted with the newest body parts had been an unpleasant discovery for him, to put it mildly.
His morning container of coffee stood cooling and untouched on his desk in the corner. He’d gotten right to work.
“Look at it this way, this makes identifying those torsos you had in the drawers a little easier,” Hunter told the medical examiner.
“Theoretically,” Rayburn countered. It was obvious by his expression that he had his doubts.
“What do you mean, ‘theoretically’?” Kenzie asked.
“What if those heads you found belong to different torsos?” Rayburn asked. “Then what?”
It was a possibility that none of them wanted to consider.
“Then we look for those,” Kenzie finally replied stoically, then added in a more hopeful note, “Until this whole thing is behind us.”
Rayburn shook his head. “Your whole family is too damn optimistic for me.” He paused, looking at the two detectives. He assumed they had come to see him this early for a reason. “I hesitate to ask, but do you have anything else for me?”
“Not at the moment,” Hunter said. “We just wanted to make sure that all the body parts were delivered to the morgue.”
“Oh, they’re here all right,” the medical examiner said sarcastically. “Now, if you’ll leave me to do my job,” he said pointedly, his eyes indicating the rear door, his meaning clear.
There really was another reason they had stopped by and it involved the folder Kenzie had with her.
She brought it up now. “We thought this might help,” she told Rayburn, handing the medical examiner the folder that contained copies of the missing person files they had managed to narrow down. “We think at least some of those people we found are in this pile.”
Rayburn sighed, eyeing the folder in his hand. He dropped it on the gurney next to the head he was busy examining. “Another haystack to go through. Thanks. Now, please leave,” he requested.
Hunter and Kenzie filed out.
* * *
“I don’t think he likes his job,” Hunter commented once they had walked out of the morgue.
Kenzie laughed to herself. “That’s probably why he has a countdown calendar on his desk. I saw it on the way in.”
“Countdown calendar?” Hunter questioned. They turned the corner.
“Yes. It’s a calendar that counts down how many days a person has left until retirement. From the looks of it, the doc has way too many to go,” Kenzie answered.
“Too bad,” Hunter commented, feeling sorry for the medical examiner. “A man shouldn’t be stuck at a job he doesn’t have a passion for.”
“Do you have a passion for your job?” Kenzie asked out of the blue, curious.
“I wake up every morning whistling,” he said without missing a beat.
The elevator arrived and they got in. She pressed for the fifth floor.
She had no idea if Hunter was being serious or sarcastic but for now, she decided not ask him any further personal questions.
Kenzie changed the subject.
“I hope that Raybu
rn can identify at least a few more of the victims for us,” she said as they rode up to the squad room. “The more victims we know, the more information we can gather. Speaking of which, did Valdez ever get anything from the victim’s brother and sister-in-law who he went to question?”
In light of the day they had had yesterday, that had completely slipped his mind.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet,” Hunter answered. And then he smiled at her. “As you might recall, I was kind of busy last night.”
After they had finally left the cabin and made their way down the mountain again, it had been way too late to go back to the precinct. Hunter had suggested getting dinner out.
Rather than go to a restaurant, since they were both pretty tired, they had settled on takeout.
Even though they hadn’t eaten all day, neither one of them was really hungry for food. Most of the takeout wound up in her refrigerator.
They were far more interested in comfort. Comfort led to other things and he stayed the night, leaving early this morning to go home and change.
She would have thought they were on the path to establishing a pattern if she didn’t feel that she knew better, Kenzie mused. Hunter Brannigan was not a man to be pigeonholed and she wasn’t about to make that mistake, no matter how much she wanted to believe that his behavior was changing. Changing because they had something special going on.
That happened only in movies. Grade-B romantic comedies at that. And this was life with a capital L.
No, she was going to just enjoy this for as long as it lasted. Kenzie absolutely refused to fall into the trap of making future plans because she knew the minute she started doing that, it would mark the beginning of the end.
“I guess we’ll find out now, then,” she said, referring to what Valdez had learned, as they walked into the squad room. They headed for the small room that had been allotted to them.
“I guess so,” Hunter echoed with a smile that she was quickly finding had a way of just seamlessly slipping under her skin and instantly sabotaging her thinking process.
“Heard you guys had one hell of a day yesterday,” Valdez said by way of a greeting. Choi was already there and had gone for coffee. O’Hara hadn’t come in yet.
“I’m more interested in the day you had,” Hunter told the other man. “Did you find out anything useful from the Kellys?”
Instead of answering, Valdez just grinned.
“What?” Kenzie cried. “Out with it.”
“You know that grainy photo you gave me to show them?” Valdez asked Kenzie. “The one taken at the bank when Kurtz closed out his account?”
She wasn’t going to get her hopes up until she heard Valdez say the actual words, Kenzie told herself. “What about it?”
“Now, Valdez,” Hunter ordered when the other detective appeared to be drawing this out.
“Jenny Kelly said she thought she recognized the woman as being the same one her brother-in-law was seeing just before he disappeared a year ago,” Valdez announced.
“She met her?” Kenzie questioned, her excitement almost palpable and getting the better of her despite her resolutions.
“Not exactly,” Valdez confessed. “William Kelly was very secretive about who he was seeing, or even that he was seeing anyone,” he told Hunter and Kenzie.
“So then how did she make the identification?” Hunter asked, sounding short as he questioned his partner.
“Here’s the good part,” Valdez said. “Seems that Jenny Kelly is the really curious type. She thought her brother-in-law was seeing someone so she decided to follow the guy. She saw him go into this woman’s house, then she watched them through the window,” he concluded, looking like the cat that had swallowed a canary.
“Go ahead,” Hunter urged.
“Well, Jenny Kelly is pretty sure that this was the woman she saw—the woman had a different name,” he added, thinking of the name the woman had used when she was with John Kurtz, “but according to Jenny, this was her.”
“You said that she followed her to her house—” Kenzie said.
“That’s what Jenny Kelly said,” Valdez qualified.
“Did she remember the address of the house?” Kenzie asked.
“Yes—”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Kenzie cried. “Let’s go talk to this woman,” she urged, ready to fly out of the police station and go to the woman’s house. It was too much to hope for that she was still living there, but they might find something that would help them find her.
Some of the exuberance left Valdez’s voice as he told her, “Jenny Kelly and her husband already did that. They went to talk to the woman as soon as tattoo guy went missing. The woman wasn’t there,” he told them, disappointed. “Turns out the house had been empty for some time.”
Kenzie sighed, frustrated. “Another dead end.”
“Seems that way—for now,” Hunter said. Undaunted, he pushed forward on another front. “Back to trying to find out who owns or originally owned that cabin with its unique outhouse collection,” he told the others with a touch of sarcasm.
“You realize that depending on how far back that deed of ownership goes, finding out who actually owns that cabin may wind up being one hell of an involved treasure hunt,” Kenzie pointed out.
“If this was easy,” Hunter pointed out, “everyone would be a detective.”
“I know, I know,” she said. She shouldn’t be complaining. “But there really should be a happy medium,” Kenzie added.
“Who knows,” Hunter speculated, “we might get lucky. Or the doc might come up with some more positive IDs for us.”
She saw that accomplishment in a grimmer, more realistic light.
“That means that there’ll be more people to break the news to,” she told Hunter and the others. “More people to rob of any shreds of hope they might be harboring that their loved one might still be alive.”
“And more opportunity to catch this cold-blooded killer, stop them from killing someone else and allowing those families to get closure,” Hunter reminded her.
“Or revenge,” Kenzie countered.
“Or revenge,” Hunter granted. “Revenge is good, too, at least in this case,” he readily agreed. He thought of the stuffy, dusty office. Not exactly a place to cheer the soul. “I can go to the county registrar’s office myself,” he told Kenzie.
She wasn’t about to be sidelined now. She intended to see this through every step of the way.
“No, I’m coming with you,” she insisted. “You might not have noticed,” she told Hunter, “but I’m not any good at twiddling my thumbs, waiting around for someone else to get the results.”
Right, like that could have escaped anyone’s notice, he thought.
“I noticed,” he laughed.
“If you’re going to the county registrar’s office, what do you want us to do?” Valdez asked, nodding toward Choi, who had returned with coffee, and O’Hara, who had just walked in.
Hunter had it all worked out and outlined it for the others.
“O’Hara, you go down to the crime scene lab and see if they came up with anything we can use. Choi, find out if Valri Cavanaugh has picked up on any sightings of our black widow under any of her various aliases. Valdez—” he turned to look at his partner “—I want you to go back to the Kellys’. Find out if they knew if their brother had a bank account and what bank he used. Dollars to doughnuts, it was emptied out like the others were.
“If so,” he continued, “find out when this happened and the bank branch’s location. Once you get that information, see if you can get a hold of any surveillance video the bank might have from that day. With any luck, our black widow stayed true to form and hovered around in the background to make sure that her mark took out every last red cent.” He looked at the rest of the task force gathered around him. “If nothing
else, eventually, this pattern of wholesale greed has to trip her up and lead us to her door.”
“Maybe in a perfect world,” Choi muttered under his breath.
Choi spoke in a low voice, but Hunter had heard him. “No,” he contradicted, addressing Choi’s comment. “In an imperfect world. People like this black widow don’t exist in a perfect world,” he said flatly.
They all had their assignments and went about fulfilling them.
* * *
Kenzie and Hunter drove to the county registrar’s office, located some twenty-five miles away from the heart of Aurora. Hunter volunteered to drive and was surprised that she didn’t offer any resistance. Instead, Kenzie readily agreed to the arrangement.
Something was up, he thought.
“You look awfully grim,” Hunter noted, glancing at the expression on her face. “We might finally be closing in on some answers.”
She didn’t quite see it that way. Finding a name—the right name—and pulling it out of county records sounded just too easy. She had a feeling there was some kind of catch.
“Or those answers are just going to lead us to even more questions,” Kenzie said. “Sometimes I feel just like I’m trapped in this big, recurring dream, going down a road that just leads to another road that leads to another road. And so on,” she sighed, wrapping it all up in a big, unmanageable package.
“Maybe you need to take a break,” Hunter suggested. “Step away and clear your head if it’s getting too intense for you.”
She was too dedicated to just shrug her duty off like way. “I can’t step away,” Kenzie insisted. He knew better than that, she thought. “I owe it to those victims to find who did this to them.”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking it over. “I think they’d understand,” Hunter told her gently.
“Maybe,” she allowed. “But I wouldn’t. I can’t slack off. I—we,” she corrected herself, “have to catch this woman, this monster, before she finds someone else to hack up.”
“Then focus on that,” Hunter counseled. “Focus on solving the case and not any of that other peripheral stuff.”
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