2nd Cycle of the Harbinger Series: The continuation of the #1 Hard-boiled/Police Procedural smash Plain Jane

by Carolyn McCray

  “So, look for men released in what? The last few months?”

  Kent took it all in. The hundreds of little yellow cones marking where evidence had been. “Oh, no. He’s been released in the last week. This was his catharsis. This was his pent-up rage.”

  Joshua nodded. “You are the man.”

  “Once you have that list, look at their previous addresses. Our guy has left a string of bodies. I would say they were mistaken for bar brawls gone wrong. He beat them with his fists.”

  “But he used --” Joshua started to say.

  “No, the meat grinders were her idea,” Kent explained.

  “How did you figure that out?” Joshua asked.

  “Because look how the bodies were staged. This is a huge theatrical presentation. Our guy is disorganized. A brute. The scene would have been a hundred times messier if this had been his pathology.”

  Joshua’s eyebrow went up. “Messier than this?”

  Kent chuckled. Everyone was so obsessed with the volume of blood and gore, they couldn’t see the underlying pattern.

  “Imagine the scene without any blood splatter or bones,” Kent prompted. Joshua needed a little refresher course.

  “Okay, that is going to be hard,” Joshua said.

  “Then do it on your computer. I’m sure your crime scene creator can do a pretty good job.” While Kent did not rely on technology himself, that didn’t mean he wasn’t familiar with the tools available.

  “Yah, yah,” Joshua mumbled, as he worked on his tablet. “Here!”

  Kent looked over. The computer had made the walls white and the floors a neutral grey. The only thing left on screen were the bodies.

  “They are all…they are all at the same stage in the meat grinders.”

  Kent nodded. “She wanted a precise image from her head. If the male killer had his way, some of the bodies would have been fully ground, others just barely. A way more random pattern.”

  “Damn, you are even better dead,” Joshua whispered.

  Before Kent could agree, there was a noise from outside. The crime scene team must have been arriving at the crack of dawn to finish their duties.

  “Back here, there’s a way out,” Joshua urged.

  Oh, how Kent wished he could spend more time here, but alas, that was not the case.

  Bidding farewell to one of the most masterful killings in recent history, Kent followed Joshua out.

  * * *

  Nicole startled awake. Light streamed through the crack between the curtains. She wiped a bit of drool from her chin, then did the same to Logan.

  They had conked out.

  She glanced over at the clock. It was nine thirty in the morning.

  No way. No how.

  But the busy sounds of the street confirmed it was that late in the morning.

  How could this have happened?

  Kent was nowhere to be found, but chalk that up to the usual.

  Her bedroom door creaked open. “Nicole?” her father asked as he entered.

  “Yah,” she replied, moving Logan to the other arm, since the one he was laying in was asleep. “Why did you let me sleep this long?”

  “I’ve been checking on you every half an hour. I called your boss at eight and he said to let you sleep.”

  Glick. Her second father. Of course, he said to sleep in.

  Nicole rose, angry. Angry at herself, Kent, her father, Glick. Oh, she might as well throw Ruben in there because had he been asked, he would have said the same thing.

  She couldn’t stay angry long as Logan awoke and did his first big boy stretch, yawning with that perfect little mouth of his.

  Nicole couldn’t help it. She might want to be out hunting down serial killers, but she had to stop and coo to Logan. He blinked a few times, then smacked his lips together.

  His signal he was ready to eat.

  Yep, and his hand reached out to her breast.

  The boy knew how to get a point across.

  “I’ll leave you two and go down and make some breakfast.”

  Nicole was about to argue that she needed to get going right after feeding Logan, but damn some pancakes and scrambled eggs did sound absolutely delicious. She could only assume that Kent wasn’t going to solve the crime in the next half hour.

  “And Dad?” Nicole asked.

  He turned back in the doorway. “Yes, honey?”

  “How about some hash browns? Golden brown?”

  He smiled that long slow smile of his. “You got it.”

  Quietly he closed the door as Nicole adjusted the nursing bra so Logan could latch on.

  For a moment Nicole wished that there wasn’t death and destruction out there. She wouldn’t mind spending a little more time with this bundle of perfection. But even as she thought it, Logan drifted off to sleep. He wouldn’t miss his Mommy for a few hours.

  And there was a killer on a rampage.

  She kissed him on the top of his little head then put Logan back to bed.

  Now it was time for a shower for Mommy.

  Then off to catch another serial killer.

  * * *

  There were a few drawbacks to being dead, Kent had to concede. One was that Jimmi didn’t know he was alive, so Kent couldn’t sit beside him, looking over his shoulder. The man really did work better under pressure.

  So for now, Joshua and Kent were sitting around, waiting for Jimmi to get done with his analysis, hopefully finding the male suspect from the murders the night before.

  Joshua was playing some game involving peppermints and gum drops. If the game was as inane as the soundtrack, it was eating through what was left of Joshua’s frontal lobes.

  Kent had spent the time going over their girl’s file. They didn’t have a name, but Kent still felt like he knew her. Anyone around her would say she was a sweet woman. A real giver.

  Ah, sociopaths were the best at blending in. It was easy to be nice and generous when you had your eye on the prize. Every kind thing this woman did was later taken out on her victims.

  She was so sophisticated that Kent bet that she had been in the system as a teen. She had earned her chops in group therapy. Learning how to mimic normal human behavior.

  Joshua’s phone rang the theme song to Glee. Even Kent had to admit that Joshua needed to get a life.

  The morgue attendant answered, “Yo, Jimmi!”

  Kent watched Joshua’s face as he took in the information from Jimmi. Kent knew even before Joshua that Jimmi had found them at least one suspect.

  “Care to take a guess?” Joshua asked with a smile as he closed the connection on Jimmi.

  So the shoe was on the other foot now.

  Kent kind of liked it.

  He stroked his stubble with the back of his hand. Ever since he’d been “dead,” he’d gotten a little lax on the shaving.

  He scanned everything he knew about the female unsub. Where would she find her killer partner?

  It wouldn’t be back east. Seldom were killers so brutal back there. She would have a very limited selection. And she wouldn’t dare look in the Midwest. Too close to home.

  No, she’d look to the west. Northwest and the Southwest had far too few serial killers. That left the far west.

  California. Plenty of killers with a wide range of tastes.

  “He was arrested in Southern California,” he stated.

  “Damn it!” Joshua said, slapping the counter. “I swear you really are psychic. Can’t we please, please, please take you to be tested?”

  “No,” Kent replied. “Now who is he?”

  Joshua typed on his keyboard and brought up the picture of their male suspect, Bute Parkland. He looked the part. Shaved bald head, but not a skinhead. He was so muscular that he didn’t appear to have a neck. It looked like someone had just set his rather large head onto a set of muscle-bound shoulders.

  Next to him, Bute’s rap sheet scrolled down and still hadn’t reached the end. Almost all for assault and battery with a few B&E’s thrown in there for vari
ety.

  A few sexual assaults and a possession of steroids charge.

  Some stuck. Some didn’t. He’d just been serving a dime in Pelican Bay up in Northern California even though he had been arrested in Southern California. After nearly beating several prisoners to death in the Twin Towers down in LA, Bute had been transferred to Pelican Bay where they were used to prisoners like Bute.

  In the first three weeks at Pelican Bay, Bute had been sent to the infirmary five times for “accidents,” that had resulted in a broken wrist, broken zygomatic arch, and a broken tailbone. Apparently these accidents broke Bute. He had been the ideal prisoner after that.

  Kent could only imagine the rage that had built up over those long nine years at Pelican Bay.

  “Have Jimmi check Bute’s --”

  Joshua raised his hand. “He already did. Bute had no visitors either at the Twin Towers or at Pelican Bay.”

  Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. To have a driver’s license picture of Bute’s partner. That would have made it far too simple.

  “Letters?” The two had to communicate some way.

  “No physical, but emails, that is a totally other story.”

  Kent watched the screen change from Bute’s picture and rap sheet to a string of email communications.

  They went back two months. Probably about the time their girl had gotten a bit tired of killing with heroin. The deaths probably had been far too quiet and neat. Their girl was a bit more blood-thirsty than that.

  The woman’s screen name was Ready4Anything. That she was.

  “I take it that you can’t trace it?” Kent said.

  “Jimmi is trying, but he said it could take a while.”

  Kent wasn’t surprised. Their girl would be meticulous. She would have covered her tracks well. At least her IP address. Her intentions, not so much.

  “Let’s look at these lovebird notes.”

  Both Bute and his mystery woman would know that all email communication would be opened and read before being allowed through. They would be circumspect to say the least.

  * * *

  Joshua read the first letter. It was the usual. “I found you on a pen pal site and want you to know someone out in the world cares about you.”

  “Are these prison guards idiots?” Kent sighed, shaking his head.

  They were on the first few lines of the first page of the first email and already Kent had found something.

  “What?”

  Kent raised an eyebrow. “Do you really think Bute would have signed up to be a pen pal?”

  The genius profiler was right. Joshua quickly did a scan of the pen pal sites for Pelican Bay. Bute was on none of them.

  “See what I mean?” Kent said. “They should have flagged this communication right away. Maybe a family of four would still be alive.”

  Joshua nodded in agreement, although he doubted if he would have made the catch. Not everyone was Kent, and sometimes he forgot about that.

  Kent skimmed the next few emails, reading far faster than Joshua could ever hope to.

  “Here. Here it is,” Kent stated, snapping his fingers, pointing to a passage. He read it aloud. “I really admire your work.”

  Joshua read the sentence over and over again. “I don’t get it.”

  “Work? When has Bute worked a day in his life?”

  Oh yah, that.

  “I am just starting on my journey. Exploring my options,” Kent read from the letter. “She’s telling him she is a green serial killer. Dear God, do these guards just jack off instead of reading these emails?”

  Joshua shrugged, again not certain if he would have picked up on that clue either.

  Kent was in a league of his own.

  CHAPTER 13

  Kent stood in the center of a projection of the crime scene and turned ever so slightly to the left, taking in the scene through a 360 degree view. The carnage was impressive, but somehow the female unsub had controlled Bute enough to create her own landscape of horror. Just how she wanted it.

  His girl had more depth than he thought. Female killers were always interesting. They just didn’t fall into the common categories that male serial killers were lumped into.

  Females, as always, were far more complex. Their psychosis was a precious bundle of idiosyncratic neuroses. What made a woman kill was a far more debated topic in forensic behavioral analysis than any other single topic.

  Even after interviewing, and by interviewing Kent meant circling each other with weapons until he killed the unsub, Kent had found no common thread. No deep insight into the feminine homicidal maniac’s core pathos. But it was fun trying.

  Joshua re-entered the crime scene. He’d been calling Jimmi to get working on the female unsub’s email account.

  “Good news, bad news. Which one do you want?” Joshua asked.

  “Bad,” Kent replied.

  “The email account is a dummy. Jimmi is trying to track it down, but he doesn’t give it much hope.”

  Kent nodded. He would be disappointed in their girl if she had done anything differently. “At some point though, the unsub had to sign up.”

  Joshua nodded. “Jimmi is working that angle.”

  “And the good news?”

  “We have identified the bodies. It is the Parrish family. The mother was a teacher and her school called missing persons when she didn’t show for work and wasn’t home.”

  “Not necessarily good news then,” Kent said.

  “What do you mean? Can’t we track the serial killers by their victimology?”

  “Not in this case. Now if it had been Bute alone, he would have been working on animal instinct, killing someone who crossed his path. But our girl. Oh no, she picked this family randomly.”

  “That’s a bummer,” Joshua commented.

  Yes, yes it was.

  * * *

  Nicole eased herself into her Mustang. Her body was sore all over. That nursing chair wasn’t nearly as comfortable to sleep in as it was to sit in.

  Baby Logan was bathed, fed and in a milk coma in his bassinette. She set her watch for two and a half hours. Three hours was cutting it a bit close both for Logan and her boobs.

  She went to start the car, but her phone rang.

  “Usher here.” Damn it. When was she going to get that right?

  “Hey, Detective,” Jimmi said. “I think I might have a lead on the email address.”

  “What email?” Nicole asked.

  “Um, the one you asked Joshua to send to me to trace?”

  Nicole had absolutely no idea what the tech was talking about, which meant Kent was probably involved. She might as well play along rather than stirring up some questions.

  “Oh, right. That one. What did you find?”

  Luckily everyone was used to her being a little off her game since the pregnancy, so Jimmi seemed to accept the fact she had first forgotten an important clue, then suddenly remembered it.

  “The killer is smart, but she had to apply through the prison email system to participate in the pen pal program. That email had to be verified. Now the screen name has been deleted and all email from that account is being forwarded by an anonymous proxy.”

  “Jimmi…” Nicole really didn’t have the energy to follow his cryptic techno-speak.

  “Sorry,” Jimmi replied, but didn’t sound all that sorry that she couldn’t follow his logic. “It just means we might have a chance at finding the original IP address the killer used.”

  “Great. Let me know when you find it.”

  “You got it,” Jimmi answered and the connection went dead.

  At nearly the same moment, her phone vibrated to signal an incoming text.

  It came from a number she didn’t recognize, so of course that had to be her husband. “Morning sleepy head. Can you go do the family notification, since your partner is headed to his IA inquiry?”

  An address popped up along with some data from Joshua. They must have identified the bodies from the meat packing crime scene
.

  “Of course, Master,” she texted back.

  All she got back was a smiley face. Typical Kent.

  She revved the car then slid out into traffic. The address wasn’t far. Although she really wished it was further. Family notifications were the absolute worst part of the job.

  But it was part of the job.

  Within minutes, she pulled up to an apartment building. It was the residence of Mrs. Parrish’s ex-husband. The woman’s family came from Montana and the state police there were doing the notification of her parents.

  She was almost glad she had the ex-husband. Although telling him that his son was dead, and not just dead but put through a meat grinder while still alive, wouldn’t be easy.

  There was no way this was going to go well.

  Pulling into two parking spaces, she did not want the Mustang to get scratched, Nicole exited the car and headed to apartment block C, unit 303. Of course, it had to be a walk up. No elevators.

  Pregnancy had really done a number on her body. She had to grab hold of the railing and haul herself up the steps. By the third floor, she was nearly winded.

  Nicole paused at the landing, leaning over, catching her breath. This sucked. As soon as the doctor said she could, Nicole might actually use her gym membership.

  Finally, she felt like she could talk without wheezing and headed to apartment 303.

  She knocked, hoping the man was at work, but promptly the door opened, until the chain caught.

  “Yes, may I help you?”

  Nicole flashed her badge. “May I come inside?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “Please, you are Mr. Parrish, correct.”

  “Yes…”

  Nicole frowned. “Trust me, we’ll want to do this inside.”

  The door shut temporarily, then opened up fully. “I’m sorry. Come in.”

  Nicole entered a rather typical looking apartment. A neutral micro-fiber couch and matching chair. A low coffee table littered with mail. No art on the walls. No accent pillows.

  A guy’s pad.

  The sixty inch television hanging on the wall only proved that.