by Kate Morris
“Oh, yeah. Crap. We need a designated no-fly zone workspace here somewhere,” she lamented and tapped her foot impatiently.
“We’ll have to use my room and tell Grace not to go in there,” he said and led the way, carrying their box of FBI files.
Lorena followed, also transporting her own items. Jack went back to retrieve their coffees, the most important thing. He had a small nightstand and a long dresser. He laid out their homework on the bureau and the coffees on the nightstand. Lorena got to work arranging their case evidence the way they normally did back at the station. She taped and hung the pictures on the wall and started organizing the file notes in a way that made sense for them.
“I’ll get us a whiteboard tomorrow.”
“’Kay,” she said nonchalantly as she perused another file.
They worked in tandem until the case was laid out before them in the manner they preferred.
Jack sipped his coffee before remarking, “We have all females ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-seven. The latest was eighteen. She was the youngest. Not sure why he chose someone young this time. Or maybe we’ve got another Gingerbread. Maybe he is a she.”
“No,” Lorena said, shaking her head slightly. “Not this time. The killer is definitely a man.”
Jack had been joking, but he knew she didn’t always get irony or sarcasm. “The rapes would indicate a man, too.”
“Right,” she said, clueless.
He just smirked and tried to concentrate on their work. Lorena stood and left the room. Nothing new there, either. She returned a moment later with a small bag of peanut M & M’s.
“There isn’t any candy in the cupboards,” she complained.
Jack chuckled and said, “Yeah, we’ll have to fix that first thing.”
“This whole thing could flop if we don’t get our daily dose of junk food,” she teased. “We need my Atomic Fireballs!”
“We? I think you mean you, partner.”
She grinned and nodded and went back to her file. “There are heavy doses of narcotics in the last four victims’ blood reports. Looks like the first few weren’t tested or something.”
Jack looked over the reports, as well. “This one was. That makes five.”
He handed her the file he was perusing.
“Pharmaceuticals. Looks like a pretty big dose. This guy had access to medicine. Phenyl Barbitol. That doesn’t seem like something that would be easy to get your hands on,” Jack commented.
“Right,” she said. “He has to have access to drugs.”
“Pharmacist?” Jack asked rhetorically.
Lorena shrugged. “Who knows? Drugs can be bought illegally off the street, so this could be any idiot with a connection.”
“True enough,” he agreed. “I’ll check in with a few friends I have over in Narcs. See if any of them know of someone who’s pedaling anesthesia.”
“Good,” she said absentmindedly as she opened another file.
“I can reconnect with some of my old informants, too.”
She smiled and said, “Nothing like criminals to keep us in the loop.”
He chuckled and nodded.
“Likes to dump them by the water, huh?” she asked rhetorically. Jack already knew this. He didn’t want to tell her everything about their killer. She’d find it all on her own, and he wanted her opinion without his own thoughts clouding her mind.
“Yes, he does.”
“And the words written on their backs? Always the same. If he’d dumped them in the water, it would’ve likely faded since he draws the letters in their blood.
“Well, you didn’t expect him to write the words in his own blood, did you?”
“That would’ve been nice,” she answered with sarcasm. “How come they never make it that easy?
“Sometimes they do,” he pointed out. “Remember the guy we busted a few months ago?”
“Yes, deciding to urinate a few feet from your crime scene isn’t exactly brilliant. He wasn’t a serial, though. Just a loser.”
“And leaving a bloody handprint on the tree where he was taking a leak didn’t help, either,” Jack added with a chuckle.
“We can’t all be smart,” Lorena joked.
Jack chuffed, “Well, you can.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “So, he likes to write the word, ‘Trix’ on their backs. What the heck does it mean?”
“Not sure. Could be a reference to the women. Most of them were prostitutes. He could be referring to turning a trick.”
“Maybe,” she said, although Jack could hear the skepticism in her voice. “But why spell it with an ‘x’?”
“A woman’s nickname? Someone he doesn’t like?”
They worked a while longer. She refilled her coffee cup, but Jack did not. He would have to eventually crash later. A gallon of caffeine wasn’t going to help with that.
“Doesn’t leave a print in the writing,” she said. “Of course. That’s why he’s still getting away with all this.”
“How do you think he’s dumping them without being seen? Some of them are pretty far from the nearest roads.”
“Interesting,” was all she said.
Lorena was quiet for a while, making notes on her legal pad. Jack did the same. He had learned over time that they made a great team. They’d solved quite a few murders in Cleveland in the past months since becoming partners. He liked her a lot as a partner. She knew when to back off and let him think. He reciprocated that. Actually, most of the time, she went off on her own somewhere while he worked by himself. Then they got together throughout the day for discussions. Sometimes she headed for the gym to think. Other times, she just went to the park near their office.
“Do you think Grace is gonna be okay here?” he asked, concerned about Lorena’s niece.
“Huh? Oh, Grace. Geesh, I hope so. I worry about her. Our life is weird enough without adding traveling to other cities and uprooting her from her school and friends.”
“Bob said if it’s going to be too long here, he’d be glad to let her stay with them.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. She did that a lot when she was stressing about something. He knew the source of her stress.
“She’s gone, Evans,” he said, trying to reassure her. “Juliette’s on the lam. She’s not gonna risk coming back to Cleveland to hurt Grace just to get at you. That psycho is long gone.”
“They’re never gone,” she said quietly.
“Let’s just see where we can get on this case. Maybe it’ll be a quick close.”
Her brow creased heavily before she said, “I don’t know about that. This body was found four years ago. He could’ve been doing this for many years. He’s a professional. He’s evasive. He hasn’t been caught yet.”
“That’s before we got involved,” he teased, to which she snorted.
Jack yawned and then again.
“Hit the hay,” she suggested, chewing on her pen. “I’ve got this. You’ve already had a chance to look at some of this. I’m probably going to stay up all night and work. Go to bed.”
“You’re in my bedroom,” he pointed out with a smile.
“Oh, yeah!” she said with a smile. “I’ll work in the living room.”
“No, no,” Jack corrected her. “Just stay in here and work. I’ll crash on the couch. I’ve slept in stranger places than a sofa.”
“Like where?” she asked with confusion, looking directly at him.
“Nothing,” he said dismissively.
“No, what do you mean?”
He grabbed his pillow and a blanket and sheets from the closet and replied as he headed for the door, “Just military stuff. You get used to sleeping when and where you can.”
“Oh, yeah. That makes sense. Where was the strangest place you’ve ever had to sleep?”
“Strangest place,” he pondered as he grabbed his overnight bag. “Definitely during an all-day firefight. We were pinned down, so we slept in shifts while we kept watch for our ai
r support to make runs.”
“Yep. That’s weird. Guess you can sleep through anything.”
“See ya’ in the morning, partner,” he told her and made his exit.
“Yeah,” she murmured, already back to work as he closed the door.
Jack made a makeshift bed on the sofa, covering it with a sheet and tossing his pillow and blanket down. He hoped Grace didn’t come into this room. He dug around in his bag and found some sweatpants. The apartment was entirely too hot. He left off his shirt and removed his socks, as well. As he lay on his sofa bed, Jack consulted his watch. Two a.m. She’d work through the night and not even miss a beat. For him, he was done. Within minutes, he was dead asleep. Unfortunately, his dreams were plagued with the faceless images of murdered women who were marked on their backs. The red letters scrolled in such dark red blood that they resembled the horns of Satan himself.
Chapter Three
Lorena
She reread the first victim’s file, the one from four years ago. She didn’t think this was his first victim at all. She just figured that it was the first body that the authorities had discovered of his work and could definitively link to others. It was particularly brutal. The woman was twenty-four, a runaway from a young age, a prostitute, heroin addict and was a frequent visitor to a women’s shelter. There were so many homeless runaways in this city, even worse than Cleveland. As a cop needing to talk with some of them, she knew it would be hard to infiltrate their communities, too. She highly doubted with their timeframe that they’d get anywhere trying to. They never talked to the police, so she’d leave the rest of that to Craig’s team.
Their victim’s name was Shirley McVey, and she hadn’t been seen by her family in six years when the authorities finally found her body. Lorena couldn’t even imagine what her family would’ve felt, receiving a phone call from the police to inform them that their child was found murdered. It made Lorena sick to her stomach even considering something like that with Grace.
She studied the crime scene photographs and consulted the autopsy report again. There were marks consistent with bruising from the wrists being bound, although most of their wrists were not tied when they were found. There were also bruises around some of their ankles. This got Lorena thinking. Was he hauling them in a van, lying prone and bound at the wrists and ankles? Did he work for a medical supply company that delivered pharmaceuticals? Is that why he had access to narcotics? She made a note to have the team look into that possible lead, too.
All of the bodies had one thing in common. They were strangled, mutilated, and raped. He was clever enough not to leave trace evidence, semen or hairs on the bodies. Of course, some of the bodies hadn’t been found for months and even years. Many were in a sad state of decomposition by the time they were discovered. The signs of torture were still similar with the victims, though. It definitely linked them as being killed by the same man.
She perused the profiler’s report next. It didn’t hold any particular surprises. They had him pegged for a male, age twenty-five to forty-five. Lorena agreed with the age assessment. Most serials this prolific started young, and since the one victim was found four years ago, it seemed that he was at least twenty-two but likely much older. He had perfected his craft and would be difficult to catch because of it.
The only evidence they seemed to have that was at all significant was a footprint near the body of Allie Xiang. She was a runaway, former prodigy violin player-turned stripper. One of her friends at the strip club actually came forward to report her as missing. They’d been former roommates until Allie took a turn south, spiraling out of control with drug use. After that, she slept under an overpass in a well-known homeless camp. Since she was a twenty-year-old homeless prostitute, the local police hadn’t taken her disappearance seriously at first. Then her body had been found twenty miles from Portland on a riverbank, discovered by boys throwing and skipping rocks into the water. He’d left a footprint in the mud, only one.
It irritated her that he was so thorough. And yet, if she was being honest, it also fascinated her just the tiniest bit. She wanted to catch him. She wanted him put away and off the streets.
Some of the knots he used to tie his victims were the same, but not with enough consistency to pin him down to anything of importance. She wondered if he traveled for his job. Bodies dumped in other states would indicate that he had a way of getting out of town without arousing suspicion from his place of employment. The farthest dump spot was nearly five hundred miles away. For the average person to drive that round trip and be back quickly would be difficult. However, if he had a job that required travel to these other states for some reason, then he’d be able to kill in multiple states and get back home without missing work.
She also wondered if he was married or had a family. Many serials did. As a matter of fact, she knew that some of them kept up the family façade as a way of hiding their true identities of madmen. It didn’t call attention to them when they were attending their kids’ soccer games or helping them peddle Girl Scout cookies outside the local supermarket. Gary Ridgeway, a native of Washington state, killed forty-nine prostitutes before being caught. He was also married. It was a good ruse to keep up the family man appearance. Nobody suspected Joe Smith, married father of four to be the serial killer they kept hearing about on the nightly news. People liked living in a state of delusion. It wouldn’t surprise her if their Trix killer was married, held down a regular job, and volunteered at church. Their whole goal in life was to blend in enough to continue their tradecraft. It was her life’s work to catch them.
At four thirty, Lorena left the apartment and went for a jog. The night air was crisp, and the rain had finally stopped. She had never been to this state before. Finding time to travel was difficult with her job. When she got back to their apartment, she took the keys to the SUV and used the GPS to find a store. She drove to a Walmart that was open twenty-four hours where she bought most of the items on their list with the exception of a large whiteboard, which would have to wait until tomorrow. She did purchase a small whiteboard, which would work for a while.
She slipped past a sleeping Jack and went to his room with her loot. She tried not to gawk at his bare chest since he was lying on his back with his arm flung over his head. He was her partner and nothing else, and he never would or could be anything more. She told herself it was just because she was without a boyfriend that she’d stared. Of course, that was her usual relationship status if she was being completely honest. Honesty was overrated, though.
Once she had her supplies set up, she opened a can of Coke and a package of Twizzlers and got back to work. Her head was clearer because of the run.
She looked over the victim list again. Two of the women were from north of Portland. It seemed like the most accessible place to start. Some of the out-of-state victims were dumped there and were also from other regions. A few were natives of the surrounding Portland area. If he hauled them to dumping grounds, he’d have evidence in his vehicle. Some of the women were from the states in which they were discarded. It still made her think that he was somehow going to other states for a specific reason other than just murder.
She focused in on Allie Xiang’s file again. As thorough as the FBI was, they had to have questioned the victims’ friends and family members for each of these cases. There weren’t many notes about this, though. She needed to speak with the people in the homeless camp and her friend from the strip club.
Another victim, a little older at twenty-seven, was also a local woman and also a prostitute. Her name was Sara Pickering. Lorena made a note to visit the homeless shelter where this woman sometimes went to seek help. She knew it would be a long shot because the homeless element of society didn’t usually like cops sniffing around. They all had their secrets to keep concealed. Perhaps she’d get lucky and one of the workers would remember this victim.
Sara had nearly been decapitated by whatever ligature he’d used. Rope fibers were found embedded in the skin of her n
eck. It would take a lot of force to decapitate someone with a rope. He had been particularly overzealous with her murder and even worse with Allie. They were the two most brutal murders. What had set him off about Sara? Did she try to escape? Had she fought with him, physically assault him? Or had she reminded him of someone from his past? Was he killing a woman from his past? Was her name Trix or Trixie? Lorena was no closer to the answers to these questions, but she made notes of them in her small notepad anyway. Sometimes just writing them down helped unlock a clue.
She started making notes of the victims’ injuries. Then she made separate sticky notes and stuck them on the apartment wall about their appearances. Did they have any distinguishing factors like brown hair or short in stature? Did any of them look similar? Most seemed to be blonde, but Lorena wasn’t sure if it meant anything just yet.
Then she noticed that each woman was missing a tooth, and, according to the medical examiner’s files, they were removed post-mortem and were not recovered at the crime scene.
“He’s a collector,” she whispered to herself.
Another file revealed that most were strangled, sexually assaulted, and malnourished. Upon further review, Lorena realized that the dates when the women went missing and the times when they were found were sometimes months later.
“Are you keeping them somewhere?” Lorena asked the empty room.
Every woman was skinny, malnourished and had one missing tooth. Many showed signs of repeated torture, rape, and abuse. Ligature marks and scarring around their ankles and wrists would suggest he kept them tied for an extended period of time. If he was holding them at his place of residence, then he wouldn’t be married. Lorena doubted that he was using his own house to store away the victims. He would have to have somewhere private, remote, and somewhere that they wouldn’t be heard screaming for help. She looked at the map again now hanging on the wall. There were certainly enough remote locations from Portland down to northern California and all the way over to Nevada and Utah. It was a crapshoot. He could have a hunting cabin tucked away somewhere in Washington state or a bunker in the foothills of Utah. Wherever he was stashing them away, Lorena was sure he was and that it must’ve been a very hidden, secret place.
