by Kate Morris
He pulled into a spot at the headquarters and ran through the rain with Lorena to the building. Craig was there waiting for them.
“Hey, Craig,” she said and shook his hand, then tried flicking water from her jacket.
“Glad you’re finally here, Lorena,” Craig said. Then he shook Jack’s hand and offered a nod.
He said in a friendly tone, “Hard one to crack, huh?”
Craig nodded and said, “Yeah, you have no idea. Bureau’s busting everyone’s chops on this, too.”
“What’s the fervor all about? You guys get cases like this all the time. Why call in so many people, especially a couple cops from halfway across the country?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what? The news?” Lorena asked. “No, we just got in last night.”
“Late last night, more like in the middle of the night,” Jack corrected.
“Yeah, sorry about that. Geez, I feel bad dragging you guys in on this, but my boss was breathing down my neck about finding the best investigators I knew. Everyone’s brought people in on it.”
“Seriously?” Lorena said. “For one serial? They don’t even have that many confirmed kills on this guy yet.”
“It’s not that. It’s gotten even worse,” Craig explained as he led them down hallways toward a large room that looked more fitting for wedding receptions than a meeting. Just about every seat was filled already. “If you haven’t been following the case, then you haven’t heard. Some bigshot politician’s daughter was kidnapped.”
“What?” Lorena asked on a gasp. “And they think it was this guy?”
“He left a calling card,” Craig said.
“That’s unusual. He’s changing his tactic then,” Lorena said. “I didn’t read about him communicating in any of his other murder files.”
“Yeah, I’ll explain it after the meeting. Maybe it’s better you go in and listen to this briefing without knowing everything we do. It’ll give you a fresher perspective.”
“Wow, we hadn’t heard about someone’s daughter being kidnapped.”
“Yeah, guess he’s running for Oregon State’s Attorney office or something. Him and his fancy wife have been all over the papers hosting charity events and crap like that.”
“What’s his name?” Jack asked in a hoarse whisper as they took seats near the front of the room, the only three chairs left.
“Neumann, Victor Neumann,” Craig answered.
Jack felt the blood rush from his face as he sat next to Lorena. His ex-wife’s step-daughter was missing, and he’d just been brought to Portland to work the case.
Chapter Five
Lorena
Lorena listened for nearly an hour as different men in the FBI and one woman came to the podium with their slideshow presentations and analyses about the Tooth Fairy. Some of it jived with the theories she was forming, but some of it didn’t. This wasn’t how she was used to working. They tended to work cases alone unless it was something that the rest of the department needed to be briefed on during their weekly meetings. She took diligent notes, though, just in case.
They came to a question and answer session, and many people stood up to voice their opinions. There had to be nearly a hundred people in the room.
“And the missing teeth,” the female FBI agent said at the podium. “Obviously these are trophies. We’ve confirmed with every victim’s dentist now that they were not, in fact, missing the teeth that were found absent at their death. He’s taking trophies of teeth.”
The interaction went on for a while as the agents took questions from the audience. Then they disbanded, and most went about their work, heading out of the building or back to their offices.
“Hey, my boss wants you guys in on this meeting,” Craig said, walking toward the doors to the big room.
“Oh, I doubt if we’ll be of any help,” Jack said. “We just got in last night. I haven’t even had a chance to read the whole stack of files yet.”
“I know. I told him that, but he still wants you and Lorena there,” Craig said, leading the way.
They went farther into the building where they came to a glass-encased boardroom with probably twenty chairs at a long, cherry boardroom table. Lorena sat between Craig and Jack and pulled a can of Coke from her bag. She didn’t care what anyone thought. She needed the energy. She also felt severely under-dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt. She’d removed her blazer when they entered the building because it was wet. Now she was cold, goosebumps rising on her arms.
Craig nudged her and handed Lorena a sheet of paper, “Lorena, this is the note he left after he took the Neumann girl. They’re trying to look for prints in the lab.”
She nodded and shared the information with Jack, who was unusually quiet. He was also suddenly very pale. Maybe he was hungry. It was afternoon, and neither of them had eaten much yet.
The photocopy of the letter read:
Dear FBI friends,
I am taking Hailee Neumann because she interests me, and because I know you’ll never find her because you are severely incompetent at what you do. If I was as incompetent as you, I’d have gone broke years ago. I take what I want, you see. I took her right out of her home after she was dropped off after school by her friend’s mother. It was almost too easy. I have the most trusting face. I only wish there were more of me to have taken the other two girls in the car, as well. These whores need to be taught a lesson. If I didn’t do it, someone else would. Alas, modern security cameras on the electric poles have hindered many a man like me. My father taught my mother the same lesson. His life was much more peaceful after she was gone. I shall expel the evil from her. It is what she needs. I will write again soon.
Trix
Lorena reread the letter twice more to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.
“Before you ask,” Craig whispered, “we already checked it for prints and forensics and got nothing.”
“Typewriter,” Jack said.
“Yeah, and an old one, too,” Craig said. “We’ve got the model and whatnot, but so far it’s not helping with anything.”
“Not even from the ribbon?” Jack asked.
“No, it’s pretty common. Hell, even Amazon sells typewriter ribbon. I didn’t think anyone still used it, but they must.”
“He’s leaving them at the water because he’s cleansing them, cleaning their souls,” Lorena said out loud what she was thinking, still staring at the words in front of her.
“Excuse me?” one of the agents close to them asked.
“Huh?” Lorena asked, looking up and then back down at the file. “Um, yeah, he’s dumping them near water or partially in the water as a symbolic gesture of cleansing. An act of purification or baptism, if you will. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the debris on their bodies came from being in the water before he killed them, or maybe right after.”
“One of the victims had water in her lungs,” a female agent commented. “It wasn’t enough to prove that he drowned her, but she still had a small amount in there.”
“He’s not drowning them,” Lorena said, mostly to herself. “Definitely not drowning them. This is ritualistic. He wants to choke them to death to watch them die. If he drowned them, especially at night which is probably when he does this, he wouldn’t be able to see them die. He wants to look at them while he strangles them to death. Much more personal. The water is symbolic of cleanliness. He thinks he’s purifying them, these ‘whores’.”
Then she dug around in her bag until she found what she needed. She opened the pack of LifeSavers and spread them out on the table until she found two purple ones, which she popped into her mouth. If she didn’t eat something soon, she’d have to raid their vending machine. She knew they had one because they passed it on their way to this office. She’d spied Doritos. Man, some Doritos would taste great about know. When she looked up, every set of eyes in the room were on her. She looked at Jack.
“My partner is very good at getting into the heads of the
se freaks.”
She frowned at Jack and looked around at the other people again. Then she cleared her throat.
“Right, okay, so we know a little. He’s cleaning them, maybe even baptizing them in the water. That would explain the debris on the bodies. It would also explain the church-mom-Sunday-best clothing they are all found in, too.”
“I don’t think so,” one of the male agents said. “We’ve had the best profilers in the country on this case, and none of them have come up with that.”
“But, she’s right. There was mud and dirt found in many of their shoes,” another one said, agreeing with Lorena’s theory.
She really didn’t care if any of them agreed with her. Most FBI agents never did. It didn’t matter to Lorena. She was still going to go with her gut on this case just like she did back home in Cleveland working any other case. She wasn’t going to let their judgment cloud her vision.
“Who are you again?” the first man asked her.
“Detective Evans, Cleveland homicide division,” she answered, getting a sneer and a disregarding look from the man.
“Yeah, Evans,” the other one said. “You’re the detective that cracked the Gingerbread case. I knew you looked familiar.”
“My partner helped. It wasn’t just me,” she corrected, never wanting to take credit away from Jack. He was a good partner and always had her back.
“No, it was mostly her. You were right the first time,” he said with his usual good humor and charm and unmistakable sex appeal by the looks of the female agents around them who regarded Jack with flirty eyes.
Lorena shot him an impatient look.
“You brought in the Cleveland police on this?” the first man asked their boss, the man at the head of the table running the meeting who looked neat and professional in his expensive suit and wire-framed eyeglasses.
“Yes, and I want everyone to cooperate with Foster and Evans. Many people had those Gingerbread files in their hands before it got to them, and they were still the ones who broke the case wide open.”
She nodded to the older gentleman to show her appreciation. This was unusual. Most FBI agents treated her like she was an idiot, except for Craig, of course, who was her buddy. But she didn’t miss the first man’s eye roll at his boss’s directive.
“You know, Miss Evans,” their boss said, “you might be on to something with that theory. I’m going to have our forensics teams look at the evidence again and see if they can’t match it to your theory.”
She nodded again and went back to sorting LifeSavers. Lorena didn’t feel as if she had enough information on the case yet to form a fully-developed opinion on this man yet.
“What about Trix?” the female agent asked. “He signs the bodies and this letter with that name. Why Trix? Why not the Tooth Fairy?”
“Right,” Craig added. “He already saw the papers calling him the Tooth Fairy, surely. I mean, unless he lives on the east coast, he had to have seen the nickname.”
“He doesn’t like that one,” Lorena put in. “There’s some connection with Trix. Maybe his mother, maybe the nickname of an old flame he’s killing over and over again. He mostly kills hookers, so maybe he had a negative sexual experience with one when he was young who was named that. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want to go down known as the Tooth Fairy.”
“So why take the teeth?” the female agent asked Lorena directly.
“They all need a trophy. They can’t relive the moment with their victims at that exact moment when he killed them if he can’t touch something that belonged to them.”
“Right, but then why not just take a piece of their hair or clothing?” the woman asked, this time the whole room.
“He doesn’t want their hair,” she said. “Whoever he’s killing over and over again had blonde hair. If he liked her, he wouldn’t want to kill her. He’s recreating her, making her alive again, born again, which takes us back to the baptism point.”
“Good job, Evans,” the supervisor said.
“We’ve researched Trix extensively,” Craig said. “Nothing comes up. That name or whatever it means is not related to anything significant.”
“So ask him,” Lorena said. “Put an op-ed in the local newspaper and ask him why he refers to himself as Trix or why he writes it on the bodies.”
“Get real!” the first, more hostile man remarked with a loud bark of rude laughter. “And why don’t we just ask him to turn himself in?”
“Because he won’t,” Lorena said. “His work’s not done yet. He hasn’t found that one perfect woman, the one that would make him feel as if his work is complete.”
“His work?” the man asked with a snort.
“Right, this is his job, you see,” Lorena explained. “He’ll never be done, but he thinks he could be if he found the perfect woman to fix, to save, to cleanse, and that she’d be cleansed after he was done with her. That one who could bring ‘her’ back from the dead. Then he could stop.”
“Oh, alrighty then,” the man said with sardonic humor.
Lorena wanted to leave the meeting. This was boring, explaining to this man and the others the nature of something she already so profoundly understood about people like Trix.
“You don’t quit your job because you can’t find the Tooth Fairy,” she said to him directly. “You’ll never find him. But that doesn’t mean you’ll turn in your resignation today knowing this. You’ll come in tomorrow, punch the clock, labor over files, follow leads, and not solve this case. Just like he’ll complete this set of teeth until he has the perfect set, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to quit killing people just because he has the perfect set of teeth. Why? Because they won’t be perfect. Even if they look good on paper, look good wired together and placed on display in his secret lair where he keeps his dirty deeds buried, he won’t stop because he’ll find a flaw. One day, he’ll study the set of teeth, and that itch will begin again. He’ll find one, tiny, miniscule flaw that will make him insane enough to throw out the teeth, destroy them and do it all over again. Nothing will ever be perfect enough for him because he’s sick. He’ll stalk another young woman and see the flaw in her that makes him want to kill her, to cleanse her, to baptize her, that makes him want to relive killing her by taking one of her teeth, too. Then he’ll need a full set and will start following other women and killing them until he has another full set that seems just slightly more perfect than the last. He thinks this new girl is going to satiate the need, but she won’t. He’ll realize it soon enough and cleanse her, as well. There will never be enough women out there to quiet the beast inside of him. This is what he does. You won’t solve this case because you can’t, and he won’t stop killing women because he can’t.”
When she finished, there was a hushed pause in the room, a static charge in the air that she had caused. The agitator in the group’s mouth was hanging open with something akin to shock and maybe a little disgust.
Lorena turned to their director and said, “He’s taking them somewhere and keeping them for a while. I think you probably have about two months, maybe less until he tires of this girl.”
She tapped her index finger twice on the typewritten letter on the table in front of her. Then she gathered her things and stood up to leave. This meeting for Lorena was over. Jack pushed to his feet, as well, and followed her from the room.
When they got to the hallway and the door shut behind them, Jack chuckled.
“I think you spooked them, Evans,” he said.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I think you made some fans,” he teased.
She shrugged and said, “I told you they never like me. I don’t even know why the hell I agreed to this.”
“’Cuz civic duty and all that,” he said lightly.
“Sure,” Lorena replied.
“Hey, at least Craig’s boss liked you.”
“Awesome,” she said. “One out of thirty! Go me!”
“Not bad odds,” Jack said with a smirk. “I still like
you.”
“Why didn’t you do most of the talking? You’re more charming than me.”
“You think I’m charming?” he asked sincerely.
“I don’t think you need me to tell you that, Foster. Every woman in this building is ready to bear your children.”
Craig burst through the door an instant later and said, “My boss said to give you access to whatever you need. I think you made a good impression.”
Lorena was slightly disappointed. She wanted to take Grace and go home. Something about this case had her on edge. Maybe it was because some of the girls that were murdered by Trix reminded her of Grace with their blonde hair.
“Great,” she said with sarcasm.
“What first?” Craig asked them.
Jack looked at Lorena before she turned to walk to the long window at the end of the hall.
Craig joined her along with Jack as she stared out at the rain. This case felt like she could fall into a rabbit hole. This man was psychotic, deranged, and dangerous. She didn’t want to put Gracie in harm’s way. If it got too heavy, she was going home to Cleveland.
“Let’s go to lunch,” Craig said.
“Sounds like the best place to start,” Jack said, managing to get Lorena to smile.
“What do you guys like? My treat. Well, the Bureau’s treat.”
“So, basically since we’re tax-payers, it’s still our treat,” Jack joked.
“Oh, yeah. Guess it is,” Craig said. “I’m not that familiar with the city yet, but…”
“I got this,” Jack interrupted. “I know all the best diners and dive restaurants around.”
“Right! I forgot you worked out here, Foster,” Craig commented as they left.
Lorena looked over her shoulder as the rest of the agents filed out of the boardroom. The one who was openly rude to her offered a glare of contempt her way. It sent a chill down her back.
Lorena called to check in with Grace and told her to order whatever takeout she wanted. She’d left her credit card with her niece for that purpose. Grace said she was in the mood for pizza, and Lorena told her to order two large so that she and Jack could eat leftovers tonight. She never knew how long their hours were going to be, so it paid to have a backup plan. Their apartment had a small kitchen, but she doubted she’d have time to cook. Grace told her that she’d finished her schoolwork and that she was watching MTV. Of course, it was just to get a rise of Lorena, which it had. Then Gracie had giggled and cut the line. Lorena wondered if she was going to have gray hair soon. Probably.
