by Kate Morris
“He wasn’t before,” she said quietly. “And I’d have less respect for you if you hadn’t done something. Men like Victor are just all dead and black inside. He could change. He could be a better husband and father. He chooses not to be. You’re nothing like him. A real man does the right thing, even when it’s hard.”
Her words humbled and struck him straight to his core. After enduring war, being mocked for even enlisting by some of his friends and many in society, being falsely accused in the media of being a ‘murderer of innocent civilians’ like everyone else in the military, said to have become a cop because he was an adrenaline junky, Jack felt his life choices were just slightly vindicated. Lorena’s opinion of him was more important to Jack than he cared to admit. He also wasn’t so sure if Lorena wasn’t just talking about him anymore. Perhaps she was also thinking of her father. He still didn’t know if what she told Trix was the truth or not about her own father being a serial killer, but he wasn’t going to ask, either.
“Ready to get going?” he asked, not wanting to talk further about his character. Lorena could slay him open with a single sentence and leave his feelings all on the outside where he did not like them to be laid bare. Like his father, he preferred to keep it all bottled up inside and hidden away.
She took a long breath and held it. “He’s not going to keep this going much longer. He’ll grow bored. He’ll need a new girl. He’ll kill Hailee soon, probably in the next few days.”
And just like that, she’d just dropped another grenade in their conversation. Jack felt instantly sick. He knew deep down that Hailee was in trouble, but he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. He was also afraid that Lorena was going to be the next girl he took.
As he was driving them to catch a bite to eat, Craig called and asked to meet them at a local restaurant between their two locations. He pulled onto the gravel parking lot and spotted Craig’s car, which he parked right beside.
“The medical examiner’s still looking at the body, but I’ve got some information on the victim,” he said as Jack led the way into the restaurant.
The hostess offered them a booth in the back of the restaurant per Jack’s request, and a waitress took their drink orders immediately.
“Tiffany Gastineau, twenty-one, blonde, same look, same antique-style clothing, left by water. Body was decomposing pretty badly, but we got a positive i.d. She was busted a few times for prostitution. He was right about her teeth. She was smoking so much crack that she was starting to wear them down and turn them gray.”
“He knew her, too,” Lorena said quietly beside him.
Jack nodded as the waitress brought their drinks. They ordered- grilled chicken salad for him; tuna melt on rye for Craig; and French fries for Lorena. Just fries. She was a bizarre person sometimes. She did order a second Coke, though. She wanted two. They both gave her the same look when the waitress left, also with a similar expression.
Lorena said, “What? I’m thirsty.”
“Got it,” Craig said with a frown as if he found her odd and returned to their discussion. “She had the usual bruising on her throat from being strangled and ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. Oh, hey, I got that picture of Hailee blown up, too.”
He slid it across the table to them as Lorena removed a package of Twizzlers from her backpack and began munching. At least she offered them both one, which they both turned down with confused frowns.
“I think it’s definitely a log home like you said. Two of our techs agreed. Looks like a cut stone foundation, pine logs. Now, many of these homes have stone fireplaces and accent walls of stone, so she could be somewhere on a second floor or even in a finished attic space. She’s…we’re not sure, but it looks like she’s chained to the wall. See here?”
He pointed with his pen tip to the spot he meant. Jack could see it, too. It definitely looked like some sort of anchor bolt screwed into the stone wall with a chain attached to it.
“Explains why they can’t get away,” Jack observed.
“Wait,” Lorena said as he was about to slide it back. “Here. Look.”
She was pointing to the left side of the photo.
“Doesn’t this look like…hair? Blonde hair or something coming into the frame?”
Jack stared intently and finally saw what she meant. “Yeah, it does.”
“He’s got more than one woman in this room,” Lorena said. “He said that Hailee didn’t enjoy the fun, right? He probably rapes and kills them in front of each other in this room. It would make them too scared to try to escape. It keeps them frightened.”
“Yeah, that would do it,” Jack said.
“Our tech said he thought this here,” Craig said, pointing again at a dark blur, “looks like a metal bar. He could be keeping them in cages and chained to walls.”
Lorena said, “We know he had more women than just Hailee. He left Stephanie Pearson’s body for us to find. If he’s keeping Hailee in this room, then I think he’s keeping the others there, too. I don’t think he’s keeping them in more than one location. Maybe Allie Xiang got loose and escaped because one of the others helped her.”
“That’s an excellent theory, Lorena,” Craig praised.
“Was Tiffany Gastineau missing any teeth?” Jack asked Craig.
“Missing one tooth,” he said and paused as the waitress dropped their food in front of them. Then he continued, “It’s weird. She’s wearing braces.”
“A street hooker is wearing braces?” Lorena asked.
“Yeah, guess he must’ve picked her because her teeth were perfect, or getting perfect,” Craig said. “Other than the fact that the crack pipe was ruining them slowly.”
“He removed her tooth even with braces on?” Lorena asked the man, her interest ignited.
“Yes, unhooked the bracket and took the tooth, her right incisor,” Craig answered and took a bite of his sandwich.
“How the hell did he do that? I don’t even know how you’d go about doing that,” Jack said. “Aren’t those things super-glued on with construction adhesive?”
Craig smiled at his joke, but Lorena didn’t. She was too intent on figuring it out to tease. She wasn’t even eating her grease sticks.
“Not sure,” Lorena said. “I never wore them. It’s something like that, though.”
“My sister Maeve did. She was pissed. She hated braces. But, you know what? As I think about it, maybe they aren’t that hard to get off. I remember my parents got pissed at her a few times for breaking brackets. It costs money to have new brackets put back on. I guess if he was that determined, he probably took it out easily.”
“Didn’t the one girl- I think it was the Pearson girl- work at a free dentist clinic and was studying dentistry courses?”
“Yeah,” Craig said. “She did. Good point. Think it could be a tech who worked there or a dude that was cleaning the tools?”
“Hell, even a janitor,” Jack said.
“Not a janitor,” Lorena corrected. “He went to college in Florida. Why become a janitor?”
“He said he does work for the public that they can’t or won’t do for themselves,” Jack said. “I can’t remember that line exactly.”
“We need to check into that school,” Craig said and took his sandwich and left the table.
“You should eat, Evans,” Jack said. “This could be a really long, damn day.”
“What?” she asked distractedly. “Oh, yeah.”
She shoved three French fries into her mouth and kept right on pouring over notes.
“What if it’s been in front of us the whole time? What if he works at that free medical clinic?” Lorena asked rhetorically.
“Could be,” he said. “I thought the feds sent some guys over there to talk to the girls she worked with at that place.”
“I don’t see it in the file,” Lorena said. “It should be in Stephanie Pearson’s file. I don’t see it.”
“Maybe they logged it into their database, though” he suggested.
A
moment later, Craig returned without his sandwich but with a plan. “The clinic is open tomorrow morning from eight till noon, but my boss is pulling favors right now to get as many of the employees down there in a few hours to meet with us. He’s also not too keen on this angle in the investigation, so I hope it pans out.”
“Whoever Trix really is, he’s obsessed with pulling teeth out of women’s heads and keeping them somewhere as souvenirs,” Lorena said.
Craig jumped in to tell them, “Oh, right. I got the analysis on the teeth he left for you at the meeting. The forensic odontologist thinks he’s got a match on three of them to the victims we’ve already found. We’re still waiting on the rest.”
Jack said, “Well, some of them may belong to women we don’t even know about yet.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Craig admitted. “Let’s hope you’re wrong, Jack.”
“I know,” he agreed as Lorena continued to scour her notes.
“I wonder how many of our victims have a connection to this clinic?” Lorena speculated aloud.
“Not sure,” Jack said. “We’ll know more in a few hours, hopefully.”
“It’s interesting, though, right?” she asked and took a long drink of her second soda. “If he targeted women on the streets, homeless girls, hookers, strippers, mostly women that nobody would notice was even missing- or even if they were reported by mutual friends to the police, weren’t taken seriously- then these wouldn’t be the types of women who’d go every six months to their regular dental check-ups, right? The ones on drugs and living on the streets would use a service like a free clinic. At least, they do in Cleveland. They don’t have the money to go to the dentist or doctors. That can be very expensive, dental work, and drug habits always come first. He would be able to keep an eye on them, watch them, know about them, learn who they were and where they went after they left the clinic, stalk them.”
He and Craig sat back and let Lorena go. She wasn’t really talking to them anyway. She was musing out loud, rambling, but she was making good points and pulling together a solid lead.
“They get treatment there, he tracks them down, follows them. Takes them. He could have an office next door to this clinic, or he could work at the clinic. He would have the chance to discover what they were like, that they didn’t meet his standards of perfection. He’d know they were prostitutes, whores, unclean and undeserving, likely drug addicts. Something about them triggered in his mind terrible memories of his dead mother, the woman his father murdered and he helped bury. He would see in her what disgusted him about his mother, why he has no sympathy for his dead mother, what disgusts him about all women, even the ones who were more perfect than others like Hailee, the most perfect, chaste girl of all, who also happened to disappoint him in the end. He knows he can get away with this because nobody is going to think it’s strange when he pulls up next to one on the street and solicits her for paid sex because that’s the profession they chose. He said he was like this before his father killed his mother, that she watched him too closely. If his mother was starting to suspect that her son was mentally unstable- likely killing small animals and torturing things- then perhaps she was talking to his father about sending him away to get help, a clinic, an institution. Maybe Trix overheard this. He hates her but doesn’t blame his father and doesn’t have sympathy for the fact that he murdered her. So, he stalks women that remind him of his mother. Women that would judge that part of him, that hidden, insane side that nobody else sees. Maybe they can see it, though. These girls are streetwise, tough, smart, intuitive. They must see his other side better than common laypeople. Nobody would notice a man at a strip club watching the girls. Nobody at his job suspects him because these women go undetected by people, are forgotten by most the second they walk out the door because they are the insignificants of our society, the embarrassments, the ones that nobody likes to stare at for too long for fear that she might want something like money from them so that she could go buy more drugs. We avoid things that make us uncomfortable, even people, even fallen women. The people he works with and around think he’s a pillar of society because he’s married with kids and…”
She trailed off on her rant, shoved three more fries in and drained her soda.
“And what?” Jack prompted.
“Theories, just theories right now. We need to go. Let’s go.”
She attempted to scoot past Jack, but he was quick enough to get out of her way and out of the booth ahead of her. He’d been mesmerized by her profile into this man’s psyche and didn’t want to admit that it had caused a chill to chase down his spine.
Craig followed them in his car, and they went to the clinic. It wasn’t in what Jack would consider the nice end of town, but, then again, they were trying to provide a free clinic to the people who lived in and around it. The clinic was a part of a strip mall where a cash advance store was located, along with a Korean restaurant, nail salon, barber shop, and a dollar store. Across the street were two, mom-and-pop restaurants, a bakery, a pizza shop, and a convenience store with bars on the front windows. Jack hadn’t expected so many businesses to be in the plaza. They’d have to talk with every single one to ensure that they didn’t miss something. If Trix was the owner of a business and didn’t work at the clinic, then they needed to talk to all of them.
Craig got out of his car and joined them near the curb, “I’ll call in for help. This is going to take a while.”
They split up, and Jack took the Korean restaurant, which soon turned out to be a dead-end because the people working there barely spoke English and definitely didn’t want to talk to the police about anything. Coming into neighborhoods like this, he expected resistance. Most of the people who inhabited these neighborhoods and owned businesses in them learned quickly not to speak to the police because it usually meant someone would take retribution against them. When he finished in the restaurant, he went back out into the drizzle that had begun and noticed four unmarked sedans, obviously the bureau agents that Craig summoned there to help. The cash advance store only had two, full-time employees, both women, who said they never noticed anything suspicious. Jack wondered why a company would put a cash advance store in a bad section of town and only two, unarmed women as the sole employees to hold down the fort. He met Lorena on the sidewalk again.
“The nail salon was a bust,” she reported. “Nobody speaks clear English, and they weren’t going to tell me anything anyway.”
“That’s about how far I’ve gotten so far. Hit the barber shop together?”
“Sure,” she said. “Craig might be having better luck because he hasn’t come out of the dollar store yet. And his guys are across the street talking to the owners of those businesses there. Maybe they’ll catch a break.”
“Let’s hope. We’re not getting anywhere.”
“You know barber shops and hair salons are gossip havens. Someone might know something in there.”
“After you,” he said and opened the door for her.
“How can I help you, police officers?” an elderly black man, a barber, greeted them.
“That obvious, huh?” Jack joked.
“You’re not doing a real good job of hidin’ the fact,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
“We just have some questions about the comings and goings around here,” he said.
“Have a seat,” the old man said, his full head of hair nearly all white. “I’ll clean you up while we chat.”
“Sure,” Jack said amiably and took a seat in the chair.
“You’re on your own with that hair, girl,” he teased Lorena, who looked a little miffed at the old man. “I think the humidity is winning.”
He wrapped the upper part of Jack’s collar and jacket with towels and got to work trimming and cutting.
Lorena got to work questioning the man, who appeared to be the only one on duty.
“Do you own the place, Mr….”
“Thompson, Reginald Thompson, or you can call me Reg,” he said.
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“Thanks,” Lorena said. “I’m Detective Evans, and he’s Foster. We’re investigating the kidnapping of a young Portland girl, just turned eighteen. We believe her kidnapping could be part of a string of murders that have taken…”
“Yeah, those Tooth Fairy murders,” he said. “I follow the news. I know the man you’re after, Detective.”
“Oh, good. That saves time,” she said. “We have reason to believe that he could’ve been canvassing this neighborhood…”
“Right, stealing girls off the streets,” he said. Jack just smiled as Reg kept talking and cutting. “Wouldn’t surprise me if he took girls from around here. Ain’t nobody gonna miss a girl like that. Helpless, hopeless young women selling their bodies on the streets like they do. Just so sad. Such a waste.”
“I agree, sir,” she said. “But we need to figure this out because the girl he most recently kidnapped is still alive. We have a chance, a slim one, of bringing her home to her family.”
“I wish you luck on that, young lady.”
“It’s not going to be luck. I need facts to solve this case, sir,” she told him honestly. “Can you tell me if you’ve noticed anything strange around here, in this shopping plaza, in particular? Any men who might seem…odd or loitering around a lot watching young women?”
“Just the usual,” he said. “Men picking up girls right out there off the curb. Makes me sick.”
He was talking about hookers, but Jack knew Lorena wanted more than just that. They knew he stalked hookers and probably picked them up right off the corners of many streets with as many of them as he’d killed.
“What about people coming and going at the free dental clinic? Ever see anyone over there hanging around that might give you concern?”
“Lots of the people they treat over there are street people and the like. Ain’t none of them got the money to go to a dentist. Those doctors are doing the community a service, I tell you. They’re good people, charitable and all that.”
“Yes, I’m sure they are,” she said, “but would you say that anyone who works there might give cause to feel alarmed? Ever hear any of your customers talking about it?”
