Blood Trails

by Michael A. Black

  “How soon could you do it?”

  The chuckle turned to an irritated laugh. “You’ll have to submit a request through NCIC,” he said. “You can tie into that up there, can’t you?”

  Labyorteaux told him she could and thanked him. Red tape. The Americans reveled in it.

  She tapped her pencil on the tablet where she’d written the name and date of birth. At least she had something to go on now.

  An American in Toronto. That, in itself, limited the possibilities, unless he’d moved here. Plus, with his medical conditions, he’d have to be listed on the health care computer system. It was worth a shot to send an inquiry to the border stations, too, to see if they had any record of his recent crossing. And she could now cross-check his name with the lists of conference attendees.

  After running the name on her own computer system, and drawing a blank as far as Canadian residents, she sighed and put her head in her hands. When she looked up, she saw Inspector Graven standing in the doorway of her cubicle. Sitting up straight, she managed a weak smile.

  “Good afternoon, sir.”

  He frowned. “How’s the investigation going on that stabbing murder at the parking garage?”

  “I’ve finally found out who he is.” She tapped the tablet page. “He was an American. I’m waiting to hear back from the Border Stations.”

  Graven worked his hand over his chin.

  Was he checking to see if he remembered to shave this morning? Or was it a sign of annoyance?

  “Check the conference attendee’s lists and the downtown hotels too,” Graven said. “If he’s not a permanent resident, he’s got to have turned up missing from one of them. Probably came in as a report of an unpaid bill.”

  “Already on it, sir,” she said.

  He seemed unimpressed. “And go through that list of plates I had the uniforms copy down. It was every car up and down two levels from where we found the body. I think there were a couple American ones in there.”

  “I planned on doing that, too,” she said.

  Graven smiled ever so slightly and, in his usual, gruff tone, said “Okay, luv. Keep me posted.”

  “We were expecting you yesterday,” Special Agent Pearson said, his lips forming into a small pout.

  Colby grinned. “What can I say? My boss is an asshole.” For once, he’d told the truth in making an excuse, and felt good about it.

  Pearson expelled a loud breath through flaring nostrils and held the door to the inner offices open. “Come in.”

  Colby followed Pearson to the same interview room that he’d been in before. It gnawed at him that they were still treating him like a suspect, or something.

  And they talk about “inter-agency cooperation.”

  Pearson held out his hand indicating the chair and sat opposite him, staring at him from across the table. The FBI Man then opened the manila folder he’d been carrying.

  “There’s been a new development,” he said. “Another homicide?” Colby asked.

  Pearson nodded and held up two fingers.

  “Once again, we have reason to believe that the killer, or killers, purposely recreated the scenes of Morgan Laird’s series of murders. Four in Indiana, six here in Illinois.”

  Colby felt a tightening in his gut. “You think it’s the work of more than one guy?”

  “We assume nothing. Our VICAP program indicates that it is, most probably, the work of one individual, but he may be working in concert with another.” Pearson paused and raised his eyebrows. “Serial killers are typically loners, but this is no ordinary perpetrator.”

  Typical Fed, Colby thought. Spread the bullshit on so thick, that no matter how it eventually plays out, you’re covered.

  “However,” Pearson continued, “as I said, there’s been a new development.” He let the sentence hang.

  Colby waited, his irritation growing. “You gonna tell me about it, or you want me to guess?”

  The FBI agent’s mouth tightened into a thin line. He withdrew an 8x11 color photograph and slid it across the table.

  Colby looked down at the photo. It was the cover of Blood Trails. “Recognize that?” Pearson asked. Colby nodded.

  Pearson reached into the folder again and removed a photocopy of the title page. Above the bold print name was a practically undecipherable signature.

  “Is that your signature?” Pearson asked, setting the photocopy on the tabletop and resting an index finger on the penned scrawl.

  Colby studied it. Where the hell was this leading?

  “Looks like it,” he said. “I signed a lot of them.”

  Pearson’s eyes narrowed.

  “This book,” he tapped the photo of Blood Trails, “was found at the latest crime scene.”

  Colby raised his eyebrows. It was a message. A message to him.

  Pearson continued. “The vic was a young homosexual, strangled and dumped in an alley in Boystown. The section about Benjamin Pike book-marked with the new victim’s big toe.”

  “You dust the book for prints?” Colby’s voice sounded coarse, hollow.

  “Of course,” Pearson said. “In a case of this magnitude, we put a rush on all of the forensics.” Colby felt the tightness in his gut ratcheting up another notch. Why couldn’t this son-of-a-bitch just spit things out?

  “Find any?” Colby was ready to jump out of his chair and grab the file right out of the asshole’s hands.

  “We did.” Pearson pointed to the top of the title page. “Several, including an exceptionally defined latent right here. His triumphant little smirk was cut short by Colby’s reply.

  “It was mine, right?”

  Pearson’s lips compressed, then he nodded. “Yours and a host of unidentifiables. Not on file. Some smudged partials.”

  “But none, you believe, belong to the suspect.” It was more of a statement than a question. Colby had to start showing these assholes that he was as quick on the uptake as they were. Fortune favors the bold, he thought.

  “Don’t you think it’s time that I got assigned to this task force as something more than a consultant?”

  The FBI man frowned. “Detective, while your input here might have some value, it’s our consensus that it might be a mistake to involve you more fully at this time.”

  “Why the hell not? The prick’s obviously taunting me.”

  “Therein lies the problem,” Pearson said.

  “What problem?”

  Pearson sat back on the cheap plastic chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

  “For you, I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “this is far too personal.”

  Colby’s brow furrowed. “Then why am I here?”

  “You’re here so that we can gain insight into the un-sub,” Pearson said. “Not as an investigator.”

  It had taken Leslie most of the day, but finally things were starting to fall into place. Cross checking the plates recorded in the parking garage had yielded six American ones. Three from New York, one from Michigan, one from Minnesota, and one from Illinois. It was the last one that rang true. It had been found parked two levels down from the spot where the body had been found. The license plates were registered to the New Genesis Corporation in Oakbrook Estates, Illinois, Leslie found a driver’s license record for John H. Norton living in that area also. After a quick phone call to the Oakbrook Estates Police Department asking them to do a death notification and to contact her, she searched for the town, finding it near Chicago. Next she crosschecked the events at the Convention Center the night of the murder and found another tie-in: a geneticists’ convention. One of the scheduled speakers had been Norton, but he’d never showed.

  “Mr. John H. Norton?” Leslie asked Dr. Carroll, one of the Canadian scientists who had been a keynote speaker at the conference. “Did you know him?”

  The scientist’s hesitant reply made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She was on to something.

  “Yes,” Carroll said. “I knew him.”

  “What can you tell me about
him?”

  She heard a deep sigh on the other end of the line. “Dr. Carroll?”

  “Well, I, um, don’t wish to speak ill of the dead.”

  “Please, doctor,” Leslie said. “This is very important.”

  She heard him sigh before answering. “I always found him to be a rather odd bird.”

  “In what way, sir?”

  Once again, the scientist’s answer was slow in coming, and riddled with uncomfortable pauses.

  “He was a very capable, oftentimes brilliant man. But, if I had to put my finger on it, I’d say he had something of a…personality problem.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  She heard another heavy sigh “My associate, Dr. Leavitt, was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work in stem cell research,” Carroll said. “Norton spoke in a very disparaging manner about it. And when those scientists in Britain cloned that sheep, and when that woman paid to have her dead cat cloned, he hit the roof. He was so angry at the attention and acclaim they received. My guess is, he had research projects in those areas himself, and resented them for beating him to the punch.”

  “Beating him to the punch?”

  “Yes, well, a Nobel Prize, even though my colleague didn’t receive it, is a strong motivator.”

  “I see,” Leslie said, making a mental note to check into Norton’s work more closely. “Do you know where Mr. Norton was based?”

  “In the States. Somewhere near Chicago, I believe.”

  “Was he associated with a company called New Genesis?”

  “I do believe that it was something like that,” Carroll said.

  After making sure Norton’s car was towed and processed by the evidence technicians, she began checking the downtown hotels and, sure enough, there had been a John H. Norton registered at the Royal York. He’d never checked out, leaving his luggage, a sparsely packed suitcase, in his room.

  “What did you do with his things?” Leslie asked the hotel manager.

  “I guess we still have them in storage.”

  “Good. I’ll send someone by to pick them up,” she said, a smile working its way across her face. Finally, she was getting somewhere.

  Inspector Graven was impressed, too, but not quite enough.

  “So it’s taken us this long just to find out who he is and where he’s from?” His expression was grave, sour. Like someone had poured curdled milk into his coffee. “We need to get moving on this one, luv.”

  “I’m going to the lab now to speak with the techs,” she said. “They’re going over the items from his hotel room.”

  But that turned out to be another disappointment. Not only were Norton’s things unremarkable in content, the hotel housekeepers had packed all his belongings in his suitcase, depriving her of any clues the layout of his clothes would have provided. Not that they would have yielded much anyway, in all probability. From all appearances, this still appeared to be a random crime. A robbery. The victim’s wallet was missing, and the thorough search of all the trash cans in the area had been done the first night. They either missed it, or the killer disposed of it in another fashion.

  Maybe he kept the wallet as a souvenir, which would be nice if they caught him with it. But that was looking like a pretty big “if” right now. Norton’s car proved to be another matter.

  The head of the forensic team was a short, skinny man with a fringe of grayish hair around his ears and tiny, gold-framed glasses. Leslie knew him as Tab, which was how all the detectives referred to him. His last name was something long, Polish, and unpronounceable.

  “Nothing remarkable,” he said. Something in his expression caught her eye.

  “What?” she asked. “You noticed something, didn’t you?”

  Tab took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “Like I said, nothing remarkable. Plenty of prints all over the interior of the car, the windows, the doors. But…”

  “But what?”

  “There’s absolutely nothing on certain areas. Like the button on the shift lever. Usually, you put your thumb on it to press down to shift it from Park.” His lips drew together. “No prints at all. None on the steering wheel or the trunk area. It’d been wiped clean.”

  Leslie’s heart jumped. That meant the killer had gone through Norton’s car, taking the time to move it to a place different from the body. Why? What was he looking for? Another piece of the puzzle, but one without a definite answer.

  “Did the body look like it’d been dropped?” she asked.

  Tab shook his head. “Hardly. With the mashed right foot and leg, post-mortem, I’d say the perpetrator killed the man, then drove off in his car.”

  “Then why not just keep going? Ditch the car someplace else, not two levels below the crime scene?” Tab raised his eyebrows.

  “It would make sense,” he said. “But then again, I’m not a killer.”

  Leslie appreciated his laconic humor, but her mind was racing. Maybe, just maybe the killer didn’t want to drive Norton’s car away because he had a car of his own. But he still went to the trouble of moving it, and wiping it down. Too bad there weren’t more surveillance cameras in the area. The recordings they’d confiscated had yielded nothing significant so far. Regardless, this was shaping up to be a bit more than your run-of-the-mill mugging turned bad. She was going to have to learn more about the late John

  H. Norton, which is what she told her boss when she got back.

  “Makes sense.” Graven rubbed his fingers over his jaw again. His expression looked as dour as ever. “We’ll have to backtrack him. In the meantime, there’s been a development.”

  “Oh?”

  The right side of his mouth drew up in a weary looking smile.

  “As it turns out, this Norton fellow was a pretty important guy. The Americans are a bit upset by his demise, and are putting the pressure on for us to solve it fast.”

  Leslie felt her stomach tie into a knot. Was he going to take her off the case?

  “Lieu, I’m doing the best I can. I just found out who he was, and it’s not like we have a lot to go on.”

  Graven’s mouth twitched slightly in what he must have thought passed for a smile. He walked to the window in his office and stood, looking out at the bleak darkness. The glow from the artificial lights of the parking lot made the scene look particularly glum.

  “I know, luv, but nonetheless, we have to try to appease our neighbors to the south.”

  “Meaning?”

  He turned. “Meaning, we’re going to have to step it up a bit. Put on the old dog and pony show to demonstrate how much we’re doing. I still think this was a robbery gone bad, so I’m assigning two other detectives to check things out.”

  It felt like he’d given the knot another twist.

  “Well, I can certainly use a little help,” she said, her voice cracking faintly. “Am I still the primary investigator?”

  Graven sighed. “I prefer not to think of things in those terms.”

  It felt like a sucker-punch. He was trying to let her down easy. It was a matter of faith, and his in her was obviously lacking.

  “I see.” She fought to hold back the sudden hotness in her eyes. Was her first homicide slipping away?

  Graven seemed to sense her despair and smiled, his voice conciliatory and soothing at the same time. “Attempts to notify family in the U.S. have proved negative,” he said. “Apparently, the victim’s domestic partner is also deceased. A fall of some sort”

  This struck Leslie as a bit odd. “That’s interesting.”

  “Interesting, but a bit too far out of our bailiwick.” Graven considered this for a moment and then clapped his hands together. “Anyway, like you said, we need to find out more about the victim. Pack your bags, and take your toothbrush. You’re going south to backtrack through the gent’s personal affairs.”

  “South? You mean to the United States?”

  He nodded. “To Chicago, specifically. I happen to know someone there in law enforcement
. Worked with him a few times. I’ll give him a call and he can help you along.”

  “All right, sir,” she said. At least she was still connected to the investigation. “What will you being doing up here?”

  Graven assumed a thoughtful expression, as if weighing the scope of his answer.

  “Oh, we’ll putter along,” he said, “and round up the usual suspects.”

  Chapter 5

  The boozy air hit Dix like a breeze from heaven, and he suddenly longed for a smoke, even though he’d given up cigarettes fifteen years ago. Booze, on the other hand, was still his frequent companion. More frequently of late, he reflected as his eyes narrowed to scan the dimly lit interior. He spotted Colby at a booth near the back. Dix waved to the bartender on the way there, and paused to pat the waitress on the arm and order another round of whatever she’d brought to his buddy’s table.

  “On second thought,” he said, watching Colby drain his glass, “better make his a double. I’ll have scotch on the rocks.” She nodded and angled off toward the bar.

  Dix flashed a broad grin when he got to the booth and slid in across from Colby.

  “Man, you look like shit,” Dix said. Colby shrugged. Maybe he’d been drinking doubles already.

  “Thanks for coming, brother.” Colby’s eye’s looked like twin roadmaps. The glass in front of him was still half-full.

  The waitress came with their drinks, setting down a whiskey soda in front of Colby along with a napkin and Dix’s scotch.

  “Hey, what’s this?” Colby asked. “I was still working on this one.”

  “A gift from an angel,” the waitress said as she winked at Dix and then walked away.

  “Hey,” Dix said, pushing the second drink toward him. “You should see if she wants to go home with you tonight.”

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Just what I need. More complications in my life.”

  “So,” Dix asked after sampling a small bit of his drink, “what’s so important that I had to drag myself down here to this scene of the crime?”

  “Déjà vu,” Colby said. “You know what that means?”

  “Yeah, it means you’re drunker than you look if you think you can speak French.”