“Sorry,” his partner said. “He had us half convinced he was supposed to be here—”
“Until the actual coroner arrived,” Dr. Gallo admitted. He was helped to his feet by the cop who had just been kneeling on his shoulder blades. They likely would have been rougher, but now that the trespasser had been revealed to be the family member of a victim, the rules had changed. The cops would be praying to their cop-gods that Dr. Gallo didn’t sue the department.
It didn’t make what he had done any less wrong, and it didn’t mean he might not have questions to answer at a police station in his near future, but for various reasons, PR regrettably being one of them, it changed how we dealt with him.
“Would have worked, too,” Dr. Gallo was explaining, sounding absurdly cheerful, “except for the coroner, like I said. Who left, by the way.”
George rolled his eyes. He didn’t say a thing, but I knew what he was thinking. More turf wars downtown. And all because Dr. Zinner lost a bet and no one else on his staff would let him forget it. A coroner would be back, and soon, but not Dr. Zinner.
All George said was, “Long story, but everything’s under control.” It wasn’t the first time I had admired his ability to tell a flawless, believable lie.
Emma Jan cleared her throat and, now that Dr. Gallo was standing on his own two feet, shook his hand. “Again, I’m very sorry about your nephew. I’m not sure how you knew where we’d be unless you do have guilty knowledge…”
She and George looked at me out of the corners of their eyes. I sighed and fessed up. “Clearly, Dr. Gallo followed me back from our meeting this afternoon.”
“Clearly,” Dr. Gallo agreed. “And it’s Max.” He made a gesture and, with the automatic deference to a physician shown by most cops at the scene, accepted a pair of gloves from the nearest officer. “Look, you guys have a doc on the scene. I’m licensed and I’ve been to a million of these. Well.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “Not these, but you know. You can’t tell me you like waiting around for the coroner. So let’s go.”
I opened my mouth: inappropriate. Against all the rules. He wasn’t even the right kind of doctor. Worse, he was a family member. Also—
“Fuck it,” George said. (I could have timed it to the second.) I looked at Emma Jan, who shrugged.
“He’s here, he wants to. He might see something an emotionally detached doctor won’t.” And he’s less likely to sue anybody if we let him play in our sandbox.
Max, I noticed, had busily been snapping on his gloves and not bothering to wait for our permission.
“Rigor mortis is long gone,” he said, carefully kneeling by the body. “Kid’s been dead for at least twelve hours.” He peered at the boy’s eyes. They had probably been intense and lovely in life, but now were clouded over. “Chris was found hour eleven. Is that typical of these kids?”
Reluctantly, we nodded. I didn’t even want to think of Michaela’s reaction when she found out what we had done. What we had allowed the family member of a victim to do. But there was something about Max Gallo. It wasn’t just me (or Shiro, or Adrienne). Emma Jan and George felt it, too. That thrumming charisma. The black eyes, so like a shark’s. You wanted to please him and were a little afraid of him at the same time. And the silly thing … I was relieved. Relieved that George and Emma Jan could feel it, too. Relieved that it wasn’t just more proof I needed to jettison my virginity ASAP.
“Blunt trauma around the head,” Max was muttering. “Probable cause of death. Also like Chris. Parents out of town?”
“Still are, yeah,” George replied. “The Edina police are still trying to reach them.”
I did not want to be around when they got here. To distract myself, I walked around Max and the body. Then stopped. “You guys. This is wrong.”
“To put it mildly,” Max muttered, gently examining the dead boy’s fingers. He beckoned and one of the crime scene officers came over, and obligingly shot several flash pictures of the dead boy’s fingers and hands.
“Yeah, Cadence, we covered that; we’re all with you on that one. If you think back, we all agreed this sucks and blows.”
“Look,” I insisted. “Jeans, right?”
“Chris had them, too. Was found in them,” Max corrected himself. More flashes.
“Right, just like the others. Except these are all beat up. The other boys were found in new jeans—remember how they were almost stiff, George? But look.”
All four of them—Paul had gotten close, no doubt emboldened by Max—were suddenly crouched beside me. “Those aren’t new look at look at look at the holes!”
“Right, Paul. And the striped shirt. It’s inside out.”
There was a short silence, followed by Emma Jan’s puzzled, “What’s up with that? And this boy, he’s the eighth in seven years. That’s way off the pattern.”
“Somebody getting bored?” Max asked sarcastically. “Ready for you guys to get your thumbs out and catch him? Changing the game so you can?”
We said nothing; we knew why he’d said such a thing. And we knew it wasn’t unjustified. I didn’t even have to kick George, who just reddened but didn’t retort. A miracle for the ages.
“Patterns we can do patterns HOAP can do patterns, you bet!”
“Uh, what?” Max asked, clearly startled by the large bespectacled black man looming over the crime scene and practically vibrating.
“Great, Paul, thanks for the nerd update. And Emma Jan, thanks to you, too, but we can do math all by ourselves,” George sniped.
“Shush. Be nice. Let’s see if anything else is different.” I checked the boy’s pockets, being careful of the urine and fecal matter. Pretty much the first thing a dead body does is lose control of its bowels. Death is just … awful. In every single way.
“Oh, now look at this.” I showed them. “It’s not even my birthday.”
“A goddamned parking garage ticket?” George breathed. All the color fell out of his face except for two red patches on his cheeks. “You’re shitting me!”
“Nuh-uh. This was either an oversight, or the killer did it on purpose.” And it wasn’t an oversight. Not with JBK.
“Jesus! An actual clue? An honest-to-God clue at the first scene I bust?” Max asked. “Clearly I need to do this. A lot.”
“Bite your tongue,” Emma Jan muttered, her gaze never leaving the parking ticket.
“Yes! That’s right!” Paul was pointing at the body and practically jumping up and down. “The pattern the pattern is there and eight is the wrong color. Eight is wrong; HOAP needs to have that uploaded, eight is the wrong color!”
George rolled his eyes at me. “What are you thinking? Copycat? Max? You must have studied whatever you could of the other scenes. I’m not buying that you just happened to decide to stumble across this scene.”
“You’re right. And … you’re right. I think it’s laziness, or desperation. Not that he wants to get caught, so much but … I don’t think it’s another person. But I’m—” Max paused and spread his hands, still covered with the latex gloves. “This isn’t my field. It’s your call. Adrienne?”
“I … don’t think so. Remember, we’ve kept most of this out of the media. The killer got too many things right … the boy was beaten to death. The doc—the other doc, not you, Max; if you go near this kid’s post you’ll be in jail eight seconds later—is gonna rule COD severe head trauma. The jeans and shirt are right, just not how the killer showed them to us.”
“So?” Emma Jan asked.
“I think he wants to get caught. He wants to stop but can’t make himself do it.”
“Boy, have you been reading too many fairy tales.”
“Okay.” I met George’s eyes. “What’s your theory?”
George looked back down at the boy. “Not a copycat,” he said after a long pause. “I agree; the fucko got too much right. But I’m thinking he got sloppy, or is having a psychotic break of some kind.”
Emma Jan sighed. “Don’t tease.”
�
�Psychotic break,” Max muttered. “That would be nice, if it led directly to suicide, do not pass Go.”
“Do you—”
George talked over my interruption, which was fair. “I think he’s destabilizing all over the place. Remember how Bundy’s last killings were just a fuckin’ frenzy? No planning, just whack-whack-and-boom. Because, Cadence, come on. These guys … they don’t ever stop. You know that.”
“Careful,” Emma Jan said with a smile that wasn’t especially friendly. “That sounds like a trite cliché.”
We both stared at her.
“That’s true,” George finally said. “It does. Huh.”
“Uh, what?” Max asked. He turned to me. “I thought your name was Adrienne.”
“Sorry,” George said. “Super-secret FBI stuff. Which reminds me, get lost or you’re under arrest. And hey! Call me about the wingman thing.”
The police led a confused Dr. Gallo away from the scene. Leaving only the ones who were supposed to be there … and we were just as confused, believe me.
chapter forty-nine
Hours later, I was finishing my paperwork. George, who could always get through his faster than I could mine, had left an hour ago. As usual, it was quieter and saner after his departure but, conversely, duller. George was the kind of person who filled a room simply by walking through the door. When he left it could at times seem like an anticlimax.
He’d made a vague threat involving my boyfriend and battery acid (he was probably going to hold a Splenda grudge until the end of time), told an inappropriate dirty joke, and then, in a puff of black smoke (or so it seemed sometimes), was gone.
Max Gallo had been scolded and then ROR, unlikely to ever be brought up on charges provided he kept away from other JBJ crime scenes. (“Unless invited?” I’d asked, only to flinch from the sizzling glare Michaela shot my way. To say she had been displeased would be putting it very mildly.)
Paul had wasted no time disappearing into the computer lab; he’d chattered run-on sentence with lots of repeat phrases all the way back to the office. Emma Jan had to keep distracting George from turning around and smacking the poor guy on the drive back. I was a little afraid he’d twitch himself to death. Or get beaten to death. Altogether, a stressful ride back to the office.
George’s irritation had eventually changed to mild concern: “I think we broke him.”
“Don’t talk about it,” I had hissed back.
I hated the waiting game when lives were at stake, but it was a fact of life in this business. The FBI computers were now whirring through all the data we’d been able to give it from the latest JBJ crime scene, cross-referencing it with the data from the previous murders. Though we would explore the copycat angle, we were all still pretty certain it was the real deal.
“Still at it?” Emma Jan asked. She leaned back in her chair and stretched. I could hear her back crack. “Ooooh, that was a good one.”
“No, I’m finished. And wiped. I gotta get home and take a nineteen-hour nap. Oh, and that dumb Dawg,” I groaned, remembering my home situation. Argh. Poor Patrick, trapped with Dawg for hours and hours while I mooned after Max Gallo and peeked at new dead bodies.
“Oh. Um. Shiro and I were supposed to head over to the gun range tonight.”
“Oh?” I managed—barely—to keep the irritation out of my voice.
“Yeah. She—you know, we made plans. To go to the range tonight.”
Well, too bad, Emma Jan Thyme. Shiro shouldn’t have made a commitment if there was a chance she couldn’t keep it. Which, FYI, there was. I’ve neglected my boyfriend long enough, thank you.
I forced a smile. “Here’s the way it works, Emma Jan. You can’t just decide which one of us you’ll see. We’re not a doctor’s office. You can’t make an appointment with the body and just expect the others to
chapter fifty
“Good evening, Agent Thyme.”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Hi, Shiro. Uh. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Cadence didn’t seem at all cool with it.”
“Cadence,” I said, picking up her jacket and slipping into her boots—she would inappropriately disrobe when she became fatigued, “will get over it. Besides, I am far too keyed up with energy to go home. And I did not snatch an animal that did not belong to me.”
“You’re not tired?” She was watching me carefully. “Cadence was pretty tired. She wanted to go home and take a nap. And I think she wanted to check on Patrick.”
“Irrelevant. Cadence is not here right now.” I shrugged into the coat and found the car keys. “Shall we?”
* * *
I took a deep breath. If I had been led here in a blindfold, I would know I was in the indoor range beneath our building. Gunpowder was like perfume to me. And here, here was where Agent Thyme would understand I was her superior in this … one … way.
“Agent Thyme, this is Dan Shepard, the high priest of the gun range.”
“Meetcha,” he mumbled. Dan Shepard was the least threatening-looking person I had ever seen. Short—not much over five feet—and heavy, with wispy blond hair that was slowly jumping ship. His muddy brown eyes swam behind thick lenses.
He was one of the best shots on the planet. Yes. The planet. In fact, I strongly suspected he had been a wet boy in his youth, retiring from the rounds of government-sanctioned assassinations to run BOFFO’s gun range.
The least interesting thing about Dan was that he suffered from sedatephobia—fear of silence. Something he never had to worry about down here.
He waved a plump hand in my general direction and said, sounding like a distracted mad scientist, which I often thought he was, “You left those hollow points at home, Shiro? Yeah? Do not bring that shit into my range again. Use the damn wad cutters like the rest of us. Capice?”
“Dan! You wound me,” I protested, hoping he wouldn’t insist on checking my loads and ammo pouch. “I would never think it after you made your displeasure known.”
Emma Jan was smiling. “Do I want to know, honey?”
“No, Agent Thyme. You do not.” I was pleased to be called “honey,” so long as she understood I would not be easier on her. It was pleasant to have a new friend. If that is what she was. Perhaps she had called me honey to put me off my guard …
While I pondered (weak and weary! Shout-out to Edgar Allan Poe; ugh, I said “shout-out”…), Dan followed us as we walked the length of the range, staying well outside the red lines. He was wringing his pale, pudgy hands so tightly I wondered if he might accidentally hurt himself. And while he followed us he rattled off all the silly rules he made up after I had begun making use of his gun range.
“No challenging people you don’t like to duels. No putting Pinkman’s picture downrange and shooting at it. No egging on other agents to shoot at it. No shotguns—”
“Not even twenty gauge?”
“No shotguns!”
“Hmph.”
“No armor-piercing rounds, no APLP ammo.”
“APLPs,” Emma Jan moaned orgasmically. I laughed, I couldn’t help it.
“I would never.” The second one, that is. Armor-Piercing Limited-Penetration rounds were still wildly illegal, and for good reason. I had been able to get a look at a classified report on the ammo, which had been used three times in the field and caused fatalities all three times. The fact that Agent Thyme knew what they were raised her stock even more. Once I had broken her to my will we could be great friends …
But back to the APLPs, and how they were a deep dark secret. Nothing unusual in itself, except the three people involved in APLP fatalities had been shot in the left buttock, the right wrist, and the left thigh.
The man shot in the buttock died instantly, as the bullet shredded everything from his ass to his stomach. The man shot in the right wrist died of shock after seeing his wrist not only disappear but shatter all the way up his forearm. And the man shot in the left thigh also died of shock, as the bullet ripped away nearly all the muscle and shattered the bone.
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Our man in the field had noted in his report that it was as if the ammunition had an explosive charge at the tip. Except, of course, it did not. The ammo was so controversial it was verboten pending further tests. The military was currently in the middle of the arduous testing process.
“No eating sushi when you’re on the line. In fact, no chopsticks on the line; don’t think I forgot what happened last time. And no goddamned machine pistols.”
“Now you’re just trying to hurt me,” I chided.
“Are we clear, Shiro?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“And you.” Emma Jan snapped to attention. “Don’t listen to this one. She’s pure evil. Follow the range rules and I won’t have you killed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You say that to all the girls.” I was dreamily imagining what it would be like to have access to that sort of ammunition. If there was a God, he would help our military complete the testing as soon as possible. Hmm, but how could I use it while making sure Adrienne never ever got her hands on it?
Sigh. A problem for another day.
“Shiro, you’re here.” Dan pointed to lane two. “Thyme, is it? Thyme, you’re here.” He pointed to lane one. It was no coincidence that we were at the other end from where others were practicing. “What’d you bring?”
We unzipped our small duffels and showed him. Emma Jan had brought a Browning 9×19mm Hi-Power and several magazines. She was clearly familiar with it; she took it out of her duffel the way someone would root around in their purse for a piece of gum.
“Huh. Hi-Power.” Dan’s watery gaze sharpened. “Interesting choice.”
“Our Hostage Rescue Team uses it. My last girlfriend got me turned on to these after she’d tried it for a while. I never looked back. D’you want to squeeze off a few?” She extended the unloaded gun to me, butt first with the safety on. She knew her range etiquette. Good. Dan would not have to get the Taser.
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