The girl working the front desk looked up from her computer. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”
“Hi. I’m Lieutenant Kane with the TPD. This is Sergeant Rawlings.” Hank gave her a nod. “Can we speak with a manager or whoever is in charge here?”
“That would be Brenda White. She’s out at lunch right now. Just about everyone is.”
“What time are you expecting her back?” I asked.
“She should be back in a half hour or so.”
I pointed to the handful of guest chairs. “Okay if we just wait here?”
“Sure. That’s fine.”
“Thanks.”
We took seats in the waiting area, and I picked up an issue of Road & Track. Hank chose Field and Stream though I doubted he’d ever seen a field or a stream in his life.
I’d forgone making fun of him about his wife on a couple occasions, and I was due. I tossed him a copy of Good Housekeeping. “Here you go, Hank. You don’t want your wife to find out you’re reading about guy stuff.”
He grabbed the magazine and glanced at the cover. He shook his head. “I already have this issue at home. Karen got me a subscription. They have a nice recipe for scones in this one though.”
I looked for a crack of a smile. It wasn’t there. He may have been serious. I thumbed through my magazine and stopped to read an article on the new Corvette. After that article and another, plus two more magazines, I heard some women talking in the hall. Two women walked through the door of the ad agency. They both carried bags of what I assumed to be leftovers from whatever place they’d stopped at for lunch.
The receptionist got the attention of one of the women and pointed toward Hank and me. That woman handed the bag to her companion and approached.
“Hello, I’m Brenda White. How can I help you?”
I stood. “Hello, Miss White. We would like to ask some questions regarding the deceased that was found outside of the building.”
“Oh, okay. It’s all anyone has been talking about. I have a few minutes. Do you want to come back to my office?”
“That would be fine, thanks.”
Hank and I followed her back and sat across from her at her desk. Miscellaneous sales awards and posters covered the back wall of her office.
She scooted herself close to her desk and folded her hands. “How can we help?”
“Miss White, the deceased woman was scheduled to do a sales training for your company.”
She leaned back from the desk but didn’t speak.
“Her name was Sarah McMillian. Did you know her?” Hank asked.
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t know her. We had a sales training scheduled, but the presenter never showed up. We had almost thirty people booked for the training there.”
I flashed her a perplexed look. “There? You don’t do the trainings here?”
She shook her head. “No. We book out a conference room over at the Helix hotel. It’s where we do all of our sales trainings.”
“Was someone from the office supposed to pick the woman up at the airport?” I asked.
“No, no. We send our trainees to the hotel. They send the trainer. That’s the extent of our relationship.”
“Just to be clear, no one from your company had any direct contact with Sarah McMillian?” Hank asked.
She shook her head again. “Sorry, no. The company that we booked the sales trainer through was out of Chicago. I gave them the date I needed, the location, and what time we would like to start the training. They gave me the name of the trainer they would be sending. That was it.”
We ran more questions past her before we wrapped up the interview. She seemed truthful about the fact that she didn’t know and had never met the woman. However, the fact remained that someone had known what company she was there to do the training for and dumped her at their building. We thanked her for her time and headed back to the station.
Chapter 9
Hank’s phone rang on our way back. The head of security at the airport was ready for us. We parked in the structure and navigated our way through the airport. We made our way to the TSA’s security office on the second level and walked in. An obese man in his midfifties was holding down the front counter. He wore a blue long-sleeved collared shirt and a black tie. A TSA badge sat clipped to his breast pocket. Sewn insignias decorated his shoulders. His name badge read Bates. We approached.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“Lieutenant Kane and Sergeant Rawlings to see Nick Waterman.”
“One moment.” He stood and waddled toward the back. Bates poked his head into one of the offices at the end of the hall.
Waterman appeared and walked toward us. Over a year had passed since I’d seen him last. He was a touch heavier, and his hair was grayer than I remembered. He was a good friend of the TPD. Waterman worked a lot with our drug task force. He was our eyes and ears at the airport. His position didn’t require the standard TSA uniform. He wore a dark-gray suit and a blue tie.
“Gentlemen.”
I reached out for a handshake. “Hey, Nick.”
A handshake with Hank followed.
“So we need to find a certain woman on video, I understand?”
I nodded. “We have a name, flight number, and description. Can we work with that?”
“Should be all we need. Let’s head back to the surveillance room.” He turned and gave us a wave over his shoulder. “Follow me back.”
Down the hall and to the left, we walked into the airport’s surveillance center, a long rectangular room with a wall of forty-two-inch monitors, all displaying different camera views. Each of the six agents monitoring the screens had a work area with three more monitors. We followed him to an empty station at the back of the room.
Waterman took a seat. “This is going to be us here.”
Hank and I pulled over two free chairs and sat.
Waterman punched away at the keyboard to access the system. “What’s the name, date, flight number?”
“Sarah McMillian.” I pulled my notepad from my pocket and flipped to where I’d entered the information from her itinerary. “Flight 1187, Sunday night.”
He plugged it into the computer. “I’m going to bring up the video from the gate and see if we can spot her coming off of the flight. From there, we can follow her through the airport.”
“You can do that?” Hank asked.
Waterman nodded in confirmation. “We have cameras everywhere. We don’t miss a thing. Here we go. The flight came in at 9:03 p.m. Do you know what her seat number was? I should be able to get us a pretty good starting point that way.”
I shook my head. “We have a copy of her itinerary at the station in her file, but I don’t have the seat number here.”
“That’s fine. I’ll start us at 9:06 p.m., and we’ll work from there. Know what she was wearing?”
I shook my head again. I doubted she’d come off the plane in lingerie.
“Rough description?” Waterman asked.
“We’re looking for a blond about five foot six and in her thirties. If I had to guess, I’d say dressed in business attire.”
“We should be able to find her. Let’s have a look.”
He started to roll the footage on the desk monitor. We watched as the travelers started to come from the jetway into the airport. Two men in suits walked out first. Both dragged carry-ons and chatted with each other. An overweight man in a yellow polo shirt followed next. A twenty-something year old in a hooded sweatshirt and backpack appeared from the doorway into the airport. He wore a flat-brimmed hat and a pair of white headphones. A blond followed him out. Oversize sunglasses rested on her forehead. She wore a white blouse and navy blue skirt. A laptop bag hung over the handle of the carry-on she wheeled out. The woman on the screen matched everything we had for Sarah McMillian.
“Is that her?” Waterman asked.
“Pretty sure,” I said.
We watched as she walked through the frame and disappeared off camera. Waterman
clicked a few buttons, and a different view came on the screen. The camera focused down the length of the walkway in the concourse. She entered the frame at the top. We followed her on the screen until she disappeared heading past the security checkpoint. He pulled up another view that caught her making a right toward the escalators.
“She’s headed down the escalators—either picking up checked luggage or going out to street level. Let me pull up the view from the baggage area. We should be able to catch her coming off the escalators there.” He punched at his keyboard.
So far she hadn’t spoken with anyone in the airport. She was heading from point A to point B. She didn’t even stop at the bathroom. From what we could tell, nobody was following her. We watched the monitor, waiting for her to come down the escalator. She appeared on the screen and made a right toward the baggage carousel. She waited for her luggage. Through ten minutes of video, she stood there waiting on her bag. No one approached her. At the thirteenth minute, she removed her phone from her bag and made a call. It must have been the call to her husband. The call didn’t last much more than a minute. She put the phone away. The carousel began to spin, and bags started sliding down. She pulled a black suitcase off and made for the doors leading outside.
“Do you have video out there?” Hank asked.
“Absolutely. One second.”
Waterman pulled up the footage of the curbside loading zone for the arriving flights. We spotted her walking toward the taxi station. She entered the line for a cab.
“Do you have a camera closer?” I asked.
Waterman shook his head. “I think this is as close as we got.”
We watched as she advanced in line and got into a taxi. A cab driver loaded her bags. The distance of the camera was too far away for us to get anything usable. The cab driver appeared as a half-inch blur on the screen. He reentered the cab and pulled to the far left lane to avoid the other cars at the curb. The cab drove from the frame. I dialed up Jones. He picked up right away.
“Jones, it’s Kane.”
“Hey, Kane. I’m just finishing up looking at the hotel’s security footage now.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing that matches the woman’s description.”
“Okay. We got her getting into a taxi at the airport about nine-thirty. I would guess that she would have to have been there before ten at the latest.”
“I didn’t see anything like that. I’ll give the footage another once over.”
“Thanks, Jones. Let me know.” I hung up.
Waterman switched cameras and followed the cab on the screen until it disappeared from the arriving flights area. He rewound the footage to the point where she entered the taxi. We went frame by frame, trying to get anything we could from the cab: a company, tag number, car number, something we could use. We came up empty, aside from the car being yellow and having a taxi light on top.
“There’s just not a lot to work with, guys. The cab being blocked from the other cars and the distance doesn’t give us much,” Waterman said.
“Think we could get a copy of the footage from when she entered the cab? Maybe our tech department at the station can do their magic and get something from it.”
“Sure, let me grab a disc.”
Waterman had our copy of the footage burned to DVD a few minutes later. Hank and I wrapped up at the airport and headed back to the station. I dropped off the video with Terry Murphy in our tech department and headed for my office. The time neared five o’clock. My voicemail light on my phone was flashing. I clicked the button to play the message. It was Jones letting me know the hotel’s footage showed no cabs and no one matching her description throughout the night. I erased the message and took a seat behind my desk.
The captain rang my phone a few minutes later, looking for an update. I filled him in on the details from the interview at the ad agency as well as the footage we’d brought back from the airport. I had the chain of events nailed down. We had her getting picked up but not arriving. What we needed to do was find that cab. The captain wrapped up the conversation by telling me to go home. I had been working fifteen days straight. I grabbed the case file and keys from my desk and headed out.
Chapter 10
She lay unconscious and bound to the bed. He’d branded her, just like the last. He’d had her for a total of seven hours. No longer wearing her business attire, she wore the same green teddy and thong as Sarah McMillian. He had twelve identical outfits, courtesy of the department store he’d stolen them from a few months back. Her driver’s license told him her name was Diane Robins. She was thirty-six and one hundred twenty-three pounds. She was a blond with blue eyes—a perfect candidate. He took a seat a couple feet away from where she lay. His victim didn’t move aside from the slow, rhythmic motion of her breathing. He put one leg over his other knee and watched her chest moving in and out with each breath. A coughing attack ensued. His eyes watered. Blood puddled in his hand. His illness was progressing.
He pulled himself from the chair and went to her. With the back of his hand, he smacked her face. She didn’t respond. He had his new work area set. Xylazine was circulating through Diane’s bloodstream, just enough to keep her out. He waited another ten minutes to be sure and then untied her. Her body lay limp in his arms as he carried her through the kitchen to the garage. A pesky fly buzzed around his ear, and he shook his head to shoo it away.
A rectangular dining room table sat center stage in the garage—no chairs. Plastic from rafters to floor separated his work area from the other sections of the three-car garage. The yellow of the taxi cab could be seen beyond the makeshift plastic wall. Plastic sheeting covered the surface of the table and floor to catch any spatter of blood. His cleanup after the last had been far too time-consuming. He laid Diane’s body on the table and positioned her for the procedure. He went to his rolling work cart, which held his tools.
Earlier in the day, he’d made a trip a few towns over to steal a lobotomy book from the library. He needed to get more structured with his attempts. The results from the previous methods were too hit or miss. He opened it to the first dog-eared page. His head nodded as he read it over for the umpteenth time. He headed back inside to change.
Dressed in white coveralls and latex gloves, he walked back into the garage. He plugged electric hair clippers into the extension cord hanging from the ceiling and buzzed her right temple. A razor from the tool cart shaved away the stubble that remained. He finished prepping the area with a swab from an alcohol pad.
Measuring out three centimeters back and six centimeters up from her orbital socket, he marked the area with a felt-tip pen. He took a scalpel from his tool cart and cut the skin from the area. He placed the flap in a small dish of saline solution to reattach later. A squirt bottle of the same solution flushed away the running blood. A postage-stamp-sized area of white skull shone through the blood with each squirt of saline. The drill came next. He secured a half-inch hole saw to the chuck. He’d modified a bit with a collar that wouldn’t allow it to cut deeper than 7.1 millimeters. From his recent research, that was the correct thickness of an adult female skull. He placed the drill bit against the bone and squeezed the trigger. He flushed the area with water while he worked and kept a mindful eye on the depth. From the collar on the outside of the bit, he could see he was close. He slowed the drill’s revolutions until the collar bottomed out. He set the drill on the cart and flushed the opening with saline. The bone moved freely when he touched it with his forceps. He pried the piece of skull away and exposed the inside of her head.
With a scalpel, he cut away the casing to reveal her brain. He then slipped the blade between the white matter in the prefrontal lobe. He made a number of small slices, as shown in his book. Even with his reading and searching online, he hadn’t found a solid reference on how to reattach the bit of skull he removed. Doctors used a thin wire that became permanent, to reattach pieces of removed skull. He didn’t have the capacity or materials to complete that part of the proce
dure. The removed bit of skull found the hole it had come from. It would have to do. He used the forceps to place the removed flap of skin back over the area and sutured her up.
He stepped back from his patient and looked over his work. In a few hours, he would see how successful his new procedure was.
Chapter 11
My list of cab companies that worked the airport was getting shorter. I gave our victim’s description and time of pickup to each dispatcher. A few companies were checking with their drivers and had agreed to call me back. While I wouldn’t get paid for my efforts, I wasn’t comfortable leaving a murderer on the streets any longer than I had to. If it took a few off-the-clock hours to make some headway, I’d damn sure work them. The clock on my cable box read a quarter after eight when my phone rang. I figured it was someone from one of the cab companies.
I caught the number on the phone’s caller ID. It was my sister, Melissa.
“Hi, Mel.”
“Hey, bro. What are you doing?”
I plopped down on the couch and let out a deep breath. Butch stared at me. He didn’t look pleased that I was encroaching on his living space. “I’m working from the house.”
“It’s after eight. Why are you working from home?”
I didn’t feel like getting into the case with her on the phone. “I’m making phone calls and checking up on a few things.”
“Oh. Are you done?”
“I guess. What’s up?” My nephew chattering and making noise in the background came through the earpiece.
“We need to talk about Dad.”
“What about Dad?”
“He came over last week. It seemed like he was having a hard time remembering things.”
I looked at the ceiling. My sister had a flair for the dramatic. “Like?” I asked.
“Well, he called Scrambles, Oscar. Oscar has been dead for years.”
“Really?” I asked it in the most sarcastic tone I could muster.
“Why do you say it like that?”
“It’s the same damn dog. They are the same breed, same color, and same size. Oscar lived to be fifteen. Fifteen years of Dad calling your brown fluffy dog Oscar. Now you have a new one that’s—again—identical, and you think Dad is getting senile because he called it by the old one’s name. I can pretty much guarantee you that I’d do the same thing. I didn’t even remember the new one’s name until you just said it.”
Malevolent (Lieutenant Kane series Book 1) Page 5
