by Gail Caban
“Is that all?” Eddie narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, ‘is that all?’” Ness looked offended.
Eddie bent down and picked up a thick folder filled with documents and placed it on the table between them: “Open it.”
Ness did as she was instructed, and she was at a loss for words. Inside the document were not only records of the trio, there were current pictures, class schedules, apartment cleaning schedules, and copies of the blueprints and schematics of their apartment block.
“How did you get all of this?”
“What did you do yesterday? Sleep?” Eddie ignored her question.
Ness’ eyes widened in embarrassment. “Well . . .” Eddie held up his hand to stop her, “Ness, do you know why I’ve been able to do what I do for almost three decades without being caught?”
“Because you’re always prepared.”
“Exactly. Just knowing where someone lives and what car they drive isn’t going to help you in the long run—you will inevitably get caught . . . or killed. Taking the time to truly learn your victims—what they do on a daily basis, who they see, why they go out, if they have an alarm system and the possibility of needing to bypass said system, how many locks they have on their doors, how many pets they have, the possibility of a gardener coming past and seeing the scene prematurely, etc. There are countless possibilities of things that can go wrong when you’re hunting a victim, and you need to prepare for every scenario.”
Ness bit her lip and nodded.
“Now, we need to get to work. We don’t have a lot of time before our window of opportunity runs out.”
“Window of opportunity?”
“Yes, Jarrod and Nathan are away with their families for the day and will only be back tomorrow because they have late classes; however, dear old Travis decided to stay in his apartment and nurse his hangover. We’re going to kill him today.”
“What? But we haven’t prepared for it.” Ness exclaimed. “No, you haven’t, but I have.” Eddie closed the folder. “Today is going to be your next lesson. After this, the planning comes down to you.”
Ness went pale and started shuffling her feet. “Have a seat.” Eddie pointed at the chair at the table across from him and pulled out a blueprint of the apartment block.
“Practically all of the apartments in this block are the same or are mirror images of one another. This is an expensive block and all of the apartments come equipped with alarm systems and deadbolts on the doors.”
“So, how do we get in?” Ness asked.
“Well, there are alarm scramblers that one can use to decode the alarm before it goes off, but those are pretty difficult to come by, and deadbolts can be picked with the right tools.”
“Do you have these types of tools?” “Of course,” Eddie laughed. “But we’re not going to be using them to get into Jones’ apartment.”
“Why not?” Eddie narrowed his eyes at her, “This is why preparation is always the most important aspect of this game. If you do it right, you won’t get it wrong. You see I quickly found that Travis will never pass up an opportunity for sex. And that’s where you come in.”
“I’m listening.”
“All you need to do is knock on his door.”
“Oh, is that all?” Ness scoffed.
“Yep. There are of course a few cameras in the building that we’ll need to be careful of, but those can be easily negotiated around. Are you ready for this, Ness?”
“There’s no turning back now.” She answered.
“Good. Take the time to go over everything in these files and start planning how you want to handle Jarrod and Nathan. I’m going to get a few hours of shut-eye. We’ll get to work at nightfall. If you get hungry, help yourself to anything in the fridge,” Eddie said and walked up the stairs.
Ness frowned as she watched him go up the stairs. Now what? I have no idea what I’m doing! Ness spent the next several hours going over the folder with all of the information on the trio. After she’d studied all of the details, she noticed that all of them were definitely creatures of habit, and that could work to her advantage. Additionally, Ness noticed that they were heavy drinkers which could make them easier targets when the opportunity arose.
At lunchtime, Ness closed the folder and walked into the kitchen. Her stomach grumbled at her. She opened the fridge and saw there was a box of untouched pizza, so Ness helped herself to a couple of slices and walked back to the living room. If we’re going after Travis tonight, then we won’t be back until morning, Ness thought and pulled out her phone. She dialed Lindsay’s number.
“Hey, Ness,” Lindsay answered.
“Hey, Lindsay. I won’t be back tonight—I’ve met up with an old friend from college, and she’s begged me to stay with her and catch up a bit.”
“No problem. Have fun, Ness,” Lindsay said as she hung up.
At least that’s taken care of, Ness looked out toward the road through the window. She could have sworn that she heard Wyatt’s truck start up and leave.
12
Wyatt stood at his bedroom window that overlooked the driveway and saw Ness pull out. Wyatt was unable to sleep after the call that he received from Wilcox the night before, and he knew he was going to need to go to Chicago today to see Wilcox in person. The problem was, he felt conflicted about what he was going to tell Lindsay. He turned and watched her sleep soundly. It was amazing that she was still able to look perfect after an entire night’s sleep. He admired her for a few moments and watched how her hair fell gently over the side of the pillow. Her lips were slightly apart as she breathed quietly. Wyatt walked up to her and kissed her gently on the cheek. She stirred slightly and opened her eyes to look at him.
“Honey, I’m going to need to go into work today. Something happened last night, and some of the guys from Chicago need my assistance,” he said, not giving too much detail, but also not being untruthful.
“On a Sunday?” Lindsay asked sitting up. “It’s an important case,” Wyatt reassured her.
Lindsay looked slightly disappointed but nodded her approval without any form of resistance.
“Thank you, honey. I’ll be home later,” Wyatt leaned forward and kissed her.
He didn’t care about her morning breath. This was a woman that always put him and his career above her personal needs, and he knew that there was no way that he deserved her. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you, too. Be safe, and hurry back,” Lindsay said as she laid back down on her pillow and smiled at Wyatt as he left for the front door.
Wyatt pulled in at the 4th District in South Chicago a little before 8:00 A.M., and he walked inside. He had been in the building before, and many of the officers were familiar with him. However, he didn't recognize the sergeant sitting behind her desk.
“Good morning, Sergeant,” Wyatt said formally.
“What can I do for you?” She asked with a prickly tone in her voice.
“I’m Wyatt Elliott. I’m here to see Robert Wilcox: he’s expecting me.”
The desk sergeant scrutinized him for a few seconds and got up from her seat after taking a large sip of her coffee. “Come with me,” she walked hastily down the hall and toward an electronically locked gate. She typed in a code on the keypad, and the gate buzzed open. “The Major Crimes Unit is run by a bunch of criminals, and that’s why we keep them locked up.”
Wyatt raised his eyebrow at her. “That was a joke,” she said in a monotone voice and with a completely deadpan face. “Ha ha,” she added at the end without smiling. “You’ll find Wilcox through the door over there,” she pointed ahead.
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
“Mm-hmm,” she turned and walked back down the corridor.
Wyatt walked toward the door and popped his head inside. He could see Robert Wilcox sitting at his desk with his hair disheveled and three empty coffee cups in the trash can next to his desk. “You get any sleep last night, Robert?” Wilcox smiled at Wyatt as he approached his desk.
“What’s that?
” he laughed. Wilcox stood up and shook Wyatt’s hand. “I must say, your desk sergeant is absolutely delightful,” Wyatt said facetiously. Wilcox laughed, “You have no idea.”
“So, what have you got?” Wyatt asked. “Grab a seat,” Wilcox said, turning the file around so Wyatt could see all of the reports and pictures.
“Henry Martin’s vehicle was found at the bottom of a cliff at Devil’s Head last night. A couple of hikers were setting up camp when they stumbled across the vehicle, and they called it in. It took some time for the search and rescue teams to get down there but once they did, they found this,” Wilcox pulled out a picture of Martin’s mangled body. “It looks like some wildlife found him, but what concerns me is the state of his face. Those aren’t animal bites, and the glass fragments in the vehicle don’t account for an injury of this nature.”
“Do you think it was staged?” Wyatt said without looking up from the pictures.
“It could be. It is starting to look that way. His body also seemed strange when they pulled it out,” Wilcox took his jacket off and hung it behind his chair.
“How so?” Wyatt frowned.
“Well, we checked his phone after we got it working again and saw that he sent a message to his girlfriend three days ago. If we assume that he was in an accident after that and killed on impact, his body would have started to show signs of bloating. There weren’t any in this case.”
“So, what are you thinking?”
“The only time I’ve seen a delay in bloating is when a body has been stored in a freezer after death. It delays the bacteria from replicating too quickly and delays the bloating and decomposition process.” “Hmmm . . .” Wyatt thought out loud.
“We’ll know more when the autopsy results come back. They should be done in the next few hours,” Wilcox stood up from his desk. “Hey, you hungry? Because I’m ravenous. Working all-nighters really hits the ‘starvation’ switch,” Wilcox laughed.
“Strangely . . .” Wyatt said, closing the folder with crime-scene pictures in it, “. . . I’m pretty hungry, too.”
“Awesome. I know a great place around the corner that serves the best pancakes in town.”
They started to leave but were interrupted by Wilcox’s buzzing phone. He pulled it out of his pocket and listened intently for a few seconds before saying goodbye and hanging up.
“Breakfast is going to have to wait for a little while my friend. That was the coroner and they want us down in the autopsy rooms ASAP. He said there’s something that we need to see.”
13
Wilcox and Wyatt drove across town to the pathology lab, but fortunately—because it was still before 9:00 A.M.—most people had yet to start moving around the city, and they got to the offices relatively quickly.
Wilcox parked his car and they climbed out, hastily heading inside. Wilcox showed his badge to the young receptionist who quickly ushered them through the doors. Wyatt had to breathe through his mouth when they moved into the hallway of the autopsy rooms. The combination of dead bodies and strong antiseptic liquids was wreaking havoc on his empty stomach. Wilcox moved through to the third autopsy room and pushed the doors open.
“What have you got for us, Doc?” Wilcox asked the aging pathologist. Dr. William Young was an overweight, balding, and rather somber-looking man who looked like he spent too much time with the dead instead of the living.
“Actually, quite a bit,” he said as he pulled the sheet off Henry Martin’s body, which made Wyatt grimace. The pictures didn’t do reality justice, and because he was a small-town cop, he wasn’t used to such gruesome deaths.
“His face looks awful,” Wyatt piped up.
“It most certainly does, young man. But that’s what a broken beer bottle and a lot of rage will do to someone’s soft tissue in their face,” Dr. Young answered matter-of-factly.
“A beer bottle?” Wilcox asked. “Are you sure?”
“100%. There were still shards of green glass in the cuts, and after a few tests, we could even narrow it down further to a Heineken bottle. The glass shards from the vehicle weren’t responsible for this: someone did this to him and staged it to look like an accident. They probably hoped that the vehicle wouldn’t be discovered for a while and the body would start decomposing before it was located, but I guess luck wasn’t in their favor,” Dr. Young removed the sheet entirely showing Martin’s damaged body. “There are several bite wounds on the corpse, and by the size of these claw marks, I’m almost certain a grizzly was responsible for them.”
“How do you know that they weren’t inflicted by the killer?” Wyatt asked. “These were inflicted postmortem, and there was still saliva in the bite marks which proved to be therapsid.” Young answered.
“Thera . . . what?”
“It’s the order that grizzly bears belong to, so it was a simple deduction,” Young stated.
“What else have you got for us, Doc?” Wilcox asked.
“Well, your suspicions about the body being in a freezer proved to be correct. But it was only for a day or two before the body was thrown off the cliff.”
“You’re going to have to explain how you know that, Doc.” Wilcox held up his hands in resignation.
“There are definitely signs in the tissue that freezing was occurring after death, but this didn’t spread deep into the internal organs. If the body was in the freezer for any longer, the changes would have occurred in the deeper organ tissues. But that isn’t the best find.”
“Well? Come on, Doc—the suspense is killing us.”
Dr. Young picked up a bag containing three long blond hairs that were covered in dry blood: “These were on the victim, and they may very well belong to our killer. I’ve sent the follicles away to look for any DNA matches in the system, but nothing has come back yet.”
“Thanks Doc, this might just be what we need to crack the case,” Wilcox smiled, and he and Wyatt left the building.
30 minutes later they were sitting down at the diner and waiting for their pancakes to arrive. “What do you think?” Wilcox asked Wyatt, taking a sip of his coffee.
Wyatt exhaled forcefully, “I have absolutely no idea. Whoever did that to him must have really hated him.” Wilcox narrowed his eyes at Wyatt, “You do know that you’re going to be a suspect in this?”
“The realization has crossed my mind,” Wyatt leaned forward and inhaled deeply.
“Look mate, if you had anything to do with this, I can help divert the gaze away from you, if you know what I mean. You saved my ass once; I’ll happily return the favor. Besides, the way that I see it, this guy deserves what he got.”
“I know, thanks Robert, but I had nothing to do with this. Though, I have a feeling that I may know who did,” Wyatt stared down at the table.
“Well, the offer stands. Don’t take too long to let me know if you need me to alter a few things. Once things get processed, it will be out of my hands.” Wyatt was about to respond but stopped himself because the waitress brought them their servings of pancakes.
“Thank you. These look absolutely delicious,” Wyatt said to the waitress who responded with a smile and a sultry wink. Once she was out of earshot, Wyatt responded, “I’ll let you know as soon as I can,” and took a large bite of his syrupy pancakes. “Wow, these are great!” he exclaimed. “I told you.” Wilcox laughed.
“Listen, I have to piss. Don’t touch my pancakes.” When Wilcox had left, Wyatt pulled out his phone and opened the tracking app of the device in Ness’ car. 397 Riverview Road, Northbrook . . . that’s a rather far distance from campus, Ness, Wyatt returned his phone to his pocket when Wilcox returned, and the two ate in practical silence as they devoured their pancakes.
“This was delicious. Thanks for introducing me to this place, Robert.” Wyatt said as he mopped up the last bit of the syrup with his pancakes. “Anytime, my friend,” Wilcox said and dropped cash onto the table before they drove back to the station.
“Thank you for everything, Robert,” Wyatt said as they pulled into
the parking lot.
“Don’t mention it but do let me know how you want me to take this further.” Wyatt nodded and climbed out the vehicle. “There are just a few things I need to double-check first,” he said as he shut the door and headed toward his truck.
40 minutes later, Wyatt parked his truck across the street of 397 Riverview Road, and he could see Ness’ Civic parked in the driveway. He watched the house for several minutes until he decided he wasn’t going to get much done here. He started up his truck and drove toward home. He needed to find out everything that he could about the person who lived at 397 Riverview Road.
14
Eddie emerged from his room at 4:00 P.M. and had changed into different clothes. He wore a skintight, black, cotton long-sleeve shirt with dark cargo pants and SWAT boots.
“You look very fashionable, Dexter,” Ness smiled as he came down the stairs. Eddie tossed a duffel bag at her, “Those should fit.”
Ness unzipped the bag and could see that Eddie had purchased clothes exactly like his for her to wear, but they all appeared to be in her size. “I’ll go get changed,” Ness headed to the bathroom where she stripped her clothes and donned the new clothes. They all fit perfectly, and she wondered how Eddie guessed her sizes so well. A few minutes later, Ness emerged from the bathroom.
“The look suits you.”
“Thanks.”
“You ready?” Eddie asked, picking up another duffel bag from the ground. “Have you memorized all of the information that you needed to?”
“I have.”
“Good, let’s go to the garage. Bring the folder with all of the contents,” Eddie turned and walked toward the kitchen.
Ness grabbed the folder and followed Eddie. They walked through the kitchen and passed through the door into the garage. Eddie turned on the light, and Ness could see two vehicles parked in the garage. One was an expensive-looking Mercedes G Wagon, where the other was a much cheaper looking Ford Contour. Eddie turned toward her,
