by Elle Gray
“And what leads you to that thought? The fingernail?”
I nod. “Yeah, that’s a big indicator. The fingernail is ritualistic. With an act that deliberate, the killer is not only marking his kill, but he’s also trying to communicate something with us.”
“And what’s that?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know yet. That’s why I said I don’t have enough data,” I explain. “I need to go back through the case files and see if there are any other murders that match this MO.”
“Nothing stands out to me offhand,” Morris says.
I’m not entirely surprised to hear him say that. And I have to remind myself once again that he’s not trained to look for the same things I am. If Briar Glen had a detectives department, perhaps they would have gotten the training and knew what they needed to be looking for. Morris and his men are trained to do the basics. Their role is more cleanup and procedural than investigative. They’re here to pick up the pieces after a crime, but don’t know how to take the steps needed to prevent the next one from happening. Again, not their fault.
“All the same, I need to pore through them to see if there are any others that match this girl,” I say.
Inside the autopsy suite, Sofia is waving us in, so we push through the swinging door and walk in. Morris and I stand side by side on one side of the table while she stands on the other. Sofia raises her face and pulls down her mask. Morris is looking pale all of a sudden, like he’s on the verge of vomiting. Sofia quickly covers the body with a pale blue sheet, a grimace on her face.
“Sorry, Sheriff. I forgot,” she says.
He waves her off. “It’s fine. No sweat.”
His voice is thick and choked when he speaks. Sofia and I share a small grin when Morris isn’t looking. I find it amusing that for such a large man, he certainly has a delicate stomach.
“So what did you find?” Morris asks, trying to reassert himself.
“I won’t have toxicology back for a while,” she says. “But I’m confident that the cause of death was exsanguination due to a severing of her carotid artery.”
“Lovely,” Morris mutters.
“I took fingernail scrapings and some other trace evidence like hairs I found, and I’ve sent them to the lab in Seattle,” Sofia goes on. “We won’t have them back for a bit either.”
I nod. That’s standard. It’s not like on television, where you get results of tox screens or hair analysis in the blink of an eye. Especially if you don’t have an in-house lab who can analyze them. It’s not unexpected.
“I can say with some degree of confidence that she was sexually assaulted. Judging by the amount of tearing and bruising to her genital region, I’d say it was by more than one person too,” she says, her voice grim.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope that you were able to get some fluids,” I say.
“Afraid not. There’s evidence of spermicide, so the killer was smart enough to wear a condom,” she replies.
“Figured,” I mutter.
“You said it was more than one person who assaulted her?” Morris said.
She nods. “I can’t be one hundred percent certain of course, but that’s my gut feeling, again, based on the tearing and bruising,” she tells him.
“Jesus,” he whispers to himself.
The fact that she was perhaps assaulted by multiple people puts a whole new spin on things for me. It’s not often you get a serial killer who works with a partner, let alone a whole team. The signature automatically makes me think serial, and most of those guys are loners. So this is throwing me for a loop.
More than that, I’m left wondering what it has to do with the overall pattern of violence in Briar Glen. Or whether it has anything to do with it at all. Am I simply seeing shadows? Making connections that aren’t really there? My gut tells me there’s more here. Something sinister is happening in this city. The violent crime rate is just too out of whack for me to think otherwise.
“I need more data. More information,” I mutter to myself.
“What’s that?” Morris asks.
I shake my head. “Nothing. Just talking to myself.”
“So we’re looking at a group assault and a murder to cover up the assault,” Morris says.
“It’s possible,” I say.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not. It’s the fingernail that’s throwing me.”
“Why is that?” Sofia asks.
“Because if this was a case of a pack of guys attacking a girl, it would be more frenzied. You’d see more evidence of that kind of bloodlust that comes up in a pack mentality,” I say. “The way she was laid out was cold. Calculated. It was methodical. And that fingernail was deliberate. Those aren’t the actions of a savage gang rape.”
“Is it possible, that nail not breaking was just a spot of dumb luck?” Morris asks.
I shake my head again. “It’s also the only one of her nails that was acrylic,” I note. “The rest of her nails were natural.”
“That’s true, Sheriff,” Sofia confirms.
“All right. So what does it mean?” he asks.
“I’m not sure yet. That’s why I was saying I need more data,” I reply. “I need to find out if there are any cases that have matching MOs, and if so, what the disposition of those cases are. I need to know if there are any people who were tossed out as suspects for one reason or another.”
“So what do you need from me?” Morris asks.
“Access to your database and all your files,” I say. “And also access to Dr. Carville as needed.”
“Done,” he says. “And I’ll even toss in a spare office, so you don’t have to work out of that crappy bungalow they have you in.”
“Appreciate that, Sheriff.”
Silence descends over the room, and all of our gazes drift down to the woman beneath the sheet. Not to speak out of turn, but I get the idea that all three of us feel the weight of responsibility for this woman settling down over us.
It’s as if we’re all making a silent pact with each other, and with her. She deserves justice, and I’m going to work my guts out to make sure she gets it. I get the feeling all three of us will.
“Okay, let’s get to work,” I say.
Thirteen
Briar Glen Sheriff’s Station; Downtown Briar Glen
“Ain’t much, but it’s all yours as long as you need it,” Morris says.
“It’ll do me just fine. Thank you, Sheriff.”
“I’ll have the boxes of files brought in,” he tells me. “You can access everything else on that computer.”
I give him a nod. “I appreciate all you’re doing, Sheriff.”
“Like I said, I know my shortcomings, and I’d be a damn fool to turn down help when it’s offered,” he replies. “On that note, I’ll leave you to it. You need anything, just give me a shout.”
He closes the door behind him, leaving me alone in the vacant office. The office is in serious need of an upgrade. The wood paneling on the walls looks fifty years old, and the floor is covered with linoleum that’s cracked and pitted. There’s a large desk in the center of the room with a pair of chairs in front of it.
Against the wall to the left of the desk are two tall four-drawer file cabinets and a long table running beneath the window on the right. There’s a large white board on the wall next to the filing cabinets, and a map of Briar Glen tacked to the wall behind it. Except, the map is twenty years old and is sorely out of date. The city has grown quite a bit since that map was drawn up.
I sit down at the desk and fire up a computer that would have been cutting edge in 1990. It probably hasn’t been fired up since then, so it takes a few minutes to shake the rust off and boot up. I’m spoiled by the tech at the field office, which unlike this dinosaur, is always state of the art.
When the machine finally finishes booting up, I take a few minutes to get acquainted with the programs and how their system works. I’m no tech genius, but I’m fairly adept at nav
igating different systems, especially as it pertains to law enforcement databases. They’re all usually somewhat similar and it’s just a matter of figuring out the small differences. Once you do that, it’s pretty smooth sailing.
I call up the search box and start plugging in keywords as I search for similar MOs. The problem I run into is that the Briar Glen PD isn’t like us, and they don’t break down cases like that. At the Bureau, we log crimes using specific keywords related to those crimes so that we can check for similarities both in the state and national databases. But this department apparently doesn’t.
“Damn,” I mutter.
I lean back in the chair and quickly realize my mistake as it groans and squeaks ominously, as if it’s about to break, so I sit up quickly and glare at it.
“Please. I’m not that heavy,” I growl at the chair like it can understand me.
I stand up and pace the office for a moment, deciding on the best angle of attack. I have no other choice but to go old school and dive through the case files themselves. There’s a coffee pot sitting on top of the file cabinet that looks as if it hasn’t been used since the Reagan Administration, so I’m crossing my fingers that it still works.
I quickly dust it off and carry the pot out of the office, then wander around for a moment before I locate the break room. After washing the dust off the pot and filling it with water, I strike gold and find filters, some ground coffee, and a mug that looks relatively sanitary. After filching enough supplies to get me through the day, I carry it all back to my makeshift office and start getting it ready, making a mental note to stop by a store and stock up on good coffee. Cop shops have notoriously bad stuff. Call me a snob all you want, but coffee is one of those things I don’t like to leave to chance. I’ve got to have a half-decent blend.
It’s not long before the office is filled with the scent of coffee brewing. I wait until I have a cup in hand before sitting down at the terminal and bracing myself for the work ahead, which I know is going to be tedious. This is the less glamorous part of the job, but this is the job nonetheless.
I take a sip of my coffee and immediately wince at the bitter brew, half-tempted to spit it out. But I refrain. It’s hot and it’s got caffeine, and at the moment, that’s all I care about. Mostly. I’m not going to drink this swill tomorrow. I look at the computer screen and call up a list of statistics for the previous year.
“Thirty-seven murders in 2017,” I say.
Just for comparison’s sake, I call up Seattle’s stats and find there were only twenty-eight in total. As I toggle between the data sets, I see that so far this year, Seattle is up to forty-nine murders, and Briar Glen is keeping pace with forty-two. But it’s only October, so there are still a couple of months to pad those stats.
They’re all numbers I’m already familiar with, but it seems important to me to start at the beginning again. It’s an oddity of mine, I know. But when I’m starting from square one, as I’m clearly doing here, I like to physically start from square one. It’s like coming to it with a fresh set of eyes for me. I know I’m not, but it kind of seems that way. I remember mentioning that to Paxton shortly after we met and were comparing investigative styles. He said I might be the strangest person he’d ever met. But he also said that whatever I’m doing obviously works because I get results, so to keep on doing it.
So that’s what I’m doing.
I call up the crime statistics for this year and immediately remove any that have had an outcome and have officially been closed. That is, any that have resulted in an arrest and a conviction at trial. Those are unimportant. The initial culling leaves thirty-two open-unsolved cases. Which is a lot of case files to go through. Especially when you go through them as thoroughly as I do. But the sight of the woman on the beach, specifically her eyes, flash through my mind, and that’s all the motivation I need to quit whining and start working.
I start at the beginning of the year and read every single line of every single case file. Of the thirty-two open-unsolved cases, eighteen were killed by gunshot. Six by manual strangulation. Six by knife wounds, either stabbing, or having their throats cut. And the final two were beaten to death. All of them are grisly ways to go, but there’s something about being beaten to death that makes me cringe harder. There’s just something so primal and animalistic about it.
“How goes the battle in here?”
I give a start as I look up to see Sheriff Morris standing in the doorway. I’d been so absorbed in the work that I didn’t even hear the door open. A rueful chuckle escapes me as I run a hand through my hair, more to give myself a moment to slow my racing heart than anything. I glance at the clock and see that five hours have passed since I first sat down.
“Can’t believe it’s gotten so late,” I say.
He shrugs. “It happens when you get caught up in the work.”
“Yeah. That it does. Anyway, I finished with the list of murders so far this year,” I tell him. “Gruesome stuff.”
He nods. “Tell me about it. The last guy we found, Tyler… Tyler something or other－”
“Salters. Tyler Salters,” I say.
“Right. That guy. Cut up like a Christmas goose,” Morris sighs. “I mean, I’ve seen some things, but the way that poor kid was sliced and diced was just inhuman.”
I nod and lean back in the chair, recalling what I’d read in the autopsy report for Salters. Seventy-eight cuts and punctures to his body, mainly centered in the chest, neck, and stomach area. The crime scene photos were ghastly, to say the least. Morris walks in and drops down heavily into the chair across from me. I have to bite back the smile that’s forming on my lips. His big frame dwarfs the chair and almost makes him look like he’s sitting at a child’s tea party table.
“It was so bad, it didn’t even look real to me,” I comment. “Seemed more like a prop out of an Eli Roth splattercore film.”
“Splatter what?”
“It’s a subgenre of horror,” I say. “Focuses more on the grisly aspects of the crime. It’s graphic and gory. Horror without limits, is what they call it.”
A look of revulsion crosses his face. “I’d call it trash, personally.”
I shrug. “It’s interesting. From a certain perspective, anyway.”
“I’ll pass. Give me a good Bogey film any day of the week.”
I chuckle. “Humphrey Bogart movies actually suit you. I would have guessed that about you.”
“Would it surprise you to know I like period pieces?”
“Let me guess… Braveheart? Gladiator? No, wait… Ben Hur.”
“Those are good. Liked ‘em a lot,” he replies. “But I also liked Far From the Madding Crowd. Elizabeth. Quills. Pride and Prejudice. Shakespeare in Love. I even liked Titanic quite a bit. Good films, all.”
I have to keep my jaw from hitting the desk. “You’re yanking my chain. Right?”
He shakes his head and chuckles. “Just when you think you’ve got me figured out, right?”
I smile sheepishly. “In my defense, I haven’t been profiling you. Perhaps I should have been.”
“Pretty sure you wouldn’t find me all that interesting.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. We all have quirks I find fascinating,” I say. “Your choice in movies would be one of yours.”
We share an amicable silence for a moment. But the good humor begins to fade as the dark reality of what we’re dealing with starts to settle down over us once more. Morris frowns and looks down at the linoleum.
“You’ve been Sheriff for what, six years now?” I ask.
He nods. “Yep. My term’s up in two years.”
“Going to run again?”
Morris runs a hand across his broad face. “Don’t know.”
“Why not? You’re good at your job. And I can tell you care a hell of a lot about this town.”
“Yeah, but there’s a world of difference between caring and being able to do a good job. You’ve shown me I’ve had a blind spot all this time. I’ve failed t
his town.”
“You haven’t failed anything.”
“No? How is it you, sittin’ all the way up there in Seattle, diagnosed the cancer that’s eating away at this town, and I didn’t?”
“I think you’re being too hard on yourself, Sheriff. I’m trained to look at things like this. You’re not,” I tell him. “I have a feeling you knew there was something going on here. But without the proper tools and training, how can you accurately diagnose a problem?”
“Shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to know when bodies are dropping like they do around here, there may be a bigger problem.”
“Why don’t you have a detectives bureau here, Sheriff?”
He chuffs. “You should talk to the city council about that. They force us to operate on a shoestring budget, since the city proper doesn’t have a police force. We end up having to follow city priorities even if we’re technically county level. They cry poverty but go and spend more on their pet beautification projects than the practical things that keep a city safe and secure. Couple years back, they spent half a million bucks on half a dozen fountains for the city. Fountains. That five hundred grand could have put more deputies on the street. Maybe if we had more bodies, we’d be able to head off some of these murders. Maybe that girl on the slab down in Sofia’s morgue wouldn’t be there.”
It’s hard to miss the bitterness in Morris’ voice. It’s unfortunately, a story I’ve heard more times than I can count when dealing with smaller municipalities. Some of the city councils in these towns get it in their heads that their city is safe and providing more uniformed officers would be overkill. So they allocate their funds to pet projects like fountains.
I’ve seen it time and time again. It’s frustrating and makes life more difficult than it needs to be for men and women like Morris. They’ve got all the responsibility to safeguard a county, but don’t get adequate support or resources from the local political hacks who control the purse strings.
“Anyway, enough of my wailing and moaning,” he says. “It is what it is, and there’s nothin’ I can do about it.”
