by Osborne, Jon
Simply stated, the watch was a real piece of junk. Something a kid might wear.
The watch itself consisted of a worn red-leather strap and what appeared to be a cartoon character using its hands to point out the hour and minute.
Dana zoomed in even closer on the video and narrowed her eyes.
Mickey Mouse.
She shook her head in confusion, not knowing why the watch bothered her, just that it did. In a big way. A cop’s instinct, she supposed – a sixth sense about these sorts of things. Call it whatever you wanted, she thought, but she’d followed far too many of these gut feelings directly to a murderer’s doorstep to simply ignore it altogether.
Besides, flimsy lead or not, at least it was a lead. She’d gone on much less during the Cleveland Slasher investigation – not to mention a lot of other cases that she’d investigated in the past. So it was important that she didn’t ignore any possible roads here, no matter how unpromising those roads might initially seem. Because sometimes it was the seemingly innocuous details that cracked a case wide open.
Dana stretched her neck to the left and punched in Gary Templeton’s number on her cellphone. As big of a deal as a bank robbery might be, this was even bigger. A possible killer who’d been caught on video was on the loose out there somewhere in Cleveland, and Dana needed Templeton’s help to track that person down. Now. If they split up the responsibilities, they could probably get twice the amount of work done in the same length of time. And she also wanted to hear the Cleveland cop’s thoughts on why he might think the woman in the video had called her out by name. Maybe he could make sense out of this mess. Lord knew she couldn’t.
Dana gritted her teeth and snapped shut her phone when Templeton didn’t answer his. No doubt he was up to his elbows in crime already working the bank robbery, but even though she sympathized with him, sympathy didn’t catch killers. But that was you got in the world of law-enforcement. A cop’s life never seemed to get any easier, whether you were FBI or Cleveland PD. No matter how many cases you solved – no matter how many bad guys you put away – for each case you managed to put to bed there were always twenty more unsolved cases staring you dead in the face at the end of each exhausting workday. Mocking you. Daring you to try to solve them.
Dana closed her eyes and slipped her cellphone back into her purse, wishing with all her heart and soul that Jeremy was still around for her to bounce some ideas off. Because in addition to being her lover and one of her best friends, he’d also been a damned fine investigator – one of the finest she’d ever known. He’d have had plenty of ideas concerning the identity of the woman in the video. But Jeremy wasn’t around anymore. Not now and not ever again. He was dead and rotting six feet beneath the ground in a cemetery out in Los Angeles now.
All thanks to Dana and her supposedly sterling work in the FBI.
She shook her head sorrowfully. She guessed it was true what they said: you reaped what you sowed.
And from the look of things, she’d sowed a lot of heartache.
Dana twisted at her hips in an effort to loosen up the cramped muscles in her badly aching lower back, realizing that with Templeton already busy with his own problems she’d be puzzling out this one on her own until further notice. No big surprise there, though. She’d jumped into this case willy-nilly from the start, hadn’t stopped to think things through properly or ask for backup, which protocol clearly dictated she do. So alone was exactly the way she deserved to be working right now.
She let out a slow breath and bit down into her lip again, wondering what had changed about her. There’d been a time in her career not too long ago when she’d actually preferred working alone. Clearly, though, those days were long gone now. In the past, however, she’d often found that doing most of the work herself actually made it easier for her to get the job done when the pressure was on. Because when you worked alone, there was nobody else around to get in your way, nobody to slow you down, nobody to send you off on wild-goose chases that rarely – if ever – panned out.
Dana reached out and twisted on the warm-water tap in front of her, pumping some fruity-smelling soap into her palm from the plastic dispenser above the sink and vigorously scrubbing her hands. She felt dirty, filthy, like she just couldn’t get clean for the life of her. No big surprise there, either, though. After all, when you’d spent as much time as she had chasing the lowest common denominators of humanity through the gutters of life, some of that dirt was eventually bound to rub off on you.
She was drying off her hands with a wad of industrial-strength paper towels from the automatic dispenser to her left when the door to the bathroom suddenly flew open with a violent bang, nearly causing her heart to explode in her chest.
Dana whirled around in a panic and shot her right hand inside her leather bomber jacket for her Glock, curling her fingers tightly around the weapon’s corrugated-plastic grip as her gaze went automatically to Nancy Lawson’s left wrist to see if she was wearing a watch.
And, if so, what kind of watch.
“Hey there, Agent Whitestone,” Lawson said, smiling brightly and stepping farther into the otherwise-deserted bathroom. “Long time, no see, huh?”
PART IV
STORM FRONT MOVING IN
“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” – Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER 28
My first murder had taken place the previous August.
Leaning in closer to the bathroom mirror at 969 Turning Oaks Drive on the west side of Chicago, I reapply my bright red lipstick and remember the night that I’d stood inside the bathroom at a popular nightclub just outside of Atlanta before making my way back out onto the crowded dance floor.
I’d felt a little nervous then, of course, but if I’d still had a penis it would have stiffened in delicious anticipation. And why the hell not? Murdering people was a lot like fucking them, wasn’t it? Of course it was. Both were intimate acts filled with extreme violence when done properly, and both caused stains that were very difficult to scrub away.
So, looking at things that way, I’d decided I’d grow a new pair and do what I’d come there to do that night. Enough with all the preliminaries already. Enough with all the build-up. No more talking the talk and not walking the walk.
My mother was expecting this.
***
After scoping out the scene for several minutes, I check my Mickey Mouse watch while I stand in the northeast corner of the club with my face mostly hidden by an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. I’ve chosen to appear as a man tonight in the hopes that it would eliminate all of the unwanted attention I surely would have received had I been dressed as a woman. As a man, though, I won’t need to worry about any drunks offering to buy me shots or trying to cop a cheap feel over my dress, drooling all over themselves as they did their best Brad Pitt imitations and tried their damndest to get into my pants.
I smile to myself, wondering how many of them would still be trying to spread my thighs if they’d known what had used to dangle between my legs…
Fifty percent of them, at the very least.
***
The Mickey Mouse watch is extremely difficult to read in the darkened nightclub. Straining my eyes, I finally catch sight of the little black hands as they’re illuminated in the intermittent strobe lights flashing overhead and threatening to bring on a full-blown seizure in my brain.
One-thirty a.m. Only an hour or so to go now until show time.
Around that time, the curtains will finally go up and Dinah Leach will finally go down for the count forever, never to rise again.
Assuming, of course, that the weather reports were to be believed.
I shudder with delight at the delicious prospect of what lay ahead, both tonight and for the rest of my life. Following several months of careful planning, my mother and I had decided that Johnny’s Hideaway on Roswell Road would be the perfect place for all of the action to start going down. And, from all appearances, it seems like a natural fi
t.
Absolutely perfect for my intentions for the evening.
“The Devil Went Down To Georgia” plays in my mind, competing with the chest-thumping rap music that’s blaring over the speakers in the club to provide a jarring, discordant soundtrack for the surreal scene. I wrinkle up my face in distaste against the audible onslaught in my ears and take a deep breath through my nostrils, steeling myself for what will come next. The devil has come down to Georgia, indeed. And if the devil had her way, she’d be wearing a beautiful red dress, a stunning pearl necklace and six-inch stilettos, to boot.
***
I’ve followed my prey for a solid week now – stalked her, actually, if you wanted to get technical about the whole thing, appropriately changing my appearance each night to avoid being recognized by her as a familiar face. Now all I need to do is wait for the powerful storm to strike. And on this night – blessed of all nights – Hurricane Allison is scheduled to arrive in all of her glory at precisely two-thirty a.m., at least according to the weatherman on the radio station that I’d been listening to when I’d pulled into the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway a little more than an hour earlier.
My stomach had flipped over on itself as I’d listened to the report, knowing that the hurricane would provide the very noisy cover I’d need to get away with what I already knew would be my exceedingly bloody crime.
First things first, though. I still need to get the woman alone.
Hardly an insignificant hurdle to leap, at all.
***
Johnny’s Hideaway is a hip, eclectic, upscale joint – the kind of place that plays music ranging anywhere from Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and The Beach Boys to Madonna and Eminem and Rihanna. A little something for everybody. Just like I have a little something for Dinah Leach, right? Damn right. The reality television star just needs to wait a little bit longer to find out exactly what my gift to her will be. But it won’t be the suspense that will be killing her.
Instead, it’ll be me pulling the dirty deed.
Fifty feet away, Dinah Leach shakes her shimmy to the frenetic sounds of Lady Gaga – looking like a complete and total slut as she does so, of course. As usual, the fame whore is obviously enjoying the feeling of all the adoring eyeballs glued to her. Fake-ass celebrity bitch. Who the fuck does she think she is? With any luck at all, though, her fifteen minutes of fame will expire at just about the same time her worthless life does. And the clock’s ticking now. I wonder if she can hear it. It’s getting louder now.
Tick, tick, tick.
I stretch my slender neck to the left while I sip ice water through a plastic straw; wetting my lips at the same time I whet my enormous appetite for murder. Of course Dinah Leach can’t hear the clock ticking. She’s much too consumed with her own fleeting celebrity to notice something like that. Much too full of herself. That being said, I suppose it would’ve been difficult for anybody to hear anything above the deafening music that’s blasting over the fifty or so speakers stationed around Johnny’s Hideaway, vibrating the floor beneath my shiny black dress shoes so violently that it reminds me of standing on the platform of a busy subway station in New York City.
From my shielded position over in the corner of the club, I watch Dinah Leach swivel her hips suggestively in perfect time to Gaga’s “Poker Face”. The woman’s jeans look expensive to me, and I have an eye trained to notice such things. The fancy denim had no doubt cost her five hundred bucks at a bare minimum, and they’d clearly been tailored to show off her best asset. Her only asset, really.
The only thing anyone in the world really values about her.
I narrow my glittering green eyes when a pair of hulking, muscular black men wearing oversized Atlanta Falcons football jerseys and backward-facing baseball caps move forward and sandwich Dinah Leach out on the crowded dance floor, trying their damndest to get some of her undeserved fame to rub off on them.
I smirk and take another sip of my ice water. Jesus Christ. Don’t these idiots know that fake celebrity comes with its own fake gloss that never quite rubs off, no matter how hard you try?
Apparently not.
I lift my left wrist and check my watch again. One forty-two a.m. now. Just a little bit longer until we can finally get this show on the road. And the clock is still ticking. I wonder again if Dinah Leach can hear it. It’s barreling down on her like a goddamn freight train now.
Tick, tick, tick…
CHAPTER 29
Dana’s eyes homed in like a powerful laser on the watch strapped around Nancy Lawson’s left wrist.
It was a Tag Heuer.
She blew out a slow breath that deflated her chest four inches and tried to control the manic jackhammering of her heartbeat against her ribcage. No use.
Nancy Lawson’s timepiece looked like a fairly expensive piece of jewelry to her – especially for someone who’d been complaining about money just ten minutes earlier – but it wasn’t the cheap Mickey Mouse watch that the woman in the video had been wearing.
Dana shook herself and tried to calm down. Wasn’t easy. She closed her eyes and briefly wondered if she’d ever recover from the trauma of her life-and-death struggle in her brother’s underground bunker at the conclusion of the Cleveland Slasher case two years earlier. She’d faced down other killers in the past, of course – lots of other killers – but never before had she felt this jumpy, this unsure of herself. The sad fact of the matter was that she was acting like a scared little rabbit right now when what she needed to be acting like right now was a goddamn lion. People’s lives depended on it.
“Is everything OK, Agent Whitestone? What’s wrong, honey? You look like you’re going to be sick.”
Dana opened her eyes and pursed her lips, wadding up the wet paper towels in her hand and tossed the resulting ball into the metal garbage receptacle two feet away. “Actually, no, Miss Lawson,” she said. “Everything’s not OK. Not even close.”
She paused when the idea occurred to her. To hell with it. As long as she had Nancy Lawson here in the restroom with her, she might as well put their time to good use and take advantage of the impromptu meeting. “I hate to bother you any further, ma’am,” Dana said, “but I wonder if you help me out with something else. It’ll only take a minute or two of your time, I promise.”
The corner’s office employee looked hesitant, a concerned frown creasing her flawlessly painted lips. “Help you out with what, Agent Whitestone?” she asked. “To tell you the truth, I think I’ve already done everything I can for you.”
The woman paused. “Probably a little more than I should have, come to think of it. I don’t mind helping you, Agent Whitestone, I really don’t, but I also want keep my job. Need to keep my job, for that matter. And there’s no point in me ticking off Dr. Johnson any more than he’s usually ticked off at me for no good reason. He’s not exactly the kind of man who suffers slights lightly, if you catch my meaning.”
Dana nodded and dug her cellphone from her purse again. Flipping it open, she covered the short distance between them. “I do, Miss Lawson, but this is extremely important. And I assure you that Dr. Johnson will never find out about it. It’ll be our little secret.”
She held up the screen so they could both see. “Anyhow, I know you don’t like watching these things, but I was wondering if you could take a look at this autopsy video and see if you can identify the woman in it for me. There’s nothing graphic in the video, I swear. No cutting or surgical procedures of any kind. Just take a quick look, OK? Like I said before, it’ll only take a minute or two of your time.”
Lawson still didn’t look so sure. “I really don’t think that’s a very good idea, Agent Whitestone.”
Dana resisted the urge to scream. But she really needed the woman’s help right now.
And she knew that there was nothing quite as effective as cold hard cash to persuade someone to reconsider his or her previously hard-line stance.
“There’s a monetary reward in it for you,” she said quickly, remember
ing Lawson’s earlier consternation over being denied a raise in conjunction with her additional duties as the backup A/V person. “I can offer you five hundred dollars right here and now for your help, no strings attached. If you can help me out, great. If not, you get the money anyway. I’ll write out a check to you just as soon as we’re done here. It’s a win-win situation for you any way you look at it.”
Just as Dana had suspected, Lawson’s ears perked up at the mention of money,
Pulling down the sleeves of her smart-looking blue blazer, the human-resources worker straightened her posture. “Well, I guess it couldn’t hurt to just look.”
Dana nodded. “Nope. Couldn’t hurt at all. And you just might help me catch a killer while you’re at it. Anyway, I want you to watch this video and tell me if you recognize the woman in it.”
She tapped the PLAY button on the touch-screen telephone and both she and Lawson looked on as the images flashed across the screen.
Lawson’s bright blue eyes widened when the woman wearing the fancy dress entered the autopsy room and mouthed the words “fuck you, Dana” to the camera while holding up the picture of Nathan Stiedowe to the camera.
When the video stopped, Lawson shook her head emphatically. “I’ve never seen that woman before in my entire life,” she said, completely sure of herself. “I’m very sorry, Agent Whitestone, but I’m extremely good with faces, and I know for a fact that I’ve never seen her before.”
Dana sighed and flipped shut her phone. She hadn’t really expected Lawson to recognize the woman in the video, of course, but at least the possibility had been there. In any event, there went five hundred dollars of the taxpayers’ hard-earned money down the toilet. Wasteful government spending at its worst.
