An Eye for an Eye

by Caroline Fardig

  Another young woman’s disappearance was a lot to process. I rubbed my temples. “I’m not sure I wanted to know all that.”

  “I’m only trying to keep you in the loop like you asked.”

  “Right. Well, at least you’re treating me like a member of the team this time instead of some stupid civilian.”

  “You are a civilian, though.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  ***

  When we arrived at the morgue, Baxter and I went inside to suit up in surgical gowns, masks, and gloves.

  He asked me, “Are you ready for this?”

  I tied my gown at my waist. “Considering how much the DA likes to yell when you guys have no leads on a case, not really.”

  Hesitating, he said, “I meant for seeing Jenna again.”

  By this point, I’d been around Jenna’s body enough that I’d been able to disconnect the lifeless shell from the vibrant girl I’d known. That didn’t mean I’d worked through my feelings about it, though. Or that I wanted to talk about it—especially with Baxter. “I’m good,” I replied, and pushed past him to open the double doors to the room where the autopsy would be conducted. Sterling and District Attorney Wade McAlister were already there with Dr. Berg.

  The morgue had a considerably more somber atmosphere than the last time I’d been here, which I was sure Dr. Berg preferred. He thought of the morgue as a sacred place, but during the last investigation everyone had been at each other’s throats. This time, everyone seemed shell-shocked and sad. With a young woman we all knew lying there on the slab, the morgue felt especially bleak and oppressive.

  Dr. Berg said, “We’ll begin. The autopsy for Jenna Walsh will be at ten o’clock this morning. Detectives, as usual, one of you will need to be in attendance. As we discussed at the scene, I believe the preliminary cause of death to be exsanguination.” He pointed to the three-inch gash on the left side of Jenna’s neck. “Notice the laceration on the victim’s neck, which did indeed sever a jugular vein. It’s the only major wound on the body.” He pulled back her top lip to reveal a gaping hole where her right front tooth should have been. “Her upper right central incisor was removed postmortem.” He raised one of her arms to show us the underside of her wrist, which had a band of reddish discoloration. “But note that there are a few defensive wounds on the victim’s hands and arms, plus some ligature marks on her wrists and ankles. She was held against her will for a time before she was killed.”

  His voice grave, Baxter said, “Jenna went missing Saturday night. It’s possible that she was bound and held for nearly two days before she was killed.”

  At the thought of Jenna being tied up by a crazy person, tears welled in my eyes before I could stop them. It was sickening to imagine what she might have had to endure in those two days. She would have been terrified and defenseless, hoping for someone to rescue her. But help never came. Based on the horror evident in their eyes, everyone in the room was thinking the same thing I was.

  DA McAlister pulled down his mask and wiped a hand over his face. “This sick bastard has to be stopped. And soon. If we don’t find this guy and lock him up, there’s no telling who he’s going to target next.” I wondered if the DA was beginning to fear for his own family’s safety.

  Dr. Berg said, “I agree. Moving on, I’ve just sent the victim’s clothes to the lab, so they should be there momentarily. As I believe I overheard some of you discussing at the scene, the victim was indeed cleaned and redressed after death. Ellie, you’ll see this when you examine the clothing, but I wanted to point out that I found pieces of straw in the victim’s boots when I removed them from her feet. That could help us pinpoint where the killer may have taken her before her death.”

  I nodded, afraid that if I spoke my voice would waver.

  Sterling said, “If you found straw, it sounds like she may have been in a barn or on a farm. Unfortunately there’s no shortage of those in the northern half of this county.”

  The DA grunted and turned to the detectives. “You know if you don’t get a handle on this now, before another body turns up, the Feds will step in. And that will be a nightmare for all of us.”

  He was right. Three related deaths (especially with ritualistic elements) would bump our killer into the territory of serial killer. The FBI tended to take notice at that. It was possible they already had, considering that family members of local law enforcement were being targeted specifically.

  “We’re well aware of that, and we’re doing everything we can,” Sterling replied, his tone tight.

  Dr. Berg cleared his throat, bringing our attention back to his report. “We’ve established that the park wasn’t the primary crime scene. To further support that, I’ve noticed some lividity on the victim’s back, which means she was lying flat for some time after her death. I’m assuming it was when the killer was cleaning and redressing the body. There was also some blood pooling in the feet and legs, which means she was moved to the park and posed in a sitting position within six hours of her death, when livor mortis would become fixed. Based on what I’ve found so far, I’m putting the time of death window between four and six PM.”

  Sterling had begun pacing the room as Dr. Berg was speaking. “We can’t know whether the killer will keep the same timeframe from abduction to time of death that he did with Jenna Walsh, but it’s safe to assume that if we don’t find Michaela Richards within at least forty-eight hours, it could be too late for her.”

  DA McAlister spat, “Well, then why are you standing around here like an asshole? Get to work!”

  Ripping off his mask, Sterling stopped pacing and faced the DA, stone-faced.

  Dr. Berg cut in, “Wade, that’s enough. If no one has any other questions, we can reconvene in the morning.”

  Sterling stalked out of the room. Grumbling, the DA followed him out.

  Dr. Berg sighed and turned to Baxter and me. “You two be safe out there.”

  Baxter nodded. “Of course we will. See you soon.”

  “Goodnight, Doc,” I said, feeling his troubled eyes on me as I exited the morgue.

  As we removed our protective coverings and disposed of them, I noticed the same concerned look in Baxter’s eyes. He said, “You okay?”

  “I will be.”

  We exited the cold, dreary morgue, only to be hit with a biting wind as we hurried across the parking lot to Baxter’s SUV. From the look of consternation on his face, I could tell he was struggling to come up with a way to insert some kind of normalcy into our situation.

  “Do you feel like eating?” he finally asked.

  I had a strong stomach around death, but the situation had me somewhat nauseous. However, knowing that I’d be stuck at the station the rest of the night, I figured I’d better get some food while I could. It was helpful for energy and focus to eat every few hours when pulling all-nighters.

  “I guess.”

  He smiled. “Good. Because I lost my dinner out at the park.”

  I nodded knowingly. “Still got that nasty gag reflex at death scenes, huh?” Baxter vomited at first sight of a dead body. As soon as he lost the contents of his stomach, he was fine, and you’d never know he’d had a problem.

  “You know me well.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The only dining establishment open at this ungodly hour was a twenty-four-hour fast food taco joint, so we grabbed some drive-thru on the way back to the station. After choking down part of a limp taco on the way from Baxter’s SUV to the conference room, I decided eating was a bad decision in my current state of agitation and trashed the rest. What I really needed was a drink and a good night’s sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen tonight.

  Baxter and I entered the conference room to find Sterling and Amanda with Chief Deputy Sheriff Rick Esparza. My heart sank, realizing Jayne had either been removed from this case or had excused herself. This was always her meeting.

  I sat down next to Amanda, who gave me a pat on the arm. I returned a half-hea
rted smile. From Esparza, I got a head nod, which was more than I’d expected from the always-focused Chief Deputy.

  Esparza said, “Okay, guys, let’s do this and get back to work. We can’t waste a moment on this one. Sterling, go.”

  Frowning, Sterling closed the file he’d been perusing. “I hate to say it, Chief, but I don’t have jack shit to tell you. Without the primary crime scene, we’re flying blind. And as meticulous as this guy was about staging Jenna Walsh’s body, he’s going to be damn near impossible to find unless he decides he wants to be found.”

  Sterling was gruff and grumbly as a rule, but I’d never seen him with the wind out of his sails like this. The man had enough confidence for several people, plus he’d had the best case closure rate in the county for years.

  Esparza stared him down. “That doesn’t mean we give up, Detective.”

  Sterling clenched his jaw. “I’m simply saying we don’t have a lot to go on.”

  After flicking her eyes toward Sterling for a moment, Amanda slid photos of two fingerprints and two printouts of possible AFIS fingerprint matches toward Esparza. “It isn’t much, but I found the same fingerprints on the poem and on the plastic wrapping around the flowers. Unfortunately, there was no positive match to any prints in AFIS.”

  “Another dead end,” Sterling muttered.

  She went on, “For now, yes. But the good news is that these prints have to belong to the killer. They don’t match Jenna Walsh’s. And they couldn’t be from the store clerk who sold the flowers, for example, because the only people who could possibly have come into contact with both the flowers and the note were the killer and Jenna.”

  Sterling griped, “Which again proves my earlier point. This asshole is taunting us, leaving prints he knows we can’t use.”

  Baxter sat up straighter in his chair. “But when we finally do nail this psycho, we can tie him definitively to the crime. That’s a big deal.”

  Nodding, Esparza said, “There you go. What else?”

  Amanda said, “The killer changed the victim’s clothes after he killed her. There was no visible blood on what she was wearing when she was found. And Ellie felt like the clothes didn’t belong to her.” Amanda passed Esparza a full-length photo of Jenna sitting on the bench at Richards Park.

  “Right,” I said. “The whole outfit is dated—probably about fifteen years old by my guess. It’s also something Jenna would never have worn.”

  Baxter added, “We think the killer dressed the victim a certain way to satisfy a fantasy or to make her look like someone he knew.”

  “Also, Dr. Berg told us he found straw inside her boots, so there’s a good possibility she’d been in a barn or at a farm at some point,” I said. “Amanda, have you received the clothes from him?”

  “Yes, right before this meeting. I haven’t begun processing them yet,” she replied.

  “We also learned from Dr. Berg that the victim is missing a tooth…which had been removed after her death. And he found ligature marks on her wrists and ankles.” I cleared my throat, trying to rid it of the lump that was yet again trying to form there. “It seemed to him that she’d been restrained for a while.”

  Amanda threw me a sympathetic glance. She knew how much this case was getting to me.

  Fidgety and nervous, Sterling was not his usual cocksure self, either. “Anything pop yet from the old case files?”

  Baxter frowned. “Not yet, but we’ve got several people on it. We have the incident reports stored electronically, but to go into the kind of detail we need, the physical case files have to be pulled. It’s a lot of paperwork to wade through—it’ll take some time.”

  Esparza had been listening quietly as we spoke, writing notes on a legal pad he’d brought with him. He put his pen down. “I think we’ve got more going for us than we might realize. I sat down with the Sheriff and Frank Donovan this evening. They’re both distraught, obviously, but they were able to put their heads together and come up with a few cases from their time as partners that might fit with what the killer alluded to in his poems. I had your guys going through the files prioritize those cases.”

  Baxter nodded. “Good. Thanks, Chief. We’re also compiling a list of people who own silver Toyota Corollas, which is the type of vehicle Jenna Walsh got into at six PM on Saturday night, the last time she was seen. We can cross-reference those names with the old case files we pull. And we’re searching property records for anyone who owns a barn, which we can also use to narrow down a list of suspects. While we’re at it, we’re pulling addresses for abandoned and foreclosed properties with barns. If we get desperate, we can physically search those. I’ve also got an FBI cryptanalyst working on the two poems we found at the two death scenes.”

  After scribbling more onto his notepad, Esparza said, “Excellent work. I know it doesn’t seem like we have much to go on at the moment, but it sounds like with one stroke of good luck we could get what we need to start tracking this maniac down. Where are we with surveillance footage from the mall showing the pay phone where the tip call was placed?”

  Sterling shook his head, still seeming unconvinced that a clue was going to suddenly drop into our laps. “We’ve got someone scrubbing through it. The angle of the camera near the pay phone didn’t give us a shot of the guy’s face, so we’re having to look through the rest of the tapes, trying to track him to a place where there’s a better shot of him. Again, it’s going to take time we don’t have.”

  I said, “Speaking of phones, did the cyber guys find anything more on Jenna’s cell? Based on her call log, this new boyfriend of hers called himself ‘Derek.’ But his number was to a burner phone.”

  “We called it,” replied Sterling. “All we got was a preprogrammed voicemail. No signal to be tracked. He probably tossed it already. They haven’t found anything on her phone we can use.”

  Esparza nodded. “Okay. Well, I know you all are working your asses off on this, which the Sheriff and I appreciate. With how this whole thing is playing out, it sounds like we’re going to have to stay on this for a while. Make sure to take breaks, and don’t run yourselves into the ground. We need to stay sharp. If no one has anything else, then I’ll let you get back to work.”

  We all got up quietly and exited the room. I headed straight for the restroom to splash some water on my face. I’d been close to the case I’d worked a few months ago, but it had been nothing like this. In fact, this case was dredging up unwanted memories of my mother’s murder case for some reason. Even though I hadn’t known the pieces of victim we’d been finding one by one had been my mother, I’d had this sick, squirmy feeling throughout the case that was eerily similar to the unease bubbling inside me at the moment. I tried to bottle it all up and push it out of my mind. But knowing I had to go to the lab and study the clothes Jenna had been wearing, I couldn’t seem to completely shake it off.

  Thinking some chocolate might help, I headed out of the restroom to find a vending machine. I nearly ran into Baxter, who was leaning against the wall just outside the door.

  “Why are you loitering outside the ladies’ room?” I asked, only half-joking.

  “To give you this.” He handed me a Twix, my favorite chocolate bar. “I thought you looked like you could use it.”

  “Since you just gave me candy, I’m not going to bring up the fact that I think it’s super freaky that you can sometimes read my mind like a book. I was literally on my way to the break room just now to get a Twix.”

  Baxter grinned. “I’m a man of many talents. Unfortunately, one of them is not wading through old case files, which is what I’m going to be doing for the next few hours. When I get to the point where I want to eat my service pistol, would you want to go somewhere and get some breakfast? I assume the task of processing the victim’s clothing is going to have a similar effect on you.”

  Again with the mind reading. Like the candy bar, an invitation to breakfast in the morning was a nice gesture, but I wasn’t sure about sharing a meal with Baxter. I still
harbored some resentment toward him. Although I could easily keep it at bay while we were working, I didn’t know if I could handle being around him once I relaxed and let my guard down.

  He correctly interpreted my silence. The man was three for three. Sighing, he said, “I get it that I might not be your first choice for a breakfast companion. But if I have to go with Sterling, he is going to be the one on the wrong end of my service pistol. The guy is driving me nuts. Do me a solid and go to breakfast with me. He won’t try to come along if he knows you’ll be there.”

  I laughed for the first time all night. “Well, since you put it that way, I guess I have to say yes, if only to save Sterling’s miserable life.”

  ***

  When I got back to the lab, Beck was gone. I said to a bleary-eyed Amanda, who was staring at the AFIS computer in the office, “Did Beck ditch us in the middle of two active murder investigations?”

  “No, although I wouldn’t put it past him. Since we didn’t get a ton of evidence on either case, we’re trying to spread out our time and pull as few double shifts as possible. The department is convinced this is long from over, so like the Chief said, we need to save our energy while we can. Beck pulled a double on the Donovan case, so I took this one.”

  “Got it.” I tore into my Twix and took a big bite, feeling marginally better.

  Her eyebrows shot up. “Hitting the hard stuff already?”

  “Had to,” I mumbled. “Are the clothes still in evidence?”

  “They are. I have two more fingerprints to analyze and run through AFIS, but I know they’re more of the killer’s prints. He has an interesting tented arch pattern. Pretty uncommon.”

  “Well, that should make your life easier, in the unfortunate event you have another scene to process. I hope that’s not the case.”

  “Me, too.” She stared at me for a moment before continuing. “If there are more incidences tied to these cases…will you come back and work them with us?”