Thicker than Blood (Zoe Bentley Mystery)

by Mike Omer

  “Was Henrietta Fishburne raped?” Bright asked.

  “Not as far as I can tell,” Terrel said.

  Zoe blinked, startled. Up until now, she’d assumed it was a foregone conclusion. “Are you sure?”

  “The victim’s knees and palms are bruised in a manner that seems to indicate she was forced to her knees,” Terrel said. “However, I found no indications of recent penetration.”

  She’d been stripped, forced to her knees, and strangled from behind . . . but not raped. And then there was the pentagram and the knife in the woman’s stomach. And that damn phone call. Zoe tried to turn those things in her mind, find some explanation for them. It didn’t fit with Glover’s profile, nor with his partner’s.

  “Any progress on the Lamb case?” Bright asked.

  “So far we have no definite suspect, but we are quite certain he belongs to a church in McKinley Park,” O’Donnell said.

  She summarized what they had so far, mentioning Zoe and Tatum’s involvement at profiling the suspect. “We already have several statements that confirm that Rod Glover was part of the congregation, and considering the choice of Catherine Lamb as the first victim, we think it’s probable that Glover’s accomplice, unsub beta, belonged to that congregation as well.”

  “That’s quite a leap, isn’t it?” Valentine asked. “Since we know Rod Glover was familiar with the victim, the unsub could be anyone at all.”

  “There are indications that the unsub knew Catherine Lamb as well,” Zoe said.

  “Like what?”

  Zoe explained about the necklace and mentioned the covering of the body.

  “But Rod Glover could have done that as well, right?” Valentine pointed out.

  “It doesn’t fit his profile.”

  “Killers can be unpredictable. We can’t base the investigation on a theory that has nothing solid to support it.”

  Was Valentine only arguing because she’d made him look like an idiot? Well, for one, he could blame only himself. “I’m not saying we limit our work to investigating the congregation members, but this is a highly likely theory.”

  “We have limited resources,” Valentine said. “We have to decide how to allocate them.”

  “Okay, okay.” Bright raised his hands. “How many parishioners in that church?”

  “We couldn’t get a definite number, but over the last few years, there have been hundreds,” O’Donnell answered.

  “Hmm. For now I agree with Agent Valentine,” Bright said. “There’s nothing concrete that ties the second murderer—the unsub—to the church’s congregation, and interviewing hundreds of parishioners is something we can’t spare any time on.”

  “We’re already working on the list,” O’Donnell said. “And we can start by checking the ones with a criminal record.”

  “Fine. Start by making a list, and then we’ll see.” Bright checked his watch. “It’s been nine hours since Henrietta Fishburne was found and about thirty-eight hours since she was killed. I want both these cases investigated together. I’ve discussed it with Captain Miller from South, and with the chief of the bureau’s Chicago field office, and we’ve agreed to form a task force, led by me.”

  Zoe saw O’Donnell’s eyes narrow. She had been the one to catch the first murder case. Zoe intuited that O’Donnell had expected to lead the investigation herself. Instead, Bright had just taken over.

  “We can use this room as a situation room,” Bright continued. “We will assign additional manpower to the task force later. Let’s get going. We need to get these monsters off the streets of Chicago.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Three glowing monitors flickered in the dark room. Each monitor displayed angry Twitter arguments, vicious forum debates, toxic comments, violent images. The room was lit not by lamps or by ceiling lights, but by hate.

  Laughing_Irukandji leaned back in his chair, slurping ramen noodles, occasionally putting the bowl down to click a link or type a quick angry comment.

  He had an actual name, but he didn’t call himself by that name anymore. That name belonged to his physical body, which he no longer cared about. His real life was beyond those monitors, traveling at light speed through cables that spanned the world. And there, he was Laughing_Irukandji.

  He opened Twitter feeds on two of his monitors, watching raging arguments bloom, dozens of furious Twitter users screaming in revulsion, a new comment appearing every second. He smiled, reading through choice comments as they shouted about racism and misogyny. They assumed they were arguing with actual people. They were actually engaged in a shouting match with five bots. Bits of brainless scripts, just vomiting whatever Laughing_Irukandji told them to. He got that tingle of satisfaction, imagining all those people gnashing their teeth as they hammered responses, arguing with nothing.

  He had at any given moment a few hundred bots, his small army of chaos, masquerading as men and women, Democrats, Republicans, teenagers, middle-aged men and women. His favorite at the moment were three bots pretending to be celebrities. Just that morning, thousands of Instagram users were shocked to see one of their favorite fashion models announce that Hitler was right about many things.

  He slurped another glob of noodles and winced as he accidentally chewed with his aching tooth. It’d been bothering him for a few days now, but he wasn’t about to go to the dentist and check it out. Last time he went, the dentist actually showed him how to brush his teeth, as if he were a child. He came back home furious and sent his bot army to troll the bitch’s Facebook page, sending her threats and sexual propositions until she shut down her profile.

  That’d teach her.

  Aside from his bots, he had viruses and Trojan horses that did his bidding, replicating through the net with a speed that astounded even him. He had access to computers in China, Russia, France, England, Israel, Australia . . . the list went on. Here, sitting in his chair, his throne, he wasn’t just a man. He was a god.

  He browsed to his favorite troll forum. One of the users had cracked the password of his neighbor’s phone and found nude photos on it. Laughing_Irukandji took a few choice photos, entered the girl’s Facebook account, and, through it, sent the pictures to all of her friends. Another glimmer of satisfaction. But just a glimmer. It wasn’t a rush like it used to be.

  These days, he needed more.

  He checked his finances. He had three strains of ransomware running, and they each provided him with a few hundred dollars a day. He kept them low scale, no need to get greedy. Getting greedy was how people got caught. And Laughing_Irukandji had no intention of getting caught.

  He then browsed his preferred websites. Everyday Feminism, ChicagoPride, ThinkProgress . . . he read the articles carefully, feeling the fury rising in him. He cultivated his emotions with care. A gardener, watering and tending his anger, and hate, and venom. Sometimes it was hard to care. But he did his best to keep the fire going.

  An alert popped up, and he tensed. A message from him. He felt the rush of anticipation and excitement as he clicked it.

  The Twitter comments kept materializing on one of the monitors, unnoticed. He read the message from Jack_the_Ripper over and over again, and in the darkness, he smiled.

  CHAPTER 31

  Tatum stretched in his seat and rubbed his eyes. For the past hour he’d been studying the two murder case files, trying to outline the similarities and the differences, trying to understand the progression in the minds of the murderers.

  Serial killers changed and adapted. They constantly obsessed about their last murder, the things they could do differently next time. They often changed their behavior because their confidence grew. Sometimes they just shifted their behavior as their fantasies and desires became more intricate. If he could figure out why they did things differently this time, perhaps they could predict the changes next time, as well.

  But as difficult as it was to do with one murderer, it became infinitely harder with two. For example—Catherine Lamb had been covered, while Henrietta Fishburne had
been left on display, posed grotesquely. Was it because Glover didn’t want this victim covered? Was it because neither of the men knew this woman, so they didn’t care? Or maybe it was because the unsub’s fantasy somehow included this abhorrent spectacle? He’d actually listed all the possible reasons as they occurred to him, stopping when he reached ten. This was the opposite of useful. A profiler’s job was to tighten the killer’s characteristics, narrow the pool of suspects. If he explained all the various ways things might have transpired, it would only serve to muddy the waters.

  He looked around the situation room. Zoe sat alone at the far end of the large table, looking at crime scene photos, biting her lip. Agent Valentine sat a few feet away from her, typing on his laptop. Koch was working one of the murder boards, painstakingly drawing a timeline of the Henrietta Fishburne murder.

  The crime scene photos dominated the murder board. One shot of the entire battered body, framed in the circular pentagram. Then close-ups of the ligature marks, another shot of the bite mark, and a third shot of the knife in the victim’s body.

  Above was a photo of Fishburne taken from her Instagram account. She was smiling, leaning back on the railing of a bridge. The scenery seemed European. He hoped it had been taken on a long vacation and that Henrietta had had the time of her life. The contrast between the smiling woman and the mutilated corpse was difficult to stomach.

  “What do we know about her?” Tatum asked Koch.

  Koch took a moment to collect his thoughts. “Henrietta Fishburne was a paralegal working in a large law firm located in the Chicago Loop. She lived with her husband and daughter in Riverdale—that’s a neighborhood in South Chicago. She was a dedicated employee, worked hard.”

  “Was it customary for her to leave so late at night?” Tatum asked.

  Koch shrugged. “According to her husband, in the past three weeks, Henrietta always worked late, but she usually left the office by eight in the evening. However, Monday night she was asked to stay with one of the firm’s lawyers, working on an important case. So she left at half past midnight. Which meant she was on the train that stopped at 147th Street at one thirty-five in the morning.”

  “Did anyone know she was going to stay late? Did she tell someone?”

  “Some coworkers and her husband.”

  Tatum nodded, satisfied, and sat down next to Zoe. “Fishburne didn’t usually leave the office so late,” he said. “It was a one-time thing.”

  Zoe raised her eyes from the photos on the table. “So even if the killers had followed her around or had watched the parking lot for a few nights, they couldn’t have expected her to leave work so late.”

  “The attack was probably random. The killers had been waiting in the parking lot for someone, anyone who fit, to show up when there were no nearby witnesses. Henrietta Fishburne just happened to fit the bill.”

  “That matches Glover’s usual MO,” Zoe said. “Lurk in a remote location, nearby a water source, patiently waiting for a victim to show up.”

  “But it doesn’t match the murder of Catherine Lamb.”

  She nodded. “That parking lot at the train station must have been one of Glover’s spots.”

  “His spots?”

  She raised her eyes to him. “There were no murders between 2009 and 2016.”

  He guessed he was somehow supposed to link the two sentences together, but as often happened when talking to Zoe, he felt at a loss. “So?”

  “Glover lived here for at least ten years. But he only killed two women, both in 2008. What did he do the rest of the time?”

  “Indulged in fantasies. Masturbated to keep his sexual needs in check.”

  “That’s right. But to keep them exciting, he’d need to freshen them up a bit every once in a while.”

  “Why? How do you know he didn’t just relive his earlier murders over and over?”

  “If that had been the case, the entire porn industry would have collapsed long ago,” Zoe said, a bit impatiently. “Sexual fantasies need variety. Especially with obsessive sexual predators, like Glover. And we know he responds to certain locations. That’s why he almost always goes nearby water. So he’d probably get a buzz when fantasizing at his special locations. I assume he’d go to spots that fit his MO and fantasize. He’d wait, just like last night, for a woman to walk by, alone, and he’d concoct a fantasy in his mind about how he would grab her, rape her, and strangle her to death.”

  “So you’re thinking he simply returned to somewhere he used to frequent before?”

  “I’m almost sure of it. I’m betting he knew the train schedules by heart.”

  “But he didn’t actually rape Henrietta Fishburne. Why?”

  Zoe tapped one of the pictures. Tatum studied it closely. It was Henrietta’s ribs, blooming with bruises.

  “They confirmed this bruise is a result of a kick,” Zoe said. “He kicked her when she was down.”

  “Or his partner did.”

  “I don’t think so. His partner wants blood. Whatever the reason, this was his focus. And he got the blood he needed. But Glover desired something and didn’t get it. So he got angry, and he kicked her.”

  Tatum thought about it. “You think he couldn’t function?”

  “Yes. Maybe it’s the cancer. He must have been infuriated.” To Tatum’s surprise, she sounded worried.

  “So?”

  “It might significantly shorten the time until the next murder.”

  They both let the silence stretch. Tatum was the first to break it. “Why the pentagram, the knife, and the phone call?”

  “Well, like you already figured out, he wanted us to find her like that. And he wanted it to happen as soon as possible, probably before the body could decompose significantly.”

  “But why?”

  “He could be trying to throw us off,” Zoe said, doubt in her voice.

  “Or he could be doing it to send you a message,” Tatum suggested. “Maybe he wanted you to see the body.”

  “Why a pentagram, then? That makes no sense. There’s no significance to a pentagram for me or Glover.”

  “It could be about publicity. Now that his time is running out, he’s trying to leave his mark.”

  “That’s possible,” Zoe conceded. “Glover never showed any interest in publicity before, but his circumstances changed significantly.”

  Agent Valentine sighed audibly from his seat. “You’re obviously missing the point.”

  Tatum glanced at the man. During their time in the Chicago field office, he’d gotten to know Valentine a bit. He was a nice enough guy, with a good sense of humor. But Valentine’s patronizing manner toward Zoe set him on edge. “Which is?”

  “There’s a religious aspect to these murders. First murder, they place the necklace of a cross on the victim’s neck, right on the marks of the noose that killed her. In the second murder, they draw a pentagram and then pose the victim like a sacrifice to the devil, a knife in her stomach. I bet that’s why he called to brag about it. Maybe he thinks he’s the next prophet or something.”

  “Rod Glover isn’t a religious fanatic,” Zoe said. “He couldn’t care less about it.”

  “Maybe. People change when they face death. Like you said, his time is running out.”

  “That’s absurd. It doesn’t align with his profile at all.”

  “The man has brain cancer. Who knows what’s going on in his head right now? He might be completely deranged. Besides, it might be his partner’s idea. The guy’s already drinking blood. You think devil worship is beyond him? Hell, maybe that’s what the blood drinking is all about.”

  “Fine,” Zoe said curtly. “Your suggestion is noted. Thank you.”

  Valentine shrugged, returning to his work.

  “Here’s something else that’s bothering me.” Zoe pointed at a pair of photographs. One was from the Lamb crime scene—the markings of bloody footprints pacing around the body. The other was from the recent scene—indentations of footprints in the mud circling a part of the
pentagram. “We assumed he was out of control in the first scene, which was why he was pacing around the body over and over again. But he seems to be doing the same thing here.”

  “Here they’ve been drawing the pentagram, posing the body,” Tatum pointed out. “They’d have to walk around it repeatedly.”

  “But it almost seems to be in a sort of pattern. See? Three paces, and he stops, turns to face the body. Then he steps sideways twice, and then here . . . three paces, and he turns to face the body. In the other scene it’s similar. I checked with O’Donnell. In both cases it’s the unsub’s footsteps, not Glover’s. It looks like some sort of obsessive ritual that follows the murder. Something that might not be related to the blood.”

  “What does it tell us?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing yet. But we need to look for other patterns. Perhaps this man has a set of obsessive-compulsive rituals he does. If that’s the case, it would be visible when talking to him.”

  “We’ll keep an eye out for that.”

  “Where’s O’Donnell gone?” Zoe asked, glancing around.

  “She went with Ellis to look for that crack addict and get another look at both crime scenes.”

  “We should go and have a look at the parking lot too,” Zoe said.

  “Tomorrow morning?” Tatum suggested hopefully.

  “I want to see it tonight, when it’s dark. That’s how they saw it.”

  Tatum sighed. “Of course you do. Let me finish up, and we’ll go there together.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Zoe stepped into her motel room, letting the door click shut behind her. After visiting the train station’s parking lot, she’d meant to go back with Tatum to the police station and keep working. But a chill had crawled up her spine. She had to take a break. So she’d asked Tatum to drop her off at the motel.

  The dark presence of Henrietta Fishburne’s death festered in her mind. She could feel it like a physical presence, straining against her skull. She had to let it out.