Thicker than Blood (Zoe Bentley Mystery)

by Mike Omer

It took Zoe a second to catch on. “Swenson was still here an hour ago.”

  “Yup.”

  “Could he have logged off with his phone? Or—”

  “I was with him an hour ago, Zoe. He didn’t log off with his phone.”

  “Then that clinches it. He isn’t Glover’s accomplice. He’s not unsub beta.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  She sighed. “The evidence didn’t make sense any other way. What did Dracula2 say on the chat?”

  “He wrote, ‘Sure, thanks.’ He was answering the question I asked him, if he got what he needed from the file.”

  “But he didn’t open the file?”

  “No. Maybe he figured out that it was a trap.” Tatum shook his head and crossed the room, slumping into an empty chair.

  Zoe groaned and leaned back. Looking at the task force room, it was impossible to guess that it was Saturday night. The majority of the investigators were in the room, talking on the phone, updating the whiteboards, tapping on their laptops. O’Donnell wasn’t there, but Zoe could hear her talking outside the room on the phone. She sounded furious.

  Martinez slid his chair next to hers. “I just got off the phone with Rhea Deleon’s doctor,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I’m trying to figure out why she was returning home so late from work. The doctor was one of the people Rhea talked to on the phone that day. Anyway, it turns out Rhea had severe anemia. Do you think the unsub knew that? Perhaps that’s why he targeted her?”

  Zoe bit her lip. “The evidence doesn’t look like he targeted her. It looked like a random abduction. But maybe it affected the taste of her blood. And that could change his behavior.”

  “That could explain why we haven’t found the body yet.”

  That was one of the many questions they were grappling with. Catherine and Henrietta had been found soon after their murders. In Henrietta’s case, Glover had made sure it would happen. But they were getting close to forty-eight hours since Rhea’s disappearance, and there was no sign of her body.

  “It’s possible,” Zoe said.

  “Maybe they kept her alive.”

  “Or maybe the unsub decided as a result to eat her entire body,” Zoe said.

  Martinez sighed. “You sure can give everything a positive spin.”

  “Cannibalistic behavior among serial killers isn’t rare, and it’s a natural progression from blood drinking.”

  O’Donnell strode into the room, fuming. She stomped over to Zoe. “I need a cigarette break.”

  “Okay.” Zoe frowned. “Why are you telling me that?”

  “Because I want you to come with me.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Neither do I. But I still need a break.”

  Zoe shrugged and followed O’Donnell out to the hallway. They crossed it and stepped into a room with a small gray couch, a round table with several magazines, and a potted plant. A large window faced the highway. Headlights twinkled as cars drove past. O’Donnell trudged over to the window and exhaled loudly.

  “What is this room?” Zoe asked, looking around her. It almost seemed like a waiting room at a doctor’s office.

  “It’s an interview room,” O’Donnell said. “For people we want to make comfortable. Family members, frightened witnesses, that sort of thing. It’s also a good place to chill, late at night, when you feel like punching a wall.”

  “Do you feel like punching a wall?”

  “I feel like punching my husband.”

  “Oh.”

  “And Bright. And Manny. And this entire damn department.”

  Zoe walked over to O’Donnell, unsure what she was doing there.

  “It was my husband on the phone,” O’Donnell said. “He was angry I left him with the kid on a Saturday night.”

  “It’s not exactly your fault that Rhea Deleon got abducted,” Zoe said.

  “That’s what I said. But it turns out some random detective from the department posted a picture of his children sleeping on Facebook an hour ago. And guess who’s Facebook friends with him? That’s right, my husband.”

  “So what?”

  “My husband,” O’Donnell explained, “thinks that this guy is maintaining a healthy family-work balance. He wants me to learn from him.”

  “You can explain to him that the entire task force is here.”

  “He doesn’t want to hear it, Zoe. If you just had to listen to his endless bitching like I did, you’d know.” O’Donnell shut her eyes. “Sorry for dragging you out like that. But I had to vent, and I have no one else in this damn place to talk to.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Besides, you’re a shrink, right? You’re probably used to it.”

  Zoe frowned. “I’m a forensic psychologist. When I talk to patients, they’re mostly violent criminals.”

  “I’m pretty violent right now,” O’Donnell said cheerfully. “So that works for me.”

  “I’m sure your husband understands.”

  O’Donnell shook her head. “He doesn’t. Not that it matters. I’m probably on my way out of Violent Crimes. Bright pretty much told me that a few hours ago. My husband will be thrilled.”

  “Oh.” Zoe recalled O’Donnell going to Bright’s office to talk to him. “I’m sorry. Is this because of that thing with your ex-partner?”

  O’Donnell shrugged. “It’s part of it. For a while I figured I could just try to hang in there. The rumors would pass. And if I handled my cases well, then at least Bright would see it’s worth keeping me. But two out of my five homicide cases in the past year are still open. And now this case is going nowhere. Bright isn’t stupid. No one wants to partner with me, and I have that thing with Manny hanging over my head.”

  “Well, I doubt Bright is actually paying attention to the rumors about you being a rat,” Zoe said. “Like you said, he isn’t stupid.”

  O’Donnell broodingly leaned her forehead on the windowpane. “I informed on Manny to Internal Affairs.”

  “Oh.” Zoe didn’t know what to say to that.

  “I didn’t do it because I was sleeping with him or sleeping with the IA guy, and I didn’t cut a deal. All the rumors are bullshit. But I did rat him out.” O’Donnell’s voice cracked.

  She seemed to curl into herself as she talked. She suddenly looked like a tiny, lost child. Zoe hesitated, then put her hand on O’Donnell’s shoulder.

  O’Donnell glanced at her, eyes wet. “It’s not like I have a stick up my ass. Some cops are dirty, but they’re still good cops. When I was in uniform, I saw my partner skim five hundred dollars off a drug dealer we busted. He wanted to cut it with me, and I refused. But I didn’t rat him out. This job . . . civilians don’t even know how many times a day cops need to fight temptations. People slip. Especially when everyone assumes we’re all dirty anyway. I get it.”

  “But with Manny it was different?”

  “He had drug dealers paying him on a monthly basis. He had a whole racket with two different defense lawyers—he busted dealers, gave them a lawyer’s card, and if that lawyer got the client, Manny got twenty percent. I saw him take money from a pimp twice. And he kept telling me I need to take some of it. That way, he’d know he could trust me. And you know what? I almost did. Because at that point it was either be a rat or be dirty, and I couldn’t even figure out which was worse.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  O’Donnell wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “No, I didn’t. You’d think I’d feel good about having a backbone or whatever, but frankly, half the time, I’ve regretted it. It would have been so much easier. Instead, I went to Internal Affairs and gave them what I had. And now I’m the department’s rat.”

  “You did the right thing,” Zoe said, feeling the hollowness of her words.

  “Yeah? Well, they don’t give awards for that.”

  Zoe squeezed O’Donnell’s shoulder. Then, after a moment of silence, she said, “I sometimes regret going after Glover.”

  O�
��Donnell blinked, looking surprised. “Why?”

  “After he got away, things weren’t the same for me. Some people thought I’d made it all up. I didn’t have a lot of friends. And it hasn’t changed since. I didn’t have to do it, not really; I was just a teenager. I could let the police do their job. It’s not like he was arrested because of what I did. He stayed free. Kept killing. So I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I just did nothing. Grown up to do something else. Hanging around with friends, maybe have a family like you. Without this thing hovering over me. Without getting creepy letters from him, without putting my sister in danger.”

  Neither of them moved or said anything for a few minutes.

  “I’m done feeling sorry for myself,” O’Donnell said.

  “Okay,” Zoe said. “Let’s go. I need to go over your transcripts of the interviews with the men from the list I gave you, in case you missed something.”

  CHAPTER 67

  Sunday, October 23, 2016

  His phone rang, making him jump. He’d been sitting in the kitchen staring at the morning sunlight filtering through the window. For how long? An hour? Two?

  He vaguely recognized the name on the phone’s screen. He needed to answer that call, just like he’d needed to answer the previous four, but he couldn’t find it in him. Answering that phone meant wearing his “normal” costume. It meant that he had to contain all those emotions and impulses and fears behind a facade of calm.

  And he couldn’t. He had lost control.

  “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Daniel asked.

  Daniel had returned last night, his face sheepish and apologetic. He’d taken one look at his friend’s eyes and had seen it really was Daniel, not the tumor, in control. So he’d let him in. Daniel had apologized, and he’d said there was no need to be sorry. He knew the tumor had done that, not Daniel. Besides, the woman was still alive. Daniel had been happy to hear that.

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. They’ll call back later.”

  But it mattered, he knew. He was letting his life fall apart. At some point, someone would notice. Daniel had told him over and over to make sure he maintained his routines.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  “Want to go for a walk?” Daniel asked.

  He gaped at his friend in surprise. Daniel never went on walks with him. It was too dangerous. “What if someone recognizes you?”

  “That picture doesn’t look anything like me.”

  That was true. Cancer had consumed Daniel’s body. His face was almost a skull, the skin stretched on it like shrink-wrap. His hair was falling out in clumps. He looked terrible.

  But at least no one would recognize him.

  He got up and opened the door to the bathroom. “We’re going out for a little while,” he said.

  The woman gave him a beseeching look. She didn’t look too great herself. He tried to recall when he’d last let her drink. That morning? The night before? He’d have to do that when they returned.

  They walked side by side, passersby ignoring them. He was relieved. When he was on the streets alone, people always stared at him. But when he was with a friend, they didn’t pay him any attention.

  Maybe people just thought that a man walking alone was strange. Maybe they liked everyone to be paired up. A man and his wife. A couple of friends. Boyfriend and girlfriend. A man and his dog. A mother and her child. Things had to come in twos. Just like in Noah’s ark.

  “We need to go hunting again,” Daniel said.

  “I know. But . . . can it wait? Just a few more nights?” He didn’t like the idea of leaving the woman alone in the house just yet.

  “You know we can’t.”

  It was true; they couldn’t. Daniel’s time was running out. And besides, he had stopped drinking the woman’s blood, giving her time to get better.

  They strode by a kiosk, and his gaze was drawn to the familiar face.

  Catherine, her eyes following him, a real-life Mona Lisa. He paused, transfixed. She knew his secrets. All his dark secrets.

  “She’ll tell everyone,” he murmured. “She knows.”

  “Not if we stop her,” Daniel said, just like he’d said two weeks ago. “Buy them. Buy them all.”

  The man in control approached the kiosk owner. “The Chicago Daily Gazette,” he said. “How much?”

  The vendor offered a copy to him. “One dollar.”

  “I want them all.”

  The man blinked, confused. “All?”

  “All the copies of the Chicago Daily Gazette.”

  “I have more than two hundred here.”

  “I want them all.” He took out his wallet.

  “I’ll have to count them.”

  That would take ages. And Catherine would be staring at him the entire time. “No. I’ll pay three hundred. For all of them.”

  The man considered it, then nodded, looking pleased.

  He took out three bills from his wallet. Daniel always insisted they carried enough cash with them. Plastic created a trail.

  The bag with the papers was heavy, but it didn’t matter. It felt good to be doing something about Catherine’s stares. “Let’s go home,” he told Daniel.

  CHAPTER 68

  “We need to review the case from the start,” O’Donnell said.

  Zoe nodded. She was right. Their current path led them nowhere. They had to contemplate other possibilities.

  The three of them sat in the situation room by themselves. It was Sunday morning, and several members of the task force hadn’t shown up yet. Zoe wondered if Albert Lamb was at church, preaching. If the congregation had gathered. She’d wanted to go there herself, see the service, but O’Donnell insisted they stay away, that after the previous day, their presence would be problematic. Bright had sent a detective who wasn’t related to the case to watch the proceedings and take a few pictures.

  “Let’s entertain the possibility that Glover’s partner, our unsub, doesn’t belong to the church at all,” Tatum said.

  An instant tug of rage. She almost snapped at him. Of course the unsub belonged to the church.

  Except maybe he didn’t. Did they actually have a shred of proof that he was a member?

  A profiler’s job essentially wasn’t finding the killer. That was always the police’s role. A profiler needed to point the police in the right direction. To reduce the group of suspects from everyone to a manageable crowd. But if the profiler made a mistake, if a part of his profile was wrong, the killer could be outside the tight group of suspects. And the cops would ignore him because he didn’t fit with what the profiler had said. The worst possible thing to do then would be to cling to the existing profile.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s assume I was wrong. The unsub is not part of the church community.”

  Tatum looked startled as she said it, almost as if she’d spoken in an alien language.

  “In that case,” O’Donnell said, “Glover chose Catherine as the victim for his reasons. Maybe she knew something about him. Maybe she’d seen him return to Chicago, and he was worried she would tell someone.”

  “And he met his accomplice somewhere else,” Zoe said. “Like on the dark web.”

  “We know Dracula2 was on the dark web,” Tatum said. “That’s where the vampires forum is.”

  Zoe waited for the rush of ideas to manifest, but all she felt was frustration. She tried imagining it: Glover approaching a stranger on the dark web, abandoning all his real-life charm, replacing it with chat acronyms and emojis. And convincing a stranger to go on a killing spree with him. Sometimes, an idea felt so wrong its presence in your brain was almost like a pebble in a shoe. It distracted you, everything else becoming hard until you got it out.

  “I don’t like it,” Tatum said. “It doesn’t fit. Glover wouldn’t put the cross on Catherine. He would take it as a trophy. And if the unsub didn’t know her, he wouldn’t have done it either, because he wouldn’t be aware it existed.”

  “And those c
rime reports,” O’Donnell said. “They do intersect with the area of the church.”

  Zoe exhaled, relieved. “So we think he’s in the church.”

  “It does fit. But he wasn’t on the list of names you gave me,” O’Donnell said.

  “Maybe he was and just had a good poker face,” Tatum suggested.

  “He is spinning out of control. It’s very unlikely he could withstand a prolonged conversation, not to mention a police interrogation,” Zoe said. “Could you have missed his odd behavior when you interviewed him? A facial tic? A stutter?”

  “No,” O’Donnell said sharply. Zoe recognized that tone well. She used it often enough when people suggested that she’d messed something up.

  “Let’s assume he wasn’t, then,” Tatum said hurriedly. “Who else do we have?”

  “All the other people on the list are very unlikely,” Zoe said tiredly. “But we can go over each one and discuss why.”

  “What about people who aren’t on the list?” Tatum said.

  “There are names on Patrick’s list that don’t appear on the list you got from Albert,” O’Donnell agreed.

  They had the lists printed out in three copies, and each of them went over them, looking for discrepancies.

  “I’ve got twelve extra names,” O’Donnell finally said.

  “Me too,” Zoe said.

  “I have thirteen,” Tatum said. “You missed one. Patrick Carpenter isn’t on either of the lists.”

  He was right. Patrick’s name wasn’t on the list O’Donnell had gotten from Patrick. And when Zoe had written down all the members with Albert, they’d ignored Patrick, since obviously she already knew who he was. They stared at the lists for a few seconds in silence.

  “It could be Patrick. It fits,” O’Donnell finally said. “He knew Catherine well. He lives in the area we marked likely for the killer’s address.”

  “He’s married, though,” Tatum pointed out. “Wouldn’t his wife notice something strange?”

  “She’s been in the hospital for almost two weeks,” O’Donnell said. “She was hospitalized just after we assume the unsub stopped taking his medication.”

  “He’s been absent from church, supposedly because of his wife,” Zoe said.