by Su Williams
“Yeah. I think I get it.”
She rambled on some more, showed me some recent ‘tags’ and identified the taggers. Some of it looked more like art than gang banger scrawl. She drove by the Milk Bottle Café, where Nick and I stopped on our way home from training at Laser Quest, back in the Spring. I thought of the man, a wounded boy in a man’s body, that I’d seen start the fire that gutted the city landmark just a few years ago. I knew the case was cold in finding him and I wasn’t really sure I wanted to investigate his story any further, given the trauma he’d suffered as a child. But the thought of cold cases piqued my curiosity.
“Hey, you guys have a Cold Case Unit, don’t you?” The idea of solving some of Spokane’s unsolvable crimes bubbled through my thoughts, despite Nick’s warnings not to get involved and risk exposing the Caphar.
“Sure. Any case in particular you’re thinking of?” she asked as she turned south, back toward the Courthouse.
“None I can think of specifically. I just have a thing for the TV show. They only show reruns now, but it makes me curious about unsolved crimes in the city.”
“Well, I’ll take you to meet Conrad Bannister. He’s the sergeant in charge of the Cold Case Unit. You’ll love him. He’s a real joker.”
I expected to trudge down to a dingy basement office with metal shelves loaded with row upon row of brown cardboard boxes covered with dust. So when Molly pressed ‘two’ on the elevator keypad, I smiled and laughed inwardly. And when we walked into a six by six foot office space with southern facing windows and sunlight streaming over verdant hanging plants, I laughed out loud.
Molly turned and grinned. “Not what you were expecting?”
“Huh! Yeah-no.”
A tall man with grey at his temples and a bulging belly covered by his brown suit jacket stood to greet us.
“Sergeant Bannister, this is Miss Emari Sweet. She’s my ride-along for the day and wanted to know more about our Cold Case Unit.”
The sergeant shook my hand. He smiled when I didn’t just let him squeeze my fingers like a prissy girl, but placed my hand palm to palm with his. Daddy always told me to never give people the ‘limp fish’ handshake.
“Nice to meet you, Miss Sweet.”
“Thank you, Sergeant. Likewise. And you can just call me Emari.”
He smiled again, bigger this time, like I was his new best friend—or maybe he was contemplating what joke he could play on me. “What would you like to know?”
“Um, I’m not sure. Just the basics, I guess.” I didn’t really have a plan. I was just basking in the excitement of potential solutions to chilly crimes.
“All right, then. Well, Spokane currently has sixteen unsolved ‘cold cases’,” Sergeant Bannister said, using air quotes. “Three of those are missing persons, the rest are homicides. We have two detectives assigned full-time.”
“So, how long does it take for a case to be considered ‘cold’?” I asked.
“There’s not really a set time. If we’ve exhausted all possible leads it could become cold in as little as seventy-two hours. Some consider that a case doesn’t become cold until the detective who investigated it retires. So fifteen to twenty years after the fact.”
“Holy crow, that long?”
Bannister nodded.
“I’ll leave you two to it then. I’ve got some paperwork to do downstairs before shift change,” Molly said with a smile.
The detective and I said our goodbyes to the beat cop and plunged into the cases.
“Where’s the evidence kept? It doesn’t seem like there’d be enough room for sixteen cases worth of evidence in this room.” The urge to memoryprint some of that evidence tingled in my fingertips. If he asked how I came about the information I’d confess to being clairvoyant.
A wicked grin twisted Bannister’s mouth and he rubbed his hands together. “Down in the dungeons, my pretty,” he teased.
“I knew it! I knew there were dungeons in this castle,” I joked of the courthouse that closely resembled a medieval, sandstone castle complete with crenulations and grinning gargoyles.
The sergeant guided me to the elevators with a hand at the small of my back. A gentlemanly touch. I read him as we walked. He was a kind-hearted man, recently divorced after fifteen years of marriage—which he fully blamed on the job. He had two children, a boy and a girl, that he saw on weekends and adored beyond measure. ‘To serve and to protect’ meant more to him than a slogan. He was one of those men born to be a policeman.
The elevator doors rumbled open to a garish, florescent-lit corridor. The third door down on the right side had a sign that read ‘Evidence Lock Up: Major/Cold Case’.
“This has been our most frustrating case,” he explained a moment later as he placed a cardboard box on an examination table. “It’s from ’73, a little before the World’s Fair. This woman was found in a construction site in Riverfront Park on Havermale Island.” Back in Spokane’s genesis, Havermale Island was a small stretch of rocky land that divided the Spokane River into two branches. The first settlers used the island as a garrison against attack from the Nez Perce Indians.
A shudder crawled up my spine as I thought of my last foray to the island across that suspension bridge. The bridge where I lost my mortal life and became Caphar.
Bannister pried open the box and set it reverently aside. It may have been over forty years ago, but the dead still deserved his respect. “You’re not squeamish, are you?”
Given the amount of blood and gore I’d endured in fighting the Wraith, a little bit of rusty, decades-old blood wouldn’t bother me.
“Naw. I can handle blood and guts.”
He chuckled. “No guts. Just a lot of blood.”
The woman’s blood-spattered clothes were neatly sealed in plastic evidence bags. He lifted them out and handed them to me.
“We can’t open them, obviously. But at least you can see what’s available to the investigation.”
The evidence bag disappeared to my touch as I pushed into the memories embedded in the blood.
She runs, shedding her high heeled shoes that twist her ankles and hinder her speed. She shouldn’t be here, she knows. The other girls warned her of a ‘creepazoid’ lurking in the construction area where they solicite the workers during the day. But she just needed to get to the other side of the park—something she now wishes she hadn’t done.
He’s gaining, she can feel it. Like the gravel ripping her feet and the crush of her heart as it pounds inside her chest, she can feel it. Fear turns to ice in her veins. His fingers clasps her hair and jerks her sideways. She crashes and skids across the sandy lot. He pins her beneath him, between his legs. His full weight crushes the air from her lungs. He flips her to face him as she scratches and claws at him, but his primal leer turns her blood to glaciers. She can’t even muster a scream before the jagged rock in his left hand comes crashing down on her skull.
I gasped and dropped the bag on the table. The sergeant’s hand was warm, heavy, reassuring on my shoulder, anchoring me to the present.
“All right there, Miss Sweet?” he asked, concern coloring his voice.
I placed my palm on my beating heart. “Yeah. I guess it was a little surprising to see so much blood,” I lied. Bannister began placing the evidence bag back in the box. “I’m okay. I’d like to see the rest—except maybe the photos.”
Bannister scowled in contemplation. “All right, then.” He took out another bag: the rock the man used to bludgeon her to death. I hefted in my hands. He hated ‘whores’.
“Was she a prostitute?”
“Why do you think that?” he asked with arched brows.
“Well, why else would she be down at the construction site that late at night?”
“Hmph! Yeah, she was.”
“Where were her injuries? Like what side of her face?”
“Why do think her injuries were to her face?”
I showed him the clothes again. “The concentration of blood is near the top of her
blouse.”
“You sure you’re not a detective in disguise?” he kidded. If he only knew. “You’re awfully observant for a civilian.”
I flashed him a modest smile. “That’s all it is: observation.”
With hands on his hips and pursed lips, he gazed down at me. “The blows were to the right side of her face and head.”
“So, he was left-handed?” I deduced.
“It appears so.”
“Any witnesses?”
The sergeant sorted through the file. “An actor from the Civic Theatre was on his way to his apartment downtown when he says he saw a man running away from the site wearing dark-colored clothes. But he wasn’t close enough to get a description and only came forward when he saw the police at the scene the next day.”
“Did she suffer?”
“They don’t believe so. He must’ve been a big man. And strong. The coroner’s report says she was probably dead after the second blow. They reported at least five separate impact points.”
I shuddered at the image of violence. “Was she raped?”
The detective blushed at my candor. “No. There was no evidence of rape.” He watched my face as I contemplated the facts. His fingers on my shoulder squeezed gently. “Miss Sweet, I…”
“It’s Emari, Sergeant. And I know you know who I am. Doesn’t everybody in this town, by now?”
He smirked and nodded. “Are you sure this is the best thing for you to be doing right now?”
“If not now, when?” I smiled to silence his protest. “It’s actually kinda therapeutic for me.” What evidence do I need to get a lead on this guy?
He shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t see how, but okay.”
“Okay. So there’s no statute of limitation on murder, right?”
“No. Major crimes like murder, assault and rape have no statute of limitations. So if we figure out who any of these guys are, they’ll be arrested and tried. But we have to have solid evidence, and that’s tough after so many years.”
I thought about that in silence for a moment. “She probably fought back. Did they scrape her nails during the autopsy?”
Bannister handed me the bag. “Recently run through CODIS. No matches.”
“So he hasn’t committed any other murders as far as you can tell?”
“Nope. There were no other matching cases, solved or cold,” he explained. “But they also said the tissue was too degraded to get a good read. So they only had so many markers to go on. It wouldn’t ever stand up in court.”
“Hmm. Anything else?”
“Not really.”
There has to be something else. “With the velocity of the swing, isn’t it possible the assailant cut himself on the rock?”
The sergeant flipped through the file of paperwork on the case. “There doesn’t appear to be an analysis for that.”
I hefted the rock back and forth in my hands, and fingered the sharp edges through the plastic. I turned it over and over, trying to get a read on this guy. If I could’ve touched the victim, I might’ve been able to see her last memories, seen her murderer through her eyes. But after so long, her remains were crumbled and food for worms. As I grazed me fingers across the surface of the rock, I picked up something different than the icy fear in the girl’s blood. This felt searing with rage.
Rage at himself. Rage at the prostitutes that brazenly flirt during the day under the blazing sun in this made-over train yard. And with the internal rage comes the image of the man, the image he holds of himself. Tall, about six foot three. Blonde. Lanky, muscular and fast. Icy blue eyes that seem to frighten even him, because they remind him of his father. He hates the whores, because that’s what his mother calls the woman that ran off his father. His father who left him to the abuse of an angry mother.
“Miss Sweet—Emari? Are you all right?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine,” I lied again.
He took the rock from my hands. “I think that’s enough. You’re starting to scare me a little.”
I scrambled for a way to present my thoughts. “Um…can I give you my profile of the assailant?” I asked with a demure smile. He scrubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “Just for fun?”
“Sure. I guess. Just for fun,” he conceded.
“I think your guy is tall—maybe about six foot three, because of the power he used to wield the rock. I think he was fair haired, so usually that means blue eyes. I think he’d be about nineteen or twenty at the time of the murder—so he’ll be sixty-ish now. I think he was a child from a broken home, and he’ll have been abused by his mother after his father abandoned them for another woman. I think his mother called the other woman a whore, so when one of the guys on the construction site used that word about the prostitutes sashaying around, it triggered a lifelong rage and he laid in wait for one of the girls to come by. I think he’s never served in a job that’s required fingerprinting or blood-typing. And I think once he was done with the girl, it freaked him out so bad he would never do it again.”
Sergeant Bannister stared down at me in shock. “Are you sure you’re not with the CSI team?” I laughed and shook my head.
“I should’ve known I’d find you two down here in the dungeon,” Molly said from the doorway.
“Of course. Where else would we be?” I said and stood from my chair. Bannister stood speechless behind me.
“I gotta get back out on patrol. You ready to hit it?” she asked.
“Sure thing.” I turned back to the Cold Case cop. “Thank you for your time. I hope you’ll let me know if you decide to follow up on that blood evidence.”
“Uh. Yeah. I’ll do that,” he stammered.
Chapter 21 Once Upon Your Dead Body
Back out on the streets in the patrol car, Molly glanced at me from the corner of her eye and back at the road.
“What?” I finally asked.
“Did you crack a case?”
I laughed. “Hardly. We just talked about a case from ’73. I gave him my purely uneducated profile. I was just messing around. Guess I’ve seen too much Criminal Minds and CSI Miami.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bannister speechless. No wise cracks. Nothing. You must’ve wow’ed him with your uneducated profile.”
The radio beeped. “Unit 363. Unit 391 is in route to a 10-54. Please respond Code 3.” And the dispatcher gave the address.
Molly eyed me again. “Dispatch, be advised I’m still 10-8 with a ride along.”
“Copy 363. Proceed with protocol.”
“Copy dispatch.”
“10-54?” I asked.
“Possible dead body.” She switched on the lights and siren, and flipped a U-turn. “Are you up for it? I can have another unit come for you when they’re available.”
“No. I’m fine. I’m doing this to see what your day is really like,” I argued.
“It’s not like on TV, Em. And on an average day, we don’t get a DOA.”
“I know.”
Her brows crunched together, while she scanned my face.
“Emari, are you sure this is wise? Given your—history?”
“I’m fine. I promise. I’ll walk away if I get freaked out.”
Her lips puckered in disagreement. “You’ll have to stay in or by the car.”
“I understand.”
When we arrived on scene, it was apparent there was no ‘possible’ about the dead body. There was definitely a corpse crumpled next to a garage in a dirt alleyway. I sat in the car and observed the police procedure from a distance. A crowd was growing like ants at a picnic. Gawking neighbors and police scanner jockeys pressed against the police tape erected around the crime scene. News crews were already on scene and setting up for the next live feed. Molly conferred with the responding officer, nodded and turned back to me.
“This is going to take a few hours to gather evidence and reports,” she said.
“Yeah. Gonna get pretty boring for me, huh?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You want that r
ide now?”
“In a little while. I’d like to watch.” She nodded and walked back to the scene.
I leaned against the fender of the car, basking in the sunshine, and watched the crowd gathering. If I could just see the last images the victim saw, I could help solve this. Nick and Sabre’s angry protestations ricocheted around in my head. I closed my eyes in what I hoped looked like sun-worshipping, and stretched my mind toward the victim. But the buzz of thoughts of so many minds knocked me off course. My chest flashed warm as Ari pricked my skin with her spindly spider legs. Ouch! All right! I’ll use your magic too. I cupped the pendant under my palm and focused my thoughts through the melee and out to the body laying on the sandy ground in a clump of tall, heat-scorched grass. Together, we crept closer to the victim, and I imagined my hand resting on his forehead. Who killed you? I asked him.
Just as the first pink of morning blushes across the eastern horizon, the victim stumbles down the rut-filled alley. His face is already broken and bloody. His lip and left eye are swollen to the point of almost bursting the skin. He doesn’t feel much of the pain. He thinks he’s far less severely injured than he is. The fifth of Jack he’d kept to himself to keep him warm on the chilly night numbs everything. But he’s stirred a hornet’s nest with someone. And that someone is in thundering pursuit, and aimed at inflicting more damage. The pursuer, a gangly man, addict-thin and obviously hopped up on something, reaches the wobbling drunk and spins him around. Violent words are exchanged between them and the pursuers face glows crimson. He withdraws a switchblade, with a rapid click and the shoosh of ejected metal. He leers at the drunk and shoves the blade, over and over, up under the man’s ribcage, lacerating his diaphragm and leaving him without breath. I count five thrusts—and one more for good measure. The victim’s eyes open wide, like the lens of a camera, and captures a portrait of the man who murdered him. Perfectly framed in his vision is the face: gaunt and ashen, stubbled and scarred. The blue eyes blur into a single eye, as the shadow of death collapses his final view.
I gasped and choked, as the sensations of the man’s death drenched my body. Ari’s spiky legs pierced my fingers and brought me back from the brink of the victim’s death. I’d just witnessed the murder through the victim’s eyes. After catching my breath, I scanned the bystanders, looking for the face in dead man’s final memory. The investigators were combing the crowd for witnesses, apparently coming up short. Molly strolled back to my side and stood quietly at my side, examining my eyes as they roamed the crowd.
