The Body Counter

by Anne Frasier

  His next words surprised her. “Kill me. It would be a great finish.”

  “I’ve killed enough people.” It said a lot that she didn’t want to end the life of someone as evil as he was.

  “It would be an honor to be killed by you,” he said. “I’ve admired you for a long time.”

  Was that what this was about? Had it been for her benefit? No, she couldn’t think that. How could she live if she thought all those innocent victims were dead because of her?

  “Kill me or more people will die.”

  The train’s speed changed. Brakes were applied, the engagement so violent that screaming passengers were tossed out of seats. Backpacks and purses flew through the air and slammed against windows.

  In the confusion, Jude rushed him. His gun discharged as she brought him to the ground while the train wheels screeched and the car continued to slow. She knocked the weapon from his hand and pinned him down, all the while hating that she had to touch him.

  The car came to a halt; doors were pried open. The SWAT team rushed inside dressed in armor and carrying shields. They secured Pisa, two of them dragging him upright, his wrists cuffed behind his back. He didn’t take his eyes off Jude, smiling at her as if he knew a secret.

  Passengers slowly emerged from beneath seats. Thankfully, no one had been hit by the stray bullet from Pisa’s gun. They gathered in the aisle, crying and hugging one another. Uriah burst into the car, his shoulders sagging in relief when he saw Jude. She asked him whose idea it was to slam on the brakes. He said it was his.

  While the sky grew dark and lights strobed silently around them, someone took her statement. A medic bandaged Uriah’s head, cut by shattering glass, and told him he’d need stitches. Then Jude and Uriah caught a ride back to the television station in a patrol car.

  The wounded were already gone, but from where she stood on the sidewalk, she could see the guard still slumped over his desk.

  “Detective Fontaine.” Jude’s messenger bag and helmet were handed to her by an officer attending the scene. He nodded and returned to the building.

  Jude ducked under the strap of her bag. “I’m going home.” She’d seen enough.

  “I’ll drive you,” Uriah said.

  “I prefer to ride my motorcycle.” When she saw his expression, she added, “I’ll be fine. I’ll be careful.”

  “You did good tonight,” he told her.

  “Not good enough. People were shot. One person dead.”

  “It could have been much worse.”

  Someone called Uriah’s name.

  They looked up to see his father and a woman who must have been his mother striding down the sidewalk. Jude couldn’t do this. Meet someone new.

  “I can’t talk to them now.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “And I need to get home to break this new development to Iris. I want to see how she reacts to the news.” She was hoping for a confession and an arrest, yet she still felt sympathy. There was no justification for murder, but the girl had suffered years of molestation that her parents had denied. That would warp any mind. Leo Pisa and his crew had given her what she needed. Family and what might have seemed like a way to correct the wrongs that had been dealt her for so long. “Then I’ll meet you downtown and we can interrogate Pisa.”

  Uriah turned and walked up the sidewalk to meet his parents. They hugged, and Jude heard his mother’s exclamation of joy at finding her son relatively unharmed. Were they just arriving, or had they been at the gala when they got news of the shooting?

  Jude’s motorcycle had a ticket on it. She pulled it off and tossed it in the street. Straddling the bike, she tugged on her helmet, tucked the tattered hem of her dress under her thighs, and roared away, past the flashing lights and police cars, media, and onlookers. Fifteen minutes later, she pulled into the parking garage of her building and brought the bike to an abrupt halt. Her phone vibrated. She pulled it from the pocket of her jacket and checked the screen. A text from Iris. It was composed of two words: Number eight.

  CHAPTER 49

  Jude raced for the interior parking-garage door, boots pounding up four flights of the stairwell, taking two steps at a time to burst into a corridor stained with red footprints. Her apartment door was ajar. She pulled her gun and pushed the door open the rest of the way. Iris was lying on the floor, surrounded by a pool of blood, a number eight carved in her forehead.

  Breathing hard, legs threatening to buckle, ears roaring, Jude distantly noticed Iris’s hair had been braided. Beside her on the couch was a purple hairbrush. The table was strewn with empty beer bottles, along with a partially eaten pizza. BCA might be able to lift prints from the bottles, and it would be easy to trace the pizza purchase. A glance at the side of the box told Jude it had come from a place not that far away. It had been delivered or picked up, either one traceable. All these thoughts collided in her head at roughly the same time, and were over and done in seconds.

  She crouched beside Iris.

  Dead bodies were vacant. It was the best way to describe them. The person was gone, leaving behind flesh and bones and blood.

  Iris’s throat had been cut right through the bandage. Sliced deep, adequately silenced, the killer making sure she wouldn’t survive this time. Jude checked for a pulse anyway, then mentally reconstructed the timeline from the moment she’d left the apartment. How long was she at the professor’s? Fifteen minutes? That made it highly unlikely Iris had been killed by Leo Pisa; he would already have been at the telethon.

  She made a quick sweep of the apartment. Her closet and drawers had been ransacked, but there was nothing for anyone to steal or find. The killer was long gone, and Roof Cat was safe and hiding in the box spring.

  She wasn’t sure why it mattered that she change clothes, but she felt the urgent need to get out of the gown. She stripped it off and tossed it on the bed. Standing in her underwear, hands shaking, she called Uriah and broke the news.

  “Are you okay?” He sounded unusually concerned. Had her voice been shaking too?

  “Yes.” She hung up, clenching and unclenching her fists to get herself under control.

  She got dressed, putting on clothing that wasn’t frivolous, that was more appropriate for death—jeans and a black T-shirt—and waited in the living room with Iris.

  There was no need to let Uriah in when he arrived ten minutes later, out of breath and too tense for the calm sorrow of the room. She’d left the apartment door wide open. “BCA’s on the way,” he said.

  While Jude stood and watched with her arms folded over her stomach, he snapped on a pair of disposable gloves from the evidence kit he kept in the trunk of his car. He was still wearing the tuxedo, and his white cuffs were stained with blood. “Because of the telethon shooting, crime techs are spread thin, so it might be a while. In the meantime, some of our people are coming to begin processing the scene.” He handed her a pair of gloves, then began moving around the apartment. “Anything in the bathroom?” he asked. “Did the perpetrator shower?”

  “Not sure. I didn’t notice any attempt to hide anything or clean up anything.” She slipped on the gloves.

  “Flagrant, careless, or they had to leave in a hurry,” Uriah said.

  Jude picked up the purple brush and held it high. “Look.” A long, light hair was trapped in the bristles.

  “Our blond girl.”

  Jude could have gone on about how she shouldn’t have left Iris alone, but that would be too easy, and it would direct attention to her rather than the victim. This moment was about Iris, so Jude said no more. Instead, she slid the brush with the single hair into an evidence bag, sealed and signed it.

  Uriah tilted his head to one side as if listening to something beyond the room. “You hear a cat?”

  Jude retuned her ears and heard it too. Pitiful meows, coming from somewhere deep in the building. It sounded too far away for Roof Cat. “I’ll be back.” She needed to talk to Elliot anyway, find out if he’d heard or seen anything.

>   On the way to the third floor, she paused long enough to take photos of the bloody footprints on the marble steps. At Elliot’s door, she knocked, but there was no answer. Maybe she was stalling so she wouldn’t have to go back upstairs, but this time, instead of breaking in, she retrieved the key from the caretaker. “I’m worried about him,” she said.

  The caretaker eyed her latex gloves and gave her a key. Checking on a neighbor was an acceptable excuse, while spying on him wasn’t. When she got back to Elliot’s apartment, Uriah was waiting outside the door.

  “Could be connected to Iris’s murder,” he said, pulling his weapon. She turned the key in the lock and they slipped inside. Elliot’s black cat came running, tail straight up, meowing loudly. His food dish was empty, and there was no sign of his owner.

  Jude tried to remember when she’d last heard Elliot downstairs. “He can’t have been gone long.” The cat still had water. She banged around, searching kitchen cupboards, found a bag of cat food, and poured dry kibble while Uriah topped off the water dish. They put down the bowls at the same time. The cat went straight for the food.

  “Poor thing,” Uriah said.

  Watching the animal, Jude pulled out her phone and called Elliot’s number. It went to voicemail. “I’m going to see if his car’s here.”

  She checked the garage, plus the street where he sometimes parked. No sign of his vehicle. Back in his apartment, she gave Uriah the news.

  “What’s the connection between his disappearance, the blond girl, and Iris?” Uriah asked aloud.

  “That’s what I’m wondering.” She glanced around the space. “His laptop and camera are gone. I hate to say it, but I’m guessing he and the blond girl left together. It explains why she was in the building at all, and how she knew Iris was here.”

  “I’m not sure,” Uriah said. “If he left today, the cat would have been fed.”

  “Not necessarily. Maybe he didn’t care about the cat. Maybe he just got the cat as a conversation starter.” She opened another cupboard. Cereal. Drinking glasses. A half-eaten bag of Oreo cookies. The cookies weren’t charming and funny anymore. “Maybe he neglected him with no thought about the harm he was doing.”

  “Mass murderers sometimes love their pets.”

  “Mass murderers often start out by killing their pets.”

  “We know there were more than two people involved in at least one of the killings,” Uriah said. “We saw video footage of four people walking down the sidewalk. And Elliot was at every crime scene. Killers love to watch the aftermath.”

  Jude wanted to keep searching the apartment, but Uriah stopped her. “Let’s go. If he’s a suspect, we can’t be here without a warrant. Nothing we find can be used against him in court. In the meantime, we’ll try to find friends or relatives who might have a clue to his whereabouts. Or maybe we’ll get the information from Pisa.”

  She opened a drawer.

  Uriah slammed it shut. “I’m serious. We have to go.” He motioned for her to leave.

  From outside came the wail of sirens. Then someone was pounding on the foyer door. They left the apartment, locking it behind them. In the lobby, Uriah apprised officers and crime-scene specialists of the situation. Evidence cards were set up on the steps. BCA agents, with their heavy black cases, squeezed past.

  “There’s a cat up there,” Jude shouted after them. “In the bedroom. Don’t bother him.”

  Yellow crime-scene tape was strung, and people inside the building and out began to gather, hands to mouths, eyes worried. “Go back to your apartments,” Jude told them. “Please.”

  Beside her, Uriah issued a BOLO on Elliot.

  “We need to get that search warrant ASAP,” Jude said.

  Her phone rang. Unknown Number. She answered. “Detective Fontaine.”

  “This is Ruthie Logan. We met outside the house where you were held captive. You told me to call you if I had any information.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You might want to come to the shelter I stay in sometimes.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “I think you’ll want to see this.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A blond girl named Clementine.” She gave Jude the address. It was Light in the Darkness, the same shelter where Clementine and Blaine Michaels had stayed.

  CHAPTER 50

  Jude and Uriah arrived at the shelter fifteen minutes later. Ruthie, the woman who’d called, was waiting for them. She pulled Jude aside and glanced over her shoulder. Behind her, lights were dim and people were milling around, some clutching clothes, others a blanket and pillow, ready to stake out their cot.

  “This way.” Ruthie crooked her finger and led them to a bathroom with a row of shower stalls on one side, sinks on the other. Stuffed under a sink were a floral dress, bloody towels, and black tennis shoes. Above the sink was a framed affirmation.

  ALL I SEEK IS ALREADY WITHIN ME.

  “At first I thought abortion or miscarriage,” Ruthie said. “Something like that, but Clementine was grabbing her stuff like the devil was after her, and I started wondering if this might be connected to the murders.”

  Using a paper towel, Jude leaned under the sink and rolled one of the sneakers over. Then she pulled up a photo taken on the stairs of her apartment building. The tread pattern matched.

  “What can you tell us about Clementine?” Uriah asked.

  “A lot of these youngsters are rail kids.” The woman looked from one detective to the other. “They ride for free all over the country, and this is just one of the places they stop, usually in the summer. I’m gonna guess she’s catching a train out of here.”

  “Do you know where she might be going?” Jude asked.

  “Clementine and her boyfriend came here from California. Maybe she’s going back there. They usually hop the train downtown where the tracks cross the river. You know what I mean? Near the Gold Medal sign and Saint Anthony Falls. You better hurry if you want to catch her.”

  It was the place where Michaels had died. Jude and Uriah were already moving.

  CHAPTER 51

  Instead of parking near the spot where Michaels’s severed body had been found, Jude and Uriah opted for the stealth approach. It would allow them better control of the situation. Backup would be notified if and when it was needed.

  Car doors were gently closed, and the detectives moved to a small overlook that afforded an expansive view of the tracks below.

  Most Minnesotans could tell you the Mississippi River started at Lake Itasca, over two hundred miles north of Minneapolis. Jude had once gone on a school field trip to the headwaters. Before that disappointing day, she’d always pictured the beginning of the river as a small trickle, maybe something bubbling up from a field, or running softly from a crack in a slab of granite. No. The Mighty Mississippi started in a nondescript lake that looked like any of the other ten thousand lakes in Minnesota. But due to the restrictive terrain of the area known as the Iron Range, the river became powerful very quickly. Unlike the more placid Mississippi River of Iowa and Missouri, this one raged red through narrow gorges, and slipped beneath sheer black cliff faces topped with towering evergreens. The violence of the water sculpted the landscape in a breathless and beautiful way. It carved deep chasms and rushed through rugged valleys until the water lost the red of the Iron Range to finally reach downtown Minneapolis and Saint Anthony Falls. It was here, along the gorge carved by the raging river, that train tracks ran parallel to the water, then turned to cross. This was the place where the train hoppers boarded.

  “Access to the tracks is almost impossible from this outlook.” Uriah scanned the area for a better plan.

  The city was never dark, and the night was cloudy. Light reflected off the water and bounced off clouds. Jude strained her eyes and caught a movement. “I think I see something.” A dark shape appeared, then vanished behind a wall of steel held together with rivets the size of fists. She pointed. “Someone’s on the bridge.” She braced
her hands on the metal railing, prepared to swing a leg over. “I’m going down.”

  “Too steep,” Uriah said.

  “I can do it.”

  “I’ll circle around to the Third Avenue Bridge. We can come at her from both directions.” He turned and ran for the car.

  The darkness added another layer of complexity, but hopefully it would also keep Jude hidden from the person below. The terrain was steep, almost straight down in places, but she spotted a faint trail. She wasn’t the first to go this way.

  It was treacherous, but not impossible. A couple of times she slid and caught herself, once by digging in the heel of her boot, another time by grabbing a branch that luckily remained embedded in rocks and soil as she skidded to a stop.

  Descending, she shifted her gaze from the ground to the place where she’d spotted the movement on the bridge. With a few feet of incline left, she dropped with soft knees. Head down, she ran for the tracks, then followed the curved, parallel metal rails to the bridge. A few yards from the joist where she’d spotted the shadow of movement, she pulled her gun. Without waiting for Uriah, who might or might not get there before the train, she quietly spoke Clementine’s name. No response or appearance, so Jude got serious.

  “Step out with your hands up.”

  “Oh my God.” A girl with long blond hair appeared from behind the slanted metal beam, hands in the air. “Are you punking me? I didn’t think anybody really said that.”

  Was she alone? “You’re under arrest for the murder of Iris Roth.” Was Elliot with her?

  “You thought Iris was such an angel,” the girl said, “but she wasn’t.”

  Past tense. “I’m listening.”

  “Iris killed just as many people as I did, but you were protecting her.”

  “Even bad people need protecting from bad people.”

  She let out a loud snort. “Iris even came up with the idea of killing her family so it would look like another piece of performance art.”