Kill Again

by Neal Baer

  Claire fidgeted. She would have been a fool not to expect this. She just didn’t expect it to come this quickly.

  “I’ve pulled Nick Lawler back into my life,” she blurted before she could stop the words from leaving her lips.

  Now it was Fairborn’s turn to shift uncomfortably. “About Rosa Sanchez’s case,” she guessed.

  “Yes,” was all Claire could manage.

  “After I told you not to get involved in her disappearance.”

  Claire wasn’t going down without a fight. “I was concerned about her well-being, and I thought it was my duty to make sure she was okay,” she explained. “And I was right,” she said to Fairborn.

  “Right about what?”

  Claire knew she now had to go the distance. “I’m sorry I went against your wishes, Doctor. But I have to ask you to please not repeat what I’m about to tell you to anyone.”

  “But of course I won’t, dear,” came Fairborn’s reply. “You know I can’t tell anyone anything you confide to me about your patients.”

  Claire let out a deep, relieved breath. “Rosa was murdered,” Claire said.

  Fairborn grabbed the armrest of her chair with her hand. “Oh my God,” she said. “What happened?”

  “She was kidnapped, and I saw it happen.” Claire told her mentor everything that had transpired the past few days. When she stopped talking more than twenty minutes later, Fairborn’s hand was still clutching the armrest, so hard that had it been someone’s neck they’d have been long dead.

  “And your involvement in all this is with the knowledge of the police department this time?”

  “They asked me to do it,” Claire confirmed.

  “You should’ve been honest with me, dear,” Fairborn scolded.

  “I know. But I was told I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “I understand, but I’m not just anyone,” her mentor said.

  Claire felt like a child caught swiping a candy bar from the store. She couldn’t argue with Fairborn, who was right on every point.

  “Still, you were acting in your patient’s best interest,” Fairborn said.

  It sounded as if Fairborn was trying to find a way to let her slide.

  “Doctor Fairborn,” Claire said, “you’ve been nothing but understanding, and compassionate, and accommodating, and forgiving of my situation. I’ve asked more from you than I ever could’ve expected—”

  “Stop,” Fairborn said, putting up her hand for emphasis.

  But Claire couldn’t. “It’s like I’ve been sucked back into the vortex of last year. Only this time there’s a new twist. . . .” She stopped, the thoughts rushing through her head, then spoke with difficulty. “I . . . I should have told you I called Nick,” she said.

  “Claire. I know. It’s okay.”

  This stopped Claire from further self-recriminations. “It is?” she asked.

  “You went past the point where I would’ve stopped you,” Fairborn continued, “but at the end of the day you were doing the job Paul Curtin trained you to do. If overzealously,” she added.

  “Are you going to ask me to stop?” Claire asked, dreading the answer.

  “No,” replied Fairborn, “because I know you need to do this, for yourself and for Rosa. But you’ve got to keep me in the loop. You’ve got to balance it with your work here. And if I get wind of you—let’s call it ‘misbehaving’—like you did last year, I’ll have to change my mind.”

  “I didn’t see it as ‘misbehaving,’” Claire said, trying not to sound defensive.

  “You cut your hair and changed its color to bait a serial killer,” Fairborn reminded her. “That’s for the police to do, not a psychiatrist. Forensic or otherwise.”

  “I promise I won’t go over the edge,” said Claire, though she had no idea if she’d be able to keep it. “But we’ve got a real puzzle on our hands, and not a lot of hope of being able to solve it.”

  “Maybe you need some fresh eyes on it,” Fairborn said, her curiosity piqued.

  Claire was not sure she knew the woman who was speaking to her. Was Fairborn so intrigued she wanted in on the investigation of Rosa’s murder?

  Claire tried to clarify. “What do you mean by ‘fresh eyes’?”

  “You’re still teaching in Walter’s class, aren’t you?” Fairborn asked, referring to her professor boyfriend who taught a criminal forensic science seminar at Manhattan State University.

  “Yes,” Claire said. “In fact, I’m due there tomorrow morning.”

  “Then why don’t you make it a class project?” asked Fairborn.

  Claire tried to hide her surprise that Fairborn would suggest such a thing. And yet she saw the merit in it—after all, she and Nick were at something of a dead end.

  “It’s an interesting idea,” Claire said, “but the police are so paranoid of leaks they’d never go for it. We wouldn’t want the university being responsible for tainting the investigation.”

  “How so?” asked Fairborn, who, though an experienced psychiatrist, was new in the forensic end of the profession. It was no secret that she was looking forward to relinquishing the reins of the fellowship program as soon as the search committee found a suitable candidate to fill the late Paul Curtin’s shoes.

  “The police would argue they can’t risk a group of students learning details of the cases that only the killer would know. It could create an evidence problem if and when the murderer goes to trial.”

  “You don’t have to tell them everything, only what’s been in the media,” Fairborn suggested.

  Which, of course, wouldn’t work. “Except for the last murder, there hasn’t been anything in the media—”

  She stopped. Smiled.

  “I know how I can make it work,” Claire said.

  CHAPTER 15

  “No way,” Nick argued. “I don’t care how brilliant your students are. We can’t involve them in an active investigation.”

  “They won’t be,” Claire retorted, sitting across from Nick at his worn Formica kitchen table. “At least, as far as they know.”

  She reached for her cup of coffee, which was embossed with an NYPD detective’s shield. But instead of displaying Nick’s shield number at the bottom, it sported the letters DEA, an acronym for the union to which Nick and every other city police detective belonged.

  Claire took a sip and yawned. It was nearing midnight and Nick’s daughters were long in bed. Yet neither she nor Nick seemed to want to go to sleep. As tired as she was, sitting here arguing with him beat the alternative of her sterile apartment, where she’d get into bed alone with thoughts of Rosa that would render her sleepless anyway.

  “It’s too much of a risk,” said Nick.

  “What else have we got?” Claire asked. “We’ve had no luck identifying the victim out in Brooklyn. We don’t even know where to start.”

  In fact, she was understating their dilemma. All the residents of the fire-gutted building in East New York where the latest skeleton had been found were accounted for.

  “We don’t know where the victim lived, where she was taken from, how old she was—anything,” she reminded him. “What have we got to lose?”

  Nick said nothing, having already drawn his line in the sand. As he took a swig of coffee, Claire rubbed her right index finger along the tiny, nearly invisible scratches on the table’s surface and thought about all the meals eaten around that table when Nick’s wife and mother were alive.

  “So as usual, now the ball’s in my court,” Nick said.

  “A flat no isn’t a viable option. We’ve gotta think outside the box,” she replied.

  Nick smiled. The two of them knew each other’s tricks.

  “Putting it on me isn’t outside the box,” he observed. “It’s business as usual.”

  “So’s being stubborn,” Claire retorted.

  She couldn’t help but think they sounded like an old married couple. And this stalemate needed to be broken.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it�
��s too much of a risk.”

  Now it was Nick’s turn to grin. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “Do what?” Claire asked.

  “Manipulate me with the guilt trip. You don’t think you’re wrong. Stick to your guns.”

  Claire laughed and her hand grazed his. Nick felt drawn to her. He wanted to kiss her. Claire looked away. It wasn’t the first time that had happened and it was getting more and more uncomfortable.

  But not because he’s overstepping. Because I want this. At least I think I do....

  “Okay,” she now said, sitting up straight. “I wasn’t trying to manipulate you, but I do think we should give my students a shot.”

  “You understand that if they come up with something, it would be by accident, right?”

  “As long as it leads to the right place,” Claire said, “what difference does it make?”

  “Good morning,” boomed Professor Walt McClure as he stood in front of the six master’s degree candidates taking his seminar in criminal profiling. It was early the next morning, and the students were just settling at the conference table, shaking their umbrellas from the morning rainstorm, pulling out laptops, sipping coffees, grabbing muffins from the two boxes McClure brought with him each week.

  At age fifty-five, thin, of average height, with his straight brown hair beginning to show some gray at the temples, McClure wore horn-rimmed glasses and a brown corduroy suit that gave him an air of the ultimate academic. In fact, he was anything but. After earning a master’s and doctorate while rising to the rank of captain in the Philadelphia Police Department, the death of his wife of ovarian cancer prompted him to retire and move closer to his three grown children, who’d all wound up in New York City. He then built a solid reputation and bank account as a consultant, but was tiring of the constant travel just as Manhattan State approached him with an offer he couldn’t refuse: they matched his income and guaranteed him tenure, which meant he had a job for life. What was at the time a no-brainer became a true gift as McClure found himself more fulfilled as a teacher than he’d ever felt as a cop.

  To his left sat Claire in her work clothes, a burgundy suit, and an overdressed Nick: charcoal pin-stripe, white-and-royal-blue-striped shirt with French cuffs (held closed by NYPD cuff links in the shape of a detective’s shield), perfectly matched paisley tie. Claire couldn’t help but think he looked as bullish as any Wall Street investment banker.

  “I saw you in the Ledger, Detective,” Miguel Colon said, his head resting in hands held up by bent elbows on the table, stretching the dagger tattoo on his fully flexed right bicep into something more like a sword. “Like, what, a year and a half ago?”

  “Yeah, probably,” Nick said, trying to keep a poker face. The newspaper story to which Miguel referred had nothing to do with the case he and Claire had cracked. “That was right after my wife killed herself with my gun. The forensics came back inconclusive, so someone with a hair up his ass decided I must’ve murdered her. They investigated for half a year, but of course came up with nothing.”

  “Am I allowed to ask if you did it?” asked Cory Matthis, who looked like he’d gotten right out of bed and come to class.

  As his classmates snickered and rolled their eyes, Nick turned to him. “Good for you,” he said. “My answer is no, but beyond that I’m invoking my right to remain silent and I’m not answering any more questions without my lawyer.”

  He said it so seriously that the entire class, including Claire and McClure, cracked up, bringing a smile to Nick’s face as well. This had been his intention, to break the ice with these students as quickly as possible.

  Justine Yu, in jeans and sweats and no makeup, was sitting beside Cory and now crinkled her nose. “You just got laid, didn’t you?” she said more than asked, as if it were fact.

  Wes Phelps snickered. “How the hell would you know?” he asked Justine.

  “She’s more than familiar with the scent,” quipped Miguel, which everyone in the room knew was a reference to her sexual preference for women.

  Cory, for his part, turned redder than the acne on his face and said nothing as Professor McClure put up a hand. “Enough of this, and as Cory’s attorney I’m invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.” His eyes swept his students, some still smirking, to make sure they got the message. When he was sure they’d behave themselves, he continued. “Now, Doctor Waters has already told you about how she and Detective Lawler broke the case of those murdered women last year. She brought him here today for a different reason entirely.”

  “That’s right,” said Claire. “And though he didn’t know it when he tried to get a confession out of Detective Lawler, Cory’s question goes right to the heart of the subject, which we’ll call theory of the crime. Anyone care to guess what that means?”

  “It’s not a trick question, is it?” asked Kara Wallace.

  “No tricks here,” Claire assured her.

  “Then it’s obviously what the person investigating thinks happened,” Kara said.

  “For the purposes of today’s class, that’s only partially correct,” Nick confirmed. “Because it’s not that simple.”

  To Claire’s surprise, Nick rose and headed to a wall-mounted dry-erase board at one end of the room, picking up and opening a black marker. “I worked homicides for a long time,” he said as he wrote THEORY OF THE CRIME in block letters near the top of the board, underlining it with a flourish before turning back to the class. “When you get to most murder scenes, you almost immediately know what we call the cause of death.” Which he wrote under his heading as a bullet point as he spoke. “You know, gunshot, stabbing, blunt-force trauma, et cetera. Then,” he continued, starting a new bullet point and writing, “we want the manner of death.”

  “Aren’t they the same thing?” asked Leslie Carmichael, her long dreads tucked up into a wool cap this morning. Nick finished writing manner of death on the board and turned back to the class.

  “He wouldn’t be asking if they were the same,” said Wes Phelps.

  “You’re right,” said Nick. “The manner of death is more a legal term, and it can only be determined by a medical examiner. For example, say we’re called to the scene where somebody washes up on the beach at Coney Island. What’s the manner of death?”

  He looked at the class. They looked at him. For the first time, not one voice spoke up. Claire couldn’t help but grin, and when Nick noticed he did the same.

  “How about it, Doctor Waters? You wanna tell them or should I?” he offered.

  Claire eyed the students. “The answer is it depends. Because this time, Detective Lawler did ask you a trick question.”

  The students reacted, feeling a bit less dumb that none of them could answer. Nick saw his opportunity and continued.

  “Why does it depend? Well, just because we find a person shot or cut or bludgeoned or drowned doesn’t make it a homicide. Let’s say some guy washes up on Rockaway Beach. If there’s water in his lungs, we know what?”

  “That’s easy,” said Kara. “He drowned.”

  “Then what’s the manner of death?” Nick quizzed her.

  “Is accidental a possibility?” the girl asked.

  “Yes, it is,” said Nick.

  “Then I’d say accidental.”

  Miguel Colon shook his head.

  “Dude with the blade on his bicep isn’t buying it,” said Nick.

  “Nope,” Miguel answered, “because we don’t know why he drowned.”

  “Go on,” Nick prompted him.

  “Okay, so let’s say the guy was on a boat. If he fell off, it’s accidental. But if someone pushed him off, it could be murder but it would look the same.”

  “Exactly,” confirmed Nick. “Now, here’s another case, and this one is legendary. Happened back in the sixties. Woman’s driving on the Belt Parkway. Just so happened a detective on his way to work was behind her. All of a sudden, this woman drifts from the left lane all the way over to the right, and keeps going onto t
he grass until she hits a tree. The detective pulls over. The driver, in her twenties, dead. Any guesses as to the manner of death?”

  “Medical,” said Wes Phelps. “She had a stroke or a heart attack, right?”

  “And if that were the case, you’d be right,” Nick answered. “Let me tell you, that’s exactly what the detective thought. What if I told you that when the ME got her on the table down at the morgue, they found a small, bloodless bullet hole just behind her right ear?” He stopped, looked at the students. “So we now know the cause of death was a gunshot wound. What’s the manner of death?”

  Again, the students were stumped. Then, Justine Yu, who’d kept quiet until now, raised her hand. “It has to be a homicide, right?” she asked.

  Nick closed the marker and put it back on the holder. “Tell me your theory of the crime.”

  “Someone knew she went that route every day, waited for her to pass the spot where the car started to drift, and shot her,” Justine said.

  “You’re an idiot,” Cory Matthis muttered.

  “The name calling aside,” Nick chided, “tell me why you said that.”

  “Because,” began Cory, “no way in hell can someone get a shot off that perfect at a moving car.”

  “Lee Harvey Oswald did,” retorted Justine. “Twice. Including a head shot.”

  “If you believe it,” Cory said, waving his hand dismissively. “And assuming it’s true, Kennedy’s car was going, like, four miles an hour, wasn’t it? And Oswald was trained to shoot in the marines, I think. This girl was on the Belt Parkway, so unless she was in slow traffic, the shooter would’ve had to be in a car going at exactly the same speed as the victim’s or the physics of that shot make it impossible.”

  His classmates eyed Cory like he’d gone insane. Not Nick. Very slowly, he applauded five or six times, bringing a smile to Cory’s face and shock to those of his classmates.

  “He’s right?” Justine asked, flummoxed.

  “Even that detective who saw it thought like you did,” Nick said. “But yes, your classmate is correct.”