Drop Dead Perfect

by Rick Murcer

  “The old man says we’re all going to die from something, and I . . .”

  Ellen’s words caught in her throat as she swung around the curve and saw the flashing lights of several Chicago Police Department squad cars and at least two unmarked detective units. She swore under her breath. She’d become so wrapped up in her own world, she’d almost forgotten why they’d been called to the scene. Big Harv was right; she had to get her head screwed on straight. Her ex wasn’t worth the aggravation, and the distraction could cost her a job she loved. But of course, she had told herself that a thousand times before.

  “I knew this wasn’t exactly a low-profile situation. But this seems like overkill,” Oscar said.

  Ellen remembered the look on Big Harv’s face and knew why the response from the Chicago PD was so intense. She knew that the old case he’d worked all those years ago still haunted him—and that he’d do anything to make sure it didn’t happen again.

  “You’re right, but let’s get to work,” she said.

  She exited the Ford Explorer and grabbed her crime-scene kit—her rock. With Oscar at her heels, she hurried toward the park’s entrance, ID in hand. The two uniforms guarding the scene and keeping the oglers away from the body nodded them through. Ellen led the way toward a park bench about a hundred feet to the right. Several blues had formed a semicircle around the area, with four detectives standing just outside of them, per procedure. She could see someone sitting on the bench and felt her heart leap. Bodies weren’t typically found sitting up, at least in this situation, and she knew even from a distance that Clara Rice’s body had been staged.

  Ellen looked up to the sky and closed her eyes. Not even the fresh scent of a new spring could stem the tide of dread that threatened to overwhelm her.

  “Damn it,” she whispered, glancing at Oscar. The look on his face showed that he was feeling the same foreboding.

  Clearing her thoughts, she grabbed the yellow crime-scene tape from her pocket, tied one end to the rustic wrought-iron fence, and handed the other end to Oscar. In three minutes, he’d orbited the guardian cops and made a complete circle back to her. The radius was approximately seventy-five feet, and that was about as good as they could hope for. The probability of finding evidence any farther out was virtually zero, unless there was something blatantly apparent, like a gun or shell casings . . . or another body.

  Fortunately, there was still a fair amount of light, and nothing obvious appeared outside the perimeter, yet. A moment later, after a quick tour beyond the perimeter, holding a camera in one hand, tugging absently at her earring with the other, Ellen stood in front of the most bizarre display she’d been exposed to as a cop and a CSI.

  She stared, turned away, shivered, and then did it again. A different kind of anger began to grow within her. The kind of anger her friend Kate called righteous anger. It was righteous for a reason: no one deserved to be put on display like this.

  Beautiful Clara Rice was positioned on the curved, green bench, legs crossed, fully made up, eyes wide, not a black hair out of place. She was wearing a red, low-cut, long-sleeved designer dress, with matching shoes and handbag, and a color-coordinated stone necklace.

  Her appearance was stunning, but attention to detail and fashion wasn’t all the killer had managed to communicate. Good God, Ellen thought.

  For the third time in sixty seconds, she felt a tremor run the full length of her spine.

  Taped to Clara’s breasts was a sign with two chilling words marked in large, red print.

  “NOT HER”

  CHAPTER 5

  “What the hell took you so long to call me? Don’t talk. I told you to call me the minute, the very damn second, you received a report like this one. Is that so freaking hard to understand?”

  Captain Harvey Patterson shifted the handset to his left hand, which was shaking with emotion. He wasn’t just angry . . . He was scared.

  “Sergeant J. T. Foster. Didn’t I just tell you to stop talking? You not only didn’t tell me about this one, you didn’t tell me about the one last night. Does it sound like I care about some lame-ass, twenty-four-hour policy? I want to know about any possible kidnappings of women even remotely resembling this situation. Now do it. I can’t wait to hear your explanation when you get your scrawny ass up here to talk about your total incompetence—and your damn demotion to meter maid, skirt and all. Now send me those reports, and I mean right now.”

  Big Harv slammed the phone into its cradle and heard the handset crack. It slowly broke in two, dropping to the floor in slow motion. It was hardly the first time. He’d needed so many new phones over the years that they were now taking them out of his pay. He didn’t care. Most of the time, it was worth it. Besides, he had more important things to worry about.

  His e-mail alert buzzed, and the screen flashed. Sergeant Foster’s e-mail had made it through at warp speed. Amazing what a little ass chewing can accomplish. He opened the two attachments, clicked his mouse, and waited for them to print, mumbling to himself as he did. He just couldn’t understand not following instructions and orders. His military background had always served him well, but these days no one seemed to possess that kind of discipline.

  Back in the day, men and women had listened and responded to instructions because there had been severe consequences for keeping one’s head firmly planted in one’s ass and making mistakes. In this day and age, the unions and the shrinks protected everyone who screwed up, and no one accepted responsibility for anything. They all just blamed a lack of proper upbringing, stress, or God.

  Ellie’s face flashed across his mind. She had never ducked from the truth; she met everything head-on. It was hard not to feel a wave of pride. After those first few weeks, when it had sunk in that her shithead husband had left her, she’d stepped up, just like he and her mother had taught her to do. But she had changed in some not-so-good ways, too. Her shitty attitude had made her a nightmare to work with over the last year, but it seemed she was working her way through it. Though he was hardly the patient type, he exercised restraint in her case as much as possible. It didn’t hurt that she was also the best forensic tech on the force, maybe on the planet, and that always carried weight. Father or not, he knew he could count on her to get it right. That meant something.

  Big Harv shook his head, snatched the reports from the printer, and began to read the details of the first one filed this morning, and then the latest from just two hours ago, before laying them side by side on his desk.

  Both missing women were under thirty and attractive. Career professionals with good income. Both were single and apparently not dating. Both had missed dinner appointments with their friends and hadn’t responded to phone calls or visits to their apartments.

  He studied the information on Joannie Carmen. It was odd to report someone missing in such a short time frame, but he’d learned over his twenty-eight years on the force that people knew their friends and family better than any police department could. When someone called in a missing-person incident this soon, there was almost always a good reason.

  The other woman, Holly Seabrook, had been missing since the evening before. Her car had been left in a downtown parking garage, and the computer system cross-referenced her missing-person report with the towing records. People didn’t just leave their cars, especially expensive sports cars, in public parking garages.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  His thoughts traveled back some twenty-six years to his first real case as a young detective working on the South Side. The details were still so vivid, it could have been yesterday. That case had never left him. It never would.

  It had begun with just one young-missing-woman report. The Chicago Police Department had taken its sweet time investigating, even after the by-the-book twenty-four-hour waiting period had passed, thinking she’d show up eventually, like most of them did. But the police had been wrong. She’d been found the next day,
strangled and dumped near an abandoned warehouse in Hyde Park. The scene was horrific, especially for a new homicide detective like him.

  It took four weeks—and five more murdered women—before it was finally over. Eventually, the perverted son of a bitch had been killed in a gunfight with two blues, who had pulled him over on a routine traffic stop. The potential seventh victim had been in the trunk. Luckily, her kicking from the inside had alerted the two officers just as they were returning to their cruiser. They confronted the driver and asked him to open the trunk; he refused and pulled a weapon. A lucky shot between the eyes put an end to the killer who had become a source of terror and—as human nature would sometimes have it—great fascination to his city.

  Big Harv rubbed his face with both hands. His life had been forever changed, and it had required years before the images of those women had receded to a distant corner of his mind.

  Determined never to go through that again, he did his best to have his staff view every missing-person report made, hoping to avert a repeat of history. He remembered what the victims, their families, and he himself had endured. The old saying “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” resonated with him. He wanted to prevent this kind of history. The extra work involved in double-checking all missing-person reports had been worth the effort on more than one occasion. As he took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket, Big Harv felt his anxiety escalate. Not the type of stress he felt when he and Ellie were arguing, but the kind that told him that Clara Rice’s killer had only begun.

  “Foster, after you double-check the hospitals, psych wards, jails, and arrest logs for these two women, get your ass up here. Bring someone with you who can write and, for God’s sake, knows how to take orders.”

  He hung up and tossed the cell phone on the desk, praying that he was wrong, that he was overreacting. That the fine city of Chicago hadn’t birthed another killer in its long, infamous lineage of psychopathic murderers.

  Except she had, hadn’t she?

  CHAPTER 6

  After getting over the shock of seeing Clara Rice posed like a mannequin in a high-end department store, Ellen began snapping pictures with her Pentax DSLR. There was no camera better for this kind of work.

  Each click of the button helped her relax and concentrate on her job, which was to find anything she could to get a complete picture of what had happened. She’d learned not to jump to conclusions at scenes like this and to let the science and evidence talk, but her experience made it difficult not to jump automatically to the conclusion that this was a homicide, and a perverted one at that. She shook it off. She didn’t know anything at this point. Maybe Clara had become distraught and overdosed. Perhaps she’d even taped the sign on her chest herself, although what those words meant was still anyone’s guess. Still, it wasn’t unusual to see public suicides, though Ellen hadn’t been part of a suicide investigation like this one.

  Zooming in on every angle, she was careful not to get too close until she and Oscar were ready to collect samples. She took two extra shots of the sign just to make sure they could ID the font and even the type of printer, if they needed to.

  Her phone vibrated, and she pulled it from her pocket. It was a text from Kate reminding her about dinner later. It might be much later, if it happened at all.

  Swinging the camera to her side, the strap secure around her shoulder, she looked up to see Oscar returning from the far reaches of the taped-off crime scene.

  “Oscar, are you finished?” she asked. Her work voice always surprised her. She thought she sounded like a robot. She guessed it was better than her knock-you-on-your-ass tone.

  “Yep. I took all the shots of the perimeter we’ll need. There were several cigarette butts and a few pieces of paper, but they may be too old to be pertinent. I’ll start collecting . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he looked at Clara. Oscar’s gaze moved down to the sign, then quickly to the cops still milling around the perimeter. “I’m glad you’re processing the body on this one,” he said. “She looks like my younger sister.” Then Oscar hurried away, evidence bags in hand.

  Ellen exhaled. She knew what he meant.

  As a CSI, you did your best, but sometimes it was difficult not to become emotionally involved when it struck you that this lifeless body had been a living, feeling person until just a few hours ago. Particularly someone like Clara, who had her whole life before her one moment, and then the next moment, she didn’t. Clara now existed as a lifeless shell whose sole purpose was to reveal evidence.

  For the second time in five minutes, Ellen shook off the vivid emotions that were threatening to engulf her. She refocused her attention and went into full evidence-gathering mode. Reaching into her tech kit, she took out a fresh pair of gloves and tossed the first ones. She didn’t want to take a chance that something on the camera would taint any of the collection samples. She even liked the sterile smell.

  Pulling several polyethylene bags from her kit, she reached for her magnifying glass and large tweezers. Grasping the sign hanging on Clara’s front, she carefully placed it in one of the bags. They’d process it for prints at the lab. For now, she wanted to collect what she could before exposure to the elements contaminated the evidence.

  Slowly, with a concentration that threatened to block out the rest of world, Ellen began collecting the material that would hopefully shed light on what had happened to poor Clara.

  As she worked her way from the crown of Clara’s head down to her neck, Ellen stopped, frowning. There was severe bruising between the C3 and C4 vertebrae. She ran her finger over the area lightly and felt a jagged edge just below the skin’s surface. She drew back, then bent closer to the jaw area and noticed bruising beneath the makeup. She’d seen this three other times in her career. No question that they were dealing with a homicide now. It would have been impossible for the victim to break her own neck in this manner. That meant Clara must have been killed elsewhere because the killer would have needed time and privacy to prepare the body like this. He would have had to wait for just the right moment to leave her in this position without being observed. No question the scene was staged, but to what end?

  Ellen moved to the body’s right side and shined her penlight into the victim’s wide-open eyes.

  She took out the notebook from her kit, jotted down a couple of lines, and put it into her pocket. As she moved back to the body, a voice behind her startled her, causing her to cringe.

  “So, Harper, you think that dress made me look fat, huh?”

  Detective Bella Sanchez’s gravelly voice had the same effect as fingernails on a chalkboard. No, it was worse.

  Ellen closed her eyes, recalling for the thousandth time the exchange of punches. At least Ellen hadn’t been the one landing on her ass.

  Sanchez had caused her to lose focus, but that wasn’t unusual when the detectives started asking questions about what the techs had found. Except . . . Well, she hadn’t punched any of them before. She could go one of two ways here. Round two with Sanchez, which was appealing in its own right . . . or keep her job and help find Clara’s murderer.

  Turning around, she put on her best smile. Sanchez was standing next to her partner, Brice Rogers. He was a tall, good-looking detective with large, hazel eyes who spent a lot of time in the gym, earning him the nickname Superman. He’d also gained a reputation for being a tireless investigator who expected the same effort from the people he worked with. A quiet man who kept mostly to himself, he could sometimes be cold toward others. She remembered that much from the three or four times they’d worked together. What she didn’t recall from before, however, was just how handsome he was. For one brief moment, Bella was gone and there was only Brice Rogers.

  Had he always looked that good?

  She lingered a little longer on his face, then snapped out of her reverie and shifted her gaze to his partner.

  Sanchez�
�s eye caused her to do a double take. The detective was sporting one of the finest shiners Ellen had ever seen. Even with a full complement of makeup. It took all she had not to laugh—she knew full well where that would lead.

  Ellen’s mind came back around to Sanchez’s question. “Umm, I think I already answered that, Sanchez,” said Ellen. “What are you doing here? I thought you were assigned to the North Side.”

  “Yeah, I guess you did already answer that. And what can I say? My transfer came through, and they partnered me with Superman here,” said Sanchez.

  Brice looked at her. “It’s still Detective Rogers, got it?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll try to remember,” said Sanchez, never taking her eyes off Ellen.

  “Hello, FT Harper. Good to see they have the Chicago PD’s best forensic tech team on this one,” said Brice.

  He stuck out his hand, and she shook it. The man had hands the size of the Willis Tower, and they were warm. She had almost forgotten how much she appreciated warm hands. She wondered why she hadn’t noticed that about him before, either.

  Glancing back at Sanchez, Ellen made a decision, one she wouldn’t have made a few months earlier. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe she was actually paying attention to what her dad had said.

  “Listen. I’m not going to pretend we’re friends or some bullshit like that, but I already don’t like what I see with this case. So we need to work together. You okay with that?” asked Ellen.

  Sanchez waited a moment and then nodded slowly. “I am, for now,” she said, her green eyes sparkling. “But watch your sweet ass, gringa.”

  “Enough, Sanchez. So, what do you mean about not liking what you’ve seen so far?” asked Brice.

  She was relieved to talk about what she had found. She didn’t want to get into another knock-down-drag-out with Sanchez or even spend more time studying Brice’s face. At least not right at that moment.