14

by J. T. Ellison

  “You said it wasn’t biological.”

  “Right. No DNA to obtain. There was plenty of it on this body, though, nice and fresh. I put it into the LCMS.”

  “That’s your special little machine that spits out the chemical compositions, right?”

  “Special little machine? How about liquid chromatography mass spectrometer? I’d like to spend more time, do some sophisticated testing to see its composition, but I need a comparison sample with the actual material that’s leaving the marks to be sure. In the meantime, we have enough to at least get an idea of what we’re working with.”

  Sam continued her examination, and Taylor stood beside the body, lost in thought.

  Two months ago, Taylor had been called on the murder of Elizabeth Shaw, a senior at Belmont University. Elizabeth had disappeared walking home to her apartment from class. The city buzzed, searches were initiated, but it was all too late. Her body was found in the tall grass in a gulch off of Interstate 24. Thrown out of a car door like litter, she’d lain in the gulch for at least two days. The postmortem damage to her body had been animal related. The biological evidence was copious; her arms and legs were hog-tied. They hadn’t determined where she was actually killed.

  Elizabeth Shaw’s murder scene didn’t look precisely like the original work of Snow White, but during her autopsy, flakes of red Chanel lipstick were recovered from her mouth. They reexamined the knots on the ropes, found them to be much more complex than they originally appeared. And in a touch that alarmed even the most seasoned law enforcement officials, a two-decades-old newspaper clipping about the first murder in the original Snow White case had been pulled from her vagina. All thoughts of this being a simple murder flew out the window, and the homicide team found themselves quietly reopening a twenty-year-old case.

  In quick succession, two more girls were taken and murdered. Candace Brooks was killed three weeks later, left by the side of Interstate 65 this time. The press started attributing the killings to “The Highwayman”—the interstates being the one common denominator between the two crimes. Candace’s autopsy was eerily similar to Elizabeth Shaw’s, right down to the newspaper clipping—though this one detailed the twenty-year-old report about the Snow White’s second murder.

  When victim number three, Glenna Wells, showed up on a boat ramp on Percy Priest Lake, the media beat the medical examiner to the scene. A sharp-eyed young reporter had managed a glimpse of the body, saw the glowing crimson lips, the presentation of the body, and ran back to her producer with video footage. The producer was an old-timer, recognized the tableau from his early days on the crime beat. The Highwayman was relabeled the “Reemergence of the Snow White Killer.” Taylor and the rest of Metro were lambasted for not warning the area that a serial killer long dormant was back in their midst, and the media frenzy began. Glenna’s body gave them a third newspaper clipping and no more clues.

  And now there was a fourth.

  The girls were linked in death by gaping neck wounds, the newspaper clippings, the knots and that damnable Chanel lipstick. Blood tests indicated they were over the legal limit for intoxication, with BAL’s in the 1.5-2.0 range. Rohypnol showed on the tox screens. It was obvious they’d all been killed by the same man. Whether it was the original Snow White or a copycat was still up for debate. A marked difference in the new murders versus the 1980’s slayings was the slick, creamy residue on the girls’ faces. Hindered by the fact that they couldn’t do their own DNA testing, Sam was still waiting on DNA results. The DNA would tell the truth—a copycat or the original killer. Taylor leaned toward the former. The differences were subtle, but there.

  “Yo, earth to Taylor? Can I get some help here?”

  “Oh, gosh, Sam, sorry. I was thinking about something else.”

  Sam gave her a sharp glance, then pointed at the girl’s lower body.

  “Can you pull up her right leg for me? I should put her in stirrups, but since you’re here…”

  “Sure, of course. Yeah, no problem.”

  Taylor reached for the dead girl’s leg, ignoring the bizarre sensation of dead flesh against her thin latex gloves. It felt a bit like the skin on a store-bought chicken breast, rubbery, loose. Her hand almost slipped, and she chided herself. Jeez, girl, get a frickin’ grip already. She took a better hold and pulled the leg back, exposing the girl’s genitals. Sam was already at work, swabbing, following the necessary indignities. Taylor tried to watch the back of her friend’s head, but saw something glint, a reflection of the light. She looked closer.

  “A clit ring?”

  “Yeah,” Sam replied, a bit of disgust in her voice. “You’d be amazed at how many I see. Not someplace I’d particularly enjoy having a needle shoved through, but hey, that’s just me.”

  Taylor shuddered at the thought. Ouch.

  “Here it is.”

  Taylor’s heart sank as she watched Sam ease a small package out of the girl’s vagina. Wrapped in cellophane, it was coated in junk—blood, sperm and whatever else—Taylor really didn’t want to know. Sam eased the package, no bigger than a business card, onto a stainless-steel tray. She gestured to Taylor.

  “It’s all yours, if you want.”

  “No, I think I’ll let you dissect it for me, but thanks.”

  “You’re never going to get the hang of this, are you?”

  “Sweetie, that’s the reason I didn’t go to med school and you did. Open it up, let’s see what we have.”

  Sam picked the packet open gingerly, putting aside the cellophane for later testing. “Trace is going to have a field day with that,” she murmured.

  Taylor gazed at the body. What was it about this one that felt different?

  “How long had she been dead, Sam?”

  “By the time I got there? No more than an hour.”

  “So we just missed him. Why did he change his MO?”

  “Beats me, T. You’re the detective. Detect.”

  Taylor gave her a brief smile, then grew serious again.

  “How is no one missing this girl? All three of the other victims had missing-person reports on file. She looks maintained—fresh manicure, eyebrows shaped, hair’s healthy and well cut. She got drunk somewhere, with someone. She’s not lost. We should have a report on her.”

  “You’re right, we should. She’s younger than the earlier victims. Look at her X-rays over there. The dental series shows that her third molars are still developing. If I had to wager, I’d say she was between fifteen and seventeen. I don’t know, sweets. Maybe the system just hasn’t been updated, or her parents are out of town and don’t know she’s missing.”

  Sam finished tweezing out the contents of the little cellophane package. It was a piece of paper, newsprint. They both knew what it would say once they got it open.

  They were right.

  Murder in Nashville

  Snow White Killer Strikes Again

  The date on the article was December 14, 1986.

  Sam was staring at the body, a troubled expression clouding her face. Taylor watched as she bent over the girl’s neck, then stood abruptly and walked out of the suite. She disappeared for a moment, came back bearing a large magnifying sheet. She held it over the spot she’d been staring at before, her lips white.

  “Sam, what is it?” Taylor bent over the girl’s neck wound and looked through the magnifier. Her finger shook as she pointed toward the lower edge of the slice, horrified.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  Sam’s face was pinched. “I’ll have to do a swab, but it looks like it.”

  That was enough for Taylor. She held up a hand in apology, scooted to the nearest sink and lost the latte.

  Twenty minutes later, once she was feeling better, Sam handed her the details of the LCMS findings. The amount of slick material on the earlier bodies had been minute, but their newest victim had plenty to test thoroughly. The base compound was an arnica emulsion. There were traces of other ingredients; more tests would be needed to confirm all the comp
onents of the matter. But two listings from the LCMS stood out from the rest.

  Frankincense oil and myrrh oil.

  Taylor sipped a pygmy-size ginger ale and reread the LCMS findings. “What in the world do you think this is about, Sam? Should we be looking for three wise men?”

  “You’re hysterical, you know that? Feeling better?”

  Taylor swallowed hard and nodded. She despised throwing up.

  “If I had to guess, there’s something sacred about the oils. But its base is arnica cream, which is a common homeopathic remedy for bruises and sprains and such. Those are the initial findings, they could be off the mark. Without a control sample and more tests, I can’t be absolutely positive. They could be separate items or they could all be from one place.”

  “Frankincense and myrrh, though? Surely there’s something more important there. And the fact that’s it’s on their faces, like he’s anointing them…”

  She trailed off. Sam met her eyes and nodded. “That makes the most sense. He’s done so much to their bodies. Maybe he feels guilty and is trying to redeem himself. Maybe he’s just a sicko and likes the way it smells on them while he’s raping them. I don’t know, Taylor. Go catch him and you can tell me. No matter what, this latest girl was treated differently. Could be her age, could be she said or did something while he held her, but she was marked.”

  Taylor nodded. “And by marking her, he deviated from the pattern.”

  Five

  Taylor was on overdrive, the new information spinning in her head. She called Baldwin the minute she hit the truck.

  “Baldwin, I need you. The basic elements of this murder are different from the first three. And wait until you hear this. This one was special. She meant something to him. He rimmed her neck wound in lipstick. Like he did her lips. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I mean, it’s already such a gory wound, I would never have noticed, but Sam did, and she swabbed it and looked under the microscope and there was lipstick mixed in with the blood. It was, it was…really. It’s like he dressed her up. And there was a lot of the creamy stuff on her face.

  “Sam’s going to send out the full tox screen and finish the autopsy now. She’s already confirmed the high BAL and the Roofies. She said she’d get back to me if anything major popped up. I can’t imagine what would be more major than this, I mean, it was—”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Not exactly the word I was going for. Sick, is more like it.”

  “But ‘sick’ is fascinating, Taylor. Talk to me about the neck wound. This is definitely the first time he’s done it?”

  “As far as Sam can tell. She’s going back through all the wound swabs now, but she didn’t see anything like it before. Why would he do that?”

  “Why, I can’t answer. It means something to him, I’m sure. We just have to figure out what that is. Are you headed to the office?”

  “I am. I’ve got more for you.”

  “More? What?”

  “Sam ID’d the substance we found on their faces. Get this. Frankincense and myrrh. There’s more components in the matter, but she’ll have to do more testing to gather that. We’re assuming that they were being prepared, I guess.”

  “Jesus. Listen, Taylor. I’m going to be at your office when you get there. I’ll call Stuart Evanson, the new head of the BSU. He requested that I take over the case last week. I told him I’d wait, see if it solved or you asked me in. We’ll officially offer every power we have to your chief, make it legit. That work for you?”

  At the moment, Taylor could think of nothing better. She’d worked cases with Baldwin before. He respected her boundaries, treated her team with respect, won over her captain, Mitchell Price, with his “It’s your case” attitude. She wanted him on the Snow White case full-time. They needed the FBI resources, anyway.

  “I’m cool. I’ll see you there.”

  “Taylor?”

  “Yeah, hon?”

  “Thanks for last night.” His voice rumbled in her ear, and he hung up before the blush could spread to her capillaries. Damn the man already. She wasn’t in love; she was in heat. That’s what all this was about.

  Taylor navigated in four-wheel drive, forced to take her time to get downtown. The plows were working the streets again, the salt trucks followed dutifully. Abandoned cars littered the roadways; the tow trucks couldn’t get to them, so the plows were pushing large drifts against the driver’s-side doors that reached to the side mirrors. If the temperature didn’t rise soon, it would take days to get them unburied.

  She tried to drive carefully but was impatient with the roads. Aside from the plows, four-wheel drives were the only things moving. The hospitals had put out emergency calls for people who had trucks and SUVs to help staff get to work. It was surreal, an all-white landscape with little movement—the vehicles like desultory ants after an outsized picnic.

  Swerving around a public works truck, she whipped off the highway past the Tennessee Titans stadium, LP Field, and crossed the bridge over to Third, where her offices within the Criminal Justice Center waited.

  She pulled into the parking lot too fast, skidding on the ice and nearly taking out a lamppost. Her pulse took a few beats to get back to normal. She hadn’t been paying attention. Again. That was all they needed, for her to wind up wrapped around a pole. She recognized a few other vehicles—Metro police didn’t get the day off when the city was snowed under.

  Calmed, she got out of the truck, made her way carefully across the street and up the stairs that led to the back door of the CJC. She passed the ubiquitous ashtray and felt virtuous—she’d finally managed to quit. It had been three months since her last puff. She fumbled in her pocket for a minute, trying to get a hand on the plastic pass card that would allow her into the building. Her gloved hand was too bulky to feel anything. Swearing under her breath, she took it off and delved deep into her pocket. Her bare fingers hit hard plastic. Triumphant, she swept the key card and stamped her way into the building.

  Some cruel individual was subjecting the third floor to a bastardized version of their child’s Christmas recital; strains of children’s wavering voices streamed from the fingerprint room, mixed with a heavy rap beat. The resulting discordance made a headache take root behind Taylor’s right eye. Muddy puddles of water trailed four feet into the hallway where people hadn’t knocked the snow off their boots. Clumps had collected, melting on the cream-colored linoleum. After the fact, someone had used his head and spread a copy of the morning’s Tennessean on the floor. Glancing at the headline regaling the Snow White Killer’s latest victim, Taylor tapped her boots against the wall, dropping the excess snow on a picture of the Bicentennial Mall, then stepped around the puddles and followed the hallway toward the homicide office, leaving the wailing music behind her.

  Lincoln Ross rounded the corner from the opposite direction. Tall, handsome, with three-inch dreadlocks, he gave her a gap-toothed smile that hit her deep.

  “Yo, LT, what up?” He gave her five, up high, down low, and she laughed at him, cheered instantly by his enthusiasm.

  “And what’s up with you this morning? You’re awfully chipper.”

  “Hey, you know, it’s a thang.”

  “Am I to infer that the ‘thang’ is of the female persuasion?”

  Lincoln grinned like a schoolboy. “Why, yes, I believe you could in-ferrr that if you’d like. Oh, sorry. I wasn’t supposed to dangle the sex carrot in front of your nose.”

  She raised both hands and laughed. “Well, I’m not doing so good abstaining on my end, so don’t worry about it. What’s with the ghetto speak?”

  Lincoln rolled his eyes, went back to his usual elucidated drawl. “I’ve been with my new C.I., the kid who’s ratting out Terrence Norton.”

  “Oh, great. What’s Tu’shae up to now?”

  “He’s hopping, actually. He scored a DJ gig in South Nashville. A lot of Terrence’s gang hang out there. We’ve got a good stakeout going with the TBI; they’re being very cooperative
. But Tu’shae won’t talk to them, he’ll only talk to me. So I’m stuck ferrying all the information through to the TBI boys and girls.”

  Damn the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. Why couldn’t they do their own work? Cooperative or not, she needed Lincoln for these new murder cases exclusively.

  “Do you have anything we can use? I’d really like to get Terrence Norton out of our hair if we can.”

  “Not yet. Tu’shae hinted that Terrence is controlling the drugs running through the club, but he’s got nothing to back that up.”

  Administrative bullshit, that’s how Taylor saw the ongoing situation with the local gangster, Terrence Norton. He’d been plaguing her for three years, starting as a kid with a bad attitude and a minor rap sheet. As time passed, he got stronger, more jaded and in more trouble. They’d almost nailed him for jury tampering a few months back, and the TBI had to take over the case. Lincoln was doing a great job running backup from Metro’s side, and she told him so.

  Terrence was an annoyance. Taylor dismissed him from her mind; today just wasn’t the day to deal with minor miscreants.

  “Let’s move on to bigger and better thugs. Are Fitz and Marcus here?”

  Lincoln made a vague gesture toward the door to the homicide office. “Yeah, they’re in there. You want some coffee or something?”

  “No. You might want to wait, too. Tossed my cookies already this morning, wouldn’t want to put you in the same situation. Let’s go.”

  Chastened and intrigued, he followed her into their warren office and went to his desk.

  Taylor’s team was a force to be reckoned with. Lincoln Ross was her computer guru, an insightful and intriguing man. His jocular seriousness was a perfect counterbalance to her ferocity, and he’d been the voice of reason too many times for her to count. He was one of the few people that she trusted implicitly.