Ernie was unlike O’Hara, who could scare the hell out of people when he got his back up, his eyes drawing into narrow slits that could burn a hole through someone. Jamison had come to trust both of them completely and long ago decided that he would bet his life on either man.
Three years earlier, Ernie decided to make the switch from working in the sheriff’s homicide unit to the DA’s office in order to try and maintain some type of family life. He had admitted to Jamison his wife had given him an ultimatum about his hours as a homicide detective, and he hadn’t regretted it. She prepared a dark green vegetable juice concoction every morning for Ernie and put it in a thermos, insisting that he drink three glasses of it daily to keep up his energy and to try to stay as slim as his stocky body would allow, a challenge when the rest of his colleagues’ diets consisted primarily of burgers and sodas. Privately, after agreeing to taste it, O’Hara had said if drinking green slime was what it took to keep a wife happy, it would be easier to stay single.
When Jamison entered his apartment, the sun was just beginning to warm the horizon. He looked at his watch: less than an hour before the meeting. Every hour that ticked by was one less hour for Elizabeth Garrett to be found alive. At this moment it was seventeen hours, maybe less. Racing the clock to save her life was all he could think about.
His apartment looked no different than it had when he left over three hours earlier. In fact, Jamison ruefully had to admit it probably looked better when he left because it was still dark. There wasn’t much, a couch and a beanbag chair that survived both college and law school and a battered outdoor umbrella table in the kitchen with a plastic tablecloth and four folding chairs purchased at a yard sale. The only items of value were the stereo and his expensive coffee, both probably worth more than the small television balanced on a TV tray.
He pushed aside the week-old milk that was sitting toward the front of the refrigerator and reached for the orange juice; the color still looked right. He had already had three cups of coffee. There would be more down at the sheriff’s office. The problem for Jamison was that cops would drink coffee that tasted like used crankcase oil. He would buy a cup and take it into the meeting. He would need it.
Jamison ran his hand over his face and hair. Everything he touched had an oily film. He walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. He would be in the office by seven o’clock to update the district attorney before heading over to the sheriff’s meeting. Jamison reached for a towel in the laundry basket—he had given up folding them a long time ago—and settled his mind again on Elizabeth Garrett, whose face he had seen on the fax of her driver’s license. She could have been a sister of the other three victims. The resemblance to them was that striking. In an instant he knew that where there had once been three, there were now four.
At that moment Elizabeth Garrett began to stir. She felt like her eyes were weighted with lead and struggled to open them even slightly. She also felt the sapping exhaustion of the emotion of the last hours. Opening her eyes did not increase her awareness of where she was, it only disoriented her more, the blackness of the room, the sensation of waking, realizing she was in a different place and nothing was where it was supposed to be. The only feeling, other than the pounding in her head, was a slowly emerging awareness of her body.
A fog of muddy sensations broke through her efforts to see. Since she was a little girl she had been terrified of the dark. She still kept a night light glowing in her bedroom. Slowly her mind regained the context of the last few hours. She lifted her arm toward her face. Something held her, not hard, not soft, just there. She could feel her body pulling against something but all she could focus on was that she could not move more than slightly. Her mouth was dry; her tongue searched for moisture but there was none.
The fear of the darkness and the grip of disorientation rose up from her stomach like a cold wave, pushing out an unrecognizable animallike sound. She had never before heard a primal shriek of pure terror and now it rushed out of her, filling the darkness, falling into nothingness. Her throat closed in a guttural rasp. She closed her eyes against the blackness, the only control she had. The noise was faint, soft against a hard surface, quickly growing louder. Elizabeth could hear it moving toward her, muffled, but she knew the sound—running footsteps.
The light slipped through the opening door, cutting across the blackness of the room, a sharp swath that lit walls bleached by the piercing beam. Elizabeth turned her head toward the light but her eyes could not adjust. All she could see was a black outline backlit. The voice was soft, almost soothing.
“You’re awake.” It was not a question. It was a statement. “I wasn’t ready for you yet. I thought you were still asleep.” He paused, running his hand across her leg. “I’m sorry. I forgot, you don’t like the dark.” Elizabeth stared at him, memories of the past and the reality of her present creating a jarring kaleidoscope of emotions. “We don’t need these anymore, do we?” He tugged at the restraints. Elizabeth’s mind was clear now. She watched as he released the restraints and ran his hand down her body, the warmth of his hand and the familiarity of his touch oriented her mind. She knew what would happen next.
Twenty minutes after meeting with the district attorney, Jamison walked down the hall toward O’Hara’s office. Here and there silver duct tape across the carpet held down a fraying tribute to county frugality, and in some places even the duct tape had curled into a shabby fringe.
A small circle of light from a lamp illuminated the desk in O’Hara’s office. A curl of blue smoke from a lit cigar in an ashtray rose up toward a growing haze near the ceiling. Jamison shook his head. Wasn’t it supposed to be illegal to smoke in a public building? O’Hara looked up and gave him a half-smile that might have also stifled a yawn. “Good morning, Boss.”
“Morning, Bill. You ready?”
“Yeah.” O’Hara pulled his long legs down from the desk and slowly lowered his feet to the floor. He paused, taking in the dark circles under Jamison’s eyes. “Guess we both need more sleep. The big guy work you over?”
“The usual,” Jamison replied. “Gage knows we’re doing as much as we can. He just wants to have something he can throw out to the newspeople so it looks like progress is being made. I think he’ll say it would be detrimental to the investigation to reveal what we know.”
O’Hara snorted. “We don’t know shit. Just as long as he keeps the news people off our asses I’m okay with it.”
Jamison sucked in the sides of his cheeks to tamp down his frustration. “Well that’s just fine, but it wasn’t your ass that had to sit in front of his desk and tell him we got nothing on three victims and now maybe on four. C’mon, let’s go.”
It was seven thirty when O’Hara and Jamison headed for the meeting. With no breaks in the case yet they would have to make their own. The pressure was beginning to crawl up the back of Jamison’s neck and twist into a knot. They needed to do something besides wait for a body to turn up. He just didn’t know what it was.
The conference room at the sheriff’s department was definitely Jack Bekin’s turf. Bekin was sometimes referred to as “Mover.” It was a nickname that most people would think came naturally from sharing the same name of a moving company. That was part of it, but the actual reason was that Bekin made things happen. When he spoke, people moved, local politicians moved, and sometimes so did the governor. It didn’t hurt that the sheriff was also built like a Freightliner truck, massive and square, with no neck and no hair, just a huge slick head sitting on an enormous body. People just didn’t argue with Mover Bekin, and Jamison knew that today would be no different.
Jamison scanned the faces of the men around the table, eager to spot Ernie, who merely shifted his eyes in Jamison’s direction and shook his head discretely. He had nothing either, so there was no point in Jamison trying to stall until Ernie gave him the background.
Bekin raised his eyes when Jamison and O’Hara entered the room. He didn’t raise his head. Bekin had a way of turning his w
hole body when he looked from side to side, as if his head and his body were all one piece, something like the turret of a tank swinging that big cannon in the direction it wanted to fire. It was a habit that Jamison believed was used for intimidation and it generally succeeded.
Today was no different. As the two took their seats alongside the other half-dozen men around the table, Jamison noticed that Bekin’s gaze moved past him as if he were a piece of furniture in the corner. Bekin’s gaze finally came to rest on O’Hara, who had just taken a seat.
“Willie, you handling this clusterfuck for the suits in the DA’s office?”
O’Hara smiled. After making himself comfortable at the long conference table, he responded, “It’s sure not the same as riding patrol with you back in the old days, Mover. Sheriff, how you doin’? Matt Jamison and I are working these cases along with Ernie. We don’t want to get in the way. We’re just here to help out where we can.”
Mover’s eyes slid down the table to gaze at Jamison, who knew what the sheriff was thinking. Mover didn’t trust lawyers and didn’t like their presence in murder investigations. To him they were all the same; they took up room that would be better used for open-air space. And while Jamison was a prosecutor, he recognized that to Bekin he was just a lawyer who was working in the DA’s office to camouflage his true character. But the sheriff was sophisticated enough to know how to take the credit when prosecutors helped his people crack a case, or to spread the blame when they didn’t— in his eyes a win-win proposition politically. Jamison understood Bekin’s rules. The most important thing was not to let Bekin think he was intimidated.
O’Hara waited a moment, then shifted to a business-like tone. “Mover, the district attorney sent us to assure you that any arrest or search warrants could be prepared as quickly as possible.”
O’Hara nudged his knee against Jamison’s leg, a signal it was time for him to say something. It hadn’t gone unnoticed by anyone in the room that O’Hara was the first person Bekin spoke to, not Jamison.
Jamison pushed his pen across the yellow legal tablet that he had dropped in front of him on the table, an old courtroom habit that gave him an additional second or two to think. “Sheriff Bekin, the district attorney wants you to know that we’ll help you in any way we can, but Mr. Gage made it clear that this is your investigation and we are merely to assist as you request.”
He swallowed the sour taste from groveling but this was the role he was expected to play if he and the investigators from the DA’s office were going to be allowed in at this stage of the case. Everyone knew the district attorney’s office would eventually have to take responsibility, win or lose, once the case moved to a courtroom. But cops didn’t look at it like that. They figured the guy was guilty when they made the arrest, and if there wasn’t enough evidence they wouldn’t have made the arrest in the first place. From their perspective every case they had handed to the DA was a winner. If the DA lost, it wasn’t their fault.
However, both the sheriff and the DA had a history from three years before with the loss of a major gang murder prosecution because the sheriff had refused to allow prosecutors to be involved in the decision to conduct a search of a gang headquarters. The search was held to be illegal and they lost murder weapons that would have linked gang leaders directly to three murders. That was why District Attorney Gage had begun involving his top lawyers and investigators in major cases to make sure that everything was done before the case was handed over. Mover had been unable to argue that he hadn’t made a mistake excluding prosecutors from the investigation. The result was that for now there was an uneasy truce.
Jamison realized that Bekin didn’t care about him or anything he had to say as long as he stayed out of the way. Jamison knew the drill. O’Hara would be given the deference of a professional and Jamison would be listened to only when he was spoken to.
The sheriff fixed his gaze on O’Hara and then slid his eyes around the long, scarred wooden conference table. Finally his body turned enough for his gaze to rest on his own man, Puccinelli. “So, Pooch, what you got?”
Puccinelli’s face showed every line of fatigue from the preceding weeks. Jamison noted Pooch could barely keep the frustration out of his voice or his words as he began. “We have the worst of all possible situations. We have a player that nobody’s seen before and he’s started out at the top of the crime chain. So far we have three dead women—same general age, same MO. This morning we have a new victim who’s missing, and we have every reason to believe, based on the pattern, that it’s the same guy. But we won’t know until we find her, and based on his MO we don’t have long to find her before he kills her.”
He flipped open his file, pulling out several packets of large color photographs of the different crime scenes. He laid the photographs out on the table in four separate groups. A projector tray was set up with a screen pulled down from the ceiling. Puccinelli apologized. “Sorry I don’t have a Powerpoint. No time, so we go with old-school.” He stood and put a picture up on the screen of the three women who had been murdered.
“We don’t have much. There’s no physical evidence at any crime scene that will give us a break on the identity of the killer. We’ve looked statewide at sex offenders who are out. We’ve looked at modus operandi files, no hits. But what you can see from the photographs of these three victims is that they are remarkably similar in appearance.”
Clearing his throat, Puccinelli looked around at the men sitting at the table. A few were taking notes, but most of them were sitting quietly with their hands folded over their chests, their eyes drifting across the crime scene photographs clustered on the table, waiting for the new case—the one that had a victim who might still be alive, Jamison thought.
Pooch placed a photograph of Elizabeth Garrett on the projector tray so that her face showed up on the screen over the photograph of the other three. “Here’s the new one that we think may be connected—Elizabeth Garrett. We found her car last night. You can see how much she resembles the others.”
He shuffled through another pile of crime scene photographs before putting a new one on the projector tray. “This is what we found last night inside Garrett’s car. You can see the outline of a knife or what looks like a knife at the top of a blood smear on the car’s seat, so it’s pretty clear he cut her but not badly enough to cause much blood loss. Tests so far are consistent with her blood type, so we have a pretty good idea what he’ll do to her if we don’t find her first.” He switched back the picture of Garrett.
“Where Garrett’s car was stopped we found nothing. We got tracks all over but there were so many people out there you can’t tell which track is which, and the scene was pretty scuffed up by the time our forensic boys got there. Even if they find something, I don’t think we’re going to get it today. Her father told me that she wouldn’t have taken that route to get home. Why she took that route, and why she stopped the car, we haven’t a clue.
“Garrett’s an elementary school teacher. She had dinner with a girlfriend last night. She was supposed to spend the night at her house but the girlfriend says she changed her mind. Said she wasn’t feeling well and would sleep better in her own bed. I talked to the girlfriend. Nothing there so far, but all my interviews have either been on the phone or just short face-to-face. We will be following up with everyone this morning. They didn’t talk to anybody at the restaurant, no guys, nothing strange. Her parents are obviously terrified.
“Here’s what we do know. Every one of these women was found dead within a day and a half after they were last seen and they each had been dead around four to eight or nine hours when they were found.” He cleared his throat again. “Bottom line, the clock’s our enemy. I think if this same guy took this Elizabeth Garrett, we got until maybe ten tonight to find her alive. No more. After that we’ll just be picking up the pieces.”
Pooch put the composite photograph of the previous victims back on the screen. “Of the three dead women, one was taken from her car and the other
two were taken from their homes. No sign of forced entry. Each of the murder victims was cut viciously, slashed on different parts of their bodies with an extremely sharp knife, but the wounds were post-mortem. Dr. Gupta says he thinks all three murder victims were actually killed by a toxic injection of a heroin-barbiturate combination. Basically the killer injected them with that shit and it stopped their hearts. Each victim had several human hairs and some dog hairs on their bodies. The human hair came from an African American, but there’s no hair bulb on any of the pieces. They were all clippings. We’re working to see if we can get any mitochondrial DNA from the hair, but I don’t think it will take us anywhere. My guess is that the perp is placing the hair there intentionally, so I’m going to speculate that he’s just screwing with us.
“We know they aren’t random killings because all the victims so closely resemble one another, but other than that we have no common link. Their jobs were all different. There’s no semen or bodily fluids, nothing that looks like rape or sodomy or anything in their throats—nothing. Whoever this asshole is, he knows something about crime scene investigation because he’s covered his tracks.”
He put a photograph up of a crime scene showing a woman whose head lolled back at an unnatural angle, the slash across her throat a vivid mélange of torn flesh and bone.
“The first victim—Maria Ventana. A teenage couple discovered the body lying on the side of an isolated road several miles from her car.”
Puccinelli put up a photograph of the car and continued. “There was a smear of blood on the seat just like with Garrett.”
He shook his head with disgust. “She’d been washed down with bleach, but she bled out more at the scene . . .” Puccinelli’s voice trailed off while he picked up another file, moved one of the photograph packets to the center of the table, and spread it out.
Fractured Justice Page 5
