Ten Plagues

by Mary Nealy

  “The FBI is going to do some work on that photo of Caldwell. Age it. Try a few possible alterations in case he had plastic surgery. Give him a beard, lose the glasses.”

  Keren marched down the hall to her apartment, wishing she had picked one on a higher floor. It ate at her just how accessible her home was to a lunatic. She tugged the barrette out of her hair as she walked and let the heavy mass of it fall down her neck. “I’ll never get a comb through this.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to be hours getting dolled up.”

  Keren whirled around. Paul grinned at her.

  Another smile.

  Rolling her eyes, she decided to let him live. For now. She moved faster, ignoring her protesting muscles. Her feet echoed in her building’s hallway.

  “You won’t have to wait long.” With a smug smile she added, “And I was just patronizing you before, about the bodyguard thing, so you’d let me take care of you. I’m fine without a watchdog.”

  “Well, you’re getting one anyway. And if you don’t quit complaining about it, I’m telling everyone at the station your real name.”

  Keren glared at him over her shoulder. “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Try me,” Paul said lightly.

  “I’m being blackmailed by a missionary.” Keren trudged when she wanted to jog. Her ribs reminded her of the little argument she’d lost with a Malibu grill. She probably had cracked ribs. One of her knees was determined to make her sorry for every step.

  She wondered how Paul was holding up. “We’ve been at the hospital three nights now. I’m thinking of putting it on my next Christmas card: ‘Cook County: my home away from home.’“

  “I’m getting close to liking the chairs in the hospital, now that my spine has been bent out of alignment enough to match them.” Paul wasn’t even breathing hard, the big jerk. “And I don’t know when they’ll let me back into my place.”

  There was a stretch of silence, then Paul asked, “Do you think she’s going to wake up?”

  Keren stopped and turned to face Paul. “Of course she’s going to wake up. Why would God have saved her the way He did in that park, if He didn’t have further plans for her?”

  Paul nodded but without a lot of assurance. “She’s been out so long.”

  “Three days isn’t that long when your injuries are as traumatic as LaToya’s. She needs to heal, then she’ll wake up.” Keren laid her hand on his arm. “I know she will.”

  “And what about the two since then?” Paul covered her hand with his. “Melody Fredericks dead, Katrina Hardcastle missing. He’s escalating, Keren. You know he is. He’s on a rampage, and we’re not any closer to finding him than we were that first day.”

  “Of course we’re closer. We’ve got his face sent out to every cop in town. The FBI has it entered on their database. And we’re tracking down those Internet bug sites. If he ordered from them, he had to give a mailing address. We’ll get him.”

  “How could I have not thought of my wife and daughter right away? I actually knew the loon. Why didn’t I think of him?” Paul’s fist clenched. “We could have saved LaToya what she’s going through, and the other two women wouldn’t have even been hurt.”

  “He already had LaToya by the time the dust settled from that first explosion. Figuring it out instantly wouldn’t have stopped that.”

  “But the other two. If we’d have gotten his picture out—”

  “Stop!” Keren cut him off. “You know better than to play this guilt game. Stop whining and pull yourself together.”

  The General George Patton school of psychological counseling. Maybe she ought to slap the poor guy, too.

  There was a visible battle inside of Paul and finally the kindhearted, worried pastor faded away, replaced by the police detective, eyes sharp, head nodding. “You’re right. Sorry. Wasting time. As soon as you’re ready to go back to work, we can sit in on Melody’s autopsy.”

  Keren looked at him for a long time. She didn’t know quite what to make of his seesawing manner. As soon as she had some spare time, maybe she’d talk to him about his Pastor Jekyll and Detective Hyde personalities. For now, she just headed down the long hall again.

  “Why doesn’t he call?” Paul groused. “We found the body at my place yesterday. Another woman disappeared the same day. Where has he stashed the latest vic?”

  Vic? Keren glanced over her shoulder, but he was staring angrily at his phone, as if he could glare it into ringing.

  “It’s flies this time, isn’t it?” Keren asked.

  “Yeah, the fourth plague is flies. He can have a ball with that.”

  They reached Keren’s apartment. The door swung open when she touched the knob. She immediately snatched her hand back. She heard a high-pitched whine. Then she smelled death.

  Paul pulled out his handkerchief and gingerly pulled the door shut before more than a handful of flies could escape.

  “I think we found Katrina Hardcastle.”

  They backed away from the door. It was only after they were across the hall that they spotted the sign hanging over the door.

  “Pestis ex Musca,” Keren read aloud, thinking, Caldwell knows where I live.

  Paul translated: “The plague of flies.”

  Keren swallowed hard then forced herself to lean against the wall across from her door, and called O’Shea.

  A glance at Paul showed he was in pure cop mode. Keren thought this was more the time for the kindly pastor.

  Keren left the autopsy with a headache she decided to blame on the chemicals in the lab. Dr. Schaefer escorted them out to make a few final points, complete with eight-by-ten glossies.

  “This one is definitely different than the others,” Dr. Schaefer said with a considerable amount of gallows enthusiasm. “Her wounds are postmortem and they’re minimal, no bleeding. I suspect the blood on the shroud is his. We’re doing DNA testing.”

  “We know who did this now.” Paul picked up one of Dr. Schaefer’s gruesome snapshots with no apparent emotion. “The test doesn’t help us find him.”

  “DNA testing will be useful in court,” O’Shea reminded him.

  “She had a skull fracture and a broken neck. Her right arm is crushed. There is a compound fracture of the tibia and femur, and massive trauma, particularly down the whole right side of her body. I’d say she either fell a long way, or, more likely, she was hit. Hard.”

  Dr. Schaefer was making Keren sick, but there was no escape from the report. “There’s shattered glass imbedded in her skin. I’ll bet it proves to be the kind of glass used for headlights. She died instantly.”

  “He ran her down?” O’Shea asked.

  The ME looked up and nodded. “That’s what it looks like, Mick. I can pinpoint the time of death on her more exactly than on Juanita, too. She never spent time in a pool of an indeterminate temperature.” Dr. Schaefer considered carefully. “I’d say, judging by the rigor and the extent of decomposition, she died Sunday night.”

  “Sunday night?” Keren asked. “That’s when he was trying to kill LaToya.”

  “That’s when he ran scared from a crime scene.” Paul looked as calm as if he were figuring a math problem in his head. “He hit you with his car, Keren. Maybe he hit someone else, too.”

  O’Shea said, “Makes sense. That would explain why you don’t know her, Paul. It was strictly chance. That may be why he killed her in such a different way.”

  “And he made up for neglecting you,” Keren added, “by dumping Melody at your house.”

  “Maybe it was different, but satisfying just the same,” O’Shea speculated. “So he decides to play the next one the same way. Pick a victim at random—you don’t know Katrina Hardcastle either—and make his point with the dump site.”

  “So will the next one come to your place, O’Shea?” Keren asked. “Now that Paul and I are both out of a place to live.”

  “Not me,” Paul said. “For now I live at the hospital, and as soon as LaToya wakes up, I’m going to bunk in the h
omeless shelter.”

  “Which, being a homeless shelter,” Keren said, “is exactly the same as being out of a place to live, which I just said.”

  “When I get time, I’ll convert part of the office into living quarters.” He sounded lighthearted, but then his voice cooled until he showed no emotion at all. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep in my place for a while.”

  Keren heard him earlier referring to Melody as the vic. Caldwell was doing more damage than he knew by pushing Paul away from his peaceful life of faith.

  Then she thought of her apartment. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep in my place ever again.”

  “Caldwell is losing it. Look at the painting.” O’Shea held up photos of the dress that had been found on Melody. “Remember how carefully he painted Juanita’s shroud? And the work on the first two signs was meticulous.” O’Shea held up the sign from Keren’s apartment. “This one that arrived with Hardcastle is sloppy.”

  “It looks like he carved it out in a few minutes. He didn’t bother to sand or varnish the wood,” Paul noticed.

  “I’d say our killer is spinning out of control.” Keren ran her hand over the splintered wood.

  “Which should make him careless and easier to catch,” Dr. Schaefer added. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “You can see the deterioration of his mental state in this work.” O’Shea gestured with the eight-by-ten picture of the dress. “The drawing of Pharaoh isn’t nearly as realistic. I wouldn’t even think it was a pharaoh, if I hadn’t seen the earlier paintings.”

  Jabbing a blunt finger at the dots at the bottom of the picture, he added, “And these aren’t identifiable as gnats. I mean, I don’t know how he’d do that, but he managed to depict exactly what he wanted with the other paintings.”

  Paul said, “Pestis ex culex. The plagues must have some special meaning to him. Why hasn’t the profiler come up with something?”

  “I think they’ve quit involving Dyson since they got a name.”

  “Well then, why don’t they send him back to DC?” Paul muttered. “That guy is weird.”

  “Caldwell is falling apart.” Keren stepped back from the table.

  “I’ll do the Hardcastle autopsy first thing in the morning,” Dr. Schaefer informed them. “But my preliminary examination tells me victim number four died more like Juanita. He took her alive. My staff has done a species examination of the frogs, gnats, and flies. They’ve come up with supply houses and websites that sell things like these in quantity. Here’s a copy of the suppliers.”

  “Great, we can get a court order and have a look at their customer lists.” O’Shea nodded with satisfaction.

  Keren glanced at Paul. “What’s the next one?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “Pestis ex bestia.”

  O’Shea snagged the list of Internet sites that dealt in bugs and frogs. “I can’t keep track. What is bestia?”

  “Beasts or animals.” Paul reached for the exit door and stopped. “The plague of animals.”

  “So he’s going to turn loose a herd of sheep in O’Shea’s house?” Keren asked scathingly.

  O’Shea’s face turned ice cold. “I need to call my wife.” He opened his phone and walked a few steps away.

  Keren tried to think of anyone else who would need to be warned. Her family wasn’t around Chicago.

  “She’s going to stay with her sister in St. Louis for a while.” O’Shea’s voice was impassive, but he clicked his phone shut with undue force. “Now what about the plague of beasts?”

  Keren wanted to tell O’Shea how sorry she was for the whole mess, even though it wasn’t her fault. But O’Shea’s expression didn’t invite comment.

  Paul must have gotten that, too, because he went on. “Actually, the plague of beasts was a little different. Up until then, all the plagues had been some sort of blight. Blood made the water undrinkable. Frogs covered the land, and they crawled into beds and into the food. The gnats and flies made the air impossible to breathe. But the plague of beasts was about hurting the animals. Of course, that hurt the Egyptians by extension. But Caldwell might not be setting loose a herd of sheep so much as killing a bunch of animals, and his next victim along with them.”

  “Where do you find a flock of sheep in Chicago?” Keren wondered.

  “Or any animals.” O’Shea handed the pictures to Keren and she took them, annoyed that because of her purse she ended up being a pack mule. There was a kind of animal.

  “Mounted police, maybe?” Keren tried to think of different kinds of animals that might be in danger. “Horses? A stable?”

  “Could he be planning some kind of attack on a zoo?” O’Shea wondered.

  “Zoos are sewn up pretty tight,” Keren said. “So far, he hasn’t done any high-tech breaking and entering.”

  “He got into your apartment,” Paul reminded her.

  “Yeah, but it looks like he used a sledgehammer on my patio door.”

  “That’s low tech,” O’Shea agreed.

  “He got into your apartment, too, Paul,” Keren pointed out. “And the lock wasn’t broken.”

  “Yeah, but the mission is wide open. I don’t lock my door.”

  “You don’t lock your doors?” O’Shea exploded. “What kind of dumb thing is that to do?”

  “I’ve got nothing anybody wants.” Paul shrugged. “My furniture comes from donations. If someone needs my old couch enough to steal it from the fourth floor, then they’re welcome to it. I’ll just get another one from our used-furniture storehouse.”

  “What about stealing your life? You’ve got enemies,” Keren warned. “Even before this nightmare, Carlo and a host of others weren’t overly fond of you.”

  “ ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?’“ Paul quoted.

  “ ‘Don’t help a good boy go bad,’“ O’Shea tossed back, quoting from an old television commercial.

  “Mine’s from the Bible, yours is from TV.”

  “There’s truth in it, Paul,” Keren said. “You might be tempting someone if you make an attack on you too easy.”

  “Maybe.” Paul shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t think the lock to my apartment door works, and I have no idea where the key might be. I’ll check into it.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Keren muttered. “Thanks for your help, Dee.”

  Dr. Schaefer nodded then squared her shoulders and turned to get back to her ghastly work.

  “Now.” Keren reached for the door. “Where do we look for beasts?”

  They were considering the possibilities when they stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight. A herd stampeded toward them and surrounded them. But these animals shouted questions.

  “Is it true, Pastor Morris, that you are friends with four women who have been killed in the last two weeks?”

  “Where did they come from?” O’Shea growled.

  “No comment.” Paul began shoving relentlessly through the throng of reporters.

  “And Detective Collins, a dead body was found in your apartment? A body covered with insects?”

  “No comment.” Keren kept moving. She had ignoring reporters down to an art.

  “Are you and Pastor Morris both involved with these women, Detective?”

  Keren was going to be seeing spots for a month from the flashing cameras. She waded toward her car. Someone caught her arm and tried to drag her to a halt. She recognized a woman reporter for the crime beat of a local television station and saw a video camera right behind her. Keren pulled free, trying not to be rough enough to provide good footage.

  “Is the killer someone who wants revenge on both of you?”

  Paul reached the front passenger-side door. O’Shea provided an escort for Keren around to the driver’s side.

  “Is it true you and the pastor worked together when you were both on the force?”

  “The Chicago Police Department gives a daily briefing at headquarters, as you all know,” O’She
a announced over the din. “All your questions will be answered then.”

  “Even the question of whether Detective Collins and Pastor Morris are having an affair?”

  Keren jerked to a stop and turned to see who had asked that. She saw a man smirking at her from one of the sleazier local tabloids. She glared at him, and it was like pouring blood in shark-infested waters. The snapping cameras went crazy.

  “C’mon, Detective Collins, admit it.” The man tipped back his hat and sneered. “That’s why the killer is focusing on the two of you. The pastor is kicking up his heels with a lady cop, and this nut is offended.”

  Paul had already gotten in the car. Keren prayed desperately that he hadn’t heard the insinuations. She tamped down hard on her temper and began moving again. O’Shea helped wrestle her door open. She slid in and slammed her door shut, hoping she’d catch a few fingers in it.

  She glanced at Paul. His eyes flashed fire and his jaw was tensed into a firm line.

  O’Shea climbed in the back. “Guess the press finally put all these cases together. Took ‘em long enough.”

  Keren took another look at Paul. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where they got an idea like that.”

  “They’re going to print that.” Paul reached for the door handle. Keren grabbed his shoulder and sank her fingernails into his sweatshirt hard enough that he turned on her.

  He jerked against her grip.

  “Get ahold of yourself, Paul.” Keren saw the photographers leaning against the windows, recording everything.

  Fuming, Paul asked, “Do you know how many kids I’ve counseled about abstinence? Do you know the battle I fight every day against the single-mother culture that guarantees a life of poverty to so many women and children in my neighborhood? If they print something like that, it will undo years of work in a single day.”

  He caught Keren’s hand to pull it loose.

  “Don’t you dare open that door.” Keren let go of him and started the car. “If you go out there, I promise you I’ll leave you to those wolves.”

  She backed out of the parking stall.