Deadly Web

by Michael Omer

  “You had a gun on you when you were arrested.”

  “Only for intimidation! I would never kill another person! Please, do what you have to rule me out. DNA tests, fingerprints, whatever. I mean… My fingerprints are all over her apartment but that doesn’t have anything to do with it…”

  “Can you think of anyone else that might harm Dona?”

  “Anyone that might harm her? Why would anyone want to do that? Hell, I don’t even think I can name anyone else who knows her. I mean, she had a sister, and her parents, but she kept to herself. She didn’t work, didn’t go out. She’d stay at home all day and play computer games. I was the only one she… saw…” Blayze became quiet. “I’m not really helping myself here, am I?” he said, his voice barely audible over the wind.

  “How did you meet Dona?”

  “An online forum. A sort of mutual help group for people who are depressed.”

  “Are you usually depressed?”

  “I was. I was just out of prison, in a boring, low paying job, and I was struggling with alcoholism.” Blayze lifted his hand, his finger and thumb nearly touching. “I was this close to falling off the wagon. Yeah, I was not in a good place. And she helped me. And we began to talk. First on the forum, then we started chatting privately. We chatted for hours every day. I was already falling in love with her. She was so warm, and innocent, and…” Tears began flowing down his cheeks, but he kept talking. “Eventually I convinced her to meet me. At the time, I didn’t know how incredibly rare that was. Dona never met anyone. I mean anyone. We started meeting up almost daily. She made me feel happy again. I didn’t need the forum anymore, all I needed was to see her. And I think she was improving as well. She was talking about getting a job. She started walking around the neighborhood every morning. Short walks, but it was an amazing step for her.”

  “Did you notice anything else different lately with her?”

  “Besides those walks? Not really. She was still spending most of her day playing Dragonworld on the computer. She had the same extreme mood swings. I got to her place on Saturday, and she was in bed, crying her eyes out for no reason. Took me two hours to get her to eat something and calm down. I know that sounds irregular, but it really wasn’t. Dona was suffering from intense depression. That’s why I asked if she killed herself. I think she had tried to do that twice before. But I would never imagine that anyone—” His voice cracked.

  Jacob waited a second, then said, “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Terry. If you want, we can go to the station right now and get your full statement, just to speed things up.”

  Blayze took a long breath. He looked at the bucket, the fish gaping within. It was too large to swim inside; it would die soon. “No, thanks,” he finally said. “I changed my mind, Detective. You want to ask me any questions here? No problem. But I’m not coming with you to the station, and I won’t give you anything without a warrant.”

  “This is not helping your case, Mr. Terry,” Jacob said, his voice hardening.

  “I thought it was Dona’s case you were investigating, Detective,” Blayze said. “But unless I’m under arrest, I prefer to stay here. I’m not under arrest, am I?”

  “No.” Jacob said.

  Not yet, Mitchell thought.

  Blayze sat on the sand, looking at the waves.

  “Thank you, Mr. Terry,” Jacob said. “I assume that if we need to talk to you again we’ll be able to find you at home?”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess,” Blayze said. “You can try my phone as well. When I’m not fishing, I answer every call.”

  The detectives turned to leave. As they walked past the remains of the campfire, Mitchell put his hand just above the ashes. They were still hot.

  “What do you think?” he asked Jacob.

  “Well, I can’t really tell,” Jacob said. “But he deeply loved her. And deep love turns to hate very fast in the right circumstances. It’s almost always the boyfriend, or the husband, or the lover.”

  They walked in silence for a few more minutes.

  “Besides,” he said. “We have no other suspects.”

  Things became even more incriminating on their way back to the city. Matt called them to say there were five different sets of prints taken at the crime scene. One set belonged to Blayze, one belonged to Dona. He assumed the rest belonged to her sister and parents. The door handle and the snack bowls on the table didn’t have any prints on them, which meant whoever was there last had wiped them clean. That could mean anything.

  The computer wasn’t password protected. Matt had accessed Dona’s e-mail account. She had no social network accounts as far as he could tell, which was obviously unusual. Her e-mail account was almost empty, just some promotion e-mails related to the computer game Dragonworld or to the Buoy Forum, which was a mutual assistance forum—probably the one Blayze had mentioned. Dona had stopped visiting the forum four months ago, which narrowed down the people who talked to her routinely even more.

  There were some online searches for Buffy memorabilia in her browser history from the last couple of days. At first Matt had assumed she’d been shopping, but then he’d realized the searches matched the items in her possession. She’d been checking out prices on eBay. He thought she was considering selling her collection. Her collection’s worth, according to Matt, was above seven thousand dollars.

  “She had in her closet a jacket worn by Sarah Michelle Gellar during one of the episodes,” Matt said. “Worth more than three thousand dollars. The knife replica on the night table is the knife Faith used—”

  “Who?” Jacob asked.

  “Faith. She’s a big deal in the Buffyverse. The knife’s worth two hundred dollars. Several jewelry pieces inside her dresser that were used on the set and were worth a couple of hundred each.”

  “Okay,” Jacob said. “What about the anonymous phone call to dispatch? Did you check it out?”

  “I heard it,” Matt said. “It was pre-recorded with a text to speech application. It’s very short, just her name, address, and that she needs assistance. The call was made using a prepaid phone with a new SIM card, as far as we can tell. We’re still checking to see if we can trace it, or find out where it was purchased from.”

  “Great, Matt. Keep us posted about it,” Jacob said.

  “And now I’m going to sleep,” Matt said, his voice brittle. “And if anyone else is murdered tonight, you can wake someone else.”

  “There is no one else, Matt. You’re our guy,” Jacob said.

  “I’m turning off the phone.”

  “Good night, Matt.”

  “Good night, Jacob.”

  Jacob hung up, and they drove in silence a couple of minutes.

  “Seven thousand dollars could also be a motive for murder for a man like Blayze,” Mitchell pointed out.

  “Yeah.”

  “Blayze could have wiped the fingerprints himself, make it look like someone else did it.”

  “That’s true,” Jacob agreed.

  Mitchell thought about it. “He did look as if he really does love her,” he said. “I mean, you know, you could see the loss in his eyes.”

  Jacob glanced at him in amusement. “Seriously? Since when do you solve a case by looking into a man’s eyes?”

  “Well, it’s just a feeling I had.”

  “Yeah, well, love can do funny things.”

  “I know,” Mitchell said vacantly. Would someone like Blayze hurt someone he truly loved? Strangle her with his bare hands? How could that even be possible? He shook his head. What was wrong with him? A boyfriend or husband killing his partner was one of the most common murder types there was. Why should Blayze be any different?

  “We need to find some proof,” he said hoarsely.

  “Yup.”

  The smell of the morgue always made Bernard want to flee. He had a keen sense of smell, keener than most, and the coppery smell of blood, the ghastly odor of the dead body, and the smells of disinfectants and formalin were almost too much to bear. The firs
t time he’d been in an autopsy room during his police academy days, he’d left the room to throw up. He wasn’t the only one, but as far as he could tell he was the only one who had done so three times. These days, he had better control over his gag reflex—though he made sure to verify that the path to the exit was unobstructed, and that he knew where the bathroom was.

  A pair of white lab coats, spotted with some brown stains, hung next to the exit doors. The white cloth reflected the cold light of the fluorescent lamps. The tiled floor, though clean, felt a bit sticky under his feet.

  As he walked toward Annie Turner and the dead body of Frank Gulliepe, Bernard tried to avoid thinking about the stickiness, concentrating on the number of tiles instead. Thirteen tiles between the door and the metal gurney. Thirteen, now there was a number. He looked at Frank Gulliepe, half covered with a pale blue blanket, his torso bare, the Y shape of the incision marks foreign and strange.

  There were tools on a metal table beside the body. An electric saw, a scalpel, forceps, something that seemed to be a hammer. Bernard always forgot what they did with the hammer thing. It didn’t match the style of the rest of its grisly siblings. It would have been more at home beside some nails, used when a picture on the wall required hanging.

  “What can you tell us, Annie?” Hannah asked. She didn’t seem to be troubled by the smell at all. Bernard wondered if it was because her nostrils were smaller. He would have been glad for a smaller pair of nostrils right about now.

  “Well, the cause of death, like I said, was a stab to the heart,” Annie said. “We have seven stab wounds. Also, the fingers on the right hand are sliced, looks like a defensive wound. Two stab wounds went through the liver, one punctured the kidney, one punctured the lungs. Two stab wounds were much more superficial, probably because the blade hit the ribs. And this here is the stab to the heart.”

  She pointed at the stab wounds as she explained this. Bernard counted with her. One, two, three… someone wanted to make sure this guy was dead.

  “The stab to the kidney, and the superficial one here, were done after the victim was already dead. The bathrobe he was dressed in was torn in two places, which line up with these two wounds, so those two stabs went through the bathrobe and into the body. The rest of the stabbings were directly into the body.”

  “The blade used was sharp and uncommonly clean. There were no particles from it left in the body, not even where it hit the bone. No rust either. The stab marks are quite wide, making me believe the blade was about two inches wide, but it’s hard to be accurate. One of the stabs, the one that punctured the liver, went about seven inches deep, so this knife was pretty long as well. Judging from the slice wound on the fingers, and the edges of the stab wounds, it was sharp on one edge, blunt on the other.”

  “A bread knife?” Bernard suggested, trying not to inhale too much.

  “Not likely. A bread knife has a serrated edge. This one was completely smooth.”

  “Okay. Do you have an accurate time of death?” Hannah asked.

  “I got it right the first time,” Annie said. “Twenty past midnight, give or take five minutes.”

  “What else?” Hannah asked.

  Bernard thought she sounded a bit strained. Perhaps she was affected by the smell after all, and wanted to leave as well?

  “Toxicology report is not back yet,” Annie said. “But his blood alcohol level was pretty high. I’d say that if he hadn’t been killed, he’d have had a wicked hangover the morning after. Small blessings, huh?”

  “Right,” Bernard said.

  “Stomach contents indicated a small dinner, not much more. He had no foreign matter under his fingernails, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll get a DNA sample from there.”

  “We have DNA samples from the crime scene that we’re pretty sure belong to the killer,” Hannah said.

  “Good luck convincing the jury with that,” Annie said contemptuously. “As far as DNA samples go, nothing is better than cells under the fingernails. Matt can’t get you incriminating evidence like that.”

  “Nor can you,” Bernard pointed out.

  “Not this time,” Annie said, her voice sharp. “However, I’ve collected hair samples from the rest of the body, so maybe there’s something there. I’ll send it to DNA analysis if necessary. That’s pretty much it.”

  “Thanks, Annie,” Hannah said, then turned and briskly went out the door.

  “Weak stomach,” Bernard said, indicating the door. “Not everyone can stay cool in a morgue.”

  He stood there for ten seconds more, just to make a point, then left the room as fast as his feet could carry him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hannah sat in Captain Bailey’s office with the rest of the detectives, filling the captain in on their progress on the murder cases.

  “We got Chad Grimes on multiple possession charges, not to mention shooting police officers, so he’s not getting back to the street anytime soon,” Hannah said, summing up. She craned her neck, trying to see Captain Bailey’s face, which hid behind a pile of paperwork. Fred Bailey’s desk had once been named the Desk of Chaos, and the name had stuck. Mounds of papers always covered every inch, the piles tumbling into each other and creating a strange mountain range with peaks, valleys, and the occasional canyon. Hannah was shorter than most, and when the paper wall divided them it was hard to actually be sure the captain was there. She shifted a bit to the left, managing to position herself so she could see most of him through the small crack between two piles of paper. “But we don’t think Grimes is the murderer,” she added.

  “Okay,” Captain Bailey said. “Let’s recap. We have one case with one suspect, and one case with about a gazillion suspects, right? Let’s start with the simpler case. This Blayze guy. Do we have enough to give the district attorney?”

  “Not really,” Jacob said. “It’s all very circumstantial. The victim had no other contacts beyond her family and her boyfriend. That, and his criminal record, are currently the only things we have.”

  “My dad would say that what we have amounts to an old man’s drool in a beer mug,” Bailey said. “That’s not even enough to get a search warrant. Hell, I wouldn’t even know what to search for. The woman was choked by someone. It’s not like we can search for the murder weapon in her boyfriend’s house. What are we looking for?”

  “Dona had a Buffy memorabilia collection worth more than seven thousand dollars,” Mitchell said. “We think she was considering selling it. Maybe Blayze was after the money.”

  “You think he killed her for seven thousand dollars?” Captain Bailey rubbed his chin. “Well, we’ve seen people kill for less. But why didn’t he wait for her to sell the stuff? And why didn’t he take some of it to sell himself?”

  “Maybe they had an argument about it and he got angry,” Mitchell suggested.

  It was a half-assed thing to say, far from typical. Mitchell seemed weary, and Hannah wondered if something was wrong.

  Captain Bailey narrowed his eyes. Hannah could usually tell how pissed off he was by how narrow his eyes became. Almond-sized meant he was content. Paper-thin slits meant people should update their resume. Currently his eyes were somewhere between pencil-thin and shoelace-thin.

  “I’m not convinced,” he said. “Find us something to give the DA. You think that this was about money? We can try to get a search warrant for Blayze’s finances. But we need a bit of proof to get it. What about her relatives? Maybe she told one of them that her boyfriend threatened to kill her? That could be helpful.”

  “The sister likes the guy, thinks that he’s reformed,” Jacob said. “The parents didn’t even know he existed.”

  “What about the forum they met in?” Bernard asked. “Maybe one of the members—”

  “She hasn’t been to the forum in four months,” Mitchell interrupted. “Matt could find no e-mails or personal messages sent by Dona to anyone in the forum. I doubt anyone there knows anything.”

  “There’s a neighbor,” Jacob said doubt
fully. “We could question her. But I didn’t get the feeling that she knew Dona all that well.”

  “What about the other Dragonworld players?” Hannah asked.

  The rest of the detectives stared at her.

  “What?” she said, irritated. “Look, Dragonworld is a multi-player game. They have a name for it. A… Morpeg or something.”

  “MMORPG,” Mitchell said.

  “Right. Anyway, she must have played with other players, right? Don’t they have like… groups, or something?”

  “Guilds,” Mitchell said after a second. “You’re right. It’s likely she has friends in the game. I’ll check it out. Maybe one of them can give us some dirt on Blayze.”

  He smiled at her. She felt her face grow warm and looked away.

  “Good.” Bailey said. “See? We’re closer to closing this case already. Now for the real nightmare. Okay, we have this fantastic standup guy, who sexually harassed at least a dozen women online. He also bought drugs from a trigger-happy drug dealer the night he was killed. And we have at least one very angry husband, a Mr.…”

  “Tarp,” Bernard said.

  “So, we have suspects galore. Like my dad used to say, we have more cocoons than we could use in a lifetime. Let’s sit down with the list, narrow it down. We have a car model, right?”

  “Two, actually,” Hannah said. “The sister said she saw a blue Ford Fiesta several times lately when her brother came to visit. The cab driver saw a red Toyota Corolla driving away from the scene of the crime.”

  “Well, the Ford Fiesta that the sister saw is probably Frank’s,” Bailey said.

  “It isn’t,” Jacob said shortly. “Frank’s car is an Audi.”

  “Look,” Bailey said tiredly, “we have a thousand leads we can follow, right? Let’s try to narrow them down. So a red Toyota Corolla was seen fleeing the scene?”

  “Driving away from the scene,” Hannah said, “I asked for some info from the DMV. It’ll take some time.”

  “Okay, how else can we narrow our suspect list? Let’s comb through the victim’s e-mail account and social media. Try to find some stronger motives than a few mean comments on Twitter. Figure out who was harassed more frequently and maliciously, like that Tarp woman. Who could have figured out Frank’s identity? Try to see if any of them has a criminal record. Yeah, we have a lot of work to do.”