R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning

by R. S. Guthrie

  That didn’t mean I gave myself a pass. Had I really believed it was going to kill him before he had a chance to enjoy a retirement and pension he’d earned fifty times over, I’d have put up a blockade between my best friend and bad food.

  But because I thought he might just be right, Rico didn’t get a pass either. That’s not the way men do things, or at least not my way. Respect begets respect. Disrespect, particularly when mentioning the deceased—the beloved deceased—got your ass handed to you. I prayed silently that Rico chose to take me up on my boxing invite and made a mental note to reach out to him on the subject in a few days if I didn’t hear from him first.

  Less than twenty minutes later Margaret Duchamp, CID boss, and her charges arrived. They canvassed the area, a for-real crack forensics team that was as good as any I’d heard about. The weather made no difference to them. It only changed the methodology. Duchamp was a bitch but they wouldn’t miss a fiber, not if they had to dig it from the Colorado snow with a pair of tweezers, thaw it, wait patiently for it to dry, and then go to work.

  I’d seen them do it and likely they’d be doing it now.

  There was nothing left for me to do here. I needed to go back to the warm precinct, drink some bitter, strong, hot coffee, start combing missing persons reports, and wait for the M.E.’s report. Once I had prints I could at least try to confirm the identity of the victim. I agreed with Cindy Wu: it was pretty clear the young lady had died from being hung. The cutting in half and disposal there at the Capitol building had likely occurred postmortem but clearly at another much warmer location.

  A few days later I sat at my desk, sitting on my still-frozen ass waiting for identification because of the perpetual backlog at the County Coroner’s office. On the computer screen in front of me was a travel website with some nice tropical thumbnails; places a cop could decompress with his family. Or at least that was what my wife Amanda was hoping for.

  The triplets were almost ten and she felt like we needed a vacation, just the two of us. We’d gotten married after returning from Idaho an entire decade back and never did take a honeymoon. Amanda took her new FBI assignment in stride, a sacrifice fly for the team. She worked often in tandem with the Secret Service in Denver chasing counterfeiters. In her capacity with the FBI itself, she was Special Agent in Charge of Financial Crimes, which meant rooting out white-collar criminals. I was happier with all of it, though it felt more than a little wrong; why should she be forced to hunt down egghead nerd biscuits? Because she was a woman? Bullshit. Amanda was a stud. A better shot than me by far; superior investigative instincts; no fear.

  But I had to admit I didn’t want her in harm’s way. In a perfect world she’d be at home and not working. I was no misogynist. I just loved her so much and I could not imagine a world where I had lost three women I cared for so deeply.

  Counterfeiters rarely fire back.

  Embezzlers cry when arrested at their office.

  I knew it ate away at her inside and it did terrify me that it was not an issue put to bed comfortably but rather like a toddler: tossing, turning, fighting it every step of the way. And I was afraid the toddler would wake up in the middle of some night down the road, howling my name and pointing an accusatory finger.

  I’d live with it. Selfish, yes, and maybe I would approach her first and retire early. I’d been researching a few options. Personal security seemed the best option but Denver was no Los Angeles or New York. The number of rich folk who paid well for a good security chief and entourage were markedly fewer there in our low-traffic Rocky Mountain paradise than some other bigger metropolises.

  Life was a series of trades. The sooner a person learned that, the easier they navigated the future.

  “You still looking for warm destinations,” Manny Rodriguez said from the facing desk.

  “Yeah. Amanda still wants to try to head somewhere. Until this morning I wasn’t onboard.”

  “But now?”

  “Now I walk from my car to the office and my ass still feels frozen to my pants.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  “I am becoming a complete pussy. Check that, my brother Jax—”

  I stopped. Shit. My dead brother Jax, the heartless me whispered inside my head and my heart suddenly weighed as much as a steel ball of similar size.

  “Sorry, man,” my younger partner said uncomfortably.

  “No, not your fault. What I was going to say is that bastard was always busting my balls about something. He claimed I was going soft in more ways than just hating the cold. He lived in north Idaho—”

  “I know, Mac.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Nothing in from the M.E. yet,” Manny said, wisely changing the subject.

  “You know how backed up they are. We’ll be lucky to get anything until Monday.”

  “Seems stupid,” he said. “Us sitting on our butts, them backed up like my uncle who eats too much cheese.”

  “Shit I should go down and print her myself.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Manny said, smiling.

  I picked up the phone and called Delta Swift. Delta and I did the academy together and she was now a Sheriff stationed at the County Building. The morgue was at County.

  “Deputy Swift.”

  “Delta, baby.”

  “Bobby Mac, you exquisite piece of beau-flesh.”

  “Now, Delta. You know I got remarried, right?”

  “Marital status has never been a big concern of mine, you know that.”

  “You still tight with the doc over there? Hollis, is it?”

  “Doc Hollis has been known to butter my muffin from time to time.”

  “I need a solid,” I told her.

  “One good scratch begets another, Detective.”

  “I’ll owe you one.”

  “Depends on what you’re asking. Might be more than one.”

  “I need a set of prints run on a victim that just showed up. I know they’re behind. I need to find out who this poor girl is. I swear, I’ll even bring a print pad and paper myself.”

  “No one has reported her missing?”

  “Not here. The national database is down.”

  “I’ll talk to him. Don’t worry, he’ll do it.”

  “Thanks, Delta.”

  My desk phone rang about two hours after speaking with Delta at the M.E.’s office.

  “Detective Macaulay.”

  “Detective, this is Ben Hollis.”

  “Doc, what can I do for you, sir?”

  “I was wondering if you could come over to my office?”

  I thought about his “office”. The cooler gave me the willies, but I needed this guy’s help and if it meant sucking it up and hanging around a bunch of purple stiffs, I could take one for the team. “Name the time.”

  “Can you be here in an hour?”

  “I can.”

  “See you then,” he said, and disconnected.

  I told Manny it didn’t sound like Doc Hollis was intimating that I should bring company so I drove to the morgue alone. As I approached the copper-colored brick building my stomach started its I-hate-hospitals-and-places-where-naked-dead-bodies-live routine of twisting into a fist and then screaming to my lower colon to go into overdrive.

  I signed in and walked across the freshly polished tile floor to the bank of elevators and waited for one going down. The morgue wasn’t actually in the basement but on a level called the mezzanine. My catholic upbringing always made me think of Purgatory when I pushed the button for a floor between floors.

  “Detective,” Hollis said. “I appreciate you taking the time from your day.”

  “As long as this is about the Dahlia murder, this is part of my day, Doc.”

  “Delt—uh, Deputy Swift came by earlier and wondered if I might run your victim’s prints sooner rather than later. She does make a convincing argument but the truth is I had just run them and was planning on calling you over about another matter in the first place.”

 
Hollis seemed nervous and was sweating profusely. Unusual, as the room was about thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

  “No problem,” I said. “Talk to me.”

  “Shall we sit over in my office?”

  “You read my mind, Doc.”

  When we were in the office he motioned to a chair for me, removed a handkerchief, and wiped the water from his brow. “I am not usually this disconcerted about a body,” he said. “B-but this particular victim—the surgical incisions, the smiling mouth perpetrated by the massive cuts to the cheek area—I don’t know; I haven’t been sleeping well since she was brought in.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Our jobs aren’t always easy to bring home with us.”

  “No,” he said. “But I called you here because of what I found.”

  I stayed silent, giving him the floor.

  “Frozen in the back of the victim’s throat, well behind the larynx, was a stack of thirty dimes.”

  “Thirty dimes you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I am a coin collector,” he said to no surprise of mine. “The coins are in excellent condition and each predated the year nineteen sixty-five by at least a decade. W-worthless from a collector’s point of view you understand.”

  “I’m not following you here, Doc. You have knowledge about the coins, I take it? Usually I just tell folks to spit it out. Uh, just say whatever they need to.”

  “Until the Coinage Act of nineteen sixty-five, dimes were composed of ninety percent silver. In fact, that’s why they’re so thin—so that the intrinsic value of the silver not exceed the ten cent coin itself. Since sixty-five, they, like most coins, are made mostly of copper, with nickel providing the coloring.”

  “Interesting stuff, Doc, but as good a detective as I am, you’ve stumped me.”

  “Most texts agree that Judas Iscariot accepted thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus to the priests in the Garden of Gethsemane.”

  “Are you a religious man, Doctor Hollis?”

  “Ben, please Detective. Not particularly. But there is enough evidence in the books of history to suggest that a man named Jesus was nailed to a cross and left there to die a most excruciating death and, in the least, he was the kindest, gentlest man to ever walk the earth and at the most, as some believe, the son of God. Either way, I find the facts in this case disturbing.”

  “Facts, as in plural?”

  “Thirty pieces of silver and the hanging of the victim.”

  “Judas hanged himself after having remorse for what he’d done,” I said.

  “After returning the silver pieces to the high priests.”

  The prints had a match in the system. A suspected runaway from Toledo: Deena Ballou. I reached out to the parents—the mother, Reba Carrigan, still lived in Toledo but the father had split to somewhere in the Midwest. He’d been out of Deena’s life for a while. Unfortunately not an uncommon story.

  Reba took the news harder than I thought. Ballou had been missing for over three years and showed signs of drug abuse that went back even further. I mistakenly assumed the mother was already prepared for such a call.

  She wasn’t.

  She cried and told me she’d never given up the hope that Deena would find God or Jesus or whatever higher power always cured people on television and in the movies.

  Such turpitude comes from the early days, I thought at the time. Parents instill such potential long before they think the child will need it.

  And it wasn’t a cruel accusation. Young kids were so perfect. I mean sure, they had their moments. Many of them. But they were so innocent and they idolized you. That idolization was as strong as any drug I’d tried or heard of. Intoxicating. And a parent had to keep things in check. Teach them right from wrong at a core level. That wasn’t going to guarantee ANYTHING in the years between fifteen and twenty-five or so. That was the scary part. But if you gave them a good core, they stood a chance. That was the best a parent could do, I had long since realized.

  My son Cole and I were finally repairing a relationship that sailed downhill at bobsled speeds after the death of Isabel, Cole’s mother and my first wife—the first deep love (and lover) I’d really ever had. But Cole was in his late twenties and after some years of pot smoking and other drugs (thank God nothing as ruining as crack or heroin or other demonstrably destructive narcotics), plus some reckless sexual exploits, had come back around and was about to finish his college degree. He’d lost his Division I hockey career after a drug testing, and then asked to leave Bemidji State “officially” for grades (because there was no arrest record for the drug use, it was his poor grades that nailed the coffin on the four-year degree there).

  But he’d rebounded, was almost finished with a degree in pre-Law at the University of Colorado Denver. Straight As. His application for the Law College at the University of Wyoming had already been accepted. His future was shaping up and our relationship was healing, albeit slowly still.

  Children—strike that; teenagers—sometimes come out of the hurtful, hateful years with skewed memories of what really went down. Most of us eventually realize that our parents knew best, did their best, and that most of what they did (right or wrong) was done through an undying and nearly unconditional love for them.

  Problem? Some realized it at twenty. Some fifty. Some not until their parents were in the cold ground. But most eventually wiped the fog off the window and saw the true landscape all around them. The lucky ones still had time to reconnect and repair old wrongs.

  And some never figured it out.

  Life again. A strange, cruel beast. You tossed the dice, you took your chances.

  The information I finally got from Reba Carrigan really didn’t help us out much beyond confirming our victim’s identity, and that was important, too. CID came back with cause and time of death but not much more:

  Deena Ballou was indeed hanged—the rope was thicker than your average laundry line—good, sturdy, towing-grade; the forensics team believed whoever hanged our victim used a proper hangman’s knot, which broke the neck upon impact. This meant she had likely been dropped from a distance of greater than three feet and that she did not suffer. That fact offered our profiler, psychiatrist Tag Brewer, M.D.—a great doctor cursed with a name more suited for a soap opera star—more to chew on.

  (Equally unfair to Tag, by the way, were his purely average looks. No Romance cover modeling in his future.)

  At least at the moment of her death Deena had been shown some mercy. The level of muscle deterioration suggested Deena Ballou had been held captive on food rations for several months. In cases like this the endured psychological terror was a suffering that was worse than physical pain but left scars, though less visible, that were equally impossible for live victims to erase fully.

  My boss, Elias Shackleford, called me in for a briefing. As usual, the man was impeccably dressed, his desk uncluttered and looking as if he’d just swiped it with a dust rag.

  “Let’s hear where we’re at, Mac.”

  “Yes, sir. Victim is Deena Ballou from Toledo. Rodriguez and Trent canvassed Colfax, Five Points, and a few other hot spots. No one seemed to remember her turning tricks. Heavy drug use and no consistent job history we’ve found, however, so—”

  Shackleford waved his impatient ‘I get it, no arrests is all that means’ wave.

  “We’re about finished with the halfway houses; no luck.”

  “Have you considered releasing her photo to the media?” Shackleford said.

  “I’d like to keep it close for a bit longer. The killer obviously gets off on the notoriety. Staging the way he does. We’ve kept all of it except ‘female murder victim’ off the news.”

  “He?”

  “Doc Brewer feels the profile is most definitely male now.”

  “How so?”

  “The mercy of quick death shown at the time of death. No torture or other signs of serious physical abuse. Statistics suggest women are more probable to
do damage to the vic.”

  “Bobbit syndrome,” he said absently.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant?”

  “Lorena Bobbit. Cut her husband’s penis off and threw it out the window.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I suddenly had Lord of the Rings in my head.”

  “Hobbit,” he said, a bit more derisively than I preferred. Shackleford had never been the same since Idaho.

  “Got it,” I said, giving him a pass. Shackleford played middle linebacker in Division I and still looked like he could. I was a decent boxer but my boss still looked like he could tear me a new one, head gear or no.

  “Any leads?”

  “Next of kin has been notified. The mother says she was living with her at the time she left. She was classified as a runaway. She was sixteen when she was killed. Almost seventeen.”

  “So she’s ostensibly lived here in the city for, what, three years? Must have had some help somewhere,” Shackelford said.

  “The mother says her estranged brother lives here. Last known address was a bust, but Trent is working on tracking him down. Guy by the name of Carrigan. Burly Carrigan.”

  “You think we’ve seen the last of this guy? The killer, I mean.”

  “No, sir. I don’t.”

  “Me either. Let’s get this guy before we’ve got a media circus on our hands.”

  “And more victims,” I said.

  “Right. More victims. We’re done.”

  3

  Present Day, two months post-abduction

  HAILEY AWOKE in a different cell, this time strapped to a chair. Her head felt like it was filled with hardening concrete mix. She thought maybe she’d been drugged, but it was difficult to concentrate, to remember what were her last memories. Dinner. She remembered eating the ration of potatoes, meat scraps from the bowl, on hands and knees, and lapping up the milk.

  Her captor wasn’t particularly unkind. Excepting the feeding like a dog behavior.

  She could not focus; she only really knew she was in a chair because of her seated position. Her arms were tied behind her back; her legs were bound to the legs of the chair.