by Scott Young
“I don’t know. He wasn’t in yet but he had a late night,” Mancini replied. “I’ll get him up to speed whenever he wanders in.”
Montgomery shrugged. “Hey, it’s not like I miss him. His act gets old after a while and sometimes he hits on me so hard, he leaves bruises.”
“He’s harmless. You know that,” Jeff said, settling onto a stool near Sasha’s desk. “Let’s get to it so you can eventually get some sleep.”
“From your lips...” Sasha said as she walked over to her computer. A few keystrokes later she’d brought up her report on the vehicle. “Like I said last night, this car is unusually clean, but whoever wiped it didn’t reckon with my skills.”
The sheer data on the screen overwhelmed Mancini but Sasha was right at home, shifting the charts, graphs and lists with the skill of a virtuoso musician. When she had them in the order she wanted, she began.
“At first glance, it seemed like the vehicle had no story to tell but after I scraped the treads and inner wheel wells, it told quite a fascinating little tale,” Sergeant Montgomery said. “There was trace residue from several different plants, trees and other flora as well as insect larvae and animal droppings. I ran them through the mass spectrometer and the most prominent residue came from the vaccinium corymbosom or High Bush Blueberry, a shrub whose fruit attracts various forms of wildlife, which explains the droppings. These particular pellets came from the procyon lotor, more commonly known as the raccoon. There was also a prominent amount of Quercus Coccinea or Scarlet Oak residue. I’ve already got Officer Nieves cross referencing for any location in the tri-state area where both types of plant life and raccoons would be present. So far he’s come up with 208 such spots.” She sighed.
Mancini made a face and Montgomery cut him off before he could say anything.
“I’m not done. I believe we can narrow it down even further. There were trace amounts of some form of petroleum within the mud I found in the tire treads. Once, I get the trimethylpentane and n-heptane ratio, I’ll be able to tell exactly where the petroleum was produced. I’m currently waiting for the results, but I should be able to at least give you a smaller search grid.” Sasha turned to Mancini with a hopeful look. “What do you think, Jeff?”
He stood and continued to look up at the screen for a few moments before saying, “I think we have a lot more to go on than we did yesterday.” Mancini looked at Montgomery with a smile. “Thanks, Sasha. You rock.”
“That I do. Thanks for noticing,” she said, returning his smile. “But that’s small time compared to my next revelation.”
“There’s more?” Jeff asked.
“Oh, yeah! Sit your ass back down because I pretty much hit the freakin’ lottery on this one,” she said, changing the screen to another set of seemingly incomprehensible charts.
Before starting, she paused and said, “Sorry about that outburst, Jeff. I’ve had 7 espressos and a couple of Red Bulls. It’s been a long night.”
“Believe me, I understand, Sasha,” Jeff responded. “I haven’t slept more than a few hours since this all started. I’m sure I look like all kinds of shit warmed over.”
“Yeah, you’re a wreck. Everyone should look so bad. When exactly is the People Magazine ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ photo shoot, cowboy?” Sasha said. Instantly she realized she had crossed the line. After an awkward few seconds, she added, “Anyway, let me show you what I’ve got.”
Jeff couldn’t help but laugh.
Sasha’s eyes got wide as she blushed. “I mean the data from my analysis!”
Mancini smiled warmly, extending his arms in front of him as if to say “please do,” but decided not to make the situation worse for Montgomery with a wise crack.
“Okay, well I also went over the interior of the car inch by inch and when I got to the passenger’s seat, I found something extremely interesting. I was leaning on the seat with my elbow, checking the seatbelts for any particulates, when I felt a pinch. Apparently, the seat had a bad spring inside the fabric.”
“Riiiight, right. I remember Emily complaining about it to Kurt,” Jeff said. “She said it was like getting stung by a bee when you hit it just right.”
“Yes, I imagine it was,” Montgomery agreed, “and the last passenger must have hit it exactly right because it stung someone good.”
“DNA?” Mancini asked, hopefully.
“Yes,” Sasha replied. “I ran it through every known database and got a hit almost immediately.”
“That’s terrific,” Jeff said, jumping up from his stool again. “Whose is it?”
“That’s the weird part I mentioned when I called. The DNA belongs to Ava Vazquez, Jeff.”
“I...know that name,” Mancini said, the color draining from his face.
“Yes, I imagine you would,” the M.E. said. “You investigated her murder a few months ago. Ava Vazquez is dead.”
“What? How can that be?” the detective asked frantically. “Did you double check the DNA? How can she be dead and somehow end up riding in Emily’s passenger seat?”
“I triple checked it and then I did a more in-depth analysis of the sample. I found it to be necrotic, definitely not from a live body,” Sasha replied. She waited a few moments before saying, “I think we have a serial, Jeff. One who tortures, kills and dumps his victims and then digs up the corpse after they’ve been buried. Maybe somehow preserves them, too.”
The medical examiner’s words chilled Jeff Mancini to the core. The prospect of it was too ghoulish to comprehend. What kind of monster were they dealing with? Most serials kept tokens or trophies from their kills, but to dig up the body itself? It didn’t make any sense. It was a risk only a truly demented psychopath would take; beyond brazen, beyond bizarre. What would compel a man to do something like that?
To make matters worse, nothing about the two cases were remotely similar. Most serial killers are slaves to their routine, keeping the same M.O. for each victim. Any changes in their rituals are subtle and logical, a progression within the same basic premise. They rarely killed in completely different ways. Jeff’s mind started to reel as the details of the Vazquez case came flooding back.
Ava Vazquez was 22 years old when she disappeared from her mother’s home while the elder woman, Yolanda, worked the overnight shift as a cashier at the local supermarket. She was missing 4 days when her body was discovered near Ground Zero.
Her body showed no signs of torture and COD was determined to be an accidental drug overdose because of multiple track marks on her arms and legs, despite the absence of narcotics in her system. Crawley had dismissed it as a simple case of a pimp trying to turn Ava out and taking it too far, too fast. After Jeff spoke with her mother, he dismissed that theory.
A girl like Ava, God-fearing, ambitious and intelligent, would never get caught up in the world of drugs and prostitution. Jeff attended her funeral out of respect and it was there that Yolanda Vazquez begged him to find out what happened to Ava; to bring peace to her daughter’s soul. Unfortunately, his investigation hit one dead end after another and eventually he had to move on. His failure to get justice for Ava had haunted him for weeks. Now it was possible that she’d been abducted and her body desecrated by the same madman who’d taken, tortured and killed Emily Sheppard.
The vivid image of his friend’s dead body lying in the mud under the Brooklyn Bridge came to Mancini’s mind unbidden. He slumped back onto the stool and ran his hands through his hair over and over, trying to force the sight of Emily’s mutilated neck out of his mind’s eye. He’d tried mightily to come to grips with everything that had happened with varying levels of success. Now he needed to somehow process this new development, but the pieces didn’t fit; the senselessness of it all threatened to overwhelm him. Sasha Montgomery stayed silent, letting him work it out in his mind. After a few minutes, his training and experience took over and the detective looked up, his face pale and haggard. “Did you pull the autopsy report on Ava Vazquez?” he asked.
“Of course,” Sasha said. �
��I looked for any similarities but there were none. No signs of torture but multiple injection sights on her arms, legs and feet. Nothing to make anyone think it was the same killer. Except of course that we now know Ava’s body was in Emily’s car.”
“It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes a lick of sense,” Jeff said, unable to reconcile the conflicting data. He was out of control emotionally, desperately trying to maintain a calm outer veneer, but he felt the dam about to burst. All the emotions he’d been pushing down were bubbling to the surface at the worst possible time. The last thing he needed was to break down in front of a fellow officer. That could lead to being forced to see a shrink or, worse yet, being pulled from the case. He couldn’t let that happen. He refused to.
Thankfully, Montgomery spoke, breaking him out of the torrent of emotions, “I notified Caroline Mooney and asked her to go over the autopsy report too. She’s better qualified to catch any irregularities than I am.”
Mancini looked at Sasha, his mind still racing. “Thanks. Tha – Thank you. I – I – uh...that petroleum. Let me know if you manage to find out where it came from, okay?” He felt slightly dizzy.
“You know it.” Sasha smiled at him with sympathy in her eyes, much like Dr. Miller the day before. “Listen, Jeff. You’ve got a lot of friends around here and we all know what this one means to you. I want you to know you can count on me and everyone else to do whatever we can to help.”
“Thanks, again. Truly. I appreciate that more than you can know,” Mancini said. He stood and hugged her for a brief moment, immediately feeling awkward for doing it. He broke the embrace suddenly, turned and headed toward the door. “When I get this bastard, drinks on me, okay?” he shouted without turning.
“You got it,” Sasha answered. After Mancini disappeared through the swinging doors, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “‘When’s the photo shoot?’ Geez, Sasha, could you be a bigger loser,” she muttered to herself and put her right thumb and forefinger up to her forehead in the shape of an “L.”
Immediately after walking through those doors, Jeff Mancini pressed his back against the cold, concrete wall outside the laboratory. He slid down the surface until he was squatting with the palms of each hand pressed firmly against his eyes, fighting the urge to cry. His head filled with visions of his best friend and his wife, of Kurt and Emily, so happy, so in love. He stayed there for a few minutes, breathing deeply and forcing his mind to think of other things. He momentarily remembered that bizarre message from Dr. Miller and inadvertently chuckled. That seemed to snap him back from the emotional edge and, after a few moments, he slowly stood, adjusting his clothes in an effort to get it together.
Feeling the weight of his near breakdown and growing exhaustion on his shoulders, Detective Mancini headed for the coffee machine near the exit. When he turned the corner, he spotted Kevin Crawley near the machine. His longtime partner had the new morgue assistant, Maggie Brelan, pushed up against the wall with his left hand and was using his right hand to point a finger in her face, menacingly. Jeff couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she looked petrified.
Maggie was a tall, slender woman with jet-black hair cut into a bob. She looked a bit like a recovering goth girl, one who realized you can’t get a good job when you look like one of the undead. She still had some of the trappings, including too much eye make-up, a nose ring and two lip piercings, but otherwise she had cleaned up nicely. When Maggie saw Mancini, she gestured to Crawley who turned to look at Jeff before backing off her. Kevin motioned for the girl to leave and she quickly ran through the exit doors.
Crawley then turned to Mancini. “There you are, partner! Been looking for you,” he said with a big smile.
“What was that all about, Kev?” Jeff asked.
“What? Oh, that. Captain Mulvaney wanted me to impress upon the new girl what her responsibilities are,” he said matter-of-factly. “She tends to overstep, y’know?”
“Overstep? In what way?” Mancini said.
“Forget it, dude. Nothing important,” Crawley answered. “What did Gum have for us?”
Mancini was absolutely sure something was off about what he just witnessed. His partner’s refusal to talk about it reinforced that notion, but he was too tired to go back and forth with Crawley, so he let it go for now.
“Long story short, Sasha is tracing where Emily’s car has been for the past week or so. Still working on it but making headway,” Mancini said, still eyeing his partner.
“Okay. Should I get the rundown too?” Crawley asked.
“No, she’s been up all night. Let her be,” Jeff replied, knowing Montgomery didn’t need Crawley sniffing around right now. “Besides, there’s more.” His face turned grim once more.
“That doesn’t sound good,” his partner said.
“It’s not. There’s a very real chance we are dealing with a serial killer, Kev,” Mancini explained. “Get this: Sasha found Ava Vazquez’s DNA in Emily’s car. We think she was killed by the same person.”
Crawley put his hand on his head, obviously shaken by this news. “No way. Not possible.” He looked distraught. It was the look Mancini had seen hundreds of times on the faces of family members asked to identify a loved one’s body.
“It’s true,” Jeff said. “This thing is much bigger than we thought.” He put his hand on Crawley’s shoulder to steady him.
“Okay. Okay. What’s our next move, partner?” Crawley asked, composing himself.
“Right now, we need to head back over to Gene-Tech,” Mancini replied.
“Oh, shit! No way, buddy. I can’t go through that again right now,” Crawley said. “How ‘bout I follow up with Mooney and see where she is. Then I’ll read over everything CSU came up with and meet you later, okay?”
“Sure, whatever. Just keep me in the loop should any new developments arise, okay?” Mancini conceded, happy to have some time alone to process everything.
“You got it, and give my regards to the ice queen, will ya?” Crawley said through a forced grin.
Detective Mancini was surprised when Holden Levitt came to retrieve him from the Gene-Tech reception area a mere 10 minutes after he’d arrived. As the elevator doors closed, Levitt turned to the detective.
“Dr. Miller insisted I bring you right up, Detective,” Holden said, nervously looking at the ground. “I think I should warn you...no, not warn, that’s not right. I guess, just make you aware...Dr. Miller isn’t quite herself today.” The lab assistant’s face turned beet red as he awkwardly struggled to express himself.
“What seems to be the problem?” Mancini asked just as they reached the 15th floor.
Even before the doors completely opened, Holden Levitt scurried out of the elevator. Without looking back, he said, “You should see for yourself, Detective. Good luck.”
Jeff stood outside the elevator for a moment staring down the hallway where Levitt had disappeared. He stifled a yawn and shook his head vigorously as he wondered just what was going on lately. It seemed like everywhere he went, someone was acting strangely: Captain Mulvaney, Crawley, Kurt, Sasha, even Maggie, the morgue assistant. Now, Holden Levitt? For the briefest of moments, he thought maybe they were all in it together. Maybe it was a vast conspiracy to drive him crazy. He dismissed the notion immediately, chalking up the irrational thought to his fatigue and anxiety. He felt silly for even considering it.
When Detective Mancini walked into Dr. Miller’s lab, his world became an entirely new level of strange. As soon as he opened the door he could hear the sultry vocals of Fiona Apple singing “Criminal” throughout the room. All the lights were off and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he noticed the air smelled of, what was it, jasmine? The only light came from the various computer screens populating the room, giving everything an eerie, blue hue. Dr. Miller herself was once again in the far corner of the room, her back to Mancini as she swayed seductively to the music. He approached slowly, watching her hips move in time with the beat. Once he was almost ten feet a
way, she spun around, her eyes still closed, seemingly oblivious to his presence.
She wore a dark, sleeveless, low cut dress that displayed her charms in a way that surprised the detective. It seemed entirely too provocative and daring for the reserved hematologist. The dress was accentuated by elbow-length dark gloves, knee high boots and a black, lace choker adorned with some kind of charm that rested at the base of her neck. Her raven hair was down and wild, cascading to her shoulders, and framing her delicate features in a way that made her look exotic and mysterious. Dr. Miller ran her hands across her face, lips and body as she continued to gyrate to the music. Her skin was still incredibly pale, but her lips were full and a shade of crimson Jeff had never seen before. He was mesmerized by her and unable to look away. Her eyes suddenly snapped open. She smiled a devilish grin, full of sexual desire as her sparkling azure eyes locked onto Mancini’s.
Dr. Miller moved toward him slowly, her eyes never wavering. When she was directly in front of the Detective, she spun around twice and threw herself against his body. Jeff instinctively caught her in his muscular arms as she placed each hand on his respective shoulders. Their faces were mere inches apart and she licked her lips seductively. He caught the faintest whiff of cinnamon on her breath as she breathed heavily, purposely pushing her breasts against him with each new inhalation. Mancini felt himself react to her body, a deep and powerful longing the likes of which he’d never experienced before. He felt an unearthly calm as he gazed deeply into her eyes; a peace he’d never known. Jeff leaned in to kiss her and she met him instantly, her lips quivering with a passion so intense it felt like an electric current was passing between them. Suddenly, Dr. Miller bit his lower lip with such force that she drew blood. Mancini cried out and pushed her away by sheer reflex, immediately missing her closeness and the feeling it brought him.
“Ow! What was that?” Jeff said, his mind beginning to clear.
