Bleeders

by Anthony Bruno

  Trisha stepped toward the bathroom. A clear plastic envelope taped to the door contained a light blue copy of a checklist, indicating what the techs had done in the room and what they had found. She scanned it and saw that they had checked for fingerprints, blood traces, hairs and fibers, and had inventoried the contents of the shelves and medicine cabinet. The handwriting was small and cramped, and since the blue copy was always the third of four, it was difficult to decipher. Easier to just check things for herself.

  She went to the medicine cabinet, and her eye went straight to the amber plastic prescription bottles, which were all on the same glass shelf, two at the front, one tucked in back. She looked past the Synthroid and Xanax bottles to the one at the back. Dilaudid, a heavy-duty painkiller. The prescription was dated almost year and a half ago. Mrs. Wexler must have had some kind of injury or operation, and like most people she kept the unused painkillers just in case. Synthroid was a commonly prescribed drug for regulating thyroid function, and Xanax was the popular mood elevator that everyone seemed to use these days. As she suspected, Drac hadn’t come to steal drugs. He would have definitely taken the Dilaudid if that had been his motive. A serial killer murders for just one purpose, to live out his fantasy, nothing else. He doesn’t kill to steal, though he might take a souvenir to help him remember the experience.

  Trisha stood on her toes to get a look at the shelves themselves to see if there was a mark where something had been, but unlike her own medicine cabinet at home, these shelves were clean enough to eat off. If something were missing, she wouldn’t be able to tell that way.

  She peered into the toilet, glanced at the sink, examined the tub, then went back to the checklist. She struggled with the handwriting and was able to determine that the fixtures had been checked, and no blood traces had been found. As usual, Drac was meticulous. His crime scenes were always confined to the bedrooms. He never cleaned himself in the bathrooms or kitchens, but she got the impression he didn’t leave with blood on his hands. He probably used gloves and brought a plastic bag to take them back in his pocket. He was anal retentive in that sense. The only mess he could tolerate was the one he left in the bed.

  She stepped into the closet and examined the hanging blouses, skirts, dresses, and jackets, all neatly spaced to prevent wrinkles. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. If he had come in here looking for a souvenir, he made sure he left the room as perfect as he found it. The techs had swept the carpeting for hairs and fibers, but her gut told her that Drac wouldn’t have even come in here. He avoided leaving inadvertent traces of himself. He was careful to a fault, and that was the major problem she was having putting together a workable profile. Every time she sat down at the computer to write it, she stopped after a few sentences, realizing that she was just spewing a generic description of a serial murderer. He hadn’t left the kind of clues that showed his uniqueness and usually inspired her. She was pretty sure he was an experienced killer at the top of his game. If she had started tracking him at the beginning of his career, he would have been in the process of developing. He would have been experimenting with his method and making mistakes, and that would have revealed important things about him and given her something to work with. She had a feeling that when they finally caught this bastard and uncovered his trail of victims, the body count was going to be shocking. Maybe dozens. This guy wasn’t the typical twenty-something serial killer who had only a murder or two under his belt. Somehow Drac had managed to survive the early stages and escape detection. He was now a mature individual in his thirties or forties, she guessed, and he had turned a compulsion into a vocation. He was too good at this. He wasn’t making mistakes, and he wasn’t changing because he has no reason to.

  Her stomach cramped as she faced the very real possibility that Drac might never be caught—and her mother’s killer would never be brought to justice.

  She scanned Mrs. Wexler’s neatly arranged dressing table—a brush and comb, perfume bottles, jars of various creams, and a red leather jewelry box the size of a small beer cooler. Something on the jewelry box caught her eye. It was sticking out of the closed lid like a black lizard tongue. The end of a watchstrap, she assumed. The latch was open, and she lifted the lid. As she suspected, it was a watch, one of four laid out with several bracelets in the top tray. Trisha focused on the watches—two everyday ones with leather straps and two fancier pieces with diamond encrusted faces, one silver and one gold. But why was the one with the black strap sticking out of the box? Everything else Mrs. Wexler owned was kept obsessively neat and orderly. She wouldn’t be this careless with a watch. Unless it wasn’t her who had left it this way.

  Trisha lifted the top tray and found more bracelets and an assortment of rings with oversized stones—obviously costume jewelry—but also a double row of ring racks with slots for more delicate rings. Trisha had a feeling these rings had genuine precious stones. She counted the rings in the slots—37 in all—each one separated by an empty slot. But there were two places with three empty slots in a row. Where were those rings?

  “Pete,” she called out as she walked back into the bedroom. “Check her hand.”

  Pete stood over the body on the far side of the bed. “What’re you looking for?”

  “Rings.”

  The Caveman had taken engagement rings from his victims. He had targeted women who wore big gaudy rings, which he’d seen while giving them manicures. When Trisha discovered his glitzy taste, she got a better sense of what he was like and deduced that he was a transvestite or a transsexual with a showgirl’s sense of style.

  Trisha examined Mrs. Wexler’s right hand, which was positioned palm down. A flat red garnet in a plain yellow gold setting was on her ring finger. Trisha moved the ring along her finger. It slid easily without resistance.

  Pete turned over Mrs. Wexler’s other hand. “Wedding band and diamond engagement ring on the ring finger,” he said. “I guess she kept wearing them even though her husband passed away.”

  Trisha came around to Pete’s side of the bed. She took Mrs. Wexler’s hand and gently moved the rings up to the knuckle.

  “What’re you looking for?” he asked.

  “Look at her finger. The skin is white, the flesh a little atrophied. Like most women, she never took off her wedding band and engagement ring. But I think Drac stole a ring as a souvenir.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There are two empty spaces for rings in her jewelry box. If she never took off the wedding band and the engagement ring, one spot was for that ring.” She pointed at the garnet. “And one is missing.”

  “You think?”

  “He wanted something to savor,” she said, “something to help him relive the experience. He’s probably taken souvenirs before. We just haven’t noticed.”

  “Why not?”

  “A souvenir can be as insignificant as a piece of lint or a few hairs from a brush. With more substantial items, we have no way of knowing unless someone—a servant or a relative—can tell us a particular item is missing. Fortunately Mrs. Wexler was very organized. She—”

  A human tornado blew into the bedroom—a barking forty-ish blonde in a black suit and an open-collared white blouse followed by two brow-beaten minions, men in their thirties wearing drab suits and holding cell phones to their ears. The woman pointed to the pudgy assistant and said, “You tell that worthless piece of crap he can go pound sand for all I care.” She then pointed at the tall thin one and said, “Tell the assistant commissioner the answer is no today, it will be no tomorrow, and it will stay no till the end of freaking time. You tell him in those exact words.”

  Both men nodded obediently as they retreated to different corners, murmuring their respective messages into their phones.

  The woman marched right up to Trisha with her hand extended. “Colleen Franco, Assistant Chief, NYPD. You must be the profiler, Trisha McCleery.”

 
Trisha shook her hand. “Yes. Pleased to meet you.” Trisha kept a wary eye on Franco’s two assistants. Her instinct was always to protect the crime scene from intruders who might disturb evidence or leave traces of themselves that might confuse or even sink an investigation.

  Colleen Franco took a quick look at Mrs. Wexler’s body. “Tragic,” she said, shaking her head. “So when are you gonna give us something so we can catch this creep?” She had a perfect set of teeth, but the tooth whitening was too bright and contrasted sharply with her tanning-salon skin tone.

  “I’m working on it,” Trisha said.

  “Well, work harder.” The Assistant Chief released a hearty laugh as if she was just joking, but her humorless eyes conveyed just the opposite. Trisha knew the type. At the FBI she’d had plenty of experience with over-polished, careerist bureaucrats like Colleen Franco. She thought of them as TV news anchors with fangs.

  Franco pointed at Pete. “Do you still need Detective Warwick? You seem to know your way around. He can go back to his regular assignment. What do you think, Pete?”

  “Well… I guess it’s up to Agent McCleery.”

  Trisha was surprised that the Assistant Chief called Pete by his first name. A little chummier than Trisha would have expected. Strictly speaking she didn’t need Pete, but he did make things go more smoothly with the police department. Cops—small town or big city—never liked to cooperate with the feds, and she feared that getting access to information would be that much harder without him.

  “I can still use his help if it’s all right with you,” she said to Franco. “I’m sure I’ll get my profile assembled a lot quicker with him than without him.” After nine years with the FBI, Trisha had learned how to compete in a pissing contest with the best of them. Pete was the bone of contention, and she wanted to hang onto him if for no other reason than to show that she had teeth.

  Assistant Chief Franco swept her hand over Mrs. Wexler, Vanna White-style. “We’re up to victim number four, Agent McCleery. And unless I’m mistaken, you haven’t submitted a single page to us. Detective Warwick’s time would be better spent—”

  Trisha cut her off. “I’m sure there are plenty of other cases Detective Warwick can be working. But this one is pretty crucial, and I’d hate to see another women die just because I couldn’t get timely access to witnesses, crime scenes, police reports, lab reports, entry to the ME’s office, et cetera, et cetera. No one should have to die because of a slow response on our part.”

  Franco smiled with her teeth. “No argument there, Trisha. May I call you Trisha? But I would have to say the slow response is on your part. We requested a profile almost a month ago, and we’re still waiting for it. And as you can see, women are still dying. Now I realize that profiling is more of an intellectual exercise for the FBI, but we’re cops here and we have to deal with real people in real situations. I’m sure on some level you can appreciate that.”

  “Of course.” Trisha maintained a professional expression even though she was thinking Bitch! To call profiling an “intellectual exercise” was more than just a slap in the face. Trisha had spent more time interviewing serial killers, rapists, and arsonists than Assistant Chief Franco had spent in the nail salon, and from the looks of her flawless French tips, that was probably quite a lot.

  “Unless you can promise me that I’ll have a profile in ten days, I can’t justify giving you any more of Pete’s time.”

  Pete looked uncomfortable having to stand there and listen to two women argue over him. Trisha couldn’t help wondering if there was something personal between them.

  Franco stared at her, waiting for an answer. It might have been the way she had put on her eye liner that morning, but she seemed a bit cross-eyed. But she also seemed like the type who would use a physical abnormality to her advantage just to creep people out.

  But Trisha wasn’t cowed, and she would play this woman’s bluff. “Seven days,” she said. “You’ll have my profile in seven days.”

  “Seven working days?”

  Trisha shook her head. “Seven days from today. If I can have Pete. Otherwise, I can’t say for sure how long it will take. And I’d hate to see something like this happen again.” Trisha nodded toward Mrs. Wexler.

  Franco’s shark smile faded, and a tight-lipped grimace covered the super-white teeth.

  Her two assistants came up behind her, cells to their faces.

  The pudgy one spoke into her ear. “The mayor’s office is holding. Channel 2 got wind of this one early, and now the other stations are running with their story. The mayor will be making a statement in half an hour. They want an update ASAP.”

  The skinny one spoke into her other ear. “The Chief’s going to be with the mayor when he makes his statement. He wants to be updated now.”

  Franco scowled, showing deep lines in her forehead and around her mouth. In the blink of an eye, she’d aged twenty years. “Tell the Chief I’ll be right with him,” she said to the skinny one, then turned to the pudgy one. “Who are you talking to over there? That sorry excuse for a press secretary, Silverberg?”

  Pudgy nodded.

  “Tell that putz I’ll get back to him in ten—no—fifteen minutes.”

  The assistant looked puzzled. “That doesn’t give them much time to prepare a statement—”

  “Exactly!” she exploded. “The Chief has to know more about an investigation than anybody else. Including the mayor. Don’t you get it? We work for the Chief, not the mayor. Jeez!”

  Pudgy’s face remained placid. He’d apparently felt her wrath before and was used to it. Just part of the job. The two assistants headed back to their corners, jabbering sotto voce into their phones. Barry Krieger came back into the room and turned sideways to slip between them. Trisha cringed inside. She’d thought he’d left.

  “Oh, Barry, good to see you,” Franco said, turning on her 100 watt smile.

  “Good to see you, too, Colleen.”

  Sharks of a feather, Trisha thought.

  “I was just talking to Agent McCleery,” Franco said. “She tells me she’ll have her profile ready by next week. I’m letting her keep Detective Warwick to make sure she gets full department cooperation so we can finally catch this monster.”

  “Next week?” Barry’s brows twitched like a skeptical Labrador. “Really?”

  “Seven days from today,” Trisha said.

  “Okay then.” Franco clapped her hands. “I’ll be expecting it. Barry, when you get your copy, you send one right over to me. Me, not the chief or anyone else. I’m spearheading this investigation.”

  Trisha glanced at Pete. He must have been biting down hard on the insides of his cheeks he was so pokerfaced.

  Franco pointed to the door, and her assistants responded like faithful cocker spaniels. “Gotta go,” she said and marched out the door, her two flunkies trailing behind, still talking on their phones.

  Trisha couldn’t help glowering at her back. For someone “spearheading” the Drac investigation, she hadn’t given Mrs. Wexler’s corpse a second look. An investigator who has no regard for the victims was less than used toilet paper in Trisha’s book. It was all about the victims.

  “Trisha.” Barry came over and stood a little too close.

  Now what? she thought, suspicious as soon as she heard him calling her by her first name. Another dinner invitation? God, Barry, give it up.

  “Trisha, we traced that anonymous text message you received a few days ago. ‘Would like to know u better’?”

  “‘Would really like to know u better,’” she said, already feeling her pulse quicken.

  “It came from a cell phone that belonged to an NYU undergrad, a woman. She said she lost it at a Starbucks in the Village. She had put it on her table while she was reading a book, and when she looked up, it was gone.”

  “Whoever took it stole it to
send me that message.”

  “Or the thief dialed a wrong number.”

  “How likely is that?”

  “Not very. But our chances of finding this person are next to nil. He’s probably already ditched the phone.”

  “But it could have been our guy.” She felt fear and anger in equal measure. Barry didn’t seem to be taking this as seriously as he should. “I got written up in the paper,” she reminded him. “Drac knows I’m on the case. If he’s gonna focus on a cop, it’ll most likely be me.”

  “All true, but there’s nothing we can do with this. Just don’t change your number. If you get another text, get in touch with wire services immediately so they can trace it.”

  “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Do we have a problem, Agent McCleery?” He drew himself up to his full height and looked down at her.

  She looked him in the eye and didn’t blink. “No,” she said.

  Pete cleared his throat to get their attention. “Are you done with the body, Trisha?” He nodded toward the doorway.

  Two squat muscular women in dark blue slacks and polo shirts waited with a collapsible chrome gurney. A black vinyl body bag was unfolded on top. They were here to take Mrs. Wexler’s body to the ME’s office.

  Trisha looked at Mrs. Wexler and focused on the Indian stripes. She felt the sting of tears coming on but stifled them. “I’m done,” she said.

  Chapter 9

  Pete signaled to the bartender to bring a second round. He lifted his glass and killed off a pint of Guinness, and Trisha didn’t have much left of her bourbon on the rocks. “So has Krieger always been such a jerk?” he asked.