by Mike Omer
The apartment was small, incredibly dirty, and almost devoid of furniture. There were two small rooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. One of the rooms had an old mattress on the floor. The other room had a small, rickety wooden table and a folding chair in the middle of the room, plus a TV standing on a small prefab stand in the corner. The window that had appeared in the message to Tanessa was in the makeshift bedroom. The three officers lingered around the apartment, unsure what to do, the anticlimax of the whole thing etched deeply into their faces.
“I’m not sure this is the right place,” one of them said sullenly.
“What were you expecting?” Mitchell asked. “A stock of weapons? A coffee mug with the inscription Best Serial Killer Ever?”
“I don’t know,” the unhappy cop answered. “Pictures of the victims or something?”
“Oh, I know what you mean,” Mitchell said. “Pictures of the victims with their eyes cut out. A full-sized image of one of them, drawn in blood and feces. Something like that?”
“Yeah, I guess,” the cop said, ignoring Mitchell’s sarcastic tone.
“You watch too many movies,” Jacob said. “Get those patrol vehicles away from the building. Any serial killer coming back from a trip to the supermarket would disappear if he saw those cars waiting for him.”
The cops left the apartment.
“Okay.” Jacob sighed. “I guess we should get Matt and his crew over here. At the very least, I hope to get some fingerprints and DNA samples from this dismal apartment.”
Hannah was exhausted. It had been one of the crazier days for their squad, and she hadn’t been spared. She’d just spent four hours going door to door around the flower shop, looking for anyone who’d seen anything. Two witnesses had actually heard the commotion and seen a man run out of the flower shop and get into a car that quickly drove away. However, their descriptions of the man and the car were so hazy and conflicting that merging them into a coherent statement was practically impossible. Hannah was used to witnesses describing events differently, but having one of them say the car was a blue Ford and the other one saying she was sure the car was red had nearly made Hannah scream.
Jacob had called to update her that they had found the apartment where the killer had been staying, but he wasn’t there. George, Captain Bailey’s florist friend, said he was certain he had hit the killer, and blood spatter in the flower shop corroborated this. Was the killer dead in his car somewhere in the city? Had he gone for help? Bernard was checking with all the private clinics, nurses, doctors, and vets around the city, searching for a man who had turned up with a bullet wound. So far, no luck.
It was getting very late, and Hannah decided to go home for the night. Images of her bed beckoned to her. The paperwork and the hundreds of yet-unchecked leads could wait until tomorrow. She grabbed her handbag and walked toward the squad room door. And then, of course, the phone on her desk rang.
She nearly let it go to voicemail. After all, they had almost missed her. It was late. She really wanted to get to bed.
She answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Hello, is this the Glenmore Park Detective Squad?” a feminine voice asked.
“That’s right.”
“Hi, I’m Officer Veronica Marsen from the state police. Who am I talking to?”
“I’m Detective Shor,” Hannah said, impatient. “What’s this about?”
“It’s about the shooting that occurred today at the flower shop. As you know, we are working with your department on this case, and I wanted some updates regarding this development for our reports.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“What was the name of the woman who was hurt?”
“Officer Tanessa Lonnie,” Hannah said.
The woman on the other side paused for a moment. “Officer… yes. Of course. We are talking about the officer that… Hang on, I have this report here…”
“Tanessa was the bait,” Hannah said. “Listen, can we do this tomorrow? It’s really late.”
“Yes, of course. I’m really sorry. I just have a few more things for my report, and I was assured your full cooperation, so…”
“Fine,” Hannah nearly spat. “What else?”
“I understand that the shooter escaped?”
“The shooter? You’ve got it wrong, Miss Marsen. The killer was the one who was shot. He attacked Tanessa with a sword.”
“Oh! I don’t know why the initial report didn’t mention that! Okay. So the killer was shot and ran away, and Officer Lonnie… that’s extraordinary. Don’t you have a Detective Lonnie on the case?”
“Yeah, sure—that’s her brother. He’s…” Hannah stopped mid-sentence. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Officer Marsen. I think I have all the details I need. Goodbye!” The line went dead, and Hannah was left gripping the phone, her blood running cold.
Officer Veronica Marsen. The woman might as well have called herself Officer Nancy Droop. There was no way in hell the Staties were so clueless regarding the flower shop shooting. The chief updated them constantly.
Who had she talked to?
Matt Lowery carefully dusted the window, the powder scattering down on the sill. Three black ovals materialized near the left side of the pane. The ridges of at least two of the fingerprints were plain to see. A plain arch and a spiral whorl, his mind registered distractedly, classifying the fingerprints. The third looked like a plain arch as well, but he couldn’t be sure, as it was badly smeared. He put the powder and brush back inside the fingerprinting kit that lay by his feet, and grabbed the camera from the table. He took two photographs of the prints. Then he grabbed the tape from the kit, and carefully applied a strip to one of the fingerprints. He lifted the tape, which now contained the print, from the window, and stuck it on a small card. He did this twice more. Then he wrote “N. Facing Window” on all three cards. He added those to the nine other cards he had already collected from the bathroom. Assuming this really was the place where the killer had been staying, he hadn’t tried to wipe the place clean. They’d already found several hairs in the shower and on the mattress as well. The apartment was bound to contain endless DNA samples to check against CODIS, even if the hair amounted to nothing.
He sighed, stretching to his full 5’1”. Plenty of work today, and this apartment was as boring as a crime scene could be, especially considering the fact that a serial killer had probably lived here.
Violet was in the kitchen, extracting samples from the sink and the cupboard handles. The television set probably had a few prints as well. If the apartment had been wiped clean, they’d have tried to get some fingerprints from the wooden table and the chair, or perhaps from the bathroom wall. But since the person living here had been so accommodating, Matt was prepared to call it a night. He glanced at the time. Nearly midnight.
“Violet!” he called. “How much longer?”
“Just a few more minutes!” she called back from the kitchen.
He looked around one last time and was about to leave the room when he noticed something. The floors of the entire apartment were covered in dust, food stains, and random dirt. However, just by the mattress there was a small section of the floor that was a bit cleaner. He knelt by it, trying to trace it in his mind. It was triangular, one side aligned with the mattress’ edge. Someone had moved the mattress recently, and it had dragged the dust and dirt with it. Matt pulled the mattress aside. There was nothing behind it. He lifted it up, and saw nothing out of the ordinary—just more dirt.
Up close, he examined the floor tiles under the mattress; one seemed loose. He pulled out a sharp pocket knife and stuck it in the space between the tiles, lifting the loose one.
There was a small round hole in the mortar under the tile, and it held something. Using a pair of tweezers, Matt carefully pulled it out.
It was a dusty, sealed nylon bag. It contained a lock of red hair.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There was a tense silence in the squad room when M
itchell walked in, a bit late. Usually they’d drink coffee, banter with each other; Bernard would moan about his lack of sleep, Jacob would thump his keyboard and complain about the computer. But that morning there was nothing but dark looks and an undercurrent of anger.
“What’s going on?” he asked, not really wanting to know.
“Check out the Glenmore Park Gazette,” Jacob said.
Mitchell felt heavy and drained as he sat down in front of his computer. He opened the browser, and slowly typed in the three first letters of the Gazette’s URL; the browser completed the rest. The main page popped up, a picture of Hummingbird Blossoms in the top article. The headline was Deadly Messenger Evades Police Trap.
It got worse. There was a picture of Tanessa. The article mentioned that she had been used as bait. It hinted that this plan was ill-conceived, and that Tanessa had been chosen because of her family relation to Detective Mitchell Lonnie, one of the primary detectives on the case. The article then mentioned Mitchell’s arrest of Danny Stevenson and Janice Hewitt as suspects in the case, stressing that in fact they had merely played a harmless prank. The reporter’s name was, of course, Ricky Nate.
Mitchell stood up, feeling dizzy. His body was shaking, his teeth grinding. He knew he was about to explode, and a faraway part of his brain screamed at him to get out of there, drive home, let loose there, where it was safe. But he ignored that meek suggestion.
“Damn it!” he screamed, and kicked at his chair, which rolled across the room and banged against the wall. He picked up a mug from his desk, still half full of coffee, and threw it at the same wall, the mug crashing to pieces and leaving a huge stain.
“Relax, Lonnie!” Jacob yelled at him, leaping from his chair.
“How? How did she find out all that?” Mitchell yelled at him “Who told her?”
“I did.”
Mitchell turned around and stared at Hannah. She looked back at him, her face red.
“You?” he said, his voice sharp. “Why?”
“I didn’t know she was a reporter. She said she was from the State Police. She fooled me, Mitchell. I’m sorry.”
“You told her that using my sister as bait was my idea?”
“Of course not,” Hannah said sharply. “That was her own notion. But I told her that Tanessa was used as bait, and that she was your sister.”
“How could you be so stupid?” he asked.
Hannah didn’t even flinch. Her face stayed completely blank as she kept staring at him. But Mitchell had known her for a long time, had gone to the academy with her. The flicker in her eyes told him this was not something she was about to forgive anytime soon.
“Fuck you, Lonnie,” she said. She stood up and walked slowly out of the squad room. Bernard looked at him with disgust.
“You’re a real asshole, Mitchell,” he said.
Mitchell looked at Bernard tiredly, suddenly wishing he could rewind the past thirty seconds. He glanced at the wall, at the coffee stain trickling down to the floor where the mug shards were scattered.
“I know,” he said. He stuck his hands in his pockets. His right hand knocked against something hard. Pauline’s engagement ring, in his pocket ever since the day he had bought it. He felt as if he were suffocating, as if he were being pulled in all directions at once. He strode out of the room and went down the stairs, through the department’s exit, and into the car. He stared at the steering wheel for what felt like an eternity, and then drove home.
Jacob had served enough years in the force to know when a cop was no longer functioning. As far as Jacob was concerned, Mitchell had become completely useless. Jacob wasn’t sure what had triggered it, and for now he didn’t care. Later, he would call Mitchell and try to help him out, as a friend. But as a detective, he had to focus on the fact that there was a killer on the loose and a reasonably good trail to follow. He grabbed the keys from his desk and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Bernard asked.
“Door to door in the killer’s apartment building,” Jacob answered.
“If he really lived there,” Bernard said.
“Well, I talked to Matt this morning. He found a lock of hair hidden in the apartment. This matches our killer’s MO, so for now I’m assuming this was an apartment he stayed at.”
“Oh, okay,” Bernard said. “Does it belong to one of the victims?”
“Matt said that it seems to match Kendele Byers’s hair, but he couldn’t be sure. He said there was something strange about the sample, and that he needed more time to figure it out.” Jacob shrugged. “Anyway, I’ll take our sketch book and see if anyone saw our killer walking around. Perhaps I’ll strike gold. Who knows, maybe he asked his neighbor for a cup of sugar without wearing a disguise. That would be nice.”
“Hang on; I’ll come with you,” Bernard said.
The detectives stepped into the car, Jacob relinquishing the driver’s seat to Bernard. As they drove to Hillside Drive, Jacob became lost in thought, wondering yet again where the killer had gone. He’d been wounded during the fight in the flower shop, that much was certain. Did he get help?
“You called doctors yesterday, right?” he asked Bernard.
“Yup. Doctors, nurses, vets, retired doctors, medical students… It was a damn long list.”
“Find anything?”
“Not really. No one that admitted to taking care of a man with a bullet wound, anyway.”
“Hm.”
“Say, what’s wrong with Mitchell?” Bernard asked.
“I don’t know,” Jacob said, his voice sharp and final.
Bernard didn’t push the issue.
They reached the apartment building. It looked even shabbier in the daylight, the sun emphasizing the places where the plaster had peeled off the walls completely, exposing the bare bricks. One of the window panes on the first floor had been broken; rather than fix it, the tenants had simply boarded the window up.
“Do you want to split?” Bernard asked.
“Nah, let’s do them together,” Jacob said. “There are only three floors.”
They started at the third floor, where the killer had been staying. No one answered the first door they knocked on, and the other apartments were opened by hostile residents who made it perfectly clear they had never heard anything, seen anything, or smelled anything that could be of interest to the police. If the killer had asked them for some sugar, they weren’t about to share. The second floor was pretty much the same.
An old woman opened the first door they tried on the bottom floor. For an instant, Jacob was sure he knew her from somewhere. Then he realized why she was so familiar. She looked just like Sophia from Golden Girls, a TV series he used to watch with his wife every week when he was much younger. She had a round blob of gray hair and obscenely large glasses, behind which sharp eyes stared out at them. She was dressed in something that could have been a dress, a gown, or a tablecloth; it was hard to tell. It was blue, and spotted with the occasional flower. She was comically tiny, less than five feet, her hands and feet small as a child’s. Since Bernard was almost six feet tall, she looked up at him like someone staring at a bird flying in the sky.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Ma’am, I’m Detective Bernard Gladwin,” Bernard said, flipping open his badge. “This is my partner, Detective Cooper. We wanted to ask—”
“Detectives, huh?” she said. She looked at Jacob. “Nice fedora.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” he answered. “We wanted to ask you some questions about a man who lived here not long ago.”
“Yeah?” she frowned. “Come in, I was just making tea.”
“We really don’t want to come in, we just wanted to ask—”
“Well, I’m not about to stand out here in the hallway and answer questions, so you might as well come in, drink some tea, and eat apple strudel.” She turned around and walked inside, leaving the door wide open. Bernard hesitated for a moment and then walked in, followed by Jacob.
Her apartment stood
in complete contrast to the way the building looked outside. It had recently been freshly painted; the walls were white and clean. All the furniture looked well taken care of, though old. A rocking chair and a sofa stood around a small round wooden coffee table on an intricately-patterned red and green Persian carpet. All the walls were hidden by immense bookcases containing hundreds of books, except for one wall which was covered by framed photos of numerous kids. Her grandchildren, Jacob guessed.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
Right back turned out to be a quite flexible concept, as the woman moved at a pace that seemed to ignore the existence of time. Jacob didn’t check, but it felt as if serving them tea and a freshly-baked apple strudel took her about two days. She breathed through her nose the entire time, her face a mask of deep concentration. Finally, they each had a cup of lukewarm tea and a plate with a small slice of strudel.
“I love strudel,” she said. “You know what’s the secret to a good apple strudel?”
“No,” Jacob said. “What is it?”
“The recipe,” she said, and laughed. Or at least he thought she laughed. It sounded as if someone was torturing mice. He had a feeling it wasn’t the first time she had told this joke.
“Ma’am, we are looking for information about a man who used to live here not long ago,” Bernard said. “He lived on the third floor.”
“Oh?” she said.
“We wondered if you had seen him.”
“Maybe. I see people going up and down the stairs, occasionally. What did he do?”
“We’re not sure,” Jacob said. “But we would like to question him.”
“I see.” She glanced at his plate. “Don’t you like the strudel?”
Jacob cut a small piece with his spoon and put it in his mouth. It was, in fact, delicious. He chewed it carefully and swallowed. “It’s very good,” he said.
She nodded, satisfied. “So,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
