Grimm: The Chopping Block

by John Passarella

  Nick nodded. “Did he ever talk about rivals? Companies he lost bids to in the past?”

  “Can’t recall,” she said. “So, probably no. I think I’d remember something like that, even if I forgot the name of the company.”

  Figuring it was a longshot, but deciding he should ask anyway, Nick said, “Did he ever mention someone named Marie Chang?”

  Caitlin looked puzzled. “No. Is that someone from his office?”

  “No,” Nick replied.

  Hank jumped in. “Before he left, did he seem okay?”

  “Okay?”

  “Normal,” Nick said. “Or different somehow?”

  She exhaled, stared off into space as her mind drifted back to that last meal. After a moment, she shook her head.

  “The police asked me the same thing,” she said. “And I’m sorry, but I can’t remember anything odd about him that day. I mean, he was alone, so he ate quietly, except when I stopped by to check on him, refill his glass, and bring him his check. When he left here, I just assumed—I assumed he’d be back in a couple days. Like always.”

  They thanked her for her time. Nick nodded to the harried manager—who was bouncing from table to table, checking on orders, refilling glasses—on their way out.

  As they crossed the parking lot, Hank reflexively scanned the ground for any tripping hazard, and grumbled, “Random victims.”

  If the killer had chosen his victims at random, he would be difficult to catch through investigative leads. They’d need him to slip up at a crime scene, to leave behind DNA evidence or fingerprints, assuming he was in one of the criminal databases. Otherwise, they needed a witness to one of the abductions, and that was something out of their control.

  Basically, they needed to get lucky.

  Nick’s cell phone rang: Wu.

  “Yeah, this is Burkhardt.”

  So that Hank could hear both sides of the conversation, Nick put the call on speaker. Over the tinny cell phone connection, Wu said, “You wanted to be notified about any new missing person cases. One popped up this morning. Sheila Jenkins, thirty-two-year-old leasing agent. Left a bachelorette party at La Porte Bleue last night. Failed to show up at work this morning.”

  “Hangover?” Nick wondered.

  “According to the bride-to-be’s sister, who hosted the party, Sheila made a quick exit,” Wu said. “Alone. Mentioned an early morning appointment.”

  “Anybody check her home?”

  “After she failed to answer her cell and landline, her boss had somebody from the office swing by her place,” Wu said. “No answer. And her car’s missing.”

  “Did you get a plate number?”

  “Already in the system,” Wu said. “Patrol units notified.”

  Sheila might have left the party early to hook up with someone, and she might have slept over and not returned home. That would explain the empty house and the missing car. But not the cell phone silence, nor the absence from work. Of course, if she had taken her own party elsewhere, she might have continued to drink throughout the night, passed out in somebody else’s house or apartment. But Nick had a bad feeling that her disappearance fit the admittedly small profile of the others. They were both found weeks later. So Nick held onto the possibility that Sheila might still be alive. He asked Wu for addresses and phone numbers.

  Propped on his crutches, Hank took out a pen and small notebook and copied down the details on the witness and Sheila Jenkins’ place of business. More leads to follow, but Hank looked resigned.

  When Nick disconnected the call, Hank said, “You know what this is?”

  Nick nodded. “Another random grab.”

  * * *

  The untended vacant lot had been home to a garment factory before a fire gutted the interior. Intending to rebuild, the owners had the factory razed. But the business had been underinsured and the flagging economy had left the project in limbo. A temporary construction fence surrounding the lot had fallen into disrepair, and, in several sections, had simply fallen. Bulldozers, backhoes and excavators had left the ground uneven, while weeds had been allowed to overrun the property. In short, the lot had become an eyesore.

  None of that mattered to David Munks and Cody Kuberski. With a few hours to kill before dinner, they rode onto the lot on their mountain bikes, after effortlessly sneaking through one of the gaps in the perimeter fence. The choppy terrain gave them a training ground to test their off-road skills, their heads filled with adolescent dreams of someday competing in the X Games. They’d donned bike helmets, but not bothered with elbow and knee pads.

  Cody, at fifteen almost a year older than David, took the initiative, trying jumps and spin moves that David would then attempt to replicate. The hills weren’t as high nor the dips as low as they might have hoped. Mostly, the ground felt like a series of rises interspersed with potholes. At one point, after an unusually jarring drop, David yelped as he bit the tip of his tongue. Cody rose on his pedals as he navigated a section of dirt riddled with broken bricks.

  Swinging around, he pedaled up an incline toward the back of the lot, the area farthest from the FOR SALE sign attached to the fence at street level. He hoped the other side of the construction mound had some slopes he could work with, a dip steep enough that he could pick up speed and grab some air off the next rise. David fell in behind him, struggling through the rough, bumpy ascent and lagging behind his older friend.

  At the summit, Cody looked down the other side and noticed a smooth lane, more dirt and mud than nasty weeds and protruding rocks. He whooped in anticipation. Encouraged, David rode his pedals hard to catch up.

  Too impatient to wait, Cody launched himself down the side of the mound, gripping the handlebars of the bike as tightly as possible. The ground smoothed out and he picked up speed, rose up the far incline and lunged forward for some altitude. He came down hard, his back wheel catching on an obstruction and almost dislodging him from the bike. He recovered in time, feet outstretched, his arms shaking as he spun sideways in an abrupt stop.

  Cody looked back as David rushed down the hill, working his pedals overtime, gaining speed. David rose but didn’t elevate as much as Cody had. His back wheel caught more of the obstruction and the bike shot out from under him. David skidded across some mud into mounds of loose dirt, while his bike tumbled away from him and dropped into a clump of weeds.

  Climbing to his feet, David grumbled, “What the hell?”

  A layer of mud caked the whole right side of his gray hoodie and jeans. He winced as he rubbed his right elbow, then shook it out to test it. Sore but apparently unbroken.

  Cody noticed a red streak on the side of Dave’s forehead.

  “Dude, you’re bleeding.”

  David pressed the heel of his palm to the injury.

  “Must’ve hit a rock,” he said. “Or one of those bricks.”

  Cody rode his mountain bike back toward his friend.

  David ignored his bike for the moment, and backtracked on foot. Something smooth and white protruded from the mud. He poked it with his toe.

  “What is that?” Cody asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “No,” Cody explained. “Up there?” He pointed to the obstruction both their back tires had struck on the way down, a yard or two from the small white object that had cut David’s forehead. “Whatever it is, we both hit it coming down.”

  David looked where his friend pointed and walked toward the object, dull white amid loose clumps of grass-tufted dirt. Dropping to his knees, David sunk his fingers into the mud and pulled clumps of it away.

  “Holy crap!”

  “What?”

  “No—freakin’—way!”

  Cody dropped his bike and rushed to his friend’s side. The shape of the object David had exposed with his hands was unmistakable.

  “Jesus!” he whispered. “That’s a human skull.”

  “Think it’s real?”

  “No, numb nuts, people bury fake skulls all the time,” Cody said. “I hear there
’s a bunch of them in the cemetery.”

  “Shut up!”

  Cody kneeled beside him. “Look,” he said, tugging at a long white bone partially exposed by David’s hurried excavation. “That a rib or something?”

  “We have to call someone.”

  “911?” Cody suggested.

  “Is this an emergency?” David asked. “I mean, he’s already dead.”

  “It’s a human skeleton!” Cody said. “Somebody murdered this guy and buried his body here. Maybe there’s a reward or something.”

  “All I’m saying is, you can get in trouble calling 911 when it’s not a real emergency.”

  “So sue me,” Cody said. “I’m calling.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  By the time Nick and Hank arrived at the crime scene, the vacant lot swarmed with uniforms and crime scene techs, most congregating around the location where two teenage bikers had discovered the third set of bones.

  Nick parked behind the long row of official vehicles, climbed out of the Land Cruiser and waited on the sidewalk for Hank to get out on his crutches. Together they walked toward a gap in the fence that served as the official point of entry, guarded by a uniformed officer. Crime scene tape zigzagged across other gaps in the fence like bright yellow stitches, to keep out bystanders and the crew of the first news van to arrive.

  Fortunately, the place was industrial rather than commercial or residential, so foot traffic was minimal. Nick suspected that those gathered outside the fence worked in the immediate area. Of course, with the proliferation of smartphone cameras and video linked to social networking sites, it was only a matter of time before word got out. When Nick and Hank flashed their shields, the uniform waved them through.

  Behind him, Nick heard Hank heave a resigned sigh.

  Nick scanned the rough terrain ahead, a veritable minefield for navigating on crutches, and said, “Hank, you want to sit this one out, that’s okay.”

  “No,” Hank said. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  Nick forged ahead, careful of his own footing. The abundance of weeds concealed dips and breaks in the ground along with other hazards. He followed the most direct path to the heart of the crime scene, where techs were excavating and gathering bones, and uniforms scanned the immediate area for any they may have missed.

  Captain Renard stood out of the way of those processing the scene, but close enough for everyone to feel his oversight. Apparently a third bare bones murder had been his tipping point. The Captain might be feeling the heat from upstairs. Nick wished he had some good news to report.

  Sergeant Wu spotted Nick and walked down to meet him.

  “Was about to call you,” he said as he approached.

  “You got something?” Nick asked, looking toward the center of activity.

  “Yes,” Wu said. “But not about this.”

  “Somebody else disappeared?”

  “No,” Wu said. “Somebody’s been found. A woman’s body washed up in a tidal pool this morning. Head and hands chopped off. Killer obviously didn’t want her ID’d.”

  “No dental records or prints,” Nick said, nodding. “Effective.”

  “Usually,” Wu said with an air of anticipatory satisfaction. “But the ME discovered she had a knee prosthesis. Got the serial number and contacted the manufacturer.”

  “She got an ID?”

  Wu nodded. “Sheila Jenkins. Our latest missing person. Technically, former missing person.”

  “Different MO,” Nick mused. Which meant the murder likely had no connection to the bare bones killer.

  “Maybe he was interrupted,” Wu suggested. “Head and hands chopped off. That’s a lot of chopping already.”

  “Seems premeditated,” Nick said. “Specifically to conceal ID.”

  “If you’re chopping a whole body, you have to start somewhere,” Wu said and shrugged. “Probably the extremities.”

  Wu had a point. The killer could have started with the feet. But why not bury the body again, even if the chopping ritual hadn’t been completed? If it even was a ritual. The dismemberment seemed almost… practical rather than ritualistic. Digging shallow graves, while practical, also seemed sloppy.

  “The angle of the cuts,” Nick said. “Do they match the other murders?”

  “Doubt the ME checked,” Wu said. “For the same reason you mentioned. The cases appear unrelated.”

  “Let’s do that,” Nick said. “To find out one way or the other.”

  “I’ll have her check,” Wu said before striding downhill and reaching for his shoulder mic.

  Nick glanced down the slope to locate Hank. His partner had taken a roundabout path up the lot’s incline, favoring open spaces with fewer potential hazards. Turning back, Nick approached Captain Renard.

  “Same as before?” Nick asked.

  Renard nodded. “Chopped up like the others. One set of remains. But a… metacarpal—palm bone—was separated from the rest. Killer may have dropped it before burying the rest and stepped on it, partially embedding it in the ground, without even realizing it.”

  Renard nodded toward two teenage boys, each standing next to a parent, mother of the shorter boy, father of the other one.

  “Kids snuck onto the lot with mountain bikes. Tires hit the bones. Metacarpal cut the blond boy’s forehead after he took a fall.”

  “You interview them?” Nick asked.

  Renard shook his head. “Responding uniform’s notes. I’ll leave the interview to you and Hank—where is Hank?”

  Nick pointed. “On his way,” he said. “Walking wounded.”

  “Of course,” Renard said. “Where are we on the other two murders?”

  Nick explained that the interviews hadn’t given them any leads.

  “Victims did not know each other far as we can tell,” Nick said. “They have nothing in common. Last people to see them noticed no unusual behavior. Going about their daily routines when they were snatched. Chosen at random.”

  “I don’t like random,” Renard said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Nick!”

  Turning around, Nick saw Hank about twenty yards away, waving one of his crutches in the air.

  “I’d better see what he wants,” Nick said before rushing off.

  As Nick approached, Hank directed the tip of his crutch at a loose mound of dirt beside the smooth path he’d been following.

  “Tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Hank said.

  Nick crouched and reached out to brush aside some weeds overhanging the bits of dull white amid the dirt and rocks.

  “Sorry,” Nick said. “It is.”

  “Get some techs down here,” Hank called up to Renard, who had turned away from the original set of bones to see what had caught Hank’s interest. “We’ve got more bones.”

  Some of the crime scene guys peeled off the first site and swooped down to photograph and catalog the newly discovered cache of bones. Hank’s roundabout approach to the first site had inadvertently exposed a second one.

  Renard immediately ordered the uniforms—who had begun to mill about with continued interest but diminished purpose—to spread out and check under every clump of weeds and in every loose mound of earth for more remains. Wu coordinated the effort, splitting the officers into teams and assigning quadrants.

  Renard strode up to Nick and Hank and said, “I’m ordering GPR for this site and Claremont Park. No more surprises.”

  Ground-penetrating radar crews would have to wait for the crime scene guys to wrap up in the vacant lot, but Claremont Park was not an issue. If more victims had been buried there, they needed to find them and identify them. Hard to find a pattern with two murders, but the count had risen to four and could easily go higher.

  “Find out what you can from our bikers,” Renard continued. “We need to identify these bodies. The Chief is already breathing down my neck. When he hears about this…”

  Nick and Hank split up to question the teenagers separately. Afterward, they comp
ared notes and discovered they had nothing new to go on. Once the boys realized they had partially unearthed human remains, they hadn’t disturbed the dismembered skeleton further. They had entered the lot on a whim, seeing the uneven terrain as an urban challenge for their mountain bikes. Dumb luck that they had stumbled upon the bones.

  Hank leaned against a boulder that a construction excavator had unearthed without removing from the lot, propped his crutches against it, and massaged his underarms. Clearly, he needed a breather.

  While everyone else inspected each bit of debris underfoot, anticipating the discovery of a third set of bones, Nick wandered away from the first scene and tried to see the whole location from the perspective of a killer looking for a place to dump human remains.

  Isolated. Easily overlooked or ignored. Shallow graves indicated impatience or sloppiness. Or maybe the killer only needed the bones to stay hidden for a short amount of time, a few weeks or months at the outside. An itinerant killer, then. Murder several people, possibly more, then skip town and start the cycle over somewhere else. So far, the bones they had discovered had been from victims abducted weeks ago. What if the killer had already moved on? Assuming he had not, how much time remained to solve the case and capture the murderer—human or Wesen—before he skipped town?

  A strong breeze buffeted him, like the harbinger of a brewing storm. He glanced upward, at a bank of dark clouds smudging the sky.

  Soon the killer would be lost in the wind.

  Another gust, and a flutter of movement caught his eye. A scrap of paper, trapped in a tangle of weeds, whipped free and flipped end over end. Faux parchment paper. Nick spotted some geometric shapes on one side before it rolled over again. Curious, he chased after it, pulling latex gloves from his pocket as he walked. If the paper belonged to the killer, it might offer a clue to his identity.

  The scrap skipped out of reach twice when he bent to pick it up. He glanced around, hoping noone had noticed this bit of unintentional slapstick, as if a prankster had attached fishing line to a dollar bill and kept tugging it out of reach of his mark. One more step and the paper swirled upward, rising to knee height, where Nick snatched it out of the air.