Psychobyte

by Cat Connor

  Mitch played with my hair. “Go to sleep, El.”

  Hank weaseled his way into my thoughts. My mind ran through a weapon inventory then our route from the bedroom to the panic room. Once satisfied I’d covered everything and knowing armed security guards were stationed outside the locked front gates, sleep hit like a sledgehammer.

  Thirty-One

  One Wild Night

  Sunday started with a new crime scene and more shit than I knew how to process. It felt like failing on all fronts but I’d managed a few hours’ sleep and felt physically okay. All police were asked to leave the scene before we arrived and the scene turned over to uniformed FBI. It was a strange situation and I didn’t much like shutting out local police or using uniformed agents when we usually used Sean O’Hare’s security company. I truly disliked the idea of a cop being inside this case but until we knew for sure, police involvement needed to be limited.

  We waited outside for the bug experts to clear the scene. The last thing I wanted was our investigation broadcasted. After the all clear, two techs showed us four evidence bags containing cameras and audio devices.

  “All good?” I asked. Paid to double check.

  “Yes. We did a thorough sweep of the entire building. Nothing else is present,” said a female agent.

  The thought of being overheard and watched still gnawed at me.

  “Any way to tell if the Unsub was monitoring police presence in the houses after the deaths?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she smiled. “Happy to come out whenever Delta need us.”

  “Log those items with Delta A and use this case number, please. Three zero six dash HQ dash six five zero nine.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ma’am. Seemed like maybe I should just go with it. She was twelve. One day some twelve-year-old fresh-faced agent would be calling her ma’am. They took the devices with them and left the scene.

  I struggled with my nitrile gloves ‒ no way I was getting my taped-up fingers in one hole.

  “Here,” Kurt said handing me one of his gloves. “Wear this one on the broken hand. It’s a large.”

  “Thanks.” I looked at him for second as I tried to decide if I should mention the possibility of aspects of our investigation being overheard.

  “Something on your mind, Conway?”

  “The surveillance at the crime scenes. If we were listened to, the Unsubs will know about my newfound ability.” I eased the glove over my fingers. “It bothers me.”

  “I’ve given that some thought as well.”

  “And?”

  “I think if they’d heard anything, they would’ve used it by now, somehow. We didn’t do a lot of talking in the camera areas.”

  Good point.

  “Maybe.”

  Once I was gloved up, Kurt tapped my shoulder. “Let’s get in there.”

  I steeled myself for what I was about to see and followed Kurt into the house. A uniformed FBI agent directed us to the bathroom.

  “She’s a husk,” I said, staring at another young woman’s drained body, in another spotless bathroom, in another immaculate house.

  “Good description,” Kurt replied.

  “Sidney Churchill, age twenty-nine. Worked in the paleontology department of the Smithsonian,” I said, reading from the notes given to me by the first agent on scene. I looked down at the once-animated face of a slim blonde blue-eyed young woman. Frosty tentacles slithered into my bones. “She’s also a Republican.” Another Republican bites the dust. Political motivation didn’t feel right. Perhaps it was opportunity? “Hey, did we find out if any of these women attended support groups of any kind?”

  “As far as I know Sam and Lee are working on that. Places like AA don’t keep records of people attending. Anonymous still means something in a few circles.”

  “I suppose it does.” I stiffened and sucked in air as another raging, cold torrent raced up my spine.

  A light frown creased Kurt’s forehead as he looked up at me. “I get why the strong reaction to that letter last night. Before I picked you up today, I had a look at some of the crime-scene photos from the ‘Hank “Saw” Creole’ case.”

  I nodded. “We are not having a conversation about that.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Kurt would add my reaction to his mental folder labeled PTSD. I knew that and didn’t care. One day it’d be a thing that I couldn’t ignore but not yet. My mind, already busy with thoughts of our current case, had no room for jailbirds like Hank Creole and his warped love letters.

  “Eight victims.”

  I knew as soon as I said it that was wrong.

  “Nine,” Kurt said, letting the shower curtain fall back into place. “Violet Cramer in Winchester, remember. There are nine.”

  Yeah, nine. Nine victims, two Unsubs or four, depending on whether or not Stevens and Fallon were involved.

  With the body hidden by the shower curtain, it was just a bathroom. A very clean bathroom.

  White tile walls and a canary yellow splashback behind the sink. I crouched down and scanned the room. Where was Sidney’s note? A small white triangle peeked out from under the vanity unit. Pleased to have found it, I wiggled out the paper with my gloved fingers. Unfolding it with care.

  “What’s it say?” Kurt asked.

  “I think the better question is ‘why hide the notes?’”

  “And your theory is?”

  “It’s some kind of game. They’re not hidden well enough to make it too hard.”

  “Why bother at all?”

  “Because it amuses them for whatever sick reason. If it didn’t, then surely the notes would be left in the open.”

  “Or, it reminds us that they did not feel hurried and had time to conceal something.”

  “I think you have something there, Kurt.”

  He smiled. “What does that note say?”

  “‘Taking the light with you,’” I replied, handing it to him then standing up and moving back to the door. My head swam. I waited. A few deep breaths and it subsided.

  “Conway, is there something you want to share?” Kurt asked, placing the piece of paper in an evidence bag.

  “Someone or something has to be common to all of the women.” I watched Kurt from the doorway. “These murders, these women, they’re not a coincidence.”

  I thought about self-help groups, surveillance equipment, political rallies and stickers on cars. Still too many variables. They didn’t all use the same security company. They didn’t all have their life story in stickers on the backs of their cars. They attended different political events. I needed to widen my view and see the whole pattern.

  Kurt interrupted my thoughts. “That’s not what I saw happen a few seconds ago, but good subject change.”

  I shrugged.

  He was thinking but I knew it was about the case and not me which was good. His brow creased as the thoughts gathered momentum. While he thought and before steam came out his ears, I decided I needed time with Sidney.

  “Gimme a few minutes with Sidney?”

  Kurt nodded. “I’m not leaving. I’ll be over there,” he said, pointing to the doorway.

  Whatever.

  I pulled back the shower curtain, revealing Sidney’s naked damp bloodless frame. Crumpled, alone, cold. I felt for her. Her day had just started and now her life was over.

  Sidney didn’t react as I crouched next to her. Probably a good thing. I got closer to her head, and said, “Sidney, I’m Ellie. Can we talk for a minute?”

  An incorporeal arm moved. I watched with fascination as her ghostly being stirred and extended toward my hand. A chill encompassed me when Sidney made contact. She tugged hard. It took me a moment to realize she was pulling herself into me, not me into her. Stone-cold death took over my body. Her eyes looked out from mine, showing me all she saw before a drugged haze took her vision and someone took her life.

  Unable to look away, I watched the
shower curtain open. I clearly saw Unsub number two and a knife jab at me. The first cut a precursor to a gruesome and terrifying death. Noise alerted me to someone else in the room. Using Sidney’s ears, I forced myself to focus on it. The sound led me to red boots. Sidney’s vision blurred, fading fast. Someone stood behind the Unsub. All I could see was red boots through Unsub two’s legs. I committed what I saw of the boots to memory and Sidney was no more.

  Sidney’s ectoplasm extracted itself from my body, leaving rivers of cold running through my veins. I’d discovered the reason I felt so cold so often during this case: death. Makes a person cold from the inside out.

  “Someone else was here,” I said, as I stood up and looked at Kurt.

  “Who, Conway?”

  “A woman. I saw red boots and they weren’t men’s boots.” I eased past him in the doorway and propped myself against the wall in the hall to sketch the boots in my notebook. I looked at the picture I’d drawn. Not the best drawing I’d ever done but I knew those red boots.

  Using my phone, I Googled women’s boots. Not steel capped cowboy boots like mine, I looked for Doc Martin’s. As soon as I found them, I knew I they were Fallon’s boots. Sometimes being right sucks.

  I showed Kurt the image. He nodded and said, “I’ve seen boots like that before.”

  “You met Detective Fallon, right?”

  “Yes, at the media briefing.” He looked at me. I watched a whole roll of quarters drop ‒ this was too big for a single penny. “Her red boots are very similar.”

  “Distinctive, aren’t they?”

  “Very.”

  “How do we prove what I saw?” I was really thinking aloud. No answer required. Kurt knew that.

  He smiled and leaned his back on the wall across from me. “I have faith, Conway.”

  “We need to turn this place inside out. I want a print and there is bound to be one somewhere. I don’t care how careful she thinks she’s being. There has to be something irrefutable linking that woman to this crime scene.”

  That was a topsy-turvy way of thinking. A little voice in my head warned me to look at the big picture and step back from Fallon. Another voice argued that this was the second strike for Fallon and I was right. It felt messy. Everything was muddied up and I struggled to get a clear direction.

  “Let’s start,” Kurt said. “First, we should find out where they were hiding or if they were hiding.”

  Yep. My eyes roamed the ceiling in the hallway looking for a trapdoor. I pointed at a recessed area.

  “Trapdoor?”

  “Could be.”

  Kurt and I stood under it and looked up. We needed the ladder, again.

  “Did you pick it up?”

  “The ladder? Yeah, on the way home last night.”

  Five minutes later we hunched, uncomfortable, in the hot, stuffy ceiling space. Not a lot of headroom, no floor, just joists and insulation.

  “More a crawl space this one,” Kurt said, picking his way carefully across joists to the other side of the ceiling. “Someone has been up here … can’t have been comfortable but someone was here.”

  The heat overwhelmed me before I was halfway to Kurt. Continuing smacked of falling through a ceiling and horrendous embarrassment. Self-preservation kicked in.

  “I gotta get out of here,” I said. The walls were closing in as I turned around and made my way across joists to the ladder. As I descended, I saw the marks on the paintwork. Someone had dragged something over the rim of the trapdoor. The marks fitted with the width of our ladder. Kurt was right, someone had been up there.

  “Conway?”

  “Yep,” I called back from the safety of the floor below. “Just wanted to check something.” My fingers crossed all by themselves.

  An hour later we were back at the office. There was no point us waiting around at the scene for the crime scene techs to do their thing.

  I shifted back in the chair. Sunlight streamed through the windows, filling the room with warmth and yellow. Any other day the yellowness of the room would’ve made me smile. Today it felt close and claustrophobic.

  I went back to checking followers and friends of the latest victim on Facebook and Twitter accounts. A name jumped off the screen. Charles Locke.

  Again. Damn!

  I did a quick control-f on every page I had open and typed his name into the box created. Yep, he featured on her Twitter friends list, and her Instagram, as well as Facebook. But which Locke was it? I opened his Facebook profile. Not much was public but it was Locke Junior.

  Damn.

  Junior. Three times now I’d come across him.

  Time to bring Mallory Stevens back in and find out where Charles Locke Junior hid out. The private Facebook account annoyed me. I needed to get in and see what he talked about and who his friends were. A workaround popped into my mind. I hooked up my desk phone and punched in three numbers.

  “It’s Ellie Conway,” I said when the voice answered.

  “What can Cyber do for you, Conway?”

  “Hack a Facebook account for me.” No point dancing in circles.

  “Got a warrant?”

  Nope.

  “Not exactly.”

  “You do or you don’t, Conway, there’s no gray ground here.”

  He was right.

  “Say I do?”

  “Then send me a link to the Facebook account and before you can say battery-operated boy, you’ll have all the access you need and no one will know.”

  “I’ll get back to you in fifteen minutes.” I hung up.

  Will I? Hell yes. Warrant. No problem.

  I flipped through the list of judges available for warrants. The answer to my prayers was third down the list. Filling out the paperwork took five minutes. I printed it and headed out the door to catch Judge Hartwell. We had history. Good solid foundations of trust.

  Also, it didn’t hurt that I rescued her one Christmas from a lunatic. Especially when my asking for a warrant might be a tad premature.

  I hoped there’d be brownie points for asking and not letting Sandra sneak into Facebook and hack the shit out of it. If I didn’t get my warrant, I’d turn it over to Sandra. That had inadmissible evidence written all over it, so not the best way forward.

  Ten minutes was all it took. Well, ten minutes and a promise that Judge Hartwell would be invited to Murphy’s for the customary end of case drinks. I like helping people out, and it all comes back when you need it most.

  As soon as I was back in my office, I called Cyber and let them know an electronic copy of the warrant was on its way. I heard the email ping while talking to them. To save time I’d included the Facebook link before forwarding the warrant.

  “We’ll give you access as soon as we have it, Agent Conway. Check your email. Cheers.”

  Disconnecting the call I thought about Charles Locke junior and how likely or unlikely it was that his father hadn’t heard from him. Locke senior seemed genuinely disgusted by his son’s actions yet I felt he was holding back in other ways.

  Sean popped into my head. Locke senior apparently worked for O’Hare Security at one point and I still hadn’t spoken to Sean about him.

  I wasn’t entirely happy with the chat I’d had with Locke senior. He needed revisiting. Maybe Sam could do that. He was a pretty persuasive sort of guy.

  I wandered to my office door and whistled. Keeping it classy.

  Sam appeared with a laugh. “You whistled, Chicky Babe?”

  “Got a job for you, Sam. Charles Locke senior. Can you take a run at him? Bring him in and do it here. Just have a feeling he’s holding out on us.”

  “I’ll go pick him up now.”

  “Thanks.”

  Happier, I returned to my desk and gave Sean a call.

  “Just me. Two things … One, do you still have Rosanne? And two, did you ever have a Charles Locke on your payroll as a surveillance technician or anything that would involve installing surveillance gear, alarm systems, or smoke detectors?”

  “I
still have Rosanne. Someone should come get her. Not you!” He stopped. “I’ll do a database search, I don’t recall the name but then again, I have a manager who handles that side of the business.”

  Sean was more hands-on in the responding to alarms and scene guard areas. Or that had been my experience. His company provided scene guards for law enforcement agencies, mainly us, Homeland, and DEA. He had some hefty government contracts.

  “I’ll send Lee for Rosanne.”

  “Sooner rather than later, we’ve had her since last night.”

  “I know, sorry, we had another crime scene this morning. The case takes priority, especially a fresh scene.”

  “Cutting it close, Ellie … she starts screaming for a lawyer and you’ll get toasted.”

  I typed on my keyboard, opened a chat window and messaged Lee to please go get Rosanne from Sean. He replied and said he’d leave immediately.

  “Lee is on his way to you.”

  “I’ll have John contact you with any employment records for Charles Locke,” Sean said. “Good luck with the case, yell if you need anything else.”

  “Thanks.”

  I hung up, rocked back in my chair for a few minutes while taking stock of the current situation. As I tried to wrap my thoughts around the two people who needed interviewing, my email program dinged like a maniac and insisted I take notice. Emails flooded into my inbox. Two hundred unread emails. Maybe there’d been an email blockage that suddenly cleared?

  I scrolled through, looking for any flagged as urgent. There were twenty of those.

  About fifty emails were ignorable. I hit the delete key on those. Clearly I never received them.

  The rest could wait a while. A quick scan of the senders and subjects told me I didn’t really want to open any of them.

  With a sigh, I reached forward and instead of hitting close, hit refresh. Two more emails jumped into my inbox.

  Damn.

  My mood plummeted faster than a frozen turkey falling from the monument.

  Didn’t want to open those either.

  A shadow passed my open office door. I pushed my chair from my desk, stood up, crossed the floor and closed the door. Considering my mood, an open door was an invitation and that invitation could get someone hurt. Not an ideal situation.