The Ninth Life

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Okay,” I said.

  “One more thing,” Terry said. “Your video from the security company at your condo should be getting emailed to me shortly.”

  “All right,” I said. “Just let me know when you get it.”

  I hung up. Hank walked through my office door a moment later. “I got Michelle Kleeman on the phone,” he said. “The three sisters are on vacation together in Flagstaff. Apparently Eve was supposed to join them but canceled last minute. From what the sister said when I spoke to her, this is an annual thing.”

  “Looks like Eve took her own little vacation,” I said. “What did you tell the sister about what was going on?”

  “Nothing,” Hank said. “I asked where she was and if she’d been in contact with Eve. She gave me the information that I just told you, that she and two of her sisters were on vacation out of state, and that Eve canceled last minute. I asked which state, to which she gave me Flagstaff, Arizona. She asked why the Tampa police were looking for Eve, and I told her that we’d like to ask her some questions regarding a crime that had taken place. She inquired about the crime and, again, how her sister was involved with anything that took place in Tampa. I gave her the active-investigation-slash-can’t-share-any-details line. I kept it nice and vague. We don’t know if she’s actually in contact with her sister, Eve, and don’t need her feeding her information if she is.”

  “You have the phone number that you spoke to her on?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “Have Westbrook track it to make sure it’s where it’s supposed to be to go along with that story.”

  “Yeah, I will,” Hank said. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

  From where I sat at my desk, I could hear it vibrating.

  Hank held it before him and stared down at the screen. “This is the PD up there calling me back.”

  “Take it,” I said.

  Hank clicked Talk and brought his phone to his ear.

  “Sergeant Hank Rawlings,” he said. Shit was the only word in his next sentence.

  “What?” I asked.

  Hank took the mouthpiece from his face. “They got a scene there.”

  “Put it on speaker.”

  Hank went back to the call. “One second, Sergeant,” Hank said. “I’m going to put you on speaker. I’m sitting with my lieutenant.” Hank clicked a button on his phone, walked to my desk, and slid out a chair. He set the phone down between us on a stack of papers. “Okay, you’re on speaker,” Hank said. “Go ahead, repeat that last bit.”

  “I said we have a house full of blood.”

  “This is Lieutenant Carl Kane. You’re at the Kleeman home?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Sergeant Jason Weiss, Madison PD. We’re here. We’ve been inside. We’ve got blood everywhere. Blood and empty bags of ice. What the hell am I looking at here?”

  “Bodies?” Hank asked.

  “Nothing. The home is clear.”

  “Run through it for me,” I said.

  “I sent two patrol cars to the address and get a call back to get out here. My guys went to the door, didn’t get an answer, and walked around the home. One of them caught a view into the house and saw the bed in the master bedroom soaked in blood. They entered, cleared, and called me. So I get here and do a walk-through. I got drag marks in the house stemming from the master into the living room, where all the empty bags of ice are. No more blood after that. Not a drip. What the hell is this?”

  “We have the daughter of the pair that lived in that house down here in Tampa. She’s involved in multiple homicides,” I said. “We believe that she killed her parents there, prior to driving down here.”

  “Well, this damn well looks like the scene of a pair of homicides, minus the bodies. That master bedroom is the shit nightmares are made of. There’s blood wall to wall, including the ceiling. The sheets are all cut up.”

  The thought of Kleeman attacking and killing her parents in bed was more than unsettling.

  “But nothing else there aside from the empty bags of ice?” I asked.

  “We’re still going through the place, but right now, all we’re seeing is the blood and the empty ten-pound ice bags. Looks like about a hundred pounds’ worth. Hell, maybe more. Hold on,” he said. “There’s another pair of bags here mixed in with the ones from the ice. I don’t know. They’re just bags, see-through, about a-foot-by-a-foot size with zippers at the tops. Like big freezer bags. White stickers on them say Biomed Containment Supplies. Does that mean anything to you guys?”

  “They were from a pair of body bags,” Hank said.

  “Body bags?” the sergeant asked.

  “Correct,” I said. I didn’t explain further.

  “Whatever. I need to get a damn forensics team out here and start going through this place top to bottom.”

  “We’ll need to know what, if anything, is found and get whatever information comes out of that scene,” I said. “Make sure your forensics guys get detailed photos of everything.”

  “I’ll put you in contact with them directly when they arrive.”

  “Appreciate that,” I said. I nodded to Hank to take the phone off of speaker.

  He did and brought it back to his ear.

  “Exchange information so we can stay on top of that,” I said.

  Hank nodded and left my office, still on the call.

  I left my desk and walked next door to the captain’s office. I gave his open door a rap with my knuckles and walked in. “We’re going to have a video call with Koskinen in a few minutes here.”

  “They’re going to let you talk to him?”

  “He’s part of a murder investigation now. I’d say that it looks a little better on their behalf if they try to do anything in their power to help when they have a guard committing murders and an inmate who is more than likely coaching her through them.”

  “Okay. How are we doing this?” Bostok asked. “I’ll want to be in the room when this is going down.”

  “I got with Terry about it, and he’s going to get me set up for the call downstairs. The assistant director is going to call me a couple minutes before they’re ready.”

  “Good,” Bostok said. “Terry can record it?”

  “That’s why we’re doing it down there, yeah. We got more news as well. Parents are dead. Sisters are alive.”

  Bostok motioned for me to continue with the details. I did.

  “So we think that she transported her dead parents from Wisconsin to Florida inside of some ice-packed body bags. Then kept them at her condo on ice. Why?” Bostok asked.

  I shrugged and rubbed my eyes. “Not a damn clue.” My phone rang in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at the screen—the assistant director. “This is my call here about the video call, Cap.” I clicked Talk.

  “Lieutenant Kane,” I said.

  “It’s Charles Gill. He’s being transported over here now. We’ll be ready in just a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me get something to write with.” I walked to Bostok’s desk and made a motion as if I was writing in the air with a pen. The captain grabbed a pen from next to his computer’s keyboard and passed it to me along with a piece of paper.

  “Ready for the information,” I said.

  Chapter 33

  The time inched up on three o’clock. Larry hadn’t called. Eve could only assume that Kane would be coming shortly. She left Dana’s house and crossed the street to the storage facility. Eve walked into the service bay. Her eyes darted left and right, coming to rest on the metal workbench, four feet in height by four feet wide with a depth of around two feet. The two shelves beneath the top work surface were mostly bare. Eve walked to it, tossing Dana’s cell phone on a nearby tool bench as she did.

  Eve grabbed the top of the bench and tried sliding it out from the wall. The bench moved a foot—a couple of sockets and a wrench rolled from the surface and found the shop floor as she dropped it back to the cement. The table would suit her needs just fine. Eve swiped the r
emaining tools from the surface and muscled the bench to the service bay garage doors. She waited as the door lifted after she hit the button for the opener and then proceeded to drag the tool bench toward her storage unit. The metal legs of the bench squeaked and scratched as she pulled it across the blacktop.

  Eve stopped beside her car in front of her storage unit and raised the overhead door.

  She pulled the table inside, around her parents’ bodies that were in body bags in the middle of the storage unit, and positioned the bench in the center of the back wall. Eve went to her parents’ bodies and unzipped both of their bags. The smell from their decomposing flesh hit her nostrils as soon as she opened them up. Eve stared down at the two lying side by side. Knife wounds filled their torsos. The blood had mostly just turned their pajamas a shade of pink from the constant melting of ice over them. She reached into the first bag and scooped up her mother. Eve placed her body on the workbench and then heaved her father up onto the bench beside her. She tried, for only a moment, to position their bodies—they wouldn’t stay upright. Eve would need something to affix them to the back wall of the storage unit. She walked to the service bay in search of some nails and a hammer.

  Chapter 34

  I sat at a computer in the tech center. Hank and Captain Bostok stood off to my right. Terry leaned in as he stood beside me and clicked a couple of keys on the computer’s keyboard.

  “You should be set,” Terry said. “The feed is connecting now.” Terry backed out of the camera’s frame and stood off to my left.

  I stared at the computer. A small box with my face in it was to the upper right-hand side of the screen. The center, where I figured Koskinen’s face would be, had a black window with a small circle that rotated. It read connecting you to the meeting at the top left of the monitor.

  After another fifteen seconds of the screen saying connecting, it read connected, and a man in a dark gray suit appeared on-screen. He wore a red tie, which filled most of the monitor, before he backed away and I could see his face and his surroundings. The man had short, light brown hair and a full mustache with no beard. A pair of wire-framed glasses wrapped his eyes.

  “Looks like we’re on,” he said. He sat in the chair that was behind him at the desk. “Lieutenant Kane?”

  “This is,” I said.

  “Assistant Director Charles Gill.”

  I put a face to the voice that I’d been hearing on the phone.

  “We have Koskinen here, whenever you’re ready.”

  I had no notes of questions that I wanted to ask him. I just wanted to see his face and see what, if anything, he’d give me. “Put him on,” I said.

  The assistant director stood from the chair and moved out of the frame. A moment later, I saw a figure in a blue inmate uniform come into frame before sitting down. He sat and gazed into the camera.

  I stared back at the man—the faded, tattooed nines were present below his eyes and center of his forehead, and his nose was a bit crooked, like the photo that Kleeman had in her romance novel—Koskinen. He reached his handcuffed hands up to his hairline and brushed some of the graying hair from his face. The beard that he’d had in the photo that Hank and I saw in Kleeman’s condo was gone.

  “Hello, Kane,” he said. “Long time, no see. Nice beard. I had one myself until just a few months ago.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  He leaned back in the chair. I saw a hand of someone smack him on the back of his shoulder to sit up straight. Koskinen looked off camera for a moment at whoever did it before looking back at me. “I assume you mean the female guard that gave me the phone,” he said. “I only assume that because the staff here has been asking me questions about her. I haven’t seen her in a week or more.”

  “Did you put her up to doing what she’s doing?” I asked.

  He pulled his head back and tried to put on a face of ignorance. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Put her up to what?” he asked.

  “Right,” I said. “You’re just clueless to everything. We know that you’ve been talking to her, using her dead father’s phone. Talking to her on her dead mother’s phone.”

  He curled his handcuffed hands into fists and placed them under his chin as he leaned forward closer to the camera. “Is that whose phone that was? I assure you that I had no idea about any of that. Obviously I didn’t kill her parents, Kane. I’ve been in here, serving my time. Enjoying my little cell that you put me in. The woman told me to give her a call. She said that it was under the name Susan on the phone, so I tried giving her a ring the other day. She didn’t answer, though.”

  “I know that it was you that I was talking to the other day. You know, when you were pretending to be her father on the phone.”

  He stared into the camera for a moment before the corner of his mouth turned up into a smile. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

  “Are you going to cut the bullshit?” I asked.

  “Is that what you want, Kane? For me to cut the bullshit?”

  “Yes. It is,” I said.

  “Let me see the scars on the side of your head,” he said.

  I heard someone on his end of the video call tell him that he was there to answer questions, not ask them.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Let me see the scars, and we’ll talk.”

  I turned my head so the scars were visible to the camera and pointed at them with my finger—the middle one.

  “Real mature, Lieutenant,” Koskinen said. “Do you think about me when you see them in the mirror?”

  “Not for a second,” I said.

  “Come on. You wanted me to cut the bullshit, but now you’re lying to me?” He shook his head, and his shoulders sank. “Okay, here’s the deal. Immunity from any new charges, and I’ll tell you everything that I know about Eve and what is going on.”

  “So now you know everything about her and what’s going on?”

  Koskinen widened his eyes and leaned closer to the camera. “I don’t know shit until I see the word immunity in writing.” He leaned back. “Then we’ll see. I probably wouldn’t dally too much. From what these guys say, she seems pretty dangerous. I imagine that you don’t want someone like that prowling your neighborhood.” Koskinen looked off camera. “That’s all I’m saying to him,” he said to whoever was there.

  His prowling your neighborhood line I figured to be a bread crumb, that he did in fact know every last thing that she was doing.

  “You’re going to answer his questions and give him what he’s asking for,” someone said off-screen. I imagined that it was the assistant director. The voice sounded like his.

  “I assure you that I’m not saying another damn word to him until I get what I want. You can let me sit in front of the camera for days and not another syllable will come from my lips.”

  I saw Koskinen get lifted from his chair by the shoulder of his shirt. They took him out of the camera’s view. A moment later, the assistant director sat back in front of the camera. “I’ll call you,” he said. The feed ended.

  I turned and looked at Bostok.

  “What would we have him on?” the captain asked.

  “Conspiracy to commit murder, to start things off,” I said. “I’m sure we could find a couple more things.”

  “But if we brought charges, or Wisconsin brought charges, would they pull him from the mental health facility and stick him in a regular prison?” Bostok asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “You’d have to think that new charges would be brought to trial, and his defense attorneys would say that he’s insane—and already in a mental health facility, proving that fact.”

  “When this all comes to light, we’d have some pretty damn angry families if we gave someone involved a get-out-of-jail-free pass,” Hank said. “Well, maybe not get-out-of-jail-free, but you know what I mean.”

  “What are the chances that this guy ever sees the light of day again?” Bostok asked.

  �
��None, as far as I know,” I said. I crossed my arms over my chest. “But no repercussions means that he could try to do this again.”

  “Not if his immunity deal has wording that if he’s ever suspected in anything ever again, he’ll be held accountable and has no chance for immunity,” Bostok said.

  “Right. But then again, we’d be making a deal with a person who is already considered insane. I’m not even sure how that would work. Plus, if Wisconsin wants to bring him up on any charges, say they get him in connection with the murder of her parents, then what the hell do we do?” I asked.

  “Let me make some calls,” Bostok said. “I’ll run this all past the major and see what his take is on it. We’ll have to work with Wisconsin either way, I’d imagine.”

  I felt my cell phone ringing in my pocket. I pulled it out, stood, and looked at the screen. “This is the assistant director calling,” I said. “I’ll be in my office.”

  I clicked Talk as I left the tech department and started up the flights of stairs to the third floor.

  “Lieutenant Kane,” I said.

  “Charles Gill. Well, what do you think?”

  “My captain was in the room for the video call. He’s on the phone now trying to decide what the hell to do. What did you do with him?” I asked.

  “He’s being taken back to his room now until we figure out what we’re doing. Either way, when it’s all said and done, he’ll be looking at disciplinary measures.”

  “Which are?” I asked.

  “He’ll spend some time in a seclusion room.”

  I imagined the term seclusion room was mental health facility talk for solitary confinement.

  “He’ll also have his personal items removed from his room and his schedule adjusted.”

  I figured that meant they would take everything he had and keep him awake all night. I hit the door for the third floor and started toward the lunchroom for a coffee. “Appreciate you getting him on the line for me. I’ll give you a call as soon as we have something put together or an answer to this immunity thing. Just have him available to get back on a video call when the time comes.”