DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by BREARTON, T. J.

“I got it,” Dana said through gritted teeth.

  She threw the phone on the bed. She’d wanted to smash it against the wall in Lori’s room, but the student was watching her. Those eyes of hers, seeing Dana, seeing inside her, making her skin crawl.

  * * *

  Dana stood at the window as more cars pulled up. They were here. Two men got out of the dark sedan and moved stiffly up the street. The FBI were coming to get Lori.

  They knocked on the door downstairs, and Dana gestured for Lori to walk ahead of her out of the bedroom. The student hesitated. “I need clothes? I need my things . . .”

  “That’ll all be taken care of,” Dana said. Then abruptly, “Lori, did you have something to do with this?”

  The girl seemed shocked. “Did I . . . ?”

  Dana’s voice carried an edge. “You’ve corresponded with Doctor Lata, Lori. You’ve spoken about me, told him you ‘saw’ me. What do you think you know? You think you know me? Did you know about my brother?”

  “No, I . . . what? No . . .”

  “Have you ‘seen’ things in the other girls, too, Lori; your friends? Maybe things you didn’t like?” She could feel herself revving up the way she had with George Lambert. She stopped herself, thinking about the drawings in Lori’s portfolio, thinking about that day twenty-five years ago.

  It was still with her. It had never left her.

  There had been no clear evidence of foul play, but there had been no confirmation of suicide either — no rocks in David’s pockets or farewell note left in his bag, no closure for the sister he left behind.

  Her parents had refused an autopsy. As if they didn’t want the world to know, not for certain, what had happened to David. They’d learned he’d been skipping classes, dropping activities, and his grades had been going downhill. When the marijuana was found in his backpack, it seemed to line up, as far as her father was concerned. Family and friends concluded it was a tragedy which they should have seen coming. They ‘made up’ for it by throwing Heather an even bigger wedding six months later, and dropping a huge sum of money on a rehab program for Shannon.

  For Dana, nothing had ended.

  The cops at the door knocked again. “Detective Gates? Miss Stender?”

  “Lori, you need to come clean. You need to talk to me now.”

  “I don’t have anything to say. I told you. It was my fault Sonia was in the study. She did it for me. I was interested; I like that sort of thing. I didn’t know any of the other students. I’d seen Maggie, once or twice, around campus.” She had hardened now. “But that’s it. Somebody stole my drawing. And that’s meaningful to you, right? I can tell.” She stood beside her bed, hands balled into fists. “So take that, lady, and take your dead brother, and leave me alone.”

  From downstairs came, “Gates? We’re coming in.”

  Dana whipped her head to the side and barked at them, “Just a minute!” She faced Lori again, who was a few inches shorter than she was, and she grabbed one of the girl’s wrists, like she had done to Sarah once or twice, to pull her away from danger.

  “Lori, they just found Maggie Lange. That’s three girls, all from the list. If you didn’t have anything to do with this, fine. But if you’re not telling me something . . . Lori, you’re the last name on that list.”

  Lori pulled away. She rubbed her wrist. Dana saw that she had left a mark. Just a reddening impression.

  Then the girl wheeled around. “You know how someone ran from you the night you were at O’Sullivan’s?”

  “How do you know?”

  Her eyes were snapping. “Oh come on. Everyone knows.”

  “What about it?”

  “You want to know something? You want to know what I think? I don’t know if I have any ‘gifts,’ okay? But maybe you should consider some other reason that person ran from you. Maybe you need to take a better look. Stop trying to pin this on me.”

  Footsteps were pounding up the stairs. Dana looked at the bedroom door.

  “Alright,” she said quietly.

  She left, pulling her collar up around her neck, leaving the girl behind, pushing through the agents ascending the stairs, cutting through their questions, their stares.

  DAY NINE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR / The Smiley Face Murders

  The detectives walked into the morgue.

  “En ze midnight hour,” Hamill sang with a fake accent. “I kun feel your power . . .”

  Hamill’s renditions of 80s pop artists like Madonna, rendered with terrible Dutch, German, or Austrian accents, were one of his star turns. He and Dana descended the stairs to the autopsy room below.

  “Just like ze prayer, you know I take you zere . . .”

  “Quit it, alright?” It was past midnight anyway, it was two a.m. Hamill wanted to distract her, to help her in his clumsy way. They had been granted this look at the body, and they were continuing their investigation, but everyone knew it was just a courtesy. The FBI had already been here. Already made their observations and notes. The detectives had become the B team.

  No, the Feds wouldn’t take over, per se. They would just make the state police irrelevant. But she didn’t care; even if the visit to the morgue was token, even if she hadn’t been allowed at the scene of the last crime, she was more determined than ever to close this case. She’d consider anything: Lori’s comments, Lata’s insights, drawings of man-beasts, tattoos that looked like biohazard signs, bodies on the slab.

  The partners reached the ground floor and walked down a short corridor. Hamill was humming the song now. He was trying to cheer her up. She thought she could smell alcohol on him again, too. They pushed through two doors that reminded Dana of a restaurant, rather than a morgue.

  Janine Poehler stood in her white smock next to the body of Maggie Lange. Poehler’s graying blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her eyes had the same steely cast as the chrome appliances in the room. Those eyes seemed to mirror what Dana was thinking. The pathologist had already been through all of this once with Yarrow and his agents. Now she needed to go through it again for the detectives.

  “Same thing,” Poehler said. “What we’re seeing so far is consistent with a drowning.”

  Hamill looked over at Dana. He raised his eyebrows. “Smiley face murder number three?”

  Poehler looked at the detectives with a quizzical expression. “Smiley face?”

  Dana waved a dismissive hand in the air. “It’s a theory.”

  Poehler’s look held; she wanted to hear it.

  Dana took a breath. “It was a theory formulated by two retired police detectives in New York City. Several college-aged males were found dead in bodies of water. And near where quite a few of the bodies were found, there was graffiti of smiley faces.”

  “It’s like a cop ghost story,” Hamill said.

  Poehler scowled for a moment, then her gaze dropped to the body, and they all looked there. Maggie Lange was pale, with a bluish tint. Face-up, a white sheet covering her from the chest down. Dana lingered over the colorless lips, small nose; the staring sunken eyes.

  “So,” Hamill said. “Same old, same old.”

  “How long?” Dana was riveted by the corpse.

  “Based on lividity, lack of fully expressed rigor, coloring, the sinking of the eyes, she was found about three hours after death. We won’t know more until the tox screening.”

  “And there it is,” Hamill scoffed. “From what I hear — after all the waiting — you won’t able to retrieve enough uncorrupted tissue to determine toxicology. It’s another dead end.”

  “It might be.”

  Dana kept looking at Maggie Lange. The girl’s nose ring had yet to be removed. Her dyed blonde hair was still damp. “Tell me about the drowning.”

  Poehler pushed aside a stack of medical trays on a wheeled rack. The tools on the top tray glistened beneath the lights. The room was filled with stainless steel appliances, including a refrigerator and a giant walk-in cooler, where more bodies were stored. Aside from the compu
ter workstations, the place looked like a giant kitchen. It completed the unsettling likeness to a restaurant.

  “Seventy to eighty percent of drownings are called ‘wet drownings,’” Poehler said. “The pulmonary alveoli lining is semi-permeable. That means that, depending on the level of osmotic pressure, when water enters the alveoli, there is an exchange.” She gestured to the body.

  “Water enters the blood stream,” Dana said.

  “Correct. Partly you have asphyxia due to fluid causing obstruction to the air passages. That’s why we call it ‘wet.’ Water passes quickly from the lungs to the blood, which leads to hemolysis and dilution. This increases blood volume — there’s water in the blood stream. The water also denatures the protective surfactant which lines the alveolar walls, which decreases lung compliance and creates severe ventilation perfusion mismatch. Inhaled water creates vagal reflexes which increase peripheral airway resistance, usually from pulmonary vasoconstriction.”

  “You could sing that,” said Hamill.

  The women ignored him and Poehler went on. “This constriction causes the concentration of serum electrolytes to decrease considerably. Everything, basically, gets washed away. Including any toxins on the body. It also causes a rapid increase in the potassium serum, which overburdens the heart and typically leads to pulmonary edema.”

  “But this is not a wet drowning,” Dana said, keeping watch on Poehler.

  “The other victims, yes. This one . . . It doesn’t appear to be. But we won’t know more until we do the internal. If she expired from what we call a dry drowning, water does not enter the lungs. Instead, death results from immediate, sustained, laryngeal spasm due to an inrush of water to the nasopharynx or larynx.”

  “Please translate,” said Hamill with a thin smile. His attempts at humor had fizzled out.

  “A mucous plug forms. Foam and froth develops. It’s an amazing defensive reaction. Resuscitated victims usually have pleasant memories. Panoramic views of their lives, of their best memories, some have mentioned past lives.”

  Hamill’s phone rang. He glanced at Dana, excused himself, and walked away, speaking in a low voice.

  Dana kept going with Poehler. She was trying to focus on the science, but she found her mind wandering, thinking about memories and past lives. Ancient civilizations and cycles of time. “And — I’m sorry — but we’re a hundred percent sure that she drowned?”

  “Yes. Ninety-nine percent.” Poehler carefully rolled down the sheet covering Lange’s body. “We look at the plasma specific gravity. The specific gravity from the left side of her heart was less than that of the right.” Lange’s hands were blue, stiffened by rigor to form claws. Poehler pointed at the torso. “She had fluid in her lungs and in her bloodstream, which diluted any toxins. These situations create the most difficult medico-legal cases, Detective Gates. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t drown.”

  Dana put her hands in her pockets. She brushed the spine of Rakesh Lata’s book with her thumb. “What about Sonia Taylor? She was in a shallow river.”

  Poehler now studied Dana. “Drowning is not limited to deep water situations. An unconscious person can fall face down in a puddle or ditch and die of immersion. A few inches of water are all that’s necessary.”

  Dana nodded, took her hands out of her coat.

  “The autopsy conclusion of drowning can pose problems,” the pathologist said, with a conciliatory tone. “The findings are often minimal, obscure, or completely absent. What we do have, though, what we have just been able to obtain from the other two victims, are diatoms.”

  Dana felt something inside her light up. “Diatoms?”

  “It took several days from the forensic limnologist working nearly round the clock but we have bone marrow examinations from your first two victims.”

  “Bone marrow . . .”

  “That’s where diatoms aggregate. They’re a microbial fingerprint, a where and when of a drowning. But if we already know the where and when — I can see the question in your face — diatoms are microorganisms commonly found in almost all water bodies, but elsewhere as well. We’re talking about tiny, single-celled species of algae, and no two are alike.”

  “You can match diatoms from a murder, from the site, with other diatoms someplace else? Something that got on a shoe, clothing, something.”

  “In theory.”

  “Still circumstantial, though.” Dana thought it through. “Diatoms in a victim matching those from somewhere else, doesn’t prove anything.”

  “There are three specific diatom tests,” the doctor offered. “All have been widely applied to detect whether a drowning occurred post-mortem or ante-mortem. Your CSI has water samples of all three sites and we’re cross-referencing.”

  “The FBI knows this?”

  “They do. Yes. We just received the results this afternoon. That’s when I called you.”

  Dana realized that the pathologist had done her a favor. The FBI might not have cared whether the detectives knew. “Thank you,” she said.

  Poehler raised a hand; don’t mention it.

  Dana looked at the body. “I want to see a diatom,” she said.

  For a moment, she thought the pathologist was going to start laughing, or tell Dana she was nuts. “Come with me,” Poehler said.

  She led Dana to another room and flipped on a light. There were bookshelves filled with thick medical volumes. A sink, coffee maker, filing cabinets. On the desk, two framed pictures.

  “Diatoms under the microscope look something like a kaleidoscope, and I probably wouldn’t try to study them if you’re on LSD,” Poehler said. The comment was so dry it took Dana a moment to realize the doctor had actually made a joke.

  Dana glanced back through the open door. Hamill was at the far side of the autopsy room, pacing back and forth as he spoke on the phone. They were still trying to get to the bottom of what “Charlie’s” was, but so far no one was talking, and running the name through the database as an alias had yielded nothing. Hamill caught Dana looking at him and winked.

  Dana moved around the desk so she could see the images in the frames. At the other end of the room, Poehler was putting a microscope together. Apparently she didn’t have the actual diatoms from the victims. She was preparing some kind of presentation.

  Poehler plunked down a heavy microscope, slid a wooden box up against it. She opened this to reveal several dozen glass slides. She selected the right one and slid it over the plate on the microscope, trapping it with two metal clips. She clicked on a light, leaned forward, fiddled with the focus knob for a moment, and then stepped away. “Have a look,” she said.

  Dana bent towards the eyepiece. She peered at a shifting circle of light with fuzzy edges. Within the circle, a variety of shapes.

  “See them?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Amazing, right? Diatoms form colonies everywhere there is water. These here are dead, preserved, but marine biologists use active colonies to assess and monitor water quality. Healthy populations of diatoms mean healthy water. They’re also probably in your cat litter and toothpaste. Pretty spectacular, right?”

  The all-business pathologist had displayed more human emotion in the past two minutes than Dana had ever seen before. “They look like . . . what are those things?” Dana asked. “Those intricate paintings that they just destroy afterwards.”

  “Mandalas. Paintings by Buddhist monks.” A memory flashed through Dana’s mind — Wayland Kimball saying he was a Buddhist.

  “That’s it.”

  Poehler was right; Dana was looking at something extraordinary. The prepared slide was not alive with active organisms, but was breathtaking nonetheless. Arranged in a circle, packing it all the way around, were dead creatures that looked like space-age symbology. They almost looked fake, as if they’d been handcrafted, and not emerged out of life in the water. Circles, ovals, triangles, even shapes that resembled candlesticks. Some looked like plant seeds. Others like the inside of a lemon, or a kiwi cross secti
on. Faded blues, browns, ambers, deep greens.

  “Here,” Poehler said, and suddenly the image disappeared and Dana was looking at a bright white circle as Poehler clipped in a fresh slide.

  “That’s a single diatom,” she said.

  A circle with three triangular shapes inside of it, arranged evenly, their tips coming together in the center of the mass. She felt something riffle through her, like a pulse of light.

  This image was orange, brighter at the edges, darkest in the triangular impressions within. Then the image seemed to move, as if it was coming alive. The edges bled and the triangular shapes wavered. Dana realized her drippy eye was interfering.

  “What are we looking at, people?” Hamill came into the room.

  Dana quickly wiped the moisture then stared back at the image. It looked a bit like the tattoo on Perry Brady’s arm. It looked, too, like the biohazard stickers on the wall at O’Sullivan’s. She had a hard time believing there was some pertinent connection between these symbols and diatoms, but there it was. Finally, she turned to her partner. “Take a look.”

  Poehler switched the slide for Hamill, putting the first one back in. Hamill glanced at the women like they were both smoking a little something, and then bent over the microscope. As he oohed and aahed, Poehler said to Dana, “You can see why we consider it diatom fingerprinting.”

  She could. Each one was unique. Like fingerprints. Diatom analysis couldn’t be faked, or refuted in court.

  “Wow,” he said. “They’re like necklace beads on Venice beach or something. What the hell are they?”

  Poehler glanced at Dana, who suddenly laughed. It was a release that had been coming for some time. It felt good. But there was something solid here, Dana thought, a kind of critical mass building.

  Hamill stepped away, frowning at them.

  “Can I see that other one?” Dana asked.

  “Sure.”

  Dana tucked into the microscope as Poehler put in the second slide, the one of the single diatom. They seemed to have all momentarily forgotten the dead girl on the table in the other room.

  With her head bent into the eyepiece, she said, “Maybe that’s our smiley face right there.”