by Leslie Wolfe
He’d always resented how biased she had been against his job, ever since they got married. She knew she was marrying a cop, but she’d held the secret hope she could change him, make him, “grow out of it and get a real job, one that pays the damn mortgage.” When he refused, she’d turned on the heat and made him go through hell one day at a time, every day worse than the last. It took him years of enduring abuse before he walked away; not because he was still fostering some surreal hope of making things work with Jennifer, but because leaving his chronically unhappy wife meant not seeing Meredith every day. Not tucking her in at night, not reading her bedtime stories.
But Meredith had grown and was starting to be upset every time her parents argued. Soon he realized his presence in the home was doing her more harm than good. One night, after a lengthy argument that ended in a flurry of curses and slammed doors, and his daughter sobbing in her bedroom, he packed a small duffel bag and dropped it by the door, getting ready to tell Jennifer he wasn’t coming back.
She was expecting it and took the news better than he’d anticipated, although she was bitterly frustrated for the loss of what she’d called, “her best years.” He’d made only one mistake before leaving that night. When Jennifer had said she didn’t want primary custody of Meredith, his face lit up like a kid on Christmas day. He’d tipped his hand.
Jennifer saw his reaction and immediately shifted gears. The following morning, one of the most expensive custody lawyers in Las Vegas had been retained by her using funds pulled from their joint account, and a three-year court battle ensued. Jennifer’s purpose had been to squeeze every dollar she could out of him, using Meredith as leverage. If he agreed to pay a certain amount in alimony, she would let him see Meredith once a month. If he was willing to pay more, he could spend time with Meredith every other weekend.
He’d almost lost faith in the justice system when he saw his job twisted, sharpened, and wielded against him in front of a judge who fell for all of her theatrics, no objections raised by his lawyer ever sustained. “He spends his time with criminals and drug addicts,” the tearful mother had declared on the stand. “His life is at risk every single day, and he might not be able to come home at night to take care of my little girl. And one day, his job will take its toll on his life… Please, Your Honor, don’t let his job harm my baby,” she had ended her plea, patting her eyes with a tissue for maximum effect.
One year later, Jennifer had married a dentist. Another three years down the road, the dentist was gone, leaving behind a hefty percentage of his monthly income, and his place in Jennifer’s bed was then taken by a Latino restaurant owner with a dubious past. But even that one was now history, and the serial bride was on the market again from what he’d heard. He was keeping tabs on her, not because he’d had a hard time letting her go; quite the opposite. But if his daughter was forced to share her home with her mother’s latest man, he’d better be Mr. Perfect Behavior Around A Child, walking the line. Or else.
“Who else could’ve taken my baby other than the scum you choose to work with?” she said, her voice an irritating, high pitch. Agent Rosales turned her face away from the argument she’d been watching like a tennis match, probably fed up with such family scenes.
“We’ll find out, Jen,” he replied as calmly as he could. “Especially if you let me do my job.”
“You asshole,” she screamed, then broke down into heavy sobs. “You promised me she’d be safe,” she whimpered between heaving bursts of tears.
He reached out and tried to console her, but she pushed back angrily, pounding his chest with her fists. Agent Rosales intervened; she took Jennifer’s arm and led her to the couch, speaking to her in a soothing voice.
Holt went to the fridge and scoured through the freezer, looking for an ice pack. He couldn’t find one and chose a bag of frozen peas instead. He removed his jacket, wincing in pain when the sleeve twisted his right arm, and slapped the ice pack on his shoulder, the instant relief releasing a long, pained breath from his lungs.
“You’ve been busy, Detective,” Agent Glover said, giving him a critical, head-to-toe look, his eyes lingering on Holt’s blooming shiner. Then he approached the dining table and pulled out a chair for Holt and another one for himself. “We need to talk.”
“What about?” Holt asked, still standing. He went back to the fridge, opened the door, and took out a bottle of orange juice, balancing the ice pack on his shoulder until he could put the bottle on the table.
SA Glover patted the chair invitingly. “Please, Detective.”
Holt grudgingly obliged. He didn’t feel like sitting when Snowman had his daughter. He needed to get going. He had a few ideas on how to find the son of a bitch; he’d learned his game once. Chances were, like with any other human being, Snowman would fall back into his old patterns of behavior and do the same things he used to do.
“Do you have any suspects in mind?” the fed asked.
Holt closed his eyes for a moment. “I’ve put a lot of bad people away,” he said, lowering his voice so Jennifer wouldn’t go ballistic on him again, screaming to let the world know she’d been right. He uncapped the juice bottle and downed it in a couple of thirsty gulps.
“Anyone in particular standing out?”
Holt rubbed his forehead, thinking what, if anything, he could tell the fed. “Not really, no.”
The agent looked at him sideways. He probably saw right through Holt’s lies. “How did you get that?” he asked, pointing at Holt’s improvised ice pack.
Holt let out a quick, sad laugh. “Just another day in the office.”
“Not something we should know about?”
He groaned, feeling his exasperation rising with every minute he was wasting talking to this man instead of going out to find his daughter. “Why don’t you tell me what you guys are doing to find my daughter? You’re supposed to be the experts, right?”
SA Glover stared at Holt for half a second before replying, his gaze disapproving, almost insulted. “We set up a command post at your precinct and a base here. My colleagues and I will map the sex offenders in the area, look at your caseload, former and current, coordinate any forensics, and bring in the bureau’s technical assets. Here, at the house, we’re set up to receive the ransom call and trace it.”
“Uh-huh,” Holt replied. They weren’t going to do much of anything; just a bunch of database searches and stuff. They’d be busy rummaging through piles of data for at least a few hours, and that’s all he needed to get to Meredith, now that he knew who’d taken her.
“Have you received a ransom call, Detective?” SA Glover asked.
He flinched imperceptibly and cursed himself in his mind. “No, I didn’t. Why do you ask?”
“Routine,” Glover replied, his earlier look returning. He didn’t believe a single word. “You will tell me when that call comes in, right?”
“Right,” Holt said, pushing the chair back with a loud screech of wooden legs against granite tiles. “I guess we’re done here?”
The fed also stood, immediately buttoning his suit jacket.
“Can I ask, where are you going, Detective? Why the rush? Parents normally huddle up together and wait by the phone in kidnapping cases like yours.”
“You’ve seen my ex-wife,” Holt replied, lowering his voice. “I believe it’s better for everyone involved if I excused myself.”
He walked toward the door, then accepted Glover’s help with putting on his jacket. He nodded toward Jennifer, but she turned her head away from him. Then he opened the front door and extended his left hand to the agent.
“Thanks for everything,” Holt said. “Please call me as soon as you have something.”
“You do the same, Detective,” SA Glover replied, shaking his hand. “I know what I’d do if I were in your place. Please don’t insult my intelligence; we’re on the same team. Call us if you catch a lead, if you watch any relevant surveillance video, or put another BOLO on a suspect’s car.”
“Will d
o,” he replied, thinking the exact opposite. He wasn’t going to let these people become involved in this mess. One wrong move from any of them and Snowman would kill Meredith, just because he could, just because he wanted to teach Holt a lesson. He’d seen him do that before, cold as a snake, quick, unpredictable.
Holt was better off on his own.
Before climbing into his SUV, he looked around, taking in the details of the street: how many cars, if there was anyone killing time in any of them.
He knew what he would do in Glover’s place.
Someone was about to start tailing him, and he had to lose that tail.
14
Autopsy
Twenty-four hours missing
I entered the morgue the same way I always did, holding my breath. A subconscious, albeit futile effort to keep the smell of death from invading my body a moment sooner. This time, death was delusive, because the body it had claimed had a beating heart only hours ago. I couldn’t smell the stench of decay taking over the morgue, because death had not yet had the time to weave its intricate web of destruction, invisible yet unstoppable once life conceded the battle with the Grim Reaper.
I felt the need to tiptoe, as to not awaken the dead girl, no matter how ridiculous that was. She seemed peaceful, safe, at rest after enduring an unspeakable ordeal. I couldn’t jeopardize that in any way, although I knew very well that she’d never be afraid again.
The cold silence of the morgue felt heavy against the distant hum of the refrigerated storage units lining the back wall. A blend of recognizable chemical smells littered the air in clouds of fumes I walked through, recognizing some but not others. Formalin, alcohol, methanol, and a sharp scent that tickled the back of my throat unpleasantly, leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Dr. Anne St. Clair was examining the victim’s stomach contents under a magnifying glass mounted on a flexible arm and surrounded by powerful LED lights. I couldn’t bring myself to comprehend how she could breathe normally that close to someone’s digested meal, even if she did so from behind a face shield. I was standing six, maybe seven feet away, and I could smell the acrid fluids in the girl’s stomach as if it were bile rising up my own throat.
I breathed through my mouth, willing my stomach to stay put instead of wanting to show off its content right next to the vic’s. I managed to swallow once or twice, and the bitter taste in my mouth washed off in part.
“Hey,” I said, stopping a few feet away from the table, knotting my fingers.
“Hey back at you,” Anne replied, not looking up from the stomach opened for examination in a tray, under her magnifying glass.
I watched her take a tiny sample of fluid and put it on a slide, then displayed the image on a large screen mounted on the wall.
“Yeah,” she said, on a long breath of air coming out of her chest, “just as I thought.”
I took a tentative step closer to the autopsy table.
“What do you have?” I asked, unable to take my eyes off the marbled skin of the young girl. Only hours earlier, tears were rolling from her eyes. Buried alive, left for dead in the desert, she’d somehow managed to endure. If only she’d endured a little longer.
I turned away to hide the tears choking me, but Anne’s sad smile told me she shared my feelings. “Help me nail the sick son of a bitch,” I whispered.
“Gladly,” she replied. “This is preliminary; I’m not done with the exam yet.”
“Got it,” I replied.
Anne was so thorough, so rigorous when it came to following procedure. Right now, I needed the Navy doctor Anne to speak to me, the pilot Anne who’d flown Medevac helicopters in Afghanistan under heavy fire, saving lives, fighting for every minute, every drop of blood. Screw the procedure to bloody hell. “Talk to me,” I encouraged her.
She peeled off her gloves then sent them flying into a stainless-steel trash can marked with the universal biohazard symbol. Then she rolled a four-legged stool next to the table and sat, pointing at another one for me. I remained standing, too restless to sit.
“Meet Alyssa Conway, fifteen years old. The official cause of death is enforced exposure; the low temperature and dehydration weakened her body to the point where nothing could be done,” she explained as if I hadn’t been there to see with my own eyes her desperate efforts to save that girl’s life. “She sustained blunt force trauma and crushing on large sections of her body, leading to a systemic inflammatory response.”
I gritted my teeth and said nothing.
“Ever wondered why she didn’t pull herself out of that grave?” Anne asked, her voice tinted with barely controlled rage.
I’d thought about that. The girl’s body had been covered with a few inches of stones and dirt, but her hands and head were kept above ground, and she should’ve been able to dig herself out. As my overactive imagination explored the potential explanations for her immobility, a wave of nausea and dizziness took over my body. Sitting on the lab stool seemed like a great idea.
“Why?” I asked, cringing in anticipation of what promised to bring a new level of horror to an already sickening case.
“Modified tetrodotoxin, a powerful neurotoxin. You might know it as pufferfish toxin.”
I strained my memory to recall where I’d heard about pufferfish. Yeah, in the news; some rich twats with a death wish risked their lives and paid $200 to eat a fish that could kill them on the spot. Yet another perfect example of how too much money transformed certain people into unredeemable plonkers.
“I thought tetrodotoxin killed you where you stood,” I offered hesitantly.
“Hence the word modified,” Anne explained.
“I’m not following.”
Since when did criminals get so damn savvy? What happened to the good, old-fashioned knife or firearm? Palpable things we could track, we could find fingerprints on, bloodstains too.
“Think of cocaine, for example. Dealers buy pure cocaine from their South American sources, then they cut it here, using a variety of chemicals, some harmless, others deadly.”
I frowned, shifting in my seat, more confused than before.
“Cocaine fillers could be as harmless as powdered milk. They could be mildly toxic, like boric acid, or absolutely deadly, like strychnine or dimethyl terephthalate.”
“You’re saying the killer diluted the pufferfish toxin with something to make it, what, less deadly?”
“Tetrodotoxin kills by paralyzing the body, by disrupting the message the brain gives the body to move, including breathing. If carefully diluted or modified, the neurotoxin can act as a long-term paralytic, effectively locking the victim inside her own body.”
I felt a chill grabbing my insides and twisting them in a tight knot. “What are you saying?”
“She was conscious but unable to move. She willed her body to move, but nothing happened. Eventually, the initial dose of modified toxin would’ve worn off, in about eight to ten hours, and she should’ve been able to walk away.”
Anne stopped talking, turning her face away from me.
“But?”
“He came back and fed her more poison. The bastard came back several times, refreshing the needed concentration to keep her restrained.”
I stood and started pacing; I wanted to scream, or maybe I needed a stiff drink to dislodge the horror that had taken residence in my gut, sending icicles through my veins. I wanted to ask why, what possible reason could someone have to do such an evil thing, but then I understood, remembering the bloodstains, old and new, covering her thighs.
“Was she raped?” I asked in a whisper.
“Repeatedly and violently,” Anne replied. “Over the past thirty-six to forty-eight hours, which is my preliminary estimate for the time she spent in the desert, she received three or four doses of poison. That corresponds to the timeline of the assaults she endured. She was raped vaginally, anally, and orally. That,” she pointed toward the screen where a reddish-brown sludge was shown in a high degree of magnification, “is what’s left of sem
en after spending several hours immersed in stomach acid.”
I didn’t see anything; only discolored sludge. But semen meant DNA; I knew that much.
“Does that mean we have DNA evidence?”
“We do, but not from the stomach contents; that’s too broken down from the immersion in hydrochloric acid. He was careless enough to leave his mark in numerous other places where it was preserved better. The degree of decay of the semen he left behind will allow me to build a precise timeline of his visits. My report will have the entire analysis.”
“Is he in CODIS?” I asked, hoping for a miracle.
“It’s still running,” she replied.
“All right, that’s a lot to process,” I replied, getting ready to leave, eager to breathe some fresh air, no matter how cold.
“I’m not done yet,” Anne replied.
“Let’s hear it,” I said, taking a seat back on the stool.
“Alyssa Conway went missing on December nineteenth and was found almost three weeks later. During this time, she sustained frequent and varied forms of sexual assault, none as violent as what she’d gone through in the past couple of days. She was injected with powerful narcotics and hallucinogens and had this embedded under her skin,” she added, handing me a small evidence jar.
It was a small, black capsule, not more than three millimeters in length.
“Is this what I think it is?” I asked.
“State-of-the-art microchip with a built-in GPS locator.”
“She was tagged like a dog?”
“Precisely.”
We didn’t need to say anything else; it wasn’t the first time the human trafficking trifecta had landed on a cold slab in Anne’s morgue: GPS-enabled microchips, signs of repeated sexual abuse, and use of narcotics as a chemical restraint. Victims rarely stayed local though; when they landed on Anne’s table, they were usually traced to other cities, other states. Their kidnappers knew to move them quickly, before someone they knew could recognize them in some hotel bar or parking garage on the Strip.
