Nine Lives - Ep3
#3 of Nine Lives
Adult rated for crime scene descriptions.
A killer is stalking the twin cities. Dafydd Owen gets caught up in the investigation.
With frustration (and body count) mounting unpleasantly, things begin to get complicated.
Sarah and I watched as another pretty girl's body was hauled from the river. Just like Carole Miller, Taylor Daniels was naked, crudely declawed and had the same oversized zip-tie digging deeply into her neck. We were listening in on the conversation between Lt Anderson and a tall otter in river police gear when we noticed a sudden change in the ME's body language. Catching my eye, Sarah moved away to find out what was up while I carried on listening to the two cops.
"The only thing in common with these two sites is water. There's absolutely no way these two bodies were put into the river anywhere near each other."
"Can you work up a list of possible dump sites for each?"
"The first one, way too many. This one, there's limited opportunities until you go so far upriver that you'd see signs she had been in the water longer or there'd be more damage to the body. Stuff doesn't just float serenely down rivers, they hit things, they get rolled along the bottom. It's predictable.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning with the current flow volume figures and a chat with your ME about how long they've been immersed and the extent of post-mortem damage I can give you an upper limit of how far upstream to look for where each body went into the water."
"Do this one first. If there's fewer options and the site is fresher we may catch a break."
Sarah was back, looking pale.
"Sweet Goddess, Dafydd.. we've got to find this bastard." I flicked an ear in her direction, feline equivalent of a raised eyebrow in some other species, and she continued. "ME noticed something odd about the marks on her neck. Too soon to be sure until he gets her back to the morgue and gets that zip-tie off but he thinks it was tightened slowly - possibly over a period of hours."
"Cold hearted bastard."
"There's some other marks too. He's not sure enough to say but I'm certain I heard him mutter something about a shock-collar as I was walking up."
"So are we looking at an extreme sexual sadist with a thing for feline girls?"
"We might.. Do you suppose he's been getting some relief from some of the more extreme local hookers before he started escalating? Maybe started going a little too far in the games and the professional girls start avoiding him.. "
"Can't hurt to ask. You want to bug Sadie again or should I do it?" Sadie was a very dicreet madam. Her operation raised no waves, paid off all the right people but never in excess, treated its workers better than most in the industry and I'd been permanently on her good side for the last five years since I helped her avoid a hostile takeover of her business by an out-of-town gang. Normally Sadie would have handled something like that herself with a minimum of fuss, but that time the opposition had kidnapped her twin daughters, using the threat of shipping them off to one of the less savory operations. I brought her daughters home unharmed and nobody ever asked what happened to the people holding them.
"You do it. I've got another angle I want to chase."
"Fair enough." No sense in delaying. I pulled out my phone.
"Dafydd, what a pleasant surprise! I do hope my people were helpful enough to your lovely partner."
"No worries there, Sadie. Something else has come up though. I was wondering if you were free for dinner tonight? Maybe Leon's place at 6:30?"
"I'd be delighted, Dafydd. I'll see you there."
Next call.
"This is Leon."
"Owen. Leon, can you find a slot for my guest and I tonight at 6:30?"
"Dafydd, I've been wondering when you'd be bringing that pretty lynx folks have been talking about to my place."
"Sarah won't be coming. I'm having dinner with Sadie, Leon. Business."
"I'll seat you in the small back room. Nothing is booked in there tonight and I can guarantee that there won't be."
"Thanks, Leon. I owe you one."
"Just bring Sarah round sometime."
"I think I can do that."
"I'd say 'Have good day' but given the nature of your work I'm not sure I want to see what one of your 'good days' looks like."
I grinned. "Take care, Leon. Bye."
Leon ran a phenomenal Italian restaurant just south of downtown. True to his word, Leon had found us a spot to eat where we wouldn't be disturbed or overheard. Five minutes after arriving at the table the door opened and a waiter showed Sadie in.
Sadie was a tall skunk, not much younger then me but she'd aged a lot more gracefully than I had. Her curvy figure and her coloring were offset perfectly by the black and silver cocktail dress she'd selected this evening. I got to my hindpaws to greet her.
"Still as beautiful as ever, Sadie."
"Ever the gentleman, Dafydd, but I'm getting old and fat."
"Can't say as I've noticed."
"That's because you're getting old as fast as I am, and it would probably take thumbscrews for you to say anything about a ladies weight!" Her eyes sparkled as she laughed.
I threw up my hands in surrender and laughed back. "May it please the court, I wish to enter a plea of nolo contendere"
We made small-talk through much of dinner. Sadie rather appreciated the old-fashioned english practice of leaving talk of business until the after-dinner drinks and coffee were served. I learned that both her daughters were now in college, a few interesting things about a couple of prominent local politicians and confirmed a rumor that Tonya Hardcastle was considering a run for AG next year. In return Sadie found out a lot about the circumstances under which I'd met Sarah. It was talking about Sarah that provided the segue into what we were really here to discuss after a waiter deposited a pair of brandy snifters and a couple of espressos then quietly withdrew.
"Did Sarah get what she needed from Anna?"
"Yes, she did. Anna's client has been eliminated from consideration in this case."
"Oh?"
"Anna's client held one of the 5 credit cards that were used at the same time and place where both Carole Miller and Taylor Daniels were snatched. He was with Anna all night both nights so he's out of the frame."
"Having somebody like that running around is very bad for business, Dafydd."
"I'm hoping your contacts can find something out a little more efficiently than mine can."
"No promises, of course, but I'll certainly see what I can do. What do you need?"
"Probably not a client of your organization, the person we are interested in may have tastes that run to a kinky extreme. I'm wondering if anyone has recently been blackballed for letting the game get a little out of hand. Maybe bad enough that even the most desperate street girl would avoid him."
"I haven't heard of anything like that and normally I would, but I'll ask around to make sure. I'll have the girls talk to their friends too and see if there's a rumor like that on the street. Was the activity around the river today the other missing girl?"
"I'm afraid so. Same as the first one."
"I'm hearing some pretty ugly rumors about what this bastard does to them, Dafydd. Some of my feline girls are starting to get scared."
"Until this creep is off the streets, Sadie, they are probably right to be. Double check when vetting new clients, ok?" She nodded, without saying anything, then we were back to the small-talk while we finished off our brandy and coffee.
A week later, I'd seen way too much riverbank and mud. We'd identified every possible place with somewhat secluded access to the river and that was close enough to where the bodies were found. Four guys at the FBI office were running license plate recognition programs across ever traffic camera shot near any of them, in the desperate hope that the same vehicle would show up near a potential dump site for both bodies in the right time frame. Traffic cams are pretty low resolution so the software was only picking up about 60% of the plates. The poor guys also had to watch it all, frame by frame, writing down their best guess as to the vehicle identification of everything they saw.
We had nothing. We were chasing a damn ghost. Sadie had called me a couple of days ago confirming that there was absolutely no buzz amongst the local professional girls about an ex-client like I had described. Sarah had tapped a couple of contacts she had in the local kink community asking about anyone who might have been booted from groups or banned from events for being a dangerous player or a predator. Word travels fast in that community, if you're dangerous you find yourself on your own real quick. There were a few but none of them fit the profile we were steadily building. That profile was depressingly thin, though. Cy and Paul were getting frustrated. Cy had forwarded every detail of the two girls cases to his superiors, expressing his opinion that we had a potential serial killer on our hands and asking for help. The report had been acknowledged and we'd heard nothing back.
Monday evening, since we were all downtown for one reason or another, we all met in my office. Liz had gone home for the night, Sarah had come downstairs from her offices on the 3rd floor and along with Cy, Paul and myself we were in my back office. I gathered glasses and shared some of my "winnings" from my bet with Paul.
Cy looked up "I usually drink mine on the rocks, but I suspect that would be sacrilege for this?"
I grinned back at him. "I'm afraid it would, Cy. Try it like this." I added the tiniest splash of spring water to his glass. "That will open up the more subtle flavors the same way as melting ice does, without chilling it down and killing the aromatics." After one sniff he gave us a toothy 'gator grin.
"Damn, but that smells fine." He looked over at Paul. "This is what you've been paying off your bets with?"
The bighorn ram leaned back in his chair as he answered. "Yep, but it's fair. When he loses he pays off in equal measure. I just don't get to drink as much of it as he does."
"Right now, we're all losing." That was Sarah, griping about the case. "There's got to be something we're all missing." Cy nodded quietly before responding.
"That's why I want the help I've been asking for, Sarah. Don't get me wrong, you guys are good and so is Paul's department. Hell, the guys in my office are as good as any you'll find at a regional office anywhere in the country. The folks I want to help us out though, they are the best. They work nothing but cases like this one and if anyone can find what we're missing they can."
Paul's frustration was starting to show. "What the fuck are they waiting for? Are they going to wait until he snatches another one, leaving us with another countdown to fishing some poor girls mutilated body out of the river before they decide we really do need their help?"
Cy held his paws up in the air. "Not my call to make Paul. I'm doing all I can. Speaking of countdowns, though, I assume everybody else has noticed the anomaly here." Everybody in the room nodded before I opened my mouth.
"He grabbed Taylor no more than three days after Carole was killed. It's been just over a week and half since we found Taylor. Four possibilities. He's changing his game on us, he's taking a break, he's gone somewhere else or he grabbed somebody that nobody has missed. Thoughts?"
Cy looked down at his glass. "Changing his game on us would be very bad news. When guys like this 'change their game' the result is almost always worse than before."
Paul looked at the ceiling. "Taking a break doesn't help us now, but if he shows up again then perhaps the reason he took that break can give us a lead on who he is. Same if he's gone somewhere else. If we get a ping about a case elsewhere with a similar MO we're suddenly much closer to the guy, because his relocation is a lead in itself."
I looked as Sarah and she said what was on both our minds. "Taking somebody that's not been missed is bad too. If he's done that we're already in the countdown and we've no idea how long it has to run. But who'd he get? A single girl living alone? She'd be missed at work or in class unless she's out of school and between jobs. A girl off the streets? Isn't that the opposite way these things go? Don't they usually start with the easy targets like that and escalate the other way?"
We thought about that for a few seconds and I felt the temperature in the room drop a few degrees as a very unpleasant thought crawled across my mind.
"He could be escalating the other way. Getting closer to his ideal target image. There's one way a girl off the street, a runaway, could be closer to the image this twisted bastard has in his head than the usual club clientele. She could be younger."
We finished our drinks quietly, then went home.
The following morning, the same dark thought was still with us. Paul got some friends of his on the vice squad to ask around about any feline girls who were missing. I called Sadie again with the same question. We both got the same results and they were useless. Feline girls were kinda scarce working the streets these days. Only the most desperate were risking it, the ones needing to pay off a nasty pimp or feed a drug habit. Way too many of them had just gone to ground for us to find a needle in this particular haystack.
Thursday morning, we got that needle firmly jabbed into our hides.
The river police called Paul with a report that a tug on the river had struck a body. We hustled down to the nearest landing stage and were picked up by a river police RHIB that took us to the recovery site.
This one was beyond ugly. We were looking at a girl who couldn't have been more than 15, even accounting for her undernourished state. She was a mixed breed, from the stripe pattern on her fur at least part tiger. The props on the tug had almost totally destroyed one paw and arm, gouged deeply into her chest and then quite literally cut her in half just below the rib cage. The same tall otter from before was here too and he looked at the two pieces of the body as they were brought on board.
"Starboard prop caught her first, does the paw damage and part of the arm damage.. flings her into the port prop that does the major damage, with the arm flailing free and back into the starboard prop again to finish the job."
"Seen a few of these?"
"Prop injuries, you mean? Too many. Worst was a water-ski accident. Sharks do it cleaner." He cursed as a news chopper swept overhead. "Bloody vultures."
If you ignored everything below her chin, she looked almost peaceful. I snapped as tasteful a picture of her face as I could with my phone and sent it to Sadie with the message "Anyone know her?" By the time we were back on shore I had my answer in the form of a txt message.
[Sadie] You've quite put several of my girls off their lunch, but Donna knows her. She's nervous of cops so can I bring her by your office at about 3? [Owen] I'll be there. Sarah too.
At 3:15, Sarah and I were sitting in one of my side rooms listening to a visibly shaken and upset bunny tell us everything she knew about our mystery girl.
"She goes by Janet on the street. I dunno her last name but she's originally from Chicago. Indifferent mom, abusive dad. She ran. Turned up here about six months ago with a habit to feed and only one way of doing it. I was trying to help her get off the stuff, get off the street. Somebody did that for me when I wasn't much older than her. She just turned 15."
"Do you know roughly when she originally ran?"
"Just over a year ago, I think."
"Got any better picture of her?"
"Loads, on my phone."
"Can you send me a couple of decent ones?" She grabbed her phone and did so immediately. I sent them to the office printer direct from my phone.
"Thank you, Donna. If you remember anything else that could help us get a full ID on her, just tell either Sarah or I. Here's both our business cards. Liz, the lady out front, will pick up both lines during office hours and will know where to reach us. If they go to voicemail we'll get immediate alerts on both our mobiles that there's a message waiting."
As Sarah showed Sadie and Donna out I looked at the pictures on my phone again. One showed her clearly in her working clothes, hanging out on the street with some other girls. The other was the one that I stared at for a long time. She was obviously hanging out with Donna - a perfectly ordinary looking teenage girl laughing across the table in the food court of a local mall. She hadn't got the empty look in her eyes yet. She wasn't beyond help, and Donna had known it. Sarah and I grabbed the printouts of the photos and went to meet Cy and Paul.
I passed Paul a copy of the photos, as Sarah updated them on what we knew.
"Probable first name Janet, no last name. 15 years old, runaway from abusive home situation in Chicago just over a year ago. Addict."
Cy was already typing on his computer. "Three possible hits. Can I see those?" Paul passed the photos over. "This is her. Janet Hunter. Picked up for prostitution 8 months ago, placed in foster care by Chicago CPS, bolted from the foster home first chance she got."
"Any word from the ME?"
"Same MO. I'm betting it was our guy, he's still on schedule."
"He's going to grab somebody else any day now."
"Yeah, I'm adding this to what I've already sent up the line."
Friday morning we got one piece of good news. We'd have an FBI task force arriving the following morning. Our work got considerably more complicated too.
Fishing Janet out of the river had been the lead on every evening news show. The morning paper wasn't helping. "THIRD BODY FOUND." screamed the headline. The subtitle was only marginally smaller. "Third victim of the Warehouse Killer?"
Paul and Cy were about to be dogged by the press everywhere they went. As soon as the reinforcements from Quantico got here, so would they. I needed to take some steps to make sure Sarah and I were not bogged down so badly. Reporters would really cramp our style. Fortunately there were a few folks I could call to keep the worst of them off our backs.
to be continued...