by Edwin Dasso
Donna Cordoba, Sarah Allen, Olivia Ross and now, Carmen Torres.
“How did we get the name so quickly?” asked Carter.
“We got lucky. The victim had an intramedullary nail implanted in her humerus, that’s the bone in the upper arm. It had a lot number engraved on it and the M. E. was able to track it down. Our victim had been in a car crash just over a year ago and experienced multiple fractures. Right upper arm, both legs, several ribs.”
“Did she have pins in the legs too?”
“Yes.”
“So now we know why he took the legs. Strange he missed the arm though. There must have been scarring.”
“Not much, according to the M. E. Anyway, it got us a name.”
Carter stood.
“I’m going for another coffee. You want?”
Brandt shook his head. His eyes were fixed on the whiteboard.
At the door of the Special Investigations room, she turned back to say something, when she noticed Brandt had drawn an oval around the first letter of the victims’ surnames.
C… A… R… T…
“Shit!” she said.
“It could be something else.”
“Come on, Brandt. We said there was a tie to the Bureau. It looks like that tie is to me!”
8
“I’m going to arrange for the cops to station a patrol at your home…”
“No! Look, Brandt. You know I did eight years in the Military Police before the Bureau. I can handle myself. I’ve taken on much tougher jerks than this guy.”
“You may not see him coming, Carter.”
“Forget it. I’ll be more vigilant. I carry a gun and know how to use it, plus I’ve got all my M. P. training in unarmed combat to fall back on.”
“Didn’t you get a disability discharge or something?”
Carter did not respond at first. Someone, she thought, has been digging into my military records.
“No. I was honorably discharged. I chose not to reenlist because of ‘glass ceiling’ issues.” Yeah, she added in her mind, like the attempted rape by one of the M. P. officers that ended with him in the base hospital and me being encouraged to return to civilian life. Still don’t recall what I did to him. The bastard was in a wheelchair when I last saw him. Screw you, Morrison, wherever you are.
“Well, I suggest you wear a vest permanently from now on.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary. The killer, if he is after me, hasn’t used a gun on any of his victims. Number one had a plastic tie pulled tight round her neck, then we had choked, strangulation with a rope and, now…?”
“Drowning, according to the M. E. In the Lake where we fished her out. She had water in her lungs with the phytoplankton species that turns Tahoe’s lake water blue.”
“Okay. Point proven. I’ll be okay, Brandt. Let’s just catch this bastard and get this over with. Hey,” she leaned on the doorframe, observing her partner from across the room, “what was it you saw on the boards before we had the names thing pop up.”
Brandt glanced at the almost empty whiteboard.
“I’ve investigated two previous serial killer cases since I’ve been with the Bureau. Did you get any of these as an M. P.?” Carter shook her head. “Okay, well in both those cases we had an outside consultant, a psychiatrist in private practice, a retiree with profiling experience from the FBI, who joined the team. He’s getting on a bit now, so I don’t know if he’s going to be available for this one. Anyway, he told us that many serial killers establish communication with the law enforcement investigators. Sometimes it’s direct, like letters or phone calls; other times they leave messages at the crime scenes or on the bodies. Looks like we have one of the latter. I spotted the C…A…R with the victims’ surnames a few days ago and started to look for other parts of the message. I confess I didn’t see it as referring to you until Lake Tahoe. I did find something though. In the place names. Sacramento, Redding, Elk Grove, and now Lake Tahoe. Taking the first letter we get S…R…E…and either L or T. I checked when I went for the map. There are no common use words that start like that. There is a city in Russia, Sretensk, not far from the border with China. It’s not that big a place. Seven thousand or so population. He could be giving us a clue to where he’s from. I’ve made a call to someone I know in Homeland and they are searching for anyone who emigrated from there. Nothing for SREL though, other than the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in Georgia. I can’t see our man as an ecologist somehow. Then again it could be an anagram, and we probably won’t be able to figure that out until he’s finished his kill spree. If he’s spelling your name with the victim’s surnames, that could be two more kills.”
“And you want to wait for two more bodies to turn up to test your theory?”
“Hell no!”
“What about words ending in LERS or TERS? Did you think of that?”
Brandt glanced at the board.
“Something spelled backwards. No, that didn’t occur to me.”
Carter pulled out her phone, connected to the Internet and typed a quick search.
“If it is six kills, so six letters, there are thirteen words ending in …lers, but if the kill count is higher, that number grows a lot. For words ending in …ters, there are many more, even for six. I’ve sent the lists to our server. I’ll sort them both reverse alphabetically so when we get another body, the word lists will shorten.”
“Jeez. I hate this job more, every day. Can’t wait to retire.”
“Let’s catch this guy first, okay? I’ll go print out the ordered lists.” She spun around and left.
Brandt picked up his phone, searched for a name in his contacts, and dialed.
“Phil? Jim Brandt at the Bureau. I need a favor. I want a wiretap on a fellow agent’s phones. Yes, it’s an odd request, I know, but it’s connected with the serial killer case I’m investigating. If the perp contacts the agent, I want a recording. How fast can you put that into effect?”
9
Two days later, little progress had been made. Carter had spent hours studying the lists she had generated to see if any of the words connected to her or prior cases of the Bureau, but to no avail. Brandt sat, Buddha-like, staring at the whiteboards, once again replete with all the photographs and annotations as before, though now in a slightly different arrangement. He kept repeating a phrase to himself, one that had become an annoying mantra for Carter. “We’re missing something. We’re missing something.”
After the first two hours of trying to concentrate on the lists, she had grabbed them and left the Special Investigations room to return to her own desk. Her stomach ached; a constant protest against the continuous coffee assault. She brought half a dozen cans of energy drink to the office, but these were usually crushed and in her trash can before midday. They, and the interspersed coffees, helped keep her drowsiness at bay during the mornings, but by four in the afternoon, she felt a buzzing in her head, and fighting the need to sleep became more important than checking the lists.
Carter went in search of Buddha Brandt and told him she was headed home. She would carry on working the lists from there, then try to get an early night with the help of a couple of sleeping pills. He mumbled something in reply, though it might just have been “We’re missing something.”
Home. Kick off the shoes. Throw jacket on a chair back. Place holstered gun and ID on the coffee table. She looked longingly at the bottle and glass. It was not yet five in the afternoon. She was about to repeat her daily ritual and pour a stiff drink when the thought occurred to her that maybe the alcohol was to blame for not sleeping well. Instead, she sat on the couch, took out her phone and dialed the number she had for her brother’s prison ward.
“Hi bro’. How’s it going?”
10
Brandt answered his phone, alone in the special investigations room, early the next morning.
“Hi Jim. It’s Phil, calling you back on that wiretap. Had it in place before she left the building yesterday. Very little traffic.
In fact, just one weird phone call she made, so far.”
“What do you mean ‘weird’?”
“Well, Jim, in all the years I’ve been working in intelligence, I’ve never come across anything like this. Look, I’ll send the recording to your phone now. I’ll keep the tap in place, as you asked.” He paused. Then… “I know a guy at the NSA, an expert in encryption. He owes me a few favors. Want me to pass this on to him?”
Brandt quickly thought this through. Getting someone, even on an unofficial basis, at the National Security Agency to look at a recording of a call made from an fellow agent’s phone… that would probably only bring political trouble; not something he wanted this close to the end of his career. He told his friend just to send him the recording and keep the tap in place; to call him tomorrow with any updates. Brandt hung up just as his phone pinged indicating a text message. It was Phil again, sending the recording as an attachment.
It took him a few minutes, punctuated by nervous glances at the door, worried Carter would turn up at any minute, to figure out how to uncompress the audio file. He waited impatiently while the blue line crawled across to the right side of the screen, then clicked on the play button. A cacophony of clicks and squeals mixed with nonsensical words assaulted his ear. He jerked the phone away and hit the speaker button. The demented cries of a dying African bushman, or at least that’s what he thought he was listening to, flooded the room. Brandt quickly lowered the volume.
“What in hell is that?” A familiar deep baritone intruded from the doorway.
Brandt raised his eyes, his deep frown gone in an instant, his eyes lighting up with a genuine smile.
“Noah! Am I glad to see you! Are you here to help?”
The visitor laughed.
“I’m bored, Jim. Retirement doesn’t set well with me.”
“I thought you were running your own clinic now…”
“Yeah, but the kind of cases I get are a little repetitive and usually not very challenging, but don’t tell my patients that.” He laughed again. “The chance to get involved with something more interesting was too good to pass up. So here I am. What can I do to help?”
“Hey, Noah. This is a formal request from the Bureau, so we expect a bill, okay?”
“When have you ever known a medical professional in private practice not to bill his time, Jim?” Another laugh, which Brandt joined. “So what we got?”
Brandt spent the next ten minutes running through a quick summary of the case.
“…and that brings me to the audio you heard. I had my partner’s phone tapped and that’s what it recorded yesterday evening. She made the call. As you can hear from the start, the only bit in clear English, she was calling her brother…”
“Cryptophasia!” blurted out the newcomer. “Case solved. Can I bill you for the full day?”
“What? Crypto…?”
“Cryptophasia. Many siblings, especially twins, develop their own language. Usually it’s a relatively simple structure based on mispronounced words or shortened references to events they have shared. For example, they are kids, right. The first time they try ice cream might be on a trip to a local park with their parents. It’s cold, unusual, sweet, something entirely new in their shared universe. So they associate the park with eating this new delight. In their language, ice cream becomes ‘greco’; green for the grass and ‘co’ for the temperature. Now, twins tend to keep these languages more time than siblings as they are on an identical evolutionary learning cycle, so on rare occasions, the cryptophasic language can grow to be immensely complex.”
Brandt nodded.
“Yeah, that fits. Carter’s brother is an identical twin.”
“Fascinating! Identical twins of different sexes; that’s a very rare condition. It’s caused by a fertilized egg losing one of the copies of the Y chromosome when it divides into two embryos very early on in their development. The resultant babies are male, with the traditional XY genetic marker, and female, with an XO. But, as I said, this is fairly rare. Let me hear that recording again.”
Once again, the discordant din filled the room.
“What in hell is that?” Same phrase, same origin by the doorway, different voice.
Brandt hit the stop button immediately.
“Carter! I…”
“So what was that sound? Does it have anything to do with our case?” she asked, eying the elderly Afro-American stranger.
11
“Special Agent Erin Carter. Doctor Noah Adams, psychiatrist and ex-FBI profiler. Also a good friend.”
Carter nodded to the new man, a wary nod, one that spoke volumes, her reaction immediately captured by Adams’ inquisitive green eyes.
“I see Agent Carter doesn’t have a particularly high opinion of those in my profession,” he remarked.
“There’s history…”
Carter imposed her voice over Brandt’s explanation.
“I can tell the story, Jim, much better than anyone else. If I choose to.”
“I’m sorry…” Brandt was once again interrupted, this time by the psychiatrist.
“I should be the one apologizing, Agent Carter. You see, some years ago myself and two colleagues were involved in a research project on the subject of twins. There’s a paper we wrote somewhere, though it’s probably out of date by now.”
Carter examined the man. Medium height. Late sixties. A full head of gray, tightly-curled hair worn longer than the FBI would permit. Those green eyes that seemed to miss nothing, hiding behind a thick-framed pair of spectacles. The grey hair becoming speckled as it merged into a beard; the latter neatly trimmed. He looked a little overweight, though broad-shouldered suggesting he used to work out, maybe still did.
“Are you going to be working on our case?”
“So I believe.”
“Then you can call me Erin, or Carter; whichever you wish.” She held out a hand. The doctor’s grip was firm and strong. “Maybe, if we get along, I’ll tell you my story.”
“Thank you… Erin. Rest assured whatever you decide to share will be held in the strictest professional confidence.”
“So,” she said, directing her gaze at Brandt’s phone. “What was that ruckus anyway?”
“Okay, Carter. Confession time. As you wouldn’t accept additional protection given we think this case is connected to you…”
“I’ve been thinking about that over breakfast, and, whilst I do think the first murder was designed to involve the Bureau, me having a connection here is a big stretch. We don’t know if the victims’ initials are spelling out my name or it’s just a coincidence. We don’t know, if the killer is using the names to send a message, if he hasn’t jumbled up the order to make it harder for us. We don’t know if he’s just jerking our chain. So I’m putting that on the back burner for now.”
“But my gut says I’m not wrong on this. Anyhow, I reached out and asked a friend from intelligence to set up a tap on your phone in case the killer contacted you directly. If I waited until after the first contact, we might have missed important clues that could lead us to him before he kills again.”
“Without a warrant?”
Brandt nodded.
“Without my permission?”
Another nod.
“So it’s one hundred percent illegal?”
“Yeah…”
“If I give my permission, there’s no blowback, right? So, as of a couple of days, you have my blessing. We should document that in the case file just in case.”
“That’s very trusting of you, Erin.”
“All I want to do, Doc, is catch this guy. I don’t think Brandt’s theory has any merit at the moment, but you never know. And he’s right about one thing. If the killer is going to make any mistakes or allow me to pressure him into giving us something we can work with, it will probably be in that first call. He’ll be aware we might have requested a wiretap for any further calls, but will probably think the first one is unmonitored. Come to that, you might want to have a tap on you
r phone too, Brandt, as the Lead Agent.”
“Point taken. I’ll get on it. And thanks.”
“So, the banshee calls?”
Brandt cleared his throat.
“You called your brother last night, right?”
“Yeah. I ring him once every week, sometimes more.”
“That was the call you made.”
“What?”
“Listen, I’ll play it again.”
“Before you do that, Jim… Erin, what do you recall about your conversation with your brother?”
“Oh, it was pretty standard, I think. I can’t remember exactly what we said. Boring stuff about life outside the psych ward, as usual.”
“Do you ever discuss cases you’re working on?”
Brandt’s head swiveled round to stare at the psychiatrist.
“Sometimes, I guess. I don’t really remember the details of the calls. It’s a kind of lifeline for him. News from the outside; stuff from his only family. You know.”
Adams signaled for Brandt to replay the recording. No one spoke as the minutes passed.
“That’s odd. I can hear my voice saying hi to him, then that noise starts. From what I can remember, we talked normally and I didn’t hear anything like that during the call. Could it be some kind of electronic interference? Perhaps a glitch caused by our tapping into a call that the prison records anyway.”
“No, I don’t think so.” The psychiatrist looked at Carter, analyzing her reactions to the recording. “Do you recognize the word cryptophasia?”
Carter thought for a moment.
“Kind of. When my brother went to jail, I was sent to a shrink… er… child psychiatrist for a few years. I think I might have heard that word then.”
Adams proceeded to reiterate the same explanation of the twin speak phenomenon he had offered Brandt earlier.
“So twins do this?”
“Yes.”
“But Tobias and I aren’t strictly speaking twins. There’s Toby too.”