In choosing his restraints, he’d gone old school. Modern day hospital restraints used Velcro and slide buckles, easily overcome if the donor struggled enough. To prevent that, he’d used thick leather and old-fashioned slip-proof belt buckles.
“Wh…what?” the doctor mumbled in his alcohol and ketamine induced state.
Before his donor could reach for the chest leather strap, he secured both wrists on the t-shaped extended arm rests for the table.
That woke him up more.
“Hey! What are…you doing?” The donor bucked a little against his body restraints, his fingers on his hands flexing as he tried to move his arms.
“Relax. You’re not going to get loose and you’ll only end up hurting yourself,” he said, as he grasped one of the man’s flailing legs he was trying to use to kick free. It took more effort than he’d expected to hold it in place. He ended up putting all his body weight on his thigh as he strapped the leather tight around it. Then he went for the ankle, dodging the only free extremity trying to kick him in the head.
Finally, he managed to secure the body and could begin the rest of his work.
“Why? What?” the doctor stammered, seemingly trying to remember the five w questions. Who, what, when, where and why.
He found it funny and giggled.
“Let’s start with the what,” he said as he went over to the thermostat and increased the room’s heat to about eighty degrees. He’d learned early on that cold temperatures slowed the circulation and therefore prolonged the blood harvesting process. Especially when your donors were naked.
And he needed them naked. The dirt and vermin in their clothes could contaminate his product and that just wouldn’t do.
“What am I doing?” He grasped the sewing scissors and slipped one sharp edge under the sleeve of the doctor’s dirty shirt at the cuff and sliced open the material all the way to the shoulder seam. “I am going to put you to good use. First, I’m going to shed you of the trappings and filth of the street. Next, I’m going to harvest all the blood from your body. Blood you’re not doing anything with but pickling it in alcohol.” He set the scissors on the surgical mayo tray stand beside the doctor’s head where the man could watch. Picking up the bottle of rubbing alcohol, he soaked a clean cloth with it. Then he cleaned the arm from top to bottom, removing any contaminants.
“Why?”
“Why am I doing this? Or why you?”
The doctor nodded.
“Let’s start with the second question first. Why you,” he said as he washed the arm a second time. Then tied a tourniquet above the elbow to make the brachial vein pop up for easy access. “Because you once were a productive part of society. A well-known and respected neurosurgeon. Now you’re nothing more than a pathetic drunkard, who would do anything for a bottle of cheap alcohol.”
He pulled the second tray closer and picked up the large bore IV needle, attached to the thick, slightly opaque tubing made for blood to flow through. “As for why I’m doing this? I’m reclaiming you, or at least the most useful part of you—your blood— for society.”
And he inserted the needle into the donor’s arm.
* * *
Carson watched the faces gathered around the conference table and the other police lining the walls as they all comprehended the problem as Brianna had just told them.
Shock.
Fear.
Anger.
A few people registered one or two, others all three. He understood. This was their city, their home. Their responsibility to protect.
“We need to get in touch with the local blood bank administrators,” the chief said, turning to the female officer beside him who already had her phone out. “Have them go through their files and check to see if any blood is in their system but not logged in through official channels.”
“Uhm, they won’t find any,” Kirk F said from his spot.
Everyone in the room turned to stare at the youngest member of the group. He swung his gaze to Aaron for permission to continue. The detective nodded.
“Yesterday, Aaron, er…Detective Jeffers had me visit the blood banks in the area. He wanted me to find out about the equipment they used and where they’d get them.” Kirk F tapped on his laptop. “While I was there one of the nurses told me how the blood was collected. They do it by gravity, letting the person’s heart pump the blood into the tubing and it drains down into the bag until it’s filled. About four hundred and fifty milliliters.”
“And this is important how?” one of the officers at the table said, his face barely hiding his condescension at the college student’s work.
Time to step in.
“Because knowing how the normal process and procedures of blood collection takes place, gives an idea as to the skills and knowledge base of our killer,” Carson said, then nodded to Kirk F. “What else did you learn?”
“When you donate blood, they first draw off a test tube of blood and it gets an identification number. That same ID number is connected to a label that goes on the bag of blood. When the blood is finished being collected. Both are sent to the laboratory and scanned into a computer that has the donor’s information on it.”
“So, if our guy has some way of getting the blood into the system, he could put his illegally harvested blood in with the legal stuff and no one would be the wiser,” one of the plain clothes detectives said.
“Surely, they’d know if there was a sudden increase in their supply?” the captain asked.
“Not necessarily,” Brianna said. “The U.S. uses approximately thirty-six thousand units of red blood cells every day. Add in the seven thousand units of platelets, ten thousand of plasma, that gives you around twenty-one million blood components used in a year, by the US only.”
Everyone in the room except Aaron stared at the beautiful woman who rattled off obscure facts like a computer app and just did math in her head in a split second.
“She’s good with numbers,” Aaron said as if it was a known fact between them.
Interesting. Carson got the idea that the two were more than just colleagues yesterday. Now, he suspected they had a deeper connection than just physical attraction, whether they knew it or not.
“I hate to ask this,” Brianna said, looking around the room. “What if the blood is contaminated, like HIV or hepatitis positive? Could that be his plan?”
Shock and fear once more registered on the faces around the room.
Brianna hit the problem on the head.
Carson understood why Jeffers insisted on keeping her in the loop on this case. No one had considered that in this room of highly suspicious by nature and profession individuals. It took the outsider.
“The tests we ran on our victims didn’t show HIV or hepatitis for either,” the coroner’s investigator said, flipping through the file in front of her.
A visible sigh of relief ran through the room.
“Besides, that’s not something he’d be able to hide,” Kirk F said, once again drawing the room’s attention to him. “That tube of blood I told you got drawn first? It accompanies the bag of blood to the blood bank and is used to test the blood for any diseases like HIV and hepatitis. If it comes up positive, that blood with the matching numbers on its label are tossed out.”
“If he’s capable of doing the fake labels, couldn’t he bypass the testing portion?” One of the uniformed officers asked.
“He’d have to be a computer hacker,” the younger man said. “According to my source the test are done by machines which automatically transfer the information to the state. Then the blood and matching test tube are shipped to various hospitals and clinics. The test tube blood is used to crossmatch the blood to the patient, so they get the right kind.” He shrugged. “Not sure what that means, but it’s important.”
“Okay, we’ll hold off contacting the blood banks and hospitals for now,” the chief said, then turned to Carson. “If he’s not trying to contaminate the blood supply, what is this guy up to?”
; It was his turn to give them a profile of the man they were looking for. A look into his physical, emotional, and social background. A tool that would help them home in on both their perpetrator and his victim pool.
“From what we learned today, and what I’ve observed from the crime scenes and victims, I believe your murderer is trying to bolster the blood supply as opposed to destroying it. He is choosing victims that he believes once held a place of prominence or potential but have fallen on hard times, living on the streets.”
“How’s he learning that about them?” one of the plain clothes detectives asked.
“He’s posing as a journalist who is doing some sort of exposé about them and how they ended up homeless,” Brianna said.
“Are we sure he isn’t a reporter?” another policewoman asked.
Aaron shook his head. “No. We think he is posing as one to gain their confidence. We have a witness who said our man was taking pictures of various homeless people, but seemed selective in who he spent time with. Another witness informed Ms. Matthews that the first victim, Mia Tanaka had met with him several times before she went missing.”
Time to take over.
“The man you’re looking for is probably a white male between the ages of thirty and fifty. He’s physically fit, since lifting and moving the bodies to their posed destinations requires strength and mobility. Freezing the female victim and waiting six months before he started showing us his work, tells us he’s patient. Cleaning them corpses and dressing them in outfits that represent their previous lives before they became homeless, tells us he’s meticulous, possibly a germ-a-phobe and intelligent enough to find the correct outfits.”
Carson paused to let the officers taking notes to catch up. “He’s facing them so that the rising sun will shine on their faces. This could be a sign of them being resurrected into a new life, reclaiming them from the streets.
“The collecting of the blood tells me several things,” he paused again, looking around the room to make contact with the officers and be sure he had their attention. “First, I believe he’s had someone in his life that died from a lack of adequate blood for transfusion. Probably from some kind of accident. It may be recent, but I suspect it would have happened when your killer was young—maybe twenty to thirty years ago—and the result imprinted on their psyche in some way. I’d do a search of deaths due to hemorrhage of people with the rarest blood types. Also, the killer could blame the homeless for his loved one’s death. Perhaps they received the rare blood and made it unavailable for others your suspect deemed more worthy of it.”
“He sees them as useless, even parasites living on society,” Brianna said, her eyes bright with understanding. “So, he harvests their blood for someone else to use, cleans them up, because now they’ve given something useful—their blood—to society and he’s transformed them back into their previous lives.”
The woman would make a good profiler. She had a natural talent for it.
“Exactly,” Carson said.
“Because he’s able to put the blood into the system and follow the protocols,” Kirk F said, “he probably works in one of the blood bank labs, right?”
Carson nodded at the young man, then turned to the chief of police. “I’d suggest you start doing background checks on all people actively working in the blood banks labs across the city. And also, anyone fired or who may have quit in the past year.”
“We’ll have our tech people start searching,” the Chief said to his assistant, then turned to the smaller man beside him. “Stedaman let’s get your people out talking to the homeless and volunteers in the shelters to find out anything about this guy posing as a journalist. Maybe we’ll stop him before he can pick up another victim.”
“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” Aaron said, his jaw tense and one muscle ticking from it down into his neck.
“Why?” the chief asked, even though his eyes said he knew the answer already.
“We believe he’s already got his next victim.”
27
His name on the streets is Steroid Kyle,” Aaron said, writing his name in a third column beside Art’s on the whiteboard. “One of the homeless we’ve interviewed said the journalist he’d seen speaking with Art also spent time talking with this young man.”
“Talking to the witness,” Brianna took up the story, “we learned that Steroid Kyle was once a promising football player, a standout in college, but got hooked on drugs and didn’t last long in the pros.”
Jaylon pulled a picture out of the file in front of him and taped it to the whiteboard above the name Steroid Kyle.
“After doing some late night research,” he cast a scathing glance at Aaron, who had called him at three a.m. and asked him to search the local colleges, even Ohio State, to see if a Kyle that fit their description and lived in the area had ever played football for them, “we have this as our possible third victim. Kyle Dandridge.
“I remember him,” Aaron said. “He was a former linebacker for Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, standout player for Cleveland Heights High School and ranked in the top two hundred national high school players seven years ago.”
Jaylon nodded and went back to the file he started on the guy. “Drafted out of college, played pro for almost three years with the Bears, which makes him about twenty-six, the age our witness thought he might be.”
“We’ll get a copy of his picture and put him on the patrols’ list to question the volunteers and homeless about,” Stedaman said, glancing to the captain of the patrol division, who nodded, writing the information down.
“I’ll get this out to them now,” he said and left the room, along with other division chiefs.
“There’s one last element we need to address,” Aaron said with a nod to Jaylon.
“Because it takes time to drain the blood from his victims and because he froze Mia Tanaka, we determined he’d need a place that had both privacy and a refrigeration unit of some sort,” Jaylon said. “Kirk F has started searching for old meat-packing plants.”
“Young man,” the chief addressed Kirk F.
“Yes, sir,” he said sitting straighter in his seat.
“You keep searching until you find something.”
Kirk F swallowed, glanced at Aaron, who nodded. “Yes, sir, I will.”
“Good.” The chief stood and everyone, but Brianna and Carson followed suit. “Let’s find this SOB before he litters our city with more of our citizens as corpse statues.”
The core group of Stedaman, Aaron, Brianna and the pup, Kirk F, Matt Edgars, the profiler Carson, and Jaylon stayed in the conference room after the others left. Jaylon was impressed with his partner’s ability to put together a team and convince their commander and the police chief to let him keep it. Totally off protocol and regulations. But he guessed the circumstances dictated they needed all the help they could get on this one.
“Any chance this human witness can help us narrow down the search for our killer or the missing homeless man?” the captain asked Aaron.
“Paula has been quite ill, Captain,” he answered.
“And grieving for the loss of her friend,” Brianna added, this time not so rushed.
“We haven’t wanted to push her too much,” Aaron continued, although he did shoot a soft look the tall blonde’s way.
Captain Stedaman stared at Aaron with one brow raised. “I think it’s time someone pushed her, detective. Today. Before the city gets overrun with dead bodies.”
* * *
Alone in the house, Katie and Paula sat at the kitchen table sharing a chopped green salad with grilled chicken and strawberries in it. After witnessing the younger woman’s frustration last night in trying to remember the man she’d seen speaking with her friend Art, Katie and Matt discussed using a new technique Jake had taught her to help eye-witnesses remember more details about an event or suspect. One of the reasons her husband went into the homicide division with Kirk F was to give her quiet time to walk Paula through the proc
ess.
Paula’s healthy recovery was the most important thing right now, so she’d given her the morning breathing treatment, her medications and time to rest afterward. A firm believer that protein and a stable glucose level helped anyone’s brain function adequately, Katie planned to begin the interview after lunch, over tea and a dessert of homemade chocolate brownies Kirk F’s nana had sent over this morning—Katie had never met the woman, but dearly loved her already.
First thing she wanted to do was establish a mutual respect and trust with her.
“Where did you meet Brianna?” she asked, reaching for her glass of tea.
Paula swallowed her food and wiped her mouth with the paper napkin before answering. “At the women’s shelter.”
“Were you a volunteer there?”
Paula’s features grew taut, here eyes wary. “No. I was a resident there when we met.”
“Good for you. Getting out of an abusive relationship is never easy.”
Paula pushed her food away, a spark in her eyes.
Finally, the young woman was angry. Good. They wouldn’t be able to get to her true memories if she was trying to hide her feelings.
“Don’t pretend you know what I’ve been through, lady,” she bit out, barely containing her anger and contempt. “You with your perfect husband and career. You have no idea.”
“Trust me I do,” Katie said, barely above a whisper.
“No. I don’t think you do. Did your mother turn you into a whore before your twelfth birthday? Did she give you pot and cocaine to ease your pain and humiliation? Did she sell you to the neighborhood pimp, who used his fists to convince you to do what he said, no matter how depraved?”
And there it was. The place where Katie could connect with her.
“When I was a kid, my father died, and my mother remarried. The man she married was the leader of a cult he called The Family and he eventually became known to the world as The Prophet.”
Paula’s brows drew down in a puzzled V. “I’ve heard of him. Wasn’t he responsible for that bombing in Pennsylvania like fifteen years ago?”
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