A Tracers Trilogy

by Laura Griffin

  She lifted three bags and took them to an empty table. Ric scanned the immaculate laboratory. Lining the walls were glass cabinets containing rows of beakers, test tubes, and other supplies he couldn’t identify. On the opposite end of the room, several white-coated men peered into microscopes that probably cost more money than Ric took home in a year. The Delphi Center operated on hefty fees and a private endowment, so it could afford the best of the best as far as staff and equipment. Delphi was rumored to be every bit as good as the FBI lab at Quantico. Mia claimed it was better.

  “Let’s have a look.” She spent a few minutes at the sink washing up, as if she was scrubbing in for surgery. Then she tore off a sheet of clean white paper from a roll at the end of the table and spread it out to create a work surface. Finally, she pulled on fresh gloves and eye shields before unsealing one of the evidence bags.

  The first held the duct tape.

  “Who did this?” she exclaimed, instantly zeroing in on the same problem Ric had when he’d first seen the evidence photos. Whoever had removed the binding from the victim’s wrists had cut through the tape in three places.

  “No idea. Could have been the crime-scene techs. Maybe the ME. Although I doubt it. He’s pretty meticulous.”

  “You didn’t attend the autopsy?” She continued to look surprised.

  “Wasn’t my case then. Burleson caught it. He did the crime scene, the autopsy. But then the chief tossed it over to me. Thinks it might be related to a motel murder on I-35. Woman in that case had her hands taped, too.”

  Mia shook her head. “Well, I hope you have pictures. This is a mess.”

  “We do,” Ric said, but pictures weren’t going to be enough if this thing went to trial. The sort of knots or bindings used by a perpetrator could reveal a lot, provided some idiot didn’t recklessly saw them off the body and destroy the evidence. Photographs were okay, but they weren’t as effective in court as the real thing, which was why Ric had given Burleson a ration of shit over this. As the lead investigator, he should have kept an eye on the crime-scene techs and even the ME every step of the way to make sure the evidence stayed intact.

  Mia was turning the chunks of tape over slowly with a pair of tweezers. “I should be able to get some skin cells off the adhesive side if the perp wasn’t wearing gloves. But even if he was, he might have torn the tape with his teeth and deposited saliva.” After a few moments, she replaced the tape in the evidence bag. “What else did you have?”

  “I haven’t seen the rest of it. Her shoes, I think. And her dress. I understand there was a lot of blood.”

  Mia resealed the bag and replaced it in the refrigerator before shifting her attention to the second bag. A new sheet of paper came out, new gloves. Mia unsealed the bag and, to Ric’s surprise, pulled out a big white envelope. It was one of those waterproof bubble-wrap mailers.

  Her gaze flashed to his. “Who packed this?” she asked, opening it.

  “Not me.”

  “Why was this packed in plastic? It degrades biological evidence.” She pulled out a royal-blue garment that was stiff with dried blood. Shaking her head, she unfolded it and spread it out on the table.

  The dress was short, low-cut. The upper half was saturated with blackened bloodstains.

  Mia’s breath hissed out. She reached a tentative finger out and traced one of the many gashes in the fabric.

  “My God,” she whispered. “He must have stabbed her a hundred times.”

  • • •

  El Patio was loud and crowded when the man’s phone started vibrating on the bar. He checked the number and bit back a curse as he picked up.

  The caller didn’t say anything. The man waited.

  Finally, a shaky sigh. “Lake View Park,” the caller said. “South lot.”

  Unbelievable. He tossed some money onto the bar and went outside into the bitter cold.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” he demanded. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Come soon. This one’s …” A nervous laugh, almost hysterical. “God, I can’t believe this. Just get here, okay?”

  The man stepped away from the cluster of smokers hanging out near the door. The place was packed tonight. Vehicles streamed in and out of the parking lot.

  “This is the last time,” he said, scanning the rows for his Buick. “I mean it. You still got that account number?”

  “Just get here! We’ll work that out later.”

  “We’ll work it out now. Do you have it or not?”

  “Yes.”

  He crossed the lot to his car and yanked open the door. “I want double this time. This is getting messy.”

  Shit, messy? It was a train wreck. But he was in it now, and there was no going back. The best he could hope for was to minimize the damage and get paid.

  He tossed his coat inside and slid behind the wheel as the caller wrestled with the decision. There was nothing to decide. This guy was an addict—completely and totally at the mercy of his habit.

  And so he went for the jugular. “Tick-tock,” he said.

  “All right! Come on! This is—” The caller’s voice broke, and he started weeping. Weeping. The sound was

  fucking pathetic.

  “We got a deal or not?”

  “Yes. I told you. Are you in your car?”

  He turned the key, and the twelve-year-old sedan sputtered to life. It was about fifty thousand miles past its prime. The car, like his career plans, should have been junked years ago. He was getting too old for this shit. And he wasn’t cut out for it, never had been. He needed out. Soon.

  “Are you coming?” the caller asked.

  He turned out of the lot and cranked the heater. It was a long drive out to Lake Buchanan.

  He couldn’t believe he was doing this again. He took a deep breath and focused on the money. “I’m on my way.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Mia tipped her head back to look at the sky, grateful for the break in the bleak winter weather. It wasn’t just clear, it was perfectly clear. And the sky wasn’t just blue, it was a brilliant turquoise. The day was gorgeous, filled with sun and promise and possibility.

  Just like the day Amy had died.

  For an instant, Mia was standing beside her banana-seat bike, watching her sister pull out of the driveway in the secondhand Chevy Malibu she’d bought with life-guarding money. Mia waved, and Amy tapped the horn before driving away.

  “Notice anything?”

  She snapped back to the present and glanced down into the grinning, freckled face of her six-year-old nephew.

  Did she notice anything?

  “Umm … you still haven’t tied your sneaker?”

  “Nope.” Sam’s smile widened, revealing a missing incisor.

  “Umm …” Mia crouched down to tie the shoe herself. “You got a haircut since I last saw you?”

  “Nope.”

  “You lost another tooth?”

  “Nope. Do you give up?”

  Mia stood and fisted a hand on her hip. “I give up.”

  “I’m standing on your shadow,” he said gleefully. “That means you’re it.”

  “I thought we called time out.” They’d been playing shadow tag in her yard that morning before climbing into Mia’s rental car for a trip to the zoo.

  “You did. But I called time in, remember? When you were getting the tickets.”

  Mia mussed his rust-colored hair, the same color Vivian’s had been before she started dying it. “Okay, then I’m it.” Mia picked up his mittened hand. “But let’s call time out while we visit Cleo and Patra. We can start up again when we get home. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  They walked over to the chain-link fence surrounding the cat exhibit—five Bengal tigers, which for a zoo of this size was impressive. The tigers were lolling about on some rocks, enjoying the winter sun. By the bones littered around, it looked as though they’d recently devoured their usual breakfast—a deer hindquarter. Sam tugged out of her grasp and darted betwee
n strollers to kneel beside the fence.

  Mia watched him with that familiar tightness in her chest. Her nephew loved animals almost as much as she loved taking him to see them. They’d been here dozens of times, but he always begged to come back, although the place wasn’t even a full-fledged zoo. It was more of a rescue center, filled mostly with exotic animals people had acquired as pets before discovering it was a bad idea—pythons, monkeys, alligators. The aviary was filled with cockatoos and macaws that had decades left to live but whose owners were now in nursing homes.

  “Cleo’s asleep,” Sam announced. “So is Patra. This is boring.”

  The usually playful tigers were Sam’s favorite attraction. They had been rescued from a ranch not far away following a major drug bust. According to the information posted on the fence, the tigers’ first owner had kept them around to impress his friends and intimidate his rivals.

  “Let’s go see the llamas,” Mia suggested, because the cats didn’t look as if they’d be stirring anytime soon. “You said you wanted to feed them this time.”

  They trekked along the dirt path to the petting zoo. Sam glanced up at her. “What do you think would happen if they put a person in there instead of a deer?”

  “You mean in with the tigers?”

  “Yeah, for feeding time.”

  “That’s a good question,” she said, which was her typical response when he caught her off guard. It seemed to be happening more and more lately, and she was waiting for the day when he’d come to visit her and the first question out of his mouth would be, “Hey, Aunt Mia, where do babies come from?”

  “Do you think they’d eat him? The person?” He gazed up at her.

  “I’m not sure. I guess it would depend on how hungry they were.”

  “I think they’d eat him,” he said with confidence. “Tigers are meat eaters, like T. rexes. And people are meat.”

  Mia watched him as they approached the petting zoo and had the nagging feeling there was more to this conversation than tigers.

  He turned to look at her. “Do you really work at a place with lots of dead people?”

  She took a deep breath. Why didn’t Viv get these questions? Her sister was so much better at explaining things than she was.

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one.” He shrugged. “I heard Gram talking to Mom about it. Gram said the place where you work probably stinks to high heaven.”

  Some days it did. It depended on which direction the wind was blowing.

  Mia cleared her throat. “Well, I work at a research laboratory.” They stopped beside the animal yard, and Sam looked up at her blankly. “It’s a place with all kinds of scientists. Some of us study bugs. Some of us study soil. Some of us study bones. Some of us study what happens to people and animals after they die.”

  “Do you have to touch them?”

  “I don’t, no. I’m not that kind of scientist. I study much smaller things, sometimes with a microscope. Remember the microscope I got you for your birthday last year?”

  “Yeah. I lost all the slides, though. Aunt Mia, look! There’s a baby one! Can I feed it?”

  Mia followed his gaze and saw the baby llama wandering amid the pigs and billy goats.

  “You can try,” she said, glad for the distraction. She wasn’t sure how much Vivian wanted her son to know about the Delphi Center, particularly the body farm. It had been controversial since its inception, and many of the property owners nearby didn’t care for the vultures, the scavengers, or the macabre attention the place attracted.

  Mia dug through her purse until she came up with the eight quarters needed to buy kibble from the food dispenser near the barn. She filled a large paper cup and returned to the fence.

  She glanced around at the moms and kids, at the strollers parked haphazardly beside the gate. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. Her gaze skimmed over the children mingling among the goats and llamas.

  “Sam?”

  Her heart started to thud. Her chest tightened. She looked at the man with the little girl on his shoulders. She looked at the crying toddler cowering away from a goat. She squeezed her way through a knot of people and stepped into the barn. The smell of manure hit her. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness, and she waited for Sam to emerge from the shadows.

  “Sam?”

  She was answered by clucking hens and a bleating lamb. She rushed back outside and checked the animal yard again. No Sam. Her stomach did a flip. She cast a frantic look back at the tigers, but he wasn’t over there, either.

  “Sam!”

  Panic gripped her as she did a slow three-sixty, searching the kaleidoscope of people for an orange mop of hair and a bright green coat. But she didn’t see either and her blood turned to ice.

  “Sammy!” It was loud and shrill, but still no answer.

  He was gone.

  • • •

  Jonah propped his shoulder against the door frame as the Travis County deputy ME removed his glasses and cleaned them for what had to be the fifth time.

  “And this conclusion’s based on what, exactly?” Ric said, voicing the question in Jonah’s head.

  His partner was seated across from George Froehler in the only guest chair available in the man’s cramped office. Jonah hadn’t even been able to set foot in the room because of all the files and medical journals stacked in knee-high piles around the desk. No matter how many times they visited the deputy ME, the mess always came as a surprise. How could such a meticulous doctor tolerate such a cluttered workspace?

  “Postmortem lividity.” Froehler replaced the spectacles on his nose. “The process by which red blood cells collect in the body’s lowest points after death.”

  “I know what lividity is.” Ric obviously didn’t like being talked down to as if he was some beat cop. “But I’m not getting how that means she was killed indoors. Maybe he killed her outside near the dump site, then the body ended up facedown after she got dropped off that bridge.”

  “It did.” Froehler folded his hands in front of him. “The fall would account for the broken ribs and likely the shattered patella visible on the X-rays. My point is, despite being discovered in the facedown position near the bridge, she died on her back and was left that way for at least a few hours. The carpet fibers recovered from her hair, along with the abrasions on her shoulders and buttocks, suggest to me that your primary crime scene is indoors.”

  “What color are the carpet fibers?” Ric asked.

  “Beige, unfortunately.”

  The most common color around.

  “And did you see anything similar between this victim’s injuries and the one from three weeks ago? The one from the motel room?”

  “Aside from the fact that they both had their hands bound with duct tape and were sexually assaulted? No. In the motel-room murder, the cause of death was manual strangulation, and the assailant left behind semen. As for your more recent victim, Ashley Meyer, she was killed by blunt-force trauma to the head. After she sustained the forty-two knife wounds, all shallow. In other words, he didn’t stab her to death, he hit her with something heavy, maybe a wrench or a tire iron, something like that. Also, her assailant used a condom, which left traces of lubricant but no semen. I believe she died indoors on a carpeted floor, then was moved from the scene and dumped off the bridge. She landed facedown, which was how the hikers discovered her.” The ME checked his watch. “Any other questions, Detectives? I’m needed in the morgue.”

  “These fibers,” Jonah said. “Did you send them to the lab?”

  “Of course. They’re at the Delphi Center, along with the other trace evidence in this case.” He stood up and handed Ric a copy of the autopsy report.

  “Thanks for your help.” Ric took the report and headed for the door. “Oh, and one more thing. In the Meyer case, did you remove the duct tape from her wrists at autopsy? The tape was cut through in three different places.”

  Froehler stiffened. “Absolutely not. I would have used a single razor cut i
n order to preserve the integrity of the binding. Her hands were bagged separately when she arrived here.”

  Ric shot Jonah a look. Sounded as if the crime-scene techs had screwed up right under the lead detective’s nose.

  They made their way back down to the main floor of the Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office. Hays County wasn’t big enough to have its own ME, so San Marcos cops had to work with TCMEO in Austin. It was a nice facility, but the half-hour drive was a pain in the ass.

  A cold gust hit them when Jonah pushed open the door.

  “So, what do you think of his theory?” Ric asked, taking his keys from his pocket as they approached the unmarked police unit parked at a meter in front of the building.

  “Froehler’s?”

  “Yeah. That the murders aren’t connected.”

  Jonah pulled open his door with a squeak and slid into the passenger seat. “I think he’s right. These two cases, I don’t know, don’t fit or something. The crimes seem totally different to me.”

  “Except for the duct tape, the timing, and the sexual assault.” Ric reached behind his seat to slide the report into an accordion file that was growing fatter by the hour. He started the engine.

  “Lot of rapes involve duct tape,” Jonah said. “That’s why the bindings are important. Perps have a certain way of doing it.”

  Ric flashed him a look, and Jonah knew he was telling his partner something he already knew. But he was thinking out loud here.

  Ric pulled onto Sabine Street. “I get the same feeling. First crime, pretty straightforward—prostitute killed in a motel room. Maybe she tried to shake down her john or something, he got ticked off. Or maybe he didn’t want to pay. Ashley Meyer was a college student, clean record. Plus, it seems like her killer was pretty amped up. The knife wounds. The blow to the head. A lot of emotion there.”

  “I’m getting that, too. Seems like a different MO.”

  Ric shook his head. “This case is gonna drag. And I really want to focus on the Hannigan shooting before that trail gets cold.”

  Jonah glanced at him. “You think it’s a straight-up robbery that went south?”

  “No.”