“Maybe an hour,” Kerry said.
“Okay. I guess we’ll see you in the morning. Did you guys just want to call me when you’re headed over here? I’ll make sure your dad is out of bed.”
“That will work. Make sure no one else knows we’re coming.”
“Don’t worry. My lips are sealed.”
The employee walked toward her at the phone.
“Thanks, Uncle Harper,” she said.
“No problem, Kerr Bear.” He clicked off.
Kerry hung the phone back on its hook.
The man stopped directly before her, and Kerry looked him up and down. The guy appeared in his early forties, was thin, and smelled of cigarettes. His long hair pulled back into a ponytail. Kerry spotted a tattoo of a guitar on his right forearm. His other arm had a sleeve of tattoos starting around his elbow and quickly vanished under his work shirt. The nameplate pinned to his shirt said Joe, with Manager underneath his name.
“Joe Ramsey. I’m the manager for the diner. Was there some kind of problem with a couple of other patrons over there?” he asked.
Kerry flashed him a smile, leaned against the wall, and twirled a bit of her blond hair around her finger. “Not really. I heard them say something about me, so I confronted them. They didn’t like the way that I dress. They called me a sinner because of my outfit. You don’t have a problem with my outfit, do you?” She rubbed her hand on her bare stomach.
The manager glanced down at her hand and then back up. “Just as long as everything is fine.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just thought it was rude was all.” She stared the man in the eyes and cocked her head. “Do I know you from somewhere?” she asked with a smile.
“Um, I don’t believe so,” he said.
“Huh, that’s weird. Something about you really strikes me as familiar. Wait, you don’t play in a band, do you?”
“I used to,” he said. “Been a few years, though.”
“You should get back into it. You’ve got the look. I like it.”
He gave her a smile and leaned against the wall next to the phone.
“Maybe you can play me something sometime?” Kerry asked.
“Love to.”
“I’ll get your number before we leave. Sorry about the thing with the couple over there.”
The manager waved away her apology. “No worries,” he said.
“Maybe see you soon, Joe,” Kerry pressed her finger against his name badge. She walked back toward her sister, glancing back once to see the manager staring at her as she walked away.
She came upon the old couple’s booth and caught disgusted stares from the pair as she approached. Kerry flicked her tongue at the old man, who gave her a look of shock.
“Bad move, gramps,” she said. “You should have kept your mouth closed.”
Kerry slid into the booth across from Kitty.
“All good with Uncle Harper?” Kitty asked.
“Sounds like it.”
Kitty shoveled some hash browns into her mouth. “What was going on with the old couple and the guy?” she asked while chewing.
“The old man said something to his wife about me while I was walking for the phones, so I went to see what he said.”
“What did he say?”
“He called me a sinner.”
Kitty laughed.
“So I had a talk with them, and they called the manager or something. That’s who the guy was.”
“What did he say?”
“Asked if there was a problem. I gave him some doe eyes, hair twirls, and nice words, and he melted like an idiot,” Kerry said. “We’re all good. I’m not going to be able to say the same for Gertrude and Henry over there, though.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. They will be leaving here with us.”
Kitty tossed her fork onto her plate and leaned closer to her sister. She smiled ear to ear. “How should we do it?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Beth and I drove toward our hotel in Irving, Texas. We were roughly a half hour out when my phone rang. The screen said Ball was calling. I clicked Talk.
“Get my message?” I asked.
“I was over by the twins. So you just got done with the potential witness?” Ball asked.
“That we did. We spent about an hour or so out there with him. Not a ton to go on, unfortunately.”
“What did he say?”
I gave Ball the highlights from the conversation Beth and I had had with Mr. Delbin regarding the twin girls.
“Do you guys think it may be who we’re looking for?” Ball asked.
“What he described definitely sounded off, but I don’t know. Is there anything we can do as far as looking into early-twenties female twins with records?”
“Sure, let me just punch that into the old computer here and see what names turn up.” Sarcasm hung to Ball’s words. Then he chuckled. “I’ll have Marcus and Lewis see what they can come up with.”
“Appreciate it.”
“Did you guys touch base with Scott and Bill?”
“Beth did a couple of minutes ago,” I said. “They’re going to meet us back at the hotel in a little bit. We’ll get together and discuss what, if anything, they came up with at the local office today.”
“Sure. Give me a ring if you guys come up with anything. Otherwise, you’ll hear from me if our twins find anything on your twins.”
“Good enough,” I said.
“You guys be safe out there,” Ball said.
“Ah. Okay.” I clicked off from the call. The be safe comment wasn’t something Ball had ever said, and it struck me as off.
“Ball?” Beth asked.
“Yeah, he just wanted to see what the guy told us. That’s about it.” I sat quiet for a moment then asked, “Has Ball ever told you to be safe out there?”
“No.”
“Me either. He just said it. It seemed strange.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was just a different way for him to end his call. I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
I said nothing.
“What, do you think you’re jinxed now?” she asked.
“Well, it would be us that would be jinxed. He said, ‘you guys.’”
“Great.” Then she dug into her pocket for something. “Now who’s calling?” Beth’s hand came out with her phone. She looked at the screen and handed me the phone. “It’s Bill.”
I took Beth’s phone and clicked Talk. “Hey, Bill. It’s Hank. Beth’s driving.”
“Sure,” Bill said. “We have some news. Scott and I are just leaving the Bureau office now and headed to the Dallas County medical examiner’s. Another body was found this morning. The word finally trickled in to us.”
“What details do we have?”
“The man was found on the side of the road. Strangulation consistent with past victims. No ID on the guy.”
“And found where exactly?” I asked.
“They picked him up an hour or so east of Dallas.”
“Do you have an exact location?”
“That’s all I have right now. Like I said. This is just trickling in. We have where the body presently is, so that’s where we’re headed,” Bill said. “The guys back at the field office are trying to get the exact location as to where the remains were found, from the local authorities who found it. We’re also trying to get into contact with the officers who first responded to the scene as well.”
“Got it. Either way, it seems our suspect or suspects are in the area.”
“It looks like it. The ME’s office is pretty much right in downtown Dallas—about fifteen minutes or so from our hotel. Where are you guys at?”
“About a half hour from the hotel on Interstate 30,” I said.
“You’d pretty much have to pass the ME’s office to get back to the hotel. Did you want to meet us there?”
“The body is there now?”
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ll meet you. Did you want to just tex
t me the address?”
“Sure. You’ll see it in a second. The medical examiner’s office is tucked into a large complex that has a forensics division and crime-investigation lab. Maybe just meet us in the parking lot for the complex. I’ll give you a ring when we get there.”
“Thanks, Bill. We’ll see you guys in a bit.” I ended the call on Beth’s phone and passed it back to her.
“Another body?” she asked.
“At the Dallas ME. We’re going to meet Scott and Bill there.”
“Where is it at?”
“Bill said he was going to text me the address. I guess it’s downtown.” I dug into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone. Just as I did so, the message from Bill came in. I copied and pasted it into my navigation and gave it a second to come up with our directions. “Nav says it’s just eleven minutes from where we’re at.”
“Any details on the body?”
“Consistent with the others that we’ve had. Bill said it was found east of Dallas.”
“How far?” Beth asked.
“An hour. I didn’t get an address.”
“Maybe we should turn around and go check out the dump site and let them handle the body,” Beth said.
“Bill said he didn’t have an exact location yet. From the sounds of it, this information is all pretty fresh. Let’s pop in by them at the body, see what we see, and take it from there.”
Beth nodded.
My navigation took us to the complex, located on a frontage road off I-35 East. Beth pulled into the lot, made a quick right, and parked in the area facing the freeway, designated for visitor parking. We stepped from the car. I rested against our rental car’s trunk and took in the buildings as I dialed Bill. The building on my left looked to be an older three-story red-brick building with stretches of green windows running horizontally. Attached to that building, directly before me, was a two-story addition in a lighter beige color. It appeared to hold the main entrance to the facility, judging by the flags out front and a small courtyard. The windows of the building matched the green color of the attached older section. To my right was a seven-story brick office building that looked as though it was constructed sometime in the seventies, yet it still appeared to be part of the facility, from the covered walking bridge connecting it to the center building. I tapped my cell phone’s screen and dialed Bill.
“Are you guys there?” he answered.
“Beth and I just parked. We’re right out front in the visitor parking.”
“Okay, we should be there in a couple minutes. Big black SUV. But we’ll find you if you don’t see us.”
“Sounds good.” I clicked off.
I turned toward Beth, who’d taken up a spot at the car’s trunk beside me. “They’ll be here in a couple minutes,” I said.
We sat at the rear of the car and waited. Not more than a minute or two had passed when a black SUV matching what Bill had described turned into the lot and pulled up beside our car. I didn’t recognize the man driving or the person sitting in the passenger seat. All four doors opened, and Scott appeared from the driver’s side rear of the SUV nearer Beth and me. Bill approached from the other side and walked toward us. The two agents accompanying Bill and Scott walked up as well.
“These are Agent Christopher Rockwell and Supervisory Agent Luke Gallo,” Bill said.
I shook the two agents’ hands, then Beth did.
The supervisory agent, Gallo, who’d been driving when they pulled up, looked to be in his late forties. He was square in the shoulders, husky, and six foot. His head was shaved clean, and black sunglasses wrapped his eyes. Agent Rockwell was a bit thinner and a bit shorter than the supervisory agent. Rockwell had a graying goatee matching the color of his short hair. Both men wore black suits with light-colored dress shirts and ties beneath. We went through our round of introductions. The supervisory agent requested we just call him Gallo—the other, Rockwell, said Chris would be fine.
“How did it go out by the possible eyewitness?” Scott asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t know if there was much there to lead us in a direction. But if we’re dealing with twin females, he may have in fact seen them.”
“Red tractor, silver trailer with a possible detail of larger exhaust stacks,” Beth added.
“We could probably circulate that,” Gallo said. “It’s something.”
“Agreed,” Bill said. “That is, if that’s what they’re traveling in.”
“I don’t think it would hurt to put it out there, either way,” Gallo said.
“Nothing new today?” Beth asked.
“Not really, until this,” Scott said. “We basically went through where the drops occurred and spoke via telephone to each department that was first on the scene. We can go over everything we got today later tonight, back at the hotel.”
“Sure,” I said. “So do we want to go and take a look at our latest here?”
“Yup. Let’s head inside,” Gallo said.
Our group walked toward the building’s entrance.
CHAPTER SIX
We followed Gallo into the building, walked across the circular marble inlay on the floor that read County of Dallas on the top and State of Texas on the bottom—a star resided in the center of the words and crest. We stopped at the reception desk, where Gallo requested a Dr. Graves. I put my back to the counter and waited with the rest of the group, staring at the waiting area filled with potted plants and brown leather chairs. My mind went to the man Gallo had asked for, which brought a bit of a smile across my face. The man’s last name, Graves, I thought fitting for a medical examiner. The click-clack of someone walking caught my ear. I looked over my shoulder to see a man in a white lab coat with blue pants approaching down the glossy-white-floored corridor. The man was balding, thin, and not much over five foot five. He came directly to our group.
“You’re the gentlemen”—he craned his neck to look around me—“and lady from the FBI?” he asked.
“Correct,” I said.
We ran through some quick introductions with the medical examiner, and he waved for us to follow him down the hall.
“The body came in a couple of hours ago,” he said over his shoulder. “Shipped over to us from the neighboring county. I’ve begun the preliminary autopsy but haven’t opened him up yet. We did run his prints, and his ID came back a few minutes ago. His name was Anthony… um, Italian last name that I can’t remember offhand. I have everything on a clipboard with the body.”
Dr. Graves pushed his way through a pair of double doors, walked the short hall, and then pushed open another pair of stainless-steel double doors. He made a quick right through another stainless door with a small oval window, and our group funneled into a large room behind him. I took a step to the right to get a look at the long rectangular room. The floor was glossy white like the hallway we’d been walking though the room had blocks of a glossy blue color mixed in. The left side of the room was basically one long stainless-steel desk with small cabinets and office chairs. The far right side of the room looked identical. Running down the center of the room was a half-wall divider with four long stainless-steel sinks for holding bodies—three were occupied. Various trays, drawers, and attachments accompanied each sink, creating identical workstations. I imagined the other side of the divider was filled with more of the same sink workstations. The half wall behind the sinks held racks of tubing and tools. Large scales for weighing organs and removed bits from the bodies hung from the ceilings over each station.
“Down here at the end,” Graves said.
We followed him to the last sink, where a bald corpse was laid out with its arms to its sides.
Graves scooped up a clipboard from the desk area adjacent to the sink. “Anthony Armenti.”
I pulled my notepad from my pocket and requested a spelling of the last name, which the ME gave me. “Did you guys run him in the system?” I asked.
“I’m betting they did next door, but all I needed was a name and DOB for my sheet h
ere.” He set the clipboard back down on the desk and walked to the body.
Our group gathered around so he could go through his findings. I stared down at the male corpse, covered in a sheet from his waist down. From my position at his shoulder, I could see bruising around his neck in a uniform one-and-a-half-inch stripe going left to right. I took in the rest of the man’s features: thin face, approximately in his thirties. He had black smudges around his mouth. His head was freshly shaved, with what looked like fingernail marks on his scalp. I spotted an abrasion on his right shoulder, with another to the portion of his right cheek. Another mark, almost like bruising, caught my eye under his left arm.
“Let’s see, where to start?” Graves said as he gloved his hands. “Well, we cleaned him up when he came in. The guy had a layer of dirt on him—homeless maybe. His clothes were equally as dirty. The man did have shoulder-length brown hair prior to me shaving it off. The forensics department had actually requested the hair to search through for trace. They have it over by them, along with the clothing.”
“They’re in the same facility here?” I asked.
“The next building over,” he said.
I nodded.
“Strangulation was our COD,” Graves said. “Rope is my first guess. And more than likely done by a person applying the rope, as opposed to hanging.” Graves pointed out some abrasions around the edges of the larger bruising around the man’s throat. “See these little marks in the flesh? Rope burn. I’m guessing someone was behind him holding a rope, and he was ripping his head around, causing the rope to slide. That theory would be consistent with this.” He rolled the body to show us the man’s back with a three-inch circular bruise directly in the center. “The bruise in the center of the back could have been from a knee. Also, I’m going to venture to guess that we had two assailants. See all of these cuts on his scalp.” The ME pointed out the area. “Fingernails, as if someone was using two hands, one on each side of his head, and pulling. I also found some fingernail marks on his right arm. The size and shape are different. We also have some bruising on his thighs. My thinking was that someone was sitting on his lap and he had another person behind him.” He rolled the body back and repositioned the man on the table.
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