In the Belly of Jonah

by Brannan, Sandra

  “Worse than death?”

  I could think of a few things, not the least of which was someone going after my Achilles heel—my family.

  “What’s worse than what she went through?” Lisa asked.

  “I don’t know. What did she go through?” I’d pushed too far again. Lisa clammed up and drank her beer in silence. Brainstorming again, I added, “Maybe she took a bullet intended for someone else? Metaphorically speaking. Do you have anyone in your life you love so much you would give your life for them?”

  Lisa blinked and stared at me.

  “How about that Pierce fellow?” I pressed.

  She grimaced. “Are you crazy? I just said he was handsome. We’re not dating or anything. He’s not like that.”

  “Gay?”

  She shook her head.

  “Now me, if someone threatened my mom or dad or even one of my brothers or sisters, I would be willing to lay down my life.”I’d never been in that situation, but I wasn’t exaggerating. But who’s to say? Especially when your life is on the line. I added, “I think.”

  She smiled. It got her thinking about it anyway. It was my turn to go silent. It turned out to be an excellent strategy.

  Lisa spoke quietly. “She doesn’t have one single bruise on her body, Liv. Nowhere. And you were right. She had nothing under her fingernails, no broken fingernails. She never scratched her attacker or struggled in any way. She had no defensive wounds on her hands. Just one large chunk cut from her center.”

  I gasped, nearly choking on my beer. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around that one. “Shit. I just can’t get used to that thought. I threw up this morning just reading the guy’s account of how he found Jill’s body.”

  “Yeah, kind of crude, wasn’t he? He didn’t mean to be. Shock can do that to some people. He just couldn’t stop babbling, ruminating over the image.”

  “What’s the cause of death? Do they know?”

  “They got started late because they were waiting on the ID,” Lisa said.

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassment rushing to my cheeks. I hadn’t realized I was holding up the show. I was so reluctant to look at Jill’s face. It still haunted me. The gray, waxy skin. The dark lips. The bulging eyes. It just wasn’t Jill at all. And yet it was.

  “Agent Pierce and the coroner were waiting until you finished identifying the body. I was there with them, but I didn’t realize it was you on the other side of the wall; otherwise, I would have stayed with you through that terrible moment. As soon as you were done, the coroner started her initial assessment, which is why I know there were no visible defensive wounds. Pierce will let me know what the coroner finds after it’s all done. Other than toxicology. That takes days, sometimes weeks.”

  “What are you hoping to find?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re here for a reason. This is an unusual murder. There must be something about it that’s pulling you toward similar cases. What’s the common link?” I asked.

  She snapped on the television with the remote control that was on the coffee table and channel surfed. Settling on a country music video channel, she set the remote down. Staring at the set, she asked, “Have you ever thought about joining? Seriously?”

  “A band?” I asked. Such a smart-ass.

  “The FBI,” Lisa said.

  “Yes and no,”I said, grabbing the remote and turning off the television. “Yes, I’ve thought about it. No, not seriously.”

  “You should.”Lisa stared at the blank set, just as I had a few hours ago. “Okay, here’s a puzzler for you. Why would you cut a chunk out of your victim’s body and then prop it up on a crutch so she’s sitting up? What does that mean?”

  “Jill was propped on a crutch?” I asked, trying hard to fight the bile that was crawling up my throat.

  “More like wedged. The perp stuck the crutch—or cane or whatever the thing was—behind the girl and wedged the handle beneath the shoulder blades where the spine should have been. That poor girl.”

  I felt sorry for Lisa. I had had trouble simply looking at Jill’s face and couldn’t imagine how I would have felt seeing her body, let alone having to study it as Lisa must be doing.

  “Maybe it’s a symbol or a message to someone. Like he was tired of carrying her, supporting her,” I speculated.

  She gave a nod of approval. “That’s a thought. I was thinking more like the perp ripped her heart out, her guts, her being, then propped her up for the whole world to see he’d conquered her.”

  “You’re the psychologist. Why a square?” I asked.

  “Actually a rectangle. And that’s the fifty-thousand-dollar question,”she said, draining the balance of her beer.

  “So, why do you think Jill didn’t fight back, Lisa?”

  “That bothers me the most. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out a scenario where I would not fight for my life.”

  “And?”

  “And I can’t come up with one. Except if I were unconscious,” she concluded.

  “Was she? You mentioned drug overdose earlier,” I pressed.

  “Still too early to know for sure. Coroner suspects she was. Jill had a needle mark on the upper part of her right arm. Lab results aren’t ready yet. But the coroner is sure we’ll have something to work with,” Lisa assured.

  The oven timer alerted me that the brownies were ready. I pulled the pan from the oven and set it on a cooling rack. I retrieved two cold beers, handing one to Lisa and setting the other down on the coffee table in front of the couch. A few minutes later I went back for the pan of brownies and two forks. I folded my long legs underneath me on the couch beside Lisa, handing her one of the forks. We both dug in.

  The pan was half empty and our bellies were full. Lisa tossed her fork aside and leaned back on the couch, holding her stomach. I did the same.

  “She was wearing a weird dress,” Lisa said in a small voice.

  She was staring out the window, and I slowly leaned forward, straining to hear her.

  “It looked like a costume. At this point, we don’t think it’s hers. Did you ever see her wear a dress? No, of course not. What was I thinking,”Lisa said, her voice regaining strength. “She had on a pair of tennis shoes, but we don’t think those were hers, either. They were way too big for her and there was no sand or mud or anything on the soles. They looked brand new, like they were just slipped on her feet after the fact.”

  “Strange,” I said.

  “That’s not all. There were these weird little cabinets on the beach between Jill and the water. It looked like they were staged there for her to be looking at, if it wasn’t for the fact that her face had been covered with a tea towel.”

  “You mean like a dish rag?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what this guy was thinking, but the whole scene was bizarre, macabre, unreal . . . ” Lisa’s words trailed.

  “And you’re thinking this might be the work of a serial killer? You mean there is more than one body with the center hacked from the torso?”

  Lisa’s cell phone rang. She looked at me before answering the call and said, “Yes and no.”

  WHILE THE PHONE RANG, Streeter looked at his watch. It was eight o’clock. He and Berta had been into the autopsy for nearly seven hours when he had decided to cut out, take a shower, and head back to his office for a few. Lisa Henry had left a message for him that she’d arrived in Fort Collins and was planning on finding a room in a local hotel. She would assess the situation and then talk with Doug Brandt and some of the key players before reporting to him on her findings.

  Henry answered after two rings.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, popping the top off a cold can of soup and taking a swallow.

  “The hotels are booked up here. I’m staying with a friend from college who happens to be the vic’s boss.”

  “Is he on the up and up?”

  Henry cleared her throat. “She didn’t kill Jill Brannigan, if that’s what you mean. I can vouch for h
er.”

  “Oh, you mean the Bergen woman, not Joe Renker. Is she sitting right there listening?”Streeter said, guzzling from the can a second time. It was the only thing he’d eaten since breakfast, and despite the day he’d just experienced, the tomato soup appealed to him.

  “I’m outside now. Spent about two hours with Detective Doug Brandt. He is happy to have the FBI’s assistance and confirmed that even if you didn’t find what you were looking for during the autopsy, he’d love for us to take the lead.”

  “Can’t unless we can find a jurisdictional reason,” Streeter reminded her.

  “He knows. He’s trying. What did you find?”

  Streeter took a deep breath. “Pretty sure it’s heroin again. Berta wants to confirm some of the findings and will be spending the next two days or so with the scope. And multitasking by planting her foot so far up the laboratory’s backside that they’ll want to expedite the tests.”

  Henry laughed. Streeter imagined her clear, bright eyes and shy smile while she stood on some woman’s porch. What he couldn’t imagine was being a houseguest while working a case. It would drive him crazy not to have his solitude in the mountains to gather his thoughts, having instead to feign the enjoyment of company and being polite about it.

  “Is the weather cooperating for Brandt?”

  “It hasn’t rained yet. They have the crime scene secured. I spent about half my time with Brandt on the scene. It’s so darn cold up here compared to D.C., even this time of year. I almost forgot.”

  “Are you freezing standing outside? Because I can call you later if you’d rather,” he offered, though he was hoping she would not accept.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “We’ll go through all the evidence they’ve collected and review the photos. I’ll meet you tomorrow morning at Brandt’s office, and you can take me to the scene after we’re through. Might as well make a day of it,”he said, tossing the empty soup can into the wastebasket.

  Streeter frequented Fort Collins from time to time as cases and leads found him in the area. He hadn’t been there since the Jaspar case three years before. And the opportunity to meet Brandt had never presented itself then. What he dreaded was the return to Horsetooth Reservoir, because the only other time he’d been there was to watch a sunset with Paula. And she had made it a memorable sunset for him. Moon rising as the sun was setting. Spectacular.

  “I take it that means you and Dr. Johnson confirmed your suspicions,”Henry said.

  “We have a serial case on our hands,” Streeter answered. “Whatever the killer used to sever the core from Jill Brannigan was the same instrument used in the de Milo case last October.”

  “So you’re the new lead?”

  “Appears so.”

  “Doug Brandt will do cartwheels,” Henry said.

  “It’s more important than ever that you’re working with me on this, Henry. I need this guy’s profile. I need you to reach deep and tell me what this bastard is up to.” The pencil Streeter had been tapping snapped in his fingers. He tossed both ends in the wastebasket and plowed his thick fingers through his hair.

  “Does Dr. Johnson have any idea, yet, what made the cut in either this case or in the de Milo case?”

  Because of the way the killer had left one of the vics’ torsos near Platteville, just north of Denver, the FBI had referred to the case file as the “Venus de Milo Murderer,” shortened to the de Milo case. In the de Milo killings the cuts were all made in one direction. Streeter spread the pictures of today’s autopsy across his screen, zooming in on the tissue of Jill Brannigan’s midsection. The cuts were in one direction, no sawing motions. The motion was from front to back, as if a hunk of skin, bone, and organs had been forced out of her by a blast of some kind. It reminded Streeter of those horrible images he brought back in his tortured mind after his time in Mogadishu. Jill’s skin hadn’t been singed or burned in any way, and the force of whatever had torn through the tissue was strong enough to nearly cauterize the blood vessels, which staunched the blood flow. As Brandt had said, it truly was as though a giant hand had come down and punched a cookie cutter into Jill Brannigan’s torso.

  Whatever it was, it was strong enough to cut through her spine in two places and her ribs, although what bones she had left in her midsection had been shattered by force. As Streeter studied the photos, what amazed him was the precision. Just as in the de Milo case, the killer was meticulous with each cut, careful not to damage any other part of the victims’ bodies. It made Streeter wonder if the killer was a surgeon, a welder, a butcher, or an expert in some other profession that demanded such precision. But he didn’t want to share his thoughts with Lisa Henry. Not until she had a chance to draw her own conclusions. Then they would talk, compare notes.

  “We have forensics trying to mimic the cut pattern and have been for the past nine months. No knife or saw-blade patterns we’ve tried can replicate the patterns in the de Milo case so far. They’ve even tried blow torches and saw blades,” Streeter answered.

  Henry added, “That means you’ve narrowed down the weapon to something unusual, which is bound to help you locate whoever made the purchase.”

  “If we ever figure out what it is that’s making the unusual cut pattern,”Streeter reminded her. “Look, let me send you these digitals so you can study them tonight. I’ll bring my files up and we can compare notes after we’ve drawn our own conclusions on this thing. I have enough that if you can compile some kind of profile for me by tomorrow night, I can fire a battery of questions your way so we can get this thing hemmed in.”

  “Shouldn’t be too tough since I have my profile from the de Milo case. I want to see if my conclusions for you on that case morph or focus any more clearly after tomorrow,” Henry said.

  “That’s what I was hoping,”Streeter confirmed. “Thanks, kiddo. I’ll see you at Brandt’s around eight.”

  Lisa came through the door and shrugged out of her jacket. “Brrr. I forgot how cold it gets here.”

  “It’s June.”

  “It’s cold.”

  I gave her a look. “You have forgotten, because Laramie is a helluva lot colder than it is here in Fort Collins. Don’t you remember stealing away on the weekends just to mall crawl or movie hop to warm up indoors? We used to think Fort Collins was like some tropical island for us compared to Siberia.”

  “We did have a tendency to exaggerate, didn’t we?” Lisa said, plopping beside me on the couch.

  I put my book down. “Exaggerate, my ass. During the five o’clock news, I saw where the high in Laramie today was fifty degrees compared to seventy here in Fort Collins. Can you imagine how cold it must have been six months ago?”

  Lisa shivered. “I used to schedule my classes according to where the underground tunnels reached and how far away the buildings were from the tunnels.”

  “No wonder you dropped the law dream. That building was a mile away,” I laughed.

  “With no tunnels.”

  Her words trailed and I could see that although she was trying to be relaxed, she was distracted by what she’d learned from her phone call. I wanted to give her the space she needed, but I was dying to know what she meant during our conversation just before she took the call.

  “Lisa, you said ‘yes and no’ when I asked you whether the other victims had been cut the same way Jill had been. Did you mean yes and no about this being the gruesome handiwork of a serial killer, but this might be a copycat, or did you mean yes you have a serial killer on your hands and no there is not more than one body with a chunk cut out of it?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lisa said, reading through the notes she had taken earlier in the day.

  “Which uh-huh?” I asked.

  “The second.”

  “So this is a serial killer, but the other murder or murders did not exactly match Jill’s?”

  “Right,” Lisa said. She peered over her notebook. “But remember, this is not for public consumption, Liv. You can’t be telling anyone what’s happening he
re.”

  “I won’t, Lisa. I know you don’t want to panic people or incite the media. Tabloidic journalism is already an epidemic,” I opined.

  “Tabloidic? Is that even a word?” Lisa grinned.

  “No. But it should be. Was it good news?” I pointed to her cell phone on the coffee table.

  “What? The call? Yeah, it was good news. The autopsy was done after you left, and Special Agent Pierce was giving me a brief update. He’s coming up tomorrow morning to spend the day.”

  I have no idea what overtook me in the moment, but I was struck with a brilliant idea that I would reflect on ruefully days later. “Well, since you don’t have a hotel room, do you guys want to use this house as your base camp?”

  “Headquarters, you mean?” Lisa said.

  “Why not? I’ll be at work all day, and I won’t bother you guys a bit. I can stay out of your way and simply need a place to crash each night and shower in the morning. Otherwise, I’ll just camp out at work.”

  Lisa laid her notebook on her lap. “You’d do that for us?”

  “For you, and for Jill. I don’t know these other guys.”

  “Thanks. We might take you up on that. I doubt it, though. We’re hoping to use Detective Brandt’s office as our makeshift headquarters, but it all depends on how dicey it gets with his boss.”

  “Chief of Police Mel Richardson?” I asked. “Of Fort Collins? Well then, I better go buy more coffee and food, because both your FBI asses will be kicked to the curb as soon as you pull jurisdiction,” I said.

  Lisa simply stared at me.

  “Control freak,” I explained. “Even Detective Brandt may need somewhere to light after your meeting in the morning. Invite him along too. Mi casa es su casa.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Like you said, some things never change.”