by Steven James
There are only four ways to poison someone—inhalation, ingestion, injection, and absorption—so I asked Cheyenne, “Do we know how it was administered?”
“Injected. Potassium chloride.”
“So,” I mumbled, “they found an overage of intravascular potassium without potassium in the vitreous humor.” It was more of an observation than a question.
She looked at me quizzically. “How did you know?”
“It’s a big clue that points to potassium chloride. But also, an obvious one. The killer must have known we’d find it.”
“You think? I wouldn’t suspect many killers would know something like that.”
“This guy would. He wants us on his tail.”
“How do you know he didn’t just make a mistake?”
“Like you said in the mine the other day: it’s about leaving a message. He’s not trying to cover his tracks, he’s purposely choosing to leave them.”
She took her time before replying. “One more thing. It was only one woman at the Cherry Creek Reservoir.”
“At least that’s one bit of good news.”
Cheyenne was silent for a moment and seemed to be deep in thought, then she said softly, “A ten-year-old girl found the body parts before the killer phoned in the location.”
I felt my throat tighten. And deep inside of me, in the place that matters most, I vowed to get this guy.
I opened the folder and began to scrutinize the files.
19
6:45 a.m.
Tessa would have slept in for at least another two hours if Dora’s stupid alarm hadn’t gone off.
When Dora just rolled over and ignored it, Tessa turned it off herself, then flopped back onto the trundle bed and stared at Dora’s desk. Her computer. The wall.
Dora’s breathing became steady again.
Over the past few months her friend hadn’t been getting nearly enough rest.
So Tessa let her sleep. She needed it.
Last winter, Dora’s parents had gone on a double date with one of her dad’s friends, Lieutenant Mason, and his wife. The girl who was babysitting the Masons’ baby texted Dora to find out when everyone was supposed to get back and Dora had replied to the text message. While they were texting back and forth the babysitter left the baby alone in the tub. And the little girl had slipped under the water.
Thinking about it still brought Tessa chills.
Only a few people knew that it was Dora who’d been texting Melissa, and as far as Tessa knew, she was the only person Dora had talked to about it. “If I hadn’t been texting her,” she’d told Tessa one time, “Melissa would have been paying attention to the baby.”
“That’s stupid,” Tessa had said. “It’s not your fault.” But it hadn’t helped. Nothing she’d said had done any good, so finally she just didn’t bring it up anymore.
For a while Tessa lay watching the screen saver on Dora’s computer scroll through pictures of her family. Tessa had never had two parents around, except, sort of, if you counted the couple of months before her mom died when Patrick was with them.
And all that made it hard to look at the pictures of Dora with her two happy parents.
Tessa picked up her cell, opened the photo suite, tapped to the cover flow view, and flipped through pics of her mom, hoping it might make her feel better, but it did just the opposite. Eventually, she put the phone down, rolled over, stared at the wall, and waited for her friend to wake up.
Cheyenne was quiet as we drove toward Sebastian Taylor’s house, and I appreciated the silence because it gave me a chance to review the case files in depth.
The candles surrounding Heather’s body were Chantels, a brand carried by nearly all candle and department stores; so trying to track down the purchaser was probably a dead end.
In addition, the recording device could have been purchased at any electronics store, so—just like the candles, almost impossible to track. No prints on the candles or the device.
The forensics team had been able to determine that the candles had been burning for nearly two hours.
The time gap between when the candles were lit and the anonymous tip was phoned in would have given the killer enough time to drive almost anywhere in the Denver metroplex.
The anonymous tip on Friday, the one reporting the location of Sebastian Taylor and Brigitte Marcello’s bodies, had been placed while I was in the courthouse.
Emergency Medical Services hadn’t been able to track the locations from which either of the calls were made.
The case files included transcripts of both anonymous 911 calls, and in both cases, the caller had said something that caught my at-tention: “Dusk is coming. Day four ends on Wednesday.”
The repeated phrases conclusively linked the double homicides on Thursday and Friday, and also sparked my curiosity.
Dusk is coming . . .
Day four ends on Wednesday . . .
Dusk . . . A metaphor for death? A deadline?
Day four . . . Days of the month? The length of the crime spree?
Days of creation, maybe? What did the Bible say God created on day four? Maybe something to do with that?
I didn’t know. Something to look into.
As I mulled things over, I paged to the information about the murders at Sebastian Taylor’s house.
He owned a high-end security system with five video surveillance cameras, three of which had been disabled. The other two only showed brief glimpses of a medium-built man in a ski mask.
And the killer had made it personal once again: he’d left a note for me on the workbench in Sebastian Taylor’s garage: “Shade won’t be bothering you anymore, Agent Bowers.” So the killer knew that Taylor called himself Shade, and he knew that Taylor had been sending me messages.
But how? None of that’s been released to the public. And how did he find Taylor?
I flipped the page.
After murdering them, the killer had transported Brigitte’s body parts to the lake but left Sebastian Taylor’s body in the garage. And, although on a personal level the scenario disturbed me deeply, on a professional level it intrigued me.
Typically, killers only transport body parts to dispose of them or take them home as souvenirs. So why leave one body at the house and transport the other across town and then leave it at a public beach?
I considered this: based on the two messages he’d left for me, the murderer knew who I was, knew I’d be at the crime scene Thursday afternoon, and knew I would be testifying in Chicago. So it was likely he also knew about my work.
If that were the case, he was either very stupid—leaving me so many locations, the combination of which would help me track him down. Or he was very smart—perhaps choosing the abandoned mine and the public beach for no other reason than to misdirect the investigation.
And since he’d been able to locate Sebastian Taylor, something no other law enforcement agency in the country had been able to do, I did not think this killer was stupid.
No, not at all.
As Cheyenne wound the car higher into the mountains toward Taylor’s house, I finished my coffee and realized that if she were to decide to try hers later, it wouldn’t be fresh anymore and consequently she wouldn’t enjoy it and might never fall in love with the world’s perfect beverage. So, as a favor to her, I drank hers too.
“We should be there in about ten minutes,” she said.
I turned to the list of possible suspects.
Tessa heard Dora stirring on the bed but waited to see if she was ready to get up.
Her friend’s real name was actually Pandora, but she didn’t like being constantly reminded of the story about the girl opening the box and unleashing all of the evil in the world—not exactly the coolest legacy to have. So pretty much everyone just called her Dora.
She had cinnamon hair, shy, brown-black eyes, and a sort of normal, easily forgettable face. The two girls had totally connected the first time they met, even though they had, like, nothing in common.
Oh: except that since Dora’s dad was the medical examiner, both of their dads dealt with dead bodies all the time.
So at least there was that.
Finally Dora leaned over the edge of the bed. “Tessa, you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sleep OK?”
“Yeah. You?”
A pause and then, “I kept waking up thinking about . . . you know.”
“Yeah.” Tessa tried to think of something that would get Dora’s mind off the baby’s death. “Hey, I heard about this cool new Syrup Dive video. We should check it out.”
Dora looked at her quizzically. “I thought you hated Syrup Dive? You told me their music was pangelo . . .”
“Panglossian.” Tessa shrugged. “Well, maybe I changed my mind. C’mon, I hear the video’s sweet.”
And so, even though Tessa really did think Syrup Dive’s music was naively optimistic—she went to Dora’s computer and mouse-clicked to YouTube.
Added advantage: you don’t have to keep seeing pics of Dora’s smiling parents pop up.
“Panglossian.” Dora swung her feet to the floor. “That Greek?”
“Latin. I never studied Greek. Just Latin. And a little French.”
Dora joined her beside the computer. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
“I can’t figure out why I don’t laugh when I tickle myself.”
She found the video.
“And,” her friend said, “my story, Pandora’s Box. You don’t know that. I still can’t believe you never actually read it. Considering how much you read.”
Tessa had never been all that into Greek myths. “I think I know it pretty well: Pandora was curious. She opened the box and out came all the pain and pestilence and disease of the world.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all.” Dora yawned. “It has a surprise ending.”
“I’ll check it out this week. I promise.”
And then she pressed “play.”
I had just finished Cheyenne’s coffee and was about two-thirds of the way through the case files when she broke the silence. “We’re here.”
Looking up from the papers I saw that we were turning onto the long, sloping gravel driveway that led to Sebastian Taylor’s house.
20
Taylor had chosen to live on a dead-end road, which seemed tragically ironic to me, considering the circumstances.
Rustic, yet sophisticated, the amber and tan house wasn’t pretentious enough to attract undue attention but still spoke of wealth and affluence just as I’m sure Taylor wanted it to.
In addition to Brigitte Marcello’s car, which still sat in the driveway, two cruisers and two civilian cars, including Kurt’s, were parked outside the house.
After taking a moment to show our IDs to the half-asleep officer standing guard, Cheyenne and I stepped into Sebastian Taylor’s living room.
Lush carpet. Leather furniture. Civil War paraphernalia. Nouveau paintings that must have cost a fortune. I noted that the walls contained no pictures of either of Taylor’s ex-wives or any of his four children, and none of this surprised me. A well-stocked liquor cabinet sat near the door to the dining room.
One of the officers from the crime scene unit was dusting for prints in the dining room, and I figured the other CSU members were probably in the garage, where the murders occurred. When I’m working a case I typically carry a pair of latex gloves in the back pocket of my jeans, but there were already extras waiting for us on the coffee table, so Cheyenne and I snapped them on. “Let’s start upstairs,” she said.
I nodded and we ascended.
Halfway up the steps she cleared her throat slightly. “You’ve been awfully quiet since we left your house, Pat. What’s going on in that mind of yours?”
I took a second to collect my thoughts, then said, “In fifteen years as an investigator I’ve never come across a double homicide in which the killer dismembered two victims, then transported one of them to a secondary scene where it would be easily located and identified within hours.”
“True,” she said thoughtfully. “Typically, he would have left them both or taken them both.”
We reached the landing. “Exactly.”
The upstairs of Taylor’s house was small. Just a master bedroom with an attached bathroom, a spare bedroom that he’d left completely empty, a common bathroom, and a landing which he’d turned into a computer workspace. Both the hallway and the bedrooms were decorated with earth tones that were carefully coordinated to match the carpeting.
She led the way to the master bedroom. “What do you think the killer was trying to tell us by transporting only one body?”
“I don’t know what he was trying to tell us,” I said. “But considering the facts so far, he has managed to tell me one thing.”
“What’s that?”
The master bedroom’s carpet was freshly vacuumed, probably by the CSU searching for trace evidence. The room looked pristine, nothing out of place.
“That he’s unique in the way he thinks.” I knelt and scanned beneath the bed. Found nothing. Stood and glanced at her.
“In other words,” she said. “Hard to pigeonhole.”
“Seems to be going around.”
“Makes me think of something I once read: it is essential for an investigator to understand his opponent’s intellect, training, and aptitude and then respond accordingly.”
I paused. “My article last month.”
“Yes. It was one of your better ones this year.” Her eyes became careful planets orbiting the room in precise symmetry. Occasion ally, she would move her lips slightly but then furrow her eyes and shake her head slightly as if she were having a quiet discourse with herself. “I didn’t agree with all your conclusions, but I did agree with the section about not expecting a person of inferior or superior intellect to act in conventional ways.”
We entered the bathroom.
“Well, that’s the one part I can’t take credit for.” Shaving cream and a razor lay on the counter. A laundry bin sat in the corner. I lifted the washcloth that was lying on top and gently held it against my cheek. Still slightly damp. “It’s not a direct quote, but the concept comes from C. Auguste Dupin’s approach in ‘The Purloined Letter.’ I credited him in the endnotes.”
“I know,” she said. “I read them.”
Now this was my kind of woman.
I knew from the case files that the crime scene unit had found strands of Taylor’s hair in the shower drain. I saw nothing else of note in the shower area.
“But,” she said, “I was surprised you’d cite a fictional story.”
“Well, my daughter—that is, stepdaughter—she’s a big fan of Poe. She convinced me to read three of his detective stories. Not bad, actually.”
“I’ll have to check them out.”
We took our time exploring the upstairs rooms, then headed to the first floor where we found Lieutenant Kurt Mason sending one of the members of his crime scene unit to examine Brigitte’s car.
As he left, Cheyenne approached Taylor’s liquor cabinet and pointed to a half-empty wine bottle. “Brunello di Montalcino, 1997. Nice. This man knew his wine.” She gestured toward the array of bottles. “But, there’s an awful lot of pretty potent stuff there. You think he had a drinking problem?”
Kurt shook his head. “Someone with a drinking problem doesn’t leave half-empty bottles sitting around, or keep a shelf full of booze out in the open. He hides the bottles in the cupboard, under the bed, in the closet.” Whether or not Kurt realized it, his voice was becoming softer with each word. He knelt and peered through a bottle of vodka. “No. Taylor didn’t have a problem. He had a hobby.”
Cheyenne and I exchanged glances. I was pretty sure Kurt didn’t drink, but I knew that his wife Cheryl had picked up the habit after their baby daughter’s death last winter. And, despite all the times I’d visited their home since he invited me to join the task force last January, I’d never seen any half-empty bottles lying around.
Time to change the subject.
“Prints and DNA,” I said. “Anything yet?”
Kurt stood, shook his head. “Not a thing.”
I looked in the kitchen trash can: a granola cereal box, a few crumpled napkins, orange peels. Closed the lid. “Listen, I’ve been thinking we should take a closer look at the victimology.”
Cheyenne spoke, mirroring my thoughts. “The more you know about the victims’ lifestyle, history, and habits, the more you’ll know about the killer.”
“Yes.” She’d obviously read one of my articles from last year too. Impressive. “How is he choosing them? Where did his life intersect with theirs? Let’s go deeper. Not just the typical things like acquaintances, place of employment, home address, club memberships. I want to know what route our victims took to work, where they rented their videos, where they bought their gas.”
I realized I was giving orders and caught myself. “I’m sorry. I mean, that’s the approach I think we should take.”
“We’ll get Robinson and Kipler on it,” Kurt said. He didn’t seem bothered by my tone.
“I need to talk to Kipler anyway,” Cheyenne interjected. “I’ll give them a call.” She pulled out her cell and stepped into the dining room.
When she was gone Kurt glanced at the door at the far end of the kitchen. “Have you seen the garage?”
“Not yet.”
“C’mon. It’s time you had a look.”
21
Taylor’s garage was a brightly lit sanctum for his freshly waxed Lexus SUV, which sat perfectly centered between the walls. A workbench skirted the west side. The room appeared spotless except for the wide, angular swathe of blood where the killer had done his work.
Most of the evidence had already been removed from the garage and taken to the lab, including the ropes that had bound Taylor, the gag, and his corpse itself; but the manila envelope with the killer’s handwritten message to me was still lying on the workbench: “Shade won’t be bothering you anymore, Agent Bowers.”