He had to dispose of T. Metcalf that morning, wanting to keep her a bit longer but unable to deal with the smell. It’s risky, dumping the body that way twice in a row, but it adds to his supernatural mystique. He’s looking forward to the headlines.
Charles sits on his basement floor amid the barrels of gasoline, and stares at the gory red spot where he violated the corpse only hours ago. Tomorrow he’ll have another one to take her place. Until then, he has more planning to do.
Jack is the cause of it.
He’s expected all along to attack the cop in charge of his case. But he’s dwelling on Jack more than he expected to.
Maybe the media is the cause of it, and all the attention he’s getting makes him want to show off. Television mocked him, now it fears him. Justice.
Or maybe, after weeks of scheming and plotting, the idea that Jack wants to stop him before he’s finished makes her just as bad as those whores who forced him to undertake this mission in the first place.
What is Jack doing now? How is the case progressing? Is she living in fear, worried she’ll be attacked again? Does she feel helpless and powerless? Is she angry because she can’t do anything to stop him?
Maybe he’ll give her a call and find out. It’s time to kick it up a notch, give her some personal treatment. She wants to go up against him? Fine. She’s going to regret that decision, for the rest of her life.
Which won’t be very long.
But why call, when he can drop by? After all, he knows where she lives.
The Gingerbread Man closes his eyes and begins to plan.
Chapter 16
I WOUND UP TAKING A NAP, which was a mixed blessing. It refreshed me somewhat, and gave me some much-needed rest, but when my eyes opened, it was only five o’clock in the evening and I knew I’d never get to sleep come bedtime.
So I smoothed the wrinkles from my suit, took some pain medication and some cold medication, and went back to the only office in the city that never closed.
Herb was gone when I arrived, home with his wife and his life, work no longer on his mind. The ME’s report was waiting for me on my desk, another rush job courtesy of the mayor’s office, and I took a sip from my vending machine coffee and sat down to peruse the atrocities inflicted on another poor girl.
The first bit of news that leaped out at me was the time of death. The ME placed it at about seven P.M. the previous night. The killer had kept the body around for a lot longer than he’d kept the first one.
He’d hurt this one a lot more as well. This girl had thirty-seven wounds of various lengths and depths, but the ME indicated that several of the wounds had been reopened. Microscopic steel fragments matched those from the previous vic, indicating the same knife had been used. Histamine levels, coupled with a partially bitten-off tongue and the fingernail marks on the palms that Hughes pointed out, indicated they were premortem. She’d been tortured, the ME estimated for as long as four hours.
Death was caused by massive blood loss. Hopefully shock had spared her some pain. There were fibers found in wounds on her wrists and ankles, twine once again.
She was missing all of her toes, her labia minora and majora, four fingers, and both ears. None of them were recovered. No semen was found, but the obvious sexual nature of the crime inferred that rape might have occurred, and the perp either pulled out or used a condom.
Her urine contained traces of sodium secobarbital, the needle puncture mark on her upper left arm.
No identification was found, and the girl was officially dubbed Jane Doe #2. An expert mortician worked on her face and hair for almost two hours to make it appear as lifelike as possible. Then a digital photograph was taken, and the eyes were electronically drawn in on a computer.
This restruct picture was given to the media in time for the six o’clock news, along with a similar photo of the first Jane Doe. If anyone knew either girl, or had any information related to the case, they were asked to call the task force number. Herb had set up a unit of six desk officers to field calls, all of whom had been sufficiently briefed on the case to be able to weed out the crackpots and thrill-seekers.
The second note had been written in the same ink, on the same paper. No prints, hairs, or fibers were found on the note.
The two 7-Elevens were eight blocks apart. I thought about putting plainclothes cops on stakeouts of every convenience store in Chicago, but we would have needed five hundred people to cover the hundred-plus stores around the clock. Instead I put teams on the fifteen stores within a twenty-block radius of the first crime scene, and then drafted a flier to hand out. It told convenience store employees to keep their eyes out for anyone trying to steal garbage cans, drop off garbage cans, or fake a seizure in their shops.
After drawing up the letter, I called down to the desk sergeant and had her round up all the uniforms in the building. The night shift was treated to the same video of the Alka-Seltzer kid as the day shift, with similar results. No one recognized the suspect or the MO.
I hadn’t even hit a third of the cops in the district yet, but my optimism was beginning to sag. Mug shots were now filed on computer rather than in books, and I did a quick search of young white male shoplifters and came up with more than eight thousand hits. Even with help it would take a zillion years.
I took a deep breath and let it out slow. If there was any connective tissue between what we had so far and our perp, I was too dense to see it. I was no closer to catching this guy than the day I’d taken the case.
I put in the videotape of the second crime scene and viewed it, seeing for the first time Benedict remove the note from the body, which had been stapled to Jane Doe #2’s buttocks. After that it only got grimmer, made even worse because the picture quality was so good.
The first crime scene was videotaped at night while raining, by someone who had problems differentiating between focus and zoom. This video was clean, clear, and in your face. When the tape ended I had no desire to watch it again right away.
But I did watch it again. And again after that, numbing myself to the gore and trying to find something, anything, that might give me a clue.
During the fifth or sixth viewing, my mind began to wander. Was this how I was destined to spend the rest of my life? Benedict was home right now, with his wife. Maybe they were watching TV together, or making love. Or, most likely, eating. But whatever they were doing, it was together. They were sharing their lives. I was here, alone, watching the end of someone else’s.
So what’s the alternative? Go home, clean myself up, and hit the bars? Sure, I could let myself get picked up, kill the lonelies for a night. But I needed something more substantial than a quick, informal lay.
What I needed, what I’ve been missing for damn near fifteen years, was to be in love. And I didn’t think I’d find it at the bars.
I thought, wistfully, about my ex-husband, Alan.
Alan was something special, that one-in-a-million guy who liked holding hands and sending flowers. He rarely lost his temper, was a whiz in the kitchen, and loved me so completely that I was never cold, even during the brutal Chicago winter.
I take full responsibility for ruining our marriage.
I met him on the job, back in the days when I walked a beat. He came up to me on the street, told me someone had lifted his wallet. I couldn’t say he was especially handsome, but he had the kindest eyes I’d ever seen.
We dated for six months before he proposed.
In the beginning, our marriage was great. Alan was a freelance artist, so he was able to make his own schedule, ensuring that we always had time to be together.
Until my promotion to the Violent Crimes Unit.
Prior to this, Alan and I had planned to have children. We were going to have a boy named Jay and a girl named Melody, and buy a house with a big backyard, in a good school district.
But much as I wanted that, I also wanted a career. Maternity leave meant time away from work, and a newly ranked detective third class needed collars to m
ake second grade.
My work week jumped from forty hours to sixty.
Alan was patient. He understood my ambition. He tried to wait until I was ready. Then a major career setback forced me to spend even more time on the job.
Alan left me a week before I made detective second. That was also the week my insomnia started.
I buried the memories. Regret wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Only one thing would.
I picked up the phone, put it back down, and picked it up again. Swallowing what little pride I had left was harder than I thought, but I managed. The taxpayers financed a call to Information, and ten seconds later I was dialing Lunch Mates, hoping they’d be closed at this hour.
“Thanks for calling Lunch Mates. This is Sheila, how may I help you?”
Her voice was so buoyantly optimistic that I felt a wee bit better about my decision to call a dating service.
“I guess I wanted to make an appointment, or schedule a visit. I didn’t really expect you to still be open.”
“We have late hours. After all, human relationships don’t just run from nine to five. May I have your name, miss?”
“Jacqueline Daniels. Jack, for short.”
She tittered politely. “Wonderful name. Your occupation, please?”
“Police officer.”
“We have many clients in the law enforcement field. Were you looking for a match also within the department?”
“Christ, no . . . I mean . . .”
“No problem. It’s hard to date in the same profession. That’s why all those famous actors and actresses are always getting divorced. Sexual orientation?”
“Pardon me?”
“Are you looking to meet a man or a woman?”
“A man.”
“Wonderful. We have many good men to choose from.”
Her ability to put people at ease probably made all the losers she dealt with feel a lot better about themselves. It was sure working with me.
“Are you free at any time soon to come in for an orientation?”
“Yeah, uh, maybe tomorrow? Lunchtime, if possible?”
“How about twelve o’clock?”
“Fine.”
She gave me directions, we made a little more small talk, and she’d bolstered my ego enough to make me feel good about hiring a service to find men because I was too incompetent to find one on my own.
“See you tomorrow at noon, Ms. Daniels. We’ll get all of your information then, along with giving you an overview of our company. We’ll also be taking a picture of you. You’re free to bring in any pictures of yourself, if you’d like.”
Other than my driver’s license, I didn’t think I had any pictures of myself.
“Will there be a videotape?”
More musical laughter. “Oh, no. We don’t make videos of our clients. We simply get to know them, then come up with likely matches to meet for lunch. We have thirty-five agents here, and each handles between fifty to a hundred clients. Our agents set up lunch dates within their own client list. If they go through their whole list without a suitable match, the client is given to another agent.”
That sounded like being the last kid picked for a backyard football game. I could picture some poor fat girl being traded from agent to agent every month, and the image made me wince.
“Well, I’ll see you soon then.”
“Good evening, Ms. Daniels.”
I hung up, my confidence still high. Then I realized I’d forgotten to ask about the cost of this service. That helped kill the optimism buzz.
I knew an ex-cop who used an expression whenever something bad happened. He was a real creep, but as the years passed I’ve come to respect the honesty of his words. Whenever he’d failed a test, or gotten a reprimand, he always said, “It’s just one more layer on the shit cake.”
With all the layers I’d built up over my life, I suppose one more didn’t matter too much.
The phone rang, and I slapped the receiver to my face.
“Jack? I was wondering if you’d still be there.”
It was the assistant ME, Dr. Phil Blasky. He was one of the best in the business, we used him on practically every high-profile case. In person, he was a thin bald man with an egg-shaped head, but his voice was a rich opera baritone, similar to that of James Earl Jones.
“Hi, Phil. Looks like we’re both burning the midnight oil.”
“You’ve gotten the second Jane Doe reports? I messengered them over.”
“Just reviewed them. I guess the mayor is pressuring you folks as much as us.”
“Jack . . .” Phil’s voice dropped an octave, which made it low enough to rattle teeth. “I’ve been working late to investigate that lead Bains told me about. Checking the bodies for anything hidden in them. I found something in the stab wound of the second Jane Doe, and then went back to the first one and found the same thing.”
“What?”
Phil took a breath. “It’s semen, Jack.”
“Pardon me?”
“The guy’s sperm. I found it in the deepest stab wound on each victim. Got a chemical hit while swabbing them out. I never would have found it if I hadn’t been told to look.”
I let this sink in. “You mean he raped the stab wounds?”
“The wounds have some tearing along the edges, so that’s a good assumption.”
“While they were still alive?”
“We’re not sure. But there’s a possibility of it, yes.”
“Where?” I had to ask.
“Both of them in the stomach.”
“Can we type him?”
“The lab is trying now. But that’s a long shot. It’s mixed in with a lot of blood, and has been decomposing for days.”
This was the present he said he’d left me. Jesus.
“Thanks, Phil.”
“Catch this psycho, Jack.”
Phil ended the call.
I gripped the phone until that annoying off-the-hook signal came on and reminded me to hang up. The images swirling around in my brain were almost too horrible to imagine.
I’d been stabbed once, years ago, by a gang-banger with a switch blade. Knife went into my belly. I had minor surgery to stop the bleeding, was off my feet for a month. The pain had been one of the worst I’d ever experienced, a combination of a cramp, an ulcer, and a third-degree burn. The thought of a man violating that wound . . .
I shuddered. Then I got up and rewound the crime scene tape to watch for the umpteenth time, my determination fiercer than ever.
Chapter 17
HE CALLS FIRST, FROM A PAY phone a block away. A machine answers. Perfect. He drops the receiver, not bothering to hang it up, and walks over to the front door of Jack’s apartment building.
With a discreet look in either direction, he begins to press buzzers. On the eighth button he gets someone on the intercom.
“I’m from Booker’s Heating and Cooling. Here to look at the furnace.”
He’s buzzed in.
It’s an old building, straight middle class. The halls are clean and recently painted, but there’s no doorman, no security camera, and the lighting is low wattage to save the landlord on his electric bill.
It can’t get any easier.
Jack lives on the third floor, apartment 302. He takes the stairs, reasoning he’s less likely to encounter someone in the stairwell than on the elevator. But even if he does, he’s dressed for the part; a stained brown jumpsuit, a toolbox, and a name tag that reads “Marvin.”
The Gingerbread Man makes it to Jack’s floor without seeing a soul. The hallway extends out in either direction in an L shape, and he easily locates the right apartment.
He knocks on it softly. There’s always the chance that Jack is home and just didn’t pick up her phone. There’s also the possibility that she has a dog. Knocking should make the dog bark, unless it’s very well trained.
But no one answers, and nothing barks. He takes a thin billfold out of his back pocket and opens it up, selecting an appro
priate tension wrench and lock pick.
Foreplay.
Opening deadbolts is almost as easy as opening car doors. He has the penal system to thank. He went to jail on a B&E charge. Even though he had killed before, he was naive in the ways of properly committing a crime. Prison turned out to be the perfect school for honing his skills.
It takes him forty seconds to knock back the tumblers. The deadbolt turns with a satisfying snick, and the Gingerbread Man enters the home of the cop assigned to catch him. He locks the door and looks around.
It’s perfect. No dog, no witnesses, and Jack has even been good enough to leave the lights on for him. He tugs on his latex gloves and giggles. Now for phase two of the plan.
He does a quick tour of the apartment, not knowing how much time he has until she gets home. It doesn’t take long to deduce the bedroom closet is the best hiding place. It’s roomy, has a hamper that he can sit on, and is only a few steps away from the bed. Plus, there’s no window in the bedroom, no chance of anyone looking in. He gets to work.
Opening his aluminum toolbox, he takes out the rechargeable drill and a quarter-inch bit. He makes a hole in the closet door about three feet from the floor. Then he rubs off the splinters on both sides with a small file, and uses a roll of duct tape to pick up all the sawdust on the carpet. Next he sprays some WD-40 on the closet hinges, until it opens and closes as silent as death.
Satisfied with the setup, he goes to the bathroom and empties his bladder.
He enters the closet and shuts the door behind him. The adrenaline is pumping like hot oil through his veins. Sitting on the hamper, he has a perfect view of Jack’s bed from the hole in the closet door. He removes the gun from the bag, an old .22 with the serial numbers filed off, and practices opening the door and creeping up to the bed.
On the third try he’s confident he can sneak up to the sleeping lieutenant without making a sound.
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