by Blake Pierce
“Agent Lavoie, I’m given to understand,” Blackford said.
“Call me Nate,” Nate said, giving him that wide-toothed grin he often used when he needed to disarm someone. So, it wasn’t just Laura who had picked up on the mood.
“Alright, then,” Blackford said, gesturing towards the door, but declining the obvious move of using Nate’s first name right away. “We’re to head out to the coroner in your car, so I’m told.”
Nate did a good job of not batting an eyelid. Laura let her fingers curl tightly into a fist by her side, where she was turned slightly away from the Captain, so he couldn’t see it. Letting him bother them, and letting him know he’d bothered them, right out of the gate was not a good way to keep control of this relationship. It would give him a license to print money, as far as antagonizing them went.
“Let’s go,” Laura said, cocking her head towards the door. She led the way without hesitation, knowing as she always did that Nate had her back.
Well, usually always. The last couple of weeks had been tough.
But he was back on her side now, she knew.
They headed into the car, Blackford pointedly taking the passenger seat so that he at least wasn’t relegated to sitting in the back. He stretched out long legs in front of him, setting the seat back a couple of notches. Nate got into the back seat behind Laura without any comment, taking it mildly. He was good at that. Choosing his battles.
“So, what can you tell us about the first victim?” Laura asked, starting up the car and beginning to pull out of the weed-strewn lot.
“Another woman,” he said. “You got the victim profile in your briefing notes?”
Laura nodded, and Nate spoke up from the backseat where he had the notes beside him. “We looked them over on the journey here. From what we understand, we’re dealing with a couple of women, both in their mid-thirties and local to the Atlanta area. Beyond that, the similarities seem to end – one blonde, one brunette, no correlation in height or weight, working in different industries. Have you found any connections between them?”
“Not yet,” Blackford grunted. “It’s early days.”
“And the crime scene?” Laura prompted. She wanted to hear it from him. If he was determined to make it difficult, that was fine. She still had a job to do. She still needed to know.
“It was a boarded-up old gas station out on the outskirts of the city,” Blackford said. He was reclining almost lazily in his seat, one hand tilted up against the window, almost like he was pointing to the roof. A casual position, as if to tell them that he wasn’t at all intimidated by their presence. “No one around. It’s a whole abandoned area, just like this one. There’s supposedly a security guard, but they don’t patrol, and it turns out the cameras weren’t working on the stretch covering the road and the gas station itself.”
“Convenient,” Laura remarked. “Is this a recent development?”
Blackford shook his head. “Hard to say,” he replied. “The files aren’t preserved for long. Overwritten. Time we got to check them, everything was just blank. No way of knowing when that happened. Course, the security firm are claiming they knew nothing about it.”
“No backups, no records?” Laura asked.
“Nope.” Blackford tapped his knuckles against the glass of the window in a short, staccato pattern. “Ask me, the firm’s been ripping off the landowners. Not doing their jobs. What it boils down to for us is a whole lack of evidence when there could have been plenty available.”
“What about the victim?” Nate asked. “Our notes say she was found in pretty similar circumstances to the scene we’ve just left.”
“That’s right,” Blackford nodded. Laura noted that he seemed to hold the same level of disdain for both of them, from the tone of his voice and the way every word seemed forced. At least it was good to know he wasn’t just a misogynist, though it wasn’t much of an improvement. “She was strung up on a platform, same mechanism as the one you just saw. She had the clock round her neck and the ropes, all the rest of it. Looks as though the timer was set for twelve hours again, and went off at midnight.”
“How do you know the exact time of death?” Laura asked.
“The clocks stop when the timer hits zero,” Blackford said. After a brief pause, he shrugged. “Well, it could be the clocks weren’t accurate. But the coroner says the window for the time of death is around midnight. It stacks up. From what we can gather, the clock starts at exactly twelve noon and gives them twelve hours before they drop.”
“Why?” Laura said. It was the obvious question. More of a rhetorical one right now, but one they were going to have to answer if they were ever going to get to the bottom of this case. It was a huge part of the MO, and therefore clearly very important to the killer.
“Who knows?” Blackford shrugged. “Maybe the sick bastard just wants them to suffer. To know they’re going to die.”
“There’s no way for them to escape, you don’t think?” Nate asked. “It’s not some kind of sick test? Like those movies that were going around a few years back – trying to force them to do what it takes to survive?”
Blackford made a noise in the back of his throat. “You’ll see in a minute,” he says. “Pull in on the left here. This is the coroner’s office.”
His ominous words hung in Laura’s ears as she parked the car, feeling that crawling sensation on her skin that came with the knowledge she was about to go and purposefully look at a dead body.
There hadn’t been any photographs of this scene in their briefing notes. And she wondered, given Blackford’s hint, what exactly they were about to find.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Laura walked into the cold underground room first. It was like diving into the deep end of a pool. If you knew you were going to have to get wet, sometimes it was better to just get it over with and do it all at once. Not to linger back, dipping a toe first, letting others go ahead of you.
You had to take charge of your fear, put your head forwards, and just go.
The coroner turned out to be a middle-aged little man in a white coat with wiry hair, and a half-stooped back, no doubt from years of bending over corpses without proper posture correction. He turned as they entered, frowning at Laura but then brightening as soon as he saw Blackford.
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “You must be here to see the Marchall and Rowse bodies. I heard the FBI were being drafted in.”
Blackford had stepped forward, keeping level with Laura after passing through the doorway. She saw his jawline tense out of the corner of her eye. He really wasn’t happy with this, was he?
“Just show them the bodies, if you could, Jerry.”
Jerry did so, nodding rapidly like one of those nodding figurines people put in their cars. He led them over to the far side of the concrete and metal room, towards two steel tables which were covered with foreboding sheets.
It didn’t matter how many times you had to go into one of these chilled rooms, filled with bodies and silence. It was always creepy, every time. Sometimes even more so, when the coroner was weirdly cheerful and friendly – which, in Laura’s experience, a lot of them were.
But approaching those covered bodies, knowing you were going to have to take a very thorough look at what was under the sheets – there was nothing quite like it.
“This is our first victim,” Jerry was saying, gesturing to the furthest table. They all filed around it dutifully. Blackford held back a little, down by the feet, having clearly already seen what was to be seen. Jerry took up a position by the head, leaving Nate and Laura to gather side by side along the torso. “The cause of death was definitely hanging by the neck.” He flipped back the sheet with little ceremony, revealing the body of the woman who’d been listed in their briefing as Stephanie Marchall.
She was naked, already bearing the signs of several incisions that had been sewn back together. Her skin was sallow, almost a gray color, and her hair hung limp from the back of her head. Her eyes, thankfully, were closed.
Laura tried to flip that switch in her mind, going from looking at the woman as a dead human to seeing her as an object to be studied. It wasn’t always possible to do it completely, but keeping evidence at the forefront of her mind helped. She needed to gather as much information as possible from what she could see here, rather than letting emotion enter the picture. The dead faces would haunt her later, when she tried to sleep – but no more than her visions of the living ones already did.
There was no wonder she’d turned to drink in the past. No wonder that many law enforcement officials ended up going down that path. But someone had to look – because this woman, and all the others like her, deserved justice. And all the living ones – they deserved to be safe. Which meant looking at this body and finding the clues which would catch her killer.
“Looks like rope burns around the wrist and mouth,” Laura said. Her eyes traced the familiar patterns of bruising, red raw burns, and raised welts on the skin. It was clear that not only had the victim been tied up, but she had fought. Tried to free her wrists. It would have been immensely painful, judging by the raw skin left behind. In a few spots, it had even given way, leaving behind scratch-like cuts across the surface of the skin that would have been terribly painful if the victim had survived.
“Yes,” Jerry said, with the kind of methodical and professional tone that coroners often slipped into when describing all kinds of bodily injuries. As if he, too, knew how to flip off that switch and look at the body as an object instead of a person. “Judging by the impressions around the mouth in particular, I would suggest that the ropes were bound in place for a longer period of time before death took place. Hours, certainly.”
“How long?” Laura asked, glancing at him.
“Difficult to say exactly,” Jerry replied. “Though Captain Blackford here tells me that there was a stopped clock and a timer found at the scene. Twelve hours, wasn't that correct?”
“That's right,” Blackford replied laconically. “Techs have managed to take the clock apart, confirmed it was a twelve-hour timer.”
“So, in my professional opinion,” Jerry concluded. “The victim was bound and gagged on the platform for the full twelve hours before the hanging occurred. As for death, it would have been fairly instant. Her neck was snapped by the fall, which is exactly what you usually prefer when it comes to a hanging. She didn't even have time for strangulation.”
“Anything else to note, with this particular body?” Nate asked. Laura glanced at him and saw that he was keeping his eyes to certain spots on the body. Only looking at the hands, the neck and mouth, the legs. As if, even in death, he wanted to be respectful to the woman who had lost her life.
“Nothing affecting the case,” the coroner shrugged. “I can tell you that she ate a fruit salad for her last meal. Again, quite some time before her death. There were a few existing injuries, though nothing serious - a couple of minor bruises and a scratch across one knuckle. Upon examination, it does not appear to be connected to the case. I would say it happened a couple of days before.”
“What about the second victim?” Laura asked, turning a full one eighty degrees to look at the table behind them. Jerry took her cue, replacing the sheet over Stephanie Marchall's body before removing the one from over Veronica Rowse.
“We have a very similar story here,” he said. “I’m not seeing anything pre-existing that would have any bearing on the case, except for a small bruise to the back of the neck which could have taken place in the time before she was brought to the platform. Perhaps the day before, perhaps earlier that morning. It’s a little difficult to say, because of the burns left by the rope – they partially cover it, I’m afraid.”
Laura ran her eyes over the second body, trying to convince herself that it was easier the second time. It wasn’t. But she could at least pretend. “You’re thinking he may have knocked them unconscious before bringing them to the platform?” she asked.
“It would certainly make sense.” Jerry paused, cocking his head. “But I don’t want to give too many assumptions, here. It’s also possible that the women were tied up before being put into place. Perhaps threatened with a weapon if they didn’t comply, which would explain the lack of defensive wounds. He might have walked them right up there himself. I can’t say that I have the evidence present in the bodies before us to be able to tell you exactly how they arrived where they did.”
Laura nodded again. She appreciated the way Jerry spoke. He was very clear about what he did and did not know. That was helpful, as an investigator. It was good to discuss theories and whether they might be plausible, but equally good to know which ones were confirmed and which were just theories.
“What happened to her hand?” Nate asked.
Laura lifted her eyes to the other side of the body. She hadn’t even noticed it, until he’d said something. She’d been looking at the wrist closest to them, but the other one…
It was mangled. Beyond repair, certainly. Even if Veronica Rowse had been alive and breathing, she’d have needed a huge amount of medical help. Her skin was all but ripped away, leaving behind gouge marks over the surface of her thumb, wrist, and the back of her hand. Her fingers were clean but oddly bloodless, no doubt as a result of Jerry having cleaned away all of the blood that must have issued from such a wound.
“Well, I’m afraid it wasn’t a pretty end for her,” Jerry said, with a note of sympathy in his voice. “While Marchall fell and broke her neck immediately, Rowse did not. She appears to have managed to get a hand free before her death, though I don’t think it was very long before. If it had been a long while, she may well have suffered enough blood loss to die from that alone – or to tip herself off the edge of the platform when she fainted. Either way, we’d be looking at a different result. And the platform itself, while it did contain some significant blood spatter, was not bloodied enough to suggest that she was bleeding down onto it for long.”
“So, she was strangled to death by the rope?” Nate asked. His tone was low, sickened.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Jerry said. “It would have been a slow death by asphyxiation. She does appear to have emptied her bowels at the moment of death, and before we cut away her clothes and the rope, there was blood on the noose consistent with the shape of her fingers. My guess would be that she made a last-ditch, desperate attempt to get her hand free as the timer ticked down, partially degloving herself in the process. She then fumbled to get the rope from her neck but wasn’t able to make any significant impact before dropping. Unfortunately, her angle or perhaps the way her arms were braced prevented her neck from snapping, and there we have it.”
Laura suppressed a shudder. It was a gruesome way to go. In terrible pain, panicking, knowing that it was almost over and not being able to stop it. But at least she’d been able to fight until the end.
She reached for the sheet, as if she wanted to be respectful and cover up the suffering this woman had endured. But she had an ulterior motive, as Jerry reached to help her: she let her hand brush just lightly over Veronica Rowse’s wrist, the less injured one, right across the rope burn. A spot the killer must surely have touched while tying her up. She concentrated on the feel of the cool skin, and as a faint headache spiked in her forehead. she knew she’d managed it. She let the sheet drop quickly into place, not wanting to interrupt her own movement when she came back to –
She was looking ahead, but there was blackness all around her. It was like looking through a tunnel. Not being able to see anything beyond this small circular window onto the world, this tiny glimpse…
And the window – it was almost entirely filled by a clock.
Immediately, viscerally, Laura recognized it. It was the same kind of clock that had been used in both of the other crime scenes. She’d seen it in the photographs. An old-fashioned, circular, pale white clock face with black hands and Roman numerals, the kind that might have been a kitchen clock. Below it, a timer that was built into the same frame, allowing you to time your
dishes and ensure you never forgot to take anything out of the oven.
And yet, the timer itself was changed, updated, modified somehow. She’d seen those clocks, remembered one hanging on her grandmother’s wall, a place that filled her memory with the scent of freshly baked cherry pie. The timers on those clocks went up to an hour, no more. This one had obviously been removed and replaced with a more modern timer, something with a digital display.
There were hands in her vision, two of them. One steadied the clock, turned it as it caught a glint of the sun across the face. She saw a reflection of a window, a real window, with a blue sky beyond. There wasn’t much detail, though she strained to make it out – and then the clock shifted slightly, and the reflection was gone. Instead, she saw the other hand covering the timer. Tapping it.
The clock showed almost three. Three in the afternoon – it had to be. The sunshine precluded three in the morning.
And the hands holding the clock were shaking. Laura couldn’t see the timer properly, not the whole display, but she could see a second counter ticking downwards rapidly. Ticking someone’s life away.
They were already on a deadline.
Laura snapped out of the vision and back to herself, staring down at the freshly covered body on the table. She moved to cover her momentary lapse, as she always did, instinctively able to return to what she had been doing so as not to give away that anything was wrong.
“I think we’ve seen enough here,” Nate said, his voice a low rumble in the cold room, echoing slightly from the metal shelves that surrounded them. “Laura?”
“Yes, absolutely,” Laura nodded, her mind elsewhere. Twelve. That was what she had been unable to see. The timer must have been set for a certain hour, and twelve had come up four times now in the crime scenes. Both women were set on their respective platforms for twelve hours, it seemed, and both of them were on timers for twelve hours. From twelve noon to twelve midnight.