Trix

by Kate Morris

  Last night, I did not dream of the skinned rabbits. I dreamed of you, Detective Lorena Evans. I wondered what it would be like to make you submit to me, give yourself over completely, surrender and beg. I could break you. I know I could. I could dig around in your skull and pull out all your dark, twisted secrets.

  Then I wondered what you would look like without your skin. You also have lovely teeth. I think they are perfect enough that I could just take the whole set.

  Tell me your favorite breakfast cereal, and don’t lie. I will know if you do.

  Until we speak again, I will have to amuse myself with Hailee Neumann. She does not have the fire I see behind your hazel eyes, but she’ll have to do for now.

  P.S. I left you a gift down there by the river near Cathedral Park.

  “I’ll call Craig,” Jack said, going to the other room.

  Lorena felt flushed, hot and stifled. She followed Jack to the living room where he was already talking to Craig.

  He held up his finger to Lorena, “Don’t respond. They want to read it and respond for you.”

  She nodded, expecting as much. They could screw this up or help immensely. If they didn’t sound like her, Trix would know in a heartbeat. He didn’t know her personally, but he’d know the typical tone of the bureau’s robotic response if they did it wrong.

  Lorena crossed the room and went to the long row of tall windows to stare out at the water. She was completely unfamiliar with her surroundings and felt out of place. It was unsettling. To her left was another set of sliding glass doors. She slid it open and went out onto the dock and walked to the end. He had a great view. It was peaceful and quiet. The water around them was serene, and apparently, none of the people who owned boats and houseboats on this dock were either awake or even living in them. She figured they probably lived here only during the summer.

  “I told him we’d be right in,” Jack said behind her.

  Lorena nodded. “Okay.”

  “He’s also got us an appointment to talk to the other art dealer.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “You okay, partner?” he asked, coming closer.

  Lorena looked up at him and said, “Yeah, I’ll just be glad to catch this creep and get out of here.”

  “I know,” he said. “Don’t take any of that stuff to heart. He’s fixated on you, but it’s not like he could ever get anywhere close to you. You’re safe, and there’s no way he knows where you are.”

  Lorena nodded but couldn’t shake the feeling that Trix was going to sneak up behind her and place a ligature around her neck.

  “I’m sorry he found out about your parents. We need to work on burying that better.”

  “I did. Our Captain helped me, worked with the cyber department and we did bury it. Juliette found it and now so has Trix. It’s like my whole life, the parts of it that I don’t want anyone to know about is on display. Now everyone at the FBI office working this case will know about it, too.”

  “Don’t worry. I already talked to Craig about it. He’s gonna keep it on the down low.”

  “What’s it matter? If two people we’ve been trying to catch can find it, everyone can. Grace could.”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  She shook her head and said, “No, and I don’t ever want her to.”

  Jack nodded with sympathy. “Yeah. We’ve all got secrets we’d like to keep under wraps. We’ll get Craig working on burying this. He’s got access to the whole bureau. Someone surely has the ability to kill the story.”

  “Thanks,” she said and wrapped her arms around her middle with a shiver.

  “Nice sweatshirt,” he remarked, knowing she wanted the subject changed.

  Lorena looked down and blushed, “Oh, sorry. I got cold last night when I was working, so I saw this was on the couch where you left it. I didn’t want to wake you to get my own.”

  He chuckled and said, “It’s fine. I’m just giving you a hard time.”

  She glanced at him, noticed that he must’ve pulled on a t-shirt over his bare chest. Lorena quickly looked away. “Thanks.”

  She was hesitant to leave, and he must’ve picked up on it because Jack stood with her.

  “It’s really nice here,” she said.

  “Yeah, I liked it when I lived here,” he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “It was what I needed after my divorce.”

  Jack bent over and rested his elbows on the railing. He looked out at the water, as well.

  “Was it really stressful?” she asked, still curious about Jack’s past.

  He nodded. “Divorce? Stressful? Yeah, it was stressful. It was like waking up in a nightmare and not being able to get out of it.”

  “Did you leave her immediately?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I don’t think it’s something to take lightly when your spouse cheats on you. I quickly realized therapy wasn’t going to fix it anyway. I think the affair was going on for quite a long time, too. Or at least that’s the impression I got from Hailee during our chats. And from my own suspicions. I think I knew before I knew.”

  “How did she know Victor?”

  He sighed. “Honestly, she met him because of me. I had to go to a friend’s wedding. He worked in Vice. His fiancée worked in the D.A.’s office. It was one of those things where anywhere you looked at the reception, there were people you worked with. We ended up being seated at the same table as Victor and his wife. That was back when she was still alive.”

  “Why did your friend say that Elizabeth was ‘back’ like she’d gone somewhere?” Lorena asked, thinking of that first day they’d arrived in Portland.

  “They moved to California and lived there for a while. It was really quick after our divorce. Victor’s ambition brought them back here. Less competition for a coveted political position, I suppose.”

  That explained the pictures of Hailee on the beach with her friends.

  “How did his wife die?”

  “Freak accident,” he said. “They’d held a big party at their house, and after everyone left, she was tipsy- well, drunk and fell into the pool and drowned.”

  Lorena thought about this for a moment. “Was he having the affair with your wife at that time?”

  Jack squinted his eyes, bit his lower lip, and finally said, “We should get going. Craig’s waiting.”

  She swallowed hard and nodded. She’d touched on a sensitive nerve. Had he already speculated that Victor killed his wife so that he could be with Elizabeth? Discovering from Elizabeth’s bruises and also Hailee’s friend that Victor was abusing his family probably started that suspicion working in Jack’s mind, if he hadn’t thought this already. It certainly did set off alarms in hers the moment he said the cause of the first wife’s death.

  Within a few minutes, they were on their way to meet up with Craig. When they got there, Lorena could immediately tell that he’d slept at the office. Dark circles marked under his eyes, and his clothing was slightly rumpled. The whole team looked weary, exhausted, and sleep-deprived. A few men were standing in a circle in the corner of the room. They were all specialists in the fields of serial murderers and child abductions. She handed over her phone.

  “Has he called you yet or just the text? I didn’t see anything come across the trace,” Craig said, rubbing a hand over his weary face.

  “No, no phone contact,” Lorena told him.

  “We’ve got a team tracking the river to see what they can find over in Cathedral Park,” he said to Jack.

  “Hopefully they don’t find anything,” Jack replied, to which Craig nodded.

  “I’ll get this back to you in just a sec,” he said and left them.

  He returned a moment later and said, “Just my boss and one of the psych specialists are reading it. Don’t worry, Lorena. I know there were a lot of personal things in that text.”

  “Thanks.”

  He changed pace and said, “Jeremy Titus’s alibi checked out. He’s pretty much off the suspect list. I got our
background checks on the two art dealers. Harvey’s pretty clean other than suspected in a fraud case. It didn’t stick. He had a few minor run-ins when he was young but seemed to clean up his act. He never did time or anything, either. Moreti’s another story.”

  An agent came over to get Craig’s help with something, so he left them again.

  Jack touched her elbow, “I smell coffee.”

  He indicated another room, a conference room with a long table, and they went in. There was more than just carafes of coffee, platters of donuts and muffins, and a bowl of fruit. There was bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs and pancakes all along the back wall under covered silver serving trays. They helped themselves and waited in the room, taking seats. It was what she’d call a command center room filled with evidence and hypotheses taped and tacked to the walls and scattered on tables. It was all devoted to Trix. Lorena rose and walked the room, paper cup full of coffee and blueberry muffin in tow.

  Pictures of suspects covered the gray walls. Both of the art dealers that she and Jack suspected were also there, as well as Skylar’s father. There were maps with red ink circling areas, and red push pins marking sites where bodies were found. She was sure that after today, there’d be another red pin marking an area west of them in Cathedral Park. West.

  “Where’s my phone?” she blurted, interrupting Jack talking to one of the female agents about the case.

  “Craig took it, remember?”

  “Yeah, I need it,” she said and left to find Craig. Jack followed her.

  They tracked down Craig in another room close by, and Lorena snatched her phone out of the other agent’s hand.

  “Hey!” she said with irritation.

  “Give me a minute,” she said. “I’ll give it right back.”

  The agent started arguing, but Craig shut her down. Lorena scrolled the message from Trix and looked at the last sentence again.

  “Down there…he says ‘down there by the river’,” Lorena said, mostly talking to herself.

  “Yeah, so?” the agent said in a huff and crossed her arms.

  “He’s north of the city,” Lorena said.

  She said, “He could be anywhere. That doesn’t…”

  “No, he’s north. He drove down here last night and dumped the body so that he could taunt us with it. But he slipped up. He said that he left something ‘down there by the river’. Down meaning south. It’s how people express south. Like,” she said, air quoting, “I drove down to San Diego. I drove up to Seattle.”

  Their supervisor came forward and said, “She’s right.”

  The female agent seemed upset that her boss was taking Lorena’s side, but Lorena didn’t care. All she wanted was to solve this case and get Hailee back from this man alive.

  “I also think, sir, that it shows that he had more than one woman captured wherever he is.”

  Jack broke in and said, “Unless he has more than one place to keep them hidden, too. We could be looking for multiple locations.”

  She turned to her partner and said, “That’s a big risk. Two different locations to stash his victims, plus, we have to factor in drive time and keeping his day job and possibly a family. That’s a lot of running around.”

  “Could have his lair set up with more than one spot on site for multiple victims,” Jack thought aloud. “He could have two or three outbuildings. Didn’t I read that the one woman had frostbite on her toes, the beginning stages? That doesn’t happen post-mortem.”

  “She could’ve gotten away,” Lorena said to him and handed back the phone. She led Jack from the room and walked to the command center while continuing to talk. She wanted to look at that file again. “See here,” she said, indicating the lab work from the medical examiner’s notes. “The woman had a lot of dirt and debris under her nails, scratches and abrasions and even a stick in her hair. I just wonder if she got free somehow and managed to run for a while from him.”

  “That would explain why she had so many scratches. She looked like she ran through thickets and underbrush,” Jack noted, studying her photographs from the crime scene and then the coroner’s. “Plant residue in the report on her hands and feet.”

  “Right, she escaped. Probably at night. Took off running pell-mell. The scratching on this body does not match up with any other victim. The others were skinny, not well-fed at all, but they had the usual bruising and ligature marks around their wrists, ankles, and in some cases, their throats. This woman has many, tiny scratches. Her palms are scraped. Her feet must’ve been bare, although he still took the time to dress her in the end.”

  “She has multiple contusions and what looks like a very deep cut on her right foot,” Jack said, pointing to an autopsy picture. “She was running from him barefoot.”

  “Makes sense. He keeps them barefoot. This girl just figured out how to get away. She was smarter than the others. Allie Xiang, child prodigy violinist, turned stripper then homeless drug addict. This one was smart, though. She’d outthought him. She’d escaped.”

  “And she’d paid the price because he’d murdered her more brutally. She had stab wounds, not something we can see consistently in the other files. Most were just strangled. More personal.”

  “He’d also applied red lipstick to her lips. He was trying to show that this one was a whore, that she’d disgusted him more than the others.”

  “She only disgusted him,” Jack said, “because she was able to out-maneuver him and get away.”

  “Exactly. And her clothing wasn’t as virtuous as the others, either. The heels are sexy, not dowdy and old-fashioned. Her dress is a little dowdy like the others, but he left the top unbuttoned and her breasts completely exposed. He was displeased with her. She’d gotten away from him. He lost control of her and had to reclaim it, violently.”

  “And he lives north of the city out in the woods where nobody can see him do these things to these women, where they won’t be heard if they scream.”

  “And she got away from him.”

  “And it pissed him off enough to mutilate and then humiliate her, even though she was already dead.”

  Lorena turned to look for another file and noticed six agents, including Craig, his boss, and the woman who was upset that Lorena took the phone from her, standing in the conference room staring at them. Jack also turned.

  “You two just made more progress on this case in five minutes than we’ve made in almost a year,” the director said. “Give her back her phone. Let her respond to him without our assistance.”

  “Yes, sir,” Craig said, handing it back to Lorena.

  “Detectives,” he said to Jack and Lorena and turned to leave the room. Then he said to Craig, “Let me know if he makes additional contact.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lorena turned to Jack and said, “I need somewhere quiet where I can think.”

  “Let’s get out of here. Hey, Craig,” he said to their friend, who joined them. “We’ve got twenty minutes before we have to meet the art dealer, Harvey Phillips. I’ve got an idea.”

  They left the conference room with Craig on their heels. On the way back out to their SUV, Jack explained his plan.

  “Get your text together,” he said to Lorena. “Figure out what you want to say. We’ll send the text in the middle of the meeting. Craig, you could do that for us. Keep the phone hidden in your coat and hit send. We might get lucky, and this Harvey guy’s phone will beep a text alert. Even if he keeps it on silent mode, he’ll feel it vibrate. If it’s him, there’s no way he’s not going to at least take a peek. It would be too tempting, even for someone as in control as this freak.”

  “Good idea,” Craig said with a nod.

  They drove to the meeting place, Phillips’s warehouse where he stored art and artifacts. Craig drove them so that she and Jack could ride in the back seat and formulate a good text. She sent back:

  Dear Trix, it was good to hear from you again. I’m glad you understood the message I sent you on the news channel.

  “What ar
e you going to tell him about your favorite breakfast cereal, Evans?” Jack asked.

  They both knew that the cereal was code for worst, recurring nightmare. There was no way she wanted to share something so personal with this pervert, but she also didn’t want to lie. He was right. He would know if she was lying, and their correspondence would be over. She looked at Jack and shrugged.

  “It’s your call, chief,” he said. “Tell him something real or make it up and do it well enough that he can’t tell you’re lying. Just don’t go with a cliché.”

  Lorena frowned and nodded. She began typing.

  The only way I would ever tell you about my worst nightmare is in person. But I will tell you of another, recurring one. My sister was killed in a car crash by a man high on drugs. The dream is always the same, and I almost save her. I never do, though. I awaken with chills and tremors of an unrealized outcome that will never be.

  Craig’s phone rang in the front seat, “Yes, sir. Got it. We’ll head there next. Yes, she’s texting him now. I will. Yes, sir.”

  “What’s up?” Jack asked.

  “Found a body, damn it,” he said. “Finish your text, Lorena. We need to get this asshole interviewed and head to Cathedral Park.”

  Let’s play a different game. Let’s see if your high I.Q. can beat my 145. Give me clues as to who you are and let me see if I can find you, Tooth Fairy. Unless you are afraid I am smarter than you. Your friend, Lorena

  “Ready,” she said and gave the phone to Jack to review.

  “Risky. Taunting him? Think that’s a good idea?”

  Lorena shrugged and answered, “Not sure. I used the nickname the media assigned to him because I know it pisses him off. He wanted to give himself the name of Trix, and they took that away from him. If he’s smart, angry, and overly confident, he’ll take the bait.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  They arrived a few minutes later at the warehouse of the art dealer. Lorena sent the text first to Craig, who forwarded it to his boss, who then approved it. Then he took her phone and prepared to send it to their killer’s phone number during their interview.