by Rick Reed
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Alaina Kusta was a civil lawyer. Her office was the front room of her tiny house near Garvin Park. She owned a red Mazda Miata with vanity plates that read: SOSUEME. A civil attorney with a sense of humor, Jack thought as he and Liddell watched the little red sports car being loaded onto the back of a flatbed wrecker.
The killing was macabre. Doubly so because Alaina was murdered in the middle of a busy shopping mall parking lot, and in broad daylight. Despite all the people walking to and from their cars, no one had witnessed the vicious attack—at least, no one willing to stick around and talk to police. Nor did the video cameras that covered every inch of space inside Eastland Mall prove of any help. They posted very few cameras outside, and not a one covered the parking lot where the murder had taken place.
Blood was smeared down the driver’s side of the car, and a small amount had pooled on the parking lot. Dumped unceremoniously beside the car was the naked body of the woman. Long, deep gashes and cuts covered almost every square inch of her flesh. Her throat was cut so deeply, it almost severed her head from her body. The registration in the car matched the driver’s license in the purse near the body. Alaina Kusta had purchases from J. C. Penney, Foot-Smart, and Macy’s, still in their bags, some in the front seat, some on the ground beside the body.
The young security guard who had found the body was so shocked by the sight that an ambulance had to be called. Jack had tried to talk to him, but he was goofy from the tranquilizers the EMTs had administered.
“She was attacked beside her car,” Sergeant Walker said, “but she didn’t get those injuries there.”
“What do you think?” Liddell asked.
Sergeant Walker pointed at the pool of blood. “We found cast-off blood patterns on the driver’s window of the car, so she was attacked right here. But there isn’t enough blood on the ground to explain all the wounds on the body.”
He turned in a circle. “I think she was struck once or twice,” he said, mimicking the attacker wielding a blade over his head and striking downward. “She was stunned, reached out to her car, and slid to the ground. The killer must have put her in a vehicle or something to finish the job. When she was dead, he dumped her corpse beside her car.”
“A vehicle where he could finish cutting her up. Maybe a trailer or a van,” Jack offered.
“Yeah,” Walker said. “That would explain the blood here.” He pointed the flashlight. “This looks like blood was dripping straight down from the side of something. See how it’s almost in a straight line. If we’re right, there’s one hell of a mess inside that vehicle.”
Jack eyed the sprawled body, obscene in its nakedness. “Where are her clothes?” he asked. “Anything taken from her car?”
“We haven’t found her clothes,” Walker said.
“I’ll run her license plate and have a uniformed car secure her house.”
Walker rubbed the back of his neck, and his face was gray with weariness. “What the hell is going on here, Jack?”
The clerk in the Records Unit took Jack’s call and handed the phone to Jansen.
“Larry, I need you to find anything you can on a woman named Alaina Kusta. She was an attorney.”
“Was?” Jansen asked.
“She’s the body that was found at Eastland Mall,” Jack explained.
“Call you right back,” Jansen said, and broke the connection.
“Jansen?” Liddell asked when Jack hit the end button.
“He’s still working with us. He’s in Records.”
“I guess Internal Affairs couldn’t pin anything on him. But they got his evil master,” Liddell said. “With Double Dick gone, Larry doesn’t have any protection.”
Five minutes later, Jack’s phone rang.
Jansen reported: “Alaina Kusta was fifty-three years old. Her eighty-three-year-old mother is in a nursing home. Alaina received a parking ticket a month ago for double-parking outside the Pine Haven facility. So I called Pine Haven,” he explained. “I found out she visited her mother yesterday, but she didn’t come today. The nursing staff said she came every day at five o’clock.”
Larry didn’t have much else. As a civil lawyer, she had worked on money disputes and custody and divorce, so she had made lots of enemies. People can become murderous when they lose money or their kids. So that added a couple hundred suspects to the list.
Kusta also had a daughter, also a lawyer and living in Indianapolis. Jansen was trying to get her contact information and would call her. He had gotten her address from the dispatcher and sent two cars to secure it. Kusta’s address for her home and office were the same. North Main Street—a block before it ended at Garvin Park.
Jack grew up less than a mile away from the park and knew the area well. When he was a kid, there was a meatpacking facility cattycorner from Kusta’s place. It was equipped with pens, cattle fences, and the chutes they would run the cattle through to slaughter them. Cows and pigs were brought in by cattle trucks, processed, and shipped out in refrigerated trucks. Like most kids, he had been fascinated with the gory stories some of the older boys told at school, but when he went to see for himself, he was sickened by the reality and couldn’t eat meat for weeks. It was ironic that he’d never been able to kill an animal, but he had killed several men. The difference, he guessed, was the men deserved it.
Jack and Liddell parked and got out on the street in front of the victim’s home/office. The color of the house was bright green faded to chalky olive. A gravel parking lot separated her house from a condemned building that had once been a family-run tavern that Jack remembered having the best BBQ in Evansville. Directly across the street was an auto body shop, whose yard, driveway, and street were strewn with cars and trucks with mix and match paint jobs.
It was past eight o’clock, and the nighttime streets were already filling with kids, riding bikes or skateboards, and wannabe gang-bangers clutching their sagging pants. Old folks sat on the porches of houses with nothing but window fans for air conditioning, trying to catch a breeze. The overpowering smell of sewer gas permeated the air.
Jack had played basketball just down the street in Garvin Park when he was a kid. He and his younger brother, Kevin, went to St. Anthony’s grade school a mile away, but the park was the closest place to find a game of pickup basketball, or maybe a fistfight, or maybe both. The neighborhood hadn’t seemed so poor back then, but the kids were tougher than today’s crop and more capable of controlling their violence.
“Smell that?” Liddell asked.
“Do you mean the hopeless desperation of a forgotten community?”
Jack knew Liddell could relate to the surroundings. He had once told Jack that he grew up in a similar neighborhood, and if not for the neighborhood cop taking an interest in him, life would have turned out much different.
“No. I wasn’t referring to the obvious breakdown of the social contract between government and its citizens.”
Jack smiled at his partner. “I love it when you talk all intelligent and stuff.”
A familiar black Mercedes-Benz turned the corner at Garvin Park and came in their direction. It stopped in the street, looking for a place to park, then the driver spotted Jack and rolled down a window.
“We need a search warrant,” Jack said.
“This is the victim’s house and office?” Eric asked, looking around uneasily.
No doubt worrying about leaving his car on the street in this neighborhood, Jack thought.
“Who cares?” Liddell remarked. “We gotta search something. This house will do.”
“Okay, I get your point,” Manson said. “I’ll go back to the office and start the papers.”
Jack stopped him. “Actually, I had you come here because I was hoping you would get the search warrant from here. I want you to go through the place with us.”
Eric raised an eyebrow. “Care to tell me why?”
It’s not because I like your company, Jack thought, but said, “The truth? Your
boss wants to be kept in the loop, and I don’t have the time to call him every five minutes. Plus, you can be on hand in case we need legal help.”
Eric laughed. “You mean, in case she comes back and catches you roaming through her underwear drawers and confidential legal files?”
“She’s not coming back, Eric,” Jack said solemnly. “She’s dead.”
Manson walked to the curb, talking into his cell phone. When he finished he walked up the wooden handicap ramp onto the porch where Jack, Liddell, and Walker waited.
“What’s the verdict?” Jack asked.
“Someone’s on their way with a warrant,” Eric said. “They just have to stop by a judge’s for a signature and then we can go in.”
“Did you tell Trent?”
Eric held his cell phone up. “That’s who I was just talking to.”
Jack noticed Eric rubbing his thumb and forefinger together and recognized this as Eric’s thought process. Everyone had a different way of focusing mental energy on solving a problem. Liddell would become chatty. Garcia was a visual thinker. Jack wasn’t sure what he did. Scotch maybe.
“This is the second attorney killed in as many days,” Jack said.
That got Eric’s attention. “What are you suggesting, Jack?”
Jack didn’t really know what, if anything, he was suggesting. If lawyers were being targeted because of some criminal activity on their part, Jack wanted to be sure he found the evidence legally. And finding it with Eric—the chief deputy prosecutor—would eliminate any questions about how it was found or if it was planted by the police just to discredit some political bastard.
“I’m not suggesting anything, Eric. Just making an observation,” Jack said.
A uniformed officer came down the sidewalk, talking animatedly on his walkie-talkie. “We found her clothes strewn along Stockwell Road at Vogel,” he said when he got close.
“How do you know they’re Ms. Kusta’s?” Eric asked.
The officer grinned. “Well, counselor, these were women’s clothes and they were blood soaked and cut to rags.” To Jack he said, “No weapon.”
“Have them check the businesses along Stockwell,” Jack said. “Roofs, sewer drains, trash, anywhere outside someone could throw a weapon.”
He knew it was an exercise in futility, but it had to be done.
The officer hurried off and Eric looked down the street. “The warrant’s here.”
To his dismay, Jack recognized the ten-year-old red Camaro. The car pulled to the curb, and Moira walked up to the men.
“What are you doing here?” Jack asked.
She flashed him a kid-sister smile. “I’ve got the search warrant.” She handed the stapled papers to her boss, Eric.
“I mean you, why are you here? If Katie finds out I let you get involved, there will be hell to pay.”
Moira gave Jack a defiant look. “You’re not the boss of me. And for that matter, neither is my sister.”
“She’s right, Jack,” Eric said, examining the warrant. “It’s good experience for her. Jump right in, that sort of thing. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at me. I asked her to bring it.”
Jack’s tried to bite the words back, but they came out anyway: “You think this is a game, Eric?”
He did this just to piss me off.
“She could be in danger just being seen with us. No disrespect meant, Moira, but a lot of people have died because of this monster.”
“You mean being seen with you, Jack?” Eric asked. “You do attract a lot of crazies. I’ll give you that. But Moira is a deputy prosecutor, and while she is working for us, that trumps being your sister-in-law. She’s assisting me, and I’m assisting you.” He seemed to consider the matter closed, and held the papers out to Jack.
You don’t know Katie at all, Jack thought, not without a twinge of pleasure. Wait until Katie found out.
Liddell, who had watched this exchange, took the papers from Eric and headed to the front door with two crime scene techs in tow.
Crime scene techs used a pry bar to yank open the front door, and a uniformed officer made entry first. As he passed through the door, he yelled, “Police. Is anyone in here?” He repeated this announcement as he and another officer moved through the house. They came back and one officer said to Jack, “Windows are locked. Back door is dead bolted and the chain is on. We didn’t see anything out of place, Jack.”
Jack nodded and the officer left to guard the front door.
Walker and one crime scene tech went in next and were gone only a few minutes before returning.
“It’s all yours,” Walker said, and he advised his people they could leave. “I’ll stay here just in case,” he told Jack, and held out latex gloves.
Eric took two pairs and handed one pair to Moira.
Jack’s phone rang. He talked for a moment and then hung up.
“They find something in her car?” Liddell asked.
Jack shook his head. “That was Sherman Price, the manager at the landfill.”
Three blocks down the street, a cargo van pulled away from the curb and turned east toward Governor Street before turning its headlights on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sherman Price stood beside his work truck, wringing his big hands, as Jack and Liddell arrived at the landfill. Sergeant Walker was tied up at Alaina Kusta’s house, so Corporal Kim Booker was the ranking officer at the scene.
“Hey, guys,” she said, approaching the detectives. “We found something.” Without further ado, she led the two detectives and the landfill foreman back in the direction she had just come from.
They gingerly stepped around bits of broken glass, shards of metal, and other hazards poking through the scrim. Two white-clad CSU technicians stood beside one of the monster compacting tractors, and looked down at a mangled trash bag whose contents were spilled out near the chopping blades.
“Don’t this just beat all!” Price said.
Ten feet away, a human leg with the foot still attached lay next to a female torso. Where the head and arms should have been were only bloody wounds. The chest was crushed and eviscerated, most likely by the compactor blades. Price’s stomach lurched and he walked away.
“The other remains were in the same type of bags,” Corporal Booker remarked.
“It would have taken someone very strong and very determined to haul all these bags out here,” Jack speculated. The cut in the fence was over two hundred yards away.
“No way he could do it in one trip,” Liddell added.
Unless the killer has an accomplice, or a partner, Jack thought.
“He didn’t dig very deep.” Liddell pointed at the shallow impressions where the recent bags lay.
“Interesting point,” Jack said. “Maybe the compactors were supposed to mix the body parts in with the rest of the garbage.”
“We must have walked right over this spot yesterday,” Booker said.
Jack cast his gaze out over the sprawling mounds of trash. Now what? It will take an army to search this whole place. No guarantee of finding anything else.
“GPR,” Corporal Booker said. Both Jack and Liddell turned, and she explained. “Ground-penetrating radar.”
Jack had heard of it, but had never seen it used before. The principle was the same as radar used by the Navy. “Do you have one in your pocket?”
She laughed out loud and said, “Smartass. We had one donated by the city engineer’s office. They got a new one that actually works and gave us their crap, like usual.”
“Have you used one?”
She put her hands on her hips and scowled. “What? You don’t think a woman can program a remote for a television, do you? Maybe I should get a man to come and run the damn thing.”
“Slow down, girl,” Liddell said.
She dropped her hands to her sides. “Sorry, guys. I’m not a fem-inazi, just a little touchy when someone questions my work.”
“I just meant if you had experience,” Jack said.
; “I’ll call Walker and get permission to use it. We can cover a large area in less than an hour. But,” she pointed out, “with this ground being full of all kinds of stuff, we might not be able to penetrate the ground more than eighteen inches.”
“That’s as deep as these were buried, right?” Jack asked, and she nodded. “Sherman, can you have your guys take a break?”
Price kept his gaze pinned on his feet. “Sure. Whatever you say, detective.”
A brown Ford Taurus was backed up to the recycling bins near St. Joseph Avenue, with one man in the driver’s side. The passenger was putting a soda can in the bin. Neither man’s eyes left the group of policemen on top of the landfill.
“Those are the ones,” Clint noted as he came back to the car, “we have to watch.”
Eric Manson was waiting for the detectives in their office at police headquarters when they returned. Liddell went to the coffeemaker and filled paper cups for each of them. Jack filled in Eric on the recent discovery at the landfill.
Eric said, “Do we have any idea who the leak is?”
Jack wondered what that question had to do with the information he’d just given him.
“It’s not a tough question,” Eric said. When Jack still didn’t respond, he added, “I’ve been informed that you aren’t considering MS-13 a viable suspect anymore. Is that correct?”
Jack wasn’t sure what the hostile tone was all about. “You tell me, counselor. You seem to know everything. In light of what I just told you about Nina, I think we can safely say her killer wasn’t from a gang.”
Eric then delivered his salvo. “I just got off the phone with Claudine Setera. That little Channel Six girl. Trent wasn’t pleased to hear about this from a reporter instead of the investigators.”
Claudine would eat Eric for breakfast if she heard him describe her as “that little Channel Six girl,” Jack thought wryly.
Eric was on a roll. “She knows the names of the victims. All of them! She already knows you found more body parts at the landfill. And she knew about MS-13, that you aren’t considering them as suspects,” Eric said. “These leaks have to stop!”