Killer Pursuit: An Allison McNeil Thriller

by Jeff Gunhus

  “Jordi,” Allison scolded.

  “It can’t come back to us,” he said. “That’s why it’s taking some time. I’m not running the query through the regular FBI servers.” He went on to describe his methodology, something about mirrored systems and truncated alias paths that sounded like another language to Allison. Finally, she held up a hand.

  “OK, I get it. You’re super smart,” she said.

  “Damn right I am.” Jordi grinned.

  “But tell me this,” she said. “If you find her in these hidden databases, and especially if you somehow find the videos, can you keep it under wraps? Make it so no one else knows? I’m talking even if Clarence Mason calls you into his office to give up the goods?”

  Jordi grinned. “You know me, love. The only thing I like more than doing you a favor is giving the system the middle finger. This is just between me and you.”

  Allison leaned forward and gave Jordi a kiss on the cheek. “You’re the best.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Jordi said. He swiveled in his chair as she left the room. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to do that old-timey field investigation thing. You know, interview witnesses. Inspect the victim’s body. Want to come?”

  Jordi laughed and gestured to the room around him. “What? And leave all this? No thank you. I’ll race you to see who can find Catherine Fews’s real name first.”

  “If I win, you come to the gym with me for a month,” Allison said.

  Jordi clutched his chest in a mock heart attack, then added, “And if I find her first, you’re buying my pizza for a month.”

  “You’ve got a deal,” Allison said. “Good luck.”

  Jordi turned back to his computer screens, fingers dancing across his keyboard. “Yeah, baby. Only thing better than pizza is free pizza.”

  Allison smiled and left Jordi hard at work. Part of her wished she could just let him find the information she needed, but she knew she couldn’t count on it. The other team members, the ones Jordi derided as “pukes”, were actually top forensics professionals who had scoured FBI databases looking for a match. Maybe Jordi did have some magic mojo he was going to drum up to solve what the other team couldn’t, but there was no way she was going to just sit around and wait to find out.

  Even so, she dreaded where the path naturally led her to next.

  13

  The mortuary drawer slid out with a grating sound of metal on metal. In the silence of the two-story, linoleum-floored room, it was loud enough that Allison half-expected someone to fling open the door and demand what the ruckus was all about. The man helping her, a young orderly named Maurice Hunt, smiled as if to apologize for the noise. He was a mouse of a man, wiry and slope-shouldered, his too-small nose made to look ridiculous by the oversized glasses poised on its end. Allison noticed his fingernails were grown out long but kept immaculately clean. He kept his eyes carefully averted from her, as if in fear of accidentally making eye contact.

  “How long have you worked here, Maurice?” Allison asked.

  “Six years,” he said, pushing his glasses back into place. “No, eight, I guess. Time. You know how it goes.”

  Allison couldn’t help but wonder if the man had turned odd after working in the morgue for eight years or if he’d come into the job that way.

  Maurice unzipped the body bag and Allison could have sworn she saw him draw in a deep breath, creating an unnerving impression of a chef opening an oven.

  “I’ll take it from here,” Allison said. Her FBI badge had gotten her this far, but she was acutely aware she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. She hadn’t cleared the visit through regular channels, trying to keep a low profile. Having Maurice the morgue ghoul hanging around asking questions wasn’t part of that plan. But it didn’t look like getting rid of him was going to be an option.

  Maurice frowned, insulted. “I’m supposed to stay,” he said. “Even if you are with the FBI. Besides, I watch all the shows. CSI. Bones. Forensic Team Challenge. Maybe I can help?”

  Allison figured Maurice actually might know more than she did. She wasn’t a pathologist, or even particularly adept at forensics. Her Masters degree in human psychology had led her to a career track in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, the shop the public knew from countless TV shows and movies about profilers. She’d gone through the Academy like everyone else in BAU, a rigorous four-month training program that taught her the basics of fieldwork and weapons handling, but most of the last seven years had been spent at a desk with only rare excursions into the field. The fact that those few times had turned into face-to-face confrontations with the men she was tracking made her by far the exception within BAU. Still, while she knew her way around a dead body, pathology wasn’t her strong suit. But what she was good at was noticing things that other people missed.

  “Suit yourself. Gloves?” she said.

  Maurice reached into his pocket and handed her a pair of latex gloves. He pulled on a pair of his own. “The head’s not attached, you know,” he said eagerly.

  “Yes, I know,” Allison said, unable to keep an edge from her voice. Maurice caught it and took a step back to give her room. She reached into the body bag and found that there were six separate bags inside. The torso, head and four limbs. Someone had arranged them in place.

  “Did you do this?” she said.

  Maurice nodded. “Seemed like the nice thing to do. In case…you know…her parents came down or something.”

  Allison pursed her lips, recalibrating her judgment of the strange orderly. Maybe if Allison did her job right, this girl’s parents would eventually be contacted and able to mourn their daughter and collect her remains. “That was nice of you. Here, will you help me with this?”

  Maurice jumped forward, all smiles. He reached out as Allison handed him the bags containing the limbs, one after another. He piled them up like firewood at the end of the flat iron bed of the morgue drawer.

  “Should we transfer them to an examining room?” Maurice asked. “That’s where the ME does the examinations.”

  “No, this is fine,” Allison said. “I’m not doing a full exam. I just want a closer look.” She wanted to make the visit as short as possible. She figured it was inevitable that the DCPD and the FBI team investigating the case would eventually become aware of her snooping and she wasn’t overly anxious to have to use the lie Mason had given her about doing research. The idea didn’t make her nervous because she was some kind of Girl Scout. It was more that she was just a terrible liar.

  Allison opened the largest bag first. The stench of decaying flesh rose from the bag like heat off pavement. Allison turned her head and tried to catch her breath. A great sucking noise came from above them and she realized Maurice had crossed to a wall and turned on a high-powered vent for the fumes. He walked back, holding out a nose-plug for her. Allison waved it away. He shrugged and held out two pairs of toothed forceps, one for her and one for himself. She took a pair and smiled. It was nice to have an assistant, even one as strange as Maurice.

  “OK, let’s see what we have here,” Allison murmured. She rotated the torso to look at one of the shoulders. The wound was grey, dead flesh now, but it still told a story. It was a surgical incision, not the frantic hacking of a killer expressing anger or hate. No, this was controlled and calculated. She used the forceps to lift a flap of skin to examine the shoulder joint. This area was rougher, with gouges throughout the glenohumeral joint where the humerus met the scapula. The killer had trouble removing the arm here, suggesting he (and it was almost always a he) wasn’t a doctor or a butcher as she’d seen hypothesized in the report Mason had given her.

  She inspected each of the four other cuts: the three other limbs and the neck. These showed the same indications as the first cut: a smooth first incision and then problems getting through the bone and joints efficiently.

  Next, she reexamined each cut, mimicking the sawing motion needed to do each one, moving around the body to try the same cut f
rom different angles.

  “Are you trying to get into the mind of the killer by acting out the crime?” Maurice asked. “That’s so wicked.”

  Allison smiled at the use of the term wicked which Maurice obviously felt was cool, but that she was pretty sure was out of date by about five years. “No, I’m trying to figure out for sure if our killer was left or right handed.”

  “How can you tell?” Maurice asked.

  “Come look at this,” she said, pointing to an incision in the upper thigh. “If you were going to cut off someone’s leg, how would you do it?”

  “With an electric saw,” Maurice said, a little too quickly, Allison thought.

  “I mean, which side would you stand on? Where would you cut first?”

  Maurice thought about it, then positioned himself next to the torso. “I guess I’d stand here, reach across the leg I’m not cutting, and start from the outside.”

  “Good, so we look to see if that matches up with the evidence. Take out the left leg.”

  Maurice grabbed the bag. “You think he cut off the left one first?”

  “No, the right one,” she replied. “See how the left one is cut higher up on the thigh, up to the pelvis?”

  “Because he didn’t have a second leg in his way when he was cutting that one off,” Maurice said excitedly.

  Allison smiled. “Exactly. Pretty sharp, Maurice.”

  It was an odd image seeing Maurice beaming from ear to ear because of her compliment just as he held Catherine Fews’s severed leg out to her.

  Allison took the leg and inspected it. “There, look.” She pointed to a series of thin parallel lacerations on the top of the leg. They were at an angle, higher toward the inner thigh and lower toward the outside of the leg.

  “That’s from the saw when he was cutting the other leg,” Maurice said excitedly. “But wait. That could be from either a left or right handed person, depending where they stood.”

  “Correct,” Allison said. “But imagine you’re standing on the right side, cutting this leg and you’re right handed. First, the direction of the cut is awkward, but doable. But if you did, then once you got down to the bone, you’d probably hit the top edge of the saw against the inside of the opposite leg.” She rolled over the left leg. “No indication.”

  “The killer was left-handed,” Maurice said softly, obviously impressed. “Is that a big deal?”

  “Only 10% of the population is left-handed,” Allison said. “I’d say taking 90% of potential suspects out of consideration is a pretty big deal.”

  Maurice raised his left hand. “I guess I’m a suspect,” he said. “I’m a lefty. Can you believe it? You know left-handed people are more creative and smarter than average?”

  “Well, let’s hope the killer is neither of those things,” she said, inspecting the ankles of both legs. Then the shoulders of the amputated arms.

  “What are you looking for now?” Maurice asked.

  “Anything that can tell me who this was,” she replied.

  Maurice pointed to the paperwork tucked into the plastic holder on the side of the bag. “Catherine Fews. Says right there.”

  Allison was about to explain that all they really had was the girl’s work name. She needed to know where she came from, how she had ended up turning high-class tricks in DC with video cameras pointed at her bed. Who she’d been before her life in DC might be the key to answering those questions. But she stopped herself, reminding herself that she was supposed to be operating on the down low.

  “I know,” she said instead. “I’m looking for clues about how she lived. Maybe signs she took drugs. Old bruises. Something.”

  “The ME would catch all that,” Maurice said. “There was someone down from the FBI for this one; our doc just assisted.”

  Allison nodded. It was probably an exercise in futility, but she’d already turned up one fact missed in the forensic report that proved important. But that was a clue about the killer, not the girl.

  “Sometimes things get missed,” she said.

  Maurice squinted at her, looking back and forth between the cadaver tag and Allison. “That name. It’s not her real one, is it? It’s like her call girl name. You’re looking for some way to ID her.”

  Allison didn’t respond at first, but she had to admit the little weirdo was actually kind of clever. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to let him know. “You got it,” she said. “All we have is her alias.” She went to the torso and inspected the lower back, the hips, the girl’s chest and then finally her pelvic area. “So I’m looking for details that can help us deduce who she was.”

  “I deduce that she was someone who used tanning beds. In the nude,” Maurice said, his voice unable to mask an awkward emphasis on the word nude. Allison shot him a disapproving look but he didn’t see it. “She overdid it, though. Makes her tat show.”

  Allison looked where he was pointing. Right at the bikini line was a small, irregularly shaped area of skin several shades lighter than the skin around it.

  “A tat? You mean a tattoo?” Allison asked.

  “Yeah, we see it all the time here. Really bad tattoos that got removed. They’ve gotten to a point now where they can get rid of most of it, but you can still find them if you know where to look.”

  Allison pressed the light-colored skin but saw nothing underneath it. If there had been a tattoo there, it might have been the clue she needed. But it was long gone.

  “You should see some of the ones we’ve found,” Maurice said, starting to laugh in short snorts through his small nose. “Mostly names of old boyfriends or girlfriends. Together forever. Oops, right? But the best are the misspellings. I’m Awesme, with no o in awesome. Regret Nohing, spelled n-o-h-i-n-g. Bet he regretted that, right?” Maurice was enjoying himself, laughing out loud at his own comments. “Or my favorite was Sweet Pee. Get it? Like his pee. Freaking hilarious.”

  Allison watched Maurice giggle like a high school girl, his body shuddering so hard that his oversized glasses nearly fell off the end of his nose. Suddenly, he turned serious. He pointed to the patch of light skin on the torso in front of them. “Do you want to see what her tattoo was?”

  Allison nodded, a thrill of excitement in her chest. “Can you do that?”

  Maurice made a show of looking around the room even though they both knew they were the only ones there. “It’s kind of against the rules,” he whispered. “But I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  Allison smiled. “Of course. Just between you and me.”

  Maurice clapped the air and then spun around and headed toward the door. “Back in a jiff,” he called.

  Allison watched the door shut behind the young man and wondered, not for the first time, whether he had a few screws loose. When he returned with a scalpel in one fist, she wondered if maybe it was more than just a few screws.

  “What do you plan on doing with that?” Allison asked.

  “This is how we solve the mystery,” Maurice said.

  “Slow down, hard charger,” Allison said, holding her hand up. “Why don’t you explain to me what’s going on here before you do anything stupid.”

  Maurice looked taken aback by Allison’s serious tone. He lost his manic grin and seemed to refocus himself. “Do you have a tattoo?” Even with his new self-control, his eyes roved over her body as if he were imagining where such a tattoo might be hidden.

  Allison shook her head. “No, do you?”

  Without hesitation, he pulled up his shirt on one side, exposing the pasty white skin of his ribcage. There was a tattoo seven or eight inches tall of an astronaut on the back of a bucking horse, a lasso in one hand. Maurice looked at her, obviously expecting a reaction.

  “Wow,” she said, trying to stifle a sudden urge to laugh. “That’s something.”

  Maurice looked disappointed. He sang, totally off-key, “Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah. Some call me the gangster of love.” He looked incredulous. “The Steve Miller Band?” He went back to singing. “Some
people call me Maurice.” He pursed his lips and swung his hips. “Weeee, oooooh.”

  “Oh yeah,” Allison said, just wishing he would stop. “I remember that song. Cool.”

  Maurice lowered his shirt, not buying it. He pointed to the patch of light skin on the torso. “The way it works, see, is you get the offending tattoo, usually when you’re drunk, sometimes from someone who is drunk.”

  “Or just a bad speller apparently,” Allison said.

  “That too. Then years later, once you get respectable, you decide the tattoo was a terrible mistake that needs to be erased from the history books. Only, like most mistakes, this one is permanent.”

  “How about less philosophy and a little more getting to the point?”

  Maurice scowled, obviously a little bummed that his captive audience didn't seem that captive at all.

  Allison chided herself. The way to get through to this kid was to stroke his ego, not bash it. “Sorry, go ahead.”

  “The point is everyone knows you can get tattoos removed, but few people know how it's really done.”

  “You're right. I have no idea, but I'm guessing you do.” Actually Allison had a pretty good idea, but Maurice smiled at the comment.

  “A tattoo is inked down into the subcutaneous level of the skin, which is why it's permanent. Tattoo removal doesn't remove the tattoo, it just uses light therapy to fade out the top layers. If I wanted to get rid of my space cowboy tat, which I don’t, it would take like thirty or forty treatments to make it look gone.”

  Allison felt a thrill of excitement. “But the tattoo would still be there, in the subcutaneous layer.” She eyed the scalpel in his hand with new interest. “Are you saying that if you cut the top layers off, we'll still see it?”

  Maurice nodded. He leaned in and whispered, “We do it all the time down here.”

  Revulsion dulled Allison's excitement as she pictured Maurice and his vulture friends cutting chunks of flesh out of cadavers to have a good laugh. She decided to worry about that later. Right now, she needed Maurice's ill-gotten expertise.