by Steven James
Maybe they suspected, as we did, that this crime was linked to several previous homicides.
And, of course, to the public, a serial killer’s crimes are a lot more interesting than just another random murder.
As Sharyn and I crossed the scraggly, unkempt lawn to speak with the teens, I assessed the neighborhood.
Wildly overgrown.
Weed-infested.
Two homes across the street had burned down, and the blackened beams of their remains looked like splintered, charred bones jutting up from the earth. A nearby empty lot still retained the concrete footprint of a small house that must have been demolished before its debris was cleared away.
The block’s remaining homes were in various states of disrepair. Sagging roofs and porches. Missing doors. Shattered, jagged glass, or boarded-up windows.
None of the houses appeared to be currently occupied—unless squatters were residing in them under the radar.
The neighborhood looked like a war zone.
A deserted high school crouched at the end of the street, with no fence surrounding it to keep out trespassers. Based on the extent of weather damage and graffiti, it appeared that the school had been closed for years.
Halfway up what was apparently the outer wall of the gymnasium, someone had spray-painted an elaborate panther that peered out across the neighborhood as if it were searching its own private urban jungle for prey.
From my experience rock climbing over the years, I instinctively picked out a route up the side of the building that the artist might have ascended to tag the wall—just stem up using that brick ridge along the corner, then undercling the window with one hand while painting with the other.
Tricky, but doable.
Having a sense of the neighborhood, I focused on the teens again, who were now only a few steps away beneath the branches of a sprawling red oak tree.
Tear stains streaked the girls’ makeup.
“Is he gonna be okay?” Mimi called out to us, apparently assuming that we’d come with an update about their friend.
“The doctors are with him right now,” I answered. “They’re helping him.”
I avoided saying, They’re doing all they can, since, even though that phrase has the intent of being good news, it almost always comes across sounding like bad news.
During the drive, we’d checked with the hospital and learned that Canyon Robbins, the boy who’d been stabbed, was in critical condition.
He wasn’t the victim Sharyn had texted me about.
And he wasn’t the one we were here to investigate.
“But if they’re helping him, then he’s gonna be okay, right?” Mimi pressed, looking for any reassurance she could get.
“He’s in surgery now,” Sharyn replied, prudently avoiding any speculation or giving any unwarranted assurances about his condition or chances.
We’d both learned this at the Academy: state the facts, avoid making promises regarding outcomes over which you have no control.
Sometimes context and compassion require you to temper what you say.
Honesty but not always openness.
All at once, Mimi turned and snapped at Erik. “You stabbed him!” Stifling back a sob, she lifted an accusatory finger. “You probably killed him!”
“It was an accident. You were right there. He jumped at me and I—”
“He’s gonna die and it’s all your fault!” The pent-up emotion got the best of her, and she shoved him. The boy stumbled back, his ankle caught on the bottom step of the porch, and he tumbled to the ground, an uncoordinated flailing of arms and legs.
The officer to her left intervened, grabbing her arm more roughly than the slight scuffle called for, and yanked her back.
“Quiet!” he demanded. His nametag read Kramer. “Both of you. I’ve had enough. Stop it or I’m cuffing you.”
Typically, in situations like this you don’t want to undermine the authority of other law enforcement officers or authority figures, but if this guy ended up getting any harsher with them, I would have to step in and take him to task.
Erik climbed somewhat clumsily to his feet and brushed himself off.
I didn’t want to intimidate the kids or make them defensive, but I did need to identify myself, so I tipped open my credentials and said, “I’m Patrick Bowers. I’m with the FBI. Agent Weist here and I are trying to sort out what happened in the house. While we wait to hear more about how Canyon is doing, can you tell me what you know about the woman who was found upstairs?”
“You mean the body that was found up there,” Gwen corrected me. “I can’t believe there was a dead person up there, right up above us the whole time!” She shivered with revulsion. “I promise, we didn’t have anything to do with it. I’m serious!”
“Alright. Help me understand what happened. Why did you come here?”
“It was Igazi’s idea,” Gwen said.
“Igazi?”
“Canyon’s friend,” Erik explained.
“Where can we find Igazi?” Sharyn asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if that’s his real name or not. It’s what people call him. ‘Igazi’ means ‘blood’ in Zulu—or, I don’t know, that’s what Canyon told me. He’s a street artist.”
“Graffiti?” Sharyn said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” I made a note to follow up on that. “Why did you choose this particular house?”
“Just to be alone,” Mimi answered.
I gestured toward the other homes on the street. “But why not one of those? Some of them are tucked back pretty far from the road. They might’ve offered a little more privacy.”
“This is where Igazi said we should come,” she reiterated.
Igazi again.
“So, agents.” Kramer heaved an impatient sigh. “Are we good here? We’re supposed to take ’em in.”
Any additional questions could wait. Right now I figured it was more important to get these three to a doctor to make sure they were okay.
Sharyn glanced my way and I nodded.
“Yes,” she told Kramer. “You taking them to the DDC?”
“Yeah. Their parents are gonna meet us there.”
Sharyn assured the three teens that we would pass along any updates about their friend, gave them each a business card with her cell number in case they thought of anything else, and then Kramer and his partner led them to a couple of nearby cruisers.
When they were gone, I asked Sharyn, “DDC?”
“Detroit Detention Center. Booking isn’t done at each precinct any longer. It’s all centralized.”
Even though, from all we knew, Canyon’s stab wound was accidental, the police would still need statements from each of the teens before determining if any charges were going to be filed.
She went on, “A couple years ago, word spread that if the cops arrested you and you claimed to be hurt or were in need of medical attention, they were required to take you to the hospital. Asthma, a bruise—really anything at all.”
“And suspects would do that to postpone getting booked, and also to get to a place where there was less security, more of an opportunity to slip away.”
“Exactly.” She donned exam gloves and I did the same. “It wasted a lot of time and resources—neither of which the police department in this city has enough of anyway.”
“The DDC has medical staff on-site?”
A nod. “It’s your one-stop shop for processing suspects and keeping them alive at the same time. I know the place all too well. My ex is a doctor. He helps out there sometimes.”
We ducked beneath the crime scene tape while the bystanders on the other side of the street continued to film us.
One person’s tragedy is another person’s entertainment. It’s been that way from antiquity—the Internet just adds more seat
s to the arena, just makes it easier to watch the games unfold.
For all I knew, Sharyn and I were already starring on someone’s YouTube channel.
The two of us passed through the open door and entered the house.
11
I scanned the living room.
Most graffiti artists have a distinctive style, and the satanic symbols on the walls appeared to have been painted by someone a lot less skilled than whoever had tagged the panther on the high school down the street.
Igazi?
Maybe.
We would find out.
A sleeper sofa, two sliced-open reclining chairs, and a few floor lamps cluttered the cramped room. A scattering of dried autumn leaves lay beneath the boarded-up windows. Discarded clothes, junk mail, and unrecognizable debris lay strewn haphazardly across the floor.
In an abandoned building like this, dirt and grime eventually collect everywhere and now lay wherever I looked.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics at work.
No, the universe isn’t thrumming on into complexity, but continually descending into cold and final chaos. In the end, everything deteriorates—galaxies, solar systems, planets, cities. Living rooms in Detroit.
A universe ruled by the god of decay.
In this job, the God of grace is a lot harder to see.
The fine mist of blood spatter on the kitchen wall matched the nature of blowback from a chest GSW at close range, which we’d learned during our drive was the preliminary assessment of the method of death.
If you work in this job long enough, you learn to read the blood even if spatter analysis isn’t your specialty, and the pattern here was consistent with the shooter standing about a meter from the victim.
After finishing in the kitchen and surveying the remaining rooms on the ground floor, we headed toward the steps to view the woman who’d been left in the master bedroom upstairs.
I asked Sharyn, “What’s your sense of things? Do you anticipate any jurisdictional hurdles here? The Bureau assisting with a serial homicide investigation?”
“Actually, the DPD kicked it into our lane. They reached out to us. Their funding comes from the local tax base, which has been gutted over the last few decades as the city’s population has bottomed out. Detroit has fewer officers now than they’ve had since the 1920s. Lieutenant Sproul is only too happy to have more eyes on things, especially with a high-profile case like this.”
“So we’re going to have to do the heavy lifting.”
“Yes, we are.”
The layer of dirt on the steps had only been disturbed on the right side by the officers who’d prudently kept over there to minimize the impact to the scene.
Second floor.
Top of the stairs.
A DPD officer who barely looked old enough to get into an R-rated movie, let alone work a scene like this, stood sentry beside a door near the end of the hall.
He was biting his lip uneasily as we approached. I wondered if this might be his first homicide.
In a way, I hoped so—because that would mean fewer nightmares, fewer memories to haunt him.
In a way, I hoped not—because then he might’ve gotten used to it. But that was its own kind of nightmare.
After Sharyn and I had identified ourselves, he said, “Schwartz and Julianne are in there now.”
Sharyn looked at him curiously. “I didn’t think they’d arrived yet.”
“Showed up pretty much right away. Told me to wait out here.”
“Okay.”
She must have noticed how flushed he looked because she patted his arm and read his name badge. “It’s okay, Officer Springman. You’ll be alright.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s just, I’ve never . . . That’s my first dead body in there.”
“You’ll get used to it,” she said.
Or maybe not, I thought.
I paused momentarily at the doorway and drew in a breath, hoping to center myself in preparation for seeing my second body of the day.
Then I let it out.
Didn’t help.
Never does.
I stepped into the room.
12
A wedge of dreary evening sunlight slanted through the jagged glass of the single window on the north wall, illuminating the bedroom.
A slim woman in her late twenties wearing a CSI cap and an elegant wedding ring was recording the body’s temperature and checking the amount of lividity. I noticed that her left arm hadn’t developed properly. Meromelia. She seemed to manage well enough with just the one functioning arm.
The prematurely graying man beside her looked only a couple years older than me, maybe forty or so. His eyes were set just a little too far apart, leaving the impression that he would be able to see what was happening off to each side of him as well as in the front. He’d emptied the victim’s pockets and was bagging the items, placing them on the impeccably made bed.
Incongruities are often clues—and the clean, neat sheets in a home like this was incongruous, to say the least. We would definitely check the sheets for DNA from whoever might have straightened them.
Sharyn already knew both officers and when she introduced us, I learned that the young CSI tech was named Julianne Springman. The man with her, Detective Ted Schwartz.
The officer outside the door had referred to Schwartz by his last name, but showed a higher degree of familiarity by calling Julianne by her first name. Since the two shared the same last name, I guessed that they were related.
He wore no wedding band. Brother and sister? Exes?
I’d ask Sharyn later.
The victim’s body was positioned on the floor, seated with its back against the bed, unlike the other victims who’d all been found in the closets. Her hands were folded in repose on her lap. The killer had intertwined her fingers and there was a measure of dignity to that. She could almost have been praying. However, any mood of tranquility was ruined by her head hanging limply forward. Her eyes were open and her skin was cyanotic and claylike with the mask of death.
If a homicide victim’s eyes are closed, you can almost convince yourself that the person is simply asleep or has entered some form of eternal rest. But when her eyes are open like this, it’s not quite so easy to get yourself to believe that things are in any way okay.
The bloodstains on her shirt were consistent with the spatter in the kitchen.
A gunshot to the chest.
Considering the location of the wound, I suspected death came quickly and that she didn’t suffer much.
A small blessing. But a blessing nonetheless.
“She was posed,” Ted observed. “Just like the others.”
Not exactly, because she wasn’t in the closet, but I said nothing.
To stage a scene is to alter it so that it appears to be a different type of crime. To pose a victim means leaving her in a position that carries some meaning or significance to the offender.
Both reveal intention in their own way. Staging is a redirect. Posing is often a middle finger raised against the victim or the authorities. Sometimes the posing contains a very intimate, very personal message.
So the posing here indicated that he’d left her like this for a reason, although it was too early to discern what that might have been.
Why here? Why the room and not the closet?
A different killer?
I knelt by her side.
Early twenties. African-American. Slight frame. By the way she was seated, it was difficult to determine her height, but I posited between five foot and five-three. She wore a pair of cuffed skinny jeans and a loose-fitting, pearly white long-sleeve blouse, unblemished save for the bloodstains. And the bullet hole.
No sign of a struggle.
I used my Mini Maglite to search beneath the bed, but its beam only revealed undisturb
ed clods of dust and a dated children’s picture book, also covered with thick dust.
The other scenes I’d evaluated on my flight here often had a jumble of trash in the rooms—in most cases, more than this one did: piles of broken record albums, picture frames, children’s Halloween costumes, discarded Atari games, laundry detergent bottles, just about every type of litter imaginable. All left behind when the homeowners moved out.
There was no anonymous tip this time and no letter carved into her forehead.
Is this crime even linked to the others?
Every anomaly is an arrow pointing to the truth.
“Why up here?” Ted said.
“Up here?” Julianne asked.
“This room. If the killer was just trying to dispose of her body, he’d most likely leave it on the first level or perhaps drag her into the basement.” It sounded like Ted was thinking aloud. “Why would he go through all the trouble of dragging her up the stairs after she was dead?”
“She was carried,” I said.
“How do you know that?”
I ran my finger along the floorboard for approximately ten centimeters beside the victim’s feet and then showed the dirt on my finger and the track on the floor. “No drag marks here or on the stairs.”
Then I noted the clean cuffs on her pants and pointed out the pristine, unblemished sleeves of her shirt. “No dirt. No scuff marks. Nothing on her hands or sleeves. With this much grime in the room and on the stairs—”
“Hmm, yeah,” he said. “So she wasn’t dragged.”
“To carry a body up a flight of stairs shows commitment,” Sharyn noted.
“It speaks to relationship,” Ted observed. “Plus, there wasn’t any effort to dehumanize the body. Very controlled. Very deliberate. This guy is ruthless and careful.”
“Five victims.” Sharyn’s eyes were on a headless doll on the floor near the window. She seemed to shiver, then looked away. “Five different homes. No obvious connections between the victims. What’s he trying to tell us? How’s he choosing his victims?”
I had no answers.
“Have we been able to identify her?” I asked Ted and Julianne. “Do we have a name?”