by Steven James
“No,” Ted replied. “Not yet. No one’s been reported missing.”
As I inspected the body, I considered the sight lines in the room. All of the previous victims had been carefully positioned as well without any effort at concealment or obfuscation, just as Ted had noted.
But this woman wasn’t staring out of the closet.
I eyed the place on the wall where, if the victim had been alive and able to lift her head, she would have been looking.
Though the paint was old and faded, one rectangular area about a foot wide and maybe eighteen inches high was less faded than the rest. A 4d nail was centered near the top of it.
Taken in connection with the other crimes, I decided it was at least possible that she was left here to draw attention to what was missing on the wall.
I placed my hand beside the faded area and photographed it for perspective.
Ted was watching me. “A painting maybe?” he suggested.
“Maybe.” I tapped the wall. “But I want to know for sure what was hanging here.”
“How are we supposed to find that out?”
“Start with whoever used to live in this house. Based on the faded paint and considering the lack of direct sunlight that would reach this wall because of its orientation to the window, whatever was hanging here was here for a while. Let’s find the former residents and ask them. Whoever they were, they moved out before last autumn, but only later did someone board up the windows, so—”
“Wait. How do you know that?”
“The dried leaves beneath the living room windows. Someone boarded up the windows after they blew in from the tree out front—red oak leaves.”
I examined the victim’s personal items that had been bagged and labeled on the bed: a set of Lexus car keys, a crumpled wad of bills, a phone.
“No purse?” I asked.
“No,” Ted replied.
Pointing to the bag with the set of car keys in it, I said, “Do we have someone searching for the car?”
“There’s an officer driving around the neighborhood.”
This woman has no letter carved into her forehead. Maybe the killer didn’t have the chance yet to return to the body.
Julianne had been studying the body when I entered the room. “Are you able to determine the time of death?” I asked her.
“I’ll need to do some more tests to nail it down.”
“Ballpark it for me.”
“Well, based on lividity and the lack of abdominal putrefaction stains, I’d say we’re looking at eighteen to twenty-four hours ago—but that’s just an initial estimate.”
“Okay.”
Half as long as any of the previous victims when the tips were sent in.
An incongruity.
A fault line.
Just what we needed.
“I can’t believe she’s the fifth one we’ve found,” Ted muttered.
“Actually, she’s the first one we’ve found,” Sharyn corrected him.
“How do you figure?”
“The location of the previous four victims was given to us. The tips told us exactly where they would be. In this case, however, when Canyon was stabbed, the officers who responded searched the house and found this woman here. No anonymous tip.”
It was a good point. The differentiation was significant.
I picked up the bagged mobile phone. “Do we know if this is her cell?”
“It was in her pocket,” Ted told me.
“I already dusted it,” Julianne said. “It’s been wiped clean—I mean, the outside of it has. Not the data.”
“You were able to access it to check?”
“Well, no. I just mean I know the outside is clean. No fingerprints.”
“You’re sure there aren’t any on the home button?”
“Yes. Why?”
Solving a crime often depends on reconstructing who last spoke with or saw the victim, or who might’ve been present when she died. That often involves determining if she was planning on meeting someone close to the time of death. If the phone wasn’t locked or encrypted, and we were able to get into it, selfies, text messages, microblogs, calendars, and reminders—any of those things could offer valuable leads.
Because of that, as soon as we can, we attempt to access a victim’s phone or mobile device. If possible, even before leaving the scene.
Sometimes a phone is the best witness of all.
I opened the bag.
“I know you want to get into that cell, but if you enter the wrong password, it might wipe the data,” Ted cautioned.
Our Cyber Division was making strides accessing locked iPhones through NAND mirroring, but that process was tedious and time-consuming and I wouldn’t be able to do it here.
However.
“If I’m right about what kind of phone this is,” I said, “I won’t need a password.”
I went to the body and, noting the bracelet activity tracker on the woman’s left wrist, I guessed she was right-handed.
“Do you have the photos you need?” I asked them.
“Yes,” Julianne said.
“Is it alright if I move her hand?”
“Yes.”
I’d never tried this before and I didn’t know if it would work, but I figured it was worth a shot.
I lifted the woman’s right thumb. Fingerprint scanners don’t work well with cold fingers, so I slowly exhaled warm air onto its tip, being careful not to leave too much moisture behind.
Carefully, I laid it against the home button.
It took a few tries, but at last the screen unlocked when I tried her right index finger instead.
“Let’s find out what your name is,” I said to her softly.
13
Once I was in the phone, it didn’t take long to discover that the victim was a twenty-two-year-old accountant named Jamika Karon.
After we pulled up her address, Ted called dispatch to get a unit to her home, which was about fifteen miles southwest of the city.
Holding the phone by the corners just in case there might have been any prints that Julianne missed, I checked to see which apps were still open.
Seven were: a web browser, YouTube—she was halfway through a cat video—a texting app, the actual phone app, a messaging app called TypeKnot, a dating one called Hook’dup, and a breaking news application that was currently trending with a story about an unidentified woman who’d been found in an abandoned house on Runyon Street.
A tragic twist of irony: while her body sat here, her phone was streaming the story of her death.
The news app had been updated most recently with a video of Officer Kramer and his partner leading the three teens to his car. The camera angle told me that it’d been filmed by someone in that crowd across the street.
Going to the window, I studied them.
Sixteen people.
Three more than when Sharyn and I had arrived.
No one was acting suspiciously.
I accessed Jamika’s texts and email.
She had nine unopened emoticon-rich texts from late last night and today. They came from “Sis,” “Hank,” and “Bennie”—names we would look into. By the informal way they addressed her, it was apparent that they all had a close relationship with her.
The last text that’d been replied to came from a number that didn’t correspond to any names in her contact lists or address book. She’d written, “See you there!” in reply to a message that simply read, “Well?”
The exchange had happened last night between ten twenty-one and ten thirty-four, which coincided with the time of death Julianne had postulated.
Sharyn, who’d been scrutinizing Jamika’s personal effects, asked, “What are you thinking, Pat?”
“The best way to find out who she was meeting is simply to
ask.”
“Ask who?”
“The person who texted her.”
I laid down Jamika’s cell, opened an app on my own phone to record the audio of the call, and then tapped in the number.
At the window again, I saw that the sun had dipped behind the school’s hulking shell, leaving long, angular shadows cutting across the neighborhood.
As the call began ringing, one of the men in the crowd turned his phone to look at its screen.
Okay.
That got my attention.
He wore a black hoodie that shrouded his face, but I could see the back of his hands and tell that he was light-skinned.
He toyed with one of the ends of the hoodie’s drawstrings as he studied his phone while the one in my hand continued to ring.
At last he tapped his screen and I heard a male voice in my ear: “Who is this?”
I gestured urgently for Sharyn and Ted to join me at the window.
“I know about last night.” I wanted to see if I could get a reaction and establish without a doubt that it wasn’t simply chance that the man outside had answered his phone at the same time someone had picked up the call I’d put through. “About what happened after she texted you. We need to meet.”
He glanced around the neighborhood. “Who the—?” But he never finished his sentence. Instead he abruptly ended the call and eased back from the crowd before bolting through a nearby yard toward the school.
That was definitely a reaction.
I didn’t want to turn my back on him for a second, so rather than taking the stairs back to the first floor, I smashed out the rest of the window’s glass, grabbed the drainpipe outside, and half slid, half leapt to the ground. My landing wasn’t perfect, my left leg buckled, and as I rose to my feet, I called for Sharyn to detain the onlookers and set up roadblocks. “Two blocks. Every direction!”
Ignoring the pinching tightness in my ankle, I sprinted through the deepening shadows, pursuing the subject toward the school.
14
I shouted for him to stop, but he disappeared into the building.
They never stop.
Neither do I.
SIG and Maglite out, I whipped through the doorway and entered a hallway that stretched the length of the school.
Dim. Illuminated only by the light that leaked in through the open classroom doors. Most of the baffled ceiling panels had fallen down and lay trampled on the floor, likely by the scrappers who’d removed the lockers that had once lined these walls.
No sign of the suspect.
“FBI!” I moved forward cautiously. “Step out with your hands up!”
He could have fled through the neighborhood. Instead, he came here.
He’s comfortable here. He knows this place.
No sounds—but the baffles on the floor could be muffling his footsteps as they were doing to mine.
I swept my light in front of me.
A girls’ bathroom door stood open to my left. I ducked in for a visual sweep, making sure to avoid stepping on the strips of asbestos that must have been ripped off the pipes before they were removed.
The bathroom’s metal stalls were gone, but the toilets were still there. Three had been sledgehammered, and the remaining one served as a repository for spent spray cans.
Empty.
Back in the hall, I heard urgent steps far ahead of me and rushed toward them, passing a trophy case that still held a collection of trophies from the days when the high school was still being used. No one had bothered to remove them.
And then to the library, where the footsteps led.
Inside, rows of shelves stood in quiet formation, all devoid of books.
Words came to me, but I didn’t know where I’d heard them before: Wooden skeletons stripped of their paper flesh.
No windows. No natural light.
I passed my light through the line of shelves and once again clearly identified myself as a federal agent. The words bounced around the library like solid objects. I called out again for the suspect to step out and put his hands up, but there was no response.
Gun ready, I quickly swept around the edge of each shelving unit in turn, clearing the rows.
I was half done when the thudding began.
The echo of impact.
Shelf against shelf.
Giant dominoes, colliding heavily against each other, toppling in a line toward me.
Scrambling for safety, I leapt to the side, barely managing to get out of the way before the shelf smashed down where I’d been only seconds before. As it landed, a cloud of choking dust billowed up around me.
Coughing, I crossed the library, edged through the door that the suspect would’ve needed to pass through to flee, and found myself in a hall that terminated at the gymnasium.
Detective Schwartz must have followed me because he appeared at the other end of the hallway just as I was about to enter the gym. I sent him to check the boys’ locker room down the hall.
The gym floor was severely warped, as if it were a wooden wave pool frozen in midripple. In some areas, the floorboards were bowed knee-high, waterlogged and swollen from the weather coming in through the shattered windows or the leaking roof overhead.
The boards flexed underfoot as I crossed them, creating an odd sensation of me not having my footing even though I was walking across the floor.
Ten meters above me, metal beams and girders spanned the length of the gym. Above those, broad strips of ceiling tiles had rotted away as they let in the water that’d bowed this floor.
The missing tiles revealed an attic ventilation area above the gymnasium. As I scanned the area, a light sprinkle of detritus filtered down through one of the openings, telegraphing movement above me.
He’d already made it up there.
This guy was fast.
Scary fast.
Unless there’s more than one person.
Wary of a second subject, I located the access ladder near the stage at the far end of the gym and ascended it, wondering why the suspect would have gone up here rather than fleeing into the night.
Why trap yourself in the attic?
To hide? Thinking no one would think to look up there? To wait things out?
The faint sound of police sirens cycled into the gymnasium. Backup was still a ways out.
I had to duck through the attic’s low entrance, but found that I could easily stand once I was on the other side and balancing on one of the narrow, swinging catwalks above the gym.
Hot, staid air, despite the late time of day.
Dust particles that’d been kicked up by recent movement migrated through my flashlight’s beam. Tiny specks of the rotting past. Chaos. The god of decay.
A few glimpses of strangled light found their way through slits in the roof joists above me, creating a strange patchwork of light and shadow.
The network of wooden plank catwalks crisscrossed the ventilation area, supported by unsubstantial-looking cables attached to the roof’s rotting support beams.
The gym’s faux ceiling hung about two meters below the catwalks, and beyond that were the girders and narrow supports. Through the sections of caved-in tiles, the warped floor was visible three stories down.
A dormant ventilation fan nearly as tall as I was stood four meters from me, its dust-encased metal blades imposing, but stationary.
As I moved forward, the catwalk creaked and swayed underfoot and I wasn’t sure how much I trusted those narrow cables or the exposed, weather-weakened beams they were bolted to.
Holding the SIG in one hand and flashlight in the other, I couldn’t grasp the cables to steady myself. Normally, my balance wasn’t too bad, but I was no gymnast or balance beam walker, so as I edged forward, I did so with careful, hesitant steps so I wouldn’t slip off and crash through to the gym floor.
He was holding something in his left hand.
“Drop the weapon!” I leveled my gun at him. “Now!”
But as I was angling my light toward him, he clicked on the hefty flashlight he was holding and tipped its fierce beam into my eyes, momentarily blinding me.
It caught me off guard and I blinked and squinted, trying to see again. I heard him running toward me.
I shouted for him to stop, but he kept coming, each step causing the catwalk to rock enough to distract me, enough to force me to focus on staying upright rather than on addressing the threat he was posing to me.
He might have a weapon.
“Stop!” I shouted again.
But he raced forward, using that light to keep me from seeing his face.
“I will shoot!”
Fire, Pat!
No! He might be unarmed. You can’t shoot without the clear indication of—
You have to. He’s a threat and—
He leapt at me with a fierce crescent kick that connected with my hand and sent the Maglite flying away from me and twirling across the attic, tossing curls of uncertain light and shadow behind it in its wake. It bounced off the boards and landed on one of the remaining ceiling tiles, casting its angular cone of light across the attic, but in the wrong direction for me to make out my assailant’s face.
Somehow, the guy kept his balance as he landed on the catwalk.
He swung his flashlight at my right hand, smacking violently into my wrist, but I held on to my weapon. Then, for some reason, he tossed the light aside and it dropped through the paneling beneath us.
He kicked at me again.
I knew enough about fighting to know that in martial arts with every move you’re setting up for the next one. So, a punch might set up for a kick; a kick might set up for a punch. Kick, kick, punch. Usually, combinations have two, three, or four moves. And this guy liked his combinations.
This time I was able to block his foot, but he quickly followed up with a hook that I wasn’t expecting. His fist caught me in the jaw and the force of the blow sent me spiraling backward. I lost my balance and fell onto the catwalk, crashing onto my side.