Blind Rage

by Terri Persons

  A blob in a wrinkled suit stepped in front of her and blocked her way. He was Greg Thorsson, an agent from the bureau’s Milwaukee office. He compensated for his diminutive stature with a gargantuan mouth. She’d worked with him years earlier when they were both posted in St. Louis. He started in with the insults as if they’d never parted ways. “What’d you do, stop for a latte?”

  “Nice to see you, too, Greg.” She veered around him. “Has your wife wised up yet and left you for another woman?”

  He was on her heels as she started up the front steps. “Garcia must be desperate if he called in the witch doctor.”

  “Voodoo priestess,” she said over her shoulder. “Get it right.” As she weaved through the bodies crowding the porch, she felt the stares burning a hole in her back. As soon as she was inside, the cops would join Thorsson with the lame jokes. She’d heard it all before, behind her back and to her face. She could write the one-liners herself.

  Where’re her broom and crystal ball?…Maybe she can bring Hoover back from the dead…How about I dig my Ouija board outta the closet for backup?

  Following her onto the porch, Thorsson continued the jabs. “Gonna cast an evil spell on me?”

  She pivoted around and looked pointedly at his round belly. “I already have.”

  “You’re not very Minnesota nice.”

  “Neither are you.” She threw open the front door and went inside.

  In the home’s foyer, she spotted two men from the bureau’s Minneapolis office yapping with a homicide detective. One of the agents gave her a nod and continued talking. The Minneapolis crew didn’t know her well, and that was fine with Bernadette. While she’d initially wanted to work in the bureau’s larger downtown Minneapolis office, she’d grown used to her basement digs in downtown St. Paul.

  Garcia had instructed her to go to the second floor, and she started up the open staircase.

  Someone yelled after her, “Hey!”

  Thorsson had followed her inside. “Go away,” she said without turning around. Looking to the top of the stairs, she could see her ASAC standing by himself, his black hair trimmed with Marine efficiency and his weight lifter’s arms pushing out the sleeves of his trench coat. His back was to the stairs.

  The pain in the ass jogged up next to her. “I heard you blew away a bad guy this spring. Any of that post-traumatic shit going on with you? You gonna snap on us?”

  Thorsson was referring to a case she’d worked the previous May with Garcia. She and her boss had shot the killer dead. “If I snap, Greg, I promise to take you out first.”

  When the two agents reached the second floor, Garcia turned around and glared at Thorsson. “Don’t you have someplace you need to be, Agent?”

  Thorsson folded his stumpy arms in front of his bowling-ball body. “Sir. I thought Agent Saint Clare needed—”

  “Agent Saint Clare doesn’t need a damn thing,” Garcia snapped.

  Bernadette stifled a grin.

  “Yes, sir,” said Thorsson. He hesitated for a moment, seemingly unsure of where to go, then turned around and thumped down the stairs. He headed for a knot of police officers gathered at the bottom.

  Garcia watched Thorsson with a frown and then looked at Bernadette. “Jesus. Did you fly here or what?”

  She blinked, wondering for a moment if her boss was now taking shots at her, then realized she had indeed made the drive in record time despite the traffic. “How many did Milwaukee send?”

  “Thorsson and another guy.”

  “So they sent one agent.”

  Garcia smiled. “Not bad, Cat.”

  She liked that her boss dropped the formalities when they were alone. She smiled and addressed him in kind. “Where are we going, Tony?”

  With a tip of his head, he motioned her down the hallway. “This way.”

  While she followed him, Bernadette took off her sunglasses. She didn’t need the camouflage with Garcia; he’d gotten used to her exotic eyes. “Crime lab here?”

  “Come and gone.”

  She glanced around the second story. “How many bedrooms?”

  “Three up. One on the main floor. Plus there’s a bedroom under construction in the basement.”

  “Anyone hear anything? Who was actually inside the house?”

  At the end of the long hallway, he stopped at a closed door. “Nobody was home all weekend except for the victim.”

  “That seems odd, with all the students living here.”

  “The other girls had gone home to Mom and Dad or were shacked up with boyfriends.”

  “I didn’t think the U was such a suitcase college.”

  “For some it is. Depends on the kid, I suppose. Depends on the living arrangement. Whether the roommates get along.” He snapped on a pair of gloves.

  “So why wasn’t she back home?”

  “Home is—was—a bit of a longer drive. Chicago.” He handed her a set of latex. “You’re going to want these.”

  She held up her hands, clad in leather gloves. “These will work.”

  “You’ll ruin them. Tub’s only got a couple of inches of water left in it, but it’s yucky water.”

  “I can guess why it’s yucky.” She took off her leather drivers, stuffed them in her coat pockets, and yanked on the latex. “What happened to the rest of the bathwater?”

  “The tub’s got one of those old-fashioned rubber cork deals on a chain. The kid who found her freaked, and his first instinct was to pull the stopper. It started to empty, and then the cork thing got sucked back into the drain.”

  “Give me the timing and all that. She was last seen by her housemates—”

  “Friday afternoon.”

  “She wasn’t found until this morning?”

  “Here’s the deal. The basement, first-floor, and other second-floor apartments each have a small bathroom with a stool, sink, and shower. The other girls laid claim to them. Each chick got her own john, basically.”

  “As God and Mother Nature intended it.”

  “Our girl”—he fished a notebook out of his coat pocket, flipped it open, and read—“Shelby Hammond, age twenty and a junior majoring in psychology, was saddled with this goofy bedroom that’s got a toilet stool in a tiny closet, and a bathtub sitting smack-dab in the middle of the room.”

  “Weird.”

  “The room is really a large bathroom,” Garcia explained. “The owner added a bay window and a closet and called it a bedroom so he could squeeze in another student renter.”

  “Getting stuck with a tub would have annoyed me,” said Bernadette. “I have to have a shower. I hate baths.”

  “I’m not a tub fan either, and this didn’t change my mind any.” He flipped a page. “Minneapolis PD said one of the roommates’ boyfriends found the body. He’d stopped by to pick his girlfriend up for class this morning and had to take a quick leak. All the other bathrooms were tied up, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “He thought our psychology major had left for class already and pushed open the bedroom door to use her closet toilet.”

  “They don’t lock their doors around here?”

  “Nope.” Garcia opened the bedroom door.

  “I’ll bet they start locking them now,” said Bernadette as the two of them faced the tub, one limb from the corpse draped over the side.

  Chapter 3

  THE TUB WAS ACROSS THE ROOM, SITUATED ALONGSIDE THE bay window. A brass bed, a vanity with an attached mirror, and a tall chest of drawers crowded the rest of the room. Pink shag carpeting covered the floor, and matching pink fabric dressed the bed and the bay window. Pink posters were tacked up on every wall, a pink Babe on Board road sign hung from the wall over the bed, and fuzzy pink dice dangled from the dresser mirror. The only things that weren’t overwhelmingly pink were the tub and its occupant.

  From where Bernadette and Garcia stood just inside the threshold, all that was visible over the top of the white tub was a white leg thrown over the side. The porcelain and the flesh w
ere identically pale, as if they were part of the same modern sculpture. The toes of the white foot offered the only splash of color, with nails that were painted pink.

  Bernadette walked over to the side of the tub, her shoes squishing on the soggy carpet that surrounded it. “Why is it that all redheads look like spitfires when they’re alive…”

  “And so damn dead when they’re dead?” asked Garcia, coming up next to her.

  “Yeah. No one does dead like a redhead. It’s like their skin turns to wax or something. Why is that?”

  “Maybe it’s because they’re so white to begin with,” offered Garcia.

  “I’m sure there’s a scientific reason.”

  The dead woman provided no opinion on the matter. With the one leg draped over the side and the other slightly bent at the knee, she was sprawled out on her back. Her arms were thrown up over her head and rested against the back of the tub. Her long hair fanned out in the shallow water and fell across her face, looking like the tendrils of some sort of orange sea plant. Her dead eyes—twin water bugs—peeked out from behind the hair.

  Bruises dotted her legs and arms, showing she had flailed about. Constraint marks were visible around her shoulders, collarbone, and base of her neck. The water was murky; she’d defecated while she was struggling or her bowels had released after she’d succumbed. Bernadette hunkered down along the side of the tub. “She went kicking and fighting, the poor thing.”

  “Seems so.”

  She lifted one of the corpse’s hands off the back of the tub and scrutinized the fingernails, painted the same shade of pink as the toenails. “I don’t see any skin under her nails.”

  “If there was anything to be had, CSI got it.”

  “Right,” she said, and set the hand back down.

  Garcia bent over, plucked something off the carpet, and held it in front of his face. A rose petal. Pink. The crime scene crew hadn’t bagged all of them. More were sprinkled in the dirty water. “What was this about?”

  Bernadette picked a petal off the shag. “I’d say Miss Shelby Hammond was entertaining a gentleman.”

  “Couldn’t a girl do that for herself? Sprinkle the water with flowers?”

  “She could,” said Bernadette, dropping the petal back on the floor and standing up. “But it’d be strange, even for a psychology major who likes pink. A bubble bath is one thing. Rose petals are quite another.”

  Garcia motioned toward the ledge that ran alongside the bay window. It was filled with melted candles in various shades of pink. “What about candles?”

  “Girl might light candles for herself. That is still borderline weird in my book, but not over the edge like rose petals.”

  “You’re thinking she got the tub ready for a soak with Romeo. She went in first…”

  “And then he turned on her.” Bernadette walked around the tub to the windows and pushed aside the curtains. The miniblinds behind the curtains were folded shut. Spreading a pair of slats, she saw a duplex across the street. “What about the neighbors? Maybe they saw her with somebody over the weekend.”

  “Minneapolis PD is on top of it.”

  Bernadette went over to the vanity and studied the photos tucked into the frame of the mirror. They were all snapshots of Hammond with girlfriends.

  “See any candidates for man of the year?” asked Garcia.

  “Nope.” Bernadette lifted each of the photos, checked the backs, and returned them. Nothing. Nothing. One—with Hammond and another girl—carried neat script on the back: “To my best friend. Have a blast at college.” It made Bernadette sad and mad at the same time. “I really want to get this bastard.”

  Garcia was checking under the bed. “Me, too.”

  She took down another photo. A landscape shot. It had a red sticker on the back shaped like a stop sign, with a local phone number running across the middle. Underneath the number it said “Suicide Stop Line.” Bernadette stared at it, then told herself it didn’t matter if Hammond had contemplated taking her own life. This wasn’t a suicide. She slipped the photo back under the frame.

  “Anything?” asked Garcia, standing up.

  “Nada.” Bernadette started opening vanity drawers and poking around the clothing inside them. “Could have been a guy she picked up in a club. One-night-stand sort of thing.”

  “I don’t see any obvious signs of sexual activity,” he said, nodding at the perfectly made bed.

  “Could be they did it on the floor because”—Bernadette’s voice trailed off as she thought back to her college years—“Shelby’s bed was noisy and she was afraid a roommate would come home and hear.”

  Garcia, while pressing down on the mattress with one hand and listening to the squeak, said, “Roommates told the police that Hammond wasn’t into dating. Didn’t go out to bars.”

  Bernadette held up a packaged condom. “Roommates don’t know everything.”

  “Hmm.”

  She dropped the condom back in the drawer and closed it. “Did you tell your college roommates everything?”

  “We didn’t talk,” said Garcia. “We drank and watched television.”

  “Nice.”

  Garcia said, “ME will let us know if he finds any evidence of sexual activity. Sexual assault.”

  Bernadette went over to the chest of drawers and started riffling through the contents. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  “Minneapolis PD has already been through here.”

  “Humor me,” she said, closing one drawer and opening the one below it.

  He watched as she continued to dig. “What do you think?”

  “I think she had a lot of pink clothes. I thought redheads couldn’t wear pink.”

  Garcia went over to a closet, opened it, and stared with wide eyes. “Wow.”

  Bernadette closed the drawer and looked over. The closet was jammed with pink dresses, blouses, shoes, and purses. “Was the wow for the pink or the mess?”

  “Both,” said Garcia, shutting the door before something tumbled out. “If I have kids, I hope they’re all boys.”

  “Something’s missing.” She put her hands on her hips and ran her eyes around the room. “Where are her textbooks?”

  “Downstairs,” said Garcia. “Apparently the kitchen doubled as the study hall.”

  “Laptop?”

  “Computer forensics took it.”

  “Cell?”

  “Bagged. Cops are snagging phone records.”

  “I don’t suppose they found anything juicy in her directory or on her redial.”

  “Nope.”

  Bernadette went back to the tub. Hammond was a small-breasted girl—her chest was as flat as a young boy’s—and her arms and legs were like toothpicks. Her hip bones practically poked through her skin. She looked thin in the photos, too. “Was she ill?”

  “Why?”

  “My arms are bigger than her legs.”

  “And you’re pretty slender.”

  “Thank you for not using the word skinny.”

  “When the ME does his deal, that should uncover any illnesses,” said Garcia. “I know our people didn’t mention anything regarding an illness. Maybe the cops heard something. But like you said, she might not have told the other girls.”

  “Have the parents been contacted?”

  “They’re in Europe. Minneapolis Homicide is trying to track them down.”

  Bernadette bent over the tub and brought her face close to that of the dead girl’s. “Maybe she was anorexic or bulimic. That wouldn’t be something she’d share with friends or family.” She peeled down the bottom lip of the open mouth. “Her teeth look funky.”

  “From stomach acid?”

  Bernadette stood straight. “The other victims, some of them had eating disorders, too.”

  “They had a lot of problems, which is why the suicide rulings weren’t hard to swallow,” said Garcia.

  “The angry villagers aren’t going to swallow this one,” she said. “They’re going to break out the torches.�
��

  “We’re reviewing the earlier drownings,” Garcia said defensively.

  “We’ve got to step it up,” she said. “People are going to freak. They’re going to say we let a maniac run around unchecked.”

  “The police are taking action. We’re taking action.”

  She walked back and forth along the side of the pink bed. “We’re passing out Prozac and telling people to take the ‘How to Tell You’re Depressed’ quiz.”

  “The others could still be suicides.” He nodded toward the tub. “This could be completely unrelated.”

  “All the victims have been young college women with problems. All drowned. In every case, there were no witnesses. These can’t be a string of coincidences. If that’s not enough, look at the rate. Since April, it’s been one a month. Clockwork.”

  “If we count La Crosse, it’s one a month. If we don’t count La Crosse—”

  “We’ve got to count La Crosse.” She leaned against the side of the bed.

  “Do you think we’ve gone from the river to a tub?” asked Garcia.

  “You know what that tells me? That tells me the killer needs a more intense experience, a more up-close-and-personal drowning. He could crank it up in other ways, too.”

  “How?”

  “The next killing might not be spaced so far apart.”

  Garcia dragged his hand over his face. “What do you want from me?”

  “What do you want from me?” she asked. “Minneapolis Homicide is all over it. Our Minneapolis office is all over it. Milwaukee sent an asshole and an agent. They’re tripping over each other interviewing roommates.”

  “It’s Minneapolis PD’s case, first and foremost. I can’t do shit about that. It doesn’t become yours unless—”

  “Unless I prove that we’ve got a serial killer.”

  “What do you need to do that?”

  She got up from the side of the bed. “The files, going all the way back to the first one.”

  “The one in April? That was a suicide for sure.”

  “Why?”

  “There was a note.”

  “I want the note. I want the file. Did notes come with any of the other ‘suicides’?”

  Garcia’s brows knitted. “I think the second one…no…they found a scarf she’d dropped on the bridge. No note.”