The question was a mere formality. She knew procedure as well as Frank. Better probably. But since he was the lead on this, in front of others she’d played along.
“Good a start as any,” Frank commented.
He turned back to the Dumpster, intent on doing his own examination of the immediate area as well as getting as concise an overview of the victim as possible.
As he crossed back to the Dumpster, he saw Sanchez stand up and look at him over the side. It was obvious by his grimace that this was not the other detective’s favorite place to be.
“There’s no ID on the vic from what I can see, Frank,” Sanchez called out.
“We’ve got an ID,” Frank informed him. “Her name was Mary.”
“Mary?” Hill echoed. The older detective clambered out of the Dumpster. He was less than graceful. “Mary what?” he asked, trying to brush some of the debris off his clothing.
“For now, just Mary,” Frank said.
Tagging the victim White Bear would bring immediate focus on the Mission Ridge detective in exactly the fashion she didn’t want. He hadn’t made up his mind about her. And, he had to admit to himself, in all honesty, he sympathized with what she had to be feeling.
Behind them, the coroner’s vehicle pulled up at the mouth of the alley, ready to take victim number seven to the morgue.
Frank turned to glance in Julianne’s direction. He saw her looking at him. Very deliberately, she mouthed, “Thank you,” before turning away and following Riley to the front of the restaurant.
Don’t thank me yet, White Bear, he thought.
Julianne caught a ride back to the precinct with Riley rather than Frank even though she’d initially arrived with him. She was grateful that Riley didn’t press her to talk, respecting the fact that she needed some time to process what had happened. She was sure Riley just believed she was traumatized about seeing a murder victim.
Eventually, she had to tell the woman that the serial killer’s latest victim was her cousin. Right now, she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. Or Mary. She needed to pull herself together and focus. One thing she knew: She wasn’t going home until Mary’s killer was caught.
By the time she walked into the room the task force had taken over and made their own, there were two bulletin boards in the room instead of one. Mary’s photograph was pinned to the new board. Rather than the unsettling crime-scene photographs, Frank had used the one that she’d brought with her. The one she’d used to show the prostitutes last night.
If only one of them had remembered seeing Mary, maybe she could have gotten to her before…
She was going to drive herself crazy, Julianne silently reprimanded. She had to deal with what was, not with what might have been.
It almost hurt her to look at Mary’s photograph. Despite the sad eyes, Mary was smiling in the photograph. She had been so young, so pretty. The whole world could have been at her feet had she been allowed to grow up like any normal girl.
It wasn’t fair, Julianne thought angrily. It just wasn’t fair.
Like someone in a trance, she walked up to the second bulletin board because the one they had had grown too crowded to handle any more victims. Right now, Mary’s photograph was the only one on it.
How long would that last?
In the middle of saying something to Hill, Frank abruptly stopped and crossed over to her. “I need you to fill me in on things.”
She was grateful that McIntyre was letting her stay, but a wariness crept over her nonetheless. “What things?” she asked.
Because her connection was going to be kept private for the time being, he lowered his voice. “You said she was your only family.”
“Yes?” The single word inferred that he had heard correctly.
Same confounding pattern, he thought. “Then she had no brothers or sisters, nobody to ask after her, except for you?”
Where was he going with this? She didn’t like moving blindly into something. “Right.”
“Just like the others,” Frank murmured under his breath, looking at the first bulletin board.
“The others?” She’d read through all the files, but didn’t recall seeing that each woman was an only child. Was he referring to something else?
“The other victims,” Frank clarified. “That’s the only thing they had in common.” He looked from one photograph to another, thinking what a terrible waste it all was. “None of the women had anyone in their lives to ask after them if they suddenly went missing.”
Julianne took offense at his statement. “She had me,” she protested.
He pointed out the obvious. “But you didn’t know where she was. So you weren’t a presence,” he said matter-of-factly. “Or a factor. All these other women, they were all single, or divorced.”
“Our second victim was a widow,” Riley reminded him, walking into the room from the opposite end. She tossed down her purse on her desk, weary beyond reason. She hated coming up against dead ends and that was all their canvassing had yielded: dead ends.
Frank shrugged. “Same difference. For all intents and purposes, they were all alone. No immediate family in the area to ask about them if they suddenly vanished.
Employers assumed they were taking a sick day. And who misses a hooker?” He deliberately avoided looking at Julianne as he posed the question. “A cold trail is harder to follow than a hot one,” he concluded.
His eyes swept over the photographs thoughtfully. There had to be something else. Something that tied them together. Something they were all missing. But what?
“Maybe he just picks them at random,” Hill suggested. That had been his theory all along.
But Frank shook his head. “One or two, maybe. But the chances of all seven of them being loners is astronomical,” he insisted. “No, the killer hand selected them.”
“Okay, assuming you’re right,” Julianne said, crossing her arms before her, waiting to be convinced. “Why? Why these particular women and not another group?”
“If we knew that, we could narrow our search, couldn’t we?” Frank countered, banking down a wave of sarcasm before it entered his voice.
He looked at her for a long moment, still not certain he was doing the right thing by letting her remain on the task force. Rules dictated that he take her off if she had a personal stake in it and this was really personal.
“I need to talk to you in private,” he said abruptly, walking into the hall.
Those were the exact words the principal had used the day he’d called her into his office. He called her in to tell her that her father was found dead. She was eighteen and four days away from graduating high school.
Julianne struggled against the chill that slipped down her spine now as she walked out of the room and followed Frank into the hall.
The moment they were out of earshot of the others, he turned to look at her. “I’m not sure that letting you stay is the right thing to do,” he told her honestly. “The rules—”
She didn’t let him finish. “You’re not someone who goes by the rules.”
She said it with such certainty, he was sure Riley had to have tipped her off. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody,” she replied quietly. “I can see it in your eyes.”
“That Navajo clairvoyance again?” This time he allowed a touch of sarcasm to come through.
“No, that’s gut instincts. Cops are supposed to have them,” she reminded him. He wasn’t coming around, she thought. She needed something more. There was only one card she had left to play. She hoped it would do the trick. “You come from a big family, McIntyre. How would you feel if that was your cousin’s picture posted on the bulletin board and you thought you let her down? Would you just back away, pack up and go home and let someone else take over finding her killer?” she challenged. “I don’t think so.”
Frank didn’t answer immediately. But he knew how he’d react. He’d track down the bastard and make him pay for what he’d done.
But this w
asn’t his cousin, it was hers and that made all the difference in the world.
Being leader was a no-win situation, he thought darkly. But, for what it was worth, it did allow him to call the shots—until he wound up shooting himself in the foot, he thought cryptically.
“Okay, you can stay. For now,” he qualified. “But that means that you don’t go Lone Ranger on me, understand?”
“Wrong character,” she corrected with a glimmer of a smile on her lips. “Tonto was the Indian.”
“Yeah, but Tonto followed the rules.”
She laughed shortly. It was all in how you viewed things, she thought. “Tonto teamed up with a white guy in a mask.” That was back in the day when stereotypes were the rule, not the exception. And pairing the two together had gone against type. “There were no rules.”
“There are here.” She couldn’t mistake his meaning. There were rules and she was to abide by them.
Julianne took a deep breath. “Duly noted,” she said. Mentally holding her breath, she asked, “So, do I get to stay?”
“You get to stay.”
“Thank you. Anything else?”
“Not at the moment,” he told her.
With a nod of her head, Julianne turned around and walked back to the squad room.
Unconsciously noting the almost infinitesimal sway of her hips as she moved, Frank had an uneasy feeling he was going to live to regret his decision as he followed Julianne back into the squad room.
Chapter 5
“We’re going to start from scratch,” Frank announced once he walked back into the squad room.
Hill set down the coffee—his twelfth cup of the day—and frowned. “Come again?”
“We’re going to question anybody who had any interaction with our victims. The career women,” he specified. “Talk to their coworkers, their neighbors, find out what supermarkets they went to and talk to the checkers. Sometimes people share things with strangers they wouldn’t tell their friends.”
“These people didn’t have friends,” Sanchez reminded him. “They had stepping-stones. They climbed up on the backs of others,” he elaborated, when Julianne gave him a puzzled look.
“Maybe somebody had it in for one of them,” Frank theorized.
“And did what, killed all these other women to hide it?” Riley asked, incredulously.
“Maybe he killed the first one for a reason—and discovered that he liked the feeling. Liked being God in that tiny universe,” Julianne said, thinking out loud.
Frank nodded, the movement becoming more enthusiastic as he thought over what Julianne was saying. “Good. Go with that. Talk to Andrea Katz’s employer, her neighbors, her coworkers, anyone you can find. Get her credit history and see where she shopped, what restaurants she went to, what movie theaters she frequented. Who her boyfriends were,” he added.
“You heard the man,” Riley said to Julianne. “Let’s go.”
Julianne rose, but her attention was focused on the lone photograph on the second bulletin board. “I thought that—”
He didn’t let her finish. “You thought wrong. We’re going to do this in order.”
“The first forty-eight hours after a crime are the most crucial.”
He didn’t want her investigating her cousin’s death for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that she was too involved and could very possibly make an emotional call. “Thank you, I’ll try to remember that. Now get going. Sanchez, Hill, you take the next two.”
“How come we get two and they get one?” Hill protested.
“What is this, kindergarten?” Frank challenged. “The next two are prostitutes. There are less people to talk to.”
Hill grunted as he went out with Sanchez, clutching his wilted coffee container.
Frank was right.
The prostitutes proved to be harder to get a handle on. Although some of the working girls staked out particular corners and guarded them zealously, for the most part, the faces along the “Boulevard of Easy Virtue,” the label that McFadden had come to be known by, changed. Hookers moved around, they dropped out of sight and no one seemed to notice their absence. If they did, they weren’t talking.
Despite having two sets of steps to retrace, Sanchez and Hill were back in the office before Julianne and Riley.
Julianne had expected Frank to allow her to question the various strolling hostesses of the evening about Mary and was disappointed when he’d told her to check out Andrea Katz. The killer’s first victim had been a software programmer supposedly away on a business trip when she was killed. She never made it to the meeting that her firm had sent her to.
Andrea, blond, shapely and in her late twenties, had been missing for almost a week before the connection was made between her and the body found in a Dumpster within a trendy apartment complex.
Up until that point, the detectives handling the case assumed that the woman lived within the complex. The fact that no one recognized her only testified to the transient nature of the residents who lived there. People came and went without taking note of one another.
Andrea had been strangled from behind. Like all the victims who came after her.
The people at Andrea’s firm had nothing new to add to the testimony they had given before. Andrea was a hard worker, a go-getter who kept to herself for the most part. The people who worked closest to her desk said that there’d been no photographs on it, no treasured mementos. She was very orderly, very neat, almost pathologically so, according to one woman. She made it evident that there was no love lost between them.
“Andrea didn’t go out for drinks after work, didn’t share lunch with anyone—Lord knows we asked and tried to get her to come, but she always said no. So we stopped asking. She was too interested in getting ahead to make friends,” the woman concluded dismissively.
Her testimony echoed that of the other coworkers.
“Makes you think of Thoreau, doesn’t it,” Riley commented as they left the building and walked up to the car she’d driven to the firm. Julianne looked at her silently, waiting for enlightenment. “You know, the guy who said that most people live lives of quiet desperation.”
Julianne shrugged. Other than being an overachiever, there was nothing to set the woman’s life apart, nothing that made her a prime target.
“Maybe she liked a quiet life,” Julianne speculated. “It wasn’t as if someone was holding a gun to her head, saying she had to be a top-notch programmer. It was what she wanted. This day and age, women have a lot more options opened to them than they used to.”
Getting into the vehicle, Riley strapped in, waiting for Julianne to do the same before she started the car. “And yet,” she commented, “some of them still choose to go the easy route and sell their bodies for money.”
Julianne felt her throat tightening. “What makes you think it’s easy?” she challenged.
Riley spared her a glance. “I meant that they didn’t have to spend time studying, or sacrificing anything.”
Riley couldn’t have been more wrong, Julianne thought. She’d come away from questioning the hookers last night with a very distinct impression. It killed her that Mary had numbered among those lost souls. “They sacrificed their pride, their self-respect. They sacrificed everything just to survive. And sometimes, they do have guns held to their heads.”
“Did I just offend you somehow?” Riley asked. “If I did, I didn’t mean it. I was just talking. Thinking out loud.”
Julianne blew out a breath. She had no right biting Riley’s head off. Riley was right, she hadn’t meant anything by it. “Sorry, I’m just edgy.”
Riley made a right turn at the next light. “Yeah, I kind of noticed.”
It wasn’t often she apologized. Wasn’t often she felt she was in the wrong. But she had and she was. She supposed some kind of an explanation was in order. “I’m not used to having a partner. The police department over at Mission Ridge isn’t very big. I usually go off on my own.”
She’d had her s
uspicions about that, Riley thought. “That kind of thing is frowned upon around here,” Riley warned her. And then she winked. “Although it does happen. I’ll try not to get on your nerves,” she went on to promise amiably.
Julianne looked straight ahead. “It’s not you, it’s me.”
Stopping at a red light, Riley turned toward her, humor curving her mouth at hearing the classic line. “Are you breaking up with me, Julianne?”
Julianne laughed. God, it felt good to laugh. She couldn’t remember when she last had. “No, just trying not to be so on edge.” Even her hands were clenched in her lap, she realized. She deliberately spread her fingers out in a effort to shed the tension she felt.
Riley inclined her head. “Homicide’ll do that to you.”
Riley sounded completely laidback and relaxed, Julianne noted. “Doesn’t do that to you.”
Grinning, Riley lifted one shoulder in a careless little shrug. “I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got a great support system.”
“Your family.” It wasn’t a guess on Julianne’s part, not after watching Riley at Rafferty’s last night.
Riley nodded. “Nothing beats it.”
A sliver of envy momentarily wove its way through her. Had to be nice, Julianne thought, knowing people cared about you. Her father had, in his own way, when he wasn’t floating in the bottom of a bottle. “I wouldn’t know.”
“No family?” Riley asked, surprised.
Julianne thought of Mary, thought of the way her cousin had looked in the Dumpster, her face forever frozen in fear. Had Mary called out to her? With her last breath, had she called to her to come save her the way she used to do when they were both growing up on the reservation? Mary always managed to get into some kind of scrape and then she’d come running for help.
She hadn’t been there for Mary when it counted. There was no getting around that.
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