by Jason Parent
But looking into Michael’s tear-filled eyes, she knew her life had had some worth. Her work had always been good enough, and it had to be then. Focus on the case. She took in a breath, stood up straight, slid her loose hair behind her ears, and pushed the thought of her own death as far back in her mind as she could.
As if she had flipped a switch, Sam was back in cop mode. She looked Michael in the eyes. “Are you going to be okay?”
He sniffled but gave her a nod.
“Give me five minutes with Dr. Prentiss, then we’ll talk.”
“But, Sam, I—”
“Wait out in the hall. I promise, just five minutes.”
He hung his head and plodded toward the door. When he reached the door, he glanced back, and she gave him a nod. She didn’t like sending him off alone after he had just experienced a terrible vision, but she had a job to do. That had to be her primary focus.
“What was that all about?” Dr. Prentiss asked as soon as the door closed behind Michael.
“It’s… nothing. Michael’s had a difficult time lately. He doesn’t have many people looking out for him these days. He… worries about me. Anyway, what do you got for me?”
“Quite a bit, actually. But you’re not going to like it. This is some nasty business.” Dr. Prentiss shook his satchel. “Just let me get my notes.”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a clipboard with a pen tucked behind its clasp. He flipped through the pages, stopping occasionally while muttering and nodding.
When he was through reviewing the pages, he tucked the clipboard beneath his arm, walked over to the remains of Gloria Jackson, and drew back the sheet. “I estimate her time of death somewhere between four p.m. Saturday and two a.m. Sunday morning. She doesn’t appear to have been in the water for more than twenty-four hours. Cause of death seems rather obvious. This lady was butchered. Official cause: blood loss.”
“You couldn’t just tell me this was the work of a shark or maybe a really off-course school of piranha and make my job a whole lot easier, could you? I saw what some coyotes did to the remains of a child once. That was some gruesome stuff.”
“You don’t seem the type to be satisfied with anything less than the truth, Detective.”
“My cross and my curse. But make no mistake. An animal did this, even if it’s the bipedal kind that lives in the suburbs. So tell me, Doctor, what exactly did our perp do to this woman?”
“Well, aside from some scratches on her right arm, the victim has few defensive wounds.” Dr. Prentiss lifted the corpse’s head. “She sustained blunt force trauma to the back of her skull, creating a fissure. The weapon used was something cylindrical like a pipe or a bat.” He pulled the pen from his clipboard and used it to point at some inch-thick purple strips of smooth skin circling each ankle. “Rope burns here and on her right wrist. The skin of her left wrist—and of most of her left arm—is missing, as you can see. That appears to be where the killer made his first cuts. My assumption at the beach was correct. Many of these wounds were pre-mortem. He sawed through her skin as if he were slicing roast beef.”
“Torture. You’re certain?”
“Absolutely. I’ve analyzed the wounds thoroughly. The notches in the bone indicate the use of a serrated blade.”
“A saw?”
“No. We dug metal fragments from the bone that turned out to be polarized steel, the same composition as an average kitchen knife. Whoever did this took his time. I’m no psychiatrist, but…”
“Go on.”
“The method of torture was precise, done by someone in control of his emotions and his faculties. It took a steady hand and an even steadier heart.” He leaned over and tapped his pen against the skeletal arm. “Here, you can see the progression of the attack. The striations on the left arm are two inches apart. The killer removed segments in intervals. The skin was carved, little by little and slice by slice, almost up to the shoulder. The slashes on the rest of the body appear more random. The victim probably had been alive for a good part of it, but it appears that the killer continued cutting pieces from her even after her death, particularly those from her legs.”
Sam flinched. She didn’t want to know what had happened to the missing pieces. “Where’s the logic in that? Better yet, where’s the logic in torturing this woman? What could she possibly have known that was worth torturing her to find out?”
“I’m afraid the answers to those questions lie well outside my area of expertise, Detective.”
Sam rubbed her chin. The answer to her last question was simple enough to figure out: nothing. If information had been the killer’s goal, he would have gotten everything he needed long before he had desecrated the victim’s body to the extent in which Sam now found it. By the second cut, the guidance counselor would have been telling more tales than Scheherazade.
A chill ran down her spine. No one could have done this for personal enjoyment. Surely, no one could be that sick. But experience had taught her better, no matter how many times she tried to deny it.
“Anyway,” Dr. Prentiss continued, “from the measurements of the lacerations, I was able to determine the size and type of the blade to a reasonable degree of medical certainty. It’s all in my report.” He tapped on his clipboard. “I’ll have a copy sent over to you as soon as I finalize it.”
“Thank you, Dr. Prentiss.” Sam smiled and shook his hand. “I’ll call you to discuss it further once I’ve reviewed your full report. I’ve kept that boy waiting long enough.”
“Did you need him to identify the victim? Because that was already—”
“No, nothing like that. He’s a… student ride-along.”
Dr. Prentiss smirked. “If you say so. Anyway, I don’t think he has the stomach for this line of work.” He laughed.
Sam shook her head. “Well, I’d best be getting back to him. Thanks again.”
“Any time, Detective. Any time.”
Sam headed out of the morgue and nearly panicked when she didn’t see Michael in the hallway. She hustled out of the building and found him kicking around a rock in the parking lot. His hood was up, one of the strings pulled tight and hanging out of his mouth. She could tell he had been crying by the puffiness of his eyes.
When he saw her, he ran over, wrapped his arms around her, and buried his face in her jacket. “I tried, Sam. The whole time you were in there, I tried to think when it might happen. As much as it scared me, I replayed that vision over and over again in my mind. It was just me and you and Dr. Prentiss—”
“It’s okay, Michael.” She hugged him back, careful to avoid touching his bare hands. She didn’t want him to experience the pain of having another vision about her, even though she desperately wanted to know what he’d seen.
“I couldn’t see any calendars or clocks or newspapers or nothing.”
“Sh… it’s okay.”
Michael pulled out of her embrace. “It’s not okay! You’re going to die, and you don’t even give a shit! I saw you lying there, dead. You’re going to die and leave me just like everyone else does.”
A knot formed in her throat, but she kept up her face. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be more careful. But Michael, you don’t know when or how I die. There’s nothing more I can do than to be on my guard.”
“You were stabbed, I think.” Michael stomped his foot. “And your hair seemed longer. Ugh, I don’t know. I barely saw you before the vision ended.” He froze. “Wait a minute. That’s it!”
He lunged and grabbed her hand. He held it for a moment, then his face fell. “Why does it only fucking work when I don’t want it to?”
Sam grabbed him by the arms. “Listen. I’m going to be okay. We’ll figure something out. I promise.”
Michael went quiet then. She knew she had failed to convince him. Not knowing what else to do, she took him home. He hid his face behind his hood the entire ride. Wh
en she pulled into the driveway, he barely waited until the car stopped before jumping out and slamming the door.
Sam let him go. He needed some time to process what he’d seen, and she had a case to solve. Her case gave her the chance to do what she was trained to do: solve murders, not predict and prevent them. Delving into the work would help her get her head on straight.
Since she still had an hour before sunset, she headed straight to Ms. Jackson’s apartment, ready to start from ground zero. On the way, she called for backup to help her toss it. An hour of searching revealed nothing out of the ordinary, aside from a second toothbrush and some male undergarments in the dryer. Any records pertaining to the kids or families of schoolchildren she had tried to help must have been kept at her office. Other than a few newspaper articles on the table, the apartment revealed little about the victim’s work and no insight at all into why anyone would want to kill her, much less torture her for information.
Questioning Jackson’s friends and neighbors proved just as fruitless. All described her as gentle spirited, amicable, and sweet. Like trained parrots hesitant to speak ill of the dead, most used those exact words. The guidance counselor had no lover, male or female, that any of them could recall, though her next-door neighbor reported often seeing a strange car in her driveway late at night. Jackson had no criminal record and, it seemed, no enemies—except for the obvious one who had carved her into steaks. No one Sam questioned gave her any information about Jackson’s death or even her whereabouts the day she went missing, not a single lead worth following up, aside from the possibility of a secret lover. From what Sam could gather, Gloria Jackson was everything right with society.
So why would anyone want to kill her? That was the billion-dollar question.
In their few dealings in the past, Sam remembered the guidance counselor’s fierce dedication to her work, a trait to which Sam could relate. The school seemed the next logical place to investigate. And with the holiday break beginning, no one would be around to protest her snooping.
Sam made a quick phone call to Principal Roger Alves, who agreed to meet her at the high school early Thanksgiving morning. She didn’t know his plans for the holiday—she had planned to spend it with a TV dinner and some Three Stooges reruns—so she greeted him in front of the school with a smile and thanked him for his time.
Despite the cold and it being a day off, Alves seemed eager to help. “Gloria was a respected member of our faculty,” he said after shaking Sam’s hand. The skin over his knuckles was dry and cracking. He was a meek professor type, an older gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair parted on one side, gaunt features, and a butt chin. “She was loved by all who knew her.” Alves’s voice softened, and he looked away, but not before Sam caught the face of a man dealing with great sorrow.
Our mystery man? Sam kept her deduction silent. Alves was hiding something, but it wasn’t guilt.
He sniffled as he fumbled with his keys, hands trembling. At last, he pushed the right key into the keyhole and unlocked the door. He raised his head and straightened his tweed jacket. His sorrow had regressed but could not retreat beyond the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. After holding the door open for Sam, he followed her inside and locked it behind them.
Alves opened a gray panel in the faux-brick wall and flicked what looked like a half dozen breakers. The hallway illuminated with a sickly yellow light and hum that sounded like a cranked-up amplifier. “Please, follow me.” He waved an arm. “Her office is just down the hallway here.”
Sam crossed the lapels of her coat. For some reason, she found it colder in that empty school than it had been outside. The shiny waxed floors contrasted with speckled, stained, and in some places, broken white ceiling tiles. An air of somberness made her feel as if she had entered a crypt instead of an institution of learning. Every echoed footstep brought more gravity, as if the walls were closing in on her despite the spaciousness of the hallway.
Alves stopped and turned to her with defeated eyes and drooped shoulders. “I know you probably can’t tell me much, but do you have any idea who might have done this?”
“It’s too early to tell, but we have some leads,” she lied.
The principal set his jaw. It reminded Sam of all the times she clenched her teeth tightly while she fumed inside, knowing that feeling anger and hate was always preferable to letting loss and longing take hold. She wondered if she was perhaps only projecting her own emotions onto him.
He shook his head and continued walking. “I wouldn’t say this in front of the students, but I hope you find the son of a bitch and fill him with holes.”
Sam hoped so, too. “We’ll do everything we can to see that justice is served.”
Alves sighed. “Well, we’re here.” He stepped around her and riffled through his key ring once more.
Sam looked at the gold placard on the door: Guidance. Guide me, Gloria. Guide me to your killer.
Alves opened the door and turned on the light. “Now, professionally speaking, I can’t let you see the student records, any psychological evaluations—even the opinions of Gloria herself—or any other private information that may be held in their files.” He pointed at a large filing cabinet against the far wall. It had eight drawers arranged in two columns. “So that cabinet is off limits. Please feel free to go through anything else. Glo—Ms. Jackson was a very meticulous woman, so I’m sure everything will be organized and easy to find.”
Sam moved over to the desk. On it, she saw older pictures of Ms. Jackson with a chocolate lab that aged in each photo until it was replaced by a gorgeous baby girl with curly black locks and dimples the size of craters. A niece, Sam presumed. Other than a letter opener, a few stacks of Post-it notes, some blank legal pads, a stapler, and a jar full of pens and pencils, the desk was sparsely covered. She was not surprised; the juicy stuff was rarely kept in plain view.
She had a tried-and-true process for conducting an investigative search. When someone was murdered, the first documents she would seek were schedules: calendars, diaries, appointment books, or anything else that could pinpoint the victim’s location or companions at a time closest to the murder. Most people kept a considerable amount of information stored in their cellphones, so they would be Sam’s go-to sources. But cellphones were left on the victims only by stupid—and easy to catch—criminals. More often than not, the victim’s cellphone was never found.
Next she tackled the desk drawers. In the top drawer were Gloria’s personal bills and some office supplies, nothing of note save for a set of keys. In the top left drawer, she found what looked like a diary. It was bound in pleather with a latch and lock. She pulled it out.
“I believe that’s her day planner,” Alves said. “I’m not sure why she locked it, but I assume it was to keep her sometimes blatant disregard for my instructions hidden from me. Gloria could be so… stubborn. She really cared about these kids. About everyone, really. It was one of the many things I… we all loved about her.”
“Had she disobeyed any of your instructions recently?”
Alves’s eyes glistened with tears. “Not that I’m aware of. You would know better than me, I’m guessing, if you can get that open.” He gestured at the planner in her hand.
Sam grabbed the key ring. All four keys on it were far too large to fit the lock.
Alves was sniffling more frequently. A noise emitted from his throat that sounded as though he was trying to hold back a cough. “Excuse me,” he said as he headed out of the office. He stopped at the doorway. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. In the meantime”—his eyes shifted over to the file cabinet—“I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
Sam nodded, and the principal exited the room. She had read him loud and clear—the keys, or at least one of them, were to the filing cabinet. But that knowledge did her no good if she didn’t know what to look for.
She glanced back at the planner. Its lock looked s
o cheap she could probably pick it with a paper clip. “Fuck it.” She pulled on the flap until the fabric tore away from the metal clasp.
Ms. Jackson was a bit archaic in her calendaring system. The details of her work and personal life were spread across the pages in calligraphy-like handwriting. Nearly every weekday was marked by at least one set of initials. Some days had multiple pairings of letters, each corresponding to a specific time of day.
Dr. Prentiss had estimated the time of death at no earlier than four p.m. on Saturday, October 23. Sam slid her finger down the calendar. She saw only one marking on October 23. “T.M. – 2:00 p.m.” The letters had to be initials. But whose? Who was she meeting on her day off just two hours before she was killed?
Sam grabbed Ms. Jackson’s keys and ran over to the filing cabinet, shoved the first key into the keyhole, and turned it. Success. She pulled open the drawer. The inside of the filing cabinet was filled with manila folders, many of which were teeming with papers. Despite their volume, each folder was arranged neatly and alphabetically—last name first. Over the top of the files lay a single sheet of printing paper. In large, bold letters, it read, “CLOSED FILES.”
Sam smiled. Gloria’s organizational skills were making her job easy. She closed the drawer, removed the key, and hurried to the adjacent drawer. When she opened it, her smile grew larger. She couldn’t have more accurately predicted what she would find. Across the top of the files contained inside, Sam found a similar sheet of printing paper. That one read, “OPEN FILES.”
Sam thumbed through the folders. The last names on them went up only to F. She found M two drawers below. Quickly, Sam scanned the files until she found her first match: Thomas Marconi. The name meant nothing to her, nor did she expect it would. Sam pulled the student’s file and continued to the next one.
“Tessa Masterson,” Sam read. The name caused several bells to ring inside her head, but it took her a moment to realize why. “Tessa!” She felt as though the evidence she needed for her case had just been gift-wrapped and handed to her. Tessa was the name of the girl Michael claimed would soon kill her father. The coincidence was too amazing to ignore. The name wasn’t that common. There couldn’t be many Tessas at Carnegie. Maybe the girl had killed Gloria Jackson as a precursor to stabbing Daddy.