by J. A. Jance
“You’re saying she was eating dog food?” Joanna echoed.
“Yes,” Kendra replied. “It would appear she had a steady diet of it.”
“Oh, my God!” Joanna exclaimed. “That’s awful.”
“And that’s not all. I also found evidence of internal bruising on one leg just above the ankle. That kind of lower-leg injury suggests she’d been shackled for an extended period of time.”
“You’re saying she was manacled and starved?”
“Yes.”
“Had she been sexually assaulted?”
“Highly likely,” Kendra answered. “Tissue swabs tested positive for semen, so we should be able to come up with a DNA profile of the perpetrator. If the body hadn’t been found when it was, that evidence would have been lost. So I guess we owe that creepy Jack Carver kid a debt of gratitude.”
“What about cause of death?” Joanna asked. “Any visible wounds?”
“No potentially fatal ones—as in no gunshot wounds, no stab wounds, no blunt-force trauma.”
“What did she die of, then?”
“Asphyxiation,” Kendra answered, “but not manual strangulation. She had extensive injuries to her hands—injuries that occurred in the hours leading up to her death.”
“What kind of injuries?”
“Contusions, multiple broken bones. Her hands looked almost pulverized—as though the victim had been pounding on something hard, and that made me wonder: What if she’d been shut up inside an enclosure of some kind and was trying desperately to get out? So I ran a specific test and took a look at her short-chain 3-hydroxyacyl-CoA dehydrogenase.”
“Her what?”
“Never mind. The term is difficult to say and even more difficult to remember. In the world of M.E.-speak, we call that particular test SCHAD for short. The results I obtained suggest that Jane Doe was partially frozen before being dumped.”
“Are you saying the victim was crammed into a freezer and frozen alive?”
“That’s my theory,” Kendra replied. “The wounds to her hands were self-inflicted.”
Joanna Brady had been a cop for almost eight years, but news about this shocking manner of death left her horrified.
“That’s appalling,” she murmured.
“Yes,” Kendra agreed, “isn’t it just.”
“Does Tom Hadlock know about this?”
“Not yet. As far as I know, he’s still at the crime scene, and Detective Howell was on her way to tell him. As she was leaving, I asked her if she’d be informing you of my findings. Since you’re officially on maternity leave, she said she’d have to go through channels. Seeing as how I don’t work for the sheriff’s department, I don’t have to worry about going through channels. That’s why I called. I figure us law-enforcement ladies need to stick together.”
“Thank you for that,” Joanna replied. “Is there any news on the other victims? Do you think they might have died the same way?”
“One for sure didn’t,” Kendra answered. “The partial skull that Tom Hadlock dropped off last night shows clear evidence of a single bullet wound to the back of the head. For John Doe I’d have to say gun violence is the most likely cause of death.”
“Suicide?” Joanna asked.
“Not from that angle,” Kendra said. “We’re talking gun violence served up execution style. With the other two victims, until I have more bones to work with, I won’t be able to tell, but if I were a gambler, I’d be betting money on the probability that we’re dealing with several young women—marginalized women—who just happen to be the natural prey of serial killers.”
“Any theories about who our perpetrator might be?”
“The level of malnutrition on the autopsied victim suggests that she had been confined for a number of months, so whoever this monster is, he’s living far enough off the grid and with enough privacy that nosy neighbors aren’t calling him out. My concerns are these: We’ve got three victims so far, but what if there are more? What if there are other victims still being held prisoner?”
Joanna took a moment to digest that. “Other living victims, you mean,” she said. “That’s what you were saying earlier about our not having the luxury of time.”
“Right,” Kendra agreed. “Let’s bring this asshole down before he has a chance to kill anyone else.”
“Believe me,” Joanna said, “we’re on it.”
As soon as Dr. Baldwin hung up, Joanna tried calling Tom on the satphone. It rang, but he didn’t answer. Knowing that a voice mail would show up once he was back in range, she called his cell phone and left a message.
“If it’s not too late and if you don’t mind, could you stop by my place on your way back to the Justice Center?”
As that brief call ended, Sage chimed in with an urgent newborn summons. She was hungry, and Joanna was more than ready to feed her. The rocker in the nursery had been Joanna’s mother’s. When the feeding was over, she sat with Sage nestled against her, thinking about another baby—a brutally slain baby—one who hadn’t lived long enough to draw even so much as a single breath. Baby Jane Doe had never been wrapped in a soft blanket or held close or fed at her mother’s breast.
It might have been nothing except raging hormones, but thinking about that poor lost child was too much. Tears trickled down Joanna’s cheeks and dribbled onto the soft nap of Sage’s pale pink receiving blanket. She was still weeping when Denny, wrinkly and damp from an extended bath, ventured into the nursery.
“Mommy,” he said, touching her damp face, “what’s the matter? Why are you crying?”
Joanna was grateful that her son had been out of earshot during that all-too-graphic discussion with Kendra Baldwin, but she was sorry to have been caught crying. For the second time that day, she forced herself to tell Denny the truth about what was going on.
“I’m sad,” she admitted. “Two people were found murdered today, a woman and her baby.”
“Are you going to catch the bad guy who did it?” Denny asked.
“Yes, I will,” Joanna declared, wiping away the tears. “It’s my job and my department’s job, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 14
JAMES ARDMORE—JIMMY, AS HE PREFERRED TO BE CALLED—WAS pissed. The last thing—the very last thing—he’d ever expected to happen was to have one of his stalking victims turn the tables on him.
Once he’d dumped Amelia, he’d gone back to his truck, clocked in, and had driven to L.A., where he had unloaded the trailer at the warehouse. Then, instead of picking up his previously scheduled return load, he had driven east to the far side of Indio and parked his rig in the lot at the casino. It didn’t matter that he’d be leaving it there for a couple of days. The guy in charge was a friend of his, who, for a few bucks in his hand, was generous with the guest passes that meant rigs could sit undisturbed in the parking lot for up to a week at a time, no questions asked.
Jimmy went inside to the car-rental desk. He would have preferred an SUV, but since none were currently available, he had to settle for a Nissan Altima.
Once in the car and headed back to L.A., he called his boss in Omaha. “Bad news, Jake,” he announced. “I managed to get to the warehouse and unload, but when I went to leave again, my truck broke down and had to be towed. The mechanic here says it’s going to take two days at least to get the parts in and another day to install them, so I’m stuck here for that long—three days and maybe more.”
Naturally, Jake wasn’t happy about that. It meant he’d have to send another driver to L.A. to pick up the load Jim was supposed to drive from L.A. to Dallas. The good news for Jimmy was that although Jake might be all kinds of pissed off right now, he was also desperate for experienced drivers and was in no position to give Jimmy his walking papers.
Had Jim Ardmore still been working for an actual living, he might have been more worried about such things, but his life had changed remarkably over the last few years. Now that he had unlimited access to his late brother’s money, Jimm
y had paid off his mobile home and treated himself to a brand-new also paid-in-full Peterbilt, leaving him free to call his own shots about working or not working—about taking trip assignments or turning them down. This was definitely one of the latter.
He drove to the Airbnb he’d rented in Venice. He had booked the place under the name of Arthur Ardmore and paid for it with an AmEx that had his brother’s name on the account. Jimmy couldn’t help but smile just thinking about that. Old stick-in-the-mud Arthur seemed to be doing a lot more traveling and having way more fun now that he was dead than when he was still alive.
As for the collection of girls Jimmy kept in the basement? He kept them for as long as he wanted—until he tired of them or they turned up pregnant, whichever came first. Which is what had happened to the little Mexican babe from El Paso. She must have gotten pregnant almost the first time he touched her. But what he was looking for now was a suitable replacement for Sandra Locke. She’d been a blonde, and that’s what he wanted to bring back home—another blonde, preferably one with the kinds of curves he liked.
Jimmy wasn’t in a big hurry. This was a vacation, after all. The weather in California was balmy compared to Arthur’s drafty shack out in the Peloncillos or Jimmy’s double-wide in Road Forks. He entertained himself by reading the restaurant reviews on Yelp and sampling the food, treating himself to upscale fare that wasn’t generally available in the truck stops he usually frequented along the interstates.
By Saturday afternoon, though, his time off was coming to an end, and he was worried. Jake would want him back on the road by Monday at the latest, and time to find that missing blonde was running short. If he wasn’t going to go home empty-handed, he would have to get a move on.
He spent the day strolling the beaches and the Santa Monica Pier, looking for a likely prospect. There seemed to be plenty of hot numbers to choose from, but the problem with the girls on the beaches and the pier was that they seemed to run in groups—in pairs at least. What Jimmy really needed to find was your basic one-of-a-kind—a loner—someone he could target without anyone being the wiser.
Earlier in the week, he’d done his due diligence by checking out the product on display at the various gentlemen’s clubs around town, but the girls he found in those were all too old for his taste and too shopworn. He understood the trade-off. Women like that—the ones who’d been around the block—made for safer targets because they lived riskier lives. When something bad happened to a down-on-her-luck pole dancer, people in general and cops in particular tended to shrug their shoulders and act as if the victims involved had gotten what they deserved. The unexplained disappearance of a random prostitute here and there seldom caused a huge hue and cry. And most of the time, when one of them vanished without a trace, no one gave enough of a damn to go crying to the cops.
When Jimmy had plucked Amelia off that darkened street at the far end of El Paso, it hadn’t occurred to him that he had just scored a virgin. That had been purely the luck of the draw, and one he was hoping to duplicate. So far he’d come up empty.
Late in the evening, tired and frustrated, he settled into a coffee shop at the corner of Pacific and Washington. When he ordered his tall, double vanilla blond iced latte, the young woman behind the counter—Megan, according to her name tag—turned out to be exactly what he wanted. Young, blond, blue-eyed, with no visible tattoos or piercings, and she came complete with a ready smile.
Drink in hand, Jimmy settled into a nearby chair, one that was close enough to the counter so he could hear the banter back and forth between Megan and her customers, most of whom seemed to be regulars. His eavesdropping provided him with several important pieces of information. Megan lived in the neighborhood, had recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend, was looking for a new roommate, was attending Santa Monica College, and wanted to get through school without a ton of student debt. Bingo.
Of all those tidbits, the most interesting was the fact that Megan needed a new roommate for an apartment that was evidently only a couple of blocks away. The coffee shop was scheduled to close at ten. By nine thirty Jimmy had moved the car from the beach lot to a spot next to the curb facing eastward on Washington. That way once Megan’s shift ended and she was ready to go home, he’d be outside waiting, and she’d be ripe for the picking.
Except it hadn’t worked out quite like that. Despite her age, Megan was evidently the coffee shop’s manager, and she was the last one to leave, locking the door behind her. As Jimmy had anticipated, she walked eastward, away from the beach rather than toward it. Watching her go, he marked her progress along the sidewalk, delaying his attack until she was well away from the coffee shop’s entrance and he could be sure she was alone.
Once she was halfway between two glowing streetlights and next to the end of an alley, he pulled up beside her and rolled down the window. “Hey, Megan,” he called. “Can you give me a little help here? How do I get back to the 10?”
Just as he expected, she came over to his vehicle and leaned down to peer into the window. “Oh, hi,” she said. “It’s you. Go back to Pacific and turn right on that. Follow that north to Rose. Right on Rose and then left on Fourth. Fourth will take you all the way to the freeway.”
“Thanks for the help,” he said.
“No problem.”
“Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“No thanks, my place is just a couple of blocks from here.”
She turned and resumed her walk. He doused the lights, put the Nissan in park, and stepped out of the car. As he closed on her from behind, the last thing he expected was for her to fight back. She must have heard his footsteps because before he had a chance to lay hands on her, she stopped abruptly and spun around to face him. He barely caught a glimpse of the stun gun gripped in her fist before she zapped him with it, nailing him full in the chest and giving him a forceful shove for good measure.
Jimmy crumpled onto his back like a felled ox and lay there for a time, seeing stars and waiting for his head to clear. When he finally got his wits about him and struggled to his feet, Megan had disappeared into the night. Cussing her under his breath, he groped for his wallet and was relieved to find it just where it was supposed to be—still in his hip pocket. If the little bitch had rolled him and stolen that, he would have been up shit creek, with no credit cards and no money and with both his IDs—one for him and one for Arthur—loose in the world. That could have been disastrous.
As furious with himself as he was with Megan, Jimmy pulled it together and staggered back to his waiting car without making any attempt to follow her. She was gone. What he needed to do was get the hell out of the neighborhood in case she was even now calling the cops. Rolling down the window, he listened for approaching sirens before pulling in to traffic. Since Megan had given him directions for going north, he went directly to the first decent intersection and headed south.
As he drove, a still-dazed Jimmy tried to assess the potential damage. He had paid in cash at the coffee shop, so Megan didn’t have any credit-card information that would be of use in tracking him. His biggest worry was that she might have been able to provide either a description of his vehicle or even the tag number. That meant he needed to get that Nissan back to the rental agency in Indio ASAP.
While on the hunt, Jimmy always kept his goods with him. That way once he had his target in hand, there was no reason for him to return to his lodgings. That was the case here, too. When he got to Venice Boulevard, he drove east as far as the northbound lanes of the 405.
Back on I-10 finally and driving eastbound still empty-handed, he pounded the steering wheel in a gesture that was equal parts fury and frustration. How was it possible that he could have been taken down by a little slip of a girl who couldn’t have been a day over twenty, if she was even that? What the hell was someone like her doing walking around with a goddamned stun gun in her pocket? How could that have happened? How could Jimmy have let that happen?
He was relieved to find, however, that there was no s
ign of any unusual police activity on I-10. He stayed in the middle lanes and stuck to the posted speed limits as he rolled past the long line of trucks waiting at the weigh station. By then he was relatively sure no one was looking for him, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
Back in Indio he dropped off the car, gassed up his truck, and headed southbound on CA-86. Under the circumstances it seemed like a good idea to head eastbound on I-8 rather than I-10. What he really wanted to do was pull over, haul out a bottle of Jameson, and really tie one on, but he couldn’t risk that. The last thing he needed was for some overly zealous cop to check out his vehicle and nail him on an open-container charge. That would be the end of his CDL and the end of his cover as well.
Once Jimmy finally had himself back under control, he used his cell phone to call Omaha. It was the middle of the night and the office was empty, so the call went straight to voice mail.
“Hey, Jake,” Jimmy said. “Got my truck out of hock late this afternoon. I was planning to call in tomorrow to see if you had another load ready for me to take east. Problem is, I just had a call from home. My brother’s health has taken a turn for the worse, and he’s been transported by ambulance to a hospital in Tucson. I’m the only family he has left, so I’m going to deadhead back home. Sorry about that, especially knowing how shorthanded you are right now, but it’s the best I can do. I’ll let you know as soon as I’m available.”
At Brawley he turned off the highway and tucked in among several other big rigs parked for the night on an empty lot behind a bustling gas station. Up in his bunk, he gathered the things he’d gotten out in advance of bringing his intended prize back to the truck—duct tape, tie-wraps, and a tarp. Once he had those properly stowed, he climbed into bed and tried to relax.
Lying there waiting to sleep, he noticed that he had a bit of a headache. That was unusual, and he wondered about that. Was it a residual effect from being hit by that stun gun or was it from the fall he’d taken? Except for those occasions when he cut loose and let himself indulge in more Jameson than was good for him, Jimmy Ardmore wasn’t prone to headaches, but for the time being he decided that the best thing to do with this non-Jameson headache was ignore it and try to get some sleep.