“Haven’t seen you since the last case,” Zienuc said, smiling wearily. “How’s your little guy?”
“Good, thanks,” Jill said tightly; and David said, “Happy. Sleeping like a baby.”
He was in the chair by the desk. Looked down at Jill’s phone in his hand and hesitated. “Before you hear this, there’s two things you should know. First, this creep said he got my number from a friend in a bar. I don’t believe it. Second - Jill?” He looked tensely at her. “You want to…”
“I saw him,” she said abruptly, on the floor near David with her arms hugging her knees.
Connor and Zienuc blinked at her. Zienuc grabbed for his notebook.
“He was in shadow. I just caught a glimpse of him when I ran back to our building for one of Jesse’s toys.”
Connor asked, “How’d you know it was him?”
“I didn’t. He bragged about it during the recording.” Jill hugged her knees tighter. “He was probably in disguise. Wore glasses and seemed fat, although afterwards I realized his neck was slender, and bellies don’t pouch out like his did…”
“As if he had something under it?” Zienuc asked, scribbling.
“Yes.”
David said, “Sounds like he uses disguises. Claimed he’d seen me at some hospital conference ‘looking quite different from the real me’ - his words. Probably lied about being there, just bragged that he has different looks.”
Jill filled them in on what description she could. “Caucasian, I’m pretty sure, and above average height.” Her throat was tight. “I didn’t see his face. He was mostly in shadow but it was clear he was watching me. Just standing there, not moving.” She shuddered; glanced up to David.
“Ready for his voice?” he asked, his fingers on Jill’s phone.
Both detectives nodded stiffly. Rudy stopped fiddling with David’s phone, and moved a tiny mike closer to re-record.
The room filled with David’s voice and the voice of a monster who had attacked six people, killing four of them.
“…expect our future conversations to be quick, so I can’t be traced. Cops can be clever with these phones too. It’s been so nice talking to you-”
“Why do you kill couples?”
“Why not? They’re offensive. Lovers can be so smug, superior-acting in their own selfish little worlds.” A sigh. “Well, maybe not all, I admit. Your Jill looked so precious running out of your building clutching that toy. Oh, and Happy Birthday to Jesse! Soon, right? Lucky you, David, you’ve got it all. Both of you, you’re so damn perfect.”
Connor scowled and Zienuc scribbled. David scribbled too, making a list, it looked like.
“That’s right, we’re flawless, we don’t even cry or bleed. So you want to kill us too?”
“Not yet. We have a game to play first.”
“What game?”
“Catch me.” A sigh. “I’ve been getting bored. My victims are too…like shooting fish in a barrel. But going up against you makes it more exciting.” Dramatic sigh. “Ironic how fate has brought us together. Pure fate that one of my hits was brought to your hospital. So catch me before I kill the next pair, and if you don’t it’s on you. Your fault, David. I really must go now.”
David switched it off. Silence hung in the tense air for a moment, then Connor said, “Whoa. Serious psycho;” and Zienuc muttered, “Hates men and women equally, but craves their attention.”
Jill got up as if she ached, and sat on the edge of the desk. “I missed the first half of the conversation,” she said.
David glanced down at his list. “Right, here’s more. Catch Me referred to himself as my new friend and fellow sharp shooter. Called just using a .22 caliber gun boring. Also used the term, ‘doubting Thomas,’ which may suggest a religious background.”
“Choir boy gone bad?” Connor ventured. “Well, we’ve got the start of a profile. Creep’s a loner. Hates authority, anyone with successful relationships, or who is supposedly superior. David has you, Jill, and fame from his roof shot which is why his” – a sarcastic gesture – “fellow sharp shooter is challenging him.”
Zienuc added, “Also wants control over everyone. Can’t resist taunting us with his Catch Me notes. Has a sick need to feel superior.”
“Oh and Happy Birthday to Jesse!” Jill mimicked furiously. “That was a taunt too. A threat!”
David handed Jill’s phone to Rudy. “Put a trap in this too.”
“Was planning to.” Rudy nodded and took it.
Connor shook his head in frustration. “This sonofabitch is smart, too. Wears gloves and disguises, shoots victims at random with an unregistered gun, and leaves no physical evidence, no eyewitnesses, two grainy surveillance photos that might be him, taken at night.”
His gaze went from Jill to David. “This twisted psycho will be calling you again. At the rate we’re going, you’re the only lead we have. Try to keep him talking. Even with a burn phone we can narrow down his location if you keep him on it longer.”
Rudy handed Jill back her phone, and the detectives rose. Tired as they were, they looked hopeful.
Zienuc even cracked a smile at the two mattresses on the floor. “I like your bed,” he said. “Nice. Better than the lumpy bunks we have at the precinct.”
The police left, with thanks and urging to get some sleep. David turned off the overhead light, dropped his head onto Jill’s shoulder and wrapped his arms around her. For long moments, they just stood like that, leaning together against the door and trying to get their breathing to slow.
Then they stumbled to bed, and precious sleep time lost to fretting, comforting, reassuring, and more fretting before they both conked out.
11
“Where’s Ashley?”
It was seven in the morning. Groggy interns and residents waited for morning patient rounds by the nurses’ desk, munching bagels and stale donuts and bitching about no sleep. The intern named Kate Olsen had directed her question to another intern named Mari Withers, but Charlie Ortega looked around, surprised.
“Ash isn’t here?”
“You saw her last,” Kate said. “You guys were off last night, didn’t you go out?”
“Yeah but…” Charlie frowned. “Just across the street to Farrell’s for, like, forty minutes.” He looked around again, concerned. Ashley Cobb was so reliable.
David stopped flipping through patient charts and looked at Jill turning from Tricia. Jill’s eyes widened: What’s this?
Ortega said nervously, “Ash hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours. Maybe had too much to drink.”
“Happened to me once.” Tricia’s cheeks bulged with Pop Tart. “Farrell’s is bad ‘cause it’s too easy, too close.”
Charlie was already punching his phone. “She isn’t answering,” he said after a short wait, still frowning. “It went to voice mail.”
David put the new patient charts into the chart rack, gave it a tense shove. Others fell in behind him. Jill asked Charlie, “Did she come back with you?”
“Maybe a couple of minutes later. She was talking to some guy whose niece was interested in OB here.”
Talking to some guy.
Jill traded chilled looks with David. Catch Me last night said he got David’s number from some friend in a bar. He didn’t say how. Dread surged.
“Say nothing,” David said low. “Maybe she’s just…”
A frantic whisper: “Ashley Cobb with three alarm clocks in her room?”
Walking the hall behind them, Ramu Chitkara and Gary Phipps were mumbling about how lucky their night had been. Just three births, with only one of them complicated – a fat kid breech.
“Hey, David?” Gary asked. Like Ramu, Charlie and Tricia, he was one of Jill’s fellow first year residents who had struggled through internship with her. “How do you flip kids like that?”
“Same way you get to Carnegie Hall,” David answered.
“Well, sorry we had to call you. You get back to sleep okay?”
“Yeah. No prob.” David had
slept little during the night, and his expression was the same as Jill’s: straining to be neutral. It was hard, but there was the daily bunch of new moms to be checked, and the jostling interns who had to be taught how.
Jill was still hearing Talking to some guy. She felt a knot tighten in her chest.
Outside the first patient’s room, David stopped for a moment and stared at the group trailing behind him.
“What?” Tricia asked.
“This bunch seems bigger today.”
A dozen interns and residents looked at each other.
“It’s because of the gunshot through the uterus, isn’t it?”
Lots of nodding. It was unusual and they had to learn. “Wait,” David said. “Beth Willis is down in 514. We gotta start here.”
Chart in hand, he led the way into the first room where he greeted new mom Morgan Tilley. Asked her how she felt. Did the physical, checked the pulse and blood pressure, and felt the belly to make sure the uterus was contracting on schedule. It was.
“So what do we not need?” he asked.
“Ergotrate,” chorused several voices, and a single one trailed, “You only need it if the uterus isn’t contracting.”
“Smart interns,” David said, smiling at Morgan Tilley, scribbling a note for the nurse. Tilley looked thrilled with his smile, Jill noticed, making a face at Tricia who smirked. Tilley had turned down her TV when they came in, but it still burbled and suddenly: “Oh look!” Her eyes shot from David to Jill and back to the TV. “That’s you!” she said, turning the sound up.
Weary gazes went to the television. Last night’s footage of Jill and David pushing through Emergency, with David’s face close to Jill’s as the idiot with the phone cam taped them.
“Wait till I tell my friends!” Tilley was excited for just a moment, then her face turned round-eyed.
“Isn’t this terrible about the Couples Killer? Do you think they’ll catch him?”
“Yeah, I do,” David said with an edge, glancing at Jill.
He got them out of there. The second patient’s TV was thankfully showing ads, and the third patient felt sick and had her TV off. David checked, then told the group about episiotomy infections causing fever, wrote a nurse’s order for doxycycline and clamped it to the outside of the chart. Red-flagged it with a red sticky.
Back in the hall his phone rang. Jill felt a new tremor go through her.
He listened, muttered, and hung up.
“That was Jim Holloway with Beth Willis,” he told the group. “Pediatrics jumped the gun and sent Beth’s little boy up early. They’re just getting him settled. We don’t want to scare him, so seeing her will have to wait.”
Faces looked disappointed, but Jill was relieved it wasn’t about Ashley Cobb. Got your number from a friend in a bar… SO WHERE IS SHE NOW? The words stormed at her.
David’s phone rang again, and she clenched.
Watched as he answered, went white, barely spoke and walked away from the others. Jill stepped closer to him, knowing his reactions. Her fear turned to nausea.
He rang off and looked at her, his face suddenly older. “Kerri,” he said quietly. “Not good.”
“Ashley?” she whispered.
He nodded. Seemed frozen for a moment, then turned around and looked down the hall. Open doors, nurses buzzing in and out. “TVs are all on,” he said. “If it’s not on yet it will be…”
He seemed to make a decision and motioned to his rounds group. “Come,” he said. “Doctors’ lounge.”
12
He told them.
Turned down the TV in there and got them all clustered, sitting and standing, around the chairs and sagging couches of the OB doctors’ lounge. The hospital had been notified, and other available OB staff came running in: Sam MacIntyre, Woody Greenberg looking like he’d just lurched out of bed, and Jim Holloway with his phone still in his hand.
David stood before the 1940s poster welcoming visitors to the Stork Club.
“Ashley Cobb has been found murdered,” he announced somberly, without preamble.
Gasps and cries. Kate Olsen and Mari Withers clutched at each other, incredulous and sobbing.
“I was just with her last night!” Mari cried.
“At Farrell’s,” David said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, yes!” Mari wept. Tricia hugged her, trying to comfort. Ashley, Kate and Mari had been friends.
David revealed more, his features tight. “Some kid taking a short cut found Ashley’s body in the alley next to Farrell’s. Her purse was missing, but police found her nametag on her scrubs.” David’s voice was grave. “She died from multiple blunt force blows to her head.”
Someone moaned. Jill helped Mari to a couch and sat with her, feeling a whirring wail grow louder and louder in her head. Just weeks ago, she had taught Ashley how to get an IV into a collapsed vein. In her mind she saw Ashley again, alive and stressed, saying, “But there is no vein. I can’t find it!” And then she’d found it, gotten the IV in. A quick learner, so sweet, eager…
Tears welled and burned.
Tricia sat on Mari’s other side, still hugging her, peering worriedly over to Jill. She looked stricken. Woody reached out to pat Mari’s knee. But his eyes were heartbroken.
David was meanwhile announcing that he and Jill would be changing their cell phones. “I’ll have the office notify you when we get our new numbers, which will be ASAP. Use only those.”
Then he told most of them to leave, return to duties. He asked Mari and Ortega to stay, though. Also Tricia, Sam and Woody.
Scrubs filed out, stunned and weeping.
David sank onto the couch under the Welcome to the Stork Club poster. Jill dropped down next to him and the others, grim-faced, moved to closer chairs.
“Charlie?” David asked. “You and Mari must have been the last of us to see Ashley alive.”
Ortega nodded in slow shock. His hands were trembling. “Yeah. I tried to get her to come, but Mari and the others were already leaving.” He gestured despairingly. “She told me, ‘In a minute, I’m helping this guy.’ I figured she’d be right behind us.”
He wiped his mouth hard, and MacIntyre said softly, “Hey man, you’re not a camp counselor.”
“I should’ve…should’ve…” Charlie kept shaking his head. There were no words for this.
“You willing to talk to the police?” David asked him.
“Of course.”
“What about you, Mari?” David looked at her, hunched with her face in her hands.
She looked up tearfully. “What? Yes, but - I didn’t see… I mean, one minute Ash was with me, and then she went over to the bar. It was crowded…”
“Talk to the cops anyway.” David’s gaze shifted to the open door, where two familiar figures were waiting.
“Come in,” he said. “We may have two eyewitnesses.”
“Detectives Kerri Blasco and Alex Brand, meet Mari Withers. The rest of us you know.”
Mari seemed confused at the others’ greetings to the cops. David explained that they’d all met Kerri and Alex before.
“Rapes,” Tricia and Ortega said together.
“Statutory rape and child molestation,” Sam said.
“Not to mention those two other crises,” Woody added, flinching. “Killers in the building. Bomb-sniffing dogs.”
“Oh-h.” Mari was wiping her bloodshot eyes. “My parents got scared. Didn’t want me to come here but I insisted, it’s the best…” Her voice trailed as she saw Blasco and Brand sit and get out a touch screen tablet.
“Surveillance photo from the bar,” Kerri said, angling the tablet so Mari and Charlie could see. She flicked to a second photo, and a third. “Is this the man you saw talking to Ashley?”
Both studied the photos and said yes, definitely. He’d had his back to Mari, but she’d seen his reflection in the mirror.
Kerri scribbled in her notebook.
Mari could only weep and shrug and shake her head at further questions. Da
vid told her to go check on nurses’ notes, try to calm.
Tricia touched her arm as she left; now Charlie was looking ready to cry. “My fault Ash was even talking to him,” he told the detectives, explaining the reason. Then he suddenly seemed confused. “She was attacked in the alley next door? What makes you sure this guy did it?”
Alex glanced at David for a second, then the others. “For starters, he was the last one seen with her. The bartender said he seemed too interested, trying to delay her on purpose.”
Kerri leaned forward. “In the alley the CSU has found shoe prints. Size ten of an ordinary shoe but with ground peanuts that look like they’re from Farrell’s floor. Our lab is testing. Otherwise no prints, fibers, or DNA. Guy must have worn gloves, clobbered Ashley from behind and pulled her by her hood. There were drag marks from her shoes, zipper scrapes on the front of her neck.” Kerri hesitated. “So the bartender’s statement and alley findings alone would leave this just strongly circumstantial. In theory it could have been another guy from the bar.”
“But then he called me,” David said tightly.
Charlie gaped at him.
“He called you?” Sam and Woody echoed almost together.
“Yes,” David said with a grimace. “Bragged that he got my number from a friend in a bar. What are the odds?”
He picked up the tablet, brought it close to frown at the goateed face smiling at Ashley. The shot was from a medium-high placed surveillance cam, which the creep probably guessed because he kept his body hunched and his head down. David tried to study the forehead under the graying wig combed forward, and what appeared to be a slightly jutting chin under the goatee.
He passed the tablet from Jill to Sam, Tricia, and Woody, who took turns studying the picture. “Just so you know what the guy calling me looks like,” he said. “Study the bone structure, what you can see of it. The beard’s fake and he likes disguises.”
“He never stood,” Charlie said, watching the others scowl at the tablet. “But he looked close to my size.” Charlie was six feet.
CATCH ME (EMBRYO: A Raney & Levine Thriller, Book 4) Page 6