Snuff

by Simonson, Melissa

  She glanced up from the keyboard she’d been pounding, typing the Heckles reports. “I was thinking the same shit. Doesn’t seem like coincidence since it’s looking like a recurring theme. He holds the captives three weeks, dumps them at three a.m., waits three days before he kidnaps another set.” She snapped the notebook closed and dug through her desk drawers. “He must stick to a stringent schedule for a reason.”

  Three a.m.—devil’s hour; the inverse of Jesus’s hour, three p.m.—

  A drawer slammed closed, and his dark eyes flashed to Lisette as she tore through stacks of files with quick fingers. “He could have OCD or something. Needs to incorporate threes. Only then wouldn’t he want to abduct three girls? Do you remember Heckles’s booking number? I always lose the goddamned paperwork.”

  “0019875.”

  She keyed in the number. A few second later, her printer puffed to life.

  Would a man with OCD keep women in such squalid conditions? Many sufferers were obsessive about keeping germs at bay—constant hand-washing, fanatical cleaning routines.

  He didn’t have OCD, but he did have a set ritual he wouldn’t or couldn’t deviate from.

  Lisette’s eyeballs rolled up as she propped her Timberlands on her desk, staring off into space. “Threes could have to do with a Christian trinity—the father, the son, and the holy ghost. Only it having anything to do with God seems off. It’s not like God condones kidnapping and torture. Unless he thinks God is speaking to him. But if he were delusional he wouldn’t take precautions like giving the survivors burner cells and strategically abducting women in lots with no security cameras. Crazy people can’t think that rationally….” her voice bled into background music beneath John’s internal narrative.

  What did he know about the meaning of three?

  Too much.

  The number three was considered to be feminine and introverted, connected to the planet Jupiter. The Tarot card representative of the three energy was The Empress.

  Also related to Mars, Tuesday, and the color yellow.

  Three, the number of personal completeness. Linked to God—God was three in one and one in three.

  Jesus was tempted three times; had been resurrected on the third day. He prayed in the garden three times, asked Peter if he loved him three times.

  Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days.

  Restoration of Israel connected with the numeral three.

  In geometry, two lines don’t make a closed figure, rendering two an incomplete number—making three the first complete number.

  Number three—significant because it’s the fundamental of all pattern and geometry. There must be three of something in order to form a pattern.

  Debunked theories like the homicidal triad circled the number three. It was once thought a killer had to have committed three murders to be considered serial.

  Three signified life in feng shui.

  A snapped expletive jarred him back to present, wrapped in Lisette’s office, mauve walls pressing in all on sides.

  “She what?” She pushed back from the desk and stood, her swivel chair coasting into a bank of file cabinets behind her. “No, I’m on my way.” She stabbed the phone’s screen and disconnected, throwing her purse over her shoulder.

  John watched her tear her fingers through layers of gold hair and twist them into a knot at the back of her head. “Problem?”

  “Yeah. Apparently Brooke’s hankering to go home. As if that’s going to fucking happen.” She stomped to the door, calling over her shoulder. “I’ll be back. Call me if anything happens.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Lisette stomps into the room I’ve been sequestered in. Jack trails her, flicking through a wad of paperwork, speaking with a nurse in pink scrubs.

  She doesn’t lead with pleasantries, crossing her arms as her lips thin. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to go home so soon.”

  “I’m not going to kill myself.”

  She scowls. “I fucking know that, Brooke. That’s not what I’m concerned about.”

  I throw the heavy blankets off. “Then what?”

  “You’ve just walked away from a very traumatic situation. It would be best to stay put for a least a few days.”

  Does she think I’ve managed to forget the traumatic situation? “My boyfriend’s a doctor. He can take care of me. I just want to go home and sleep in my own bed, with my things, and my cat. I’ll go crazy if I stay here any longer.”

  She narrows her eyes for a moment before turning her glare on Jack. I can tell he’s trying not to smile. Lisette doesn’t wear forbidding well—it’s more amusing than scary. “You’ll take time off to stay with her?”

  “The hospital’s aware of what happened.” Jack hands the nurse her clipboard, and she takes her leave. “They said take as much time as I need.”

  She wags her index finger at us as the door shuts behind the nurse. “You really shouldn’t be staying in your apartment. We don’t know if this freakshow’s got your address. We never located your driver’s license, and chances are good he’s got it. If you insist, we’re going to have to increase the number of patrol officers watching your place. One’s been watching from the parking lot.”

  I don’t care if a second pair of goons bunk on cots in the living room. “I won’t mind if you send people to hang out inside the apartment until you find the guy. I just don’t want to be here.”

  Jack pipes up from the door. “They let me check her charts. She’s fine. There’s no reason she needs to stay, for observation or otherwise. I’ll bring her in if something happens.”

  She chews on the inside of her cheek. “I’m going to check on you every day, morning and evening. I might call in between, so you’d better answer. Got it?”

  I nod. She shoots me another one of her quasi-glares, then turns on her heel.

  “Take good care of her,” are her exasperated parting words—they sound more like a threat—before she leaves, long blonde ponytail swaying behind her.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Stacy called not long after Lisette left, when John had taken up residence in her office.

  “I’ve been looking into possible prior victims, but I can’t decide which fits this guy’s MO best. I went back three years. I’ve got a couple unsolveds in the general area, but they seem like dead ends.”

  He abandoned the notepad he’d been scrawling onto. “Walk me through the list.”

  “Okay. A woman’s house was broken into in the middle of the night. The guy went in through a window, made himself a sandwich, and then went into her bedroom to rape her. He pulled her nightgown over her face, held a curling iron to her head, and told her it was a gun. She surprised him, fought back, so he roughed her up. She didn’t have any major injuries, and they never caught the guy.”

  The man John was looking for wouldn’t substitute a gun for a curling iron, nor waste time fixing a sandwich when an unsuspecting sleeping woman was nearby. Highly unlikely he’d plot an attack on someone else’s turf. He wanted to spend time with his victims, revel in their pain.

  “Next.”

  “All right, there’s a guy who made a fake profile on match.com. He’d message women to set up meetings, but they always thought he stood them up, because he never showed. Only he did show, and followed them home, or so police think. Seven raped women had the same story. He’s taken the profile down. All cases are open. No DNA, he used condoms.”

  Too preferential—he found the hunt thrilling, not just the rapes. That man was patient, carefully selecting victims, while John’s faceless perpetrator wasn’t.

  Lisette’s desk chair groaned when he leaned back. “I don’t think this guy would bother with phony profiles and stalking, since he didn’t seem to do so with this case. The man I’m looking for isn’t patient. He doesn’t take pleasure in the hunt, he wants to get down to business quickly. The injuries on the women would be extensive, and I doubt they’d be left alive.”

  “You’re killing me, smalls. O
kay. Unidentified teenage girl—cops think she was a prostitute—found in a suitcase in a dumpster outside a motel. Seems like an isolated incident since it never happened again. Police think she may have pissed off the wrong john. It doesn’t seem like she was sexually assaulted, but there were multiple injuries. Stab wounds, cigarette burns, and ligature marks. Official cause of death was strangulation. Fibers in the throat, so she’d probably been gagged. I guess she’d have to be, if the dude did this in a motel with people in other rooms. Coroner opened up her stomach during autopsy and found urine and traces of blood. And can I just say, ew. She died not long after ingesting that crap.”

  Drinking blood? Well isn’t that delightfully biblical. A whore drunk on the blood of the saints. What a concept.

  John was hesitant to think he was looking for a religious fanatic. Forcing a girl to drink urine was cruel, not reminiscent of scripture. “Did the coroner manage to get DNA from the blood?”

  “It was too degraded, and there wasn’t enough for testing.”

  The office door swung open, and Lisette stormed inside. She tossed her purse on the couch and tore the elastic band from her hair, massaging her scalp with her fingertips as she slumped onto the chair across from John.

  “How long ago was this?” he asked, gaze lingering on the slightly swollen curve of her reddened bottom lip. It almost looked like she’d been kissing someone, but he doubted that was the case. Nobody looked that irritated afterward. More likely she’d been biting her lips or pressing them together to keep from shouting at slow drivers on her way back to the station.

  “Six months ago,” Stacy said. “They had a few suspects, but none panned out.”

  “Send me that file.”

  “Already done. Incidentally, I’m going to need more office space just for your mail, Maxwell. Remind me to never let you go on vacation again.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Not that I can see.” Every other moment something thumped softly in the background, and he could imagine Stacy flicking through envelopes with tiger-striped nails. “Junk, AT&T bill, letter from University of the District of Columbia, something from...” she paused. “A prison. Maine postmark. Isn’t that where your mom lives? The state, not the prison.”

  John scarcely considered the sheer ridiculousness of the idea of his prim, perfect mother donning prison garb, and it wouldn’t have taken a genius to know who the sender was. “Open it for me.”

  “I—are you sure?” Stacy was the type to press and pry, but only out of genuine friendly curiosity. He knew she’d never rifle through his personal things without permission, but the fact she seemed hesitant to do so even with consent was laughable.

  “Yes.” John doubted Seth Lowry would have written much Stacy would be able to decipher, since he’d never told her about his mother’s rape.

  “Okay.” He heard her fumble with her cell. “I’m slitting the tab. I’m pulling out the letter. It’s pretty short, for a letter. Bad handwriting. Who’s Seth Lowry?”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Will I be seeing you on the twenty-third?”

  The impending parole hearing. John felt it went without saying he wouldn’t miss that for anything, but lying was easier than giving her an explanation. “Throw it away. It’s not important. Someone I arrested ten years ago. He never gets tired of being a pain in my ass.”

  John had had a lot of experience with manipulative narcissists, and the most eloquent tactic was ignoring them.

  “Gotta go if I’m going to find this site anytime soon.”

  “Thanks. I’ll call you later.”

  They said their goodbyes and disconnected. John didn’t look up from the screen of his phone. “Brooke’s headed home, then?”

  Lisette scowled. “Yeah. Traffic was a fucking nightmare. The doctors can’t really hold her, since there’s nothing wrong and it’s been over twenty-four hours. I guess it’s not that big of a deal. Units are sitting on her apartment.”

  “I may have found another victim.” John accessed his Bureau email. “Prostitute. Makes sense he would start with high-risk prey. You don’t need to blitz a hooker to get her into a car.”

  “Hookers aren’t as stupid as you’d think,” she said around the Chapstick she was applying. “Working in vice taught me that. They carry weapons, have phones, won’t consent to being restrained. Most johns are repeat customers. It’s the new ones the girls are most careful with.”

  “This was a teenager, not a seasoned pro.”

  She crossed one denim-clad leg over the other. “Or the john didn’t look threatening. It’s hard to be scared of some short dope with thick glasses. What department did the case pass through? I haven’t heard of it, so it didn’t come through Homicide.”

  John scrolled through the attachments in Stacy’s email. “Sex Crimes. I guess it would be the obvious department, considering the victim was a hooker.”

  She stood, locking her arms over her head in a stretch. “Forward the email to me, and I’ll head downstairs. My old partner’s in Sex Crimes, promoted to Lieutenant. If he found anything, he’ll tell me.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Jack shifts his Camry into park once he’s rolled into our assigned space.

  He’s out of the car and around the passenger’s side before I’ve gotten my seatbelt off. “You are not carrying me,” I warn through the window. “I’m pregnant, not an invalid.”

  That I’m not crippled doesn’t seem to sway Jack any. I know it’s ungrateful or illogical, being irritated people are concerned, but I don’t deserve concern or a doting caretaker. Nothing happened to me. Nothing physical.

  One of his hands curls around the inside of my elbow as he steers me up the flight of stairs to our front door. He waves at two men sitting in an unmarked police cruiser as we pass a bed of brittle flowers with black veins.

  “You know them?”

  “Aaron and Brett. They’ve been on the six a.m. to two p.m. shift, watching since you’ve been missing.”

  Tough gig. A painful ass and a crick in the neck from surveillance can’t be fun.

  The keys jingle when he unlocks the door and holds it open. Stripes bolts off the couch and winds through my legs in frenzied gray figure-eights, yowling like he does every morning when he wants breakfast.

  “He missed you.” A sad sort of smile tugs Jack’s mouth at the corner. “I never thought cats cared about much of anything, but he slept on your pillow every night. I swear he actually looked sad, too.”

  I missed him more than he’d missed me. I got him a year ago at the Humane Society. He’d already been named and neutered, which made him an easy sell. Jack pretended to be allergic and annoyed, but I’d caught him snuggling up to Stripes more than a few times. Men.

  Jack closes the door. The deadbolt tumbles and the security chain rattles when I stoop to pick up my loud fuzzball.

  Stripes squeaks when Jack crushes the pair of us into his polo. “Do you want to go to bed?” His breath is hot against my hair, and he squeezes me so tight it’s hard to tell where he ends and I begin.

  “I’ve been in bed for the past thirty-six hours,” I mumble into his chest. “I want to sit on the couch with Stripes. Watch TV.” Maybe Law & Order: SVU will stamp Abby and her fourth-degree burns from my mind.

  He follows me the couch, hovering like an aircraft as he arranges a blanket around me. “Are you hungry? Do you want me to make you anything?”

  “Have you been to the grocery store?” I ask as Stripes bumps into my open palm over and over, begging for attention.

  “No,” he says sheepishly. “I’ve been living on coffee and the occasional Xanax. I haven’t slept much since you’ve been gone.”

  “I’m not hungry anyway.”

  His brow creases. Wrong answer.

  “Maybe we can go to the store tomorrow,” I offer. “I don’t need anything right now. My appetite’s been nonexistent.”

  Another wrong answer, clearly. Jack drops a sack full of rattling prenatal vitam
ins to the floor. “It’s not just you now. The baby needs proper nutrition.”

  “Do you think I’m too stupid to realize that? I know I’m not a doctor, but fuck. You try barfing for days and tell me if you’re in a hurry to eat.”

  He slides onto a bar stool in front of the kitchen island across from the couch. “If you write a list of things you want, I can hit the grocery store. Antacids and Saltines to settle your stomach. Gatorade to replace lost electrolytes from vomiting.”

  It’s annoying when Jack speaks Clinical Doctor, so I acquiesce before he gets momentum. “I’ll do it later.”

  He fixes me with his pale blue gaze while I nuzzle Stripes and pretend not to notice. He’s deciding what to say, I can tell, but I don’t want him to say anything. Talking is exhausting. Dreaming up appropriate, non-scary responses taxes my brain, which already feels like a wrung sponge.

  Jack must catch the hint because he cracks open a book on the counter and buries his face between its pages.

  FORTY-SIX

  John had his phone in hand as he pushed open the lobby doors of the precinct when a call from Stacy streamed through. He answered on the first ring.

  “John.”

  He couldn’t remember the last time she’d used his first name, let alone heard her voice shake. It was enough to stop him in his tracks on his way through the parking lot. “What is it?”

  She stumbled over words, her pitch higher than normal. “I think I’ve found it. The website.”

  “Good. Can you find a location?”

  She was on the verge of tears, he could tell despite the phony coughs she uttered to mask her wobbling voice. “I can’t trace it since it’s hosted on an anonymous blogging platform. Probably used a burner email to register for the url, and the platform doesn’t have access to any of their blogger’s identities. I broke through the first layers of encryption and found a recent video. You’ve told me about things like this, but seeing it—actually watching it—is worse than anything I imagined. I know why the girls killed themselves now. There’s no way they could have a normal life after that.”