Love Loss Revenge

by Graysen Morgen

  "Captain, I ran across this homicide from three years ago, a middle-aged woman was randomly shot in broad daylight by a high-powered rifle at a long distance and left for dead in the street," she flipped through the file. "Her name was Hillenbrand, Monica Hillenbrand."

  "What about it? Did you find a new lead?" he asked.

  "Well, not necessarily. I worked on a case in my second or third year with the bureau that was similar. There was a serial killer named Jacob Perry that was randomly shooting people from building rooftops all over Illinois. I believe he was using a hunting rifle. He'd been a sniper or sharp shooter I think in the Army at one time. Anyway, over the course of a year he picked off at least a dozen people in the state before we were able to catch him."

  "How are these cases linked?"

  "I'm not sure if they're linked, but there are similarities. Also, it was never proven, but there were rumors that Perry had an apprentice, a person to take his place if he got caught. It's possible, if that's true, this person could be continuing Jacob Perry's hunting spree. I would need to do some more research and see if I can find anymore similar cases."

  Captain Burke leaned back in his desk chair causing it to squeak loudly. He pursed his lips and folded his hands. "So you think a serial killer's assistant or whatever, is killing people on the other side of the country ten years later? Is that correct?"

  Rian knew she was a highly trained investigator and could easily prove her point, but she didn't care anymore, not about the job, not about anything. "It's just a hunch, a similarity that I thought I would bring to your attention. Do whatever you want with it." She stood up and walked out of his office and back to her tiny metal desk in the cold case file room at the end of the hallway. She wondered why he had even hired her. It's not like they actually had a position for a strictly 'cold case' detective. She figured maybe she was put on the payroll due to her skills and put on cold cases as sort a holding pattern until she was actually needed. She decided to search the cold cases and pull aside any random shooting cases to put together a profile on her own time. If this really was Perry's apprentice he would be difficult to catch, but it wasn't her job to catch him, so she'd simply occupy her spare time with a hunch that could potentially catch a serial killer, or lead to a huge waste of time. Either way, she was using time she didn't need or want anyhow.

  ~

  A few days later the phone rang in the middle of the night pulling Rian out of the middle of a dream with Ari wrapped tightly in her arms. She opened her eyes in the darkness and tossed the pillow she was clutching to the floor in disgust.

  "Casey."

  "Rian, Captain Burke here, I want you to head out to Kerns. There's a homicide call and I want you to see if this is similar to your hunch. Let me know what you find out." He hung up before she could reply.

  Rian dressed quickly and hurried across town. She wasn't thrilled about seeing a dead body. During her short time working with cold cases she'd seen more dead body pictures than she could count and her mind always seemed to find a way to twist the picture into Ari's dead body on the sidewalk.

  When she arrived on scene there were two other detectives that weren't at all thrilled to see her at their crime scene and the medical examiner, a slightly shorter woman with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and light brown eyes that seemed to growl every time Rian got close to the body.

  "Casey you're here to observe and that's all," one of the detectives said as he spit tobacco into a paper coffee cup. Rian nodded and pulled a small notebook from her inside jacket pocket.

  The victim was a middle-aged white male with a large caliber gunshot wound. Rian made notes of the scene and all of the buildings in both directions as far as she could see in the dark. When the medical examiner rolled him to the side Rian noticed most of the left portion of the back of his skull was missing.

  "Exit wound," Rian said to herself.

  "Yes, Sherlock, that would be were the bullet exited and took half of his head with it," the medical examiner said sarcastically.

  "I actually wasn't talking to you," Rian said as she moved around to the other side of the road to make a few more notes about the scene.

  "Who invited her?" The medical examiner asked the detective with the coffee cup as she nodded in Rian's direction.

  "I sure as hell didn't. The captain said she has a hunch or some shit about a cold case. As far as I'm concerned she couldn't find her way out of a paper bag, much less solve a homicide case. But, hey I'm not some washed up retired federal agent now am I?" he said and spit into the cup again.

  Rian walked back over to the body. "Any idea on the caliber or distance?" she asked the medical examiner. That's when she noticed the name on her I.D. badge was Leann Swanson.

  "Nope. I'm not a fancy big time agent, I have to go back to my lab to figure out the specifics, but maybe you can enlighten us," she said.

  Rian looked at the two of them and walked away. She was halfway to her unmarked car when she turned back around. "If the two of you were even half as competent as a washed up retired federal agent you would know it was a .308 caliber and shot from at least two hundred yards away," she calmly said before walking away.

  When Rian got in her car she let her frustration roll of her back and dialed the Captain's number. He was surprised to hear all of the information that she'd given him, but he didn't see a need to scour the rooftops for spent cartridges. He denied her request and sent her back to her cold case assignment, which, was fine with her. She expressed her desire to stay away from homicide when she was hired. She had no desire to work active cases and she didn't have the drive to pursue suspects on a high priority level. The fire that drove that ambition in her went out a long time ago.

  The next afternoon the phone rang in the cold case room. Rian yawned and answered it. She was tired from being up in the middle of the night and was too awake to go back to sleep once she got back to her tiny apartment.

  "This is Leann, the medical examiner from last night,"

  "I know who you are," Rian cut her off.

  "Well, I need you to come down to my office within the hour."

  Rian checked her watch, it was nearing her lunch hour and she really didn't want to spend it in the M.E.'s office with a dead body. "I'm about to go to lunch."

  "My office is in building C, third floor," she said just before the line went dead.

  "I know where it is," Rian said to herself.

  ~

  Rian walked into the M.E.'s office close to two hours later with a fast food cup in her hand. She took a sip from the straw causing it to slurp. Leann turned around, the sharp crease in her brow said it all, she was pissed. Rian walked further into the room.

  "It's about time you showed up," Leann spat and snatched the sheet off the gunshot victim's body. He was gray in color and naked. He looked peaceful until you noticed the small hole on one side of his head and the other side of his skull missing. Rian visibly flinched and backed away slightly.

  "I told you I was going to lunch. I'm not even sure why you called me down here, I work cold cases."

  "You knew things, at the crime scene, details no one else knew," Leann said with a little too much accusation in her voice.

  Rian shrugged she wasn't in the mood to give a mathematical lesson, caliber patterns was basic geometry 101. She'd learned the simple formulas and detection methods during her first year at the academy. She slurped her drink again.

  "How did you know the details?"

  "Call it intuition," Rian simply stated.

  "Sounds more like suspicion to me."

  Rian slurped the last of her drink and tossed it in the trash can. "There's your DNA sample let me know if it matches anything you found at that clean crime scene. Otherwise, stop wasting my time with useless bullshit. I was a federal agent. I don't need to justify my knowledge or training to you or anyone else in this goddamn building. Now, if you or the detectives on this case would like to know my theory or how I came up with it I will gladly explain
it to you," she said and walked out the door.

  As soon as Rian was back at her desk her cell phone rang. The captain called her into his office. She had a feeling this would happen so she grabbed the file she was working on and went down to his office a few floors below her.

  "Care to explain," he said when she sat down.

  "There isn't anything to explain. You asked me to go observe a crime scene, I did that. Your medical examiner decided to question me like a suspect so I left."

  "I see. I am a little curious as to how you knew the details myself. I know federal agents are trained at a higher level than us city folk, but you were perfectly accurate and I've never heard of that before," he said and leaned back in his squeaky chair.

  Rian bit back the sarcastic response she wanted to give. "Captain, I explained that this cold case I ran across had similarities to the federal case I had worked. Based on the information from both cases I came up with a hypothesis, which I briefed you on. At that crime scene I simply took in the surroundings and lack of evidence. When I visually examined the body the entrance and exit wounds were obvious based on my high level training, as you put it. I was able to come to the conclusion that the victim was shot with a long range high-powered rifle. Based on the entrance hole the caliber looked like a .308, and the exit wound and perceived bullet path led me to think it was at a long range of at least a hundred yards. I explained most of this on the phone last night, which was why I wanted to take a look at a few rooftops in that range."

  "All right, if you come up with anything else get it to the detectives on the case without hesitation. I also want you to take that cold case information to Leann and work with her to see if we can put some proof behind any of these similarities. We work together in this department Casey." He chewed the side of his lip and waited for a response, when she didn't give one he dismissed her.

  Rian spent the rest of her day buried in cold case files. She had all of the shootings for the past four years separated into multiple piles. There were no other random shootings in their jurisdiction but she was willing to bet there were others in the state.

  The next morning she called the M.E.'s office and got Leann's voicemail. She left a brief message to have her call returned and left her cell number. She decided to make a few calls to other large cities in the state to see if any of them had unsolved random shooting cases from the past four or five years. None of the other departments could give her specifics, but they all said they'd do some research and call her back. She wondered if anyone would actually follow up. If she flashed her federal badge they'd surely jump through hoops to get her the information she was requesting. She missed the high priority that came with the title, but she didn't miss the high profile cases.

  It was ironic how she was working on a random shooting case when a random drive by shooting was how Ari was murdered. She wondered if there were any leads. It had been a few months since she resigned and she hadn't heard from anyone, so more than likely the trail went cold. Ari's murder would probably remain unsolved. This made her think about her case against the Argentine crime boss Fiorino Canturri. The case she worked on for two long years and hundreds of hours. She hadn't heard of anything in the national news, so it was probably collecting dust too. She wondered what happened to it and who it had been assigned to. She was so close to finally being able to nail that bastard, and then her whole life was turned upside down.

  Chapter Seven

  An hour later, Rian's thoughts were brought back to reality when her cell phone rang.

  "Casey," she said without looking at the caller ID.

  "It's Leann, I got your message. What's this about?"

  "The captain says we need to play nice and I need to share my file with you," Rian sounded like a scolded child.

  "Is that so," Leann laughed.

  "When and where do you want to meet?" Rian said sarcastically ignoring the laughter.

  "How long is this going to take?"

  "I don't fucking know. I have a cold case and some information on an old federal case that are both similar to this latest homicide and I need to see if they all jive. So, it can be ten minutes or two hours. Just tell me when and where so I can get this over with."

  Leann rolled her eyes at the phone and opened her schedule book. "I'm tied up for the rest of the afternoon. Can you meet me this evening?"

  "That's fine. Where?"

  "How about your place?" Leann said.

  "Not going to happen," Rian said flatly.

  "I have a roommate so my house is out. What about your office?"

  "It's more like a file room with a rickety piece of shit desk, but that's fine. Seven?"

  "It's a date," Leann said sarcastically and hung up.

  ~

  Rian and Leann put all of the information from the two files they had together and Rian looked up as much information on Jacob Perry as she could access since she was no longer a member of the bureau. They ordered Chinese food after two hours and were still working over an hour later.

  "I wish I had autopsied this woman," Leann said as she flipped through the cold case file. "I was moved to this district later that same year. I did work with him though. Melvin Pierson was thorough, but old and came to his conclusions a little too easily. He retired at the beginning of the following year."

  "Was he in someone's pocket?" Rian asked.

  "Oh no. I don't know, he just didn't take the time to really cross the T's and dot the I's. It annoyed the hell out of me, but I was new to the district so I just went along with it."

  "He didn't put any measurements in his file. There's no bullet caliber, not even a guess, and there aren't any suspected heights or distances for the bullet path. According to his chart she was simply shot with a high-powered rifle and it wasn't close range. That leaves an open book so large it would take two lifetimes to go through all of the possibilities," Rian said in frustration.

  "You said Jacob Perry used tactical hunting rifles, right?"

  "Yeah, mostly .270 and .30-06 and he was always three hundred to six hundred yards away. He had military sharp shooting training."

  "How did you catch him?" Leann asked curiously.

  "I wasn't involved. The case was sort of like a training case that multiple agents worked on. I was based in Chicago and in the span of two years he killed a dozen random people. He left no one alive, always a shot through the head. One night I got a call that he had been identified and apprehended. By that time, I was working on other cases and had moved on. A year later, I was assigned to D.C. I heard he was executed. I checked the database and it looks like it was close to four years ago. That's why I went back four years. If this is his apprentice then he's been killing randomly for about four years."

  "What made you leave the FBI?"

  Rian didn't answer, instead she opened the case folder for the most recent homicide.

  "You don't talk much do you?" Leanne said.

  "We're talking about these cases aren't we?" Rian said sarcastically.

  "You really are as cold as everyone says you are."

  "Look, I don't care what anyone says about me. My personal life is just that, personal. I retired, period. Now, if you have questions about these cases I will talk all you want."

  "Fine, since you seem to know calibers and all of that fancy stuff, what do you think the numbers are with your cold case victim?"

  "The pictures are inconclusive. Entrance wound looks like a .308 maybe a .270. I don't know. The back of her head is completely gone so it's definitely a hunting rifle. The bullets have large grain weights and are made to open into a huge pattern," She opened her hands to demonstrate. "It's called a dead kill. If a hunter shoots an animal they want it to drop right in that spot, die instantly. Otherwise, they may never find it. That's why the bullets open and make a huge path. Regular bullets with a smaller grain weight are made to be more of a through and through path. Without seeing the holes personally I can't give you an accurate number. The shooter was definitely long distance,
but I don't think a hundred yards."

  "What makes you think that?"

  "Well," Rian took a blank piece of paper and a pen and drew a sideways cone shape that covered most of the paper. "See, these are the sizes of the exit hole. You read it backwards like this," she turned it around and wrote some numbers. "This is bullet speed based in yards. So, if you take a bullet, say shot from a hundred yards then you are looking at this size hole based on the speed because of the distance. Now, if you speed the bullet up by shooting it from a shorter distance say fifty yards the bullet is traveling much faster and hits the target sooner causing a larger hole. So hunters that are hunting from a long distance or sharp shooters that shoot up to a mile in distance use certain grain weights to compensate so the hole is still large enough for the dead kill."

  "Wow," Leann was impressed. "Are you a hunter or did you learn this in the FBI academy?"

  Rian smiled thinly. "The academy teaches you things you never thought you'd need to know. Algebra is used but geometry is major, it's used a lot in determining facts."

  "So, based on your theory and your drawing, the cold case victim was shot from a shorter distance than our guy the other night. Correct?"

  "Yes. She was also shot from a much shorter distance than Jacob Perry shot from. So, if this is his apprentice I have a feeling this woman could have been his first victim. He shot her from a shorter distance of around fifty yards to make sure he got the kill shot and it was a dead kill. He's getting better because our guy the other night was around two hundred yards. He's progressing and he's been doing this for at least four years, so there are others more than likely all over the state. Perry's victims were all over Illinois, at least six or eight cities I think."