Drop Dead Crime: Mystery and Suspense from the Leading Ladies of Murder

by Lisa Regan

  “That’s good to know,” Doc Rizza replied with a quick sigh. “What else do you need? Ah, yes, autopsy reports, you said.” He walked over to the large filing cabinet and rummaged through the files in the second drawer. He extracted three folders and joined Tess at the exam table, pulling up a chair and staring at the grocery bag. “What else have you got in there?”

  “Um, we might not need to process the rest of the stuff. DNA is all I need, really,” she added quickly, shifting her eyes sideways. “What’s your analysis of his MO?”

  “The attacks were brutal and sudden; the sexual assaults violent and prolonged. There’s little evidence of defensive wounds because the victims were quickly overpowered. The carvings were done antemortem, and in all three cases, the cause of death was blunt force trauma.”

  “Spells out a lot of anger, doesn’t it?” Tess asked.

  “Indeed, it does; but you’re the profiler, not me. I’m just the coroner. You speculate and theorize, while I state only scientifically proven facts.”

  “What’s your opinion on the carvings?” she asked, ignoring his previous statement. She still wanted him to ruminate with her, to brainstorm ideas about the killer’s motivations, his true intentions.

  Doc Rizza steepled his hands in front of him and whistled as if to express the question was a challenging one. “This son of a bitch has a message to communicate to us, to the world. He carves these symbols on his victims’ bodies; he writes in blood on their walls. We haven’t a clue what the messages mean, while he gets to euphorically believe he’s the smartest at this game.”

  “If we want to catch him, we need to understand his messages,” Tess replied, then grabbed a sheet of paper from the printer and the pen from Doc Rizza’s chest pocket. “May I?” she asked after the fact with a quick smile. “Let’s write it down. What did the bastard carve?”

  “On Mandy Alvarado’s body,” Doc read from the first file, “he carved 2M.”

  Tess wrote it on the paper. “Then?”

  “Earlene, the pilot, had 5W cut on her back.”

  “Always in the same place?”

  “Always above the left buttock,” Doc confirmed. “Then, he wrote 1M on Christi Connor’s back.”

  Tess wrote 1M on the paper, then, after the pen hesitated midair for a long moment, she wrote 3D below the other three entries without putting in Danielle’s name.

  Doc sprung to his feet. “Is there another victim?” he asked, not taking his eyes from the paper.

  “Sorry, but I can’t say. All I can tell you is that no one died without making it to your autopsy table,” she offered, instantly regretting even sharing that much information. Doc wasn’t stupid; he would find two strands of DNA in the samples provided. What if Danielle was in some DNA registry? Millions of people had voluntarily sent their DNA to ancestry services, not knowing that those services had built databases they readily sold to anyone who wanted to have the information. As such, even if Danielle didn’t have a record, her DNA, or one of her close family members’ DNA, could be in the system. Someone like Doc Rizza wouldn’t need more to find out everything she wasn’t sharing.

  She needed to be more careful and share nothing of what she knew.

  “What do you see in these symbols, Doc?” she asked, but received no reply; only a quick, frustrated glance. She wrung her hands for a while, wondering if it could be that simple. “I see, M, W, and D, and I’m thinking months, weeks, and days.”

  “Until when?”

  “That, we don’t know yet,” she said, feeling frustration overcome her brief sense of accomplishment. “Let’s assume I’m right and map the timeline, then we’ll see if anything matches. The first victim, Mandy, when did she die?”

  “Um, on January third, precisely two months ago yesterday.”

  “That means, if I’m right and the carvings on her back mean two months, then something should’ve happened yesterday, but what? Can you please check?”

  If the carvings were about time, they didn’t refer to other girls being attacked. Even if Danielle had been assaulted exactly two months after Mandy, that seemed to be a coincidence, because Earlene was attacked after Mandy, three and a half weeks later. If the carvings were really about time, they had to represent something else, something she didn’t know of. Something to do with Mandy.

  He pulled over his laptop and opened the system, then accessed the case file. “No mention of any event or case log entry with yesterday’s date.”

  “Damn, I thought I knew what the carvings were about,” Tess mumbled. “How about the second victim, the pilot?”

  “Earlene was killed on January twenty-eighth,” Doc replied. “If 5W means five weeks, that would be, um, today. For whatever that means.”

  “Today? Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” he replied, gesturing at the calendar open on his laptop.

  “And the third one?”

  “Christi Connor was killed on February twenty-fourth, and one month from that would make it March twenty-fourth. Whatever this is, we won’t know for a while.”

  “If I’m right and these are time references, Doc. Because I might be wrong.”

  “I can’t remember a time when you were wrong,” he replied with a kind smile. “How about the mystery entry, 3D? What date is that running from?”

  She hesitated for a long moment. “Yesterday.”

  “So, the day after tomorrow, I guess?”

  “Yeah,” she replied. “We’ll know soon enough.” She walked over to the back wall, then returned to the table, restless, frustrated about her own powerlessness. Every minute she wasted not understanding what the unsub’s message meant, the bastard walked free, stalking his next victim, getting ready to kill again.

  She’d seen his sort, studied it at large, and put his kind behind bars or into the ground, every damn time. It was a matter of understanding how the unsub thought, what he felt, and anticipating what his next move was going to be.

  He must’ve been a male in his thirties, white—based on the race of his victims—and a sadistic lust killer. He’d evolved into the state he was now, and his rage was fueled by something in his past, an event that profilers called a trigger. His victims didn’t share a common physiognomy. Mandy was a brunette with green eyes, Earlene had hazel eyes and dark brown hair, and Christi was a freckled redhead with brown eyes. As for Danielle, she had auburn-blonde hair and blue eyes. Nothing in common.

  Tess’s colleague, SA Patto, had done his diligence regarding the victims’ backgrounds, and the three girls couldn’t’ve been further apart. They’d never gone to the same schools, shops, restaurants, or hair salons. Tess reviewed the first victim’s background in detail; it was common to find a serial killer who started killing with a victim he met by accident, in his close circle, whether social or geographical. But there was nothing of the sort she could find. The accountant, single mom had minimal interactions with anyone outside her work and the functions of her daughter’s rearing.

  Based on the information contained in the detailed backgrounds, the three victims had never crossed paths, nor had they shared any commonality.

  That left Tess with the extra bit of information she’d gathered from Danielle.

  “Doc, is there a reference anywhere on those case files to the name Delilah?”

  “Ah, I see you heard the recording,” Doc reacted, puzzling Tess. “What an amazing thing, to be able to do that, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t know about the recording?” He saw the baffled look on Tess’s face continuing to linger, and he clarified in a softer, less excited voice. “They retrieved a recording of Christi Conner’s assault.”

  “What recording?”

  “Christi had one of those Alexa digital virtual assistants. She must’ve said something during the attack that made the device start recording everything. That’s how we learned that the unsub repeatedly called Christi by the name Delilah during the assault. I also heard with my own ears
how brutal it was; it’s nearly unbearable to listen to.”

  Tess made an impatient gesture with her hand, and Doc started the playback on his computer with a loud sigh.

  Over the next few minutes, cringing and wishing she could tear the speakers to pieces, Tess listened to the sounds of Christi Connor screaming and pleading while being raped and then killed. The unsub laughed like a madman, made threats, spilled his rage, and called the victim Delilah. He’d said, “How do you like it now, Delilah? How’s that avarice working for you now? You’ll never forget me, I swear, Delilah.”

  The end of the recording brought silence, heavy and troublesome, interrupted only by the whirring of the centrifuge. Tess stood, went around the exam table and hit the red button on the machine.

  “No need to run DNA now, Doc. I’ve just confirmed what I needed to confirm.”

  She waited for the machine to stop spinning, and the lid popped open. She extracted the two vials and slid them into her pocket, under Doc Rizza’s stunned eyes.

  “There’s a survivor,” Rizza whispered, slack-jawed. “You found a survivor, didn’t you?”

  “Shhh,” she urged him with a finger pressed against her lips.

  “I’ve already promised,” he replied, seeming a little offended with her lack of confidence.

  “What I wouldn’t give to know what Delilah stands for. What does the name represent? Is she a woman from the unsub’s past? She’s most likely someone who did him wrong in a meaningful way.”

  “In the Hebrew Bible, Delilah was a betrayer. The great Samson loved her, but she revealed the source of his power to the Philistines and cut his hair. Consequently, Samson’s vigor was lost, and he was captured, I believe. Captured or killed by the Philistines.”

  “Do you think the unsub has religious motives?” Tess asked.

  “I thought of it, because of the words he leaves written on the wall. Those resemble, to some extent, the seven deadly sins. Avarice is one, and we saw that in Christi’s case. Lust is another deadly sin, and so is greed. As a deadly sin, greed is equated with avarice.”

  “Not only as a deadly sin, but I believe the thesaurus also equates the two notions,” she replied thoughtfully. “But the unsub used different variants of the concept, avarice and greed. What’s the difference?”

  “Avarice is more of a financial nature, while greed could be any form of overconsumption, including food or drink,” Doc replied.

  “I didn’t know you were a word wiz, Doc.”

  “I do crosswords a lot lately. Nothing else to do with myself at night since…” His voice trailed off, and his shoulders dropped. “Anyway, in the unlikely circumstance there was a survivor that you might or might not know about, was there a word on that hypothetical person’s wall?”

  Tess smiled at the convoluted way he asked the question. He’d earned her trust on many occasions; against her initial commitment, she decided she was going to show that. “Arrogance.”

  “Ah, another deadly sin,” Doc replied. “How interesting.”

  “I can’t figure out how they connect. These women had done nothing in their lives to justify those words. Nothing that I could find.”

  “Keep looking, Tess. You’ll find him, I know you will.”

  He stood with a groan and vigorously rubbed his back as he straightened with difficulty. He pointed at the bag of evidence. “What should I do with these?”

  “I can’t ask you to store them without a case number,” she replied, reluctantly grabbing the bag.

  “Sure you can, if this is what you need me to do,” he replied. “I’ll store them with today’s date instead of a case number, and we’ll see where that goes. If it goes nowhere, in one year from today, I’ll cremate the entire box. No record of it anywhere, no questions asked. By then, I trust the Word Killer will be history.”

  She extracted the two vials from her pocket and handed them over. “Thanks, Doc. I’ve got to run.”

  “Where to?” he asked, walking her to the door.

  “It’s time to talk to the men in those women’s lives,” she replied. “Even if it’s not officially my case. Maybe the men were the targets.”

  “What made you think of that? The men weren’t harmed.”

  “The story of Samson, and how he was defeated by a woman’s betrayal. The unsub punishes the Delilah in his life over and over again, but he somehow might be targeting the Philistines. Like any villain in a good story, I’m sure they were guilty of more than one deadly sin.”

  7

  It was still early, and there was a good chance she’d find Mandy Alvarado’s boyfriend, Allan Brehm, at his posh office downtown. While she drove there, Donovan read her everything he had about Brehm. He was fifty-two years old, a bit of an age difference from Mandy, who was only twenty-seven. He was a successful real estate developer, who’d built hotels and resorts in Miami Beach and Palm Beach over the past thirty years. Rumors had it he was ruthless, forcing older property owners out of their homes if he wanted to cheaply acquire the properties.

  Donovan’s research put Brehm’s net assets somewhere over the two-billion-dollar mark.

  In short, he was a greedy son of a bitch.

  Huh, Tess thought. Maybe it’s a coincidence, just like the fact that none of the Word Killer’s victims had been married. No, they were all dating and had wealthy boyfriends. She wondered if that was relevant; probably it was, a critical piece of the victimology puzzle she needed to keep in mind.

  She entered the high-rise property bearing the Brehm Realty Investments logo in gold lettering and headed straight for the reception desk. There, she presented her ID and frowned when she saw the receptionist’s reaction.

  “I need to see Mr. Brehm immediately,” Tess said. “This is important.”

  Flustered, the receptionist let her mouth gape for a fraction of a second, then picked up the phone. Dialing, she mumbled, “Oh, I thought you knew.”

  Tess touched the phone cradle with a finger, ending the call the receptionist was making before it connected. “Know what?”

  “Mr. Brehm died last night,” she said, keeping her voice a low whisper, and looking left and right as if she’d been instructed to keep the tycoon’s death a secret.

  “How did he die?”

  “Severe allergic reaction,” the receptionist said. “His steak was tainted with shellfish.”

  In other words, he’d been poisoned.

  “Who had access to his property?”

  “Oh, he didn’t eat at home last night,” she whispered, bringing her head closer to Tess.

  “Where did he eat?”

  “At his favorite restaurant, the Aji Hibachi.”

  Tess scoffed. “Let me get this straight. He was allergic to shellfish, yet he chose to have steak at a Japanese restaurant?”

  “He’d been eating there for years, and there was never an issue.”

  “What about an EpiPen? Didn’t he carry one of those?”

  The girl shrugged. “Sorry, I don’t know anything about that. His executive assistant might know more.”

  But Tess was already rushing out of the building. Brehm’s death meant two things. One, she’d been right about the carvings; they were dates, death dates for the boyfriends if she could venture to draw a conclusion based on a single data point. But to consider it a coincidence would’ve been too much. Two, the five-week warning that had been carved on Earlene Burnett’s body expired today, and that meant her boyfriend, none other than the famous Elias Mosley, was next to die.

  Nowhere in the messages the Word Killer had left behind was it stated the deadlines ran out at night. Elias Mosley could be dead already.

  She ran all the way to her SUV and was about to call Donovan when a call from Pearson came through.

  “Sir,” she greeted the caller, rolling her eyes in frustration. She didn’t have any time to spare.

  “Where are we with BCI Insurance?”

  “Who?” she blurted before she realized what she was saying.

  “
Jeez, Winnett, you’re unbelievable. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t fire you right now, over the phone. Please tell me you’ve been looking into the fraud case I assigned to you.”

  “Y—yes, I have.”

  “Really? Have you talked to anyone at BCI yet?”

  Lying to Pearson was only going to make matters worse. “No, sir, I haven’t,” she reluctantly admitted.

  “Then, what the hell have you been doing all day?”

  She let a long moment pass, already knowing how Pearson would react to what she had to say.

  “I’ve been looking into the Word murders. I have a theory—”

  “Patto has a theory I’d want to hear, Winnett, not you,” he snapped. “You know why? Because Patto is the agent assigned to the Word murders, not you.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Do you have a theory about BCI’s fraudulent health plans? That’s what I want to hear from you, and nothing else.”

  She munched on her lip, thinking how best to get her boss to cooperate.

  “Elias Mosley will die tonight. If he’s not already dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a long story, but—”

  “Tell me.”

  “The victim’s skin carvings represent time, time elapsed between the day the girls die and the day their boyfriends die. Allan Brehm died last night.”

  “I’m not following,” Pearson replied, as usual, frustrated when he was missing information.

  “The M in the carvings stands for months, the W for weeks, the D for days.”

  “What D?” he asked. “There’s no carved D on any of the bodies.”

  “Uh, no specific D, just theoretically, if he were to kill a victim and carve a D on her back, that would stand for days,” she quickly unloaded a statement that had to be the lamest lie told by an agent in the entire history of the FBI. Even a rookie could’ve caught it; Pearson, for some reason, decided to let it slide with a minute of silence and a request that threw her off.

  “Talk to Patto about this. Work with him.”

  She knew she should’ve replied, “Yes, sir,” but couldn’t.