by Mike Omer
Neither were torn and shredded clothing and missing underpants. Dr. Terrel’s job was to be as accurate as possible, but Zoe had no doubt regarding Catherine’s rape.
“There are bruises on the face, the arms, the knees, and the left breast. None broke the skin. The cause of death is asphyxia. The marks on her throat correspond with ligature strangulation. The horizontal angle makes it clear that the strangulation wasn’t caused by hanging, which makes it most likely the death was a homicide. The ligature marks are wide and shallow and left no abrasions or bruises. This makes me think that a wide and smooth device, such as a belt, was used.”
Or a tie. Zoe couldn’t suppress the thought any more than she could stop her heart from pounding. Rod Glover had used ties to murder his victims. The ligature marks they left were exactly the same as Terrel had described.
“I found no grooves or scratches on her neck corresponding to the necklace that was on the body when it got here.” Terrel raised her eyes from the body. “I can’t be sure, but I don’t think she wore the necklace when she was murdered.”
O’Donnell’s eyes met Zoe’s for a fraction of a second.
“What can you tell us about the knife wound?” Tatum asked.
“For one, I can tell you it wasn’t a knife wound at all.” Terrel circled the body and gestured at the wound on the arm. “If you look closely, you’ll see three wounds, not one. Two small puncture wounds and a third, larger wound. These wounds were caused by a needle. There’s bruising on her wrist, here, indicating that it was gripped hard. This is probably because he gripped her while inserting the needle.”
“The victim was injected with something?” Tatum asked.
“I can’t know for sure until I get the toxicology reports, but it’s likely. However, this was a thick needle. The diameter is between 0.06 and 0.07 inches. That means it was a sixteen- or fifteen-gauge needle. Usually, when administering injections, thinner needles are used. This needle size is more typical for blood donations. Also, I don’t understand why he kept jabbing the needle into her.”
Tatum frowned. “It’s possible that he simply doesn’t know anything about needles.”
Terrel nodded. “That’s true. Look here—do you see this bruise?” She pointed at an extensive purple bruise around the largest wound. “This was probably caused by blood vessels rupturing during the injection.”
Zoe bent to look at it. The shape and size of the bruise made her think of something else entirely. “Isn’t the bruise too big to be caused by the needle?” she asked.
“It really depends. The large wound indicates the needle moved quite roughly,” Terrel said, but Zoe thought she could hear the slight hesitation in the doctor’s voice.
“What if the bruise was caused by suction?” Zoe asked.
Terrel scrutinized the bruise. “I suppose it’s possible.”
Detective O’Donnell seemed to catch on. “You think this is a hickey?”
“The needle mark was irregularly wide for an injection, like the doctor said,” Zoe pointed out. “He might have been trying to draw blood from her for personal consumption. And when he saw it spilling, he couldn’t help himself.”
Tatum, O’Donnell, and Terrel all looked at her with varying degrees of disgust and astonishment. Zoe ignored their incredulity. Blood drinking was not unheard of and had happened multiple times with sexual predators and serial killers in the past.
“If that’s what happened, it explains the wounds,” Terrel said. “The first two puncture wounds sank into her muscles. He couldn’t get to her vein. The third time, he hit the basilic vein, but he accidentally tore it. Perhaps the victim struggled with him, wrenched her arm away, and this was the result. The blood loss that occurred was the result of this tear. And to make this bruise, he would have sucked at it quite vigorously.”
“Any way we can test this?” O’Donnell asked.
Terrel thought about it for a moment. “I can test for saliva remnants with fluorescent spectroscopy.”
“Do you think he was experienced at what he did?” Zoe asked. “Or was he just jabbing the needle wherever he saw a vein?”
“It’s hard to say, since it looks like she resisted. Even a professional nurse would have found it hard to use a needle in that situation. But a professional would have probably targeted the median cubital vein. This looks like the job of someone who saw how to do it, perhaps online, but never tried it himself and was never guided professionally.”
Dr. Terrel pointed out some additional minor details, but Zoe was only half listening. In all his murders, Glover had never demonstrated any interest in the victims’ blood, never mind consuming it. Like all the previous leads they’d investigated in the past week, this one led to a dead end.
CHAPTER 6
“You were right about the necklace,” O’Donnell said as soon as they left the morgue. “He probably did put it there after he killed her.”
Zoe didn’t seem to be particularly thrilled about it. The profiler seemed much more tired than the day before. Well, that made two of them. O’Donnell was exhausted. Part of it was the autopsy. Those always made her feel like she just ran an unpleasant, foul-smelling marathon. But the last day had taken its toll as well.
Door-to-door questioning of the neighbors had resulted in nothing. No one on the street seemed to have heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, and none of them knew Catherine Lamb particularly well. O’Donnell spent a few hours talking to two of Catherine’s closest friends. In the past few months they’d been seeing less and less of Catherine. She told them she was busy with her church work. They both said that whenever they met with her, she seemed unusually tired. One of them thought she might have been depressed.
O’Donnell didn’t interview Catherine’s father again. Her mother, it turned out, had died three years earlier. She’d been the church administrator, and when she’d died, Catherine had taken over, first unofficially, and it had later been made official.
She had a quick conversation with the other religious counselor in the church, a man named Patrick Carpenter. He was still shocked by the news when she talked to him, but he had a crisis of his own—his wife had been hospitalized due to a sudden scare with her pregnancy a week before. He hadn’t seen Catherine for a few days but had talked to her briefly on the phone on Friday, several hours before she died. When O’Donnell asked him if Catherine seemed sick or tired lately, he answered that he hadn’t noticed anything unusual. O’Donnell asked him for a list of the people they’d counseled, at which point the conversation became chilly. He refused to give her any names outright and finally agreed, quite reluctantly, to talk about it on the following day.
“Let me buy you two a drink,” O’Donnell now offered.
“Thanks,” Tatum said. “But we should really—”
“It will only take a moment.” O’Donnell walked over to the vending machine across the hall. She swiped her card and bought a Coke for herself. She pulled the tab, the satisfying hiss already promising sugary goodness. She took a long swig that helped settle her nausea and headache. Then she turned to Zoe and Tatum, who were looking at her, bemused. “What’s your poison? I need some sugar after an autopsy.”
They both asked for Cokes as well. For a few seconds, the three of them sipped silently from the cans outside the morgue. This was great advertising material. “Coca-Cola, a fresh taste after seeing a brain being scooped out of a skull.”
Maybe it needed a copywriter for a better catchphrase.
Her phone rang. It was Kyle.
“Yeah.” She answered the phone in a tone meant to clarify to her husband that now was not the time to talk.
“Mommy?”
O’Donnell immediately softened. “Hey, baby,” she said. “I can’t really talk right now. Is everything okay?”
“No.” Nellie sounded close to tears. “It’s an emergency.”
Nellie was five years old, but she already knew what an emergency was. Because she was only allowed to call her mother in case of an
emergency. So an emergency meant any situation that warranted calling Mom.
O’Donnell sighed. “What is it, baby?”
“Daddy can’t find my purple pants. And I need those pants for Anna’s tea party, I told you I need them, and you said that you will wash them and that I could wear them, so Daddy said I have to wear my black pants, but I can’t.”
In the background, Kyle, her husband, shouted, “Nellie, don’t bother Mommy—those are perfectly good pants. Come here. Nellie, don’t . . .” His voice suddenly disappeared.
“Nellie?” O’Donnell said. “Are you there?”
“Yes. I locked myself in the bathroom.”
O’Donnell sighed. “Tell Daddy they’re on the laundry couch.” The laundry couch was just a regular couch in the living room, but since it was constantly covered in laundry, no one actually sat on it, ever.
“Daddy already looked on the laundry couch. He made a mess.” Nellie sounded pleased at the opportunity to snitch on her dad.
“It’s in the third pile from the left, under the white shirts.”
“Daddy!” Nellie screeched, presumably through the locked bathroom door. “The purple pants are on the laundry couch under the white shirts in the third pile.”
Even though it wasn’t perfect timing, O’Donnell still felt a strange joy at hearing Nellie say purple. She always said it a bit slow, as if struggling to get the syllables right. It was the sweetest thing.
“I already searched there.” Kyle’s voice was muffled and frustrated.
“Look again!” Nellie screamed.
O’Donnell glanced at Tatum and Zoe. “One more second,” she told them.
“He found it,” Nellie reported. “Thanks, Mommy.”
“Bye, baby. Have fun.”
Nellie hung up, and O’Donnell pocketed her phone.
“I talked to Martinez yesterday,” she told the two feds. “Well, yelled at him, really. He had no place telling you about the murder without talking to me first.”
“We didn’t mean to overstep any boundaries,” Tatum said.
“You didn’t care about overstepping them either,” O’Donnell retorted. “Never mind. Martinez said you’re both a pain in the ass.”
“We have a complicated relationship,” Tatum explained.
“But he also said you two know what you’re doing. And I could really use your opinion on this one. I’ve investigated two sexual homicides before. One was the ex-boyfriend; one was a rape that got out of hand. These are cases I can wrap my head around. But I never had a case where the murderer drank the victim’s blood. Or took the time to put some nice jewelry on her before leaving. Martinez said if you could profile this murder for me—”
“We’re currently on a different case,” Zoe said.
“Your Rod Glover case—you told me. What if it’s the same guy?”
“That’s not likely.”
“Why not?”
“This murder seems to diverge significantly from Glover’s—”
O’Donnell’s phone rang again. “Hold that thought.” She pulled out her phone in annoyance. But it was Larsen, from Forensics. He was the one in charge of Catherine Lamb’s murder scene. She answered the call. “O’Donnell.”
“I’ve got something for you,” Larsen said.
O’Donnell waited. Larsen waited too. He was the kind of guy who wanted you to play second fiddle to his tune. She sighed. “What did you find?”
“We went over the shoe prints that we got from the scene.” Yesterday he’d told her they’d gotten both the left and right shoe prints of the murderer—a size 9. Larsen had told her he could easily match the shoe to the print, if she ever managed to find the shoe. It would be a good thing to have in court. “We took a bunch of them, in the different rooms. So I was filing them today, and one seemed different. It was only a partial print that we got in the bathroom. But it looked like a different shoe. One that definitely didn’t belong to the victim. And since you made sure everyone put their shoe condoms on, it wasn’t ours either.”
“The father entered the scene before us,” O’Donnell pointed out. “Maybe he went to the bathroom.” She could imagine him running to the bathroom to throw up. It wouldn’t be unusual for him not to mention it.
“The father is a size 7.5. The print we got is an 8.5. So we went through everything we had again, and guess what?”
Did she really have to guess? She decided not to. “What?”
“Those bloody finger smudges we found everywhere at the scene? Definitely belong to two different pairs of hands. I sent them over to an expert in fingerprinting, and he verified it. Even though the hands were gloved, there’s a list of characteristics that can identify hands beyond fingerprints, and there were some key differences.”
“So we have two unknown people in the victim’s house after the murder. Both male?”
“Almost definitely male, according to shoe size and hand structure. And that’s not all . . .”
There was that pause again. “What else?” O’Donnell asked.
“I got the idea to look outside more carefully, you know? If two men were at the door, maybe there’d be some indication. We found another footprint that matches the 8.5 shoe outside in the yard. And we have another handprint on the doorframe. Don’t get excited, no fingerprints, but the handprint matches the same characteristics of the second individual.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“That’s all.”
“Keep me posted,” she said, and knowing he expected it, she added, “Fantastic work, Larsen.” Hanging up, she turned to face the feds.
Zoe had morphed. Instead of the tired, dejected person who had been there before, she was now tense and eager. “There were two men at the scene?” she asked.
“Looks like it,” O’Donnell said carefully.
“That would explain the inconsistencies.” Zoe glanced at Tatum. “If Glover paired up with someone else—”
“Someone less experienced,” Tatum said. “Maybe easily manipulated.”
“Subject to certain fantasies that Glover could accommodate,” Zoe said. “This guy probably already fantasized about Catherine. That’s why they targeted her specifically. It’s someone who knows her.”
“And he probably got her to open the door,” Tatum said.
“He acts first—they agreed about it beforehand. Maybe he didn’t even know Glover would kill her, but Glover knew.”
“Then Glover kills her. His partner in crime feels guilty about it. He covers her. Finds her necklace and puts it on her.”
“And Glover keeps his trophy.”
O’Donnell watched them, caught in their own private dynamic, and felt a spark of jealousy. She’d been there before, with her first partner. She and Jim had been paired when she’d become a homicide detective. They’d been partners for fourteen months. She hadn’t known how lucky she was. She assumed the relationship they had—this seamlessness—was something that always happened, a part of the job. But then Jim was promoted and transferred, and she was paired with Manny Shea. And what a mess that was. With Manny, she either had to become dirty or turn a blind eye. And when Manny’s shady dealings finally collapsed, she paid the price. And of course, now she had no one.
Watching Tatum and Zoe complete each other’s sentences, exchanging looks that held messages she couldn’t read, was like being a child again, seeing the other kids playing in the schoolyard while she stood alone.
“I don’t want to rain on your parade,” O’Donnell said, though she did. “But there’s no evidence your guy Glover is involved in this. And I don’t want you getting any preconceived notions about the case and messing it up.”
“You’re right,” Tatum said quickly. “But we would be glad to help.”
“I don’t need you to profile this murderer and tell me it definitely sounds like your guy,” O’Donnell said skeptically. She’d wanted their help, but their agenda was glaringly obvious.
“We can start by profiling the second one,” Zoe sai
d. “The man who consumed the victim’s blood. He’s probably the same one who covered her.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” O’Donnell said.
Zoe caught O’Donnell’s gaze, the profiler’s eyes reminding O’Donnell of a cat’s stare just before it pounced. “We can help.”
And frankly, O’Donnell was happy for all the help she could get.
CHAPTER 7
The man in control didn’t like to sleep. Not lately, anyway, not ever since he’d stopped taking his medication.
Before that, it wasn’t even a question he could contemplate. The various pills he took would knock him out for ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day, easy. A deep sleep that felt like he was submerged in wet cement. Dreamless, as far as he was concerned. He knew everyone dreamed, but what did it matter, if he couldn’t remember it?
But now, off his medication for almost a week, he slept less and less.
He could remember his dreams now. It was like standing in a tempest of fear, anger, and lust. He’d wake up, his blankets twisted into strange shapes, sometimes crushed between his fists as if he’d throttled the bedsheet in his sleep.
When he slept, he lost control. And he knew it was the most important thing right now. Control. He’d lost control before in his life, and it had always ended terribly. Never again.
Control, he knew, wasn’t an actual thing that you had. It was more like an outfit, something you put on. A disguise for other people to see. As long as you acted as if you were in control, you were in control. They said a wolf in sheep’s clothing as if it was a bad thing. But wasn’t it what everyone wanted? For you to be one of the sheep?
He got out of bed—short naps during the day were mostly dreamless and helped him stay awake at night. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror. There was a stain on his shirt. People in control didn’t wear dirty clothes. He changed shirts, combed his hair. Smiled at the reflection politely, and the reflection smiled back.
Less teeth next time. A man in control didn’t bare his teeth like that. He smiled with his lips.