by Leslie Wolfe
“Wait here,” Cat said, in a tone that didn’t accept any argument. She wasn’t ready to argue, or challenge the intruder on her own, so she nodded and let go of his arm.
Cat took a few quick steps and intercepted the man as he was leaving her room.
“Hey, you, stop right there,” Cat shouted, but the man shoved him forcefully against the wall and ran past him. In a second, he was gone.
Cat watched him disappear with a frustrated glare. “Ain’t no spring chicken anymore,” he mumbled, breathing hard. “Ain’t no summer one, either. Sorry, kiddo, I know you’d’ve wanted that bastard nailed,” he added, then helped Tess get back into her room.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll live, don’t worry about me.”
As soon as she sat on the bed, she pressed the button that paged Melissa. It took her nurse a few seconds to show up, then she confirmed what they already suspected. No surgical masks were worn on that floor, no one wore white garb, and no one injected anything into the IV bag’s injection port before wiping it with disinfectant wipes.
“What do you want to do?” Melissa asked her in a faint voice. “Normally we’d call the police, but—”
“He wore latex gloves, the blue kind, like the ones you’re wearing, so prints are off the table,” Tess replied. “I’ll ask someone to get the IV bag over to the FBI lab to see what he put in it for me.” As she said the words, she felt a shiver down her spine. Someone wanted her dead, and, by sheer luck, had failed. Being helpless like that, depending on other people, and being an easy, lame target was something she couldn’t deal with.
“What’s going on?” Fradella asked, the moment he made his way inside the room through the cluster of people already huddled at Tess’s door. News apparently traveled fast on the post-op floor. A couple of hospital security officers were also there, and Dr. DePaolo was giving them orders in short, muffled phrases.
“Uh, nothing much,” Tess replied with a sad smile. “Someone spiced my IV, but we caught him. Well, sort of caught him. ‘Saw him’ is a better statement.”
“Did you see his face?”
“No, nothing useful,” Cat replied, seeming embarrassed. “His head was covered with one of those blue thingies that doctors wear on their heads, and he wore a mask on his snout. He seemed young, but they all seem young when you’re pushing seventy, you know.”
Fradella made a quick phone call, then asked, “What are we missing?”
“That’s the perfect question, Todd,” Tess replied. “Why me? How am I relevant, and to whom? The old case we worked on is done, finished, and the perp’s dead. This new case, I’m barely even working it, and no one knows that I am on it. So, why me?”
“I trust you’ll post a police officer at the door?” Dr. DePaolo asked.
“He’s already on his way.”
“These are the only people authorized to be in here, except you two and the other federal agents,” he said, handing Fradella a short list of names on a yellow sticky note. “No one else belongs in there.” He gave Tess a worried look, then went away in his hastened yet completely silent step.
Tess watched the interaction without saying a word, but then sat on her bed with a look of annoyance on her face.
“I can’t wrap my head around this… why the hell me?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out, like we normally do,” Fradella replied, then gently touched her shoulder. She pulled away abruptly; the sudden move tugged at her sutures and made her yelp in pain.
Shocked, Fradella took a step back, holding both his hands in the air in a pacifying gesture. “Whoa,” he said, “It’s okay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s all right,” Tess replied, averting her eyes. “It’s not your fault.”
Fradella tilted his head just a little, and scrutinized her with a puzzled look.
“Should I be chasing another perp, Tess? Maybe one who’s not on any case paperwork?”
Cat glared at Fradella, but he didn’t seem to notice it. His eyes remained locked on hers, and she couldn’t turn away. She almost bit her lip in frustration.
“No, Todd, why would you say that?” she managed to articulate with just the right amount of annoyance in her voice.
“It’s something you said right after surgery, when they wheeled you into this room.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Let’s just drop it, will you?” Tess pleaded.
“I’m a cop, goddamn it, don’t insult me!”
“The things people say while still under anesthesia are, most times, blatantly wrong,” Melissa intervened. “People think they stand to hear all kinds of truths from their loved ones, but all they hear is chemically induced gibberish. Things that don’t exist. Old memories messing with their minds and things like that.”
Tess looked briefly in Melissa’s direction, thinking it was the first time she’d actually been grateful to someone for lying to a law enforcement officer. Her nurse was full of surprises. Perceptive, sensitive, smart, and brave too. Melissa lied to Fradella without batting an eyelash, and she was a natural. Too bad she had such a hard time lately, leaving dark circles under her eyes and bringing a look of desperation to her face when she thought no one was looking.
“That’s not what I heard,” Fradella pushed back, but in a less combative voice.
“Listen, the only thing I need is to see these two unsubs locked up. I need to see Katherine out of harm’s way, alive and well. How about we focus on that?”
Fradella sighed and sat on the chair closest to Tess, then opened his bag and took out his laptop.
“We made progress while you were busy getting yourself almost killed,” he said, sounding more bitter than she expected to hear. “Your guy, Donovan, called with access credentials to the victims’ social media accounts. I logged in to Sarah’s Facebook account and found an interesting thread of conversations with a friend of hers, a chick by the name of Anita Salas.”
Tess chuckled when she heard Fradella’s choice of words. “Why does this chick stand out?”
“Read for yourself,” he replied, then handed her the laptop.
She read quickly through a dozen or so intimate exchanges between the two women, then dialed a number and Donovan picked up immediately.
“Ask,” he quipped instead of a greeting.
“Hey, D, if I give you someone’s Facebook page, can you get me their real name and address?”
“Yep, can do.”
She read the page link to him and he took less than thirty seconds to respond.
“Her legal name is, indeed, Anita Salas. I’ll text you her address.”
“Text it to Gary too. Thanks much!”
Tess immersed herself into the review of Sarah’s social media accounts, while Fradella examined all the photos the three victims had posted over time, looking for people who didn’t belong, people who might appear in more than one person’s photo stream, a common face.
Michowsky conferenced them in as soon as he arrived at Anita Salas’s place, and they were resigned to only listen to the conversation. The video feed left a lot to be desired.
Fradella muted the conference line for a few seconds. “Remind me to tell Gary we don’t really care to see the color of the ceiling,” he said. “He’s such a klutz. What’d he do? Turned on the camera, then put the phone on the table, flat down?”
“Probably,” Tess replied, looking at an image of Anita’s living room ceiling fan.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Michowsky was saying, over the conference system. “I understand you two were close?”
Anita sniffled and didn’t respond. She’d probably replied with a gesture they couldn’t see.
“What can you tell me about Sarah’s recent state of mind? You two shared a lot, didn’t you?”
“We were best friends,” Anita said. “We grew up together, since we were six. Like sisters. She had made it in life, you know. Beautiful little daughter; a good, loving husband; a good job
. She had a good life ahead of her. She met the love of her life in college, while I’m still looking. She was always ahead of me somehow, but it never bothered me. She deserved to be happy.”
“Was she?” Michowsky asked, then continued. “Happy?”
A brief moment of silence took over, and the conference system hummed a little louder.
“She was,” Anita replied hesitantly. “She had everything she’d dreamed of, so she had to be.”
“Had to be?” Michowsky pushed back. “Based on your Facebook messages, you two shared your most intimate thoughts, yet you don’t know if she was happy or not?”
“She’d never told me otherwise, but I don’t think she’d been that happy lately. I think she got bored with a life most women would consider a dream come true.”
“What did she say?”
“It’s more like what she didn’t say, or how she said what little she said. She never openly admitted it, but I think she was bored with her life. Bored to go home every day, make dinner, do laundry, you know, live the life of a young wife and mother.”
“Was she depressed?”
“Maybe a little,” Anita said. “Since the baby was born. I kept telling her that once Chelsea had entered her life, everything had changed, and that little girl came first. She kept saying that she knew that, but she wanted more out of life.”
“More, like what? Was money an issue?”
“I don’t think so. They made good money, both of them. She wasn’t a bad person, you know,” Anita whispered.
“I didn’t say she was,” Michowsky replied in a gentle voice.
“She told me once she wanted to feel in love again. To feel the blood rush through her veins when a man kissed her. She loved Matthew, but they’d been married for six years, and that does things to a couple.”
“Tell me about it,” Michowsky replied, “I’ve been married twenty-seven. We’re merely friends now, and the kids are all grown and gone.”
“I don’t think Sarah was ready for just friends. I think something was missing from her life, something that made her sad, depressed.”
“Do you think she was having an affair?”
“N–no,” Anita replied with a little stutter, “I would’ve known about it. Those things, she always shared. The look a guy gave her at work, someone who checked her out at the store, I always knew about those things.”
“But no affair,” Michowsky added.
“No,” she replied thoughtfully. “Um, maybe not yet. I think she was getting there.”
“Any enemies, disgruntled customers, or anything out of the ordinary?”
“Lately, she felt she was being followed, or so she thought. She was afraid to tell anyone, afraid they’d laugh at her. Not even Matthew knew about it.”
The conference call ended with Michowsky thanking Anita for her time. Tess opened her laptop and connected the private network, then turned on the webcam in the Palm Beach conference room, displaying the case board on the wide screen at the foot of her bed.
“Some déjà vu,” Fradella commented. “Almost verbatim the interview we had with Lisa’s hairdresser. These women had a lot in common.”
“Yes, they did. Let’s look at the victimology matrix,” she said. “By the way, nice work so far. I see you added a line for depressed, that’s good. All victims were or seemed depressed. But were they cheating, or thinking of cheating? Let’s try to confirm that.”
“I’ll add a new line to the matrix. We need to talk to more people though. Husbands might not know, and we’d—”
“Hurt them if we asked? Yes, we would. Let’s try a different path. If these women were starting to consider an affair, maybe someone close to them knew about it.”
“Women always talk about this sort of thing, don’t they?” Fradella asked, smiling awkwardly.
“Not always. We might not be able to confirm it, but it’s worth adding the line anyway.” She zoomed in and took a closer look at the photos of Lisa, Sarah, and Katherine. “Women who look like that, all they have to do is stop saying no.”
“You think the unsub is their secret lover?”
“The profile is starting to take shape in my mind,” Tess replied. “These things, they’re all interconnected somehow. You have unhappiness in the marriage, the craving for excitement, for male attention, the cheapened ring, they all must tie together somehow. But the killer who strangles them isn’t the one who rapes them… how does that make sense? Why is he interested in such a precise, detailed profile? How is he finding them?”
A call from Donovan disrupted her chain of thought.
“Shoot,” she said, putting the call on speaker.
“We struck out with the vehicles stopped near the bank at the time of Lisa Trask’s disappearance. None on video, nothing we can use.”
Tess crinkled her nose. “Damn.”
“There were several vehicles passing by at that time, including an unmarked police car, a black Crown Victoria. The plate doesn’t show. The only view we have comes from the ATM across the street, and the image is distant and grainy.”
“Can we trace it? That cop might have seen something.”
“We’re pushing the photo to all precincts, to see if anyone recognizes the vehicle or its driver.”
“How long will that take?” Tess asked.
“A few hours, at least. There’s one thing, though. This Crown Vic seems older than the squad cars I’ve seen roaming the streets lately. We need to confirm if it’s still in active police use. RTCC will confirm, and that won’t take long.”
30
Facts of Life
Melissa sneaked out of Tess Winnett’s room unnoticed. She was a bit overwhelmed with the constant coming and going of people, and surprised the fed had managed to stay on her recovery schedule with so much disruption. Patients rarely understood how important rest can be for healing, and visitors understood even less. They come to see their loved ones and feel guilty for wanting to leave too soon, to go back to their normal, healthy lives. In doing so, they keep the patient from getting much-needed rest.
She began to understand why Dr. DePaolo had assigned her to this particular patient. Probably, if left unsupervised, she would have turned the entire hospital floor into a police precinct, chasing the serial killing team she’d heard Tess talking about. Melissa had paid limited attention to their conversations; for the most part it was just background noise to her. All her paperwork required attention to detail and focus, and she had to fulfill that task from Tess’s room. Yet she stopped updating charts every now and then and perked her ears, when certain things sounded particularly interesting. The autopsy findings shared by the ME were quite fascinating. Tess and the other cops talking about who the killer might be and his motivations, also intriguing. Tess’s aversion to being touched, and the secrets she seemed to hide from her closest friends, that was yet another mystery.
Melissa loved suspense, and read a good crime novel when she had the time. Hearing bits and pieces of a real crime story was an exciting way to pass her day, and it took her mind off her personal life falling apart. That didn’t last too long, and whenever she remembered what was going on with Derek and her, what her marriage had ended up becoming, she felt sick at her stomach, as if someone had punched her hard, leaving her breathless and writhing in pain.
She’d slept poorly the night before, true to her decision to pretend everything was fine and share the bed with her husband. She found herself trying to take as little space as possible at the far edge of the bed, careful not to touch him by accident, still nauseous and frightened after what had happened between those sheets. He’d slept soundly the entire night, and that had been a relief, but she started her day exhausted and in desperate need of answers. Who was the woman he’d followed the day before yesterday? Was she his lover, or someone he couldn’t stop thinking about, wanting her, craving her body like an addict craves his fix? Or was she his former mistress, one who’d dumped him and now feared his vengeance?
She�
�d tried coming to terms with what she’d witnessed, and had spent an entire day trying to rationalize Derek’s behavior. He must have had a reason to do what he’d done, to act that way. After all, he was a financial forensics investigator; she’d always imagined him to be the typical auditor, one whose work is performed in front of computer screens scrolling through endless spreadsheets and figuring out who stole what money and from whom. But what if his duties included following targeted persons, as part of tracking their spending patterns? Maybe he was supposed to assess the lifestyle and habits of a certain suspect. Maybe that beautiful woman was nothing more than a smuggler, or a money launderer for the mob. And maybe pigs could fly.
She shook her head, disappointed with herself for trying to fabricate excuses for a man who’d become abusive, disinterested in his family, and secretive, to say the least. These few days spent in Special Agent Tess Winnett’s hospital room had educated her about how real investigations were done in the modern era. No one really followed anyone anymore; it’s all digital. So, whatever Derek was doing trailing that stranger through the city was probably not work related. It was time she toughened up and faced her dire reality. No more excuses, no more delays.
About lunch time, the nurses’ station was at its quietest, and Melissa slid in front of a computer hooked to a laser color printer. She checked to see if anyone paid attention to what she was doing, then inserted the memory card from Sophie’s camera into a media slot and sifted through the pictures she’d snapped two nights before. Most of them were quite poor, either blurry or too dark, but she found a couple that were good enough to print.
She chose a close-up of the woman’s face, and a wider-angle photo, showing her approaching Derek, and her reaction when she saw him. She magnified that image, centering the view on the woman’s face. Despite a grainy, yellowish hue, she was able to decipher the expression on the woman’s face. Her eyes were widened and her pupils dilated, her eyebrows ruffled and raised. Her mouth was half open, as if to draw breath before screaming. Her entire demeanor proved the woman was terrified to see Derek there, in the mall parking lot. But why? Had he abused her, like she’d endured only a few nights before?