by Leslie Wolfe
46
The Giver
Tess left Interview Two with a DNA sample, but didn’t hold much hope. The plumber had voluntarily offered the sample and that meant he knew he never touched those women. Dead end, and just more wasted time, when time was something they couldn’t afford to waste.
She topped the cold coffee in her borrowed mug and took a swig, stopping just briefly on the way to Interview Three. Before entering, she followed Michowsky to the adjacent observation room, and looked at the next suspect in line for interrogation.
“Why is he half naked?” she asked.
The suspect, a skinny-looking street thug with light-brown hair and a three-day shadow that revealed a scar on his chin, wore a pair of faded, black jeans, and some running shoes that had seen better days. He fidgeted incessantly and glanced at the ceiling camera at least once every minute.
“This lovely young man is Gino ‘The Giver’ Janda, twenty-five, with an endless rap sheet for any drug-related offense known to man,” Michowsky said. “He’s Katherine Nelson’s dealer. He didn’t have a shirt on when the unis chased him for three blocks to drag his sorry ass in here.”
“Any correlation with the other victims?” Tess asked, frowning at the restless man. She didn’t want to waste more time with a nonviable suspect, but gaining any perspective into the secret life of Dr. Katherine Nelson could prove beneficial.
“None we could find,” Michowsky replied. “Doc Rizza confirmed neither Lisa nor Sarah were using.”
Tess went straight into the interview room and put Katherine’s photo in front of Janda, and he flinched.
“Whoa,” he said, pulling away from the table.
“We have you for distribution of a controlled substance,” Tess went straight to the point. “You’re pushing amphetamines to her.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Save your breath, Janda, we have proof. But that’s not why you’re here. She’s missing, and we need to know where you’re holding her.”
“No, no, no,” he said, “you can’t pin that on me. I didn’t sell her anything; I just saw her passing down the street. Maybe someone else was selling her stuff, but I don’t know nothing of any of that.”
“You know that street corner where you, um, don’t sell anything? Across the street there’s an ATM, you asshat,” Michowsky intervened. “We have you on video, selling to her. Now spill it.”
Janda’s face fell apart, as if coming unglued at the seams. He ran both his hands over his face, then wiped his clammy palms against his jeans, while his eyes darted all over the room.
“You’re going down hard, asshole,” Michowsky continued. “This ain’t your first dance.”
“I want a deal,” he said. “I’ll tell you all I know, but I want a deal. No deal, no spill.”
“Possession with intent to distribute,” Michowsky offered. “Down from dealing, that’s a walk in the park for you.”
“I’ll do too much time. Nope. Simple possession, or I keep my trap shut.”
Michowsky glanced at Tess and she nodded.
“Simple possession, okay, now spill and make it worth my while.”
He looked both of them in the eye, as to make sure they weren’t screwing with him.
“She bought amphetamines from me,” he eventually said, “once or twice a week, not more.”
“For how long?”
“More than a year, I guess. The lady had her high under control.”
“What do you mean?” Tess asked.
“She didn’t spiral, just kept it even. Not many people can do that. But I guess someone in her position would know how to handle herself.”
“What position is that?” Michowsky asked.
“You know, a doctor. Made me wonder why she didn’t script for herself; there’s legal highs out there you can write up and take forever, and way better than my shit.”
“Why did she buy from you? Did you ever ask her?”
“Yeah, sure I did. After so long, we were almost like friends, although she wouldn’t script for me, either. She said she wanted to keep things clean, not mix her work in any of that.”
“But why was she using?” Tess asked.
“She said she needed the edge for work. Long hours and stuff like that. She said most young doctors are using something to put up with it. ‘No one’s clean,’ she said.”
“So why did you kidnap her?”
“What? I didn’t! I swear to God.” He’d become agitated again, and wanted to get off the chair.
“Sit down,” Michowsky snapped at him, and he froze. “You were dealing to her, and now she’s gone. She disappeared that same afternoon. Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in? I’m sure even a bonehead like you can figure out just how bad this looks.”
Janda’s blood drained from his face, and his knuckles turned white, as he clenched his fists on the tabletop.
“Yeah, you made a great deal. Simple possession, on top of rape and murder,” Michowsky added.
“Wait, what? I ain’t done any of that, I swear!”
Tess stared at him for a second and wondered if he had anything to do with their case. Most likely not, but it was worth one more question.
“Why did you rape her, Gino?” Tess asked quietly.
“Listen, I might do a lot of things,” he replied, “but I don’t need to rape no one.”
“Why is that?”
“Let’s say that I would, in theory, be selling something like breath mints that make you feel good, or some sugar. Do you know how much pussy I can get for a single hit of Oxy mints?”
Tess stood, getting ready to leave.
“Listen, you got to believe me,” Janda pleaded. “When she and I finished our business last week, she said she was going out on a date. She was fired up about it.”
“You’re not making this up?” Michowsky said, getting in Janda’s face.
“No, that’s what she said. I remember joking with her ’cause she was married. I asked her if she was going to ditch that whale of a wedding ring. I’d have taken it off her hands if she insisted, you know. She said no, ’cause the dude knew she was hooked up.”
“Who was this guy?”
“What, you think she showed me his driver’s license? I don’t know, just some dude, some doctor she worked with, that’s all.”
Tess left the room without another word, followed by Michowsky, just as Fradella rushed toward them.
“Got bad news,” he said, “they just found Katherine Nelson’s body.”
47
Ambulance
The Ford Expedition swerved and weaved through the thick traffic with Fradella at the wheel, lights flashing and siren blaring. On the passenger seat, Tess winced with every pothole or change of direction, and held on tightly to the armrest to reduce the effect on her healing sutures.
“We should’ve had more time,” she said angrily, raising her voice to cover the blaring siren.
“I know,” Fradella replied, “you said it three times already.”
“This was not supposed to happen,” she added. “We had plainclothes cops all over that damn hospital, in the parking structure, on each floor, everywhere. I just left that place, for God’s sake. How could he—”
“They said she was found in an ambulance, parked near the ER receiving area.”
“Are they pulling video?”
“As we speak,” Fradella replied, then took the off-ramp, driving much faster than he should have.
Tess felt how the SUV tilted to the side, almost ready to flip, and held on with both hands.
“Whoa, Todd, let’s not get there in an ambulance ourselves, all right?”
He slowed down somewhat, but then floored it again as soon as he got to a straight stretch of road.
They arrived a minute later, and the first thing she saw was the commotion of police cars and vans surrounding a cordoned-off area of the hospital’s ER access, centered around an ambulance with its rear doors wide open. Doc Rizza’s van was parked c
losest to the ambulance, and AJ, his assistant, went back and forth between the two vehicles, carrying evidence collection kits.
She got out of the car and scampered toward the ambulance, taking in the surroundings. This was bold, to drive in plain sight like that and leave an ambulance with a body inside, in the middle of the road under 24/7 video surveillance, and just walk out of there, unfazed. Maybe they’ll see him on camera, and trace where he went. Maybe they’ll finally catch a break in this deeply upsetting case, and get a lead that actually went somewhere for a change. While Stacy was still alive.
She stopped a few feet shy of the ambulance, bracing herself. She’d believed she’d find Katherine in time, while she was still alive. She never thought the day would come when she’d see the young Dr. Nelson inside a body bag, not while the team worked the case the way they’d been working it, with all their resources pooled together and enduring a slew of sleepless nights, leaving no stone unturned and no lead unfollowed. Yet Katherine’s body was inside that ambulance, with Doc Rizza hovering above it with a liver temp probe in his hand, while AJ was unsealing a new body bag.
She grabbed the door handle and climbed a step onto the van’s wide bumper, wincing.
“Hey, Doc,” she said, letting undertones of anger and frustration color her voice.
“Ah, good, you’re already here,” he replied, without looking at her. “Time of death was roughly three hours ago, at about 7:30PM. I’ll step aside now, let you take a look, and then AJ will take more photos. It’s quite crammed in here.”
“What can you tell me, Doc?” she insisted. “You have to give me something we can use.”
Doc Rizza straightened his back with a sigh, propping his hands on his hips, as if to ease the pressure on his back.
“This isn’t getting any easier, Tess,” he replied, looking away. “Here we go. Cause of death was similar, only more brutal, so I’ll probably write it down as crushed trachea, not just strangulation. I’ll decide after I open her up. She was badly beaten and raped, and the ligature marks were deeper, more severe, some lacerating the skin all the way to the tendons. She fought bravely, with a lot of energy.”
“Was she beaten worse than Lisa or Sarah?”
“By far,” Doc replied. “I’ll have to confirm it on my table, but I’ll venture a guess and say the rapes were more brutal also.”
“She’s only been gone a week,” Tess said, and as she was articulating the words, she shuddered at the thought of what that meant. Being captive and enduring that kind of repeated assault for a week… she couldn’t bear to think about it anymore. It clouded her judgment, making her enraged, hence irrational, and she needed every ounce of rational thought and deductive logic she could muster to catch those monsters. “I thought we had more time,” she added angrily. “I thought we were going to get to her in time.”
“He’s probably devolving, or, better said, they are probably devolving,” Doc said. “The increase in the severity of the attacks surely points that direction.”
“How about her ring?” Tess asked.
“Gone, and replaced with a cheap one, probably identical with Lisa and Sarah’s.”
“Livor mortis?”
“Same as before, only he was in a hurry to dump the body. She’d been tied up and killed in the same position as the other two victims, but the blood didn’t have that much time to pool.”
“Any other discrepancies? I need to understand how these bastards are escalating.”
“One other thing, at first sight. She wasn’t groomed that thoroughly, the way Lisa and Sarah were. She had some hair on her legs, armpits, and her pubic region. She wore no makeup, but her skin was clean and so was her hair.”
“So, she took showers, but didn’t do the grooming part,” Tess summarized, thoughtful.
“What do you think that means?” Doc asked.
“I don’t know yet. It must have enraged the killer to see his fantasies disintegrate. Maybe she disobeyed him; it could be that simple. How soon can you tell me if she’d been taking amphetamines before being abducted?”
“Right now, just give me a second.” He took a test strip out of a small jar and pricked Katherine’s skin with a needle. A droplet of blood appeared, and Doc quickly smeared it onto the test strip. He waited a minute, then rinsed it with distilled water and compared it against the label of the jar.
“She’s still bleeding, Doc,” she whispered.
“Yes, she is, poor thing,” he replied. “For about ten hours after death, blood will still preserve some measure of its liquid form. However, that’s more like oozing rather than bleeding. To me, bleeding presupposes a live, beating heart, while hers no longer beats.” He wiped his brow with the back of his gloved hand. “You’re right. She’d been taking amphetamines, and by the residual concentrations I’m seeing here, she must have been past the peak of her withdrawal.”
“I see. Doc, what does amphetamine withdrawal look like? What are the symptoms?”
“Anger, irritation, fatigue, hunger, suicidal ideation… the whole shebang. Why, you have a theory?”
“I do, but I’m not sure how much it’s worth.”
“Share,” Fradella said, appearing behind her.
“This kind of escalation in violence, when dealing with killing teams, can happen in two situations that I can think of. One is when the team dynamics are deteriorating, the team bonds are degrading, and they’re on a path to a breakup. Many times, such breakups end in murder after a short burst of escalated violence. The second situation will occur in the rare cases of defiant victims who’ll do everything they can to enrage the captors, to trigger a different kind of response. It’s possible that Katherine provoked the killing team.”
“Why would she do that?” Fradella asked.
The question brought a wave of bad memories to her, so violent she wavered under its weight.
“Um, to die faster, to end her suffering,” she said, feeling choked with emotion. “Dr. Nelson was an educated woman who must have understood her situation quite well. That, combined with the rage and suicidal thoughts given by the amphetamine withdrawal, could have motivated her to taunt her attackers, to provoke them into ending her misery sooner.”
“Yeah, but they still took Stacy Rodriguez before killing her. Her death wasn’t just impulse,” Fradella said.
“I noticed,” Tess replied. “For this killing team, having the two women together for a couple of days is paramount. I had a bad feeling when they took Stacy sooner than we’d expected, and I hoped I was wrong. I hoped we still had time for Katherine.”
She climbed the second step into the ambulance and slid past Doc Rizza, approaching the head of the stretcher where Katherine lay. She looked at the young woman’s livid body, quietly observing all the details. The bruising and abrasions on her neck, where a half-inch rope had left its mark repeatedly, scraping and blistering the skin while she was still breathing, then crushing her windpipe and ending her life. The petechial hemorrhaging coloring the conjunctiva of her eyes, even her eyelids. The marks on her beautiful face where she’d been pummeled, and those on her arms where they’d manhandled her ruthlessly. The ligature lacerations on her wrists and ankles, some cutting deeply into her skin, a sign of the fight she’d put up for so long. Without realizing, Tess touched Katherine’s hand and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
She felt Doc’s warm hand giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “You’ll find them, Tess. If anyone can, you can.”
She turned around, still choked, unwilling to let others see her moment of weakness. She saw Michowsky approaching the ambulance, and stepped down, meeting him halfway.
“Please tell me we have video of this bastard, Gary.”
“We do, but it’s no good. All we see is a man in a black hoodie getting out of the ambulance and disappearing on foot. Then we lose him on campus, when he moves out of camera range.”
“The wedding rings still didn’t show up anywhere, at pawn shops?”
“No, there’s no sig
n of any rings anywhere,” Michowsky replied calmly.
Tess glanced quickly in his direction. “Did you check?”
“I did, Tess. I know how to do my job.”
“Well, apparently, you don’t,” she snapped, “and neither do I. Not as long as they’re out there, killing and raping at will, with no one to stop them.”
Michowsky pressed his lips together, but didn’t say anything.
“It’s got to stop,” Tess said, grinding her teeth in anger. “It’s just got to stop. How much longer? How many more women have to die before we catch these bastards?”
Doc Rizza approached her and touched her arm. “You need to get some rest, Tess. You’ve just been released from the hospital, and you’ve worked a full day, on your feet. It’s too much; go home and get some rest.”
“No,” she replied coldly. “I’m going back to that conference room, and I’ll pore over every piece of data again, and again, and then run the searches one more time, for as long as it takes. There must be something that we missed. No one’s that goddamned perfect.”
No one spoke for a while, but that didn’t make her feel any better. If she were in better physical shape, she’d probably kick something, or drive her fist through a wall.
“I’m coming with you,” Fradella offered. “We’ll look at the evidence together.”
“Yeah, me too,” Michowsky offered.
She kept her eyes on the many lights of the hospital. Its main building towered over them and most of its windows were lit. The night was still young, and the hospital was humming with activity. She still remembered the dynamic of the place; up until earlier that same day, she’d lived there continuously for almost an entire week.
There was something that wouldn’t let her leave; somehow, the hospital seemed relevant to the case, although it didn’t make any sense. Yes, Katherine Nelson had been a doctor at that hospital, but none of the other victims had anything to do with that place. Her instinct to check on Melissa’s husband had proven to be a complete waste of time, and the fact that the killer had dumped Katherine’s body at the hospital wasn’t that relevant either, considering he always dumped the bodies where he’d abducted his victims. Then, what was it in her gut that wouldn’t let her be? She shrugged it off, and started walking toward the car. If it was that important, it would come to her, probably as soon as she downed another stiff coffee. They’d already looked at the hospital as a possible correlation and found nothing.