by Jon Osborne
The man looked to be in his mid-forties, with thinning gray that had been parted sharply on the left side of his head. The paper mask covering the lower half of his face made determining any facial features difficult, but Dana felt certain Nancy Lawson would know who he was. The coroner’s office wasn’t all that big of a place – people-wise, at least – for the man to be an unknown entity. Unfamiliar faces wouldn’t go unnoticed around here, and Nancy Lawson seemed to be the sort of woman who’d notice everything.
A minute or so after Johnson had left the room, his pathology assistant followed suit, closing the door behind him.
Dana frowned as the image on the video stood still for what seemed a lifetime then – just Christian Manhoff’s dead body alone in the room with a large rawhide dog bone shoved halfway down his throat. Finding the fast-forward button on the computer, Dana watched the same scene unfold for two more minutes, according to the time-stamp located in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.
And then the door to the autopsy room opened up again.
Dana widened her eyes. A woman in her late-thirties or early forties entered the room, dressed to the nines in a designer dress and high-heeled shoes. She was holding something in her right hand.
Turning directly to the camera hidden behind the potted plant, the woman smiled at the viewfinder before lifting up the picture of Dana’s brother and mouthing three distinct words that you didn’t need to be a professional lip-reader to figure out.
Fuck you, Dana.
Dana recoiled from the computer screen, as though the woman might somehow reach through the monitor and grab her by the throat. Dana’s pulse skipped three beats in a row in her neck as the woman attached the picture of Nathan Stiedowe to Christian Manhoff’s nipple ring. Then the woman simply turned around, flipped off the camera with both her middle fingers and left the room.
Dana rewound the video and watched it again. And then for a third and fourth time.
Fuck you, Dana.
Fuck you, Dana.
Fuck you, Dana.
Fuck you, Dana.
Dana’s ears rang. Her hands shook. Her palms flooded with sweat. It was clear that the woman in the autopsy video had zero interest in concealing her identity, no fear at all about her face being captured on tape. And that worried Dana. A lot. Because only someone with nothing to lose would display such carelessness. And how in the hell had the woman known the camera had been hidden behind the plant in the first place? Did she work there?
Dana shook her head. Didn’t seem likely considering the fact that it would have taken all of about five minutes to identify her if she did work there. So if that wasn’t it, what was it then? Was she a disgruntled former employee? A relative of one? And just how exactly had she gained access to the autopsy room in the first place? Nancy Lawson had said the camera had been installed just a couple weeks prior, so that meant the woman had been privy to that information too. But how in the hell could she have known that if she didn’t work there?
Dana tapped the trackpad to stop the video and called up the Internet browser on Nancy Lawson’s computer before saving the footage in a zip file and e-mailing it to herself.
Just then, Nancy Lawson’s voice sounded directly behind her. ‘Find anything interesting, Agent Whitestone?’
Dana nearly jumped out of her skin. A cold trickle of sweat slid down the back of her neck. Her heartbeat thudded dully in her chest. ‘Not a damn thing,’ Dana lied, standing up quickly and moving around to the other side of the desk, instinctively putting some distance between herself and the coroner’s office employee. ‘Didn’t find anything, at all.’
The well-dressed woman on the autopsy footage didn’t resemble Nancy Lawson in the least little bit, but Dana had been burned in the past by such simple oversights and she didn’t want to get burned again. Not this time. Everyone had to remain a suspect until Dana could rule him or her out, and she hadn’t done that yet with Nancy Lawson.
Dana tried to keep the adrenalin out of her voice as she continued to speak. Wasn’t easy. ‘Thank you again for all your help, Miss Lawson. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.’
Nancy Lawson blew off a thick cloud of steam from her piping-hot Styrofoam cup of coffee and took a tentative sip.
‘Don’t mention it, honey. That’s what they pay me the big bucks for.’
CHAPTER 17
Hands still shaking, Dana ducked into the gleaming public restroom at the coroner’s office building and tried to steady herself. Wasn’t easy.
A familiar dread washed through her stomach as she splashed some cold water onto her face and tried to calm down. No good. She was still too shaken up from the shocking video she’d just watched to even breathe properly, much less think straight – a shocking video she hadn’t been expecting to see at all.
Dana shook herself. What had the woman in the surveillance footage been trying to tell her by attaching the photograph of her brother to Christian Manhoff’s body, anyway? Besides ‘fuck you’, of course. That part of the message hadn’t been very difficult to figure out.
It was clear she’d been calling Dana out by name – literally, just as Nathan Stiedowe had done during the Cleveland Slasher investigation – but to what end and for what purpose? And could the woman in the video be a murderer? Just like Dana’s brother had been? Could Dana be sure of that? Had the woman in the video been the same person who’d shoved a large rawhide bone down Christian Manhoff’s throat until he’d choked to death on it? Or was the woman in the video simply connected to the murder somehow? And if so, just how, exactly, was she connected to it?
Dana shook her head and took several deep breaths through her nostrils. Nothing made any sense to her. Still, what else was new? She’d been in a daze ever since she’d first emerged from her coma three days earlier and it didn’t look like she’d snap out of it anytime soon. That being said, Dana knew she’d need to do just that. And quick. One person was dead already and there could be more to come soon. Would probably be more to come soon. With suspects like this one – people who went to such great lengths to actually draw attention to their terrible crimes – there were always more to come.
But Dana didn’t see how the woman in the video could have possibly pulled off the murder by herself. She just didn’t appear physically capable.
Christian Manhoff had been a big man. A huge man, even. He must have outweighed the woman in the video by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. Surely the woman in the video couldn’t have overpowered him. She looked tall, sure – taller than the average female and certainly a lot taller than Dana – but she didn’t look anywhere near strong enough to pull off the deed by herself. So did that mean she’d had assistance killing Christian Manhoff? And if so, from whom? Or – for some odd reason – had the woman in the video simply been piggybacking on a murder that had already committed by someone else, one to which she had no other link?
Dana didn’t know, but she sure as hell planned to find out. Flipping open her cellphone, she accessed her e-mail account and downloaded the attached zip file she’d sent herself a few minutes earlier before watching the autopsy video several more times, her heart pounding progressively harder against her ribcage each time through until she thought it would explode like a time bomb inside her chest.
On the fourth or fifth repeat viewing, Dana finally noticed the watch strapped around the woman’s left wrist as she entered the autopsy room and held up the photograph of Nathan Stiedowe to the camera.
Dana paused the video and selected the portion of the image featuring the watch before zooming in. The watch had caught Dana’s eye mostly because it looked so out of place when compared to the rest of the woman’s hopelessly trendy attire. The dress the woman in the video had been wearing looked like it had cost a pretty penny, indeed – along with her shoes, jewellery and haircut. Something of a closet clotheshorse herself, Dana knew quality when she saw it, and the bird-flipping, profanity-mouthing woman’s get-up in the video was definitely quality.
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Dana bit down gently her lower lip – an unfortunate habit she’d formed in grade school and still hadn’t quite gotten over yet – while she continued to think things through. She rubbed at her aching neck and wished like hell that the tension residing there would find somewhere else to live already. The woman’s wardrobe had obviously selected with care and the cheap watch stuck out like sore thumb. It was almost like topping off a piece of perfectly prepared filet mignon with a healthy dollop of two-dollar whipped cream you’d picked up at the grocery store as an afterthought: a small addition but one that was nonetheless large enough to completely ruin the overall presentation.
Simply stated, the watch was a piece of junk. Something a kid might wear.
The watch itself consisted of a worn red-leather strap and what appeared to be a cartoon character using its hands to point out the hour and minute.
Dana zoomed in even closer on the video and narrowed her eyes.
Mickey Mouse.
Dana shook her head in confusion, hoping she wasn’t wasting her time with this line of thinking. Still, even though she didn’t know why the watch bothered her, she just knew that it did. Bothered her in a big way, as a matter of fact. A cop’s instinct, she supposed – a sixth sense. Call it whatever you wanted, but she’d followed far too many of her gut feelings directly to a murderer’s doorstep to simply ignore it altogether.
Besides, flimsy lead or not, at least it was some sort of lead. She’d gone on much less during the Cleveland Slasher investigation, not to mention a lot of other cases she’d investigated in the past. So it was important that she didn’t ignore any possible roads here, no matter how unpromising those roads might seem. Sometimes it was the seemingly innocuous details that cracked a case wide open.
Dana stretched her neck again and punched in Gary Templeton’s number on her cellphone. As big of a deal as a bank robbery might be, this was even bigger. A possible killer who’d been caught on video was on the loose out there somewhere in Cleveland and Dana needed Templeton’s help to track that person down. Now. And if they split up the responsibilities, they could probably get twice the amount of work done in the same length of time. Dana also wanted to hear Templeton’s thoughts on why he might think the woman in the video had called her out by name. Maybe he could make sense out of this mess. Lord knew she couldn’t.
Dana gritted her teeth when Templeton didn’t answer his phone. No doubt he was up to his elbows in crime already working the bank robbery. Dana sympathised with him, but sympathy didn’t catch killers. Still, a cop’s life never seemed to get any easier, whether you were FBI or Cleveland PD. No matter how many cases you solved, no matter how many bad guys you put away, for each case you put to bed there were always twenty more unsolved cases staring you dead in the face at the end of each exhausting workday. Mocking you. Daring you to try to solve them.
Dana closed her eyes and flipped shut her cellphone, wishing like hell Jeremy Brown were around for her to bounce some ideas off. Jeremy had been a damn fine investigator, one of the finest Dana had ever known in her entire career. He’d have had plenty of ideas concerning the mystery woman in the video. But Jeremy wasn’t around any more. Not now and not ever again. He was dead and rotting six feet beneath the ground in a cemetery out in Los Angeles. All thanks to Dana and her supposedly sterling work in the FBI.
Dana shook her head. You reaped what you sowed.
With Templeton already busy with his own problems, Dana realised she’d be puzzling out this one on her own until further notice. No big surprise there, though. She’d jumped into this case willy-nilly from the start, hadn’t stopped to think things through properly or ask for backup, which protocol clearly dictated. So alone was exactly the way she deserved to be working.
Dana let out a slow breath. There’d been a time in her career not too long ago when she’d actually preferred alone, but those days were long gone now. In the past, she’d often found that doing most of the work for herself actually made it easier for her to get the job done when the pressure was on. When you worked alone, there was nobody else was around to get in your way, nobody else around to slow you down, nobody else around to send you off on wild-goose chases that rarely – if ever – panned out.
Dana went to the sink and twisted on the warm-water tap before pumping some fruity-smelling hand soap into her palm from the plastic dispenser positioned above the sink. She felt dirty, like she just couldn’t get clean for the life of her. But where lay the big surprise in that? When you’d spent as much time as Dana had chasing the lowest common denominators of humanity through the gutters of life, some of that filth was bound to rub off on you.
As Dana dried off her hands with a wad of industrial-strength paper towels, her heart nearly exploded inside her chest when door to the bathroom suddenly flew open with a violent bang.
Dana whirled around. Her gaze went automatically to Nancy Lawson’s left wrist to see if she was wearing a watch. And, if so, what kind of watch.
‘Hello, Agent Whitestone,’ Lawson said, smiling brightly. ‘Long time, no see.’
CHAPTER 18
Nicholas’s first murder had taken place the previous August.
Leaning in close to the bathroom mirror at 969 Turning Oaks Drive on the west side of Chicago, he reapplied his bright red lipstick and remembered the night he’d stood inside a bathroom at a popular Atlanta nightclub just before he’d made his way back out onto the crowded dance floor.
Nicholas had felt a little nervous then, of course, but if he’d still had a penis it would have stiffened in delicious anticipation. And why not? Murdering people was a lot like fucking them, wasn’t it? Of course it was. Both were intimate acts filled with unspeakable violence when done properly, and both caused stains that were extremely difficult to scrub away.
So, looking at things that way, Nicholas had decided he’d grow a new pair and do what he’d come there to do that night. Enough with all the preliminaries already. Enough with all the build-up. No more talking the talk and not walking the walk.
His mother was expecting this.
***
After scoping out the scene for several minutes, Nicholas checked his Mickey Mouse watch while he stood in the northeast corner of the club, his face mostly hidden by an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Nicholas had chosen to appear as a man that night in the hopes that it would eliminate all the unwanted attention he surely would have received had he been dressed as a woman. As a man, though, Nicholas wouldn’t need to worry about any drunks offering to buy him shots or moving in to cop a cheap feel, drooling all over themselves as they did their best Brad Pitt imitations and tried their damndest to get into his pants.
Nicholas wondered how many of them would still be trying to spread his thighs if they’d known what used to dangle between his legs…
Fifty per cent of them, at the very least.
***
The Mickey Mouse watch was extremely difficult to read in the darkened nightclub. Straining his eyes, Nicholas finally caught sight of the little black hands as they were illuminated in the intermittent strobe lights flashing overhead and threatening to bring on a full-blown seizure.
One-thirty a.m. Only an hour or so to go now until show time.
Around that time, the curtains would finally go up and Dinah Leach would finally go down for the count for ever, never to rise again. That’s assuming, of course, that the weather reports were to be believed.
Nicholas shuddered again at the delicious prospect of what lay ahead for him, both tonight and for the rest of his life. After several months of careful planning, he and his mother had decided that Johnny’s Hideaway on Roswell Road would be the perfect place for all the action to start going down. And, from all appearances, it seemed to be a natural fit. Absolutely perfect for his intentions for the evening.
The Devil Went Down To Georgia played in Nicholas’s mind and competed with the rap music blaring over the speakers in the club to provide a jarring, discordant soundtrack for the scene. Wrinkling up
his face in disgust against the audible onslaught in his ears, Nicholas took in a deep breath through his nostrils and steeled himself for what would come next. The devil had gone down to Georgia, indeed. And if the devil had his way, he’d have been wearing a beautiful red dress, a stunning pearl necklace and glamorous, six-inch high heels, to boot.
***
Nicholas had followed his prey for a solid week now – stalked her, actually, if you wanted to get technical about the whole thing, appropriately changing his appearance each night to avoid being recognised by her as a familiar face. Now all he needed to do was wait for the powerful storm to strike. And on this night – blessed of all nights – Hurricane Allison was scheduled to arrive in all her glory at precisely two-thirty a.m., according to the weatherman on the radio station Nicholas had been listening to when he’d pulled into the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway an hour earlier.
Nicholas had smiled to himself while he’d listened to the report, knowing the hurricane would provide the very noisy cover he’d need to get away with what he already knew would be his exceedingly bloody crime.
First things first, though. Nicholas still needed to get the woman alone.
Hardly an insignificant hurdle to leap, at all.
***
Johnny’s Hideaway was a hip, eclectic, upscale joint – the kind of place that played music ranging anywhere from Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and The Beach Boys to Madonna and Eminem and Rhianna. A little something for everybody. Just like Nicholas had a little something for Dinah Leach. The reality television star would just need to wait a little bit longer now to find out exactly what his gift to her would be. But it wouldn’t be the suspense killing her. It would be Nicholas himself pulling off the dirty deed.
Fifty feet away out on the crowded dance floor, Dinah Leach shook her shimmy to the upbeat sounds of Lady Gaga – looking like a complete and total slut as she did so, of course. As usual, the fame whore seemed to be enjoying the feeling of all the adoring eyeballs glued to her. Fake-ass celebrity bitch. With any luck at all, though, her fifteen minutes of fame would expire at just about the same time her worthless life did. And the clock was ticking now. Nicholas wondered if she could hear it. It was getting louder.