Heron Park

by C. K. Raggio

  “They were hers?” Cassie asked, glad to change the subject.

  “Yup, seems he bought them for her before she moved to New York. His girlfriend makes them special for people. We took a DNA sample. We should get the results back over the next few days.”

  Cassie sunk deeper into the mud. How did she manage to step in the only area of the crime scene that wasn’t a foot deep in leaves and water? She pulled free, but threw herself off balance and her other foot splashed in a puddle. A pink mass caught her eye as the water rippled. “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Rick asked, coming up behind her.

  “I don’t know.” She stooped down and searched the rippling surface. She couldn’t see the bottom. “Anyone have anything I could use to remove this water?” she called out.

  A female tech wearing a blue slicker handed her a small bucket. Carefully, Cassie dipped it in toward the edges of the puddle, trying not to disturb the middle where she’d seen whatever the heck it was. Her knuckle brushed up against something with a bit of squishiness to it as the bucket filled.

  When the leaves and mud became visible she set the bucket off to the side. A bloated gray mass sat nestled amongst the colors of fall. She flinched and looked away.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Phil asked.

  “If you were thinking it was a tongue,” Rick said with a hint of disgust. “Yes.”

  Izzy pointed. “What are those indentations on the edge? Are those teeth marks? Did our guy bite it out?”

  Bile rose in Cassie’s mouth. The marks in the dirt from Jane Doe two fighting the restraints. The punctures in Tina’s neck that Doc said were made so she couldn’t scream. “I think between the pain, and because she couldn’t yell for help or get away she bit out her own tongue.”

  Izzy gulped in a mouthful of air. “Jesus…”

  Cassie glanced at her. “I’m sure that’s exactly who our victim was trying to scream for.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Rick stormed into his motel room and slammed the door. He threw the manila file on the bed, sorting through the pictures and maps, looking for the right one. It couldn’t be. There was no way this motherfucker staked that girl out the same way. He pulled out the photo forensics had blown up for him. The way Jane Doe two was tied down looked exactly the way Marcy Tucker was staked.

  He sat at the small dinette table in front of his laptop and typed in Marcy’s case. There were hundreds of pictures, but he remembered the JPG numbers and scanned down. His fingers pounded on the enter key to zoom in. He held the picture of the Heron Park Jane up to the computer screen to compare.

  Throwing the photo down, he slammed his fist on the table. The cheap dinette cracked down the center. He grabbed his laptop before the table crumbled into a heap at his feet.

  He kicked at it, sending it tumbling across the room. Someone pounded on the wall from the room next to his. Pacing, he tried to release some of the tension strangling his muscles. He wished the fleabag motel had a gym. Or at the least a punching bag.

  When he first saw the Jane Doe at the park, and how the killer had sliced her left nipple off and placed it in her right hand, he thought he was seeing things, maybe it was from lack of sleep. Then he looked closer at the body. Every slice on Jane Doe’s chest matched the ones that had been cut into Marcy. The stakes her arms and legs were tied to looked the same, and the wire too.

  It had been public knowledge that the case he worked on over a year ago had a killer who butchered a woman in the exact same way. What wasn’t as wide spread was that the picture of Marcy’s corpse at the crime scene wound up on an internet site. The FBI found it within an hour, and closed it down, but the damage had already been done.

  Their guy must’ve been a member, or at the least saw a picture. Rick took one more look at the two identical crime scenes. This wasn’t good. He grabbed his phone and called up their computer whiz back at headquarters. He told her to compare their suspect list to every name they had on file for the site Psychos On The Hunt. Most of the names had been aliases, but there was no harm trying.

  After he hung up, he unrolled the large map of the waterways the Coast Guard had sent over. He tacked it up on the wall, near the bed so he could see it from every corner in the room. With a red marker, he highlighted the docks closest to the park.

  Many of the larger marinas required you to be a resident and have a key to access the gates. Any deeded docking would also leave some sort of paper trail. Something their guy wouldn’t leave. Unless he stole a key.

  His phone rang and he answered it without looking. “Sanders.”

  There was a pause, and then a gruff voice said, “It’s Flemings.”

  Rick froze. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “Yeah, you’re the last piece of shit I want to be calling too. But I’m your back up on this case. I need to know what’s going on.”

  Tension knotted in Rick’s back. Was this how his superiors were going to punish him for killing that girl? He shut his eyes for a moment, not even able to bring her name to his lips.

  “Hello? Sanders, if you hung up on me!”

  “I’m here. Did you get the update I sent in yesterday?”

  “Yes. Anything new? Spit it out, I have to go pick up my kids. I only get one day a week with them.” The venom in the man’s voice oozed through the phone.

  Flemings was a douchebag, but Rick had never meant to mess with his relationship with his kids. “I don’t know. This guy is highly organized. Smarter than most killers I’ve studied. He knows where to go and when.”

  “Yeah, pretty much figured that. Anything worth mentioning?”

  Rick went back and forth on whether to tell him about Marcy Tucker. Crap. He’d skip it for now. “With Jane Doe two, the ME found no evidence of human intercourse. The ax handle seems to be the only culprit. The mutilation of the woman’s vaginal and reproductive organs was done while she was still alive. Hemorrhaging from the trauma is what killed her.”

  Flemings huffed into the phone. “You’re wasting my time. We have the report for the second vic. A chunk of the woman’s thigh had been chewed off premortem as well. What do you think about it?”

  Rick wondered if the dog decided it wanted a snack, or if the sick SOB ordered it to bite. “I think that if you had the report sitting in front of you a heads up would’ve been nice. I’m not in the mood to be wasting my time either.”

  “You’re a piece of work, you know that. So, in other words, you have two dead bodies and nothing else? No ideas or thoughts? What, did you find a hot piece of ass to take up most your time? Or wait, no, you only move in on other people’s wives.”

  Rick hung up the phone. He didn’t expect the guy to like him, but when it came to working on a case together he expected a bit more professionalism. He pushed the pictures aside and lay on the bed.

  Not like it made it okay, but he hadn’t been the only one doing Flemings’ wife. One of these days the asshole was going to piss him off so bad that he’d tell him just how many men his wife was giving rim jobs to.

  It would’ve been nice to bounce ideas off someone else, but with Flemings as his back up, he would be on his own. He took a deep breath. All of the unanswered questions of this case were stacking up at a ridiculous pace. What was this guy doing with the internal organs and the skin of these women? The heads?

  Was their guy like Ed Gein, the serial killer notorious for making lampshades out of human skin and belts decorated with nipples? Or was he using the human scraps for dog chow?

  And where were the victim’s clothes and personnel items? He rubbed at his eyes, he needed to concentrate on the things he did know, and hope something there could help him answer the ones he didn’t.

  The guy had to have seen the picture of Marcy’s torture and mimicked it to get to Rick. The more power and control he got over the case, and the people who were searching for him, the more invincible it would make him feel. But why go after him? The guy only killed women.

  Unless
Rick had talked to the guy and hadn’t blinked an eye at him. At the news conference? They’d been over those tapes and hadn’t found anyone looking suspicious. Maybe he’d seen the guy at the bank or a gas station. Shit it could’ve been anywhere.

  The walls of the small motel room seemed to be closing in on him. This was why working for the BAU would never have worked. He felt trapped not being able to move. He needed to step back from the case, think about something else.

  At least the homicide detectives in this town weren’t complete morons. He’d worked in a few small towns and the help hadn’t been near as good. Or as good looking for that matter.

  Cassie Logan was something special. Something about her made his palms sweat and his pulse race. He clenched his jaw. Definitely something he wasn’t used to. The sound of her voice and the way she looked at him, like she could see straight to his core. Wow, he was glad no one could hear his cheesy thoughts. Not thinking about the case was getting him even more worked up. He looked up at the map.

  A muffled shriek of his phone rang out from beside him on the bed. He read the number and cleared his throat. “Sanders.”

  Cassie’s voice sounded rushed and excited. “Rick, hey. I tried to get Hank, but he didn’t pick up, so I figured I’d run it by you.”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  She took a breath and went on. “I had a hunch and checked out missing persons. It seems that in the past ten years, three other women and their dogs have gone missing. That’s not including the two who originally brought you here. In all three cases, the last time anybody saw them it’d been during bad weather. None of them had any relatives or friends to speak of. But when their neighbors were questioned about them, they all said the women adored their dogs. Took them to the park at least two or three times a week. Guess where they walked them?”

  Rick jumped up. What the hell? “Why wasn’t this caught earlier? I never saw any information on these girls.”

  “I talked to Missing Persons and they said no real investigations were done on them. They all lived in high crime areas, and their neighbors stated the girls were known drug abusers and prostitutes. All three were behind on their rent, one of them had no heat or electric in her apartment. Because the dogs were gone as well, Missing Persons pegged them for skipping town.”

  Rick rubbed his temples. “This might be our guy. If it is, that means he’s been practicing around here for a while. He started with women who wouldn’t be looked into and even spaced them out, so they wouldn’t be linked to each other.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Cassie said.

  “Okay, try Hank again, see what he thinks. Any leads to who the vic is yet?”

  “Nothing solid, but we have a few possibilities. The missing person reports are getting crazy. Someone goes to the supermarket for more than an hour and families are calling them in as missing. People are starting to panic. I’m emailing you the information on the women now.”

  Rick sat on the bed and flipped open his laptop. “Thanks. Can’t really blame the people on panicking. Keep me posted on any more info on these new cases. Also, make a call and verify the officers are patrolling the parks. Those deer trails and the beach area especially.”

  “On it. Oh, there’s Hank beeping in. I’ll call you in a bit.”

  The phone clicked off and Rick set it down. If Cassie’s hunch was right, then their guy was a lot smarter than anyone could’ve imagined. There were anywhere between five to ten women down south and a possible five – definite two – here on Long Island. Who knows how many more? Why hadn’t the dogs of the ones Cassie mentioned been found?

  He thought of Rooter and the spaniel mix. How would you make a dog attack and kill like that? Training. Were those missing dogs used in training exercises?

  If Cassie was right, their guy was all over the fucking chart. His arrogance may be the only thing going their way. Rick peered between the faded green curtains. A light went out in the parking lot and it darkened. They needed their guy to make a mistake. He rested his head against the window frame. God forgive him, because for that, it seemed they would need him to kill again.

  CHAPTER 12

  Through a sleeping fog, Cassie heard the buzzing of her alarm. She slapped at it, sending it crashing to the floor. It’d been over a month since they found Tina Conner’s body at the park. This was the first time Cassie had the chance to sleep more than four hours and it hadn’t been her idea. Her coughing fits had everyone insisting she go home early the night before.

  She forced her legs over the side of the bed. Her hair, damp with sweat, stuck to her face. Every muscle screamed. She put a hand to her forehead. Heat radiated into her palm. She and fevers didn’t mesh well. Anything over 101 usually meant she’d not only be seeing pink unicorns but riding one.

  She tried to get up and a violent coughing fit rocked her body. Each hack made the pressure in her face and sinuses seem ready to explode.

  When it passed she reached for her phone. There was no way she could go in right now. Maybe they could give her a few more hours to try and sleep it off so she was at least functional. Her phone beeped before she could dial. She hit the voicemail button.

  Hank’s voice droned through the speaker. “Hey, Cass, I just wanted to let you know that if you even attempt to come into the office it will be a waste of your energy. You’re sick, and we can’t have everyone else catching it. Stay home today. If anything happens we’ll let you know. See you tomorrow.”

  A moment of panic constricted her chest. She’d never called in sick. What if they found a lead? What if… Another coughing fit. This one had her hunched over, her gag reflexes reacted and she stumbled from her room to the bathroom.

  With one eye open and her cheek against the cool toilet seat, she realized there was no way she was going anywhere.

  ~~~

  “Are you okay?” her father asked. “Do you need anything else?” His eyes scanned the numerous glasses of juice, water and medicines he’d placed on the coffee table.

  For what felt like millionth time she shook her head and grimaced, as the world seemed to tilt with the motion. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back on the pillow. “I’m fine,” she mumbled, not entirely sure she’d said the words out loud.

  She was thankful her father and Sam had run to the pharmacy for her, but all she wanted to do is sleep. Goosebumps pricked her skin and she nestled deeper under the blankets. Sam and her father spoke in hushed tones as she drifted into a fever fogged slumber.

  Cassie blinked awake. How long had she been out? The wind howled and rattled the windows. The sky was the color of used charcoal, an irate storm had come out to play. She glanced at her phone, it was eleven in the morning, no missed calls.

  A wet nose touched her hand and Snow blinked her big brown eyes. Cassie grinned at the dog and reached for the glass of water on the coffee table. A white sheet of paper fluttered to the ground from underneath it.

  Cassie,

  Running to Josh’s center. Snow refused to leave your side, so we left her. Hope you don’t mind. If you need us call my cell.

  Love you, Dad

  Snow whined. Cassie scratched behind her ear and took a gulp of water. Even her taste buds seemed to be on fire. “Well, that’s a first. You let Dad go somewhere without you? That’s very out of character.” Snow put her ears back and her tail swept across the floor.

  “You’re right.” Cassie patted her head. “Always better to have some company when you’re sick.” Cassie rose to her feet. Her entire body creaked and moaned, like she’d been on the couch for days. At least her temperature seemed to have gone down to bearable levels.

  She slowly stretched her arms over her head, so as not to get the coughing started again and glanced out her window. Out of habit she flipped the outdoor dock lights on. They illuminated her father’s boat in its slip. Snow rubbed up against her side.

  Sam and her father must’ve put on some extra lines. The boat looked secure enough, she wasn’t bouncin
g off the dock at least. The south wind picked up as Cassie watched. A white-capped wave slammed into the unsuspecting rocks behind her house. The water catapulted off the small jetty, and crashed into the door and window.

  Cassie jumped back, startled. “Shit!” She placed a hand over her fluttering chest and laughed.

  Snow’s ears went back and her pink tongue hung out of the side of her mouth, like a sheepish grin on her furry face. “Can’t say that didn’t scare you too.” Cassie’s continued laughter brought on a coughing fit. She moved toward the couch for the cough syrup and chugged down a bit, shuddering at the taste. Grape-flavored my ass.

  With the boat safe, and no messages lighting up her phone, she lay back down on the couch and pulled the blanket to her chin. All the medicine she’d taken was making her groggy. Sleep called to her. Her body sank into the cushions and her eyes grew heavy. Snow paced, her nails clicked against the wood floors, rocking Cassie to sleep.

  She tossed and turned, her dreams one nightmare after another. A deep, aggressive bark snapped Cassie upright. Blood rushed to her head and she gripped the couch to steady a wave of dizziness. Snow never barked. At least not like that.

  Nothing was out of place in the room, but Snow’s muscles quivered through her rigid body. Her ears twitched as she stared toward the hallway. Cassie strained to hear any noises beside the storm outside.

  “Snow? What is it?” A scratching, scraping sound reached Cassie’s ears. “What the…?” She pushed the blanket from her body and turned toward the guest bedroom. The scratching came again, louder, followed by a series of bangs.

  Sounded like a hammer hitting against her house. Was someone trying to break in?

  Bang – bang.

  Snow slinked to the guest bedroom door, each quiet step moving her stomach closer to the ground. Cassie got up and reached blindly for her gun on the mantel.