by Mary Burton
Her sunglasses catching the sun, Vargas leaned against the brick building, her arms folded. She looked relaxed, but he smelled the tension sizzling around her.
“Taking a nap?” he asked.
“Waiting for your sluggish self. I’ve spoken to the apartment manager, and he’s ready to show us the apartment.”
“What about a search warrant?”
“I have the go-ahead from a judge to ascertain the status of Elena Hayes. If we see any evidence of trouble, we’ll back out and request the warrant.”
Inside the building they took the elevator to the fifth floor and rounded a long corner where a skinny guy with a pockmarked face stood. He wore tattered jeans, a black T-shirt, and boots. In his hand was a ring of keys.
Sharp showed him his badge and introduced himself.
“I’m Max Quentin. Haven’t seen Ms. Hayes in a couple of days,” he said as he searched the ring of keys. “She was headed out for a vacation.”
“Is it unusual for you not to see her for days at a time?”
“Yes. She had an obsession for schedules. Gym, work, and then out with her friends at night. She’s always coming and going.”
“Do you pay this close attention to all your tenants?” Vargas asked.
“No. Just the hot ones.” The manager grinned as he found the right key and turned the lock. The door opened to an airy one-bedroom apartment with a large picture window overlooking the train tracks and the river. Her place was simply decorated with an overstuffed couch and a white shag area rug. A glass coffee table held a television remote and a neat stack of magazines.
Vargas rattled keys in her hands. “I confirmed with Elena’s colleague, Miranda, who said Elena had a huge presentation at work in two weeks. Part of her getting away was to have a quiet place to prepare.”
“Where did she go?”
“Miranda thought she may have gone to her parents’ lake house so no one from work would drop in on her.”
Sharp nodded to a laptop on the kitchen counter. “Think she would have needed that if she were going to work on her vacation?”
“Absolutely,” Vargas said. “Miranda said she was dedicated and had her eye on a promotion.”
“Has anyone checked with the hospitals?” Sharp asked.
Vargas flipped open a small notebook. “I called the local ones, and no one has heard of Elena Hayes or admitted anyone matching her description.”
“What about a boyfriend?”
More notebook pages flipped. “She had one a couple of years ago. He left her and married someone else. She’s been single since. Really into fitness. Loves yoga. Was talking last week about what she’d do if she closed this upcoming deal.”
The living area connected to a galley kitchen, which was clean and tidy. A small hallway led to a bedroom. The shades were drawn up, bathing the room in sunlight. Lying in the center of a neatly made king-size bed was a doll.
“Damn,” Vargas muttered behind Sharp.
“We need to get a search warrant and seal this apartment,” he said.
Sharp moved closer to the bed, tugging on latex gloves. The doll had dark hair and wide bright-blue eyes and wore a red dress. He wasn’t an expert, but he could see the doll’s face was shaped exactly like the one given to Diane. The detailed painting around the eyes and the lips was perfect.
Sharp took a couple of snapshots of the doll before he and Vargas walked out of the apartment. The manager locked the door.
Sharp called for a uniform to stand guard in front of the door until the warrant and forensic team arrived. Only when a uniformed officer had secured the room did the two detectives take the elevator to the first floor.
When they were alone, he said, “We have at least an hour before we can get back in there, and I have a possible crime scene just a couple of blocks from here. Walk with me, and let’s take a look at an alley a block away.”
“Man, I got a full caseload. I don’t have time for strolls.”
“Humor me, Vargas,” he said. He moved to his car and from the trunk collected a flashlight.
“It’s the middle of the day,” Vargas said.
He clicked it on, confirmed it worked, and turned it off. “Stick with me on this.”
Vargas matched Sharp’s quick pace as the two traveled the brick sidewalk. He found the alley Jimmy had described and paused at the entrance. The narrow lane sandwiched between two old brick buildings was empty except for a dumpster at the dead end. One way in. One way out. The perfect death trap.
“Heard about Terrance Dillon, the kid stabbed and dumped north of the city?” Sharp asked.
“I did. Word is he was a good kid with no record. What does this alley have to do with him?”
Sharp reached in his pocket and pulled out latex gloves. “According to Terrance’s father, the kid came to this alley to make a delivery.”
She arched a brow as she also fished out gloves. “You mean drugs?”
“I do.”
“Drug deals go bad all the time,” Vargas challenged.
“According to the kid’s father, the drug in question might have been propofol stolen from a doctor’s office.”
“The kid’s father set up the deal?”
“He did.”
“Keep it in the family. Nice.”
“Jimmy said the drugs were enough to keep a person out for weeks.”
Her frown deepening, she shifted her gaze to the alley. “A month. That’s about the amount of time Diane Richardson’s killer needed to keep her immobilized.”
Sharp clicked on his light, which cast an infrared beam. Hunters used this light to track the blood trail of shot game. He was hunting for human blood. “I asked Dr. McGowan to test the foreign DNA found on Richardson’s and Dillon’s bodies.”
“You think they could be a match?”
“Right now, I wouldn’t bet against it.”
Sharp slowly moved into the alley, inspecting the worn cobblestones. At first, he saw only the gray. “If this deal occurred last Sunday, then the drugs wouldn’t have been for Diane. The work on her was already done at that point.”
“You think this guy is planning to take someone else? Maybe someone like Elena?”
“I’d like to be wrong.” If Elena was in danger, that meant Tessa could be as well. Sharp kept his gaze on the cobblestones. “There was no blood at the spot where we found the kid’s body. His stab wound did maximum damage, and Kincaid thinks he bled out quickly.”
“So wherever he died, he bled.”
“Yes.”
“It hasn’t rained since Monday, so we have a good chance of finding it if it’s here.” Vargas cocked her head. “So this kid’s father might have been in touch with Diane’s killer?”
“He talked with a woman looking to sell prescription medications.”
She shook her head. “Does this lovely woman have a name?”
“Frances, he thinks.”
“That’s it?”
“Afraid so. But she most likely works out of one of the medical buildings off Route 360 near Mechanicsville. Based on what he told me, it won’t take long to find the building.”
Sharp was halfway into the alley when his light skimmed over a large dark patch. The air carried hints of a coppery scent. “Look.”
Vargas knelt and studied the stain. “I’ll be damned.”
Sharp fished a small blood-testing kit from his side pocket. It came with a cotton swab and a glass vial with chemicals that reacted to blood. He dabbed the stain and pushed the swab into the vial, breaking the seal and releasing a chemical. He shook the bottle. Within seconds the clear liquid changed to a bright blue. “The blood is human.”
She took the vial and held it up to the light. “So now we need to prove it belonged to Terrance and then find this mystery woman named Frances. She might have seen our killer.”
Sharp reached for his phone. “Let’s roll.”
Tessa relayed Sharp’s request to Dr. Kincaid, who ordered the tests on the blood samples taken
from Terrance Dillon. After a brief discussion of the day’s pending cases, they moved to the autopsy suite. Their first case was a man in his fifties who’d suffered a massive heart attack last night while watching his favorite variety show on television. Next on deck was an autopsy of a sixty-five-year-old woman who’d consumed twice the legal limit of alcohol and stumbled down a flight of stairs. She’d hit her head at the bottom and broken her neck.
Dr. Kincaid shook her head. “Stay in shape, watch the booze and drugs, avoid dark alleys at night, and look both ways before you cross the street, and your chances of making it to a ripe old age increase exponentially.”
“The Diane Richardsons of the world are rare.”
“And thank God.”
When the cases had been cleared, Tessa stripped off her gown and grabbed her purse. She headed outside for some fresh air and a walk. As the sun warmed her face, she realized she was hungry. She’d not eaten much at Sharp’s last night, and now she was starving. She stopped at a taco truck parked on Main Street and ordered a burrito. As she moved back up toward her office and took a bite, her cell chimed with a text. Benson file on your desk.
Benson. Kara Benson. This morning she’d arrived early at work and, troubled by Holly’s mention of makeup on Kara’s body, requested the autopsy file. She’d asked the records clerk to text her when she found it, not expecting to see it for several days.
Her appetite for her burrito instantly vanished, and she hurried back to her office. A yellow interoffice envelope resting on her desk greeted her. Putting her purse in her bottom desk drawer, she opened the envelope to Kara’s old autopsy file. Her heart beat fast as she sat at her desk and pulled on her reading glasses. She slowly opened the file, wondering if she would ever be able to forget what was in it.
The first page was a diagram of the victim’s body. There were a couple of scrapes on the knees and palms, suggesting a fall, but other than those minor injuries, there were no other signs of trauma to the body. She flipped the page to her first look at Kara’s body lying on the autopsy table. Kara’s thick dark hair was brushed away from her freshly scrubbed pale face, which was splotched with decomposition stippling. Her jaw was slack and her eyes half-open. The image took her breath away.
She sat back in her chair and took off her glasses as she raised her hand to her mouth. She thought about the argument Holly had remembered Tessa having with Kara. “It had to have been so petty and stupid.”
Shaking herself mentally, she drew back her emotions and focused on the facts. The victim had been missing for five days but had only been dead thirty to forty hours when found. The temperatures had been unseasonably high, and decomposition had been rapid. By the time the body had been found, gasses from decomposition had bloated the corpse. When the crews moved her, she’d popped and deflated.
Tessa had seen this before and accepted this process as natural. But she’d also watched seasoned detectives when she’d been in Baltimore wilt and run to the nearest bathroom or bush to be sick. Death was inevitable, but it wasn’t pretty.
The inventory of the victim’s organs found them healthy. Her heart was of normal size, as was her liver. Stomach contents were minimal. There’d been traces of crackers and some broth. Wherever she’d been during those missing days, she’d been eating.
The medical examiner had conducted a vaginal examination and found traces of seminal fluid, but no signs of vaginal tearing or bruising, which suggested she’d not resisted intercourse. The fluids had been sent off for DNA, but when the results came back six months later, there’d been no match.
She flipped through the photos taken right after Kara’s body had been brought to the medical examiner’s office. In these images, her face hadn’t been scrubbed by the technician yet. Though at first glance the face was clean, as she looked closer, she could see definite traces of pale makeup around her hairline and ears. Shadows of bright-red lipstick colored her lips, and hints of a pale blue shaded her eyelids. Though it appeared her face had been wiped clean, she’d clearly been heavily made up.
Kara had never been a big fan of makeup, and the night of the Halloween party had been no exception. Whereas Diane, Elena, and Tessa had had fun exaggerating their doll features, Kara had not warmed to the garish look. “I’m a natural doll,” she’d quipped as she straightened her red dress. And yet there were traces of makeup on her face five days after she vanished.
Where had the makeup come from? And why had it been wiped from her face before she arrived at the medical examiner’s office? She’d been missing five days, but according to liver temperature readings taken in the medical examiner’s office, she’d only been dead about thirty hours. There were no signs of exposure, so presumably she’d been inside. So if there had been makeup, one night in the elements, even if it rained, would not have been enough to erase the makeup so completely.
Tessa checked the inventory of the patient’s belongings. She’d been wearing a simple red dress, black high heels, and a bow in her hair. The description matched the pictures Tessa had taken the night of the party. The only discrepancy was the bow. Kara had not been wearing a bow.
No one would have thought twice about the makeup or bow given Kara had been at a Halloween party before she vanished.
Kara’s toxicology report revealed lethal levels of barbiturates. The drugs had caused her breathing to depress and finally her heart to stop. The drugs also explained the lack of vaginal tearing. If the sex had not been consensual, she’d have been too drugged to resist anyone.
Tessa checked the files and discovered there was still DNA logged in the evidence lockers that were kept refrigerated. Knowing how much science had advanced in the last dozen years, she ordered new DNA testing on the seminal fluids found in Kara as well as a cross-check with the DNA found in Diane and on Terrance Dillon. Two women made up, one with tattoos and the other presumably with makeup. Both deaths also involved high levels of drugs that led to overdose, and there was evidence both women had had intercourse near time of death.
Terrance Dillon was still the outlier, but if he had been killed in a drug deal involving propofol, then that was a solid link to Diane, who’d died from the drug. Yes, a dozen years separated the first death and the most recent two, but the otherwise unique cases showed too many signs of interconnection to be ignored.
A couple of days ago, everyone would have considered the tests too speculative and wouldn’t have ordered them. Now she wasn’t so sure this was a long shot.
She might get flak for the expedited tests and their costs, but as Sharp once said, it was easier to seek forgiveness than ask permission.
In the park, the laughter of children swirled around Sharp as he stood in front of the spot where Diane Richardson had been found three days ago. Though most of the crime scene tape was now gone, a trace of it was tangled in a bush and drifted in the fall breeze.
He tried to imagine the possible paths the killer would have taken to get her body here. The forensic team had found faint tire tracks and taken impressions. There’d also been one partial boot print found near the body.
He walked back toward the parking lot counting the steps. Diane Richardson had not been a big woman, but carrying a dead body was unwieldy, even for the fittest killer. This guy had stamina. He walked to his car and looked back toward the tree. What was it about this place? Why bring her here?
He lives close by.
The words whispered in his head. The killer knew this small town located twenty miles north of Richmond well. From this spot, Terrance Dillon lived 3.5 miles away. Kara had been found 4.6 miles from here. The small private college where all the girls had attended was 6.2 miles away.
Killers, like everyday people, were creatures of habit. They had their routines, too. They chose to dispose of their victims in familiar areas. Easy in, easy out, and no one was the wiser.
Sharp reached for a cigarette and lit it. He inhaled and thought about the thousands of homes in this area. This guy had held Diane for weeks, so he would hav
e needed privacy.
Houses with basements and large lots came to mind, but Sharp knew if the killer were careful and kept his victim sedated, he might be able to keep her in close quarters. Keep your grass cut and say a nice word or two to your neighbors, and for the most part, people left you the hell alone.
As he stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette, he thought about Vargas’s comments about Tessa. Vargas hadn’t ruled her out as a person of interest, but no matter how compelling the argument, he could never imagine Tessa killing anyone. Ever.
He thought back to when he and Tessa had bumped into each other two years ago. He’d had one of his infrequent visits with Roger, who had said Tessa was back in Richmond working as a resident at the state hospital. Sharp had always been attracted to Tessa, but the decade difference in age and the awkward timing had kept him at a distance. Now the years didn’t matter as much, and the timing was about as good as it would ever get.
He’d found out she hung out with friends who lived on Monument Avenue and made a point to just happen by one day. It was during his third “happen by” that he’d spotted her with some friends playing croquet in the wide grassy median strip dividing the historic avenue.
Her long black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, and a sweat-stained tank top clung to her breasts. Shorts showed off long athletic legs and a great ass. He noted the scar on her right leg, the reminder from the car accident suffered the night Kara vanished. Still, she moved well.
The sun had given her skin a warm glow, accentuating her fit, toned body. Half the guys playing had been stealing glances of her as she bent forward to make a shot.
He’d leaned against a tree, watching the game. Watching her. Enjoying every moment of it.
She’d not recognized him, but when other players had broken for a break, she’d glanced over at him a couple of times.