by Anne Frasier
He popped the metal top and took a swig, swallowed, made eye contact, then broke away. “While you were gone, I was thinking and I remembered something.”
She nodded, not in an intense or excited way, just casually. The kind of nod you might give a friend who was bitching about the weather.
“I remember this girl . . . She was pretty. Long blond hair. About my age. And she smelled good. Like cookies or something.”
That surprised yet didn’t surprise her. “A boy’s going to notice a pretty girl.”
His pale cheeks grew pink.
“Why did you notice her? Was she acting odd? Nervous? Did her hands shake when you tore her ticket? Was her breathing noticeable?”
“She was alone.”
“Alone?”
“You ever hear of a teenage girl going to a movie by herself? Girls can’t even go to the bathroom alone.”
“That’s an astute observation.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything about her.” He took another drink of soda. “I don’t want to get her in trouble. A girl wouldn’t do something like that.”
She didn’t bother to remind him of the females involved in the brutal 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders. He was way too young to be familiar with those anyway.
“How do you know she was alone?”
“She wasn’t talking to anybody, and when she walked down the hall she was by herself.”
“So you do look at some people.”
“I guess.” He shifted in his seat and jammed his hands between his thighs. “I didn’t mean to lie.” Nervous again.
“I know,” she said, settling deeper into her chair and considering her next words. “I’m telling you this in confidence, so please don’t mention it outside this room.” It was good to let him know she was trusting him with pertinent information about the case. “There might have been more than one perpetrator. If so, those people might or might not have gone in together. If they went in together, they most likely split up.”
She opened her laptop and logged on to the VPN, then pulled her chair around and sat next to him so they could both see the screen as she clicked keys and started the video feed of people entering the theater.
Unfortunately, the sidewalk was dark. Broken bulbs weren’t a priority in the city, and it was entirely possible they’d been replaced and rebroken. Maybe even more than once, because vandals had decided they liked it dark. The department’s audio-visual specialist was trying to lighten up the footage, but Jude didn’t feel very hopeful. On top of it being dark, the night had been cold and windy. People were wearing knit caps, heads bent, faces down, in a signature Minnesota pose developed from years of living in a cold climate.
Mitchell had nothing more to add, so Jude told him she’d be in touch. “You have my card and phone number. Call if you think of anything else.”
Her next witness was another usher. He lacked any kind of observational skills, and the interview was over in a couple of minutes. That was followed by the projectionist. Neither was able to add anything of significance.
She got a text from Uriah.
Meet me upstairs. Ortega wants to talk to us before we head to the morgue.
CHAPTER 5
I know death when I see it,” Uriah said five minutes later when Jude caught up with him in Homicide. “There’s no sign of life there. I’m sorry.”
She stared at the limp Chinese evergreen on her desk. She’d had such high hopes for it. In some weird way, it represented more than a plant. It represented her ability to nurture something, anything, and keep it alive.
The Homicide Department amounted to a scattering of desks throughout a massive room on the third floor of the Minneapolis Police Department. Open, no cubicles. On a sunny day, light poured in from a row of windows overlooking the city street below. If a person had a green thumb, plants could do well. A couple of officers even grew herbs alongside the typical array of framed photos. Jude didn’t have any framed photos, but she’d been into the idea of a plant.
“Maybe it needs more light,” she mused. She’d chosen this particular plant because the woman at the nursery told her it was unkillable. Jude had liked the sound of that. Unkillable.
“It has plenty of light,” Uriah said. “It’s the water. You’ve watered it almost every day.”
Eyes still on the drooping plant, Jude said, “I think it’s alive.”
“It’s dead.” He emphasized dead as if the word should have been in all caps.
She opened her water bottle and poured a third of the contents on the plant, resaturating the soil and roots.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Uriah said. “Over–cared for. Killed with kindness. I grew up in farm country, and I know what yellow leaves mean. Too much water.”
She was overreacting, and she knew she was projecting. She must have looked upset, because Uriah continued to reassure her. “You can get another plant. And you can kill that one too. And when that happens, you can try again with another one. The nursery will love you.”
“I don’t want another plant,” Jude said. “I want this plant.”
“Sorry. Just trying to help.” Uriah was getting better at reading her. Or maybe she was losing some of the blank expression she’d worked hard to perfect in captivity. During that time, it hadn’t taken long to learn that a lack of response or visible reaction often resulted in being left alone. Torture was no fun if the victim didn’t react.
“You’ve done okay with your cat, and that’s more important than a plant.”
“He’s not my cat.” Uriah was right, but she didn’t want anything to die, not even a plant. She was tired of death.
They heard knuckles rapping on glass and looked up to see Chief Ortega motioning them into her office. There was something that made Jude uneasy about a room separated from everyone else by a wall of glass. It felt more like a stage. She would hate to work in there.
Inside the glass fishbowl, Jude and Uriah briefed the chief on the case. “I just officially interviewed the main witness,” Jude told her. “A kid named Mitchell Davidson. So far he hasn’t provided us with much information.”
“What about cameras?” Rather than taking a seat, Chief Ortega perched on one corner of her desk and swung a long leg. She was a beautiful woman with shiny dark hair and a different shade of lipstick every day. Today it was pink, yesterday red. Too pretty for the job, some might have said. There were whispers (which she’d surely heard) that she ought to dress more professionally, but she ignored them. Jude had always admired that about her and tried to emulate it in her own reactions to public opinion.
“We’ve gone through footage a few times,” Uriah said. “But the crowd made it easy for the perpetrator to hide in plain sight, and heavy coats and hats made it easier for any blood to go unnoticed.”
“Doesn’t take a specialist to know these probably aren’t drug deals gone bad or revenge killings,” Ortega said. “Randomly deliberate is what I’m calling them. I’m hoping they’re not connected to the previous slashings, but if they are, we’ve got something big on our hands.” She crossed her arms, her expression so worried that anybody beyond the glass would be able to see it. Not her typical behavior, positive no matter the situation. Even given the severity of what they were dealing with, she seemed unusually agitated.
“We’ve checked all the databases, including CISA and CODIS, looking for similar MOs over the past few years,” Jude told her. “Nothing.”
“One of the victims from last night’s killing was a friend of a friend,” Chief Ortega admitted, sharing his name and exposing the reason for her out-of-character behavior. “Nice guy. Recently divorced, having a hard time of it.”
The death of an acquaintance had a way of changing everything. The separation of work and home had been breached, at least a little. For someone with children and a husband, having that false sense of safety violated would have to be especially unsettling.
Jude understood that love and fear went hand in hand; she’d witnessed th
at combination of emotions in the faces of parents who’d lost their children. And now she sensed that same fear in Chief Ortega. Just a shadow of it. Just a hint. Just a sprinkle, a bit of flavor. But it was there, working its way into the woman’s subconscious.
“We’ll keep you in the loop,” Uriah said.
“I want to be more than in the loop,” the chief said. “I want to be immediately informed of any new development. Send me a text, give me a call, but stay connected.” She slid off her desk, a sure sign the conversation was winding down. “I want you both to live and breathe this case and the previous ones until they’re solved. I know that goes against my philosophy of maintaining our sanity in this job, but this is going to require more from everyone.”
“We’ve got an event tonight,” Uriah reminded her.
“Cancel it.”
“We can’t,” Jude said. “Crisis Center fund-raiser.” This was the second one of three, the hope being to raise enough cash to bring the crisis hotline back after a budget cut had ended the program. The third and final fund-raiser would involve a live interview with Uriah, who the center considered to have star power because he’d lost his wife to suicide. The program’s main focus was suicide prevention, and with Uriah as its poster child, its organizers hoped sympathetic viewers would open their wallets. To put even more pressure on him, Uriah had agreed to spend the interview talking about his own loss. It wouldn’t be easy.
“I understand,” Chief Ortega said. Suicide prevention wasn’t something any of them took lightly. “Of course you have to go.”
Poor Uriah. Manning a phone at the telethon had been hard on him the first time. The truth was, he was probably the one who needed a hotline. Survivors needed support too.
As the partners turned to leave, Uriah checked his watch, probably calculating how many hours he had left before tonight’s event.
“I plan to view it from home,” Ortega said with sympathy. “And I plan to donate. It’s a good cause.” As an afterthought, she said, “Don’t forget the yoga class.”
Uriah and Jude screeched to a halt.
“I’m not a yoga person,” Jude said.
“You just said to live and breathe these homicides,” Uriah reminded the chief.
“Didn’t you get my email?” Ortega asked. “It will take very little of your time, and it could help with the investigation. Relax your mind in order to tap into your subconscious.”
Ortega had recently attended a mental-health conference, and she was now pushing activities Jude would just as soon avoid.
“Ever since the blackouts and riots, we’ve had more PTSD and compassion fatigue within the department,” Ortega was saying. “And we’ve lost good men and women to smaller, safer towns. We’ve got officers making poor decisions under stress. I’m trying to find a way to remedy that.”
Jude didn’t like the way she was looking at her.
“It’s just a few times a month, that’s all. I’m hoping officers will even be able to use calming techniques in the field.”
Most detectives would envy having a chief who insisted her detectives have a home life and not live for their jobs. It was different for Jude. She had no one at home, and that was fine and that was good. It made things easier, made her job easier. The same could be said for Uriah. They were both loners. But sometimes Jude looked at Ortega’s life—a husband, two tolerable children, and two charming Labs—and she wondered if anything like that could exist for her.
“Can you really make us do this?” Jude asked. That seemed like a misuse of power.
Ortega rolled her eyes and didn’t try to hide her annoyance. “No, and I have little influence beyond Homicide, but I hope you’ll participate.” Her face softened. “If you both attend, officers from every department will be less likely to balk. And the mental health of everybody here is something we need to make a priority.”
Uriah nodded. “I’ll give it a shot, but it won’t be pretty.”
As far as Jude knew, Uriah spent most of his spare time visiting antiquarian-book sales and listening to obscure music. She wasn’t sure if he exercised exercised, but his downtown apartment building was one of the tallest in the city, and she knew he rarely took the elevator, always challenging himself to beat his previous record. He’d even announce it upon arrival in the office, as if the typical time it might take someone to scale sixteen flights of stairs was common knowledge. His current time was two minutes and nineteen seconds. He wanted to shave it to an even two.
Jude’s and Uriah’s phones buzzed simultaneously. They pulled them out and checked their screens: summoned to the office of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner.
CHAPTER 6
At the ME’s office on Chicago Avenue, they followed Ingrid Stevenson into an autopsy suite. The medical examiner was known for her efficiency, so it was no surprise to see that the three bodies from the theater had already been autopsied, although they were still taking up residence on separate workstations under large round lights. Jude and Uriah didn’t attend every autopsy, but it wasn’t unusual for Ingrid to call them down to her world to share her findings. She was pragmatic, didn’t overanalyze, but was excellent when it came to detecting things some people might miss.
“I know there’s a lot of speculation about these murders possibly being connected to the two previous ones,” she said, “but I’ve noted a discrepancy.”
As Ingrid spoke, Jude moved among the stainless-steel gurneys, giving Ingrid’s assistant a nod as he stepped aside to offer full access to the nearest body. She challenged herself to find the clues before Ingrid launched into an explanation of her discovery.
All three victims’ expressions hinted at the surprise and horror sometimes seen in the faces of the dead. Uriah and Ingrid might not have picked up on it, but Jude could see the suggestion of a reaction, a moment of awareness before death. Oddly enough, that reflection of surprise and horror was often mixed with embarrassment. This is how I’m dying. This is the humiliation of my end. The expression of knowing you were suddenly and unwillingly involved in an odd and ritualistic act of public mortification, yet could do nothing about it as your blood drained and major arteries went flat.
It would not have been a silent death, but the sound systems in movie theaters could be deafening. If all three kills happened during moments when chaos on the screen occupied all eyes, even the eyes of the almost dead, then the gasps and gurgles of the victims would have been drowned out by the other noise.
“An action-adventure was showing,” Jude said. “Explosions, gunfire, special effects—no shortage of scenes that would have been loud.” And even the type of movie felt like part of the finely tuned murder scene. “Did the killer or killers watch the movie at home first to figure out the optimum time to kill? When the noise was the loudest and longest?”
She moved from one body to the next, leaning close, then finally glanced up, first at Uriah, then at Ingrid, thinking she’d spotted the discrepancy the ME was talking about. “The wounds aren’t quite the same. One is shallower.”
Ingrid looked pleased. “I suspect the differences we’re seeing are due to a variation in the strength of the perpetrators.” She nodded to the body in front of her. “But even though the wounds aren’t the same, I’d say they were produced by similar knives.”
She walked to her laptop. With a few key clicks, she pulled up the autopsy reports on a large monitor, complete with images of the two previous victims. “As you can see, these bodies have similar wounds.” She drew small circles with the mouse. “Visually they all look very much alike, and measurements of depth and length are similar. Accomplished with an extremely sharp blade, maybe a hunting knife, carried out from behind by a right-handed person. Left hand is placed on the victim’s forehead, neck exposed. But while it’s true the body with the shallower cut reveals evidence of a weaker individual, that particular slice is also from a left-handed person. Throats sliced from behind always begin with a deep cut, then taper off.”
“Female?” Jude as
ked, wondering about the girl Mitchell Davidson had mentioned.
“Possibly, but not necessarily. Could be hesitation, although I don’t see any signs of struggle. More than one slice to the throat would be indicative of struggle.”
Standing behind her, looking at the screen, Uriah said, “So that pretty much confirms our theory of more than one killer.”
“You’ve got at least two perpetrators,” Ingrid said.
Jude looked up. “And possibly three.”
Uriah untied his gown. “We need to check out local shops. See if anybody is buying duplicate knives, especially hunting knives.”
“They could be making those purchases online,” Jude said. “That’s what I’d do.” But smart criminals could be surprisingly stupid. Many were caught due to things like rope fibers and other items purchased nearby and used for their kill.
“Possibly,” Uriah said. “I’m going to call the chief and update her. She’ll want to schedule a press conference soon. We all know how crucial the first forty-eight hours are.”
“Do you think it’s wise to go public with this?” Ingrid asked. “It could set off a panic.”
“I agree we need to get this information out as quickly as possible,” Jude said. “We’ll keep some details to ourselves, like the left-handed kill.” A press conference was the most direct way to reach the public. Community members with pertinent information often played an essential role in the capture of criminals.
Uriah pulled out his phone. “And there’s a good chance people are already in a panic.” He scrolled, then turned the screen around to reveal a close-up of a theater victim. Jude winced. It was the chief’s friend of a friend. Someone, possibly Mitchell, had posted the photo to social media.
CHAPTER 7
Got a caller who specifically requested you.” The young man pushed a cream-colored desk phone toward Jude while other operators conversed with pledge-drive supporters. The press conference had gone smoothly, and the tip-line number would be scrolling across the bottoms of television screens during every newscast. Jude and Uriah were now at the Twin Cities Public Television station on Fourth Street in downtown Saint Paul, working telethon lines.