Clyde scowls at this. “Yeah, she has a guy fella who runs with her. They been together nearly a year, I think. Goes by the name of Dutch.”
“Do you know his last name?” Junior asks.
I wonder why. It’s not like there’s a whole bunch of people by the name of Dutch running around.
Clyde shakes his head.
“What does he look like?” Junior asks.
Clyde shrugs and blinks slowly, like a slow-motion picture. “Dark hair, wears it long, has a beak nose. He’s not very tall.”
I can’t imagine anyone looks very tall in Clyde’s world and wonder what this means to him. I’m about to ask him to clarify when he does a karate chop motion on his chest just below the nipple line. “Comes to about here on me.”
Junior pulls a picture out of his pocket and shows it to Clyde. “Is this him?”
“Yup.”
“Is Dutch staying here?” Junior asks with a hopeful tone, returning the picture to his pocket.
“He was, but when Lacy didn’t return, neither did he.”
Junior’s shoulders sag with disappointment. “Has anybody else stayed in that cabin since Lacy left?” he asks.
“No, business is a little slow right now. And I figured Lacy might come back. She left some stuff in there.”
“We need to take a look at her cabin,” I say.
Clyde scowls again. “What for?”
“There might be something in there that could help us catch this serial killer guy,” Junior says, playing along with my ruse. “The sooner we can catch him, the better your rent collections will be. You can’t collect rent from dead people.”
Clyde looks intrigued, now that we’re speaking his language. “You looking for evidence, like that CSI stuff?” he says, scratching at his armpit.
“Something like that, yes,” Junior says.
“Yeah, okay.” Clyde turns and reenters his cabin, shutting the door behind him. We wait, assuming he’s gone to get a key, but then I start to wonder. There’s a little too much chlorine in Clyde’s gene pool for my comfort. Just as I’m about to tell Junior to knock again, the door opens. I’m expecting Clyde to go with us to cabin eighteen, but to our surprise he holds out one incredibly long arm and I see a key hanging from his ham fist. “Bring it back when you’re done,” he says, dropping the key into Junior’s hand, which looks infantile next to Clyde’s. Then the door shuts again.
I’m glad Clyde gave that key to Junior, given that he was holding it with the same hand that had been scratching at his armpit moments before. Lord knows what else he was scratching when he was inside that cabin.
Junior seems unfazed, or perhaps just unaware. He turns and looks at me with an anticipatory smile. “Shall we?”
CHAPTER 4
Cabin eighteen is in the back row behind the ten cabins out front. After getting my scene-processing kit from Junior’s car, we follow a dirt path between Clyde’s cabin and the one next to it. Then we head down the row behind. Many of the cabins’ numbers are missing, but number twenty has survived, so it’s easy enough to identify ours by counting backward. Before unlocking the door, we both don gloves. Since we still don’t know where Lacy was killed, we need to treat this room as a crime scene.
The exteriors of the cabins have held up over the years reasonably well, but the same can’t be said for the insides. The interior of this cabin is dark and smells of mildew. Junior reaches for the switch inside the door and flips on an overhead light. Two of the four bulbs in the light are dead, but this is probably a blessing in disguise. I’m certain this room looks much better in dim light. The floor is carpeted, but it is threadbare and worn down to reveal the wooden planks in several places. The bed, a double, is covered with an old-fashioned bedspread that at one time had a rim of fringe around its edges. All that remains now of the fringe are mangled, tangled clumps of thread that hang from the edge of the spread like tiny turds. The blanket’s color is a mix of gray and yellow, and it’s hard to guess what the original color was, though I’m thinking it was either white or beige.
A cheap pressed-wood credenza, with six drawers in it, is on the wall opposite the bed. The handle on one of the drawers is missing, and there is a screwdriver thrust into one of the holes where the handle used to be, providing a makeshift way to open the drawer. A plastic shopping bag is on top of the credenza, whose faux-wood laminate is peeling and broken. A razor, two toothbrushes, and a used bar of soap, with one short, dark, curly hair dried onto its surface, are inside it. The sight of the hair makes me gag.
There is no TV—this place is a bare-bones level of existence—but there is a small refrigerator in the far corner, with a one-burner electric hot plate on top of it. A round table, with the same laminate top as the credenza, and two mismatched wooden folding chairs are near it.
The entrance to the bathroom is in the far corner and the room is tiny. There is a sink, a toilet, and a stall shower, with a hinged glass door on it, all of them jammed so close together that one could practically shit, shower, and shave all at the same time. At first, I think the glass in the shower door is opaque, but then I realize it’s covered with soap and lime buildup from a lack of cleaning and the effects of the hard water we have in this area. The tile floor has years of grime ground into the cracks where the grout used to be.
A wave of nausea comes over me as I look at the filthy floor and I clamp a hand over my mouth. I back out of the room and walk over to the bed, feeling the nausea subside. Once I feel like my stomach is under control, I reach down and pull back the covers on the bed. The sheets are gray and thin, and when I look along the sides of the bed, where the fitted sheet is rolling back from the mattress seams, I see the telltale reddish-brown residue of bedbugs.
My stomach lurches again and I look away, letting my head roll back. I see a spot on the ceiling above me that has a similar reddish-brown color and I quickly step back, thinking it’s one of the bugs. But then I look closer and see that the shape isn’t quite right, and it isn’t moving.
“Junior? Come over here and look at this. Does it look like blood?”
I point up at the spot and he stares at it. It’s too high for either of us to get a close look at it, and after looking around the room, Junior says, “We need something to stand on. And I think we should spray this room with luminol, see what shines.”
“Okay, but let’s get some pictures of everything as it is now before we do that.”
For the next twenty minutes, I work my way around the room, snapping pictures of everything from the hair on the soap bar in the bag to the mildew in the corner of the shower. I find a hypodermic needle, uncapped, lying behind the toilet and very carefully retrieve it and place it in a glass evidence jar. Junior helps me collect and label the bag and its contents, and then we swab all the likely spots for DNA. Given the poor quality—or apparent lack—of maid service in the place, I’m guessing those swabs will be a veritable primordial soup of DNA remnants.
Just for grins, I make Junior lift the mattress on the bed. He nearly drops it when a half-dozen little brown bugs go scurrying for cover. “What the hell are those?” he says, backing his feet up. “Cockroaches?”
“No, bedbugs. Hold on, I want to capture one or two of them. Since they like to dine on human flesh, maybe they’ll be good sources for DNA.”
The bugs are fast and skittery and it takes me four tries before I manage to scoop a bug into an evidence jar. I decide one will do and quickly screw on the lid. Junior lets the mattress drop and then shudders, brushing at himself.
I continue photographing, bagging, tagging, and swabbing everything I think is appropriate, while Junior hunts down Clyde and rounds up a small stepladder. The ladder is rather rickety-looking, so I let Junior do the climbing and swabbing of the spot on the ceiling as I hold the ladder steady. When that’s done, I take out my luminol and start by spraying the ceiling above the bed, extending several feet beyond the perimeter of the bed itself. I then spray the wall around the headboard and then the h
eadboard itself. The surface of the bed is next, and then I spray the rug around the bed. I do all of this as fast as I can, and then I give Junior the nod. He flips off the overhead light and I turn on my special flashlight, aiming at the ceiling first.
“Wow, look at that,” I say. “I think we have our crime scene.”
Along the ceiling, there is a line of tiny luminescent spots that runs above the bed from one side to the other, extending a tiny bit behind us. Junior is taking pictures and I shine the light on the wall and headboard next. Here, there is surprisingly little to see, a few random, minuscule specks of luminescence on the wall and only three on the headboard—spots so small, we didn’t see them with the naked eye.
As soon as Junior is done shooting pictures of that area, I move the light to the rug, where we again find some random drops and one curved line that looks like it might have been made by the edge of a shoe. Junior again snaps away, and when he’s done, I turn the light to the surface of the bed, where I expect to see a giant pool of glowing evidence.
There is nothing there. I give Junior a puzzled look. “Let’s pull back the covers and spray some more, and if that doesn’t show anything, we’ll flip the mattress,” I say.
Junior helps me do just that, but despite our efforts, we still come up empty on the bed.
“He must have used some kind of plastic barrier,” Junior says. “We have castoff on the ceiling and walls, some drips on the carpet and floor, and part of a footprint, so clearly something happened here. But the void on the bed means he covered it with something. He came prepared.”
I frown at this.
“What?” Junior says, seeing my expression. “You don’t agree?”
“No, I do. I agree with everything you just said. But that shoots a hole in a theory I had. If we assume Lacy wasn’t a copycat, and the same man who killed the women in Eau Claire killed her, I figured her death was one of opportunity. I imagined the guy was trying not to kill anymore, knowing it might raise questions, but Lacy kind of fell into his lap. He couldn’t help himself because she fit his victim profile. But if he had plastic to cover the bed, and the flower petals to stuff in the wound, then that means her death was planned. It was premeditated and carried out in an area some distance from all the others.” I pause and swallow hard. “He’s starting up again.”
“If that’s true, there will be more victims,” Junior says. “But where?” The two of us stand there lost in thought for a moment. Then Junior hands me the camera and takes out his cell phone. “I need to call Hurley.”
Junior jabs at his phone screen, but his gloved fingers won’t do the trick, so he removes them. Then he jabs at the screen some more and curses under his breath. “No signal in here,” he says. “I’m going to step outside.”
He walks over, opens the cabin door, and stops dead in his tracks. “What the . . .”
A short man with long, dark, greasy hair and a beak nose is standing on the threshold. He looks startled as he stares up at Junior, then at me standing behind him.
“Are you Dutch?” Junior says.
Dutch, or the man we assume is Dutch, answers by spinning on his heel and taking off at a run.
CHAPTER 5
“Damn it!” Junior mutters, and then he takes off after the guy.
Good thing Junior’s willing to run—because I’m not. I hate running. I’m not built for it, and if anyone ever sees me running, they should run, too, because it means something really awful is chasing me.
I step outside just in time to see Junior disappear around the end of cabin ten. I turn right and hurry down toward the middle path we followed to the back row of cabins. When I emerge out front in the parking area, I find our fleeing man prone on the ground with his face in one of those desperate clumps of grass, Junior’s knee in the small of his back.
“I’m going to let you up,” Junior says, mildly breathless. “I just want to talk to you, but if you try to run again, I’m going to arrest you and throw you in jail.”
I think Junior is bluffing; as far as I can tell, this fellow hasn’t broken any laws that we know about, at least not yet. The cops are allowed to lie and most of them, Junior included, do it convincingly. Besides, I’m thinking that for anyone who has been forced to stay in one of these cabins, a jail cell with three squares a day and no bedbugs might seem more like a gift than a threat. But our man seems adequately kowtowed, and when Junior takes his knee off his back, Dutch rolls over and sits up.
“What the heck, man,” Dutch mutters, frowning at Junior and rubbing one of his elbows.
“I’m going to ask you again, is your name Dutch?”
“Yeah,” he utters with a scowl. “Why?”
“You’ve been hanging with Lacy O’Connor,” Junior says.
“I was,” Dutch says, his scowl deepening. Then his expression brightens. “Oh! Do you guys have her? Is she in jail? I wondered why she didn’t come back.”
Junior looks at me and I shrug. The guy sounds convincing to me, but these druggies are amazing actors at times.
“Yeah, Lacy is with us, in a manner of speaking,” Junior says. “When did you last see her?”
“Night before last,” Dutch says.
“Where?” Junior asks.
“Right here, in her cabin.”
“Why did you come back here to the cabin today?”
“I left my shaving stuff behind,” Dutch says, rubbing at the scruff on his face.
I recall the plastic bag with the razor and hairy soap, which was on the credenza. So far, his story seems reasonable.
“Does Lacy need bail money?” Dutch asks. “’Cause I know a guy who might front her some green if she . . .” His voice drifts off and he looks around frantically for a second. “She might be able to work a deal with the guy,” he says finally.
I have a terrible feeling I know exactly what type of deal he’s talking about.
Junior bites his lip for a second and then decides to spill the beans. “Dutch, Lacy is dead.”
“Dead?” Dutch echoes with disbelief. “Did she OD? Aw, damn. Didn’t anyone have any Narcan? Hell, that stuff is everywhere now. Why didn’t someone have Narcan?” Dutch looks angry and like he’s about to cry.
“No, she didn’t overdose,” Junior says. “Someone killed her. Stabbed her to death and left her by the side of the road like some trash.” If he’s hoping to elicit some righteous indignation from Dutch, he’s disappointed.
“I didn’t kill her,” Dutch says emphatically. Then he finally musters up some tears—either that or he’s starting to go through withdrawal. “I love that girl,” he says sadly.
“Yeah, you love her so much that you got her hooked on drugs and took her away from her family,” I say.
He shoots me an irritated look. “I admit I led her over to the dark side,” he says, “but I’m trying to get us both clean now. I even went to the ER here and told them I needed help. That’s where I was when Lacy disappeared.”
Junior looks at me with an unspoken request. I nod and step away, taking out my cell phone and dialing the number of the ER at the hospital in Sorenson. I worked there for six years, so I still know many of the docs and some of the staff there. I get lucky and my call is answered by one of my old friends, Phyllis, aka Syph, a nurse who has been working in the ER since she was born.
“Hey, Syph, it’s Mattie.”
“Mets,” Phyllis says, using the nickname I had in the ER years ago, “what sort of trouble are you getting into today?”
“I’m at the scene of a murder and one of the cops is talking to a suspect, a guy named Dutch Simmons. He has an alibi, claims he was in the ER as a patient on the night in question, and I’m wondering if you can verify that for me.”
“Sure, what night?”
“Night before last. That would be the evening of April fifth, morning of April sixth.”
I hear Syph tapping away at a keyboard and after a moment she says, “Yep, he was here, all right. Ambulance brought him in as an overdose just bef
ore eight at night on the fifth and we shot him up with some Narcan. That got him going through withdrawal. He spent several hours here in the ER and then was admitted upstairs. He was discharged at nine this morning.”
That covered the entire estimated time of death for Lacy. I felt a twinge of disappointment, but also a trill of excitement. Ruling Dutch out made the case more complicated, but it also left the door open for a case of mistaken conviction for Ulrich. “Thanks, Syph. I owe you one.”
“Drop by anytime. You know you miss this place.”
Oddly enough, she’s right. I do miss the ER at times. The unpredictability, the fast pace, the unexpectedness, the variety. . . was all stuff I enjoyed most of the time. By contrast, the OR had been something of a snore, given that most of the cases were preplanned and followed a predictable course and pattern. Plus, there was little interaction between staff and patients, since most of the patients were anesthetized into oblivion and covered up with sterile drapes that reduced them to a patch of iodine-bronzed skin.
I disconnect the call and go back to Junior and Dutch. “He’s covered,” I say. “He was in the hospital from eight o’clock in the evening on the fifth until nine a.m. on the sixth.”
Junior sighs. “When was the last time you saw Lacy?” he asks Dutch, who is busy brushing dust off his already-filthy pants.
Dutch stops brushing, looks at Junior, squints his eyes, and then groans as if the effort hurts. He rubs his forehead with his two middle fingers, making a circle where a cyclopean eye would be if he had one. “We scored some stuff from a guy in a bar.”
“What bar?” Junior pushes.
“Somewhere,” Dutch says, wavering a little. Though this sounds like an evasive answer, it’s not. Three of the bars in Sorenson have the names Somewhere, Anywhere, and Nowhere, which can make a discussion about a night out sound like an Abbott and Costello routine.
“You mean the Somewhere Bar, right?” Junior asks to clarify. Dutch nods. “How did you pay for the drugs?” Junior asks.
Dead Ringer Page 4