Drop Dead Perfect

by Rick Murcer

Sanchez wasn’t simply uninterested in Brice’s conversation with an old acquaintance; she was out to continue the rumble with Ellen Harper. Fur was going to fly.

  He said a hasty good-bye and sprinted down the hallway, bent on catching Sanchez before things got out of hand. Which would not bode well for his new relationship with Sanchez, either. She was a partner, true, and he valued that. Partners had each other’s backs, and despite her crusty exterior, Sanchez was going to be a pretty good detective. Yet there was his budding interest in Ellie to consider . . .

  Brice wasn’t sure where this new revelation had surfaced from, but he’d never seen Ellie Harper the way he had over the last two days. Even though they had worked together on a few cases before, her violet eyes hadn’t ever demanded his attention like this. He liked her hair and the way it framed her face. She wasn’t so much pretty as striking, a result not simply of her looks but of the way she carried herself. She was gorgeous and could control as much of that beauty as she wanted at any given moment. Women like that were rare. It was also hard to ignore her long legs and tight jeans. He was still a man and acutely aware of his appreciation for a woman’s physical attributes, but it was more than that with Ellie.

  Damn, Rogers. Two days. What’s it gonna be like after two more?

  Turning the corner, he glanced through the large window of Ellen’s office and caught a glimpse of Sanchez pointing a finger.

  Oh, damn.

  He heard Sanchez say something to Ellen. His hand was on the door to the lab just as Ellen moved around the corner of her desk. She was fast.

  “Ellen! Stand down,” he yelled.

  As he stepped inside the office, he ran into the back of a man in a blue lab coat. They hit the floor in a tangled heap.

  Pushing the tech away, he scrambled to his feet and headed toward the two women . . . and stopped, his breath leaving his lungs in disbelief.

  Ellen’s haymaker flew over Sanchez’s head. An instant later, Ellen was sitting on top of Sanchez, holding the lapels of Sanchez’s blazer in a white-knuckle grip. Ellen spoke softly, her face determined but calm.

  “We’re not doing this, Sanchez. Enough is enough. You’re right. I should have been more sensitive to the question you asked about the dress. I haven’t been in a happy place over the last freaking year.”

  “Get off me, Harper. We ain’t talking like this,” Sanchez demanded.

  “Yes. Yes, we are. I’m apologizing, and you’re accepting, got it? We got three murders and two kidnappings to investigate. One of them is a dead CSI, who was not only my friend but also a great guy with a family. He shouldn’t have gone out like that. He’s more important than this shit we’re doing. It’s petty, and you know what else? I’m tired. I’m tired of feeling mad, angry, and bitchy. I want to be over it, and you aren’t helping.”

  “I don’t care about your damn life, Harper,” said Sanchez.

  “I get that. But I’m trying to care about it, and that means getting rid of the baggage. Our fight is baggage. I’m done. I’m moving on. But if you want to take a swing, then have at it. I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  Brice watched Ellen rise and back up toward her desk as Bella sat up, neither one taking her eyes off the other. Ellen was tough. He could see that clearly; she had guts. The kind of guts he hadn’t managed to rally in his own life.

  The lab tech he’d knocked down got to one knee, looking a little dazed. Brice reached down and pulled him up from the tiled floor.

  “Thanks. What the hell are you, a fullback? That hurt,” said Steve.

  “Sorry. Just trying to stop the Chicago PD pay-per-view Fight of the Century.”

  “Yeah. I see that.”

  Brice took two steps and extended his hand toward Sanchez. She looked at him, back to Ellen, and then slowly shook her head as she reached for his outstretched arm.

  She brushed the front of her jeans and gave Ellen a half grin. Brice stayed right by her side.

  “Okay. I get it. We’ve got more important stuff to deal with. And I’m sorry about the way your old man left you. It wasn’t my fault, gringa.”

  “You’re right; it wasn’t. So are we good?”

  Silence.

  “Detective Sanchez?” asked Brice. “The woman asked you a question.”

  “I freaking heard it. I’m thinking. Yeah, we’re good, for now. I gotta think some more. We ain’t ever going to be best friends, but I’m woman enough to keep it together, under one condition.”

  “Name it,” said Ellen.

  “You owe me a nail job. I broke three fingernails in that little fiasco.”

  “I can do that. In fact, we’ll go together. You have a hard head.”

  “That might work, sometime. But not now. I still ain’t totally sure we won’t be takin’ swings at each other again. I’ll just give you the bill, and you can hand me the cash.”

  “That’s a start.”

  Ellen smiled, and it took all of Brice’s willpower to pull his gaze from her mouth.

  “So can we get to work?” he asked.

  “We ain’t doing no damn group hug or nothin’, but yeah, we can shift gears. Big Harv sent me over to help with something. That’s why he pulled me aside,” said Sanchez.

  Brice noticed that Sanchez seemed to stand a little taller. Moments like this could tell you something about people, if you paid attention. Sanchez had some self-esteem issues, no doubt, yet there was a sense of pride shining now. And she had that one important quality all good detectives possessed—determination.

  “What does he want you to help with?” asked Steve. He’d moved closer to Ellen’s side, and the four of them were huddled like they were going to call the next play in a sandlot football game.

  “He wants me to go over the video footage of all the intersections where the women were dumped and, of course, where Oscar was killed. He thinks another trained eye looking alongside you science geeks might make a difference on what we all see.”

  “Sanchez . . .” started Ellen.

  “Hey. I know. It looks like busywork, ’cept it ain’t. I got this thing about spatial balance and symmetry. That’s part of the reason I got promoted to detective. And yeah, I know those words. My minor in college was design. I get what stuff should look like and where objects belong in a given area.”

  “You are full of surprises, aren’t you?” said Brice, raising his eyebrows.

  Sanchez batted her eyes. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  Just then another lab tech stepped through Ellen’s door. Ellen moved so fast that Brice’s hand moved toward his gun.

  “Ellen,” the tech said, almost out of breath. “I just got the reports back from the ME’s office regarding the two women. And you got to see this.”

  Brice watched as Ellen’s violet eyes ignited. She stepped past him before he could react. But not before he caught another brief swirl of her scent. Intoxicating.

  “What do I need to see?”

  The lab tech held the blue files in the air. “The killer left another calling card.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Pushing open the door to the evidence review room with one hand, Ellen hurried to the wide, seven-by-seven table, followed by Brice and Steve.

  The table, affectionately called Einstein by Ellen, was a special order for the Chicago Police Department. It was made up of seven square glass panes irradiated by a sophisticated set of lights, which could display a gamut of light spectrums, including black light and infrared, either individually or all at once. The light variance often displayed secretion patterns, blood spatter subtleties, and even hints of substances that could be analyzed via centrifuge.

  Once, she’d been able to trace the exact time a particular tree species found in a secluded region of Northern Michigan had gone through its reproductive cycle in order to catch a rapist in a lie that ultimately led to his conviction.
/>   Running her hand over the control panel, Ellen felt the coolness stimulate her fingers. She gently reached over to wipe away a small smudge that had been left by whoever had last taken advantage of her baby’s talents.

  “Damn. That’s one lucky machine,” said Steve to Brice, grinning. “She doesn’t look at me like that.”

  “Yeah. And if she touched you like that, well, you’d need a cold shower,” said Brice.

  His voice revealed a spark of humor that Ellen had not heard before, and she found her mind wandering to what it would take to send him to a cold shower.

  Stay focused, Ellie. We’ve got work to do.

  A great thought in theory, except Superman was getting harder and harder to ignore in every way.

  “Well, if you gentlemen could do what Einstein here can do, I might consider taking you to dinner, at the very least,” she said.

  “Pretty hard to compete with a forty-thousand-dollar table that exposes itself like this one, especially if you’ve got any geek in you at all . . . And you named it?” said Steve, shaking his head.

  “Yes. Yes, I did. It’s a personal thing. He can show dozens of possibilities and talk to us in all the specific languages of the light spectrum, so I thought Einstein was very appropriate—and he likes the name.”

  “How do you know he likes the name?” asked Brice.

  There was that low, quiet voice again. She wondered if he even got it. Hell, she was just starting to . . . get it.

  “He told me—and don’t ask how. I’ve given away too many secrets already. Let’s get to it.”

  She noticed Brice’s incredible eyes focus on her face a beat too long before looking away. Maybe she was reading too much into his body language. Maybe not. Either way, she felt a certain level of exhilaration that amplified the reason they were here—for her, at least.

  Maybe it was the idea that she was considered important to this investigation. Whatever was going on, she’d try to figure it out later. Ellen refocused as she opened the blue file folders and began to spread the transparencies that the ME’s office had provided on the translucent table.

  Oscar’s camera was still missing, but luckily she’d snapped most of the pictures of the bodies herself. So they’d gotten a break there, for whatever that was worth.

  She’d requested regular paper prints of the pictures she’d taken, as well as the ones the ME had shot once they got the bodies of Clara Rice and Holly Seabrook back to the examination room to perform the autopsies, but she preferred working with the color, X-ray-like transparencies, which were easier to manipulate and magnify. This method brought her artistic creativity into play and let her analyze what she saw. It was almost like watching a painting unfold in her studio.

  Understanding a work of art is personal, but getting to what the artist was trying to portray was the real trick. Like the two cell phones and the evidence at both scenes, the transparencies would paint a story, stroke by stroke.

  By running a specially designed computer program, she could compare pictures from the ME’s office and the ones she’d taken side by side, one area of the body and one inch at a time—or less, if necessary.

  The tech who’d brought the files said they’d found something that needed Ellen’s attention, but Ellen had told her not to explain it to her. She wanted to make her own observations and then they could compare notes.

  Her dad would be proud of that line of thinking. Pure, uninfluenced observation led to pure, untainted evidence analysis. And the pure joy of discovery.

  A few minutes later, she had forty-nine color transparencies spread on the table. She scanned each one in silence while the two men looked on. Steve knew to wait for her analysis before he spoke. To Brice’s credit, he picked up on that and said nothing.

  Ellen hadn’t gotten past image twelve when her eyes darted to the lower section of the picture. The shot was a side-by-side of the ME’s photo and hers, showing a small, oblong image on the back of Clara’s left calf. She reached for the remote control and pointed it to that section of the table, and instantaneously the image grew to ten times normal. Ellen bent closer, as did Brice. Steve moved to the other side of the table for a different angle.

  “What is it?” asked Brice.

  “I don’t know for sure, but it looks like a sliver.”

  “So? People get slivers,” he said.

  She didn’t reply but stepped to her left and hit the remote again, enlarging image number twenty-nine. Immediately Holly’s left calf displayed the almost identical lesions and residual material.

  Another sliver. This one was a little wider, more coarse, but the location was the same.

  Going back to twelve, then back to twenty-nine two more times, she stood straight up, putting her hands on her hips.

  “Okay, boys. I think it highly unlikely that both of these women would have similar slivers in identical places. Since they were both about the same height, I think it indicates that they might have been in the same spot or in the same situation before they were killed.”

  “What does that mean exactly?” asked Brice.

  “I’ll know more when we get the slivers under a microscope, but my guess is that it will be the same material. You can make out the tiny grain of the wood sticking out from Holly’s calf.”

  She pointed to the picture. Brice leaned in and then nodded.

  “That’s not all,” said Ellen. “Look at the angle of entry on both. The material entered both legs from the bottom of the injury. That indicates that they were probably forced down.”

  “Like into a chair?” asked Steve.

  “Yeah. That makes sense. Plus, I’ve seen this before. So that would be my guess.”

  “So, these ladies were probably forced to sit in the same chair. That means the same location, so that means the same killer,” said Brice.

  “Well, we suspected as much, so now we’re sure. The evidence doesn’t lie,” said Ellen, her eyes scanning the rest of the transparencies.

  “So when we get the analyses of the splinters completed, it’ll show us the wood type, and based on that, we might be able to find the manufacturer and just where that type of chair, or maybe bench, was made, right?” asked Brice.

  Ellen heard Steve answer yes, but her mind had gone one step further. She was staring at the wrists of both ladies and then the purple bruises around the middle of both victims. Something was off. The rope’s impression around Holly’s abdominal region seemed a shade lighter, yet it was fairly obvious that the binding was made of identical material. The yellow fibers found on each of them said so.

  The strand imprint even indicated the rope used on both ladies probably came from the same batch. It could be a bit different because of pressure or maybe the women struggled with different degrees of strength. She didn’t think so, however. It was obvious to her that Holly’s skin was simply lighter where the binding had contacted her skin.

  She reached into the report file that showed whether there were any unusual residues recorded by the FTIR spectroscopy. There was a spike for one of the polymer acids used in the chemical mixture of certain duct tape adhesives and another minute spike in the particulate section of the report that measured dust content in Holly’s report, but not Clara’s.

  What was different?

  Running her finger over the report, she remembered something from her training days. Nylon binding like this could change color as a result of exposure to certain molecules found in specific types of dust. Or it could be different because one rope was coated with something and the other was not.

  She brought her finger back to the part of the report that showed the spike in the chemicals in the dust and headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” asked Brice, falling into step.

  “I need to check one more thing, but I think I might know where these women were held.”

  CHAPTER 27
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br />   With all the self-constraint she could muster, Joannie smiled at the hooded man standing in front of her. Maybe muster wasn’t the right word. It was more like desperately conjure. Her look had to be magical—not surprised, not appalled, not reflecting so much as a hint of the disgust she felt, which, if exposed, could lead to her death. Right here. Right now. In this chair.

  If she slipped, bounced out of character, the hooded figure, and most certainly Kyle, would see that and know she was lying. It would be the end. Even though they’d promised not to hurt her, she knew better. If she didn’t play like she had to play, she’d never see daylight again.

  And what was she to make of the remark that his brother Kyle had found her for him?

  What the hell did that mean, exactly? Were they real flesh-and-blood brothers or had it just been one of those terms men used when referring to a close friend?

  The thought of either scenario was less than comforting, but the idea of blood brothers in this game, this courting ritual, or whatever they would call it, made her skin crawl. Yet, if it were true that they were real brothers, then it gave her a piece of the puzzle to work with. Most brothers loved each other, but some degree of sibling rivalry almost always existed beneath the surface. Perhaps Kyle picking “his brother’s woman” was a sensitive point.

  Her smile widened ever so slightly, achieving just the right degree of friendliness, verging on sexy. The masked man turned his head, and even in the less-than-perfect light, she could sense that he was a little unnerved, maybe even shy. That could mean he wasn’t at all comfortable with women. But why? He was built as well as Kyle and carried himself well.

  Her hooded suitor hesitated, then finally moved closer to her, kneeling down in front of her in the classic pose for a proposal. As he searched her face, she saw the eyes of an anxious man—his blue eyes were beautiful, but frantic just the same.

  Good God, is he going to ask me to marry him?

  He stared at the floor for a long moment. Then slowly, with an unsteady hand, he touched her thigh. Despite wanting to wrench away from him, she remained utterly still. Somehow, she buried the urge to scream.