Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries)

by Methos, Victor

  Sarah could see what was on the desk the man had been sitting at: a face. A human face that had been severed and dried. Hanging on the walls were a lot more.

  And then the ache shot through her in one forceful hammering, and as abruptly as it had come, it stopped.

  She was left on the floor sobbing. The tears ran down her cheeks, and she wanted to wipe them away, to ignore what had happened. To show it that it didn’t control her. But she couldn’t move. Every ounce of strength had gone to fighting the pain, and she had nothing left, not even the mental energy to keep thinking about it.

  After a few minutes, she had calmed down enough to climb back into bed, unsure whether sleep would come tonight or not.

  22

  Though most of the agents around had gone to lunch, Arnold Rosen stayed behind and stared at the phone on his desk. The lab was supposed to get back with an ID on the corpse that had been found on Gillian Hanks’s doorstep. Lunch could wait.

  But watching the clock inevitably made it go slower, and he got up and paced the room awhile. Then he crumpled up paper and shot baskets into his waste bin, which occupied him for a good five minutes or so. Surfing the internet grew boring after about ten minutes, and he didn’t belong to any social media sites, so the number of things he could actually do to kill time was limited.

  Finally, mercifully, he thought, the phone rang.

  “This is Rosen.”

  “Agent Rosen, it’s Steve.”

  He pulled out a pen and got a notepad from his desk. “Give me something good, Steve.”

  “Got a match for you. Claire Robison from Harrisburg. I’m sending the address and next of kin along in the email. Should be getting it in a minute. Twenty-two years old, lived with both parents.”

  “Remind me to get you a good Christmas present.”

  “Get me a good Christmas present.”

  Rosen hung up and checked his email. Though he needed to wait only a few minutes, it seemed much more agonizing than waiting for the phone to ring before. When it arrived, he read the biographical information and rushed out the door. He checked the cubicles and saw Giovanni writing a report on an unrelated case.

  “Agent Adami, let’s go. We got something hot.”

  Harrisburg was over two hours from DC. Rosen let Giovanni do the driving. After a certain age, he found, concentrating for long periods of time became more difficult. But Giovanni was humming along to a song on the radio, oblivious to the fact that his youth was a major advantage in nearly every realm.

  “You seem in a good mood,” Rosen said.

  “I am. I had a date last night.”

  “Yeah? Who was she?”

  “Sarah.”

  “Sarah, as in the psychic Sarah? The one you told me would ruin our reputation if we associated with?”

  “And I still think it would. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have dinner with her.”

  Rosen glanced at a liquor store out the window. Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, it was busy. “She’s cute. If I was thirty years younger, maybe I’d give you some competition.”

  “Oh, it’d be no competition.”

  “Really?” Rosen said with a grin. “Son, I was in the dating game when you were pooping your pants. Don’t downplay experience. Besides, it won’t last.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Two people who meet in law enforcement is one too many. There’s something about this case that you’re working that won’t be there when it’s over. When the investigation is done, you’ll both go your separate ways.”

  Giovanni glanced to him. “You sound like you know from experience.”

  “I do. Before I was married, there was a victim of an attempted rape. This was back when I was a detective in Detroit. I spent a lot of time with her. We grew close. Started dating. When we finally caught the bastard, he took a plea deal and went upstate for fifteen years. The relationship just fell apart after that. I was a reminder to her of one of the worst experiences of her life. It’ll be like that for you two. After this is over, you’ll both be thinking of this case when you look at one another.”

  “She’s not part of the case.”

  “I know, but that’s how you guys met. It’s part of your history now.”

  They drove most of the way without speaking again, just listening to music. They had to stop for gas once, and Rosen used the bathroom in the gas station. It was one of the ones that were around back and filthy, like it’d never been cleaned. As he was walking out, he saw Giovanni giving cash to a homeless man who was begging in front of the gas station.

  Once back on the road, Rosen said, “I usually don’t do that as a policy. Too many schemers.”

  “I give to the veterans.”

  Rosen looked at him and then back out at the road.

  Harrisburg wasn’t a quiet town. It’d grown since Rosen had been here last, almost twenty years ago. As the state capital, the city spread out around the government buildings in the city center, the most prominent being the capitol building itself.

  As they exited the interstate, their GPS led them through congested downtown Harrisburg and through the winding suburbs. The run-down home they were looking for had a dying lawn guarded by a rusting fence with a “Beware of Dog” sign, though Rosen didn’t see a dog anywhere.

  They got out of the car and walked up the driveway to the house. The weather had gone from sunny to overcast, giving everything a gray pallor. Rosen could tell it was going to rain soon.

  He knocked, and a short while later, a woman answered. She was thin to the point of being unhealthy, with thinning hair. Her beige sweater was frayed at the sleeves.

  “Are you Mrs. Mindy Robison?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ma’am, we’re with the FBI. We’re investigating the disappearance of your daughter.”

  “Yes,” she said in an upbeat way, as though hoping for good news.

  “I, ah…”

  Rosen had never, in the nearly twenty years doing this, been able to break bad news to good people. It was a skill he just didn’t have.

  “I’m sorry,” was all he said.

  The woman didn’t move. Tears ran down her face, but she made no attempt to wipe them away. She didn’t appear to notice.

  Rosen stood in front of her and didn’t speak. He would wait until she was ready. Giovanni couldn’t even look at her. He had to look behind them at the passing traffic.

  “If you need some time, I understand. But we’d like to ask a few questions now.”

  “What happened?”

  “May we come in?”

  She nodded and held the door open for them. She walked into the front room and sat on the couch, absently playing with her fingers, her eyes staring at a spot on the wall. The tears continued to flow, but she wasn’t really sobbing. Rosen wondered if she was on any medications that dulled her senses.

  “I prepared myself for the worst,” she said. “But you can’t prepare yourself for something like this. Not really. It feels like my heart has been ripped out, Detective.”

  Rosen was about to correct her but instead sat down and quietly took in the home. Photographs filled every space on the wall. Mostly of children. In one photo, he counted seven kids and wondered which one Claire was.

  “She was our middle child,” the woman said. “She was troubled. Into drugs and things like that. Ran with the wrong people. But I never thought anything like this could happen.”

  Rosen nodded. “It’s my understanding you tried to file a missing persons report, but it was denied, is that right?”

  “Yes. She had run away before. Several times. The police here knew about her, and they said they would keep an eye out. So I didn’t go through the whole process, didn’t push for it. Maybe if I had…”

  “No, filing or not filing a piece of paper in a filing cabinet would not have done anything to prevent this, Mindy. This was like lightning striking. Something that we have no control over.”

  She swallowed. “How did she�
��”

  “She was murdered.”

  “How?”

  Rosen thought of how to phrase this. In truth, she’d probably bled to death. But he wasn’t about to tell her mother that. “We’re not a hundred percent certain yet.” True enough, he thought.

  “I see.” She drifted off a moment and then said, “When can I see her?”

  “We can probably have the body returned to you for burial within a few days. She’s being processed for evidence right now, and an autopsy will be performed.”

  Mindy nodded and didn’t speak again. Rosen looked at Giovanni, who shrugged.

  “Mindy,” Rosen said softly, “is there anything you can tell us that will help us catch who did this? A list of people she was spending time with that maybe she shouldn’t have been, anyone calling her at odd hours, anything like that?”

  She shook her head. “Claire didn’t involve me in her life at all. I’m sorry. I couldn’t even tell you who her best friend was. She came here to sleep and then would leave and not return for two or three days at a time.”

  “Was she dating anybody?”

  “If she was, she never told us about it.”

  Giovanni asked, “Was she employed?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She would sleep for twelve or fifteen hours a day sometimes. I can’t imagine she held a job with that schedule. She took classes at a local college every once in a while, but she always eventually dropped out.”

  “Do you have a current photo of her?”

  She thought a moment. “I may. Let me look for it.”

  As Mindy left the room, Rosen said, “Looks like we’re not getting anything here.”

  “How could she not know anything about her daughter?” Giovanni whispered.

  “Because sometimes they want nothing to do with you. And once they hit eighteen, you have no control over it.”

  Mindy walked back in holding a phone. She showed a photo on it to Rosen. A young, very attractive woman had her arm around an older man with a potbelly.

  “That’s her father. I can just text you this photo if you like.”

  “I would. Here’s my card. It has my cell phone on it. And please don’t hesitate to call if you think of anything else.”

  Rosen stood up and took in the living room one more time. He got the impression that a lot of memories were stored here, and maybe not all of them good. As he walked to the door, Mindy followed him. She didn’t say goodbye as she shut the door behind them.

  “She was odd,” Giovanni said as they were walking back to the car.

  “She’s medicated pretty heavily. Probably mixed it with some booze.”

  “So what now?”

  “There’s some link between Claire and all the other girls. She was different somehow. For all the others, he followed the pattern of the Black Dahlia. This one he didn’t. He cut her up and dropped her off on Gillian’s porch. Why?”

  “Maybe he’s just messing with us.”

  “Well, clearly, but there has to be a reason. He could’ve done that at any time.”

  Giovanni’s phone rang. “Gonna take this.”

  “Sure.”

  As Giovanni spoke on the phone, Rosen sat on the hood of the car. It was starting to drizzle now, and he felt the raindrops on his face and watched the way they spattered on the pavement and made a polka-dot pattern in the dust. Storms cleared the air, as if violence could wash everything away. Off in the distance, Rosen could see a storm moving toward them. The gray-black clouds crawled over the city and dumped their contents over people who ran indoors.

  “Hey,” Giovanni said, “that was Sarah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She said she wants to talk to us. You feel like grabbing lunch?”

  “Sure, lead the way.”

  23

  Sarah entered the café and got a table by the windows. The rain had soaked her shoulders and hair, and she brushed it off as well as she could. She actually didn’t mind the rain, which was probably why she didn’t own an umbrella and kept putting off buying one.

  She asked the waitress for a coffee. As the rain pounded down, several people ran in from their cars. Some of them were young, probably in high school. She remembered herself at that age. She had been put to work in the home, with some light work in the fields. Though there were dances and family functions, she remembered feeling a deep loneliness. Not as acute as it was now, but still there, just under the surface.

  Sometimes she wondered what it would have been like to go to a dance or share an awkward first kiss with a boy. Her first real kiss was a drunken waste in the back room of Pink’s. She didn’t even remember what the man had looked like. When she lost her virginity a couple of months later, she’d been so drunk that she fell asleep during the sex. Her boyfriend at the time was so upset that he left and never spoke to her again.

  Those were firsts that she knew she would never get back. They were gone forever, and she’d wasted them for nothing.

  Giovanni opened the front door. His hair was wet and in his eyes. Agent Rosen was right behind him with an umbrella and a raincoat. He struck her as someone who’d have those things ready at all times. Giovanni saw her and came over. The two men sat down.

  “Hi,” he said with a grin.

  “Hi.”

  Rosen leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. “What did you need from us, Sarah?”

  “I saw something.”

  “What?”

  “After Giovanni took me to that porch, I—”

  “You took her to Gillian’s house?” Rosen said, turning to Giovanni.

  “Just to look around.”

  “You were the one who said we shouldn’t have her on the case.”

  Sarah hadn’t known that, and from the blush in Giovanni’s cheeks, she could tell he hadn’t intended to tell her.

  “I just looked at it,” she said. “I didn’t talk to anyone or touch anything. But later, when I was going to sleep, I think I saw… him.”

  “Him who?”

  “The man you’re looking for. The Blood Dahlia.”

  Rosen tilted his head slightly. “And what did he look like?”

  “Slim and white. I couldn’t really see him because it was so dark. But I saw what he did. He keeps them chained in a basement. This one, he cut out her tongue with a pair of scissors. She was screaming at him, and he just took the scissors and did it.”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “What’s he doing with the faces?” Rosen said, placing his elbows on the table.

  “He’s making them into masks. I don’t know why. But this girl, I saw her clearly. She had a tattoo on her forearm. It’s like a tribal tattoo, and there was some red right in the middle. He usually cuts them out but he was so excited he forgot to do it with her.”

  “What else did you see?”

  “Little things. A house somewhere. He wants to appear as normal as possible, I think, so the house is in a family neighborhood. I saw kids in the background.”

  “Anything else?”

  She shook her head. “No. But I was there in the basement. I saw that. It looks like he made it specially, just for this.”

  Giovanni said, “Can I talk to you for a second, Arnold?”

  The two men rose and took a few steps away from the table. Sarah could still hear them speaking but pretended that she couldn’t.

  “I never told her about the tongue,” Giovanni whispered.

  Rosen looked at him in silence for a moment. “You sure?”

  “Yeah. And the body was gone when we got there. No way she could know about that tattoo.”

  “Did she have a tattoo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Rosen nodded. “Only one way to find out.”

  Sarah sat in the back of the car as Giovanni drove. Rosen was talking on the phone to someone from the Medical Examiner’s Office about visiting the body. The person was being difficult, and finally Rosen just told them that he would arrest them and then look a
t the body anyway. That must’ve worked, because then he just said, “Good,” and hung up.

  “What’s the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner?” Sarah asked. “I’ve heard you refer to both.”

  Rosen said, “You have to be a pathologist—a doctor who specializes in studying corpses—to be a medical examiner. To be a coroner, you just have to be elected to the position. Sometimes they’re doctors from other fields, but in some of the smaller counties in the South and Midwest, I’ve seen coroners who are just the town mechanic or farmers, and they want the job.”

  “Who would want that job?”

  “Exactly. Except that it pays more than a mechanic or farmer.”

  The Medical Examiner’s Office was in a white building that looked like an office building, but several other medical offices were located there. Sarah saw two dentists and a family practitioner.

  After they parked, Giovanni opened the door for her. They walked into the building and across the hall to a single door with a sign that read, STATE MEDICAL EXAMINER.

  Checking in with the front desk got them three visitor’s passes, and then they were led back to the refrigeration units by a portly man in a white lab coat who was texting while he walked. He ran into a mop that leaned against the wall and turned bright red but didn’t stop texting.

  The refrigeration unit was a wall of what looked like chrome filing cabinets. The man counted out from the near end of the lowest row and pulled the handle of the middle one. Inside was a body covered with a white sheet. The man, without gloves, pulled the sheet off.

  Sarah winced and looked away. Giovanni immediately said, “Hey, what the hell?”

  “Sorry. I thought you wanted to see it.”

  Giovanni turned to her. “You okay?”

  She nodded. In what felt like a feat of strength, she looked back at the body.

  The blond hair was still intact, as were the ears and neck. But the face was completely removed. The mouth was slightly open, and she could see that the tongue had been cut off about halfway down.