by Cat Connor
“If I’d called sooner …”
“That’s not helpful thinking. Go and sit in the car. I’ll be back.” I patted Emilio on the shoulder. “We’ll find out what happened.”
Detective Fallon waited for me at the entrance to the apartment. There was something about her that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I let that thought settle; sooner or later I’d figure it out. The cop on the door handed us disposable booties; no potential sullying of the crime scene.
“Let’s do this thing, Detective.”
“Troy, please, Agent Conway.”
I nodded. “Troy it is, as long as you call me Ellie and not Agent Conway.”
She appeared friendlier than before. Maybe it was initial nerves that I’d picked up on.
“Come on through. I’ll think you’ll find this interesting,” Troy said. Her mouth set in a grim line. She led the way past several officers. At the bathroom door I stopped and patted my pockets. Damn. No gloves. I usually carried small black nitrile gloves. I swung my pack off my shoulder and checked the front pocket where my spare gloves lived. Growling internally I remembered intending to replace the gloves and finding the box in my office had gone. I made a mental note to get another box of small gloves from stores.
“Troy, do you have nitrile or latex gloves on you?”
“Sure.” Troy dipped her hand into her jacket pocket and handed me a pair of latex gloves.
I pulled them on. Bit loose but better than nothing.
“Did Mr. Herrera come into the apartment at all?”
“No. He waited outside for uniforms to arrive.”
Good.
“This is the cleanest murder scene I’ve attended. Our victim ...” she swung the door open and pointed to the shower. “… is in there.
Troy waited by the door while I entered the room. Yep, it was clean. At first glance the victim’s body appeared awkward. Crumpled, yet leaning against the shower wall. It looked as though she wanted to curl up but somehow prevented or unable to. Strands of her long wet blonde hair stuck to her blanched cheek. My eyes skirted the slashes and stab wounds on her body, not yet ready to take in the extent of the injuries.
“Jane Daughtry,” I said to no one. “We’re not meeting under the nicest circumstances.”
“Did you need something?” Troy asked poking her head around the door.
“Nope.”
I bent down to Jane and said, “We’ll talk soon. I just need to have a look at your bathroom first.”
The bathroom was clean and tidy, with a fresh towel on a rail within reach of the shower. A clothes hamper stood in the corner of the room. I lifted the lid. Empty. A faint scent intrigued me. I bent down to the clothes hamper and sniffed. Musky, wet dirt. I dropped the lid. The cabinet under the sink contained four drawers and one cupboard. Good place to start. The drawers contained all manner of expected things, hair brushes, hair dryer, styling tools, tissues, body lotions. In the cupboard were cleaning products, cloths, and a roll of paper towels.
On the wall beside the sink was a shelf. Folded towels, stacked in groups: three groups of two. Lime green, bright blue, lime green. I turned and looked at the towel she’d chosen to use. Dark blue. So she didn’t use the towels stacked in the bathroom. Guess they were for show? A vase containing bright blue and lime green skinny branches sat on the vanity countertop. Arty. Behind the large mirror above the sink, another cabinet, containing prescription medications, over-the-counter medication, hair products, and makeup.
One of the pill bottles sat with the label obscured, yet all the others were face out. I lifted that bottle out for closer inspection. Sleeping tablets.A new prescription. The date was three days prior. I opened the lid, expecting a month’s worth of sleeping tablets minus maybe three pills. Tipping the contents into my gloved hand I counted ten pills. Ten.
“Troy?” I called.
She appeared next to me. “Problem?”
“Did you look in the medicine cabinet?”
She nodded. “Glanced more than looked.Very orderly cabinet.”
Yes. It is. Except for the one bottle facing the wrong way.
I showed her the pill bottle and the contents of my hand, then tipped the pills back in the container and placed it carefully back on the shelf the way I’d found it.
“Something to think about,” I replied. “I’ll be right back.”
I left her in the bathroom and did a quick tour of the rest of the house. Nothing out of place anywhere. Open windows in the living room, dining room, and the main bedroom. I checked the bedside table for something that might explain her state of mind.
A notebook. I flipped through it: she wrote poetry. Tendrils of cold curled through my soul. There was a darkness in Jane that emerged in the text on the pages of her notebook. I held the book by the spine and shook it. A folded piece of paper floated to the ground.
I bent down to retrieve it and saw another book under the bed. I took both and sat down on the edge of the well-made bed. First the piece of paper. I opened it to find a sentence: Don’t leave me.
Comparing that sentence with the handwritten poems was easy. Even I could tell it was the same person. Jane’s name was written inside the front cover of the notebook. Again, same handwriting. I turned my attention to the book from under the bed. Bile rose at the familiar oranges on the cover. I turned it over in my hand.
Whispers in the Water. Ever since Aidan found a publisher for it, unbeknownst to Mac and me, I’d been haunted by that book. I opened it and saw Mac’s handwriting. ‘Dear Jane, keep writing. All the best, Mac Connelly.’ He’d dated it.
I stared at the date and tried to remember what we were doing that day. Was it an official book signing? Did it matter? No. Probably not.
I turned it over in my hands a few times. A well-read book. Some pages were marked. I let the book fall open at the first of the marked pages. ‘Stolen.’ A shiver ran through me. I hated that poem. Hated what it became at the hands of a killer. Nausea grew. Finding my poetry at another potential crime scene did not sit well with my last coffee.
Troy’s voice rang out. “Agent Conway?Ellie?”
“Master bedroom,” I called back.
Troy walked through the doorway. “Find something?”
“Yes, I did.” I cleared my head with a deep breath. “She’d been writing some dark poetry.” I didn’t say she’d been reading it as well.
“Do you think this could be suicide?”
No, I didn’t, but it had to be explored like everything else.
“You wouldn’t have called me in if you thought this was suicide,” I replied. “What did you see that made you call me?”
“Stab wounds and no blood.”
“Weapon?”
“No knife in the bathroom … unless it’s under the body. We haven’t moved her.”
I stood up. Something about the scene unnerved me. Judgment call time.
“I’m going to call our crime techs. You’ll get copies of the reports but I want our people involved.”
She didn’t argue. I made the call to the techs and our medical examiner. Then I called Delta.
“Let’s go back to Jane and see what she has to say,” I said, ushering Troy from the room. I left the book on the bed. The techs would get it along with everything else. There was something very wrong in the apartment.
The cleanliness of the bathroom disturbed me. Nothing out of place. Not even a stray hair from a hair brush. My attention turned to Jane. I knelt by the shower, close to her head and whispered, “What happened, Jane? What do you need to tell me?”
My eyes followed her line of sight. Her cloudy eyes stared at something. I wriggled around until my head was as close to hers as possible without contaminating the crime scene. Her fixed gaze pointed to the side of the vanity unit. A tiny triangle out of place. Scrambling to my feet I lurched toward to the vanity. Something poked out from behind it. Looked like a small piece of paper. I pulled a packet containing sterile disposable forceps from my bag and tore it o
pen. Carefully, I grasped the eighth of an inch of visible white paper and extracted a folded piece of paper.
“How did you see that?” Troy asked.
“Jane told me,” I replied, dropping the paper into my hand. I handed Troy the forceps and inspected the paper. It was no bigger than a piece from a memo cube, folded in quarters.
“What is it?” Troy asked, ignoring the comment I made about the dead woman telling me where it was.
Wise lady.
“Paper,” I replied, opening it out. It contained four words. ‘Don’t take it personally.’
“Pardon?” Troy said.
“That’s what it says, ‘Don’t take it personally.’” I showed her the note.
“Wonder what it means?”
“Nothing good,” I replied. “Good things are not usually hidden in a crime scene.”
I held the note carefully by one corner and took an evidence bag out of my pack. Troy took it from me and opened it up, allowing me to drop the note into it.
With the pen from my pocket I wrote the date, time, and Jane Daughtry’s name on the chain of custody form printed on the evidence bag then added a description of the evidence and signed my name. I dropped it into my bag. Everything in my gut told me this would be our case so I’d generate a case number once I was back in the office.
My attention turned to the body of Jane Daughtry. I started by counting and inspecting stab wounds. Most of them appeared shallow. The deep, life-ending gashes were down her wrists. Did someone want this to look like suicide? All the wounds could’ve been made by the victim. None were in difficult to reach places. But why would someone repeatedly stab themselves? Where was the blood? Who took all the sleeping pills?
“There isn’t one drop of blood anywhere … why?” I asked.
“When uniforms arrived the shower was running hot. The showerhead is removable and high-powered. There are water drops high up on the walls.”
She was right.
“Disregard the suicide idea for the moment. Someone cleaned up.”
Which didn’t rule out suicide: family members have been known to clean up after suicides. If you intended to murder someone, killing them in a shower was a good option. It confined the mess and made it easier to clean up.
“So we have a clean killer.”
What was missing? Smell. If the killer cleaned he did so with water not with bleach or any other cleaning product.
I took a deep breath in through my nose. No residual chemical smells. I took a closer look at the cleaning products I’d seen in the cabinet under the sink and pulled out two spray bottles and a cream cleanser. All were hyper allergenic non-scented cleaning products. One of the sprays was for glass, the other a general bathroom cleaner.
“This stuff might have been used on the surfaces,” I said checking each bottle just in case there was a residual smell. Sometimes non-scented wasn’t. No smell.
I put the bottles back and noticed there was a roll of paper towels behind the stack of cleaning cloths. I opened the swing top trash can next to the vanity. Scrunched paper towels.
“So the Unsub hosed down the shower and the body, then wiped over all the external surfaces with paper towels and cleaning product?” Troy said, writing in her notebook.
“Maybe. Or Jane here, cleaned the bathroom earlier.”
It’s never straightforward. People complicate things.
I bent down to Jane and said, “I’ll find out what happened here.” A warm scent rose from her skin. A fleeting ethereal image filled my mind. Jane stepping into the shower, reaching for shower gel from the caddy on the wall. My eyes turned to the caddy.
No shower gel. So where was it?
When I looked up Troy was watching me.
“Do you always talk to the dead?”
“Yes. She’s the only one who knows what really happened here apart from the killer, and Jane won’t lie.”
“I suppose,” Troy said.
“There’s no shower gel or soap in the shower,” I said. Breathing in the same scent again. It reminded me of something. A perfume I’d smelled before. Placing it was proving tricky.
She wrote in her notebook. “That’s odd. But you found hypo allergenic cleaning products so maybe she’s allergic to soaps and so forth.”
I didn’t really want to say I saw her reach for the shower gel before she died.
“Or, the killer took it,” I said.
“A trophy?” Troy asked.
“Possibly,” I replied.
“What are your thoughts?”
“I think our Unsub is just getting started.” And I have nothing to base that on. Bits and pieces of the crime scene and Jane’s home swirled in my mind. The note caused a special kind of disturbance in the force. One that told me we were going to see more notes and more death. “There is something familiar about this scene. I’ll get back to you.”
I had questions that required answers. What happened to the missing sleeping pills? How many sex offenders lived in the area? Was there a sexual aspect to the killing? Where was the shower gel she’d used? And I knew without a shadow of doubt that the Unsub had left some kind of evidence in the house, we just had to find it. Every contact leaves a trace. There is no exception to that rule.
A female voice I didn’t recognize spoke from deep within my head, telling me to start with the prescription bottle. I checked the bathroom cabinet again. That bottle was the only one from that particular doctor and the only one facing the wrong way. Using my phone I photographed the label.
All names, characters, places, and incidents in this publication are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Eraserbyte
© 2015 by Cat Connor
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First published by Rebel ePublishers 2015
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