Lilith: a novel

by Edward Trimnell

  “Is this all Travis Hall’s handwriting?” Alan asked.

  “Naw. I wrote out the IOU and made him sign it. My mom says I should be a lawyer, you know. Well, maybe someday. I’ve got to get my undergrad degree first. Does this make a pretty good contract?”

  “You did a fine job,” Alan replied simply. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Travis recently.”

  “Hell, no. Like I said—he took off practically the day after I gave him the money. Haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

  “Is it okay if we take this?” Alan asked, referring to the wrinkled IOU in his hands. “It might come in handy in our investigation, and something tells me that it isn’t going to do you much good.”

  “Be my guest,” Carlucci said.

  “Okay, thank you, Mr. Carlucci. You’ve been very helpful.” Alan turned to Lorelei. Thank you for your time and assistance once again, Ms. Monroe. Hopefully this will lead us somewhere.”

  He paused and handed out his business cards to Carlucci and Lorelei, even though Lorelei had already been given one.

  “If Travis Hall shows up here again, or if either of you sees or hears from him again, call me at this number immediately. Do not talk to him any more than is absolutely necessary; and above all, don’t mention any of this or attempt to confront him.”

  They both nodded. Alan took down John Carlucci’s cell phone number, just in case there were additional questions about the man who had skipped out on his IOU. There was another round of thank yous, and Alan and Maribel made their exit.

  As they were headed out the main entrance of the gym, Carlucci called out:

  “Hey, detectives! If you catch up with Travis Hall, try to get him to fork over my fifty bucks, please!”

  33.

  On the ride back to Cincinnati, Maribel asked Alan, “Do you think that ‘Travis Hall’ is really named Travis Hall? He could have given that young man a fake name, right?”

  “It’s definitely possible,” Alan said. “But it’s equally possible that he really is named Travis Hall. He probably never expected us to trace him to that fitness club, of all places. So he didn't imagine that the police would ever be talking to John Carlucci or Lorelei Monroe.”

  Maribel nodded. “That’s how we so often catch them. They think they’ve got everything figured out—and then they make a careless mistake.”

  “Usually they do,” Alan agreed.

  “Okay,” Maribel continued. “Let’s assume that all of these coincidences add up like you think, and that Travis Hall is both the man seen at the Terrace View last Saturday night, as well as the man who is working with Lilith. I think we also now see why Lorelei’s photos showed up on that fake profile on the dating site.”

  “The classic rejected suitor,” Alan said, finishing the thought. “He was teed off about Lorelei turning him down. So what does he do? He involves her in his robbery-homicide sideline in a not-so-subtle way. Of course, he never paused to think that Lorelei’s photos would provide the link that would ultimately lead us to him.”

  “Assuming, that is, that he really is Travis Hall. If he really isn’t Travis Hall, then we still won’t be much closer to finding him.”

  “I could be wrong,” Alan said, “but I think he’s Travis Hall. If he was impulsive enough to use Lorelei’s photos in the fake profile, then he isn’t nearly as smart as he probably thinks that he is.”

  When they returned to the ODCI office, Alan ran a database search on Travis Hall. There were multiple DMV records, of course—even when he filtered for Travis’s likely age.

  On a hunch, Alan decided to search the criminal records. After about half an hour of searching, his computer screen was filled with the mug shot of Travis Hall, DOB 4/12/1982. Travis Hall was a good-looking man with longish, brown-blonde hair.

  More significantly, though, Travis Hall had a tattoo that resembled a length of barbed wire. It was located exactly where Viktor Pudovkin described it to be.

  “Got him!” Alan called out across the office. Maribel and Dave hurried over and gathered around Alan’s computer screen.

  “He was sent away a few years ago for theft and burglary. He also has a few busts for possession, but the prison time was for theft and burglary.”

  “Okay,” Dave allowed. He was reading through the on-screen notes, and he had been briefed about Maribel and Alan’s second trip to Columbus. “But Travis Hall is a low-level criminal. He was sent away for an amateurish theft-slash-burglary. A serial killer is usually a different kind of animal. They usually have above-average intelligence, for one thing. Based on what you two found out, and what we have here, this guy isn’t very bright. How could he graduate from breaking into a garage and stealing some tools, to setting up this elaborate online ruse that has so far led to the deaths of three college-educated victims? As you both know, we haven’t been able to track Lilith down online. The killer did a pretty good job of cleaning up the electronic trail.”

  Dave shook his head. “I’m not saying that this guy wasn't in the parking lot of the Terrace View last Friday—we have pretty good evidence for that. But I don’t see how he could be connected to Lilith. Frankly speaking, this guy doesn't have that kind of brainpower.”

  “Sometimes criminals get smarter in prison,” Maribel said. “Sometimes they use the contacts they make in prison to take their craft to the next level.”

  “Maribel is right,” Alan said. They all knew the stark truth about the corrections system—in Ohio and elsewhere. Theoretically there were opportunities for reform, but the prison environment, and the inclinations of the men who landed there, seldom resulted in personal improvement.

  All too often, the corrections system served as a finishing school for career criminals. When the men in prison weren’t victimizing each other, they were often sharing notes, exchanging knowledge.

  “And don’t forget,” Alan said. “Travis Hall—if we’re right about him—is only one half of the Lilith equation. We still need to track down the identity of that woman who almost had dinner with you last Saturday night, Dave.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “More gumshoes,” Alan said.

  But Dave’s question turned out to be a valid one: Travis Hall had ended his parole period ten months ago. For the better part of the past year, he had been under no obligation to report in to the authorities; and of course, he had not done so.

  Since then, Travis Hall had more or less disappeared from the grid. His last known address was an apartment in Cincinnati. But when Alan and Maribel showed up there the next morning, they were greeted at the front door by an elderly African-American woman, a widow who had recently downsized after selling her house.

  Alan and Maribel checked with the apartment complex’s superintendent. To the surprise of neither detective, Travis had left no forwarding address.

  “He just moved out one day,” the superintendent told them. “And you know, in all these months, he’s gotten like three pieces of mail. And those have all been junk mail.”

  “Did you hang on to his mail?” Maribel asked. What seemed like junk to a civilian often contained unexpected evidence.

  “No—if they don't leave a forwarding address, then we don’t hold their mail. This ain’t UPS, you know.”

  Travis had few relatives—and most of them lived in western Indiana, near the Illinois border. But Travis had clearly been in Cincinnati during the previous weekend. Western Indiana was a five- or six-hour drive away. He would almost certainly be found somewhere closer, at least in the short term.

  Then Alan remembered something significant about Travis—a characteristic that he had already demonstrated, that they already knew about.

  “He likes to work out,” Alan observed to Maribel and Dave. “He’s a gym rat.”

  Alan had dabbled with weightlifting while in the army, but he had never been really serious about it. Alan had always been more of a runner. But he had known plenty of guys who were aspiring Arnold Schwarzeneggers.


  “Guys who work out seriously are religious about it,” Alan continued. “That means that if Travis is in Cincinnati, he’s working out somewhere.”

  “So where?” Dave wondered aloud. “There have to be dozens of gyms in the Cincinnati area.”

  “There are,” Alan concurred. “But Travis won’t be at just any of them. First of all, there are different kinds of gyms.”

  “’Different kinds of gyms?’” Dave asked.

  “I know what Alan means,” Maribel cut in. “There are different kinds of gyms. There are gyms that are targeted to older, more affluent clientele. These are the ones that have a lot of cardio machines and fancy locker rooms. It’s unlikely that Travis would be working out at a gym like that. He wouldn't want what they have to offer, and he wouldn't fit in.”

  “You make it sound like joining a social club,” Dave said.

  “In a way, it is. There are also gyms that cater exclusively to women. Travis wouldn’t even be allowed to work out at one of these.”

  “And then,” Alan said, “there are gyms that cater to young guys with limited funds who don't want a lot of cardio machines, and certainly no aerobics classes. These guys don’t care as much about the condition of the locker room or the amenities. Some of these gyms have bare concrete floors. But what these gyms do offer is lots of iron to pump. Rows and rows of bench presses, preacher benches for doing curls, and dozens of barbells, dumbbells, and other basic pieces of equipment.”

  “Okay,” Dave said. “I get it. So Travis will be at a gym like that.”

  “Exactly,” Alan affirmed. “That still doesn't narrow it down completely, but that will get us started. Travis was careless enough to give John Carlucci his real name, and he was careless enough to put Lorelei’s photos on one of those fake profiles. He isn’t giving up his workouts in order to lay low and be extra cautious—we can bet on that.”

  Alan next researched the gyms in the Cincinnati area that billed themselves as havens for back-to-basics iron pumpers. There were, to Alan’s surprise, a fairly large number of these listed in all of the online directories, as well as in the Cincinnati Yellow Pages.

  Then Alan called each one of these gyms to see if they offered a pay-per-visit option. Most gyms didn't operate this way, as their business model largely depended on dabblers who signed up for an annual contract, then stopped working out after only a handful of visits.

  But a gym called Rod’s Iron Shop was both back-to-basics, and offered the pay-per-visit option. Six dollars each time.

  Rod’s Iron Shop was truly a small gym—so small, in fact, that the eponymous Rod Sturgis seemed to be the only fulltime employee. He was an aging weightlifter in his early fifties. He wore his hair in a modified mullet that had gone out of style in the early 1990s.

  When Alan showed up at Rod’s Iron Shop, Sturgis was minding the front counter. He was cooperative, but he did not know who Travis Hall was—at least not immediately.

  “No one by that name in our membership files,” Sturgis said, consulting his computer.

  “Is there any chance that he could have taken advantage of your pay-per-visit option? Do you have a sign-in sheet for that?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Sturgis said, as if the idea had been a brilliant one. On the front counter there was a clipboard that contained multiple sheets of paper printed with grids for signatures.

  “Mind if I take a look?” Alan asked, gesturing to the sheets.

  “Be my guest.”

  Alan had to scan the first three sheets before he found Travis Hall’s signature. Just as Alan had hoped, Travis had taken no extra measures to conceal his identity when going about his daily life. He didn't expect anyone in law enforcement to be looking for him at Rod’s Iron Shop.

  “Looks like you found him,” Sturgis said.

  “Yes,” Alan said. “It says here that he visited five days ago. Does his name ring a bell now?”

  Sturgis shrugged. “Not really. I’m sorry.”

  “Do you have any sort of a surveillance camera anywhere on the premises?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Sturgis said, “I do.”

  Rod Sturgis briefly explained that he had installed a security camera in the parking lot the previous year, after a thief had broken into several patrons’ cars. “But I usually erase the camera’s hard drive every seventy-two hours,” he said. “The hard drive gets full after a week, you know.”

  “Oh,” Alan said.

  “But,” Sturgis brightened, as if he had been toying with Alan. “This week I haven’t gotten around to cleaning the hard drive yet, which means I have the video for the day you’re looking for. Now—whether or not your man is on that video is anyone’s guess.”

  “Can the video be downloaded onto a flash drive?” Alan asked, producing a small device from his breast pocket. Alan’s subordinates sometimes hinted that he was a bit of a Luddite. But he always made a habit of carrying a blank flash drive. “I can promise you that you won’t get any viruses.”

  “Fair enough,” Sturgis said. “If you can’t trust the police, who can you trust? Wait right here and I’ll get the video for the day your guy was here. I’ll have to download it to my PC first. That’s the way the program works.”

  Alan thanked the gym owner profusely. Cooperative citizens were always easier to work with than uncooperative ones.

  When Alan returned to the ODCI office, he scanned through the video. It wasn't long before he saw a man—clearly identifiable as Travis Hall—climb out of a Jeep. Alan paused the video and zoomed in on the Jeep’s license plate.

  When he ran the license plate number through the DMV database, the name that came up was not Travis Hall—but Jessica Knox, DOB 9/13/1983.

  Jessica Knox, unlike Travis Hall, had no criminal record. Given the proximity of their ages, Alan’s first thought was that Knox was probably Hall’s girlfriend. Then he accessed Jessica Knox’s driver’s license photo.

  “This could be Lilith,” he said aloud. “Possibly.” The exclamation caught both Dave and Maribel’s attention. “Dave, get over here,” he said. “And take a look at this license photo.”

  The photo was well over three years old. Jessica Knox would have to renew her license later this year. The lighting and focus were a little off, too. But the photo should have been sufficient for recognition—or so Alan hoped.

  “Is this the woman you saw in the restaurant Saturday night?” Alan asked.

  “I think,” Dave said tentatively. “Or I think she could be. I only saw her briefly. And this isn’t the best driver’s license photo.”

  “If you were a witness in a criminal case, would you be able to pick her out of a lineup?”

  “Maybe,” Dave said. “I wouldn't be able to swear that this is her. That’s the big thing, right? But it could be her. I’m sorry Alan, I was just too far away.”

  “Okay, Dave. Thanks. We’ll talk some more later.”

  Dave returned to his cubicle, and Alan began researching more deeply into the life of Jessica Knox. From birth through high school, Knox had lived in the nearby town of Iron Mills, Ohio. She had moved to Cincinnati shortly after graduation.

  Knox had worked at a bank for about three years. Then her employment record became suddenly spotty and irregular—and it stayed that way. This, at least, was the story told by the information that Alan was able to access in the various state and federal databases.

  The Cincinnati Bell landline number that had been assigned to Jessica Knox had since been reassigned to a dry cleaning business. This suggested that Jessica had not had the number for quite some time. Her last known address—the address on her driver’s license—was in Cincinnati, at an apartment complex.

  Alan called the complex and spoke to one of the managers who was willing to talk to him over the phone. Jessica had moved out months ago, and she had left no forwarding address.

  “I probably shouldn't tell you this,” the complex manager said, “but her rent checks kept bouncing. That’s why she had to move out.”

&nb
sp; “Thank you,” Alan said, winding up the call, “that information may be helpful.”

  Alan didn't know exactly what was going on, but there was something suspicious about the story presented by the data: For some reason, Knox had either quit or been fired from a stable job at a Cincinnati area bank, a position which probably paid well and offered some career mobility. Then she had shifted to working irregularly at jobs that would constitute underemployment, considering her resume at that point. Then her rent checks had started bouncing, and she had gone off the grid, more or less.

  And, of course, she was likely associated with Travis Hall, given that he had been filmed driving her car.

  Alan accessed Jessica Knox’s DMV photo once again. The face staring back at Alan on the screen revealed nothing. There were only suggestions.

  “Are you Lilith?” Alan asked the photo in a whisper. I’m going to find out.

  “Maribel,” Alan said over his shoulder, “how would you like to take a field trip to Iron Mills?”

  34.

  Late the next morning Alan and Maribel made the roughly thirty-minute drive to Iron Mills. The town was located within the orbit of the Greater Cincinnati area, but it might as well have been a different country—or at least a different part of the country. In Iron Mills there was none of the easy affluence that one observed in the up-and-coming new suburbs of Cincinnati. There were no McMansions, designer daycare centers for upper middle-class working parents, or gleaming shopping malls.

  Iron Mills was a land that post-industrial, globalized America had forgotten. Alan did not know if there had ever been any iron smelting facilities here, but it was clear that there had once been working factories. These factories now formed a perimeter of ramshackle, rusting hulks on the outskirts of town—businesses that had probably not made a payroll since the late 1990s.

  “Kind of a depressing place, isn’t it?” Maribel observed, noting a large, deserted factory building with a weedy gravel parking lot. The windows of the factory were boarded over. It was impossible to discern exactly what sort of business the factory had once been. There was a prominent sign near the chained main entrance: a FOR SALE sign with the name and telephone number of a real estate holding company.