Fractured Justice

by James A. Ardaiz

  On this clear night, moonlight bathed the old headstone markers near the iron fence edging the roadway and the faces of aging monuments of lives long forgotten were briefly illuminated as the car’s headlights followed the turn. Even now as an adult, Elizabeth Anne Garrett still felt a slight shudder as she turned to the roadway cutting through the two cemeteries that had cradled the dead for more than one hundred years. She knew there was nothing to be frightened of, but that didn’t change the feeling of being watched. That feeling had never gone away.

  She shivered involuntarily just as the corner of her eye caught the flash of light in her rearview mirror, headlights flickering in a sequenced dance with a brief flash of red. Her first thought was reflexive. I didn’t do anything wrong. She looked at the rearview mirror more closely to make sure. The glare of the headlights made it difficult to see anything except the outline of the vehicle behind her. She pulled over into a dirt parking area near the cemetery gate and pressed a button, lowering the window, the damp cold fall air seeping into the warmth of her car as she released her seat belt and started to look behind her, shutting off the engine.

  He was at her car before she was aware of his presence. The gloved hand lightly rested on the sill of the open window. Elizabeth looked straight into an expanse of black leather that almost filled the window. He was standing so close to the door it startled her. “Oh—” It was all that came out of her mouth, the words choked off as her throat closed involuntarily, her eyes focusing on the other gloved hand and the dully glinting silver shaft that rose from the leathered fist.

  The moonlight slid over the knife as it turned slightly and moved in a fluid motion through the window and near her face. There was something almost reptilian about the blade as it swayed in his hand. The silver light made the razor edge flash and then disappear as the unsheathed steel turned straight, lightly touched her throat, and then raised itself before her face. She couldn’t see the face of the man holding the glistening sliver of steel. He said nothing. He didn’t have to.

  Elizabeth’s blue-gray eyes widened, flicking back and forth with the minuet of the blade as it swung lightly side to side, inches from her eyes. A tremor rose from her abdomen, sliding up through her chest like a fog, her mouth trembling as her lips parted, the breath going in and out in short bursts, puffing clouds of soundless mist in the chill air.

  His face was still in the shadow of the unlit roadway as he opened the door. Reaching in with liquid movement, his hand grazed across her leg, lightly drawing his leather-tipped fingers down the inside of her thigh. Elizabeth felt her body move closer to the center console, pushing against it. There was no place to move.

  He pulled the blade back, twisting it again toward her face and then resting the tip against her throat, pressing just lightly against the skin as his hand moved up her leg. She could feel the pulse of her heart moving against the needlelike point. He didn’t push any harder, allowing the tip to slide down like a slowly moving teardrop.

  She closed her eyes and waited. She could not will herself to move, the touch of steel a paralyzing carapace holding her body still as it moved down her neck with the whisper touch of a caress. The blade slid away leaving the sensation of a rivulet of trickling dampness moving down her flesh. She didn’t need to open her eyes to realize the blade was again in front of her face. She could sense it, like someone standing near her bed in the darkness while she slept. It was there. He was there.

  She forced her eyes open just as moonlight caught the stain of crimson on the point of the blade. She saw him stare at the blade for a moment, his eyes widening as if it was unexpected, then turn his gaze to her face, letting the stiletto tip linger for a moment in front of her, allowing the scarlet drop to glaze the steel. He drew the flat of the blade across the leather driver’s seat in an almost delicate feline motion, cleansing the tip.

  His face lowered to her level, the nighttime shadows distorting his features as he used his teeth to pull the glove from his left hand. He raised his finger to his lips, a soundless gesture, and then his ungloved hand slid again slowly up the inside of her thigh.

  He drew his head back just enough for the silver light to cross his face as the heat of his hand floated up her leg. The deep-set eyes glowed black. She felt a shudder wrap her body as his face moved toward her. His words came out in a whisper. “Remember me?”

  Chapter 6

  The call from O’Hara pulled Jamison from another night of fitful sleep. The Symes case, like the other murder cases, had run into nothing but a wall of questions leaving Jamison desperately searching for answers. When the phone rang, O’Hara’s voice ground through his sleep-fogged brain. A young woman’s car had been found and she was missing. Jamison’s mind began to clear. Even with his crime-calloused mind he recoiled at the thought there might be another one.

  O’Hara continued. “We don’t have a body. We have a car with the door unlocked, what looks like a blood smear on the seat, and some indications that a knife was used. So far there is no reason why the driver would have left the car at the location where it was found.”

  Jamison heard the click as soon as he said, “Pick me up.”

  As O’Hara sped through the darkened streets Jamison tried to block out the muffled crackle of the sheriff’s dispatch radio while he attempted to collect his thoughts. Three homicides in the last month, each about ten days apart. Jamison pulled the scenes of the three murders to the front of his mind, searching again for anything that might help him find a link between the crimes when they arrived at the scene. He already knew the similarities. It had played out so many times in his mind that he could even hear the sounds.

  He could feel in his gut the growing dread that now there was a fourth. And Jamison couldn’t see anything clearly except that he hadn’t been able to prevent it.

  Outside the lightly fogged car window the dark landscape rushed by them as O’Hara headed toward the new crime scene. Jamison rubbed his face, stress seeping through his pores at the thought that they had another murder and they still had no suspect.

  The words of his old friend Dr. Aaron Levy kept ringing in his mind. After the Ventana and Johnson murders, Jamison felt he was missing some obvious link. He went to see the middle-aged psychologist for insight. Unlike many psychologists who testified, Levy didn’t look for excuses for criminal behavior. He looked for explanations that made sense, which he delivered with the accent of his native Brooklyn.

  Jamison had known Levy for a considerable portion of his life. The psychologist and his father had been friends and, at various times of his life, Levy had counseled Jamison when he needed to talk to somebody. Indeed, the older man had somehow sensed a void in the younger man and whenever Jamison felt that void, Levy had been there to fill it. Their conversations helped Jamison understand how the past had shaped him and that once he understood, it was best to leave it buried.

  Levy had taken the time to educate him about the type of person he was likely chasing and Jamison had been an eager student. “Most people think,” Levy had said, “that because someone commits a monstrous act that they are monsters, look like monsters, act like monsters. But the reality is that psychopaths look just like the rest of us. Every malignant thought they carry in the dark recesses of their minds, and what we see is the aftermath, the result of their twisted fantasies. We are shocked when we see their faces on the news because they look just like us.”

  Two days after the Symes murder, Jamison paid another visit to Levy. Leaning back in his office chair, the bearded psychologist had softly offered that even though the information released had been minimal, the pictures of the three victims had told him that Jamison was looking for someone who had very special characteristics. That was, their prey embodied all the aspects of a classic sexual sadist serial killer.

  Jamison had nodded and then placed a number of crime-scene photographs on the table. Methodically, he had gone over the details of each murder and the victims’ backgrounds with Levy, hoping he might offer some insigh
t that would bring him closer to a more refined focus. It had puzzled Jamison that none of the victims had been sexually assaulted even though the crimes appeared overtly sexual in nature.

  They had carefully examined the pictures of the crime scenes spread out on Levy’s desk in striking slashes of red and pallid skin tones. Levy had separated the pictures that focused on the faces of the victims and said, “What gives sexual pleasure is not necessarily the sexual act itself. He may be impotent. He may take his pleasure in private as he fantasizes about what he has done. What they think, how they think, and why they do what they do is only limited by their own dark thoughts.”

  Levy’s hand had moved the photographs across his desk like tarot cards shuffled by a soothsayer. But as Jamison had watched, he knew that Levy was drawing upon years of experience rather than some mystical insight. After a thoughtful silence, he had said, “These murders appear extraordinarily cruel and yet, what you tell me is that when the horrible wounds were inflicted on the victims they were already dead. They were all missing approximately twenty-four hours and then killed several hours before they were found. So the killer spared them the pain of his desecration and yet he kept them alive for hours before he killed them.” He had murmured the last statement as if asking himself “What did he do in that time?”

  As his implied question hung in the air, Levy had continued. “My guess is that he fed on the sight and smell of their fear. All of these young women look very similar, correct?”

  Jamison had acknowledged that his investigator, Bill O’Hara, had noticed this early in the investigation; each of the victims were similar in age, hair color, complexion, and build. Even their facial features were similar.

  “These victims are selected in advance, I think. We know that suffering is the most important thing to the serial killer. They are without conscience, moral restraint, or a sense of society’s boundaries. Their entire focus is on themselves and their own desires. Many are in fact highly intelligent.”

  As Jamison rose to leave, Levy had put his hand on his young friend’s arm. “Matt, these are not crimes of impulse. There is a ritualistic pattern. Each woman has been displayed as an example of his power and his control of the situation. The grotesque wounds that were inflicted are about power. They aren’t about pain. He has done that to show you what he can do because he intended for these women to be found. He wants you to feel fear. That is part of his pleasure.”

  Now as Jamison rushed to this new crime scene, Levy’s words were planted in his mind. “That he will do it again is inevitable. There is a reason all his victims look alike and we most likely will not know that reason until you find this man.”

  Jamison sat back in the seat as O’Hara sped through the darkened streets, wondering what the young woman looked like whose abandoned car they were rushing to.

  Chapter 7

  Jamison’s mental replay of the psychologist’s analysis snapped off when he saw the emergency lights breaking the darkness ahead. Even from a block away, the flashing lights of two sheriff’s cruisers threw off flickering red-and-blue patterns that caught the tips of the rows of stone markers bordering the road. The criminal identification bureau van was there, its bright generator-driven lights turning night into high noon. All the lights surrounded one small vehicle sitting in a dirt-and-gravel parking area near the cemetery gate.

  As he got out of the car, the cold night air hit Jamison in the face. He looked around. The roadway cut directly between two cemeteries that had been there since the turn of the century. Once carefully tended stone markers were now blackened by neglect as families moved on. A twinge of guilt nibbled at Jamison. His father was out there in the darkness resting under a flat bronze marker indicating the newer generations of the deceased. He hadn’t visited in the years since the funeral. Tonight would be no exception; there were others who demanded his attention.

  He followed O’Hara down the pitted roadway, picking his path carefully and regretting his choice of loafers instead of heavy shoes. Puccinelli was standing twenty feet from the vehicle, observing the identification bureau technicians. Jamison joined O’Hara near the detective. The silver hair of Detective Puccinelli reflected the generator-driven lights. Jamison heard O’Hara’s voice over the steady rumble of the gas engines. “Hey, Pooch. What’ve we got?”

  Taking a cigarette from his mouth, Puccinelli looked up from his notebook and shook his head, the dense cloud of exhaled smoke hanging in the damp air. “Don’t know much. The car belongs to an Elizabeth Garrett. Her parents live a few miles just north of here. Apparently she was still living at home. The report I have is that she was supposed to be spending the night with a girlfriend and was going to go to work from there, but evidently Garrett changed her mind and decided to head home.”

  Pooch looked down at his notepad and added, “A neighbor of Garrett’s parents saw the car as he drove by and called her father. He came over right away. That was about ten thirty. He said the car was unlocked and the keys were gone. At this point all we know is that this would not have been her normal route home and if it hadn’t been for the neighbor coming this way we wouldn’t have known anything until this morning when she didn’t report for work.

  “We’ve got a lot of footprints but the dad’s been here; the neighbor’s been here. The first deputy on the scene has been here. God knows who else has walked around. We got multiple tire tracks too. Could be the father’s, could be the neighbors. Who the hell knows? Between the gravel and the dirt it’s going to be damn near impossible to make a clear tire track.”

  O’Hara acknowledged the difficulties. It would be a break if they found a tire track they could match with a tire of a suspect vehicle, but that was the starting point.

  Puccinelli nodded to Jamison. “Matt, got you out too?”

  Pushing his mouth up to somewhere between a grimace and a smile, Jamison said, “Yeah, Pooch, had nothing else to do at four a.m. so still with it. Anything in the car?”

  The detective’s weathered face reacted subtly to the use of his nickname by the young prosecutor. “The driver’s seat has a blood smear right down the side,” he answered. “You can see the imprint of what looks to me like a knife blade at the top of the smear. You can take a look.”

  Puccinelli hesitated and then stepped closer. “I hate to say it, but I think we got another one like the others. The only break we may have is we know from her girlfriend that she’s only been missing for five or six hours. If this is another one, then if he follows the pattern she’s still alive out there somewhere.” Pooch paused before adding, “At least for now.”

  Jamison followed O’Hara as he made his way to the open driver’s door of Garrett’s car. O’Hara thumbed the switch on his flashlight and carefully swept the small circle of light over the interior. Next to the left side of the driver’s seat there was a dark reddish smudge, as if something had been wiped off against the upholstery. At the top of the stain the partial outline of what looked like a thin knife blade could be seen. The first case had also involved a car and a bloodstained slice had been left in a similar spot. A day and a half later the driver, Maria Ventana, had been found dead on a blind access road several miles from where her car had been left.

  Dr. Levy’s words still echoing in Jamison’s mind, his stomach began to churn when he considered the possibility the killer was watching them at that very moment. Levy had said this type of killer frequently waited in hiding to watch the reaction to his handiwork. Jamison peered into the darkness that bordered the crime scene like a black curtain. He saw nothing except the night-shaded monuments to the dead.

  Jamison stared at the bloodstain on the car’s seat. If they were lucky and it was the same killer as the other victims, they had slightly less than twenty-four hours left to find this Elizabeth Garrett alive—after that they would find her dead. It was like the countdown to an execution. But that was twenty-four hours from the time she was taken and they had already lost at least five or six trying to discover if she was gone and wha
t might have happened.

  Puccinelli, watching with detached interest, told them, “The sheriff wants a meeting with the rest of the detectives working the case. We’re meeting in two hours. Maybe you two can sit in?” He was asking. It was evident to O’Hara and Jamison that Pooch needed some backup of his own and he had decided they were it.

  “Okay.” Jamison nodded. “I need to call the district attorney and let him know because the press is going to be all over this.”

  He heard O’Hara muttering, “As soon as they crawl out of their holes when the sun comes up.” Jamison didn’t disagree and besides, O’Hara wouldn’t care if he did.

  Chapter 8

  After another hour at the crime scene, it was clear nothing more would be gained from them standing around. O’Hara drove Jamison home so he could clean up before their meeting with the sheriff.

  On the way back Jamison called Ernie Garcia, his other investigator. It was still early and the eastern sky was just beginning to crack from its overnight slumber. He filled Ernie in on the new crime scene and asked him to go straight to the sheriff’s office and hold it together until he and O’Hara could get there.

  Jamison preferred sending Ernie out when a political relationship needed to be maintained. He generally wouldn’t say anything until he had digested all the facts and merged them with his observations. Ernie said that it was his Mexican heritage that allowed him to project an easy que será manner, including an accent that he hauled out when it suited him. But there was a big difference between the easy manner Ernie projected and the steel hidden behind it.