Whiskey Sour

by J. A. Konrath

  I sat across his desk and faced the man. Captain Steven Bains was short, stout, about ten years my senior, and had a hair weave that looked unrealistic because it had no gray in it, whereas his mustache did. He finished peering at the paper in front of him and removed his reading glasses to look at me.

  “You weren’t carrying last night.”

  “I know. Maybe it was a good thing, because if I had my piece I might have killed one or more of them.”

  “Wear it from now on. It looks like this guy is gunning for you.”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me about the second victim.”

  I ran it down for him, and he asked questions when appropriate.

  “The pressure is mounting,” he said when I finished. “The police superintendent and the mayor’s office want to turn the case over to the Feds.”

  I made a face. “We’re not lacking for manpower or resources. The only thing we’re lacking is leads, because this guy doesn’t give us any to follow.”

  “That’s why I refused. But after the media kicks into gear today, it won’t be long before my authority is usurped. If you want to keep this one, Jack, you’ll have to dig up something more to go on.”

  “We’re doing a restruct of the second vic. Maybe we’ll get an ID.”

  “Hedge that bet.”

  I knew what he meant. In 99.9 percent of murder cases, the killer knows the victim, and links can be found. But the Gingerbread Man could be picking up random women. If that were the case, even positive IDs might not help us catch him.

  “Any idea what he meant in the note, about leaving you another hidden present?”

  “No. Another victim, maybe? But he doesn’t hide them, he likes to put them in public places. Maybe…”

  I rolled it around in my noggin. I left you another present, but it’s deeply hidden. He’s implying that the present was there, with the body, hidden deep. Deep in the body?

  “What if he hid something inside the bodies?”

  “Wouldn’t the autopsy have picked it up?”

  “Maybe not something deeply hidden.”

  Bains picked up the phone and got the assistant Medical Examiner, Phil Blasky. He asked him to recheck the first Jane Doe, looking for anything that might have been placed inside the body.

  “He’s on it.” Bains hung up and scratched his mustache. “Special Agents Coursey and Dailey spoke with me yesterday.”

  I waited.

  “They told me they don’t believe you’re giving them your full cooperation.”

  I chose my words carefully. “The FBI would profile Hitler as Jewish.”

  Bains smiled briefly, an unusual move for him.

  “No one likes an asshole, Jack, until you have to move your bowels.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “And the letters, I want them analyzed.”

  “They’re at the lab now.”

  “I meant by a handwriting expert.”

  “We’re already sure that the letters match.”

  “That’s only part of it. The mayor’s office is sending an expert to look over the letters to get a profile of our suspect.”

  I made a face. “Another profile? Are we going to consult a psychic next?”

  “I’m sure you’ll give him your full cooperation, Lieutenant.” Bains said it with the full weight of his authority. Then he dismissed me, and I stood up to leave.

  “Jack?”

  “Cap?”

  “Watch out for the overtime too. You’re no help to the case when you’re too exhausted to see straight.”

  I left, irritated. Being on the force for over twenty years, I’d had my share of big cases, and the corresponding media and political pressure. But being forced to work with the FBI, and now some snake oil handwriting expert, made my work all the more difficult.

  “Look at it this way,” Benedict said when I filled him in. “You get paid whether you catch the guy or not.”

  “Your attitude leaves something to be desired, Detective.”

  “It’s just a job, Jack. Don’t take it personally. It’s what you do to make money, so you can live your life. I want to catch this guy as much as you do. You saw what he did to those women. Hell, look what he did to my mouth. But when I walk out that door, I leave work behind.”

  “This particular work seems to be following me wherever I go.”

  Herb frowned. “Get some rest. Take a day off. Call up that dating service and find a nice guy and get laid. Do something, for God’s sake, other than police work. Fifty years from now, when you’re dead and buried, you want the epitaph on your tombstone to read ”She was a good cop“?”

  I thought about it.

  “Fine,” I decided. “I’ll take the afternoon off. Can you manage the store while I’m gone?”

  “Consider it done.”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  “Live your life, Jack. You’ve only got one.”

  I nodded and left.

  When I got home, I spent the next four hours thinking about the case.

  Chapter 15

  IT’S ALL IN THE PLANNING.

  If you plan out every detail, you can get away with anything. The trick is to delay the gratification until the planning is complete. That’s why he’s been caught in the past — because the thrill of the crime overrode common sense. But that won’t happen again. He now thinks of planning as an appetizer. Foreplay. It has become fun in its own right.

  He’s planned this spree so well that he’ll be able to kill all four girls within a week, while still allowing himself time to enjoy each one. It’s a tight schedule, made even tighter by the sudden interest he’s taken in Jack Daniels, but the months of plotting and watching and waiting are paying off. By next week he’ll be history, a Chicago legend, leaving behind a legacy of terror and unanswered questions.

  He had to dispose of T. Metcalf that morning, wanting to keep her a bit longer but unable to deal with the smell. It’s risky, dumping the body that way twice in a row, but it adds to his supernatural mystique. He’s looking forward to the headlines.

  Charles sits on his basement floor amid the barrels of gasoline, and stares at the gory red spot where he violated the corpse only hours ago. Tomorrow he’ll have another one to take her place. Until then, he has more planning to do.

  Jack is the cause of it.

  He’s expected all along to attack the cop in charge of his case. But he’s dwelling on Jack more than he expected to.

  Maybe the media is the cause of it, and all the attention he’s getting makes him want to show off. Television mocked him, now it fears him. Justice.

  Or maybe, after weeks of scheming and plotting, the idea that Jack wants to stop him before he’s finished makes her just as bad as those whores who forced him to undertake this mission in the first place.

  What is Jack doing now? How is the case progressing? Is she living in fear, worried she’ll be attacked again? Does she feel helpless and powerless? Is she angry because she can’t do anything to stop him?

  Maybe he’ll give her a call and find out. It’s time to kick it up a notch, give her some personal treatment. She wants to go up against him? Fine. She’s going to regret that decision, for the rest of her life.

  Which won’t be very long.

  But why call, when he can drop by? After all, he knows where she lives.

  The Gingerbread Man closes his eyes and begins to plan.

  Chapter 16

  I WOUND UP TAKING A NAP, which was a mixed blessing. It refreshed me somewhat, and gave me some much-needed rest, but when my eyes opened, it was only five o’clock in the evening and I knew I’d never get to sleep come bedtime.

  So I smoothed the wrinkles from my suit, took some pain medication and some cold medication, and went back to the only office in the city that never closed.

  Herb was gone when I arrived, home with his wife and his life, work no longer on his mind. The ME’s report was waiting for me on my desk, another rush job courtesy of the mayor�
�s office, and I took a sip from my vending machine coffee and sat down to peruse the atrocities inflicted on another poor girl.

  The first bit of news that leaped out at me was the time of death. The ME placed it at about seven P.M. the previous night. The killer had kept the body around for a lot longer than he’d kept the first one.

  He’d hurt this one a lot more as well. This girl had thirty-seven wounds of various lengths and depths, but the ME indicated that several of the wounds had been reopened. Microscopic steel fragments matched those from the previous vic, indicating the same knife had been used. Histamine levels, coupled with a partially bitten-off tongue and the fingernail marks on the palms that Hughes pointed out, indicated they were premortem. She’d been tortured, the ME estimated for as long as four hours.

  Death was caused by massive blood loss. Hopefully shock had spared her some pain. There were fibers found in wounds on her wrists and ankles, twine once again.

  She was missing all of her toes, her labia minora and majora, four fingers, and both ears. None of them were recovered. No semen was found, but the obvious sexual nature of the crime inferred that rape might have occurred, and the perp either pulled out or used a condom.

  Her urine contained traces of sodium secobarbital, the needle puncture mark on her upper left arm.

  No identification was found, and the girl was officially dubbed Jane Doe #2. An expert mortician worked on her face and hair for almost two hours to make it appear as lifelike as possible. Then a digital photograph was taken, and the eyes were electronically drawn in on a computer.

  This restruct picture was given to the media in time for the six o’clock news, along with a similar photo of the first Jane Doe. If anyone knew either girl, or had any information related to the case, they were asked to call the task force number. Herb had set up a unit of six desk officers to field calls, all of whom had been sufficiently briefed on the case to be able to weed out the crackpots and thrill-seekers.

  The second note had been written in the same ink, on the same paper. No prints, hairs, or fibers were found on the note.

  The two 7-Elevens were eight blocks apart. I thought about putting plainclothes cops on stakeouts of every convenience store in Chicago, but we would have needed five hundred people to cover the hundred-plus stores around the clock. Instead I put teams on the fifteen stores within a twenty-block radius of the first crime scene, and then drafted a flier to hand out. It told convenience store employees to keep their eyes out for anyone trying to steal garbage cans, drop off garbage cans, or fake a seizure in their shops.

  After drawing up the letter, I called down to the desk sergeant and had her round up all the uniforms in the building. The night shift was treated to the same video of the Alka-Seltzer kid as the day shift, with similar results. No one recognized the suspect or the MO.

  I hadn’t even hit a third of the cops in the district yet, but my optimism was beginning to sag. Mug shots were now filed on computer rather than in books, and I did a quick search of young white male shoplifters and came up with more than eight thousand hits. Even with help it would take a zillion years.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slow. If there was any connective tissue between what we had so far and our perp, I was too dense to see it. I was no closer to catching this guy than the day I’d taken the case.

  I put in the videotape of the second crime scene and viewed it, seeing for the first time Benedict remove the note from the body, which had been stapled to Jane Doe #2’s buttocks. After that it only got grimmer, made even worse because the picture quality was so good.

  The first crime scene was videotaped at night while raining, by someone who had problems differentiating between focus and zoom. This video was clean, clear, and in your face. When the tape ended I had no desire to watch it again right away.

  But I did watch it again. And again after that, numbing myself to the gore and trying to find something, anything, that might give me a clue.

  During the fifth or sixth viewing, my mind began to wander. Was this how I was destined to spend the rest of my life? Benedict was home right now, with his wife. Maybe they were watching TV together, or making love. Or, most likely, eating. But whatever they were doing, it was together. They were sharing their lives. I was here, alone, watching the end of someone else’s.

  So what’s the alternative? Go home, clean myself up, and hit the bars? Sure, I could let myself get picked up, kill the lonelies for a night. But I needed something more substantial than a quick, informal lay.

  What I needed, what I’ve been missing for damn near fifteen years, was to be in love. And I didn’t think I’d find it at the bars.

  I thought, wistfully, about my ex-husband, Alan.

  Alan was something special, that one-in-a-million guy who liked holding hands and sending flowers. He rarely lost his temper, was a whiz in the kitchen, and loved me so completely that I was never cold, even during the brutal Chicago winter.

  I take full responsibility for ruining our marriage.

  I met him on the job, back in the days when I walked a beat. He came up to me on the street, told me someone had lifted his wallet. I couldn’t say he was especially handsome, but he had the kindest eyes I’d ever seen.

  We dated for six months before he proposed.

  In the beginning, our marriage was great. Alan was a freelance artist, so he was able to make his own schedule, ensuring that we always had time to be together.

  Until my promotion to the Violent Crimes Unit.

  Prior to this, Alan and I had planned to have children. We were going to have a boy named Jay and a girl named Melody, and buy a house with a big backyard, in a good school district.

  But much as I wanted that, I also wanted a career. Maternity leave meant time away from work, and a newly ranked detective third class needed collars to make second grade.

  My work week jumped from forty hours to sixty.

  Alan was patient. He understood my ambition. He tried to wait until I was ready. Then a major career setback forced me to spend even more time on the job.

  Alan left me a week before I made detective second. That was also the week my insomnia started.

  I buried the memories. Regret wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Only one thing would.

  I picked up the phone, put it back down, and picked it up again. Swallowing what little pride I had left was harder than I thought, but I managed. The taxpayers financed a call to Information, and ten seconds later I was dialing Lunch Mates, hoping they’d be closed at this hour.

  “Thanks for calling Lunch Mates. This is Sheila, how may I help you?”

  Her voice was so buoyantly optimistic that I felt a wee bit better about my decision to call a dating service.

  “I guess I wanted to make an appointment, or schedule a visit. I didn’t really expect you to still be open.”

  “We have late hours. After all, human relationships don’t just run from nine to five. May I have your name, miss?”

  “Jacqueline Daniels. Jack, for short.”

  She tittered politely. “Wonderful name. Your occupation, please?”

  “Police officer.”

  “We have many clients in the law enforcement field. Were you looking for a match also within the department?”

  “Christ, no…I mean…”

  “No problem. It’s hard to date in the same profession. That’s why all those famous actors and actresses are always getting divorced. Sexual orientation?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Are you looking to meet a man or a woman?”

  “A man.”

  “Wonderful. We have many good men to choose from.”

  Her ability to put people at ease probably made all the losers she dealt with feel a lot better about themselves. It was sure working with me.

  “Are you free at any time soon to come in for an orientation?”

  “Yeah, uh, maybe tomorrow? Lunchtime, if possible?”

  “How about twelve o’clock?”

  �
�Fine.”

  She gave me directions, we made a little more small talk, and she’d bolstered my ego enough to make me feel good about hiring a service to find men because I was too incompetent to find one on my own.

  “See you tomorrow at noon, Ms. Daniels. We’ll get all of your information then, along with giving you an overview of our company. We’ll also be taking a picture of you. You’re free to bring in any pictures of yourself, if you’d like.”