Evil Like Me

by Steve Bradshaw

  Wilcox had made zero progress since the night he stood over Donald Deckle on South Main. So far the new medical examiner had been zero help—still waiting on some oddball test results from D.C. that “may” tie his latest problems together. To add to the misery, at the Deckle crime scene Wilcox screwed up his debut with the new ME. She was nothing like he had expected. Petty rebuffed his every use of artistic profanity, and she was clearly unimpressed with his raw investigative style. To top things off, Dr. Victoria Petty caught Wilcox looking at her legs as they knelt over the body. All else considered, he had to admit it was a classless move. But the top Memphis homicide detective would get over it. He was too set in his ways to change anything, not even for a good looking medical examiner.

  Waiting on the ME was not all he did since the Deckle homicide. His interviews with the three detectives handling the other—potentially linked—cases had not gone well. His in-your-face accusations of gross incompetence and piss poor detective work ended two meetings with middle fingers waving. The third, they had to pull Detective Cameron Baily off him.

  Even the interview of the only eyewitness had gone nowhere. Although Wilcox’s gut told him the guy was more than an innocent bystander, he did not have enough to hold Hunter Keller, or to even justify a tail. As Wilcox lined up the burnt fries on his crumpled napkin, he knew his clock was ticking. He had seventeen days to figure things out or he would need to add another burnt fry to his napkin.

  Each time the door opened, the outside world poured into the dark smoky burger joint like a convoy of semis on high beams. From the last table, he made out the large African American standing at the door scoping out the room. When the door closed, the behemoth started toward him through the scattered tables pushing chairs out of his lane. Wilcox had made a lot of enemies over the years, but he could not make out the face of the one coming at him. He didn’t want to shoot the man, but he would. With his hand on his gun he remembered the Memphis Redbirds baseball bat mounted above the jukebox. A dive over a pool table would give him enough space and time to come out swinging.

  The black man stopped in the dark room a few feet away. “You’re one ugly son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, well my mama loves me,” Wilcox said, still unable to make out the face. His left foot pointed at the pool table. “What in the hell do you want? I’m eating my dinner.”

  “I want to pound your skinny, white ass between the cracks of this crap linoleum.”

  “Well get in line you big black—Cameron?” He pushed the hanging lamp out. The light splashed on the mystery man’s face. “Detective Cameron Baily, you almost got a baseball bat upside your head.”

  “You and what army’s gonna bring it?” Baily flopped down a stack of files on the table knocking the loose silverware onto the floor and tipping over the salt, pepper, and sugar. Tony stared at Baily as he caught his four fries in midair.

  Baily pulled out a chair like a toy and sat, the swinging light over the table never got above his nose. “I started feeling sorry for you, Wilcox.”

  “Aren’t you sweet.” Tony rearranged the fries on his napkin thinking about the big man now sitting at his table. Anybody who played right tackle for my Tigers can’t be a total son of a bitch. And he’s third generation cop to boot. His old man was one of the best—Kent Baily—shot in the head by a punk in Orange Mound—another drug deal gone bad. Thought it would have kept his son out of the brotherhood, but he just came in faster.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” Wilcox asked.

  Baily pushed the stack of files to the center of the table. “I brought you a present, you mean old coot.” He waved at the bar and tilted his hand to his mouth. A beer would arrive in minutes.

  “You tryin’ to get on my good side?” Wilcox said. “My eye’s still sore.”

  Baily smiled. His white teeth lit the table and changed the moment. “You upset me the other day. Don’t ever say I don’t give a shit about catchin’ bad guys. You’re lucky you only got one shiner. All I saw was red.”

  Tony lit a cigarette. “Guess it was a little insensitive,” he said under his breath.

  “You pissed off half the detectives with that ‘holier than thou’ crap. We know you’re the best at catchin’ bad guys, but don’t think you care more than any of us.”

  “You come here to tell me how to be, rookie?” Wilcox leaned back sucking his smoke.

  “Nope. Guess you’ll always be an asshole. Right now I’m cutting you some slack. You’ve been through a lot. Just remember, Alex was my friend too. We came up the ranks together. I miss the hell out of him—a damn good man. But there’s nothin’ we can do about it now. Sometimes the bad guys win. They got my dad and they got Alex. It can’t stop us. It must make us stronger.”

  Wilcox looked over his tilted bottle a hundred miles away. The memory of the day he found his rookie partner tortured and dead was still raw. It could still be his end game.

  Baily grabbed a file off the top of the stack. “You want to finish eating your sick lookin’ burger and those four grungy fries you’re playin’ with, or you wanna get somethin’ done? I brought the case files of the unsolved homicides that could tie to your Mr. Deckle.”

  Wilcox mentally returned and focused on the stack. He took a slow drag. “Guess you’ve looked inside those files since you think they’re connected. The boys have been less than cooperative with details,” Wilcox muttered.

  “’Cause you’ve been a pain in the ass tryin’ to get your way, the hell with everyone else. It’s a new day, Detective Wilcox. You actually have to be nice to people you work with.” Baily opened the first dog-eared file and knocked over a beer. Wilcox caught it like the fries and didn’t spill a drop. Baily’s beer arrived. They sat and drank and stared at each other—thinking.

  “August 22. Thomas Derby, a thirty-seven-year-old white male,” Baily scanned. “Found hangin’ out the window, fourteenth floor of the Sterick Building.”

  “Damn abandoned building for decades. Tell me why this is not a suicide?”

  “The autopsy. Petty said Mr. Derby had to be dead before he got strung up.” Baily looked up from the file. “Guess he couldn’t hang himself dead, and I’m no doctor.” He grabbed his longneck and stuck it in his smile. Wilcox frowned rubbing his unshaven jaw.

  Smart ass. “Then how’d the ME say he died?” Wilcox asked.

  “Strangled. One hand. A crushing grip. Petty said it shattered the thyroid cartilage and fractured cervical vertebrae—neck spine bones. She made these notes in red ink—three of the seven cervical vertebrae were snapped clean in two. Strangulation pressure had to be great. Trauma to the thyroid cartilage and trachea—the front part of the neck—is always expected in strangulations, but the damage to Derby’s spine was excessive.”

  “Can that damage happen other ways like running into something, or the body dropping some distance and stopping with the rope around the neck? Seems to me body weight directed to the noose could do serious damage.”

  “Petty says no. There’s telltale tissue damage fitting both fracture sites, one large hand wrapped around the guy’s neck—a fat thumb over the thyroid cartilage and four fingers clampin’ down on the back of the neck. Dr. Petty says the finger indentations almost left prints.”

  Wilcox downed his beer and waved two fingers. “Someone went to great lengths to make it look like a suicide. Takes effort and strength to hang a dead guy out a window.”

  “Yeah, and Mr. Derby looked strange according to these notes—eyes popping out his head like fried eggs sunny side up, and a snow white face. But all you guys look like that to me.” He chuckled into his longneck again.

  “Funny—racist. We can’t all be melanin gifted. What else you got?”

  Baily leaned into the file flipping pages with big fingers. “Don’t see anythin’ major in detective notes. Wait. Somethin’ about a weird smile. Derby’s mouth was wide open, corners pulled back to his ears. He swallowed his tongue, too. Petty’s notes are full of medical terms. I think ‘contorted
anterior facials’ means face was screwed up.”

  “We need more on the Sterick building and what Derby was doing there? What did he do for a living? Who wanted him dead? Did anyone report the guy missing? I want to know who saw Derby hanging outside the fourteenth floor window. Really! When’s the last time you even looked at that eyesore of a building? It’s damn invisible downtown.”

  “You’re the old fart with the history of the city. I’m the rookie. Look. I got a suggestion, somethin’ I’ve been readin’ about—the art of closing in on linked killings.”

  “You read?” Wilcox scoffed.

  “Keep that up and I’ll pound you again. It says it’s best to start with overviews of cold cases, don’t get hung up in details early. Take these three cases and Deckle for example, what ties them together that’s simple? After we get the big picture, we can dive deeper and see if it holds together or falls apart. This technique is supposed to speed up the process. Gets us lookin’ at the relevant stuff first. We don’t get lost in the minutia.”

  Wilcox pushed his cigarette into his burger bun. The ‘graduated assessment process’ is how it’s done. Glad to see someone’s writing this stuff down. “Go ahead, Baily.”

  “Okay. We got William Hudson next, another white guy but older than Derby, forty-five. He’s an accountant in private practice. Petty puts time of death early morning September 11.”

  “A decomp. Died twenty days after Derby,” Wilcox said.

  “Right. But Mr. Hudson wasn’t strangled. He got a knife in the back.”

  “Like Deckle.”

  “Correct. They found Mr. Hudson in an office building, White Station Tower. Unlike the Sterick Building, this place is open for business,” Baily said.

  “Except the tenth floor where the body was found,” Wilcox added.

  “They closed the floor for remodeling scheduled to start year end. Had controlled access—locked doors in stairwells, elevator programmed to skip it. You needed a key to get on the floor, one only security had.”

  “That’s bullshit. Anyone can get a key, especially bad people,” Wilcox said. “It’s like damn guns. Never understood the logic of the idiots wanting to take guns from the innocent people.”

  “Yeah, for another day. Good news is the elevator is monitored 24/7. The last stop on the tenth floor was seven days prior to Hudson’s time of death—September 4. The building manager and a couple of architects found the body on the seventeenth, a bad smell complaint.”

  “What about surveillance, they gotta have cameras.”

  “They do,” Baily said. “But the cameras on ten were turned off when they closed the floor back in July.”

  “What about stairwells, elevators, and lobbies on all the other floors? Hudson had to get to ten somehow. He didn’t just materialize. If we haven’t done it yet, we need to look at video from the fourth to the seventeenth. Hudson’s gotta be there, and maybe our killer.

  “What we have on the knife wound?” Wilcox asked.

  Baily kept a nose in the file dragging a finger. “Tell me if this line’s out of the Deckle M.E. report. Knife entered posterior thoracic region, deep penetration between T4-T5. Lacerated aortic artery, exsanguination—fatal blood loss.”

  Exactly like Deckle. “The poor bastard bled to death in minutes,” Wilcox said under his breath. They both stared at their beers as they relived the heinous act. Wilcox lit another smoke. “What else?”

  Baily blinked his way back to the table and flipped the page. “Same as Derby, the white face and bulging eyes and weird smile, lips pulled back to the ears. Swallowed his tongue. It’s like something scared the hell out of ’em.”

  “What else you got?”

  “Petty says he was dead a week before he was found.”

  “Any signs of a struggle?” Wilcox asked.

  “No.”

  “You got Pemberton’s file?”

  “Yes. Mark Pemberton, another white guy, age forty-six,” Baily said as the waitress walked up behind. “Yes, I want another beer.”

  “I’ll take another long neck,” Wilcox said as she took the remains of his burger and cleared the bottle collection. “Leave my burnt fries alone, please ma’am.”

  Baily’s nose dipped back into the open file. “I can tell you a lot about this one. He’s mine. I found him in a dumpster behind the Peabody Hotel October 1. You were out of town chasing your favorite serial killer.”

  Wilcox rolled his eyes. “Don’t remind me.”

  “Mr. Pemberton got killed twenty days after Mr. Hudson. Strangled identical to Mr. Derby. The ME said damage to the neck was a forensic match. Hudson and Derby are connected.”

  “Slow down, Baily. Who found Pemberton?”

  Two wet longnecks hit the table. “Hotel employee taking out the trash. Saw a leg hanging out the top of the dumpster. Mr. Pemberton had to be tossed up there.”

  “And how did you reach that conclusion?”

  “The guy that found him had wheeled out his first pile of garbage bags. Tossed the bags seven feet up into the jumbo dumpster. He saw nothing. He returns with a second pile of bags five minutes later and sees Pemberton’s leg. It had to happen in the five-minute window. Pemberton was on top of the first pile of garbage bags the guy tossed.”

  “We got pictures?”

  “Somewhere in here.” Baily dug through the file. “Mr. Pemberton’s a big guy, two hundred and thirty pounds. I looked for a ladder or somethin’ in the alley to stand on. I found nothing.”

  “Or he came from high above, Baily.”

  “Damn! The roof.”

  “Is the parking garage next to that dumpster?”

  “Yes sir. I missed it,” Baily sighed.

  “Derby, Hudson, Pemberton, and Deckle: four unsolved homicides twenty days apart, two identical strangulations, two identical knifings, four weird faces, all around the same age. Derby’s the only one repositioned to look like a suicide,” Wilcox said.

  “Maybe the killer stopped trying to hide his work after Derby?”

  If that’s true, there could be kills before Derby. “We need to take a closer look at all deaths in the city twenty day increments prior to the Derby death. I mean all homicides, suicides, accidental, and naturals. We need to look for more connections.”

  “You think we got a serial killer?” Baily asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s too soon to go there,” Wilcox said. “Could be organized crime taking out the trash, or just coincidental. We need something more definitive to connect the cases.”

  “Your Mr. Deckle’s the only one with an eyewitness,” Baily said as he opened the file.

  “Right. Hunter Keller, a strange little guy. Works in a used book store across from the bank—Rare Books,” Wilcox said lighting another cigarette. “Says he saw someone go in the bank. Claims he tried to warn Deckle—called him on his cell. Couldn’t get him to answer, so he called 911. The ME said Deckle was dead before the call to 911. I have Deckle’s cell. Keller never called him.”

  “Sounds a little screwy, but it would not be the first time an eyewitness couldn’t remember. What else did Keller tell you?”

  “He described an old model sedan that crawled by the bank with its lights off. Claims it parked in the alley. He said he was closing the book store when it caught his attention. He gave me a ‘comic book’ description of a guy leaving the car and entering the bank—a large, dark man floating over the ground wearing a long, black coat, the collar up, and a wide brimmed hat with a round top.”

  “Sounds like the ‘Darkman’, an old sci-fi movie.”

  Wilcox put down his longneck and flipped his Zippo lighter between his fingers “I talked to Deckle’s wife that night.”

  “You went to see her?”

  “Nope. Talked to her on Deckle’s cell phone. She called right before I crossed Main to talk to Mr. Keller. She knew something had happened. A Memphis cop answered the phone and passed it to me.”

  “You told her on the phone her husband was killed?”

 
Wilcox lit another smoke. “Had no choice. But that’s not what I’m trying to tell you, Baily. His wife was on the cell phone with her husband the same time when Keller claims he called Deckle. The two were talking when the car parked in the alley. That old sedan belongs to Deckle.”

  “Strange, but I don’t think Keller did this.”

  “Is it your gut or brain talking?” Wilcox shot back

  “My brain says any one of the four dead guys could crush that little guy like a bug.”

  “I don’t know. I interviewed him all night. He’s more than an eyewitness. He’s hiding something.”

  Baily pulled out a small notepad. “I saw that comment in the Deckle file, so I did some checking on Keller.” He flipped a few pages and squinted at his bullet points. “Abandoned at birth. Bounced around foster homes until adopted by Arnold and Alma Keller. Grew up in Oklahoma on a farm south of Stringtown.”

  “Abandoned at birth?” Wilcox rubbed the stubble on his chin watching the door.

  “Keller was found in the snow around midnight in December. Don’t have a year. He was found stuffed in a cardboard box left at a train stop in Stringtown. Hadn’t been a train go through that town for decades. It was abandoned even back then.”

  “Surprised he didn’t freeze to death.”

  “Some lady found him. She was walking her dog.”

  “Walkin’ a dog at midnight in a snowstorm? What’re the chances?” Wilcox scoffed.

  “Hospital report said he was wrapped in a bloody blanket with his umbilical cord still attached. They estimated he was less than an hour old when they got him. Said he almost died ’cause the drop in body temp. His name came from the blanket—a Hunter blanket.

  “The guy’s described as a quiet bookworm type,” Baily said. “I think he came into our world because he saw somethin’ outside his window at closing time. Maybe he screwed up some of the details, but there’s a chance he did see Deckle’s killer.”

  “I couldn’t confirm a thing he said.”

  “Maybe he was smoking pot or somethin’.” Baily held his notepad up to the hanging lamp. “Here’s something I forgot. His adoptive parents died five years ago.”