by Alex Hughes
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather go through you,” I said quickly.
“I’m getting tired of playing kindergarten teacher with you two.”
I waited.
“Keep me in the loop. I don’t want to be caught off guard if you’re gone.”
“Fine.” I leaned forward. The thing with Tom bothered me. A lot. I’d promised him, damn it. Promised him we’d keep him safe.
“Are you okay?” Paulsen asked, an odd question from a cop. “You haven’t been . . .”
“I’m fine,” I said automatically. Surrounded by this many cops, I’d say it lit on fire and covered in supercancer. I wasn’t, of course; my world was tilting on its axis lately, and I was gripping on with the edges of my fingernails. But I was gripping. And maybe, today, the telepathy could work. Maybe I could prove myself. Maybe I could keep this job.
Her posture straightened all at once. “Make sure you stay that way, okay? Talk to me before something major happens.” She paused, like she was waiting for me to say something else. Finally, when I didn’t, she said, “Close the door on your way out.”
* * *
It occurred to me suddenly that I hadn’t put Cherabino’s cubicle back in its dubious order when I’d left it last night. Not a good move when I was trying to get back in her good graces. I checked the time—I had an hour before the big group of interviews started this morning. Maybe I could go fix this, and show I was trying.
I arrived at the cubicle, coffee peace offering in hand, but she wasn’t there. The mess, however, was. So I straightened up as best I could, restoring her piles where I thought I’d left them. The casebook with Emily’s autopsy was out in the center of the desk, where I’d left it, and she’d left it in the cabinet.
I put the file back, my hands running over the smooth rows of binders, a visceral representation of order. Or disorder; this was Cherabino’s Unsolved Cabinet, and just this drawer was stuffed to the brim with maybe twenty-five cases. Rows of binders, of folders, small and large—new ones to the front, carefully labeled in Cherabino’s messy scrawl, colored tags sticking up from cases that had gone cold or were waiting on something. I think the yellow flags were court appearances. I went back and read the labels carefully, trying to see if they sparked anything.
I recognized a lot of the names. A beheading, a stab victim, one shooting precise and tidy in a new school, one with the brains splattered in the old bathroom in the south side. That strangler in the car with the female cop. The guy trampled to death behind a horse barn.
Wait—strangler? I went back, pulling Officer Peeler’s murder book out—the book had a blue flag, whatever that meant. I spread out the book’s gory pictures, the crime scene in all its glory.
The woman in the car, strangled with a clear cord. A clear cord with an edge that cut into her neck, opening it like an eerie red smile. Blood splattered everywhere. Everywhere but the passenger seat—a space for the child, the child who got away, the child who wouldn’t hardly talk afterward.
And at the center of the scene in the car, in the center of Mindspace, a calm, sharp mind. A mind I’d felt before. A mind I’d felt at the house a few days ago. The mind of our killer.
I shut the file drawer hard, the sound echoing, as Cherabino arrived.
* * *
“What are you doing in my files?” she asked.
“I know who Emily’s killer is,” I returned. “Or at least a starting place.” I caught her up with what I’d found. “We never caught the hit man, remember? The guy who actually killed Peeler. It’s the same mind, I’d swear it. And the cord he abandoned—that clear cord. It’s just like the fragment of cord Dotty was talking about. Did we ever get analysis back on that?”
“We did,” Cherabino said. “Let me see.” She came over and stood too close to me, looking at the pictures spread out over her desk.
“Where’s Michael?” I asked.
“System flush,” she said absently. “He picked up a little lung cancer while out in the field, and the doctor says they might as well go ahead and take care of it. He should be back this afternoon. I’ve got a session myself next week.” She looked up. “Isn’t it time for your checkup again? You are a smoker.”
“I know, I know.” I had no intention of going to the doctor, though. At least not until the telepathy healed up; I didn’t want the chance of the Guild getting any information on me I couldn’t control.
Cherabino reached out and touched one of the pictures on the desk in front of her. “How sure are you it’s the same mind?”
Not very, my mind echoed immediately. I think she got the edge of it. “As sure as I can be right now,” I added. “You don’t find killers that calm in the middle of things, you just don’t. And the feel of that mind . . .” I struggled to describe a sense she’d never had and never seen, grasping at something . . . “Smell. If it was smell, he’s sharp like the smell of ammonia. Distinctive. I’d know it again, I swear. And I was there at the first scene. He got interrupted and he left that cord.”
“In the bottom drawer of the Unsolved files, there’s a red binder. It’s the one with Strangler Number Four written on it. Pull that out for me.”
“Sure,” I said, and did.
We waited while she went over the files. “That cord should have been a tip-off. Damn it. He’s a cop killer, for crying out loud. I had flags all over the place. I don’t know why I didn’t catch this before.”
“You mean other than the hundreds of cases that have been across your desk since?”
She fingered the blue flag on the side of the binder, and another, bent-over green flag. “I had it marked to look at over the holiday at least. And sent out a notice. Most of the county and the GBI knows to flag me if they find a murder fitting the description. I would have picked it up again over Christmas with new information.” Most of the department took a lot of time off in December, so nonessential work was pushed to January, frequently. Cherabino worked straight through, and used the time to catch up on outstanding cases. Last year I had stayed too, to keep up.
She paged through and made small “hmmph” sounds. “Ah, okay. This guy doesn’t usually leave the bodies out like this. He’s much more methodical than that. You add in the domestic violence thing and you’ve got my brain going in a whole other direction. I mean, they’re under money pressure as it is. Why add the expense of a killer for hire when you can just do it yourself?”
“Maybe he knows Emily, or something.”
“You keep calling her Emily. It’s not good to get too close to the victim, you know.”
I purposefully ignored that. “It’s weird, I’ll give you, considering the circumstances. But it was definitely that guy at the scene. The cop killer.”
“The scene where you passed out? That one?”
“Doesn’t mean I was blind to what mattered. It’s him. You want a rabbit out of the hat, this is what I have.”
She blew out a line of air. “I asked for help, I’ll take the help. But I want you to understand, if this is the same guy I’ve been trying to find, there’s something else going on. Something we need to find.”
I felt the information about Emily almost on the tip of my tongue, almost ready to blurt out—but something, like a deepwater fish, darted across Cherabino’s mind. I got a picture of an intense sexual moment—and she turned bright red. Her embarrassment covered any details.
I reached for something, anything, to cover the moment. “What are the other cases?” I asked.
She took a breath and latched onto the change in subject like a lifeline. “There was another sighting in Stone Mountain. No cord, though. And a case that might have had something to do with it, maybe not. It’s been a long few months.”
“Why not a cord?”
“He doesn’t usually leave them behind. The scene in the car was interrupted, remember?”
That’s right, bec
ause of the kid in the car. “Wait, what did Dotty’s report on the cord say?”
“She and Michael have traced the cord material to three major companies in the area—the only companies in a hundred miles that even could have produced that kind of material, especially with the black-light lettering;apparently that takes some kind of specialized industrial process or something. In any case, Michael’s pretty sure he knows which—one of them uses Dymani Systems for their shipping.”
“Where—” I hurriedly corrected myself. “Where our victim worked.”
“You’ve got it. No guarantee it’s a real link, by the way, but suspicious. We’ll have Andrew going over their books with a fine-tooth comb. Going to have to wait a day or two—there’s a priority he’s working on right now.”
“In the meantime, we’re going to interview the other companies and Dymani Systems, maybe Emily’s boss?” I asked.
Cherabino looked at me, smiled, and then winced from her headache. “That’s on the agenda, yes.” She gathered up the pictures. “This is a good lead. I’m glad you found it.”
The moment was suddenly thick and perfect. I wanted—I wanted things I couldn’t have. And I wouldn’t scare her, I wouldn’t push her, I wouldn’t.
I pulled for the first change of subject I could think of. Work. “Did they ever identify the body in Stone Mountain?”
A pang rang through me as she looked away.
“No. No, there was too much gone. Artificial organs, biological implants, nothing was in good enough shape to be any help. And DNA and Missing Persons didn’t find any matches.” She paused. “He pulled out the teeth, all of them, so nothing was left for dental. And he buried him. This guy can clean up his tracks when he wants to. Assuming it’s him.”
“He didn’t clean up at the house.”
“No.” She straightened her shoulders. “No, he didn’t. At the car scene, we surprised him. He didn’t have an option. But here he did—he had all the time he wanted. And he left her out for us to find, staged just like that.”
“And you think that’s significant.”
“Yeah. It has to be. He killed a cop, Adam. Officer Peeler. One of us. And that wasn’t his first, or his fifth, kill. I swore to myself I’d find this guy. I swore, and then I let it get pushed aside.”
“You’ll find him,” I said, with full assurance.
“Maybe. I’m not going to give up, I can tell you that much. You can’t just kill a cop and walk away. But he’s smart, he’s well connected. Since we still haven’t been able to find him, despite all the money trails, all the stakeouts and hard work, means he’s a professional. Until he makes a mistake or I get lucky . . .”
“What if the house is a mistake?” I asked. “The messy scene. Could we find him that way?”
“I sure as hell am going to try.”
* * *
The morning and most of the afternoon passed in a blur of difficult interviews, which became more difficult as the afternoon wore on and my telepathy started to have issues again. Finally I tapped out and settled down at a desk to do paperwork. At least the letters weren’t swimming today; I had to really focus, but I could read them.
“Good news,” Michael said. I looked up from my desk. Yes, that was really him, and he was talking to me. Directly. Without Cherabino. He looked run-down today, with a slight green tinge to his skin left over from the flush.
I thought about asking about it to be polite, and then decided I didn’t really want the rundown. “Good news about what?”
He had a stack of paper files, computer printouts, and legal-pad notes in hand. A heavy stack. “The records search came up with information on the strangler you guys are looking for. A lot of it, actually. I finished it up just now.”
“Cherabino told you about that?”
“Yes. She asked me to try to see where else he’s struck over the last few years, see if we can find a pattern.”
I cleared space on the desk and pulled a chair over. “Why aren’t you telling this to Cherabino?”
“She’s in court.” He set down the stack of files on the desk and opened one of them. “Here, Gwinnett County. They have six hits on stranglers in the last five years, most of them just as messy as our case, one a more conventional ligature. There was also a hanging—looked like a kill rather than self-induced, but it didn’t sound important.” He pulled out a handwritten list with Cobb County listed at the top. “Marietta City Police said—”
“Hold up.” I put my hands in the time-out position.
“What?”
“How many counties did you call?”
“All of them?”
“In Georgia?”
“In metro, why?”
I took a breath. “That’s way more work than anybody would expect you to do. Holy cow, that’s a lot of legwork. Did anybody give you any trouble with the data?”
“I talked to the records clerks. It was pretty straightforward.”
I sat back and looked at Michael with fresh eyes. Yeah, he was generally happy. Yeah, he’d stolen my spot next to Cherabino—but he just might be brilliant. He just might be an asset, a help. And maybe I needed to get over myself and listen to the guy.
“Is that bad?” he asked.
“No, not at all. Just unexpected. Every other cop in the place tends not to talk to me.” Oops, too honest there.
“You’re on the team.”
“Well, yes.”
“Well, there you go, then.” He looked at me like I was being an idiot. Maybe I was.
“What do we have in DeKalb?” I asked, to change the subject. “I assume about the same?” DeKalb might be a bit more densely populated, but it was smaller. It had to be similar population numbers.
“Well, no. At least thirty.”
“Thirty? In comparison to four?”
“According to the records. It’s a trend in the South DeKalb zone, at least according to the numbers. Domestic abuse with bruises all the way up to serious brain damage and death. Sometimes in the same couple over the span of a few months. What’s interesting to me is we don’t have any police reports of this couple in particular. . . .”
“He beat her,” I said.
“Yes. You said that. But did he strangle her?”
I flashed through a whole bunch of strong emotions I’d had foisted on me at the scene. He’d abused her in a hundred ways, including rape, but . . . “No,” it hurt me to admit, “no strangulation. Where are you going with this line of reasoning?”
He pulled out another folder, this one in a brighter color—likely one he’d bought himself rather than a department purchase. “See, Homicide magazine says hired killers generally have a preferred method, something they go back to again and again. They’ll get paid to make something look like an accident, say, and most will probably do it, but the next job, they’ll go back to their comfort zone. So I put together a report like Cherabino said and sent it over to her federal contact to see if they have cases in other states, if somebody else is trying to catch this guy.”
“Federal contact?” I asked, nervous, reminded of that phone call from the FBI. I wasn’t talking about that unless someone brought it up, I told myself. And Kara was getting me a certification.
“Have you sent over a description of the crimes to the GBI?” I remembered the state profiler who’d helped us on the last case with Bradley, a woman by the name of Piccanonni. Ordered woman—she thought in rows and boxes. “Dotty said she was sending the information on the cord, but they’ll have a lot of access to information we just don’t on the local level. Might be worth checking in to see if they’ll share.”
“Is that antijurisdictional?”
“If the federal thing is okay, the state wouldn’t be? Don’t look at me. That would be a question for Cherabino.” I took a second to skim into his head deep enough to figure out what in the heck he was talking
about. Oh, sharing information bad? Huh. Paulsen always seemed pretty open to such things, but maybe she was a rebel. Wait, I’d been able to read him. Mind-deaf Michael. In the afternoon. And my head hadn’t hurt, not at all. Holy crap, this was awesome! Maybe the universe was finally smiling on me. Maybe I could make this happen.
I leaned forward and started to page through the folders. His careful handwriting was everywhere—this must have taken him hours. It would have taken me days.
Fulton County had a bright green sticky note on it—City Hall? Space Port? Then another sticker on Fayette County, one on Paulding, Jackson . . .
“How many victims did you find?” I looked up at Michael. “By your standards. If you’re looking for the hit man. How many do you think he’s killed in the last five years?”
“Thirty-six.”
Seemed like a lot of people. “Thirty-six?”
“Well, if you consider maybe a hit a month over five years, just the ones we’ve caught. If you really think he’s a killer for hire, the number’s not all that unreasonable.”
I whistled. Still. “The metro area has six million people. I guess it’s a big enough population to support a business like that.”
“There has to be a way to trace him through the money or through the victims,” Michael said. “Cherabino says there’s always a common thread.”
Money. “We have to get on Andrew’s list ASAP. Hired killers need to be paid. Let me teach you how to get through the priority system—it’s called gifts. Good gifts. Do you have a short list?”
“A short list?”
“Victims you think for certain for certain are the same killer’s handiwork. We need to have all our ducks in a row—and the right present—if there’s any chance we can get Andrew’s boss to push us higher in the priority list.”
He went blank for a second. “I can make one.”
“You do that. I’ll have to figure out what Brown needs these days and if we can afford it. In the meantime, maybe we can start tracing back commonalities and give us a head start on finding the guy.” I stood up and grabbed a beaten-up chair from the empty desk next to me. I brought it back, setting it down on the side of the open space. “Here, sit down, we’ll go through what you’ve got. When’s Cherabino getting back?” I asked him, regretfully—I should know these things.