Next he checks the propane torch. After a quick shake, he determines the handheld tank to be half full. That’s not enough fuel for what he has planned, so he unscrews the pencil-flame top from the canister and attaches it to a fresh tank.
The final tool on his workbench is a two-pound ball-peen hammer with a plastic composite shank extending from the stainless steel head down through the handle. This requires no fine tuning, so he lets it be.
Over the years, he’s used just about every device imaginable to inflict pain. He had a phase where he preferred power tools. A phase where he only used his gloved hands. For a two-year stretch, every murder he committed was done with a car jack; with wire ties it could be used to easily detach joints from sockets.
But after a lifetime of trial and error, he decided the simplest ways were ultimately the best. Cutting. Burning. Breaking. Everything beyond that was just showing off.
He glances at his iPhone again. Jack’s eyes are squeezed shut, her jaw muscles clenching down on the ball gag.
Think that hurts, Lieutenant? Just wait until tonight.
Because tonight, Mr. K will show off.
Twenty-one years ago
1989, August 16
The Cook County Morgue smelled like a butcher shop from Dante’s seventh circle of hell.
Underneath the acrid stench of bleach and spray disinfectant, there was the unmistakable odor of meat. But it was meat on the verge of going bad—the beginning stages of rot that all the chemicals in the world couldn’t completely mask.
I was standing in one of the autopsy rooms, staring down at the headless corpse of a naked Caucasian woman—the one we’d discovered in the Dumpster while chasing that bald john the night before. Her arms and legs were severed, but Medical Examiner Phil Blasky—a balding man with an egg-shaped head—had placed them in the appropriate spots along her torso.
I wondered if they would be sewn back on before burial, or if it didn’t matter, since she didn’t have a head.
I’d traded my hooker outfit for plainclothes—a gray, off-the-rack pantsuit I bought at Sears. It was too loose in the butt and too tight in the chest, and with my hair pulled back I looked somewhat like an effeminate man. Especially since I’d forsaken makeup, having had enough of the gunk caked on me yesterday. In the car ride over to the morgue, I spent five solid minutes trying to convince my partner, Harry McGlade, that I wasn’t a lesbian.
Harry nudged me with his elbow, then pointed to the dead woman’s chest.
“Look how perky they are, even in death. Think they’re even paid for yet?”
The corpse’s implants stuck out like two torpedoes. Except for their color—a very pale blue—they looked like they’d popped right out of the pages of Playboy.
“Maybe you should have that done,” Harry said. “You’re sort of lacking in that department, Jackie.”
“You forgot to take your pill today, Harry.”
“My pill?”
“Your shut the fuck up pill.”
“You’re funny.”
“And you’re seven kinds of stupid. You ever want to make detective?”
Harry shrugged.
“Well, I do,” I said through my teeth as Blasky came back into the room. “So try to act like a cop.”
Harry saluted me. “Yes, sir.”
Asshole. I still couldn’t believe I got stuck with him as a partner.
Blasky stood across the autopsy table from us. He nodded at me. Unlike the old boys’ network back at the district house, Blasky treated me like a cop, not like a girl or a pretender to the throne.
“Do you know the cause of death?” I asked.
“I’m not a doctor,” Harry said, “but I’d put my money on the severed head and limbs.”
Blasky smiled condescendingly at Harry. “Then you’d lose your money,” Blasky said, his voice deep and commanding, not far off from Darth Vader’s. “The amputations were postmortem. CAT scan shows she died from internal hemorrhaging. Several major organs were pierced.”
“How?” Harry folded his arms across his chest. “There are no stab wounds at all.”
I was wondering the same thing, but then I noticed a trickle of blood seeping out between the woman’s legs.
“A sharpened broomstick,” I said.
Blasky raised an eyebrow. “That’s my guess as well. We’ll know for sure when I open her up. Why didn’t you think it was a sword? Or a poker?”
“Those would have damaged her labia.”
“What?” McGlade asked. “You mean someone stuck a…oh, shit…that’s sick.”
“Have you swabbed for semen?” I asked. “Yes. Negative.”
That didn’t rule out rape. Perp could have used a condom. The cause of death made this an obvious sex murder.
“Defense marks?” I asked.
The medical examiner shook his head. “No. No ligature marks either. I’m betting the blood work shows drugs.”
After discovering the body in the Dumpster last night, I’d stayed and watched the crime scene team do their work. They’d dusted for prints on the body and come up negative. They’d also scraped under the fingernails in the hope the victim scratched her killer and picked up some of his skin cells or blood. Chicago had adopted the new DNA profiling technique begun in England, and it could directly link a perp to a crime by determining a genetic match.
But if the victim were drugged to the point where she didn’t even need to be tied up while she was being assaulted, chances weren’t high there would be DNA evidence.
I put my hand in front of my face to stifle a yawn. After watching the crime scene guys do their thing, I’d had to write my report of the murder, as well as my report for arresting the john who hopped into the Dumpster after asking me to manipulate his prostate. As a result, I slept a total of two hours, and that was mostly tossing and turning. I’d been struggling with insomnia since graduating the police academy, but I was pretty sure it was a transitory thing.
At least, I hoped it was.
The door to the autopsy room opened, and two men walked in. Both were thin, both were older than McGlade and I. One was dressed like me—a cheap suit, barely concealing the shoulder holster. He had a thick, wide mustache that looked a lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s. I don’t think he could have appeared more like a stereotypical Homicide detective if he tried.
The other wore a gray suit that fit like it was made just for him and probably cost more than I earned in a month. He obviously wasn’t a cop, and he was kind of cute, in a strong-jawed male-model sort of way.
The cop eyed Harry and me, then held out his hand.
“Detective Herb Benedict, Homicide. Call me Herb.”
His grip was warm and confident.
“Officer Jacqueline Streng. Jacqueline is fine.” I hated when Harry called me Jackie.
“Who’s the suit?” Harry asked.
The good-looking man answered, “Armani.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Armani,” I said, extending my hand.
The man’s eyes twinkled. “The suit is made by a designer named Giorgio Armani. My name is Shell Compton.”
His grip was also warm and confident, but it lingered longer than Herb’s.
“This one of your whores, Shelly?” Harry asked, jerking a thumb at the corpse.
Shell’s face got hard, and he took his hand back and stared at McGlade. “None of the ladies who work with me are whores. They’re escorts, and what they chose to do with their clients is their business and perfectly legal.”
“Huh,” Harry said. “Never met a self-righteous pimp before.”
“Is he your partner?”
Shell asked me.
I nodded.
Shell tilted his head to the side and whispered, so only I heard him. “I’m so sorry.”
Then we all turned our attention to the body. I watched Shell’s eyes, watched his look of shock turn to sadness when he noticed the tattoo on the corpse’s ankle.
“That’s Linda,” he said, shoulders saggin
g.
“You’re sure?” Herb asked.
“Tattoo on her ankle. Mole on her collarbone.” He turned away, glassy-eyed.
Herb flipped open a handheld notepad. “You reported Linda Candell missing yesterday. She’d been gone for forty-eight hours prior to that.”
Shell nodded. “Linda wasn’t flighty. She didn’t just disappear, and she’d never miss a date with a client. I tried to file a police report after she missed her first appointment, but I was told I had to wait two days.” He looked at the ME. “When did she die?”
Blasky clucked his tongue. “Hard to say. When I took her core temperature, it was seventy degrees. In that heat, in that dumpster, it should have been at least a hundred. I think, after she was murdered, the killer put her on ice. Not a freezer—there aren’t freezer burns. But someplace cold.”
I felt a shiver crawl up my backbone. Being horribly murdered was bad enough. Getting stuck in a refrigerator afterward, like meat, was one of the worst things I’d ever heard.
Shell must not have cared for the idea either. He excused himself and hurried out of the room. Herb tucked his notebook into his breast pocket and turned to me.
“How long have you been doing Vice stings, Jacqueline?”
“Yesterday was my sixth night.”
“Do you think you can do an undercover operation for longer than a night? Say, a week or two?”
I felt my pulse quicken, wondering if this would be my opportunity to finally work Homicide. Goodbye spandex skirts and slutty high heels. Hello respect and commendation.
“This is the third body in six weeks,” Herb continued. “Same MO. All escorts. Two of them worked for Shell.”
“He’s gotta be the killer,” Harry said. “I don’t trust guys who wear nice clothes.”
Both Herb and I ignored him. “You’re thinking I pose as an escort,” I said.
Herb nodded. “I’ve already talked to my captain. You’d be placed in Shell’s operation, working full time. He’s already agreed. We think it might be someone close to his business, maybe a client or a competitor. You wouldn’t have to do anything sexual. Shell was telling the truth; his escort service is simply an escort service, not a prostitution ring. You’d wear a wire the whole time, be under full surveillance—”
“I’ll do it,” I said, interrupting him.
Herb stared at me. He had a kind face, but his gaze was hard. “Wasn’t too long ago I was a uniform, eager to get into plainclothes. But this is serious, Jacqueline. The man doing this is a monster.”
I gave him a hard stare right back. “I’m in. This is why I became a cop.”
We held the intensity for a few seconds in silence, then Herb grinned. “Great,” he said, chuckling.
Was he mocking me? I folded my arms across my chest. “Is something funny, Detective?”
Herb shook his head. “Not at all. I just have this feeling we’re going to work well together.”
Present day
2010, August 10
I began to cry. My eyes stung like I’d been hit with mace. But the real sting was in my wrists.
The bastard had dipped the rope around my arms in salt.
As I sawed away at the edge of the concrete, determined to break the rope, it eventually began to rub my skin raw. The pain was quite extraordinary for such a superficial wound. I put it up alongside root canals and getting shot and breaking my leg.
Mr. K liked salt. It was a trademark of his, along with the ball gag.
I really have to get out of here.
I continued to work on the rope, tears streaming down my face, biting down on the rubber ball to help with the pain, trying not to think about Mr. K’s other trademarks.
The ones I’d seen firsthand.
Three years ago
2007, August 8
I walked briskly to the storage facility, minding each step so I didn’t scrape my Jimmy Choos. They weren’t the most appropriate footwear for police work, but a long time ago a man taught me that more people remembered style than deeds, and that stuck. Even so, I tried to overcompensate with deeds in an effort to compete with my boundless style.
Herb waddled behind me, wheezing. I slowed my pace just a tad, letting him catch up, trying to remember what he used to be like when he was thin. Back in the day, Herb Benedict could run a hundred meters in thirteen seconds. Now it would take him two minutes. Seven minutes if he had to stop to tie his shoes. Eighteen minutes if there was a hot dog stand on the route.
Merle’s U-Store-It was an ugly brown building, the dirty brick coated in graffiti so old even the taggers didn’t think it worthwhile anymore. It was a few stories tall, probably a converted warehouse or factory from the days when Chicago was an industrial hub. The entrance was a single metal door with a sign next to it, proclaiming they were open six a.m. until midnight, seven days a week.
The door opened to a narrow hallway, a bare forty-watt bulb stuck in the ceiling, which made the grimy walls look even dingier. A few yards down was the obligatory manager/watchman, behind a protective barrier of bulletproof glass that bore a few divots. Black guy, short beard, scar on his nose. At the moment, all the watchman was watching was a portable television set up on his desk. He didn’t even glance at us when we walked up, and I had to rap on the window to get his attention.
“New rental contracts are on the table,” he droned. “If you forgot your key, I need two forms of ID, and there’s a five-dollar charge.”
He still hadn’t looked at us.
“Police,” I said, fishing my gold badge from the pocket of my Tignanello handbag and clinking it against the glass.
“Police still gotta pay the five bucks.” He kept his eyes on the TV.
“We’re here to arrest the man who just came in. Did you see him?”
“Didn’t see nuthin’.”
I looked around the cubbyhole he used as an office. No security system. No surveillance equipment. If he didn’t see the guy, there was no way he’d know which storage unit he owned. This place was so low tech I was surprised the entrance had an electric lock.
“Buzz us in,” I said, using my cop tone.
“Got a warrant?”
I considered saying yes. It was doubtful he’d turn away from the television to check. Instead I said, “I don’t need a warrant. I’m arresting him for carrying a concealed weapon. You want some guy with a gun running around your building?”
“Ain’t my building. I just work here.”
Now I understood the reason for the bulletproof glass. I’d known this guy for less than thirty seconds, and I was overcome with a fierce desire to shoot him.
“Let me see some ID, sir,” I ordered.
Now he looked at me, his expression pained. “Why you got to hassle me, offa-sir?”
I was the one hassling him?
“Open the goddamn door, pinhead,” Herb said.
The watchman buzzed us in. Incredible. I’d been on the force for over twenty years and outranked Herb, but because he was a man he automatically got more respect. So little had changed since I was a rookie.
The metal security door opened. I walked through and saw a lobby, which boasted a metal garbage can, a freight elevator, a door that said STAIRS, and corridors going left and right. Above the elevator were lights indicating three floors.
“Cover the exit and call me,” I told Herb, digging my Bluetooth earpiece out of my purse and attaching it to the side of my head. “This may take a while.”
I went into the stairwell, figuring I’d start on the third floor and work my way down. The storage units here had garage-style doors, secured with padlocks. Even if he was inside his unit with the door closed behind him, all I had to do was look for the missing lock and I’d know it was his.
The stairway smelled dusty, like old drywall. I listened for movement, heard nothing, then took the concrete steps two at a time, unbuttoning the strap over the Colt in my shoulder holster. My earpiece buzzed and I pressed the tiny button.
“They need to
make these headsets bigger,” Herb said. “It’s too small for my fingers.”
“Maybe you need to make your fingers smaller.” I was on the second floor. I eased open the door and poked my head through, just to see if our man was around. He wasn’t, so I continued up the stairs.
“If this really is Mr. K,” Herb said, “what’s he storing here?”
“Maybe his money.”
One of the many persistent rumors circulating about the mysterious Mr. K was that he worked as a contract killer for the Outfit. With over a hundred unsolved murders attributed to him, perhaps he actually did need a storage locker to store all of his cash. Banks kept records of large deposits, and most of the mobsters I knew didn’t pay by check.
If Mr. K was a hired gun, he was an iceman. I’d dealt with a few serial killers over the years, and their motives made a warped sort of sense; hurting and killing people was exciting to them. But I believed contract killers, and contract torturers, were a whole different breed. If evil really existed, did it manifest itself in psychopaths who enjoyed inflicting pain on others? Or was it a trait of otherwise normal people who committed atrocities for money, because they were just following orders? Which was worse, killing because you liked it? Or killing because you just didn’t give a shit about humanity?
I stepped out of the stairwell onto the third floor, knowing I really didn’t need an answer to that question. My job wasn’t to psychoanalyze criminals. It was to catch them. And if our suspect was really Mr. K, it would be the high point of my career to put the bastard away.
The third floor hallway was empty in both directions, and I didn’t see any open storage units. I walked slowly, looking at padlocks. Every door had either a lock, or a metal band that sealed the unrented units.
I turned the corner, then stopped. A few yards ahead, one of the doors to a storage unit was open about a foot and a half, some light pouring through the bottom.
Shaken (Jacqueline Jack Daniels Mysteries) [Plus Bonus Content] Page 4