by Holly Hunt
They'd been staking out the area for a month, but there was nothing to it; if the Holiday Killer had been there, either he was invisible or he'd since decided to find somewhere else to hide. The room had no sign of blood or the bondage needed to hold the kids for an extended period of time, and they were forced to admit there was nothing in the factory.
The forensics guys recognized right away that the footprint found, prominent and deliberate, at the front door of his Valentine's Day victim was a hoax, created by the man holding a boot out and manipulating the way it landed. Either that, or he had a terrible limp that would make it easy to identify him. It was too flat-footed, with no pressure changes to indicate someone actually walking, they explained to her when between guffaws, happy to have one over on the cops.
The radio crackled to life, breaking her from dwelling on her failures.
"This is dispatch, Detective Donhowi, please respond."
Liz almost caused an accident pulling over to get at her radio.
"This is Donhowi. Has he struck?"
"End of Thomas Avenue, on the river. Sergeant Donhowi and Detective Edwards are already on their way."
"Heading over from Bourke West now. ETA five minutes."
Liz hung up the radio and headed into traffic. It was 2 in the morning and the streets were almost empty, people hidden away indoors, doors bolted, their children asleep.
Liz worried about the identity of the victim. Would it be Jamie? Had Phil and Rose lost track of him long enough for the killer to strike? Had she just managed not to hear the notice of his kidnapping on the radio? The uncertainty gnawed at her gut, alternately making her flush with heat and feel like she wanted to throw up. She didn't know what she'd do to her husband and her mother if her son was dead.
Halfway to the scene, she did have to pull over to throw up, leaning out of the window until she was able to calm herself down, the cool night air easing her hot flushes.
Taking three deep breaths, she steeled herself. If it was Jamie, then she was going to deal with it. If it wasn't, she would do what she always had, and get the crime solved. She saw barely ten trucks in the two miles to Thomas Avenue, and not even one car on the way to the docklands. Then she hit the crime scene.
Reporters and police cars had taken over the cul-de-sac and barricaded the road. There was a large crowd of media people there, and they obscured the mucky river's edge from the roadway. The darkness of the night didn't manage to obscure the scene from curious reporters, though, the flashes of mobile phones and cameras momentarily lighting up the scene, the light managing to reach the scene from over a hundred yards away.
Liz climbed out of the car at the wooden barricades, the lights still flashing on the roof of the cruiser, and shrugged between the people and toward the scene. She grabbed a pair of latex gloves out of a box in the back of a cruiser and headed into the crime scene, covering her nose with her mouth. These were marshy lands, and they stank worse than a body left in the sun for three days.
"Donhowi!" Bill called out, waving her over. "We're just dragging him up now."
Dragging?
Liz checked herself at the embankment, staring at the body being brought up from the river. She slipped down the embankment a little to have a look at him, almost falling over in the muck.
The boy was slashed neck to pelvis, his entrails dragging up on shore behind him. Countless fish and other aquatic wildlife had been at him, judging by the state of his intestines.
"Anyone notify the parents?" she asked, looking at the sergeant as she stood up, resisting the impulse to wipe her marsh-mucked hands on her pants.
"We don't know who he is—don't know who to notify." Bill looked her in the eye. "Are you alright, Liz?"
"Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, looking away from the young boy.
"We didn't even hear about this one going missing," the young man beside her said, looking up from the boy's wrinkled hands at her. "It doesn't fit."
Liz nodded a little, thinking. The killer had threatened to take Jamie when she refused to get off the case, but he hadn't. And now this boy was here, dead, eaten by fish. He wasn't displayed for the cops to find, he was barely mutilated, and most of what had been done to him could easily have been done by the marine life.
Could this be a Holiday Killer murder, or was there another murderer loose in this poor town? Was this boy a replacement? Did the killer attack him when he realized that Liz wouldn't let him get at Jamie? Was this a frustration murder, and that's why he was dumped on the bottom of the river?
Was it Liz's fault the kid was dead?
Or was this boy the victim of a completely different killer? Was he a homeless kid the killer had picked up on the side of the road, hitchhiking across the country? Was there someone out there who would miss him?
The questions circled around in her head, making her feel a bit dizzy.
"Who found him?" she asked Bill, ignoring the forensics boy.
"A bunch of divers working overtime. This is the crayfish-harvesting area." He waved at a pair of men in rain boots and rain jackets. "He was attached to one of the crates. The boys say they got the best haul in that crate. Then they saw the body, dropped it back into the water, and called us. Figure the crayfish were … dining, so to speak."
"No use trying to catch those crayfish," Liz mused, carefully picking her footholds and making her way down to the body. His eyes had been removed, though she couldn't tell if that had been the killer or the fish. "Or the other critters feasting on him." She gently lifted one of his arms, looking at his wrist.
His hands and feet were heavily wrinkled, indicating he'd been in the water for at least a few hours, maybe more. The kid could have been in that water for a couple of days, at least, the gasses released during decomposition sifting into the water through the hole in his stomach as they formed, preventing his body from rising. His skin was alternately blanched and blotched, blood pooling in his extremities where he'd rested on the bottom, face down. Around the slash in his torso, the blood was leeched from the skin, turning it a deep, translucent white.
"Did we recover the restraints?" she asked, peering closely at the rope burn marks on his wrists.
One of the forensic divers pulled off his mask as a medical examiner descended on the boy, to find out what he could before the body became too unstable to examine. "There weren't any with him. Just a couple of rocks in his coat pockets to hold his body down. If there were restraints, they were removed before he went into the water. He's too fresh for the lobsters to have eaten through them."
"Which means he was likely dead or unconscious before he was thrown in." Liz put the boy's hand down and looked at his mouth. She opened it and pushed down gently on his chest. A thin, filmy substance welled in his mouth, filled with silt from the river bottom, the bruises of his struggle showing across his shoulders and his upper arms. "Unconscious, but he struggled at the end. He drowned as he bled out."
"The fish couldn't have helped." The sergeant pointed at a fish flopping about in the mishmash of intestines, and grimaced. "And the crayfish. I think we might find a few little ones still in there, and a lot of eggs."
"More than likely." Liz stood up, taking in the sight of the body. Aside from the slit in his torso, which ran to his crotch, and his missing eyes, there were only a couple of burns on his wrists and—she leaned down to check—ankles, where he'd been restrained.
This boy was too old for the Holiday Killer—ten, maybe eleven years old. His clothes were too well maintained for a homeless kid, but also too threadbare to be first-hand. He was from a poor neighborhood, maybe ran away from home and ended up nabbed. Maybe his parents were used to him staying away from home for days at a time. In the poorer districts, it wasn't unique for a kid to go wandering for a month before he turned back up again. The parents eventually stopped worrying and calling the police.
She was starting to get the impression that this was not a Holiday Killer victim.
Bill looked her over. "The Holiday Kill
er threatened Jamie. We were all worried the man would take him. And yet, here's his next victim, with no action taken against your son."
"Are we sure he's the next victim?" Liz asked, looking at the boy. "No public death, no clear kidnapping, nothing. Just a body found in a watery grave, on Easter morning."
"That's not strictly true," Lisa said, stepping up beside them. "They found three Easter eggs in his pockets. We're going to officially treat it as the Holiday Killer's crime, unless something pops up to make us think different."
"But this one is different," Liz said, looking back at the body. "It's completely different from the others. No display, no heavy mutilation,… This death is completely different from those of the Holiday Killer's victims."
"Until you can make a case substantiated with evidence that this was a copycat, or a completely different case, then you will treat this as the same." Sergeant Donhowi looked at Lisa. "I can't believe there's two child-killers in this town, not without evidence. I just can't. Now let's get this boy on the stretcher and get him home."
"We have to work out where home is, first. It's a good thing he wasn't in the water too long; facial recognition might still work." Liz shook herself and looked at Lisa. "Can you organize that? I have to talk to the boys."
Lisa looked at the fishermen and nodded, turning back to the body on the tarp. The forensics team was looking him over, taking photographs of whatever they could, including the assorted wildlife still nibbling on his entrails and skin.
Liz headed over the swampy marsh, wind milling a couple of times as her feet sank deeper into the mud than she expected. By the time she got to where the two divers were standing, she was red-faced and out of breath.
"God, I need a bath," she muttered, stepping up onto the pavement and heading for the fishermen standing uncomfortably near one of the first-responder vehicles, both studiously looking anywhere but at the body.
She smiled at them as the shorter one looked at her, taking off her latex gloves and handing them to one of the forensics boys as he ran past.
"Hi," she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. "I'm Special Detective Donhowi. I'd like to talk to the pair of you about what you found this morning."
"Are you with the FBI?" one of them asked, hurriedly hiding something behind his back. "It's only, I wasn't meant to be on this shift this week, but my parole officer said I could go with the boat, long as I kept checking in."
Liz filed that away for later. The man had a record, which meant if she tried his prints, he should show up on the database. After the last guy to find a body killed an officer and ran off, she wasn't about to let this pair go without being able to find them again, through any means necessary.
"I'm not with the FBI, Mr. … Jones," she said, reading the name on his jacket, right below the label of the Dauntless, a fishing ship recently involved in a flashy bit of news she hadn't paid much attention to. "How long have you been in town?"
"A couple days, miss," the man said, elbowing his friend. "We came in off the Dauntless, the deep-sea vessel, when it came in to drop off the catch. We decided to stay a couple of days, since the area is mad with crays that sell for a lot of money at the markets. We cast some crates, hoping to take home Easter dinner." The man swallowed. "We got permits for them."
"I'll need to see them." She looked to the quiet one. "Were you off the same ship?"
"Nah, this is my friend, Bruce," Jones interrupted. "He lives over on Hoddington Crescent. We only come down here for the crayfish."
Liz sighed, realizing that these men, though highly suspicious, were not likely to be of any danger. "Write down your names and contact numbers," she said, pulling a notebook from her pocket. "And I'll need to see some form of ID. If I need to get in contact with you, I want to know who you are, and where I can actually find you."
The men nodded, the louder one taking the notebook and hurriedly writing down names and addresses for the pair of them. He handed the scrawl back and she looked it over, then added some details from the passport and driver's licenses they offered as ID.
Satisfied that she what she needed if she wanted to find them again, she nodded to the two men and headed for her car, pulling her marshy shoes off on the way across the road. She had another pair on the back seat, and just planned to wear those until she could get these cleaned.
The journalists and civilians backed away from her stinky shoes as she passed, not willing to get the marshland mud on their clothes, while Liz made a mental note that carrying mucky shoes was an effective way to get through a crowd when she was in a hurry. She almost laughed as she pulled a plastic bag out of the back seat and dropped them into it.
What a way to start the day, she thought sarcastically as she drove toward the police station, where the paperwork of the morning awaited her. Bring on the holidays, indeed.
She rubbed at her face, sighing in frustration as she glanced in the rearview mirror, the throng of media still visible. Could this kid really be another Holiday victim? Or was there another psychopath on the loose? She didn't think it could be the Killer, unless he'd drastically changed his entire killing pattern, from victim to display, in the last—she thought back on the condition of the body—two days.
But there had yet to be a child taken this Easter, and she couldn't help but feel that this kid was a distraction, something to keep her busy while he sought a way around her defenses, to Jamie.
Maybe I'm just getting paranoid, she thought to herself as she pulled into the station's car park. Then again, that's the default emotion around here, these days.
5
Liz stood on the front step, looking the man in the eye. "I'm sorry, Mr. Michaels. But your son was found dead this morning."
The man stared at her, clearly unable to work out what was going on. "Russell? But … but he's meant to be at his cousins' house, for a sleepover." Then his face seemed to break, emotions playing across its surface. "I told him, I told him to stick to the open roads where there were plenty of people to see him. He didn't want to end up like his mother, but would he listen? No! And now he's gone too…" He began to sob, failing to hold himself together.
Liz felt very awkward, patting him on the shoulder. "Mr. Michaels, did you hear about your son going missing? That he hadn't made it to the sleepover?"
He shook his head. "No. I didn't hear anything from her. I thought he'd made it. He's eleven, well outside the age range of the Holiday Killer, I thought he'd be safe walking three blocks…"
Why not check on him anyway? she thought, keeping her face straight, examining the man's body language for any sign of trickery. "I need to know the address of the house he was meant to be staying at," she said, whipping out her notebook and writing it down as he told her. "We will find the man responsible for your son's death, Mr. Michaels."
"You'd better," he said, tears leaking out of the corner of his eyes. "Because if I find the Holiday Killer first, you won't have enough to piece him back together."
"We don't know that this is his work—"
"Don't play dumb with me. It's Easter. There's been a child murdered. What else could it be?"
"We're working all the angles, Mr. Michaels."
"Work them fast. I want whoever it was caught."
"We do what we can." Liz nodded, turning to go, but stopped when an idea struck her. "Mr. Michaels, may I see your son's room, please? It may be important to the case."
The man hesitated, but stepped aside. Liz slipped in, waiting for Mr. Michaels to lead the way.
She was a bit nervous about what she would find in the boy's room. Would it be spotless, the sign of the Holiday Killer, just as Mike and Emma's rooms had been when they were taken this year? Would the killer clean the boy's room even if he wasn't taken from there?
They walked down the hallway, toward the room.
What if the kid's room wasn't cleaned? Did that point to another lapse in the Holiday Killer's pattern, did it mean the development of a new one, or did it mean the birth of a new serial ki
ller in Matryville?
The man pushed open the boy's bedroom door, but hesitated in the doorway.
"This isn't the way he left it…"
Liz gently pushed past the man and stepped into the room, a churning in her gut telling her that she was not going to like what she found, no matter what it was.
The place was clean and tidy, not a sock out of place. Liz stepped very carefully, trying not to disturb anything.
"Is your son a tidy child?" she asked, pulling out her cell phone.
"Are you kidding?" the man asked, his eyes wide as he looked around the room. "He's eleven! If I didn't force him to have a bath, he wouldn't have one at all!"
"That's what I thought. No one comes in here." She smiled reassuringly at the man and headed for the front porch, holding her phone to her ear.
"Dispatch? This is Special Detective Donhowi. I need a forensic team to 1421 Liddell Crescent. Priority one, related to the Holiday Killer. Thanks, Denise." She hung up and turned to look at the man, who was speaking angrily down the phone to someone. He swore and hung up as she returned.
"I take it that was the person your son was meant to be staying with?"
"My wife's parents—they were meant to be minding him." The man looked at the phone in his hand, then sank down heavily at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. "This is insane," he muttered, shaking his head. "Why wouldn't Melinda or Carl call me to say he hadn't turned up? Why would he target Russell? What does a clean room have to do with my son's murder?" he demanded, aiming the last question at Liz.
She couldn't imagine any reason for the person looking after young Russell to not report him missing. But he was eleven, for hell's sake—what kind of parent would let an eleven-year-old out of their sight? And if he'd never shown up, it was even more reason for suspicion in terms of the family. They should have called his dad—and the police—immediately. Particularly with the Holiday Killer in the area.