by P. J. Tracy
He heard Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth approaching, escorted by a patrolman, and retreated from the shadows of the birch grove and back to Katya Smirnova’s crime scene a few yards away.
—
Lon Cather was vegan pale and had a skin-and-bones physique that made Gino want to tie him down and force-feed him hamburgers. It’s not that he had anything personal against vegans, but as a devoted carnivore who believed in the power of ingesting hemoglobin at every available opportunity, he thought they were all certifiably insane masochists.
As Cather led him and Magozzi into a wooded area of Phalen Park, his mouth running the clipped, fast dialogue of a highly caffeinated person, Gino began to rethink his initial assessment of the man. Maybe Lon wasn’t a malnourished vegan after all, maybe he just lived on coffee and cigarettes and ate microwave bacon for dinner. He was about the right age and demographic for reckless living in this line of work—Gino estimated he had probably three or four years with a shield under his belt, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding band.
“Thanks for coming, Detectives,” he fired off rapid-speed. “Second I got here, I thought of your case in the dog park, figured we might be able to help each other out. After I talked to Detective McLaren, I knew we were looking at the same guy.”
“We appreciate the call,” Gino said, his eyes scouring the underbrush as they terminated their depressing journey at the body of another pretty brunette.
Katya Smirnova had the same telltale desecrations as Megan Lynn and Charlotte Wells—strangulation marks around her neck, knife slashes to her torso, and, of course, the playing card tucked inside her shirt. But if you looked at the woman instead of just the dead body, you saw the differences.
Katya was older than the others, for one thing. Gino saw his wife, Angela, in the more mature features, which was chilling, and there was something else behind the flat eyes. Not fear, not panic, but a remnant of sadness, as if she had seen pure evil and couldn’t bring herself to believe it existed.
“Everything’s been processed but the card and her personal effects. I had the ME hold the body in situ so you could take a look.”
Gino sucked in a quick breath. “Oh, man.”
Cather winced. “This looks familiar to you, then.”
“Oh yeah. It’s a bad déjà vu in every way except one.”
“What’s that?”
“He cut off her hand.”
Magozzi crouched down, looked closer, and swallowed hard. The work was butchery, the skin ragged around the stump where a hand should have been. “Did you find the hand?”
“Not yet. So this guy takes trophies?”
“He hasn’t in the past.”
Cather folded his arms across his chest and squinted off into the woods. “Serials don’t usually change things up.”
“No, but the smart ones adapt when things go off script,” Magozzi said. “My guess would be she was a fighter and tagged him, and he felt like he had to get rid of the evidence.”
Cather swatted at a fly on his hand. Homicide cops were all squeamish about flies at crime scenes because you kind of knew where they’d been before they landed on you. “If he cut off her hand to get rid of his DNA, he’s gotta be in the system.”
“We’re working that angle.”
“Still—no offense intended—that’s pretty smart for a killer in my experience.”
“This isn’t an ordinary killer. He’s polished. And he’s smart. Find that hand, and maybe you’ll have something solid to work with. It’s only a possibility, but it’s all we’ve got right now.”
“We’re working on that. I’ve got men hitting every trash bin in the park, divers in the lake already, and dogs on the way, but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for any of that. He’d be crazy to leave the hand close to the scene.”
“Still a good call,” Gino said.
Cather gave him a wry look. “All of us Saint Paul cops watch old CSI reruns so we know what to do. So what about your scene? Anything that could help us out?”
Magozzi stood up with a sigh. “We have human male blood waiting on DNA tests so we can send it through CODIS, but it was just a few drops on a thornbush by the immediate scene. And it could belong to anybody. It’s a busy park. We’re not counting on anything being easy with this guy. I’ve never seen crime scenes this sanitized.”
Cather looked seriously irritated, and folded his arms across his chest. “I like your cynicism, Detective Magozzi. What I don’t like is the fact that we’ve got two murders in two nights. This guy is on fire. We’ve gotta stop him. And we’ve gotta work together. You have a problem with that?”
“No problem whatsoever. We’ll get you copies of our reports and the surveillance footage from around the dog park and Powderhorn Park, for what’s it’s worth—nothing popped on them.”
Cather’s posture relaxed a little. “And I’ll do the same. So, you two have been on the job a long time. Any instincts about this one?”
Gino made a circuit around the body. “Nothing you probably haven’t come up with yourself. The ritual is the key here. He’s telling us a story, and he’s staying true to every detail. Except taking the hand, in this case.”
“The playing card angle bothers the hell out of me,” Cather agreed. “It’s bizarre. And why spades? Why not hearts or diamonds or clubs?”
“It all means something. If we can figure that out, then we’ve got him.” Gino slipped on a glove and gestured to the five of spades peeking out of Katya Smirnova’s tank top. “You mind?”
“Be my guest. I’ve been waiting to bag it.”
Gino carefully removed the card from the body and flipped it over. “Same pattern as the other cards.”
Magozzi bent in for a closer look. “Standard-issue Bicycle brand. You can buy them anywhere.”
Cather glanced at the card Gino was holding. His face went very still as if his mind was traveling somewhere else his eyes couldn’t follow, and then he took the card in a gloved hand and looked up at Magozzi. “Maybe he’s not as smart as you think he is.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I know where this card came from. It’s a Bicycle, yeah, but not standard issue. See the top? Some of the white border is sliced off.”
Magozzi and Gino both took a closer look. “Yeah, you’re right about that. So what does that mean?”
“It means this card came from a casino.”
“How do you know?”
“You don’t play?”
“Crazy Eights, and that’s as far as I go.”
“Casinos only use decks for one deal at the table. Pretty expensive overhead if you have to replace every deck once somebody’s touched it. So they sell the used ones for dirt cheap, but they don’t want them coming back to the table to fill in a five-card flush or something, so they mark them before they let them go out the door. Some of them cut the corners off, some of them take a slice off the top or a side—either way, the dealer can see it or feel it in a heartbeat.”
Magozzi thought about all the random scraps of information and experiences people collected during a lifetime, and how sometimes they came into play in the most unexpected ways. “So that card came from a casino.”
“Not just any casino. Eagle Lake is the only one I know that slices the top off.”
Magozzi raised his brows. “You’re a devoted gambling man.”
Cather shrugged. “Kind of a semiprofessional hobby. Half the time, it pays better than the job.”
“I’ve never heard of Eagle Lake,” Gino said.
“It’s new and it’s small, in southwestern Minnesota near the Iowa border. I’ll check it out.” Cather’s phone rang and he lifted a finger and answered the call while Gino and Magozzi took the opportunity to make some notes and snap photographs of the scene.
A few minutes later, Cather hung up. “Surveillance footage from the
cameras around the park is ready to look at. You got some time to compare notes?”
“We’ve got time for that.”
An hour later, the three detectives were gathered around a computer screen at Saint Paul Police Headquarters, staring at a freeze-frame of surveillance footage from a traffic cam on the edge of Phalen Park. It was dark and grainy, but there was an unmistakable image of a man entering the park through a wooded area. The time stamp on the footage was four-forty in the morning.
“This could be our guy,” Cather said, gnawing on a toothpick like it was his last meal before his execution.
Gino craned his neck to get a closer look at the screen. “Could be, but no way we can get an ID from this, and there’s nothing from our footage for corroboration. But maybe you can drum up some new witnesses with the time frame and run with it. I sure as hell hope so, anyhow.”
Cather tossed his pulped toothpick into a trash can. “Maybe I can do even better than that. Thanks for your time and your eyes. I’ll keep you posted.”
TWENTY
Detective Lon Cather had spent plenty of time in casinos, but those times, he’d been half in the bag and hitting the tables hard. Today, he was nursing a Diet Coke and sitting in the control room at Eagle Lake Casino with Sammy “Junior” Liman, head of security. Ironically sweet nickname for the guy, because there was nothing junior about Junior—he was built like a tractor and had the demeanor of a contract killer. He also had an impressive chunk of gray matter lurking inside his thick, bullet-shaped skull.
Lon was resting his eyes on an enormous wall filled with security monitors that covered the entire floor of the casino from every conceivable angle while Junior clickety-clacked on his computer keyboard in focused silence.
Junior finally lifted his head and leaned back in his chair, his muscular bulk pushing it to its limits. “So this is the guy you want me to run through our database?” he asked, pointing to the grainy surveillance shot from Phalen Park.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
“Lon, the light is shit, the resolution is shit, the angle of his face is shit, and he’s too far away. What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
“Whatever you can.”
“You don’t have any other shots of this guy?”
Lon sighed and sucked some lukewarm Diet Coke out of a straw, thinking of the time his team had spent parsing three different cases’ worth of park and park-adjacent traffic cam footage, hoping to find some images that corroborated this suspicious one. They’d come up zeros on the footage at Megan Lynn’s scene last year in Powderhorn Park, same with Charlotte Wells’s scene at the dog park; there was only this one shot from Katya Smirnova’s scene.
“Sorry, Junior, this is all I’ve got. But there’s a possible . . . no, a probable connection to this casino, and he’s shorter than average, goes five-six at best.”
“You know that for sure?”
“I checked out this spot at the park after I saw the footage. Did the measurements, did the calculations. This trail marker here is approximately seven feet away from his entry point, the marker is four feet five inches . . .”
Junior held up his hands with a smile. “I got it, Mr. Math, and I believe you. So I’ve got some kind of a baseline. Still, this is going to be a huge pain in the ass, Lon. I’m going to have to run this image through enhancement before I even put it into facial recognition to compare with our casino footage, same with the biometrics. And there’s no guarantee that anything that pops—if anything pops—will be even remotely accurate. The computer is learning with every face it records, but the whole concept of taking a blur and making a person is still in prepuberty.”
“I got it, Junior. I know it’s a long shot, but it’s worth the time, trust me.”
“I do. So you think this guy is your killer?”
“My gut tells me so.”
Junior sighed and looked back at his computer screen. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks, friend.”
“No problem. Come down for some leisure time once this is all wrapped up and we’ll call it even.” He frowned. “You look like crap. You want a room, grab an hour before you head back up to the Cities?”
Lon pushed himself out of his chair before his butt grew roots. “Wish I could, but the clock is ticking.”
“I don’t envy you that.”
Lon shook his hand, gave him a solid clap on the shoulder. “You ever miss the job?”
Junior gave him a crooked smile. “I miss it like crazy, six days a week.”
“What happens on the seventh day?”
“I get my paycheck and see that extra zero on the end. Makes up for a lot.”
TWENTY-ONE
Grace and Annie were in the third-floor Monkeewrench office, checking the Beast for any progress on Magozzi’s and Gino’s serial killer case before they left for Walt’s.
“Look at this stack,” Annie complained, holding up a thick fistful of printouts. “The list just keeps getting longer and longer. Who knew there were this many cons who went into prison right after Megan Lynn’s murder last year and got out before the murder of Charlotte Wells two days ago?”
Grace pushed another inch away from her desk, thinking that pretty soon she wouldn’t be able to reach the keyboard. “Any homicide hits?”
“Not like our boy. Mostly people shooting home invaders, deaths by auto, that sort of thing.”
They heard the elevator rising, then the heavy tread of Harley’s boots on the maple floor. “All systems go, ladies. Remote access to the home office is online, satellite uplink is fully functional, and we are ready to launch. Buttonwillow, here we come.”
“Yippee,” Annie mumbled, rising from her chair and smoothing the front of her dress.
“You’re wearing four-inch heels to a farm?”
“These are not four-inch heels, they’re three-inch heels, and I have no intention of stepping foot outside the Chariot the entire time we’re down there.”
“Think of it as an anthropological trip. You can learn all about where your food comes from.”
“My food comes from a grocery store, thank you very much. Speaking of food, did you stock the Chariot’s pantry? Because Lord only knows if they even have grocery stores down there.”
“Nah, I thought we could butcher a hog if we get hungry. God, Annie, of course the Chariot is stocked. I am amazed by your constant underestimation of me.”
“Hmm. I suppose, in this particular instance, I could manage to be impressed by your planning ability, depending on what you stocked in the Chariot. We’ll see.”
Grace started gathering her tote and laptop. “Did you pack the salads I brought over this morning, Harley?”
Harley looked around the room in a decidedly evasive way. “Salads?”
“The pasta salad. The potato salad, the green salad, the vegetable salad . . .”
“Oh. Yeah. Those. Well, I wasn’t quite sure they were supposed to go in the Chariot . . .”
Annie dropped her head and let out a suffering sigh. “You ate them.”
“Well, I may have sampled some of them . . .”
Grace was about to scold him, but then her phone chimed. She picked up immediately when she saw the caller ID. “Hi, Magozzi. We’re just about to leave . . .”
Annie and Harley watched her expression still, then darken as she listened. “Send whatever you have, whenever you have it. We can access anything from the road and send it to the Beast remotely.”
Grace hung up and said, “They have another one. Phalen Park in Saint Paul. The five of spades.”
Annie covered her mouth. “Oh no.”
“Jesus,” Harley muttered. “That’s two women in two days. This guy is going nuts.”
“He’s decompensating.”
“Right. That’s what the profilers call it. I call it a fancy word for going n
uts. So what can we do for Magozzi and Gino?”
“They’re sending us some surveillance footage we can plug into facial recognition, and anything else they get along the way. They’re fresh off the crime scene, so new information is coming in all the time. Let’s get started from here before we head down to Walt’s.”
Harley grabbed his phone. “I’ll give him a call, let him know we’re going to be a little late. Annie, why don’t you go get Roadrunner and Charlie?”
“Where are they?”
“Sitting in the Chariot, waiting to push off. Charlie’s in the captain’s chair. He thinks he’s driving.”
TWENTY-TWO
Minnesota was at the beginning of one of those summers farmers sat up nights worrying about. Five days of sun for every good rain was the formula for giving the crops a good start without making quagmires out of cow paddocks and dirt roads, but few of the old-timers had ever seen such a thing happen, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen this year.
June hadn’t blown the goodbye kiss yet, and already the corn plants were showing signs of drought stress that only the farmers noticed. For the most part, it was a tough crop. Corn loved heat and sun, and it took a long time for lack of water to visibly wither the leaves and dry out the stalks. Monday’s hard rain had been cosmetic, washing the dust off the plants, but also damaging, pummeling dry soil balls away from the roots. On this morning, those who had spent a lifetime connected to the land saw the cornstalks starting to lean, just a bit; saw, too, the tiny petals on alfalfa blossoms curling in on themselves, and they worried. Those not connected to the land saw only the lushness of the landscape, never imagining how quickly things could change.
There was a gentle swell to the land here. Not so much that you’d call it rolling—hell, when the land rolled in Minnesota, they called it a mountain range—this was more like the lazy waves on the Pacific when it was bedding down for the night.
Walt had seen that ocean once when Mary had got it into her head to buy that broken-down old camper and see the U.S. of A. before they got tied down with kids and the farm. They’d made it all the way to California, looked around a bit, then hightailed it right back to the Midwest like a runaway horse heading for the barn. Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe the badness had been here all along, and they ran right back into it.