by Mary Stone
“Holy shit,” he managed, eyes wide. “All right, yeah. I’ll meet you at the office. I’ll see what else I can dig up before you get back.”
As he bade Winter goodbye, Autumn’s expression turned curious, and he was struck by an unexpected pang of guilt.
So much for reconnecting with his friend.
25
As Aiden rapped his knuckles against the wooden door, he grated his teeth. He’d never been to the apartment complex before today, and the GPS on his phone had directed him in circles twice before he found the damn parking lot. The building wasn’t in poor shape, but neither could it be classified as upscale.
Based on the whiff of must and stale cigarettes in the hallway, the monthly rent for a one-bedroom was right in line with the income of a graduate student.
Just before the door creaked inward, he thought he heard a resigned sigh. Leaning one shoulder against the wall, Autumn Trent eased the door open with her other hand. As the opening widened, he spotted a little pointy-eared dog tucked against her chest. The pup’s eyes followed his movements, but it didn’t bark.
“Can I help you?” There was more than a little suspicion in her tone, or maybe it was impatience. Either way, his hopes for an easy dialogue were dashed.
“Yeah, actually.” Brows raised, he gestured to the hallway at her back. “You mind if I come in?”
Green eyes narrowed, she stepped aside to give him room to enter.
“Shoes off,” she ordered. “This complex might be a shithole, but that doesn’t mean my place has to be.”
The light scent of pineapple and vanilla was a far cry from the sour odor they left behind in the dim hall. As he glanced around the spacious living room, he could almost trick himself into believing the complex catered to well-off hipsters instead of debt-ridden college students.
A rustic, stone surfaced coffee table sat in front of an expansive sectional couch, and the television on the matching stand was at least as large as his. Rather than a table and chairs, the dining area off to the side of the open kitchen had been set up like an office.
“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in an hour.” Her voice snapped him out of the intent observation. “And my car’s in the shop, so I’ve got to take the bus or an Uber. So, make it quick, Mr. Parrish.”
Paws clattered against the hardwood floor as the little dog trotted over to sniff Aiden’s legs. Dropping down to a crouch, he held out a hand before he looked back up to where Autumn leaned against the breakfast bar. “Give me a half hour, and I’ll drive you to your appointment myself.”
Her olive-green shorts ended just above mid-thigh, and the start of a tattoo was visible from beneath the hem. Printed on her loose, black t-shirt were the letters NIN—the logo of a band he knew well from his days in high school and college.
Maybe he’d finally found a piece of common ground that would alleviate some of her suspicions.
Scratching one of the dog’s fluffy ears, he gestured to her shirt with his free hand. “When I was in my undergrad, I saw them in Chicago. They played Hurt, and Johnny Cash walked out onto the stage at the start of it. Easily the best show I’ve ever seen.”
Though he half-expected her to brush off the recollection and ask him to hurry up and get to the point, the impatience dissipated from her pretty face. She now looked incredulous. “Really?”
“What does that mean?” Despite the pointed question, he felt the start of a smile on his lips.
“It means I didn’t pick you for a Nine Inch Nails fan,” she answered with a slight shake of her head. “I don’t know what the hell I thought you listened to, but it wasn’t Trent Reznor or Johnny Cash.”
“First, who doesn’t like Johnny Cash? And second, you didn’t know what you thought I listened to, or you don’t want to tell me?” Now, the touch of amusement had turned into a full-blown smirk.
“Little of both, honestly.”
“All right. I’m curious now.” With one last pat on the dog’s head, he rose to his full height. “What did you think I listened to?”
She shrugged as if the answer should have been obvious. “Shit. Either shit, or some indie stuff I’ve never heard of.”
“You think I’m a hipster?” he pressed, eyebrows raised as he offered her an expectant look.
“Your words, not mine.” She shook her head again, but he could see the first trace of amusement in her eyes. “All right. Well, if you’re going to chauffeur me to my doctor’s office, then I guess I’ve got a little time. I’m not going to turn down a chance to ditch the bus. What was it you wanted to ask me?”
With a nod, he retrieved his phone as he made his way to the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. “Jenson Leary,” he said. He watched her expression as he raised the device for her to view the screen. “Do you know him?”
She squinted and leaned closer, but there was no flicker of recognition on her face.
“No,” she finally answered, shaking her head. “Sorry. I’ve never seen him. The name doesn’t sound familiar, either.”
“Here.” He held out the phone for her to take. “There are some older pictures of him there too. Look through them, maybe you knew him when you were younger.”
“Yeah, all right.” As she accepted the phone, her fingertips brushed against the back of his hand.
The touch was feathery light, and based on the focused look she wore, the gesture had not been intentional. Now, why that disappointed him, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to know.
What was important, he reminded himself, was that the borderline hostility with which she had greeted him had finally worn away. All it had taken was the mention of a concert from seventeen years ago.
White light glinted off her eyes as she sighed and shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. He doesn’t look familiar. Who is he?”
“Well, he was born and raised in Minneapolis and Minnetonka.”
Based on their interaction six weeks earlier, if he wanted to delve into her past, he would have to be careful in his choice of words.
She shrugged and passed the smartphone back to him. “Minneapolis is a big city, and Minnetonka is decent sized too.”
“He had a traumatic brain injury when he was twelve years old. He had to have surgery, and his surgeon was Dr. Catherine Schmidt.”
She stiffened minutely. “And?” she prodded.
“He was found dead in a fifty-five-gallon drum a little over a month and a half ago.”
Though the look was fleeting, her eyes widened. “Oh.”
“We believe that whoever killed him also killed a woman we found about thirteen years ago. We still haven’t identified her, but she had a healed injury on her skull too. We were able to retain a partial list of Dr. Schmidt’s surgical patients from one particular hospital, and we’re getting a court order for a list of patients in other hospitals in which she had surgical privileges. After that, I’m already pretty sure that we’ll find Jane Doe in that list.”
Autumn crossed her arms over her chest, and Aiden noticed goose bumps raise on her skin. She just stared at him, saying nothing, the blood draining from her pretty face as he spoke.
“Whoever she was,” he went on, “the medical examiner says that both she and Jenson Leary underwent brain surgery shortly before they were killed. And whoever performed the surgery knew what they were doing, because both of them stayed alive long enough for the surgical wounds to start to heal.”
“And you think Dr. Schmidt killed them?” Her green eyes flicked back to his, and he saw a hint of anxiety beneath the calm demeanor.
“We aren’t sure. Dr. Schmidt dropped off the face of the planet fifteen years ago. No death certificate, no obituary, no nothing. One day she was there, and then the next day, she was gone.”
“But whoever they are, they’re targeting Dr. Schmidt’s patients. Is that what I’m picking up here?”
“We think so.”
As they lapsed into silence, she tapped her fingers against the back of the tall chair a
t her side. “This is going to sound really weird,” she started, shifting her attention to him.
“I can deal with weird. Try me.”
“It was just a weird feeling I got when she’d come check up on me after the surgery. After I came out of the coma, it was like, like I was just better at socializing, I guess. I could get a read on people like I hadn’t been able to before. That sort of reaction isn’t unheard of with frontal lobe injuries.”
Aiden nodded. “That’s the part of the brain that’s essentially responsible for your personality.”
Autumn nodded in return. “Exactly. I was shy and quiet before, but after.” She sighed and shook her head. “It’s like I wasn’t beholden to any of the doubts that had been holding me back before, and that, being able to read people, that was a big part of it. But like I told you, she just creeped me out. There was something off whenever she talked to me, like she had an ulterior motive for everything she asked. I didn’t know what it was, I still don’t know what it was. But, you want my honest opinion?”
He nodded. “Absolutely.”
“And don’t put too much weight on it. Memory, it’s not as reliable as people like to think it is. We learn new information, and that biases the way we look at our memories. Memories aren’t static, they’re subject to change just like everything else in our brain.”
The corner of his mouth turned up in the start of a smirk. “I know.”
She flushed a little. “Right, master’s in social cognitive, my bad.”
“You remembered.”
“Of course I remembered.” She rolled her eyes, but the amusement in her tone was unmistakable. “Meeting the dude who runs the behavioral analysis section of the FBI is a pretty memorable experience to us plebeians, Mr. Parrish.”
“Oh, okay. The woman who’ll have a Ph.D. and a Juris Doctorate by the end of the month calls herself a plebeian. Whatever you say, Doctor Trent.”
With a matter-of-fact smile, she held up an index finger. “Not Dr. Trent yet. I’ve still got to defend my dissertation, and that’s all provided I don’t keel over between now and then. Or I guess now it’s all provided I don’t get nabbed by a serial killer and murdered into an oil drum, huh?”
“It’s a very real concern for all of us.” He offered her a shrug and a knowing smile.
“Okay.” The word was a cross between a snort and a laugh. “Well, thanks for the moment of levity. That’s probably the best way to tell someone you think they might be the target of a mad scientist murderer.”
“I do what I can.”
“You’re doing a great job.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” he chuckled. “What was it you were saying about memory?”
As the mirth behind her eyes gave way to unease, he was taken aback by a rush of disappointment.
“Right. Sorry. Memories, they’re unreliable, even flashbulb memories. But in my honest opinion,” she shivered again, “based on my interactions with Dr. Schmidt and the knowledge I’ve got now, I think she was a sociopath.”
26
By the time he saw Winter stride into the cluster of cubicles reserved for the violent crimes division, Noah had unearthed just about every imaginable piece of information about Jenson Leary
And, as best as he could tell, Jenson was a regular guy who had lived a regular life before he was kidnapped and murdered by a deranged killer.
“Hey,” he greeted, pushing himself out of the office chair to stand. “How was the drive?”
“Slow.” The word was practically a groan as she readjusted the aviator sunglasses atop her head. “Any luck? What did you find about our victim?”
With a sigh, he dropped down to sit. “Pull up a chair.”
“That good, huh?” She nodded as she shoved the other office chair to rest beside his. “What did you find?” As she sat, her blue eyes flicked over to take in the spread of pictures and documents on top of his desk.
“Jenson Leary was a normal dude. He was thirty-one, married, no kids, no record. Former military with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Old Dominion. He was working on his master’s when he disappeared. His wife, Faith Leary, is a supervisor in a call center for a cell phone carrier. She’s got a degree, too, but hers is in chemistry. It’s from Old Dominion as well, which was how they met.”
Winter picked up a picture, studying the man’s face. “Sad.”
Noah had to agree. “A month or two before he disappeared, the local cops in Fayetteville were looking for a serial rapist around the neighborhood where Jenson and Faith lived. Jenson gave them a DNA sample to rule him out as a suspect, but they found their man before it was entered into the database, and no one thought to enter the info after the fact. A new chief came onboard and began whipping the department into shape. Had them update records, and the DNA was finally entered.”
“Way to go, chief,” Winter muttered, thinking of how much time that could have been saved had the information been available weeks ago.
“Since learning of Jenson’s identification, we also learned that his head injury occurred when he was twelve. He was riding a bike without a helmet, and he wrecked it. Nothing suspicious, no foul play, just a legitimate accident.”
“But?”
“But he lived in Sioux City, Iowa at the time, and they life flighted him to a hospital in Minneapolis. The same hospital where Autumn had her surgery, and I’ll give you one guess who his surgeon was.”
“Catherine Schmidt,” Winter breathed. “What about Ladwig? Did this guy have any connection to him?”
“He saw a psychiatrist while he was at Old Dominion, something to do with recurring migraines. He went to a shrink because he thought it might’ve had to do with stress. At least that’s what his wife said, so that’s what he told her. It wasn’t Ladwig, but…” he paused to hold up an index finger, “I looked them up, and surprise, surprise. Guess who was at the same conference as them?”
“Ladwig.”
“Right. Now, conferences about psychiatric topics don’t necessarily mean that everyone there knows one another, but I think it’s enough.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Enough for what?”
“Enough to go have a chat with our favorite psychiatrist,” he answered, closing the folder with a slap. “See what he knows about Catherine Schmidt and Jenson Leary.”
“What about Jane Doe?” she wondered after a brief moment of quiet.
“Nothing yet, but Bree just finished getting a court order from a judge. We should have a list of all Dr. Schmidt’s patients by the end of the day. Then, it’s just a matter of matching up the one who fits the forensic anthropologist’s picture of Jane Doe. We match that, plus the type of head injury and the approximate time she went missing, and we should have a tentative ID. Enough to dig around some more to find a connection between her and Ladwig too.”
Propping an elbow atop the desk, she met his gaze as she leaned in closer. “What if it’s not Ladwig? I didn’t see him, so what if he’s not who we’re looking for?”
“You saw his name, though. When you were looking for information about Catherine Schmidt. That’s something, right?”
“I suppose,” she sighed.
“‘I suppose is just about as good as we’ve got right now, darlin’. We’ve had someone following Ladwig every day for the last month and a half, but he hasn’t given us anything. We don’t have probable cause to arrest him, but now that we’ve got a victim’s name, we can ask him what he knows and get a feel for whether or not we’re headed in the right direction.”
Winter rubbed her temple but didn’t seem in any distress as she answered, “True.”
“If not, if we still think Catherine Schmidt is our primary suspect, we can get ahold of someone in white collar crimes and see if they can help us track down something that’ll tell us where in the hell she went.” As he offered her a reassuring smile, he hoped the look was convincing.
Victim identification or not, they were grasping at straws, and they all knew i
t. Unless Ladwig gave them something, their trail would go cold again.
It would go cold until they found the next man or woman dissolving in a fifty-five-gallon drum.
Lips pursed, Winter finally nodded her agreement. “All right. Yeah. We should go talk to Ladwig.”
“Let’s do a little more digging around in Jenson’s history first. Find out everything we can about him, and then see what we can find out about the conference Ladwig and Catherine Schmidt attended. The more we know, the more likely we are to get something out of him.”
“Right, yeah. He’s a weird guy, but he’s smart. We need to make sure we’ve got all our bases covered.”
His smile felt a little more genuine as Winter’s skepticism gave way to cool determination. “The more we know about Jenson, the harder it will be for Ladwig to pull the wool over our eyes.”
27
Hands folded in her lap, Autumn sat at the edge of an exam chair as she stared absently at a poster affixed to the back of the closed door. The infographic gave a rundown of the benefits of vaccines, and at the bottom-right corner was a list of sources used for the data.
After an ultrasound of her abdomen had revealed a foreign object pressing on the side of her stomach, the doctor had ordered an x-ray. If the images still didn’t reveal specifics about the anomaly, then she would send Autumn to a different part of the hospital for a CT scan.
The whole process was familiar, but the familiarity was as much the reason for her unease as anything.
As the door creaked open, Autumn pulled herself from the moment of contemplation to offer a slight smile to the woman who stepped into the room. Her thoughts threatened to spiral into a mass of anxiety, but she pushed past the rush of worry.
“Well, I’ve got some good news,” the doctor announced as she tucked a translucent, black and white print into a lighted fixture on the wall. Her blue eyes flicked over to Autumn as she tapped the circular shape of the unknown object. “It’s not any sort of cancer or infection or anything of that nature. Now, you said you had surgery when you were younger, could you elaborate on that? Is there any way some piece of a medical tool could have broken off and lodged itself somewhere in your body?”