The Coldest Fear

by Rick Reed

  He blew his breath into his hand and sniffed it. Hell, it’s almost three in the morning. What am I worrying about? He decided to go into the detective squad room. It should be deserted this time of night and he could sit for a spell. The only thing he had to go home to was a sick wife, and her bitching and nagging. He hoped that whatever he was trying to pull out of his mind would come to him.

  In the back parking lot at police headquarters, Jansen pulled into one of the city-council spots that were almost always deserted and parked his take-home car. He was walking toward the back entrance to the squad room when he noticed a couple of cars that didn’t belong in the parking lot.

  One was Captain Franklin’s personal vehicle. Franklin was never at work this early and especially not in his own personal car.

  The other car was a newer royal-blue Buick that just screamed FBI. That meant something big was going on. Whatever it was, Jansen was going to find out. Information was better than currency in his line of work.

  He walked up to the back of headquarters and peered through the heavy glass panes. There was no one in the hallway, but the lights were on in the captain’s office. He used his key fob and winced at the electric click as the lock disengaged. He hated these locks that were linked to a security system. There would be a record of his entering through that blasted door at an exact time and date. It took all the sneak out of “sneaky bastard,” and he was rather proud of his reputation.

  As soon as he was through the door, he entered the detective squad room and looked to be sure he was alone. He logged onto his computer and moved a couple of pending files into the record-room basket icon, and left his computer logged onto the system. It would automatically log him out after an hour and thus it would look like he had worked for an hour and gone home. What a hardworking man I am, he thought.

  Now that he had created a fake reason for being in the building, he peeked back into the hallway and found it empty and quiet except for the sound of soft voices coming from Captain Franklin’s office.

  He moved like a shadow down the hall and stood just outside the office, where he could hear the voices much better. He wished he had his digital recorder with him because he could enhance the volume on his computer later. His hearing wasn’t as sharp as it was when he was younger.

  “Well, I guess this is all supposition until we verify with the coroner,” Captain Franklin was saying.

  A voice that Jansen didn’t recognize said, “It’ll be our guy, Captain. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “I hope to God you’re wrong, Agent Tunney,” Franklin said.

  “Call me Frank, Captain,” the voice said, and Jansen felt a shock of recognition at the name.

  Special Agent Frank Tunney. Serial killer hunter, Jansen thought. And Tunney had said something about it being “our guy.” Jansen wondered what he was talking about, and then it came to him. The murders they were working were supposed to be by a serial killer. Obviously this was of interest to the FBI or they wouldn’t have sent someone as important as Tunney in the middle of the night. Now he really missed his digital recorder. It would be great to have this on tape.

  “So this guy—The Cleaver—has been in your gun sights for some time?” Captain Franklin said.

  “Twenty-four known kills so far,” Tunney said. “Twenty-five if Brenda Lincoln is another.”

  “Then Detective Murphy is correct about these cases all being related,” Franklin said.

  “That’s the troubling part,” Tunney admitted. “The Cleaver is a very methodical killer. He has always followed a pattern and selected his kill sites inside homes. The killing you have at the motel, and the one in the kitchen—Louise Brigham, I think you said—don’t fit with that pattern.”

  “Brenda Lincoln was killed in her garage,” Franklin reminded him. “And she was very publicly displayed.”

  “He took her face off with a hand axe. The rest of the damage was just to confuse you . . . and me. That’s why I thought it worth a trip in the middle of the night. There is something very personal about these killings. Not like the other ones. I think he’s just made his first mistake, Captain.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Franklin said. “But we’re still no closer to catching him than you have been.”

  “Oh. I think you might be surprised. This Jack Murphy of yours is quite a pistol if I remember correctly.”

  “It’s okay, Agent Tunney. You can call him a smart-ass. Everyone else does.”

  Tunney chuckled, and to Jansen that was shocking. FBI agents were not known for their sense of humor. To Jansen’s trained bullshit meter, Tunney was holding something back.

  “I’ve called Jack and his team to meet us at the morgue,” Franklin said. “I’ll drive.”

  Franklin and Tunney were just stepping into the hallway as the back door to headquarters clicked.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  A tall man advanced toward him carrying an axe. Behind the man, flames danced into the sky. But the man was a mere black figure set against the inferno. Jack tried to pull his pistol, but it wasn’t in his holster where it belonged. He reached to his ankle for the backup pistol he carried, but it too was missing. He steeled himself for the attack.

  The ringing phone was like a piece of metal skewering a raw nerve. Jack started awake and then remembered he was still in the office. He had gone to sleep with his head resting on his desk. It was just a bad dream.

  Liddell and Garcia had gone to run down information and he had been looking through the folders of the murders. They had worked through the late night and early morning with no success and the autopsy of Kooky was scheduled for this morning. He quickly glanced at the clock. Four-thirty in the morning.

  “What?” he said into the receiver. It was Captain Franklin.

  “Get down to the morgue. Bigfoot will meet you there,” Franklin said, and the line went dead.

  Jack hung up and wondered if there had been another murder. One hell of a way to start Halloween, Jack thought.

  He made a quick bathroom stop and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the sink. He looked like hammered shit. Not bad for four-thirty in the morning with about fifteen minutes of hard sleep.

  A half dozen cars sat in the morgue parking lot. Jack recognized Liddell’s unmarked tan-colored Crown Vic. Little Casket’s Suburban was also in the lot but not near the garage doors where it would have been if there had been a recent delivery of a cadaver. That was a good sign.

  Jack buzzed his way in and proceeded down the hall toward the autopsy room. A voice hailed him from Lilly Caskins’s office.

  “You look terrible, pod’na,” Liddell said, as Jack entered the small office. He saw the room was packed.

  Lilly was almost hidden behind her desk with Captain Franklin sitting in one of the two chairs in front of Lilly’s desk, and Liddell somehow squeezed into the other. Off to the side Angelina Garcia stood twisting the ends of her hair.

  He wondered why they were all there, at the morgue, and not in some other capacious location where they could spread out and have lattes and half-caf-cappucinos with sprigs of mint. He didn’t have to wait long for the answer.

  “We were waiting for you, Detective Murphy,” came a voice from behind him. Jack turned and looked into the light gray eyes of FBI profiler Frank Tunney.

  Tunney was tall and lean but had an athlete’s aura. He was dressed in the traditional blue suit that must be the school uniform for FBI agents. Jack thought it would have been better if they had all been made to wear kilts and then they would look like ancient warriors with serious cross-dressing issues. He kept this observation to himself and said, “Agent Tunney,” and shook hands.

  He’d met Tunney at several schools where the police department had sent him to learn the art of criminal profiling. Tunney was considered the preeminent authority on the topic and had a reputation among the troops as a serial-killer hunter.

  Frank Tunney had earned a PhD in psychology from Harvard at the age of twen
ty and had spent almost ten years teaching before being recruited into the FBI’s famous Behavioral Analysis Unit. He had not only assisted in high-profile cases in the United States, but also been requested and loaned out to several other countries. For someone in his early forties he’d had a full life.

  Murphy wondered if the chief had decided to call in the big guns since they—meaning Jack and his team—were at a standstill. His question was answered when Tunney said, “Susan called and explained what you’ve been working on. It seems we have a mutual interest.”

  “So you’re the friend Susan was talking about?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” Tunney said with a boyish grin. “We go way back, Susie and I.”

  Jack wanted to ask just how far back they went, but he forced himself to focus on the case. Tunney was exactly the guy they needed on this.

  Since Captain Franklin was the ranking man in the room, Tunney addressed him, saying, “Captain, can we all move to the autopsy room please?” The FBI is big on protocol. But Jack thought if Tunney was so smart he would realize that the only one in the room whom he should fear was Little Casket.

  As if he read Jack’s mind, Tunney said, “But this is your facility, Miss Caskins. Would you do us the honor?”

  Caskins turned to Agent Tunney and her face looked like a Dalí painting, because her jaw dropped almost to the floor. She had probably not been called “Miss” Caskins for about eight hundred or so years.

  Tunney turned and smiled at Jack, letting him know he had read the power structure in the room correctly. Jack quietly gave him the thumbs-up.

  Liddell walked next to Jack down the corridor and leaned over to whisper, “What’s going on?”

  “Hell if I know,” Jack answered. “You mean you’ve all been just sitting around waiting for me and no one has talked about what Tunney is doing here?”

  Liddell got a semi-serious look on his face and said, “Little Casket was in the room and we were all afraid to move much less speak.”

  Up ahead of them everyone was moving into the autopsy room. Jack could see that Dr. John was inside, stooped over what seemed to be the remains of Brenda Lincoln.

  Dr. John was in full scrubs with a mask and gloves. The corpse on the steel table was unclothed and shimmering from the number of cuts that covered every inch of skin. Even the bottoms of the feet were crisscrossed with deep slices, some going into the bone.

  Jack noticed a look pass between Dr. John and Tunney, and then Dr. John said, “You were right, Agent Tunney.”

  “Anyone going to let us in on what’s going on?” Liddell said, causing everyone to look at him.

  “Are you sure about the results, John?” Captain Franklin asked the pathologist.

  “As sure as I can be without sending the tissue samples off for microscopic examination,” Carmodi answered. “Which, of course, I was going to do.” He looked slightly embarrassed and Jack was more confused than ever.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Claudine Setera rubbed at her eyes and squinted at the red-numbered display of the clock beside her bed. Her cell phone was vibrating and she had to squint to read the little display window. It was that creepy little detective who was always talking to her chest.

  She thought about shutting the phone off, but then decided that maybe he had something for her besides a drunken booty call. If he propositioned her one more time she was going to the chief of police and filing a complaint.

  She answered the phone. “What?”

  “You’re gonna want to wake up for this,” Jansen said.

  Claudine set up in bed at the tone of his voice.

  They had moved from the autopsy room to the larger conference room, and were spread out in chairs around the large table, all except Liddell, who was methodically working his way through the room, opening a drawer here, a cabinet door there, foraging for any unguarded snacks.

  “So what can you tell us about this Cleaver guy?” Jack asked.

  Tunney looked at Jack and answered, “Not what you want to know, Detective Murphy. We don’t know who he is and that is the thing, isn’t it?”

  “Well, that would sure help,” Liddell said.

  Franklin shot Liddell a cautioning look and asked, “Do you have any forensic evidence, witnesses, descriptions?”

  Tunney shook his head. “One of the Seattle papers ran a composite one time, but it turned out the witness was lying, and we wasted a lot of time and man power.” He got up and walked around the room. Jack could remember seeing him do this at the seminars he’d attended. Tunney was in professor mode, Jack thought.

  “The Cleaver has been successful because he never stays in one place too long. He has never been known to go back to a location once he has finished his spree of murders. He always uses the same weapon, a hand axe of some type—hence the media-given name, The Cleaver—and he always kills his victims in their homes. We believe he uses the same weapon because we have been able to forensically obtain some trace elements of iron from several of the victims’ skulls. His M.O. is to stalk his victim until he becomes familiar enough with them to know when they are home alone, and then he enters the house—no forced entries—and . . .”

  Liddell interrupted him, asking, “You say he has never forced an entry?”

  Tunney stopped pacing and placed both hands on the conference tabletop. “Twenty-four confirmed kills and he has never once forced his way into a house.”

  “Well, I’m not as educated as your guys in Quantico,” Liddell said, “but doesn’t that kind of indicate that all of his victims let him in. That they may have known him?”

  Tunney looked like he had anticipated that question. “We thought of that. And it’s a possibility. But when you look at the scope of his travels, it would be highly unlikely that he actually ‘knew’ all of his victims. He has killed people in eight states from east to west and north to south.”

  “That’s an average of three victims in each state,” Dr. John piped in.

  “You’re not just another pretty face, Doc,” Liddell said and blew a kiss at him.

  Dr. John looked embarrassed.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Liddell said, and finally pulled up a chair and sat at the table. “Sorry, Agent Tunney.”

  Tunney smiled and said, “No apology needed, Detective. Despite what you’ve heard, FBI agents sometimes do possess a sense of humor.”

  Liddell leaned toward Jack and whispered, “It’s like he can read your mind. That’s creepy.”

  “Focus,” Jack whispered back at him.

  “Et tu, Brute?” Liddell said.

  Tunney apparently was listening and broke out in laughter at this exchange. “You guys are good,” he said, and even Captain Franklin was smiling.

  “They do pretty good work when they’re not screwing around,” Franklin admitted. “I just wish they would be more serious when we have a guest from an outside agency,” he said, directing this remark at Jack.

  Little Casket spoke up. “If your guy is the same as our guy, he’s not following the pattern. He’s already killed five here and one of them a policeman.”

  The room became quiet, until Tunney said, “He seems to be straying from his usual pattern, but it’s possible that we don’t know about all of his murders. Sometimes these killers change their entire style. There are no guarantees in profiling.” He looked around the room at each face. “One thing I can predict though. He isn’t finished with you.”

  The front-door buzzer sounded. Lilly stood up and said, “I’ll see who it is,” and she left the conference room. Before the others could go back to their discussion they heard voices raised. Jack recognized one of them as the domineering voice of Lilly Caskins. The other sounded female and just as determined, which was not a good thing.

  Lilly came back in the room and said, “Okay, which one of you idiots told the news media about this?” She explained, saying, “Channel Six. That Italian broad, Claudine Setera. She’s at the door. She wants to speak to FBI Special Agent Frank Tunney about The Clea
ver.”

  Standing at the front door of the morgue under a dark and moonless October sky, Claudine felt little, insignificant. But after she scooped all the other stations with this story she would never have to feel that way again. She smiled at the thought of Blake James sleeping through the story of the century. Well, at least it’s the story of the year in this little town, she thought.

  Then she had a more unpleasant thought. She had promised to meet with Detective Jansen at a place of his choosing to “pay him back” for this lead. The thought of that slimeball touching her made her feel sick. But, then, she had no plan to ever hold up her end of the bargain, so he could go play with himself. And she couldn’t help thinking that he was probably doing so while he was talking with her this morning. Her stomach clenched.

  Where is that little troll of a medical examiner? Claudine thought, looking at the door that had been closed in her face. There’s no way they can ignore me when I drop a bomb like this on them. Should have brought a cameraman, she thought, but then that would have tipped someone at the station that she was on this story, and she hadn’t been at Channel Six long enough to know whom she could trust. Well, after she got the interview with Agent Tunney this morning all of that crap at the station would end. She had reason to believe that Jack Murphy and his team were inside as well.

  She pulled out her notebook and wrote down the license plates of all the cars in the morgue parking lot. The door to the morgue opened and Jack Murphy came out. He was talking on a portable radio as he came out.

  “Yes. Please have the vehicle towed to impound,” he said into the radio.

  Claudine Setera looked out in the lot to the point where Murphy had been gazing. The only vehicle in that part of the lot was the car she had come in. Her personal car. He wouldn’t dare, she thought.