The Ninth Life

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Right, so you could pretty much judge his book by the cover is what you’re saying,” Bostok said.

  “Not quite that simple, though,” I said. “Somehow this guy had a silver tongue with the women. It was how he acquired those he killed. Picked them up in nightclubs.”

  “Girls going home with a guy covered in satanic tattoos? With his face tattooed?” Bostok shook his head. “Shouldn’t that have been a big red flashing sign that says run the other way?”

  “It should have, but wasn’t apparently. He’d find those out alone. Approach and chat them up. He seemed to be able to single out those that were weak, or desperate for attention, or whatever. The guy actually had a master’s in psychology. He was a counselor at a charter school before he cracked.”

  “That’s interesting.” He tapped the surface of his desk with the end of a pen. “How did the arrest go down?”

  “Exceptionally messy,” I said. “See, the tattoos and shit aside, with the way he talked to me on the phone, I had this mental image of him being some meek school psychology counselor. You know, the lurking-around-in-the-shadows type. It couldn’t have been further from the truth. This guy was drug-fueled rage and craziness.”

  Bostok motioned for me to give him the story.

  “So what led us to him was a possible ID on him from some security footage at a nightclub where we believe he picked a woman up. We made a couple of still photos of the footage and distributed them through the press. A couple people came forward and claimed to know who the guy was. I guess a bigger guy with tattooed nines on his face is fairly easy to remember. We went to the listed address on him, but the place was deserted. So we decided to stop in at his parents’ house. My partner and I took a trip out to the address, a house in Glendale, a Milwaukee suburb. We figure that maybe they knew where he could be. Well, through the windows of the house, we see blood all over the floor in the living room. So we call it in and split around the house. I took the back, my partner the front. The second I rounded the house, I have this asshole on me with a big-ass serrated military knife. I didn’t even get a chance to get a shot off before he knocked my gun from my hand and we went to the ground.”

  “Koskinen,” Bostok said.

  “Yeah. He was all jacked up on PCP, plus he is a bigger guy—six two, two ten. Basically, I had my work cut out for me in a brawl. So I’m trying to fight him off of me and doing whatever the hell I can to keep his knife away from me. He got me with it in the side of the head a couple of times. Meanwhile, I’m trying to punch this asshole while trying to not get stabbed. The whole time he’s screaming something about releasing my soul to the dark one, or some other crazy shit. Jim heard him yelling and came running. He can’t shoot the guy because I’m wrapped up with him. So Jim runs to me and Koskinen and gets the guy’s back, trying to secure his arms. Koskinen swings the blade backward and plants it deep into Jim’s leg. Jim lets go of Koskinen, and he rips away from me. Koskinen ran around the corner of the house back toward the road. I get back to my feet to find my gun and go after him. Keep in mind, I have blood in my eyes, blinding me, and am just leaking all over. I don’t see my damn gun anywhere and can’t waste any more time, allowing Koskinen to get away while I search for it. Jim had just been stabbed in the leg, so he’s still on the ground and sure as hell wasn’t about to catch someone on foot.”

  “So this is the guy that your scars are from?” Bostok tapped the side of his head.

  I reached up on the right side of my head and ran my fingertips across the old wounds. “Yeah, some of them,” I said.

  “Okay. Continue,” the captain said.

  “So, I round the corner of the house in the direction that Koskinen fled, figuring he’s already at the street, running or getting in a car or something. Nope, he was right there around the corner. I ran smack into him. Koskinen bear hugs me and slams me to the ground. I was a little lighter then, maybe twenty-five pounds lighter, but this guy scooped me up like nothing. I lock eyes on him over me and he’s lifting this blade over his head and about to slam the thing down into my chest while he’s chanting some gibberish. I reached up and caught his arms as they came down, stopping the knife just an inch or two from my chest. I struggle with him a bit and get the blade pushed away from me. As soon as I had the knife cleared of my body, I put a good right elbow into his cheek. Then another into the side of his head. Then another and another. He finally flopped off of me after I’d knocked him out. I immediately rolled him, mounted his back, and cuffed him—leaking my blood on him the entire time. He came to as I was pulling him to his feet. I dragged him to the car—he jerked and yanked and tried biting at me the entire way. He was spouting off that I wasn’t his judge, that no earthly man could judge him, and that he wasn’t done doing the master’s plan. He said that he was the powerful one and this wasn’t the last I’d see of his work.”

  “Apparently he wasn’t lying.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately, that’s how it’s looking,” I said.

  “So that was it? Booked and cooked?”

  “No,” I said. “So I get Koskinen in the back of our cruiser and then go to check on Jim. He was still on the ground at the back of the house. I helped him to his feet and am walking him back to the car when we hear screaming laughter and thumping. Koskinen is in the back of the damn cruiser laughing his ass off and smashing his face into the cage. And I’m not talking about little taps. He’s rearing back and putting everything he has into it.”

  “Hog-tie him?” Bostok asked.

  I nodded. “He was a mess, though. Just blood covering everything. He crushed his own eye socket, broke his nose, jaw, you name it. He just laughed as we got him tied up. Anyway, I waited with Jim for our paramedics to arrive. Jim was bleeding pretty badly. I sent patrol into the house as soon as they got on scene. They found an unconscious, beaten, college-aged woman in the basement. The inside of the house itself was a whole other can of worms. Dead animal remains all over, carcasses on the furniture, some just bones.”

  “Any more bodies found?”

  “Yup. His parents—dead and rotting. He’d sat their bodies on a small table inside of the master bedroom closet and nailed them to the back wall so they’d stay propped upright in a seated position. There was candles and weird crap all around them. A giant pentagram was spray-painted on the carpet. It was like some kind of makeshift altar. In old blood on the wall it read, False creators must die.”

  I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket. I pulled my phone half out and gave the screen a look. “Damn. This is Jim again, Cap.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” he said.

  “That was about the gist of the story, anyway,” I said.

  I spun from the chair, stood, and clicked Talk as I walked from Bostok’s office.

  Chapter 6

  “What’s up?” I answered.

  “Hey, sorry I had to run before. I had a meeting that the captain wanted me in on. Anyway, I was just thinking about something,” Jim said. “You said that the car had a stolen Wisconsin tag?”

  “That’s what it came back as, yeah,” I said.

  I walked into my office and took a seat at the corner of my desk. I looked over at my chair sitting three inches lower than it should have been.

  “As in stolen from Wisconsin? Or lifted off of a vehicle down in Tampa that had a Wisconsin tag on it?”

  “Damn, you know, I never even asked.”

  “What’s the tag number?” Jim asked.

  “I didn’t write it down, but the car is in our forensics garage downstairs in the station here. Can I keep you on the line for a second while I run downstairs to get it?”

  “Sure,” Jim said.

  I slid down from the edge of my desk, walked the hall, and took the stairs two flights down to the first floor. I entered the forensics unit and passed by the offices and workstations. I caught a glance from Rob in one of the glass-enclosed labs, working at a computer. I continued to the back of the unit, turned the corner, and walked through the doorway into our
station’s forensics garage that was used when we needed to process a vehicle. The far right side of the room held a long stainless steel table and shelving. The wall closest to me on my left held a pair of computer stations. Droplights hung from the exposed metal beams of the ceiling. The garage walls and floor were a stark white, and the lighting made them only brighter. In the first bay of the three-bay garage was our Acura. I saw Rick kneeling at the closed passenger side door of the car. He looked to be pulling prints from the door handle area. A large rolling cart topped with a number of tools stood near the car’s front bumper. I walked past Rick to the rear of the car with the trunk lid open.

  Rick saw me and stood. “Just getting started, Kane. I think she was… Oh, sorry,” he said, seeing that I was on the phone.

  I held up a finger at Rick, signaling that I’d just be a moment, and read the tag number off to Jim, who waited on the line.

  “Comes back to a Ford registered in Madison,” Jim said. “We have a note in the system here with a report number. One second.”

  I waited, staring into the trunk. The tan carpet was bloodied but not to the extent that the woman had bled out on it. I saw a couple of voids in the blood, which was odd. The thought ran through my head that she’d been killed somewhere else and then placed into the trunk.

  “That tag was stolen at the registered homeowner’s house. A guy by the name of Matt Fellner. It was reported stolen about two weeks ago. I have the police report here. It doesn’t say much. The guy saw the license plate was missing as he left for work in the morning. Assumed it was taken sometime overnight. Whoever took it only took the rear tag.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Any contact information on this guy?”

  “Yeah, I have a phone number here. Are you ready for it?”

  I pinned my phone to my ear with my shoulder and dug my notepad from my pocket. I took the pen from the binding. “Shoot,” I said.

  Jim gave me the number, and I wrote it down. “All right, Jim. I appreciate the help.”

  “Sure. Let me know how it goes. And if you need anything else, just give me a call. We’re slow, so if you need me to do any more digging, just ask.”

  “Appreciate it,” I said.

  “Anytime, partner.”

  I clicked off and gave Rick, who was leaning against his rolling cart, my attention. “Anything new?” I asked.

  “I was just going to say that the blood isn’t quite right in the trunk,” Rick said.

  “Not enough? I noticed some weird voids.”

  “Exactly. I’m thinking that there was something else in the trunk that maybe she was on top of. There’s a couple spots that look as if the blood rolled off of something and pooled.”

  “Think she was killed somewhere else?”

  “Not sure. There’s still a good amount of blood in there. I’m going to need to send someone over by Ed to get her clothing this afternoon. Maybe we can get some trace on it that could clear things up.”

  “Was Hank down here?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I think he’s over in tech now. We printed the phone and passed it off to them. They were going to go through it and see what they could get.”

  “All right,” I said. “Finding anything with the car?”

  “I’ll be working with this car here for probably most of the afternoon. There’s prints all over it, so I’m going to be pulling them and having Kevin or Rob run them as I get them. Not seeing a smoking gun, though. No murder weapon.”

  “Okay. Do me a favor and remove the license plate and frame. Print them both.”

  “Absolutely,” Rick said.

  “I might be out of the office. We need to find this girl’s roommate and then pop over by Ed. If he has her clothes ready for you, we’ll bring them back.”

  “I’d appreciate that. It’ll save me or my guys a trip,” Rick said.

  “Call my cell phone with anything you get.”

  Rick nodded and went back to his fingerprinting.

  I left the lab and walked past the elevators and stairs for the tech unit at the end of the hall. I gave the closed door a knock with the back of my hand and walked in. I looked left over two vacant computer stations at the big whiteboard listing the jobs that they were working on. I looked to my right at Terry Murphy’s office. The lights were on, and he sat at his desk. I headed over.

  “Terry,” I said.

  “Hey, Kane,” Terry said. “Rawlings is in the back with Westbrook. They’re going over that phone that was just brought in.”

  “All I needed to know,” I said.

  I left Terry’s office and walked past the first workstations of computers and around a big square beam with a calendar attached to it. I saw Hank seated at a long table with Joe Westbrook, one of our department’s other tech guys. I headed over and saw that the phone was plugged into the computer system in front of the two.

  “Getting anything?” I asked.

  Westbrook shook his head.

  “As far as the phone itself, we had some internet activity today. The last outgoing and incoming calls were to and from you—but she missed a bunch of calls today and had a number of text messages,” Hank said. “All from someone named Billie.”

  “That Billie is her roommate. We need that number to contact her,” I said.

  “Give me a second,” Westbrook said. “I’ll pull it back up.” He took the phone in hand and went into the call log. He wrote the number down on a piece of paper on the desk and then handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What was the internet activity?”

  “Just some log-ins to email and social media accounts. About it,” Westbrook said.

  “Which wouldn’t have been from her,” Hank said.

  “Can we see where the phone has been?”

  “Doubt it,” Westbrook said.

  “Give me a little more than ‘doubt it.’”

  “Well, the phone is from a prepaid provider. So when I run it, it’s just going to tell me the carrier that it’s piggybacking off of. These prepaid phones just use one of the big three or four mobile companies’ networks. Anyway, we’ll have to subpoena the main company, and then they will tell me to subpoena the prepaid company, who I basically already know isn’t going to have any records on the phone. Put it this way, it’s going to be a bitch, and we probably won’t get anything without a hell of a lot of back and forth,” Westbrook said.

  “Okay. So what you’re saying is that we’re going to have to do some police work?”

  “That may end up giving you better results,” Westbrook said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Come on, Hank.” I turned and motioned for Hank to follow.

  “Where are we going?” Hank asked.

  “To do some police work.”

  Hank followed me from the tech unit and back upstairs to the third floor. We walked to my office and entered. I scooped up the phone on my desk and dialed the number for the roommate. I got an answer in just a couple of rings.

  “Hello,” a woman said.

  Her voice crackled, and I heard her sniff.

  “Is this Billie Webber?” I asked. I walked around my desk and took a seat in my low-riding chair.

  Hank plopped down on the couch at the back of my office.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Miss Webber, my name is Lieutenant Carl Kane from the Tampa Police Department.”

  “Is this about Erica?” she asked.

  I heard her sniff again.

  “It is,” I said.

  I heard the girl taking in a couple of erratic breaths.

  “I just got off the phone with her mother. It’s true?” She paused. “She’s dead? Someone killed her?”

  “I’m sorry, miss,” I said.

  I gave her a moment while she cried into the phone. When she composed herself enough, I explained to her the importance and time-sensitive nature of us being able to meet with her—any information that we could get on Erica or her last known whereabouts could point us in the direction of the person responsible.<
br />
  She coughed into the phone and cleared her throat. “I think she was taken from here,” she said. “When I came home last night, the garage door was open. I tried calling her a bunch of times, but she didn’t answer.”

  “What time did you return home and notice this?” I asked.

  “A little after one in the morning. I was out with some girls from work.”

  “Okay, Miss Webber. We’d like to stop out at your place, have a talk with you, and have a look around.”

  “I’m here now,” she said.

  “We can be there in about a half hour.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Do you have the address?”

  “We do,” I said. I read it off to her, and she confirmed it.

  “You’ll have to page me from the front gates so I can let you in. My unit number is 1107.”

  I wrote down the apartment number, thanked her, and hung my phone back on its base. I scooped up the piece of paper that had her phone number on it, folded it up, and jammed it into my pocket.

  “She thinks that our victim was taken from their apartment,” I said. I looked over at Hank seated on the couch. “It will take us about twenty-five minutes to get out there. Are you ready to go?”

  “I’m set,” Hank said. He put a hand on the couch’s armrest to push himself to his feet.

  A knock came on my office door.

  I glanced over at the doorway as I fished my keys from my desk. Detective Jones stood in the doorway, taking up most of it.

  “How was the dentist?” I asked and slid my desk drawer closed.

  “Awful,” he said. “But I’m starting to be able to feel my face again. I heard we had one this morning.”

  “We did. We’re about to head out for an interview now and have a look around. After that we need to shoot over to the ME’s office. Do you want to take a ride with us?”

  “Sure,” Jones said.

  Hank and I followed Jones from my office, and I locked the door. As I walked, I dialed the number I had for the man whose license plate had been stolen.

  Chapter 7

  She took a number of connecting buses and walked the rest of the way to the apartment of Billie Webber and the late Erica Osweiler. She was there for Billie Webber. Eve needed another woman to kill, another bread crumb for the lieutenant to follow, and had learned of Erica Osweiler’s roommate while she was snooping through Erica’s phone and social media accounts. The woman would do just fine, or at least that was what she was told.