The Ninth Life

by E. H. Reinhard

  “Fair enough,” Bostok said.

  Chapter 19

  She’d called and messaged Larry repeatedly after she killed Phyllis and before she left the body—at least ten times. He never answered or sent a text back. Eve drove Phyllis’s car around aimlessly. She didn’t know what to do. She needed guidance, and Larry wasn’t calling her back. She didn’t know if she should go back to the condo. She didn’t know if she should get the vehicle she’d been driving, her father’s, from inside of the garage next to Billie Webber’s. The clock on the dash read a couple of minutes after four in the morning. She tried Larry again.

  The phone rang and rang. Just as she was about to hang up, he answered.

  “Hey, I’ll have to be quiet, and this will have to be quick. What’s going on?” he asked.

  “A woman was presented to me like you said. I took her life and left her at the lieutenant’s instead.”

  “What?” Larry asked.

  “Some woman from the condo came to my door. She came inside and then saw some coverage of me on the television. She tried running. I pushed her down the stairs and then gave her to the master.”

  “You’re on the news already?” Larry asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm. They’re putting it all together. The assistant director came in here a little bit ago and tried to rattle my cage about you and our relationship. I told him to go pound sand. Well, not quite that nicely. I imagine that I’ll be getting some kind of repercussions—they’ll screw with my food, or drug me out, or stick me in a hole for a little while. At minimum, they’ll toss my room in the morning, so I’ll probably be hard to get on the phone tomorrow.”

  “Do you think they’ll find where you’ve been hiding the phone?” she asked.

  “I doubt it. But either way, this battery is almost dead, and I don’t know how much I want to leave it out to charge. They’ll probably be in and out of here all day tomorrow.”

  “I need to know what to do,” she said. “I’m not sure if I should go back to the condo.”

  Larry was silent for a moment. “Why did you leave the latest one there instead of the earlier one?”

  “Because it was safer. And I couldn’t get you on the phone to discuss it with you. So I just went with my gut.”

  “How was it safer?”

  “They’re looking for the car in the garage. It was also on the news. I figured leaving it where it was, tucked away in the garage, was the best option. So I’m driving around in the car that belonged to the woman that I left at the lieutenant’s condo.”

  “So your father’s car and the one with the dead girl in the trunk are still in the garage?”

  “Yes,” Eve said.

  “Did they say anything on the news about your father or his car?”

  “No,” Eve said.

  “Did you leave any ID or anything with the woman that you left at Kane’s place?”

  “No,” Eve said.

  “Okay. So it will be a bit before they figure out who she is. I want you to go back to your condo. Park that woman’s car back in her garage. Can you do that?”

  “I should be able to, yeah.”

  “All right. Then go into your condo. Load your cargo in your father’s car and take it to the storage unit. Do that and call me.”

  “Do you think it’s safe to go back there?”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine,” he said.

  “If you’re sure,” Eve said.

  “I am.”

  “All right,” Eve said. “I’ll talk to you soon. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Larry said.

  Eve let out a relieved breath and clicked off from the call. She turned on her directional to make the next left and start back toward the condo.

  Chapter 20

  I didn’t sleep. One of Ed’s guys from the late shift at the coroner’s office had come and removed the woman’s body right around four thirty in the morning. Two patrol cars stayed as Bostok had instructed. The rest of the officers, including Donner and Reynolds, left around five, the captain a few minutes after. I spent the hours before my shift started looking over my old notes on the original investigation—I’d found them in my storage locker at my condo after a half hour of searching. Nothing caught my eye that could help with what we were currently dealing with. I went into work early, being tailed by a patrol car, and after an hour in the station’s gym, I sat down at my desk right around eight.

  My cell phone rang. I pulled it from my pocket, glanced at the screen, and clicked Talk.

  “Hey, Jim,” I said.

  “Morning. What’s up?” he asked. “Any developments since last night?”

  “Yup. We got another one overnight,” I said.

  “The same?” he asked.

  “With a cherry on top. The body was dumped outside of my condo.”

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Yup. She, meaning Kleeman, even rang my buzzer and let me know that she left it outside for me.”

  “You’re shitting me,” he said.

  “Wish I was.”

  “Okay. I’m just getting up and around, probably won’t be in the station for a good hour yet, but what do you need?”

  “Not sure. I’ve just been on the phone this morning calling whoever I could.”

  “Bounce some stuff off of me. Who did you call?”

  “I talked to the assistant director at the state hospital. I guess he tried talking to Koskinen, who of course wouldn’t give him anything. None of his guards said that they’d ever noticed anything off between the interactions of Koskinen and Kleeman.”

  “I don’t know how much stock I’d put in that,” Jim said. “They would probably be reprimanded if they now said that they noticed something amiss but had never reported it.”

  “Same thing that I thought,” I said.

  “Did you ask to speak with Koskinen directly?”

  “Yeah. The assistant director told me that he’d have to get it cleared and would look into it. So that’s kind of up in the air.”

  “You said last night in the text that you guys have an arrest warrant for her?”

  “We do,” I said. “And her face and name are all over the news.”

  “You put in for everything? Credit reports, phone, bank, everything?”

  “We did. But I don’t think any of it has come back yet.”

  “Did you get ahold of anyone up where she lives? Up here? If you have an arrest warrant for her, I’m sure they could get a search warrant and look around her place.”

  “It’s on my list of calls to make, on top of a pile of other things.” I ran through my to-do list with Jim. I still needed to get Eve Kleeman’s parents on the phone. We still needed to find Billie Webber, or her body. We needed to get an identity on the woman we found outside of my condo. I told him that my forensics guys’ running of her prints had turned up nothing on the latest woman. I also needed to get the security video from outside of my condo.

  “Sounds like you got your hands full but your bases covered.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Keep plugging away, I guess.”

  “If you can think of something that I can do to help, just shoot me a call or send off a text.”

  “Will do,” I said. I clicked off from the call and leaned back in my chair, thinking of what to tackle first.

  “What’s first?” Hank asked. He walked through my office doorway, holding a half of a doughnut in one hand and a coffee in the other. Hank took two big bites of his doughnut and sat across from me at my desk, awaiting my response. I’d called him in to work an hour early and filled him in on the events that had transpired overnight.

  “Same thing that I was kicking around. Find Kleeman,” I said.

  “Right. Got anything for me to look into to lead us to that end?”

  “Yeah. Run Kleeman’s address and call the local PD up there. Tell them what we’ve got going on and ask them what they need from us to get a search warrant for her house.”

  “Got
it,” Hank said. “Did you talk to Ed? Was he doing the autopsy right away?”

  “I haven’t talked to him yet.”

  “All right. I’ll get into contact with whatever PD I need to, and then I’ll get Ed on the phone to let him know that we’ll probably have to go the dental records and missing persons route on our latest,” Hank said.

  “Okay.” I pulled myself closer to my desk. “Let me try calling Eve Kleeman’s parents again.”

  Hank scooted his chair back and stood. “If Ed has anything for us, did you want to drive over there?”

  “See what he has, and we’ll go from there. He might not have even gotten started with her yet.”

  “All right.” Hank started walking from my office.

  My eyes went to his feet, noticing that he’d abandoned his sneakers for a regular set of dress shoes. I thought about giving him a zinger before he made it out the door but couldn’t come up with anything on the fly.

  I reached out for my desk phone, scooped it up, and found the number for Eve Kleeman’s parents in my notebook. I punched it in and held the receiver to my ear with my shoulder. A moment later, a man picked up.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  I leaned forward at my desk. “Yes. Is this Colin Kleeman?” I asked.

  “Speaking. Who’s this?”

  “My name is Lieutenant Carl Kane with the Tampa Police Department.”

  “Lieutenant Carl Kane with the Tampa Police Department,” he repeated. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

  “I tried you last night and left you a message. This is regarding your daughter.”

  “Oh, I never listen to my messages. It’s always someone just trying to sell me something. You said you’re calling about Eve?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What for?” he asked.

  I thought for a moment, trying to come up with the best way to say that his daughter was in some kind of relationship with a killer from the state mental hospital and was now in Tampa, brutally murdering people in his style. That we needed whatever information that he could give us to arrest her and throw away the key. I deflected his question and started easy.

  “When was the last time that you spoke to her?” I asked.

  “Yesterday.”

  “And she was where when you talked to her?” I asked.

  “Driving. What’s this about, now?”

  “Driving where?” I asked.

  “She didn’t say,” he said. “Now, why don’t you tell me what this is about?”

  Her father was giving me succinct answers and would probably give me nothing if I continued to press and didn’t give him the reason for my call. He’d said that he spoke to her yesterday, which meant that she had to have been speaking with him on a cell phone. I wanted the number. There was a chance that we could trace it. I figured I’d try to get it before telling him why I wanted it.

  “What number did she call you from?” I asked.

  “I’m hanging up if you don’t tell me what this is about,” he said.

  I scratched at the side of my bald head and then told her father what we knew—her fingerprints at murder scenes, her contacting me, the works.

  He was quiet for a moment. “This has to be some kind of a mistake,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Kleeman.”

  “She wouldn’t have had an inappropriate relationship with someone from the hospital.”

  “We believe that she did,” I said.

  “There just has to be some kind of a logical explanation,” he said.

  I explained to him as clearly as I could where, exactly, we’d found her prints—the phone of a woman who was now dead that had been used to call my desk, the license plate, the plate frame, the car. I told him again where we’d found the prints in the apartment where a murder took place. I told him about Eve’s print in blood. Last, I told him of the fact that her prints were on the buttons for my intercom.

  He was quiet again before mumbling a handful of profanities under his breath.

  “Sir, anything that you can help me with betters the chance that we can bring her in without any more lives lost, and that includes your daughter,” I said.

  “Damn,” he said.

  I heard him let out a big puff of air.

  “I knew something wasn’t right with this new relationship that she said she had,” he said.

  “What do you mean by that, Mr. Kleeman? Is this Larry Koskinen that we’re speaking of?”

  “I don’t know. She never gave me a name, or she may have and maybe I just don’t remember. Either way, Eve always talked about some guy from her work. How special he made her feel, how much they were in love. I mean, I thought it was great. That she’d found someone. Before him, I think her last boyfriend came sometime in her early twenties. Eve never really dated. I guess you could say that she wasn’t really sought out by the opposite sex. She’s a big, strong girl, if you know what I mean. Not much of a looker and kind of butch.”

  I furrowed my brow, thinking it odd that he referred to his own daughter as not much of a looker and kind of butch, but I let it go. “Tell me about the last time that you saw her in person,” I said.

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you. It was the same as it always is. We just talked and spent some time together.”

  “The topic?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t even tell you,” he said.

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A week or two ago,” he said.

  “Did anything seem out of the ordinary?”

  “Out of the ordinary? No. Not in the least. I have to say, none of what you’re talking about sounds like something that she’d do or be involved in. I can’t help but think that there’s just some kind of a mix-up here.”

  “I wish that was the case, but it’s just not looking that way. Mr. Kleeman, what phone number did she call you from yesterday?”

  “It was the same one as always.”

  “Do you have that number?”

  “Um, one second, let me find it on my phone.”

  I went to the doorway of my office and cupped the mouthpiece of my phone. With a quick whistle, I got Hank’s attention at his desk in the bull pen. I waved him toward my office. Mr. Kleeman came back on the line and rattled off a phone number, which I wrote down. The number had a Wisconsin prefix. I ripped it from my notepad.

  Hank appeared in my doorway.

  “One second, Mr. Kleeman,” I said. I cupped the mouthpiece of my phone again to talk to Hank without Mr. Kleeman hearing. “I have Kleeman’s father on the phone. He just gave me a phone number. I want Terry on it right away.” I held the slip of paper out toward Hank.

  Hank took it and left my office.

  “Do you have any idea where she is?” he asked.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out. The phone number could help.”

  “I’m going to call her and find out just what the hell is actually going on here.”

  “I’ll ask you to not do that. The phone may be the only way that we get a location on her. We’d like to find her and get this resolved peacefully. If she knows that we’re on to that specific phone, she could dispose of it.”

  He didn’t respond, and I didn’t have a read on whether I actually got through to the guy or not. I needed to keep him on the line until Hank got downstairs with that phone number. There was a chance that Kleeman could immediately call his daughter as soon as I hung up and tell her to disable her phone.

  “Do you think that maybe she shared some things with her mother that she might not have shared with you?”

  “No. Her mother is in poor health. Early onset Alzheimer’s.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Mr. Kleeman. What about brothers or sisters? Maybe someone else that I could contact that might have recently spoken with her.”

  “Only child,” he said.

  “All right. Can you think of anything else that could help us locate your daughter? Did she ever mention anything about Tampa? Can
you think of any friends or family that she may know down here?”

  “Nobody,” he said. “She’s never even been to Florida before.”

  I tried keeping Colin Kleeman on the phone, but he insisted that he had to go and then hung up on me. Hank returned and told me that we didn’t have any kind of signal on Eve Kleeman’s phone. Terry said that he’d keep trying the number in hopes of getting a signal if she turned it on. He also said that he’d contact the carrier to try to get the records on the phone itself.

  I had run every question that I could think of past her father while I had him on the line, but he’d given me nothing that would help. Her father either had no idea what she was actually doing down in Florida or was awfully good at playing clueless.

  Chapter 21

  I’d just returned from the lunchroom with a tall cup of Colombian roast and a packaged crumb cake. I sipped at my coffee while I spilled crumbs down the front of my suit jacket and tie.

  Hank walked into my office. He held up a scrap of paper. “Just got a call. This one might be what we’re looking for.”

  I waved him toward my desk. “What did we get?” I asked.

  “Woman caller. Judith Parker. She says that Eve Kleeman lives in her condo complex.”

  “What condo complex?” I asked.

  “She just said that it was off of Bayshore,” Hank said. “Here.” He passed me the torn-out piece of notepad paper.

  I took it. The paper had her name, phone number, and an address. I didn’t recognize the address immediately, but if she lived off Bayshore Boulevard, it would put her within a mile or two of my condo at the most.

  “This woman was certain?” I asked.

  “She said that the woman’s name was Eve and that the photos on the television were definitely her.”

  “Did she give you an exact address?” I asked.

  “No. She said that she’d seen her by the pool and around the facility this last week. She didn’t know what actual condo she lived in, though.”