by David Archer
Tina sat down at her own desk next to Jake’s and shot him a smile that made him blush. He had come to the conclusion that she was exactly the kind of girl he went for, but she hadn’t ever given him the impression that he had a chance, so he tried hard not to let it show. He figured she probably knew he had a crush on her, though; in his experience, girls could usually tell.
Gabriella came in at just after ten, profusely apologizing for being late and bearing gifts in the form of coffee. Everyone smiled and thanked her, then told her not to worry about it, because she had been racking up a good record at handling the minor cases. She brushed off their praise and settled at her own computer, typing furiously to get her reports completed quickly.
By the time Jake had finished his cheating spouse reports, he was ready for another cup of coffee and offered to get one for Tina while he was at it. Returning with two cups in his hands, he walked carefully as he made his way back to his desk, stopping only to give Tina hers, and when he got back to his desk, he was ready to start going over some of the older cases. He had learned that it was always wise to finish his reports, then look at them again a few days later. It was amazing the things he would remember that he had forgotten to include on his first go-round.
Tina looked up, a grateful smile on her face. "Thanks, Jake," she said.
Shortly before noon, Chance stood up and stretched, deciding that he needed to take a break from all the paperwork. He had been sitting at his computer for almost four hours straight, and even after Jake had finished his own work and offered to help, he still hadn't gotten nearly as far as he would’ve liked. He walked out of the office and Gabriella looked up to see just what he was up to.
"I'm going to go find some lunch," he said with a grin, and then turned to Jake. "You want to come along, whiz kid? Lunch is on me. My way of saying thanks for taking on so much of the boring work, so I don’t have to do it."
"Sure," Jake said without a moment’s hesitation. "That sounds great, Chance. By the way, you do realize I'm older than you, right?"
“Yeah, but I'm still your boss,” Chance said with a grin.
"I'll take a free lunch," Gabriella said. “You were going to invite me along, right?”
"Of course, my love," Chance replied with a smile on his face. “Tina? Care to join us?”
“Sure,” Tina said, and Jake fought back the urge to blush again.
Chance turned to where Pete was standing. “Pete? Wanna come along?”
“No, I'm good,” Pete said, smiling. “Josie is supposed to take me out to lunch today, if she ever comes out of her office.”
Chance turned back to his wife and the others. “Just us, then,” he said. “Carol is meeting with Max for lunch, she’s heading out soon as she gets off the phone.”
Gabriella started shutting down her computer, then gathered up her things so that she could join them for lunch. "Come on, kids," Chance said. "You probably got everything done already, anyway."
Jake looked up with a smile. "I do," he said. "And if you’re buying, there’s no way in the world I'm going to pass up the chance to have a steak at your expense."
“Ditto,” Tina said. “Let’s...”
"Sorry to do this, gang," Carol said suddenly, coming out of her office. "I just got a call about a case, and it’s going to be a big one. You’ve all heard about the women who have been turning up dead all around the city? It seems the families of some of the victims have decided the local authorities aren’t doing their jobs, and they’ve heard enough about us to be willing to pay to have us work with the LVPD on it. Josie is preparing a briefing for us now."
"Are you serious?" Tina asked. "The Las Vegas Police Department is going to let a bunch of private eyes come in on an official investigation?"
"Yeah, what she said," Chance said, his eyes wide as he looked at the office manager.
“Apparently,” Carol said. “I just got off the phone with the sheriff, and he said the governor has ordered him to go along with the idea.” She shrugged. “He says he didn’t argue, because they need all the help they can get on this case.”
"Why would they want to bring us in on this?" Jake asked as he followed the rest of them to the briefing room Carol had set up.
“The sheriff says he remembers Pete from back in the day,” Carol said. “I assured him that Pete, and all of us, will do everything possible to help bring this killer to justice.”
Josie was already waiting there for the rest of them to catch up. She had already put a lot of the relevant information on the big screen on the wall. They all sat down at the big round table and started to open the files Josie had hastily printed after Carol had given her a heads up.
"Hey, gang," Josie said in greeting as she wheeled her chair over to pick up the remote for the projector. "I know you are all acquainted with the case from the news, but this morning all police reports and other materials were sent over to us," she said. "Here we have synopses of what the investigators on the case consider to be the most important information to be dealt with. These files contain witness reports, interviews with suspects and their background checks, backgrounds on the victims and their families, forensic reports, et cetera. There is a lot of information here. They've conducted over two hundred interviews so far. The forensic evidence is very slim, so you’ll want to know this material."
Pete took over. "This killer has a very set pattern. All the victims have disappeared without a trace, and two of them weren’t even noticed missing for a day or so. They were found again seven days later, in public places. They have then been dead between six and ten hours. Their deaths have all been estimated to have taken place around midnight, and all of them died by overdose on OxyContin. They are always dressed in clothing other than what they were wearing when they disappeared. The victims are all women, between twenty and twenty-eight years of age. They are of different ethnicities and backgrounds, and the only known connection seems to be that each of them has been diagnosed with depression of one form or another."
"There are no signs of sexual abuse," Tina interrupted, turning the papers in front of her. "There are no other injuries either. No bruises, no cuts, no blood. Just irritated, red skin. Where does that come from?"
"The coroners believe that the bodies have been cleaned with the rough side of a kitchen sponge, or something like that," Pete informed them.
"Before or after they died?" Chance asked.
"They don’t know for sure," Pete said. "Possibly both. This is one of the reasons the forensic evidence is so slim, everything that might have been there seems to have been washed away."
"What about the tip lines?" Chance asked. “Are they getting any calls?”
"They have several lines going," Josie informed them, "and they are being flooded with calls, everybody from suspicious neighbors to crazies who insist it’s the work of Satan, and one nutcase who tried to confess even though he’s been in a mental institution for the past nine years." She looked up. “He stole a nurse’s cell phone.”
"This killer won't call," Pete said softly. "This is very private for him, he doesn't want all this attention."
"What makes you think that?" Tina frowned. "Aren't serial killers usually attention seeking? Wanting to show off their superior intelligence and all that?"
"Typically yes," Pete agreed, "but this killer doesn't seem like that to me. No one has tried to contact either the media or the families of the victims. There have been no ransom notes or messages when they go missing. This killer wants to remain anonymous. He is fighting a private battle with himself."
"But where do the victims fit in?" Tina asked.
"I don't know," Pete said. "Maybe it's their innocence that's important, maybe they’re some sort of companions."
"Or a replacement." The team turned to Jake, who seemed a bit nervous for some reason. "Maybe the killer has lost someone, and is trying to get her back, but the illusion just doesn't hold up."
Pete nodded. "That's a good thought."
Pete's pho
ne beeped and he looked at the text message. "Okay, the Station Commander says they’re waiting for us. Josie, look into the victims' backgrounds and check all their families and other adults in their lives. Chance and Gabriella, the crime scenes and the evidence. I’ll be looking through the witness statements, such as they are. Jake, you and Tina can look at any known offenders who might have worked in any way similar to this in the past, especially if they’ve only recently come to the area."
“Or returned to it,” Josie said. “Might have been gone to prison for a while, maybe. To be thorough, I pulled up what the Station Commander sent over and added everything I could find on this case so far, and put a copy into the file for each of you. Take a look at the big monitor. The three women you see in those photos have all been found dead, scrubbed clean and wrapped in plastic, and left in conspicuous locations all around Las Vegas, and all of them died similarly enough for the LVPD to be certain it’s the same MO. Each of them went missing, and then seven days later, their bodies were each found laid out in similar fashion at someplace where they were certain to be found, and each and every one of them died of a massive overdose of oxycodone."
"Oxy isn’t all that easy to get hold of, the last few years," Tina pointed out. "Opioids are pretty commonly abused drugs nowadays, but doctors are becoming more cautious about prescribing them because they have an extremely high risk of overdose and even higher risk of deliberate abuse. In fact, nowadays, even when they are prescribed, they're usually carefully controlled and monitored by the doctor who prescribes them. The kidnapper must have some kind of easy access to them, I would think. It’s even possible that it could be a doctor, or perhaps a pharmacist, or somebody working around drug stores or hospitals."
"The first thing we want to do, then, is check with all the local hospitals and pharmacies," Pete said. "It’s quite possible the drugs are being taken out of their inventories without them even being aware of it."
"Probably a stupid question," Chance said, and the others all looked at him. "But do you think there’s any chance these might be suicides? I'm just asking, because it says each of them had been diagnosed with some sort of a depression problem. Is it possible these women actually took their own lives?"
Jake looked closely at the file he was holding. "While it’s true that people with depression are generally more likely to have suicidal thoughts, the odds of three women committing suicide by overdosing on OxyContin would be pretty high. I highly doubt that any of these are suicides."
"I agree," Josie said. "It just wouldn’t add up that way. On top of that, each of the women had apparently been held in some kind of captivity. All of them have ligature marks on their wrists and ankles, all of them show some sign of being malnourished, and they all show signs of muscular atrophy that would normally come from being confined in a small space."
"On the other hand, just the fact they didn’t die of thirst probably means the kidnapper was at least trying to take care of them," Pete said. “Kind of sounds like he didn’t really set out to be cruel.”
"That’s a good point," Jake agreed. "I actually read about a case like this before. In that case, the killer used drugs because he was trying to be merciful. An overdose can be a very quick and relatively painless form of euthanasia."
"I agree, but that’s not all," Carol continued, motioning for Josie to show another image on the screen. Photos of all three of the women, which were taken when they were found, quickly appeared on the screen. Each of them was fully dressed, laying on her back with her eyes closed and her hands folded on her chest, and each of them had been carefully wrapped in plastic to keep them in that position. "Look at the way he disposed of the bodies. It’s like he was trying to be extremely gentle with them. Suicides couldn’t possibly do this to themselves."
"Maybe he was sorry he killed them?" Gabriella asked. “I'm sure we’ve all heard the theory that a lot of killers regret their actions afterward, but can’t seem to stop themselves from doing it.”
"It gets even stranger than that," Tina said, reading through her file. "According to the medical examiner, none of the victims show any signs of sexual assault."
"So these cases are likely not motivated by any kind of sexual desire," Jake said. “Most of the serial killers I’ve read about who go after women generally do have a sexual component to their motivations, but not all of them.”
"Right,” Chance said, “so, what we know so far is that the suspect kidnaps the victim, ties them up somewhere and then keeps them for a week, at the very least providing them with water until—what? He just gets tired of them, and decides to get rid of them?"
"That’s how it looks," Josie said, nodding. She aimed the remote at the screen once again, bringing up the next photo. This one was a picture of a young black woman, smiling at the camera. "This is Juliana Willets, a civil attorney, aged twenty-nine, the killer's first victim. She was reported as missing almost five weeks ago by her employer when she failed to make an appearance at an important court case. Juliana had been diagnosed bipolar back when she was just a teenager. She was found dead a week after she was reported missing. Her body was left in the back seat of a car that belonged to a hotel cleaning lady. When she came out to get in her car the next morning, she noticed someone laying in the back seat and called police."
She aimed the remote again, bringing up a photo that showed a Caucasian woman with blonde hair, laughing while apparently trying to get away from the camera. "Four days after Juliana Willets’ body was found, Adrienne Moore, aged thirty-two, was reported missing by her husband when she failed to show to pick up her little boy from school," Josie explained. "She was just a normal, everyday housewife, and everyone said she loved taking care of her six-year-old son, whose name is Jimmy. She had been diagnosed with severe postpartum depression after her second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Her body was found laying on a bench at Rainbow Family Park." She looked around at everyone. “Another family had taken their children to the park to play that morning, and the kids came running back to say there was a lady who was all wrapped up and couldn’t breathe. They thought the kids were just playing, but followed them anyway and found the body. I guess the kids had been warned about playing with plastic wrap, so seeing her like that set off an alarm for them.”
A new set of pictures appeared on the screen, and these displayed a young, darker-skinned woman with long, black, curly hair, in what looked like a driver’s license photo. "In what seems to be a regular pattern, Zoe Castellanos was reported missing four days later, when her friends noticed she hadn’t been to her college classes for at least a couple of days. Zoe, twenty-one, was a student at the University of Nevada on a full scholarship. Her friends thought it was weird that she would take a chance of losing her scholarship by cutting class, so they called it in. Zoe was determined to have some kind of general depression problem by the school psychologist sometime in her first year as a student there. She was found laying in the flower bed at a hotel yesterday afternoon, her body wrapped in plastic just like the other two."
"Which means,” Pete said “that if the suspect follows the same pattern he’s used before, then it’s very likely that another victim will be taken sometime in the next three days," Pete said. “Is that right?”
"That’s exactly right," Josie confirmed. "The problem is going to be figuring out who it might be, because there isn’t anything other than their depression problems that seems to connect these three women. Different jobs, age range, ethnicity; the only thing they have in common is that they all suffer from depression, and even that is a tenuous connection, at best."
"Well, that’s going to make it hard, isn’t it?" Tina asked. "I mean, don’t an awful lot of people suffer from depression problems?"
"Acute depression is actually the one of the most common forms of mental illness,” Jake said. “Over fifty million adults in the U.S. are affected, making up almost twenty percent of the population. You would probably find it a lot easier to narrow down the potential victims if we
found out the only thing they had in common was a tendency to be overweight, and that certainly wouldn’t be easy."
"Well, that’s just terrific," Chance said with a sigh, leaning back in his chair. “This guy needs to be stopped, and soon.”
"But why would the suspect be going after people with depression problems?" Gabriella asked. “What could be the attraction for him?”
"He could see those problems as some kind of weakness," Chance suggested. “Maybe somebody close to him had similar issues, and he felt that it somehow hurt him. Maybe he’s getting revenge this way.”
"Possible, but not necessarily true," Jake countered. "Take a look, this killer keeps his victim for a whole week, apparently without harming them. There are no signs of torture, no signs of assault, physical or sexual. He’s even gentle in his own twisted way when it comes to killing the victim. He doesn’t seem to have any kind of anger or disgust for his victims, and yet he’s somehow attracted to them.” He paused for a moment. "But a week later, he gets tired of them," he continued. He looked thoughtful for a second. "Maybe these women are a substitute for someone else," he said thoughtfully. "Maybe these women remind him of someone that he wants, but can't bring himself to actually approach. He kidnaps them as a way to satisfy that desire without actually going through with it."
"If he was using them to fulfill a desire for someone else, I would think we’d see a sexual component," Tina said. “That’s missing in all these cases, so I don’t think it fits entirely.”
“No, it could,” Jake said. “Just because he uses these women as surrogates for someone else doesn’t mean that he wants to act on the romantic or sexual desires he has for that actual person. There could be an entirely different reason he’s using surrogates, and who knows how many reasons why he feels he can’t approach his real obsession directly.”
"If you’re right, though," Tina said, “then it probably isn’t going to be very long before he goes after the woman who is the actual object of his desire. We need to try to figure out who that could be.”