Every Breath You Take

by Jay Zendrowski

  *

  They'd just reconvened in the squad room when Caruso's phone rang. He looked at the caller before answering. "Caruso." He listened for a few seconds before responding. "Okay, we'll be right there." He slipped his phone back into his pocket. "It's Janssen."

  Wilson and Johannson were on their way to court, but the rest of the team gathered around Janssen in the forensics lab, the body of Nicole Fletcher covered by a sheet and lying face down on the examination table.

  Caruso said as he looked up at Janssen. "You've got her on her stomach. That's not a good sign."

  "No sir," Janssen said, slowly drawing back the sheet.

  The team members leaned closer as they looked down at the girl's naked body. Circular burn marks dotted the girl's back. The red blistered dots were close to half an inch in diameter, and spanned the length of her back from her shoulder blades to the top of her buttocks, some of them looking blackish-grey and charred. They weren't randomly placed, like he'd done with the whip marks. The burns had been specifically spaced equal distant from each other, and looking downwards from the back of her neck, they spelled the word STING.

  "What do you think he used to do that with?" Caruso said, pointing to the burns.

  "The diameter of the burns is too big for a cigarette," Janssen replied, "but there are small particles of ash present, so my guess would be a cigar."

  "Jesus Christ." It was Chin that muttered under her breath.

  "You can cover her up now," Caruso said. Janssen nodded to Singleton, who drew the sheet back over the girl before Caruso continued. "Anything else come up during the examination."

  Janssen shook her head. "No. I'm running the tox screens now, but so far everything looks the same as with the other two girls."

  "Right," Caruso said. "Let us know if anything turns up." Janssen nodded as the team left the lab, returning to the squad room.

  "Okay guys, let's see what we can dig up," Caruso said. "Pepper and Wallace, we've got the address of where this girl was living on Cheapside Street. Go to her apartment and see what you can find out." He turned to Chin and McTavish. "Chin, you check her out through Facebook and all that other social networking shit-see if there are any connections between this girl and the others. Ian, find out what she was studying at Western, especially if she was in one of Drummond's classes."

  Chin went to her map and added another two more push pins, a red one at the location of the burned-out house on Dundas Street East, and a blue one for Nicole Fletcher's apartment on Cheapside.

  Pepper took a look at the map, noting the locations of where the girls were last seen, and then looked at the location of Drummond's house on the west side of the city. The girls were all in the vicinity of the university, which you would expect. He'd read that serial killers often liked to work in the area where they lived, but in this case, if the killer was looking for co-eds, he had to go where they were. It would have been surprising to find university girls living in Drummond's subdivision, unless they lived at home with their parents.

  "Tee, let's go," Wallace said.

  They drove to the house on Cheapside Street where it had been reported that Nicole Fletcher was living. The couple that owned the house said they hadn't seen Nicole around since early Saturday, but thought she might have either gone home to her parents, or spent part of the weekend with a friend. They were devastated when Pepper informed them that she'd been killed.

  The man took them up to the apartment, and was surprised to find that the door was unlocked. "Nicole was always very careful about keeping her door locked," he said.

  "Thank you. We'll take it from here," Pepper said. The man backed away as the detectives entered the apartment, pulling on latex gloves.

  "Her purse is right here," Pepper said, stepping over to the counter and looking through it. "Nothing's been taken. Her wallet's inside."

  "And there doesn't look like there's been any sign of a struggle," Wallace said as he came back into the kitchen after looking through the rest of the apartment.

  Pepper stepped over to the small kitchen table, a textbook and laptop sitting next to an open notebook. He reached down and picked up a slip of paper sitting on the notebook. It was a standard delivery slip, with no company logo on it. The address on Cheapside Street had been scrawled in pen, along with the words, 'upper apartment', 'large pepperoni and mushroom', and a dollar figure in the price column. Saturday's date had been written at the top next to the address, everything in scribbled block letters. "Rupe, take a look at this," he said as he passed it to Wallace.

  "It looks like she ordered a pizza," Wallace said as he finished reading the note and looked around the kitchen.

  "But there's no empty pizza box," Pepper said as he came back from looking in the living room. He poked his head out the door and looked in the blue plastic box on the upper porch. "Nothing in the recycling bin either."

  Wallace held up the invoice. "Do you think this is how our guy got in?"

  "That would be my guess. Put that invoice in an evidence bag and then let's see if any of the neighbours saw anything."

  They went to the houses on either side first. One couple had been out for the night and the other hadn't seen anything. As they were walking back towards the sidewalk, Pepper spotted a pinched face and mass of white hair peeking between the drapes of the house directly across the street from them. "I think that's where we should go next," he said as Wallace followed his gaze. The face pulled away from the window as they walked up towards the house, the door opening immediately to their knock.

  "Can I help you?" the voice was thready and wobbled a bit, and belonged to a wizened but plucky old soul who resembled nothing so much as an aged pixie.

  "I'm Detective Pepper and this is Detective Wallace." The two men flashed their badges. "I wonder if we could ask you a few questions, Mrs?"

  "Hooper. Audrey Hooper," the woman said, stepping aside as she ushered them in. The house was hot, and smelled like moth balls and cats-lots of cats. The living room they stepped into was dark, with heavy drapes on the windows. Crocheted throw blankets adorned nearly every piece of furniture in the room, with a cat on every chair in sight. A side table in the living room was covered with family photos.

  "Would you gentlemen like some tea? It'll only take a minute."

  "No thank you, Mrs. Hooper, we're fine," Pepper said. "We'd just like to ask-"

  "Is this about the young blonde girl that's living at Bill and Edna's place?" she interrupted, motioning to the house across the street.

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "Well, I haven't seen her around for a couple of days, and every Monday morning at nine-ten she waves to me on her way to the university. She hasn't missed a Monday all term."

  "She waves to you?" Pepper looked over and noticed a hard-backed chair sitting in front of the window.

  "Yes. She smiles and waves as she walks by and I wave back. She's very sweet. Edna told me her name's Nicole."

  "Yes. Nicole Fletcher. She's been missing for a couple of days and we're wondering if you, or anyone on the street might have seen anything or anyone unusual?"

  "Oh dear," the woman said, sitting down abruptly in her rocking chair, visibly upset as she clutched the front of her sweater.

  "Let me get you a glass of water," Wallace said, stepping into her tiny kitchen.

  Pepper sat on the couch opposite her, muscling a couple of cats out of the way. The woman looked over at him, her bony fingers twisting her sweater. "I wondered at the time, but after a few days the man never came back. Do you think that man in the car had anything to do with it?"

  "What man?"

  "For the last week or so, I've see a car parked down the street a few times. I know all the cars of the people that live on the street, and I'd never seen that one before."

  Wallace returned and set the glass of water down on the table beside her before seating himself next to his partner.

  "Do you know what kind of car it was?"

  "I don't know much about
cars."

  "Was it a small car? Was it a minivan? Do you know what colour it was?"

  "It wasn't a minivan or one of those SUV things-just a typical car. It was black, either black or dark blue."

  "Did you ever see anybody get out of it?"

  "No, it was always at night and it was always just sitting by the curb. I couldn't tell if there was anybody in the car or not. But the car was like the one I'd seen delivering a pizza across the street Saturday evening."

  Pepper looked over to Wallace as both of them sat forward. "To Nicole's apartment?"

  "I think so. I saw Bill and Edna drive out earlier, and then a while later, the pizza guy backed into the driveway, so I assumed it was Nicole that had ordered it."

  "Backed into the driveway? How did you know it was a pizza guy?"

  "I saw him get out of the car and take out a pizza box."

  "Can you describe him?"

  "It was pretty dark, and my eyesight isn't what it once was, but he was about your height and build," she said, nodding towards Pepper.

  "Did you see anything else? Colour of hair maybe?"

  "It was dark and he wore a ball cap. But if I had to guess, I'd say he had dark hair. He had big glasses on too."

  "Did you see him come back and drive away?"

  "No, just after he got out of the car, my friend Vera called. She was all excited to tell me about her new great-granddaughter. When I looked out again, the car was gone."

  "By any chance, you didn't happened to notice the licence plate number of the car?"

  "The car that I saw parked on the street, I did remember part of it. The first part was BKH, and that stuck in my head because that was my daughter Beverly's initials before she got married."

  "Did you notice the numbers following that?"

  "No, I never really paid much attention-but Beverly's initials stuck in my head."

  "The car that delivered the pizza, was it the same one that you'd seen on the street?"

  "It might have even been the same car, I'm not really sure. It was black, like the other one."

  "Can you remember anything else about the car, or the man you saw get out of with the pizza box?"

  The woman thought for a second, scratching the head of a cat that had jumped onto her lap. "No, I'm afraid not."

  Pepper and Wallace stood up. Pepper handed the old woman his business card. "You've been a great help, Mrs. Hooper. If you remember anything else, give me a call right away."

  "Of course," she replied, getting up and escorting them to the front door. "I hope you find Nicole. She's such a sweet young girl."

  "Thanks, Mrs. Hooper. We'll be in touch," Pepper said as they walked out.

  They tried a number of houses along the street, but no one had seen anything. They got in their car and headed back to the police station.

  "I think this is the first time I'm happy that people have nosey neighbours," Wallace said.

  "Yes. That partial plate is definitely going to help. We'll run that and see if we come up with some black or navy blue cars."

  "That description she gave of the guy. That could fit Drummond. He's about your height and build. Dark hair. And he wears glasses sometimes too."

  "The car doesn't match his silver Honda, but he could have another stashed away somewhere, or have used a friend's. He's pretty smart. He knows after the search warrant we'd be looking for a silver car."

  "Yeah. Let's get this pizza invoice back to the station and run this partial plate. Hopefully something pops."