Blood Sisters

by Jim O'Shea

  “Is it the Ginger Killer again, Detective?”

  Hunter lifted his gaze at the sound of the familiar voice.

  D.B. Chier was a popular field reporter from a local Salt Lake station, and had always been fair in his dealings with him.

  “No comment, Danny.”

  “Any ID yet on the victim?”

  Hunter ignored the follow-up question as he flashed his badge at a Tooele officer who’d been in the exact same position the day before. The young man smiled in recognition, but it took a few seconds for him to produce a name for the face he instantly recognized. Once he had it, he didn’t bother to check Hunter’s credentials and nodded as he lifted the strip of yellow plastic. “More gruesome than yesterday, Detective Hunter.”

  Hunter ducked under the tape and flicked his cigarette butt to the ground. He passed the Adirondack chair where Meghan Becker’s body had been found the day before, and took note of the dried blood still left on the bright yellow paint. He climbed concrete stairs to the front door, and several uniformed officers parted just inside to let him pass.

  Sheriff Sally Huneke stood watching a forensic technician remove blood from the floor with a cotton swab. The color had almost completely drained from her face, but not from the room itself. A bright crimson trail led across the living room and kitchen, disappearing around a corner near the back door.

  “The victim’s in the basement,” Huneke said, pointing toward the back of the house. “It’s a walk-out, so go outside and around to the back. There’s blood everywhere up here.”

  Hunter surveyed the scene, but the details would have to wait.

  “It looks like the initial attack took place up here.” Huneke gestured toward the trail of blood, “The victim made it downstairs before…” Tooele’s sheriff put her hand to her mouth and bent over as if she was about to puke. She looked more like the harried mother of teenage kids than a professional cop suddenly forced to deal with an entire region gripped by fear.

  He waited until Huneke had regained some composure. “I hear they were twins.”

  Huneke shook her head while leaning against the wall. “Jonas is already down there with the EMTs. He stayed at his in-laws’ place last night and was here before me. I’ll let him show you.”

  Hunter didn’t like the tone of Huneke’s voice, any more than he liked confronting yet another murder scene—especially this one. The Ginger Killer had stuck twice now in two days, which meant the brief sabbatical was over and Libby Meeker could be in greater danger than ever. But if he wanted her dead, she’d be dead…right?

  Hunter swallowed a lump in his throat and ignored appeals for comments from Chier and the rest of the press as he trudged through mud and snow around the side of the house. The newer construction was built on a slope, leaving the rear of the basement exposed. Double French doors led from the basement to the backyard and stood propped open.

  Hunter slipped plastic booties over his shoes and entered quietly. A portable halogen lighting system pointed toward the murder victim, but Mark Jonas blocked his view of the body.

  Hunter had seen enough murder scenes in his career to develop a near-immunity to the horror, but bile still rose into the back of his mouth when he eventually was able to see the latest victim. Like Becker-One, Becker-Two lay splayed out and face up, this time in a rusty wheelbarrow.

  However, unlike all previous Ginger Killer victims, the corpse had much more than the signature knife wound to the chest. A white cotton skirt was soaked in blood, and there was also a hole in the victim’s neck accompanied by a thick stream of dried blood that had trailed down to a blue blouse. A crumbled piece of paper soaked in blood sat on a table next to a plastic evidence marker labeled with the number four.

  Hunter tapped Jonas on the shoulder and knelt next to him. “Talk to me.”

  When Jonas turned his direction, his gaze was icy. “Congratulations. You’ve had a boy.”

  The words seemed out-of-context, until the medical examiner lifted the stained fabric of the dress. Hunter recoiled and had to steady himself on the edge of the wheelbarrow. Male genitalia had been removed from the victim’s body, and lay unceremoniously between both legs on blood-soaked cotton.

  “I don’t think he knew,” came a familiar voice from behind him.

  Hunter looked over his shoulder.

  Huneke stood slumped over, her face still pale and drawn. “The Ginger Killer,” she said. “I don’t think he realized Meghan Becker’s twin was a man, or a cross-dresser, for that matter. We’ve been questioning the neighbors, and none of them were aware either so I’m guessing the lifestyle choice was a new thing for him.”

  Hunter wiped his face with both hands.

  “Charles Becker had moved in recently with his sister Meghan, and we believe he came back last night after her murder to get some of his things. He told one of our officers yesterday he planned to stay at a friend’s house.”

  “The perp was waiting for him?” Hunter asked.

  “Our guess is he saw Mr. Becker leaving the home in drag when he originally stalked the sister,” Huneke replied. “He probably didn’t realize it was a man and figured he’d come back later and get a two-for-one.”

  Hunter grabbed the dress and began to lift the edge before changing his mind.

  “I think the murderer tried to turn the he into a she,” Jonas said, “when he found out the she was a he.” He pointed at the remnants of a bloody brassiere lying next to the body—cut open from the front and with each cup containing a blood-soaked, prosthetic breast. When he lifted Charles Becker’s chin off his chest with a metal forceps, it exposed the large wound to the throat. “He cut off Mr. Becker’s Adam’s apple and I believe he even shaved his face and reapplied lipstick before he left.” Jonas pointed at several specks of dried blood high on the man’s cheek and then to a plastic razor and silver lipstick tube on the floor laying next to evidence tags that read ‘7’ and ‘8’.

  “And this?”

  Hunter pointed at the bloody paper with his pen.

  “It was shoved inside the throat wound.”

  Hunter pulled out his notebook.

  “It’s too bloody to make much out right now, but it appears to be another printed page from a book. We’ll get it cleaned up and analyzed and forward the results to you as soon as possible.”

  “What about…” Hunter’s voice trailed off.

  Jonas nodded and gestured toward his metal briefcase. “A piece to a jigsaw puzzle was found in the throat cavity. I believe it was pushed through the hole.”

  “Like yesterday’s?”

  Jonas nodded. “Size, shape, and material.”

  “Two in a row.”

  Jonas lowered his voice. “It might be five for five.”

  Hunter leaned in closer.

  “I had forensics pull up X-rays from the previous autopsies,” Jonas said quietly. “I haven’t had a chance to examine them carefully yet thanks to this latest incident, but there appear to be shadows I hadn’t noticed in the first three victim’s pharynx cavities. We may have to exhume the bodies and open them up.”

  “You’re saying there could be puzzle pieces lodged in all the previous victims’ throats?”

  Jonas nodded.

  “We don’t typically examine the pharynx unless strangulation or suffocation was presumed the cause-of-death which is probably why I missed the shadows. They could have been in the victim’s esophagi and I wouldn’t have noticed it.”

  “Then why was yesterday’s piece found in Meghan Becker’s mouth?”

  “Her oropharynx could have contracted due to the early stages of rigor mortis and pushed the object into the nasopharynx.”

  “English, please.”

  “The killer may have shoved it down her throat and Meghan Becker’s body expunged it into her mouth cavity after death. Remember, we got to her much later than the previous victims.”

  All the throat talk caused Hunter to involuntarily swallow hard. “I’ll need a photo of both the puzzle piece an
d bloody paper as soon as possible.”

  “Of course.”

  Hunter stood, and the Salt Lake City medical examiner followed suit.

  “We need to stop meeting like this, Hunt.”

  Hunter glanced back at the body although not sure why, since the image was burned firmly into his brain. A thickness seemed to settle around him and the need for fresh air was suddenly overwhelming. “I’ll call you,” he said, as he turned toward the basement door.

  Hunter returned to the scene of the original attack to take notes and photos, and it was immediately apparent it was identical to all the previous. Shattered pictures and keepsakes, lots of blood, and a lock that did not look as if it had been forced. He left the murder scene thirty minutes later through the neighbor’s back yard, his skin tingling as he hurried through the thick snow. The entire way to his car, he felt watched.

  25

  “You can rest assured tonight as well, Ms. Meeker.”

  Officer Darby Potts stood on Libby’s front porch while Norm took one last sniff of her snow-covered boots. She smiled and placed a freckled hand on Libby’s arm. “I’ve been doing this almost as long as Detective Hunter, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

  Although she was a big woman with a big gun, Libby couldn’t help but wonder if the policewoman was as confident as she appeared. Hunter had assured her she’d be safe with the veteran police officer camped out in front of her home, but Libby would have preferred to have Hunter perched on her sofa inside the home as he was the night before.

  Libby thanked Potts once more, turned the deadbolt after letting Norm in, and watched out the living room window until the officer had reached her car and shut the door. She walked into the kitchen with Norm at her heels, pulled a clean wine glass from the dishwasher, and poured herself a glass of merlot—a large one. She started to take a sip but stopped, deciding to wait until she made her nightly rounds of the main level, turning off lights, making sure doors and windows were locked, and pulling shades.

  Mission completed, Libby grabbed the wine glass off the kitchen table and was in the process of stuffing a magazine under her arm when she stopped abruptly and held the glass up to the kitchen’s overhead light.

  She’d filled the glass nearly to the top, but it was now only two thirds full. If that wasn’t enough, the previously clean glass now had smudges lining the rim. A closer inspection using the light from the overhead fixture clearly showed dark pink lip impressions on the glass’s rim.

  Her favorite shade of lipstick. The only problem was that she wasn’t wearing any.

  Fear swept over Libby once again, a bone-jarring terror that forced her to slump into a kitchen chair and bend over at the waist. Confusion took over as she reconsidered the possibilities she’d been trying to dismiss. “Stop!” Libby’s loud scream in the empty house startled her almost as much as it did the dog. “If you’re setting up shop in my brain, at least have the decency to identify yourself!”

  As the words echoed, Libby tossed the wine glass into the sink, scattering shards of glass and streaks of red liquid. She grabbed the magazine again and headed toward the stairs to the second floor, but stopped next to the large mirror under the stairs and stared at a face that had haunted both her waking and sleeping moments for almost a year now. She stood for a long time staring at the image, hoping it would talk to her, praying it would give up its secrets. Nothing. The frozen image seemed to be mocking her, as if waiting for someone besides Libby to tell it to move.

  She eventually made it upstairs to her bed but, despite being mentally and physically exhausted, didn’t turn off her bedside light until 2:00 AM. The patter of sleet on the window would normally be a natural sedative, but instead sounded like timid fingers tapping to gain entry. She laid on her back staring at the ceiling, listening to the steady sleet accompanied by a strong wind pushing against her bedroom windows.

  Maybe staying awake was a good thing, considering the familiar nightmare most likely awaiting her in sleep. But did it really matter? Especially considering the fact that she was finding it increasingly difficult to separate her waking moments from her dreams anyway—and it wasn’t as if she had to be at work in the morning. Florich had managed to arrange an extended leave-of-absence with little resistance from anyone at Long+McCauley and, truth be told, she was blessed to still have a job.

  Libby had always felt safe in the home on Stansberry Lane, both as a child and an adult. Now look at her. She considered taking her meds, but they would convince her everything was OK, and she couldn't afford to feel that way. Nothing was OK.

  As if providing consensus from the animal kingdom, a coyote howled from not far outside her bedroom window. She shook her head at the resulting silence. Although Libby had always been skeptical of anything supernatural, especially when it came to her grandmother’s Native American mysticism, her left brain continued to ask valid questions. Did she enter the bank twice that day and not remember the first? Had she innocently assembled a series of odd coincidences and transformed them into a belief that Melissa was still alive?

  Or, as her right brain suggested, merely succumbed to a truth that was both impossible and undeniable at the same time? Valid questions indeed, but there were so many more. If Melissa had, in fact, survived the horrific explosion, why had she returned to Tooele in secret? Better question…for what purpose? Was a plague really working its way down Interstate 15 as Detective Hunter suggested and, if so, had she been somehow infected by it? Did the resulting fever unleash demons Libby had kept hidden her entire life, or had a flaw in her mental makeup opened the door to something much worse?

  And then there were the secrets.

  Why hadn’t she shared the incident at the bank? The banker recognized her and Aisha knew the whole story, but she’d kept the episode from her manager and Detective Hunter. What about her boss? Florich most likely had a key to both her office and desk, which meant he could have planted the puzzle piece. And what about the many visions she’d had in recent weeks, or the eerie sounds heard rising up from Melissa’s tomb? Not to mention her frequent out-of-body experiences and her family’s lifelong mental challenges…the persistent feeling of being watched.

  They would remain her secrets…at least for now.

  Libby attempted to crawl out of bed to check on Officer Potts, but halfway up, sat on the edge, and took a deep breath. When her head stopped spinning, she trudged slowly toward the window, trying not to stub her toe in the darkness.

  Clicking on the hardwood floor caught Libby’s attention and she turned to see Norm padding up slowly behind her. When she knelt, the old dog offered her a discerning gaze, as if fully aware of the challenges that seemed to be overwhelming his owner. He snorted in disagreement, but they both knew the truth.

  “Nice try, Norman,” Libby said while scratching him gently behind the ears.

  The little dog kept black eyes trained on her.

  “So, do you think I’m crazy too?”

  Norm looked at her as if to say, ‘you never asked’.

  “Well I’m asking now. Do you—" Libby’s head snapped up at the blare of a car horn. She hopped to her feet. When she got to the window, her mouth gaped open.

  Officer Darby Potts, the twenty-year veteran of the Tooele Police Department, was slumped over the steering wheel, her body apparently pushing down on the car’s horn.

  Libby rushed to her phone on the nightstand and used her back to slide down the wall onto the floor as she dialed 911. She was sitting with her legs stretched out on the floor when the call ended, and stayed there until the phone’s display light faded out, leaving her trembling in total darkness.

  26

  “How is she?” Libby asked, her voice echoing in the hospital’s concrete stairwell.

  Hunter stared straight ahead, his face flat and dull. “They’ve managed to stabilize her,” he said in a monotone voice.

  Libby rested her head on his shoulder and picked up the familiar musk. “I feel so bad.”

&n
bsp; He wrapped his arm around her waist, but neither of them spoke for a long time.

  Eventually, the clank of a metal door from the floor above broke the silence.

  “We found another puzzle piece on the floor of the squad car. I believe the killer shoved it down Darby’s throat after stabbing her, but she apparently spit it out.”

  Libby’s hands balled into fists. “That makes three in a row now with Charles Becker?”

  “We think it may be all six victims,” Hunter said. “The Medical Examiner is requesting the bodies of the first three victims be exhumed, but it appears from a closer examination of the X-rays that there are objects lodged in each of their throats.”

  Libby lowered her head to prevent Hunter from seeing her eyes fill with tears.

  “You’ll be OK.”

  Libby grabbed his hand and squeezed. “I need a few minutes alone.”

  “Take all the time you need,” he said after a brief pause. “I should get back.”

  Hunter left, leaving Libby alone in the empty stairwell struggling to find the strength to do what she needed to do. Fifteen minutes later, she took a deep breath and retraced her path from the empty stairwell to a long hallway lined with uniformed police officers. She stood outside Room 324 looking in.

  Hunter was at the foot of the hospital bed, but stepped into the hallway when he noticed her outside the door. “You don’t have to do this, Libby.”

  She was about to speak when a nurse blocking her view of the patient moved away from the side of the bed. Libby gasped. The loss of blood and harsh hospital lights cast Officer Potts’ face in a pallid glow, and she looked like a ghost of the person Libby had been introduced to little more than twelve hours prior. But the woman was neither nightmare nor another hallucination. She was a real person in real time—surrounded by real people dealing with the horrific remnants of an unspeakable act of violence.

  Hunter touched her on the arm so lightly she barely felt it, and the sheer gentleness of it spoke volumes. Her heart seemed to slow in response. “I want to see her,” Libby said softly. “She was protecting me.”