Blood Sisters

by Jim O'Shea

  Hunter pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and blotted a tear on her cheek she didn’t know was there. After what seemed like a respectful pause, he said, “The doctors say she’s in a semi-conscious state right now. She reacts to some visual stimuli, but is unable to speak or move.”

  Libby nodded as she moved toward the door, following the rhythmic beat of the ventilator. She forced one foot in front of the other and slowly approached the bed rubbing both arms.

  Darby Potts’ eyes were round and pointed at the ceiling.

  When she touched the officer’s hand, her skin was cold to the touch.

  A young man in scrubs standing at the foot of the bed looked up from an electronic tablet. “She can’t speak, but she can see and hear you.”

  Libby nodded, sucked as deep a breath as she could manage through her teeth, and leaned over the bed.

  Officer Potts’s head didn’t move, but sunken eyes turned slowly in their sockets toward Libby. When they stopped, Potts’s ruined body recoiled and she screamed, using her face instead of her voice.

  Libby lurched backward, but the woman’s horrified gaze stayed riveted to hers. The remaining color in Potts’s face bled out, her face contorted, and the monitor tracking her heart beat accelerated so fast it sounded like one continuous beep.

  Libby ran.

  ~*~

  Twenty minutes later, she sat quietly next to Hunter in the hospital’s cafeteria, watching a steady stream of blank-faced hospital workers and visitors feed their caffeine addictions. His thick, dark hair had more gray strands than she remembered, and inky black shadows hung below his eyes. She could only imagine how bad she looked.

  He nudged a paper cup full of coffee toward her. “Officer Potts has been sedated and stabilized.”

  Libby exhaled. “Will she make it?”

  Hunter reached out to touch her hand, but she pulled it back.

  “What happened in there?”

  The detective’s normally rigid face was now anything but. “You startled her for some reason. Perhaps her brain connected your face to the attack because it was at your house. The doctors tell me they may have to induce a coma to save her life, but I’m hoping she can find a way to communicate in some way before then.” He inched his chair forward. “Why don’t we get out of here, get some breakfast, and talk?”

  Although she wasn’t hungry, the thought of spending time with the Salt Lake City detective anywhere but in a hospital or cemetery was intoxicating. She squeezed his hand and thanked him.

  “Restaurant?” he said. “Coffee shop? What would you like?”

  She grabbed her purse, stood, and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  “Privacy.”

  ~*~

  The good detective must not have been thinking when he picked the spot because, according to the Tooele newspaper, it was the last place Hannah Flannery was seen alive. Libby kept the tidbit to herself, because The Doughnut Palace was empty after the morning rush. It also had the added advantage of her being able to order anything she wanted, as long as it was a doughnut or coffee.

  Hunter sat rigid in a padded metal chair, hands folded across his chest, and steel blue eyes focused on a notebook opened on the table. When his gaze did lift, he seemed to look at her differently.

  Libby took a sip of the steaming black liquid. “I’m sorry for kissing you at the hospital,” she said softly. “That was very inappropriate, and I don’t want to come across as needy.”

  “It’ll pass.”

  Hunter offered a tight, awkward smile and left for the restroom before Libby could respond—which was probably a good thing, because she might have told him that she didn’t want it to pass. As long as Detective Troy Hunter was around, she could handle all the trials and tribulations the world threw in her direction—maybe even those that came from beyond it.

  When Hunter returned to the small laminated table a few minutes later, Libby propped her elbows on the table and leaned into him. “May I ask you a question?”

  He nodded as he eased into the chair.

  “How did a quiet town like Tooele City suddenly become the murder capital of the country in three days?”

  Hunter rubbed his face with both hands. “When a maniac came to town.” He took the last sip of coffee and then stared into his cup like a gypsy reading tea leaves. “Have you given any more thought to leaving town? At least temporarily?”

  “I could never leave Tooele,” Libby said, deploying a subtle eye roll. “Great job and friends, too many attractive men pursuing me, etcetera. How about you? Have you ever considering leaving law enforcement or maybe relocating from Salt Lake?”

  “Same problem.” He forged a thin smile. “Hard to leave when you’ve got the perfect job and life.”

  Libby feigned a smile. “I know you probably can’t say too much, but do you have any idea yet who this guy might be?”

  Hunter fanned the pages of his notebook and frowned. “Whoever he is, he’s been incredibly cautious. There’s been five murders and one attempted murder, and the only physical evidence we have so far besides the puzzle pieces is a few seconds of crappy video.”

  Video? Libby stared.

  “Nothing definitive,” Hunter said. “We obtained some security footage at Ms. Flannery’s apartment complex of someone we believe was him because of the location and the timing. Unfortunately, the video was from too great a distance and is too grainy to be of much use.” He took a slow sip of coffee. “This guy’s been very careful, Libby, to the point I’d probably consider him an obsessive compulsive. We haven’t found a single fingerprint or a molecule of DNA to link to him, but we’re hopeful we get something from this morning. He had to leave something behind with the struggle and all, and there was no time to clean up afterward like in the other attacks.”

  “I guess it’s safe to assume he’s a total psycho?”

  Hunter shrugged his shoulders. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.”

  “I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t scared to death.”

  “You’d be a fool if you weren’t. We’re going to station another officer at your home, twenty-four seven from now on.”

  Libby tried to relax the fingernails digging into her palm.

  “I’d like to put this officer inside your house, if that’s OK with you. I’ll request a female officer and we can rotate them on twelve-hour shifts.”

  Libby debated the issue in her head for a few seconds before agreeing—less privacy being a small price to pay for increased security.

  Hunter looked at his watch. “I need to get back. Sheriff Huneke has an officer stationed in front of your house right now. I’ll follow you home and get you both set up.”

  Libby liked this side of Detective Troy Hunter—forceful, opinionated, direct. Honest. But the left side of her brain interrupted the warm musings, and unspoken secrets reared their ugly head once again.

  It was time.

  “Before we leave,” she said, trying not to grit her teeth, “I think it’s time I shared a few more things with you.”

  27

  Hunter closed his notebook and sighed. Libby’s ‘few more things’ turned out to be the understatement of the year.

  He finished what was left in his metal flask while staring at the two Tooele patrol cars parked in front of Libby’s house. Both were empty—one with the newly assigned officer now stationed inside the home, the other still surrounded by yellow crime scene tape.

  The swarm of reporters had been removed from Stansberry Lane not long after Hunter arrived with Libby, but managed to stick around just long enough to capture the look of fear on her face in living color before she closed and locked the door to the outside world.

  Only a handful of neighbors remained, huddled together at a respectful distance and undoubtedly discussing the horrific event, as evidenced by the steady plumes of their breath wafting up into the cold morning air.

  Hunter slid the flask back into his jacket. His theory was rye whiskey helped lubrica
te his mind, allowing thoughts and ideas to spin without friction. But it wasn’t working this time. His synapses had ground to a halt, jammed with new information like course sand in rusty gears. He recalled Libby’s face before she closed the door. Haunted would be how he would describe it, and he now knew by what.

  He reopened his notebook and tried to read his own handwriting, but couldn’t seem to string words together in an order that made any sense at first. Instead, random words leapt off the page like bi-polar, doppelganger, and ghost. His conflicted mind tried to sort facts from feelings, struggled to shuffle mental cards into a logical order that might help him fully comprehend what Libby had shared.

  A steady sleet accompanied Hunter on the drive back to Tooele’s town center, a combined city hall, jail, and police station. Along with the rhythm of beating windshield wipers, it provided the perfect environment to clear his head—to try and sort through revelations that cast a new and disturbing light on Libby Meeker and the Ginger Killer murders.

  Her sharing was cautious at first, as Libby began with the story behind her grandmother’s zodiac box, and her friend Aisha’s trip to see a Native American medicine woman. When she showed him photos of the box and its contents on her phone, Hunter got one of those investigator’s intuition moments he was famous for. He requested copies, and she texted them to his phone while they sat across from each other.

  She followed that with the mystery surrounding her sister’s death and her mother’s lifelong mental challenges. That led to both parents’ claims involving the appearance of Melissa’s ghostly apparition, and the harsh reality of their subsequent heart attacks. Her mother’s unsuccessful attempt to share a deathbed secret about her sister was next, a secret that had apparently originated with the grandmother—G-Ma. Libby claimed she had no clue what the mysterious secret could be, and Hunter believed her.

  The flood of information was accompanied by questions that gradually grew more personal in nature, and by the sense that he wasn’t asking the right ones. But they served their purpose, and she opened up even more.

  Next came the bizarre episode at the bank, followed by Libby’s other odd experiences—fleeting visions of her dead sister in passing cars and store fronts, the sounds in her house, a constant feeling of being watched. The eerie stories turned out to be nothing but a prelude to the bizarre incident at her parents’ house—the lady in red and the recorded message, both of which had somehow disappeared.

  No witnesses.

  None of it provable.

  All of it disturbing.

  But the pièce de résistance remained, of course, the jigsaw puzzle. Both sides now, in fact.

  The front was a forty-two-part riddle with very little mystery remaining. The image was now virtually complete with the addition of the photocopied versions of the pieces found at the last three murders. Only eight pieces were still missing—three of which were most likely buried inside corpses six feet underground.

  Of the remaining pieces, two would complete baby Melissa’s face when combined with the remaining eyes piece, and the other six would finish off the sparse right side of the puzzle and bookend empty bassinet. The alphanumeric sequence on the back of the puzzle still lacked any obvious significance, but Hunter had a distinct sense that would change.

  Through all of Libby’s revelations, Hunter grasped more than what he believed she had consciously intended. Disturbing ideas formed in his brain, despite the fact he could easily see beyond the layer of paranoia that defined her to the rest of the world. Doubt was such an ugly word, but unless he had overlooked something obvious, three things about the strange facts surrounding the Ginger Killer murders tugged at him.

  One. Why would four separate women willingly open their door to a stranger? Especially the last two, who would have been well aware of the increased threat level in northern Utah. And how could the attacker surprise Officer Potts so much that she was even unable to get her weapon pulled from her holster? Could the person have been a petite woman who appeared to pose no danger? If that were actually the case, would any of the victims have anticipated the steel blade before it was suddenly and inexplicably plunged into their chests?

  Two. There appeared to be only one logical explanation for Libby’s many personal issues and bizarre experiences—her family’s history of mental illness—and that reality alone opened up a myriad of new possibilities.

  The last was his failure to find third party alibis for Libby at the time of the murders. In each case, there was no evidence that would eliminate the possibility that she could have been in each location. Despite the fact it was the last thing he wanted to believe, the details of the case pointed toward an almost unthinkable connection between Libby and the antagonist stalking her in her own home…and perhaps in her own mind.

  Could they be one in the same?

  Hunter shook his head.

  The old man from the apartment complex who claimed to see a woman in a tan trench coat matching Libby’s description prior to the Flannery murder could’ve simply been mistaken. He was eighty-four years old with glasses as thick as a soda bottle. When it came to the grainy video of the mysterious figure in the parking lot, there were no vehicles around to provide scale, so it could have been a man as easily as a woman. Besides, wasn’t everyone seeing young, red-haired women these days?

  As a favor to Hunter, a friend in Salt Lake City’s forensics unit had agreed to compare Libby’s photo with the fuzzy video images from the apartment’s parking lot, all off-the-record. He would expertly search for any similarities amongst the pixels, tiny dots in shades of black and white that together formed the portrait of what could be a serial murderer. But it only worked if one stood far enough back to see the image they created, and Hunter knew he had allowed himself to get far too close to be able to do that.

  Even if nothing came from the apartment video, there was the jigsaw puzzle. Despite no sign of a break-in, Libby’s house had somehow become home to the only physical evidence linked directly to all five murders and a sixth attempted murder. Not to mention all the circumstantial evidence.

  Nicholas and Marilyn Meeker each died mysteriously from heart failure just weeks apart, even though Libby swore they were both on their heart medications. Both claimed to have seen their deceased daughter. Or perhaps a woman impersonating her? He made a mental note to see what life insurance policies the Meekers held, and, if any, who was the beneficiary.

  It all led to the slew of questions rolling around in his brain. Were Libby’s psychological challenges worse than she’d let on? Perhaps much worse? Could she actually be criminally insane, being manipulated by a personage buried deep within her psyche? If the unthinkable was true, did Libby herself even know? Did puppets ever see the strings dangling over their own heads?

  Hunter took several deep breaths and let them out slowly. His thoughts and theories were suddenly becoming a one-way street with a single destination, something every detective struggled to avoid. “No,” he commanded himself out loud.

  Hunter started to grab the metal flask in his coat pocket but, instead, reached inside the glove box for the ever-present bottle of mouthwash. He did a quick rinse, rolled down his window to spit it out, and snatched his notebook off the passenger seat. A team of law enforcement professionals waited for him inside the Tooele government center, and he had no clue what he would tell them.

  28

  Hunter bypassed mismatched seats already claimed by people not yet in the room, and settled into a maroon upholstered chair accented with a strip of gray duct tape over one arm. While he waited in the Tooele town center’s lone conference room, he pulled up the photo of the feather from Pearl Meeker’s zodiac box on his phone.

  He forwarded it to a beat cop from Salt Lake City who was an avid bird watcher, with a request to identify the species. He then pulled up one of the images of the strange fabric and its mysterious markings and forwarded it to a linguistics expert he knew at a local university. The accompanying question was twofold—did he re
cognize the writing or know anyone who would?

  The noted professor acknowledged receipt within seconds, and was able to identify it as the language of the Choctaw. He immediately passed it on to a colleague, a fellow linguist and a native from a tribe originating in Oklahoma.

  For now, all Hunter had to go on was a gut feeling it had something to do with Marilyn Meeker’s untold secret.

  He was examining the third photo, the black lines scrawled on the back of the jigsaw puzzle, when Tooele’s mayor and Sheriff Huneke pushed the conference room’s double doors open in synch. Huneke held a thick file folder in one hand and a soda bottle by its neck in the other. Mayor Robert “Bob” Barnett came in with the Tooele City Gazette tucked under his arm and reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. Both had dark circles under their eyes.

  Hunter nodded a silent ‘hello’ to both before returning his gaze to the confusing sequence on the phone’s screen—an uppercase E and lowercase x followed by a dash, the number 34, a second dash, and an empty space where the pieces were still missing. Although the working theory that the numbers were simply identifying information from the factory was a solid one, his mind was going different directions. Lock combination? Password?

  He shrugged and silenced his phone just as Huneke and Barnett sat down on his side of the table. Sheriff Huneke slid the sweaty soda bottle along the polished wood table top and right into his open hand. Hunter smiled, twisted off the top, and took a long drink.

  Hunter’s captain, Leon Fitter, and the Utah State Police commander assigned to the Ginger Killer case followed them into the room and took seats across the table.

  Fitter slid a folded piece of paper across the table to Hunter. “Hot off the presses.”

  Hunter took it and unfolded it in his lap. It was a color photo of the bloody piece of paper found at the second Becker murder. The lab had managed to smooth out the wrinkles from the page and remove most the blood, leaving the uneven surface tinged a light crimson.