Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (13 page)

23

Sarah entered the café and got a table by the windows. The rain had soaked her shoulders and hair, and she brushed it off as well as she could. She actually didn’t mind the rain, which was probably why she didn’t own an umbrella and kept putting off buying one.

She asked t
he waitress for a coffee. As the rain pounded down, several people ran in from their cars. Some of them were young, probably in high school. She remembered herself at that age. She had been put to work in the home, with some light work in the fields. Though there were dances and family functions, she remembered feeling a deep loneliness. Not as acute as it was now, but still there, just under the surface.

Sometimes she wondered what it would have been like to go to a dance or share an awkward first kiss with a boy. Her first real kiss was a drunken waste in the back
room of Pink’s. She didn’t even remember what the man had looked like. When she lost her virginity a couple of months later, she’d been so drunk that she fell asleep during the sex. Her boyfriend at the time was so upset that he left and never spoke to her again.

Those were firsts that she knew she would never get back. They were gone forever, and she’d wasted them for nothing.

Giovanni opened the front door. His hair was wet and in his eyes. Agent Rosen was right behind him with an umbrella and a raincoat. He struck her as someone who’d have those things ready at all times. Giovanni saw her and came over. The two men sat down.

“Hi,” he said with a grin.

“Hi.”

Rosen leaned back in his seat and folded his arms. “What did you need from us, Sarah?”

“I saw something.”

“What?”

“After Giovanni took me to that porch, I—”

“You took her to Gillian’s house?” Rosen said, turning to Giovanni.

“Just to look around.”

“You were the one
who said we shouldn’t have her on the case.”

Sarah hadn’t known that
, and from the blush in Giovanni’s cheeks, she could tell he hadn’t intended to tell her.

“I just looked at it,” she said. “I didn’t talk to anyone or touch anything. But later, when I was
going to sleep, I think I saw… him.”

“Him who?”

“The man you’re looking for. The Blood Dahlia.”

Rose
n tilted his head slightly. “And what did he look like?”

“Slim and white
. I couldn’t really see him because it was so dark. But I saw what he did. He keeps them chained in a basement. This one, he cut out her tongue with a pair of scissors. She was screaming at him, and he just took the scissors and did it.”

The two men looked
at each other.

“What’s he doing with the faces?” Rosen said, placing his elbows on the table.

“He’s making them into masks. I don’t know why. But this girl, I saw her clearly. She had a tattoo on her forearm. It’s like a tribal tattoo, and there was some red right in the middle. He usually cuts them out but he was so excited he forgot to do it with her.”

“
What else did you see?”

“Little things. A house somewhere. He wants to appear as normal as possible
, I think, so the house is in a family neighborhood. I saw kids in the background.”

“Anything else?”

She shook her head. “No. But I was there in the basement. I saw that. It looks like he made it specially, just for this.”

Giovanni said, “Can I talk to you for a second, Arnold?”

The two men rose and took a few steps away from the table. Sarah could still hear them speaking but pretended that she couldn’t.

“I never told her about the tongue,” Giovanni whispered.

Rosen looked at him in silence for a moment. “You sure?”

“Yeah. And the body was gone when we got there. No way she could know about that tattoo.”

“Did she have a tattoo?”

“I don’t know.”

Rosen nodded. “Only one way to find out.”

Sarah sat in the back of the car as Giovanni drove. Rosen was talking on the phone to someone from the Medical Examiner’s Office about visiting the body. The person was being difficult
, and finally Rosen just told them that he would arrest them and then look at the body anyway. That must’ve worked, because then he just said, “Good,” and hung up.

“What’s the difference between a coroner and a medical examiner?” Sarah asked. “I’ve heard you refer to both.”

Rosen said, “You have to be a pathologist—a doctor who specializes in studying corpses—to be a medical examiner. To be a coroner, you just have to be elected to the position. Sometimes they’re doctors from other fields, but in some of the smaller counties in the South and Midwest, I’ve seen coroners who are just the town mechanic or farmers, and they want the job.”

“Who would want that job?”

“Exactly. Except that it pays more than a mechanic or farmer.”

The Medical Examiner’s Office was in a white building that looked like an office building
, but several other medical offices were located there. Sarah saw two dentists and a family practitioner.

After they parked, Giovanni opened the door for her. They walked into the building and across the hall to a single door
with a sign that read, STATE MEDICAL EXAMINER.

C
hecking in with the front desk got them three visitor’s passes, and then they were led back to the refrigeration units by a portly man in a white lab coat who was texting while he walked. He ran into a mop that leaned against the wall and turned bright red but didn’t stop texting.

The
refrigeration unit was a wall of what looked like chrome filing cabinets. The man counted out from the near end of the lowest row and pulled the handle of the middle one. Inside was a body covered with a white sheet. The man, without gloves, pulled the sheet off.

Sarah winced and looked away. Giovanni immediately said, “Hey, what the hell?”

“Sorry. I thought you wanted to see it.”

Giovanni turned to her. “You okay?”

She nodded. In what felt like a feat of strength, she looked back at the body.

The blond hair was still intact, as were the ears and neck. But the face was completely removed. The mouth was slightly open
, and she could see that the tongue had been cut off about halfway down.

“Pull the sheet down all the way, please,” Rosen said.

The man did as he was asked. On the girl’s right forearm was a tribal tattoo in black ink. In the center was a red diamond.

Rosen nodded to the man
, who covered the corpse back up and pushed it into the refrigeration unit.

Rosen exhaled loudly, his hands on his hips, as he looked from Giovanni to Sarah. “Well,” he said. “I guess you’re hired. Welcome to the FBI.”

24

Daniel Wolfgram sat on his front porch and sipped homemade lemonade. It was tangy with just a hint of alcohol from the bitters and gave him a warm feeling in his stomach. The one memory from childhood he could actually reflect on with joy was lemonade.

Though Daniel loved his mother, or at least as close to love as he could muster, his father was nothing but a memory of pain
, like an electric shock going through Daniel’s body whenever he thought of him.

As punishment when he was a young boy, h
is father had made him do bare-knuckled push-ups on cement, and, if he couldn’t complete the number he was given, his father would put cigarettes out on his back. Wolfgram remembered the sting more than anything else—that initial sting when his skin would stink and burn. After a few seconds, the nerve endings would burn as well, dulling the pain.

One day at school, his teacher noticed a cigarette burn on his neck. He wasn’t sure what happened after that, just a flurry of meetings with counselors and policemen, but it ended with his father losing custody of him and spending time in jail.

Wolfgram was taken out of the home and placed with a foster family. They were nice enough, initially, but they’d had eleven foster children already. Each one provided $150 per month, which back then was a good bit of money—the only real concern the foster parents had. With eleven other children vying for what little attention they gave, Wolfgram, quiet by nature, was left to himself.

That
was where he discovered mathematics when he was eleven years old. It was actually at the insistence of a neighbor—a kindly old man named Gregory. The old man seemed to understand that Wolfgram wasn’t like the other children. One day, he’d bought him a book on dinosaurs. Wolfgram was brought to his home to accept it. As he was flipping through the book, he noticed another book on the history of mathematics open on Gregory’s desk.

Gregory, himself a professor of philosophy, thought the young boy was looking at the portraits
of the great mathematicians in history who were in the book. Intuitively, the eleven-year-old Wolfgram began playing with algebra and read the chapter on Leibniz and the founding of calculus. He began running the sample problems in the book on a Post-it Note on the desk, with Gregory hanging over his shoulder watching. Wolfgram thought he was just having fun and didn’t understand the old man’s reaction. But Gregory kneeled down to eye level and said, “Daniel, I’m going to give you some problems to do, okay?”

Wolfgram agreed. A textbook was given to him. Within minutes, Wolfgram was solving problems of logarithmic differentiation. And time seemed to stop. He didn’t remember how long he was at Gregory’s house, but it was long enough that night had fallen. He had gotten through most of the textbook, well into topics covered in a
third-semester college class.

The next day, Gregory came over to speak to his foster parents. Wolfgram listened in from the top of the staircase. He didn’t remember most of the conversation, but certain bits of it stuck out to him. He remembered his foster father s
aying, “We can’t afford it,” over and over.

Gregory told them, “Well
,
I’ll
pay for it.”

What they had been discussing was putting Wolfgram into a gifted school
, someplace where he could be with other children like him, ones who cared more about ideas than football.

But that wasn’t what life had in store for him. The week before he was supposed to start his new program, at about ten o’clock
one night, his foster father came into the bedroom where Wolfgram slept with four other children and informed him that he was leaving. That they had too many children and needed to, as he’d said, “Get ridda some.”

The real reason was apparent to Wolfgram even at that age
: the man was jealous and insecure. He didn’t want one of his foster children, who were clearly there only for the government paycheck they received every month, to succeed in life when he had failed.

The next day, Wolfgram was shuffled to an orphanage
while awaiting his next placement. Within a month, his father was granted custody again. Two years later, his father lost custody permanently due to severe child abuse and neglect, primarily from a single incident where he strapped Daniel to a pipe in the basement and whipped him until he nearly bled to death.

The course his life
had taken reminded him of an aphorism he’d seen, something like “Short and evil have the days of my life been.” Now he wished he’d remembered who had said it.

The cell phone in his pocket rang. He pulled it out and didn’t recognize the number.

“This is Daniel.”

“Oh, Daniel,
hi, this is Dara. From the party.”

“Yes, I remember. How are you?”

“Good.”

“How is your son, Jake?”

“He’s fine, thanks. He’s at his karate lessons right now. Um, listen, Jake’s going out of town with my parents this weekend, and I don’t really have any plans. I was just wondering if maybe you wanted to do something?”

Wolfgram grinned
, and he didn’t know why. “Yes, I’d like that.”

“Okay. Do you wanna get dinner somewhere?”

“Sure. I’ll find someplace good. I can’t tomorrow, but is Saturday all right?”

“Yeah, Saturday works.”

“Great. I’ll pick you up. Just text me your address.”

“Okay, see you then.”

Wolfgram hung up and stared at his phone. He’d attempted romantic relationships before. One had been with another professor at the university. He’d taken her home and played some of his favorite pornography for her. She was revolted and left. That was a lesson that couldn’t have been learned any other way, he concluded.

If he was going to fit in
and blend with other people, he had to act like them. He couldn’t be honest with anyone.

He rose, glanced around his neighborhood, and went inside his home. He had other matters that were more pressing than a date.