Cuts Like a Knife: A Novel (A Kristen Conner Mystery Book 1) (39 page)

“Who told you?”

“I am a detective, Captain,” I answer. “I detect for a living.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Conner. I know it was Squires and I’m going to kick his tail back to parking meters over this. Everyone had strict orders to leave you out of this one. I want you to get back in your car and drive home right now. You don’t need to be here.”

“Sorry, Captain, I’m not going to do it . . . And before you say it, I’m not leaving, even if you give me a direct order.”

Please don’t give me a direct order.

We stare each other down, hands on hips, jaws set. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a mob of journalists, photographers, and video cameramen hustling to get as close to us as the perimeter tape will allow. Digital cameras are taking in everything. Zaworski takes me by the arm and walks me toward the front door of the crime scene to get us out of that particular line of fire.

“I knew you were going to be even more difficult than usual when they let you out of the hospital against everyone’s better judgment but yours,” he says with a dull tone. “Keep moving and don’t smile.”

He looks back at my two bodyguards who have caught up with us and says, “You have a new job. Help out the border patrol. The mob is getting unruly. No one gets past the tape. And you don’t leave until we do.”

He nods for me to follow him. I’m an hour behind Don, Blackshear, Martinez, Konkade, Big Tony, a couple of other detectives from the Third, and a host of new FBI faces. Everyone on the perimeter—reporters, uniformed cops, spectators—follow Zaworski and me with their eyes and cameras and shout questions as we walk up to the front door of a small ranch house with beat-up aluminum siding. There are brown patches all over the yard. The shrubbery, which looks like it hasn’t been trimmed in years, is growing in wild and grotesque shapes, half covering the front picture window. The sidewalk is uneven and cracked and missing whole chunks of concrete. One of the downspouts has broken free of its moorings and is hanging away from the eaves of the house, ready to fall in a twist of metal. A pane is missing an entire corner in one of the front windows. Tar paper shows through some areas of the roof with missing shingles. I take it all in. This is different. Whoever victim number fifty-one is, she is no Sandra, Candace, GiGi, or Stefani.

Without turning my head, I say to Zaworski, “Dell Woods called and left me a message while I was sleeping.”

He stops in his tracks in the doorway and looks at me.

“He says he’s calling back. I figure you’ll want to huddle the team and let them listen to his message.”

“You got that right.”

“And I’m guessing the FBI is going to patch into my cell line so they can triangulate his location when he calls back.”

“How do you know he’ll call back?”

“He said so in the message.”

I hold up my hand before he can say anything else, pull out my phone and get into my voicemail, then let him listen.

When he’s done, he hands it back to me, and I save the message, then hand it back to him again. “You gather the team to listen in and discuss and that will give me fifteen minutes to catch up on the crime scene. You all will know as much about Dell’s most recent contact with me as I do at this point.”

“Anything else, Conner?”

“No, sir, that will be it.”

When did I get so sassy with my boss? He’s giving me a lot of rope these days—I better cool it before I hang myself.

• • •

I know everyone is enthralled with crime scene investigation dramas. That’s because they’ve never been to a crime scene. A quick camera shot of a dead body is one thing, but when you’re actually there and have to take in real flesh and blood that has been traumatized with a knife or blunt force, the sights and smells of decomposition, then it’s not so glamorous. I’ve watched the show set in Miami a couple times. Sure they put plenty of white and blue makeup on the corpses, but the victims still tend to be beautiful. That’s not the stuff of a real crime scene.

I don’t know how Jerome and Bruce do it. Our two techies are working murder number five for us. The Cutter is definitely in the acceleration mode that Van Guten anticipated. They are putting items into clear bags and then writing notes on the bags with Sharpies. The medical examiner is leaving as I arrive. Once we give the green light, the body will go into a big black bag, which will be zipped up and taken to the morgue so the body can be seriously studied.

Grace Mills.
Grace.
Pretty name. Her background is a little different than the others. She doesn’t have a professional job—she was a waitress at a cocktail lounge about ten minutes from her 900-square-foot house—and obviously, her place isn’t nearly as nice inside or out as what the others lived in. Not the same zip code—literally.

I cover all the rooms in a slow and methodical walk-through. When I get to her bedroom, I just stand at the door and watch the workers preparing to move her from the blood-soaked bed, trying to imagine the place with just her and him. I breathe slowly. I say a prayer. I have an impression. Of what? I think I can feel some of his emotions. Elation. Frustration. Disappointment. Fear?

I try to hold on to a soft blurred image in my mind, but then it’s gone.

• • •

Don rides with me from the crime scene.

“I know you all are convinced that Cutter Shark attacked me,” I say, “but you’re ignoring one simple fact. If he attacked me I wouldn’t be here. According to Virgil, our killer hasn’t let anyone go free yet. Once you swim in his ocean, you don’t make it to shore.”

“You might be right,” Don says, “no matter how contrived your word picture. But Van Guten likes Woods for your attack and for being the Shark.”

I shake my head. Dell just didn’t feel right for either role.

“This is not the MO of the Cutter Shark. He hasn’t snuck up on people in parking lots. He has charmed his way into their bedrooms. He hasn’t attacked them and drug them in there by the hair.”

“Maybe Dell thought he was going to charm you and when it didn’t work out, he attacked you.”

I give that serious thought. “Even if you’re right, I’ll ask again: why am I still alive then?”

“That’s a great question, KC. Maybe he has real feelings for you in his twisted, perverted mind. He is crazy, you know.”

“Did you just call me KC?”

“I did. My bad. But bottom line, the shrink thinks your ex is our man.”

“Bottom line, she’s wrong. It’s not Dell. And Dell is not my ex.”

There is no way he could punch like that.

• • •

We met back at the State Building at 7:00 p.m. Fifteen of us sat around a long conference table, like a big family settling down for a dinner of information. Willingham was at the head of the table, with Zaworski right next to him. Reynolds entered a few minutes late, arriving by helicopter like some serious hotshot. He sat at Willing-ham’s left hand. I look at them. The holy trinity of the Cutter Shark murder investigation.

Van Guten had been sitting in the seat next to Willingham when the meeting started, but left the room to answer a phone call. When she got back in, Reynolds had taken her chair. She gave him a decidedly dirty look and appeared less than thrilled to get stuck down at the other end of the table next to me. I glance at her several times out of the corner of my eye. How can anyone have such perfect fingernails? I can’t stop stealing looks at them—honestly, I don’t think they’re fake. Her hair is perfect—she could walk away from this place and into any restaurant in the city fifteen minutes later—without stopping in the powder room—and fit right in. I’ve never wanted to win a beauty contest but I feel just a little self-conscious looking at my short, clipped nails. No polish. Maybe I’ll get a manicure tomorrow. And maybe I’ll join the circus. Just as likely.

We’d been going at it hard for ninety minutes. We spent the first thirty minutes on Dell. I got my phone back and was given explicit instructions to pick the thing up the second a private number vibrated, no matter what time of day or night.

Reynolds confirmed that Dell’s home has been linked to Cutter Shark activity. There’s no sign of him being there recently and even though they’ve been tossing the place for almost twenty-four hours, they’ve found no physical evidence explicitly tying him to any of the crimes. No way is Dell a serial killer. I did not date a serial killer. But the thought crosses my mind that it would delight a sicko like the Cutter Shark to play with a detective. But it’s not Dell. No way.

I feel incredibly sad for him. And I’m very bothered by the fact that I could hang around with someone off and on for most of six months and never have a clue that there was something terribly wrong with him. He’s not the killer. But he did tell me he was in some kind of trouble. Did I sense something? Anything? Besides a die-hard pursuit? A lot of guys are weird when it comes to dating. And he’s not the killer. Or am I just a lousy, blind, deaf detective?

Right before we transitioned to the postmortem of the Grace Mills crime scene, my cell buzzed and sure enough, it was a private number. Everyone in the room froze and my heart was racing as I hit the green answer button on my Nokia. It was my credit card company wanting to know if I wanted to try their identity theft protection plan free for a month with no obligation to buy. I thought it might be funny to ask a few questions about costs and benefits with everyone listening in, but Don’s audible sighs and angst-ridden expression were helpful deterrents.
Don, I wasn’t going to
fool around. I’m not
that stupid.

Willingham looked irritated. Not my fault, I wanted to say to him. Any thought of actually voicing such sentiment and defending myself was cut off by Zaworski’s stern gaze. Has he been talking to Don? Reynolds was trying to make eye contact with me the whole time. Not going to happen, Major.

I’ve kept my mouth shut since explaining for the seventh time everything I know about Dell’s call. How many times can you say you were asleep, he called, you didn’t pick up, he left a message, and you listened to the message while driving over to a murder site? The same message they heard from a guy they think is the killer, but who isn’t the killer.

A number of theories were espoused as to why the Cutter Shark picked Grace Mills. She wasn’t really that less attractive than the other women and yes, she met the qualification of being single, but she definitely stood apart from the rest in her occupation and residence. She didn’t show signs of illegal drug abuse but she definitely liked her alcohol. Another AA target? We don’t know yet. There were empty beer and whiskey bottles everywhere. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Jim Beam were her poisons of choice. There were enough cases of PBR stacked on one side of her garage that she could weather a couple years of famine, pestilence, and nuclear fallout without having to drive to the corner convenience store for a six-pack. My guess was that the guy who owns the bar she works at, downstairs for questioning even as we spoke, was going to have a lot less beer missing from his inventory in the years ahead.

Don started things off by asking if Grace’s murderer was even the Cutter Shark—or maybe a copycat killer instead. One of the FBI forensics experts got Bruce on the speakerphone and after about ten minutes of question and answer, the group was reasonably certain that this was the work of the one and only Cutter Shark.

Konkade chalked up the perpetrator going for “a drunk slob”—his phrase, not mine—rather than a sophisticated lady, to the law of averages. If you go out with enough people, some of them are going to look better, have better habits, and generally be better off than others. Grace just happened to be on the very right edge of the murderer’s bell curve as applied to victim selection.

That didn’t really fuel a lot of discussion. Reynolds was flipping through notebooks the whole time to see if there was precedence. He was sure he remembered another woman who might be a little like Grace. He found the page he was looking for, and it ended up that one of the Cutter Shark victims in Charleston, South Carolina, was almost as messy as Grace. But then the comparison broke down. She was actually a very successful artist who kept her studio in her home, which was on the National Register of Historic Places and worth a couple million dollars. She was also beautiful and from the pictures had good personal hygiene. She just kept a messy house.

Konkade argued that this just might prove his point; over time not only would the killer find women who were more or less messy, but he would also find some women who were richer and some women who were poorer. He still didn’t have anyone convinced. He looked deflated as he smoothed the hair on his bald dome.

Van Guten took over the conversation and discussed the Cutter Shark as a man in and out of a killing frenzy, not quite on top of his game, showing cracks in his veneer, and making mistakes. The only problem, Willingham pointed out, was that the guy really hadn’t made any mistakes; at least none were immediately identifiable at his latest killing ground. He still hadn’t left the proverbial calling card with his current address. Van Guten didn’t like this response. I watched her swinging the toe of her right foot, higher and higher over her left-crossed leg.

The conversation ground to a halt and it looked like things were done for a Saturday night. I started organizing my papers into a neat pile.

“Conner, you haven’t said much. Why do you think he went after Grace?”