Progeny (8 page)

“Rick is meeting us there. Get what you got here back to the lab and get started,” I said.

“Okay.” Pax took his kit and left the room.

Hank and I were right behind him. We hopped in our car and headed out. On my phone, I pulled up the address the captain had sent over and clicked the button on my GPS to take us there. The drive would be twenty-eight minutes, or so the screen said.

Hank and I sat in silence for half of the ride. I assumed we were both thinking about the same things. The level of insanity required to skin a human was unimaginable. The sheer amount of malice it took to attack an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s was deplorable.

I turned right onto SR-54 East and flipped down the sun visor on the unmarked cruiser.

Hank pulled his aviator sunglasses from his breast pocket of his jacket and put them on to shield his eyes from the morning sun. “Are we sure this is another copycat?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do we know who the victim is?”

“No.”

Angel heard the television in the living room. The local news was broadcasting from the neighborhood where they’d left Herb LaSalle’s corpse dangling from the rafters of his garage. The anchorman kept repeating the phrase, “Grisly remains found inside home in upscale neighborhood.”

“Baby, come in here,” Carmen called.

Angel walked into the living room, her gloved hands covered in bits of flesh. The fleshing knife hung from her right hand.

“Take those silly gloves off, Angel. Your father never wore those.”

“I don’t want to cut myself. These are safe, look.” She pulled the blade of the knife over the palm of her hand. The stainless butcher’s glove protected her skin.

“I don’t care. You need to do it by feel, or else you’ll screw up. Take them off before you go back to work.”

Angel looked at the floor. “Fine, Mama. Did you need something?”

“They found LaSalle.”

“I know. I could hear the news from the other room,” Angel said.

Carmen stood from the couch and turned off the television. “We’ll have to hurry to get to the rest of them before the cops do.”

She motioned for Angel to go back into the spare bedroom. Carmen followed her in.

“How’s it coming?” Carmen asked.

“I have the Pullman skin completely salted and in the rack.” Angel nodded toward the rolling silver bread rack filled with slats of skin on baking trays. “I just started on LaSalle’s.”

Carmen held her curled finger against her lips as her eyes welled up.

“What’s the matter?” Angel asked.

“Nothing.” Carmen shook her head. “Your Daddy just said he was happy to see his Angel all grown up and following in his footsteps.”

“I wish he was still here.”

“So do I.” Carmen sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Come on. Let me give you a hand. We’ll have to head out in a little bit.”

“Shit,” I said.

We rolled down the block, weaving in and out among news vans.

“Someone must have gotten the word out,” Hank said.

Orange plastic barricades, just in front of a Pasco County squad car with a shooting star on the side, blocked the street up ahead. I pulled up to the blockade and lowered my window. A large deputy approached. He looked to be in his thirties, with a black sheriff’s baseball cap covering short brown hair. Dark sunglasses hid his eyes. His tattooed arms filled the short sleeves of his green sheriff’s shirt. He wore some kind of large tactical-looking watch. He was probably a member of their SWAT unit when he wasn’t watching barricades. When he reached my window, I saw that his name badge read Coker.

“Lieutenant Kane and Sergeant Rawlings from the TPD. Your guys are expecting us,” I said.

He pulled off his sunglasses. “Yeah, the homicide guys. I haven’t been in there, but I hear it’s bad. You’ll want to talk with Deputy Gillison. He should be in the house.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Let me get the barricades for you.”

I nodded.

Coker stepped away from my window and waved over another deputy to help him slide the plastic barricades out of the way, and then he pointed us through. Hank and I drove three houses up and parked along the curb behind another sheriff’s car. We got out and walked toward a large ivory-colored house where a deputy stood at the front door. Another deputy appeared to be looking into the bushes alongside him. However, as Hank and I neared, I realized the other deputy wasn’t searching but heaving into the bushes.

I showed my badge to the one not retching. “We’re looking for a Deputy Gillison,” I said.

“Garage,” he said. “Go inside and head to the right. Follow the blood.”

The other deputy turned, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and faced us. “It’s bad,” he said.

I nodded and entered the home, and Hank followed. We stood in the front entryway. On the floor, a few feet in front of us, blood was smeared in both directions—drag marks. I traced the route of blood with my eyes from left to right. It started around the far corner, next to the dining room. It came toward us and continued down the walkway. The blood marks disappeared under a door that, I assumed, led to the garage. Two sheriffs stood to the sides of the closed door. Hank and I walked over, being careful to not disturb the blood.

“Deputy Gillison?” I asked.

The one on the left spoke. “Inside.”

He turned the handle and pulled the door open, carefully not looking inside. As the door opened, I could see what I figured to be a man hanging by his feet from the ceiling. His skin had been removed, and he too wore gauze wrapped around his waist. What was left of his hands just touched the pool of blood on the garage floor beneath him. A man in a lab coat with his back toward us was taking photos. A single deputy stood inside the garage. Hank and I entered.

“Geez,” Hank said.

The deputy looked at us. He appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties. His face was round with a thick brown-and-gray mustache—his buzz cut was the same colors. His belly strained the buttons on his green sheriff’s shirt. He rocked his neck back and forth and let out a little grunt. “I take it you’re my guys from TPD homicide?”

“I’m Lieutenant Kane. This is Sergeant Rawlings.”

“Gillison,” he said. “Does whatever this is match with what you guys found yesterday?”

I walked over to the hanging remains. The skin that remained was consistent with the previous body. “It does,” I said.

“So what the hell is this? We have a copycat of a serial killer from thirty years ago?”

“That’s what it looks like. Do we know who this is?” I asked.

“I’d say it’s the homeowner. The house belongs to a Herb LaSalle. As far as we can tell, he lived here alone.”

“Do we have any proof that it’s the homeowner?” Hank asked.

“There’s a bunch of blood-soaked clothes in the corner there.” Gillison jerked his chin toward the back of the garage, and his neck skin wiggled. “There may be an ID, but I’ve been told to not go through anything. We’re supposed to wait on someone from forensics.”

“We have one of our guys on the way,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s the word I got from our captain. It looks like this is going to be your show.” He said it in a way that sounded as if he wasn’t pleased that we would be taking the homicide as part of our case, and his demeanor toward us suggested the same.

“What do we know so far, Gillison? Who found the body?” I asked.

“The cleaning lady. She showed up for work, entered through the kitchen, and saw all the blood. She followed it through the house out here, saw this, and called us right away.”

“Is she still here?” I asked.

“She was with a couple of our guys outside, last I heard.”

“The murder took place inside, and the man was brought out here?” Hank asked.

“It looks like it. There’s a large blood pool around the breakfast bar in the kitchen. The drag marks start there,” Gillison said.

The garage door leading back into the house opened. Rick stood there, staring in at the murder scene. “What the hell?”

“Rick,” I said.

He stepped in and closed the door at his back. His eyes darted around the room. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said.

I nodded toward the clothes in the corner. “Bloody clothes. Get them bagged and tagged. Check for a wallet. We need to see if this is, in fact, the homeowner.”

Rick continued staring at the body strung from the ceiling. “Um, yeah, okay.” He set his kit down on the floor and opened the top. He gloved up and examined the pile of clothes. After a moment, he scooped up what had originally been a light-blue polo shirt and held it up by the shoulder seams to examine it. Then he walked to the body hanging from the ceiling and examined the man’s neck. “Throat was slashed while he was sitting upright,” Rick said.

“That’s what the blood on the shirt says?” Hank asked.

“Correct.” He switched hands with the shirt and held it toward us. “Blood from the neckline down, some spatter on the shoulders. The right sleeve and side of the shirt are covered in blood. I’d say he fell to the ground in his own blood pool on his right side.” He grabbed a plastic evidence bag from his kit and stuffed the shirt down inside. He sealed the top, placed it next to his kit, and pulled a few more plastic bags from inside.

He bagged the man’s shoes, socks and boxer shorts, and then the khaki slacks were all that remained. He lifted them up by the belt loops. “Heavy,” he said. Rick lay them flat on the garage floor and went through the pockets. “I got a wallet.” He reached into the pocket and removed it. He flipped it open and eyeballed the driver’s license. “Herb LaSalle.” He looked over at the hanging body. “Height and weight are about right.” Rick bagged the pants and the wallet. “I’m going to give the rest of the garage here a good look. Pax is going to meet me here in a little bit. He was heading back to the station with some items from the assisted-living place.”

“I wanted him to get going on the prints and DNA samples from that stuff,” I said.

“Rob is back at the lab. He’s going to start in on that. I called Pax as soon as I saw all the blood in the walkway. This is going to be a two-man job.”

“Okay, as long as someone is working on the other stuff,” I said.

“Rob will get it taken care of,” Rick said.

I looked at Gillison. “Let’s leave him to it. You want to show us the kitchen?”

“Yeah, come on.” Gillison gave us a wave and walked toward the door.

We followed him back through the house, minding the bloody drag marks. As I stared down at them as we walked, I saw what looked like a heel print from a shoe and stopped.

“Hank,” I said, pointing at the mark in the blood.

He crouched and looked. “Heel. It’s small.” A look of confusion crossed his face. “And thin. A woman?”

We spent another two hours on the scene before heading back to the station. Rick and Pax went over the drag marks and photographed and fingerprinted the entire home—kitchen to garage. The Pasco County coroner, along with his team, lowered the victim and removed him from the garage. Rick and Pax collected the equipment used to hoist him and brought it back to our lab. I spoke with the housekeeper that had called it in. She had spoken with LaSalle the prior afternoon. We cross-checked the heel print in the blood against the shoes she wore. They were not a match, and the size wasn’t close. The heel print belonged to our attacker. The coroner put our time of death between fifteen and twenty hours before. The man had been murdered sometime the previous evening.

Hank and I walked into the station and went straight to Bostok’s office.

The captain sat at his desk with his arms crossed over his chest. “Same?” he asked.

“Same.”

He flung his pen on top of his desk and rubbed his eyes. “Any evidence?”

“Forensics gathered some things,” I said.

“What about the assisted-living place?”

“We found an inhaler that belonged to the man out in the parking lot. It looks like he was taken from there. The inhaler is down in forensics being printed. We also have a few items that we can get a DNA sample from. We met the daughter. She says her father was a juror on the Redding case.”

“A juror?”

“Correct,” I said.

“What about the second victim? Juror as well?”

“We haven’t gotten that far, Cap.”

“Let’s get someone on that ASAP,” Bostok said.

“I’m going to head down to the lab and double check the file boxes on the case now. I don’t remember seeing juror names, though.” I looked at Hank. “Do you?”

He shook his head.

I looked back at the captain. “I’d like to get a meeting set up in a little bit here. Maybe bring in Donner and Jones for extra help. We need more manpower working toward the same goal—getting whoever is doing this off the street and behind bars before there are more victims,” I said.

“Okay. I’ll get Sergeant Timmons and a couple of his guys over as well. What time are we thinking?” Bostok asked.

I looked at my watch. “Say an hour?”

“That’s fine. I’m sure Major Danes will want to be a part of this. I’ll let him know. Do we have anything else to go on with forensics?”

“We have a partial heel print from a shoe they are looking into. It looks like it may be a woman’s,” Hank said.

“A woman?”

Hank nodded.

“Okay. I should probably call Sam in for the meeting as well. We are going to have to put something together for the press. I saw that they were out at Wesley Chapel.”

“Yeah, probably ten vans,” I said.

“Okay. Get to it. I’ll get on the phone with everyone.”

“Sounds good, Cap,” I said.

Hank and I left Bostok’s office. I walked down the hall toward the bank of elevators. Hank went to make copies of everything we had so far, to distribute at our meeting.

I thumbed the button for the elevator and glanced at the lights above. One car was up on the sixth floor, and the other was on ground level. I opted for the stairs.

I walked into the forensics lab and spotted Rick at a table toward the back. He saw me and waved me over.

“Get something?” I asked.

Laid out on the table was the gauze the man had been wrapped in, along with the winching system used to hoist the body at the LaSalle house. “The gauze looks like a dead end again, but there’s prints all over this winch.”