Signature Kill (8 page)
Authors: David Levien
“I need you guys to run DNA on these hairs against the Northwestway Park victim. I’ve got clearance from Lieutenant Breslau, IMPD, and the family,” he told the young man.
“All right,” the clerk said, and took the information from Behr, which he attached to the bag that held the hairbrush. “Just so you know, DNA can only be recovered from hairs with the bulb still attached. There might be some here, but it’d be better if you plucked the hairs.”
Thanks, CSI
, Behr almost said. Instead he opted for: “That’s not an option. How long will it take?”
“Things are kind of backed up,” the clerk said. “It’s going to be a couple of weeks at least.”
“Anything you can do to help it through the system would be
much appreciated,” Behr said. “I know Lieutenant Breslau feels the same way.”
Truth was, he didn’t know how Breslau felt, but it wasn’t the first time a little bullshit had been spread around this particular building, and it wouldn’t be the last.
“We’re on it,” the clerk said to Behr’s departing back.
The day has been bright yet cold, the sun promising but failing to warm the air. He sits outside Cinnamon’s house in his car. He’s spent a good part of the afternoon there when he should’ve been at work, but the project has taken him over now. He’s tracked her enough over the past few weeks to know her routine: She takes a walk in the morning and comes back from the White Hen Pantry with a big coffee and a fresh pack of cigarettes. She smokes one along the way home. In the afternoon it’s down to the Prime Time Package store and a walk back with a brown paper bag that looks about the size of a quart bottle of beer. She doesn’t appear to have a car. He can’t be sure if she lives alone or if others are in the house, though he hasn’t seen anyone. He doesn’t know what else she does during the day. He supposes she goes out occasionally. He can’t sit there all day long though. He has to appear at his office at some point. He considers knocking, or going in the back door, but he develops a slightly different idea. He doesn’t know from where it has come, only that it arrives fully blown and seems like it will work. He feels his heart surge with the joy of creation when he thinks of it. Her front door swings open and she emerges, zipping her tight leather jacket, her breath a cloud around her, and it has begun.
She walks up the block and he turns on his ignition and drives past her. He keeps the car at a normal speed, perhaps even slower than the limit. He has time. He drives to Prime Time Package and parks in the lot along the far side of the building. He’s circled the store many times and learned there are no cameras back there. Dusk has usually
fallen by the time she reaches the store, and today is no exception. The blazing orange orb of the sun drops behind the trees, and within moments the day goes from brilliant to bruised. He parks, but leaves the car unlocked and enters the store.
Cases of beer are stacked all along the entrance, and since the brand doesn’t matter, he doesn’t bother going any deeper into the store. He picks up a case of Stroh’s in cans and puts it down at the register, then gathers two twelve-packs of Labatt Blue in bottles. The clerk, a Pakistani, comes around and rings up the purchase. He pays cash, and he spots her through the window between the specials signs, coming toward the store. He pockets his change and stacks the twelve-packs on top of the case.
“Do you want bags for the bottles?” the clerk asks.
“No,” he answers.
He heads for the door. He needs to be outside before she arrives, everything hinges on that. He puts his back into the bar and eases the glass door open, then turns toward her. He feels his heart thumping lightly in his chest as he faces her, in person at last. She is even smaller than he’d thought, height-wise. Her frame is compact and well formed. Her eyes sparkle above rings of black eyeliner along her bottom lids. A cloud of cigarette smoke hovers around her. Her hair catches the day’s remaining light. Then he speaks.
“I got too much,” he says. “It was on sale. Help me carry it to my car and I’ll give you a six-pack?”
She looks at him for a moment, as he strains against the armful of beer, and shrugs.
“Sure, noodle arms,” she says, and the corner of her mouth rises in a quarter smile. She puts the cigarette between her lips, reaches out and takes the twelve-packs off the top, and he begins walking around the corner toward the parking lot. She follows.
“I’m just over here,” he says, mild and unimpressive, as he heads to his car. Loose gravel and old broken glass crunch under their feet as they cross the lot. He walks along with her, his exterior calm, but inside his true self is savage as a meat ax.
“Not too sure about your taste in beer. Stroh’s? Can I get a six of the Labatt at least?” she asks.
“Sure,” he says.
There are no other cars in the lot. He fishes in his pocket for his keys and pops the trunk. He puts the case of cans inside and steps back, giving her room to deposit the twelve-packs.
“So, should I just take—” she begins speaking but stops. She stiffens as she sees the lengths of duct tape and nylon cord, precut and tied, in the trunk. She can’t know what they are for, only that it feels wrong. But that is all she has time to consider. He punches her in the back of the head, a short, sharp blow just at the base of her skull, and she sags as she goes out. Her cigarette hits the ground, and he pushes her right in on top of the beer and swings her legs into the roomy trunk. He secures her hands and feet with the lengths of cord, puts a strip of tape across her mouth, and closes the trunk. From the street, a passing motorist would merely glimpse a man placing packages in his car. He gets behind the wheel and drives away, euphoric, into the falling darkness.
Trevor was on the floor on a play mat that was festooned with boinging, buzzing, and clicking gadgets that had probably been scientifically engineered by a team in a lab to stimulate a child’s senses. The boy was ignoring most of that, however, and was instead engaged in what looked like a wrestling sit-out drill. From time to time Behr would glance over to see one of Trevor’s limbs give out and plant him on his face upon the padded cotton mat. It didn’t seem to faze his son though.
Behr surveyed his place, which had turned into a command post for his task force of one. The idea that his missing woman had gotten into the car of someone hunting women was a long shot, but Behr woke up thinking about the reward most days now. The idea of the money played in his head, while the actuality of his bills piled up and his savings dropped, and it was causing him to work long and hard. After he’d gotten the flash drive from Sasso, he’d run his laser printer like a coal engine for two days straight, stopping only to go to Staples for another box of paper and a new printer cartridge. He’d then set about reading and organizing what he’d printed. He’d put up a large city map so he could pushpin the locations of bodies and murders, as well as a bulletin board for other important facts. The case files themselves went into stacks by year. An index card timeline of all the cases stretched around the walls at eye level. There was another box for witness statements from the other cases. Breslau hadn’t been particularly judicious but had been
generous with what he’d sent. Behr had fifty-seven unsolved cases going back roughly eighteen years to sift through.
So he concentrated his focus on the cases resembling his. Young women, known prostitutes, those who may have been prostitutes, and those who were at-risk types and could’ve been in similar situations to the prostitutes. Those most like Kendra Gibbons. Over the first few days of reading, he tossed a dozen of the cases—the drug-related killings, women who were older than fifty, women killed in office settings. He booted the domestic violence cases that hadn’t been successfully prosecuted. Then there were the shooting victims, the African American, Asian, and Latina victims, blunt trauma cases, vehicular homicide, and an apparent poisoning. That pared the number down to thirty-seven dead Caucasian women, between the ages of eighteen and forty-six, who’d been killed by stabbing or strangulation by currently unknown assailants and had been found either intact or partially or fully dismembered over the past sixteen and a half years.
It was a lot to contend with, a formless sea of information. But out of that formlessness, a shape had begun to emerge. Behr couldn’t recognize it with his conscious mind, but he felt it floating at the edges of his perception like a ghostly figure. There was a term for what he was looking at, but not one he was yet prepared to utter …
That’s when he realized the sun had gone down. And that he hadn’t fed Trevor for a while and Susan would be home from work soon, so he put the pages he was reading back into a file folder and got Trevor’s jacket. The boy was his little mascot these past few weeks, staying with him during the day while he worked instead of going off to day care. It could be distracting once in a while, but it was money saved and good time spent.
“All right, buddy, time to go home,” Behr said, rubbing his face in an attempt to wipe off what he’d been reading. “Let’s go see Mommy.”
Susan was just taking off her coat when Behr walked in, Trevor in one arm, a bag of takeout food in the other.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“My men,” she said, smiling and taking Trevor for hugs and kisses.
“I got Boston Market,” he said.
“Who’s better than you?” she asked.
“Hell if I know.”
Later, they lay in bed, the sheets bunched up between their feet, she in her pajamas, and he in his clothes. They had begun fooling around, but she’d pulled away.
“There’s something about the routine of this that’s starting to make me feel cheap, Frank,” she said.
“That’s not the intention,” he told her.
“Yeah, but it’s getting to be the result.”
“You know that’s not the way I see you. Not the way I feel about us,” he said.
“Okay.”
He was moments away from that inner alarm binging and causing him to get up and return to his endless cases of gore and pain when she spoke.
“What are we doing, Frank?”
“You mean why do you two live here and I don’t?”
“Yeah.”
The silence between them was his only answer. Then she spoke.
“I don’t know much, beyond the obvious, about why your marriage failed. But from what you’ve told me, your ex said it was because you just couldn’t get out from under the sadness. The grief. The misery.”
Behr had too much to say about all that she’d just brought up, so he simply nodded in the dark.
“And has that changed yet?”
“Hold on. You don’t think my life is different? With you? And him?”
“Your life is different, but you still haven’t gotten out from under.”
She was right. He wasn’t out from under. Somehow solving this case and claiming the reward represented a new start. But for now he was still caught in a riptide of crap, and like an experienced ocean swimmer he was swimming parallel to shore until it let go. But he didn’t say any of that to her. He couldn’t. Instead he swung his feet to the floor and started getting dressed.
The air inside the garage already has the close, shrine-like feel he yearns for. Everything out in the world is too clean now. That’s the problem with this age. It is all plastic and sterile.
But not in here
. In this space the air smells of sacred fluids: urine, blood, and semen. They will run together onto the floor. Some of them already do, darkening the concrete. It is elemental.
When they arrived, he had pulled his car in, unloaded Cinnamon, and moved the car back out. Now it is dark and quiet inside, a moment of calm. He goes to the sofa, which is covered by an old blanket, and stands over her. Her hands and feet are bound. Her jacket, shirt, and brassiere lie on the floor along with her shoes, socks, and jeans. He’d cut those off immediately. She wears only panties, pale and pink colored. Outside, the world carries on, people walking around clinging to the myth of escape, desperately seeking the safe, the happy, the normal. But reality is inside, here, between them.
It is time …
Bodies, and parts of bodies, intact and taken apart, naked and partially clothed and bound and tied and posed, some identified, some unidentified, going back years and years and years surrounded him
.
Picture time for Behr. He’d pinned police department victim photos, both in stark black and white and in lurid color, on bulletin boards and along the walls of his office, and they were quickly becoming plastered across the surfaces of his brain. Motel rooms, wooded areas, roadsides, Dumpsters, a warehouse, a fifty-five-gallon drum, parks, including the most recent find along the tree line of Northwestway. That one was the most bizarre tableau and seemed to have been staged with great care.
Behr had run through the half dozen sets of photo printer ink cartridges he’d picked up for the project. He was aware that now, along with his time, he was spending his own money combing cold cases, but so far none of the unidentified bodies announced themselves as Kendra Gibbons. He was also aware, painfully so, that he had nothing substantive that connected her to any of these past cases.
“Huh,” Behr said aloud, as he stood back and appraised the shots in total. He’d hung them in chronological order, and he had begun to recognize a very clear difference in them, a progression, starting
about six years back. The difference was in the quality and in the impact of the photos. At first he ascribed it to the advent of digital photography and the new, sharper lenses that came along with it. But he soon realized the distinctions went beyond that. There was a skill level at play, lighting-wise and compositionally, even in the overall density of image, in the more recent photos that far outstripped the prior ones. Behr moved closer and noticed a tiny photo credit in most of the recent batch that read “D. Quinn.” He stepped back again and understood what made the difference.
When looking at crime scenes, Behr had been trained to concentrate on the edges. The investigator can’t ignore the central piece—the body, or the blown safe, or the looted car—but too many investigators got sucked into that element. It was only natural. It was, after all, the reason for the investigation. But the mind tended to become overwhelmed by it. It caused a type of tunnel vision that shut out other pertinent information. So one was advised to instead focus on the periphery, where a pen might’ve been touched or a drinking glass used, or a bottle or a footprint or a tool might’ve been left by the criminal. Behr realized that the pictures of the more recent scenes seemed to be shot with this aesthetic. The bodies were in the photos, of course, and they were central, but they weren’t dead center in the frame, and the surrounding spaces were included in a highly detailed manner. Behr stared and studied the more recent batch for hours. He pulled up a chair and continued. He didn’t see anything that helped. He knew he might not for a long time, if ever. But at least he knew there was a chance.