So Close the Hand of Death (12 page)

T
he dark water lapped languorously at the bank, and Taylor could hear the small stirrings of animals in the surrounding woods. It was quiet on this boat dock, isolated. That was why the killer chose this place. It was out of the way. Off the beaten path. Private.

A familiar chirping noise came to her ears, playing in the background behind the murmurs and joking conversations of the crime scene techs.

Crickets. Crickets in winter. Surely there was some old wives’ tale that addressed that phenomenon? The world was probably going to stop spinning on its axis, or Sam was sure to have a boy, or a cat was going to walk over her grave. She should ask Ariadne, the witch would have the answer. She always did.

Taylor watched Sam get the body into the M.E.’s van, her instructions reverential yet efficient. Marcus was handling the investigation; Taylor didn’t need to be at the scene anymore. She decided to stay a few more minutes anyway, feeling a false sense of responsibility. More guilt, if she was being honest. That was crazy, she wasn’t responsible, for the Schechter boy’s death or for
this case, but the simple fact that another kid had died was too much for her.

When was this going to stop? Was it something she’d done, some wrong she’d committed? And why, if the Pretender was so fucking omniscient, wasn’t he taking his chance? He’d get off on the thrill of having cops around. She’d walked the perimeter of the crime scene alone purposefully. If he was watching, maybe he’d take a chance. From a distance, in the dark, the best he could do would be a body shot, her vest would stop that in a heartbeat.

She realized she was assuming that the Schechter boy was just a ploy designed to distract her, and sharpened her senses even further. Death was not a finite commodity.

Anger burned through her.
Come on, you motherfucker. Let’s go
. The dark greeted her with silence, broken only by crickets and the grunts of the investigators behind her.

Over the past few months, the murder rate on the whole had risen in Nashville. While her team’s close rate was still in the eighty to eighty-three percent range, much higher than anyone else’s in Metro and across the country, too, the fact that there were more murders to solve meant resources were stretched thin, and emotions running high. She knew the Pretender had contributed to the mess, amplifying the murder rate almost fifteen percent all on his own, but she’d had other cases this year that contributed. Nashville was much more likely to see an uptick in lowbrow crime—drugs, prostitution, gangs—than these unique serial cases. Yet the crazies kept finding her.

Another reason she needed to resolve the problem, and soon. If she eliminated the Pretender, the crime
rates would drop. The chief would be happy with her, Delores Norris, the head of the Office of Professional Accountability, would quit breathing down her neck, Fitz would come back to work and her whole team would be back together, and life would go on.

Yes, elimination was the key.

Sam interrupted her reverie. “We’re ready to take off. Tabor will meet us there.”

Taylor turned to her best friend. “You look tired. You could hand it off to one of the other M.E.’s.”

Sam was almost eight weeks pregnant, dark circles riding under her eyes, her face drawn with exhaustion.

“I’m okay. Simon’s got the twins, and I’m feeling all right now. I’m on the late shift this week, so that works good. It’s the mornings that are getting to me. I’m much sicker with this one than the twins. Hell, I didn’t even know I was pregnant with them for a couple of months.”

“All the more reason to rest. But I understand. I saw a couple of the guys on their phones. I hope this hasn’t leaked out just yet. Keep an eye on that, will you?”

“Sure thing. I’ll see you later.”

“Wait, Sam. Mind if I join you?”

Surprise etched Sam’s face, but she shook her head. “Not at all. I could use the company. I’ll see you over there.”

Taylor watched Sam stride away and get into the plain white van that served Forensic Medical. She found Marcus, let him know she was leaving, then climbed in her own car. She picked up her cell to call Baldwin again, tell him she was heading to the morgue, and realized the battery was dead. Careless. She never let that happen. But with the quick trip to North Carolina,
Fitz, the murders this morning, she’d just spaced out. Baldwin would be furious with her, she’d get a lecture. She didn’t blame him, it was a stupid mistake.

She got out of the car and went to borrow Marcus’s cell. She didn’t need her flashlight, not with the crime scene fully illuminated. She scooted around the edge of one of the light stands, turning her body to slip past the contraption. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something orange. She halted, looked closer. The tree closest to her had a pentacle painted on the wood.

She shouted to the nearest crime scene tech. “Hey, Iles, come here for a second.”

Iles was capable, smart. Quiet and businesslike. She liked him. He came over to her, smiling, his teeth flashing white against his tanned face. She wondered if he went to a salon or spray tanned, or both. Really, a tan at the beginning of winter? Metrosexual men, she never knew what to think about them. She usually didn’t trust guys who spent more time in the bathroom getting ready than she did—with the exception of Lincoln, of course. His fascination with clothes was actually fascinating to her. That man had taste, and style. He wasn’t a poseur.

“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

She pointed to the tree. “Has anyone looked at this?”

Iles shined a Maglite on the bark, the fluorescent orange practically leaped out in 3-D. Eerie. It had been spray-painted, little drips of orange had run down the tree, puddling in the bark and on the ground below. She leaned in close and sniffed deeply, the acrid scent of acetone filled her nostrils. Not totally fresh, but not entirely dry either.

“No, I don’t think we have. You think this has something to do with the crime scene?”

“A teenager dead, and a pentacle at the scene? Either it does, or someone has a very sick sense of humor.”

She called to Marcus. He joined them, eyebrows tight.

“What’s up, LT? They just found a bag under the tree branch, looks like the kid’s backpack. I think we’re going to be at this for another couple of hours, at least.”

“Did you see this?”

Marcus stared at the tree.

“No, I didn’t.” He turned to Iles, voice tight. “Get pictures of this, now.”

“Why would someone paint a pentacle on the tree out here?” Iles asked. “I thought you shot the kid who ran the Halloween massacre, and locked the rest of them away.”

Taylor tried not to flinch in the face of Iles’s words.

“Let’s just pray it’s someone playing a very bad joke,” she said.

She drove in silence to Forensic Medical, planning to use the phone as soon as she arrived. It was after hours and the lobby was dark. She used her key card to enter. She was doing her damndest here. From the outside, it looked like another strike against her, running around alone in the dark. She was becoming more aware of her vulnerabilities. It wasn’t so hard to lay herself out in the open, ripe for the taking. She needed it to look like she wasn’t aware of her surroundings, that she was comfortable enough to let her guard down. And that
meant walking a thin line, close to the ones she loved, to draw the bastard out.

She’d been alone for a couple of hours now. Why hadn’t he made a play? What in the name of God was he waiting for?

The door unlocked with a snap, and she entered the building. The reception desk was deserted, of course. Kris, the bubbly, vivacious girl who handled the day-to-day management of calls, requests, family visits, was home for the night.

Taylor pulled out Kris’s chair and sat at the desk. She reached for the phone, and a picture taped to the top of Kris’s computer caught her eye. Kris and Barclay Iles, in bathing suits, hugging, tan and happy. Ah. That explained Iles’s tan. She didn’t know they were dating. Kris had always seemed to like bad boys; Iles was, well, benign, if she were to be honest. Hmm.

She dialed home, but Baldwin didn’t answer, the phone went directly to voice mail. That only happened when he was on the other line, so she left a message detailing where she was, the random pentacle at the Peter Schechter scene and that she loved him. All told, a good message, she thought. At least it ended well.

After taking one last glance at the picture of Kris and Barclay Iles, she crossed the lobby and swiped her card again to enter Forensic Medical’s inner sanctum. A long hallway led to the autopsy suite, and she smiled as she passed Sam’s office. The door was ajar, a small red Chinese lamp filled the room with soft light. Everything was in its place. Sam was a neat freak, had more than a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Just enough that details were always sewn up, her office never looked like a bomb had gone off in it. It was what
made her such a good medical examiner—there weren’t too many things that she didn’t notice.

Taylor entered the women’s locker room, put her hair up in a bun and changed into a pair of scrubs. She didn’t want her street clothes anywhere near the autopsy suite tonight—floaters were the worst, and she’d stink for days if she miscalculated.

Sam was already at work, sipping a cup of green tea just inside the door, wearing a full-length lead apron. She wasn’t alone. Dr. Michael Tabor, the forensic odontologist for the state of Tennessee, was staring at the illuminated x-ray window box. Stuart Charisse, Sam’s perpetual lab assistant, was taking new radiographs of the body, which was still clothed.

Tabor greeted Taylor with a hug. She’d always enjoyed working with him. A regular dentist by trade, he was also one of the most experienced forensic odontologists in the country. His ties to Los Angeles and New York had garnered him nationwide respect, and enabled him to work cases outside of Tennessee. He’d been called to New York after 9/11 to work on identifications. He had spent weeks in New York naming the firefighters, police and other innocent men and women lost in the collapse. Taylor knew the experience had changed him, and she couldn’t help but respect how difficult a job that had been.

While Stuart prepped and x-rayed the floater’s teeth, Tabor went through the National Dental Image Repository worksheet on his laptop. Though he could look at the two sets of radiographs and tell almost immediately if they had a match, this was an official case, and the procedures must be followed.

On paper, the law enforcement dental identification process seemed simple. Match antemortem dental
records to postmortem records through the use of the FBI’s huge nationwide NDIR computer database. In reality, the NDIR didn’t have much luck making matches. The dental database should have been basic protocol all over the country. But many of the rural police departments found it difficult to populate their databases simply because their victims weren’t commonly seen by dentists. The big-city guys were too busy with their caseloads to follow through. It just hadn’t gotten to the point that it worked smoothly.

The idea behind it was easy. When a missing persons report came in, the investigator who talks with the family asks if the missing person has been to a dentist in the past several years. If they existed, antemortem radiographs and dental charts would be retrieved, charted and inputted into the database.

If a likely victim surfaced, a forensic odontologist would examine the body, then create a postmortem dental chart using plain sight and postmortem radiographs. The database would work its magic, spit out a match, and notification would be made to the family that their loved one had been found. If it worked.

Peter Schechter’s case was a bit easier. Missing for five days, his parents had submitted his radiographs to the police over the weekend. They were in the NDIR system. Tabor already had the comparison radiographs prepped.

Taylor watched Stuart and Tabor work together, Tabor nodding and clucking. He had a good poker face, so she couldn’t tell if there was a match yet or not. Sam was filling out some preliminary paperwork. Taylor went to her.

“I didn’t know Kris and Barclay Iles were dating,” she said.

Sam knit her brows at the interruption, answered without breaking stride in her writing. “Yeah, they’ve been out to us for a couple of months now. She was the reason he got hired in the first place—she brought his resume to me. He was almost overqualified—he’d made it a couple of years in med school before dropping out. I was a little annoyed when I found out he was actually her boyfriend, but it doesn’t seem to affect either one of their duties. I see how well you and Baldwin work together, thought I’d bend the rules a bit and let them have at it.”

“You’re using Baldwin and me as an example?”

“Of course. Lord knows Simon and I can’t work side by side. I’d wring his neck and he’d divorce me. We’re both much too controlling. But the two of you, you have that give and take, you complement each other rather than butt heads. It’s cool.”

Sam was right, Taylor did work well with Baldwin. She worked well with her whole team. Granted, she’d handpicked them, made sure she had personalities that would coalesce, but Sam had a point. It wasn’t always easy to work with your significant other.

“It’s him,” Tabor said.

“One hundred percent?” Sam asked.

“Yeah. No doubt about it. The radiographs are a perfect match. Sorry about that, ladies. I’ll get the rest of the paperwork filed in the morning. But for the time being, as far as I’m concerned, you can do a notification.” Tabor packed his things, nodded to both Taylor and Sam, then let himself out.

Sam put her tea down. “All right then. Stuart, let’s get him undressed.”

Taylor watched while they struggled with the wet
clothes. When his shirt was stripped off, she felt a huge pang of relief.

Taylor called Marcus. He answered on the first ring.

“It’s Schechter?” he asked without preamble.

“Yeah. Tabor just finished the dental comparison.”

“Damn. Okay then. I’ll head out to see his parents. Any word on our pentacle? Is Schechter left over from the Halloween murders?”