Tunnel Vision (7 page)

“What about the victim?” she continued.

“Male. Hispanic. I’d guess around thirty or thirtyfive years old, but it’s hard to tell with Hispanics. We age well, you know,” he said, waggling his eyebrows at Maggie. “Full set of teeth with no apparent dental work. Probably gnawed on a few thousand tortillas over the years. Hard to tell anything about his height and weight considering that he’s now a shadow of his former self. I’ll know more when you locate the other three-fourths of him.”

“How long has he been dead?” Nicholls asked.

“Who the fuck knows? Coulda been in there a week or an hour before he was found. Formaldehyde is a great preservative, you know. His companions in the aquarium are in pristine condition and they’ve been toast for months. Find me a body to work with and if it hasn’t already been pickled, too, I can be more specific unless, of course....”

“Enough of the anatomy lesson, Frank. We get the idea.” Brodie said.

“Tell you one thing though. This wasn’t some quickie slice and dice. Whoever separated our friend from his body did some pretty neat work. Maybe not a Harvard-trained brain surgeon, but definitely not the butcher at the local A & P.”

“Okay. Let me know if you come up with anything else we should know.”

Cardona shook hands with Brodie and Nicholls, but when he got to Maggie he raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. He winked and jogged back to the lab van as a pink blush began to spread up her neck.

“Now what?” Nicholls asked as they walked

across the grassy area in front of the building toward their car.

“Punt, I guess,” Brodie said.

Following a few feet behind them, Maggie glanced through the notes she had taken and looked at the diagram she had drawn of the scene. Her foot sank unexpectedly into a depression in the grass and she was barely able to catch herself before falling down.

“What the hell?” she muttered to herself.

“You coming, Weston?” Brodie called out when she and Nicholls reached their car. Maggie was on her hands and knees, shining a small flashlight on something on the ground.

Squinting, she answered, “Yeah! Hey, what’s under this grate?” She looked around until she spotted an older man wearing the blue denim workshirt of a university employee. She motioned him toward her and dusted grass from her slacks. The man walked up to her and rested on the rake in his hands. “What’s this grate for?” she asked again. Brodie sighed as she and Nicholls strolled back to where Maggie was kneeling. “What’s the problem?”

Brodie asked shortly when she and Nicholls rejoined Maggie.

“I asked what this grate is for,” Maggie repeated as she leaned closer to the grate and cupped her hands around her eyes to see into the darkness below.

“Oh, that’s part of the old tunnel system the university tried when it first opened,” the man explained. “There’s a vent about every couple hundred yards. It was supposed to let students get from one building to another in bad weather. I think they were used as shelters in case of tornadoes too.”

“Are they under every building?” she asked, still straining to see what her limited light illuminated.

“Just the original four or five buildings,” he answered. “They turned out to be better suited for muggings and lover’s lanes than anything else so the university sealed them off.”

“Is the Biology Building one of the original buildings?” Maggie asked.

“Yep.”

“But all the exterior entrances are padlocked,”

Nicholls said. “We checked them out while we were combing the grounds.”

Standing up and brushing the grass from her hands and knees, Maggie looked around again. “Who has keys for the padlocks?”

“Security should, ma’am,” the maintenance

worker said.

“Get in touch with security and have them bring their keys, Nicholls,” Brodie said.

A SHORT FLIGHT of narrow concrete steps led to the basement of the Biology Building. Brodie turned the key in the padlock and slowly pushed the door open, drawing her weapon as she reached inside and felt along the wall. Finding a light switch, she flipped it on and a series of dim overhead fluorescent lights flickered on. The room smelled dank and moldy and dust particles floated through the glow cast by the overhead lights. There were no windows along the walls and a dark green mold appeared to run down the wall from cracks in the mortar. “Clear,” she said as she looked around and re-holstered her gun. Assorted desks and file cabinets were stacked against one wall. Other equipment she was unfamiliar with was pushed into piles along the other walls. Nicholls and Weston followed her down the steps before separating to comb the room.

“Jesus, smells like my grandmother’s root cellar in here,” Nicholls mumbled as he glanced around.

“Hope no one’s allergic to mold and mildew,”

Maggie added.

“Look around and see if the dust on this crap looks like it’s been disturbed,” Brodie ordered as she pulled a pair of latex gloves from her pocket. Brodie poked through some of the junk and began moving file cabinets away from the wall to clear a path between cabinets.

“Found a door,” she called from behind the cabinets.

Nicholls and Maggie joined her and moved the rusting cabinets farther away. A large padlock secured the damp wooden door from the outside and Brodie began going through the keys they had gotten from campus security one by one. She looked over her shoulder at the other detectives. “Looks like no one’s been down here in a long, long time and this mother is eat up with rust.”

“I didn’t see anything that looked out of place or had been dusted recently,” Nicholls said while Brodie tried another key.

“Got it!” Brodie said.

She leaned against the old wooden door and pushed it open with her shoulder. She flipped on her flashlight and shined it into what was obviously a tunnel of some type. Moisture from rain earlier in the morning pooled in small puddles along the floor and the walls glistened with a dewy wetness.

“Where’s it go?” Nicholls asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Brodie said with a shrug. “Any other exits?”

“Didn’t find any,” Maggie answered.

“Nick, check with maintenance to see if they have blueprints for this tunnel system while Weston and I see if this hole goes anywhere interesting. The dust on the cabinets and other junk in front of this door didn’t appear to have been disturbed, but you never know.”

Nicholls nodded and made his way back to the basement entrance as the beam from Maggie’s flashlight joined Brodie’s. Brodie drew her gun again and stepped into the tunnel. Sweeping the beams from their flashlights around, they moved cautiously.

“This tunnel probably hasn’t been used since Custer was a corporal,” Maggie said. She could feel the mold and dust spores attacking her sinuses and couldn’t suppress a sneeze that had been building since they entered the dank basement. “Both the outside doors were locked, so this is probably a wild goose chase,” Maggie observed. “We didn’t find any doors inside the building itself that would lead down here.”

“Let’s talk to the janitors in the building who worked over the weekend,” Brodie said. “See if they noticed anyone unusual in and out of the building after dark.”

The tunnel curved slightly about a hundred yards from the entrance. The beams from their flashlights cut through the darkness like a knife as they stepped forward. Brodie stopped so abruptly that Maggie bumped into her. “Jesus fuckin’ H. Christ,” she breathed.

Maggie gripped Brodie’s arm tightly and felt a wave of nausea rush over her. “Oh, my God,” she said when she saw the scene in front of them.

“Looks like we found what we were looking for,”

Brodie said quietly. Their lights moved over what could have been a slaughterhouse floor. Semi-dried sticky black pools of blood covered the floor and apparent bloodstains had run down the walls.

“Let’s get the lab guys back here and hope we haven’t fucked up too much evidence in the process,”

Brodie said as they began to back away from the area.

“Organize search teams as soon as we can get back in here. I want to know where these tunnels go.”

THE WAITRESS IN the restaurant’s smoking

section, a college age girl with short blonde hair, cleared the plates from in front of the three detectives. As she lit a cigarette Brodie noticed the girl smiling at Nicholls and batting her eyelashes at him like a fan on a hot night. She smiled to herself as he winked back at the girl and asked for a refill, using his softest drawl. Within moments the waitress was back with the coffee pot.“It’s a fresh pot,” she said while pouring.

“Thank you, sweetheart. I appreciate that,” he said.When the waitress finally left the table, Brodie asked, “Adding another one to your already long list of Barbies?”

“The list can never be too long,” he laughed as he brought his cup to his lips. Maggie wasn’t a part of their conversation and didn’t ask any questions. She had been generally silent throughout the meal, a fact not lost on Brodie.

“When did you start smoking again?” Maggie asked, realizing her mistake as Brodie’s eyes flew up to meet hers.

Nicholls didn’t seem to notice Maggie’s slip. “I’ve been trying to convince her to quit, but she’s being stubborn about it.”

Brodie took a deep breath and flicked ashes into the ashtray. “You know, she’s been dead for a while now, but if memory serves me right, neither one of you looks a fuckin’ thing like my mother,” she said tightly.

“Jesus, you’re touchy today, Brodie. Strike out last weekend?” Nicholls asked.

“My personal life isn’t any of your goddamn business, Nicholls. Remember that!” she snapped. Surprised by the sudden irritation in his partner’s voice, Nicholls narrowed his eyes. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

Mashing out her unfinished cigarette, Brodie quickly changed the subject. “Nothing,” she said, looking at Maggie. “What do you think our next step should be, Weston?”

Grateful to be on a safer topic, Maggie pulled her notebook from her pocket and glanced through it for a minute before answering. “If we make a few assumptions, and I suppose we’ll have to for now, the victim was probably killed over the weekend and there might be a missing person report. Since the head was left on the campus he could have been a student or a university employee. I think we should check with personnel first to see if anyone has been absent from work today. Cardona said he looked to be at least thirty, so we might speculate he wasn’t a student.”

“Why?” Brodie challenged. “People over thirty have been known to attend college.”

“I know, but universities don’t keep attendance records the way public schools do. It would be easier to eliminate employees first.”

“The vic could have come from anywhere,”

Nicholls said.

“True,” said Maggie leaning slightly forward,

“but why would anyone carry around a head and decide to dump it at the university here? He, or she, could have dumped it in a field somewhere in the boonies and it wouldn’t have been found for weeks or months, if then. Besides, considering the head showed no signs of decomposition, I don’t think the perp kept it around very long. Maybe a few hours at most.”

“She’s right,” Nicholls nodded.

Emboldened by his agreement, she continued,

“Decapitation is pretty extreme for a beginner or an impulse killer. Something like that would take some advanced planning. He could have done something similar before and gotten away with it. Perhaps not as flashy as this, but now he’s willing to take more risks.”

“Maybe he doesn’t like Hispanics,” Brodie said.

“Maybe he’s just a fuckin’ whacko,” Nicholls added.

Brodie leaned her head back in thought. “We need to find how our perp got the victim into those tunnels. We’ve spent hours searching every one only to run into a brick wall, literally. I want to see the earliest floor plans for the Biology Building and examine the inside again at the exact original entrance location. He didn’t get the victim down there by wiggling his nose and there’s no evidence he used the outside basement entrance.”

“My team and I checked that building thoroughly, Lieutenant,” Maggie said defensively.

“I’m not saying you weren’t thorough, Detective. But now I want that building torn apart. We have to have missed something. It’s a good idea to check out the university employees. Make a few calls when we get back to the office. See what you can find out about the floor plans, too. In the meantime, Nicholls, you and I will check to see if there’s anything new on our Thursday John Doe. I’ll check the missing person reports and you go over the stolen car lists. Oh, and see if the lab was able to trace any part numbers on the car. Looks like it’s time to let our fingers do the walking for a while.”

THE DAY WAS shot and all Brodie had to show for it was another body, or at least part of one, and a throbbing headache. The good news was that the second victim at least had a face. She rubbed her forehead with her thumb and forefinger as she made notes to herself along with a list of questions that needed to be answered. She noticed Maggie and Nicholls seemed to be getting along and worked well together, bouncing ideas off one another.

Occasionally, her train of thought would be broken by the sound of Maggie’s laughter. She had an easy, infectious laugh that made everyone around her feel good. Frowning, she tried to shut the sound out. She didn’t want to feel good about having Maggie around. By five she felt like she was going cross-eyed from reading reports. Any time she had to stay at her desk for more than an hour she felt as if she was smothering. Flipping shut the folder she was reading, she stood and stretched as she pulled her jacket on. Too many thoughts and questions were shoving their way around in her mind looking for a way to connect. She had more questions than answers and needed something to distract her from her private thoughts.

“Don’t think I can stand any more excitement for today, Nicholls. Everybody go home and get a good night’s sleep. Hopefully tomorrow we’ll have a few more reports in and can start to piece this thing together.”

“I think I’ll just run over my notes one more time,” Maggie said.

Nicholls leaned down next to her as he slipped his jacket on. “Brown noser,” he whispered.