Vanished - A Mystery (Dixon & Baudin Book 1) (6 page)

12

Dixon woke with an erection. It wasn’t something that happened often since he’d turned thirty-five, but occasionally he would wake with one and feel like a young kid again. He turned to his wife and wrapped his arm around her. Laying kisses on her neck, he snuggled next to her, pressing his erection against her. She roused and for a moment pushed back into him. And then, as quickly as the moment came, it was gone. She withdrew. Not physically, but he could feel that she wasn’t into it anymore as surely as if she had risen and walked away.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“It’s just early. I’m not feelin’ it.”

“You used to feel it.”

“I know, but… I don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m the worst wife.”

He kissed her gently on the lips and then rolled away to sit up in bed. “No, it’s fine. I just thought it would give me something to think about during the day.”

She rubbed his back. “Well, it’s better to have something to look forward to than a memory.”

He grinned. “I’ll take you up on that, you know.”

“Please do.”

Dixon rose and strolled into the bathroom. He urinated, stripped down, and then got into the shower. “Oh, how many pizzas are you ordering for the game tomorrow?”

“Is three enough?” she said from the bedroom.

“Better make it four. I invited Jerry from work and Chris from across the street.”

“Oh.”

He began soaping his chest and arms. “Something wrong with Jerry and Chris?”

“No, that’s fine. Just a lot of people. I don’t know if we have room.”

“We’ll make room.”

He finished showering and got out, staring at his body in the mirror. He’d been a track star in high school and had always been lean and muscular. But a slight belly protruded, and skin sagged in places it hadn’t ten years ago. To him, age seemed to be little more than the cumulative effects of gravity.

“Hey, hon?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

There was no answer for a moment. “I love you, too.”

When he was done showering and dressing, Dixon went to his son. He picked him up and tickled his belly, which always made him smile. He played with him for twenty minutes until it was breakfast time, and then he brought the boy out and put him in a high chair at the table.

“What do you two have planned for today?” he said, sitting down as she shoveled eggs and bacon onto his plate.

“We’re going with Kelsey to the mall and then lunch.”

He took a bite of eggs then rose and retrieved the Tabasco from the fridge. “I’ll probably be late for dinner. Wanna catch up on some stuff so I don’t have to go in tomorrow.”

“Okay. I’ll keep a plate hot for you.”

She brought him orange juice, and he took her hand, staring up at her eyes. Kissing the soft skin of her fingers, he let go, and she slipped away. He didn’t know much about women, but something was wrong. For the past few months, Hillary had been making intimations that perhaps it was time for another child, but she’d stopped in recent weeks. Dixon didn’t understand it, but women somehow intuitively knew when their biological clocks were ticking down. The window of having more kids, for her, was closing.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out. “Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Ethan. You at the precinct?”

“Not yet.”

“We still partners?”

“I’m eating breakfast with my family right now. Can this wait?”

“When you’re done, meet me at the coroner’s office. He’s got the preliminary ready for us.”

Dixon hung up and stared at the phone. Then he slipped it back into his pocket. It hadn’t been a request. Baudin had just told him where to be as though he were his boss. Maybe he’d be better off alone again after all.

“Who was that?” Hillary asked.

“New partner,” he said, rising and kissing his boy on the cheek. “Gotta run.” He grabbed a piece of toast out of the toaster, kissed her quickly on the lips, and was out the door.

The coroner’s office was next to the county fairgrounds with nothing else but a few government buildings nearby. As Dixon drove, he again got that feeling of being on a different planet. He wondered if somewhere out in the universe, another creature was looking at a deserted stretch of nothing on its own planet with the same feeling.

He pulled up to the government complex and saw Baudin sitting on the trunk of his car, doing something on his cell phone. He wore a red shirt with a black tie today, looking like some sinister preacher. Dixon got out of the car and scanned the area.

“They should develop this land,” he said, a cloud of dust swirling over him.

“Why? The world need more strip malls and movie theaters?”

“Be better than dirt.”

Baudin hopped off the trunk, and they entered the building. The doors were open, but there was no receptionist at the front counter. Down a long linoleum corridor, the sound of clanging metal echoed, as though someone were moving pots and pans around. They headed in that direction.

In a room off to the side, a man was stocking pans and trays on a shelf. He saw them and his eyes went wide. “Who are you?” he said.

“Detective Kyle Dixon. Gil here?”

“Oh,” he said, relieved. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s down in his office.”

“Thanks.”

Baudin followed him. Dixon had been to the office several times. It was, in his estimation, the worst office he’d ever been in. Tucked away in a corner with no windows, Gil was a hoarder. He didn’t call it that himself, but that was what it was. No paper with even a hint of importance was ever thrown away. No files were shredded. It meant his office was stacked from floor to ceiling with papers, trinkets, boxes and folders.

“That man’s a junkie,” Baudin said. “We need to remember that if we ever need something Gil’s not giving us.”

Dixon looked back at him. “How you know he’s a junkie?”

“He had that droopy appearance, like his arms and shoulders were too heavy for him. And he was missing his shoelaces.”

“So?”

“So they use those to tie off injection sites.”

Dixon shook his head. “No way, man. They test ’em here.”

“Yeah? And who does the testing?”

Gil’s office was overflowing with junk. Paper binders were now stacked outside of the office in the corridor. Dixon sighed as he stepped over them.

Gil was behind his desk filling out a paper form with a pen. He looked up, and it seemed for a moment he didn’t recognize Dixon. Then a smile crept over his face, and he said, “Detective Dixon? So glad you chose to light our dreary day.”

“Gil, you gotta clean some of this shit out, man. This isn’t healthy.”

He shrugged. “Nothing’s healthy. You ready to see your gal?”

They followed Gil down another corridor to the elevators. The old, creaking elevators jolted several times as though cables were snapping above them. Baudin didn’t seem to notice. He was studying Gil’s face.

They stepped off in the basement, where the bodies were kept. Gil opened one of the old-style refrigeration units and pulled out the metal panel the body lay on.

Their Jane Doe looked different from when Dixon had seen her last. She was much whiter. The genitals were where his eyes went first, to the gaping, open wounds that revealed the dried, crimson interior. He had to look away, down to her feet and the mangled toes with the skin falling off the bone. He’d once watched something on the Discovery Channel about a caveman who had been found frozen into the ice. They thawed him out and determined that he’d been murdered. Jane Doe looked like that caveman, with ancient, crusted flesh.

Dixon closed his eyes and said a quick prayer for her.

“She suffocated,” Gil said, staring down at her face. “Suffocation’s what kills someone when they’re crucified. Their lungs can’t get enough air, but it’s too painful to put pressure on your feet to stand and give your lungs space. So they slowly suffocate. It takes days.”

“About three days, wouldn’t you say, Doc?” Baudin said.

“Guess so. Though I’d guesstimate she’d been out there at least twenty days. She’s got maggots inside her. We can get an ento person out here from UW to take a look and give you a date certain.”

Baudin walked around the table to the head and looked at her eyes. “Was there anything in her throat?”

“Like what?”

“Anything that shouldn’t be there?”

“I didn’t see nothin’.”

Baudin leaned over her. “What was she cut with?”

“Something sharp, a knife or razor. Some organs missing.”

“Which ones?”

“The pancreas and thymus. Odd ones to take. That heart, though, that ain’t hers. That’s a deer’s heart, best I can figure.”

“Deer heart?” Baudin said, looking up at him.

“Yessir, her heart was still in her chest. Couldn’t get through the breastplate, though it looks like he tried. See right there? She’s got scrape marks on it. He tried to lift it like a lid on Tupperware. But you gotta cut the ribs first to release the breastplate. Don’t reckon this fella had any medical knowledge. Shoved the deer heart right where her stomach goes.”

Dixon said, “What about the breasts?”

“Those were torn away. Nothing sharp there. Just cut a little bit and then torn right off. Damn brutal.”

“Can you tell if she was raped or sodomized?”

“Nothin’ there for a SANE kit to analyze. The rectum’s so deteriorated I can’t tell. Any semen or hair from this fella’s long gone. Sorry, boys, but there just ain’t enough here for me to tell you anything.”

Baudin said, “How long were the nails?”

“Fingernails?”

“No, the nails she was hammered in with.”

“Oh, four inches, about. Why?”

“Christ’s nails were supposedly between seven and nine inches long. If this was symbolic, he should’ve used the same-sized nails. Anything else you can tell us?”

“She bled out, so I can’t get enough to test for drugs in the system… There just ain’t much there.”

Baudin nodded. “I appreciate the rush, Doc. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Baudin stepped away, but Dixon remained, staring at the girl’s eyes. “How old you think she was, Gil?”

“Maybe seventeen, eighteen. Probably no older than twenty-one or so.”

“You take the dental impressions?”

“Yeah, we had Marvin come out, and we did ’em. And again, not enough.”

“What do you mean?” Baudin said, staring at an anatomy poster on the wall.

“Some of her teeth are missing.”

“How many?”

“’Bout fifteen.”

Baudin stepped closer to the body. “Can you open her mouth?”

Gil grabbed her chin and upper lip without gloves and forced them open, a slight
crack
escaping from the desiccated flesh. Baudin and Dixon both peered inside. Every other tooth was gone. Dixon saw ragged flesh in some of the holes.

“They were pulled,” Dixon said. “And not softly.”

Baudin shook his head. “They pulled enough so we can’t identify her.”

Damn
, Dixon thought. He didn’t have medical knowledge, but he knew that ninety percent of the time bodies were identified through dental records.

“Anything else you can tell us, Gil?”

“Well, fingertips was cut off, too. No prints. And some birds got a hold of her—crows, probably. So not all the wounds you see are from him. I’m sorry. I’ll keep lookin’, but don’t expect much.”

Dixon nodded. “I appreciate it just the same. Have yourself a good day.”

As the men walked out, they glanced into the room where the young assistant had been. He was gone.

“Fucker pulled the teeth,” Baudin said as their footsteps echoed in the corridor.

“Why the organs?” Dixon said. “What the hell does he want with the pancreas and thymus?”

Baudin was quiet a moment. “They’re called the sweetbreads in cooking. I think he took them to eat.”

13

Dixon wanted to come up with a picture of what Jane Doe had looked like, based on the photos the forensic techs had taken. Then he could get the photo out to the media and hope a parent with a missing child or a roommate would call in.

The computer artist the department had on contract was located in a graphic design studio. The place was the opposite of the coroner’s office: full of light and color, walls painted yellow and red. The tables and desks were all glass, and the artist hummed to himself as he worked, Dixon sitting across from him in his office.

Dixon glanced out the office door and saw Baudin at the conference room table, working on his iPad.

“How’s this looking for the nose?” the designer said.

Dixon looked at the photo of Jane Doe’s body that they’d printed up and then at the computer model. “Close. A little narrower up top, I think.”

The artist, whose name Dixon couldn’t remember because he’d never used him before, hummed again as he narrowed the nose.

“Now?”

“Better.” He leaned to the side. “You wanna take a look?” he yelled.

Baudin set the iPad down and hurried over. He hovered over the artist’s shoulder, glaring at the image on the screen. “That’s her.”

Dixon nodded, and the designer touched up a few things and printed the photo.

“Gimme about twenty copies and email me a digital, would you?” Dixon asked.

“No worries.”

When he had the printouts, Dixon couldn’t help staring at them. The girl was beautiful, someone who would stand out in any crowd. Baudin wouldn’t look at the photo again. Instead, he paced near the entrance to the studio until Dixon was done.

“You got contacts in the news?” Baudin asked.

“Yeah. I’m gonna head over there now.”

Baudin’s phone rang. He answered it. “Hello?… Yes. Yes, I’m her father… Today? What happened?… I’ll be right down.”

“Everything okay?”

“My daughter got into some trouble at school. I’m gonna head down there for a minute. Can you give me a lift back to the precinct?”

On the drive over, Dixon glanced at Baudin, who was busy again on his iPad. The man had an intense look of concentration that never broke. Even when he appeared to be relaxing, his face and body posture betrayed the fact that he was thinking furiously about something.

“So that 9-11 bullshit,” Dixon said. “You really believe that?”

“I do.”

“Well, what else you believe?”

“Whatd’ya mean?”

“I don’t think conspiracy theorists are ever happy with one conspiracy. I’m sure you got more.”

He grinned and lowered his iPad. “You trying to get to know me, Kyle?”

“I’ve always been interested in what crazy people believe.”

He went back to the iPad. “You ever heard of the Tuskegee experiments?”

“No.”

He looked out the window at a woman on the corner. “Government researchers wanted to study the progression of syphilis but didn’t want to use whites. So they studied it in the black population in Alabama. They never told the participants they had syphilis. In Guatemala, these same government doctors purposely infected people with syphilis, too. They knew penicillin could cure it, but they never gave it to them or to the blacks in Alabama. They let them die, so they could study them.”

“Bullshit,” Dixon said.

“Look it up, man. Don’t take my word for it. But a government willing to kill its own people just to study syphilis… Imagine what that government would do to its own people if it wanted to go to war and needed an excuse. We been at war for a hundred years with almost no periods of peace, man. Somewhere in the world, American soldiers are fighting, all the time. We’re a nation built on war. Our government doesn’t know how to function any other way.”

Dixon shook his head. “You believe in UFOs, too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t—what? That’s just stupid.”

“How the hell do I know what’s up there? Could be giant spacewomen for all I know.”

“Giant spacewomen infecting people with syphilis?”

He shrugged. “Maybe they get around?”

Dixon chuckled as he merged onto the interstate.

Once he’d dropped Baudin off at his car, Dixon headed to KBS 5 News. The studio was in what appeared to be an office building with a private two-year college on the first floor. Dixon parked at a meter and put coins in before heading inside and up to the main floor.

The station had no security, which always surprised him, considering that these people were on television every night and the offices had nameplates on all the doors. Everyone seemed to be preparing for the mid-morning broadcast, and he stood by for a second and watched them on the monitors, practicing and warming up their voices.

He continued to the last office, which had a nameplate on the door: “Carol Billings.”

She was typing away on her computer so quickly that it sounded like pounding rain rather than typing. When she didn’t notice his presence after he’d stood there for a few seconds, he cleared his throat. She jumped as though he’d just grabbed her purse.

“Oh my gosh,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said, sitting down across from her. “Didn’t think you were so jumpy.”

She exhaled as though forcing herself to calm down. “You always sneak up on women?”

“Just the ones I’m gonna rape.”

She threw a pencil at him. “Asshole.”

“How you been?”

Carol took a sip from a bottle of water and then leaned back in her chair. “Good. Did you see my piece on the water dispute between the mayor and Frank Herbert?”

“I didn’t. I don’t watch TV, Carol.”

“Like, at all?”

“Like, at all. Just takes away my time or upsets me.”

“What about the news? You’re a detective, you gotta know what’s going on in your city.”

“I figure it’s none of my business. World’s always been a mess, I ain’t gonna fix it.”

“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”

Dixon brushed a piece of lint off his pants. “Listen, I don’t wanna take up too much of your time, but I got a photo that needs to go out on the five o’clock and the ten o’clock.”

“Both? Mm, this must be juicy.”

“On the record, it’s a body that was found on Brett McCabe’s property that needs to be identified. We’re still determining cause of death and need help with identification.”

“And off the record?” she said, leaning forward like a child listening to a bedtime story.

“You sure love this gory shit, don’t you?”

“I live for it. Now, what’s really going on?”

“Murder vic. She was crucified, and her breasts and genitals were cut off. The guy pulled half her teeth out and cut off her fingertips, so we couldn’t identify her.”

“Whoa.”

“No shit. So can you run it?”

“Of course. Gimme what you got.”

“I’ll email you the photo. She was probably eighteen to twenty-one years old, found about two miles in on McCabe’s property, on the county border.”

“You got anybody you’re lookin’ at?”

He shook his head. “Not a one, except for McCabe himself. He looked old and feeble to me, though. It’s a completely cold case. We’ll probably just file it in the open-unsolved, but I wanna run with it a little first.”

She nodded, staring at him a moment. “I’ll get it on air. In exchange for something, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I want first release of anything you guys make public. If you catch the prick, I want twenty minutes with him in the holding cell.”

“No way.”

“You just said you’re not gonna catch him, so what does it matter?”

He grinned. “You shoulda been a lawyer. Always an angle, huh? All right, he’s yours if we get him.”

She smiled and leaned back, taking her water and holding it up as if she were delivering a toast. “Well, here’s to catching him, then.”