Simon Says... Scream Read online

  She nodded, then walked to the door and asked for water for the interviewee. When it was delivered in a bottle, he uncapped it and drank. She watched, as he gulped the bulk of it in one sitting, then wiped his mouth again.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Nothing like alcohol to make your throat dry.”

  She wanted to ask why he continued to drink, if that were the case, but she had come to accept it as one of those things. It didn’t matter what answer he gave; the addiction was real. Or almost as uncontrollable as anything else in life. She pulled her notepad toward her and picked up the pen. “Now tell me. What did you see?”

  “The devil,” he replied instantly. “No doubt in my mind, the devil himself was there last night.”

  She put down the pen, crossed her arms, and looked at him.

  He immediately held up his hand. “I get it. You don’t believe me. But I’m telling you, it was the devil.”

  “And what was he doing?”

  “Nothing good,” he stated.

  “Did you see him kill that woman?”

  The witness immediately shook his head. “Nope, nope, nope, nope. I didn’t see nothing like that.”

  “So then what did you see?”

  “He came out of the alleyway, wearing a big cloak and a mask with horns,” he told her.

  “So this devil wore the devil’s mask?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “It looked really real.”

  She nodded and put down a couple simple notes. “Any idea how tall he was? How big he was? Did he hold anything in his hand? Did you see him bring in the woman?”

  “Nope,” he answered. “I was just sitting there, snoozing, then I heard a weird thunk, thunk, thunk sound and heard him saying something. When I looked around the corner—from where I was hiding farther down the alleyway—he stood in front of the dumpster, his hands on his hips like this.” Her interviewee hopped up, put his hands on his hips, and glared, as if the table were the dumpster.

  “So he was pissed?”

  He nodded. “He looked like it. But he had on this weird mask, like I said. And the way he was standing there, I didn’t really see his face. So I don’t know if it was anger for sure, but that’s what it seemed like,” he explained apologetically.

  “And, if you did see his face, what would you have seen?”

  He shrugged. “Well, it would have been just the mask.”

  “Height?”

  “I’m thinking around six foot,” he guessed.

  “And you figured that out how?”

  “Well, he could rest his arms easily on the top of the dumpster.”

  That she wrote down. “Did he have anything in his hands or anything with him?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I saw.”

  “Did he come past you?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, nope, no way. I wasn’t gonna let that happen. I would have been out of there beforehand, but, when I saw him heading down to the other end, I let him go, and then I called the police.”

  “But you didn’t call the police right away, did you?”

  He looked around nervously.

  “Because first you wanted to see what he put in the dumpster, didn’t you?”

  The guy lifted his gaze, and she saw the haunted look in his eyes.

  “Well, he cured me of that.” His voice was harsh, almost guttural in tone. “Because what I saw is something I won’t ever unsee.”

  As she remembered the poor woman with the visible torture evident on her body, she could only agree with him. “What else can you tell me?”

  “Nothing.” He laughed. “That was all.”

  “Did he stop on the way as he left? Did he throw anything on the way out of the alley? Did he turn and look back?”

  “No, he just walked away.”

  She looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. “And there’s nothing else you can tell me?”

  He shook his head. “No, he wore this long thing that looked like a cloak and the mask, but that was it.”

  “Did he have the mask on when you first saw him?”

  He frowned. “I don’t know.” He paused. “He also had this, you know, like a big hood on the long coat.”

  “So, was it a cape or a coat?”

  He shrugged.

  “But it had a hood? So how do you know he wore a devil’s mask?”

  “Because he pushed the hood off his head, when he looked up at the sky. Remember when I said he was standing, his hands on his hips, as if he was frustrated, angry, or something?”

  “Got it,” she muttered, wishing there was more. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but when did any of this shit make sense? She wrote down the name of her witness. “Do you have an address? Somewhere you stay?”

  “Not for a very long time,” he answered.

  “Do you stay at any of the shelters?”

  “When I can get a bed. Other than that, I just go from park to park.”

  She sighed and sat back. “Was anybody else there around at the time?”

  “Nope. Just me.”

  “You don’t have any friends you hang out with?”

  “I do, but I had a full bottle of booze,” he explained. “Matter of fact, I was supposed to go share it, but I drank it all, after seeing that dumpster last night.” He shook his head. “I knew I wouldn’t be welcome if they found out I’d done that.”

  “Well, you also spent the day in the tank.”

  “And thank you for that,” he said. “It was nice and dry.”

  She sighed. “You know that we could give you a hand to get you dried out.”

  “There have been lots of hands over the years.” He sniffled, his eyes turning rheumy with emotions. “Ain’t none of them ever took yet.”

  “Doesn’t mean they can’t,” she argued.

  “Maybe,” he muttered. “But I’d have to give up the one thing that’s been good to me.”

  “You mean, the bottle?” she asked gently.

  He nodded. “Yeah, she’s always there for me.”

  “But she’s a bitch in the morning,” Kate added, with a note of humor.

  He looked at her, and a bright smile flashed on his face. “That she is,” he noted affectionately, “but she’s my bitch.”

  And that was about the truth of it. After he was gone, Kate returned to her department. As she walked to the bullpen, she picked up a coffee, wondering how, ever since the team had all come to terms, there was always coffee now.

  As she neared her desk, her landline was ringing. She groaned, raced over, and grabbed it. “Detective Kate Morgan here.”

  Dr. Smidge was on the other end. “I’ve got your DB from this morning on the table.”

  “Already? It must be almost like a holiday down there.”

  “Not likely,” he snapped. “A couple things you should probably go over.”

  “I’m on my way,” she replied. “Give me half an hour.”

  “That’s all right. I got lots of paperwork and plenty to deal with.”

  When he hung up the phone, she turned and looked over at Rodney. “That was Dr. Smidge. He’s got this morning’s victim on the table, and he wants me to go over there for some reason.”

  At that, Rodney looked up, startled.

  “I know. Most of the time he’s kicking us out of there.”

  “How did it get on his table so fast?”

  “I asked him that and made a smart remark about it must be a holiday if he’s already up to this patient, but he didn’t seem to appreciate it.”

  “Well, that’s nothing new either.” Rodney hopped up to his feet. “I’ll come with you.”

  “You got anything else to do at the same time?”

  “Go back over the crime scene,” he replied, with a shrug. “A couple statements that I wouldn’t mind going over.”

  “Locals?”

  “Some people saw something a couple blocks away.”

  “A couple blocks away?” She frowned as they walked out of the office. She
looked longingly at the cup of coffee sitting and cooling on her desk.

  He stopped her, pointing at the coffee. “Look. You can have a few minutes to drink it, if you want.” She hesitated, and he said, “Stop. You know this isn’t just about getting to the bottom of it. It’s also about not killing ourselves in the process.” She shot him a look, and he nodded. “Think about it. We won’t be doing the victim any good if we get there out of sorts. It won’t be any picnic to see that again. Best that we’re calm, collected, and pulled together. And, for you, that means, grab your damn coffee.”

  She walked back to her desk, picked it up, and had several sips. Her computer wasn’t even on yet. She looked around at the bullpen. “Where are the others?”

  “Two were in with the sergeant,” Rodney noted quietly.

  “Problems?”

  “No. One needs some personal time off. One’s trying to arrange some holidays. Owen was in, and then he headed out to talk to a couple constables, doing some of the canvassing last night.”

  “On the same case?”

  Rodney nodded. “He’s the one who phoned in to say that somebody a couple blocks away had heard and seen something suspicious.”

  She shook her head. “Why a couple blocks away?”

  He pulled out his phone, looked up the statement he wanted, and replied, “There was a pickup rumbling around the streets, going around the block several times, as if looking for something. He noted it because of a funky tarp in the back—something rolled up.”

  “So you’re thinking it might have been the body in the back?”

  “That’s what Owen was wondering. Anyway, he went down to talk with our witness this morning before work and confirmed the model of the vehicle. It was an old Chevy with a rusted-out muffler, so it was making more noise than it needed to. A pickup bed with no liner, unless it was a sprayed-on black one, and then a bright green tarp in the back.”

  “We found no tarp at the scene,” she murmured.

  “And the Chevy was black, with a little bit of white trim around the rims.”

  “So, old rims?”

  “It could have been. It’s hard to say. They could have just been dirty. They could have been white rims and just really muddy.”

  She nodded. “And then what? He comes down to this area, starts running around, looking at things, looking for a place to dump a body maybe?”

  “That’s what Owen was wondering.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Remember the case we had last week? The one with a couple rocks thrown off one of the bridges and hitting a pedestrian down below?” he asked. “He got a line on that one.”

  “That pedestrian didn’t die, did she?”

  “No, but she was a friend of his.”

  “Ah, it’s funny how friends completely change everything.”

  “Well, they’re not supposed to,” he noted, with a smile. “Yet there has to be a little bit of leeway in what we do. This isn’t just a job for today. It’s a long-term gig for us.”

  “Exactly.” She tossed back the last of her coffee, put down her cup, and said, “Let’s go.”

  As they headed toward the morgue, they found parking in the back of the hospital and walked down to the basement via the tunnel, where the morgue was situated. She knocked on the doors of the offices, and, when there was no answer, she turned the knob and stepped through, but the rooms were empty. She rolled her eyes and headed down to where the real action was.

  “You were really thinking he’d be in the office?” Rodney asked, with a grin.

  “He’s never in his office, is he? But it’s before the rest of it, so you always think you have to start there.”

  “I don’t know. I think I would just completely ignore offices at this point and head down to his little corner,” Rodney explained. And that’s what they did anyway.

  When she stepped through the double doors, Dr. Smidge looked up and frowned. “Gown up. Make sure you scrub down well.”

  She walked over, scrubbed her arms, put on a gown, grabbed gloves, and headed toward him. Smidge only ever requested this when he wanted her to see and to touch the body. She knew that Rodney would stay a little farther back because he couldn’t stand this part. As she stepped up to the autopsy table, Smidge pulled the sheet off the victim. She sucked in her breath.

  “What do you notice?” he asked her.

  She shot him a look. “One of the first things is,” she stated boldly, “now that she’s been washed, what was done to her is so damn clear.”

  “Well, it’s clear, but it’s not clear,” he argued. “You see the visible trauma without all the blood everywhere.”

  “The blood was bad enough,” she murmured. “At the scene it looked horrific. Now it’s like cold and clinical.”

  He nodded. “Which is a good thing because it allows us to see more. So what do you see?”

  Kate studied the body, pointed out the wrists, with fractures, the ankles both broken. A shin fracture had a bone showing. The breast area she had to force herself to look at. “Completely cut off as a circle,” she noted, peering forward. “It’s a weird hollow though.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they look like after breast implants.” Her gaze immediately went to the second one and then back to the first one, and he nodded. “She had both breasts done.”

  “Have you taken out the other one?”

  “Not yet.” He pointed. “Does it look like it’s out?”

  She could feel herself flushing because, of course, it wasn’t. “You can ID her based on those, right?”

  “Yep, when I get there,” he stated. “What else do you notice?”

  “Well, her throat.” She paused. “But the wound looks odd. That didn’t do more than cause her a lot of pain and possibly knock her out, but it’s not the cause of death.” She pointed to the higher-up slash.

  “Vocal cords,” he noted quietly.

  “Right, so we were on target with that one.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Therefore, she couldn’t have screamed.”

  “Any idea when?”

  “Probably midscream,” he stated boldly, “realizing that he would have to minimize the noise.”

  “Or first off?”

  Dr. Smidge shrugged. “Either way, it’s effective.”

  “And doesn’t she then feel like she’s drowning in her own blood?” she asked.

  “Absolutely, but she would have still been alive.”

  Kate winced. “Even with the heavy blood loss from all these injuries?” She shook her head. “The human body is amazingly resilient.”

  “If she’d been alive, we could have saved her, and all these injuries would have healed. Obviously the vocal cords would be an interesting conundrum to repair, depending on how much time had lapsed before we got her. But medicine has come a very long way.”

  “So, cause of death?”

  He pointed at the missing right breast. “Besides the fact that it’s got an odd shape, do you notice anything else?”

  She bent over, and he pulled back the tissue against the bone, and there was a hole, right through to the chest underneath.

  “Bullet?” Then she frowned. “No, what’s that? It’s almost like a—” She thought about it, shook her head. “It’s almost like somebody took a knitting needle and poked it through her chest.”

  He looked at her in surprise and then nodded. “Bull’s-eye.”

  She stared at him in shock. “Somebody rammed a knitting needle between her ribs and into her heart?”

  “Yes, it punctured her heart and went right through into her back.”

  “Jesus,” she muttered. “And I suppose …” And she didn’t even finish the sentence because, of course, the poor woman would have been awake—not awake necessarily, but she would have been alive when this was done to her. “That sounds terrible,” she murmured.

  “Yes. On top of that, we also have some burns.” He raised one of the deceased’s arms, so that Kate could see the back of the broken wrists.
“These are cigarette burns. Found a couple on her cheek, a couple on her hand, a couple on her knees and—a couple on the pubis.”

  She looked down to see that, indeed, some pubic hair looked like it had been burned off. “He burned off her pubic hair?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Probably wanted to see if it would burn,” he noted bluntly.

  “Great.” She raised her hand to her chest.

  “So we have a sadist, who wanted to bring maximum pain to this poor woman.”

  “That’s what it would look like, yes. But—” She stopped, hesitating.

  “But what?” he barked.

  “Tox screen?”

  “In progress,” he replied. “And we can only hope that she was in some way drugged, but, because of her injuries, she wouldn’t have done any fighting anyway.”

  Kate looked at the horribly broken wrists and nodded. “Even if she lifted her arms and tried to flail at him, she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”

  “Exactly,” he agreed. “It does look like her wrists were bound, so she was tied up—at least part of the time. The restraints would have been placed around where the fractures were.”

  “Any chance she’d have broken them, trying to get free?”

  He looked at her with respect. “It’s possible, except for the fact that these are open fractures.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “In this case, I would suspect either a slice or a heavy object caused the fractures. The rest of her injuries were drier and less interesting. All it really reveals is that this guy held her for hours, possibly days, getting extreme pleasure in tormenting her.”

  When the coroner covered up the woman again, Kate finally stepped back, disposing of her gloves and gown. She stood at the doorway, her hands in her pockets, and looked at the rows and rows of bodies stored here. “Why did you choose this one?” He ignored her for the moment, and she realized something was important here. “Dr. Smidge,” she called out, her voice slightly sharper.

  At that, several other people in the same room lifted their heads and looked at her. Smidge looked up and glared.

  She shook her head. “Here or your office.”

  His eyebrows shot up, and his glare heightened into almost fierce proportions.

  Beside her, Rodney whispered, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Cool it, kid.”