Deadworld (10 page)

“What, his grandfather this time?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Hey! Is that Ms. Fontaine next to him?” Jackie studied the picture closer. It sure looked like her, but they were dressed in very old-fashioned clothing.

“Look at the year, Jackie.”

It took a moment for her to find it. “What the fuck? 1934?”

Laurel nodded. “Yeah, I know. Freaky, isn’t it?”

She studied the picture but was hard-pressed to find anything different in the appearances of this Nicholas character and the current Nick Anderson. Could three generations look that much alike? Unlikely. It dawned on Jackie then, why Laurel looked so excited by the article. “You think it’s the same guy, don’t you?”

She nodded. “Could be. Maybe the geek squad can figure it out for us.”

“You realize that would make Nick Anderson around a hundred years old.”

“Or older,” she added. “I’ll bet you that’s Shelby Fontaine there, too.”

“That’s nuts, Laur. They wouldn’t be—”

“Human. I know. I think they’re vampires.”

Jackie nearly snorted coffee out of her nose, coughing hard for a moment until she could regain her composure. “Can we let the geeks look at this before we jump to any conclusions like that? Vampires. That’s fucking crazy. There’s no such thing.”

“You don’t know that, and I sent an e-mail to Hauser. He’s on his way in now to do an analysis of the pictures.”

“We need a detailed workup on this shit. I don’t want to go into the meeting and claim we’re after a vampire. I’ve been embarrassed enough for one day, thank you very much. Maybe we should get some tails on Anderson and Fontaine and see what they’re up to. I don’t want to confront Anderson with this without some kind of empirical proof.”

“Can I ask Ms. Fontaine?”

It took Jackie a second to get the vague sound of interest in her voice. “Wait a sec. You think . . .” She paused and rolled her chair over to speak quieter. “You think she’s hot, don’t you?”

Pink crept into Laurel’s cheeks. “No. Well, okay, kinda.”

Jackie didn’t know what to say. This was utterly new territory between them. “That’s . . . Laur, she’s a suspect. You can’t be interested.”

“Hey, interest does not mean I’m going to do anything about it. Give me a little credit.”

She heaved a sigh of relief. “Okay, fine. That’s . . . fine. You really think she’s that hot?”

Laurel nodded. “Oh, yeah. Drool worthy.”

“Man, this is weird.” She waved off Laurel’s look of concern. “No, I’m good with it. It’ll be good. We can talk about your sex life instead of mine for a change.”

She laughed at Jackie. “I’ll have to have some first.”

Silence fell between them. Jackie wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. “Speaking of awkward conversations, where’s Pernetti at? I need to go humiliate myself.”

“Called off.”

“Great. We going to be ready for this meeting?”

“Not now. We need Hauser’s analysis.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to John and see about bumping the meeting then. Short notice, but—”

“Jack?” Belgerman had come out of his office.

Butterflies leaped back into Jackie’s stomach. “What’s up?” “Let’s get the team together this afternoon. I’ve got Emily to give us preliminary autopsy results on the boy. She’ll see you in thirty minutes.”

Jackie let out her held breath. “Will do. Thanks.” She turned to Laurel. “Let Hauser know to e-mail us the second he finds anything else. We need to go.”

The coroner, one Dr. Emily Liyang, a tiny, fortyish Chinese woman with a rope of spun, black silk hanging to her waist in a simple ponytail, greeted them when they arrived. Belgerman pulled a fair bit of weight with her and could call in the occasional favor. Jackie had never heard what he had done to garner such a benefit, but it had proven beneficial on more than one occasion. Emily was hardly what one typically expected of a coroner, but then, Jackie knew she was not what one thought of as an FBI agent. That shared background had given them no small amount of mutual respect toward one another in the few times they had needed to speak.

“My two favorite feds,” Emily said, smiling. “Haven’t seen you two in a while, and now you bring me this boy. You owe me a drink.”

“Anytime, Emily,” Laurel piped in before Jackie could respond. “Glad you could get to it so fast. This one is bad.”

“Yeah, I noticed. Your boss man called me this morning and asked in his friendly ‘I’m FBI, so do as I say’ sort of way to please expedite this case.” She opened up a folder that had been sitting on top of some others on her spacious, compulsively neat desk, and began to remove some photos. “I finished the prelim an hour ago, but I won’t have a tox report until this afternoon at the earliest. Did you want to see the body?”

Jackie shook her head. “Unless you think we need to. We had our own look yesterday.”

Dr. Liyang gave an absent shrug. “Not really. I have all the info here. No reason to subject you to that again.” She smiled at Laurel this time, fully aware of her weaker stomach. They had gone out for drinks a couple years back to celebrate the capture of a serial rapist, and Emily had sent Laurel to the bathroom with an increasingly graphic description of some of the bodies that had come through her office. Jackie had listened with half a curious ear. She found forensics intriguing but had no desire for the work. Slapping the handcuffs on the bad guys was far more rewarding.

The photos laid out on the desk showed Archie in the various stages of autopsy, taken from a variety of angles. “Pretty straightforward, at least from the initial investigation. See here?” she said, pointing at the first picture. “The boy was bound with zip ties. You can tell by the unique marks. They go all the way around, wrists and ankles, so I’m guessing he was laid out on a table or the ground. Little evidence of struggle, and just a few bruises you might find on any typical twelve-year-old.

Jackie studied the pictures, leaning over the desk along with Laurel, looking for signs of anything they might have missed from the day before.
I was a lot more banged up than that at twelve years old,
she thought, rubbing at the dull ache that appeared in her own wrists as she studied the pictures. All he’d wanted was to get away, and he’d stepped into the arms of a killer. Jackie suppressed a shudder and continued to follow Dr. Liyang’s summary.

“Puncture wound here on the left arm is where the blood was drained out of him. Everything indicates he had been dead a good ten hours before you found him. No signs of sexual abuse. There were a few fibers we lifted off him that we’ll analyze, but other than that, he was pretty clean. I think he may have been washed, but this is the one intriguing thing I found.” She tapped at Archie’s head in a close-up picture of his face from the eyebrows up to the hairline.

Jackie noticed right away. Without the close-up, it had not been obvious before. “He colored his hair.”

Emily smiled at them. “Sure, if he was a zombie.”

Laurel’s mouth formed an
O
of understanding. “He was already dead when this happened.”

“Yep. At least I’m almost positive. I’ll know definitely by tomorrow and let you know, but it seems your killer wanted him to have different hair.”

“Was it cut, too?” Jackie wondered.

“The clothing will be gone over later today. If we find any evidence of that, I’ll call you, Jack.”

“Thanks. Why would a perp want to do that?”

Dr. Liyang shrugged. “That’s what you girls get paid the big bucks for.”

Driving back to headquarters, they continued to discuss that question. Jackie sped in and around traffic, absently maintaining the speed she knew would allow her to make all the lights through that part of town.

“Could be a fetish thing,” Laurel suggested. One hand clutched tightly on the door handle, while the other was braced against the armrest in the middle between them. “Sweet mother, Jackie! Knock it off already.”

She backed off the pedal and was forced to brake for the next light. “Damnit. What’s the matter?”

“Quit driving like you’re taking your expectant wife to the hospital.”

Jackie looked at her, imagining that soft belly expanded to the size of a basketball. Laurel’s body was built for babies. The smile vanished when she realized Laurel would likely never have one.

“I would race you to the hospital, though, if you were about to pop one out.”

Laurel shook her head and waved at the window. “Just drive normal, please.” There was silence for moment, and she continued. “You don’t think it was a fetish thing though, do you?”

Jackie shook her head. “No. It fits too much with the whole neat-arrangement-in-the-park scene. I think that boy was put there like he was on purpose. Someone went to some trouble to prop him up there and have him look a certain way.”

“Okay, I can go with that,” Laurel said. “But who and why?”

“No clue.” She drummed her fingers along the steering wheel. “Care to bet any money that Nick Anderson has an idea why?”

“Not really,” she said. “I think I’d lose that bet.”

“You would,” Jackie agreed. “Right now, I want to have a little sit-down with the geeks and see what else they’ve dug up. I want some proof we aren’t dealing with a recurring case of serial murders involving a hundred-year-old man.”

“He makes a good case for dating older men.”

Jackie glared at her and then rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. That, and drinking blood. That’s right up at the top of my list, too.”

Chapter 16

They found Hauser at his desk, the computer screens turned into a bank of old photos and newspaper clippings. He had pictures loaded up on three of them, two of which Jackie recognized. They were the old newspaper clippings Laurel had showed her earlier. He spun around in his chair to greet them when Jackie knocked once.

“Hey! How are Chicago’s loveliest agents today?” He gave them a devilish smile.

Jackie thrust her hands into her pockets. “Hungry.”

“Got half a chicken-salad sandwich here you can have,” he said, and when it got no response, the grin faded, and he continued. “Okay, sourpuss, look here. This is some weird-ass shit I’ve found. These are the two clippings you’ve already seen, the first from 1970, the other from 1934.” He wheeled his chair over by the screens and pointed. “You can see the similarities in them, might even say they look like the same guy.”

“They’re thirty-six years apart though,” Jackie said. She had a sinking feeling she already knew where Hauser was heading with this.

“Yeah, I know. How could it be the same guy, right?” He pointed at the next screen. “Here’s another photo, thirty-six years before those.”

It was a yearbook photo from Princeton University. The name listed beneath it was Nicholas Rembrandt. The image looked slightly younger than Nick Anderson, but not by much. The skin was smoother, without the crinkle in the corners of his eyes, and he wore small, round glasses, just enough to cover the eye, but the bright glaze on them was still evident, even in a black-and-white photo.

Jackie leaned over and scanned the page. “Hauser, this pic is one hundred and eight years old.”

He grinned with the evil glee of a thirteen-year-old who has uncovered his dad’s secret stash of porn. “Yeah, pretty freaky, huh?”

“You telling me it’s the same guy? Please tell me you aren’t.”

Hauser nodded. “Had Platt take the scans and analyze them. ’Puter is ninety-eight point seven percent sure the guy in all these photos is the same guy. It is statistically impossible that relatives could look that closely alike.”

“Great.”

“Oh, it gets better,” he said, chuckling. He switched the third screen over to another picture. “Look at this one.”

Laurel leaned in with her to get a close look. “Sheriff Nicholas R. Anderson and family. Is this the real guy here?”

“So says the great god of circuitry,” he said.

Jackie glanced at the article, which spoke of welcoming the new sheriff to the area and looking forward to his services and ability to keep the area protected. It was from some place in Wyoming Jackie had never heard of before. They looked like a typical Old West family: father, two teen sons, a young daughter, wife, and someone who looked to be a grandmother. “This is impossible, Hauser.”

“You’d think.”

“It’s him,” Laurel added, sounding far more sure of herself than Jackie wanted.

“Laur?” Jackie said skeptically. “This would make Nick Anderson, like . . .”

“One hundred seventy-six years old,” Hauser replied.

“There has to be some other reason for this.” Jackie’s mind could not wrap around the implications. There were none that fit her view of the world. It just didn’t work.

Hauser laughed. “Told you it was creepy. The guy should be dead.”

She looked over at Laurel and remembered what she had said about holding his hand. The guy had felt like he was dead. Laurel was still studying the photos, looking back and forth between them. “What about her?” She pointed at the image of what looked like Shelby Fontaine.

He shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t run her. You want me to?”

Laurel nodded. “Yes, please.”

“Laur?” Jackie said again. “What are you thinking here?” She was going to have to put some trust in her opinion on this because she could make no sense of it.

After a few seconds, Laurel finally stood up straight. “Not sure yet. I think I need to go talk with someone about this.”

“Someone?”

“A witch friend of mine,” she said with a faint smile.

“Cool,” Hauser said.

Jackie frowned at him. Witches. This case was going in completely the wrong direction. “Wish we could just arrest the prick.”

They both snickered at her. Hauser turned back and pulled up the information he had been working on. “You’re such a ballbuster, Jack. Glad I’m not married to you.”

Laurel slapped him on top of the head. “Be nice.”

“Anything else, Hauser?” Jackie snapped back.

“Yeah. Another couple news articles during that same year as the Princeton pic. Seems our crotchety old man was involved in another serial murder case. Five people killed, and he could never be tied to it, but was a person of interest apparently.”

Now that was interesting. “And the first one?”

“No murder case, but his career came to an end a few months after that photo was taken. Big shoot-out with some local outlaw. His family was killed, and he quit.”

“Interesting,” Jackie said. “There are five family members in the photo here.”

Hauser shrugged, smiling. “Very interesting.”

Five. They were all fives. “All these things are thirty-six years apart?”

“Freaky, isn’t it? Like some bizarre repeating murder spree.”

Laurel tugged absently at her ponytail. “I wonder what significance the thirty-six years has?”

“Oh,” Hauser answered, “that might be a simple one. Anderson was thirty-six years old when his family was killed.”

“How old were the family members?” Jackie wondered.

“Um, give me a sec and I’ll see if I can find out.” He began clicking through screens with his mouse faster than Jackie could read what he was pulling up.

“You don’t suppose,” Laurel said, finger twirling at her ponytail, “that Anderson or someone related to him is repeating the death of his family?”

The thought had just occurred to Jackie as well. “It’s awfully suspicious, if you ask me.”

“Here we go,” Hauser cut in. “Boys were twelve and fifteen, girl was eight, wife thirty-one, and Anderson’s grandmother seventy-five.”

“Twelve,” Jackie and Laurel said together.

Jackie poked Hauser in the shoulder. “Run the other cases. I want as many of the vic’s ages that you can find.”

She felt her mind beginning to spin in helpless futility. The scenario they were considering was insanity. “Okay, this is more than I can digest. I want to get a tail on Anderson and Fontaine. Hauser, can we prove these are all the same guy? A judge would laugh this out of court.”

“Haven’t turned up any kind of paper trail yet to prove anything. We’ll keep digging. This stuff has been easy to find so far. He’s not going far out of his way to hide his past, just altering things a bit so nobody makes any obvious connections.”

“Well, who would believe that shit?” Jackie shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

He laughed. “I know. It’s like he’s cloning himself, or . . . or he’s a fucking vampire! That would be so cool.”

Jackie shook her head. “Shut up, Hauser. This is about as far from cool as it gets. Laur, we need to get Gamble on organizing tails, see if Belgerman will okay a phone tap. There has to be some way to get Anderson to implicate himself or whomever it is he knows is doing this.”

“Why not just ask him?” Laurel offered. “Show him what we have? Maybe he’ll see the game is up and cave in.”

“He’s too cool for that. If it’s someone else, he doesn’t want us to know, for some reason. We need something to entice or threaten him with. He needs to want to talk.”

“Most killers want to talk,” Laurel said.

“Did you get the impression he wanted to? Or that he was baiting us to find out what a genius he is?”

“No, which is why I’m leaning toward some other killer he doesn’t want to talk about.”

“Exactly. So how do we sucker him into blabbing or leading us to the real culprit?”

Laurel shrugged. “We have a stolen penny, and we have information about his past.”

“The penny.” Jackie walked to the doorway. “Hauser, send everything you’ve found by five today. I want to go over everything we’ve got tonight.” She motioned to Laurel. “Come on. I’m so hungry I can’t think, and we need a plan.”