Fractured (10 page)

She got them too, didn't like them any better, and declined to comment. “It can't hurt to look again.”

“Our bank guy was right. We need to connect the dots somewhere and so far it's a no-go.”

“Let's take a second look.”

It wasn't too far, and she parked in the lot of the desolate abandoned school, figuring that if her tax dollars were at work keeping it plowed, then maybe they could reasonably use it as civil servants. The house across the street had that same abandoned aura, and when they gained the front porch, the bloodstains had turned black and did not improve the ambience.

Santiago walked around the perimeter, looking out the screens. “You can see this place only from a few houses. That's it. The answer isn't here, not in the front. The killer was safe and knew it.”

It
was
damn cold. Ellie looked at the splatter pattern on the floor and tried to reconstruct it in her mind. “He turned his back. Does that mean he'd brought the killer here, or had he answered the door, stepped out, and then invited the person in?”

Her partner looked thoughtful. “He knew his killer. We haven't doubted that from the first minute. He knew his killer, and the killer understood this house would be a perfect place for a bloody murder.”

“The parking lot at the university was not a perfect place at all,” she argued, walking around, the floorboards creaking with cold and age under her measured steps. “This place might be relatively private, but the first murder was really taking a chance.”

“This could be a deflection.” Santiago adjusted his scarf around his neck, pulling it up over his chin, his blue eyes reflective. “Trying to throw us off. Maybe it goes back to our dead professor. That frickin' weird cross on the chest of each victim though … he
wants
us to notice him.”

At that moment she caught it. A flicker of a movement across the street, so brief it was possible that she imagined it. Ellie went entirely still. It happened again then, a movement behind one of the windows.

She said, “I think you might be right about the neighbors. Let's go talk to whoever is in that abandoned building instead.”

 

Chapter 9

The call for the extra appointment had been somewhat of a surprise. Georgia had thought Rachel might be one of those patients who tried therapy but then decided it was too difficult to open up. The sessions caused so much anxiety for some people, and they were relieved when they decided to never come back.

Apparently not in this case.

“I stood on the pier and thought about it,” she said with a visible shiver. “The water was black and cold and a boat floated by like a ghost, dark and silent except for the low hum of the engine.” She repeated, “But I thought about it.”

“Jumping in?”

“Yes. The water, even the boat propeller. That would be fast, wouldn't it?”

This was at least an explanation of why she'd come in the first place. All of Georgia's patients had a story, but not all of them understood it. “How often have you considered suicide?”

Rachel looked reflective. On this gray afternoon she wore a long dark skirt, short boots, and a beige sweater. Her hair was tied back with a simple band and there was not a trace of makeup on her face. “Maybe more than I know. It's there in the back of my mind all of the time. I'm not sure I understood that.”

Not an unusual answer. Georgia reflected that now maybe she had an answer as to why Rachel had decided to see a therapist. She asked, “Why
didn't
you jump in?”

“Remember that date I canceled? He asked me again and this time I said yes. We went to dinner and then took a walk by the lake.” Her smile was thin and humorless. “If I had jumped, he might have been stupid enough to try and rescue me.”

“Tell me more about him. Did you enjoy yourself?”

Her patient obviously had anticipated the question as she didn't react in any way. “I was unprepared for the outcome of our evening.” Then unexpectedly, she blurted out, “My roommate threw out my shoes. I found them in the trash.”

The afternoon sun faced the evergreen hedge outside the window and the blinds were lowered for privacy but opened enough to allow some light in. There was nothing really to see out there but the parking lot, so Rachel's sudden preoccupation with the view was unwarranted. Her averted profile spoke volumes.

What outcome? Georgia almost asked but decided the change in subject was a not-so-subtle signal the question would be unwelcome, so she said instead, “Why would she throw out your shoes?”

“I don't know. I'm afraid to ask her.”

*   *   *

There had been
two choices.

Jason could have refused, expressing his personal preference of not going anywhere near that forsaken old school, but his childhood problems were not conducive to the investigation. He'd had to stay in detention fairly often—he'd never claimed to be an angel—but he could swear those cold empty hallways echoed with the pain of every lonely child that had sat at a desk when all the other students had gone home.

It had happened to him often enough.

His father, when he noticed at all that he was home late from school, had told him it served his sorry ass right, and maybe that was true.

He really didn't believe in ghosts—not at all. But there could be an essence, he thought as he tried the side door to find it chained from the inside, the slight give enough to provide an eddy of stale air through the crack. It smelled dead to him, like despair and frustration and emptiness …

Hold it, get a handle
.

He wasn't ten years old any longer.

“You sure you saw something? There are no service vehicles in the lot.” He followed her around the corner of the building. Sidearm or not, he wasn't enthusiastic about prowling deserted halls and empty classrooms in the gloom. Actually, he wasn't enthusiastic about it at all.

Unfortunately, her answer was full of conviction, the chill breeze blowing a strand of hair across her cheek. “I'm sure. Someone was watching us. They probably heard or saw us pull in and park.”

And it followed that if they were watching them,
maybe
they had seen something the night of the murder.

“There are steps down to a service entrance on each side.” Ellie gestured toward steps leading down into a hole that was dark and no doubt cold and led to a lower level of the building. “Let's try that. All I want is an open door. Whoever is there got in somehow. It could be a caretaker of some sort moving around.”

Jason had made a brief call to the chief with the address, but he hadn't heard back yet if someone was scheduled to be there. The lack of a vehicle besides Ellie's car didn't give him much hope they were going to get a positive response.

“They could be long gone.” Jason shone the flashlight from his phone down the steps. At the bottom a metal door with peeling paint presented an unappetizing barrier. “There are a dozen exits to this place.”

“But this one is swept clean. Where's the drifted snow?”

She was right. He saw the steps were clear. “Could be the angle of the wind,” he argued even as he went down first, seeing several discarded cigarette butts in the corner. He crouched down. “But the wind doesn't smoke. Motherfuck. It could be innocent like you said, just the maintenance staff, but I can smell tobacco.”

Ellie's face was somber, her hair pale in the darkness. “If I'd broken into this building, I'd have used this door. It is on the opposite side from the street and pretty hidden.”

“It's covered. Maybe they are camping out here to get a break from the cold.”

“In this weather?” Ellie was halfway down the steps and turned to him.

He jiggled the handle. “You think Milwaukee doesn't have homeless people?”

To his dismay, the door opened.

His lucky day. The only thing worse than those silent halls and rooms upstairs, he discovered, was the basement of an old empty school. Ellie pulled a pencil flashlight from the pocket of her coat and flicked her light over piles of old desks, folded cafeteria tables and chairs in stacks, broken ceilings tiles—no doubt asbestos from the age of the building, he thought darkly—broken shelving, and just about anything that obviously had no value any longer.

Something rustled in the corner. He did not want to know in the least what it was. He muttered, “This is some creepy shit.”

“You're a homicide detective.”

“So it must be
really
creepy shit,” he said defensively.

“Stairs over here.” Ellie headed toward the right corner of the room, unbuttoning her coat as she went, not because it wasn't cold, because it was, but so she had easy access to her weapon. Good call. He'd already unzipped his jacket and taken off his right glove.

The door at the top wasn't locked either and the hallway was almost as dark as it was below. The only illumination came through the doors on each end, and those had each been partially boarded up.

Jason felt his phone vibrate and he slipped it out of his pocket “Text.”

Ellie echoed his low tone. “Metzger?”

He read it. “Yeah, no one is supposed to be in the building. Last check was scheduled two weeks ago. The city is still trying to sell it.”

“Good luck to them. In this neighborhood … And what is up with that? Everyone just moves in, no rent required?”

Jason surveyed a row of rusting lockers. “I think I might sleep on a park bench instead. Let's go look, but my prediction is, whoever might be here has so many options to move around, it would take us hours to even search this place and all he'd have to do is slip past us, which would be dead easy in a building this size.”

“I'm hoping for a witness to give us a clue as to the identity of the victim.” She swung the beam in an arc across sagging ceilings. In one spot electrical wiring hung free about three feet above them. “Doesn't look like turning on the lights is an option. Maybe we should ask if a couple of uniforms could come help us search.”

He could swear the place smelled of a million-plus cafeteria meals, most of which had apparently involved stewed tomatoes, coupled with the scent of mildew and disuse. “We can ask, but I've got to tell you, I'm not all that anxious to hang around a long time to wait for them to show up. I'll send the chief a message but let's get started. The sooner we are out of here, the better.”

Ellie threw a curious glance over her shoulder. “You and I waded through waist-high grass full of snakes and who knows what else last summer, in the dark, after a ritualistic killer who burned his victims, and you weren't even fazed.”

True enough, but he preferred a known quarry.

“Yeah, what a great idea that was. It seems to me I was shot twice that particular night.” He pointed at the doorway to their left. “Let's start there.”

*   *   *

The search was
probably as fruitless as Santiago had pointed out it might be.

Every room had a closet for coats and supplies, the walk-in coolers in the kitchen had the massive doors off their hinges and were set aside, and the custodial closets were still locked.

He was right. This needed to be continued when they had more help. Ellie's slim flashlight was not going to be enough once it started to get truly dark and she could tell her partner was really jumpy.

Or maybe he
should
be more edgy than usual.

The place was a bit atmospheric with the gloom and the deserted air than she disliked as well, but if there was one thing she'd learned about Jason Santiago it was that he had a way to sense danger that seemed ingrained; she was still trying to figure that one out since he didn't talk about it much.

“Hold it.”

“What?” she asked sharply, as his hand came out to block her forward movement.

He stopped and went still. “I hear something.”

She caught it too, the sound of someone running at the back of the building and then the clear slam of a door. Santiago took off toward the reverberation, and from past experience she knew he could outdistance her, but Ellie followed, the shrouded hallways not helping, their footsteps ringing on the old tile.

Most of the doors would only open from a bar on the inside unless a key was used from the outside. It was difficult to tell exactly where the person they were looking for might have left, or even if their quarry ducked into a classroom somewhere, and after a left turn by an auditorium, Santiago stopped, breathing audibly through his nose, and shook his head. “We can't do this. The acoustics in a building like this are all over the place. I think we need to get permission from the city to bring in some investigators, even if our guy is long gone, and really look it over. Either way you slice it, it's a gamble with our time and theirs.”

He was right.

“Someone
is
trespassing.”

“They are,” he agreed, his face tight. “Surely the neighbors have noticed something.”

They left the way they'd come in, and the dingy basement seemed even more sinister on the way out. It was impossible not to contemplate how easily a person could hide among the piles of furniture and various debris. If they could have skipped using the flashlight, that would have been better since it made them visible as a target, but one of them probably would break a leg tripping over some bit of debris in the dark. As it was, Santiago took it away from her at the bottom of the stairs in one of his masculine gestures that she supposed was his notion of gallantry. She found it annoying when it happened. Ellie would have argued when he jerked it from her hand, but had learned it was usually a futile exercise.

“I'll go first,” he announced tersely.

“If you want to be the one to get shot at—again, I might add—be my guest.”

His face was all planes and hollows by the meager illumination. “Maybe I just want the hell out of here more than you.”