Ten Plagues (27 page)

The few paintings he’d gotten listed in the stores were either sold or disposed of. There was no record of where they’d gone. Keren wondered if those paintings would be bloody, ugly things.

“He’s not a man who would attract attention.” Keren stared at the picture, trying to add years, weight, a beard, madness. “But I’d be able to recognize him if I saw him. And so would you.”

“So we’re wrong about him hanging around my mission.”

“We’re not,” Keren insisted. “I know he was there, and we know he’s got inside knowledge.”

“Which means he’s a regular.” Paul nodded. “And he was there as recently as Sunday, and he’s most likely one of these five men.”

Paul lifted up the five pictures they’d chosen to focus on as the El’s brakes gave their high-pitched squeal and the train slowed. Keren caught the handrail.

“But we can’t be certain. If I were dead certain, I’d do whatever it took to point the FBI and all our police resources on these five.” Keren stuffed the pictures back in her file folder and shoved it in her oversized purse as they exited the train.

“The FBI is going to do some work on that photo of Caldwell. Age it. Try a few possible alterations in case he had plastic surgery. Give him a beard, lose the glasses.”

Keren marched down the hall to her apartment, wishing she had picked one on a higher floor. It ate at her just how accessible her home was to a lunatic. She tugged the barrette out of her hair as she walked and let the heavy mass of it fall down her neck. “I’ll never get a comb through this.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to be hours getting dolled up.”

Keren whirled around. Paul grinned at her.

Another smile.

Rolling her eyes, she decided to let him live. For now. She moved faster, ignoring her protesting muscles. Her feet echoed in her building’s hallway.

“You won’t have to wait long.” With a smug smile she added, “And I was just patronizing you before, about the bodyguard thing, so you’d let me take care of you. I’m fine without a watchdog.”

“Well, you’re getting one anyway. And if you don’t quit complaining about it, I’m telling everyone at the station your real name.”

Keren glared at him over her shoulder. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Try me,” Paul said lightly.

“I’m being blackmailed by a missionary.” Keren trudged when she wanted to jog. Her ribs reminded her of the little argument she’d lost with a Malibu grill. She probably had cracked ribs. One of her knees was determined to make her sorry for every step.

She wondered how Paul was holding up. “We’ve been at the hospital three nights now. I’m thinking of putting it on my next Christmas card: ‘Cook County: my home away from home.’“

“I’m getting close to liking the chairs in the hospital, now that my spine has been bent out of alignment enough to match them.” Paul wasn’t even breathing hard, the big jerk. “And I don’t know when they’ll let me back into my place.”

There was a stretch of silence, then Paul asked, “Do you think she’s going to wake up?”

Keren stopped and turned to face Paul. “Of course she’s going to wake up. Why would God have saved her the way He did in that park, if He didn’t have further plans for her?”

Paul nodded but without a lot of assurance. “She’s been out so long.”

“Three days isn’t that long when your injuries are as traumatic as LaToya’s. She needs to heal, then she’ll wake up.” Keren laid her hand on his arm. “I know she will.”

“And what about the two since then?” Paul covered her hand with his. “Melody Fredericks dead, Katrina Hardcastle missing. He’s escalating, Keren. You know he is. He’s on a rampage, and we’re not any closer to finding him than we were that first day.”

“Of course we’re closer. We’ve got his face sent out to every cop in town. The FBI has it entered on their database. And we’re tracking down those Internet bug sites. If he ordered from them, he had to give a mailing address. We’ll get him.”

“How could I have not thought of my wife and daughter right away? I actually knew the loon. Why didn’t I think of him?” Paul’s fist clenched. “We could have saved LaToya what she’s going through, and the other two women wouldn’t have even been hurt.”

“He already had LaToya by the time the dust settled from that first explosion. Figuring it out instantly wouldn’t have stopped that.”

“But the other two. If we’d have gotten his picture out—”

“Stop!” Keren cut him off. “You know better than to play this guilt game. Stop whining and pull yourself together.”

The General George Patton school of psychological counseling. Maybe she ought to slap the poor guy, too.

There was a visible battle inside of Paul and finally the kindhearted, worried pastor faded away, replaced by the police detective, eyes sharp, head nodding. “You’re right. Sorry. Wasting time. As soon as you’re ready to go back to work, we can sit in on Melody’s autopsy.”

Keren looked at him for a long time. She didn’t know quite what to make of his seesawing manner. As soon as she had some spare time, maybe she’d talk to him about his Pastor Jekyll and Detective Hyde personalities. For now, she just headed down the long hall again.

“Why doesn’t he call?” Paul groused. “We found the body at my place yesterday. Another woman disappeared the same day. Where has he stashed the latest vic?”

Vic? Keren glanced over her shoulder, but he was staring angrily at his phone, as if he could glare it into ringing.

“It’s flies this time, isn’t it?” Keren asked.

“Yeah, the fourth plague is flies. He can have a ball with that.”

They reached Keren’s apartment. The door swung open when she touched the knob. She immediately snatched her hand back. She heard a high-pitched whine. Then she smelled death.

Paul pulled out his handkerchief and gingerly pulled the door shut before more than a handful of flies could escape.

“I think we found Katrina Hardcastle.”

They backed away from the door. It was only after they were across the hall that they spotted the sign hanging over the door.

“Pestis ex Musca,”
Keren read aloud, thinking,
Caldwell knows where I live
.

Paul translated: “The plague of flies.”

Keren swallowed hard then forced herself to lean against the wall across from her door, and called O’Shea.

A glance at Paul showed he was in pure cop mode. Keren thought this was more the time for the kindly pastor.

Keren left the autopsy with a headache she decided to blame on the chemicals in the lab. Dr. Schaefer escorted them out to make a few final points, complete with eight-by-ten glossies.

“This one is definitely different than the others,” Dr. Schaefer said with a considerable amount of gallows enthusiasm. “Her wounds are postmortem and they’re minimal, no bleeding. I suspect the blood on the shroud is his. We’re doing DNA testing.”

“We know who did this now.” Paul picked up one of Dr. Schaefer’s gruesome snapshots with no apparent emotion. “The test doesn’t help us find him.”

“DNA testing will be useful in court,” O’Shea reminded him.

“She had a skull fracture and a broken neck. Her right arm is crushed. There is a compound fracture of the tibia and femur, and massive trauma, particularly down the whole right side of her body. I’d say she either fell a long way, or, more likely, she was hit. Hard.”

Dr. Schaefer was making Keren sick, but there was no escape from the report. “There’s shattered glass imbedded in her skin. I’ll bet it proves to be the kind of glass used for headlights. She died instantly.”

“He ran her down?” O’Shea asked.

The ME looked up and nodded. “That’s what it looks like, Mick. I can pinpoint the time of death on her more exactly than on Juanita, too. She never spent time in a pool of an indeterminate temperature.” Dr. Schaefer considered carefully. “I’d say, judging by the rigor and the extent of decomposition, she died Sunday night.”

“Sunday night?” Keren asked. “That’s when he was trying to kill LaToya.”

“That’s when he ran scared from a crime scene.” Paul looked as calm as if he were figuring a math problem in his head. “He hit you with his car, Keren. Maybe he hit someone else, too.”

O’Shea said, “Makes sense. That would explain why you don’t know her, Paul. It was strictly chance. That may be why he killed her in such a different way.”

“And he made up for neglecting you,” Keren added, “by dumping Melody at your house.”

“Maybe it was different, but satisfying just the same,” O’Shea speculated. “So he decides to play the next one the same way. Pick a victim at random—you don’t know Katrina Hardcastle either—and make his point with the dump site.”

“So will the next one come to your place, O’Shea?” Keren asked. “Now that Paul and I are both out of a place to live.”

“Not me,” Paul said. “For now I live at the hospital, and as soon as LaToya wakes up, I’m going to bunk in the homeless shelter.”

“Which, being a homeless shelter,” Keren said, “is exactly the same as being out of a place to live, which I just said.”

“When I get time, I’ll convert part of the office into living quarters.” He sounded lighthearted, but then his voice cooled until he showed no emotion at all. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep in my place for a while.”

Keren heard him earlier referring to Melody as the vic. Caldwell was doing more damage than he knew by pushing Paul away from his peaceful life of faith.

Then she thought of her apartment. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep in my place ever again.”

“Caldwell is losing it. Look at the painting.” O’Shea held up photos of the dress that had been found on Melody. “Remember how carefully he painted Juanita’s shroud? And the work on the first two signs was meticulous.” O’Shea held up the sign from Keren’s apartment. “This one that arrived with Hardcastle is sloppy.”

“It looks like he carved it out in a few minutes. He didn’t bother to sand or varnish the wood,” Paul noticed.

“I’d say our killer is spinning out of control.” Keren ran her hand over the splintered wood.

“Which should make him careless and easier to catch,” Dr. Schaefer added. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

“You can see the deterioration of his mental state in this work.” O’Shea gestured with the eight-by-ten picture of the dress. “The drawing of Pharaoh isn’t nearly as realistic. I wouldn’t even think it was a pharaoh, if I hadn’t seen the earlier paintings.”

Jabbing a blunt finger at the dots at the bottom of the picture, he added, “And these aren’t identifiable as gnats. I mean, I don’t know how he’d do that, but he managed to depict exactly what he wanted with the other paintings.”

Paul said, “Pestis ex culex. The plagues must have some special meaning to him. Why hasn’t the profiler come up with something?”

“I think they’ve quit involving Dyson since they got a name.”

“Well then, why don’t they send him back to DC?” Paul muttered. “That guy is weird.”

“Caldwell is falling apart.” Keren stepped back from the table.

“I’ll do the Hardcastle autopsy first thing in the morning,” Dr. Schaefer informed them. “But my preliminary examination tells me victim number four died more like Juanita. He took her alive. My staff has done a species examination of the frogs, gnats, and flies. They’ve come up with supply houses and websites that sell things like these in quantity. Here’s a copy of the suppliers.”

“Great, we can get a court order and have a look at their customer lists.” O’Shea nodded with satisfaction.

Keren glanced at Paul. “What’s the next one?”

He didn’t miss a beat.
“Pestis ex bestia.”

O’Shea snagged the list of Internet sites that dealt in bugs and frogs. “I can’t keep track. What is
bestia?”

“Beasts or animals.” Paul reached for the exit door and stopped. “The plague of animals.”

“So he’s going to turn loose a herd of sheep in O’Shea’s house?” Keren asked scathingly.

O’Shea’s face turned ice cold. “I need to call my wife.” He opened his phone and walked a few steps away.

Keren tried to think of anyone else who would need to be warned. Her family wasn’t around Chicago.

“She’s going to stay with her sister in St. Louis for a while.” O’Shea’s voice was impassive, but he clicked his phone shut with undue force. “Now what about the plague of beasts?”

Keren wanted to tell O’Shea how sorry she was for the whole mess, even though it wasn’t her fault. But O’Shea’s expression didn’t invite comment.

Paul must have gotten that, too, because he went on. “Actually, the plague of beasts was a little different. Up until then, all the plagues had been some sort of blight. Blood made the water undrinkable. Frogs covered the land, and they crawled into beds and into the food. The gnats and flies made the air impossible to breathe. But the plague of beasts was about hurting the animals. Of course, that hurt the Egyptians by extension. But Caldwell might not be setting loose a herd of sheep so much as killing a bunch of animals, and his next victim along with them.”

“Where do you find a flock of sheep in Chicago?” Keren wondered.

“Or any animals.” O’Shea handed the pictures to Keren and she took them, annoyed that because of her purse she ended up being a pack mule.
There
was a kind of animal.