THREE TIMES A LADY (20 page)

Dana shook herself. 
What had the woman in the surveillance footage been trying to tell her by attaching the photograph of her brother to Christian Manhoff’s body, anyway?
  Besides ‘fuck you’, of course. 
That
part of the message hadn’t been very difficult to figure out. 

It was clear she’d been calling Dana out by name –
literally
, just as Nathan Stiedowe had done during the Cleveland Slasher investigation – but to what end and for what purpose?  And could the woman in the video be a murderer?  Just like Dana’s brother had been?  Could Dana be
sure
of that?  Had the woman in the video been the same person who’d shoved a large rawhide bone down Christian Manhoff’s throat until he’d choked to death on it?  Or was the woman in the video simply
connected
to the murder somehow?  And if so, just
how
, exactly, was she connected to it?

Dana shook her head and took several deep breaths through her nostrils.  Nothing made any sense to her.  Still, what else was new?  She’d been in a daze ever since she’d first emerged from her coma three days earlier and it didn’t look like she’d snap out of it anytime soon.  That being said, Dana knew she’d need to do just that.  And
quick
.  One person was dead already and there could be more to come soon.  Would
probably
be more to come soon.  With suspects like this one – people who went to such great lengths to actually
draw attention to
their terrible crimes – there were
always
more to come.

But Dana didn’t see how the woman in the video could have possibly pulled off the murder by herself.  She just didn’t appear physically capable.

Christian Manhoff had been a big man.  A
huge
man, even.  He must have outweighed the woman in the video by at least a hundred and fifty pounds.  Surely the woman in the video
couldn’t
have overpowered him.  She looked tall, sure – taller than the average female and certainly a lot taller than Dana – but she didn’t look anywhere near strong enough to pull off the deed by herself.  So did that mean she’d had assistance killing Christian Manhoff?  And if so, from whom?  Or – for some odd reason – had the woman in the video simply been piggybacking on a murder that had already committed by someone else, one to which she had no other link?

Dana didn’t know, but she sure as hell planned to find out.  Flipping open her cellphone, she accessed her e-mail account and downloaded the attached zip file she’d sent herself a few minutes earlier before watching the autopsy video several more times, her heart pounding progressively harder against her ribcage each time through until she thought it would explode like a time bomb inside her chest. 

On the fourth or fifth repeat viewing, Dana finally noticed the watch strapped around the woman’s left wrist as she entered the autopsy room and held up the photograph of Nathan Stiedowe to the camera.

Dana paused the video and selected the portion of the image featuring the watch before zooming in.  The watch had caught Dana’s eye mostly because it looked so out of place when compared to the rest of the woman’s hopelessly trendy attire.  The dress the woman in the video had been wearing looked like it had cost a pretty penny, indeed – along with her shoes, jewellery and haircut.  Something of a closet clotheshorse herself, Dana knew quality when she saw it, and the bird-flipping, profanity-mouthing woman’s get-up in the video was definitely
quality
. 

Dana bit down gently her lower lip – an unfortunate habit she’d formed in grade school and still hadn’t quite gotten over yet – while she continued to think things through.  She rubbed at her aching neck and wished like hell that the tension residing there would find somewhere else to live already.  The woman’s wardrobe had obviously selected with care and the cheap watch stuck out like sore thumb.  It was almost like topping off a piece of perfectly prepared filet mignon with a healthy dollop of two-dollar whipped cream you’d picked up at the grocery store as an afterthought: a small addition but one that was nonetheless large enough to completely ruin the overall presentation.

Simply stated, the watch was a piece of junk.  Something a kid might wear. 

The watch itself consisted of a worn red-leather strap and what appeared to be a cartoon character using its hands to point out the hour and minute. 

Dana zoomed in even closer on the video and narrowed her eyes.

Mickey Mouse.

Dana shook her head in confusion, hoping she wasn’t wasting her time with this line of thinking.  Still, even though she didn’t know
why
the watch bothered her, she just knew that it did.  Bothered her in a big way, as a matter of fact.  A cop’s instinct, she supposed – a sixth sense.  Call it whatever you wanted, but she’d followed far too many of her gut feelings directly to a murderer’s doorstep to simply ignore it altogether.

Besides, flimsy lead or not, at least it was
some
sort of lead.  She’d gone on much less during the Cleveland Slasher investigation, not to mention a lot of other cases she’d investigated in the past.  So it was important that she didn’t ignore any possible roads here, no matter how unpromising those roads might seem.  Sometimes it was the seemingly innocuous details that cracked a case wide open. 

Dana stretched her neck again and punched in Gary Templeton’s number on her cellphone.  As big of a deal as a bank robbery might be, this was even bigger.  A possible killer who’d been caught on video was on the loose out there somewhere in Cleveland and Dana needed Templeton’s help to track that person down. 
Now.
  And if they split up the responsibilities, they could probably get twice the amount of work done in the same length of time.  Dana also wanted to hear Templeton’s thoughts on why he might think the woman in the video had called her out by name.  Maybe
he
could make sense out of this mess.  Lord knew she couldn’t.

Dana gritted her teeth when Templeton didn’t answer his phone.  No doubt he was up to his elbows in crime already working the bank robbery.  Dana sympathised with him, but sympathy didn’t catch killers.  Still, a cop’s life never seemed to get any easier, whether you were FBI or Cleveland PD.  No matter how many cases you solved, no matter how many bad guys you put away, for each case you put to bed there were always twenty more unsolved cases staring you dead in the face at the end of each exhausting workday.  Mocking you.  Daring you to try to solve them.

Dana closed her eyes and flipped shut her cellphone, wishing like hell Jeremy Brown were around for her to bounce some ideas off.  Jeremy had been a damn fine investigator, one of the finest Dana had ever known in her entire career. 
He
’d have had plenty of ideas concerning the mystery woman in the video.  But Jeremy wasn’t around any more.  Not now and not ever again.  He was dead and rotting six feet beneath the ground in a cemetery out in Los Angeles.  All thanks to Dana and her supposedly sterling work in the FBI. 

Dana shook her head.  You reaped what you sowed.

With Templeton already busy with his own problems, Dana realised she’d be puzzling out this one on her own until further notice.  No big surprise there, though.  She’d jumped into this case willy-nilly from the start, hadn’t stopped to think things through properly or ask for backup, which protocol clearly dictated.  So alone was exactly the way she
deserved
to be working.

Dana let out a slow breath.  There’d been a time in her career not too long ago when she’d actually
preferred
alone, but those days were long gone now.  In the past, she’d often found that doing most of the work for herself actually made it easier for her to get the job done when the pressure was on.  When you worked alone, there was nobody else was around to get in your way, nobody else around to slow you down, nobody else around to send you off on wild-goose chases that rarely – if ever – panned out.

Dana went to the sink and twisted on the warm-water tap before pumping some fruity-smelling hand soap into her palm from the plastic dispenser positioned above the sink.  She felt dirty, like she just couldn’t get clean for the life of her.  But where lay the big surprise in that?  When you’d spent as much time as Dana had chasing the lowest common denominators of humanity through the gutters of life, some of that filth was bound to rub off on you.

As Dana dried off her hands with a wad of industrial-strength paper towels, her heart nearly exploded inside her chest when door to the bathroom suddenly flew open with a violent bang. 

Dana whirled around.  Her gaze went automatically to Nancy Lawson’s left wrist to see if she was wearing a watch.  And, if so, what
kind
of watch.

‘Hello, Agent Whitestone,’ Lawson said, smiling brightly.  ‘Long time, no see.’

N
icholas’s first murder had taken place the previous August.

Leaning in close to the bathroom mirror at 969 Turning Oaks Drive on the west side of Chicago, he reapplied his bright red lipstick and remembered the night he’d stood inside a bathroom at a popular Atlanta nightclub just before he’d made his way back out onto the crowded dance floor. 

Nicholas had felt a little nervous then, of course, but if he’d still had a penis it would have stiffened in delicious anticipation.  And why not?  Murdering people was a lot like fucking them, wasn’t it?  Of course it was.  Both were intimate acts filled with unspeakable violence when done properly, and both caused stains that were
extremely
difficult to scrub away.

So, looking at things that way, Nicholas had decided he’d grow a new pair and do what he’d come there to do that night.  Enough with all the preliminaries already.  Enough with all the build-up.  No more talking the talk and not walking the walk. 

His mother was
expecting
this.

***

After scoping out the scene for several minutes, Nicholas checked his
Mickey Mouse
watch while he stood in the northeast corner of the club, his face mostly hidden by an Atlanta Braves baseball cap.  Nicholas had chosen to appear as a man that night in the hopes that it would eliminate all the unwanted attention he surely would have received had he been dressed as a woman.  As a man, though, Nicholas wouldn’t need to worry about any drunks offering to buy him shots or moving in to cop a cheap feel, drooling all over themselves as they did their best Brad Pitt imitations and tried their damndest to get into his pants. 

Nicholas wondered how many of them would still be trying to spread his thighs if they’d known what
used
to dangle between his legs…

Fifty per cent of them, at the very least.

***

The
Mickey Mouse
watch was extremely difficult to read in the darkened nightclub.  Straining his eyes, Nicholas finally caught sight of the little black hands as they were illuminated in the intermittent strobe lights flashing overhead and threatening to bring on a full-blown seizure. 

One-thirty a.m.
  Only an hour or so to go now until show time.
 

Around that time, the curtains would finally go up and Dinah Leach would finally go down for the count for ever, never to rise again.  That’s assuming, of course, that the weather reports were to be believed.

Nicholas shuddered again at the delicious prospect of what lay ahead for him, both tonight and for the rest of his life.  After several months of careful planning, he and his mother had decided that Johnny’s Hideaway on Roswell Road would be the perfect place for all the action to start going down.  And, from all appearances, it seemed to be a natural fit.  Absolutely
perfect
for his intentions for the evening.

The Devil Went Down To Georgia
played in Nicholas’s mind and competed with the rap music blaring over the speakers in the club to provide a jarring, discordant soundtrack for the scene.  Wrinkling up his face in disgust against the audible onslaught in his ears, Nicholas took in a deep breath through his nostrils and steeled himself for what would come next.  The devil had gone down to Georgia, indeed.  And if the devil had
his
way, he’d have been wearing a beautiful red dress, a stunning pearl necklace and glamorous, six-inch high heels, to boot.

***

Nicholas had followed his prey for a solid week now –
stalked
her, actually, if you wanted to get technical about the whole thing, appropriately changing his appearance each night to avoid being recognised by her as a familiar face.  Now all he needed to do was wait for the powerful storm to strike.  And on this night – blessed of all nights – Hurricane Allison was scheduled to arrive in all her glory at precisely two-thirty a.m., according to the weatherman on the radio station Nicholas had been listening to when he’d pulled into the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway an hour earlier. 

Nicholas had smiled to himself while he’d listened to the report, knowing the hurricane would provide the very noisy cover he’d need to get away with what he already knew would be his
exceedingly
bloody crime.