Trail of Echoes (10 page)

“And Trina's family?” I asked.

“Mom—Liz—is hardworking, some type of legal secretary. Husband was killed in Afghanistan last summer. Church folks. Nobody in jail. No men hanging around. Not a day goes by without six phone calls from her. At this point, I don't know what to tell that poor lady.”

“But you
are
still looking,” Colin said.

“No, I'm not looking.” Gwen rolled her eyes, then met mine.

“I saw that Trina Porter also attended Madison,” I said.

“Uh huh.”

“What about Bethany and Tawanna?” Colin asked.

“View Park Prep over on Slauson,” Gwen said. “And to answer your original question: do I think Trina's case is related to Chanita's?”

“Or to Tawanna's or Bethany's?” I added. “Cuz if so … you know what that means.”

“You do your job,” she said, turning away from us, “and let me do mine. Now if you'd both get the fuck outta my office…”

“So, I guess we're done?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said without a glance back at us.

As we stomped back to our own squad room, Colin tapped me on the shoulder. “Zapata's been doing this too long. It's kinda like when you can't smell skunk anymore. It's not that tomato juice works, but it's olfactory exhaustion.”

“Maybe.”

“You're gonna have to compartmentalize,” he advised. “Distance yourself. Say that Tori's case—”

“Watching
Dr. Phil
and reading
National Geographic Kids
won't make you a yogi, Colin. Don't psychoanalyze me today.”

“Just wanna help.” He ambled over to the March Madness whiteboard.

“Noted. Thank you.” I sank into my chair.

A postcard sat in my mail tray. It was of an oil painting of nine naked young women bathing in a lake. A man kneeled on the nearby shore, his hand dipped into the water.
Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896.

No stamp. No return address. My name had been written in green-inked, block letters. There was a message:

QLRM GSV DROW IFNKFH. BLF ZIV DVOXLNV.

Weird shit. I always got weird shit. Santa got mail from preschoolers, and I got postcards. And when Colin returned to his desk, I held it up. “This was in my tray.”

He rolled over to my desk and stared at the message.

QLRM GSV DROW IFNKFH. BLF ZIV DVOXLNV.

He shrugged. “Weird shit.” When I didn't agree, he cocked his head. “No?”

“Oh, it's weird,” I said. “I'm just curious, since it doesn't smell like pee or weed. So it's not from one of our regular nuts. The more I stare at the letters … It looks like a puzzle maybe.”

He grunted. “Okay.”

“The most frequently used letter in the English language is
E
.”

“And you know that because…?”

“I'm smart.” I grabbed pens and a pad. “But the lonely
Q
that starts the message is not an
E
. Probably a
T
or an
M
most likely.”

“Most likely,” he mocked.

I ignored him. “The most frequently used three-letter word is ‘the.'”

He pointed to
GSV
. “Right there.”

“Let's solve it, shall we?” I copied the message onto the pad in black ink, then, in red pen, wrote
T
above the black
G
, an
H
above the black
S,
and
E
above the black
V
.

“My brain hurts,” he complained, “and I'm bored.”

“Shh.”

“You do this a lot?”

I nodded. “Grew up doing puzzles. My mother likes those big books of crosswords, cryptograms…” I slipped letters in, crossed letters out until …

JOIN THE WILD RUMPUS. YOU ARE WELCOME.

I chuckled like Ralphie from
A Christmas Story
decoding his secret message from Little Orphan Annie. Except my postcard and secret message weren't an Ovaltine commercial.

“Is this a marketing piece?” Colin asked. “For one of your ex-hubby's video games?”

“A game with nymphs? Maybe. He told me that he's working on some … Wait. Wild rumpus
.
Maybe he's doing steam-punk meets Greek myth meets
Where the Wild Things Are.
” I slipped the card and its translated message into my binder.

“I liked that story,” Colin said. “But steam-punk makes me nervous.”

“Women who can spell make you nervous.”

Join the wild rumpus. You are welcome.

What was Greg selling now?

No time for fake puzzles, though, when I had a real puzzle to solve.

The intercom on my desk phone beeped. “Lou.” It was Lieutenant Rodriguez.

“Yep?” I said.

“Get over here.
Now
.”

 

15

I sat in the chair on the other side of the big man's battered oak desk, which was piled high with stacks of aging manila folders. Hunched over, my chest almost hit my knees, not because he had torn into me—we were still in the trailers before the feature had started—but because no heat from the sun snuck past the iron grating on his windows and because he kept his office at ten degrees. And I've never thrived in the cold.

“You're stepping on toes,” Lieutenant Rodriguez said. He rearranged the collection of Dodgers bobbleheads shadowed by all the dead-people folders. “You're stepping on toes and you haven't even had the case for a whole two days yet.”

“She's half-assing it,” I complained, “and she's a tattle-tell in addition to being lazy.”

“You can't compare Chanita's case to Trina's, okay? It's too soon for that.” He twisted in his high-backed chair as his gray vampire eyes burned into mine. “Stay the hell away from Zapata. She'll bring you down with her ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter' bullshit.”

My stomach tightened as the Matt Kemp bobblehead on my boss's desk nodded in agreement. With the only light coming from a desk lamp, the toy's shadow played on the wall. And I thought of that episode of
Twilight Zone,
the one that—

Lieutenant Rodriguez snapped his fingers. “Hey. You listening?”

I gave him a practiced smile.

He waited for me to speak, but when I only continued to smile, he asked, “Worried?”

“Not yet, but I'm driving to the station to board the train.”

“You've worked harder cases. The eighty-year-old Jane Doe in the alley. That murder-suicide right after Christmas. And then there's crazy-ass Christopher Chatman and crazy-bitch Sarah Oliver. She still hiding down in Venezuela?”

“Yeah.” In addition to helping Chatman kill his wife and kids, Sarah Oliver had double-tapped her husband, Ben, in their Infiniti SUV, leaving his body and that car in a mall parking lot. Then, she'd scooped up their daughter from Ben's grandmother's house and boarded an early-morning flight to South America.

“That case was different,” I now said to my boss. “None of those cases were—”

“Serial?” He leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “Max Crase did your sister Tori, Monique and Macie Darson, the college—”

“But this one just feels…”

“Nasty.”

Ice crackled across my chest. “Girls.”

“I know. And I understand. I got two at Chanita's age, remember?”

Someone knocked on the door.

Lieutenant Rodriguez pointed at me. “You got this. I'm counting on you.” Then, he shouted, “Yeah?”

The door opened, and Colin's head popped in. “Dr. Brooks is on the line with results.”

I rushed back out into the bright glare of fluorescent light, back to my metal desk with Colin and Lieutenant Rodriguez trailing behind me. I motioned for Luke and Pepe to join the huddle, then hit
SPEAKER
on my phone. “Hey, Doc. We're all here. What's up?” I grabbed a pen and a notepad and plopped into my chair.

“First,” Brooks said, “the bad news: the rape-kit results came back. They were positive. The good news: he left semen.”

I tapped the pad with my pen. “That's pretty bold, ain't it? Not using a condom?”

“I'll send it out for DNA,” Brooks said, “which, you know, takes time. And I couldn't find any prints on her body.”

“He'll leave semen but no fingerprints?” I said.

“The X-rays also showed a recently healed right arm,” the ME reported.

“Chanita's mother told us that she had been jumped by school bullies,” I offered.

“Would you like to know why there weren't a lot of bugs?” Brooks asked.

“Yes,” we all said.

“Those needle marks in her thighs,” Brooks said. “He injected her.”

“With?” I asked.

“Bug repellant.”

I gawked at the phone, then at my team. And we stared at each other in silence, confused by Brooks's words. “Huh?” I said. “Come again?”

“Bug repellent.”

“Before or after he killed her?” Colin asked.

“After.”

“Why?” I asked.

Brooks chuckled. “That's your job, Detective, not mine.” He was turning pages. “Some other tox reports came back. No alcohol or recreational drugs in her system,
but
this is a bit strange. There were low concentrations, just traces, really, of atropine.”

No one spoke—just looked at each other and shrugged.

“Umm,” I said, “you're gonna have to tell us…”

“It's a toxin,” Brooks explained, “but a nonirritant, which is why her internal organs weren't inflamed. And you don't need a lot of it to kill someone.”

“Painless?” I asked.

“No. Bodily fluids dry up first—spit, tears, sweat. Then, after a few minutes, the body numbs. You close your eyes, and that's that.”

I wrote the word carefully in my notes, as though misspelling “atropine” would cause my own numbness, dehydration, and death. “How is it given?”

“For Chanita, I can't tell right now,” Brooks admitted. “But in the few cases I've worked before, the patient drank it as tea.”

“Atropine,” Lieutenant Rodriguez said, staring at the word on my pad.

“Yes, sir,” Brooks said. “You may know the plant name.”

“Which is?” I asked, pen poised.

“Deadly nightshade.”

 

16

Deadly nightshade.

The violet-colored bloom flashed onto the large monitor in the conference room where we now gathered. A half-finished large pepperoni pizza and two cans of Coke sat in the middle of the table near the projector. On the room's north wall, Colin had pinned scenes from Bonner Park—with Chanita in the shot and then out of the shot, the trails, the bluffs, the bowl of green that separated the park from those hillside homes.

“Chanita took a picture of this flower,” I said, tapping the laptop directional buttons. I reached into the expandable file and pulled out that picture. “This one looks different. In her picture, the petals are all open.”

“Does that happen at a certain time of year?” Pepe asked.

I scrolled down the Web page. “Flowers appear in June, July, and September.”

“She couldn't have just taken that picture, then,” Colin said. “Too early in the year.”

“So where was she last summer?” Pepe asked.

“We need to talk to her mom again,” I said, adding this question to my notepad.

“And
why
did she take a picture of it?” Luke wondered.

“Guess we need to find that out, too.” I scanned the article that accompanied the picture now on-screen. “
Atropa belladonna
plant. Absorbed through skin and ingested … very poisonous … difficulty swallowing … paralysis … death
.
” I looked up from the laptop. “Shit.”

Colin and Lieutenant Rodriguez both stared at the image of the deadly flower. Pepe wrote in his notepad as Luke studied Chanita's shot.

I wiped my greasy fingers on a napkin. “So what do we know about him?” I stepped to the whiteboard, grabbed a red marker, and wrote “MONSTER” at the top of the board.

“He's male,” Luke offered.

“He's a sexual predator,” Pepe added.

I wrote those two things, made an arrow, then scribbled an action item: “Check sex offenders near vic.”

“Why would he leave semen behind?” Colin wondered. “Either he wants to get caught or he knows he'll be difficult to trace.”

All of that went on the board.

“He has some knowledge about poisons,” Pepe said.

“Cuz you just don't drive to Walgreens and buy atropine,” I said, writing.

“He breaks shit,” Colin said. “Her left foot, maybe.”

I put a question mark by the word, then added, “Her tooth, possibly.”

“
Her,
” Pepe added.

“How poetic,” Luke snarked.

My face warmed, and I shot Luke a “you're an asshole” glare.

“He's strong,” Pepe said, ignoring his partner. “He carried her to that spot.”

“He knows the park,” Lieutenant Rodriguez offered. “Not just the hours, but the terrain.”

“He's possessive,” I added.

The men gave me quizzical looks.

“He injected her with repellent to keep the bugs away, interrupting the natural…” I narrowed my eyes. “Interrupting the natural order—he thinks he's God. Bugs, yes, but also her life, her tooth—
he
took all of that. None of it happened naturally. Her foot—
he
broke it to keep her from running. And, finally, he killed her—the ultimate act of a god.”

“The Lord giveth,” Luke said, nodding.

“And the Lord taketh away,” Lieutenant Rodriguez completed.

We shuffled through the pictures Luke had taken of the crowds at Bonner Park. Every shade in the genetic pool was represented. More men than women. Older—who could jog and walk in a park at midday on a Wednesday? Each face presented the same levels of interest and fear. No one—no
man
—appeared to be too invested in what we had found on trail 5.