Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (12 page)

21

The night seemed to go too
swiftly. Whenever Sarah was having fun, she noticed that time flew by so quickly that she couldn’t tell what time of day or night it was. But when something unenjoyable had to be done, every second seemed to drag on forever. That feeling seemed common to most people, but when she was growing up in a secluded community, it had never been apparent to her.

After sushi, they went out for drinks.
Giovanni ordered wine.

“Do you want a glass?” Giovanni shouted over the din
of the bar’s music.

“No
, thanks. I’ll stick to diet soda.”

Conversation was impossible
in the bar, and since she wasn’t drinking, there was no reason to stay. Instead, they just strolled around the neighborhood and looked into the various shops. It seemed like something from an era that no longer existed. Small cigar stores, clothing shops, antiques… they were all crammed next to bars and clubs in a section of the city no larger than a square mile. A hip, younger area that Sarah fell right into. The energy of youth was something she craved, something that had been lacking in her life for seventeen years.

“
This fits you,” Giovanni said.

“What does?”

“The city. I can’t picture you on a farm.”

After their walk
, they stood near Sarah’s car and talked. Just this, talking, wasn’t something that she had done in a long time with anyone but Jeannie. And even that was superficial. They never dove into themselves or where they saw their lives leading. With Giovanni, it seemed to just fall into place.

He didn’t try to kiss her as they said goodbye
, and she respected that. Usually, men would flirt with her with their wives or girlfriends right in front of them, and she knew that, if she wanted them, she could have them. She didn’t get that sense with him. He was more reserved than most men. She got the impression he would rather be alone than with another person.

On the drive home, she couldn’t help but grin. He was handsome but not pretty. Not dolled up or overly muscled like most men she met. He was smart but not an intellectual. Giovanni struck her
as a man that took action before anything else.

When she got home, the apartment was empty and dark. She
’d closed the blinds earlier, and no light was coming in. The first thing she did was open all the blinds and stare out onto the city. Philadelphia was such an odd mix of wealth and poverty. It seemed as though the middle class were completely disappearing and all that remained were these two polar extremes, neither one of them understanding, or wanting to understand, the other.

Sarah watched the traffic and the moon and the apartments across the street
for a long while. Normally, she would be drunk by now. The truly odd thing was how much she had missed. The way the moon bathed the city, and the city lights that sparkled like golden stars spread out before her. She tended to miss everything around her when she was drunk.

Walking into the bedroom, she strip
ped and then hopped into the shower. The water was hot. When the neighbors ran their showers or dishwashers at the same time, the hot water would run out and she would have to finish her shower as quickly as possible. But right now was the perfect time. The other people in her building were young couples, and they were all out right now.

After her shower, she lay in bed and had some fruit and cheese. The television was mindless entertainment, but that
was what she wanted. It filled the empty space with noise and light and gave her the impression that she wasn’t alone.

Within a couple of hours, she began drifting off. She flicked off the television and curled up with her body pillow. Taking a deep breath, she debated saying a prayer. For the first seventeen years of her life, she had her father standing over her
, reciting a prayer with her. When she was too sick or putting up a fight, he would do it for her. She remembered how much she looked forward to those prayers with him and how much she could use them now.

But the words just wouldn’t come. Too much pain too recently. So instead she thought about the things she had to do tomorrow. Get some groceries and go to work and call Jeannie to check up on her. All the mundane things other people took for granted
gave her purpose and direction.

Within a few minutes, she was nearly asleep. In that twilight where sleep is imminent.

And that’s when the pain pounded into her skull so forcefully she screamed.

The fiery agony radiated
through her head, as if a bullet had been fired inside her brain but didn’t have the velocity to leave and just bounced around.

Sarah fell to the floor, curled up
into a ball, screaming.

She saw walls. Bare cement walls and darkness
—pure darkness, except for a lamp at the end of the room. Next to the lamp was a face. A man sitting there, watching a young woman. He rose and walked to her and ran his hand along her face. The woman was crying uncontrollably, begging him to let her go, but he didn’t even seem to notice.

The pain grew in intensity
, and Sarah wrapped her hands around her head, squeezing so tight she thought she might crush her head. Anything to get the pain to stop.

Suddenly, she saw something else. The man rose again from
the desk, a pair of scissors in his hand. He went to the woman and cut out her tongue. Blood sprayed down over the woman’s chin and onto the man’s pants, but he didn’t care.

Sarah could see what was on the desk the man had been sitting at: a face. A
human face that had been severed and dried. Hanging on the walls were a lot more.

And then the
ache shot through her in one forceful hammering, and as abruptly as it had come, it stopped.

She was left on the floor sobbing. The tears ran down her cheeks
, and she wanted to wipe them away, to ignore what had happened. To show it that it didn’t control her. But she couldn’t move. Every ounce of strength had gone to fighting the pain, and she had nothing left, not even the mental energy to keep thinking about it.

After a few minutes
, she had calmed down enough to climb back into bed, unsure whether sleep would come tonight or not.

22

Though most of the agents around had gone to lunch, Arnold Rosen stayed behind and stared at the phone on his desk. The lab was supposed to get back with an ID on the corpse that had been found on Gillian Hanks’s doorstep. Lunch could wait.

But watching the clock inevitably made it go slower
, and he got up and paced the room awhile. Then he crumpled up paper and shot baskets into his waste bin, which occupied him for a good five minutes or so. Surfing the internet grew boring after about ten minutes, and he didn’t belong to any social media sites, so the number of things he could actually do to kill time was limited.

Finally, mercifully, he thought, the phone rang.

“This is Rosen.”

“Agent Rosen, it’
s Steve.”

He pulled out a pen and got a notepad from his desk. “Give me something good, Ste
ve.”

“Got a match for you. Claire Robison from Harrisburg. I’m sending the address
and next of kin along in the email. Should be getting it in a minute. Twenty-two years old, lived with both parents.”

“Remind me to get you a good Christmas present.”

“Get me a good Christmas present.”

Rosen hung up and checked his e
mail. Though he needed to wait only a few minutes, it seemed much more agonizing than waiting for the phone to ring before. When it arrived, he read the biographical information and rushed out the door. He checked the cubicles and saw Giovanni writing a report on an unrelated case.

“Agent Adami, let’s go. We got something hot.”

Harrisburg was over two hours from DC. Rosen let Giovanni do the driving. After a certain age, he found, concentrating for long periods of time became more difficult. But Giovanni was humming along to a song on the radio, oblivious to the fact that his youth was a major advantage in nearly every realm.

“You seem in a good mood,” Rosen said.

“I am. I had a date last night.”

“Yeah? Who was she?”

“Sarah.”

“Sarah, as in the psychic Sarah? The one you told me would ruin our reputation if we associated with?”

“And I still think it would. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have dinner with her.”

Rosen glanced
at a liquor store out the window. Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, it was busy. “She’s cute. If I was thirty years younger, maybe I’d give you some competition.”

“Oh, it’d be no
competition.”

“Really?” Rosen said with a grin. “Son, I was in the dating game when you were pooping your pants. Don’t downplay experience. Besides, it won’t last.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Two people who meet in law enforcement is
one too many. There’s something about this case that you’re working that won’t be there when it’s over. When the investigation is done, you’ll both go your separate ways.”

Giovanni glanced to him. “You sound like you know from experience.”

“I do. Before I was married, there was a victim of an attempted rape. This was back when I was a detective in Detroit. I spent a lot of time with her. We grew close. Started dating. When we finally caught the bastard, he took a plea deal and went upstate for fifteen years. The relationship just fell apart after that. I was a reminder to her of one of the worst experiences of her life. It’ll be like that for you two. After this is over, you’ll both be thinking of this case when you look at one another.”

“She’s not part of the case.”

“I know, but that’s how you guys met. It’s part of your history now.”

They drove most of the way
without speaking again, just listening to music. They had to stop for gas once, and Rosen used the bathroom in the gas station. It was one of the ones that were around back and filthy, like it’d never been cleaned. As he was walking out, he saw Giovanni giving cash to a homeless man who was begging in front of the gas station.

Once back on the road, Rosen said, “I usually don’t do that as a policy. Too many schemers.”

“I give to the veterans.”

Rosen looked
at him and then back out at the road.

Harrisburg wasn’t a quiet town. It’d grown since Rosen had been here last, almost twenty years ago. As the
state capital, the city spread out around the government buildings in the city center, the most prominent being the capitol building itself.

As they exited the interstate, their GPS led them through
congested downtown Harrisburg and through the winding suburbs. The run-down home they were looking for had a dying lawn guarded by a rusting fence with a “Beware of Dog” sign, though Rosen didn’t see a dog anywhere.

They got out of the car and walked up the driveway to the house. The weather had gone from sunny to overcast
, giving everything a gray pallor. Rosen could tell it was going to rain soon.

He knocked
, and a short while later, a woman answered. She was thin to the point of being unhealthy, with thinning hair. Her beige sweater was frayed at the sleeves.

“Are you Mrs.
Mindy Robison?”

“Yes.”

“Ma’am, we’re with the FBI. We’re investigating the disappearance of your daughter.”

“Yes,” she said in an upbeat way
, as though hoping for good news.

“I
, ah…”

Rosen had never, in the nearly twenty years doing this, been able to break bad news to good people. It was a skill he just didn’t have.

“I’m sorry,” was all he said.

The woman didn’t move. Tears ran down her face
, but she made no attempt to wipe them away. She didn’t appear to notice.

Rosen stood in front of her and didn’t speak. He would wait until she was ready. Giovanni couldn’t even look at her. He had to look behind them
at the passing traffic.

“If you need some time, I understand. But we’d like to ask a few questions now.”

“What happened?”

“May we come in?”

She nodded and held the door open for them. She walked into the front room and sat on the couch, absently playing with her fingers, her eyes staring at a spot on the wall. The tears continued to flow, but she wasn’t really sobbing. Rosen wondered if she was on any medications that dulled her senses.

“I prepared myself for the worst,” she said.
“But you can’t prepare yourself for something like this. Not really. It feels like my heart has been ripped out, Detective.”

Rosen was about to correct her but instead sat down and quietly took in the home. Photographs filled every space on the wall. Mostly of childr
en. In one photo, he counted seven kids and wondered which one Claire was.

“She was our middle child,” the woman said. “She was troubled. Into drugs and things like that. Ran with the wrong people. But I never thought anything like this could happen.”

Rosen nodded. “It’s my understanding you tried to file a missing persons report, but it was denied, is that right?”

“Yes. She had run away before. Several times. The police here knew about her
, and they said they would keep an eye out. So I didn’t go through the whole process, didn’t push for it. Maybe if I had…”

“No, filing or not filing a piece of paper in a filing cabinet would not have done anything to prevent this,
Mindy. This was like lightning striking. Something that we have no control over.”

She swallowed. “How did she…”

“She was murdered.”

“How?”

Rosen thought of how to phrase this. In truth, she’d probably bled to death. But he wasn’t about to tell her mother that. “We’re not a hundred percent certain yet.”
True enough
, he thought.

“I see.” She drifted off a moment and then said, “When can I see her?”

“We can probably have the body returned to you for burial within a few days. She’s being processed for evidence right now, and an autopsy will be performed.”

Mindy
nodded and didn’t speak again. Rosen looked at Giovanni, who shrugged.

“
Mindy,” Rosen said softly, “is there anything you can tell us that will help us catch who did this? A list of people she was spending time with that maybe she shouldn’t have been, anyone calling her at odd hours, anything like that?”

She shook her head. “Claire didn’t involve me in her life at all. I’m sorry. I couldn’t even tell you who her best friend was. She came her
e to sleep and then would leave and not return for two or three days at a time.”

“Was she dating anybody?”

“If she was, she never told us about it.”

Giovanni
asked, “Was she employed?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. She would sleep for twelve or fifteen hours a day sometimes. I can’t imagine she held a job with that schedule.
She took classes at a local college every once in a while, but she always eventually dropped out.”

“Do you have a current photo of her?”

She thought a moment. “I may. Let me look for it.”

As
Mindy left the room, Rosen said, “Looks like we’re not getting anything here.”

“How could she not k
now anything about her daughter?” Giovanni whispered.

“Because sometimes they want nothing to do with you. And once they hit eighteen, you have no control over it.”

Mindy walked back in holding a phone. She showed a photo on it to Rosen. A young, very attractive woman had her arm around an older man with a potbelly.

“That’s her father. I can just text you this photo if you like.”

“I would. Here’s my card. It has my cell phone on it. And please don’t hesitate to call if you think of anything else.”

Rosen stood up and took in the living room one more time. He got the impression that a lot of memories were stored here, and maybe not all of them good. As he walked to the door,
Mindy followed him. She didn’t say goodbye as she shut the door behind them.

“She was odd,” Giovanni said
as they were walking back to the car.

“She’s medicated pretty heavily. Probably mixed it with some booze.”

“So what now?”

“There’s some link between Claire and all the other girls.
She was different somehow. For all the others, he followed the pattern of the Black Dahlia. This one he didn’t. He cut her up and dropped her off on Gillian’s porch. Why?”

“Maybe he’s just messing with us
.”

“Well
, clearly, but there has to be a reason. He could’ve done that at any time.”

Giovanni’s phone rang. “
Gonna take this.”

“Sure.”

As Giovanni spoke on the phone, Rosen sat on the hood of the car. It was starting to drizzle now, and he felt the raindrops on his face and watched the way they spattered on the pavement and made a polka-dot pattern in the dust. Storms cleared the air, as if violence could wash everything away. Off in the distance, Rosen could see a storm moving toward them. The gray-black clouds crawled over the city and dumped their contents over people who ran indoors.

“Hey,” Giovanni said, “that was Sarah.”

“Yeah?”

“She said she wants to talk to us. You feel like grabbing lunch?”

“Sure, lead the way.”