Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (14 page)

25

Sarah watched as Kyle Vidal tapped his fingers against the desk. The man was handsome and younger, somewhere between Rosen and Giovanni. He had shifty eyes, though. She got the impression that he wasn’t someone you could fully trust.

“You guys are kidding me, right?” he said.

Rosen cleared his throat. “No.”

“Do you even realize how ridiculous this is, Agent Rosen? Do I look like some backwoods hick spotting UFOs in swamps?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

Rosen seemed embarrassed, but the only indication was a slight blush in his cheeks. “No, you don’t seem like that, sir.”

“Then why the hell are you sitting here with a carnival sidekick and pitching it to me like we just landed Sherlock Holmes? Do you have any idea what the media would do if they knew you had taken her t
o a crime scene? How do you think Gillian is going to react when she finds out that you took a fortune-teller to her house?”

Giovanni spoke up. “She’s not a fortune
-teller.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Kyle said, his voice raised.

Kyle continued that way for a few minutes. It seemed degrading for Rosen to be yelled at by someone nearly fifteen years his junior. But he was quiet and professional. Giovanni, though, was beginning to raise his voice and fidget.

Sarah was quiet. Behind Kyle’s desk were
floor-to-ceiling windows, and she stared out of them onto Fourth Street. She couldn’t see much, but on the roof of a small building across the street, a man sat on a lawn chair reading a book.

“Well?” she heard someone say.

Kyle was staring directly at her. “Excuse me?” she said sheepishly.

“I asked why you think we should pay you a salary to consult on cases when you have no
education, no training, and are a liability to this entire division.”

Sarah swallowed and looked down
at the desk. She wasn’t used to being on the spot like this and didn’t particularly enjoy it. “I don’t know.”

Kyle
glanced at Rosen and Giovanni. Rosen looked away, but Giovanni held Kyle’s gaze. It was sweet of him to want to protect her. A man hadn’t done that since her father, when she was a child.

In a flash of forced relaxation, she opened her mind.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, thoughts came to her. They began in the front of her brain and seemed to ease their way to the back of her skull like a flowing stream. Then it filled her head until she had nothing but the images and sounds, and the pain behind her eyes that pounded like a jackhammer against her head.

The conversation came first
: a woman and Kyle standing in a kitchen. The woman was in sweats and had makeup running down her face. She’d been crying for awhile. Her arms were folded, and she was leaning against the sink.

Kyle was against the refrigerator. He’d been crying as well. Sarah, if she concentrated, could hear what they were saying. The voices were thick and laced with emotion, but she could just make out enough of t
he conversation to know that the woman was leaving.

And then another
scene replaced it: Kyle standing over her grave. He appeared older but not by much. An entire family was gathered around the site as a priest read from the Bible. The woman was in the casket.

Her eyes opened
, and she looked up from the casket.

The woman
stared at Sarah and began speaking.

Sarah opened her eyes, ignoring the deep, stabbing pain in her skull
. “You don’t want to ask me about this job,” Sarah said to Kyle. “You want to ask me why your wife left you.”

“Excuse me?” he said. “How dare you—”

“She wants you to know that the drunk driving wasn’t your fault. That it was her fault, and she would have done it whether you two stayed together or not. She doesn’t want you to beat yourself up about it.” The pain made Sarah grimace, and she had to take a moment to attempt to push it back. Kyle was silent the entire time, his eyes wide and moist. “And,” she continued, “she wants you to marry Cynthia. She’s a good woman and will—”

Kyle jumped to his feet. “Get the hell outta my office!”

Rosen said, “Kyle, calm down. This is what you wanted to see.”

“Get out, now. All of you.”

Sarah rose and nearly fell over. Giovanni grabbed her and held her up. He wrapped his arm around hers and led her out of the room gently. Some of the other people on the floor were staring at them, but no one said anything.

“Can we use your office?” Giovanni said to Rosen.

“Yeah.” Rosen turned and looked at Kyle, who was still standing at his desk, his chest heaving. “That’s why I brought her in, Kyle. We need her. I can’t stop this thing without her.”

26

The couch was comfortable but too short, and Sarah’s legs hung over the end. Giovanni had shut the door to give her some privacy, but she didn’t feel like this was private. The door was just glass. She could feel eyes on her every time someone walked by.

After a bit, the door opened
, and Kyle Vidal stood there.

“Come to yell at me some more?” she asked.

He shut the door behind him and sat down in one of Rosen’s comfy leather chairs. He crossed his legs and stared at her as though she were a patient in a psychiatrist’s office. “I’m sorry for my reaction. That’s not who I am.”

Sarah closed her eyes. The light hurt and made her head throb even more. “I’ve had worse.”

“You don’t know how painful that was for me. If you’re a fake, please tell me. Tell me you looked me up somewhere before you came here today.”

“She wanted you to know that the photo album you were looking for the other day is at her mother’s house. I can tell by your face that means something to you. So tell me how I could’ve looked that up
.”

Kyle stayed silent a moment. “Is she here now?”

“No.”

Kyle nodded, staring out the windows. “It happened about
three months after she left. She was driving drunk on the freeway and hit a semi that was changing lanes. Her car flipped about four times. She died instantly.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I never got to ask why she left. She would just tell me she was unhappy but never give me a reason.”

“She had her demons, like everyone else. And I don’t think they had anything to do with you.”

Kyle looked at her. He grinned weakly and rose. “You don’t need to go through the hiring process. You’ll be a ten ninety-nine employee. My secretary will have the paperwork for you. Your official title will be as an assistant to me.”

With that, he left, leaving Sarah staring up at the ceiling. Despite the pain,
she grinned.

After the new
-hire paperwork was filled out, Sarah took a few ibuprofen and returned to Rosen’s office to meet up with Rosen and Giovanni. She lay down on his couch again as the two men sat.

“So, how does this work?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Rosen said. “I’ve never done this before. I guess we could take you to the scenes where we found the bodies, and you could tell us what you think.”

“You said this was a copycat, right?”

“Yeah. Copycat of a copycat of the Black Dahlia murder.”

“Maybe I should lea
rn about the Black Dahlia first.”

Rosen shrugged. “Why not? I’ll get the files for you.”

27

The sun was at its zenith when the files were brought into the small library at the Bureau. The
shelves had mostly law books stacked on bookshelves with two long tables and several chairs spread out in the room. Sarah sat in the one farthest from the door and had a good view of the entire room. It was quiet, and dust coated everything.

Rosen brought in several thick files
, some of them old and worn. He stacked them on the table she was sitting at and said, “Well, you’re getting to do something a lot of people wish they could do. Go through the FBI’s files on the Black Dahlia murder.”

“I never heard of it until now.”

“It’s pretty famous. I think they made some movies, too.” He stared at the files and then at Sarah. “You sure you’re okay with this?”

“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m sure I’ve seen worse.”

He shook his head. “Probably not.”

With that, he left, leaving her alone again in the library. The files were
numerous, and she didn’t know where to start. So she just started at the top.

The first file had a
black-and-white photo of a pretty young brunette. She skipped the birthdays, place of birth, and the family history and came to the original reports by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office, as well as the FBI.

The Black Dahlia was a nickname given to a young woman name
d Elizabeth Short by the newspapers after she had been killed. William Randolph Hearst himself was rumored to have handpicked the nickname because he thought it sounded dramatic. On January 15, 1947, her body was found in Leimert Park in Los Angeles. The body had been cut in half at the waist. It was found by a young mother walking her toddler.

The body had been drained of all blood
, and they determined the killer had washed it before dumping it in the park. Every inch of her seemed to be mutilated. Her face had been cut from the corners of her mouth to her ears—the reports referred to it as a “Glasgow smile.” Sarah had never heard that term before, so she googled it on her phone. The name originated from gangs in Scotland who would cut their victims’ mouths at the corners and then beat the victims so their cheek muscles contracted and tore their cheeks across the face, leaving a scar like a large smile.

Portions of Elizabeth Short’s breasts and thighs had been removed, as had the intestines
, which were found at the scene. She had a tattoo that had been cut off and shoved inside her throat. A photograph was included in the file. The body had its arms over its head and its legs spread. It wasn’t a natural position. Someone, Sarah guessed, would’ve had to arrange her that way.

The actual death wasn’t particularly detailed. In fact, the autopsy report stated she had “Female trouble.” Sarah wondered if
, in the late ’40s, it was improper to discuss anything relating to female sexual anatomy, even in an autopsy report.

The
bulk of the file was the confessions of at least forty people claiming to be the murderer, and it was in the papers on and off for the past fifty years.

The suspects were what interested Sarah. An enormous list was attached to one folder. It included politicians, police officers, actors, bankers
, and everyone in between. She just skimmed the huge list rather than reading through it.

O
ne note caught her attention. A detective in Cleveland named John St. John was investigating a series of murders known as the Cleveland Torso Murders, which occurred in the 1930s to the 1950s. The murders were just as brutal as the Black Dahlia. The killer castrated the male victims and mutilated the genitals of the female victims. He then decapitated them and cut them in half. Some of the victims had evidence of chemical burns as well.

Forensic
investigation not being what it was now, most of the victims in the Cleveland Torso Murders weren’t identified, and they never found the heads of many of them. Detective St. John believed that the killer in the Torso Murders had also killed the Black Dahlia and then fled Los Angeles. The suspect he was going to arrest died before they could get there.

As of right now, sixty years after the crime, the killer of the Black Dahlia
, and the Cleveland Torso Murders, was still considered at large.

Sarah stared at
one of the photos from the Cleveland murders. She could almost believe the victim was still alive, except for the fact that she’d been severed completely in half
.
The lower portion of the torso with the legs was placed away from the top portion, and most of one of the breasts was gone. Revulsion filled her, and she had to close the file. Though she felt disgust and pity, no images came to her. Sometimes, she’d found, when she really didn’t want to see anything, her mind closed itself off and nothing would come to her. She wondered if unconsciously she really didn’t want to see what had happened to the Black Dahlia.

“How’s it coming?”

Startled, her head snapped up, and she saw Giovanni standing there. Sarah pressed the button on her phone and brought up her home screen to see the time.

“Wow,
have I been in here almost two hours?”

“
Time flies when you’re having fun.”

Sarah leaned back in the seat. “Nothing yet. Other than
the fact that this is horrific.”

Giovanni nodded. “It’s a legendary case. William
Randolph Hearst was the one pushing it in the papers. Back then, the police were in league with the reporters. The reporters would be at the police station, interviewing witnesses and fielding calls. But of course they didn’t want to catch the killer—the chase was what sold papers, so they buried a lot of good evidence. They probably would’ve caught the sicko if it hadn’t been for the reporters.”

“I got that impression.” She looked down
at the stacks of paper. “So Nathan Archer copied this killer, and the Blood Dahlia is copying Nathan Archer?”

He shrugged. “Looks like it. Honestly, we’re
kinda at a loss. Arnold will never say that because he doesn’t want Kyle or Gillian to know, since this case has so much press. But the killer washes the bodies with bleach and some kind of acid before he dumps them. There’s no DNA, no fibers… the most we got was a tire track near one of the bodies. We ran the type of tires but could only determine it belonged to a van or truck. Which narrows it down to about twenty million cars.”

“Why’s he copying Nathan Archer? That’s one smal
l case in the middle of nowhere.”

He shrugged. “Who knows? Arnold says there’s stuff in the world you just can’t explain. You have to live with the mystery.”

She exhaled as she realized she would have to read these files again. “I think maybe the mystery is better than knowing sometimes.”

He grinned. “Let me know if you
need anything,” he said, turning and heading for the door.

Once she was alone again, she shuffled through the files until she found the first one she had read and opened it again
, starting at the beginning.