Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (3 page)

6

The condominiums were someplace grandparents went to retire. This was the impression Giovanni got when he parked in front of Arnold Rosen’s condo and sent him a text message that he was here. He waited a solid fifteen minutes, and Rosen didn’t come out and didn’t text back.

Giovanni stepped out of the car and glanced around. One thing the condos did have going for them
was how quiet they were. No children, no cars racing up and down the road. In fact, the street leading up to here was a side street in the industrial section of DC, away from the politics, the glitz, and the glamour.

Rosen’s condo was on the second floor
, and Giovanni hopped up two steps at a time. He found unit 2F and knocked. Rosen answered a short while later.

Rosen was older with white hair and the weathered face that said he’d seen a lot in his years. He was wearing almost the same outfit Giovanni was—black suit and dark tie—but he somehow wore it better.
More naturally
, Giovanni thought.

“Agent Rosen? I’m Giovanni Adami.”

“You’re late.”

“Um, no, sir. I’ve been waiting outside fifteen minutes. I texted you.”

“I don’t text, son. Let me get my sidearm.”

Rosen took off his jacket,
put the holster on with his Bureau-issued sidearm, and then walked out of the condo and locked the door behind him.

“Agent Vidal said we’re going to Philly.”

“We are indeed,” he said, putting his jacket back on. “You drive.”

Giovanni unlocked the doors and waited until Rosen
climbed in and put on his seat belt before he started the car. He pulled away from the condominiums and headed toward the freeway entrance.

“I read the reports,” Giovanni said. “A copycat of the Black Dahlia. That’s pretty crazy.”

“I’m not exactly sure what it is. And I’m not convinced it is a copycat of that exactly.”

“Looked like it to me. The victims are cut in half, raped
, and sodomized before death. Fecal matter is found on or near the victims. Tattoos are cut out and shoved in the throat. It’s nearly identical.”

“Nearly, but not quite.”

“The faces?” Giovanni asked.

“Yeah. The subject removes the victim’s faces. Six victims and we haven’t recovered a single
face. So that begs the question, what’s he doing with them? And why is that the one thing he does differently from the Black Dahlia?”

“I was thinking maybe because it makes it harder for us to identify the bodies.”

“Maybe. But if he’s even done an internet search on forensics, he’ll know that the teeth are how we identify ninety-five percent of victims in homicides. And he didn’t remove any teeth. So I’m not sure that’s it.”

Giovanni noticed a wedding ring on Rosen’s hand, but he
hadn’t said goodbye to anyone in the condo.

“So who we going to see?” Giovanni asked.

“A retired sheriff.”

“Yeah? For what?”

“There was another series of murders before your time. About ten years back. Similar to the Black Dahlia, except that the Sheriff’s Office and the forensics units didn’t know what the Black Dahlia was, and they never contacted us about it. They were nearly identical… except that the subject removed the victim’s faces.”

Giovanni didn’t know how he felt about Rosen calling these
sick bastards “subjects.” It made them sound less monstrous—as if they were part of some clinical study or something.

“Did they catch the killer?” he said.

“Yeah. This sheriff put a bullet into his throat that blew out the back of his head.”

Giovanni thought about this. If
the case in Pennsylvania was a copycat, then the case they were dealing with now was a copycat of a copycat. He’d never seen or even heard of such a thing. He wondered why Kyle would assign this to him as his first case in Behavioral Science.

The drive was long but pleasant. In the summer months, Pennsylvania was about as pretty a
s any place Giovanni had ever seen. During winter, there was almost nowhere he had been to that was more bleak. Then again, he’d grown up in Arizona, and the heat of the desert had always appealed to him. During the summer, growing up in the small town of Hyrum, you couldn’t even sit down in your car while wearing shorts because the leather seats would fry your skin.

Once they hit I-83, they’d already been in the car nearly an hour and a half. And in that time, they had hardly spoken
fifty words. Giovanni would ask about Rosen or the Bureau, and the old man would answer him with a “yes” or a “no” but wouldn’t engage. He wasn’t a man used to talking about himself, Giovanni thought. Which was just fine by him—he preferred silence, too.

“Take the Harrisburg Pike exit,” Rosen said.

Giovanni did as he was told. The countryside here was lush green with plenty of farms and acres of grassland with roaming cows and horses. Giovanni watched them as he drove by. Rolling green hills wasn’t exactly the type of scenery he’d become used to the past few years.

Rosen checked the address on
a slip of paper and then told him to turn right onto a residential street. He directed him through a maze of neighborhoods before they reached a dilapidated white home with a truck in the driveway.

“
Here it is,” he said.

Giovanni parked at
the curb and turned the car off. Rosen checked his pocket to make sure he had his badge and FBI ID and then said, “Let me do the talking.”

With that, Rosen got out of the car
, and Giovanni followed him. They walked up the driveway and opened a chain-link fence. Just as Giovanni was closing it behind him, barking startled him. A black lab sprinted around the corner right at them.

Instinctively, Giovanni reached for his sidearm.

“Easy,” Rosen said.

The lab stopped about five feet away and barked but didn’t come any closer. Rosen walked right in front of it onto the front porch
, and Giovanni hesitated and then did the same. He never took his eyes off the dog, even when it had turned away.

“It’s just a lab,” Rosen said. “You got some jittery reflexes there.”

“I just got startled is all.”

“Well
, take it easy. I don’t need the paperwork of shooting some poor guy’s dog.”

A few moments later
, a man answered the door. He was heavyset and wore a flannel shirt tucked into some jeans with a wide belt buckle. He looked through thick glasses at them, from one man to the other.

“Can I help you?”

“Mitch Bullock?” Rosen said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m Special Agent Arnold Rosen, and this is Agent Giovanni Adami. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”

“What’s this about?”

“It’s about Nathan Archer.”

Bullock stood
silently for a moment, his eyes passing between both men again. Then he nodded and opened the door wider. “You may as well come on in, I guess.”

Giovanni followed Rosen in. The home was clean but filled with so man
y decorations and religious paintings that it appeared cluttered. One entire wall was taken up by a painting of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai. Another wall had a life-size portrait of Christ rising from the tomb. Over the television were various medals and commendations. Several were from the military.

Giovanni scanned all the paintin
gs and decorations, but Rosen took only one quick glance.

“So,” Bullock said, settling into
his couch, “what about him?”

Rosen sat down
across from him in the living room. He put his arm on the armrest and tapped each of his fingers against it before speaking. Giovanni had seen him do that on his lap when he sat down in his car.

“I understand you were the one that discovered him?” Rosen said.

“Discovered and then killed. But not by choice.” Bullock slid his finger along a scar on his cheek. “He did that to me when I asked him to come down and talk to me.”

Rosen nodded. “It was great police work. I read the initial reports.”

“Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming on?”

Rosen grinned. “But in a small county, there’s no one to look them over. Especially when it’s the sheriff writing them. You don’t have an
internal affairs department like most major police departments.”

“You saying I’m a liar?” he said sternly.

“No, absolutely not. I’m just saying no one ever asked you questions about your reports. I don’t care about anything in there except one thing: How’d you find him?”

The sheriff was quiet a second, glaring at Rosen. “I wrote that in the reports.”

“You wrote that you had an anonymous tip that he worked at a hospital and had scratches. But you never identified the tip or how they knew.”

“Wouldn’t be anonymous if I identified them, now would it?”

Rosen kept his grin and glanced up to the shelf of medals above the television. “Vietnam?”

“Yup,” the sheriff said, leaning back.

“Me too. You wanna know something I learned in Vietnam? The government is full of shit. And there were two shooters that killed Kennedy.”

The sheriff, though he looked like he was trying not to, smiled. “Because every infantryman knows the body falls in the direction of the shot. And with Kennedy that means he was hit from a direction different than Oswald and then hit again from another direction.”

Rosen shook his head. “When I was taught that in basic and thought back to the assassination, I couldn’t believe how much they lied and didn’t even care. And this wasn’t some guy off the street. They covered up and lied about how a president was killed.”

“Damn shame. That young man had a lot of potential.”

Rosen leaned forward. “Don’t be that government, Mitch. Don’t cover things up. People need to hear the truth.”

The sheriff looked flustered. “Wh
y do you even care who the anonymous tip was? It was years ago.”

Rosen leaned back. “You retired after this case. Early retirement. Something in the case caused you to do that. And a man with those medals up on his wall wouldn’t back down because he was cut. We’ve all been cut
, and we move on. Something else happened. What was it?”

The sheriff sighed. “Why are you here, Agent Rosen? What do you care about a long dead case?”

“Because I’ve got six young women killed in the same identical fashion over the past six months. Think about that, Sheriff. One woman a month. Killed in an identical—not similar,
identical—
method as the victims of Nathan Archer. And then I read through your reports and find some anonymous tipster, so I’m wondering if there’s some connection. Maybe the tipster can help me, too.”

The sheriff rose and said, “I need a beer. You guys want a beer?”

“No, thank you.”

The sheriff hobbled into the kitchen. Giovanni could see a cane leaned up against the wall, but the sheriff didn’t get it. Instead, he used the wall for balance. A fridge opened
, and he heard the top of a can pop before the sheriff came back in, this time stopping and leaning against the wall.

“
The most important thing for me is that my cases not get reopened. If I tell you what you want, all them defense attorneys with clients I’ve put away are gonna be combing through my cases lookin’ to get their clients out.”

“You and I are from a different time,
Mitch. Where a man’s handshake was better than a contract. I give you my word as a man; I will not reveal anything you tell me.” He glanced to Giovanni. “And neither will he. If he does, I will contradict him on the record and say that he is mistaken.”

The sheriff nodded. “Was a young girl
, Sarah King. She was Amish, up there in the community in Lancaster. She left when she was seventeen. Ran away, I think. Ain’t seen her since.”

“The girl knew who Nathan was?”

The sheriff hesitated. “Not exactly.”

“What then?”

He sipped his beer. “She said one of the victims talked to her… from the grave.”

Giovanni
looked at Rosen, who didn’t move. He kept the sheriff’s gaze and then said softly, “You used a psychic?”

“I don’t know what she was. All I know is, she helped me twice. The first time, her and her daddy came walking into the Sheriff’s Office and asked to see me.” He grinned, his eyes
on the carpet. “She sat in a chair in my office, and her feet couldn’t touch the floor. She was just kicking them and had this smile on her face. We’d found a body in the river, and her dad told me she had something to tell me about that. We thought it was an accident.”

“What’d she say?”

“She told me the body belonged to a man who jumped in on purpose. That his wife left him and he lost his job and didn’t want to live anymore. But he forgot to leave a note. So he wanted me to deliver a message to his wife.”