Drop Dead Perfect (An Ellen Harper Psycho-Thriller) (24 page)

Tearing away from the street and heading south, she filled Bella in on what Big Harv had told her.

“Shit,”
Sanchez exhaled. “Why did everyone leave him there alone? That ain’t protocol.”

Ellen shook her head. “Maybe he stayed a little longer to think things through. He says he does that.”

“Yeah, the guys told me he does things a little different. Especially since his wife was murdered a few years back.”

“What did you say?” asked Ellen.

“You didn’t know?”

“No,” she said softly.

“He was out working a case when someone he’d busted when he was in uniform thought it was time to settle scores. The dude was jacked up on meth or coke or some shit, broke into Roger’s house meaning to kill him. His wife was the only one home—they’d just bought the place, I hear—and the bastard cut her up after he raped her. She bled out before Brice got home. The damn fool waited for Rogers. When he tried to kill him too, Brice shot him three times.”

Ellen felt her insides grow cold. Her divorce had been hellish, yet she couldn’t imagine what he’d gone through. Talk about the guilt trip of a lifetime. No wonder the man wanted to be alone. Cold separation from another human meant no more pain if something would happen to them. She understood that part.

“Rumor has it that he had to go through a nasty counseling program. But he made it and is one of Chicago’s best. Hot too.”

“Sorry to hear all of that. He must have been devastated,” said Ellen.

Sanchez shot her a quick glance, started to speak, gave her another stare, then let it go.

Her look said she heard something in Ellen’s voice.

“You got something to say, Sanchez?”

“Nah, not yet, maybe later.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Always do, Gringa, always do.”

They fell into silence as Ellen rammed through traffic trying to take seconds off the agonizing journey to where Brice and Joannie Carmen had been. Her mind raced with what had happened to them, and was even more conflicted after hearing about his wife. She pushed it away. Dwelling on those things only muddled up her ability to do her job.

For the second time in twenty minutes, she called upon all she had to keep the personal and the professional in proper perspective. She’d need to be at her best to be any real help.

The fourteen minutes from her office to the warehouse seemed like an eternity. Ellen swung onto 32nd Street. She didn’t have to guess where to go next. There must have been a dozen department units parked along the face of a particular building. As she sped toward them, she caught a glimpse of crime-scene tape and was grateful. At least someone had enough sense to mark it off and not let the troops stomp all over potential clues and evidence.

Throwing the truck into park, she tore through the door, grabbed her kit from the back, and raced to the scene, Sanchez close behind. After about ten steps, she noticed Big Harv’s black car roll in behind her and, for some reason, was buoyed by it.

Maybe it was a dad-and-daughter thing. Maybe a situation where there was strength in numbers. Her thoughts went to the former. It was always good to have the Old Man around when stress was higher than a Chicago moon. It was good to know he was the boss.

A short, stocky detective, Butch Dillon, approached Ellen as she placed her kit on the ground. “Harper. Good to see you here. I was on the original search team and the first unit back
to the spot after Rogers made the call to 9-1-1. I was the only one who approached the coat, and I found the phone lying next to it. We left his coat without touching it because of the streaks of blood. But I did pick up the phone, realized that it had been stomped on or smashed to the ground. Sorry. I needed to make sure it was his. I put it back as close as I could to the way I found it. Everything else is the way we found it. I have an—”

She wanted to punch him. Cops, detectives especially, knew better. But what was done was done. She inhaled and took a step closer to the shorter man, controlling her tone.

“Don’t tell me what you think you see. I need to look for myself. Make no mistake, Dillon, I wish you hadn’t touched the phone, but I can see why you did, so don’t sweat it. We’ll work with it.”

He nodded, apprehension painted on his face. He’d expected to get his ass chewed and hadn’t. Chalk one up for anger management, sort of.

Dillon said, “We’re going back through the buildings and canvassing the area again. Let us know if you need anything. There are eight officers ready to do what they’re told, okay?” He bit the inside of his lip. “Brice is a little tense, but most of us like him. We want to find him and soon.”

Ellen appreciated his words. More than Dillon knew.

“Sounds like you know your job, so let’s get to work,” she answered.

Dillon left with two more teams of three cops, and thirty seconds later, Ellen stood just outside the yellow tape, fully absorbed in the taped-off area. Nothing else mattered. Her eyes studied everything. Every bent blade of grass, the way the coat was laying, the direction of each coat arm, the striations of the blood against the tan leather, the indentations in the surrounding ground cover. Some from bodies hitting the dirt, others from footprints, still others she wasn’t
quite sure of. Nothing escaped her scrutiny. She simply wouldn’t allow it. Particularly with Brice and the women in danger.

Touching the camera draped around her neck, slowly, she lifted the yellow tape and moved underneath it, concentrating on the jacket and its relationship to the phone. Her eyes rested on another circle of blood to the right of the phone, where the ground was more disturbed than the rest in the forty-foot area.

Moving around in a semicircle, she focused on the angle of the blood pool to the phone and how Brice’s coat bisected the two. It appeared as if the coat had been flung to that spot . . . which meant Brice had removed his jacket, for whatever reason. Since the blood was on the left shoulder of the coat and then streaked toward the lower right corner, it was safe to assume that someone had bled on the jacket. Joannie? It made sense.

Ellen strained to see the inside lining of the coat and saw streaks of blood there as well. Brice had been bleeding . . . or he’d taken the coat off to cover Joannie. That seemed right. Especially since he’d called and said he had found her and to send an ambulance. She felt a sudden surge of emotion. Joannie must have thought him a knight in shining armor. Taking baby steps, Ellen inched closer to the ground disturbance and began to look at the faint impressions that appeared to be shoeprints. No question about their existence, it was just so difficult to see if there was anything good enough to build a mold around, but they’d try. They had to.

Scanning the area again, she noticed four toe prints of a left foot near a larger shoe impression. That could only mean Joannie had been barefoot. She bit her lip. Taking eight or ten more pictures, she stood up and felt someone touch her right elbow.

“I don’t know yet, Dad. There’s a lot going on here,” she said quietly.

“Best guess, girl. I need a best guess.”

“I don’t do guesses . . .” She caught herself. Ellen did have a good idea, even without all of the science she craved.

“Ellie?”

“All right. I think Brice found Joannie, or she might have found him. Here, they are close to the front of this building, so I’d say she came from that direction.” She pointed southwest.

“I see more blood over there, and it’s farther away from the coat and phone than you’d expect. That would make sense if there had been a fight or some kind of altercation, and I think there was. The blood could mean a thousand things from a bloody lip to a knife wound, or even a gunshot. I’m just not sure.”

She shifted her feet and continued. “See this area here?” Ellie waved her arm to a spot of ground ten feet away. “There were definitely people rolling or landing on the ground. Basic FT training makes that a no brainer. The fact that this blood pool is fifteen feet away confirms what I’m guessing to be true.”

“Tell me what that means to you,” said Big Harv.

“The fact that there isn’t a body, Joannie’s or Brice’s, means three things to me. Whoever had Joannie found her or followed her or whatever, and wanted her back. Brice got to her before the killer,
so the psycho had no choice but to recapture his obsession. I think maybe he wasn’t done with her, based on what he did to the first two victims. So either Brice and Joannie got away and are hiding, or he has them both.”

She couldn’t contain the shiver. Good God. That sounded so ominous, so cold. The truth often did.

“I’d say that’s a fair guess. If Brice and Joannie had gotten away, I think they would have contacted someone by now,” said Big Harv. His voice was steady

“So let’s say he has them, in theory. How would he have gotten them away from here? I can see that the street is secluded, and our warehouse search ran off the squatters, so the chances of a witness are slim. But he would’ve still had to get both of them under control and he only had a few minutes. Not to mention, Brice is a big man
.”

Slowly nodding her head, Ellen studied the area again. “So he had to get them out of sight quickly. That means he had a way to transport them, or he took them somewhere close,” said Ellen.

“I agree. But where―”

Just then Detective Dillon approached them. “Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been through the buildings a third time, and there’s just no trace of Detective Rogers or Miss Carmen. What now?”

Big Harv held up his hand and turned to his daughter. “Ellie?”

But she’d already moved to the other side of the taped area, closer to the building
, and the broken sidewalk a few feet from the brick exterior of the warehouse. She knelt on the ground and snapped several shots, then placed her hand on the spot again, feeling with her fingers. The softer section of ground displayed ridges, like from a tire track, but it was so hard to see. The grass on the other side of the tracks wasn’t disturbed much because that area of the soil wasn’t as soft as the other. Nevertheless, there was something there. A truck? An SUV? The ridges were pronounced, as far as she could tell, so that made sense. Then she saw it.

The thin line of blood spots had darkened, but they were still crimson enough to be recognized as blood. The line went on for a few feet then was abruptly gone. It disappeared as the ground gave way to a
fragmented section of sidewalk.

Rising from her squatting position, Ellie went under the yellow tape and stood four feet
from the building, scrutinizing the ground for more traces of blood. She saw none. She touched the brick wall, running her hand down the side of the building, then gave it a quick kick. Frustration. It wouldn’t help, but it felt good to lash out at something. She went around the corner of the building and saw another door that had been sealed and padlocked, probably for years. Another dead end.

After a few more minutes and two more kicks, she saw nothing else to refute the obvious and turned back to talk to Big Harv and Dillon, who had been joined by Bella Sanchez.

“Anything else, other than checking the foundation with your foot?” asked Big Harv.

She raised her palms to the sky. “It’s great therapy. Anyway, I need to make some molds of this area because I see tire tracks. It looks to me that the killer might have had a vehicle nearby and possibly moved Brice and Joannie with it. That makes sense, I guess. And I found more blood in that direction, then it stopped. And since Dillon’s group can’t locate Brice and Joannie in the buildings, we’ll have to rely on Hokum’s Razor and go with the obvious.”

“You don’t sound so convinced,” said her dad, watching her closely.

“That must be it. Based on what Jansen said before he clammed up, and his appearance on the traffic video . . . oh hell, it just makes me wonder.”

“Wonder what?” asked Sanchez.

Ellen exhaled. “If the killer had more help.”

CHAPTER-44

After making sure his new male guest had received a second injection of sedative, Kyle did the same for the latest, but not the least, of the potential wives he’d gathered for his brother. She slumbered easily in the chair where he’d once supposed the answer to his dreams would arise. In a way that vision had come true. He’d rid himself of a burden most men would never understand, brother or not.

He glanced up at Damon still hanging from the spike on the faded wooden wall next to Joannie Carmen, his latest favorite “woman.” He felt nothing for either of them, except a sense of freedom. Any true emotional attachment had vanished. That ship had sailed years prior, he now realized. He thought he’d cared for Damon, but that simply wasn’t true. Another illusion that death’s reality had shattered. It had been guilt and obligation, nothing more.

Detective Rogers moaned.

Kyle walked over, pulled the syringe from his pocket, and gave him another dose of his own personal barbiturate concoction. The man was strong, and getting the correct dose for anyone was not an exact science. Better to be safe than sorry. He couldn’t afford the detective waking up, even in his bound state.

He took note of the detective’s helplessness. Kyle’s captive had given him more trouble than he’d expected—he had the bruises to prove it—yet, as in his every endeavor of excellence, he’d won out. He’d triumphed under unusual circumstances, again.