Charity Kills (A David Storm Mystery) (13 page)

“Any defensive wounds on her arms or legs?” He paused and then went on. “Find anything anywhere?”

“None. She didn’t put up a fight and there were no skin cells or blood under her nails, she didn’t mark him.”

“She would have had to know him or them, and had to trust them to put herself in that situation then,” said Storm.

“Looks that way or she got caught totally off guard by one or both. Whoever took her last is the one you want, I’m sure of it, whether it’s one or two, and whoever he or they are, they covered their tracks pretty damn well.” Alisha was still looking at her deceased child.

Storm thought out loud. “The way she was killed and the lack of evidence suggests he knew what he was doing ...Hey, Alisha, you got a copier?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes, over there, why?”

Storm hesitated. He had already drawn Russell and Grady into his anonymous detective team and now he was about to attempt to bring Alisha into it. He looked her directly in the eyes. If she wavered she was out, but if she held his gaze, he had another recruit. “Alisha, I think our girl is one of seven girls killed over the past seven years. I think whoever killed her might have killed them all, and if that is true, you know what we got.”

Alisha gasped. She looked back in Storm’s eyes and he saw she understood this was no time for teasing.

“Seven girls over seven years? How do you know? What has led you to this jump to conclusion? How come it hasn’t come up before now?”

“I think there has been a cover-up. I think some very powerful people are behind the cover-up and I think police personnel and the mayor’s office have contributed to it, too.”

“Shit, Storm, what are you getting us into?” Her shock registered but she had listened this far and he could tell she would let him go on before she made up her mind.

“Alisha, this is what I know.” Storm showed her the list of the seven girls in total including Leslie, whose bodies had been found near or on the grounds of the stadium.

“Each girl died of mysterious circumstances, each died by having their throats slashed.” Alisha nodded.

He told her about his meeting with the people from the Livestock Show and how the mayor’s rep has been there, as well. He told her about how Russell and a friend had researched all the girls deaths they could find from television archives and all of his suspicions. When he finished his recap, he again looked her directly in the eyes. It was her turn to talk, to join him or walk away.

“OK, if I’m in this, what do you want from me?” asked Alisha, still sounding uncertain as to what she could add.

“You now have the list of the six more girls’ names. These would have all happened before you got hired. I want you to pull the files on them to see if you can find anything that connects them. This has to stay on the down low and you have to do this without the director or anyone knowing about it. If we get found out by anyone not only will we all be screwed, but I feel these murders will stay covered up. And Alisha, I promise, if we break this, you get credit,” added Storm.

“Bite me, Storm. I don’t give a shit about credit. If one guy or a gang did this, I want’ em; fuck the credit.”

Storm just smiled. He handed her a copy the list of names Russell and Grady had given him. He put his finger to his lips, making the sign that said, “Shush.” That’s all he knew he had to do—Alisha would do the rest. He then waved goodbye.

Storm had been thinking all day about one more recruit to enlist to the team. He thought he knew who he could trust and who he couldn’t. Inside the department he came up with a big goose egg, that is with the exception of the man he was going to see next.

Returning to Reisner Street, he saw Sergeant Hernandez sitting at his desk shuffling papers for the lieutenant. Busy work occupied much of Hernandez’s days and Storm knew Hernandez was bored to death. Hernandez was a street cop and a good one, and by now he would have been a detective if he hadn’t been hurt. He needed Hernandez in the group to do some research on serial killers and look for files on his list of girls in police archives. He needed Hernandez to pull the unsolved case files on these girls and see if any connections could be made between them, much as he had asked Alisha to do. Hernandez could do the research on the computer and no one would be the wiser. To Storm’s knowledge, Houston had never had a serial killer before, but he knew theory, profiles, and documentation would exist in the FBI files and that there had to be background on what led people like Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy to commit some of the most heinous crimes in last century.

Storm was convinced the team he was assembling had only a short time to digest as much as they could that might lead them to a killer. He needed Hernandez to round it out. He caught Hernandez’s attention and motioned him to follow him, disappearing around the corner toward the coffee room. Hernandez got up and followed him.

A Team Comes Together

Storm returned home again after dark, but this time, no angst or melancholy accompanied him. In the past years he would have simply bought himself a bottle of Jack, drunk himself into a coma and woken up the next morning with a bad hangover and absolutely no direction in his life. Tonight he had other things on his mind and sleep evaded him, but this was no call for a drink. His mind sought answers to tough questions even though some of those answers might scare him. He scrawled the questions on a yellow note pad:

1. Why was this girl killed?

2. Why was she singled out? What did she have in common with the other girls we’ve found records on?

3. What kind of person kills attractive young women?

4. Why is the mayor’s office involved at all, let alone having a spy at his meeting with the Show’s people?

5. What does Hebert know? Why isn’t he sharing it?

He thought a minute and then added the most disturbing question of all:

6. Do we have a serial murderer hunting in Houston????

He had put his covert plan in motion and now there would be no going back. He had talked to Russell and planned a meeting with his co-conspirators for the next morning at Russell’s condo. It was a place they could meet without fear of being seen or overheard. Nobody knew of his relationship with the group and it needed to stay that way.

* * * *

Russell had eagerly agreed to the meeting for the next morning, and although 9:00 AM was a little early for him, this mystery and solving the girls’ murders had become more important. Russell’s anticipation also was mounting and he was anxious to know who besides Grady and Storm would show up in the morning. Nobody from the station would know or care that Grady had gone to his place to help him with something, but what about the others? How were they involved and why? Guess I’ll just have to wait until tomorrow morning, he realized.

Russell was up at 7:00 AM—an hour he hadn’t seen in years. He had had trouble sleeping, but his lack of sleep had come from excitement. He had purpose for the first time in a coon’s age. No long night out in a local watering hole, no waking up with who knows who in his bed and not caring, except for when she left. He and Storm were working on something together, something important, a mystery he wanted to solve.

* * * *

Storm arrived at Russell’s at about 8:30 AM; it was an easy drive that time of day since it was against the flow of the ghastly lines of commuters all traveling in the opposite direction going to work. The guest parking at Russell’s building was wide open and the doorman just waved to Storm as he entered the building. Seeing him reminded Storm that he needed to tell Russell to put together a story for the doorman to cover any suspicious activity the next few days. He didn’t know how long or how many meetings they would have to have, but he knew they were all in it now and they needed to keep it under wraps for as long as possible.

The coffee was already on when Storm walked in. Right behind him was Grady with a box full of files and tapes. Russell was prepared for the tapes and disks; he had the latest in flat screens and players.

When Alisha arrived she also carried a box stuffed with files. She had just been introduced to Russell and Grady and they had gathered around the dining room table when the doorbell rang again.

This time Storm answered it and invited Sergeant Hernandez in. Storm had left Hernandez with a decision to make the night before, and it looked as if he had taken him up on it. He, too, carried a large brief case overflowing with the files, all he could find on the girls without garnering any suspicion when he left the precinct.

Each of the five poured their coffee, doctored it up, and sat down. The mood was excruciatingly serious at the table when Storm started off. “Each of you has a piece to this puzzle and I trust all of you. This is not your normal investigation. This is something we all have to keep so quiet you could hear a cockroach fart.” He looked around the table, and everyone grinned in agreement. “Let me start with what we do know.”

Storm began to lay out the facts as they knew them:

“Fact # 1: On Sunday morning around 4:30 AM a young woman was found dead in the trash dumpster outside the stadium by a cleaning person. By the way, that guy was freaked out and we can assume he had nothing to do with the crime.

“Fact # 2: Her throat had been cut and she bled out, but not in the dumpster; there was not enough blood there, so she had to be dumped there after she died.

“Fact # 3: Her clothes and purse were found later in yet another dumpster on the other side of building. Her clothes were bloody, so she had to have been killed while she was dressed, then stripped and abused.

“Fact # 4: She had had sex with someone prior to the killing; spermicide and semen were found in her vagina and on her panties, so she had put her panties back on after the first guy.”

Alisha piped in, “The girl had been molested after her death, as well. It’s important to note that the person who did that was most probably the killer; she had been anally abused postmortem, but no semen was found.”

Storm went on to tell them everything he knew about the murder and the girl. Around the table the shock of what they were hearing began to turn into disgust and rage. Not a person at the table was unaffected by what they were hearing.

“Now I want to go over my suspicions and what I base them on. Sergeant Hernandez was the first to give me a clue that there had been multiple murders in the Dome area, when he mentioned that I got
another
dead girl found at the Dome. It started me wondering about what he meant, so I got Russell involved and he brought in Grady to help me check old data at the station to see if they could find any references to other murders near or around the stadium grounds. They found reports of six girls having been found dead near the stadium or on the grounds; that makes one a year for the past seven years. All young, all pretty, and all unsolved.

“I recruited Alisha and Sergeant Hernandez to go through their files to see what they could find with the caveat that they had to keep their searches under the radar of their respective offices.” He looked at Alisha and Hernandez. “Since they are here, I have to assume they are with us and until we solve this, we all have to keep what we are doing secret. There could be a lot of heavyweight pressure come down on us if this leaks out, so we will only talk on safe phones and meet here at Russell’s till we figure this out. Russell, you wanna start?”

Beginning with Russell, each of them proceeded to report on their individual discoveries to the moment. Russell and Grady told how they had found the names of the other six girls and showed the videos of news reports from the times of the murders.

Alisha had found files on all six of the girls from the M.E.’s office records and she went over the method of each girl’s death. All had been killed by having their throats cut and all had been anally raped postmortem. None had defensive wounds, and each had been choked before death. She also went on to describe each girl’s appearance and concluded by noting that they were similar in appearance and age.

Sergeant Hernandez pulled his files and followed along. He, too, had found all six murders. He had found the reports in the unsolved case files of the precinct, he told them. “I remember the last four girls’ deaths from my time working the desk. I also remember thinking that none of these murders were vigorously investigated at the time; they all seemed to fall through the cracks, no leads ever found and no person of interest ever named.”

But now he also had more information; more background on the victims and ultimately, more commonality. All of the girls worked in or around downtown Houston. All worked for big companies where they were only a paycheck number. All came from small towns in Texas; they had headed to the big city to pursue their dreams in the fast lane, find a job, and maybe a husband. None of the girls had any family to speak of, so nobody to stand up for them or push for their deaths to be solved.

Grady interrupted. “Does it appear any of the girls knew each other?”

“Not from what I can find, nor were any of them from the same town. Two of them worked for Tejas Petroleum (but at different times), two in big law firms, one for the county, and the last two for big firms servicing the oil patch,” replied Sergeant Hernandez.

“Were they all killed during the Rodeo?” asked Storm.

“Yes, all of them, although last year’s victim was killed later than the others, late in March.”

Russell jumped in to remind them that the dates of the Show had been moved to later dates last year. They had changed them to coincide with college spring break crowd, which also made it last longer. By changing the dates the Show could run twenty days instead of fourteen.

Next, they watched the disk of the films from the security cameras that Storm had gotten from the Show. The surveillance of the center’s main entry and escalator proved to contain nothing helpful. Leslie never appeared to have gone into that building. But the stadium disk was a different matter. They saw the girl enter and go to the elevator with other women and men, but one man seemed to be paying much more attention to her than to the other women.