Authors: George Fong
Fragmented (9 page)
12
Tuesday -
By the
time Alvin Cooper found his way back to the secluded single story bungalow house, the sun had already fallen behind the hills and the sky was as dark as a raisin. He tapped a nervous finger on the steering wheel, unhappy with his current situation. His world had again become a dilemma.
The air was balmy and the dust that kicked up from his truck’s tires clung to the hairs on his arm. Cooper glided the truck down the gravel road that led to a detached garage hidden alongside the L-shaped house. The old wooden structure was scarcely sound, the door held into place by rusty hinges and a large rock placed strategically in front to prevent it from slamming shut. He parked under a large oak tree, which swallowed up the truck in its dark shadow.
Cooper exited the driver’s side door, grabbing a brown paper sack from the passenger’s seat. His breathing labored, he had a sour taste in his mouth, angry with himself for allowing the cops to find him so easily. He got away this time, having found a new place to stay, but maybe next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky. He was also upset that he had been unable to delete everything on his computer before getting the hell out.
He approached the front door to the two-bedroom house. Cooper pulled a silver key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. He jiggled the key and pushed hard on the flimsy front door. The frame was so misshapen Cooper needed to punt the bottom of the door to get it opened. The smell of mildew was overpowering. He walked into the living room where stacks of cardboard boxes formed multiple pyramids across the floor. He placed the paper sack on top of one of the stacks before flicking on a light switch, and a dim lamp illuminated the room in an off-white glow. Cooper collapsed onto a broken chair.
He reached over and grabbed the brown sack. It crunched onto his lap. He retrieved a bag of Doritos and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He stared at the whiskey’s black and white label, tracing the scrolling calligraphy with his thumb, then unscrewed the top and took a swig. A sharp twinge rushed to his head as the snap of liquor hit his throat and swooshed down his gullet. He held his breath until the burn subsided. He let his body melt, closing his eyes and resting his head.
The house was recently rented but Cooper didn’t know for how long. The renter was a new friend he had made on the Internet, Klaus Monroe. Trading porn can be interesting, but meeting people was far more intriguing.
Yesterday, Klaus Monroe had invited Cooper over for a meet-and-greet. Share a little drink, a little food, maybe more. It was all fine with Cooper until
Monroe
made the fatal mistake of misreading Cooper’s intentions.
Monroe
, a former ward of the state, confessed to Cooper his arrest for child molestation. After endlessly bragging about his escapades, his conquests, Cooper grew tired and wanted him to shut up.
Throughout that night,
Monroe
laughed incessantly at events that led to his incarceration. After draining a cheap bottle of bourbon,
Monroe
’s words became an endless string of incoherent sentences, nonsensical bullshit. Finally, Cooper had enough. A lull in the conversation and Cooper took the opportunity to slip away from the room. Standing outside smoking a cigarette, Cooper found a metal pipe lying in the dirt near the front of the house. Scraping off the dirt, he measured the weight and heft of the steel. He returned to find
Monroe
slumped low in an overstuffed chair, the empty bottle of bourbon cradled by his side. With a gentle hand, Cooper tilted
Monroe
’s head to one side, then swung the pipe, striking
Monroe
across the left temporal lobe. A heavy thud resonated a low-sounding thump, like a watermelon rolling off a kitchen counter onto the floor. He struck again, this time the distinct sound of crushing bone.
Monroe
never opened his eyes. He slumped to the right as his head fell over the armrest. Droplets of blood dripped from
Monroe
’s tongue onto the hardwood floor. If not for the blood, one might have thought
Monroe
had simply fallen asleep
.
Cooper’s eyes popped open. He was no longer recalling the past, back living in the present. His haze evaporated, returning him to reality, to the spot where he had killed someone twelve hours earlier. Although killed was hardly the correct word. More like liberated. Yes, the world was liberated from the likes of Klaus Monroe.
He stood from the chair and brushed off his pants as though trying to rid his clothes of the stench of Mr. Monroe. He was feeling agitated, especially after a very disturbing conversation earlier in the afternoon. A cop had been trolling the Internet, trying to bait him. Which is what forced Cooper to leave and move into
Monroe
’s home.
He placed the bottle of Jack on the wooden floor and pushed himself out of the chair. He yawned, the alcohol taking hold of his senses. He blinked his eyelids hard, shaking off the fatigue before heading out the front door. He made his way to the back of the truck. The rear window of the camper shell was smoked, prohibiting anyone from looking in. He took out his keys and tried a number of them before finding the one that unlocked the back lift-gate. He pulled it opened and dug around in the dark for his suitcase. The back end was full of junk. It took a few minutes of
randomly swishing his arm through the piles of loose bags and boxes before he found the handle. He yanked hard. As the suitcase fell from the heap, so did an arm protruding out of a burlap sack. Cooper took a hard look at
Monroe
’s limp appendage lying across the lift-gate, the rest of him still stuffed under the burlap fruit sack. Cooper pushed the cold limb inside the truck as if stuffing an overhead compartment aboard a crowded airplane. By early tomorrow, the summer heat would certainly engulf the truck in blowflies. Cooper needed to dispose of the body tonight, even with cops swarming around. The truck would be useless if it stank like a corpse.
Cooper carried the suitcase into the house and placed it on the living room floor. He unzipped the bag and pulled opened the flap, exposing neatly folded clothes, several pieces of electronic equipment and a number of CDs and floppy disks. He stacked them by the side of the chair and then dragged the suitcase to the back bedroom, placing it on top of an unmade bed.
He headed out the front door, turning on the porch light as he passed through the entryway. With the light on, no one would be suspicious that anything was wrong, that Klaus Monroe was no longer living here. That Klaus Monroe was no longer living. Cooper hopped behind the wheel of the Chevy and fired up the engine, grinding the gears into reverse. Already the smell of decomposing flesh began to seep into the cabin. A blowfly landed on the truck’s steering wheel. Cooper flicked a finger at the lone parasite. It smacked against the windshield before flying off. He backed the truck out, made a two-point turn and headed up the dirt trail toward the highway. Cooper intended to find a commercial dumpster to deposit the remains of Klaus Monroe. By the time someone found his body, he would be a John Doe, just another transient who succumbed to an illness or drugs. That gave Cooper more time to find an answer to his predicament.
The truck crawled forward under the shade of oak trees. Before coming to the end of the dirt road, Cooper felt his cell phone vibrate in his pants’ pocket. He pulled it out, flipped opened the cover and scanned the caller ID. Cooper smiled and pushed the green answer button. “Well, hello.”
“Where are you?” the caller said through a cloud of background street noise.
“At
Monroe
’s. Where the hell are you?”
“Close.” The caller hesitated for a beat. “Where is he?”
“In the back.” Cooper chuckled, then added, “Asleep.”
“You mean he’s dead.”
It saddened him his friend wasn’t in the mood to play games. “Yes, dead.” Cooper paused, took in a deep breath, catching a whiff of the decaying
Monroe
in the warm, moist air. “You coming?”
The caller again hesitated before answering. “Yeah. I’ll meet you and give you a hand.”
13
Tuesday –
Jack ended
his phone call with Tom Cannon, and slouched in his office chair, staring at a copy of the photo taken from the computer of Petroski, or whatever his name really was. It had been less than twelve hours, according to Harrington, that the photo was taken and they were no closer to locating the girl. Marquez had taken a break from assisting Harrington. She grabbed an empty chair from another pod and rolled it next to Jack, where she plopped down and elevated her feet on his desk.
“Looks like our Petroski is nothing more than a borrowed name,” Jack said.
Marquez raised an eyebrow. “Borrowed?”
“Tom went to the Redburn address and searched the residence. They found Mr. Petroski in the bathtub and—let me give you a hint—he wasn’t taking a bath.”
“So your suspect needed an identity and Mr. Petroski was the unfortunate volunteer.”
“I’ll bet our suspect met Petroski on the Internet trading smut. They meet face-to-face at some point in time, even become friends. Then, opportunity came a-knocking and Petroski finds himself the recipient of a chalk outline.”
“You think our UNSUB knows we’re on to him?”
“From what the detectives could tell, Petroski had been dead about a week. If we didn’t find him, the locals most certainly would have. With this heat, I’m surprised the neighbors didn’t already call the police about the smell.” Jack sighed before continuing. “Our guy had enough time to rent the
Chico
residence, set up shop and kidnap a young girl. It’s only a matter of time before he realizes we know the real Mr. Petroski is face down in a pool of sludge. He’ll need another identity.”
“That means—”
“That means,” Jack interrupted, “he’ll kill again.”
“If he hasn’t already.”
His desk phone rang. The front switchboard operator.
“Agent
Paris
, I just got a call from the Chico PD. They’re responding to a homicide and possibly a missing sixteen-year-old.”
“We were just with
Chico
. They didn’t mention any reported kidnappings. How long ago did this happen?”
“Don’t know. I just got the call.” The switchboard operator gave Jack the name and number of the detective who called.
Jack immediately started dialing. While it rang, Jack looked over at Marquez and said in a low voice, “Looks like we may have just found out who our kidnapped child is.”
The phone call connected to the Chico Police Department dispatch center and was routed to Detective Mark Colfax. Jack made a quick introduction and jumped into the pertinent questions
.
“We got the call around
,” Colfax said, “from the 911 operator advising that a Mr. Paul Baker had called in screaming that his wife had been murdered. We dispatched two units to the location but they couldn’t get Mr. Baker to come to the door. The officers were concerned he was armed. It took another hour and a half just to convince him to come out of the house with his hands raised. By the time we got the whole story out of him, it was nearly nine. Said his daughter was missing. We posted a
“What does she look like?” Jack asked.
“Five feet, ninety pounds, slender, athletic, dark hair, shoulder length.”
Jack stared at the photo while Colfax described his kidnapped victim. Without confirmation Jack was only guessing, but his inclination told him it was the same girl. Jessica Baker. Jack informed Colfax on their investigations, their search and the photo. Even without seeing the photo, Colfax believed they were the same girl.
“What happened to the mother?”
Colfax’s voice lowered as he cleared his throat. “Pretty ugly. Husband came home and found her in the bathtub. Head bashed in, throat slit ear to ear. It’s amazing her head wasn’t detached. The husband told me when he returned from work, wife’s car was in the drive. He went to the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, went through the mail. Daughter had stayed home sick with the flu. Thought she was still asleep and didn’t want to disturb her. When the wife didn’t appear, he started searching the house. That’s when he came across her body.”
“Forensic sweep the place?”
“We’re just getting started. I had a difficult time locating all our crime scene examiners this late at night.”
“What about blood and
“No shortage there. There’s blood everywhere. CSI should be able to find something in that mess.”
“I can send our ERT crew if you’re short-handed,” Jack offered.
“Could use the help.”
“I’ll contact our team leader to give you a call and get you whatever help you may need at the scene. Detective, I think it would be beneficial to both our agencies if we meet to coordinate the investigation. Better chances of locating our killer and finding Jessica Baker if we work together.”
“That’s fine with me,” Colfax replied. “When?”
