Profile of Fear: Book Four of the Profile Series (Volume 4) (3 page)

“No chance. That camera is new and hadn’t even been hooked up yet. I put a fire under their butts to get it installed before something else happens outside their store.”

“That’s too bad. Normally I would meet you in my office to discuss my findings, but there are a couple of things I want you to see as we talk. Our victim is a white teenaged female who weighs 110 pounds and is 65 inches tall. I estimate she is between fifteen- and seventeen-years-old. Her body is in the early stages of decomposition.”

Cameron shuffled his feet impatiently. “Okay, Bryan. Don’t start from the beginning. Let’s go to good stuff that will help me put away the monster who did this to her.”

“Manner of death is homicide. Cause of death is exsanguination from the throat wound. Aspiration of blood in her respiratory passage caused her to choke to death on her own blood. The throat cut was deep, and there were no signs of hesitation cuts or defensive wounds. She either didn’t see it coming or was restrained. Judging from the bruising on her wrists and ankles, I vote she was restrained.”

“Judging from the lack of blood at the scene, would you say the murder happened somewhere else, and the body was dumped behind the mall?”

“Good guess.”

“Any identifying marks to help us identify her?”

“That’s what I wanted to show you.” Bryan lifted the sheet to expose the hip of the body and pointed to a circular mark. “She has a relatively fresh tattoo. It looks like a brand, like they put on cattle.”

Cameron leaned closer, and then took out his cell to take a photo. “Yeah, I see that. Looks like the letters inside the circle are a ‘J’ and an ‘O.’

“I’m hoping it will help you identify her. I also took an x-ray of her teeth. The girl had good dental care. She’s worn braces to straighten her teeth, and has a filling in one of her molars. We’ll enter her DNA in the Missing Persons DNA Database, as well as the FBI’s CODIS DNA databases. I’ll let you know if we get a match.”

“We’ve got three missing girls that match her description. I hope this is one of them so her family gets some kind of closure.”

<><><>

Three weeks later, Cameron was reading his email when his cell went off. Checking the display, he noticed it was Bryan Pittman.

“Hey, Bryan, what’s up?”

“I’ve got an I.D. on your dumpster body.”

“Good news. Who is it?”

“Brandy Murphy from Williamsport. She was sixteen and had been missing for six months. I was able to identify her by dental records and her DNA. When she went missing, her father, Benjamin, gave officers a copy of her dental records and one of her hairbrushes for DNA.”

“She’s one of the three missing girls I told you about. Brandy was last seen at Sycamore Mall getting into a newer model black van with tinted windows. We got the surveillance tape, but we couldn’t identify the man with her, nor could we get a good look at the license plate. A hoodie covered his face. But she got into the vehicle willingly.”

“Boyfriend?”

“The father says absolutely not. Brandy was not allowed to date. She’d just gotten her driver’s license and it was her first trip to the mall. Brandy’s body language and that of the man on the tape did not suggest she was on a date.”

“Speaking of her father, Benjamin was just here and identified the body. I showed him the tattoo and he said he’d never seen it before. He said Brandy wanted to be a model and she thought a tattoo might hurt her chances of getting jobs. So she never would have gotten one on her own.”

“If he’s right, that means she got the tattoo while she was missing—with her permission or not.”

Chapter Five

Waiting for Lt. Patrick Lair in his office made Sgt. Robynn Burton twitch with anxiety. Taking two weeks paid leave while Internal Affairs investigated her undercover operation-gone-wrong was bad enough. But waiting for the supervisor who had recently promoted her to sergeant in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division was excruciating. Would Lt. Lair fire her? Would he demote her? Both were possibilities she felt she probably deserved.

To distract herself, she looked at the photographs and basketball memorabilia lining Lair’s office walls and filling his bookcases.

Lt. Patrick Lair was kind of a legend with the Indiana State Police. He grew up in Speedway, an only child of a facilities manager father, and a mother who was a librarian for the Indianapolis Public Library. Going to Indiana State University on an athletic scholarship, he soon became their star basketball player. After graduation he was recruited by the Indiana Pacers and was named their MVP for the last season he played, averaging twenty-eight points, eleven rebounds, eight assists, and three steals per game. In the Hoosier State, Lair was a basketball legend.

The media and basketball fanatics were in a frenzy when he retired to take a job with the Indiana State Police as a Trooper with a starting salary of $37,000 a year. Robynn’s peers had bets that the millionaire basketball player wouldn’t last six months once he got a taste of the long hours and hard work required of the job. They were wrong.

His professionalism and devotion to law enforcement made him a hero in Robynn’s eyes. He mentored and believed in her as she moved up the ranks, which made her screwup even harder to swallow. Her mistake had cost one of her team members his life.

Her thoughts pulled her back to a memory that haunted her every day, asleep or awake. It should have been a simple bust. It was anything but.

Robynn remembered her early-morning meeting with Alex Easton, one of the rookie detectives she supervised. She was so used to seeing him in a dress shirt, tie, and khakis that she almost didn’t recognize him. Unshaven, he wore a stained white tank with a pair of denim cutoffs. His unruly hair looked greasy, and he wore an earring in one ear.

She sat with him and reviewed how the buy would go down. Alex had looked a little anxious, but that was expected for a first assignment like this one. Once he was wired, he was ready to go. It was his first undercover assignment, and Alex was to make a buy of three rocks of crack cocaine worth $100.

They’d spent the last two weeks focusing on Leon Gary, a small-time dealer who was climbing the food chain of a gang that sold drugs on the north side of the county. They’d gotten his name from one of his dealers, who was stopped by a trooper on I-65 with a couple of kilos of marijuana in the trunk of his car. The guy had a pregnant wife at home and was desperate to trade information for his freedom. He seemed more afraid of her than the criminals he was ratting on. Without hesitation, he arranged the buy with a small-time dealer with connections, Leon Gary.

As it turned out, Leon Gary had a rap sheet five pages long, which included assault, domestic violence, shoplifting, selling of a controlled substance, and a host of other charges. Sure they wanted to get Leon off the street, but most importantly, their goal was to motivate him to spill some information about the gang leaders at the top.

Later that day, Robynn selected a space in the K-Mart parking lot so she had a visual on the unmarked white Mustang driven by her undercover detective, Alex Easton, and backed into a parking space near him.

Powering down her window, she watched as another detective on her team, Bruce James, parked his unmarked Dodge Charger five spaces over from Alex. Near the store entrance, former IMPD detective Wayne Griffin sat in his unmarked Ford Taurus. The plan was to swoop in and block the dealer’s car with one of their own, to thwart his getaway, once the hand-to-hand transaction took place. On paper the plan sounded easy-peasy, but it wasn’t.

Robynn’s attention was drawn to an older woman pushing a cart full of boxes. She stopped near Alex’s car and opened the trunk of her car. The last thing they needed was a civilian risking injury, not to mention scaring off their perp. Robynn ripped off her Indiana State Police jacket, and raced toward the woman’s car.

“May I help you with those boxes?”

Eying her suspiciously before she spoke, the woman nodded. “That’s very nice of you. Some of these boxes are heavy.”

Robynn moved the boxes into the lady’s trunk, slammed the lid down, and returned to her vehicle. As the woman drove out of the space, a man in a Lincoln SUV waited until she left and then pulled into her spot. He came to a stop and then powered his window down to talk to Alex. It was their perp.

In her earpiece, she could hear Alex make the buy, and then saw him hand an envelope of money to Leon Gary. He uttered the code word ‘takedown.’ That’s when all hell broke loose.

Bruce James, lights flashing and siren screaming, squealed the wheels of his Dodge Charger in his haste to block Leon Gary’s car.

Gary saw him and lifted a handgun, shooting Alex point-blank in the middle of his forehead. He then backed up and rammed the Dodge Charger, causing Bruce’s airbag to deploy, slamming into his upper body.

After the crash, Gary sped off and thrusted head-on into the vehicle driven by Wayne Griffin. After that crash, Leon Gary raced through the parking lot, pursued by Bruce James, who recovered from the air bag deployment.

Robynn rushed to Alex’s car and called for backup and an ambulance. But it was too late. Alex was dead.

In the meantime, Leon Gary’s car jumped a concrete-and-grass-covered median. He leaped from the car, with Bruce James and Wayne Griffin in hot pursuit. Using a flying tackle, Bruce knocked Gary to the ground and struggled to hold on to him, until Wayne immobilized him with his stun gun.

Patrick Lair entered the room, softly patted Robynn on the back, and sat behind his desk. “Sorry. Hope you haven’t been waiting long. I had to run home. My two kids are raising alpacas for 4-H and one of them got loose. An alpaca got loose—not one of my children. I found him grazing on my neighbor’s newly landscaped yard. And no, she isn’t happy.” Grinning, he filtered through a stack of files on his desk, found the folder he was seeking, and pulled it out.

“I just got here,” she lied and folded her hands on her lap to keep them from shaking.

Leaning back in his chair, his dark eyes studied her. The calm in his stare was more frightening than if he’d shouted at her. She couldn’t meet his gaze and defensively locked her arms across her chest.

Lair finally asked. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t look okay. You look like you haven’t slept in a month. In fact, you look like crap.”

“I’m holding up. The past few weeks weren’t exactly a vacation in paradise. The funeral, shrink visits, and stifling boredom are not exactly my idea of fun. I’m a cop. I should have been on the job.”

Ignoring her statement, he said, “Internal Affairs has completed their investigation and you’ve been cleared of any wrongdoing.”

That information should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. With a mixture of gratitude and guilt, she replied, “I screwed up.”

“Haven’t we all?”

“I was his supervisor. He was on
my
team. My responsibility. How can the others trust me to have their back when I obviously didn’t have his?”

“How were you supposed to know it was going to go down as it did? There are no sure things in undercover work. Too many moving targets.”

“I should have had Alex meet him in an open space, like a park. We could have prevented Leon from using his gun.”

“You don’t know that, and you need to get past this. I need you back on the job with your full focus on some cases I need you to work on.”

“What about Leon Gary?”

“He’s the prosecutor’s problem now. Not yours.” He pushed the file folder in front of him across his desk to Robynn. “This is the case I want you to work on.”

Robynn nodded and opened the file while Lt. Lair briefed her on the case.

“Shirley Metz was reported missing by her parents when the twenty-one-year-old didn’t return home. The town and county police had a good start looking for her, with no results. The State Police got invited to the party about two months after she disappeared. She’d been missing for a year when her body was found by hikers near the Handley Dairy Farm just off State Road 341.”

“What was she doing before she disappeared?”

“Her parents said she’d met two friends the night before at a local bar in Hillsboro about a mile from their house. The victim meets these women for drinks on a regular basis, so the parents weren’t concerned about her safety. About 2:00 a.m., the friends say Metz got into her Toyota Camry and told them she was heading home. Somewhere between the bar and her parent’s house, she disappeared. No trace of her, her clothing, or her car. No action on her credit cards. Gone. Metz had her purse with her, but she’d accidentally left her cell phone at the bar.”

“Runaway?”

“Her parents say no. Metz had a nine-month-old baby she adored. She worked as a hairdresser at Sycamore Mall to support her baby and herself. Her father says she’s not the type to run away. He says she has a baby, a job, and a life she wouldn’t walk away from. I agree with him. Shirley Metz did not leave the area on her own volition.”

He pointed to the file folder in front of Robynn, who opened it to see the gruesome autopsy photo on the first page. “Her throat was slit from ear-to-ear, with no signs of hesitation cuts or defensive wounds. She had bruising on her wrists and ankles that suggest she was restrained. No DNA or trace evidence. Her body had been scrubbed with bleach.”

“Any new developments I should know about?”

“Last night, I read the autopsy report of a young girl found near a mall dumpster in Shawnee County. There were too many similarities to ignore. The girl’s throat was slit, no defensive wounds, signs she was restrained. Most importantly, no DNA or trace evidence. The case belongs to Sgt. Cameron Chase. I want you to study Metz’s case file and meet with him. My gut tells me these two cases are related. Talk to Chase about them. We have money in the budget to hire that profiler, Carly Stone, to do an analysis to help us narrow our focus. See if he thinks that would be a good idea.”

Chapter Six

Robynn stepped onto the marble tile in the foyer of Giovanni’s, a new Italian restaurant near the mall, and looked around. Italian landscape oil paintings graced the walls, while dark wooden floors contrasted with the elegant, crisp, white tablecloths. Lighting was muted; the tables and chairs ornate. She mentally kicked herself for not checking the restaurant out before arranging to meet Sgt. Cameron Chase about cases that may or may not be similar. There was only one word that would describe this place: Romantic. Which was absolutely the last message she wanted to send to Cameron Chase.