Strip Search (6 page)

“So we’re looking for a guy. A very strong guy.”

“I don’t want to sound sexist, but given the upper-body strength requirement…” He shrugged. “Either it’s one of those chicks from the Worldwide Wrestling League, or it’s a guy. A barbarian.”

“Tall, dark, and brutal?”

Tony shook his head. “Again, look at the main concentration of the blood spatter. Over six feet off the floor, and forming an upward elliptical arch. Our assailant was shorter than his victim, probably shorter than average.”

“A homunculus.”

“Well, I don’t like to make value judgments about strangers. But I wouldn’t set him up on a date with my sister.”

I nodded my agreement. “I’m surprised the victim didn’t struggle more.”

“Oh, God, didn’t anyone tell you?”

Just the way he said it gave me a severe case of the jimjams. “Just give it to me straight, Tony. What happened?”

He pointed to the stainless steel gizmo to the left, obviously uncomfortable. “Do you know what that is?”

“Tony, the only thing I cook is Lean Cuisine.”

“That’s a deep fat fryer. It’s where they make french fries and onion rings.”

“I feel certain the victim wasn’t killed by onion rings.”

Tony swallowed. “The killer pushed the vic’s face down into the fryer. Into the boiling oil. While it was on.”

I felt an intense surge of nausea rising up my stomach like a surfer on the big kahuna. “So the temperature was…”

“Approximately three hundred and fifty degrees.”

I took several quick short breaths, trying to steady myself. “How—”

“First,” he continued, “the skin would melt off your face. Then you would go into shock. Your brain would literally begin to cook. It would feel like—”

I held up a hand. “I don’t need to know what it would feel like.”

“Okay.” He looked away, then muttered: “Having his throat cut afterward was probably a mercy.”

I fought back the nausea, the shaking in my knees that oh so desperately wanted a quick snort of something with a very high alcoholic content, and asked, “But—
why
?”

Tony laid his hand on my shoulder. He was looking a bit ashen himself. “And with that question, Susan, you have officially moved out of my realm—and into yours.”

“I STEADIED MYSELF against the counter, doing my best to stay out of the way of the scientists who had real work to do, and thought. Or perhaps more accurately…I listened. To the kitchen. What had happened? What went on here?

Could there possibly be a rational motive behind boiling someone’s face? It was hard to imagine. Was this planned or spontaneous? The killer used his brute strength and the tools at hand—in this case, one that fried potatoes at three hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. But he might’ve also brought a weapon for the decapitation. Premeditated? Every instinct told me he wasn’t killing for love, money, jealousy, revenge, hatred, or any of the usual motives. Everything I had seen so far pointed to a psychopath.

Which led to the second question: Why here? Why commit a murder in a fast-food restaurant? Just to take advantage of the deep fat fryer? It hardly seemed likely. A private location would be better. Even the victim’s home would be better. Perhaps he didn’t live alone. Still, subduing a family would be easier than luring someone to a downtown eatery late at night, wouldn’t it? No, the only possible explanation was that the victim worked here. Maybe the killer didn’t know where he lived, maybe the victim was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he worked here. Which meant there was about a ninety percent chance he was young, thirty or under. He was here late, after hours, presumably alone. So he must be on the managerial staff, the poor chump with the job of turning everything off and locking up. Except this time, he didn’t lock up fast enough. Or the killer was too determined to be deterred by a locked door.

“Granger,” I said, doing my best to feign politeness, “find out who was the manager of the late-night shift yesterday, okay?”

“We’re methodically reviewing all the employee records—”

“Forget that. Just find out who last night’s late-shift manager was. Then call his home.”

“Oh yeah? Why?”

“Because I have a hunch he won’t answer.”

I left Charlie Chan wondering what I knew that he didn’t and approached my best friend on the force, Amelia Escavez. Over the past few months—after my childhood friend Lisa moved to Los Angeles—we had become very close. We palled around at the office and off-hours, too. She helped me get through some rough times and I loved her dearly.

Amelia was standing by the patty grill, her trusty field kit close at hand. She was an impressions examiner. Over the years, I’d seen her taking impressions of tire tracks, footprints, fingerprints, even teeth marks. But this was the first time I’d seen her plying her trade with a greasy grill.

“Trying out a new oven cleaner, Amelia?”

She glanced up for barely a moment, then returned her attention to her work. She’d coated the surface of the grill with a white substance and was now hardening it with a handheld hair dryer. “Yup. Figured I could sell it to Dow and finally make some real money.”

“New car, new house, speedboat on Lake Mead?”

“I’d be content if I could just get a date.”

Girl talk. The older we get, it never really changes. I used to be so obsessed with work that I almost never socialized with anyone else in the PD—well, not counting David, obviously. But after Lisa took off, I made a real effort to get to know some of my colleagues, especially Amelia. Turned out we were very compatible; we were both smart, funny, and utterly sans a love life. Although staring at her slim figure and perfect height (meaning she didn’t tower over and intimidate three-fourths of the male population like yours truly), I couldn’t imagine that date-getting was really that much of a problem for her. My theory was, for whatever reason, she just wasn’t trying. “Don’t tell me the perp left a tire track on the grill.”

“Oh, it’s ever so much stranger than that. Someone—we’re assuming the killer—left a message in the grease.”

“What message? Stop me before I kill again?”

“No.”

“His name and address?”

“You wish.” She glanced at her watch. “Two more minutes and I’ll show and tell.”

“What’s that weird goo you’ve poured all over everything? It doesn’t look like dental-stone casting or any of your usual fixatives.”

“My own special recipe. Not an easy thing, lifting an impression off cooking grease.”

“I would imagine not.”

“We took pictures, of course, but there’s always a chance that an impression will reveal something not apparent to the naked eye. A fingerprint, a swirl pattern. A minute hair or fiber. You never know. Problem was, all my normal casting agents would’ve dissolved the grease.”

“So what did you come up with?”

“Hard to describe. Kind of a combination of plaster of Paris and cotton candy.”

“You’re joking, right?”

She winked. “Great scientists never reveal their secrets.” The buzzer on her wristwatch sounded. “It’s soup.”

With anyone else, I would’ve had my doubts, but Amelia knew her stuff. Carefully, Amelia put a gloved hand on each corner and lifted the cast. To her evident delight, it all held together in one perfect piece. Her secret recipe had worked. With an elegant flip, she showed me what was on the other side, what had been fingerpainted into the grease.

It was reversed, of course, but I could still read it. As it turned out, it wasn’t a message at all, at least not in the conventional sense. There were no words. Only…numbers. And symbols. And it wasn’t a sentence, it was an equation:

“What does it mean?”

Amelia gently slid her impression into a plastic evidence bag. “As if I would know. I gave up on math after my second semester of algebra.”

“Uh, yeah. That was a tough one for me, too.” I hadn’t taken a math class since junior high school. “If this was left behind by the killer, it might be important. There must be someone on staff who knows math.”

“My understanding is that O’Bannon is trying to round up experts, but not having much success. You know anyone who’s good at math?”

As a matter of fact, I did, but he had been barred from the premises. I jotted the equation into my notebook and started to move on, when Amelia said, “By the by, Susan—it’s really good to see you here.”

“Because of my sunny personality?”

“Because the person who did this…” She grimaced. “Needs to be caught. As soon as possible.”

“Amelia, dear. Have you no faith in our distinguished chief homicide detective?”

“I wouldn’t want to say anything that might lose me my job…” She paused. “So I won’t. But as I said…I’m really glad you’re here. And most of the gang in Forensics feel the same. So don’t let Granger get you down, okay?”

“Deal,” I said, not feeling nearly as much confidence as I pretended. But when you had someone as sweet as Amelia trying to give you a happy shot, it would be churlish not to cooperate. The reality was, I was already feeling edgy, nervous. I knew Granger didn’t want me on this case. He was content to let me handle minor matters—property theft, embezzlement, and what-not. But this was something else again. If I didn’t produce, and fast, Granger would be pushing O’Bannon to get rid of me. The first time I slipped up, any way at all, he’d have my consulting contract yanked and kick my butt back to the suburbs. That kind of pressure I didn’t need. That kind of pressure made me instantly flash on my uneraseable mental map of every liquor store in the city, made me calculate the approximate distance to the nearest of them and plan a route.

Granger, Tony, Amelia—all of them had said the same thing, in one way or another. This was my kind of case. They were counting on me to bring this monster in, to stop him before he mutilated someone else.

The only problem was—I didn’t know if I could.

“CHIEF ROBERT O’Bannon found his son, Darcy, lying on the floor in his library, as usual. Darcy didn’t look up, didn’t say hi. But then, he never did. Why would he? In his mind, there was no reason to offer a common greeting. What purpose did it serve?

The library also doubled as O’Bannon’s home office, but he always preferred to call it the library. Because he loved books. Three walls of the room were lined with high-quality mahogany shelves—he’d done the carpentry work, as well as the wood-staining, himself. And all the shelves were full. Full and then some—they’d had to put overflow shelves in the garage. He had all kinds of books—dictionaries, encyclopedias, fiction, nonfiction, books on every topic imaginable. He was curious about almost everything. He often said the best cure for being lonely, or depressed, was to learn something new.

He had scores of criminology texts; every time something at the office was replaced by a more current edition, he took the throwaways home. But he rarely read them. That was what he did during the day. At night, he indulged his first love: novels—the best of everything, from classic literature to current bestsellers. But his favorites had always been nineteenth-century British fiction: Hardy, the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Trollope, and perhaps his personal favorite, Jane Austen. Not exactly the conventional image of what a tough-as-nails cop read in his spare time. But he was not a cliché he didn’t go to monster truck shows or watch NASCAR races and he was content to keep it that way. It hadn’t held him back any so far. And there had been benefits, he thought, as he gazed down at his hapless autistic adult offspring, who was thumbing through the pages of
Wuthering Heights,
a book he’d read so many times he could probably recite it from memory.

Forget the
probably.
He could recall every word, like one of those living books in the last chapter of
Fahrenheit 451.
The image brought a small smile to O’Bannon’s face. Darcy was his boy, after all. At least a little piece of him.

O’Bannon placed his sterling steel cane against his desk and eased into his chair. He’d spent every day for the past several months pretending he wasn’t having any serious trouble getting around. What was a gunshot wound in the gut to a tough old cop like him, anyway? Barely worth mentioning. Except that it still hurt, even half a year later, every hour of every day, even with the medication no one at the office knew he was taking. It was much more difficult now for him to get around, to take care of business. More difficult to take care of Darcy. And Darcy typically required a lot of care.

“Have a good day, son?”

“Okay,” Darcy said, not looking up from the book on the floor, his chin propped up on both elbows. “Not Excellent. Certainly not Very Excellent.”

“Did you go to the day care center?”

“For three hours and forty-six minutes. But they do not really let me do anything with the children. Not by myself.”

“And I guess there was no time for custard. Because of course then it would be a Very Excellent Day.”

“Susan took me to The Custard Factory.” He rolled over onto one elbow and, although he didn’t actually make eye contact with his father, did look in his general direction. “But she got a call before we finished. I had to take Bus 14, then Bus 36B home.”