James Grippando - Blood Money

“I don’t cut anything. My rate is four hundred dollars an hour. Period.”

Jack considered it. The battle of experts had always seemed like a game, but as his gaze drifted back to the sheet that was draped over Emma’s remains, the game seemed hardly worth playing.

“You know,” said Jack, “based on the way the state attorney has prosecuted this case, I might actually get you four hundred bucks an hour. On a net-net basis, it seems only fair.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m beyond confident that the state of Florida will hire two whores to call my one whore a quack.”

“Jack, come on back.”

He looked up and saw Andie standing in the open doorway.

“Have you spoken to Celeste’s parents?” he asked, rising from the couch.

“It’s not Celeste,” said Andie.

Jack felt a wave of relief. . then trepidation. “Who is it?”

“We don’t know. We were hoping you could tell us.”

Chills ran the length of his spine. Jack followed her down the hallway. She walked quickly, as if eager to be done with this, and he had to hurry to keep up.

“You think it’s. . somebody I know?”

“Possibly,” said Andie. “About my age. Female. Blond. Pretty.”

Jack continued to follow, his heart in his throat, fearing the worst.

“She had no identification,” said Andie. “A landscaper found her body, naked, next to the canal along Tamiami Trail.”

Rene would have crossed the Tamiami Trail to get from the hospital to the coffee shop in Little Havana. It took all his effort, but finally Jack managed to get a few words out. “How did it happen?”

Andie opened the door to the morgue. “Strangled,” she said.

Jack followed her inside. A wall of stainless steel drawers was before him. One to the right, three drawers from the bottom, was open. Andie led him to it. An assistant medical examiner pulled the drawer farther from the wall, drawing the sheet-covered body into the room. Jack held his breath. With a nod from Andie, the examiner lifted the white sheet.

Jack’s knees nearly buckled. Her hair was mussed, her color was flat and lifeless, but there was no mistaking that classically beautiful face.

“Her name is Rene,” said Jack.

“Then you do know her?”

“Yes. Rene Fenning. She’s a doctor at Jackson.” He paused, then added, “We used to date.”

The assistant draped the white sheet back over her face.

Jack was suddenly puzzled. “If she had no identification, no clothes, how did you know to call me to make the ID?”

On Andie’s cue, the assistant lifted the sheet again, this time from the middle, exposing Rene’s torso.

Jack froze. Below the navel, about two inches above her pubic hair, was a handwritten message in black marker:

SOMEONE YOU LOVE.

It chilled Jack, and he could almost hear the voice of his attacker as he read those three words to himself.

“That’s the reason I called you,” said Andie.

The examiner replaced the sheet. Jack was still trying to comprehend that Rene was dead, and it hit him that much harder to think that it could have been Andie under that sheet. He looked at her, speechless.

Andie seemed to be staring right through him. “When is the last time you saw her, Jack?”

“Last night,” he said, and he immediately felt Andie do a double take. “At the hospital,” he added. “Andie, this is not what you think it-”

She raised a hand, which silenced him.

“Let’s go outside, Jack. Sounds like you and I need to talk.”

He called himself Merselus. It was the surname of his best friend in high school back in Paterson, New Jersey. Ironically, it was his math teacher-recognizing his tenacity, pegging him as a rare Eastside High success story-who had dubbed the two of them Merselus and Merciless. If she only knew.

Three weeks before the start of the Sydney Bennett trial, he’d used another name entirely to lease a one-bedroom apartment on the Miami River, just minutes away from the courthouse. William Teague was a week-to-week tenant in his third month of occupancy, which practically made him the mayor of a decaying village of drug addicts and prostitutes who came and went from the riverfront like water rats.

Merselus entered with a turn of the key and locked the door-lower deadbolt, upper deadbolt, and then the chain. The venetian blinds were drawn, though it was superfluous; the lone window in the apartment was boarded over from the inside, iron bars on the outside. The only light in the room was the glow from a laptop computer, which he’d left open and running on the desk. The Google satellite image was still on the screen, displaying the result of his last search: Little Havana/Tamiami Trail. His eyes narrowed as he studied it again. The slope from the highway to the brown canal. The knee-high brush along the shoreline. The perfect place to drop a warm body that Merselus wanted the police to find quickly, before his handwritten message fell to decomposition. All of it, as captured in the satellite image, was virtually identical to the actual place he’d visited a little later in the day. He gave a thin smile of appreciation to the technocrats in Silicon Valley who had made it so easy to plan.

He wondered if any of them even remembered him, ever wondered what he was up to these days.

Merselus sat on the edge of the bed, dropped his backpack between his feet on the floor, and opened it. First, he removed the essential tools of his mission-latex gloves, which left no fingerprints; a nylon cord, in case he met with resistance; the serrated diving knife, in case he met with even greater resistance. He laid each of them neatly on the bed, side by side. Deeper inside the pack, in a separate pouch, was his latest acquisition. He unzipped the pouch and carefully, almost lovingly, collected his prize. A “trophy” was what one of those self-proclaimed geniuses in criminal profiling would have called it, like the panties, jewelry, and other keepsakes that serial killers took from their victims in order to relive their fantasy, over and over. Collecting such objects was part of the sociopath’s compulsive personality. So said the experts, whom Merselus had watched repeatedly on BNN and the Faith Corso Show , all of whom uniformly overlooked one crucial fact: Their profiles were based on the assholes who got caught. Merselus didn’t consider himself a serial killer, though his work could be measured in more than one victim. He didn’t think of himself as a sociopath, either, though that term was thrown around pretty loosely these days. And he was definitely no trophy hunter.

He just thought Rene Fenning’s necklace was cool.

It was made of polished copper, the kind of necklace that kept its shape and didn’t collapse like a chain when taken off. He put his hand through the necklace, which made the opening seem small. Like Rene’s gentle neck. It almost fit his wrist like a bracelet, a testimony to the size and strength of his hands. He reached over and switched on the lamp to get a better look.

The glass bead on the front of the necklace was most intriguing. It opened with a tiny latch. Inside were three pebbles, each about the size of a BB. It was unlike anything Merselus had ever seen. He laid it on the white bedsheet and took a photograph. He took several more until he got the right lighting, a pristine image. Then he went to his computer and uploaded the image. He wasn’t certain that his image-recognition software would find a match on the Internet, and it wasn’t at all crucial. But he was curious-not just to check out the trinket, but more to test the limits of the software. This kind of search tool wasn’t something the average person on the street could have walked into the Apple Store and purchased. In the private sector, only the most elite security firms could get their hands on it. It was a trade secret still in development. A stolen trade secret.