Robin Burcell - Face of a Killer

Dixon’s gaze swung past them, down the hall, at the clerical staff who apparently had left their work to watch. “You three, my office, now.”

“The guys were just having a little fun. Me, I’m innocent,” Carillo replied. “For once.”

“ Now.”

Carillo said into the phone, “Look, I have to go. We’ll continue this conversation later.”

The three of them marched in, and before Sydney could get a word in edgewise, Schermer said, “Hey, it was just a sketch, a parody.” He opened a manila folder, showing a piece of paper inside. “have you seen this suspect?” was scrawled on the top just above a stick figure with a smiley face. He’d signed it: Michael Jacob Schermer, substitute artist.

Carillo eyed the drawing. “Pretty good likeness, don’t you think?”

Sydney barely glanced at the drawing. “Please tell me you were the one who called my desk?”

“Not unless you’re the one asking me for alimony.” “Did you?” Sydney asked Schermer.

“No one did.”

She knew what she was hearing, but didn’t want to believe it. She had to believe it. There was no other explanation. “Son of a bitch.. .”

Dixon looked at each of them in turn. “Someone want to tell me what I’m missing here, besides the fact we’ve mistaken our office for a high school cafeteria food fight?”

The room felt suddenly chilly, and Sydney crossed her arms as she tried to comprehend the full impact of what this meant. “The phone call,” she said, trying to think of all the possibilities, one being that someone was playing a cruel, sick joke. Sydney looked at Carillo. “We haven’t released info on our victims being bitten. So either someone with enough knowledge about the case just called, or the UnSub did. And if it was him…” Sydney thought about the words she’d heard. “He’s about to kidnap another woman.”

Sydney repeated the phone conversation as she remembered it. Dixon, Carillo, and Schermer listened, and when Sydney finished, Carillo said, “Well, now we know he’s following his victims in the paper.”

“Okay,” Dixon said. “This case moves up on the priority list.”

Carillo cleared his throat, and Schermer said, “Uh, yeah. One problem. I just got a page that I’m due in court in a half hour.”

Before Sydney could decipher the subtleties of that byplay, Dixon said to her, “You’re going to have to assist Carillo for the day.”

“But the Harrington report-”

“Moves down on the list. You have any other cases that need immediate attention, give them to Schermer here.” He nodded to the stick figure drawing. “Seems to me if he has this much free time, he needs the work. Now see if you and Carillo can’t get along for the short time it takes to get this investigation under way.”

Though Sydney wasn’t happy about being paired with Mr. Pipeline-to-Her-Ex Carillo, in the grand scheme of things, she had much bigger issues, and she returned to her desk, expecting that Carillo might follow, at least to get her notes on the case, go over what she’d found at Hill City and in her interview with Tara Brown. Typical Carillo, he didn’t follow, left her sitting there twiddling her thumbs while God only knew what the hell he was doing.

First thing, she thought as she got up to look for him, was that they needed to set some ground rules, number one being that Scotty needed to be left out of the loop.

Carillo wasn’t at his desk, and after wandering the halls, she found him in a different office on the phone. Judging from the conversation, his wife was on the other end. “No,” he said. “I am not selling the condo. You’re living in a goddamned mansion, with a guy who makes ten times what I make. You think you could see fit to allow me a goddamned place to live?” He listened to whatever it was she had to say, then finished with “Whoever wrote the line ‘for better or worse’ sure as hell never had to live with the worse.” He slammed the phone in the cradle, and seemed to stare at it for several seconds, then looked up, saw Sydney, and in a surprisingly calm voice said, “Give me a minute and I’ll meet you at your desk.”

By the time he arrived, he was all business, and she picked up her case file and handed it to him. “This is everything I have on the Jane Doe.” Then she handed him a manila folder, which he opened. “That’s the suspect sketch from our victim the other night, the woman we think may have been abducted and raped by the same suspect.”

He sat in a chair, dropped the binder on his lap, then opened the folder with the drawing. He took a good look, handed it back to her, then opened the case file. “And you think these two are related because of the bite marks?” he asked. “Because the way I see it, your Jane Doe has way, way more wounds.”

“But when you look closer, there are some similarities besides the bite marks. Body dumped near an isolated area at a park and in water for one.”

“Not a lot to go on.”

“You’re right. Until Dr. Armand compares the bite wounds, and either confirms or denies-”

“Or states it’s inconclusive.”

“Or states it’s inconclusive,” she agreed, “we won’t know. But either way, you have two crimes that are clearly savage and in need of solving. One’s ours, the other Hill City’s. And I can tell you they won’t be pleased by your presence.”

He flipped through the report, perused each page, not commenting. After several minutes of silence, part of which she was sure was meant to let her know that he was the one running the show, he said, without looking up from the reports, “Give me about ten minutes to make another set of copies. I’d like to get down there as soon as possible.” And with that, he stood, took the reports.

“Hey, Carillo.” He stopped, eyed her. “How is it I suddenly got assigned to this?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Schermer doesn’t have a subpoena for court, does he?”

“He’s, uh, got some personal business he needs to take care of. Off the radar, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. Care to explain?”

“Let’s just say I figured you’d be chomping at the bit for a case like this.”

She patted her hand on the stack of manila folders piled atop her desk. “Got enough of my own.”

“A few days ago, you’d have been all over it, wanting to work it.”

“And you’d have been convincing Dixon why you needed Doc Schermer or one of the other guys to work with you, because you don’t like me. What happened?”

“Guess I’m slipping. Meet me at the car in about ten.”

Scotty, she thought. That son of a bitch got Carillo to get her assigned to this damned case to keep her busy and away from McKnight’s suicide. That was the only explanation. Hell with that, she thought, pulling out her directory of FBI office numbers, searching for the Houston, Texas, field office. She punched in the number, identified herself, and asked to speak to Rick Reynolds, the agent Scotty had said he’d contacted about the note.

A long stretch of silence greeted her when she identified herself to Reynolds. Finally he said, “Look, I can’t talk right now. Give me your number. I’ll get back to you in about tentwenty minutes.”

She’d be stuck in the car with Mr. Pipeline himself if she waited that long. “Any way we can make it sooner?”

“Take it or leave it.”

She gave him her cell phone. Ten minutes later, she and Carillo were en route to Hill City.

Carillo hated owing favors. And Scotty’s last-minute request, making sure Fitzpatrick somehow got assigned to this case with no explanation other than “you owe me one” was a prime example of why. Wasn’t that he didn’t like Fitzpatrick, he told himself as he signaled for a lane change on the southbound 101 heading toward Hill City. She was as good an agent as any working in the office at the moment, just not the type he liked to work with. Guys like Schermer, though. Now there was a partner. They knew each other’s ins and outs. And they knew when to look the other way.