Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

“Deputy!” Manderly shouted, behind him by only a step.

Larson had to confirm her before they dragged him out of here. The razor-thin incisions needed no medical examiner to be properly analyzed. He lunged past another forensic technician in an effort to identify the victim’s face.

He fell to his knees as Manderly’s thick fist caught his coat collar from behind. Larson looked over his shoulder and straight up the man’s arm and said, “Give me one minute. Sixty seconds. Then we’ll do this.”

Behind a face flushed from running and indignation, Manderly met eyes with him, released him, and stepped back.

Plastic surgery was a relocated witness’s best friend, never mind Hope’s pledge never to resort to it. Chin, cheek, breast, and buttocks implants, Botox, pigmented contact lenses, teeth veneers, dental work, laser hair removal, and a cutter’s creative blade could so radically alter a person’s look that only the lab boys could make the final confirmation. He disconnected from the victim’s hair color, forced her chin flatter, her nose wider, her cheekbones lower, wondering if it possibly could be her.

He used his pen to move the woman’s hair off her neck. Ears were as individual as fingerprints. This woman’s right ear, smooth and perfect and clearly untouched by surgery, did not belong to Hope Stevens. Larson had once spent hours staring at Hope while she slept. This was not her ear. He exhaled.

Wondering now how he might explain himself, he hesitated briefly while concocting a ruse. “Gloves?” he asked the tech.

He did not look back at Manderly as the detective asked, “What the fuck are you doing in my crime scene, Deputy Marshal?”

“Gloves,” Larson restated, motioning with his hand, awaiting delivery.

“If you’re thinking of moving her head, forget it,” Manderly said. But he must have okayed the gloves, because the technician deposited a pair into Larson’s waiting palm.

Larson donned the gloves, slipped open the eyelids and touched the surface of the eye, looking for contact lenses that weren’t there.

“Victim’s name?” Larson asked.

“I’m not in a real giving mood,” Manderly said. “Maybe we take this up back at the office when your boss talks to mine.”

Larson snapped off the gloves and let them fall. He passed Manderly his full credentials wallet as he stood. He explained, “We thought… briefly… judging by what we’d heard of this scene… the address… that we might know the victim. But clearly we’re mistaken.”

“Lemme get this straight. You came here in a real cooperative mood, but changed your mind after seeing her face?”

“Why the old lady?” Larson asked. “Any theories on that?”

“Why the cross, tits to crotch?” Manderly nibbled toward the truth. “That fit the profile of whoever it is you’re after?”

Larson considered how to play this. Rotem had assigned him to track down Markowitz and therefore knew none of what he was up to; if it went boss to boss-which wasn’t going to happen until Monday morning-this would all come apart on him.

“Did she lease it or sublet it?” Larson asked.

“We barely just got here. Give us a minute to get her bagged first, would you?”

“I’m betting sublet.”

“Are you telling me this was mistaken identity?”

“They look a lot alike.”

“This one and who else?”

Larson shook his head, conveying his unwillingness to share that information.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Manderly said. “I suppose you have a theory on the neighbor?”

“An older woman like that… she was probably a longtime resident of the building. When this one became a problem, he turned to the older one for what he wanted.”

“And what did he want?”

“There’s a contract hit out,” Larson explained, stretching the truth. “I’m supposed to stop it. This razor…” Larson indicated the cuts. “We’ve seen him before.”

“So have we,” Manderly said.

Larson rose to his feet, heady from the fatigue and moving too quickly. But more than all his physical challenges, it was this information that made him stumble a step. “What’s that?”

“We had a similar killing, a razor like this, earlier today. We figure we got ourselves a serial killer.” He added, “And I’m thinking you federal boys have lost one. Am I right?”

“The other victim look anything like this one?” Larson indicated the dead woman on the floor.

“Not really. Older, maybe four or five inches shorter. Smaller overall.”

Larson felt himself relax a little. Hope might look older, but she couldn’t have shrunk. Sunderland had provided a possible place of Hope’s employment. “This wouldn’t have been an employee of St. Luke’s Hospital, by any chance. Would it have?”

Manderly’s face registered his astonishment. “Where the fuck did you get that?”

“I’ll need to speak to the investigating detective,” Larson said.

Manderly stood and brought his face close to Larson’s. “You’re looking at him,” he said. “It’s been a long fucking day, pal, and it just got longer for both of us. You’re coming to the office. And if I have to cuff you to get you there,” he said, a couple of his uniforms perking up and stepping toward them, “I will.”

“This dumb-ass picked the wrong closet,” Manderly explained. Nearly two hours had passed amid the familiar smell of burned coffee and male sweat. Cop shops weren’t so different, one to the next. It had been a while since Larson had been inside an actual police department, his time typically occupied in federal facilities. But the lighting, the low hum of printers and copiers, of keyboards and muted conversation were nearly the same.

Manderly and Larson occupied chairs in a good-sized conference room with gray carpeting and an oval table that sat eight. The room’s single window might have had a good view if the blinds hadn’t been drawn. A computer and keyboard, a blank whiteboard, a pair of phones, and a video projector accounted for most of the room’s electronics. On a separate dolly, a TV and VCR held the attention of both men.

“Thing is,” Manderly said, further explaining himself, “evidently hospital scrubs make pretty good pajamas, and this closet in ER was getting hit the hardest. That, and antibacterial soap, and shit like that. So Admin gets a heads-up from IT that they can mount a wireless webcam in there for peanuts and monitor it for theft. This jerk-off drags her in there to do his thing, having no idea he’s on Candid Camera .”

On the screen, in the silent, jerky motion of low-frame-count surveillance video, to which Larson was becoming accustomed, the abduction and murder played out again.

“Either he got seriously lucky here, or he’d scouted it and took his chances, but his back is always to the camera. We never get a look at his face.”

“Other security video?”

“They got cameras all over the entrance to the ER, ’cause that’s where the trouble always comes from. But this turd entered ER from the main wing. We got a profile of him while he sat in a chair scoping the vic, but that’s about it. And in terms of quality, it sucks. Grainy and burned out. It’s true video. This webcam stuff is much better quality.”

As it was, the webcam image didn’t impress Larson. It blurred with any quick motion, so that when the killer moved to cut her neck it looked as if someone had wiped Vaseline on the camera lens.

“Back it up,” Larson instructed, all civility gone from his voice. It felt like a ghoulish act to repeatedly watch her die.

On the fourth viewing, Larson accepted the VCR’s remote from Detective Manderly, to both men a symbolic exchange of power. Larson watched a particular twenty-second section well over a dozen times. He finally said, “I can’t make out any of that, can you?”