P.D. Martin - Kiss of Death

Sloan stands up. “We’d like to take a DNA sample for comparison. It’s just a swab inside your cheek.”

“Just because I had sex with her doesn’t mean I killed her.”

“Of course not, Mr. Fischer. And your cooperation with the DNA certainly indicates you’ve got nothing to hide.”

He nods slowly. “Okay.”

Sloan turns to me. “I’ve got a kit in the car. I’ll be back in a sec.” She walks out, quickly, perhaps worried Todd will change his mind.

“You’ll do the DNA now?”

“Yes, Todd. Like Detective Sloan said, it’s just a little swab from the inside of your cheek. It’s quick and painless.”

He nods. After a minute or so he says, “What time was Sherry killed?”

“We’re not sure yet.”

Sloan enters, paper and evidence bag in one hand and a small plastic vial in the other. She puts the paper on the table in front of Todd. “Have a read through that, Mr. Fischer, and then sign at the bottom.”

Sloan and I both take a seat. I purposely avert my gaze from Todd, and Sloan follows suit. Keep it nice and relaxed in case he suddenly gets jumpy. But our fears are unfounded—he quickly reads the form and signs it.

Sloan unscrews the vial. “Open wide please, Mr. Fischer.”

Todd does as instructed and Sloan uses the cotton-bud end to scrape the inside of his cheek, before slipping it back inside the container, sealing it and placing it in the evidence bag.

“That’s it.” She gives him a quick smile.

He looks at Sloan, then me. “Now what?”

“We’ll take this to the lab for comparison with the evidence we found on Sherry’s body and we’ll be in touch.”

“I still can’t believe she’s…dead.” He takes a deep breath and his body tenses with grief. “You will find whoever did this, won’t you?”

“We hope so, yes.” Sloan knows better than to make guarantees or to tell him that he’s still one of our prime suspects. Agreeing to give his DNA and admitting he saw Sherry last night don’t make him innocent.

“So, as far as you knew, she was heading home at 1:00 a.m.?” I confirm.

“Yes. That’s what she said, and she drove off in that direction.”

“And she never mentioned what she was upset about?”

“No.”

We thank Todd Fischer for his time, give him our cards and leave, picking our way over the piles of old papers and magazines that cover the floor between kitchen and front door.

“Sorry about the mess,” Todd says at the door. “I’ve given up trying to keep it even half-decent looking.”

“That’s fine, Todd.” I hold my hand out. “Thanks for your help.”

He shakes my hand and Sloan’s before closing the door.

In the car, Sloan buckles up. “So we’ve got an ex-boyfriend who admits to having sex with her only a couple of miles from the crime scene. It’s not looking good for Todd Fischer.”

“I don’t know.” I start the car. “My gut instinct says he’s innocent.”

“Maybe. But it sounds like there was a new man on the scene and maybe Fischer was jealous…and angry.”

“What about the bite marks? They clearly point to someone from the vampire community. And now we’ve got confirmation that Sherry had some contact with that world. Even if it was just for research.”

Sloan raises her finger. “But Todd knew. He seems like a smart kid to me. Smart enough to make it look like a vampire attack.”

Sunday, 4:30 p.m.

Once I’ve dropped Sloan, it’s on to the Federal Building and my desk. In the end we decided the professor had to wait. Sloan needs to start logging her requests and getting the DNA sample moving and I want to find out more about Anton Ward and vampires. Besides, I’d like to interview Carrington at UCLA. It’ll be interesting to see how he responds to a police and FBI visit in the middle of a class.

At my desk I open the file and turn over the first few crime-scene photographs. Rosen printed them out on regular paper, but the digital images are high resolution. The next document in the file is on Sherry Taylor, starting with the missing persons report. According to the report, she’d told her parents she was going out with Desiree Jones last night—but Desiree was with her family and had no idea she was Sherry’s cover. I bet that shocked Mrs. Taylor. And despite this, she still seemed so confident that she knew her daughter’s associates and comings and goings. You’d think her faith would be starting to crumble a little bit. So where was Sherry from 9:00 p.m. to midnight last night? At the Goth nightclub like Todd Fischer said? Or was there some other mystery date? These are questions we need to answer, but first things first…the file.

I read through the three-page missing persons report filled out by Officer Saporo from the LAPD. Even though she’d really only been missing for a few hours when the parents reported it, Saporo still did it by the book. He wasn’t too worried about a twenty-year-old still being out at eight on a Sunday morning, but there’s no legal requirement to wait twenty-four hours or any other specified time in California. Saporo classified Sherry’s disappearance as Missing/Lost rather than as a runaway, parental abduction, stranger abduction or disaster victim. While it’s possible she was abducted by a stranger, there was no evidence to suggest that. According to the form, Sherry Taylor was last seen by her parents leaving the house at nine last night. She was wearing tight Guess jeans with an eveningwear-style, short-sleeved top—black with lots of beading—and a leather jacket. The clothing doesn’t help us much, given Sherry was found naked, although it does tell us she wasn’t dressed for a Goth nightclub…at least not when she left her parents’ house. So she either changed after she left, or Todd lied.

The next section of the form relates to any companions the missing person was with, but in the case of Sherry she left the house alone and we don’t know who she may have seen after that—except for Todd. Information covering Sherry’s car has been completed in the next spot, including the fact that her Toyota Celica hasn’t been found. I give Sloan a call to confirm.

“Sloan, it’s Anderson. Don’t suppose Sherry’s car was at our crime scene?”

“No. It doesn’t look like she drove herself to Temescal Gateway Park. Unless someone else drove the car away.”

“And her cell phone wasn’t found?”

“No,” Sloan confirms. “According to the parents, they were ringing her cell every ten minutes or so, from about seven this morning. It was going straight to voice mail.”

“Does it have a GPS unit?”

“No.” She pauses. “I do have some news.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Our footprint experts have finished on-scene and identified three different sets of footprints that could be part of a circle around the body. Two are only partials, but one is more complete.”

“Go on.”

“They’ll run them against shoe databases, but we’ve got a women’s size eight and what looks like a men’s eleven and a men’s eleven or twelve.”

“It’s a start.” Although the shoe sizes are all very common. Hopefully something more specific will come from the imprints themselves.

“Problem is these prints were found amongst a lot of others. Given how much that clearing was used, any defense attorney’s going to smash them in court.”

I grimace. If Sloan’s repeating the forensic expert’s words “could be part of a circle,” she’s right—that’s not good enough for court. “Okay, thanks.”

I hang up and move back to the form and the details of the complainant—in this case Mr. and Mrs. Taylor—and then on to the more detailed information about Sherry. Again, nothing particularly stands out. The last two sections are for forensics data, but they’re blank, as you’d expect when the report had just been logged. Soon enough they would have added credit card checks and phone records and then, if suitably concerned that foul play was a factor, they would have assigned a computer technician to start the laborious process of looking for clues on Sherry’s laptop. But for a twenty-year-old, that may have been weeks away.