The Ninth Life Read online

“I don’t know. Show me these bloody clothes.”

  Hank walked me to where he saw them beside the dresser in the master bedroom.

  I knelt next to them for a better look. I looked up at Hank. “What’s wrong with this picture?” I asked.

  “They’re women’s clothes,” Hank said.

  “Exactly.” I stood and shook my head. “Don’t touch anything. Call Bostok and tell him what we have. Get forensics out here.”

  I left the apartment, found Jones on the phone at the cruiser, and had him pop the trunk. I pulled a box of gloves from the kit in the back and returned to the apartment.

  “Glove up and have a look around,” I said. I handed the box of gloves off to Hank, who stood in the kitchen.

  I walked straight to the purse in the dining room and crouched down. I found a wallet still inside of the purse, pulled it out, and flipped it open. The ID inside belonged to Billie Webber. Her purse was there, spilled open. The cell phone on the counter might have been hers as well. I stared at the smeared blood just a foot away from me. I didn’t spot a dried area anywhere. We’d just missed whatever had happened.

  Chapter 9

  I had Timmons send a car to get Jones and take him back to the station to start getting everything that we could on the two women—phone records, bank records, credit card records, the works. I wanted to know where Erica Osweiler and Billie Webber had been going and what they’d been doing. I told Jones that as soon as he requested the records, to start making contact and setting appointments to meet with friends, coworkers, and any family that either woman might have in the area.

  Jim’s voice mail played in my ear. I left him a message to call me back and looked up to see a mid-forties, wide-framed man in a Pasco County Sheriff’s Department uniform walking directly to me.

  I took my back from the wall outside of the garage and stuck my cell phone into my pocket.

  The deputy lifted the green campaign hat from his head, revealing a balding and graying hairline. He extended his hand for a handshake. “Deputy Ducasse,” he said.

  “Lieutenant Carl Kane.” I shook his hand. “You’re the lead?”

  “Yeah. Your captain touched base with our department and let us know what you had going on out here.”

  “Anything on the BOLO vehicle? Black Audi, was it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, a 2011. And not a peep. We have cars out in the area, searching. So far, no sights of your vehicle.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What do you guys need from us here?” Deputy Ducasse asked.

  I looked out across the parking lot and past the couple of Pasco County cruisers that had arrived. A number of residents were gathering in groups and staring over at us, watching the scene. “Some door knocking and crowd control, I guess,” I said.

  “Sure. What are we looking for on the door knocking?”

  “Anyone who knew the women from the apartment or saw anything going on over here in the last two days. If your deputies find anyone, have them bring them to me. Go through the crowd as well.”

  “You’ll be inside the apartment?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, my forensics guy just showed up, so he’s going to walk me through before he gets going on the processing. He’s inside taking photos now.”

  “All right. I’ll get the orders doled out.”

  “I appreciate the help on this,” I said.

  “No problem, Lieutenant.”

  I turned and headed through the garage into the apartment. I found Rick just inside, standing in the kitchen with Hank.

  “Are you ready for the tour?” Rick asked.

  “Let’s see what we have.”

  “We’ll start over here.” Rick walked to the front door and motioned for Hank and me to follow. He started with the first drips, just a few feet from the doorway, and worked his way back through the apartment. Our victim was stabbed at the front door and fell a few feet back to the floor. It gave us a reason to believe that Billie Webber was the victim and not the attacker. Rick had said that the marks and smears in the blood looked as if the victim was trying to get away. He also said that our victim was barefoot. The large pool was where the person’s life was taken. Rick stated that the cast-off pattern of blood around the pool was consistent with a knife being our murder weapon. The drag marks leading out to the garage finished roughly where a vehicle’s trunk would be. Rick stated matter-of-factly that there was too much blood for it not to be a homicide.

  “Where’s the clothing?” Rick asked.

  “Master bedroom,” Hank said.

  We walked back into the apartment from the garage and showed Rick where the clothes were. Rick set his kit down on the carpet of the bedroom and knelt next to the clothing. Hank and I stood at the bedroom’s doorway.

  Rick held up a woman’s bloody shirt before him.

  “What can you tell us about the clothes, Rick?” I asked.

  “The cast-off blood on the clothing tells me that these were the clothes worn by our killer.” He put his face closer to the tag. “Size extra-large. And she’s a blond by the looks of it. Hold this shirt up right where my fingers are, Kane,” he said.

  I did as he asked, replacing my fingers with his on two shoulder areas on the shirt that were blood free.

  Rick pulled a forceps from his kit and removed a single blond hair from the left shoulder of the shirt. He bagged the individual hair, sealed it up, and placed it into his box. Rick pulled out a large clear plastic envelope bag and opened it. “Drop the shirt in here,” he said.

  I did, and Rick pulled the orange tape backing off the evidence bag and sealed the shirt up.

  “Approximate height and weight on whoever wore those clothes?” Hank asked.

  “One second.” Rick grabbed an empty bag from his kit and lifted the pants from the ground. I saw him look at the tag inside and then stand and hold them up. He turned toward Hank and me, with the pants out before him. “Rawlings’s size, maybe,” he said. “The shirt was an extra-large. I can’t really make heads or tails out of women’s pant sizes, but these look to be fairly long. Not huge in the waist, though.”

  “So we have a six-foot-plus woman, around two hundred pounds?” Hank asked.

  “Something like that,” Rick said. He looked off to his right at a dresser drawer that was hanging open. “There’s men’s clothing in the open drawer. Did you guys leave that open?” he asked.

  “I didn’t go through anything in the dresser,” I said. “Figured it was right there near the dumped clothing, and I didn’t want to risk disturbing any prints.”

  “Well, I’d say that your suspect might be wearing men’s clothing if she got something from that drawer. If she was bigger than your average woman, that may lend a little more credibility to that guess.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Hank, go pull Billie Webber’s sheet. See what her height, weight, and hair color is. If she matches what we have here, get Deputy Ducasse, the lead out there, to get her ID out to all of his guys. If she doesn’t match up, ask him to get the approximate height, weight, and hair color distributed and added to that BOLO.”

  “Got it,” he said.

  “And do whatever you can to find out if she had a boyfriend. Or who the hell owns the men’s clothing in the drawer.”

  Hank nodded and disappeared from the master bedroom.

  Rick bagged the pants.

  “We’re positive that whatever went down in here just happened?” I asked.

  “That’s what the blood says,” Rick said. “Not more than an hour ago would be my guess. We had the single drips in the living room that weren’t dry when I arrived. A single drip on a hard surface in a mid-seventy-degree room would be dry inside of an hour, closer to forty-five minutes. I got here about a half hour after you guys did. Meaning whatever transpired here did so right before you guys arrived. We had that damp towel on the kitchen floor and some bloody water still in the kitchen sink. I’m guessing that our killer washed up a bit before they were on their way.”

  Rick�
�s confirmation that we’d let a murderer slip right through our grasp did nothing for me.

  “What can we do to confirm that the blood does, or does not, belong to Billie Webber, Rick?” I asked.

  “I can pull samples from around the apartment for DNA testing against the blood. That will take some time, though.”

  I said nothing, figuring we’d find her body, if she was the victim, long before any such results would return.

  Rick planted a hand in the bedroom’s carpet and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m going to get this room printed up,” he said. “Then I’m on to the garage.”

  “Did we get any news on the prints that we lifted this morning?”

  “Rob is still working them back at the lab,” Rick said. “He was going to call me if he got anything. Were you still planning on stopping out at the medical examiner’s to pick up that clothing?”

  “Shit,” I said. “Completely slipped my mind that I was still going to go out there. Yeah, I’ll make the stop and get the clothing back to the lab.”

  “Thanks for doing that, Kane,” Rick said.

  I let out a breath. “Okay. I’ll let you work, Rick.” I left from the front door of the apartment and walked across the sidewalk to the waist-high wooden fence. I put my foot up on the second rung and looked out at the nature preserve. I pulled my phone and dialed the captain.

  “Bostok,” he answered.

  “It’s Kane. We have a shitshow here. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Rawlings gave me a bit on the phone, and Jones filled me in on some more when he came back to the station. Run through it for me.”

  I did.

  “What time do you think you’ll be back at the station?” Bostok asked.

  “I think we have about a half hour left out here. As soon as Rick is finished, we can turn it over to Pasco to wrap up, I guess. If we’re stopping at Ed’s, I think we’ll probably be back around six.”

  “Okay. I think we should get everyone together, get on the same page, and try to get some kind of plan of action. Let’s try to shoot for a meeting around six thirty,” the captain said.

  “That should work.”

  “Find me when you get back in the building.”

  “Yup.” I clicked off from the call and walked around the side of the apartment building to the garage. Hank walked toward me from near a group of deputies gathered at a patrol car.

  “What did you get?” I asked.

  “Billie Webber is a brunette. She’s twenty-seven, five foot five, and weighs a hundred and eighteen pounds.”

  “So she’s probably not who was wearing the clothing.”

  “No,” Hank said. “The deputies are going to circulate the rough description. We still need to find this Billie Webber, though. They’re going to put her name and face out there as well.”

  I nodded. “Any word on a boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Some of the Pasco guys were questioning some neighbors. I asked if anyone had seen a man that frequented the apartment but didn’t get anywhere with that.”

  “Okay, we need to shoot out by Ed and then head back. Sounds like Bostok wants to gather everyone for a meeting around six thirty.”

  “Sure,” Hank said. “What do we do about any kind of notification?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t know anything for certain. We don’t know if this is the blood of Billie Webber.”

  “But we believe her to be missing,” Hank said. “We have a damn good idea that something happened to her. What the hell do we do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did this guy have a wife or girlfriend or any female devotees that could be doing this?” Hank turned and leaned up against the wall outside of the garage.

  I shook my head. “No wife, and I’m guessing that it would be a little difficult to get a girlfriend when you are where he is. He can’t have any contact with the outside world. That means no letters, no calls, no visits, no anything. It’s been that way the entire time he’s been inside.”

  “What about other family members?” Hank asked.

  “No siblings, and killed both of his parents.”

  “Okay, so no family. Well, if he’s locked up in the loony bin, who is the female familiar with the man, his crimes, the investigation, and you?”

  “I don’t know. Aside from supervised time with other inmates, I imagine his only other contacts are guards and doctors.”

  “That gives us three groups of possibles right there,” Hank said.

  Hank might have been right and on to something with that line of thinking. I made a mental note to call the hospital and ask some questions for myself.

  “Okay. Let me touch base with Deputy Ducasse and see if he found us any neighbors familiar with the girls.”

  Chapter 10

  Eve’s heart still raced a half hour after she’d returned to the condo. She’d made a call the second she saw the lieutenant through the apartment’s peephole. Her call was answered, to her relief. She got a single set of instructions—get away with the body. She was told that the master would make sure she got away unseen. It was all of the reassurance that she needed.

  Eve had gotten in the car, opened the garage, and clicked the car into Reverse. She watched the rearview mirror for Kane to come into view, but he didn’t. She backed out, her eyes darting out of the driver’s side window as soon as she left the cover of the garage. Eve continued in Reverse as she watched for the lieutenant to come around the sidewalk at the corner of the building. He didn’t come. Eve shifted into Drive, cranked the wheel, and started away from the apartment building. She watched the rearview and side mirrors—never spotting the lieutenant before she made the corner and left through the gates.

  Eve now sat on the light gray sofa in the furnished three-story condo rental. The condo was much larger and more expensive than Eve would have liked—almost twenty-five hundred square feet and a bit over three thousand a month. Yet the location was ideal, and Eve would never see one of the lease payments. The home was just a six-minute drive from the lieutenant’s station—even less to where he lived.

  In front of her was a television on a long, low-sitting walnut stand. An equally long and low coffee table sat on a cowhide rug separating Eve on the couch from the far side of the room where the TV was. Off her right shoulder was the condo’s kitchen with granite counters and stainless appliances. A doorway at the back side of the kitchen led to a balcony that looked out at the pool. A pair of bedrooms, a bathroom, and a home library took up the floor above her. The floor below was mostly taken up by the garage—inside that garage was Billie’s Audi, with Billie still in the trunk. Another small bedroom and a half bath took up the rest of the lower level.

  Eve picked up her coffee from a glass end table and brought it to her lips. She took in a big drink, set it back down, and flipped on the television. Eve randomly surfed the channels—nothing piqued her interest.

  She dropped the television remote to the couch cushions and reached for the romance novel on the long walnut-colored coffee table. Eve brought the book onto her lap and flipped the cover open. Paper clipped to the book’s first page was the first photo that she’d ever taken with Larry. She ran her finger across his tattooed face in the photo and smiled.

  Larry wore his light blue hospital-issued jumpsuit. Eve sank back into the couch cushions. She remembered when she first saw him and the year she waited before her transfer to his wing went through. She remembered the note he wrote to her and the first time he read to her. Eve thought back to their first talks. She remembered sitting at home after her shift and wanting nothing more than the next morning to come when she could see Larry again. Eve thought of the first time he touched her hand. The first time he snuck a kiss out of view of the cameras. Eve remembered when he began to teach her. She stared at herself in the photo, standing beside Larry and holding the camera to get a picture of the pair. She wore her uniform—dark blue slacks and a dark blue shirt, stars on the lapel, a badge on the breast pocket. The glimmer in
her eye was undeniable—love. Eve let out a sigh. A part of her missed being a guard at the hospital that she’d worked at for almost ten years.

  Eve picked up her phone and dialed. The call went to voice mail. She left a message and tossed the phone down beside her. She hated the distance between them. Eve still had a couple of things on her to-do list for the day. She let out a breath, pushed herself up from the couch, and walked upstairs. Eve grabbed five hundred dollars from the dresser drawer where she’d been keeping her cash, left the condo, and drove toward the selected storage facility—something that was a bit off the beaten path but still inside of the lieutenant’s jurisdiction.

  She wove her way through city streets east of downtown and neared the end of her drive. Eve pulled down the two-lane undivided street where the storage facility was located. While just a couple of blocks from what seemed like a high-traffic and commercial area, Eve found herself in what looked like an older neighborhood. She looked left and right out of the driver and passenger side windows. A couple of unkempt houses sat behind the chain-link fence on her right. Off to her left was another pair of homes on larger lots before a side street shot off and dead-ended just a block down.

  She began to see long white buildings with blue garage doors approaching on her right. Eve spotted the office up ahead. She slowed as she approached. The road expanded in front of the office. The building didn’t have a proper parking lot, just painted, angled lines on what was mostly the shoulder of the road. Eve imagined if a full-sized truck pulled up outside, the bed would be hanging into the roadway.

  Eve veered right and pulled between the lines. She killed the motor, got out of the car, and walked to the entrance. Eve pulled the front door open and heard the sound of bells attached to the top. She walked three steps across the dingy old green carpet to the dirt-stained front counter. The building was empty—Eve saw no one.

  Near a register on the counter sat a bell with a small note that said “Ring for service.” Eve slapped it down with the palm of her hand and put her back to the counter. She looked around the small office. Boxes were stacked in the corner, for sale. An old display held racks of packaging supplies—rolls of tape, foam padding, and bubble wrap. Eve looked left at the truck rental prices plastered to the wall. She turned, slapped the bell again, and went about looking through the front windows out at the street and the house directly across from the business.