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  “Is she still here?” I asked.

  “She was with a couple of our guys outside, last I heard.”

  “The murder took place inside, and the man was brought out here?” Hank asked.

  “It looks like it. There’s a large blood pool around the breakfast bar in the kitchen. The drag marks start there,” Gillison said.

  The garage door leading back into the house opened. Rick stood there, staring in at the murder scene. “What the hell?”

  “Rick,” I said.

  He stepped in and closed the door at his back. His eyes darted around the room. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said.

  I nodded toward the clothes in the corner. “Bloody clothes. Get them bagged and tagged. Check for a wallet. We need to see if this is, in fact, the homeowner.”

  Rick continued staring at the body strung from the ceiling. “Um, yeah, okay.” He set his kit down on the floor and opened the top. He gloved up and examined the pile of clothes. After a moment, he scooped up what had originally been a light-blue polo shirt and held it up by the shoulder seams to examine it. Then he walked to the body hanging from the ceiling and examined the man’s neck. “Throat was slashed while he was sitting upright,” Rick said.

  “That’s what the blood on the shirt says?” Hank asked.

  “Correct.” He switched hands with the shirt and held it toward us. “Blood from the neckline down, some spatter on the shoulders. The right sleeve and side of the shirt are covered in blood. I’d say he fell to the ground in his own blood pool on his right side.” He grabbed a plastic evidence bag from his kit and stuffed the shirt down inside. He sealed the top, placed it next to his kit, and pulled a few more plastic bags from inside.

  He bagged the man’s shoes, socks and boxer shorts, and then the khaki slacks were all that remained. He lifted them up by the belt loops. “Heavy,” he said. Rick lay them flat on the garage floor and went through the pockets. “I got a wallet.” He reached into the pocket and removed it. He flipped it open and eyeballed the driver’s license. “Herb LaSalle.” He looked over at the hanging body. “Height and weight are about right.” Rick bagged the pants and the wallet. “I’m going to give the rest of the garage here a good look. Pax is going to meet me here in a little bit. He was heading back to the station with some items from the assisted-living place.”

  “I wanted him to get going on the prints and DNA samples from that stuff,” I said.

  “Rob is back at the lab. He’s going to start in on that. I called Pax as soon as I saw all the blood in the walkway. This is going to be a two-man job.”

  “Okay, as long as someone is working on the other stuff,” I said.

  “Rob will get it taken care of,” Rick said.

  I looked at Gillison. “Let’s leave him to it. You want to show us the kitchen?”

  “Yeah, come on.” Gillison gave us a wave and walked toward the door.

  We followed him back through the house, minding the bloody drag marks. As I stared down at them as we walked, I saw what looked like a heel print from a shoe and stopped.

  “Hank,” I said, pointing at the mark in the blood.

  He crouched and looked. “Heel. It’s small.” A look of confusion crossed his face. “And thin. A woman?”

  Chapter 14

  We spent another two hours on the scene before heading back to the station. Rick and Pax went over the drag marks and photographed and fingerprinted the entire home—kitchen to garage. The Pasco County coroner, along with his team, lowered the victim and removed him from the garage. Rick and Pax collected the equipment used to hoist him and brought it back to our lab. I spoke with the housekeeper that had called it in. She had spoken with LaSalle the prior afternoon. We cross-checked the heel print in the blood against the shoes she wore. They were not a match, and the size wasn’t close. The heel print belonged to our attacker. The coroner put our time of death between fifteen and twenty hours before. The man had been murdered sometime the previous evening.

  Hank and I walked into the station and went straight to Bostok’s office.

  The captain sat at his desk with his arms crossed over his chest. “Same?” he asked.

  “Same.”

  He flung his pen on top of his desk and rubbed his eyes. “Any evidence?”

  “Forensics gathered some things,” I said.

  “What about the assisted-living place?”

  “We found an inhaler that belonged to the man out in the parking lot. It looks like he was taken from there. The inhaler is down in forensics being printed. We also have a few items that we can get a DNA sample from. We met the daughter. She says her father was a juror on the Redding case.”

  “A juror?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “What about the second victim? Juror as well?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far, Cap.”

  “Let’s get someone on that ASAP,” Bostok said.

  “I’m going to head down to the lab and double check the file boxes on the case now. I don’t remember seeing juror names, though.” I looked at Hank. “Do you?”

  He shook his head.

  I looked back at the captain. “I’d like to get a meeting set up in a little bit here. Maybe bring in Donner and Jones for extra help. We need more manpower working toward the same goal—getting whoever is doing this off the street and behind bars before there are more victims,” I said.

  “Okay. I’ll get Sergeant Timmons and a couple of his guys over as well. What time are we thinking?” Bostok asked.

  I looked at my watch. “Say an hour?”

  “That’s fine. I’m sure Major Danes will want to be a part of this. I’ll let him know. Do we have anything else to go on with forensics?”

  “We have a partial heel print from a shoe they are looking into. It looks like it may be a woman’s,” Hank said.

  “A woman?”

  Hank nodded.

  “Okay. I should probably call Sam in for the meeting as well. We are going to have to put something together for the press. I saw that they were out at Wesley Chapel.”

  “Yeah, probably ten vans,” I said.

  “Okay. Get to it. I’ll get on the phone with everyone.”

  “Sounds good, Cap,” I said.

  Hank and I left Bostok’s office. I walked down the hall toward the bank of elevators. Hank went to make copies of everything we had so far, to distribute at our meeting.

  I thumbed the button for the elevator and glanced at the lights above. One car was up on the sixth floor, and the other was on ground level. I opted for the stairs.

  I walked into the forensics lab and spotted Rick at a table toward the back. He saw me and waved me over.

  “Get something?” I asked.

  Laid out on the table was the gauze the man had been wrapped in, along with the winching system used to hoist the body at the LaSalle house. “The gauze looks like a dead end again, but there’s prints all over this winch.”

  “Good. Have we run them yet?”

  “I’m just starting to pull them.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Pax pulled prints from the inhaler. He’s running them as we speak.”

  “Okay. Where are the file boxes from the Redding case?”

  “Back in my office.”

  “I need to check something quick,” I said.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  I walked into his office and found the box from the trial. I browsed through the sheets of paper but found nothing with juror names.

  My phone rang in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw Ed was calling. I clicked Talk. “Yeah, Ed.”

  “I spoke with Marion Rappaport.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think we have a positive identification here.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, aside from the same medications in the toxicology report, the eye color, height, weight, all of that is there as well. We’ll still need a DNA match to confirm, but I’d say we’re at a per
centage in the nineties.”

  “Okay, Ed. Did you hear that we got another?”

  “Yeah, Pasco coroner called me. We’re a tight bunch. I was actually going to take a ride over there.”

  “Sure. Let me know if you need anything or get anything. I know we didn’t contact anyone as far as next of kin. I’m not sure if the Pasco County sheriffs did. We’re not a hundred percent that it is the homeowner, though it looks like it.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out there. I’ll be in touch later.”

  “Thanks, Ed.” I hung up, left Rick’s office, and went back to the workstation where Rick continued to examine the winch. “How long do you have here?” I asked.

  “Maybe a half hour with this. After that, I’ll need to process the clothes. Why? What’s up?”

  “We’re going to have a meeting upstairs in about fifty minutes. I’d like you to be up there. It will be a half hour or less.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine. I can have Rob work on the clothes.”

  The door to one of the glass labs flew open. Pax stood with a sheet of paper in his hand. He swung it back and forth. “We have a print match from AFIS on the inhaler.”

  I walked over and took the sheet. The name of the match was Carmen Simms.

  “Did you run her?” I asked.

  “Not yet.”

  I pointed back inside the lab.

  Pax took a seat on the rolling stool in front of his laptop and plugged the name into our system. “Carmen Simms, fifty-one, black hair, brown eyes, five-eight, one hundred thirty pounds.” He scrolled down the screen. “She’s got priors.”

  “Print it,” I said.

  Pax clicked the button, and the office printer chirped and kicked out the sheet. I pulled it from the tray and looked it over. Most of the charges against her were old, but the sheet was littered with offenses—drugs, assault, aggravated assault, fraud, and restraining orders. I looked for an address. The one listed was in Pembroke Pines, near Miami. She had no known phone number or registered vehicle. Her driver’s license hadn’t been renewed since 1993. She’d been incarcerated between the years of 1994 and 2005. The facility of incarceration was listed as the South Florida State Hospital. We didn’t have much, if any, recent information to go on. I could call down and request a check of the address listed. However, the woman was in our area. I needed more information on her.

  “Thanks, Pax. Keep doing what you’re doing,” I said.

  I took the sheet from the forensics lab and headed back upstairs. I stopped in the captain’s office.

  “Yeah?” Bostok asked. “Get something?”

  I handed him the sheet. “We got some prints off of Henry Pullman’s inhaler that belong to this woman.”

  He looked it over. “Pretty slim as far as anything recent.”

  “I know.”

  The captain adjusted his glasses on his nose and continued reading the sheet. “She was in one of the state’s mental health prisons. This woman has been a ghost since, what, two thousand three? Where was she from then until now?”

  I shrugged. “That’s what we need to find out.”

  “Have Timmons put a BOLO out on her. I just got done with my rounds of calls. People should start filing in for the meeting pretty soon. You should probably figure out who you want on what.” He handed back the sheet.

  “I’ll put together something. Until everyone is here, I’m going to dig into this Carmen Simms. Give my door a knock when we’re set.”

  The captain nodded.

  I went to my office and took a seat. On my desk, waiting for me, were the in-and-out logs from the assisted-living complex. A note from Rickson was taped to the front. It said he’d checked out everyone that had signed in as a guest—no one seemed suspicious. The note also said that the facility had a number of unguarded service roads. A dead end.

  I woke up my computer and searched her listed address. All the listings came back as the Brickshire Center Luxury Condo complex. I clicked on the website. All the images were illustrations of what the place would look like upon completion—the condos were still under construction. I punched in the address again and searched through multiple pages of results. The condo complex was a renovation of an old housing facility called the Mission Oaks Treatment Center. I searched the name and found a couple old news articles reporting about the place closing their doors after twenty-five years of operation. I continued reading. The facility had been an involuntary halfway house. They shut down in 2008.

  “Shit,” I said.

  I searched through the news articles, looking to see if any former employees were named. If they were, they might have known where Carmen Simms went. I found nothing but decided to look into it more later.

  I made a handful of copies of her rap sheet for the meeting. They finished printing seconds before the captain knocked on my window. “Everyone is here,” he said from the next room. I gathered what I had and walked down the hall to our meeting room. Rick was standing outside the door with the captain.

  Rick looked at me. “It has to be this Carmen Simms,” he said. “The prints on the winch were hers as well.”

  “Okay. Anything else?”

  “The heel print we’re still working on.”

  I nodded and turned the door handle. “Come on.”

  The captain and Rick followed me in.

  The long table running down the center of the room was filled. Hank, Jones, and Donner were present, and Timmons had five uniformed officers sitting in. The captain sat next to the major at the front, along with Sam James, who I assumed would create his press release from the information discussed in the meeting. Rick stood against the back wall.

  I tossed down the copies of the woman’s rap sheet. “Spread those around,” I said. “The woman’s name is Carmen Simms. She is our prime suspect. We have her prints with both victims.”

  As the sheets were distributed, I watched while the officers and detectives started reading them over.

  “She does not reside at the address listed. It was a halfway house that closed in two thousand eight. We have nothing as far as where she is currently staying. She doesn’t own a car. She has no phone number listed,” I said.

  Telwan raised his hand.

  I pointed at him.

  “Where the hell do we start? What do we even know about her?” he asked.

  “We know she’s in the area and, more than likely, skinning people,” Bostok said.

  “Here is what I want to do,” I said. “Jones, Donner, I need you to locate the jurors from the original Redding case. Ed said he was ninety percent sure our first victim was Henry Pullman. That was before we found this woman’s prints at both scenes. Henry Pullman was a juror on the Redding case, we need to know if Herb LaSalle, our second victim, was as well.”

  “So, call the courthouse and get the records?” Jones asked.

  “Call to get the juror’s names specifically. We already have a file on the Redding trial down in the forensics lab. I went through it briefly and didn’t find anything with jurors’ names,” I said.

  Donner eyed the sheet in his hands. “It looks like this woman was in the state mental hospital. Do we know why exactly?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t got that far into that. We’ve only had the woman’s name for forty-five minutes.”

  “Do you want me to look into that?” Donner asked.

  “Rawlings and I will be on the woman. Finding out if the jurors are targets and getting protection to them if they are is just as important as finding this woman right now. You guys focus there.”

  Donner nodded in confirmation.

  “Timmons, I want you in contact with Jones and Donner. If we confirm that LaSalle was a juror, it stands to reason that is who this woman is targeting. I’m going to need you and patrol getting to these people as soon as possible—that is, if they are local. Other than that, get that woman’s name and photo to everyone in patrol.”

  “That’s fine. We have nothing as far as a vehicle for her?”r />
  “Nothing listed,” I said.

  “Okay. I’ll try to see if we can hunt down any family on this woman. If she’s been off the grid, she had to be staying with someone,” Timmons said.

  “What about bank or credit-card records?” Major Danes asked.

  “We’ll need them. Without any idea where she banks, we’ll probably have to contact the feds and let them run with it.”

  “I’ll make the call,” Danes said.

  “Good.”

  Sam James cleared his throat. He sat in a black suit, taking notes at the front of the room. “Are we ready to distribute this woman’s name and photo to the press?”

  I looked at the captain, he looked at Major Danes, and Major Danes looked at me.

  “I’d guess the longer we wait, the more victims will turn up,” I said.

  “How long before the press release, Sam?” Danes asked.

  Sam looked at the analog clock hanging on the wall at the back of the room. “Five o’clock.”

  “It’s a little after three now,” Danes said. “We need to get more information to see exactly what we’re dealing with here. Get whatever you can by a quarter to five and bring it to me. We’ll make the decision then.”

  We split up with our tasks and left the meeting room.

  Chapter 15

  Carmen and Angel had parked the car a few houses away and walked up the block to the tan golf-course home. They stood at the front door. The ranch looked fairly new, as did the subdivision it resided in. Angel looked down at the welcome mat she stood on. It read The Carpenters. They knew the woman, Maggie Carpenter, had a husband named Chuck—whether or not Chuck was home, they didn’t know.

  “What should we do if the husband is here?” Angel asked.

  “Kill him. Anyone who stands in our way is dead. It’s what your father wants.”

  “That’s what he said?” Angel asked.

  “Anyone,” Carmen said.

  Carmen pressed the doorbell, which chimed inside the house. “Be ready for whatever happens.”

  Angel pulled the scalpel out of her pocket just enough so Carmen could see. “I am ready.”