“Never one victim,” I told George, taking pity on him. Which was a large error in judgment, as he had never, and would never, take pity on me. “Always three.”
“Aha!” George crowed. “Thus ThreeFer. I get it now. Oh. Wait. I already knew that.”
I tried to wither him with a look, but George had been glared at by the best—including both my sisters. Everything rolled off him like water off a duck. Or blood off a mirror.
“Always left out in the open, so they’re found quickly. It’s in our lap because he’s crossed state lines.”
He snorted. “Jeez, thanks. That I knew.”
Nice try, George! But you wanted the gist, and now you’re getting it. I tried to make my voice as drony and snore-inducing as possible. “One set of victims in Minot, North Dakota. Another set in Des Moines. You remember Des Moines.”
George pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Unfortunately. Everything I packed came back smelling like pig shit. I fucking hate Iowa. It’s not a state. It’s an asylum staffed with pig farmers.”
“Well, you would know more about that than I,” I answered, grinning. “So things are coming back to you; how wonderful. You’ll also recall—I hope—that you and I had to check out the Des Moines crime scene, spent hours with the locals, interviewed all sorts of—”
“Idiots, and for nothing. Des Moines was a dead end. Des Moines was disco and dodo birds.”
He was right, so I moved on. “One more set of three vics in Pierre.”
“Which smelled worse than Des Moines.”
“At least your priorities never change. And now he’s in Minneapolis. You and I—”
“Are going to kill each other one day.” He sighed.
“—are on point,” I finished.
“You mean you, and I, and Shiro, and—”
“Don’t say the name!” I nearly shrieked. The last thing we needed right now was for her to show up.
“What is she, Voldemort? Christ.” George pretended to wipe his cheek. “All right, calm down, say it, don’t spray it.”
“Cadence!” George and I turned to look; Officer Lynn Rivers was hurrying toward us. She was a stereotypical corn-fed blonde (that hair! those gorgeous blue eyes! and those legs!); I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed how very nicely she filled out her uniform. Her short hair ruffled in the breeze, obscuring her eyes, and for a minute she looked like a Viking maiden heading to a fjord. A maiden with a gun. Did you head to a fjord or, you know, make one?
George in particular was trying not to slobber into his coffee cup. “I was hoping you’d catch the squeal,” Lynn was saying. “This look like your bad guy from Pierre?”
“I’m afraid so. Also Des Moines.”
“Enough about fucking Des Moines,” George whined. “Iowa! The dullest state in the Union! The state flower is a rose. A pink rose.”
Lynn looked a bit taken aback, but I was used to the rant. I could even tell her what was coming.
“State bird,” I whispered to her.
“And the state bird is a canary! Which eats dandelion seeds and ragweed. And the state plant is the oak tree. An oak tree! Did they try to bore me out of my tits by picking boring-ass shit as their emblems?”
“Yes,” I agreed, “because it’s all about you, George.”
“Well”—he shrugged—“it usually is.”
Sadly, George was utterly serious. Poor Lynn had been here ten seconds and looked like she wished she were still stuck in traffic.
We shook hands; hers were small, and I often wondered how she managed to pull the trigger on her Beretta M9. I was very relieved she’d given up the .38 after that nasty business with an otherwise perfectly harmless dentist who liked to jam his lady friends’ left arms into his garbage disposals.
Lynn had uselessly plinked away at him with the .38 until she’d run out of ammo, and then my younger sister—well, I didn’t remember, and Lynn had been unconscious by then, but there were pieces of Dr. Demento strewn from his office all the way to the parking lot. True to BOFFO regs, the whole thing was hushed up, Lynn was given all the credit, and the name Cadence (or any other) Jones was never mentioned.
“I’m glad to see you, Lynn. We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“No doubt.” She turned to the side and tapped her hip because, silly girl, she assumed I hadn’t immediately noticed the new gun. Don’t get me wrong; .38s were fine weapons . . . if you wanted to play pin the tail on the donkey. “Does this gun make me look fat?”
“Oh, stop it.” I took another sip and shuddered. Lynn kindly took the cup from me to “share” and then “accidentally” dropped it.
Because she was an excellent cop (and with only six years of street experience!), she had anticipated me. Because she was nice (father a minister, mother a nurse), we were friends, sort of—maybe friendly was a better way to put it. She knew my secret, anyway.
But she was the only one who liked Adrienne better than Shiro or me. I tried not to take it personally. After all, Adrienne had saved her life.
Still, it stung. I tried to and generally resisted the impulse to suggest she see a psychiatrist. (That’s the thing about people in therapy. We all think everyone should be in therapy. And everyone should! The fact that we’re right just makes things trickier.)
And Lynn was a rare creature—she thought an entire department of armed, crazy federal agents was a fine plan. Congress, by contrast, didn’t always get on board. Most people didn’t, in fact. It was almost like they felt the disadvantages of putting schizophrenic kleptomaniac sociopathic multiple personality depressives in the field outweighed the benefits. Which only proves that many people have no imagination.
Okay, I think I’m done being silly now. Sure, on the face of it BOFFO looks like the FBI lost a bet. Heck, my own best friend has suggested on more than one occasion that any advantages Adrienne gives me are far outweighed by all the felony assaults she’s added to my jacket.
What my friend doesn’t understand, being an unemployed artist, that Lynn, a cop, does, is that I am an effective federal agent because of my psychological quirks. (Quirks may not be the strongest word, to be fair.) Lynn understands that a sociopath like George thinks nothing of bending a few rules to get his man. She gets that a kleptomaniac knows how to take things away from a bad guy right under his nose. She knows that a histrionic can turn in an Oscar-worthy performance in any undercover situation.
Helpful? Sure. A pain in the butthole? Yes. Worth the hassle to get the job done? Well. We have an eight-figure budget that sails through congressional budget justification every single year. What does that tell you?
“We’re already canvassing the neighborhood,” Lynn was telling me, foolishly assuming I had been paying attention, “knocking on every door. We’re focusing on the businesses that were open last night; there were quite a few. So far nobody’s seen anything.”
“Of course not.”
“This asshole’s got the luck of the devil,” George commented. And he wasn’t far wrong. Multiple crime scenes, multiple vics, for the last year . . . and we were no closer to getting him or her now than we had been when George and I drove to the airport for our fun-filled Iowa field trip.
“We’ll keep at it. But you should come over here. There’s something my boss wants you to see.”
Oh, goody. Nothing like staring down at a triple homicide to make a Hot Pocket surge back up a greasy esophagus. Blurgh.
I followed Lynn, carefully skirting photographers and what we called “the props,” those little yellow plastic numbers you placed beside various pieces of evidence, both to get a system in place and to have an idea of the size of the item. No matter how bloody and awful the crime scene, no matter how many times you had nightmares about it, no matter if you’d memorized the file, you’d be surprised what you get wrong on the witness stand weeks or months or years later.
When you’re testifying in court, it helps to look at a picture and realize the item in question couldn’t be more than six inches high or f
our inches wide. Like that.
And it doesn’t matter if you are a local sheriff, a beat cop, a Feeb, a deputy, or a member of the Secret Service. Crime scenes are all processed in essentially the same way.
Interview. Examine. Photograph. Sketch. Process. And around and around we go.
In addition to the adrenaline rush and the knowledge that there is a new puzzle to solve, crime scenes are fun for me because I get to meet new people—and not just the dead ones. Heck, other than my sisters and George, Lynn and Clapp were practically friends. (Actually, adding George to that list was an act of charity. . . . I wasn’t sure a pure sociopath could have friends.)
Case in point: Jim Clapp was dragging another man toward our small group, someone I didn’t know.
“What’s this?” the new guy was saying. “An actual pleasant surprise at one of these bloodbaths? I knew it was going to be a great day when I found two secret decoder rings in my Lucky Charms.”
I blushed and stuffed my hands in my pockets. “Three stab wounds,” I said, almost wishing I had another cup of the awful coffee. “Hardly a bath of any sort.”
The new guy—a detective, judging from the okay suit and gold shield—was about my height, with prematurely white hair (because there wasn’t a wrinkle to be found on that face unless you counted the laugh lines) and a swimmer’s build, all narrow, sinewy strength and wide shoulders.
“You must be the famous Special Agent Jones,” he continued. “Lynn’s told me quite a bit about you, but nobody said you were such a cutie.”
“That’s not true,” Clapp said. “I told you that ten minutes ago.”
“Right before I told you comments on women’s physical attributes have no place at a crime scene,” Lynn said primly.
“Aw, it’s our fault you’re so cute?” George cried. He reached out (the sociopath’s disregard for personal space) and tried to pinch her cheek. “Cute, cute, key-yute!”
She backed away with a look that suggested she wanted to try out her new gun.
“Go give someone a parking ticket, buddy,” the detective ordered absently, smacking George’s palm away from Lynn’s face with one hand and extending me the other. I clasped it and reveled in his smoky voice. “I’m Detective Ben Papp.”
Papp? As in smear? Oh, the poor man.
“Nice to meet you, though I’m sorry these are the circumstances.”
I extricated my hand with some difficulty; Papp had a grip like rubber cement. “Hazard of the trade.”
“Worse than being an Avon lady,” George piped up.
Papp ignored him, which I found enchanting. “Your boss told my boss you get first walk, and when the Feebs command, we locals tremble and obey.” He smiled, so I was pretty sure he was teasing. “We didn’t do it that way in Spokane, but who in his right mind would come to Spokane anyway? Is there even an FBI branch near Spokane?”
“There’s one in Seattle,” George said helpfully. The breeze kicked up and whipped his tie across his face. He chewed on it absently for a moment, then spit it out.
“Okay,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as mystified as I felt. “Well, come on over. We’ve got most of the documentation, but I imagine you’ll want some of your own guys to get in here.”
“Cadence needs to walk it before any of the other Feebs,” Clapp reminded him.
“We know,” half the cops on the scene said in unison. Cops were good at looking like they were focusing on something else while they were actually sucking in every bit of info they could. Meaning: they had heard every word of our “private” conversation and were anxious for the Feebs to get on with it. And who could blame them?
All Papp did was laugh. Thank goodness. How to explain that everything I looked at would be studied, analyzed, and obsessed over by three people? All living in the same body? What I would miss, Shiro would catch. What she caught and dismissed, our other sister would chase down and choke the truth out of. What they both thought irrelevant, I could fit into the rest of the puzzle.
I’m sorry about its all being so complicated.
Chapter Five
Two men, one woman. The triple-victim pattern was like that in Minot, in Des Moines, in Pierre, and now here. All stabbed with what the coroner thought was a good-sized fillet knife—something to do the job quickly, something easy to keep sharp. Something not out of place in the average kitchen. (You want to lose all interest in cooking? Visit a kitchen-based crime scene. I promise you’ll have to do it only once.) No other bruises on the bodies; they weren’t beaten or dragged. They just showed up dead.
Profiling the victims had been an exercise in mind-numbing futility. They were all different ages and races. ThreeFer had killed busboys and physicians; men and women; an alcoholic and a marathon runner, for heaven’s sake. Tox screens always came back negative, except for booze—and not every time, either. Some of the victims had been seriously impaired, some stone-cold sober. BACs came back anywhere from 0.0 to 0.11.
Because we had been unable to find commonality in the victims, we were nowhere on our profile. Until we figured out the connections the victims had to ThreeFer, we had more crime scenes to look forward to—a distressing thought, to put it mildly.
Shoot, we didn’t even know when the victims had been taken. Time of death could be deduced, but some of the victims had spent half a day or more with their killer—and some of them hadn’t even been reported missing before the body showed up. About the only thing we’d been able to figure was that ThreeFer was taking each victim one at a time, then dumping three bodies sometime later.
The bodies were always dumped somewhere semipublic (lab advised they were all killed elsewhere, and dumped where a civilian would find them and call a cop—and never in a neighborhood where a civilian would find them and not bother), and these were no exception; they were in an alley, easily visible from the sidewalk. Yes, about the only thing we could be completely sure of was that the victims had been killed elsewhere, then discarded with another awful verse.
The verses! Another puzzle, another frustrating clue that no one could figure. ThreeFer left an excerpt from a Shakespearean sonnet at each crime scene.
Pierre:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end;/Each changing place with that which goes before/In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Des Moines:
Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?/Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:/Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,/Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?
Minot:
For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate/That ’gainst thy self thou stick’st not to conspire,/Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate/Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
And here, in Minneapolis, courtesy of Officer Rivers’s iPod:
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck,/And yet methinks I have astronomy;/But not to tell of good or evil luck,/Of plagues, of dearths, or season’s quality.
“Oh, fuck me till I cry.” George sighed. He disliked Shakespeare. Me, I could take or leave the Bard; I just wanted to figure out what the sonnets had to do with anything. So far nobody had a clue.
In keeping with our mysterious fair-haired serial killer, all the sonnets had been printed somewhere on ordinary copy paper with a run-of-the-mill printer—zillions of possibilities in Minnesota alone.
“Maybe a college professor?” Lynn was asking, rereading the sonnet on her screen. “Or a—I dunno, a poet? An artist?”
“A dumbass psycho nutbag?” George asked, raking his fingers through his hair. “Welcome to the info age, baby. You don’t have to have any time in college to pump out Shakespearean sonnets. All you have to do is Google.”
Annoyingly, that was a good point.
But this time, this time, there was something new. Thank goodness, finally, hallelujah, something new. The female, vic one (I’m sorry to sound so cold, but I had to call them something until they got ID’d), had
the front page of the Star Tribune pinned to her chest . . . from January 1, 2003.
Vic two, the shorter of the men, also had paper pinned to his shirt—a desk calendar from December 15, 2003. And vic three, the tall, fat one, had a poster of—of—
“Is that what I think it is?” George asked, covering his mouth so the other cops wouldn’t see him smirk. But heavens knew I was used to it.
“It’s a poster of the Three Tenors.”
“Stapled to his forehead!”
“The big jerk,” I muttered.
“Ah, come on, Cadence, what’s your beef against big boy singers?” George squatted by the body and peered closely at the poster. “Y’know, you ought to let yourself go once in a while. ‘Big jerk’? Call him an asshole. Call him a sick fuck. Call him a twisted—”
“Why now?” I mused. I was as close to the body as I could safely get without messing up evidence. Same again: stab wound to the chest. No defensive wounds. How was he stabbing them without their fighting back?
“Weird,” a new voice said, and I looked up. Then straightened in a hurry. “They don’t ever fight him. Weird.”
“Jerry,” I began warningly.
“Weird weird weird.”
“You better behave.”
“Oh shit on a brick!” my partner exploded. “Who let you past the tape?”
Our colleague, Jerry Nance, blinked big wet hurt eyes at us. He was dressed like a typical fed, in what looked like an off-the-rack suit, black socks, loafers, and a boring solid blue tie. Only George and I knew he had meticulously made the suit by hand, and it had taken months. The suit concealed dozens of hidden pockets.
He was slender, tall, and balding. His high forehead was sunburned and peeling; his pale blue eyes were watery and vague. He looked, moved, and spoke like an amiable midwesterner. He was, in fact, from Italy, spoke nine languages, and had three college degrees and an IQ of 162.
He had the soul of a clerk, and lived for making lists, examining evidence, putting things in their place, and relentlessly alphabetizing everything he could get his hands on.
He was brilliant and invaluable at crime scenes.