Black Fall Read online

  We weren’t recording the entrance to the safe house because we weren’t expecting McGillis to come knocking. Fortunately, I was able to make a composite drawing using the FBI system. It matched the security cam footage of the woman stealing the child earlier in the day. “So you matched the face to the body?”

  Lewis shakes her head. “Not quite. The face is a bit of a mess, but the body matches the general height and size you described, plus the hair and clothes. There aren’t that many unidentified bodies we come across.”

  I guess that’s better than no lead, and Lewis gets points in my book for paying attention to the bulletins in the midst of all this. Still, it’s a tenuous connection.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Lewis says. “The reason we’re driving out to the Plains is because of the way she was killed. The knife you described? Your drawing looked like a sashimi knife. This woman was killed by the same kind of knife. The medical examiner was able to spot the wounds right away. Either she’s a victim of our kidnapper, or she’s our kidnapper who became someone else’s victim.”

  The idea that the woman who tracked me to the loft was murdered is still registering. This would mean someone else is involved. Her murder couldn’t have been random. Damn. This thing is getting real complicated, real quick, and at the worst possible time.

  Lewis thinks out loud. “So, if this is our babynapper, it raises the question of who killed her, and why.”

  I’m afraid I already know the answer, at least part of it. “Her accomplice. They killed her because she failed.” There was a sense of purpose in the woman’s eyes. I felt she was sent on a mission, and not acting alone.

  Lewis nods as she studies the traffic in front of us. “This is the part that’s still unclear to me. I’ve gone over your report several times. After she draws the knife, there’s not a lot of detail. Was she trying to kill you? Or the child? Or both?”

  “I don’t know. All I remember was seeing the knife and reacting. It was kind of a blur.” This is the difficult part to explain to people who aren’t cops. They don’t appreciate the fact that the hardest decisions we have to make are the ones we only have a fraction of a second to think about. In their minds it’s like a TV show, where the bad guys tell us what they’re up to and we get to have a long debate. It drives me nuts. I’m torn up by what happened, but I don’t know what my alternative was.

  “I understand. Not the time to ask her what her intentions are,” Lewis replies sympathetically. “I wish just once other people could know that feeling when you walk up to a car in the middle of the night and see someone reaching into their jacket.”

  My thoughts exactly. “Or respond to a suspected burglary, climb through the bushes, and see someone pointing something metallic at you and there’s only a moment to decide if it’s a kid with a toy, a drunk, or somebody about to shoot you.”

  “I don’t miss my days on patrol.” She laughs. “I once used my stun gun on a goat.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “I got a call about a prowler. Turned out a Dominican family was raising goats in their backyard and couple of them got loose in the neighborhood. I loved filling out the report on that one. Kept finding gyros in my desk drawer for a month.”

  Cop humor. There’s nothing quite like it. You deal with so much darkness you have to learn to find the comedy where you can. And if they sense you can’t take a joke, they’ll only make it worse. “First time I used my stun gun was on a judge.”

  She gives me a surprised sideways glance. “A judge?”

  I still blush at the memory. “I was responding to a noise complaint. It was a group of guys getting their drink on before a bachelor party. So I show up in my patrol blues.”

  “Hah!” she cackles. “Let me guess. They thought you were a stripper!”

  “For the record, that happens pretty equally to both rookie guys and girls in uniform in Miami! I’d been on the job for just a few months, and this was one of my first times out on a call without supervision. This middle-aged man with a beer in his hand answers the door of the townhouse, grins, and grabs me by the arm. I pull away and tell him to stand down. He’s having none of it. He’s convinced this is all some setup.”

  “So you tasered him?”

  “After sufficient warning. Long story short, my supervisors told me it would be better to have a judge who owed me a favor than to take him in.”

  “I wish all altercations had such happy endings.” There’s a long pause before she speaks again. “By the way, good reaction on this one. I’m not sure what I would have done if I’d seen the knife.”

  It’s always gratifying to hear another cop say you did the right thing, even if you have no memory of consciously making the choices you did. “Shooting wasn’t an option. Not with the baby there. I’m sure you would have done the same.”

  “Maybe, but still. Every part of me would want to get the bitch.”

  “I didn’t have time. If I’d chased her down, the baby probably wouldn’t have survived.” I still don’t know what the right choice was. If I made the right one, like people are telling me, then why do I feel so horrible?

  “Yeah. That’d be messed up. The child would be dead and the woman would still be alive.”

  “Maybe.”

  Maybe not. Was she murdered because she failed to kill me? Or because of something she knew?

  Neither answer is reassuring.

  Chapter Nine

  Cause of Death

  Four red lines, sutured shut with forensic glue, crisscross the face of the woman who threatened me just a day ago. With the blood now washed away, she’s unmistakable, except for one important difference. This woman’s final emotion was fear, not rage. Her mouth is open, twisted in what looks like a scream. The medical examiner tells us she died coughing on her own blood as she fought for air while her punctured lungs drowned her from within.

  I hate what she did. I should hate her, but I can’t. I still don’t know what drove her to kidnap that child and come to my doorstep, but I’m certain that ending up here on a cold metal slab wasn’t part of her plan. Maybe none of this was. I’ve seen people be manipulated into doing things they’d never agree to willingly again and again. But what, or who, could cause her to do the evil she did?

  “Is this her?” asks Lewis.

  I want to see the body in person. The 4K monitor displays in the conference room show every horrifying detail, but still, I need to be in the room with her to say for certain. I’ve learned that looks can be deceiving. The investigation that launched my career with the FBI involved a series of misidentified victims, and I barely saw through that. There’s no guarantee I would be so lucky again.

  “Is the body in this building?” I ask.

  “Yes. I can have them pull her out of the freezer.” The medical examiner, Dr. Tuft, a serious woman with short silver hair, waves to the conference room screen. “We’re not due for an autopsy for another day or so. We’ve got all the field photos and the preliminary lab images uploaded.” She’s telling this to Lewis, not me. This isn’t my case. I’m a witness or a victim, depending on how you look at it. Tuft’s only letting me see the forensic information as a professional courtesy.

  “I’d like to look at the body.”

  “We will, but is this her?” Lewis asks again. She understands how difficult this is for me, but she needs her own legal closure on the issue.

  I nod. “It looks like her.”

  As we walk down the corridor, a detective named Greer from the Prince William County Sheriff’s Office joins us. Tall, almost stooping, he gives me a courteous nod but directs his attention to Lewis. “We found her partially covered in some trash near a drainpipe. It appears to be the spot where she was murdered.”

  “Did the concealment look rushed?” asks Lewis.

  “I’d say so,” says Greer. “It was an out-of-the-way place, but not that out-of-the-way. There are a few spreads of woods nearby that are farther away from the riding trails, but it would tak
e another half hour or so to walk there, especially if you were avoiding the highway.”

  Lewis writes something on her pad, and I make a mental note. This is her investigation. I can’t go jumping in with my own questions. So I follow them closely, while trying not to step between them.

  “Shoe prints?” she asks.

  “We got some partials. Also some tread marks on the reeds. That would be consistent with the knife-wound angle and the bruising.”

  “Bruising?” I blurt out before I can catch myself. I may be used to sitting in on other agents’ cases and keeping quiet, but I’m not usually this personally invested. Bruises, like a map of choreographed footsteps, can tell you quite a lot about how someone was killed.

  Greer shoots me a backward glance, unsure if he should answer me directly. Lewis nods, telling him it’s okay.

  “Yes.” He gestures toward his right bicep. “Here”—he points to his neck—“and here. Dr. Tuft will show you, but it looks like she was in a bit of a scuffle before she was killed.”

  “Both arms?” I ask.

  “Yes.” He turns to face me now, agitated. “I’m sorry, Agent, is this an FBI case now?”

  Before I can speak, Lewis interjects. “Our Jane Doe may have kidnapped an infant from a DC hospital and threatened an FBI agent on duty there before she was then found dead in Virginia. You do the jurisdictional math, Detective. If they decide to step in, it’s certainly within their right.” She says this while still managing to be polite and professional. I’m not sure if I could have pulled it off nearly as well.

  Lewis is right about the FBI having potential jurisdiction, except for one important detail: this wouldn’t be my case. Never in a million years. I’m a victim and not impartial—if there really is such a thing. I’m just here to identify the body. Although Detective Greer doesn’t feel the same sense of professional courtesy Dr. Tuft does, I don’t take it personally. The FBI has a reputation for taking over local cases and claiming all the credit. It’s probably a bit exaggerated, but more than a few cops have done a lot of hard work only to see a news headline, months later, attributing the success to us. J. Edgar Hoover was a complicated man, but he certainly understood the value of PR.

  Thankfully, Lewis is giving me some latitude. She can tell this is probably going to be a bureau case sooner rather than later.

  “Do you have any idea who this woman was?” she asks, directing Greer’s attention to something more important than a pissing match.

  “Not yet. She’s not local. We know that.”

  We come to a stop in front of the cold-storage room.

  “I’ll leave you with Dr. Tuft while I make a few phone calls.” He gives me a hesitant look. “Agent, have your supervisor call me if you need anything.”

  Lewis’s eyes flicker toward me, gauging my reaction.

  I don’t have one, because I can’t tell if he is being polite or an ass. “Thank you for all your help, Detective.”

  Tuft leads us into a prep room. “Scrub up over there. There are some smocks and masks on the counter. I’ll go get our Jane Doe ready.”

  Lewis waits for us to be alone. “I’m sure he means well,” she says sarcastically.

  “It’s understandable,” I reply as I pull a mask over my face. “This is your case for the time being and I’ll respect that.”

  “Say it,” Lewis orders.

  “What?” But she’s been watching me since we got here. I’m sure my poker face has slipped a few times. “Am I that obvious?”

  “There’s a tone. You want to say something.” She nods to Tuft on the other side of the glass door. “You’ve been waiting for her to leave.”

  “The bruises on the arms. She was held.”

  “Yeah. One person held her. Another knifed her. I’m going to get on Greer about the boot prints. I think they may have more here than they realize. Anything else?”

  Over the years, the FBI has collected millions of data points from crime scenes. Analyzing the location and angle of a knife wound can tell you if the murder was committed by a stranger or someone known to the victim, if it was premeditated, if it involved multiple assailants. It’s not exact, but more often than not, pretty accurate. “If the ones on her arms and the neck are the only bruises . . .”

  Lewis knows where I’m headed. I don’t really need to lead her. Her instincts are as good, if not better, than mine. “How did she get down there? It doesn’t sound like the kind of place I’d go willingly. The photos showed a lot of blood on the ground. I’m sure she bled out there.” Lewis pauses for a moment, then adds, “It doesn’t seem like her killers were strangers.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it,” I agree.

  The look in her eyes tells me she thinks the same thing I’m thinking. Our Jane Doe wasn’t acting alone. There are at least two others out there strong enough to overpower her, kill her, and then leave her there. They didn’t even go to great lengths to hide what they did. Greer said the girl wasn’t a local. Were they just passing through?

  I follow Lewis into the examination room. Tuft unzips the body pouch. Jane Doe’s face has the same expression of horror I first saw on the screen, but this time in 3-D. It takes me back to my introduction to the Warlock. But my gut tells me not to expect something so dramatic this time. That victim was murdered to make a statement to the world. This one, killed for what she failed to do or what she knew, is just a discarded body. She was just a prop.

  Her skin is pale. Pale, like—like an orchid.

  While my grandfather is the showman of the family, my father is quite clever in his own right, and he has one trick that’s fooled me more than any other. It isn’t from any book I could find, or a variation of anything else I’ve ever seen. I love it for its simplicity.

  He would take an orchid from a bouquet, pluck its petals off one by one, place them into the palm of his hand, squeeze them, and then open his fist to reveal they had vanished. The most astonishing part was what would happen next: Father would take the bare stem, wave it in the air, blow on it, and the petals would miraculously reappear. Night after night, I would escape whatever dancer was babysitting me and watch his part of the show from the wings. Dad always winked when he caught me spying on him.

  My curiosity finally got the better of me. I had to know the secret. After the performance, I grabbed the orchid as they swept up the stage and inspected it. I was hoping to see some kind of trick mechanism, maybe a silk flower with springs.

  But it was real. The stem wasn’t bruised, or even bent.

  I became determined to find out how he did it. Every evening after he did the orchid trick, I’d wait until the curtains dropped to pluck it from the debris. My dad caught me sneaking around a few times, but he never said a word. It was a game. He is a quiet man, with nowhere near the bombastic personality of his father. He’s subtle.

  One night, not long after my obsession with the illusion began, we were caught in a rainstorm as we did a load-in, and half the props got stuck on the loading dock. Dad was still drying them out with a leaf blower minutes before his turn onstage. As soon as he’d finished his bit, he rushed back out to continue the salvage operation.

  The orchid was in the sweepings, just like after every other show, but when I examined it this time I noticed there was something different about it. The green stem was in fact a piece of thin pipe. The white petals were made of thick silk. At the base of the flower there was a spring, painted green.

  Dad found me later as I sat in the corner of the theater, looking at the mechanical flower and crying because the magic was gone.

  “I’m sorry, Jessica,” he said with a sad face. “I wanted you to believe.”

  Every night when he performed the illusion, he’d hide a fresh orchid in his pocket. After he made the petals magically reappear on the fake flower, he’d switch it for the real one and drop it to the stage in the blackout.

  He did this to entertain an audience of one.

  He did this for me.

  You can tell how muc
h someone values a secret by how far they’ll go to make sure no one, not even an eight-year-old girl, will find out. But sometimes the things we discard end up revealing what we work so hard to hide.

  The secrets of our magic are hidden in the litter we leave behind us on the stage. Playing cards made of plastic, newspapers with invisible tape holding them together, fabric flowers that are supposed to be real.

  This young woman was discarded. Not just because of what she failed to accomplish, but because of what her killers were about to do.

  Chapter Ten

  Out of State

  Tuft holds up a clear evidence bag with a small bloody object inside. “Alright, ladies. You ready for your first clue?”

  “Just a second.” Lewis turns to me. “Jessica, still sure this is her?”

  I gaze down at the body. “Yes. This is the woman who came to the loft.”

  Her eyes stare up at the ceiling. What was her last thought? Did she know the people who killed her? Did she feel betrayed? Did she see it coming?

  I shudder at the thought that deep down she didn’t want to kill me or the infant. What if she’d planned to fail? Did she hesitate long enough for me to draw my gun? It’s difficult to judge her now. I’m alive. The baby is alive. She’s not.

  I have a thousand questions, and no answers.

  “What’s in the bag?” asks Lewis.

  “Our victim had her monthly visitor,” replies Tuft.

  I glance over at Lewis. She gives me a small shrug, also unsure of the importance of this. By itself, it doesn’t seem like much help, but I’m sure Tuft is just priming us.

  “Tampons are like shoe prints and tire treads,” she explains. “They can tell you a lot. This lot wasn’t sold on the East Coast.”

  “Greer said she wasn’t local,” Lewis remarks.

  “She wasn’t recognized as being local, true, but it’s a big county.”