Conduit (3 page)

Cassie choked on her laugh. “Madame Zelda?”

“There was a psychic on the ten o’clock news last night.” Emily
picked up a pen off the desk and twirled it between her fingers. “The
news
,” she repeated.

“I know that drives you crazy,” Cassie said.

“He claimed to be able to connect with the dead and made vague
assumptions. Asking if they knew someone who has cancer or died of cancer. Who
doesn’t know someone who has had cancer?”

“What letters did he use?”

Emily liked to keep track of the initials that entertainment
psychics, as she referred to them, used in readings. The psychic would throw
out a seemingly random letter, but one associated with the most popular names. The
person receiving the reading would connect that letter with the name of a
person they knew, erasing skepticism.

“M and S were his favorites,” Emily said.

“He played it safe. Without thinking about it, I can name
four people I know whose names begin with the letter M.” Cassie paused and did
a quick count on her fingers. “Make that five. That’s just first names.”

“Connecting with the dead. Those frauds always use that one,
as if it’s possible to talk to the dead.”

“Because the dead are dead and the only people you can
connect with are the living, even on a psychic level,” Cassie said in a
singsong tone. She leaned over her desk toward Emily. “I’ve heard this all
before.”

Emily laughed. She gave the same speech to Cassie way too
often. Aunt Susan burned those words into her mind for years, and she couldn’t
help but repeat it.

Emily.

She stiffened at the sound of her name. Louder than before,
the whisper pressed on her brain like the vise grip of an unrelenting migraine.
Emily bit down on her bottom lip and lifted her hand to her temple. The
reverberation of her name bounced around her mind and singed her nerves. She
caught her breath and the whisper let go of her.

Cassie’s brow creased. “Emily, are you okay?” She leaned across
her desk and gently took her arm.

As Cassie spoke the words, paleness swallowed Emily’s face.
The room spun in her peripheral vision and a wave of vertigo washed over her. “I
think I need some water.” Nausea gripped her stomach and she laid her hand on
her abdomen.

Cassie got up from her desk without question. Emily rubbed
her forehead and focused on calming her queasy stomach. She had never experienced
such a physical reaction to a psychic event. Then again, the whole situation
confused her. Whispers, automatic writing. Somehow, it must be connected.

Cassie walked back into the office with a cup of water and
set it down in front of Emily. The cold liquid trickled down her throat and
soothed her aching mind. Her strength returned, having been stripped from her
when the voice took over her mind.

“What is it, Em?” Cassie asked.

“I don’t know yet.” A hint of nausea remained with her. She
placed her hand on the edge of Cassie’s desk and focused on some papers on the
desk to stop the room from swaying.

Cassie took a deep breath and crossed her arms. “But it’s
something.”

Emily didn’t answer. She had read many myths that said
channeling spirits caused automatic writings, but one couldn’t connect with the
dead because they were dead. Cassie had echoed Aunt Susan’s teachings only a
few moments earlier. “The only people you can connect with are the living,”
Emily said under her breath.

Cassie cocked her head to the side. “What’s going on?”

Emily glanced at Cassie and shook her head. Someone out
there used automatic writing to reach out to her, while the intense whispers were
also aimed in her direction. If these two phenomena originated from the same
person, they really wanted Emily to listen, even if what they had to say scared
her.

Hear me.

Emily.

A crumpled candy bar wrapper tumbled
along the side of Highway 54, just inside the Wichita city limits. The early
morning traffic paid no mind to the litter, but slowed to catch a glimpse of
the gathering of police cars and ambulances on the shoulder of the highway. No
doubt several of the drivers and passengers were on their cell phones, letting
others know about the crime scene circus.

Parked in front of the Medical Examiner’s van, Detective Lieutenant
Lionel Edwards leaned against his unmarked patrol car. He tapped his foot on
the ground to a silent tempo and mouthed the words of the song that had played
in his car a few moments earlier. Watching personnel crawl over the crime scene
in the field beyond the bottom of the ditch, Lionel had no intention of joining
them until forced to do so.

He had not wanted to begin his first morning off in a month by
leaving Barbara half asleep on a lazy Saturday morning so he could visit a
crime scene, but the sixth homicide in ten weeks demanded the sacrifice. Even
though he had only planned to sleep late and spend a few hours with Barbara
before going into work, he would not experience the luxury of time off with
this case.

Lips mashed together and eyes narrowed, Detective Sergeant Shawn
Brandt trudged up the side of the ditch. Lionel could almost hear Shawn’s internal
sighs. Shawn raised the yellow crime scene tape of the outer perimeter and
passed under the barrier. He tugged his latex gloves off his hands, folding them
inside out. When he reached Lionel, he shoved the gloves in his jacket pocket. “You
gonna join the party?”

“I thought about standing up here for another few minutes so
you can vouch that I was here, and then drive back home to Barbara,” Lionel
told his partner. “If I’m lucky, she’s still in bed.”

Shawn cracked an apathetic smile. “You’re just lucky to have
someone in your bed waiting for you.”

Lionel mused that Shawn earned the right to his bitter
comment. Though Shawn’s divorce was finalized last month, the marriage ended
over a year ago. Amber had not been as forgiving as Barbara when it came to
their job pulling them out of bed on their days off. Amber’s method of coping
with the stress included a longstanding affair with their neighbor. Through
that act of marital betrayal, Shawn lost his wife, his barbequing buddy, and his
house.

Lionel noticed Shawn had buzzed his light brown hair almost
down to his scalp since he left the station last night. “New look for the
ladies?” he asked.

“Hilarious.” Shawn rubbed his hands together, fighting the
bitter cold of the early spring morning. “So you going down there?” he asked
again.

“Is it the same as before?”

“Why else would I drag you out of bed?”

“This guy is killing way too fast. There’s not much room for
acceleration in his killings. It’s like he started at full speed, but serial
killers don’t do that.”

Shawn held up his index finger. “Ah, but remember he has a
message for us. Maybe he really wants us to listen.”

Lionel inferred from Shawn’s tone that he was withholding
information. “I take it we’ve confirmed what the message is.”

Shawn motioned for Lionel to follow him, and Lionel planted
careful steps down the side of the ditch toward the crime scene. As a child, he
could run up and down ditches without fear. Now in his late forties, even the slightest
misstep would cause a short and unfortunate fall, resulting in a twisted ankle
or similar calamity.

Within the boundaries of the outer crime scene perimeter,
officers unnecessary to the investigation huddled in a group, deep in
discussion. Though it might appear to outsiders that the officers were engaged
in important conversation about the crime scene, Lionel imagined they gossiped
about their weekend plans, golf swings, significant others, anything but the
gruesomeness in front of them. Not that Lionel blamed them. It was easier to
focus on a world that existed outside of crime when faced with the horrors of
homicide.

Beyond the yellow tape of the inner perimeter, two crime
scene investigators combed a grid search through long-forgotten weeds for
additional evidence. The tall weeds glinted gold in the early spring sun, and
some even sprouted dandelions, giving them a much nicer appearance than mere garden
menaces.

The investigators waded forward, heads down in search of
anything that might help crack the case. Given the lack of evidence at the
other crime scenes, Lionel thought their efforts futile, although necessary. After
six murders, a break in the case was long overdue.

Shawn and Lionel made their way to the center of the inner perimeter
and toward their final destination. Perry Weinberg knelt over a body, while a
crime scene technician snapped photographs of the corpse and immediate area. As
Sedgwick County’s Chief Medical Examiner, Perry had performed the autopsies on
the first five homicide victims with the same emotionless expression he wore now.
Lionel did not think badly of him for it. In the twenty plus years Lionel
worked with Perry, he had noted that emotion rarely found its way into Perry’s work.
He also rarely visited a crime scene this late in his career, so Lionel surmised
the killings affected Perry as much as everyone else.

“Twelve hours,” Perry said over his shoulder. “I’ll be more
sure when we get her opened up on the table.”

“Twelve hours since time of death,” Lionel said when they reached
Perry. An inexact science, when Perry said twelve hours he really meant give or
take several hours, but Lionel always took Perry’s estimates at face value. With
Perry’s experience, he was good at getting close to time of death on first
guess, taking into consideration the condition of the body and environmental
elements where the body was found.

Shawn turned to Lionel. “He’s dumping them quicker than
before. I wish we knew if that’s a good sign.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” Lionel said. “Maybe I’d like
some hope that he dumped her too fast and he made a mistake.” He bent over Perry’s
open black bag and stole a pair of latex gloves.

“We all want him to make a mistake,” Perry said, “but I don’t
think we’re getting one today.”

“Just let my poor, tired soul have some hope.” He pulled on
the latex gloves and walked around Perry. “What can you tell us so far?”

“Can we get some more photos of the knife wounds on her legs?”
Perry asked the photographer. He shrugged at Lionel. “No traces of blood around
the body. She didn’t die here and he cleaned her up before he moved her.”

“Just like the others,” Lionel said. Standing at the head of
the body, Lionel regarded the unemotional face of the latest victim. She appeared
younger than the previous victims, maybe twenty-five at best. “No ID yet?”

“No clothing, no ID,” Shawn said. “Just like the others,” he
added.

Leaves and dirt framed her olive complexion and matted her
once silky black hair. Soulless eyes, hazy with death, stared toward the
highway, oblivious to the horrors her naked corpse created. Her contorted, open
slit of a mouth looked as if she wanted to tell Lionel something, which was
exactly what she did. Besides appearing to be the youngest of all the victims,
she was also Asian.

“He’s changed the ethnicity of the victim this time,” Shawn said,
reading Lionel’s thoughts.

A twinge of excitement ran through Lionel’s body at the
sudden change in ethnicity, but he stifled it, knowing it might not lead
anywhere. “Unfortunately for us, the victimology is so diverse that it might
not matter,” Lionel said. He stared at the body for more clues. “She was dumped
early this morning, after it stopped raining.”

Shawn raised an eyebrow. “That’s what we figure. Her hair
isn’t wet or even damp, like it would be if she’d been rained on. I’ve got Timmons
checking on the weather to see what time the rain ceased in this part of the
city.”

Lionel crouched next to the body. The viciousness of her
death claimed all beauty once displayed on the woman. Bruises lined her throat
and traveled over her naked skin, accompanied by angry red knife slashes that
covered almost every part of her body like clothing.

The injuries were so numerous that they overlapped, and at
some points where multiple wounds collided, Lionel couldn’t tell which
direction the slashes pointed. Perry would tell them later if they were upward
or downward strokes, how deep they penetrated her body, and how many there were.
He would also be able to discern if the knife used on this victim matched the
type used on the others. For a moment, Lionel reflected that the girl suffered
this torture for several hours before her body gave up.

He put up a wall against that thought. Letting emotion in at
this very moment could result in overlooking something while studying the
victim. Making a mistake, possibly missing an important piece of evidence, could
result in a seventh girl dying, just as six women already had. Emotion could
come later when he was at home with Barbara, safely hidden in his own world
where murder didn’t exist and future victims didn’t rely on him and other homicide
detectives in the Wichita Police Department to save them.

Finished with his initial examination of the torso, Lionel
shifted his focus to the victim’s hands. Two fingers on each hand were missing,
severed by crude knife cuts between the second and third knuckles. “Tell me
this was done postmortem,” Lionel said.

Perry’s stern look from behind his glasses reflected the
coldness of the victim’s body. Lionel wondered why he bothered to voice his
thoughts to Perry. The previous victims were all tortured while they were
alive.

“I wanted you to see the hands before the autopsy,” Perry said.
He waved at the crime scene technician, who stopped his photographs. “Get
someone over here to bag the hands and recover the fingers.”

Lionel turned his attention to the ground beside the body. The
yellow weeds were absent of any blood, confirming Perry’s statement that the
murder occurred in another location. It didn’t take but a moment for Lionel to
spot the victim’s four missing fingers tossed next to her hip, nothing more
than a brutal reminder of the killer’s penchant for torture. The killer didn’t
take souvenirs. Whatever fingers he removed from the body during torture were
left with the body. Either he wanted no reminders of what he did or he wanted
no evidence lurking around that might point to him.

Shawn gestured toward the victim’s left thigh. “It’s got to
be the last letter of the message.”

Lionel leaned over to get a better look. The erratic, slanted
strokes of the capital “E” were carved into the victim’s skin toward the inside
of her left thigh. The victims were all branded with a different letter, sliced
into their skin in the exact same location. The running theory was that the
letters were a message for the police. Just as Shawn said, the “E” on this
victim seemed to complete the killer’s message.

“I hope that means he’s done,” Lionel said, though he knew
better. “Perry, you’ll let us know before you start the autopsy? And make sure
to run a rape kit please, even though we know it will probably come back
negative like the others.”

“I always do,” Perry said. “I can give you something
different about this one right now if you would like, unless you’d rather wait
for the autopsy.”

Lionel arched a brow. This killer held to a specific routine
when killing and the previous victims had revealed nothing new. Something different
could give them a much-needed clue.

Perry pointed to the “E” carved into the victim’s thigh. “That
was done postmortem.”

Though unsure what it could add to their investigation, the
small change in the killer’s ritual piqued his interest. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Perry said, as if Lionel called his
abilities into question. “Lack of blood in the wound. There’s no way he did
that before she died.”

Analyzing the new information, Lionel frowned at his partner.

“Except to clean the bodies and move them, he’s never
touched them postmortem,” Shawn said.

Lionel pushed up from the ground, grimacing at his creaking
knees. “Maybe something spooked him.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Perry said, without looking
away from the victim. “That’s your job to figure it out. I just tell you what
he did and when.”

“Thanks, Perry,” Lionel said. He and Shawn started away from
the crime scene.

“First the change in ethnicity, and then he branded her
postmortem,” Shawn said.

“I don’t think the ethnicity part means much,” Lionel said. “There’s
never been a connection between the victims. Age, appearance, social circles. It’s
all changed with every one of them. No reason to think he would stick to the
same ethnicity every time.”

“Serial killers don’t tend to cross ethnic boundaries. There’s
a reason why they choose their victims, but this one has no apparent reasons
for choosing any of these women.”

“I don’t think our guy is like other serial killers.”

“Sure wouldn’t be much fun if we had a textbook case, now
would it?”

The frustration in Shawn’s voice infected Lionel’s thoughts.
“Six murders, ten weeks,” Lionel said. “We need some help.”

“The feds sent over their profile already. Their team is
coming in next Monday to assist on the case.”

“I don’t mean a profile on the killer, and I definitely don’t
mean the case is ripped out of our hands. I mean, we need some help. This guy
just left us a message on six bodies. We may want this to be the end, but there’s
something else going on here. He’s not close to finishing.”

“We have a profile from the feds and we have a task force. The
only help we need is for this guy to make a mistake. Maybe there’s something to
the letter being done postmortem. After the body is processed and Perry does
the autopsy—”

“We’re going to have the same answers we always do,” Lionel said.
“This guy doesn’t make mistakes. He’s methodical and clean. He uses a common serrated
kitchen knife to carve up the victims. He chokes them at some point, but cause
of death isn’t asphyxiation. They die from blood loss after extreme torture. No
rape or signs of sexual assault. Then he washes the victim to get rid of any
trace evidence, and dumps her in a public place for quick discovery.”