Death of a Bankster (26 page)

Chapter 2

An armada of police cruisers, their sirens muted, and other official vehicles that responded to mayhem were idling in the street, immune to the parking rules of the road.

The tires on Maddie’s five-year-old Taurus rubbed the curb as she came to a stop while leaning sideways to get a full view of the Knights’ home—strike that, estate—on Mummy Mountain in Paradise Valley, Phoenix’s ritzier side of the tracks. Brick-like pavers framed the driveway in an alternating pattern.

After shutting off her engine, Maddie could hear the cries of coyotes, scattered in the bordering hills, voicing their objections to the static sounds coming from the squad-car radios. As she stepped out of her car, she noticed that the lining of her size-ten beige, linen blazer had begun to fray from rubbing over the short-barrel Smith and Wesson .38 she carried on her hip. She had tried a shoulder holster, but rejected it after Jed said it made her look like she had three boobs.

Jed walked toward her, his biceps sagging a bit from age. He took pride in the fact that he still worked out regularly on a heavy bag that hung in his garage, while remaining unconcerned with the leathering of his face. One of the lingering differences between the sexes, the time spent caring for the face.

“Got a score in the D’backs game?” she asked. Jed was a big Arizona Diamondbacks fan.

“My car lost the signal coming up the mountain. We’re playing the Dodgers. The only thing I got to hear was a pre-game interview with one of the spoiled visiting superstars. The jerk was crying about having to play five away games in the next six days. Those guys make a gazillion playing a kid’s game, have women throwing their panties at them while they’re on the road, and only have to work about eight months a year. And they think us regular stiffs ought to feel sorry for them. Those pricks have no clue.”

Maddie ended Jed’s sports editorial by asking, “Who called in tonight’s main event?”

“A couple of young studs in heat, they hike over the back hill on their way home from summer ball practice. Over this way,” Jed said, nodding his head toward the end of the cul-de-sac, “I’ll show you.”

The backdrop of the city’s twinkling lights made the neighborhood a beautiful place to live, but a bad place to die and death was what had brought them here.

“What’s the latest on your ex-husband’s efforts to snatch Bradley?” Jed asked as they walked.

“Curtis’s attorney just filed for a review of the custody agreement. My lawyer’s sending me a copy.”

“What grounds could he possibly have? I’m sorry but your ex is a real butt.”

“Curtis just got hired to do color commentary for the Phoenix Cardinals on radio. He got that by marrying the station owner’s daughter who, rumors say, is barren. So he’s using her to get near football and she’s using him hoping to get a child. Her only problem, Bradley already has a mommy with a gun. My attorney says Curtis’s argument is that he’ll give Bradley a more stable and safer home life than he’ll get being raised by a divorced homicide sergeant. Odd hours. Threats from unsavory characters, blah, blah, blah. Do you ever get the impression that except when they need us, civilians see cops as the enemy?”

“Maddie, my love, you’re way too beautiful to be so cynical. Now, what are you going to do about Curtis?”

“Fight the son of a bitch, what else? Listen. We need to get into tonight’s show.”

“Right over there on that hill,” Jed pointed. “If they were old enough to remember Fats Domino, the boys would likely call it Blueberry Hill, ‘cause that’s where they found their thrill.”

Maddie had long ago learned to just grin at her partner’s hackneyed humor. “Two boys,” she asked, “right?”

Jed held up two fingers. “It’s private over there, a great spot for peeping.”

“What did the boys tell you?” Maddie asked.

“Mrs. Knight regularly left the drapes open while she undressed. The teens carried binoculars in their backpacks.”

“You buy that?”

“Yeah, boys banging up against their hormones. According to them, she’d gyrate her shoulders in front of a big mirror on her bedroom wall. Last night they think she saw them. I guess it freaked them a little. They said she walked right up to the window wearing nylons and heels and crooked her finger beckoning them to come to her. After spending the day challenging each other’s stones, the boys decided if she did that again tonight they’d knock on her door and offer to leave their cherries.”

Maddie smirked. Then Jed added, “The boys say they never saw her with anyone.”

“What time were they up here?” Maddie asked, taking Jed’s arm and turning him back toward the crime scene.

“About seven, summer practice ran a little late. They had stopped for a slushy.”

“And that’s when they saw her?”

“That’s their story. But this time she was on her bed, naked and dead. And—”

“Wait a minute,” Maddie raised her hand. “How did they know she was dead if they saw her on the bed through binoculars?”

“Well, there you go, Maddie. That’s what I asked.”

She gave him her look that meant: and the answer is? She didn’t use her go-to-hell expression—that one required more shoulders than eyes.

“At first they fantasized some man having swizzled chocolate syrup all over her, but when they didn’t see a man and she didn’t move, they eventually threw a few pebbles against her window. When she didn’t react, they called it in on their cell phone. I had them take me up there so I could check the magnification. Looks like it went down about like they said. What surprises me is that the boys didn’t just run off. Or call it in anonymously.”

“Where are these boys now?”

“They were already late so, after they told me what they knew, I let them go home. They’re both shook up about what will happen when their parents find out the boys were using their fathers’ binoculars to peep. Then again, the boys weren’t peeping so much as Mrs. Knight was showing. Their behavior would have been stranger if they hadn’t watched.”

“Look at that,” Maddie said, pausing as they neared the crime scene. “The frigging place looks like the mall at Christmas.”

The house had been cordoned off with the department’s standard yellow crime scene tape, as if anything could make a murder scene appear standard. Neighbors, a few holding drinks, had their bellies pressed against the tape, their faces splashed with red from the taillights of one of the TV trucks at the curb, the driver sitting with his foot on the brake. There were more than the usual number of cops and crime scene investigators milling about. And the media was scurrying around like ants at a spilled picnic.

A moment later a circling news chopper began tossing its light beam around like a UFO searching for a landing site.

“I got a hold of the vic.’s husband, Dr. Mills Knight,” Jed said. “He’s some big-shot shrink. The department used him on a murder case back about fifteen years, before the doc became too expensive. I met the guy then, can’t picture him, but I expect I’ll recognize him. He’s in San Diego attending a symposium, whatever the hell that is, probably a five-dollar word for a conference. He’s been over there two days. The Knights have no children and their parents are all dead. The victim has no other known relatives. The doc has a sister in Tempe. That’s all the background we’ve put together so far.”

“When does the husband get back?”

“He should be on the road about now. Claims he can’t think of anyone who would want to kill his wife. We agreed to meet here around midnight. After that he’ll be at his sister’s place. When we’re buttoned up here, you go on home; I’ll do the paperwork. Give Bradley a hug for me. While I wait for the doc, I’ll stop to see the boys and their parents. Prep them for being witnesses when we catch this perp, not that they saw all that much, and try to convince the boys to keep quiet about all this until then.”

“Fat chance,” Maddie said. “This will be number-one tomorrow when those boys see their buds.” Jed smiled and nodded.

Katie Carson, a hard-driving reporter from Channel 12 Eyewitness News, came toward Maddie. The two women had met in the sixth grade and remained close friends, although their differing lives and careers had mostly kept them apart. In today’s world, hair, clothes, makeup, and voice training were part of the entertainment side of the news. Katie had always had a great shape, and now dressed like a fashion model. She had also smoothed her voice until it poured over you like expensive body lotion.

“Sergeant Richards, what can you tell us?” Katie asked, speaking loud enough to be heard over the hubbub. She then thrust her microphone at the side of Maddie’s face as if she might reply through her ear.

“I just got here, KC.” Maddie and Jed ducked under the yellow tape. Then Maddie turned back, squinting into the glare of the cameras, “Maybe more on the way out.”

The officer at the door had the pressed shiny look of a recent academy grad. A trimmed shock of carroty hair reached below his service cap. He looked scared. No. Not scared, more like overwhelmed. Could be it’s his first murder scene. His responsibility: only cops get in.

Death has its own energy field, and that force drew Maddie through the open double mahogany doors. Part way up the winding stairs, she passed a large oil painting of a blond woman with an innocent face and the kind of body you see on the fronts of hotrod magazines.

She also picked up a faint fragrance: Lavender, she thought.

As a homicide cop Maddie had learned that people came in all gradations of bad. Her instincts told her that what waited at the top of the stairs would be as dark as bad got.

Chapter 3

Death was life’s stop sign. When it came a person had no way of knowing that whatever they were doing at that moment would be the last thing they would ever do. Given the conditions under which Abigail Knight had died, she had likely welcomed the stop sign, probably begged for it.

Maddie’s black flats nested into thick white pile carpeting while she and Jed watched the medical team unwind the duct tape that had been wrapped clockwise around the victim’s wrists, pinning her arms to the brass rods of her headboard. Abigail Knight’s legs were bound to the foot posts using nylon stockings, probably her own.

Maddie inhaled, drawing the stench into her nose but she refused to flinch. Some cops used various gimmicks to trick their senses. Vapor rub under the nose, for one, but Maddie felt that keeping her smeller unencumbered came with being a homicide cop. Sometimes what stunk was a clue. Time would tell if the lavender she smelled on the stairs would mean something.

Maddie’s first close look told her that Mrs. Knight was the woman in the picture on the stairway or, more accurately, she used to be.

Abigail Knight’s face—oh God, not her face exactly—the skin from her face had been peeled away, as a chef peels the translucent outer flesh from green seedless grapes before the stuffing of a game hen. And even that had not ended Abigail Knight’s horror. Her lips had been cut off, leaving her teeth a red-splashed miniature picket fence. Maddie gasped, she had forgotten to breathe.

There was no blood spray near the victim’s head, but gravity had extracted enough to blur the stark contrast between her raw flesh and the white silk pillowcase on which her face had finally been allowed to rest. The absence of spray from her head said that Abigail had been dead when her face was peeled.

Murders like this stuck to your heart like barnacles to the hull of a ship. You just knew they changed you, knew they had to, even without knowing how or how much. Maddie fought off her shallow breaths with deeper ones and willed herself into her job.

Blood, sweat and the contents of Abigail’s freed bowels had congealed to form a foul-smelling puddle that hugged the low points of her body like cold turkey gravy. Maddie breathed through her mouth while studying the area around the bed and the rest of the room. A second picture of Mrs. Knight hung on the wall across from the door. Despite the mutilation of the person, the killer had not defaced either picture of the victim.

The killer had knocked her unconscious downstairs, Maddie reasoned, or, if he were an expected paramour, maybe upstairs in the bedroom. If on the main floor, the killer had to be strong enough to carry her limp body up the stairs. The fierce wolf that emerges to do these bestial killings is always stronger than that beast’s host body.

A man cleared his throat. Maddie turned and saw the uniformed officer she had seen outside: Carrottop. Everything from his highly polished shoes to his shirt looked new. His pale face and the pink splotches that mottled his neck, instantly told her how he was feeling. He attempted a smile but his mouth stayed tight.

She walked over and stood beside Carrottop. “There isn’t a person in here who hasn’t felt the way you do right now. We’ve just learned to control our reactions. Go outside for a few minutes, away from the crime scene. Breathe deep. If you barf, stay away ten more minutes.”

“There’s no problem, Sergeant … I’m okay.”

“Officer, we don’t need you upchucking on any evidence. Move your ass.”

“You got a heart of gold,” Jed muttered, then grinned at Maddie.

She made eye contact with the county’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Jonathan Ripley—the detectives called him Rip. He lowered his eyelids some and slowly shook his head. Abigail Knight’s severed breasts had not been found.

Maddie raked a hand through her hair; it flopped back into place. She stared blankly at the medical examiner, her face betraying her question. “Exsanguination,” Rip said. “The lady bled to death.”

Maddie ran her dry tongue across her drier lips. Dr. Ripley went back to moving as though he needed three hands.

She walked into the adjourning master bath with its double-sized hot tub and overhead skylight. For a moment she fantasized living and loving in such luxury. After shaking off her twinge of guilt about having such thoughts in the middle of such carnage, she drifted downstairs.

In the kitchen she opened the refrigerator and the dishwasher; the fridge held nothing unusual and the dishwasher was empty. On the counter she found a statement from Marta’s Maid Service and a bill from a local dry cleaner. The documents had not arrived in an envelope for neither had been creased.

Through a window she saw a few cops and media men looking at KC like it was a hot night and she was a cold beer, and they wanted to take a swig.

Maddie went back upstairs. The thermostat in the Knights’ master bedroom had been pushed down to 66 degrees. The cool felt good mixing with the heat pouring in through the front door, but she doubted a woman would strip down to her underwear in such a low temperature.

“Be sure to dust this thermostat for prints,” Maddie called out to one of the crime scene techs. He nodded.

She had not seen any flowers or plug-in air fresheners to explain the lavender-like fragrance she had discerned on the stairs. Maybe Marta’s Maid Service had sprayed something before leaving. Or perhaps the killer had both sweetened and cooled the air in his private abattoir.

On a settee near the bed a black garter belt was tangled up with a lace pushup bra. Five inch black heels lay tossed on the floor, the kind with straps that wrapped part way up the leg. The laces darkly decorated the carpet like anorexic snakes that had been caught playing the children’s game, Freeze. The nylons may have also been on the settee until the sicko used them in a manner for which they were never intended. And, last but not least, a neatly folded red babydoll nightie waited on the vanity.

If Mrs. Knight had already been wearing the babydoll, the woman would have tossed it aside as she had the garter belt and bra, not folded it. And if she slept naked, the nightie wouldn’t be out at all. Could the killer have been neat enough to fold it after removing it from her unconscious body?
Abigail Knight might have known her killer, put the red babydoll out for later, and met him wearing the black heels and nylons.

“Bill.” Maddie said, summoning over Bill Molitor, the head of the evidence team. After telling him to check the babydoll for trace evidence, she asked, “What’s this ring marking on her nightstand?” She held her hair against her forehead and bend down for another look. “It’s too big for an ordinary cup or drinking glass,” she added, coming upright to face the department’s main man for such things.

“If what made it is still around, we’ll find it,” he said, reassuringly.

“Your guys find any blood that might not be the victim’s?” Jed asked.

“No. Not yet anyway. We have found a few hairs, but no blood trace. The killer had to have gotten some blood on himself but he didn’t clean up here. We’ll process the hairs.”

Maddie’s first rule of homicide said that common thugs screwed up everything. The second rule said that the brainy killers rarely messed up on the big stuff. This meant that when dealing with premeditated killers, the prominent clues were often misdirection. If this were not true, as Jed had once put it, they would not be eligible for membership in the brainy killers’ club.

Maddie worked homicide cases the way she and her son put together jigsaw puzzles. First you build the border, then you keep moving and refitting the inside pieces until they formed a picture.

Jed had found a couple of Abigail Knight’s outfits in plastic bags hanging on a rod inside her closet. His description of the items—such as a man can describe women’s clothes—matched up with the dry-cleaning bill Maddie had found on the kitchen counter.

In Mr. Knight’s closet, Maddie saw a third picture of the dead woman in a silver and black frame gracing the top of a built-in teak chest of drawers. In this picture Abigail Knight had posed naked, sitting on the floor with her hands braced behind her and one knee raised. The pose reminded Maddie of the shiny silhouette of a woman featured on the mud flaps of a million trucks crossing America at any moment. Next to the picture, a large musical instrument, she thought a double bassoon, sat in a matching teak stand.

Back in the bedroom, she walked up to Dr. Ripley who was bent over the body. He arched his back and said, “Same set up as the black woman last week. The killer had taped her mouth to keep her quiet. Then later after she died he yanked the tape off her mouth, pulling off her lips along deep cut lines. The gauze stuffed down her throat,” he shined his light into her torn mouth, “muffled her screams while she died an excruciatingly painful death. The black woman last week was Sergeant Brackett’s case right?”

“Brackett told me,” Jed interjected, “that Folami Stowe, the black woman, had been hit over the head from behind with some blunt object that hadn’t been found at the scene.”

“Apparently,” Maddie said, “Folami Stowe knew her attacker or trusted him for whatever reason. That sound right to you?”

Her partner nodded, small nods.

“Same here,” Rip said. “The killer bludgeoned her from behind then tied her up. The blood spray indicates he removed her breasts while she was alive. The minimal blood near the head said he waited for her to bleed out before skinning her face. He would have wanted her dead so her head would be pliable.”

What Maddie hunted wasn’t human, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. This had been the work of some creature that had gnawed through the membrane separating our world and some parallel universe of ogres. What frightened Maddie most, each year it seemed more of these beasts were burrowing through to visit our side.

“Bill,” she called to the crime scene head, “you were at the Stowe scene last week, right?” He nodded. “What’s different?”

“We haven’t wrapped this one up,” he answered, “but there are differences in how they were tied. This victim has a brass headboard and footboard. Stowe had a mattress and box springs on a metal frame.”

“What about the knots?”

“Same. Left over right,” Bill Molitor said, “probably a lefthander. That should cut your odds a bit.”

“Or a smart right hander,” Maddie retorted.

“Ah. Now that’s why you get the big bucks,” Bill replied.

The block-lettered macabre memo, “I’ll Get You, My Pretty,” written in blood above Abigail Knight’s bed leaked downward at the same descending angle Maddie had seen in the photos from the Stowe murder posted on the board at the station.

Abigail Knight’s lips, attached to a strip of bloody tape, had been found inside the bathroom trash basket that had been brought in and left beside her bed. The perp. had apparently moved the can there to avoid scattering his victim’s facial skin as he patiently peeled it away.

This Asshole’s definitely meticulous. Maddie wondered if he was a neat freak in other aspects of his life. Was he neat enough to have folded his victim’s nightgown after removing it from her body?

She turned to Bill. “Was there a wastebasket next to Stowe’s bed?”

“That one from the kitchen,” he said, “this one’s from the master bath. It likely means nothing more than here the kitchen is downstairs and he had this victim upstairs.”

According to the body of knowledge on serial killers, an organized and meticulous scene indicated that the killer was intelligent, did not live near the victim, and that his killing was not the fruit of sudden impulse. Also, more than ninety percent of history’s known serial killers have been males—white males.

Maddie knew this was not racial profiling, but fact-based profiling wherein race functioned only as an element, not a cause.

On the basis that it would take years to twist sick thoughts into such a complex plan of mutilation, Maddie pegged the killer’s age at plus thirty and, based on the history of serial killers, probably less than fifty-five. It was a wide range and she would hold it loosely, but a girl had to start somewhere.

Logic argued the killer would not have known these two victims from such different worlds. One lived in a neighborhood where Spam would be served, while the other dined on prime filets. So how did the perp get into such different homes? There were no signs of forced entry at either house. He could have offered Folami Stowe money for sex to get into her place, but the image of Abigail Knight did not include the likelihood of selling her body for cash. Then again, if the teenage boys were telling the truth, the woman’s libido was stuck in overdrive.

The guy could be Brad Pitt gorgeous? If so, given the sexual proclivities of his victims, he might have been invited into their homes. Or, he could be Quasimodo with a different approach? Is he threatening or charming his way in? None of these questions came with answers so she tucked the whole mess into a quiet corner of her mind.

“This guy likes ‘em pretty,” Jed said after moving close. “On the other hand, that could be a coincidence. The killing techniques are the same, but that’s where the clear similarities end. Folami was black, Abigail white. Do their skin colors tell us something about the killer’s perversion? Could it mean the next woman to go under his knife will be Hispanic, or European? Asian or maybe Native American?”

“You think he’s working the skin color palette?” Maddie said to paddle down Jed’s thought stream. “Are white and black women now safe?”

“We won’t find those answers here tonight,” Jed said, “but hopefully we will find them.”

What the murder scene had provided in the way of answers, well, information anyway was that the killer had not hurried. The butcher had waited for each victim to bleed out from chest wounds before skinning their faces. Forensics had found no sign of fresh semen at the Stowe scene, and neither Folami nor Abigail had been roughly penetrated by anything. Those were facts in evidence. But these facts were piggybacked by another question: Did the killer take the breasts as trophies to be used for his own self-gratification at some later time, in some safer place?

Maddie knew that not much more could be done tonight. Rip needed to get Abigail Knight’s body to his lab. She wanted to go home and hug Bradley, tuck him in, and thank her mom for yet another night of extra duty.