The Enemy Inside (2 page)

His only bad quality was that he’d slept with nearly every woman in a two-mile radius, both in and out of their district. There had been some station talk, early in their partnership, of a marriage fifteen years ago when Jay was a young cadet. But he point-blank refused to acknowledge whether the rumor was even true the one time Berg had mustered up the courage to ask. They never discussed the subject again. Since then, Berg had lost count of Jay’s conquests.
 

Still
,
while everyone knows he’ll fuck anything that moves, it doesn’t stop the women flocking to him like bees to honey.
Berg shrugged.

The elevator arrived and they stepped back to let a young female officer get out. She pushed between them, pausing only long enough to direct a malevolent glare at Jay before stalking off.

Berg laughed. “If looks could kill, you’d be dead a thousand times over. Don’t you ever get tired of picking up young officers, then discarding them like used tissue and spending the rest of your life avoiding their hatred?” Berg grimaced at her partner as he raised an eyebrow in response to her question. “You needn’t look so smug.”

“Seen her naked. So worth the death glares,” he said with a grin.

Despite her disapproval, Berg couldn’t help but smile as she contemplated his general appeal. Jay was impossible to dislike. Men and women were equally drawn to him for his easygoing character and self-deprecating laugh. A well-connected, third-generation cop, he was dedicated to his job and solved more than his fair share of cases with diligent work and deadly charm.
 

“You need to become familiar with the phrase
don’t crap where you eat
,” she said.

He chuckled. “Maybe if you ever
had
sex, you’d understand. There’s no need to live up to your nickname all the time, Iceberg. You need a good humping.”

Berg gritted her teeth and crossed her arms. “You volunteering?”

Jay stepped back and raised his hands in surrender. “Hell no! I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re great to look at and all, and I’m damn sure the sex would be great, but I saw what you did to that veteran cop a couple of years back after he dared to pat you on the ass. You barely moved and the guy was on the ground faster than kids in an earthquake drill. What was that, kung fu?”

Berg raised an eyebrow. “Karate.”

Jay took another step back. “Yeah, well, whatever it was, I don’t plan on being on the receiving end of it, nice as the view may be.” He slowly raked his eyes down from her face to her body, lingering on her chest before looking away.

“We’ve been partners for two years—do you think you could keep the staring to a minimum?” She glared at him.

Jay winked. “I’ll work on it.”

They approached the morgue, barged through the two-way doors, and walked into the cold, sterile silence.
 

Jay crossed the white linoleum room with a few strides and pulled open a metal refrigerator drawer. “Ta-da!” He made an exaggerated flourish, sliding out a body covered with a sheet. “One dead scumbag.” He waved toward the covered body like a manic
The
Price is Right
model.

Berg looked dubious as she wrinkled her nose and lifted the white sheet to view the corpse. “A dead fat guy? You better have something more for me than some dead scumbag, Jay. I got up from my desk for this.”

“What if he was a serial scumbag?”

Berg arched an eyebrow. “How serial?”

“Like the guy responsible for the missing hitchhikers?”

Berg’s heart lurched. They’d been working on the missing hitchhikers for six months. During a routine review of missing persons’ files, Berg had noticed an anomaly—five local women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one had gone missing over the past two years without a trace. Missing persons were not all that uncommon; most eventually turned up locally or out-of-state, but these women had simply disappeared.
 

There had been something about the victims that got to her, so Berg dug a little deeper, talking to any available friends and family between working her regular cases. She had discovered that all the women were known hitchhikers. While many had come from broken families, they had no criminal record and no reason to disappear into the ether without a word to anyone.
 

Curiosity piqued, she had taken some DNA from the missing women’s personal items and family members. Then came a stroke of luck. During a CODIS, or a Combined DNA Index System, comparison between the Missing Persons’ Index and the Unidentified Persons’ Index, she’d gotten a match. Decomposed remains matching the DNA of one victim, Amelia Smith, had been found.

Then the trail went cold—no more witnesses and no new leads. Nothing.
 

While her hunches had generally panned out, with no hard evidence connecting the victims to each other or yielding a major breakthrough in the case, Berg had hit a wall. It was the most frustrating and mysterious case she had ever worked on. She had come up with squat beyond the one match, and she had to wonder if she’d seen patterns where there were none.
 

“You wouldn’t tease a girl, would you?” she asked Jay, now interested in the body.

Jay laughed. “I sure would, but not you, Berg. Name’s Danny Taylor, fifty-five, independent trucker based out of the city. The body was discovered three days ago, five miles from his truck on the tollway, near the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve. He had been tortured and dumped.”

Berg rubbed her arms free of the goose bumps that were emerging due to the frigid air drifting out of the open refrigerator drawer. “What does the ME list as cause of death?”

Jay looked through the medical examiner’s report. “Not sure yet, but the ME thinks shock or loss of blood. Hard to ascertain with so many injuries.” He nodded toward the man.
 

Berg studied the body critically. It was mottled with bruises, stab marks, and deep gaping wounds. Ligature furrows on his hands and wrists, combined with his blue fingers and toes, indicated he’d been tied up for a good length of time prior to death.
 

“Of course,” Jay said with a grimace, “he may have willed himself to die once his dick was cut off.”

Berg lifted the sheet a little higher and looked down to the ragged, gaping wound where the man’s penis should have been. “Ouch. Removed pre or post mortem?”

“The ME agrees it was done before he died, judging by the surrounding tissue trauma.” Jay said, looking vaguely ill. “Anyway, ME says there’s a lot more undeveloped bruising under those ugly tats, as well other injuries, so cause of death is still to be determined. We’ll know more tomorrow.”

“Okay, all this is kinda interesting in a gross way, but I’m hearing nothing from you about why you think he’s responsible for my girls,” Berg said, impatient.

“Because we found a lovely hair belonging to Melissa Shipper on him.”

Chapter Two

“You’re shitting me,” Berg said. “How do you know it’s hers? You haven’t had time to run it.”

Jay grinned, clearly delighted he knew something she didn’t. “I shit you not. I collected it off the body myself. Tight, natural blond curls—not too many women with that kind of hair, so I took a shot. I checked the visual comparison with the hair you took under the scope, and the match is identical. I am still waiting on DNA confirmation, but I don’t expect the final report to say anything different.”

Berg frowned. “Melissa went missing over eighteen months ago. Either this guy never washed, or you made some kind of mistake.”

Jay laughed. “Judging by the smell, this guy was not familiar with soap. And I don’t make mistakes—”
 

Berg raised an eyebrow.
 

“In my professional life, anyway,” he said. “Besides, the hair was on his shirt, not his body. He may not have worn the shirt for a while, or it may have been on the floor of his truck and picked up just in time for him to meet his maker and send us the case-breaker we need.”
 

He watched her as Berg considered the development. Melissa was one of the women who had disappeared, and if the hair was hers then it was good news all round. If they could tie this dead man to her, it could be case closed.
 

“There’s more,” Jay said in a teasing tone.

Berg sighed impatiently. “Okay, give.”

“He matches the general description of the guy we suspect killed that hooker a little while back.”

Berg recalled the crime. One of the grislier murders of recent months, a nineteen-year-old drug addict and suspected lot lizard had last been seen outside a local truck stop off the tollway. Her body was found a week later. She had been repeatedly raped and then beaten to death. Even more disturbing was that the life had been beaten out of her with bare-knuckle blows; her facial injuries so extensive, she had choked to death on her own blood. But the assailant’s DNA had yielded no matches on any local or national database.

Motorists who had witnessed the victim’s last movements saw her getting into a dark blue semi with a heavyset tattooed trucker, and that had been the last time anyone saw her alive. The witness statements had been hazy on the make and model of the truck, how long it had been there, or the direction it had gone when it left. Truckers suspected of being at the stop during the time in question conveniently couldn’t remember, and their daily logs were nothing more than works of fiction. It was no surprise that further investigation had yielded zero leads as the truckers closed ranks, supplied shady alibis, faked inspection reports, and spread disinformation to ensure none of their buddies was ever investigated—something they were notorious for.
 

If this guy was responsible for the hooker’s murder and had DNA linking him to Melissa’s disappearance, was it such a stretch to put two and two together?
Berg felt the beginning of excitement stir in her belly.
 

“Yes, hence my
treat
remark,” Jay said. “We may have just stumbled across the solution to a spate of nasty attacks on women. Kinda makes you warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it?”

“Look, I don’t want to make this guy responsible for all the crimes in recent memory until I get some kind of DNA confirmation,” Berg said with her usual caution. “But if he did kill the hooker, and maybe Melissa, what else might he be responsible for? The streets may once again be a little safer for women young and dumb enough to thumb a ride with random, perverted strangers. Hallelujah.”

They both looked back down at the man’s bruised and battered body.
 

Could it be possible? Was this guy responsible for two, if not more, attacks on women?
Berg wondered whether he was what had happened to one of her girls.

“He sure did die a nasty death. Looks like he pissed off someone bigger and nastier than him. Bless them,” Jay said.

“Yeah. I’d like to meet the guy who did this. Smelly here must weigh three hundred plus pounds. It would take someone the size and weight of a bulldozer to bring him down, not to mention keep him down while they tortured him. Karma’s a bitch.”

“Well, if Smelly here is responsible for killing young women, I’d like to buy whoever did him a thank-you beer,” Jay replied, turning and walking out of the morgue. Stopping, he looked back at Berg, who was still staring at the body. “Hell. Make it two beers.”

Chapter Three

Berg slipped her key in the lock of her apartment and moved swiftly inside. Closing the heavy apartment door behind her, she sagged against it in relief. It had been a long day, and she knew the love of her life was anticipating her return. She smiled as he came bounding out of the bedroom.

Solid, with a tendency to gain weight if he didn’t watch his diet, and with large, dark brown eyes and shaggy blond hair, Jesse was all she could ask for in a loyal companion, and a good deal more. His life revolved around Berg, and his excitement upon her return at the end of a long day never got old.

“Hey, Jess, how was your day?”
 

The two-year-old golden retriever’s tail was wagging so hard his whole rear end jiggled.
 

“Have you been a good boy?” She ruffled his thick, sun-colored coat with affection. “Of course you have.”

Jesse looked at Berg adoringly as his tongue lolled out the side of his mouth.
 

“I know, I know. Walk time. Let me get on my sweats.”

The canine looked put out at the lack of instant action, but jumped on the white couch to wait as patiently as his wriggling back end would allow.
 

Berg walked into the bedroom and threw her jacket on her neatly made bed.
 

The apartment was her pride and joy, and there was not a speck of dust to be seen. Only the occasional dog hair marred the simple perfection. She liked uncomplicated fixtures and zero clutter in many areas of her life, and her home was no exception. She figured Jesse didn’t mind the sparse décor as long as there was a steady supply of treats and walks.

Berg ran her hand over the spotless bathroom counter as she walked in to undress. Cleaning was one of her favorite pastimes, and when she wasn’t working, her weekends were a scrubbing, rubbing, and polishing frenzy.
 

You’ll never be clean
, the shadowy voice in her head mocked.