The Enemy Inside (4 page)

Consiglio stalked into the captain’s office and slammed the door behind him so hard it rattled the glass walls. Berg saw Leigh start at the sudden noise, the captain’s eyes widening as they settled upon the man who had appeared in front of her desk.

“I see Consiglio is in excellent form this morning,” Jay said. “Prepare to bend over and take it like a man.”

“What the fuck did we do now?” Berg whispered to Jay as Consiglio’s angry tones filtered through the glass. “It’s not even eight thirty in the morning. Surely he hasn’t risen from the crypt long enough to be in this bad a mood? Isn’t there a press conference somewhere in the northern hemisphere he should be making an appearance at?”

“Hey, think positive. It may not be us this time.”

“Yeah, right.” Berg sighed. “Have you heard anything from—”

“No,” Jay snapped.

The office door was flung open once again, and Chief Consiglio barreled out, his face twisted in fury. He ignored the pair as Jay and Berg made an effort to look busy. Sneaking a peek in the office, Berg saw Leigh’s sigh of defeat. Leigh caught Berg’s stare and beckoned her and Jay to join her.

They crept toward the office with all the enthusiasm of a pair about to face a trainee firing squad. Slinking into the office and closing the door behind them quietly, they sat on the hard wooden seats in front of the desk.

Lost in her thoughts, the captain spent a full sixty seconds staring at her blank computer screen before even acknowledging them. Sighing, she spoke without even looking up. “Consiglio wants to know why he wasn’t told about the dead trucker and the links with the hooker and the missing woman.”

Berg wondered who in the morgue had snitched. “We wanted to firm up the facts before making a report.”
 

“I know. But you know how he gets,” Captain Leigh replied. “To be fair, we should have told him our suspicions.”

Not thirty seconds into the meeting and temples already pounding in anger, Berg fought not to lose her temper. “Told him what, exactly? We are expecting the post mortem report and DNA profiles today, and then we’ll have a better idea of what we are dealing with.” Her voice rose despite her best efforts at keeping it under control. Berg had a bad feeling. She knew where this was headed. Yet again, Consiglio wanted to make a grand press announcement to further his own political ends.

Leigh nodded. “I get that, but we’ve run out of time. Consiglio’s putting out a press release in time for tonight’s evening news, reporting the hitchhiker and hooker crimes solved. He’s desperate to assure the community his ward is safe.”

Berg felt her face redden. “But, Captain! We can’t say with any kind of authority what this guy is responsible for, if anything, without a thorough investigation. Not to mention that we can’t even link those missing women together yet. I think—” She glared at Jay, trying to get him to back her up.
 

Jay sat with his mouth shut, clearly not bothering to argue.

Leigh interrupted quickly, suddenly finding her voice. “Don’t you think I know that? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the future of this precinct, and our three jobs in particular, are on the line.”
 

Berg fell silent.
 

“You started this, Raymond, by showing a link, however tenuous, between those women. The media loved it, and now you can’t expect the chief to not want the case closed. You know our district is being considered for amalgamation with the 13th as we speak. We get merged and I will no longer be able to protect your jobs. You know I don’t care how you solve the cases, just as long as you do. But the more you go off book, the more Consiglio tightens his grip. Jay is too well connected, and frankly, Berg, a smart, successful female detective who also looks great on camera is more than Consiglio’s ego can bear. All three of us are too great a threat to his political aspirations, and you know it. Don’t be naive.”

Jay remained mute.
 

Berg continued to argue. “I still think—”
 

“Consiglio isn’t interested in what you or I think, Detective Raymond,” Leigh said, her voice rising. “His exact words were, ‘Just get it done.’ So that’s what we’re doing. Solve the cases, stop talking to the media, and for God’s sake stay under the radar. Sometimes I think you
want
to be a target!”
 

Knowing the discussion was over, Berg and Jay stood and headed for the door.

“Just get it done,” Jay mimicked as they walked back to their desks. “Reverse global warming? Just get it done. Find the body of Jimmy Hoffa? Just get it done. Solve the Zodiac Killer case in time for the evening news? Just get it done.”

“Thanks for your help in there,” Berg retorted, stalking out of the station in search of more caffeine. Her temples were still pounding, and she felt the need to hit somebody, preferably a graying alderman wannabe with a god complex.
 

Chapter Five

Jay walked up behind Berg a few moments after she returned to her desk, holding his second coffee of the many to come that day. He had decided not to follow her, because he wanted to finish off his coffee and, he admitted to himself, because Berg was scary when she was mad.
 

He had wanted to back her up in the captain’s office, but what was the point? Hopefully, Consiglio’s political efforts would soon leave him with no time to bother his pet detectives in the 12th. Jay figured the path of least resistance was the most sensible option. He loved his job, and being a cop was all he ever wanted as far back as he could remember. Taking on one’s superiors, no matter how much crap they were sprouting, was a great way to get fired or transferred to Alaska to police moose and bears.
 

Unsure of what to say, Jay stood behind Berg.
 

She turned to face him, catching him on the verge of speaking, and scowled. “What? You want some?”

“Uh, no. I got beat up by a girl in first grade. That was enough humiliation for one lifetime, thanks,” Jay replied.

“Well then, my mute friend, you’d better leave me alone for a while.” She faced her laptop before suddenly turning back to give him a solid glare. “Why do you think the creatures actually born with balls are the most reluctant to use them?”

“Because we want to keep them,” Jay muttered to himself as he walked away.

By noon, it was a typical day at a station where crime rates were soaring and budgets were dwindling. The station was in full swing with cops bitching, perps shouting their innocence, and phones ringing off the hook.
 

Berg soon found herself discussing the trucker murder case with fellow officer Tony Hamilton, a longtime stalwart of the station who had previous experience in breaking trucker ranks.
 

“Truckers are like a pride of lions.” Hamilton folded his arms slowly over his pronounced belly and shifted his weight from the injured leg that gave him a noticeable limp. He looked up at Berg with his watery blue eyes. “You find the king of the jungle, get his okay, and you’ll get in and find out what you want to know without being ripped to shreds.”

“And who might that be?” Berg asked.

“No idea. I dealt with them years ago. It’s going to come down to old school police work: talking to informants, surveillance, and waiting for your moment. None of this new-fangled Internet crap. I’m pretty sure whoever the king is, he doesn’t have some kind of
face space
page.”

Berg laughed. An analog cop lost in a digital world, Hamilton was biding his time until his retirement and pension. A skilled officer, the latest in policing technology left him floundering. He had lamented more than once the
good old days
of blood groups, fingerprints, confidential informants, and walking the beat. In his own words, the DNA crap was beyond him.
 

“Hey, Hamilton!” Detective Marco Arena yelled across the room. Arena, a tanned, dark-eyed Italian with a wicked sense of humor, was still a newbie, having transferred from Minnesota late the previous year. “How’d you get that limp, ballet dancing?”
 

The officers in earshot all openly sniggered. Hamilton’s limp, which had increasingly kept him tied to a desk job as he aged, was often the butt of station jokes, as he refused to tell anyone how he got it.

“I got it doing your girlfriend, Arena,” Hamilton retorted. “She kicks when she comes. Guess that’s why you don’t have a limp . . .”
 

The officers in earshot roared and clapped.

“Hate to interrupt, but let’s go.” Jay put down the phone on his desk. “ME’s got something for us.”

The medical examiner was waiting in the morgue, tapping his foot in irritation and polishing his glasses with a handkerchief. Having held the job for more than twenty years, Dr. Steven Dwight was talented and a veritable forensics encyclopedia. Dwight had an almost uncanny way of speaking to the dead.
 

“Okay,” Dwight said, opening his report as Berg and Jay entered his autopsy room. “This is what I have so far. One Danny Taylor. Caucasian male, fifty-five years old, advanced state of liver disease due to habitual amphetamine and alcohol use, advanced heart disease, various VDs, clogged arteries, type 2 diabetes, the works. This man was not a happy camper health-wise, and I have no idea how he got his medical certification for a commercial driver’s license; he was a dead man walking.”
 

Dwight pulled the sheet off the body that was lying on an autopsy table with a roughly stitched-up Y incision in the torso.
 

“You’ll see assorted wounds here, including cuts, bruising and burns, but no single one enough to kill. You ever heard of death by a thousand cuts?”

“Yeah, the ancient Chinese used it as a method of torture or something,” Jay replied. “I saw something about it on a TV documentary months ago.”

“Excellent. You are right, although a thousand cuts is exaggerated. The ancients generally employed only twenty or so cuts, excising body parts rather than just inflicting small cuts as the name would suggest. They started by putting out the eyes, then removing toes, fingers, and moving on to arms and legs. It was so feared, torture victims would bribe their executioners to reduce the time it took to reach death,” Dwight explained.

“Awesome,” Jay said. “Why do we need to know this shit?”

“This is the kind of thing that was used on your guy. I counted one hundred and seventy-six different lacerations on the body, ranging from small nicks to stab marks and deep cuts removing small to medium chunks of flesh, then his penis. None of these wounds was deep enough to be the single cause of death, and none severed any major arteries or veins, so I believe your killer has some knowledge of anatomy.”
 

Jay and Berg nodded as they looked over the cuts.
 

“Some of the first shallow cuts had scabbed over and started healing despite his diabetes and the fact he was a heavy smoker, both of which slow healing time, meaning we are looking at a timeframe from the beginning of torture to time of death of about twelve hours.” Dwight licked a finger and flicked over the page.
 

“He was also beaten with a blunt object, something like a metal baton or bat, close to one hundred times. His hands were tied behind his back, tightly, with rope. His fingertips had been deprived of oxygen for hours, so he was never untied. Fibers in the wounds show the rope used is the usual generic nylon brand you can buy at any hardware store across the country. Like the cuts, the older bruises had started to develop, confirming your thoughts, Detective O’Loughlin, that the torture was carried out over an extended period.”