The Lady Who Cried Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (4 page)

“Now the bad news.” A playful curl came to Ben’s lips before he bent over to pet Molly.

“Of course you would have bad news.” David shot a glanced at Chelsea who had taken her seat behind her desk.

“Bevis Palazzi is revving up to stick his nose into your case,” Ben said, “and he’s got enough juice that he may be able to do it.”

“Bevis Palazzi as in Senator Harry Palazzi?” Chelsea asked.

“Bevis was friends with Khloe,” David said. “He’s also an arrogant jerk.”

“Keep this under your hats,” Ben said. “The governor is planning to retire at the end of this term. He hasn’t announced it yet. Since it seems like Senator Palazzi is never going to retire, Bevis decided to start his political career as governor. He’s using whatever means necessary to get his name in the headlines, and how better than by playing the victim’s advocate for his dead friend? Since his father is a United States Senator, he is not without influence.”

“So I may be forced to have him under foot like a bad piece of chewing gum,” David said.

“Exactly,” Ben said. “Now here’s the good news.”

“What? You have some good news?”

“The governor is not Bevis’ biggest fan,” Ben said. “He’s a friend of mine and Catherine’s. Off the record, he calls Bevis a degenerate and is not thrilled with his party grooming him to take over as governor. He’s told me that it’s enough to make him want to not retire. That’s pretty bad. He only supports Bevis publicly because some big backers in his party think Bevis can carry on his father’s legacy. If that pain in the butt gets too bad, give me a call and I’ll ask the governor to reel him in.”

“That’s why I have you on speed dial.”

With a smile at Chelsea and David, Ben went back into his office.

David leaned over her chair to whisper into her ear. “What’s your answer about lunch?”

In spite of her effort to prevent it, a coy smile came to her lips. “It sounds like your day is already planned.”

“I can fit you in,” he replied. “I’ll swing by before going back to Spencer after meeting with Doc.”

“You don’t give up.” She watched his back on his way out the door.

“Never.”

Chapter Four

“Sorry I’m late.” Mac practically ran through the door in his rush into the medical examiner’s office. He found David and Dr. Washington standing over the examination table that was covered with a white sheet.

“No problem,” David said.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Washington asked Mac with concern. “You look flushed.”

Mac ignored David’s grin. “I guess I had the heater up too high in the car when I was running late.”

“Oh, is that all?” Her lips curled into a smirk. “I thought it was something a little more intimate.”

While David burst out laughing, Mac said, “Can we get on with this?”

The medical examiner turned serious. “Cause of death was stabbing. I counted forty-six stab wounds with the concentration in her stomach and some strikes in her chest.”

“Was there any sign of sexual assault?” David asked.

“You had to ask me that.” The medical examiner looked at him for a moment before shrugging her shoulders. “Can’t be conclusive because of the extent of the mutilation. I did find semen—enough for a DNA sample. However, the bruising and tearing could be due to the attack that resulted in her murder, and not rape. The sexual activity could have been completely consensual.”

“And then things went bad afterwards,” Mac said.

“In addition to the dismemberment, he gutted her from the ribcage down to the pelvis and took her uterus.”

“Her what?” David asked.

“Uterus,” Doc Washington repeated the word. “Her female organ.”

While David gazed at her in shock, Mac asked, “Could she have been pregnant? Archie said Khloe was making a big deal on her social media sites about a huge announcement in that interview. Maybe she was going to announce that she was pregnant, and the father wanted to stop that. So he killed her and took the uterus with the fetus.”

“That’s sick,” David said.

“We already know our killer’s sick,” Mac said.

The medical examiner was shaking her head. “According to the blood tests, she wasn’t pregnant.”

“Does it look to you like the killer had medical training?” Mac asked her. “Did he know what he was doing when cutting her?”

“No,” she said with a firm shake of her head. “The cuts were frenzied. Sloppy. Not precise. I saw a lot of rage in them. He basically hacked out the uterus when he took it.”

David asked both the seasoned detective and medical examiner, “Have you ever seen something like this before? A killer who guts the woman and takes the uterus?”

Mac was staring down at the sheet under which Khloe Everest’s dismembered body rested. “I have seen similar cases. Usually it’s a man who hates women, plain and simple. I once caught a killer who didn’t care who the woman was—he would hunt them like animals and butcher them because he simply hated their sex.” He grinned. “But we got this guy’s DNA from his semen. Is it in the system?”

She smiled. “Oh yes.”

“Great,” Mac said. “Then this can be an easy case.”

“No, not that easy,” she said. “The same DNA was found on two other bodies listed in the database, but the donor has never been identified.”

“That means this guy has killed two other women,” Mac said.

“The first one is Amber Houston.”

“Where do I know that name from?” David asked.

“She disappeared the month before Khloe staged her abduction,” Mac said. “Her body was found in a garbage bag in a motel dumpster.”

“Like Khloe, her body was dismembered, and her uterus taken,” the doctor said. “There’s no way this is a copycat, because the dismemberment and uterus were never made public.”

“So it’s the same guy,” Mac said. “The DNA matched for a third victim?”

“Los Angeles,” she said. “Twenty months ago. Tiffany Blanchard. She was a model. Her body was found in a garbage bag dumped over a hillside on the beach. Dismembered with her uterus missing. In all three cases, the killer had sexual relations with the woman before stabbing her to death, mutilating and dismembering her bodies, and then taking her uterus.”

“We have a serial killer,” David said.

“Yep,” Mac said, “the worst kind.”

In the upscale resort town of Spencer, Maryland, where many of the town’s residents were listed in “Who’s Who,” the small police station resembled a sports club. Its fleet of police cruisers was top-of-the-line SUVs painted black with gold lettering on the side that read “SPENCER POLICE.” Located along the shore of Deep Creek Lake, the log building that was home to the police department sported a dock with a dozen jet skis and four speed boats. For patrolling the deep woods and up the mountains trails, they had eight ATVs. Like the cruisers, all of the vehicles were black with gold trim.

The conference with Ben Fleming and Ed Willingham, the attorney for Khloe’s late mother, turned into a luncheon meeting. Ben brought Chelsea along to take notes during their meeting. Whether she liked it or not, she was eating lunch with David.

They met in David’s office, which was located on the second floor with a view of the lake. Ben had ordered Chinese takeout from the one restaurant that dealt with it on the lake. While dealing out the food around the conference table, Ed Willingham, a prestigious lawyer and senior partner of one of the largest law firms in the Washington, DC, area, tried to talk business to Mac about a producer wanting to purchase the movie rights for Robin Spencer’s last three Mickey Forsythe books.

In spite of the obscene amount of money the producer was offering, Mac balked. “No cast approval, no rights.”

“He’s not going to let you have say in the casting of the movie.” It was difficult to tell if Ed thought, or rather hoped, that Mac was joking in his request.

“Mickey Forsythe was my mother’s creation,” Mac explained. “I’m not going to have his image tarnished by the casting of some degenerate to play him on the screen, or maybe by someone who decides to make him more sensitive or more like a boob.”

“Or maybe select a neutered German shepherd to play Diablo,” David said.

“That’s right,” Mac agreed. “Gnarly would be in a snit for a year if that happened. Have you ever seen Gnarly when he was in a snit about something?”

“It’s not pretty,” David said.

Mac pressed the top of his finger against the tabletop. “No cast approval, no rights. That’s final.”

“I guess these movies won’t get made,” Ed said in a firm tone, as if the decision had been his.

Mac picked up an egg roll with a shrug of his shoulders. “Fine with me.”

After everyone’s plates were made, Ben Fleming took the lead in the meeting. “As you know, close to a month ago, Florence Everest passed away, which started a whole mess with Khloe coming back to town and expecting to collect an inheritance, only to discover that her mother had been serious when she said she was disinherited.”

“Knowing Khloe,” Ed said, “she thought that since she was an only child she would get it all no matter what. Big surprise when her mother left it all to charity to help women victims of violent crime.”

“Which Khloe then became,” Mac noted the irony.

“Khloe managed to find an attorney to file a suit against Florence’s estate and fight the will,” Ed said. “No way was she going to win that. In the meantime, she took up residence in the house and refused to leave.”

David urged them to continue. “What information do you have that can help us find her killer?”

Ben looked across the table at Ed. The lawyer got up and closed David’s office door. On his way back to the conference table, he took a micro cassette recorder out of his pocket, turned on a button, and placed the recorder in the middle of the table.

A woman’s voice came from the speaker with the smooth, cultured tone that had belonged to Florence Everest.

“I said no!”

Slap!

“Oh, I forgot how you like it rough,” a male voice said. “If you want it like the last time—”

“Last time was not rough! Last time was an attack. I said no—”

“Of course you said no. They all say no, but they don’t mean no.”

“You pinned my hands down and you raped me!”

“You call it rape, I call it playing rough.”

There was a sound of movement followed by the man yelling, “What the hell is that?”

“Don’t you recognize it?” the woman’s voice replied with laughter. “It’s called a gun! You come near me again and I’ll shoot your balls off before shooting you dead.”

“You shoot me and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail—in a federal prison. Shooting a sheriff is a federal offense.”

“But you’ll be dead, and this tape will be on the national news!”

“Damn, bitch! You set me up!”

“Damn straight!” she said. “And you’re going to live with what you’ve done for the rest of your life because I’m pregnant now and you’re going to pay for it. Oh, and don’t even think about doing anything to me because copies of this tape will be all over—anything happens to me, and the whole world is going to know that Sheriff Harry Palazzi is a low-life, common rapist!”

“Oh, man,” Mac muttered.

Ed snapped the tape off. “Oh man is right.”

“She said copies of that tape were all over. Obviously you had one.” David noticed Mac glaring at the recorder like he wanted to shoot it.

“It was in a sealed envelope that was only to be opened upon her death,” Ed said. “She gave it to me when she came to me pregnant with Khloe. All these years, Florence has been getting a direct deposit of ten thousand dollars into her account every month. I assumed it was from Khloe’s father, who wanted no emotional part of her.”

“And here she was, the product of rape,” Chelsea said.

“Did Khloe know?” David asked.

“No,” Ed said with certainty. “When I encountered this tape I took it to Ben, and we’ve been trying to decide what to do.”

“The man is a rapist.” Mac grabbed the recorder and shook it. “He’s a sexual predator who has been raping women for years and getting away with it. Don’t you think it’s time to stop him?”

“This victim is dead,” Ben said.

“She’s not the first rape victim that Senator Palazzi got rid of,” Mac said.

“Mac,” David said gently, “Florence’s death was an accident. Pure and simple. It was investigated. What other victims has Palazzi gotten rid of?”

Mac felt all of their eyes on him. “It was back when I was working the special victims unit in Washington, before I went to homicide.” He gritted his teeth. “One night, I got called to the hospital where this woman had been dumped at the ER. Her name was Dee Blakeley. She had been beaten up and raped. When I finally got her to speak to me, she told me that she was a lobbyist who had gone to meet with Senator Harry Palazzi to talk about an upcoming bill. He poured Dee a drink. They sat in his office to talk about the bill, and suddenly, he raped her. When she fought him, he beat her up. Then, his assistant and driver arrived to take her home. When she passed out in the back of the limo, they literally dumped her at the ER and drove off.”

“Why didn’t you arrest him?” Chelsea asked.

Mac shook his head. “His people circled the wagons. The assistant and driver who knew the truth insisted that she was drunk when she showed up for the meeting and they saw her put the moves on the senator, who swore it was consensual and she was lying about the rape for her own personal gain. They all claimed afterwards, when she was leaving the senator’s office, that she had tripped and fallen and hit her face on the desk. Because she was so drunk, they refused to let her drive. When they discovered that she was bleeding from the fall, they dropped her off at the hospital. The victim told me that her cat disappeared and she had received a visit from an intimidating man saying that the same would happen to her. She wanted to withdraw her complaint and said she wouldn’t testify, but I talked her into doing it. The morning that she was to appear at the grand jury, I went to her apartment to pick her up and…” His voice trailed off.

The room fell silent.

Ben broke the silence. “What?”

“She was dead,” Mac said in a voice barely above a whisper. He looked across the table at David. “Stabbed to death—multiple stab wounds.”

“Like Khloe,” David said.

“She wasn’t dismembered, and her body hadn’t been mutilated, but that was about twelve years ago. Killers usually escalate. He may have just been getting started back then.”

“Did you have any proof that Palazzi was behind it?” the prosecutor asked.

“Come on, Ben,” Mac said. “It was the night before she was to testify to the grand jury about him raping her. That night, of all nights, a maniac breaks into her apartment and stabs her to death?”

“Was she raped during that attack?” David asked.

“No,” Mac said. “No sexual assault.”

“Since Palazzi has never been charged—” Ben started to say.

“Yes, he got away with having Dee Blakeley killed,” Mac said. “I tried to make a case, but my boss put pressure on me because he got orders from people above him to let it go. I know the senator had that girl killed.”

“Leak the tape to the media,” Chelsea said. “Even if he can’t be arrested, his reputation can be ruined. He claims to be a proponent for women’s rights, and here he’s a sexual predator.”

“Khloe’s announcement,” Mac said. “Florence said these tapes were going to be all over. Khloe could have found a copy of the tape and decided to play it during the interview.”

“Knowing Khloe,” the estate attorney said, “I would not put it past her trying to blackmail Palazzi. She had nothing. Her bid for fame fizzled. She thought she was going to inherit a fortune from her mother and had gotten cut out. As a matter of fact, after that stunt, the mysterious monthly payment stopped coming. I asked Florence about it—knowing nothing about it being from Palazzi or this recording. Florence said that the benefactor had paid in full and nothing was coming in from him anymore.”

“Florence was so mad that she cut Khloe loose completely,” David said.

Ed nodded his head. “And Khloe was furious when she found out it was real.”

“So she decided to squat in the house and search for something that she could use to her advantage and found the tape,” Mac said. “Then, she tried to blackmail Palazzi. She was doing a countdown on the social media sites. She was giving him time to squirm and think about it. Only instead, he had her killed.”