Last Known Victim Read online

  “Here we are,” Douglas said unnecessarily, as neither Patti nor Spencer could have missed the unit in question; the first officer had encircled it and the immediate area with crime-scene tape. Two men, similarly outfitted in HazMat suits, stood just beyond the tape.

  Then she saw the hands. Or what was left of them, anyway. Mostly skeletal, laid out on a plastic sheet on the ground. By each sat a plastic zip-type bag. She wondered if they would be able to extract any usable DNA from what remained, either from the hands or what looked like the “gumbo” inside the bags.

  DNA soup. Lovely.

  Patti shifted her gaze to the refrigerator itself. A typical freezer-on-top variety, white and low tech, no ice or water dispenser in the door. It didn’t come from the Taj Mahal, that was for certain.

  The larger of the two men stepped forward. “Officer Connelly, Captain. I answered the call.”

  “You set up the perimeter?”

  “Yes. Verified the find and called it in.”

  “Good. Contact the department, see if they were able to round us up a crime-scene crew.” She turned to the other man. “Paul, I’m Captain O’Shay and this is Detective Malone. I understand you’re the one who found the hands.”

  He bobbed his head in agreement. “I suppose I should’ve gotten Jim right away, but I kinda couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Surprised the hell out of me, that’s for sure.”

  “It would anyone, Paul. Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened.”

  “See, we have a procedure we follow. First, we empty the units. Dump what we can in the bins. By hand or with the help of a grapple machine. When that’s done we pressure-wash ’em.

  “Most of what’s in these things is sludge. I mean, these babies have been without power for a long time. It’s damn disgusting, I’ll tell you that.”

  Patti wouldn’t disagree. “How’d you find the hands?”

  “They were there-” he pointed “-in the freezer. Wouldn’t have found ’em if one of the bags hadn’t broken. Slipped out of my hands and busted open. Act of God, it was.”

  The act she had interest in was one of pure evil.

  “But you didn’t go get Mr. Douglas?”

  “I was kinda blown away, you know? Thought maybe this wasn’t the real thing. That one of the other guys planted it as a joke.”

  His voice shook slightly, though Patti was uncertain whether from anxiety or excitement.

  “So I laid that one out to take a real good look at it, and you know it didn’t look like plastic. That’s when I found another one.” He glanced at Douglas. “And went and got Jim.”

  “And together you removed four more?”

  He bobbed his head once more. “After we realized what we had, we were real careful.”

  “We appreciate that.” She glanced at Douglas. “Do we know where this refrigerator came from?”

  “The Metro New Orleans area.”

  “You don’t have a street, a neighborhood or-”

  “Just the Parish. Orleans.”

  Although frustrated, she wasn’t surprised. The cleanup effort was immense. She’d heard the debris from this storm alone was going to equal thirty-four years’ worth of regular New Orleans debris. Something like one hundred million cubic yards, enough to fill the Superdome twenty-two times over.

  She turned back to Paul. “Notice anything else different about this unit?”

  He thought a moment. “Nope. Sorry.”

  “If you think of anything, let us know.” She held a hand out to Jim Douglas. “We’ll take it from here. When our crime-scene crew arrives, you’ll send them our way?”

  He said he would, and as he and Paul walked away, she turned back to Spencer. He had crossed to the hands and was squatted down beside them.

  “They’re all right hands,” he said. “That’s six different victims.”

  She frowned. “Why right hands?”

  “Why hands at all?” he countered.

  “They’re trophies. Obviously.”

  “Katrina comes into town and our sick bastard here loses his collection.” He fitted on a pair of latex gloves, then held his own hand to the skeletal remains. “Women’s hands. Too small to be a man’s.”

  She slipped on a pair of gloves and joined him. When she compared, she saw that the hands were a similar size to hers. “Still, they could have belonged to a young male, maybe a teen?”

  “Maybe.” Spencer cocked his head. “Look at this. These four were very neatly severed.”

  “But these two,” Patti murmured, “real hack jobs.”

  “As time passed, he got better at what he did.”

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  “Grim thought.”

  “Well, here’s another.” She stood. “They were all frozen. They all began the decomposition process at the same time-when the power went out.”

  Spencer took over. “So we’re not going to be able to say when the mutilation occurred. Could have been right before the storm-”

  “Or years ago.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Grim fact number two. No telling how many people have handled this refrigerator or how long it’s been outside, exposed to the elements.”

  “Finding any trace will be a miracle.”

  He referred to trace evidence, she knew. Things like hair and fiber. “As will usable prints. We’ve got no way to pinpoint where this refrigerator came from, so no frame of reference to hang our investigation on.”

  “Grim fact number three,” Spencer offered.

  “Exactly. And DNA, if we can get an uncontaminated sample, won’t do us jack without something to compare it with.”

  “Grim fact number four,” Spencer murmured, trying for levity. “Thanks, I needed that.”

  The crime-scene crew, consisting of one tech, arrived. She recognized him from his gear. Obviously this lone tech would be doing it all, from photography to fingerprint-and-evidence collection.

  Where they’d scraped him up, Patti could only imagine. Without housing, there was nowhere for people to live, even those who still had jobs. Currently hundreds of NOPD officers were living on the Carnival cruise ship Ecstasy, docked downtown on the Mississippi River.

  “Yo,” the tech said, setting down the gear. “What do we have?”

  Spencer pointed. “Somebody’s collection.”

  The guy made a face and shook his head. “This is so screwed-up. The tipping point for me was them spotting a shark swimming down Veterans Boulevard. I mean, how do you come back from that?”

  He loaded the camera. “Mom lives in St. Tammany, I evacuated to her place. Lost forty trees on her property, but not one hit her house. Can you believe it?”

  He didn’t expect an answer and got to work. His story wasn’t new. Patti heard a version of it from everybody she ran into. Nobody connected in this “post-Katrina world” without sharing their storm story.

  She turned to the other officer. “Connelly, help him out here. Make certain the evidence is collected. Check in with me when it’s done.”

  She and Spencer started back to their vehicle. They didn’t speak until they had removed their HazMat gear and climbed into Spencer’s vintage Camaro.

  She turned to him. “We look for a victim. See if the computer turns up a vic that was missing a hand. Have Tony give you a-”

  She had been about to say “a hand.” He realized it, too, and glanced her way, eyebrow cocked.

  A grim smile touched her mouth. “Detective Sciame assists. Keep me posted.”

  He agreed and they fell silent again. As Spencer drove, Patti gazed out at the ravaged landscape, one thought playing through her head: it wasn’t enough the city had Katrina’s devastation and rebuilding process to face, now they had a serial killer to catch as well.

  PART II

  4

  Friday, April 20, 2007

  Noon

  City Park was a sprawling thirteen-hundred-acre park in the heart of New Orleans. Before Katrina, it had boasted three eighteen-h
ole golf courses, a tennis center, and lagoons complete with a gondola and paddle boats, Storybook Land and Carousel Gardens, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Limping back to its previous glory or not, it was still one of the oldest urban parks in the United States.

  Today it was the location of a gruesome discovery: human remains.

  Spencer parked his 1977 Camaro in front of the Bayou Oaks golf center’s two-story practice range and climbed out. The dispatcher had described the remains as “skeletal.” Certainly not the first of his career. Louisiana’s sub-tropic climate, with its abundance of rain, long hot summers and acidic soil, accelerated the decomposition process. Here, a body could be reduced to nothing but bones and a few tendons in two weeks.

  Detective Tony Sciame roared into the gravel lot. Spencer crossed to his partner’s seen-better-days Ford Taurus just as the driver’s-side door flew open and Tony heaved himself out.

  The smell of French fries followed him. The call had obviously interrupted his lunch.

  “Pasta Man,” Spencer greeted him. “Betty know you’re eating that garbage?”

  Betty, Tony’s wife of thirty-four years, monitored her husband’s food consumption like a hawk-something Tony had no intention of doing for himself-and it had become a sort of battle of wills between them.

  “Of course she does, Slick. My Betty’s a very bright woman.”

  Spencer chuckled and glanced up at the sky. “Good day for a round of golf.”

  Tony hooted in amusement. “Slick, the closest you’ve ever come to swinging a golf club is the time you broke up a fight between those two guys in plaid knickers.”

  “Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen.” They fell into step together, and he sent his partner an amused glance. “And if I were you I wouldn’t say anything about other guys’ fashion choices.”

  “What?” Tony looked down at himself. “I look good.”

  He wore trousers in a shade too green to be called khaki and too brown to really be green. Puke or vomit would describe it nicely. Tony had paired the pants with a wild print shirt whose predominant color was orange.

  “Sure, you do. For a color blind old fart.”

  Tony snorted. “You’re just jealous I have the self-confidence to wear bright colors.”

  “Whatever you need to tell yourself, my friend,” Spencer teased. Spencer had nicknamed the older man for his “pasta” gut, while Tony’s nickname for Spencer aimed at his youth and inexperience. Though they swapped insults much of the day, they liked, respected and, most importantly, trusted each other to watch their backs.

  In the NOPD, detectives weren’t assigned partners, per se. They worked rotation. When a case came in, whoever was next in line got it and chose someone to assist. It was in the “choosing” that most of the detectives paired up.

  Spencer and Tony’s was an admittedly odd pairing. Spencer was thirty-three and single; Tony had been married longer than Spencer had been alive and had four children. Spencer was a relative rookie to Investigative Support Division, ISD for short, and homicide; Tony had been working homicide for twenty-seven years. Spencer had a reputation for being a brash hothead; Tony, one as a cautious plodder.

  The tortoise and the hare. Not very sexy but, in their case, effective.

  “Yo, Mikey,” Spencer greeted the first officer, a guy who’d been in his brother Percy’s graduating class at the academy. The two had been pals and bottle buddies before Mike had gotten married. “What do we have?”

  The officer grinned. “Hey, Spencer, Detective Sciame. First tee, west course. Skeletal remains. Mostly intact.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Dunno. Not my area.”

  “Who’d the coroner’s office send?”

  “The bone lady. Elizabeth Walker.”

  “ID?”

  “Nope. And no personal effects, though there might be something more in the grave. We didn’t move the body. Called DIU, district three. They sent Landry.”

  Nearly ten years ago, the NOPD brass had decided the best place to fight crime was where it happened. They had decentralized the department, relocating the various detective units, taking them out of headquarters and moving them into the eight district stations, bundling them into what they named the Detective Investigative Unit. The detectives in DIU didn’t specialize; they handled everything except rape, child abuse and high-profile murders. For those crimes, ISD took over.

  “Glad to hear that, Mikey. You might make a decent cop, after all.”

  “Bite me, Malone.”

  “Nah, you’d like it too much.”

  “Can we save your personal issues for later?” Tony asked dryly. “The rest of the friggin’ department’s already here. I’d like to make an appearance before the vic’s bagged and tagged.”

  Unfazed, the junior officer went on. “The engineer and landscape artist who’re planning the course’s restoration found the grave. Stumbled over it, actually.”

  Spencer frowned. “What does that mean, stumbled over it?”

  “Just what it sounds like. Really freaked the engineer out. Landed right on top of it, poor bastard. If he hadn’t, they might’ve missed the grave altogether.”

  “You have names and numbers for these guys?”

  He said he did and added, “I told them both to expect a visit from the NOPD this afternoon.” The officer motioned toward the row of golf carts. “Choose your wheels. Keys are in ’em. Follow the signs.”

  They crossed to a cart and climbed in, Tony behind the wheel.

  Spencer looked at his partner. “Ironic, finding a body here now.”

  Until a few months ago, when they’d moved back into their Broad Street headquarters, the entire detective division had been operating out of trailers here at the park.

  “No joke.”

  While Tony drove, Spencer took in the surroundings. City Park had been decimated by Hurricane Katrina. The day after the storm, ninety percent of the park had been under anywhere from one to ten feet of water. Adding insult to injury, the water had been from the Gulf of Mexico, and its salt content had killed all the grass in the park, as well as a tremendous number of delicate plant species.

  And like the city itself, in the two years since Katrina, the park had hobbled back to life-though to nowhere near its pre-Katrina glory.

  They reached the site. With crime-scene tape, Mikey and his partner had created a wide swathe around the first tee. Tony parked the cart just beyond the tape; they climbed out and crossed to the officer. Spencer didn’t recognize him and decided he must be a post-Katrina hire.

  That’s the way everything was in the Big Easy these days: pre-or post-Katrina. It served as New Orleanians’ frame of reference to mark time and personal history.

  It certainly served as Spencer’s.

  Before “The Thing,” as local columnist Chris Rose had nicknamed it, Spencer had been confident he had finally conquered his demons. He’d felt secure in his own skin, his place in the universe, tiny as it was.

  Sammy’s murder, Katrina and the chaos that ensued had eroded that confidence, his feeling of security. Now he doubted. And second-guessed. Life, he’d learned, was fragile. The moment fleeting.

  He thought about it a lot. One day life was as it should be; the next, turned upside down. A cop always lived with uncertainty, but this was different. Katrina had made it feel…global.

  He and Tony signed the scene log, ducked under the tape and crossed to the group clustered around the grave.

  Located six feet behind the tee box, under a large shade tree, Spencer saw that the crime-scene guys had gotten their shots and begun the excavation process. Elizabeth Walker crouched beside, watching intently.

  The skeleton was, indeed, almost fully intact, positioned faceup. Bits of what appeared to have been clothing clung to the mottled-looking bones.

  “Hey, Terry,” Spencer greeted the DIU detective, “how’s it going?”

  “Can’t complain, though I mostly do, anyway.” He smiled and shook his hand, then Tony’s.
“How about you?”

  “Ditto, man. I’ll tell Quentin I saw you.”

  “Hell no, you won’t. Tell that no-good welcher he owes me a beer.”

  Spencer laughed. Quentin and Terry Landry had been partners before Quentin decided to quit the PD and go to law school. Now he was an assistant D. A. Truth was, you couldn’t swing a dead cat in this town without hitting someone who had worked-or partied-with one of the Malone siblings.

  Elizabeth Walker looked over her shoulder at him. An African-American who’d been a child in preintegrated New Orleans, she had a sharp eye for detail, a dry sense of humor and the no-nonsense air of a woman who had clawed her way up and out. “A Malone, God help us.”

  “Good to see you, too.” He squatted beside her. “What do you think?”

  “Definitely a woman.” She indicated the pelvic bone. “See how short it is? How wide the pelvic bowl?”

  “Age?”

  “Young, not twenty-five. Her bones hadn’t finished growing. I’ll know more after I X-ray her back at the lab.” She paused, then went on. “Judging by her color, she’s been out here awhile. A couple years, I’d think.”

  “By out here, you mean exposed to the elements.”

  “Exactly.” She pointed. “See how the bone is dry-looking, without the smooth ivory finish. And sort of a mottled gray and white. Bone is porous. If she’d been in the earth, she’d have taken on its color.”

  “Was she ever in the ground?”

  “My best guess is yes, but in a shallow grave. The wind and rain have eroded the layer of soil and debris used to cover her. Maybe even Katrina’s floodwater.”

  Spencer studied the victim. “She could have been here that long?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Spencer looked up at Tony. “Shallow grave. Our guy could have been rushed.”

  Tony nodded. “Or not cared if she was found.”

  Spencer slipped on latex gloves and carefully brushed away some leaves and other debris. Scraps of fabric clung to her pelvic area. Panties, he guessed. Had she been wearing anything else?

  The forensic anthropologist seemed to read his thoughts. “A synthetic,” she said. “Nylon, probably. The elements do a quick number on natural fabrics like cotton and silk, but the synthetics can last years. She was dressed. Look here.”