Jump The Line (Toein' The Line Book 1) Read online

  Chapter 15

  Bite Doc waves me in with barely a hello. I’m pretty sure he’s saying something like,“Go screw yourself, Detective Hawks,”but I can’t hear because he’s mumbling.

  Exercising my will power and choosing not to be ruffled by the man, I marvel at the doc’s lab. I love a well-organized morgue, the cadavers lined up in neat little fridges, row on top of row. Makes it easier finding the bodies. But in here, the temperature’s a few degrees below the morgue’s, and I wonder why. And why’n hell does Bite Doc need all these freezers?

  “Shall we?”he asks, loping to the center of his lab and stopping near a stainless steel table.

  “Yeah,”I say. There’s charm between those bushy eyebrows, I tell myself, then stifle a chuckle. There is no fucking charm anywhere near this man. Bite Doc’s a cave bear: simple.

  Like two burglars casing an empty house, we go to work, our focus on the task at hand.

  “Tell me anything at all about our perp, and I’ll buy you a lifetime’s supply of beer,”I say, hoping to scare up some of the cave bear’s charm. Instead, I get a stare the equivalent of a surly paw swipe. When I start to plunk the folder filled with color photos of Megalo’s last vic down onto Bite Doc’s stainless steel table, he catches the envelope midair, before it touches his sterilized work area.

  “Sheesh,”he says, frowning and pushing a dry hank of yellow hair from his flushed forehead. “I don’t drink spirits, Detective Hawks, but I’ll settle for a new microscope.”

  “You’ve found something already?”I ask, feeling instantly hopeful but cautious. Bite Doc’s one squirrely bastard, but I figure he must have some new evidence, or he wouldn’t have made such a deal with me. It’s like gambling, betting I’ll have to buy him a microscope. And Mormons don’t gamble.

  “You got a deal, Doc,”I say, taking a stool. “You show me some new evidence—usable—and I’ll buy you a microscope.” It’s hard to keep calm, thinking he might have something, but I manage. “What’ve you found?”

  “Patience,”Bite Doc says, maneuvering several photos into position on the table’s top.

  Yeah, that’s my nickname. Mr. Patience.

  Waiting while he putters around arranging the photos, I check my cell phone for messages. Having DeeDee run a check on Alaina’s and her family’s backgrounds, I’d also ordered a check on Bite Doc—in case.

  When you’ve been in Homicide a while, it’s hard to tell when to start checking backgrounds and when not, but when there is no evidence everyone’s a suspect. It’s anachronistic, but I don’t rule anyone out, not until I’m sure I can. It’s almost counter intuitive, but aside from the fact he’s a Mormon and unmarried and spends all his time locked in this lab, Bite Doc’s a perfect candidate to cover up a crime involving serial biting. I don’t expect anything to show up in his background, but my job is like a doctor’s. Making a diagnosis means ruling out everything that’s not wrong with the patient, in order to find out what’s wrong. In this case, I’ve got to rule out everyone who isn’t a suspect before I can determine who is. Bite Doc’s no exception.

  Damn. My Bureau of Criminal Investigation report on Bite Doc’s not ready. Wishing BCI had a better turn-around time, I re-holster my cell phone.

  “Ahem,”Bite Doc says, acting perplexed that I’ve taken to the modern habit of checking my cell phone with others present. “Let’s get on, shall we?”he says.

  Now he’s the one in a hurry?

  Put off by his arrogance, or belligerence—maybe both—I stare at the stainless steel table I almost sullied when I tossed my folder on it. Bite Doc’s got all the photos neatly labeled and laid out for my inspection next to the bones of Meera, Megalo Don’s first vic. When Doc Smalley finishes with the latest vic’s autopsy, impressions of her gnawed flesh will join Meera’s on the stainless steel table. Bite Doc will add yet more sets of impressions and molds to his impressive collection, and he’ll take hundreds more photos.

  “When you and I are done, my new partner’s bringing your employee back here from the reception area for questioning,”I tell him.

  “Uh-huh.” Bite Doc doesn’t ask. Other than Aurelia Moreno, he’s only got one other employee. I watch his face carefully, looking for any telltale facial tics or signs of discomfort with my interviewing Alaina. Seeing none, I drop my gaze to the color photos lined up on the table next to Meera’s remains. Bite Doc won’t have to worry about naming the vic in these photos. She’s got a name: Angie Dawn Miller.

  Doc lifts his head, catches my gaze. Impassive, he clears his throat. “I take it, since you’re interviewing Miss Colby, that she’s involved with this?” He nods toward the photos of Angie Miller.

  “She is, Doc,”I say, carefully not going into how Alaina’s involved, not with the man who, although unlikely, is nevertheless a possible suspect. He has a right to ask. She’s his employee. I have the right not to answer. She’s my possible witness, close friends with my vic, Angie Miller.

  “What’ve you got, Doc?”I glance conspicuously at my watch.

  “Your perp likes to locate marks on the shoulder.” He puts two photos of the latest vic and Meera next to each other, and we both bend our heads and look. “These are evidence of ecchymotioca,”he says, pointing.

  “What the fucking hell, uh, sorry, Doc. I don’t mean to offend, but what’s ecchy—?”

  “Ecchymotioca. They’re suck mark patterns made by your perp. He makes them after biting. They’re for inducing sadistic sexual gratification.”

  “I see.” Suck marks I understand from practical experience. “Doc, I’m into biting and nibbling as much as the next guy, but a fine line exists between sexual pleasure and sadism.”

  Doc nods, but doesn’t respond. He’s out of sync with my humor, trotted out for male bonding purposes. I can save it, though. It’s wasted on him.

  “What . . . are these suck mark patterns telling us?”I ask, deferring to Bite Doc’s superior knowledge. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he’s messing with my head, taunting me. What I ought to do is fake a reason for probable cause and have my buds from Cinci PD get a warrant and raid Doc’s freezers. That would teach him to be more respectful of his inferiors.

  “Here,”he says, pointing with the scalpel to a bite wound on Meera’s shoulder,“we see a foot pattern, like bird tracks in the snow.”

  Careful not to touch the stainless steel exam table, scratching it and setting Doc off, I ease off the stool and bend for a closer look, eager to confirm his analysis. Five deep gouges fork like toes at the end of two parallel bite wounds. The pattern repeats itself all over Meera’s right shoulder, but not the left, which is gnawed to mush. It’s the same pattern as the one in the recent vic’s photo of Angie Miller, which DeeDee and I puzzled over earlier at breakfast.

  “By damn, Doc, you’re right. He’s got a foot fetish.”

  Again, I can relate—uncomfortably. I like women’s toes and polished toenails, preferably a sparkling Apache red, like the Ferrari sittin’ in my garage. Doc Smalley’s not said it—not once—but each new gift feels like a bribe for my affection. I leave the car there collecting dust thick enough to grow Midwestern corn. It’s obscene, against everything my mother has taught me. I don’t take bribes for my affection, not in my personal life, and damn well not in my professional life.

  Fighting heartburn, I ease up a bit on Bite Doc. It’s not easy knowing Megalo and I share the same fetish, but unlike him, I like my women alive when I suck or nibble their toes.

  “Doc, you think many guys have such a strange . . . fetish?”

  Bite Doc avoids answering.

  I wait him out.

  “Ah,”he says at last, impatient. “So here, on this young lady, as with Meera, we also have a bite-wound pattern that forms what looks like a foot.”

  I compare Meera’s and Angie Miller’s photos. The skin on both vics’ shoulders, even on Meera’s cocoa-colored skin marred by bite wounds and decay, appears a sickly bluish gray. But the bite wounds, the suck marks, show up
a brilliant red in the deepest part of the parallel bite marks forming the foot. Then they fade to a fiery pink in the five outer areas, the toes or the areas surrounding the gouges, where the teeth punctures are less deep. Everywhere else, Megalo Don has just gnawed indiscriminately. Nevertheless, the pattern on both vics’ shoulders is evident—and identical.

  Freakin’ A. DeeDee was right. Megalo Don’s leaving bite wounds resembling feet on his vics’ shoulders. We’ve got a possible signature, from what Bite Doc and I have analyzed on both vics. Most profilers agree the signature satisfies some perverted sexual fantasy couched in a larger sadistic framework in the perp’s mind. The biting signature means Megalo has a sadistic need to satisfy, and it relates—for some reason—to feet.

  But why?

  I figure answering that question is part of the key to solving the riddle of Megalo Don. It goes to motive, and determining motive will explain why the Don’s hung up on leaving bite marks of feet in his vics’ flesh. It will also help me interpret the crime scenes when we finally learn where the Don is killing his vics.

  “Doc, I have to be sure. You’re telling me these bites definitely are not normal? They’re not some guy with really bad teeth, maybe a meth-head with a kinky predisposition. . . ?”

  I hope he’ll answer using plain English, but it’s too optimistic a wish.

  “Far from it, Detective,”he says, making no effort to hide his satisfaction with Megalo’s brilliance, and his disgust with my ignorance. “He uses some sort of special dentures to inflict them. They’re homemade. But the molds he uses to make his special dentures are of mostexcellent quality.”

  The hell? Is Doc admiring the Don’s handiwork? I reverse my earlier decision to lighten up on the doc as a suspect, and give myself a mental pat for running a BCI check. Is Bite Doc getting off on the perp’s perversion? Is he covering his own homicidal brilliance by making homemade molds in clear view of NPD, using them to chew women to death? The brutal thought is not evidence based, but I drill down on Bite Doc. “You’re saying he custom makes these molds for each murder?”

  “Yes. He brings them with him to the scene, or wherever he plans the attack,”Bite Doc continues,“and then he uses them as a . . . sexual apparatus.”

  Biting back a sarcastic innuendo, I stay focused on the reason I’m here. “Doc, is he using these dentures . . . to disguise his bite?” If so, that shoots hell out of Bite Doc’s theory—and any hope I have of forensically establishing signature using bite mark patterns.

  “No, he’s not worried about being caught,”Bite Doc says, that peculiar adoring glow of adulation again flushing his pasty face. “He gets off on inflicting bite-wound patterns of feet.”

  I shoot the old coot an admiring gaze. He’s a nut job, for sure. He might even be the serial killer I’m looking to catch, a fact I keep ever-present in my mind. But the doc’s knowledge of the exotic devices a sadistic man like Megalo Don can dream up to sexually attack and kill women like Meera—and the second and now our third vic—is encyclopedic. The man’s freaky, but Bite Doc knows his teeth, and I’m here to learn, and to catch a killer.

  “Do you think the vics are strangers to Megalo Don?”I ask. Mentally reviewing Megalo’s sadistic sexual preferences, I carefully watch Bite Doc’s reaction. He never raises a wintry eyebrow.

  “It’s possible, but I won’t say for a certainty. He is a complex individual. Most complex,”he reiterates, emphasizing his point. “His sadistic fantasies involve inflicting pain, exquisite deliberate pain. In his mind, it’s required. His goal is to frighten his victims into submission and then to eat them slowly and watch them agonize . . . for arousal purposes.”

  “Kinky bastard,”I say, not bothering this time to apologize for my language. At this point, I don’t care if I offend Bite Doc. I stare at the photos of both vics’ shoulders. “So . . . you’re saying he’s into sexually and psychologically abusing his vics?”

  Engrossed in examining the latest vic’s color photos, Bite Doc rumbles,“As I said, he’s complicated. Most likely, he’s charming to a certain extent. And he at first makes friends with his victims. He easily impresses others with his intellect.”

  Bite Doc coughs, clearly uncomfortable. The description he just gave me fits him, except for the charming part. Ted Bundy was charming, or many of his vics found him so, but Bite Doc’s anything but. I’ve studied everything on Bundy, but unlike his unsuspecting vics, I figured he was exactly what he looked like: a sicko serial killer. Is Bite Doc in Bundy’s category?

  “But after he’s sated himself sexually,”Bite Doc continues,“he kills his victim.”

  “In other words, she has to be alive while he’s biting her to get a sexual charge?”

  He stares a pinhole in my forehead with a look that could kill. Didn’t I just explain all this? I play dumb and let him glare. “You’ll have a difficult time catching him,”he says, finally. “He’s a mixed offender, to steal a bit of your profiling jargon. He’s both sane and insane. Complicated.”

  “As in‘Hannibal Lecter’ complicated?”I say, persisting, despite the doc’s growing impatience.

  Again, that stare.

  “I disagree, Doc,”I say. “I think our perp is insane. Period.”

  Bite Doc snorts. “I see you are illogically immersed in media archetypes.”

  He slides one of the color photos under his beat-up but sophisticated looking old microscope, like the ones Q uses in James Bond movies. “Think Bundy,”he says. “Ted.”

  Then he gnashes his teeth—a la Hannibal Lecter—at me, and laughs.

  “Whoa, Doc, back off!”

  I bristle at Bite Doc’s putdown. His news that our killer is like Bundy shocks me into near apoplexy. Bundy’s case could’ve gone on indefinitely if the co-eds he bit hadn’t helped identify him, if the bite marks he’d inflicted on their buttocks hadn’t forensically matched Bundy’s own teeth.

  Now I have a real problem. How’n hell can I solve this case within Captain Meyer’s short timeframe?“Doc, not to sound doubtful, but are you certain?”

  His heated glare tells me I’ve pissed him off thoroughly this time.

  “Detective, have you bothered to see the latest victim in the morgue?”

  A twinge of anxiety grips my gut. Bite Doc asked the question like he’s enquiring whether I’ve visited my terminal mother in the nursing home in the past hour. “No, I haven’t,”I say. “The coroner just faxed me the vic’s photos this morning. Why?”

  “Come,”he says, sounding bored to wooden indifference by my ignorance. “I’ll show you something. A lady,”he adds,“that even you are not likely to seduce with your uniform and badge.”

  “There is no such creature,”I say.

  Bite Doc snorts his disagreement.

  Chapter 16

  My mind is racing. My heart’s thudding out of my chest. If it’s the Viking cop here to see me, then I’ve got to walk out there and face him. I can hear him now,“You’ve got two choices, Miss Colby. Talk. Or take the perp walk.”

  But how can I protect Robin if I talk to Detective Hawks? If I’m in jail?

  Worried sick, I unlock the door to Brick’s front office and hurry in. I’ve got my plan for dealing with Detective Hawks, but I’ve also got a problem: I look like death warmed over. Why didn’t I take time this morning to comb my hair? How can I distract him looking like a gypsy witch?

  I flip the wall switch. “Damn!” Nothing. No lights. Did I forget to change the bulbs for the overhead lights? Aurelia will probably write me up for that, in addition to all my tardies.

  I squint and search the reception area’s deep gloom. What’d Brick say? Our new client has the nicest teeth he’s ever seen? I should’ve picked up on that, too, instead of trying to recall the LEO’s smile. The man’s a cop. He snarls: he doesn’t smile. Leastways, he didn’t last night.

  The cop looming in the reception area’s darkness doesn’t smile, either. But her teeth, not that she’s smiling—she’s not—and everything else about her, ju
mp out, screaming for attention. She’s not in uniform, but I can smell a cop a mile away. She’s got“detective”written all over her.

  I glance toward the sliding window separating my office from the front reception area and feel grateful it’s there, a barrier. Leaning forward across my desk, I search through the glass window, acting like I’m looking for her badge number, but I can barely see. It’s like swimming in split pea soup in here with no lights.

  I’m fighting panic. What’s she want?

  “Bosom Buds is next door,”I offer, hoping she’s not here about Robin but knowing dang well she is. Giving her the name of Bosom Buds, the breast reduction facility run by Doctor Frederick Minehauser, I hope I can get rid of her by herding her to Cincinnati’s premier face and boob fixer. She looks like the type, plastic top to bottom.

  “Do I look like I need a plastic surgeon?”she snarls.

  “Hell, no.” I stare at her toothy grimace—she’s also not here for dental work—and then at her ginormous ladies. She’s not here for breast implants, either.

  “Are you Alaina Colby?”she demands.

  I know better than to answer when cops take that high-handed tone. I’ve got the little card with my rights—if I’m arrested—in my jeans’ pocket. I’ve memorized it. “I wish to speak with my attorney,”I say.

  “Ha! Y’all must be shittin’ me, right? You want an attorney?”

  My heart pounding, I zip my lips and glare. She steps closer to the reception window separating us. When she does, I realize why she’s here. With her Kentucky accent, she’s gotta be from Newport PD about the Coca-Cola truck Stoke and I boosted. A bigger fear grips me. What if Stoke’s gone on the lam with Omar’s money, instead of making the deposit like I told him to do? But Stoke wouldn’t do that to me, would he? I try to imagine where he’d go on Omar’s deposit, a few hundred bucks. Back under the rock he crawled out from under, I hope.

  “Just charge me and then give me my phone call,”I say. Instantly, I get another of her loud throaty laughs. She’s tall and leggy, a jumping-out-of-birthday-cakes kind of babe. I can see she’d be fun at a party, but this is no party.