Where the Blame Lies, Page 4

  “I’ll need a bathroom,” she finally said, her voice slightly slurred, misery lacing her tone.

  He turned then and was quiet for a moment as he looked at her. “You really are a m-mess, aren’t you?” He sighed, shook his head. “I’ll get you a bucket.”

  A bucket?

  “I’m-I’m hungry too.” She needed food to soak up whatever was still coursing through her veins. She needed to be able to think straight if she was going to get out of this nightmare.

  He kept staring at her, tilting his head slightly. She had the notion he was smiling under the mask. “Yeah, I b-bet. It hurts to be hungry, doesn’t it? I know about that, Josie. S-someday I’m going to have to tell you about m-my upbringing.” He shook his head. “Not a story for the faint of heart. N-Not at all.”

  She stared at him. She didn’t know what to say. He sighed again. “I’ll b-be back.” He moved toward the door. That walk, shoulders rounded, slightly stooped, as though he was trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. Or at least, that’s how she’d always thought of it when she’d seen him at her apartment building. Timid. Graceless. It was him all right. She searched her memory for his name. Marshall. That was it. She didn’t recall his last name though. And she had no earthly idea why he was doing this. Did he feel rejected? That must be it. He’d seen her bring men home and felt personally dismissed by her? And she supposed she had acted dismissively toward him. She’d always been nice to him though . . . never unkind. Never.

  He walked out of the small room, and she heard the sound of the lock sliding into place on the other side of the door. She leaned her head back again, gently this time, and drew her knees to her chest. She wanted to crawl inside herself and hide. Hide from the way she felt—filthy, defiled, terrified, alone. She wept silently, tears streaking down her face as she screamed wordlessly inside her own mind.

  Why? Why? Why?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Zach breathed in the peppermint oil smeared under his nose, stepping up to the body that lay prone on the table in Cathlyn Harvey’s examination room. He’d planned to be there by eight, but she’d called his cell at six a.m. and told him she had something for him. He’d called Jimmy, taken a three-minute shower, and been out the door five minutes after getting the call.

  The door opened and Jimmy walked in, looking disheveled and as tired as Zach felt.

  “Right on time,” Cathlyn said, shooting Jimmy a small smile. “Nice to see you, James.”

  “Dr. Harvey.”

  She shot him a look. “Meeting like this?” She nodded at the dead body on the gurney between them. “Call me Cathlyn.”

  He gave her crooked smile. “Can’t argue with that.”

  “What’d you find?” Zach asked, anxious to know anything that could give them a direction to move in today.

  Cathlyn cleared her throat, using her gloved hand to point to the girl’s thigh, or what had once been her thigh and was now bone only partially covered by decayed flesh. “Words, carved so deep a few letters went through to the femur. Here,” she said and they bent closer, looking at what she was showing them. Zach saw scratches on the white bone, but couldn’t make out any words. “I used a magnifying glass and shot a couple of pictures.” She reached over to the table behind them and picked up a stack of photos, handing them to Zach.

  He peered down at the magnification of the scratches. A few of the letters were so slight as to be unreadable, as if the blade had pressed harder in some spots than in others. He read the partial words, filling in the rest from memory, and his blood ran cold. “Casus belli?”

  Cathlyn nodded. “Latin. It means—"

  “Where the blame lies,” Zach murmured, shock rolling through him.

  Cathlyn nodded, her lips set in a grim line. Jimmy furrowed his brow, looking back and forth between them. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “The Josie Stratton case we were talking about last night.”

  Jimmy looked mildly shocked. “You don’t say. But wait, that suspect was caught. Case closed.”

  Cathlyn nodded. “I remembered the phrase immediately from that case and looked it up this morning. The information about the words carved into her skin was printed in the paper, leaked by someone.”

  Most likely a member of the UC Medical Center staff, talking to any one of the reporters milling around outside the hospital. People liked to gossip, liked to talk about what they were privy to, especially when the details were lurid and the other person’s reaction would likely be shock and horror. Zach vaguely remembered his boss being pissed about the leak. But he was a rookie back then, trying to learn his beat and how to be a good cop. Once his post at the hospital had been done, he’d put Josie Stratton from his mind—or tried to anyway. As far as details though? He hadn’t had them then, and he didn’t have them now.

  “So if the perp on that one committed suicide, what is this? A copycat?”

  Zach gritted his teeth. They couldn’t jump the gun, but why else would someone carve the exact same phrase into the exact same spot on his victim’s skin? Then there were the chains . . . the abandoned location . . . “It’s gotta be. He’s recreating the crime committed nine years ago against Josie Stratton.” Zach’s heart picked up in speed for some reason he couldn’t completely articulate. But why? Why now?

  Zach looked back to Cathlyn, who was placing the pictures back in the open file folder on her table. “Were you able to pinpoint cause of death?”

  “Cardiac arrhythmia caused by starvation. I found both tissue degradation and severe electrolyte imbalances.”

  “Jesus,” Jimmy muttered as Zach let out a slow exhale. “How the fuck long does it take a person to starve to death?”

  “Anywhere from three to six weeks.”

  “Wouldn’t you dehydrate much more quickly than that?” Jimmy asked.

  Cathlyn nodded. “Yes, but this girl didn’t. She was hydrated. For whatever reason, the perpetrator gave her water, but no food.”

  “Did he want her to suffer longer?” Zach muttered, feeling sickened by the thought of anyone torturing another human being to that extent. There was a particular cruelty to the length of time it took to starve a person until their heart gave out. He remembered what he’d read about the Josie Stratton case on the computer the night before. She’d been deprived of food too. But apparently the perpetrator had given her enough to sustain a pregnancy.

  “That’s for you gentlemen to find out,” Cathlyn said. “And please do, because the person who did this to her is walking our streets right this minute. This girl was not only mutilated and starved to death, she was sexually assaulted as well. I found evidence of vaginal tearing.”

  “Semen?” Jimmy asked.

  Cathlyn shook her head. “No, but there was powder residue from a condom.”

  “That’s different than the Josie Stratton case,” Zach said.

  Cathlyn worried her lip for a moment, nodding. “Yes, Josie Stratton became pregnant, didn’t she?” She sighed, shaking her head. “Maybe this perpetrator learned from his predecessor. Don’t knock up your victims. It leaves far too much DNA behind in the form of a child. Then again, that baby was never found, was he?” Cathlyn sighed again, the sound of someone who was used to having to attempt to move past the unthinkable, categorize the horrific. He supposed all three of them could relate.

  “I do have one more thing though, and hopefully this will help ID her.” Cathlyn moved to the bottom of the table where she picked what was left of the girl’s foot up. “She has a tattoo on her ankle. Very small, and almost completely destroyed by the decomposition, but it appears to be a daisy.”

  Zach looked at Jimmy. “I don’t recall any of the women we pulled from the missing persons list having a daisy tattoo on her ankle. Do you?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “No, but she could have gotten it right before she went missing. It’s usually parents who give the details. Maybe they didn’t know.”

  “All right, boys. I’ve gotta get back to work. You go do what
you need to do. I’ll call you if I find anything else of relevance,” Cathlyn said.

  Zach nodded. “Thanks.” She gave them both a small salute. They turned and left the exam room, Zach taking in a few deep breaths when they entered the hallway leading to the elevator. He hated the smell this place would leave lingering in his nose the rest of the day, despite the pungent peppermint oil he’d applied. It made him vaguely nauseated.

  “Hey listen,” Zach said to Jimmy when they made it the parking lot. “Since we drove here separately, you want to visit the contacts of the missing persons we pulled while I go through the files of the Josie Stratton case? See if I can pull up any other similarities?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Sure. I’ve got the list in my car. You know which detectives worked that case? Did you say it was eight or nine years ago?”

  “Nine since she was abducted, about eight since she escaped.”

  Jimmy shook his head, blowing out a muttered, “Wow,” under his breath. Zach couldn’t agree more. “As far as who worked on it, I think it was Murphy and Bell, but I’ll have to double-check. Bell retired several years back, but Murphy was riding out the DROP program for the next year or so.”

  “Meet at the office later to compare notes?” Jimmy asked, turning and moving toward his car.

  “Yup,” Zach called, heading toward his own vehicle. Once he was inside and had closed the door, he rolled the window down, hoping some fresh air blowing in his face would help dispel the smell of death. He used a napkin from his glove box to wipe the strong odor of peppermint from beneath his nostrils. He sat there for a minute, going over the information Cathlyn had given them.

  Holy shit. His hunch had been right. But why? Why would someone want to recreate the crime committed against Josie Stratton? Casus belli. Where the blame lies. What blame? And what was the connection between the man who abducted Josie nine years before, and the person who’d abducted and starved the girl lying on Cathlyn Harvey’s exam table?

  He started his truck, pulling out of the parking lot, a heavy feeling in his chest, the long-ago echo of Josie’s anguished cries ringing in his head.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Before

  The days melted together, one into the other. Josie tried to think of a way to free herself, but with her hands chained behind her back, she was helpless. She could see a portion of the chains when she looked over her shoulder, but couldn’t tell what the lock looked like, or even where it was. The shackles were tight around her wrists. She had no chance of escaping them.

  Sometimes she yelled long and loud until her voice and spirit broke, her cries turning to croaky whimpers as snot trailed from her nose and slid over her lips.

  Marshall didn’t come every day and when he did show up, sometimes he only stayed for a few minutes, and other times a little longer. Sometimes he raped her, sometimes he didn’t. Even when he didn’t, she expected it, flinched at every movement he made, until she was so wound up with fear that she almost wished he’d just do it and get it over with. Anticipating the degradation was almost as bad as the reality of it.

  When he did violate her, she tried to force her mind to drift away, but she couldn’t. She’d read once about a girl who had been brutally attacked but had no memory of what happened to her. The mind could be your protector, she thought. But apparently hers didn’t work that way, because she couldn’t drift anywhere. She was painfully present each time he laid on top of her, parting her legs and violating her, her dry flesh tearing with his invasion.

  She thought of her childhood, how she’d tried to drift away back then too, when her mother had sought her out, drunk and rejected by her father, taking out her anger on Josie in any number of ways. She’d prayed to God to send her father back, to catch her mother hurting her, to protect her, to love her, to stay. Of course, he never had. But she hadn’t been able to block it out back then either. Why couldn’t she? Why was every word, every slam, every stinging slap that came her way seared into her memory, as clear as day? Whatever trick there was to shutting down your mind in the midst of horror, Josie didn’t know it. It was an endless reel of torment. No rest. Only agony.

  Marshall had brought her a short bucket, more like a pan really, which she managed to maneuver underneath herself with her feet when she needed to, using her shackled hands to work her shorts down from behind. It was a pitiful set of awkward movements that Josie had mastered after a few days. And though using a bucket for a toilet was a further humiliation, at least he hadn’t left her to sit in her own waste.

  He brought her food sometimes, but not every time, and her bones began poking through her skin, making it painful to sleep on the hard, cement floor. Her body ached. She was so hungry, so incredibly hungry.

  At first she hated to hear his footsteps on the stairs, the sound of the lock turning. She dreaded his arrival, dreaded what he would do to her. But after what she calculated was a month or so, she began praying to hear his footsteps, praying he’d come back. What if he didn’t? What if he left her to slowly starve to death alone and shackled? She sobbed at the thought, pulling at her chains uselessly again until her wrists bled. The thought alone terrified her. Will I ever be free again, or will I die this way?

  He came to her that night, the bulb from the outer hall washing the room in light. He had bread, cheese, sliced turkey, and water. He fed her the food and she ate it hungrily. It was so good it made tears trickle down her cheeks. Then he opened the water, tipping it back so she could drink. Their gazes met and held as she drank the water he offered, his hand cupped under her mouth to catch the drips. His eyes were golden hazel in the darkness of the surrounding ski mask. There was something almost loving in his gaze, like the moment was special to him too, or maybe she was imagining that. Maybe I’m developing Stockholm syndrome, she thought. She’d learned about that in the psychology class she’d taken the semester before. She hadn’t been able to understand how that could happen. It sounded ludicrous. This experience was really furthering her education, she thought, an hysterical laugh bubbling up her throat that she knew would emerge as a sob if she let it out. She swallowed it down along with the last sip of water.

  He removed the bottle from her lips and stood. Her heart constricted. He was going to leave now. Leave her alone in the dark again. “Please stay,” she whispered, her voice pleading. “Please don’t go.” Even when he was touching her in unwanted ways, defiling her, it was better than the silent nothingness, the awful aloneness of day after day and night after horrible night. She’d never known such utter loneliness.

  He stared down at her. “You stink.”

  “Then wash me.”

  She saw his eyes narrow minutely and he seemed to hesitate, but he nodded. “I’ll be back.”

  He did come back, the very next morning, and he used baby wipes to clean her body. He was gentle between her legs, and as he moved the cloth over her, the pace of his breathing increased. He was aroused. She squeezed her eyes shut as he mounted her, dirtying her once again. But afterward he washed her once more, though the cloth moved more harshly over her tender skin as he wiped away his semen. “I s-see why all those men wanted you, Josie. You think I d-don’t? You think I don’t know that you’ve gotten to me too? There’s something about y-you. Something that makes men weak, even m-me. Whores like you have their dirty tricks, don’t they, J-Josie? Whores have a w-way of making men d-do things they know they shouldn’t. Bad, b-bad things. Things that r-ruin lives.”

  She didn’t speak, as tears coursed down her cheeks. He wiped her face and then used another cloth to clean her scalp, moving her hair this way and that. He tied it up in a rubber band he’d brought and then stood, stepping back and looking down at her. His eyes were flinty, despite the warm color of his irises. He zipped up his pants and left her alone once more. Alone in the darkness, the worst type of solitude.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Zach found Cedric Murphy sitting in the break room with his feet up on the table, scrolling through his phone. “Cope,” he greeted,
his deep voice friendly, his smile wide. Zach liked the older detective and had often sought his advice on cases. He might be skating by a bit for the next twelve months, but his knowledge of the job was invaluable. In his twenty-four years, Zach figured Murphy had just about seen it all. Zach had the vague memory of the man ducking into Josie’s hospital room all those years ago, his expression grim, his jaw tight.

  When Murphy saw the look on Zach’s face, he sat back from his computer, frowning. “What’s up?”

  “Hey Murphy. I need to get some information from you about an old case.”

  “Yeah? Which one?”

  “The Josie Stratton abduction? You remember it?”

  Murphy blew out a breath, coming to his feet. “Remember it? I’ll never forget it. What do you need to know and why?”

  Zach lowered his voice. “We could have a copycat.”

  Murphy looked briefly stunned. “You serious?” He paused. “I have her file box stored down the hall. Wait for me in interview room one and we’ll talk.”

  None of the detectives had offices, just an open floor with desks, so they sometimes used interview rooms to get some privacy. Zach entered interview room one and waited for Murphy. He came in five minutes later, holding an evidence box that he set on the table. “What makes you suspect a copycat?”

  They both took a seat and Zach broke down the crime scene he’d been at the night before, and then the meeting with Cathlyn that morning.

  “That phrase—casus belli—got leaked to the press. It was all over the news.”