Chapter Seven

Detective Breaker met the chief and Raven next to the recently poured foundation of the new obstetrics wing of Memorial Hospital. The chief introduced him before stepping away to placate Dr. Fabian Long. Long was CEO of the hospital, and wanted the crime scene wrapped up as soon as possible so the fellas, as he put it, could get back to work.

Detective Breaker was a handsome man with curly black hair and a haunted look in his eyes. He wore an expensive three-piece suit under a perfectly draped trench coat. Raven didn’t know what annoyed her more – the gold watch chain or the diamond and onyx pinkie ring. But where was her empathy? She remembered how her stepmother dressed, mini-skirts, matching tops, and always the bright red heels. The more Floyd’s crazy showed itself, the fancier Jean dressed, the higher and sharper the red heels. If she couldn’t control her marriage, at least she could control the way she presented herself to the world. Perhaps Breaker felt the same way about this case.

“Where’s the scene?” she asked him, wanting to get the entire thing finished so she could get back to the restaurant before closing.

“Down there,” he said.

‘Down there’ meant the very foundation of the new Memorial Hospital wing. In the throes of construction, the imagined wing was a large, square hole rimmed by slanting walls of packed dirt, and floored by concrete. By the several people in orange vests and white jumpsuits walking all over the smooth surface, Raven concluded that the still clean and white concrete must be bone dry. The entire scene was lit by haloed circles of white light that pooled onto the concrete floor, making it gleam in places while leaving others in shadowed darkness. A crane on the edge of the hole stretched a long tentacle up toward an overcast sky, appearing to touch the pockmarked moon.

“You know who it is?” Raven asked.

“No idea. Chief called a halt to everything when he thought it’d be another Sleeping Boy case. Had to wait on Your Grace.” Breaker said.

She cocked her head at him.

“That’s you,” he explained.

“Hey,” Raven said. “Not trying to step all over your Gucci shoes, Detective. Chief asked me to take a look, that’s all.”

“What good is a look going to do except waste my time and everybody else’s?”

“Fresh pair of eyes,” Raven said. “And then you can have your serial killer all back to your little ole self.”

He appraised her for a long moment before gesturing to a uniformed officer with a clipboard. She recognized the officer, a big man with a handlebar mustache named Newell Taylor. She didn’t know why Taylor never liked her, but he didn’t. He gave her wide berth when she worked for the department last year. When they were forced to work together, he provided one-word answers when speech was required, and grunts when it wasn’t.

After Raven signed in, Taylor handed her a pair of booties and a jumpsuit. She pulled the booties on, but looked skeptically at the jumpsuit.

“Really?” she said.

“Chief’s orders,” Taylor said. “It’s the way we do things around here now. No cowboys. Or cowgirls.”

“How about cow woman? Or cow person?”

“Medical examiner here yet?” she asked Breaker.

“No, still waiting on her, too. Tonight’s been an exercise in patience.”

“But I see BLPD crime scene investigators,” she said. “How did they beat Rita here?”

“She’s finishing up at another scene. I hear she’s on her way.” He looked at his watch. “Should be here in about twenty or thirty minutes.”

Raven saved that piece of information in her head. It’s not that she didn’t like Rita Sandbourne, the medical examiner, it was that she didn’t want the questions she knew Rita would ask. And she didn’t want the memories, or the pressure to return to the force.

“So we don’t have time of death yet,” Raven said. “What time did everybody leave work?”

“By five thirty p.m. this place was a ghost town,” Breaker said. “Union.”

“Who found him?”

“A supervisor wanted to make sure he set the alarm,” Breaker answered. “You know, like when you leave home and think you left the iron on? Came back around eight thirty to check. So, it looks like the killer dropped the body between five thirty and eight thirty p.m.”

“There was an alarm?” Raven asked.

“Now, that’s wishful thinking,” he said. “He did forget. No alarm. No camera.”

“Convenient,” Raven said. “I hate convenient. I’m sure you’re detaining him.”

“We’re taking his statement, yes,” Breaker said.

Raven tilted her head to the side and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Breaker, but how long you been in homicide?”

His lips twisted into a smile. “First case, came from major crimes. I’m sure the chief already filled you in.”

“Okay,” she said. “Piece of advice. Don’t just take his statement. Detain him, question him on even the smallest detail. And question him yourself. Don’t turn it over to a uniform.”

“You automatically think he had something to do with it?”

“I don’t automatically think anything, that’s why you need to question him.”

She turned away from him and studied the foundation. More lights in the northeast corner, which had been cordoned off with police tape along with a set of white metal stairs leading to the concrete floor below.

“You think that’s the entry?” she asked. “The stairs?”

“Yes, why wouldn’t we?”

Raven studied the slanted dirt walls. “The killer walked daintily down the stairs carrying the dead weight of a body wrapped in a blanket, not knowing who might wander down here?”

“I don’t know if the walk was dainty or not, but that’s the only way down there. What else could he do, drop the body in from the sky?”

She said nothing, just gave him what Billy Ray called her ‘Floyd’, deadpan serial-killer stare.

“I see,” Breaker said. “This is going to be a waste of my time.”

She grinned, telling herself to lighten up a little. “More than likely,” she said.

“Thought so.”

He took his trench coat off and handed it to Officer Taylor, who was standing next to him like a valet. Taylor took the trench coat without delay, pressing down the neat folds, brushing off any imaginary dirt. The coat was followed by the jacket. Breaker put the jumpsuit over his slacks and the vest with the gold watch. After he was done, he slipped on the shoe covers and said, “And for the record, my shoes are Berluti, not Gucci.”

* * *

As they passed the metal stairs, Raven didn’t notice any evidence tags on the steps as they walked by, even though Breaker said the killer used them to enter the dump site. They both stopped at a metal ladder leading down from the slanted mud walls.

“After you,” he said.

“Good thing I’m not afraid of heights,” Raven said as she swung around and descended into the hole in the ground.

“You like homicide?” she asked Breaker when he was standing beside her on the ground below.

“I don’t. Major crimes geek all the way,” he said. “Do you?”

“Bit obvious, isn’t it?” she said. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you fly away?”

“Because there’s nobody else who will do this, is there? I see something needing to be done, I don’t dick around. I do it.”

“Whoa,” Raven said with a little laugh. “Shots fired. Is that a jab?”

“Take it any way you want to.”

“I will,” she breathed.

It was cooler at the bottom than up top, with more of a damp earth smell mingled with the late November Louisiana chill. Two Byrd’s Landing crime scene investigators concentrated on a long, swaddled bundle that must be the body. She recognized them both. A slim, short man named Tim who helped with the Lovelle case, and April, an older woman with curly graying hair who spent way too much money at the racetrack.

“Do you want to see the body?” Breaker asked.

“We’ll get to the body in a bit. You got a flashlight?” Raven said.

“This not enough light for you?”

He was right in a way. The construction site lights made the area as bright as an operating room. But there were corners and dark shadows where the light failed to reach. Those were the places Raven wanted to go.

“I want to see exactly where I’m walking,” she answered him absently. “And stay behind me, will you?”

“Your wish, Madam,” he said.

“Another thing,” she said. “Who are the orange vests walking around down here?”

“The foreman and a few of his team leads. They’re showing us the lay of the land.”

“Get rid of them.”

“What?”

“Get rid of them. The entire place should be a crime scene, not just your precious little corner. They can tell us the lay of the land from photographs. They don’t need to be down here.”

Breaker motioned another uniformed officer over. He whispered to him, glanced at Raven and whispered some more. The uniform walked away toward the foreman and the other construction workers.

“I’d grid search this entire area in daylight,” she told him as she pointed the flashlight in front of her feet.

“There,” she said after a while. She pointed down and said, “See that?”

“Scuff marks, shoe prints,” Breaker all but sneered. “They’re all over the place. It’s a construction site.”

“That doesn’t look like the other work boot prints, does it to you?”

Breaker didn’t argue with her, just waved Tim over. “Get some adhesive and lift that print, and photograph it,” he ordered.

Tim gave him a nasty look, but did it anyway. It looked like Breaker wasn’t making nice with the team. He was in more trouble than he knew if he thought of them as just the help. It was always a good thing to keep the crime scene investigators on your side.

“When you’re done, bag that over there, too, Tim. Please?” Raven said, pointing at a cache of empty soda cans and water bottles against the far wall. She whistled when she also noted a bottle of Perrier lying on its side.

“Expensive tastes over there,” she said.

“Those are from the construction workers,” Breaker said. “The foreman said they eat lunch down here.”

“They don’t clean up after? And they drink Perrier?”

“I don’t know much about what they drink, but they’re a messy bunch. You ever been on a working construction site?”

The bunch was indeed messy. Aside from the drink cans, there were food wrappers, and a couple of grease-spotted Burger King bags.

“Did you match the trash to the people who work here?”

Breaker folded his arms across his chest. “Haven’t exactly had time yet. Besides, you’re grasping at straws.”

“From what the chief says all you have are straws right now.”

“Tim, bag and tag all of it. You may want to map how you walked over here, and cordon it off so everyone will come this way. And lift all of the unique footprints you find. I know it’s work, but they may come in handy.”

“Sure. Welcome back, Raven.”

“I’m not back,” she corrected him.

“Not yet,” he called without turning around.

“Why would the killer leave evidence opposite of where he placed the body?”

“Found any evidence on the stairs yet?” Raven pressed.

“How else would he get down?”

“Was there evidence on the stairs?” Raven asked, coming closer to the opposite wall. “Blood, pieces of clothing, footprints, anything? You did look at all that while waiting on me, right? You don’t do everything Chief Sawyer tells you to, do you?”

Breaker pressed his lips together.

“If I were him,” she said, “I wouldn’t use the stairs. Too much can go wrong with carrying deadweight down a long flight of stairs.”

“Then what would you do? He didn’t roll them down the dirt walls. I did get a look at the blanket. It’s clean.”

“Ever occur to you that he wrapped the body in the blanket after rolling it down the embankment?”

“But then the body wouldn’t be clean. This killer always leaves the body clean.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why? I don’t know why. I’ll ask the fucker when I find him if it makes you happy.”

“You asked the FBI for a profile yet?”

“Yes. White male, private, mid-thirties, professional, organized. Probably a neat freak.”

“White because the victims are white.”

“Yes, and most serial killers are white.”

“You mean the ones that are caught are white,” Raven said. “Are they saying the crimes are sexual?”

“Isn’t that what they always say? Like Freud, they have a one-track mind,” Breaker said. “You don’t believe these crimes are sexual?”

“I’m just along for the ride on this one. I don’t know enough to believe anything. But if I were you, I would expand the crime scene like I told you, get some people out here to do a grid search tomorrow.”

“Noted.”

She turned back to him and smiled. “I wait tables now, you know that?”

“I heard.”

“There’s this old Korean War vet who comes into the restaurant all the time. I know what it means when you give somebody advice and they say, ‘noted’, Breaker.”

Stepping carefully until she was close to the far wall, she ran the light over the dirt surface. Rivulets had formed in the slanting dirt wall at what seemed regular intervals – except in one notable area. The place was almost smooth, as if someone or something had used the wall to slide to the floor.

“Tim,” she said as he was finishing tagging and bagging the trash on the floor. “You’re going to want to photograph this, and get some measurements.”

Breaker came over to stand beside her.

“One thing about this town, Detective Breaker,” she said, “is that you can never take anything for granted. The killer may have used the stairs, but the body definitely came in this way.”

* * *

A few minutes later Raven and Breaker were kneeling beside the blanket-wrapped body of the Byrd’s Landing serial killer’s latest victim. April, the curly-haired CSI who liked the racetrack, was tending the body as they waited for the medical examiner.

“Can we get a look underneath the blanket?” Raven asked April. “You get all the pictures you need?”

“Yes, finished a few minutes ago,” she said. Raven didn’t like the suspicious look on her face, and wasn’t surprised when April continued. “You know that we aren’t allowed to touch the body until Rita gets here, right?”

“I’m not asking you to touch the body,” Raven said. “Just the blanket.”

“That’s splitting hairs.”

“I promise,” Raven said, looking April in her gray eyes while thinking about the thundering hooves at the racetrack, and the bets that April on her salary shouldn’t have been making. “I won’t tell.”

April looked at Raven for a few more seconds before her thin lips tightened. With gloved hands she carefully started pushing the blanket aside, almost lovingly. Knowing April the way she did, Raven understood that she was doing it out of respect as much as necessity.

“You know how my father was, right?” Raven asked Breaker.

“Who doesn’t?” he said, his tone both clipped and suspicious.

“I think he loved me somewhere in there, but he told me a lot of stories; some, I’m sure, just to scare the daylights out of me.”

“I don’t doubt,” Breaker said.

“There was one story he told about how in the olden days they used to place living human sacrifices in the walls of new buildings, as offerings to the gods. He would describe in chilling detail how long it would take someone to die locked in the walls of the building, what would happen to their body, how they would go crazy first. I was very young. Never forgot that story. Gave me nightmares for days.”

“Okay,” he said. “But this isn’t a wall, and this kid is dead.”

“No, it’s not and yes, he is,” she said. “Quite dead.”

April had managed to get the blanket open enough so the gash in the boy’s throat was visible, and was pushing apart the folds to get to the face.

Raven went on. “But think about how these boys are killed. Throat slit, washed, and wrapped up, and then left at places that represent wealth and power.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When you’re looking at the crime scenes, think about what’s most important to this particular killer,” she said. “I think for this one it’s each part of the ritual – cutting the throat, bleeding the body out, wrapping the bodies in blankets. He’s organized, like you said. Everything has to be just right.”

“The chief didn’t tell me you liked to talk in riddles.”

She turned and favored Breaker with a hard gaze. “You’re a detective. You need to learn to love riddles.”

The blanket was finally open, cradling the face of the dead boy. How ridiculous to call this murderer the Sleeping Boy Killer. The look on the victim’s face was definitely not somnolent. His skin was pale, white as chalk, his eyes half-lidded and his blue lips parted in memory of his last breath.

April sucked in her breath.

“You know him?” Raven asked.

“That’s what’s crazy about working in a small town,” April said. “I know most of ’em. And I know this boy. Don’t you, Raven?”

“Not the crowd I hang with,” Raven said.

“What about you, Breaker?” April asked.

“Remember I’m not from around here,” Breaker said. “I barely know you.”

“His name is Henri Toulouse. He’s Judge Toulouse’s boy. Goes to school with my son.”

“Well, crap,” Raven said. “I do know the judge.”

Raven had made Judge Toulouse’s acquaintance several times. He was a family court judge she had appeared before after getting into trouble at one of her numerous foster homes. She remembered him as an overly thin man with greedy eyes and a mean mouth.

Breaker covered his eyes with his hand, the pinky ring diamond glittering in the abundance of light on the crime scene. “And I thought there was no way that this case could be a bigger pain in the ass,” he said.

“Looks like you hit the jackpot,” Raven agreed.

She stood, and studied the pools of light on the floor. Her mind went to all the secrets the dump site was hiding in its shadows and crevices. There was more evidence here than Breaker could probably even dream. The killer had more to say. Now, with this new site, he was expanding his message.

“I don’t think that the killer’s motive is sexual,” she said. “To me this feels like the ritual of sacrifice. But for some reason, for this particular victim, the perp’s willing to subvert part of the ritual in favor of the location.”

“You mean the cleaning part,” Breaker said.

“Yes, I mean the cleaning.”

“So?”

“So, this place and this particular victim mean a lot to the killer. Did the other victims have any connection to the dump sites?”

“No, not to the dump site itself. That looks random.”

“Well, this one isn’t random. Look hard for a connection between this site and the victim, or between this site and the other sites.”

“That it?” Breaker said. “That’s all Chief Sawyer’s ace detective has, a grid search and a connection for something that doesn’t even have walls yet?”

“What do you want from me, Detective Breaker?”

“For you to stay and help us with this.” It wasn’t Breaker who answered, but the chief, who had come to stand behind them unnoticed.

“You’re breaking your own rules,” Raven said when they were facing each other. “No jumpsuit.”

“I wanted to get down here before you ran away,” he said. “And it looks like I was just in time.”

Raven didn’t bother to say that she couldn’t do it. He knew that. Her face said it all. Police work would destroy her. She barely managed her job when it was her father who was the killer. She couldn’t imagine how it would be if she tried to go back with blood spilled by her own willful hands. Without saying a word, she brushed past him on her way to the ladder.

Before she could grab the cold metal to begin her climb, the chief said, “You’re going to regret this, Raven.”

She turned back to him, and said something that she would never forget as long as she lived. She said, “I don’t see how that could be a possibility, Chief.”