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“Kyle was hysterical, crying and shouting about the dog trying to eat him,” I said to Gabriel and Peter West as Badger circled his dog bed twice before lying down. “Kyle refused to stay home with Badger at that point, so I had to bring him with us.” I finished the story about why I had to bring my dog to work with me.
“Since you’re on desk duty, it’s fine,” Peter said, holding his sides where they hurt from laughing so hard at my unfortunate nephew’s plight. Badger is a rescue dog and all we know for sure is that he’s part akita. He’s gotten huge, bigger than most akitas. The vet suspected he had some St. Bernard in him as well. He’d been rescued from a dog fighting ring as a puppy, where he was scheduled to be a bait dog. Somehow, my mother found him and fell in love, so he’d come to live with us. He was about six years old now. He was tall, wide, wooly, and when it was hot, he drooled like Hooch the mastiff from that movie with Tom Hanks.
“Ace, if you leave, you have to take the dog with you, we don’t have time for Mitch or Gabriel to take him for walks,” Peter said.
“You are confused about the energy level of that dog,” I said. “He doesn’t go for walks, he doesn’t like them, he gets about twenty feet from the house and just lies down on the sidewalk and waits to be told he can go home.” My mom had tried taking him on her morning jogs with Melina, and Badger had laid down in front of the house and refused to leave. He’d just laid there until she returned. Because my mom is a determined, strong-willed woman, it had happened every day for a month before she gave up and stopped trying to force him to go for walks with her. She’d originally told me it would be fine, because on a leash he’d have no choice. My mom had been wrong, as even as a puppy, Badger had been too big for her to move if he didn’t want to go. He also couldn’t be bothered to chase cats, dogs, squirrels, delivery trucks, or anything else. He was by far the laziest dog I’d ever met. However, since he’d stopped peeing on me, I liked the lazy, massive mutt.
Most of the time, he couldn’t even be bothered to go to the front door and bark if someone rang my doorbell, he’d just continue to lie wherever he was and howl at the door when someone rang the bell, which is why everyone knocked these days. It was concerning enough that we’d talked to the vet about him possibly being depressed or ill, and the vet had tried medicating him, but it hadn’t made him any livelier. He’d even kept Badger overnight to give him full body x-rays and a special exam to make sure he wasn’t injured and that was why he was so lazy, but after several thousand dollars and three days, he’d found nothing wrong with the dog and pronounced him completely healthy, just exceptionally lazy. My seventy-something-year-old mother was ten times more active than our dog.
“She’s right, Badger will lie in that bed all day until there’s food,” Gabriel said with a smirk. Food did excite Badger, and when need be, he could be super sneaky and fast, like stealing my pizza the night before. He’d done great in doggy training school with Nadine because she’d given him treats, but if there wasn’t a treat at the end of a command, there was a good chance he was going to ignore you.
Xavier and Lucas set up a laptop for me on one of the large tables in our main office area. After a few minutes, they moved the mouse to the other side, because I couldn’t use it with my cast. The problem was, I wasn’t actually ambidextrous. I could shoot left-handed, but I couldn’t write with my left. Although, bizarrely, I did eat with my left hand. I held my fork in my left; it felt weird in the right. But I couldn’t use the mouse left-handed. Thankfully, the laptop was a touch screen and I slid the mouse away. The touchpads on these laptops were awful, which is why we all used USB wireless mice.
My first task of the day was to examine homicides that happened in the last 24 hours. We were getting ME reports, as well as the detectives’ files. There was a stack of paper files as well as another half dozen digital files for review. Any that seemed possibly related to serial killers, I was supposed to set aside for everyone else to go out and investigate. I was fairly certain I was going to hate that. I almost never spent a full eight hours in the office, there was always something to be done out in the world, and I wouldn’t be doing it because some jerk had run a red light and my dog had tried to eat my nephew’s socks off his feet.
I texted Nadine: don’t suppose any of your clients have now struck you as possible matches for Mictlan the Collector?
She immediately texted back: Not yet. Are you sure Mictlan is male? I wasn’t sure how to answer that. No, I wasn’t positive, but Patterson was. I trusted Nadine, she’d even saved my life once or maybe twice, but I was under strict orders not to mention Patterson or his involvement in the case. Since I didn’t know how to answer, I didn’t. About five minutes passed and I saw the three dots show up again on my text message screen. Nadine was texting me again.
I am sending you a client file. I wouldn’t think she was Mictlan, but she fits all your perimeters. Read the file and check her out to see if she raises any flags for you.
I checked my email and Nadine had indeed sent me a file. I opened it. The name on the top was Glinda Higgins. She lived in the same gated community as Mrs. Calderone. I texted Patterson asking if he was sure Mictlan was the Malibu Beach Strangler, because if they weren’t one in the same, it was possible that Glinda Higgins was Mictlan. She was dying, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago. She had no living relatives closer than a fourth cousin. And a search through our databases found no criminal history for Glinda, but her mom had been convicted of killing six husbands. This raised the chance that Glinda carried the psychopath gene. Glinda had married in her twenties; they’d had one child, a boy that died in a freak accident when he was six. He fell, tripping over his own feet, and hit his head on a concrete planter that lined the walk to the church door. He died in the hospital later the same day. The marriage broke up within a year of the death of the son. This wasn’t a surprise, people grieved in different ways, and losing a child often caused couples to drift apart. If Mictlan wasn’t a man, Glinda seemed like a good possibility. My phone went off. I picked it up.
Mictlan and the Beach Strangler are the same person. Was Patterson’s reply. I responded asking if he was absolutely sure about that. He immediately responded that he was positive, it wasn’t a feeling, he knew it for sure and might be able to prove it; although, if we could figure out an identity, we’d be able to prove it too with DNA. That got me wondering what Patterson’s possible proof was. I asked him. He told me he met him once a few decades ago.
“Patterson has met the Malibu Beach Strangler in person and he is positive that he is Mictlan. Is there any way to get Patterson in with a sketch artist?” I asked the room as a whole.
“That sounds like an NSA or CIA thing,” Malachi replied. I texted Peter West. He texted back that he would see what he could do. I texted Patterson asking if we could make it possible, if he’d sit down with a sketch artist to give us a sketch of the Beach Strangler. He said he would, although it wasn’t necessary. I frowned at my phone, of course it was necessary. I got no response. Several minutes passed with no texts from Patterson or Peter or Nadine.
I opened the first case file in the stack to occupy my time. It was 7:20 in the morning. I got up and got a soda from my stash in my office mini-fridge. I didn’t have teeth to worry about, I’d lost most of them in my late teens. They’d been troublesome anyway. I’d had dentures since I was eighteen. Therefore, I didn’t care that Mtn Dew ruined teeth, and while I could drink Coca-Cola, since I lost my gallbladder sometimes dark sodas made me sick. All the soda machines in the building sold Coke products, so I kept a stash of Mtn Dew in my office in a mini-fridge.
I got the soda, struggled to open it, because apparently I didn’t do that left-handed either, and looked at the cover page of the file. There was a warning on it, which meant the crime scene pictures must have been really bad even by police standards. I flipped past the cover page and saw the first picture. It was really bad. All the organs lay outside the body in the trash-strewn alley. The head was sitting up a few feet from the body, staring at it, as if surprised it was no longer attached. Most severed heads looked surprised. The mouth was open and something dangled from it that looked like strips of skin. The ME report declared the item in the mouth was part of the victim’s foot, which appeared to have been torn off, not cut. It had been shoved in while the victim was still alive, while the severing of the head was a post-mortem injury. This was new. I’d never seen anything like it. The report also said the victim’s penis had been severed and placed inside the torso in approximately the spot where the heart should have been. That definitely seemed like a message. The report concluded that there was a second victim somewhere, because the ME also found a severed female breast and uterus inside the torso. I considered that. Two victims, both with severed sexual organs shoved into one of the victims’ torso, was extreme. The male victim had been alive when the killer had cut him open and started removing the organs. The cause of death was exsanguination. There were pictures of all the recovered body parts further back in the file. It didn’t match any active serial killer profiles. It didn’t even match any closed serial killer profiles. The final conclusion of the ME was that death had occurred elsewhere and the body had been moved to its location in the alley. It was found in Marlboro Heights.
“Someone needs to go search the abandoned houses in Marlboro Heights,” I told my team, who were all sitting at the tables in different places. “I’d bet a donut that the female victim is in one of those abandoned houses, and I would bet another donut that the murders happened in said abandoned house. My guess is the female is going to be fairly grotesquely mutilated as well as the male.”
“Great,” Gabriel said, coming to look over my shoulder at the file.
“Yeah, it doesn’t match any of our current serial killer MOs, but this can’t be a first kill,” I said. Lucas reached for the file and I passed it to him. He took it and gave a low whistle as he flipped through the pictures.
“Definitely not a first kill,” Lucas agreed. “I’d check to see if any of our other extreme mutilators could be here. Specifically check for mutilators that take two victims.”
“There’s only one,” I said, without checking anything.
“The Torso Swapper,” Lucas replied, also without looking at anything. The Torso Swapper was a Florida killer who took two victims and swapped out parts between the victims, sewing limbs from the man onto the woman and vice versa. “These don’t have any stitches to compare, but I suppose it could be.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Usually he swaps the heads, though, as well as limbs, none of which are swapped here, it’s all sexual organs. That seems like a major variation.” I stopped talking and thought about it. He was still a fairly new serial killer. He’d only done it five times, all in Miami.
“But the victims are different ethnicities,” Lucas said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. The Torso Swapper did like victims to be of obvious different ethnicities, we thought it helped with shock value, although we were willing to admit we were clueless beyond that single theory. He could just be a weirdo or it was possible black sex workers, which were his preferred female victim type, were simply more plentiful. The males were always white or light-skinned Latinos. I checked the ME’s report for the male victim’s ethnicity and the white box was checked. The ethnicity of the sliced-off breast was not listed, and it was hard to tell from the picture. But again, I felt swapping limbs and swapping genitals were wildly different. However, it was probably faster to just swap the sexual organs than arms, legs, and heads. Perhaps like the Oregon Stripper, since he wasn’t at home, he was changing his tactics to allow for faster or less messy kills, while keeping enough similarities that it was identifiable.
Lucas, after a few minutes, told Mitch to add the Torso Swapper to our whiteboard list of serial killers with a question mark beside it. If it was the Swapper, there would be DNA on the female victim’s body and we’d be able to compare it to the DNA found on the other female victims. I definitely thought the Swapper was a weirdo, mutilating the female victims seemed to lead to sexual release for him and I just couldn’t fathom that.
“KCMO PD is going to take K9s to Marlboro Heights to search the area,” Gabriel told me.
“You should go with them so you can see the crime scene if they find it,” I told him.
“You’re right,” he stood up and grabbed Badger’s leash off the table. “You and Badger can join me. It might not be a bad idea to have a protective canine with us.”
Marlboro Heights was the poorest neighborhood in the metro area. Low income, crappy apartments dominated the neighborhood, but it had its fair share of rundown houses, some of which were condemned by the city or just outright abandoned because they had fallen into severe disrepair. Last time we’d gone to Marlboro Heights to search for a serial killer victim, we’d found six dead bodies in the abandoned houses. Five of them had died from drug overdoses, all of it fentanyl use, and one was a murder victim that wasn’t related to our serial killer. There was talk of the city buying all the apartments and empty houses to reinvigorate the neighborhood, but really all it would do was gentrify it and push the poor people out into other areas. However, city planners couldn’t see the flaw in their logic. Improving the neighborhood took money and money wasn’t something the residents of the neighborhood had a ton of; what they really needed were better jobs with higher pay, then they could improve their own neighborhood. The area needed their schools invigorated and better access to both lower and higher-level education, not government funds to improve housing that would then make it unaffordable for most of them. To do that, though, we needed a better educational system in general. School was boring, if you knew you weren’t going to become a historian, there was no need to spend four years in high school history classes with textbooks written by old white dudes who pushed the traditional fairy tale that equality among race and gender had been achieved during the 1960s. Just looking around the office, it was obvious gender equality didn’t exist. There were three females; Fiona, Rachael, and myself, making less than 17 percent of the SCTU female and less than 30 percent of the team was ethnically non-white.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, getting up from the table. Gabriel hooked the leash to Badger. Badger continued to lie in his bed.
“Wanna go for a ride, Badger?” Gabriel asked. Badger snored at him.
“Want to get a cheeseburger while we are out?” I asked the dog, and he jumped up from the bed.
“Maybe he’s so lazy because he eats cheeseburgers,” Eli suggested.
“This will be his first cheeseburger in months. My mom and the vet have him on a special diet to try to make him more energetic, but it hasn’t worked. He usually lies down to even eat out of his bowl. But my mom cooks his meals every week. Meat, vegetables, the whole shebang, and Badger still doesn’t stand to eat.” This was true, because no matter how hungry Badger got, he wouldn’t eat dry dog food. He’d once gone seven days without eating. He wouldn’t eat for the vet either, no matter how hungry he got. However, if you heated canned wet dog food up, he’d eat that. Which is why mom and the vet had worked out a meal plan for him. He ate what was essentially soup at every meal, but if it wasn’t hot in his bowl, he’d turn up his nose and walk away. None of us could explain this, except that Badger was a very picky eater, especially for a dog. You couldn’t heat up dry food and get him to eat it either, we’d tried that a few times too.
I had been driving one of the extra SUVs the previous day. Badger refused to jump into the back. Gabriel was trying to hoist the 140-pound dog into the back, but Badger was fighting him. I opened the back passenger door and Badger slipped away from Gabriel and came and jumped into the SUV all on his own. Gabriel came around and tried to shut the door, but Badger stuck his paw in the way.
“He requires a seatbelt,” I told Gabriel, reaching in to buckle Badger up.
“Your dog wears a seat belt?” He raised an eyebrow.
“My dog won’t ride in a car without a shoulder belt. We have special doggy seatbelts in our cars for him,” I told him and then backed out of the door opening and shut it. Gabriel opened my door for me. I glared at him. I had opened the back door, I could open my own door. I grabbed the shoulder belt with my left hand and struggled to get it buckled. Gabriel laughed at me and took the seat belt and buckled it.
“That’s why I came over; when I broke my arm, I couldn’t get my seat belt buckled, either. It oddly requires both hands be functional.” I thought about that for a moment. He was correct, I did always use two hands to buckle my seat belt, I grabbed the belt with the right and held the buckle in the left to secure it.
The traffic was still horrendous, even by city standards. I wondered where everyone was going and why. Surely all these people weren’t trying to evacuate? The Marlboro Heights neighborhood was bordered by E 79th street, Prospect Ave., E 85th Street, and Troost Ave. It was slightly larger than two square miles, and the annual median income for the area was $25,000. It had a slightly higher crime rate than the rest of Kansas City, Missouri, which was the city it was located in. When the urban renewal plan was proposed the previous year, about 30 percent of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned or condemned, which translated to something like 311 condemned or abandoned houses. Houses were generally small on plots that were a fraction of an acre, but the area surprisingly had a large number of trees that had been left to grow or had been replanted after the houses were put in. There were even two different parks in the area—Kansas City was all about giving residents plenty of parks to visit. While there were apartments, they weren’t the huge, sprawling apartment complexes. In most cases they were shabby two- or three-story buildings with a dozen units or less. The small and strange four-plex apartments were the most plentiful type of apartment in the area.
Gabriel got stuck in traffic on the I-70 overpass. We needed to turn left, but oncoming traffic had blocked the road. Meaning even though we had a green turn arrow, we weren’t moving and neither was any of the traffic next to us. We waited. The light turned yellow and then transitioned to red. Lots of horns honked around us and a few people rolled down their windows to shout at the people that had blocked the turn lane we were in. We had lights and a siren in this SUV and Gabriel could have turned it on, but realistically, the intersection was blocked because people had ignored the yellow and possibly the red light. It wasn’t like they would magically move out of our way if we turned on the lights and sirens, because they had nowhere to go. The light for the straight lanes on our side of the overpass turned green and traffic began to move. Traffic the other direction remained stopped. I turned to look over my shoulder Usually the traffic lights were synced so that we didn’t have these kinds of issues. The light behind us was green, but traffic wasn’t moving at that light either. We sat for a while longer, traffic moving south, but the way we’d come from wasn’t moving, the cars that had blocked us during the last green light continued to be the exact same cars that still blocked us.
“There has to be an accident back there,” I said to Gabriel.
“Do you want to get out and check it?” I didn’t, I wasn’t a patrol officer and didn’t have a clue what to do. But I did kinda want Gabriel to call Raytown PD to see if they could sort out the problem. Our light turned red again. I sighed heavily. Traffic heading north rushed by us again as their lights turned green. Traffic headed south was backing up even further. The car next to us tried to pull out into the lane heading north and nearly got hit by a passing truck. They waited and took their chances again, this time slipping into the flow of northbound traffic. We were on the inside turn lane, so there was nowhere for us to go. I sighed again. Badger in the middle row of seats sighed. The cars blocking our ability to turn still didn’t move as the green light for northbound lanes turned yellow. Gabriel flipped on his lights and the siren, put the SUV in park, and got out. He started walking back toward the light we’d come through before getting stuck in the turn lane. His US Marshals jacket ballooned out a bit as he walked with the breeze. I rolled down my window, then tried to reach into the back and roll down Badger’s window, but my cast didn’t fit and my fingers didn’t work. I unbuckled my seat belt, which I could do one-handed, and crawled across the console to reach Gabriel’s window, rolling down all the windows on the SUV. Badger put his head out the window just a bit. That done, I climbed back into the passenger’s seat. Our light had turned green again. I was very sick of traffic. Normally, it was just a side effect of living in a metropolitan area, but the last two days it had been ridiculously bad. I heard Gabriel come over the radio.
“There’s a couch in the roadway in front of the sports complex, and we need an ambulance for a teenager hit by a vehicle. Requesting immediate assistance from Raytown PD and EMTs. He went on to give the exact position details and what parts of traffic were stalled due to the couch and the injured teen. “Teenaged male, white, broken leg, arm, and possibly a broken pelvis. Bone sticking out of leg, a bystander has applied a tourniquet. Victim is not conscious.” Yesterday the cows had gotten out of the tractor trailer at about this same location. I could hear sirens over our own siren. I got out of the SUV. I was going to need help putting my seatbelt back on already anyway. I told Badger to be a good boy and stay put. Badger looked at me like I was crazy. I shut my door, walked around and shut Gabriel’s door. Our lights and sirens were still on. I zipped up my US Marshals SCTU hoodie. I was about to walk away, when I took the extra key fob out of the console and then locked the doors. Then I checked the ignition, since I’d rolled down all the windows. Gabriel had taken the keys with him, so it was unlikely someone would be able to steal the SUV. If they were that stupid, all government vehicles had lo-jack.
I walked back toward where I’d last seen Gabriel. As I did so, I told the drivers with their windows down that there was an injured kid holding up traffic, and paramedics and police were on the way. Most people just stared at me. This was pretty much standard procedure, it could have been because my jacket announced I was a member of the SCTU, or because I was in a cast, or because I was walking on an overpass in heavy traffic. About six cars back from our SUV, I could see Gabriel on the other side of the overpass. I carefully hoisted myself over the concrete divider, continuing to announce that paramedics and police were on their way and that there was an injured kid in the roadway. As I weaved between the cars, making my way toward Gabriel and continuing my public service announcement, an older guy in a car snorted with derision.
“Maybe the little fucker shouldn’t have jumped into the back of a moving truck,” he snarled. He was only a car away from Gabriel. I considered this. Yesterday when the cows had gotten loose, I had suggested facetiously that teens were responsible, now I was wondering if I had been correct. There was a woman with Gabriel. A car near the boy had a badly dented hood and front end and I wondered if she was the driver of the car.
“Marshal Cain,” I said, introducing myself. Gabriel gave me a look. The look told me to take my butt back to our car and wait for him. I stood there instead, not bending down to help. Gabriel and the woman seemed to have everything under control. I moved to the intersection to direct the sirens and lights to our location. I looked over the edge of the overpass and saw traffic on I-70 east was backing up, because no one could exit the ramp due to the injured boy’s location. He was lying half in the right turn lane and half in the left turn lane at the top of the exit ramp. This was cascading the traffic jam down onto the interstate, where traffic was backing up in two of the three lanes. The other lane was still moving per usual, but soon someone would slam into either one of the stopped cars, or one of the stopped cars would try to pull into the lane that traffic was moving in and there’d be an accident that shut down all three lanes of I-70 east. I was about to point this out when the first police car pulled up, an ambulance about ten seconds behind him. I turned and spoke to the officer.
A loud, crunching, metallic scraping, screeching noise, echoed up to us from below the overpass. The accident had happened; probably because someone was on their cell phone, that was the cause of more than 50 percent of traffic accidents these days.
“Ah shit,” I barely heard the officer over the sound of screeching brakes and more cars slamming into each other below us. The smell of hot oil and antifreeze was already wafting up to my nose. Then I smelled gasoline.
“You are going to need a lot more officers.” The paramedics got the boy onto a stretcher and Gabriel stood up. He joined me at the side of the overpass and we both looked over the edge. We could see at least five cars with damage blocking all three lanes below us.
”Guess it’s a good thing we were headed west,” I said, starting back toward our car.
“That woman that was helping me said the injured boy and another jumped into the bed of a pickup carrying a couch while it was stopped at the light and began fiddling with stuff. The truck took off when the light turned green and both boys were tossed out the back; the injured one fell on the hood of her car, then the couch fell off the back of the truck. The other boy got up and ran away,” Gabriel said.
“Teenagers are morons,” I said. “I’d bet they are responsible for yesterday’s cows too.”
“That kid might end up paralyzed because of that,” Gabriel said. “I know he’s going to need surgery to fix the busted leg and he’ll probably have a limp, if he can ever walk again. And they are both lucky.”
“I repeat, teenagers are morons.” I sighed as Gabriel buckled me into the passenger’s seat. He got in and started the engine about the time southbound traffic started to creep forward. “And the worst part is ultimately they are responsible for the pileup on the interstate. If they hadn’t done what they did, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Surely the driver that started it, along with the guy who was driving the truck with the couch, bears some responsibility,” Gabriel said.
“The guy driving the truck could have gotten out and shot both boys, for that he would be responsible. However, he probably didn’t stop because he will be held responsible for at least part of it. Even though it was the kids that broke the law. I noticed ratchet straps on the couch. No doubt they jumped in the truck to loosen them and push the couch out, given the cow incident yesterday.”
“I can’t decide if you are assigning blame solely on the teens or on the teens as well as the drivers of the truck and car that started the pile-up,” Gabriel said as we finally merged onto the interstate.
“The truck guy is guilty of fleeing the scene, but nothing else. Most likely when he saw the kids, he just reacted to their presence in the only way his brain could come up with. This makes him a bad driver in a crisis, but I don’t think he’s criminally responsible or even morally responsible to the injured kid. Also, I don’t believe the other kid was completely uninjured. The pileup is definitely partially the fault of the driver that caused it. But ultimately the driver wouldn’t have been in a position to cause the accident if the teens hadn’t done what they did.”
“Sometimes I forget you are completely incapable of empathy and sympathy,” Gabriel said.
“You feel bad for the kid.” I nodded. The statement was made mostly to myself.
“Yes,” Gabriel said unnecessarily.