The folder was dark brown. A corner of a sheet of paper stuck out the edge, yellowing with age. Black ink in a familiar scribble was on the front of the folder as well as the tab. The folder had once belonged to my father. This kept me from opening it.
Ten minutes earlier, I had discovered that this case had broken my father. Until then, I had always believed he was just a cop with a squad car. This was not the case. He’d been a detective, a detective that had turned in his shiny detective’s shield and gone back to being a cop with a squad car because of Sarah Anderson’s case.
There was a genetic component to Anti-Social Personality Disorder. It was what made a sociopath or psychopath with ASPD different than one with Borderline Personality Disorder. ASPD meant a person was born with it while Borderline Personality Disorders were created. Nature versus nurture at its best, meaning my type ran in families.
My mother was a warm, caring individual who could love easily and readily. My father had been more aloof. While my siblings would argue that I was his favorite, I couldn’t actually say that I had ever heard my father tell me that he loved me. He’d been a distant man, hard to know and even harder to understand. Sometimes, I wondered if he had been a sociopath as well. If so, he was more functional than I was, but there were different levels of sociopathic tendencies.
“Hey,” Gabriel said quietly, “if you don’t want to do it, I will.”
“I’m fine,” I countered, determined to learn the secrets within the folder, like if my father ever had a suspect. My eyes scanned the lines of handwritten notes, my brain processing the information as fast as I could read it.
There had only been one suspect. A store owner in town with a penchant for exotic animals. At the time, he’d owned a jaguar, a black bear, and a wolverine. Unfortunately, he’d died during the investigation when the wolverine attacked him from a tree branch and suffocated him. No evidence had been found at his house to link him to Sarah Anderson. And aside from owning a candy store, there was no real reason to think he’d ever crossed paths with the little girl. While Columbia wasn’t the size of Kansas City, it did have a population over 100,000, meaning it certainly wasn’t an “everyone knows everyone” kind of town.
Besides the permanent residents, the city housed the main branch of the University of Missouri, plus two other, smaller colleges; Columbia College and Stephens College. This made for a mobile population of students. My own experience in college had proven that serial killers existed even among the young and hip crowd of college attendees.
However, there wasn’t a zoo in the city. There was a wildlife refuge north of town that housed a variety of different animals, although I had never heard of them housing a jaguar. I had seen and heard lions there before, as well as less dangerous animals like camels and zebras. It wasn’t open to the public and access was restricted. I had only seen the animals because I’d had a relative that lived close to the sanctuary.
“There are currently no registered jaguars near here,” John Bryan informed us. “There are a few other feline predators though. I have permits for four tigers, three lions, six mountain lions, two lynxes, a caracal, an ocelot, and perhaps most terrifying, a clouded leopard.”
“That’s one of the most endangered cats in the world, why is there one here?” I asked.
“Some sanctuary,” John frowned. “About half the permits are registered to it.”
“North of town,” I sighed. “It’s a good sized refuge, but they must have expanded, because they wouldn’t have had the room for all those cats at the old location.”
“It says they have over 100 acres,” John informed me.
“They’ve expanded a lot,” I tried not to sigh again. I didn’t know the owners. I knew they’d been in trouble once or twice when I was a kid for poor enclosures and things, but if they had expanded, they had obviously fixed that problem.
“How sure are you that it was a jaguar the first time?” Gabriel asked.
“Sarah Anderson’s skull was crushed, but more importantly, there were four puncture marks and some other teeth impressions on the bone,” I answered. “I may not be a wildlife expert, but I know jaguars are the only cat that does that.”
“Why do you know that?” Xavier asked.
“My dad bought a huge book on wild cats when the body was discovered.”
“And you read it,” Gabriel answered.
“It was a book, what was I supposed to do with it?” I raised an eyebrow at him.
“It doesn’t mean this attack and the Sarah Anderson attack are related, it’s been how many years?” John Bryan asked.
“Twenty-four or twenty-five,” I answered. “However, it’s the feet. Sarah’s feet were found a few days after she went missing. They’d been severed just above the ankle bones, shoved into a pair of white socks, then Mary Jane’s and left by the river. They didn’t know how she died until they found her body. People do not randomly cut off feet and leave them places. Especially not dressed feet. It would be an astronomical coincidence if they weren’t connected.”
My mind kicked into overdrive. My brain searched for the memories of my childhood. They were easy enough to find. I had been a boring child and had grown up to be a boring adult, with the exception of serial killers, rapists, and mass murders sending me flowers, candy, severed fingers, dead prairie dogs, love letters, and occasionally, following me home. Although, since moving into the Federal Guard Neighborhood, I hadn’t had one follow me home, which was nice, but made for quiet nights.
I found no memories of feet being discovered, with or without their body. The file said something about missing children, but they had all happened before Sarah Anderson and their bodies, including their feet, had never been found. Of course, that had stopped by the time I was old enough to walk to school and started again a few years later when Callow began preying on children. Despite being a pedophile and a serial killer of children, Callow hadn’t owned a jaguar. He’d lived two streets from my house. Our yards were barely big enough for medium sized dogs. There was also the matter of him being dead, he couldn’t be tying feet into tube socks and throwing them over utility wires.
“We have a pattern,” John suddenly announced, breaking my concentration. Gabriel looked at him expectantly. John cleared his throat, suddenly feeling the weight of all our eyes on him. “So, there are a handful of teen boys listed as runaways. They all fit into Xavier’s age range of twelve to sixteen and none have been found.”
“Are they DNA testing the feet and comparing them to samples from the runaways,” Gabriel asked.
“No, that costs money,” John answered. “And getting a DNA test takes a lot of time and money when you aren’t a US Marshal.”
“I’m on it,” Xavier jumped from his chair. Aside from being borderline nutjobs, we had access to resources that police departments didn’t. As much as I liked to think that our capture rate was because we were just that damn good, the truth was, we had an entire forensics unit dedicated to serial killers. We could get DNA in a few days, sometimes less. Crime scene techs collected evidence and it was overnighted to Kansas City to our special lab. The work was done and the report magically appeared on all our computers. I’d never met our dedicated crime fighting forensics unit, but I was willing to bet they were extremely good at their jobs and possibly, a little crazy.
The only downside was that we had to share the forensics unit with the FBI’s VCU. However, we had never jockeyed for position. I had no idea how they did it. One day, I would send them pizza or something.
That made me think of Malachi. I dug out my cell phone. It rang four times before he answered, sounding out of breath and irritated.
“Blake,” his voice was husky and I knew he was in the middle of a case or sex. I didn’t really care either way, I needed to pick his brain.
“Hey, I’m in need of some info,” I told him.
“Can it wait?” He asked.
“Maybe, but more teen boys will die.”
“Will they really die or is it just a possibility?”
“Mostly, it’s a possibility. Did I interrupt?”
“Well,” there was a strange grunting noise and I heard Malachi yell at someone. He was on a case, by the sound of the noise, he had just broken someone’s nose. “Ok, we’re good. What do you need?”
“Suspect handcuffed?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Good, then I can have your full attention for a moment. So, I’m in Columbia. Do you remember the Sarah Anderson case?” Malachi was four years older than me and had a better memory.
“Girl, killed by jaguar, stuffed in grain silo, feet found much earlier by the river, I believe your father was one of the detectives,” Malachi answered.
“That’s the case. I was young when it happened. Do you remember a string of child disappearances before Sarah Anderson?”
“Yes,” Malachi paused. It wasn’t for effect, it was him accessing his memory center. Malachi had a didactic memory. It meant he never forgot, anything, unless he wanted to forget. “Five girls went missing in the space of four months.”
“That’s all you’ve got?” I asked.
“I was like eight,” Malachi answered. “One of the girls was in my class. Her name was Joan Ferris. They never found her. Joan Ferris was the second to go missing in February. The first was another girl, about the same age, went to a different school. In March, a third went missing, that one was a grade younger. In April, there was another, a grade younger than the third. In May, Sarah Anderson went missing, she was the youngest at six.”
“The file says she was eight.”
“The file is wrong,” Malachi answered. “Her brother was a year older than me. We went to high school together. She was six when she went missing. There was something shady about the disappearance, the family, everything. Her brother was abandoned and the family returned to their native country after Sarah’s body was found.”
“What was shady about them?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But they were from Argentina and Anderson isn’t a real common name for that part of the world.”
“Ugh,” I put my head on the table. “Anderson with an ‘o’ isn’t, but with an ‘e,’ kind of is.”
“You know something about Argentina and Andersons that I don’t?”
“Lots of Germans fled to South America after World War II.”
“You think they were Nazis? That’s farfetched, even for you.”
“Well,” I pursed my lips together. “Shady family from Argentina, Sarah was definitely not Hispanic. She’s a red head with blue eyes. Sounds like German origins to me.”
“Not everyone is a war criminal,” Malachi informed me.
“I know, some are serial killers.”
“I’m sure for you, that’s logical. For me, it’s a stretch. What does missing little girls have to do with dead teen boys?”
“We found feet. They had teeth marks in them, like fang marks. The feet belong to a teenaged boy.”
“Eerily similar, but you don’t change your pedophilic preferences from little girls to teen boys.”
“That’s true,” I answered. “But what’s the chances that it’s a coincidence?”
“It’s been twenty-five years. What has the killer been doing for twenty-five years?”
“Breeding jaguars illegally and raising a family,” I suggested.
“Ok, that makes more sense than your fleeing Nazi theory. Hold on,” there were loud noises on Malachi’s end of the phone. “Ok, I’m back.”
“Who are beating up?” I asked.
“Some jerk off that thinks he can take the VCU,” Malachi answered.
“What’d he do to attract the attention of the VCU?”
“He killed thirty-two women with a sledgehammer. Serious overkill on all of them, their bodies were mangled and gruesome. Do you know the kind of damage a sledgehammer will do to a body?”
“I can imagine.” Unfortunately, I really could imagine. Bloody, bashed heads filled my imagination. Brains and gore leaked from them along the concrete floor that my brain had put into the thought. Fragments of bone were lying several feet from the anonymous dead body.
“You probably can, stop thinking about it. Being eaten by a jaguar is pretty gruesome too.”
“There are different kinds of gruesome,” I told him. “Yours is gruesome in a different way than mine.”
“Is that all?”
“For now,” I answered.
“Good, I have a suspect to haul into the FBI office and try not to kill along the way.”
“Good luck,” I said and hung up.
“Well?” Gabriel asked.
“I do not know,” I answered.