Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Amazon
ISBN-10: 150277769X
Pages: 548
Copyright: April 12, 2015
ISBN-13: 9781502777690
Price: $9.99 (eBook)
Profiler Maddy Sheridan lets you into her life to share the dark sides of people (serial killers) she comes in contact but also the personal side of her life.
Maddy Sheridan Parker is back at the Journal as an investigative reporter after a leave of absence and had found the work mundane. She misses the chase of the crime, hunting serial killers, psychopaths—the more messed up the better. Maddy receives a phone call from her husband, Jackson Parker, Chief of Detectives at the SCPD asking her to give her opinion on a crime scene.
Since resigning from her job as an FBI profiler she has taken on a contract position with the SCPD as an Offender Profiler and a Crime Scene Analyst. With excitement coursing through her veins, Maddy can’t get to the sight fast enough.
When she finds is a young boy hanging from a light fixture, she is disappointed to find it was only an accidental suicide. Later they find out the boy had been sexually abused.
Even though this was not the type of case Maddy was hired to work, Jack is determined to find the monster that drove this child to suicide and pushes Maddy to work with him but she refuses.
It isn’t until a gruesome murder is discovered on the Westside that Maddy is pulled in on a case. The crime scene and victim reek of sexual homicide…up close and personal. Maddy is confused because the killer is both organized and disorganized and does not fit into one dichotomy…puzzling indeed.
When an apparent home invasion happens two days later, Maddy knows it’s not a simple invasion. This elderly couple were targets. Even though she finds the method of the kill of the elderly woman quite torturous but organized, she has to admire the imagination of the killer. There was nothing creative about killing the male—messy and disorganized.
Maddy believes the murders are all connected and are being committed by a killing team. While trying to find a connection, Maddy finds her perps are victims, her victims are perps and the killing team is doing what the law could not, bring them to justice.
The deeper Maddy digs, the more personal the case becomes drawing her nearer to already blurred lines. Maddy is joined in the case by her husband, Jack and two former FBI agents, Bryan Mayland and Andy Whittmer, otherwise known around the precinct as the Feeb Squad.
Excerpt
It was just after 11:30 in the morning when Maddy got the call. She looked at the caller ID. Jack. Now what? “Hey, Babe, what’s up?”
Jack voice was low and very controlled, “Maddy, I need you at a scene. You might as well go tell Chief you are officially on a case and will be gone from the paper.”
“Jack, I told you, no Miller case.”
“It’s not the Miller case, Maddy. Something much bigger then the Miller case. We got ourselves a murder victim. We have the scene secured. No one has touched it. Get down here.” He gave her the address and hung up.
Maddy went to Chief’s office and looked at her boss though the window. He was busy pounding away at his keyboard. She knocked on his door and he waved her in. If she had a hat, she would be holding it low in her hands.
She took a seat in front of his desk. All he had to do was look at her. “So you’re off again?”
“Yes. I just got the call. We have a murder in the west part of town. I don’t have any details on it yet…just to get my ass over there,” she told him timidly.
Chief threw back his head and laughed, “Tiger, you don’t have to be afraid of me. You should know that. Go work your case, report when you can. I am finding at least this puts you in the heart of the investigation and we get more than you would have gotten had you not been involved in it. It was to our advantage when you worked the Masters case. Got the scoop on everyone else. Now go. Stir up some action.”
Wow, go figure. Maddy grabbed her bag and locked up her office. On the way out she stopped by Miranda’s desk and told her she was going to be gone from the office and wasn’t sure on the duration. Miranda understood and told her good luck.
Maddy jumped in her car and cranked up the a/c. It was mid-July and hotter than hell outside, even for this time of the day. A body in this heat…she shook her head…it would not be pretty. She made her way through the busy streets, turned on to Hamilton Drive until she hit Stone Park Boulevard, which led her to 721 Perry Lane. The street was blocked of by a couple of squad cars on both ends. Within the parameters were a couple more squads, the coroner, CSU and Jack’s Impala. She flashed her clearance badge and the uni’s let her through. The CSU squad stood by their van as well as Jacob Conley. All patiently waiting for her to get there to analyze the scene before they could enter.
Officer Bobby Russell was standing beside the house to meet her and led her to the back of the property to what appeared to be some kind of shop. It was about the size of a one-car garage, sided the same as the house, white with brown trim. There was a single entry door as well as an overhead door just wide enough to get perhaps a large riding lawnmower through. Jack and Bryan were waiting at the single door for her.
Maddy reached in her pocket and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. “Wait before you put those on,” Jack said to her holding out a jar of Vic’s. Oh, man, this was not promising. Maddy stuck two fingers in the ointment and swiped them across the bottom of her nose then slipped on her gloves.
Jack and Bryan stood back and let Maddy enter. Maddy was totally unprepared for what she saw. “Whoa! What the hell happened here?”
“That’s what we’re hoping you can tell us,” Jack said quietly.
First, Maddy stood back and took in the overall scene. A man was seated on an old wooden chair, his body slightly slumped forward. There was blood and blood spatter everywhere. The man was a larger man, too hard to tell how tall he was in his current position. He must have weighed 200 plus pounds. Looked to be in his mid to late forties. His dark hair was matted down with blood. She walked behind him. His hands were bound oddly with a yellow bungee cord. A long rubber bungee strap held him in place on the chair. His feet, too, were bound by cloth bungee cords—one to each leg of the chair.
Now for his wounds. The man had several head contusions obviously caused by blunt force trauma. From the looks of it, inflicted by a wide blunt object, like a board. The injuries were angry and swollen. His eyes were puffy and swollen to the point you couldn’t see them. His lip was split. A trickling of blood looked as if it had slobbered from his mouth. All of these injuries were definitely antemortem. All though the wounds were massive, she honestly believed none of them were cause of death. They were purely inflicted as a means of torture. There was deep bruising on his upper arms on both sides which also indicted they were caused from the impact of a flat object.
She moved around to his front to look at his legs. It was hard to tell on the surface if there were injuries as the blood from the fatal wound had splattered on to his pant legs. Maddy lifted his pant legs as far as she could. She pulled out her pen knife and carefully ran it along the seam to just above his knee. Always pays to keep it sharp. The man had been struck across his kneecaps. She pushed his body back so he leaned back in the chair. “Holy shit! You can’t get anymore personal that this!” This man had had his genitals removed curtsey of a shotgun.
She looked around the room and found a sawed off 2x4 covered in blood and tissue matter. She picked it up by its sides. “I believe this is one of your weapons. Our perp must have grabbed it at random from this stack.” She pointed to the stack of miscellaneous cut lumber under a workbench. On the bench was a coffee can full of assorted sized bungee cords and on the wall were several long rubber bungee straps. “Our unsub didn’t come here prepared. He used materials here in the shed.”
“What about the body?” Jack asked stepping forward.
“It appears he was bound and struck several times with the 2x4. More than likely the outer extremities —legs, arms first. Then he was struck several blows to the head. The perp appears to have taken his time inflicting the injuries. Makes me wonder if he were trying to get the vic to tell him something. Hard to say. But the Pièce de résistance is this.” She pointed to his groin area. “His genitals have been blown away by a shotgun, based on the scattering, I would say maybe 12 gage. Kind of hard to tell without examining the wound. Needless to say this was a crime of hate, very personal, and definitely sexual in nature.”
“TOD?”
The room was suffocating with heat. Factoring this in liver temp wouldn’t tell them anything. Maddy picked up his arm feeling the stiffness, but it was on the downside of rigor. “Rigor is just starting to dissipate, so factoring in 3 hours before it sets in and 12 hours before peaking… I would say 15-16 hours.” She looked at her watch. 1:35. “I’m going to say between 9:00 and 11:00 last night.” She looked up at Jack. “Who is he?”
“Now this is interesting…we don’t know. He doesn’t live here. The lady of the house, Barb Lill, discovered his body when she came out to get some gardening tools. She said she started smelling something when she approached, opened the single door slightly, backed away and called 911.”
Maddy returned to the body and felt his pockets. Empty. “Damn, now this really is a mystery. So whoever did this, brought our vic to a place he had no connection to, tortured and killed him. I have to think about this one.” She looked at his finger, “Fingertips are intact so we can get good prints. Have CSU take pictures of everything from every angle. I need to study this more in depth. We’ll get a shot of our vic when Conley cleans him up and show it to Ms. Lill, see if she recognizes him. Needless to say, dust for prints. Maybe we can get some good ones off that board and the rubber strap.”
Maddy stood up straight, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Now for a look at the scene overall. Maddy walked slowly around the room. Two small windows faced the back of the property. She dug out her penlight and flipped it on, running its beam over the frame of the windows. The caulking was old and cracked but there appeared to be no tampering. She then moved to the big overhead door and wiggled the handle. Locked. She knelt in front of the door handle of the single door studying it closely. It had Master lock on it; the inner button was popped out. Why would you bother locking the overhead door if you weren’t going to lock up the small door?
Now for the benches. On one side there were stacks of flowerpots: terra cotta, ceramic, cedar trays. Near these were garden trowels, small shovels and other miscellaneous small garden tools. Along the far wall brackets had been put up to hang up rakes, hoes, and shovels. On the bench itself were coffee cans of assorted objects, the bungee straps, electrical ties, string spools, a small tool box consisting of various sized wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, needle nosed pliers, and a hammer. Below the bench was the stack of lumber. In many of the areas the dust remained undisturbed, less so in the areas of the gardening supplies and equipment. A thin layer of dust covered the other areas. She knelt down by the stack of lumber. There was a gap in dust particles where apparently the unsub had grabbed the board.
Maddy stood back so she faced the front of the victim. Blood spatter was limited to a five-foot radius flecking onto the benches themselves. Blood seepage surrounded the victim in all directions except right in front of the vic. Maddy looked at it with a skeptical eye. “Something was placed in front of vic for protection.”
“To keep from getting blood on the unsub?”
She knelt down close to the blood free zone on the cement. “No…it wasn’t that. Footprints, to suppress the footprints.”
“Why?”
“No footprints, no way to estimate size of killer, no blood trace following him out the door. I don’t think the unsub cared whether or not he got blood on himself—probably relished in it.” Puzzling…very puzzling.
Maddy walked to the door pulling off her gloves with a snap. “Bring ‘em in. I’m done.”
Jack gave the okay for CSU to take over and he and Bryan met Maddy at his car where she was leaning against the bumper. He watched her as she brushed the damp loose tendrils away from her face. She was as cool as a cucumber, totally unfazed by what she had just seen. More so than himself. “Do you want to come in and observe while I talk again to the homeowner?”
Maddy followed Jack and Bryan into the house where a tall thin woman with short cropped blonde hair and weathered skin sat on the end of her sofa with an officer standing by her side. She stood up as they entered.
“Mrs. Lill…”
“Ms. Lill,” she corrected Jack.
He held out his hand to her and said, “I’m Lt. Jack Parker, SCPD” he nodded towards Bryan and Maddy, “this is Detective Mayland and CSA Parker. I know you have already talked to one of the officers, but I would like to go over it with you again. Please take a seat.”
Ms. Lill did as he requested. “I don’t know what else I can tell you. I went out this morning to work on my flower garden. As I approached the shed I smelled this God-awful stench coming out of there. When I opened the door the smell about hit me like a brick wall. I saw briefly what was in there, came out and called the cops.”
“Was the door locked?” Maddy asked even though she knew she wasn’t suppose to ask questions. But this person wasn’t a suspect. Didn’t count as far as she was concerned. She saw Jack give her the eye, but she disregarded it.
“I must have forgotten to lock it.”
“But you didn’t use a key to get in?”
The woman sighed, “I don’t lock it up half the time, so I never gave it another thought. I didn’t even have the key on me.”
Jack took back over the questioning, “Do you remember hearing anything last night…sometime around 9:00 or 10:00?”
“I wasn’t home. I work the swing shift at Mercy. I’m an RN. I didn’t get home until…I would say probably 11:45 or maybe a little later.”
After Jack was satisfied with her answers, he gave her one of his cards and asked her to call him if she thought of anything else. The three of them went back out and leaned against Jack’s car.
“What do you think?”
Maddy shrugged, “Too soon to tell. I need the photos and time to absorb the scene. Definitely a lot of rage and like I said, sexually motivated. The unsub knew him, knew him quite well—enough he or she had a grudge against him.”
“She? You think a woman could have done this?” Bryan asked.
“There’s a woman involved in this somehow thus the sexual component. Unless being gay has anything to do with it. We will know more when we find out who the vic is. Part of it strikes me as premeditated, however not well planned, and the unsub is disorganized. He should have taken the board with him. He left too many markers we could pull evidence from. The unsub is familiar with Ms. Lill’s coming and goings, knew she wouldn’t be home and familiar enough to know this shed is back there and it’s not locked most of the time.”
|
