Nine Lives - Ep6
#6 of Nine Lives
Another girl has gone missing, and a seemingly unrelated case suggests that while half of the team's guesses could well be right, there's at least some things they were thinking that are dramatically wrong.
Nine Lives - A Dafydd Owen Story - Ep6
Sarah, Paul and I were in my office making another dent in my supplies of whiskey. I was pretty sure that Cy would have like to join us but the team from Quantico had snagged him off into a conference call with their boss around the time we left their offices. We weren't talking much, mostly staring into our glasses, Paul in the armchair against the left wall and Sarah and I sharing the couch that ran across the wall behind the door. Sometime last night, Jess Griffith had vanished between getting refused service at the Tailfeathers dance club and making it home.
She was 18, having got into the club and acquired her drinks on a fake ID. She was refused service after generously providing several samples of her stomach contents, which the club staff had, of course, cleaned up before we ever knew she was missing so no way of knowing if she'd been drugged like at least one of the others had been. The friend she was with, however, hadn't puked. She had woken up with the hangover from hell in the dorm room that the two freshmen shared. With no sign of her friend and no memory of anything that had happened at the club, she'd freaked and the testing on her blood samples was in progress.
Gail, the roommate, had admitted that they were at the club to "Have some fun, blow off some steam and get drunk, laid or both" The docs had already confirmed that the only aspect of that plan which had come together for Gail was the "drunk" part of it.
We'd done all the usual things. We'd talked to all the staff looked at security footage and talked to other folks that were at the club last night, including the ones who had posted embarrassing videos online with titles like "The exploding tabby" and "Feline firehose." Problem was, pretty much anyone close enough to take those videos and tell us anything worthwhile was also a little preoccupied with cleaning themselves up immediately afterward. The ones taken from far enough away to not be in the line of fire were far enough away that the fur with the cellphone couldn't tell us jack.
Security at the club had called the girls a cab, at Gail's request, and they'd waited outside for it. We knew the cab company and were waiting to hear back about which driver picked them up. Gail didn't remember that bit or any part of the ride back. Another girl in the same dorm had told us that the cab driver had called her down on the door intercom to get Gail back to her bed and had left before she came down to find Gail passed out on the stoop.
We had the most accurate timeline on any disappearance yet and we still had almost nothing on who was doing the snatching. Jess had vanished sometime between the two girls going outside to wait for the cab and that cab arriving. What was worse, the only person with her for that time couldn't remember a thing.
We were contemplating our mutual gloom when Paul's phone started ringing.
"Anderson... Damn. OK. Send me the address, I'm on my way." He grimaced as he put his phone back on his belt.
"Somebody just got themselves shot in a home invasion in Uptown. Afraid I'm going to have to leave the party."
"No problem, Paul. If either of us is going to be in a state to drive home we should probably call it a night pretty soon too."
Sarah and I didn't linger long, but we hadn't even got far beyond downtown when both our phones pinged at us. I was driving so Sarah checked hers.
"Dafydd, we need to turn around. Paul wants us to join him. He's sent us the address."
I hung a U at the next opportunity and picked up 35W to head south into Uptown.
The first thing that struck us both when we walked up to the house in Uptown was the mess. The place had been trashed. A big Siberian tiger guy was on the floor being attended to by the ME. From the look of it he'd taken a round that was .45 or bigger in the face. I carefully stepped around the pool of blood that had formed around him and went over to where Paul was standing.
"What you got, Buddy?"
"This." He handed me a cracked photo frame. It showed a tiger family, Siberian dad, golden mom and pale daughter.
"Fuck.. do you think this was the primary?"
"No damn idea, Dafydd, but it's making my horns itch."
"Yeah, I got that twitchy feeling on it too."
"That's what I wanted to hear." He turned around and raised his voice as he addressed the room in general. "OK, Guys, stop whatever you are doing, right now. Remember where you are standing, but back off and leave this place as untouched as you can. I'm calling the FBI team and I want them seeing this place as untouched as we can give them."
"Lieutenant? What's going on?"
"There's some shit here that might link it into the warehouse killer case. If I'm wrong I'll hand the scene back to you guys and breathe a huge sigh of relief, but I want them here first. In the meantime, if any of you doesn't bust their humps on locating the wife and daughter I want you off my team. Clear?"
"Got it, Boss. OK, guys. You heard the instruction. Find them. Anyone here who was on the first response, just step out and smoke up. You should be here when we need to talk to the feds."
This was starting to feel real. More real than the itch between my ears kinda real. We had a known serial killer, who was known to prey on fem felines, the more stripes they had the better. We had a family where husband was killed and wife and daughter vanished. The daughter fitted what we thought was the killers ideal profile, I was betting that when mom was younger, so did she.
The FBI team breezed in like the pros from Dover. That was fair enough, that was what they were. They picked up on the profile matches immediately and immediately started going through the place looking for signs of conflict that didn't match to the poor guy with the bullet in his head on the floor. They found two, in the living room and the daughter's room. I was liking this like a case of poison ivy. Every instinct I had was lighting off. Maybe that was why I saw it.
"Agent Warren! The drag marks here..."
"What are you seeing Dafydd?"
"There's two, not one. The unsub took them both."
"Shit!"
"Yeah. Martin, this is our guy. It just feels like his next step."
"I'm not going to argue but we need more than your hunch, Dafydd. My gut says the same thing but where's the fucking evidence, damn it!"
"This guys too good to leave that for you. Bet you that the cab driver says the girls were a no-show."
"What?"
"How else is the unsub going to take two drunk girls outside the club, deliver one and make the other disappear? Somebody we need to find turned up and picked them both up before the cab arrived. Delivered one, kept the other."
"Shit.. That takes more setup than we thought. How long do you think he was watching his targets?"
"Longer than we thought."
"Yeah."
The tox screen was back on Gail. Positive for rohypnol. No wonder she forgot the entire night. Wonder what she forgot about the cab driver?
We were sat in the conference room, trying to make sense of it all when Agent Conrad burst through the door.
"Guys, I got something!" She had our full attention. "The mom that was taken, when she was the same age her daughter is now, she fought off an attempted rapist. She used her claws where they mattered most, as a tigress she practically ripped it all off. The case went nowhere, they had lots of suspects but none of them had shredded junk." Sarah and I shared a look and she winked at me, reminding me about the fate of the lizard I'd done much the same to before I ripped his throat out with my other paw for attacking her that way on the day we met. Jane Conrad hadn't finished, however. "I went looking through the old files for folks that were not suspects... and I found one who spent six months in Thailand right after the case went cold."
"Thailand?" That was Cy, and Agent Warren provided the answer.
"Worlds premier center for gender reassignment surgery, Cy." I looked over at Agent Conrad.
"Jane? What species and is there anything off base about original gender?" Her reply made angels blow their horns and set off the fireworks in my mind.
"Species, wolverine. Not a lot a lot off base."
"Do we have anything traceable on this one?"
"Clearly SRS. We've got the court papers changing the name from 'Alexander" to "Alexandra" after the trip, we've got the same change at the DMV and we've got limited medical records..." she trailed off, and Agent Warren glared at her.
"Jane, we can't break the law for info!"
"I didn't, not US law anyway. I might have broken Thai law a little when I went after the clinic's records."
"We'll let that go. If, and ONLY if, you can give me something I can take before a US judge."
"This guy came in with a shredded penis and scrotum and left as a girl. There's a query from a psychologist in his file suggesting he might simply have been bi rather than truly gender-dysphoric." My ears went up.
"Warren, this is our guy or gal. She's after the woman that shredded her maleness and she's in full breakout mode. Being bi she probably doesn't mind being a female, because she is likely still equal-opportunity but I'm thinking she wasn't betting on the level of prejudice she'd hit as a trans-fem."
"Not going to disagree, on what we know so far."
"Guys... " This was Sarah.
"Ms Marshall...."
"This unsub now has a tabby looking like the daughter, and both mom - who is their primary target - and her daughter who looks just like her back when a traumatic event occurred. Our unsub is going to be shredding that poor cat. Don't count on a week here, we've got days, maybe even hours, before Jess goes into the river. And she's going to make the tigers watch."
Sarah shuddered. Something about this setup was really touching one of her nasty memories. Given what she'd already said about it, I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
"I think we're ready to brief this." Agent Warren being all by-the-book. I wasn't ready to 'brief' anything. I was ready to get out there and start kicking asses until I found out where this creep was hiding. He'd probably object in some inconvenient official manner though, so until this meeting was over and Sarah and I could get out on our own that was a non-starter. We joined Agent Warren and the team in the main conference area.
"People we are looking for Alexandra Kyte. She's a wolverine, she's trans, she's also the perp in an unsolved attempted rape you have on your files. We've already established that her last known address was an apartment where the lease expired just over a year ago. Since then, she's been living off the grid. We have current registrations for a vehicle and a boat" Agent Grimm, the mouse, picked up the narrative.
"She's bi, she's trans, she took her transition as an escape from a bad situation in a foreign country so that it wouldn't show up on records locally - as a male she was ruined, her bi orientation made transition a viable option to escape. She is likely blaming the woman responsible for that for all the trans-prejudice she has experienced. This is an elaborately structured revenge-fantasy. She has financial resources, because such things are not cheap. Something has triggered her into a meltdown and she's been acting out her revenge fantasy, getting closer and closer to the real thing." Handing off to Agent Corsa, the bear.
"This is a subject who will not hesitate to kill their captives. This subject will, without a moments remorse, eliminate all the people in their control if it looks like they are about to be taken down for this. This is an item of concern since we have seen signs of a shock-collar on previous victims and those can be modified to deliver lethal voltage and power levels. If you find her and arrest her, do not, under any circumstances, allow her to manipulate any electronics on her person, whether it's a garage door opener, a phone or a car key-fob."
Agent Warren again. "We're done here. Find her. Three lives are depending on you." Now THAT was a mission statement I could go for.
Sarah split to work her street contacts. I headed for the office. I needed to talk to Marko, he had the contract with Tailfeathers. I'd recognized one of the security guys as somebody I'd worked with before so he'd obviously taken the hint about putting his more "experienced" operators on the clubs.
"Talk to me, Marko. Damon was one of the doormen so I know you had that place covered like a blanket. How did anyone get a striped cat out of there without your guys seeing it?"
"It looked normal, Dafydd. Two drunk girls stepping out to wait for a cab. They watched them until the cab pulled up and lost interest when they got in and the cab drove away."
"It wasn't a cab, Marko. It just looked like one. It was our guy picking up the target."
"Shit, dude.. the driver was a girl.. I thought you were looking for a male?"
"It's changed since our favorite bloodhound said 'possibly male' and musky. Our unsub is Alexandra Kyte and she's trans."
"Fuck, that's a game-changer!"
"Isn't it just! I am sending you a photo. It's old from a stored DL, but it's who we are looking for."
"I'll ask Damon and the others."
"I'm calling Sadie next. See if any of her people have seen the same woman."
"Probably a good move. Between her people and mine somebody has seen her. Tell her I love her." Typical Marko. He's been head over heels for Sadie for years, she refuses to do anything about it because she doesn't want to damage their friendship. She doesn't even flirt with him like she does with me. That cynical old rat would retire and settle down with Sadie in a heartbeat if she gave him the slightest hint she was interested. I think I'm the only guy in town that knows she actually IS interested, and is holding off because she thinks she wouldn't be able to help herself if she even dipped a toe in that water.
Paydirt.
Between Marko and Sadie I had a location for where our target was living. Problem was, however, target hadn't been back there in weeks - I'm guessing that she walked away from this place about when she started her spree. We needed in and needed to look around. I was going in to take a look before I called Agent Warren and made our "look around" official.
Door was locked, front and back. I'd been through the usual key hiding places and there wasn't any easy solution hiding beside the doors. Back door, however, was on a yale deadbolt that wasn't fully extended. It was a retrofit and it didn't extend far enough that it was completely locked. Because the back door was a retrofit, there was a little space to work with between the door and the frame. I could get a claw in there. Since I could get the local cops off my neck by referring them to Paul or Cy, why not try?
Five minutes of working my forefinger claw into the gap where the lock should have engaged and I had the end of the bolt hooked. Now I just needed to rotate my finger and press that bolt back from the doorframe enough that the door would open. This wasn't easy. Taking an analogy it was like you got your claw almost twisted off - the pressure of the spring on my claw was painful and nearly at 90 degrees to the angles where my muscles could brace it, but it WAS moving.
HA!
"Oh dear, she left her back door unlocked, I'd better check that nobody has been in here!" Theatrical, I know. I only said it to give me a few seconds to retract my claw and massage my paw. It's not like there was anyone listening to me so hamming it up wasn't going to look bad. I pulled the door open and slipped inside.
Oh
My
God.
We had the right suspect.
The place was wallpapered with photographs of all our victims. Most of them partway between the time they were grabbed and where we found them. I grabbed my phone and dialed Agent Warren.
"Warren"
"Owen. Our target was living at 3607 Bryant. You need to get here."
"Is it a primary scene?"
"No, but it has a decent record."
"We're on our way."
to be continued...