Three Times a Lady

Chapter 17

Hands still shaking, Dana ducked into the gleaming public restroom at the coroner’s office building and tried to steady herself. Wasn’t easy.

A familiar dread washed through her stomach as she splashed some cold water onto her face and tried to calm down. No good. She was still too shaken up from the shocking video she’d just watched to even breathe properly, much less think straight – a shocking video she hadn’t been expecting to see at all.

Dana shook herself. What had the woman in the surveillance footage been trying to tell her by attaching the photograph of her brother to Christian Manhoff’s body, anyway? Besides ‘f*ck you’, of course. That part of the message hadn’t been very difficult to figure out.

It was clear she’d been calling Dana out by name – literally, just as Nathan Stiedowe had done during the Cleveland Slasher investigation – but to what end and for what purpose? And could the woman in the video be a murderer? Just like Dana’s brother had been? Could Dana be sure of that? Had the woman in the video been the same person who’d shoved a large rawhide bone down Christian Manhoff’s throat until he’d choked to death on it? Or was the woman in the video simply connected to the murder somehow? And if so, just how, exactly, was she connected to it?

Dana shook her head and took several deep breaths through her nostrils. Nothing made any sense to her. Still, what else was new? She’d been in a daze ever since she’d first emerged from her coma three days earlier and it didn’t look like she’d snap out of it anytime soon. That being said, Dana knew she’d need to do just that. And quick. One person was dead already and there could be more to come soon. Would probably be more to come soon. With suspects like this one – people who went to such great lengths to actually draw attention to their terrible crimes – there were always more to come.

But Dana didn’t see how the woman in the video could have possibly pulled off the murder by herself. She just didn’t appear physically capable.

Christian Manhoff had been a big man. A huge man, even. He must have outweighed the woman in the video by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. Surely the woman in the video couldn’t have overpowered him. She looked tall, sure – taller than the average female and certainly a lot taller than Dana – but she didn’t look anywhere near strong enough to pull off the deed by herself. So did that mean she’d had assistance killing Christian Manhoff? And if so, from whom? Or – for some odd reason – had the woman in the video simply been piggybacking on a murder that had already committed by someone else, one to which she had no other link?

Dana didn’t know, but she sure as hell planned to find out. Flipping open her cellphone, she accessed her e-mail account and downloaded the attached zip file she’d sent herself a few minutes earlier before watching the autopsy video several more times, her heart pounding progressively harder against her ribcage each time through until she thought it would explode like a time bomb inside her chest.

On the fourth or fifth repeat viewing, Dana finally noticed the watch strapped around the woman’s left wrist as she entered the autopsy room and held up the photograph of Nathan Stiedowe to the camera.

Dana paused the video and selected the portion of the image featuring the watch before zooming in. The watch had caught Dana’s eye mostly because it looked so out of place when compared to the rest of the woman’s hopelessly trendy attire. The dress the woman in the video had been wearing looked like it had cost a pretty penny, indeed – along with her shoes, jewellery and haircut. Something of a closet clotheshorse herself, Dana knew quality when she saw it, and the bird-flipping, profanity-mouthing woman’s get-up in the video was definitely quality.

Dana bit down gently her lower lip – an unfortunate habit she’d formed in grade school and still hadn’t quite gotten over yet – while she continued to think things through. She rubbed at her aching neck and wished like hell that the tension residing there would find somewhere else to live already. The woman’s wardrobe had obviously selected with care and the cheap watch stuck out like sore thumb. It was almost like topping off a piece of perfectly prepared filet mignon with a healthy dollop of two-dollar whipped cream you’d picked up at the grocery store as an afterthought: a small addition but one that was nonetheless large enough to completely ruin the overall presentation.

Simply stated, the watch was a piece of junk. Something a kid might wear.

The watch itself consisted of a worn red-leather strap and what appeared to be a cartoon character using its hands to point out the hour and minute.

Dana zoomed in even closer on the video and narrowed her eyes.

Mickey Mouse.

Dana shook her head in confusion, hoping she wasn’t wasting her time with this line of thinking. Still, even though she didn’t know why the watch bothered her, she just knew that it did. Bothered her in a big way, as a matter of fact. A cop’s instinct, she supposed – a sixth sense. Call it whatever you wanted, but she’d followed far too many of her gut feelings directly to a murderer’s doorstep to simply ignore it altogether.

Besides, flimsy lead or not, at least it was some sort of lead. She’d gone on much less during the Cleveland Slasher investigation, not to mention a lot of other cases she’d investigated in the past. So it was important that she didn’t ignore any possible roads here, no matter how unpromising those roads might seem. Sometimes it was the seemingly innocuous details that cracked a case wide open.

Dana stretched her neck again and punched in Gary Templeton’s number on her cellphone. As big of a deal as a bank robbery might be, this was even bigger. A possible killer who’d been caught on video was on the loose out there somewhere in Cleveland and Dana needed Templeton’s help to track that person down. Now. And if they split up the responsibilities, they could probably get twice the amount of work done in the same length of time. Dana also wanted to hear Templeton’s thoughts on why he might think the woman in the video had called her out by name. Maybe he could make sense out of this mess. Lord knew she couldn’t.

Dana gritted her teeth when Templeton didn’t answer his phone. No doubt he was up to his elbows in crime already working the bank robbery. Dana sympathised with him, but sympathy didn’t catch killers. Still, a cop’s life never seemed to get any easier, whether you were FBI or Cleveland PD. No matter how many cases you solved, no matter how many bad guys you put away, for each case you put to bed there were always twenty more unsolved cases staring you dead in the face at the end of each exhausting workday. Mocking you. Daring you to try to solve them.

Dana closed her eyes and flipped shut her cellphone, wishing like hell Jeremy Brown were around for her to bounce some ideas off. Jeremy had been a damn fine investigator, one of the finest Dana had ever known in her entire career. He’d have had plenty of ideas concerning the mystery woman in the video. But Jeremy wasn’t around any more. Not now and not ever again. He was dead and rotting six feet beneath the ground in a cemetery out in Los Angeles. All thanks to Dana and her supposedly sterling work in the FBI.

Dana shook her head. You reaped what you sowed.

With Templeton already busy with his own problems, Dana realised she’d be puzzling out this one on her own until further notice. No big surprise there, though. She’d jumped into this case willy-nilly from the start, hadn’t stopped to think things through properly or ask for backup, which protocol clearly dictated. So alone was exactly the way she deserved to be working.

Dana let out a slow breath. There’d been a time in her career not too long ago when she’d actually preferred alone, but those days were long gone now. In the past, she’d often found that doing most of the work for herself actually made it easier for her to get the job done when the pressure was on. When you worked alone, there was nobody else was around to get in your way, nobody else around to slow you down, nobody else around to send you off on wild-goose chases that rarely – if ever – panned out.

Dana went to the sink and twisted on the warm-water tap before pumping some fruity-smelling hand soap into her palm from the plastic dispenser positioned above the sink. She felt dirty, like she just couldn’t get clean for the life of her. But where lay the big surprise in that? When you’d spent as much time as Dana had chasing the lowest common denominators of humanity through the gutters of life, some of that filth was bound to rub off on you.

As Dana dried off her hands with a wad of industrial-strength paper towels, her heart nearly exploded inside her chest when door to the bathroom suddenly flew open with a violent bang.

Dana whirled around. Her gaze went automatically to Nancy Lawson’s left wrist to see if she was wearing a watch. And, if so, what kind of watch.

‘Hello, Agent Whitestone,’ Lawson said, smiling brightly. ‘Long time, no see.’