John Steel Collection - Books 1-3

Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

Adam and Sue Mitchell strolled down the wide street, laughing and joking like a pair of teenagers. After leaving the restaurant, they went to the bar where they had first met. The hours had drifted into the early morning as they wandered happily home.

The couple had just celebrated six years of blissful marriage.

It was the first time they had been alone together without work or the kids interrupting them in years. So even though it was now a Monday morning, they thought, what the hell. Having palmed off the kids onto Sue’s mother the night before, they had the whole day to themselves. No, the night they were about to share would be about them and nobody else. They walked for a couple of blocks before John suddenly grabbed Sue and pulled her into the nearest alleyway. Pushed her against the hard brick, he kissed her passionately as his hands moved all over her, caressing her slender body underneath the black satin dress. She responded to this lustful moment by kissing and biting his ears and neck.

As the two locked in a passionate embrace, so much so they forgot where they were and who might hear or see. But at the moment, they didn’t care.

They moved down the alley, away from prying eyes. John pulled Sue over to a bricked-up window in an old wall and pulled up her dress. As he lifted her onto the window ledge, her screams of passion suddenly became shrieks of terror.

Adam backed away quickly, thinking he had done something wrong. But, then, he followed her gaze, and he joined in with her wail of horror.

Perhaps just off a basketball court, a couple of well-built college students had seen the couple dive quickly into the alleyway. The screams from the woman made them come rushing over. They assumed that the woman was in distress; perhaps the man had decided he wanted more than just dinner. But, to their surprise, the couple weren’t moving, just howling. John’s trousers were still around his ankles, and Sue’s dress was still around her midriff, but both the man and woman were cowering like babies. Then, a lanky black kid ran up to Adam and Sue, unaware of what was behind them.

‘Hey guys, you two OK?’ he asked, confused at first by their fear. ‘Hey, what’s up? You look like you all seen a ghost or something,’

joked the giant skinny white kid following him. The tall black kid looked carefully at the pair, who still hadn’t registered their presence. Slowly, the kid followed the couple’s terrified gaze. He saw something in the darkness. He closed his eyes for a second to adjust to the lack of light, then slowly opened them. He wished he hadn’t.

‘Oh, s**t, man, that’s f****d up!’ The kids froze, then stumbled back to the alleyway entrance, where the rest of their friends stood in wait.

‘Hey man, call the cops,’ ordered the tall black kid to one of the others, who whipped out his phone and dialled.

‘Hello, police department, what’s your emergency?’ asked a female on the other end of the line. The skinny blonde kid grabbed the phone. ‘There’s a dead body in an alleyway,’ he informed her, then burbled the address and gave what information he could.

‘Please stay at your location; we will send a unit to your location as quickly as possible.’

The kid hung up, passed the phone back, and promptly threw up.

* * *

Detective Samantha McCall woke to the sound of her alarm. The high-pitched beeping was irritating enough to do the job of getting her up even after a short sleep, and she leant over and checked the time on the digital display. It read 05:00, and giving a quiet moan of disapproval, she slapped the off button and then collapsed back to her sleeping position.

In just a couple of minutes, she thought to herself, but she changed her mind and rolled out of bed. Leaving the bedroom sanctuary, she made for the kitchen, where she reached for the coffee machine and clicked the button to bring it back from its slumber. From there, she headed to the bathroom. Sam prepared to shower, the steam from the hot water filling the air, misting over the mirrors and a small window in the six-foot-square room. She stepped into the torrent of water and let the cascade run over her.

Switching off the taps, stopping the warm flow, she stepped out of the shower unit and wrapped a towel around her lean, lightly tanned body.

McCall used her dry hand to wipe the fog from the mirror above the white porcelain sink and then examined her reflection. Then, staring for a moment, she smiled and returned to the kitchen. She liked what she saw.

Coffee in hand, she headed back to the bedroom, slipped on some jeans and a t-shirt and got ready for the day ahead. Then, grabbing a bowl of cereal and the freshly filled coffee mug, she drifted into the sitting room.

As she approached the couch housed in a cut-out section of the floor, McCall stepped onto the cushions and sat down cross-legged, grabbed the remote for the TV, and clicked the ON button. With a burst of light and sound, the set came to life and showed a blandly good-looking man telling New York all about the weather they could expect for the day. Great, another hot one, then switched channels, looking for something less depressing than a news station.

McCall finished her breakfast and switched off the TV set before heading for an antique desk at the back of the room. Opening the left-hand drawer, she took out her 9mm Glock service pistol and slipped it into the rear holster nestled in the small of her back, then picked up her police badge. She gave it a quick brush with her hand, then clipped it next to the handcuff pouch above her right-hand trouser pocket and gave it a friendly tap.

The police officer grabbed her short leather jacket and slipped it on as she reached the front door. She checked her keys were in her pocket and left for the station.

Once she had reached her desk at the precinct, McCall began typing up the mundane paperwork that invariably followed the closing of a case. Unlike some, though, she did not mind, figuring it gave her some time to reflect on the crime. Also, Sam McCall found that going over what had occurred during the investigation of a particular case often taught her helpful lessons she could draw on in the future.

Her fingers danced over the keyboard like a pro. Suppose a stranger had seen her at that moment. In that case, they might have quickly mistaken her for a secretary or typist, not a Homicide detective.

She needed more coffee. Standing up, she reached for the stained coffee mug with the faded police badge symbol on the side and walked towards the coffee room next to Brant’s office.

The break room was small, with several chairs and a square table next to the far wall. A counter below a double window held four coffee peculators and several unclaimed mugs for visitors. In addition to offering refreshments, it was also an excellent place to go to unwind or discuss a case with a colleague without disturbing anyone else. McCall picked up one of the steaming hot containers and poured herself a mug of the dark liquid, the potent aroma of over-cooked cheap coffee filling her nostrils. Then, fetching the milk from the small refrigerator, she sniffed to see if it was still drinkable: it didn’t smell bad, so she topped up her brew.

As McCall looked out of the other door, she surveyed the bullpen before her. She saw a bustling array of cops talking on phones or chatting about yesterday’s game, and she smiled. God, how I love this life, she thought to herself.

McCall turned her gaze to the two detectives waving to get her attention, taking a sip of the coffee.

Joshua Tooms was a huge man, well over six feet four, built like a line-backer. He wore a blue suit, a white shirt and a blue tie. His father had come over from Jamaica.

Sitting beside Tooms was Antony Marinelli. Tony was a shorter, dapper man of Irish and Italian descent. Tony was huddled over a desk, busy scribbling down an address.

‘Yeah, I got it,’ Tony said. ‘We will be there as soon as we can.’ He finished writing and put the phone down.

‘We got one on the East Side,’ Tony said, waving the bit of paper in his hand. ‘The Medical Examiner is already there. You want to join us, Sam?’ The two men grabbed their jackets and headed for the elevator at the far end of the room. ‘I’ll meet you guys downstairs,’ McCall said, finishing the remains of the coffee before she too snatched up her jacket and headed over to the elevator.

The street was full of onlookers, press, and TV, prompting McCall to think, How come they get to know before we do? Unfortunately, she had to park away from the scene due to the blockage, but she knew stretching her legs would do them well.

Finding a parking space next to a blue Honda, McCall turned off the engine. Then, opening the door, she slipped out of the air-conditioned vehicle and into the morning's heat.

Shutting the door, Sam McCall combed her tawny brown hair through her fingers, falling to her shoulders. Then, with a confident tap on her Glock 17 service pistol, she slipped on a pair of sunglasses and was prepared for action.

Walking up to the barriers, McCall noticed the large crowd of people shoving each other aside to get a look. Paparazzi fought against the tide of people trying for the shot that would make them big money.

In the corner by the walled entrance to the crime scene stood a tall, broad-shouldered, uniformed cop who smiled, tipped his cap and lifted the tape for her on McCall's approach. Detective Sam McCall ducked under the yellow police barrier and thanked him. Stopping for a moment before venturing down, McCall viewed the crowd and then turned to the veteran cop.

‘Tom, can we get these people back?’ McCall asked. ‘A long way back?’

Officer Tom Simons tipped his cover and then moved the barriers into the crowd, using the barriers to push the crowd back.

‘Come on, folks, the show’s over; come on now, let’s go.’ The other uniformed officers followed suit, getting rid of the rubberneckers.

Detective Sam McCall walked up to her two colleagues, busy questioning witnesses. As she approached Detective Tooms, he looked up from his notes and met her gaze. McCall stood for a moment, letting him finish up.

Tony had finished with his witness and was heading over to McCall.

Tooms thanked the two students he’d been talking to, and as they left, McCall walked up to him.

‘So, what we got?’ she asked him. Tooms pointed out the couple who sat huddled together on the steps of an ambulance.

‘Adam and Sue Mitchell, both thirty years old, just celebrated their wedding anniversary when they decided to go up the alley for a bit of personal time. Next, these student guys heard them screaming, and the kids called 911.’

She regarded the couple registered their fear. ‘You been down there yet?’ she asked Tooms.

Tooms shook his head. ‘Thought we’d wait for you.’

McCall nodded. ‘Come on then, let’s see what Tina has for us?’

As they moved deeper into the dank and filthy alley, McCall stepped quickly out of the way of a fresh-faced uniformed officer, who almost bowled her over as he rushed past in the opposite direction. Goddamn rookie, she thought, watching him heading for a mass of heavy-looking dumpsters.

The three detectives rounded a corner to find a tall, slender, dark woman leaning over something. The woman wore blue medical overalls in yellow print with Medical Examiner. Her back was towards them, which obscured their view of the body.

‘Hi, Sam,’ the ME said without turning around. ‘Well, we got a mean one here.’

‘Hi, Tina,’ McCall replied, always happy to see her friend. ‘What do you mean ‘a mean one?’ McCall asked as her eyes gazed past the ME, and the sight before her made McCall want to lose her breakfast.

‘Jesus, what the…!’ She said just as the other two covered their mouths and turned around.

The naked body of a young woman lay on the cold ground. It had obviously been posed, and her clothes lay neatly folded beside her as crime scenes went; so far, so good. That was, everything apart from the body itself.

‘Yeah, like I say, this person is nasty… brilliant but nasty,’ said the ME, instantly regretting calling him brilliant.

‘Why, what do you mean?’ McCall asked curiously.

‘As you can see,’ Tina pointed with a gloved finger towards an area where the abdomen should have been, ‘the area here has been completely removed.’

Once occupied by the abdominal wall and its contents, there was a gaping hole. All that remained were the upper and lower parts of the trunk and the flesh and bone structure of her back. McCall could see the kidneys on either side of the spine.

The bottom section of the rib cage, body tissue, and muscle held it all together.

‘Till I get her back to the lab, I won’t know any more, apart from the fact that she wasn’t killed here,’ the ME said.

‘Lack of blood- there’s none to speak of.’ McCall noted after a slight pause for thought.

‘Lack of’ isn’t the phrase.’ Tina continued, ‘I mean, I found no blood anywhere. It’s as if she had been completely exsanguinated. But, hey, don’t go shouting about vampires just yet,’ she said, looking up and giving Tooms and Marinelli a don’t even think about it gaze just before they could comment.

Tina waved at two orderlies to come and take away the ‘Jane Doe.’ In their late twenties, two men wheeled a gurney with a body bag on top over to the remains; then, taking great care, they placed the corpse in the bag and wheeled it back to the coroner’s wagon.

The three officers waited for CSU to finish their sweep.

Instead, McCall watched impatiently while the team started to take photos and collect fibres and prints.

‘OK, detective,’ called a familiar voice. The grey-haired man was in his late forties but still had the style and bearing of a much young- er man. ‘You’re clear to go in,’ he said smiling, treating her just as a grandfather might treat his granddaughter.

‘Did you find anything?’ McCall hoped that the killer had left something, but she already had a bad feeling about this case.

‘Not really. Son-of-a-b***h is smart. Put her in an alley. Which means we have far too much information,’ the CSU tech said, making her uneasy smile.

‘Thanks, Jim. Oh, say hi to Denise for me, will you?’ McCall responded with a gentle smile.

He waved and left, leaving the rest of the CSU to finish their information gathering.

‘OK,’ McCall turned to her two colleagues. ‘We need to canvass the area. I want to find something that this bastard may have left. I am going to talk to the couple in the ambulance.’

Adam and Sue sat shivering with fear from what they had seen. Blankets covered their shoulders, and they each grasped a cup of steaming coffee.

McCall nodded to the paramedic attending them as she approached.

The medic immediately recognised her ‘give us a minute’ gesture. Then, she gave him a quick, silent thank you as he left them.

He just smiled.

She took a minute to jot down the time, date and location in her notebook, then proceeded to start the interview:

‘Hi, I am detective Sam McCall.’

‘Hi, I’m Adam Mitchell, and this is my wife, Sue.’

Sue Mitchell gave a slight nod in response.

‘I know it’s difficult, but I need you to go through what happened.’ McCall gave them a sympathetic smile. They both looked at each other and nodded. Then, sue started talking: ‘Well, we had just had dinner at the Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away.’ Her voice was as shaky as the rest of her.

‘You see, it’s our anniversary, and it was the first chance we’ve had to go out alone without the kids,’ Adam explained, making an effort to keep his voice calm.

Sue continued after giving his hand a little squeeze. ‘Well, we were just walking, enjoying the evening, when Adam pulled me down here too, well… to be alone.’ She looked down at the ground and blushed.

‘Why?’ McCall enquired, and then she figured it out. ‘Oh–OK. Got it.’ She felt embarrassed for the woman. ‘Go on, Mrs Mitchell. But I think you can leave those details,’ she added, trying not to smile. ‘Well, we got down here too, you know, and it wasn’t until we got to the end before we saw it – her.’ Sue Mitchell broke down into wracking sobs that shook her, and she buried her face in her husband’s shoulder.

McCall realised she wasn’t going to get any further sense out of the woman in the foreseeable future, so she waved to the paramedic to take the couple away. McCall wasn’t sure she would get anything more worthwhile from the couple anyway.

McCall walked back to the huddle of police at the entrance to the alley. She called over the other two detectives to join her.

‘What we got, guys?’ she asked.

Tooms flipped open his notebook. ‘Well, those guys over there.’ Tooms pointed with the end of his pen towards the students sitting on the doorstep. ‘They saw the couple go down the alleyway and thought nothing of it till they heard screaming and thought the guy was doing a special on the woman. So they ran up to try and help. And that’s when they saw what the couple was looking at.’ He closed the pad and returned it to the inner pocket of his blue suit jacket.

‘We got nothing over here, just some passers-by, didn’t see anything,’ Tony Marinelli said, pointing to an elderly couple standing be- side an ambulance.

McCall noticed that it was still the early hours, dawn hadn’t yet broken, and the alleyway was bathed in darkness.

She motioned for her colleagues to go to the other end of the blocked alleyway while she went back to try and mentally reconstruct how he may have got ‘Jane’ there. Then, finally, she reached the mouth of the alley and realised that all the onlookers had gone. Their interest had left when the body had been taken away.

Studying the entrance, she imagined a vehicle pulling up and stopping. Then went through a person's movements getting out and walking along the alleyway.

McCall assessed what the killer may have touched or come into contact with. Then, again, she tried to imagine the scene and what he might have encountered. ‘Why here?’ she thought aloud. ‘What’s so special about this place?’

As McCall stared down the breadth of the dark cobbled passage, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Then, as she slowly opened them, she was ready, taking her time, checking for something, anything.

‘Sometimes things are just plain fecking obvious,’ her father used to say. McCall stopped for a second as the thought of her dad brought a slight, unwelcome distraction to the moment. Then, she shook off the memories and proceeded down the alley.

There was nothing.

Damn it, she thought. Who was this guy? Suddenly she had a feeling of not being alone. She turned to find a tall, dark figure at the alley’s entrance, silhouetted by the bright sun behind him. She could make out a long jacket that flapped in the breeze of the large truck that powered past. She drew out her badge and held it up, moving towards the figure.

‘ Hey, excuse me, can I talk to you?’ she yelled. ‘Hey, you!’

But the figure remained motionless for a moment. Something seemed wrong about this guy, whoever he was. Suddenly something jammed up against her leg, and there was a loud screech as she kicked a ginger cat that had only been trying to be affectionate. She looked down, shocked at what she had just done, but when her focus returned to the figure, he was gone.

‘Stupid animal!’ she screamed, running toward the man. Reaching the mouth of the passage, she burst out, half expecting to see him running off or a car speeding away. But there was nothing; he had disappeared entirely. So, who the hell was he, and where did he go?