Blind Spot Page 4

  “My agent, Bernadette Saint Clare,” Garcia said to the ME guy.

  “How you doing?” asked the guy. “Sam Herman.”

  Bernadette shook his hand; her small fingers got lost in his grip. “I’m doing good.”

  “I hear you wanna see my goody bag,” Herman said.

  “You betcha,” she said.

  “Let’s head to the back of the bus,” he said.

  She and Garcia followed him and waited while he popped open the back of the hearse. The big guy leaned inside and dug around. The group of cops shuffled to the rear of the vehicle to watch.

  Garcia tipped his head down and said into her ear: “You mind an audience, or you want me to chase them away?”

  Bernadette figured Garcia was expecting some sort of show, but this wasn’t the place for it. She didn’t want to tell him that. “I don’t care,” she whispered. “It’s fine.”

  “Here you go,” said Herman, pulling his head out of the vehicle. He turned toward Bernadette and stretched out both arms. A doctor presenting a newborn.

  Bernadette peered through the clear plastic while she took out her gloves and snapped them on again. She reached out to retrieve the bundle and then pulled her hands away. She slipped off her sunglasses and leaned closer to the bag. “Holy shit.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Herman. His eyes darted from her bent head to the package and back to her.

  She looked past the investigator and over at the officers. “You’d better radio the cop shop. Get more people and boats back down here. There’s a second body.”

  One of the officers—a short guy with a ruddy face—put his foot up on the back bumper of the hearse. “Did the hand tell you that?”

  “Sort of.” Bernadette tipped her head toward the bag resting in Herman’s arms. “This came off a woman.”

  Five

  Herman inspected the hand through the plastic. He glared at Bernadette. “What’re you talking about?”

  “The index finger, around the cuticle,” she said, hanging her sunglasses back on her shirt.

  Herman looked down again. After several seconds: “Son-of-a-bitch. How’d we miss it?”

  “What is it?” asked Garcia.

  She pulled her gloves tighter over her fingers. “Trace of pink polish. On the thumbnail, too. Same spot. Around the cuticle. The deceased wasn’t much of a manicurist.”

  The short cop took his foot off the bumper. His ruddy complexion had turned redder. “Big deal. So maybe Judge Perve wore nail polish.”

  Bernadette: “Plus, that’s a woman’s ring.”

  “She’s right,” said Herman. “It’s a fat lady’s hand—not a fat fella’s.”

  Bernadette: “Plus…”

  “Another plus?” moaned Herman.

  “Plus, that hand looks a tad riper than the body. The fat lady was killed before the fat fella.” She looked at the short officer. “You’re gonna smell her before you see her.”

  “Crap,” spat the short cop. He turned and sprinted to one of the squads. He yanked open the door, got in, grabbed his handset. The rest of the uniforms scattered between the remaining cars.

  “Should we hit the woods?” Bernadette asked her boss. “Help them search?”

  “That’s not why I brought you down here,” he said in a low voice.

  Bernadette nodded. Time to stop stalling and get to it. She eyed the package. She didn’t want the hand; she couldn’t haul it around with her. The jewelry would be good, more substantial than the threads. Surely the killer had touched the band during the struggle, or while chopping off and discarding the hand. “I’d like to take the ring,” she said to Herman. “Run some…tests.”

  “What kinds of tests?”

  “She just saved your ass,” snapped Garcia.

  The gurney team bumped across the parking lot and stopped at the rear of the hearse. “We’re done,” said one of the men.

  Herman looked up from the bag. “No, you’re not.”

  “The ring,” repeated Bernadette. She and Garcia and Herman stepped away from the hearse so the men could slide the body into the wagon.

  “You’ve got to sign for it,” said Herman, his attention again locked on the package in his arms. “Paperwork is back at the office.”

  “You guys could be here all day,” she said. “Can we expedite this? Transport the hand to your office ourselves?”

  Herman looked up from the bundle and shook his head. “That ain’t kosher. I’ll send one of the guys on ahead to the office with the fat lady’s hand. You go to the office, fill out whatever they want you to fill out. Take the ring from there.”

  Garcia: “Cat. You know where the ME’s digs are?”

  “Squat building next to Regions Hospital’s parking ramp,” said Bernadette. “Looks like a dental lab.”

  “You got it,” said Garcia.

  Herman: “How’d we miss it?” He turned around and slipped the bag back into the hearse while his crew gathered around him.

  “Miss what?” asked one of the gurney men.

  “Shut up,” snapped Herman. He slammed the back of the hearse and looked at his group. “Don’t move. I gotta make some calls.” He went to the front of the wagon.

  Bernadette stepped away from the hearse and Garcia followed. “What’re you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’ll bet it turns up in the woods or the river. Thrown away, like the other two.”

  “The judge’s hand? I’ll bet you’re right.”

  “And won’t it be interesting if they find the woman’s body and she’s been tied up all nice and neat like the judge?”

  “Interesting as hell.”

  “The guy up north. The judge. The woman.” She peeled off her gloves and crammed them back in her jeans. “That would make three—three that we know of. Someone killed each of them. Cut their right hands off. Why? Was there someone somehow victimized by all three of them? Old-fashioned revenge? We were thinking it was a vigilante thing with the judge. Could be the same for the other two. What have you got on the dead guy up north?”

  “Hale Olson. The guy’s got his own interesting history. Was tangled up in a home invasion and robbery that went sour some years back.”

  “Another bad man, like Archer.”

  “Except Hale served his time. Found God in prison and all that. Cleaned up his act, by all accounts. Been behaving since he’s been out. Had a steady job up north. Retired up there and stayed.”

  Bernadette: “Let’s say for the sake of argument that, even though Mr. Olson served his time and got religion, someone thinks it wasn’t enough. Let’s also say the dead lady did something naughty and didn’t get punished sufficiently. She’s a bad mom who abused her kids. She poisoned her husband. Whatever. We add that up and what does it give us?”

  “Easy math. That gives us three dead debits to society. Why cut off the hands, though?”

  Bernadette: “Why throw away the hands? That’s the bigger question.”

  Garcia: “What do you mean?”

  “Why not take them as sick souvenirs? That’s the usual pattern. In this weirdness, the killer treats the hand like waste. Garbage.”

  “A message,” said Garcia. “A symbol of some kind?”

  “Maybe the hands themselves aren’t the important thing. The action of cutting them off is the key. A statement about what they did. A public judgment against them.”

  “That narrows it down,” said Garcia. “We’ll put out an APB for a suspect. Believes he has the right to judge others.”

  “I know,” she said. “Pretty much describes the entire human race. Except we can also add: Knows how to tie a clove hitch.”

  “Meet you at the ME’s.” Garcia turned and went to his car.

  As Bernadette watched him pull away, she heard sirens. Additional squads were racing back to the park. She slipped her sunglasses back on her face, and looked across the parking lot to the river and surrounding woods. She wondered: Who are you? Why the right hands? She knew what she had to do to find the
answers, but she wasn’t looking forward to it.

  The ME lab guy was as thin as a broomstick and as tall as one. A white coat hung from his narrow frame, and when he walked the material billowed behind him like a sheet in the wind. The jacket would have been filled out better if it were draped over a coat hanger. “What are you going to do that we can’t? The Ramsey County Medical Examiner is one of the best pathologists in the country. What sorts of tests are we talking about here?”

  Garcia: “We don’t care to disclose that information at this time.”

  Bernadette gave her boss a sideways glance while she signed on a dotted line. The two agents were sitting at a conference table filling out forms, with the broomstick pacing behind them. They were in the front of the building, in a sunny room—the public face of the medical examiner’s office. The lab, where the real work was done, was in back. So was the hand.

  The broomstick stopped moving long enough to push his glasses up on his nose. “What are you looking for from this ring? Prints? DNA?” The pacing resumed.

  “We don’t want to say,” said Garcia.

  Lab Guy stopped again, planting himself at Garcia’s elbow. “Federal arrogance. That’s what this is.”

  “We’re all working together on this,” said Garcia, continuing to write.

  “You come in here and pee on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.” He turned and headed for the door. Yanked it open and started to step through it. He said over his shoulder: “I’ll bring out the ring, but the hand stays in the lab.”

  Garcia looked at Bernadette. She nodded. “Keep the hand,” Garcia said to him.

  He walked out, letting the conference-room door slam behind him.

  “You think he’s pissed?” Bernadette asked dryly. She dropped the pen on the table and pushed the paperwork away from her.

  “Let him be pissed,” said Garcia. He clicked the pen and looked at it. The side of it carried the address and phone number of the ME’s office. “They got their own pens. We should get our own pens.” He slipped it inside his blazer.

  She retrieved her pen. “This one’s from the Ramsey County Public Defender’s Office. ‘A reasonable doubt at a reasonable price.’ Cute.” She slipped it inside her jacket.

  He drummed his hands on the table. “Everybody’s got their own pens. We’ve definitely got to order up a box. Address. Phone number. The works.”

  “We don’t like people knowing who we are and where we are and what we’re doing.”

  “That’s the old FBI,” he said. “This is the new and improved FBI. The open FBI. What’s the slogan for our pens?”

  “Famous But…” She quickly stopped herself.

  He finished her crack: “…Incompetent. I’ve heard that a million times. Old news. How about Fumbling Bumbling Idiots?”

  She smiled. “Haven’t heard that one before.”

  “That’s the one I get from the reporters every time we have a high-profile fuckup. Unfortunately, all our fuckups are high-profile.”

  “That’s because we’re the fucking FBI,” she said.

  “How would that look on a pen? ‘Because we’re the fucking FBI.’ No address or phone number or anything. Just that simple statement of fact. Whenever some perp asks us why we can get away with shit, what gives us the authority to bust his butt, we toss him the pen.”

  She laughed just as the ME lab guy walked back into the room. “Sorry to interrupt your good time,” he said. On the table between them, he dropped a plastic bag the size of a sandwich. “Be responsible federal employees and don’t lose it.”

  “Thank you,” said Bernadette, reaching for the bag.

  “By the way,” said the broomstick, “there’re a couple of initials inside. You might miss them. Pretty small. Cops are checking to see who’s been reported missing. We might have a hit if a name matches up with the initials.”

  Bernadette: “AH.”

  “Yeah,” said the guy. “How’d you know?”

  “Cops won’t find anyone with those initials,” she said.

  “How do you know?” snapped the guy.

  Garcia looked at Bernadette as she slipped the bag into her jacket. “I just do,” she said.

  Bernadette and Garcia both exhaled with relief as they walked out of the building. They didn’t say anything to each other until they were standing in the parking lot. The wind had died down and the drizzle had stopped, but it was getting colder. The sky was the color of dirty dishwater. The air hummed with the sound of traffic on the nearby tangle of freeways.

  “You would have thought we asked him to please cut off his own hand and give it to us in a Baggie,” said Bernadette.

  “We’re all possessive of our evidence,” said Garcia. “I don’t blame him. Then we give him this obtuse explanation. Tests.”

  “Yeah. Guess you’re right.” Bernadette slipped her left hand inside her jacket pocket and felt the bag with the ring. In her right pocket was the glove containing the threads; she’d decided to hang on to it as a backup in case the jewelry didn’t pan out. “I’ll keep in touch with the cops and the ME this weekend.”

  “I can keep tabs on them.” He fished his keys out of his coat pocket. “I’ll give you the heads-up when all the missing hands and bodies are accounted for.”

  “You sure?”

  “You finish unpacking and then do your deal.” He jiggled his keys. “Need any help?”

  With which task was he offering assistance? Bernadette answered as if he wanted to help with the first chore, even though she suspected he was more fascinated with the second. “Don’t have that much stuff at the office or at home.”

  “You’re a minimalist?”

  “A slob. The less I have to take care of, the better.”

  “I can relate to that,” he said. “Worst thing I ever did was buy a house.”

  “I’ll be home. You can catch me on my cell if you need me.” She turned away from him, started for her truck.

  He snagged the elbow of her jacket. “Cat?”

  She faced him. “Yeah?”

  “How do you…” He stopped in mid-sentence and let go of her sleeve. “Give me a call first thing Monday. Earlier if you…uh…come up with something.”

  It took her less than ten minutes to drive through downtown to the loft—not nearly enough time to figure out why Garcia was so fascinated with her abilities. He was unlike any of her previous supervisors, and she couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Her other bosses didn’t want to know the details of what she did or how she did it. Garcia was different; he wanted to watch. Was that because he believed in her sight—or because he doubted its veracity? She suspected it was the latter.

  Six

  While she alternated between unpacking and swearing, Bernadette did her best to ignore the two bundles. The bag containing the ring and the glove balled up with the threads were both perched on a tipped wooden fruit crate—trash left by the condo’s previous owner. Every so often she gave the bundles a sideways glance, as if she didn’t trust them completely but didn’t want to be caught staring.

  She bent over a cardboard box, dug around inside, and pulled out a wad of blouses tangled around plastic bags and wire hangers. She stood up and shook out the mess, walked over to the closet, and hung a pair of shirts over the rod. It was a miracle she’d discovered her stereo system right off the bat. Harry Connick, Jr., crooned “The Very Thought of You” while she fished out another top.

  Inside the next box was stuff wrapped in newsprint. She picked up one bundle and unraveled the paper. Dishes, filthy from the ink. She pushed the cube over to the kitchen area. The condo was made up of a series of areas, as opposed to rooms. Except for around the bathroom, there were no walled-in spaces. Her bed area consisted of an oversized ledge jutting out from the wall, with a spiral staircase providing access from the ground level. All the shelf needed was some hay and it could pass for a barn loft.

  The condo was her first home purchase. She and Michael had rented because they’d m
oved so much. He was a freelance writer and could find work anywhere, but her job took them everywhere. Wherever they landed, they’d somehow made her folks’ country furniture fit. She wondered if the antiques would ever look right in this funky setting—a loft with twelve-foot ceilings, nine-foot windows, exposed interior brick walls, exposed ductwork, and exposed pipes. Plus, what about her bike? She’d had to sneak it up in the freight elevator. She didn’t want to leave it outside, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to pay to keep it in the parking ramp. She should’ve bought a regular house with a real garage. As she set the dirty dishes in the sink, she muttered to herself: “This was a bad call.”

  Bernadette’s worst call—made along with her sister—was one she could never face. The two took an ability they were born with and honed it until it was something unnatural.

  They’d always been tuned to each other’s thoughts; it was expected that twins operated that way. Their mother had bragged about it to her lady friends: “I’m trying to figure out which dolly one is crying for, and the other girl goes and gets it.”

  Developing the ability to see through each other’s eyes seemed the next logical step. They’d concentrate hard on reading each other’s mind while staring at a math problem in school. Soon they’d see each other’s paper, watch each other’s hand writing the answer. The sight was more controllable—turned off and on easier—if the twin doing the viewing held an object belonging to her sister. The possession acted as an antenna.

  Once, Maddy was sitting on her bed, scribbling an entry into her journal while her sister was in the barn. Sensing her sister’s glance at her diary, Maddy looked around her room and saw the hairbrush from her dresser was missing. Instead of ending Bernadette’s spy mission by slamming the journal shut, she practiced an insult the twins had been trying out. She willed her sister’s sight out of her eyes.