R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning by R.S. Guthrie Read Free Book Online

until their parents were in the cold ground. But most eventually wiped the fog off the window and saw the true landscape all around them. The lucky ones still had time to reconnect and repair old wrongs.
    And some never figured it out.
    Life again. A strange, cruel beast. You tossed the dice, you took your chances.
    The information I finally got from Reba Carrigan really didn’t help us out much beyond confirming our victim’s identity, and that was important, too. CID came back with cause and time of death but not much more:
    Deena Ballou was indeed hanged—the rope was thicker than your average laundry line—good, sturdy, towing-grade; the forensics team believed whoever hanged our victim used a proper hangman’s knot, which broke the neck upon impact. This meant she had likely been dropped from a distance of greater than three feet and that she did not suffer. That fact offered our profiler, psychiatrist Tag Brewer, M.D.—a great doctor cursed with a name more suited for a soap opera star—more to chew on.
    (Equally unfair to Tag, by the way, were his purely average looks. No Romance cover modeling in his future.)
    At least at the moment of her death Deena had been shown some mercy. The level of muscle deterioration suggested Deena Ballou had been held captive on food rations for several months. In cases like this the endured psychological terror was a suffering that was worse than physical pain but left scars, though less visible, that were equally impossible for live victims to erase fully.
    My boss, Elias Shackleford, called me in for a briefing. As usual, the man was impeccably dressed, his desk uncluttered and looking as if he’d just swiped it with a dust rag.
    “Let’s hear where we’re at, Mac.”
    “Yes, sir. Victim is Deena Ballou from Toledo. Rodriguez and Trent canvassed Colfax, Five Points, and a few other hot spots. No one seemed to remember her turning tricks. Heavy drug use and no consistent job history we’ve found, however, so—”
    Shackleford waved his impatient ‘I get it, no arrests is all that means’ wave.
    “We’re about finished with the halfway houses; no luck.”
    “Have you considered releasing her photo to the media?” Shackleford said.
    “I’d like to keep it close for a bit longer. The killer obviously gets off on the notoriety. Staging the way he does. We’ve kept all of it except ‘female murder victim’ off the news.”
    “He?”
    “Doc Brewer feels the profile is most definitely male now.”
    “How so?”
    “The mercy of quick death shown at the time of death. No torture or other signs of serious physical abuse. Statistics suggest women are more probable to do damage to the vic.”
    “Bobbit syndrome,” he said absently.
    “Excuse me, Lieutenant?”
    “Lorena Bobbit. Cut her husband’s penis off and threw it out the window.”
    “Oh, sorry,” I said. “I suddenly had Lord of the Rings in my head.”
    “Hobbit,” he said, a bit more derisively than I preferred. Shackleford had never been the same since Idaho.
    “Got it,” I said, giving him a pass. Shackleford played middle linebacker in Division I and still looked like he could. I was a decent boxer but my boss still looked like he could tear me a new one, head gear or no.
    “Any leads?”
    “Next of kin has been notified. The mother says she was living with her at the time she left. She was classified as a runaway. She was sixteen when she was killed. Almost seventeen.”
    “So she’s ostensibly lived here in the city for, what, three years? Must have had some help somewhere,” Shackelford said.
    “The mother says her estranged brother lives here. Last known address was a bust, but Trent is working on tracking him down. Guy by the name of Carrigan. Burly Carrigan.”
    “You think we’ve seen the last of this guy? The killer, I mean.”
    “No, sir. I don’t.”
    “Me either. Let’s get this guy before we’ve got a media circus on our hands.”
    “And more victims,” I