CHAPTER TEN
“I don’t think it’s the neighbors,” Faith said.
“No?” Jessica asked.
The two of them were finished with their initial examination of the scene and on their way to a hotel in Boston.
A search of Margaret Hayes’s computer had verified that she had faked her dog’s certification as a service animal by printing a fake certificate online.
They hadn’t determined where she got the fake vest, but it was a pretty sure bet that was an online order too.
Faith had Googled “fake service vests” and found no fewer than eleven websites that would ship for free anywhere in the contiguous United States.
So now they had to figure out who hated that—or for any reason hated Margaret—enough to turn her into julienned person.
“No. The neighbors all disliked her, but I got the impression it was annoyance, not actual hate. Even the mother whose kid was almost attacked didn’t seem to hate her. They just wanted to ignore her as much as possible.”
“Okay, but you’ve only interviewed two of the neighbors,” Jessica pointed out. “It’s way too soon to rule them out.”
“Fair enough,” Faith allowed.
They pulled into the parking lot of a high-rise hotel that proudly offered DOUBLE ROOMS EXCELLENT VIEW. Faith didn’t really care about the view, but the hotel looked clean and comfortable without being posh or fancy. Posh and fancy were not words that described Faith.
“I think there’s a more serious incident somewhere in Hayes’s past,” Jessica said, parking the car and stepping outside. “This reads like revenge. I think we need to cross check her name with complaints, specifically complaints related to her dog or dogs in general.”
“Good idea,” Faith said. “I also want to know what the murder weapon was.”
“You don’t think it’s just a knife?”
“Could be, if our killer’s a chef or a kung fu fighter. She was cut well over a hundred times.”
“It’s not unheard of. People lose their cool and stab until their arms get tired.”
“Yeah, but she was stabbed all over, not just centered around the neck and abdomen,” Faith replied. “People who are enraged don’t stab all over. They stab in one place over and over again.”
“I mean… What else could it be? Short sword? Table saw?” When Faith didn’t chuckle, she said, “I was just joking about the last part.”
Faith worked her jaw from side to side. “Maybe we’ll get something back from the coroner. This is just excessive violence. That’s saying something considering the line of work we’re in.”
She reached for the door handle when her phone rang. When she pulled it from her pocket and saw Jenkins’ number, she frowned and remained on the porch. “Jessica, hold up a second. We’ve got a call from Jenkins.”
“Maybe he has results on the blood.”
“Let’s hope.” She answered. “Bold.”
“We’ve got another one.”
The blood drained from Faith’s face. “Another body? Seriously?”
“Yeah. Looks like four or five days old. Maybe even a week.”
Faith blinked. “A dead body that’s a week old and fits our MO?”
“Yeah. I’m… Oh, good Lord… I’m on scene.” His voice was hoarse and thready. “Bring gas masks. I’m not exaggerating. This is ungodly.”
Faith’s nostrils flared just imagining the scene. “Send us the address.”
“Seriously, stop for gas masks.”
“We passed a hardware store on our way out of Newton,” Faith said. “We’ll stop there.”
***
Faith was profoundly grateful for Jenkins’ suggestion about the gas masks when she arrived at the scene.
For the first time since she’d known him, Turk was too overwhelmed by a scent to investigate.
He stayed outside the unit, chuffing, snorting, sneezing, and shaking his head from side to side.
Faith and Jessica breathed deeply through their N95 masks, but even the surgical-grade protection the masks offered wasn’t enough to completely stifle the moldy fruit odor of the body in the living room.
Again, body was a loose term. What lay on the floor of Thomas Webb’s apartment was a tattered spread of flesh surrounded by a fuzzy gray carpet. That carpet was actual fungus growing on his dried blood. More fungus sprouted from several of the open wounds on his back.
“Yeah, this is more than a week of decay,” Faith said.
“Coroner will get an accurate estimate of time of death,” Jenkins said. “Point is, Margaret Hayes wasn’t our killer’s first victim.”
“No, she wasn’t,” Jessica agreed. “And I think we can safely say this killer has a vendetta against fake service animals and their owners.”
Faith glanced at the box of service vests in one corner of the living room.
The vests looked slightly different from the one Margaret Hayes’s dog wore, but the quality appeared to be about the same.
It was actually a pretty good fake. If Faith had just glanced at it without looking closely, she would have accepted it herself.
Up close, however, she could see small errors in the license numbers printed in small font on the upper rear of each vest. Working as Chief Instructor for the K-9 School, Faith had seen many of these vests.
Each license was an alphanumeric code with one number followed by either an agency abbreviation: FBI, CIA, MaC, ARM, et cetera, or CIV for civilian.
Following that abbreviation, the license number was always seven numerals followed by two letters followed by three more numerals.
These licenses were close, but they weren’t consistent. Some had five numerals and three letters. Others had seven numerals, one letter, and five numerals. Several skipped the first numeral, the series number, entirely.
Still, they were good fakes, a cut above the ordinary schlock.
“Did you find anything on Hayes’s computer that mentioned her as a client of Webb’s?” Faith asked.
“You think he sold these vests?”
“He bought a crate of six,” Faith said. “I doubt these were all meant for his own animal.”
“He didn’t own an animal,” Jenkins said. “I talked to the property manager, and she said he hadn’t owned an animal the whole twenty years he’d been here.”
“My point stands then,” she replied.
“What did she tell you about Thomas?” Jessica asked.
“According to her, he was a good tenant. Paid his rent on time, didn’t bother anyone, didn’t complain, kept to himself mostly.”
“So, no enemies.”
“No. Upstairs tenant was complaining about the smell the past few days. Guess we know why now. Other than that, no one had a problem with him.”
“Who’s the upstairs tenant?”
“Guy named Bobby Martin. He’s the one who actually called it in. Linda—that’s the manager—walked into this and lost her shit. Can’t say I blame her. Two bodies in one day, and the second one’s worse than the first.”
Faith turned to Jessica. “Can you crack into his computer and see if you can get a list of clients? I’m going to talk to the neighbor.”
Jessica swallowed. She didn’t look very pleased about needing to stay in that apartment, but she adjusted her mask and nodded. “I can do it.”
Faith squeezed her shoulder, then headed outside.
Turk was now across the walkway from the apartment, nose buried in a hydrangea bush.
He looked at her, then looked pointedly away.
Faith almost smiled at the uncharacteristic behavior from her dog, then thought about just how awful this had to be for Turk to be thrown completely off his game like that.
She ascended the steps, sans Turk. If she got a bad feeling about Martin, she’d call him over to give him the sniff test, but otherwise, she was fine letting him rest his nose in the hydrangeas.
She knocked on the door. A pair of eyes pulled down the blinds.
Then the door opened, and a potbellied, sideburned man of around fifty opened the door.
His appearance suggested he was used to throwing his considerable weight around and bullying people into giving him his way, but the tremble in his throat and the blank stare in his eyes suggested he was in no mood to do any of that at the moment.
It also suggested he wasn’t the killer, though that, of course, wasn’t foolproof.
“Damn,” he said. “They want the FBI for this one, huh?”
“It’s a pretty unusual one,” Faith said.
“Yeah, you can say that again,” the neighbor said.
“You’re Bobby Martin?” Faith asked.
He nodded.
“Special Agent Faith Bold, FBI. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”
“Yeah, sure.” He sniffed. “Fuck, the smell. Pardon my French, but do you think it’ll be a while down there?”
“We’ll have Mr. Webb’s remains out of the unit within an hour or two, but I think it’s going to be a little longer and a lot of cleaning before the smell disappears. Your property manager will better be able to answer that than me.”
“Might just take a trip north,” Bobby muttered. “Visit my cousins in Quebec.”
“I hear it’s nice this time of year,” Faith said. “But before we talk about leaving the country, I was hoping you could tell me about your relationship with Thomas Webb?”
“Didn’t have one,” Bobby said, shock making his words blunt. “Never talked to the guy. Maybe said hello once or twice, but he just kept to himself. Never had a problem with him, though. Not until the smell, and I guess that’s not his fault. God…” He shook his head. “Who does something like that?”
“Someone very, very angry,” Faith replied. “Any idea who that might be?”
Bobby laughed nervously. “I’ve never met anyone that angry in my life. I mean, forget the mold for a minute. He was cut to pieces. It looked like he was a testing dummy for a pissed-off Samurai.”
“And you can’t think of anyone who might have hated him enough to do that?”
“No. We all get along here. Well, most of us, but we just ignore the people we don’t like.”
“Who didn’t like Thomas?”
“That’s the thing. I never heard anyone talk about him. Once or twice a joke about him being a serial killer or a CIA agent or something and that’s why he never talked to anyone, but that’s it. Seems kind of fucked up now considering how he ended.”
“Have you noticed anything suspicious recently? Anyone showing up who didn’t belong? Vehicles parked where they’re not supposed to? People walking by who maybe loitered a little too long?”
Bobby shook his head. “Tell the truth, I probably wouldn’t have noticed if it happened right outside.
You just kind of tune things out when you live in the city.
Nothing really bad ever happened here, though.
I just mean if I saw someone I didn’t recognize, I’d assume they were visiting someone and not think about it. ”
“Did you see someone you didn’t recognize?”
“No.” He laughed and scratched the back of his head. “So, I don’t know why I said all that. I just… God. That messed me up. That messed me the hell up.”
Faith gave up on getting anything useful from him. “It’s pretty messed up,” she said. “Go ahead and take that vacation. Make it a long one.”
“Yeah, I think I will. Hell, I might even move. Knowing that someone murdered him right below me, and I never realized it…” He shuddered. “Makes you think what might happen to you out of nowhere, you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Faith replied. “I know exactly what you mean.”
She headed back to Webb’s apartment. Jessica met her outside.
She looked a little green around the gills, but for the most part, she was keeping it together.
“There are six orders for vests in his email,” Jessica told Faith.
“That’s it. No long-term records, no one railing at him on social media, no obscure death threats or obvious death threats. ”
“Did you email the list to yourself?”
“Sure did.”
“Good. Then we’ll start going through it. Odds are the killer is connected to Hayes and Webb through that business.”
Jessica nodded. “Yeah, we’ll do that. I hate to be a wimp, but can we leave? I’m on the verge of a panic attack, and I do not say that lightly.”
“Sure,” Faith said. “We’ll take off. Turk!”
Turk looked warily at her, and only when she and Jessica walked away from the apartment did he follow. He glanced back at the open door, shuddered, then quickened his pace, beating the two human agents to the gate.
Faith didn’t blame him. With her mask on, she was protected from the smell, but the visual of Webb’s torn-up body left to be food for fungus would stay with her for a long time.
Whoever this person was, they wanted to hurt these victims, then leave them where they fell.
They wanted them to be thought of as meaningless, useless, something to be disdained and ignored.
There was no mistaking it. This was personal.
And whoever it was, they weren’t going to stop.