CHAPTER FOUR
This crime scene had the typical sense of controlled chaos Faith was used to at such scenes. There were six cruisers and three animal control vans on the scene, and eight officers were busy keeping the small crowd of neighbors and passersby from sneaking a peak inside. Michael parked across the street, and the three of them trotted up to the barrier. The harried sergeant waved them past. “Cuthbert’s inside.” He turned to one of the pushier onlookers and warned, “Seriously, ma’am, back off. I’m not asking.”
The three agents walked inside. The smell hit Faith like a bowling ball. Clearly this home had housed a lot of animals. Turk put his nose to the ground and began sniffing, and Faith felt a rush of relief when he kept his nose to the ground and followed the scent to the living room.
That room was the scene of even more chaos. There were six animal control officers carrying out crates filled with reptiles. Lizards ranging from tiny anoles to a six-foot monitor lizard, snakes, turtles and even a four-foot alligator-like thing.
“Is that a caiman?” Michael asked.
“Yep,” the animal control officer replied. “What would you say if I told you that this wasn’t even in the top ten most dangerous animals in this house?”
Michael shivered. “I’d say fuck reptiles and people who own them.”
Faith frowned at him, and he sighed. “Sorry. I just hate reptiles. Especially snakes.”
She looked at Turk, and her frown deepened. Once again, he appeared overwhelmed. He was shaking his head from side to side and staring intently at each animal as it was removed.
“You must be the FBI agents.”
Faith turned toward the voice to see a well-dressed man of around fifty stepping gingerly over something in the living room. He extended his hand and said, “Detective Jim Cuthbert. Sorry for not calling. Bit of a shitshow here. We’ve got it under control now, though.”
He gestured at the floor, and Faith realized that the something he had stepped over was the body of a woman in her early thirties with jet black hair and soft brown eyes behind a pair of thick glasses.
"Alison Chen, thirty-two. A neighbor heard a scream and called the police. By the time we got here, she was dead. And if not for the swift reflexes of my partner, Detective Royce"—a tall, lanky man with a somber face lifted his hand from the other side of the room—"I would also be dead, because there was a black mamba in this living room."
“A what?” Michael asked.
“A black mamba. Big damned snake. Poisonous. Supposedly the deadliest snake in Africa and number… I don’t know. Top ten worldwide. Royce here saw it and pushed me out of the way just before it struck. So we had to wait for animal control to get here. Then they go downstairs to the basement, and it’s a literal zoo down there. I’m talking about sixty animals: lizards, snakes, turtles, a fucking caiman… Those are only the ones still alive. You think it smells bad in here, wait until you go down there.” He shook his head and shivered.
“So she was bitten by a black mamba?”
“No. That’s why we called you. We think the killer wanted to make it look like that, but he picked the wrong snake. Here.”
He pointed at the body. Chen had an ugly welt on her neck, swollen purple and leaking blood and pus. Even Faith's ironclad stomach twisted a little at that. "Looks like a snakebite to me."
“And had the killer released one of the several species of rattlesnake or maybe Chen’s puff adder into the room, then I would have thought the same thing. But not a mamba.”
“Why not a mamba?”
Cuthbert pointed at the fang marks. They were spaced about three inches apart and as thick around as a roofing nail.
“Now these have swollen a little bit, so they weren’t that big to begin with,” Cuthbert said, “but they were far too big and spread apart to have come from a mamba.”
“You a snake expert?” Michael asked.
“I am not. But I watch Animal Planet. And Animal Planet taught me that mambas are elapids. Means they’re related to cobras. Cobras have very thin, narrow fangs, like needles. They’re also not spread very far apart. If this was a mamba bite, we’d be looking at much smaller marks. Now vipers like adders and rattlesnakes, they have big fangs spaced more widely apart. Those would absolutely make the kind of marks we see here.”
“You’re sure a rattlesnake didn’t just escape on its own?” Michael asked.
“The mamba was the only uncaged animal we found here,” Cuthbert said, “Now if I were being pedantic, I would say that it’s possible that a snake escaped earlier, then escaped the house after doing in Chen. But considering the death of Marcus Reeves two nights ago, I’m thinking it’s not very likely.”
Faith and Michael shared a look.
“So you think that we have a killer who’s killing people in disguise as different animals and trying to pass the blame to said animals?” Faith summarized.
Cuthbert nodded slowly. “Yes. I’m afraid I do.”
Turk sniffed around Chen’s body while Faith and Michael processed that information. The small part of Faith that wondered if Saul was only defending his precious cats was convinced now. This was the work of a human hand.
“You get anything, boy?”
Turk whined mournfully and stepped away from the body.
“I feel you, boy,” Cuthbert sympathized.” It’s horrible.”
“Did you see the other crime scene?” Michael asked.
“Yeah, I’m the detective assigned to the case.” He shook his head. “I didn’t believe it until now, though. I kind of wish I’d called you guys sooner.”
“It probably wouldn’t have made a difference,” Michael said. “We work fast, but…”
He left the sentence unfinished, but the words echoed in Faith’s mind. Killers like this work faster.
“The manager of the zoo said that he thinks the killer used some sort of tool to mimic a cat’s bite. He said the bite marks on the throat looked like it had been torn out by something with several flat blades like incisors.
Cuthbert took a deep breath. He seemed to be steadying himself to confront the image in his mind. "Yeah. That's… well, it was hard for me to tell, but he told me the same thing. We're waiting for the autopsy report. But…" He lifted his hands and let them drop against his pant legs. "This one, I know for sure. The killer used something to mimic a snakebite. I would say a barbecue fork, but the tips are too far apart. The point is, I'm on Saul's side now. That means I'm on your side."
A hissing noise behind them pulled their eyes away from the body. Two animal control officers carried a cage with a large black-and-white lizard. The lizard glared at the officers and whipped its tail at the bars of its crate.
One of the officers noticed the stares. “Tegu. Real pretty lizards. Not this aggressive if you take care of them.” He pointed at Chen. “She didn’t take care of them.”
The three officers and their K9 watched in silence as animal control took the tegu outside. When the door closed behind them, Cuthbert said. “So that leads us to a question I’m sure you were going to ask at some point: who would want to kill Alison Chen? Well, we don’t have a name yet, but Chen here had a history of animal abuse.”
Faith raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“That is so. She was indicted ten years ago for owning nine German Shepherds in a studio apartment in Omaha. Animal control over there said when they arrived, the dogs were in appalling condition. They had to put five of them down that day and a sixth one a week later.”
Turk gave Chen’s body a fishy look and stepped away. Faith couldn’t blame him, but she still felt a pang of guilt. Good person or not, she was a person, and someone had murdered her. It was their job to find out who.
“So she switched from dogs to reptiles.”
“Birds before that. Six years ago, she was living in another apartment in Omaha, and neighbors complained of a smell. Turns out the smell was a thick veneer of bird shit all over her apartment.
Michael groaned. “Ugh.”
“Oh yeah. Almost makes you thankful for the reptile shit we’re smelling now. Anyway, last year there were fish tanks with a bunch of rotting goldfish and now it’s reptiles.”
“Jesus. Who kept selling her animals?”
"I keep saying there should be a background check for pet owners," Cuthbert says, "and animal cruelty should be a felony every time. You're in law enforcement, so you know. Serial killers start with animals and move on to people. We'd catch a lot more of them before that point if there was proper policing of animal rights violations." He looked at Chen. "Although I guess she was on the wrong end of that equation."
Michael shook his head. “How does someone end up like that? I mean… how do you live in a house with a bunch of animals that you’re treating poorly and not…” He shook his head. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
“I knew a lady when I was a kid,” Cuthbert said. “Real nice lady. Used to give us full-size candy bars at Halloween. Her name was Mrs. Lester. Mrs. Lester had a lot of cats. A lot of cats. Her place always smelled like piss. Being a kid, I didn't think anything of it. She just loved cats. And she did. Whenever I saw her, she was petting a cat, feeding a cat, holding a cat. And the cats looked fine, too. Healthy, good fur, content, calm… nothing out of the ordinary. That was until one year when I went to her house for a candy bar and caught sight of her carefully flaying a cat that she had staked to a wooden pole in her backyard."
“Christ,” Michael swore.
"Probably the other guy," Cuthbert replied. "The point is, you never know the kind of darkness people hide inside them. Mrs. Lester loved her cats. I know she did. I have an eye for emotion, and she really loved her cats. But she also felt a need to sacrifice them to Satan every now and then. I don't know how those two things exist in the same person, but sometimes people can be good in most ways but just have one big bad flaw that poisons the rest of them." He grimaced. "Bad choice of words."
Faith's phone buzzed. "Lisa's back," she told Michael. She looked at Detective Cuthbert and said, "Talk to Chen's neighbors. Friends and family, too, with priority on people who live in the area and saw her frequently. I want a list of people who might have wanted to hurt her. We're going to go talk to the owner of the animal sanctuary and ask the same questions about Marcus Reeves."
Cuthbert nodded. “Works for me. I’ll keep you posted.”
As the agents left the house, Faith wondered what Chen was like. How would an interaction with her somewhere outside of her house be? Would she seem generally nice and normal but maybe a little awkward? Would she be so confident and outgoing that no one could tell there was anything wrong at all?
And what about their killer? Would he also seem like just a regular person as West had? Or would she sense the killer in him right away like she had with Jethro Trammell, the original Donkey Killer?
Not knowing the answer to that question worried Faith the most. Whoever this killer was, he was doing a poor job of masquerading as an animal.
But if he was an expert at masquerading as a normal person, it wouldn’t matter how convincing he was as an animal.