CHAPTER SEVEN
“What’s your take on Lisa?” Michael asked as the two of them drove away from the sanctuary.
“Her emotions seem genuine to me,” Faith replied.
“So you don’t think she’s a suspect?”
Faith shook her head. “No. She had opportunity, and I suppose she could have motive considering Marcus’s past, but she was truly upset by the murder. Not just the fact that Reeves was murdered, but the way he was murdered.”
Michael nodded. “Yeah, I got that impression too. It offended her that someone tried to frame the jaguar.”
“Exactly. If she was going to kill him, that’s not how she would have done it.
“Right.”
“Okay, so what about the animal rights activist angle?”
“I like that,” Faith said. “I think we should follow up on that. Lisa’s right. Militant activists tend to have a warped sense of justice. It wouldn’t be beyond them to think that killing people with tools made to resemble animal attacks would be a sort of poetic revenge.”
“I agree. Call Cuthbert. While you’re at it, see if he found anything on Chen.”
Faith dialed the number and glanced at Turk. He was sniffing the air and shaking his head, an odd expression on his face. Her smile faded. He looked confused again. What was going on?
He noticed her and gave her the toothy grin that she had fallen in love with nearly three years ago. Then he tilted his head and sniffed some more. Finally, he barked exuberantly and buried his nose in Michael’s jacket pocket. A moment later, he surfaced with his snout buried in a bag of beef jerky.
Faith sighed with relief. He wasn’t confused. He just smelled food.
“Hello? Bold, are you there?”
“Yes! Yes, sorry. Um… Did you learn anything from Chen’s friends and family?”
“Well, sort of. Nothing helpful. She had no friends, and her family didn’t talk to her.”
“Bad blood?”
“Not that they knew of. She just stopped talking to people. Probably didn’t want them to know that she had a weird hoarding obsession with animals.”
“I can understand that. Well, we have another angle for you to look into.”
“Good, because I’m at square zero, and I hate square zero.”
“Me too. Lisa Hartley at the animal sanctuary shared some interesting news with us.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. It turns out that Marcus Reeves used to run a zoo that was shut down for severe animal husbandry violations.”
“That so? So we think this is a white knight avenging the deaths of animals.”
“Yes. Specifically, a militant animal rights activist. Someone who advocates violence to punish those cruel to animals.”
“And you want me to find out if Marcus Reeves and Alison Chen ever had a run-in with such a person or persons.”
“You read my mind.”
“I’m told I’m good at reading women’s minds.”
Faith smiled slightly. It seemed Cuthbert had taken a liking to her.
“Actually, I have some information for you,” Cuthbert said. “Not from the Chen connections but related to the case. The autopsy reports came in. Doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know, but I thought you might want to talk to the coroner yourself.”
“I would love to,” Faith replied. “Text me the address.”
“On its way to you. Hey, while I’m reading minds, I’m reading that you might want to grab dinner sometime.”
Her smile widened a little. “Sorry. I’m afraid I’m taken.”
“Ah. I was afraid of that. I saw the way you were looking at your partner.”
Faith glanced quickly at Michael and silently thanked herself for not putting the phone on speaker. She didn’t correct Cuthbert, though. That might give away the subject of their conversation. She only said, “Find me the info I need to solve this case, and I’ll give you a kiss on the cheek.”
“You torture me, Special Agent Bold. But I accept.”
He hung up, and Faith sighed with relief. Damn it. She didn’t feel that way about Michael anymore. She’d been through this already. It was just cold feet over David and the fact that Michael could talk to her about their job. So why were other people noticing that she was…
Her phone buzzed, and she shook her head. She could deal with all of that later. She had a job to do now. “Coroner’s report is in,” she said. “Cuthbert just sent me the address.”
“The coroner’s address or his address?” Michael teased.
“The coroner’s address,” Faith said with a glare. “You know I would never cheat on David.”
Michael tensed slightly, and heat climbed Faith’s cheeks. Only a few weeks ago, she had all but confessed that she was still in love with him. She wasn’t, and he’d helped her realize that, but maybe this wasn’t the time to be focused on her relationship. At least not around Michael.
“I’m sorry,” Michael said. “I shouldn’t have teased you. That was my bad.”
“It was your bad,” Faith said, a little relieved that it was, in fact, Michael who had pushed the awkwardness this time. Also a little guilty that she felt relieved.
“So the address, please?”
“Oh, right.” She gave it to him and said, “He’s going to look for our activists.”
“Do we think that’s what it was?”
“We just talked about the fact that we like that angle.”
“Yeah. I know.”
She frowned at him. “Do you not like that angle?”
He sighed. “I don’t have a good reason not to like it. It just seems too obvious, and I’m always leery of things that are too good to be true.”
“Sometimes they’re true.”
“I know. Like I said, I don’t have a good reason not to like it. It’s not even a hunch. Just… forget it. It’s just me being unsure. We’ll follow up on the lead because it’s the logical thing to do, and we’re detectives, not clairvoyants.”
“God, it would be nice if we were clairvoyants.”
“It would be nice if Salma Hayek would be waiting for me at the hotel room, but we don’t always get what we want.”
Faith gasped and slapped Michael on the shoulder. “Michael! And after accusing me of impure thoughts!”
“Hey, Ellie won’t shut up about Chris Hemsworth, so I get to fantasize about Salma Hayek.”
“Okay, well, leave that in your marriage, okay? I don’t need another reason to be awkward around your wife.”
Michael chuckled. “Fair enough.”
They pulled into the parking lot of the coroner’s office a few minutes later. Faith was always a little put off by how small the offices of such functionaries were in places like Council Bluffs. It really wasn’t surprising considering you could fit the entire populations of Council Bluffs into a large neighborhood in Philadelphia, but it was strange to walk into a building that was barely larger than a laundromat and know that this was where they managed murders. It made her think wistfully about her old idea of retiring to the Midwest.
Turk started acting strange again when they entered the coroner’s office. He whined and shook his head from side to side, pawing at his nose.
“What’s up with him?” Michael asked.
“I’m not sure,” Faith said.
And that wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t acting like he couldn’t smell right now. He was acting like something he was smelling was too intense. She sniffed the air but couldn’t pick up anything that might have that effect on him.
Finally, Turk’s breath hitched. He tossed his head back, then whipped it forward and sneezed violently. He sighed and trotted forward.
Michael covered his mouth and laughed. Faith shrugged, trying to hide her relief behind nonchalance. “Problem solved.”
The coroner greeted them with a smile as weary as Lisa Hartley’s. She was about ten years younger than Lisa, which made her about ten years older than Faith, dark-haired with candy-blue eyes and supermodel features.
“Good afternoon, agents,” she said. “I’m Dr. Yun. Welcome to my humble abode.”
Her voice was chipper in spite of her weary expression. Faith guessed that was due to years of practice pushing through the tragedy of a job that involved looking at the bodies of murdered people.
“I’ll cut right to the chase,” she said. “You guys already know that the killer was a person and not a panther or a snake.”
“Jaguar,” Michael said.
She lifted an eyebrow, and he shook his head. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
She looked him up and down and smiled slightly. It looked like Michael had an admirer out here too now. “No. Not a jaguar either. What we have is a very, very sick human.”
"Do you know what the murder weapons were?" Faith asked.
“I have a pretty good idea. Weapon one was a bunch of box cutter blades glued to something with superglue.”
“Box cutters?”
“Yes. You know the trapezoidal blades with razor-sharp edges that are really thin?”
“Yes, I know what you’re talking about. Just… Interesting.”
Dr. Yun shuddered. “If you say so. “Anyway, our guy here used ten of these blades to tear Marcus Reeves’ throat out. The skin itself was pierced by a point, sliced cleanly on one side and torn on the other side. That’s how I can tell it was a box cutter blade. The blunt edge was still thin enough to slice through, just not as cleanly.”
“How much force would it take to do something like that.”
“A lot. Think beartrap kind of force. It’s not so much the need to tear through the skin and flesh as it is that the blades are weak. Box cutters are sharp, but their blades are fragile since they’re supposed to cut through tape and cardboard, not people. In order for this to work, the closing force would have to be so great that the skin was sliced before the surface tension had a chance to bend the blades. Otherwise, there would be chips of metal in Marcus Reeve’s neck.”
“So a very powerful spring-loaded mechanism tore his throat out with a bunch of box cutters,” Faith summarized.
“Exactly so.”
Faith furrowed her brow. “What kind of tool would be able to do something like that?”
“Well, this was almost certainly fabricated, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would guess he used a coil spring from a mountain bike suspension for the jaws.”
“A mountain bike suspension?”
“Yes. The more serious bikes have coil spring suspension in the rear to take the shocks of hard landings. The springs themselves are powerful and compact. You could fit one to a hinge mechanism and attach that to a trigger on a pole. Squeeze the trigger, and boom.”
“That wouldn’t shatter the blades on impact?”
“Not if you rig it so the jaws don’t close completely. I hate to talk admiringly of a murderer, but this weapon was more sophisticated than it sounds. If only he’d used something that was a little more like jaguar teeth, he might have actually gotten away with it.”
Faith and Michael shared a sober look. “What about the other weapon?” she asked Dr. Yun.
“I just got Alison Chen’s body, so I need to dig a little more into her before I can answer that.” She winced. “Ouch. I did not intend that pun.”
“No offense taken,” Faith said. “Any guesses?”
“On record, it would be irresponsible of me to guess. Off the record, a hot dog stick.”
Faith blinked. “A hot dog stick?”
“Yes, a hot dog stick. They sell them at sporting goods stores. It’s a stick with two long prongs on the end of it, kind of like a barbecue fork but bigger. You put the hot dogs on the prongs and spin them over the fire. Or, in our killer’s case, you dip it in snake venom and plunge it into someone’s neck.”
Faith shook her head. “Wow. Clever.”
“Yes. Your killer, whoever he is, isn’t just a person disguised as an animal. He’s a brilliant person disguised as an idiot.”
Faith sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
“I don’t envy you your job,” Yun said, “and I wish you two luck. Considering what I’ve seen so far, we’re all going to need it.”
Faith pondered Yun’s words as they left the building. A brilliant person disguised as an idiot. That might actually be helpful to know eventually. Faith had suspected him of being disguised as a well-adjusted person, but his disguise would be even more believable if they didn’t suspect him of being smart enough to carry out the crime.
Now it was up to Faith to outsmart the killer before he left them with the remains of another hunt.