Chapter 9

Hmmm, heaven was built on spicy Szechwan chicken. Michelle popped the last bite into her mouth and sat back on the couch, her hand on her flat stomach. She had changed clothing before sitting down with Nick and the food, putting on a pair of short black leggings and an oversized FBI tee shirt her brother had gotten for her when he went to Quantico for some training classes a few months ago.

With her hair pulled up in a long blonde ponytail and no makeup, she looked all of ten years old.

"Full?" Nicky asked, amusement in his eyes. She had plowed into the chicken and vegetable dish as if she hadn't eaten in a year. Nick had watched in amazement as she had polished off the entire container and her half of the fried rice.

"Yep." She felt too good right now to let him bug her or provoke her. She sat back up and pulled her feet up on the couch, sitting Indian style facing him. She pointed at the cashew chicken mixed in with rice on his plate. "You gonna finish that?"

He pulled his plate out of her reach and then fed her a bite from his fork. To keep her occupied and out of his food, he reached behind him and picked up the file that he had brought with him, handing it to her. She reacted the same way she had with the food, eagerly opening the file and pulling out the copy of the letter that had been sent to him.

The note had been sent through prints and trace elements, and to their linguistics guy. There were no discernable prints on the plain white paper. One hair was found in the envelope and was being sent to the lab in Lansing as they spoke, but the DNA results could take weeks before they got results back. Linguistics hadn't gotten back to him with their report yet. So most of what he had was the note and a bad feeling.

"You know, Nick, I thought that cutting letters out of newspapers and magazines had gone out of style when home computers and printers were invented. There's something a little freaky about this cut and paste job."

Nick snorted in agreement. "We got ourselves an old fashioned type of guy or else he's been watching way too many old movies."

The words had been glued to the page by Elmer's glue, something that could be picked up at any discount store around. The words themselves were a taunt.

"Don't you ever get tired of being a day late and a dollar short, Detective Saint?" Michelle read. "Well isn't that just so nice of him? And what we needed, to be dissed by a psychopath." The letter was signed with a single initial that was cut out of a headline so that it was bigger than any other letter on the page, the letter M, the font in bright red.

"Yeah, made me feel all warm inside," Nick said around a mouthful of chicken and cashews. "Now all we have to do is look around for every white guy around the age of 30 to 35 who wears high end wool suits and has the first or last initial of M. Should be a piece of cake."

"Hey," Michelle laughed, in a much better mood now that she'd been fed. "Don't be such a pessimist. Maybe the lab guys can do something with the hair. Or maybe we'll get lucky and this guy likes to run with scissors and play in traffic. Maybe he'll run into a semi. "

"I have a feeling that the hair is just going to belong to one of our two victims. It was about twelve inches long and blonde. If not them, maybe to his newest victim." He gave her last comment all the dignity it deserved and ignored it. Was there a time that he had thought she was too classy to be a cop? He put his plate on top of hers and took both of them into the kitchen and rinsed them in the sink.

"I really don't want to think about a victim number three," she said as he reached under her sink for the dish detergent. Michelle had gotten used to him picking things up behind her. He was a neat freak and didn't even realize when he was doing it anymore. He thought better when he was doing something, anything, sitting drove him nuts unless he was busy. She had gotten used to taking things from his hands, putting them down and watching him pick them up to toss them around again.

She was reading some of the notes on the interviews she had missed out on today. They had tracked down the manager of the Blockbuster Video Store that Sheri Meridian had worked at and brought him in. He was a cranky old man who had finally called the police when one of his other employees had told him about the picture in the newspaper.

His interview was the usual, he didn't know nothing and hadn't seen her in a month. He thought she had just gotten tired of being away from her family and had moved back home. After a week of consecutive absences, he had called and fired her on her answering machine. What a sweet and considerate man. Michelle rolled her eyes.

Her coworkers weren't much better, it seemed as if no one knew much about Sheri besides the fact that her parents lived in a different state and that something bad had happened between them. Sheri had moved here recently, before that she had been in Toledo, Ohio. Before that, was anybody's guess. Sheri didn't talk to her parents anymore. She wasn't the type to make friends and didn't socialize with any of them outside the job. The biggest consensus had been that Sheri was a stuck up bitch, to quote verbatim.

"What about a car?" Michelle called back to him, looking over her shoulder to where he was drying dishes and putting them away.

He walked out of the kitchen and grabbed his pack of cigarettes off the end table, setting them back down at a scowl from her. "I put a bulletin out on it today. She drove a," he looked down at the report she held, reading upside down, "1986 Honda Accord, blue." He sat down again, still looking longingly at his cigarettes. "With our luck, it's a piece of junk that has already rusted into the ground. But we'll look for it."

Michelle reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out a square of Nicorette gum, tossing it to him and then flipped through the new pages in the file. "Not much here. I guess when I hadn't heard from you today, I hoped you were making an arrest."

"I called you." He sat the gum down next to the cigarettes with a grimace of disgust.

"Yeah, Jimmy just forgot to tell me. Did he tell you that he left me in charge of the scene today?" She turned a page.

"He did what?"

She flinched at the sudden anger in his voice.

"I'll take that as a no." She tried to ignore his silence and kept talking. "I was there watching the crime scene people doing their job. He figured I could handle it." She glanced up at him. His face was stony.

"Was I wrong?"

"How'd it go?" He didn't answer her question.

"Fine, I waited for them to leave, put the notice on the door and assigned someone for door duty. I have the key here. It's in my briefcase." She let the file drop into her lap. "Did I do wrong?"

"No, Jimmy did." And he could have gotten Nick's butt in a bigger sling than it already was in. But he didn't tell her that. There wasn't any reason to let her worry about it. He wasn't going to. He changed the subject. "So what do you think about the note?"

"Uneducated guess?"

"As if you're uneducated," he scoffed.

She glowed at the compliment but didn't mention it. "I'd say he's trying to goad you into making this personal. It's addressed to you, he wants to see if you are smart enough to catch him." She paused and looked at the note again. "I would say that he wants to see how many times he can get away with it. This won't be the last note you get either. Unless we catch him right away, you'll probably get one after every body that is found."

"My take on it as well. I think we got us a game player." He rubbed his forehead, the lingering essence of the headache right behind his eyes. "It's not just the fantasy, or the hunt, or even the kill that gets these guys. It's proving they're smarter than whoever works the case. And the bigger the name in charge, the more the killer has to prove. Psychos like these are much worse than your run of the mill serial killer."

"Ah, but," she lifted a finger in the air to make a point, "he hasn't reached serial killer status yet. He's got to knock off a couple more to get that."

Nick snorted a laugh. "Yeah, but lets not tell him that okay?"

"Yeah, just cause this is blonde," she pulled a strand of hair forward over her shoulder, "doesn't mean that it's a life style."

"You sure?" He laughed and ducked when she swung at him. "Seriously," he added when he quit laughing, "I got five calls and a bunch of call back slips from the newsies today. Someone let it slip that we got an ID. They are going to be all over this."

"Oh, shit."

"My feelings exactly. I no commented them, gave them the blah, blah, blah about waiting until the victim's next of kin had been notified. But you know that they are going to run it as soon as they can bribe, steal, or cheat someone out of the name." He sighed in disgust. "I know they got a job to do, I read the paper like everybody else. I just wish they would realize that what they do can really fuck up an investigation."

"Did you get a hold of her parents?" That was not a job Michelle would want to do. How do you tell someone that their estranged daughter was dead at the hands of a psychopathic killer? How do you tell a father that his little girl was tortured and abused and then thrown away like yesterday's garbage? She could only imagine what it would do to them to think of Sheri's last days on this earth and know the kind of pain and terror she must have experienced. Just the thought of that terror gave her shivers.

Nick saw the shiver that went through her body and understood it. The worst thing about this job was to explain to parents that their child had been murdered. And in a manner that was this grisly, there was no way to break it gently. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, rubbing gently at the knot of tension in the back of her neck.

"Yeah, I called them."

Michelle was silent as she leaned into his touch, knowing that there was more to tell and that he needed to get it out.

"I talked to her father in Arizona. They hadn't heard anything from Sheri since she moved out when she was seventeen, three years ago. He said they had a fight over some guy that she was seeing that wasn't good for her." His hand moved further down her back, still kneading at the knotted muscles. "Want to know the really sad part? The guy dumped her a month after she moved out of the parents' house. He took everything Sheri had, money, jewelry and most of her clothes. Then he just walked on her."