“Called off.”
“Great. We going to be ready for this meeting?”
“Not now. We need Hauser’s analysis.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to John and see about bumping the meeting then. Short notice, but-”
“Jack?” Belgerman had come out of his office.
Butterflies leaped back into Jackie’s stomach. “What’s up?” “Let’s get the team together this afternoon. I’ve got Emily to give us preliminary autopsy results on the boy. She’ll see you in thirty minutes.”
Jackie let out her held breath. “Will do. Thanks.” She turned to Laurel. “Let Hauser know to e-mail us the second he finds anything else. We need to go.”
The coroner, one Dr. Emily Liyang, a tiny, fortyish Chinese woman with a rope of spun, black silk hanging to her waist in a simple ponytail, greeted them when they arrived. Belgerman pulled a fair bit of weight with her and could call in the occasional favor. Jackie had never heard what he had done to garner such a benefit, but it had proven beneficial on more than one occasion. Emily was hardly what one typically expected of a coroner, but then, Jackie knew she was not what one thought of as an FBI agent. That shared background had given them no small amount of mutual respect toward one another in the few times they had needed to speak.
“My two favorite feds,” Emily said, smiling. “Haven’t seen you two in a while, and now you bring me this boy. You owe me a drink.”
“Anytime, Emily,” Laurel piped in before Jackie could respond. “Glad you could get to it so fast. This one is bad.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Your boss man called me this morning and asked in his friendly ‘I’m FBI, so do as I say’ sort of way to please expedite this case.” She opened up a folder that had been sitting on top of some others on her spacious, compulsively neat desk, and began to remove some photos. “I finished the prelim an hour ago, but I won’t have a tox report until this afternoon at the earliest. Did you want to see the body?”
Jackie shook her head. “Unless you think we need to. We had our own look yesterday.”
Dr. Liyang gave an absent shrug. “Not really. I have all the info here. No reason to subject you to that again.” She smiled at Laurel this time, fully aware of her weaker stomach. They had gone out for drinks a couple years back to celebrate the capture of a serial rapist, and Emily had sent Laurel to the bathroom with an increasingly graphic description of some of the bodies that had come through her office. Jackie had listened with half a curious ear. She found forensics intriguing but had no desire for the work. Slapping the handcuffs on the bad guys was far more rewarding.
The photos laid out on the desk showed Archie in the various stages of autopsy, taken from a variety of angles. “Pretty straightforward, at least from the initial investigation. See here?” she said, pointing at the first picture. “The boy was bound with zip ties. You can tell by the unique marks. They go all the way around, wrists and ankles, so I’m guessing he was laid out on a table or the ground. Little evidence of struggle, and just a few bruises you might find on any typical twelve-year-old.
Jackie studied the pictures, leaning over the desk along with Laurel, looking for signs of anything they might have missed from the day before. I was a lot more banged up than that at twelve years old, she thought, rubbing at the dull ache that appeared in her own wrists as she studied the pictures. All he’d wanted was to get away, and he’d stepped into the arms of a killer. Jackie suppressed a shudder and continued to follow Dr. Liyang’s summary.
“Puncture wound here on the left arm is where the blood was drained out of him. Everything indicates he had been dead a good ten hours before you found him. No signs of sexual abuse. There were a few fibers we lifted off him that we’ll analyze, but other than that, he was pretty clean. I think he may have been washed, but this is the one intriguing thing I found.” She tapped at Archie’s head in a close-up picture of his face from the eyebrows up to the hairline.
Jackie noticed right away. Without the close-up, it had not been obvious before. “He colored his hair.”
Emily smiled at them. “Sure, if he was a zombie.”
Laurel’s mouth formed an O of understanding. “He was already dead when this happened.”
“Yep. At least I’m almost positive. I’ll know definitely by tomorrow and let you know, but it seems your killer wanted him to have different hair.”
“Was it cut, too?” Jackie wondered.
“The clothing will be gone over later today. If we find any evidence of that, I’ll call you, Jack.”
“Thanks. Why would a perp want to do that?”
Dr. Liyang shrugged. “That’s what you girls get paid the big bucks for.”
Driving back to headquarters, they continued to discuss that question. Jackie sped in and around traffic, absently maintaining the speed she knew would allow her to make all the lights through that part of town.
“Could be a fetish thing,” Laurel suggested. One hand clutched tightly on the door handle, while the other was braced against the armrest in the middle between them. “Sweet mother, Jackie! Knock it off already.”
She backed off the pedal and was forced to brake for the next light. “Damnit. What’s the matter?”
“Quit driving like you’re taking your expectant wife to the hospital.”
Jackie looked at her, imagining that soft belly expanded to the size of a basketball. Laurel’s body was built for babies. The smile vanished when she realized Laurel would likely never have one.
“I would race you to the hospital, though, if you were about to pop one out.”
Laurel shook her head and waved at the window. “Just drive normal, please.” There was silence for moment, and she continued. “You don’t think it was a fetish thing though, do you?”
Jackie shook her head. “No. It fits too much with the whole neat-arrangement-in-the-park scene. I think that boy was put there like he was on purpose. Someone went to some trouble to prop him up there and have him look a certain way.”
“Okay, I can go with that,” Laurel said. “But who and why?”
“No clue.” She drummed her fingers along the steering wheel. “Care to bet any money that Nick Anderson has an idea why?”
“Not really,” she said. “I think I’d lose that bet.”
“You would,” Jackie agreed. “Right now, I want to have a little sit-down with the geeks and see what else they’ve dug up. I want some proof we aren’t dealing with a recurring case of serial murders involving a hundred-year-old man.”
“He makes a good case for dating older men.”
Jackie glared at her and then rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah. That, and drinking blood. That’s right up at the top of my list, too.”
Chapter 16
They found Hauser at his desk, the computer screens turned into a bank of old photos and newspaper clippings. He had pictures loaded up on three of them, two of which Jackie recognized. They were the old newspaper clippings Laurel had showed her earlier. He spun around in his chair to greet them when Jackie knocked once.
“Hey! How are Chicago’s loveliest agents today?” He gave them a devilish smile.
Jackie thrust her hands into her pockets. “Hungry.”
“Got half a chicken-salad sandwich here you can have,” he said, and when it got no response, the grin faded, and he continued. “Okay, sourpuss, look here. This is some weird-ass shit I’ve found. These are the two clippings you’ve already seen, the first from 1970, the other from 1934.” He wheeled his chair over by the screens and pointed. “You can see the similarities in them, might even say they look like the same guy.”
“They’re thirty-six years apart though,” Jackie said. She had a sinking feeling she already knew where Hauser was heading with this.
“Yeah, I know. How could it be the same guy, right?” He pointed at the next screen. “Here’s another photo, thirty-six years before those.”
It was a yearbook photo from Princeton University. The name listed beneath it was Nicholas Rembrandt. The image looked slightly younger than Nick Anderson, but not by much. The skin was smoother, without the crinkle in the corners of his eyes, and he wore small, round glasses, just enough to cover the eye, but the bright glaze on them was still evident, even in a black-and-white photo.