The discovery of dead bodies was not particularly unusual, especially in this neighborhood, where vagrants, drug dealers, users, gang members, hookers and their johns combined to form a rich stew of potentially deadly violence. But what made this call different, according to dispatch, was the condition of the victim—a young female who had been, if the frantic report was to be believed, “skinned alive by Mr. Midnight,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
The call was bogus, that much was obvious. The police had been getting flooded with Mr. Midnight sightings for months, and they were almost always bogus.
And there was another factor to consider, particularly in this area. Gina had been a Boston patrol officer for over half a decade and had responded to dozens of calls exactly like this one. Some loser with a hard-on for the cops would call in a phony report just to see the authorities run around like chickens with their heads cut off, often using the distraction provided by the response as cover to commit some other felony nearby.
Gina stepped out of the vehicle, scanning up and down the street for the second responder. This was just about the worst place in the entire city to have to investigate a call alone. The building was abandoned, condemned, which meant that anywhere from a couple to maybe as many as a dozen fucking vagrants were using the piece of shit as their home base. And vagrants didn’t like cops, for obvious reasons.
After a couple of instances last year where officers responding to calls exactly like this one had been ambushed, set up to be attacked and then badly injured, the administrative geniuses who hadn’t walked a beat in decades had come to the conclusion—prompted by the patrolmen’s union, of course—that it was too dangerous for officers to answer these types of calls in neighborhoods like this alone.
Now, the revised procedure called for a minimum response team of two officers, which was why Gina stood cooling her heels with one foot on the front bumper of her cruiser, scanning the area, waiting for Tommy Mitchell to join the party. So far, no one seemed to be paying any attention to her, but experience had taught her that could change in an instant.
Finally Mitchell’s cruiser rolled slowly down the nearly deserted street and Gina felt the tension ease, if only slightly. Tommy was not what even the most generous observer would consider a self-motivated officer—he was a thirty-year veteran who had never risen above the rank of patrolman—but standing alone in this neighborhood had begun to make Gina feel conspicuous and uneasy. Like a target.
Tommy eased to a stop behind Gina and worked his way laboriously out of his vehicle. She figured he had to be two hundred eighty pounds if he was an ounce, and what might once have been muscle had years ago turned mostly to flab. If ever a cop fit the stereotype of the donut-eating flatfoot, it was Tommy Mitchell. Gina watched the left side of the cruiser rise on its suspension as he exited and tried to suppress a smile, more or less succeeding.
She wondered why she had been so tense just a moment ago. This was just another bullshit call phoned in by just another crank with an axe to grind. She would be treated to the sight of Tommy Mitchell trying to avoid a heart attack as he trundled up the three stories only to discover an empty apartment; then she would get to listen to his colorful language on the way back down. Then she would return to her vehicle and get on with her day.
No big deal.
Except something felt wrong. The crank calls involving fictional dead bodies designed to fuck with the police were almost always the same—very non-specific as to gender, age or cause of death, they were uniformly stunning in their lack of creativity. But this one was different. According to dispatch, the caller had been panicked and agitated, practically babbling in his haste to relate the information.
And he had been extremely specific: A young woman, probably early twenties, naked, tied up in a dentist’s chair—that was a new one—and brutally tortured, tiny stab wounds all over her body and—this was the most disturbing—long strips of skin peeled completely away from her bones.
“Mr. Midnight,” the caller had said.
Thinking about the report made Gina shiver and she wondered if Tommy felt any more nervous about this call than usual. He hitched his belt up under his massive belly and glanced at her, his face scrunched into a scowl. “Let’s get this shit over with,” he said, and Gina decided Mr. Midnight would have to be standing in front of Tommy Mitchell with a loaded gun in one hand and a surgeon’s scalpel in the other to arouse his suspicions, and even then he might not notice anything was wrong until he took a bullet in the forehead.
Tommy stalked across the cracked concrete walkway and up the dilapidated stairs into the building, not looking back or waiting, simply assuming she would follow. She sighed deeply and trotted to catch up. The lock had been broken off the front door—years ago by the look of the rusted mechanism—and never replaced. Undoubtedly any replacement would have been hacksawed off as well, so what would be the point?
Gina entered the gloomy building and followed the sound of Tommy Mitchell’s boots clomping up the stairway to the right of the foyer. It was obvious he wanted nothing more than to clear the call so he could get back to whatever he had been doing before—sitting in his cruiser reading a book, most likely.
By the time she reached the second-floor landing, the sound of Tommy’s footsteps was already receding as he proceeded down the third-floor hallway over her head. Jesus, Gina thought, for a fat slob this guy can really move when he’s properly motivated. She sprinted up the final set of steps, cognizant of the shadowy stairwell, pissed off that Mitchell had left her behind when the whole point of having a pair of officers respond to the call was for their protection, not to split up so they could be picked off by any lunatic with a grudge and a weapon.
Hurrying down the hallway, Gina turned right and entered the only open doorway, crashing into Tommy and nearly falling to her butt as she bounced of his massive bulk. He stood just inside the apartment’s entrance, invisible from the hallway, frozen to the spot in shock. Gina picked herself up off the floor, ready to tear into the stupid asshole. She considered herself a patient person, but enough was enough. “What the hell are you…”
She stopped in midsentence, taken completely by surprise as Tommy Mitchell unsnapped his holster and removed his service weapon. He turned and stepped nimbly over her, checking behind them both in the hallway, swiveling the gun left and right. Then he edged cautiously into the apartment.
A creeping sense of horror overtook Gina. Her instincts had been right. This was no ordinary crank call from a disturbed crackpot. She rose to her feet and followed Tommy, stopping in the exact spot he had moments ago, chilled by the sight in front of her.
Whoever had called in this mess had been spot on. Blood was everywhere, congealing on the floor atop a clear plastic tarp laid out with care around the base of what did indeed look like a gigantic dentist’s chair. Secured to the chair with duct tape was a young girl, naked, unmoving and clearly dead, with wounds exactly as had been described to dispatch.
Gina slapped at her holster and removed her gun as Tommy had. She took three steps into the room and Tommy came around the corner. “This shithole’s clear,” he muttered. “There’s nobody here. We need to call this in,” as if expecting Gina to argue. She didn’t argue.
While Tommy made the call, using his cell phone instead of the radio transmitter clipped to his shirt in the hopes of keeping the inevitable lookie-loos away for as long as possible, Gina moved deeper into the room, drawn toward the young woman immobilized on the chair. It was clear the victim was dead—no one could survive such massive blood loss, not to mention the terrible wounds that had caused it—but she went through the motions anyway, checking for a pulse on the woman’s neck. Tommy hadn’t bothered to do that and it should have been their first priority after ensuring the apartment was clear.