The anonymous tip on Friday, the one reporting the location of Sebastian Taylor and Brigitte Marcello’s bodies, had been placed while I was in the courthouse.
Emergency Medical Services hadn’t been able to track the locations from which either of the calls were made.
The case files included transcripts of both anonymous 911 calls, and in both cases, the caller had said something that caught my at-tention: “Dusk is coming. Day four ends on Wednesday.”
The repeated phrases conclusively linked the double homicides on Thursday and Friday, and also sparked my curiosity.
Dusk is coming…
Day four ends on Wednesday…
Dusk… A metaphor for death? A deadline?
Day four… Days of the month? The length of the crime spree?
Days of creation, maybe? What did the Bible say God created on day four? Maybe something to do with that?
I didn’t know. Something to look into.
As I mulled things over, I paged to the information about the murders at Sebastian Taylor’s house.
He owned a high-end security system with five video surveillance cameras, three of which had been disabled. The other two only showed brief glimpses of a medium-built man in a ski mask.
And the killer had made it personal once again: he’d left a note for me on the workbench in Sebastian Taylor’s garage: “Shade won’t be bothering you anymore, Agent Bowers.” So the killer knew that Taylor called himself Shade, and he knew that Taylor had been sending me messages.
But how? None of that’s been released to the public. And how did he find Taylor?
I flipped the page.
After murdering them, the killer had transported Brigitte’s body parts to the lake but left Sebastian Taylor’s body in the garage. And, although on a personal level the scenario disturbed me deeply, on a professional level it intrigued me.
Typically, killers only transport body parts to dispose of them or take them home as souvenirs. So why leave one body at the house and transport the other across town and then leave it at a public beach?
I considered this: based on the two messages he’d left for me, the murderer knew who I was, knew I’d be at the crime scene Thursday afternoon, and knew I would be testifying in Chicago. So it was likely he also knew about my work.
If that were the case, he was either very stupid-leaving me so many locations, the combination of which would help me track him down. Or he was very smart-perhaps choosing the abandoned mine and the public beach for no other reason than to misdirect the investigation.
And since he’d been able to locate Sebastian Taylor, something no other law enforcement agency in the country had been able to do, I did not think this killer was stupid.
No, not at all.
As Cheyenne wound the car higher into the mountains toward Taylor’s house, I finished my coffee and realized that if she were to decide to try hers later, it wouldn’t be fresh anymore and consequently she wouldn’t enjoy it and might never fall in love with the world’s perfect beverage. So, as a favor to her, I drank hers too.
“We should be there in about ten minutes,” she said.
I turned to the list of possible suspects.
Tessa heard Dora stirring on the bed but waited to see if she was ready to get up.
Her friend’s real name was actually Pandora, but she didn’t like being constantly reminded of the story about the girl opening the box and unleashing all of the evil in the world-not exactly the coolest legacy to have. So pretty much everyone just called her Dora.
She had cinnamon hair, shy, brown-black eyes, and a sort of normal, easily forgettable face. The two girls had totally connected the first time they met, even though they had, like, nothing in common.
Oh: except that since Dora’s dad was the medical examiner, both of their dads dealt with dead bodies all the time.
So at least there was that.
Finally Dora leaned over the edge of the bed. “Tessa, you awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sleep OK?”
“Yeah. You?”
A pause and then, “I kept waking up thinking about… you know.”
“Yeah.” Tessa tried to think of something that would get Dora’s mind off the baby’s death. “Hey, I heard about this cool new Syrup Dive video. We should check it out.”
Dora looked at her quizzically. “I thought you hated Syrup Dive? You told me their music was pangelo…”
“Panglossian.” Tessa shrugged. “Well, maybe I changed my mind. C’mon, I hear the video’s sweet.”
And so, even though Tessa really did think Syrup Dive’s music was naively optimistic-she went to Dora’s computer and mouse-clicked to YouTube.
Added advantage: you don’t have to keep seeing pics of Dora’s smiling parents pop up.
“Panglossian.” Dora swung her feet to the floor. “That Greek?”
“Latin. I never studied Greek. Just Latin. And a little French.”
Dora joined her beside the computer. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
“I can’t figure out why I don’t laugh when I tickle myself.”
She found the video.
“And,” her friend said, “my story, Pandora’s Box. You don’t know that. I still can’t believe you never actually read it. Considering how much you read.”
Tessa had never been all that into Greek myths. “I think I know it pretty welclass="underline" Pandora was curious. She opened the box and out came all the pain and pestilence and disease of the world.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all.” Dora yawned. “It has a surprise ending.”
“I’ll check it out this week. I promise.”
And then she pressed “play.”
I had just finished Cheyenne’s coffee and was about two-thirds of the way through the case files when she broke the silence. “We’re here.”
Looking up from the papers I saw that we were turning onto the long, sloping gravel driveway that led to Sebastian Taylor’s house.
20
Taylor had chosen to live on a dead-end road, which seemed tragically ironic to me, considering the circumstances.
Rustic, yet sophisticated, the amber and tan house wasn’t pretentious enough to attract undue attention but still spoke of wealth and affluence just as I’m sure Taylor wanted it to.
In addition to Brigitte Marcello’s car, which still sat in the driveway, two cruisers and two civilian cars, including Kurt’s, were parked outside the house.
After taking a moment to show our IDs to the half-asleep officer standing guard, Cheyenne and I stepped into Sebastian Taylor’s living room.
Lush carpet. Leather furniture. Civil War paraphernalia. Nouveau paintings that must have cost a fortune. I noted that the walls contained no pictures of either of Taylor’s ex-wives or any of his four children, and none of this surprised me. A well-stocked liquor cabinet sat near the door to the dining room.
One of the officers from the crime scene unit was dusting for prints in the dining room, and I figured the other CSU members were probably in the garage, where the murders occurred. When I’m working a case I typically carry a pair of latex gloves in the back pocket of my jeans, but there were already extras waiting for us on the coffee table, so Cheyenne and I snapped them on. “Let’s start upstairs,” she said.
I nodded and we ascended.
Halfway up the steps she cleared her throat slightly. “You’ve been awfully quiet since we left your house, Pat. What’s going on in that mind of yours?”
I took a second to collect my thoughts, then said, “In fifteen years as an investigator I’ve never come across a double homicide in which the killer dismembered two victims, then transported one of them to a secondary scene where it would be easily located and identified within hours.”
“True,” she said thoughtfully. “Typically, he would have left them both or taken them both.”
We reached the landing. “Exactly.”