Drained (5 page)

“What time does your flight go out?” Karen asked.

“Nine forty-something.”

“And this guy is draining people of blood?” she asked.

I nodded. “They have thirteen women attributed to him. Seems like he kills for a month or two and then disappears for years. Eight years ago was the last time he was active. Five bodies turned up in Columbus, Ohio. Before that by a couple of years, the bodies were in St. Louis. Now it’s Chicago.”

Karen headed for the split between arriving and departing flights. We pulled in and slowed.

She looked over at me. “Just be careful, and no being a goof.”

“Goof?” I asked.

“I know how you and Kane were with the constant back and forth,” Karen said. “I’m just saying be professional until these new coworkers get to know you.”

“Got it,” I said. “No being myself.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“I know. I know.” I pointed at the airline’s entry. “Right there.”

“And don’t spread it on about me wearing the pants in our marriage.”

I smirked. “Yes, ma’am.”

Karen pulled to the curb in the airport’s drop zone for departures.

Beth was sitting on a bench beside the sliding entrance doors. I tossed her a wave.

“That’s her?” Karen asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“The hot twenty-something-year-old with the doe eyes? You’re not serious.”

“I think she’s a little older than that. Come on. Why don’t you see me off and say hi.”

“Ugh.” Karen shook her head. “Wow, I really sound like a bitch. I’m sorry. I’m blaming the drugs.”

I leaned over and gave her a kiss. “I forgive you.”

Karen smiled. “I’m glad you have a high tolerance for me. Okay. Best behavior. Here we go.”

I laughed and stepped from the passenger side of Karen’s truck. I opened the rear door, reached in, and grabbed my suitcase and laptop bag. Karen exited from the other side. She rounded the front and met me on the passenger side. I set my suitcase on the curb, draped my laptop bag over my shoulder, and gave Karen a hug. I looked at Beth and gave her a wave to come over.

“This is my wife, Karen,” I said as Beth approached.

“Hi,” Karen said. She held out her hand to shake Beth’s.

Beth shook her hand and smiled. “Nice to meet you. DEA, right?”

“Yup.” Karen released her grip on Beth’s hand, which I was positive was a lot firmer than it ought to be. “Any idea how long you will be keeping my husband away?”

“The less time it takes, the better it is for the bureau. These things never really take longer than a week. They send us out—we see what we can find. If we can’t get anywhere on location, we come back and continue from HQ.”

Karen nodded. “Okay.” Then she looked at me. “Go catch some bad guys, baby.” She reached up and rubbed the back of my hair then turned and headed back toward the truck. She looked at me over the truck’s hood. “Love you. Call me when you’re there.”

“Love you, too. I will,” I said.

Karen got in and pulled from the curb. Beth and I wheeled our suitcases into the airport.

Beth jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow and whistled as soon as we were inside. “Your wife is hot, Hank.”

“Um. Thanks,” I said.

“She was nice too. Hell of a handshake.”

I just smiled and nodded.

We checked our bags, passed through security, and headed up to our concourse.

“Do you have your case file and everything?” Beth asked.

I patted the side of my laptop bag. “I have everything. So how is this going to go when we get there?”

“We’ll pick up our rental cars from the airport and head to the local bureau office. I have the name of the agent that’s working the case that we should contact there. We’ll check in and see if there have been any updates that we need to be aware of. From there, we’ll go to our hotel, get settled, and then get a plan in place for where and how we want to start.”

That sounded logical enough.

“Are we working out of the local bureau’s office?” I asked.

“I usually don’t. They’d obviously supply us with a work area or office if we wanted, but I prefer to just handle everything from the hotel. We’ll be on the road most of the time, meeting with people anyway. We’ll stop into the local FBI office when we need to.”

“Sure,” I said.

Our plane boarded within the hour. We sat in business class, side by side. The two-hour flight would have been best served looking over the file, but photos and details of dead bodies wasn’t acceptable reading fare in a metal tube filled with a hundred and some people. So Beth and I chatted—mostly small talk. She asked how I liked the area and was adjusting to the move. I told her it was too early to tell. I picked up a little more information on her. She’d been at the FBI for six years, in the homicide division of the serial crimes unit for two. She was originally from the Chicago area, which could come in helpful as far as getting around. Beth was thirty-two. I looked for a ring and didn’t spot one.

Our flight landed just before eleven, local time. We picked up our vehicles from the rental-car office and were making our way into the city to the FBI headquarters when I pulled out my phone and called Karen.

She picked up right away. “Made it?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m in my rental car now, heading for the downtown bureau office. I guess we’re meeting with the agent in charge of this investigation and seeing where the local office is at with it.”

“And then?” she asked.

“Heading to the hotel. We’ll probably figure out where we want to get started on our side of the investigation and go from there.”

Beth was merging into the right lane of the freeway, so I put on my turn signal and got behind her.

“Okay. I have a meeting in a couple minutes,” Karen said. “Do you want to just call me when you get to the hotel and have a minute later?”

“Yup. That’s fine,” I said.

“Okay, then I’ll talk to you later. Love you.”

“Love you too,” I said.

She hung up.

Beth exited the freeway, and I followed. Two turns and a half mile of surface streets later, she turned into the FBI headquarters complex. We drove toward the main building and slowed at the gate-guarded entrance. Beth pulled up to the man in the guard shack and passed him her credentials. The gate opened in front of her car, and she passed through. I pulled up and lowered my window.

The guard leaned out from the shack’s window. “With the lady?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Just need to see your badge.”

I pulled it from my suit pocket and passed it to him. He took it from me and scanned it.

“All set, Agent Rawlings,” he said.

I put my badge back in my pocket and pulled through the metal gate. The Agent Rawlings thing was going to take some getting used to.

I found Beth parking in the lot off to my left. I made my way over to her and pulled in my rental alongside hers.

Beth stepped out from her car and grabbed her bag from the back. I killed the motor, grabbed my laptop bag from the passenger seat, and stepped out.

She waved me to her car, and I walked over.

“We’ll stop in at the main desk and let them call up to our contact agent,” she said. Beth nodded at the large, ten-story white rectangular building with bowed sides. It looked as though it had been constructed fairly recently. What wasn’t white on the sides and front was glass. We headed over, and I stared up at the building. The place looked more like an upscale hotel than a government facility. The entrance we walked toward had a courtyard recessed back into the building. A long rectangular flower garden took up the center of the area, and to each side of the flower garden sat benches. As we got closer, I noticed the flower garden and benches actually continued indoors.

“Have you been in here before?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a neat place,” Beth said. “Cool architecture.”

“New?” I asked.

“Maybe like ten years old or so.” She pointed toward a set of doors to our right. “We’re headed over there.”

We entered the building’s lobby. A number of people rummaged about, all looking hurried. A large FBI insignia was inlaid into the blue marble floor in the center of the room. I followed Beth to the desk at the back.

A man looking the part of a security guard glanced up at us from behind the counter.

“Agents Harper and Rawlings to see an Agent Andrews in serial crimes,” Beth said.

“One moment,” he said.

The man got on the phone, said that Agent Andrews had a pair of guests, gave our names, and hung up.

“You’ll want to use the elevators there”—he pointed to the corner of the lobby—“and head up to the eighth floor. Make a left out of the elevators and head down the hall to the serial crimes unit. Agent Andrews will be expecting you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Beth and I walked to the bank of elevators, and I thumbed the button to take us up.

The elevator doors spread and took us inside. We rode up in silence. The elevator doors opened and let us into a hallway. A sign on the wall showed that the serial crimes unit was to our left, just as the guard downstairs had said. We walked down the hall and entered a large cubicle-filled area that looked strikingly similar to ours in Manassas.

A man in a suit walked toward us. He was six foot and thin and looked to be in his midforties. His hair was short and blond, his face shaved clean. He wore a blue jacket over a light-gray shirt and darker-gray tie. The jacket had FBI embroidered in yellow across the front pocket. He greeted us immediately. “Are you my two from Virginia?” he asked.

“That would be us. Agents Beth Harper and Hank Rawlings,” Beth said.

“Agent Alan Andrews,” he said.

Beth reached out and shook his hand. I shook the agent’s hand next.

“Follow me,” he said.

Beth and I followed him around the room of cubicles to an office near the back. He opened the door and motioned for us to sit. We took seats as he closed the door. Agent Andrews rounded his desk and sat. He had a file open on his desk, and though it was upside down, I recognized the photos of one of the victims. “Did you guys get everything we sent over?” he asked.

Beth removed her copy of the file from her bag, so I unzipped my laptop bag and removed mine.

“Here is everything we were given,” Beth said. “Have a look and see if we are matching up on everything.”

Agent Andrews compared his file against the one Beth had handed him. “Hmm,” he said. “Everything you have we have except we never got a few of these crime-scene photos from the first victim that we had. Mind if I make a few copies quick?”

“By all means,” Beth said. “After we’re contacted for an investigation, our guys pull files from everywhere individually. Those may have come from the PD directly.”

He nodded and slipped the four pages into the copy machine at the back of his office.

“We also have this if you’d like to make a copy.” Beth slipped out the profile of our suspect, which had been drawn up some eight years before. I had looked it over, but I’d never put a lot of stock in profiles. They all read basically the same—single, possibly divorced thirty-or forty-something-year-old with a checkered past. I’m sure the bureau’s behavior analysis unit would disagree with me on the topic, but I’d been around enough homicides over the years to be entitled to my own opinion.

“Well, the victims were in the Chicago vicinity here. Let’s hope our perp still is. You guys have the full force of this office for whatever you need locally,” Andrews said.

“Thank you,” Beth said.

“Will you be needing an office?” he asked.

Beth shook her head. “No. We’ll work from our hotel and coordinate with you on everything.”

“Okay,” he said.

“What does your gut tell you on these latest victims?” I asked.

Andrews looked at me. “You want my take on it?”

I nodded.

“Well, I looked over what had been put together on this investigation, including the files from the prior homicides. There’s a reason behind the draining of blood. What it is, I don’t know. It’s an odd way to kill someone. I’ve been looking into that angle. The blood was drained by inserting needles into the main arteries. It’s not how a mortician would do it. I want to think that there may be something there, but we came up empty on that front.”

“I did a fair amount of research on the same,” Beth said. “I didn’t get anywhere with it either. As far as I can tell, it’s just this guy’s method of killing.”

“Same thing I was thinking,” Andrews said. “The stomach contents from the autopsy reports are all the same with these latest victims. Alcohol and some kind of bow-tie pasta that’s barely digested, meaning they were killed shortly after eating.”

Beth nodded. “These victims trust this guy. It’s the only way he could get away with drugging them. There’s too much Rohypnol for this to be in a public setting, meaning they have to be alone with him somewhere. And if it’s the same food, that means he’s cooking it.”

I nodded, agreeing. “How hard did you guys dig into each woman’s personal life?” I asked.

“We worked it. There’s nothing that really sticks out. We pulled bank records, phone records, e-mails.”

“And nothing at all?” I asked. “No cell-phone GPS tracking?”

“Nope. The only cell phone we found was Jasmine Thomas’s, and it was completely dead. We have our tech team looking into it, but so far, we can’t do anything with it.”

“What do you mean dead?” I asked. “Like dropped in water?”

“We don’t know. It doesn’t function. It’s going to have to be disassembled and gone through,” Andrews said.

“What about ping triangulation to get a general area? Common places the signal pinged from? Anything like that?”

He shook his head. “We requested the records from the phone carriers, which should be here tomorrow morning. The last pings, from the people we’ve spoken with at the carriers, all show towers near the women’s residences or workplaces.”

“Okay, as far as last seens or spoken withs on these women?” I asked.

“The two most recent were seen the day of them going missing. The one from a month back had spoken with a family member a few days prior.”

“What about vehicles?” I asked.