Babylon Blues: A Detective John Bowers Mystery

By Ray Bates

It's 1994, and veteran homicide detective John Bowers teams up with his partner Minola Raye to solve another grisly murder in Babylon-Portland, Oregon's fringe district of losers and forgotten victims. Like hungry sharks, Babylon's riffraff feed on the innocent and vulnerable, and only case-hardened cops like Bowers seek justice in a system that has no heart.

During a quiet weekend, a young woman has just drifted to sleep when her first waking sensation is a crushing weight falling on her chest, as if some night-stalking bird of prey had swooped down from the ceiling and clutched her in its talons. The beast's foul-smelling breath poisons the air. With a startled chirp, she comes to and stares straight into hell. A grimy hand slams over her mouth before she has a chance to scream.

The brutal killing that follows leaves Sergeants Bowers and Raye to piece together bloodied clues and investigate suspects among the throwaway people on the gritty streets of Babylon. This gripping police procedural delivers juicy crime scenes, a sizzling romance, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and the same old blues-along with the occasional gold nugget-in Babylon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 12, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595913152

Ray Bates

About the Author   RAY BATES’ police procedurals, mysteries and magazine articles reflect a true Northwest flavor. Bates’ varied background in criminal justice and forensic science includes stints as technical consultant for Regency-Fox Films, national investigator and lecturer. Bates writes a series of contemporary procedurals based in Portland, Oregon with Central Precinct Detective Sergeant John Bowers, an off-center veteran of the Robbery-Homicide Unit. Blue Butterfly, 1st book in the Bowers’ series, is packed with realism, a street-savvy cast, snappy dialog and steamy romance to woo both true crime and mystey junkies.. A Pacific Coast native, Bates resides in Portland with his wife and cat Felonious Manx where he keeps busy writing quirky mysteries, thrillers and police procedurals.  

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Copyright © 2007 by Ray Bates

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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FOR DETECTIVE ROD BROWN WHO PLANTED FERTILE SEEDS

"OF ALL THE EVENTS WHICH CONSTITUTE A PERSON’S BIOGRAPHY, THERE IS SCARCELY ONE …TO WHICH THE WORLD SO EASILY RECONCILES ITSELF AS TO HIS DEATH."

—NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

TWICE-TOLD TALES

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

PORTLAND, OREGON

1994

CHAPTER 1

She opened her eyes. The clock radio hummed from the bedside table. She could hear truck tires swishing on Saint Helen’s Road.

Staring into the darkness, which swallowed up her fear, she listened. The noise came again, and her heart thumped. Her pupils dilated until she could read the shadows slipping across the bedroom wall. Suddenly there was a new sound—a strange scrape close by. Inside the house perhaps. Was there also the soft thump of a footfall? Maybe she had dreamed it. The lightning bolt of fear, which had jolted her from sleep, may have been only a nightmare. Was the sound real? Was it coming nearer? Was it only the rain? The wind?

The door to the hallway was closed. The curtains were partially open over the Venetian blinds. She was alone in the house but felt the intrusion of an ominous presence she couldn’t name. Another car hissed by on Saint Helens Road—maybe the strange noise had come again. Now she wasn’t sure, but her pulse was still racing. She slid her right hand under the covers and gripped the butt of her .38 Smith and Wesson revolver. The gun lying beside her was the only reason she was able to sleep through the long nights since Steve had left.

Her house huddled in a clump of blackberry bushes at the foot of Forest Park’s velvet-plush hillsides rising in a timbered tidal wave behind her backyard. The bungalow was hidden in a brambly plot, which buffered her bedroom from the highway. A stone’s throw from her window, potholes punched holes in Willbridge Avenue winding uphill to the ramshackle residences hunkered down like toadstools in the woods.

The short-necked strip off Highway 30 provided a convenient turn-around for north coast lumber and steel-scrap haulers. They stopped at the route’s tacky shanties—java shacks with tarpaper roofs, beaneries, donut huts and Home Cooking cafes serving up gravied biscuits as big as seat cushions the truckers sopped up with sloppy gusto. Saturday night patrons of the nearby Babylon Bar parked at the foot of Willbridge and lobbed beer cans into the bushes, never giving a thought to whose property they littered with their trash.

The house shivered with the vibrations of another empty dump truck clanging and banging its way to the gravel pit. She had catalogued the hollow thumps and clanks of the groaning axles, the high-pitched whine of automobiles bouncing over the ruts and railroad tracks. After six weeks of sleeping alone, she also knew the signature sounds of a rattletrap El Camino crunching onto the gravel patch and the car’s radio blaring grunge rock music. Maybe that was what had startled her awake.

She strained to listen as the clock beside the bed clicked. The refrigerator turned on in the kitchen and hummed with a familiar lull. Gradually her pulse slowed.

Maybe it was only the wind banging the screen door and making the porch groan. She listened hard for any new sounds she could not identify. A car passed; a semi belched as it geared down to cross the railroad tracks. Nothing else. She hugged her pillow and drew her knees up. There was nothing to be afraid of. She could close her eyes and try to sleep.

The nights were never this long when Steve was sprawled next to her, his jaw hanging open and his exhaust rumbling like a Caterpillar tractor. Snuggled beside him she had slept easily even when the winds beat a tattoo on the windows and rattled the gutters. His presence bestowed a sense of safety on which she had come to rely. Alone now, she slept constantly on the edge of consciousness, seldom at peace with the menacing sounds filling her nights with faceless phantoms.

As she listened, the seconds ticked by with nothing but familiar sounds to reassure her. Finally she closed her eyes. In another moment, she was floating on the outgoing tide toward deep, black waters.

As she sank into a deep sleep, outside the rain had stopped, but the ground beneath her kitchen window was still soft enough for the soil to ooze over the toes of the man’s boots. He stood under the dripping eaves, his tobacco-stained fingers gripping the splintered frame. A flake of blue paint sliced under his thumbnail when he tugged on the sash. He huffed and grunted trying to budge the rain-swollen wood, reefing hard before the window jerked up, and he peered into the kitchen.

He stank of tobacco, red wine and a week’s residue of plaque coated on his mismatched grinders like paste on wallboard. He hadn’t shaved in four days or scrubbed his hide since he’d soaked in the flophouse tub two weeks ago, drained a bottle of Mad Dog, fallen asleep and almost drowned in the scummy water. His sour stink clung to him like old longjohns.

An El Camino roared back onto the highway. The glare of its headlights back-lit his grizzled figure as he wrestled a five-gallon gas can in front of the window. He stood on it and boosted himself up over the sill. Tumbling onto the kitchen floor, he took a moment to accustom his eyes to the murk. He looked around. The hump-backed refrigerator grumbled a bass riff to accompany the sibilant whisper of highway traffic. The minute hand staggered to four minutes past two on the wall clock. The faucet dripped.

There was a plate of Oreo cookies on the table. The intruder stuffed a few in his mouth and shoved more in his jacket pockets. His fingers curled around the plastic handle of a serrated steak knife as he moved toward the living room, stepped on a discarded newspaper by the oil heater and left a muddy print.

Ahead of him were two doors, one partially open—he saw a clawfoot bathtub and pink towels hanging on a chrome rack. The other door was closed. He unzipped his pants. What he wanted was to take a crap, maybe even warm his feet in the tub if he had the chance. That’d take the chill off his bones and ease the pain in his worn-out joints.

He shuffled forward and then stopped, waiting for the echoing creak in the floor to wane. Taking one step across the bathroom threshold, he glanced toward the closed door to his right and paused. Then he hitched up his pants, turned around, opened the bedroom door and saw her.

She had fallen into a senseless dream, weakened by the endorphins paralyzing her muscles as she was pulled into slumber’s endless abyss. Her first waking sensation was the crushing weight falling on her chest as if some night-stalking bird of prey had swooped down from the ceiling and clutched her in its talons. The beast’s foul-smelling breath poisoned the air. With a startled chirp, she came to and stared straight into hell. He was on top of her, his matchhead eyes scorching holes through the gloom. A grimy hand slammed over her mouth before she had a chance to scream.

When she groped for the gun, his knee pinned her arm to the mattress. Delirious with panic, she couldn’t hear anything but the blood throbbing in her ears as he tussled with her, couldn’t think of anything but a mindless urge to escape.

This was a living nightmare—it couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening to her. She tried as hard as she could to wake herself and shake off the demonic dream, but the ugly face loomed over hers like a devil’s mask as she lunged and sank her teeth into his filthy flesh. When he drew back his wounded arm, she shrieked so hard her throat bled.

The rusty knife pricked her skin like a viper’s bite as he yanked the covers off and slashed at her cotton nightgown. His free hand smothered her face so she couldn’t scream, could barely breathe, trapped in a grotesque web of horror. The harbingers of terror which occupied the dangerous Babylon nights, the unnamed bumps, creaks and groans had not prepared her for the reality of a life and death struggle. Now she was caught—helpless, alone and too terrified to fight. And she knew there was no one to hear her cries, no one to save her. She was alone with the merciless monsters of the night.

Her breath exhausted, she dug an elbow into the musty material hanging over her eyes. For a moment, his hand lifted, and the suffocating pressure relented. She filled her lungs, gasping before she felt a bone-hard fist smash into her face, fracturing her nose and splitting her lip. He shook her while he cussed, smacking her with the heel of his hand until she twisted off the bed.

They slid to the floor where he straddled her. When she moved, he punched her. Dazed, she groaned and coughed up red spittle, which bubbled, on her chin. He hit her again. Her face was so bloody that his last jab skidded off her cheekbone. When she lay still, he shredded her panties, ripped away her sanitary pad and forced his flagging erection between her legs. She quivered while he pumped against her uselessly until her pubic hair rubbed a painful weal on his limp cock.

When he loosened his grip, she bucked hard enough to topple him sideways. Struggling blindly, all she felt was pain and hysteria wrapping her in an icy cocoon. But still she fought back, biting, scratching and kicking to get free.

Her fingernails raked his face. She bit a chunk of skin from his thumb. He tried to fend off her attack with another face punch, but she only fought him harder. Tiring of the scuffle, he found the knife and plunged it into the squirming mass beneath him. Again … again … again until the blade struck bone and broke off at the handle.

Panting from the exertion, he collapsed on her chest. He was soaked with blood as red and sticky as strawberry syrup. Beneath him, she had finally quit moving, gurgling like a clogged drain while he caught his breath and waited for his lust to return so he could fuck her. His thumb dripped blood from a fresh bite, and he ached where she had clawed and bruised him. Suddenly he lost his appetite to have her.

He got up, stumbled back to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, leaving a bloody paw print on the white enamel. He pulled out a carton of milk and chu-galugged his way to empty. There was a half-full, corked bottle of Sokol Blosser Pinot Gris on the top shelf, which he grabbed. As he felt his way around the room, he left crimson smudges on the wallpaper. His arms were numb. His cock had shriveled, and his guts were tumbling like a cement mixer. The fight had made him dizzy and sick to his stomach. He needed something in his belly to quell the nausea and vertigo.

Throwing open the cupboards, he grabbed a loaf of white bread and a jar of Skippy’s. He swabbed a glob of peanut butter on the bread and bit off a chunk. Then he lurched to the sink, ran some water over his butcher’s hands, finished off the Oreos and threw the wrapper on the floor, ripped open a package of lunch-meat and fumbled with the chain lock on the back door. When he wrenched it open, a slice of bologna slipped from his clutches and plopped to the floor.

At the bottom porch step, he relieved himself. The fizzing stream of piss puddled on the concrete before he zipped up his baggy trousers and stumbled off in the drizzle, hugging the wine bottle against his bloody shirt.

Left behind on the bedroom floor, Valerie Shargate’s senseless stare hardened as her heart pumped the last spurt of blood through the gaping tear in her aorta. With her arms stretched out at her sides, she lay like a slain martyr on the cross. A diadem of bloody pearls dripped down her cheeks and stained her Sears, Roebuck nightgown Revlon red. The discarded Kotex pad lay like a bandage at her feet.

All in all, her passing from the world was as unremarkable as her entrance twenty-four years before.

CHAPTER 2

Valerie Shargate’s bungalow was just off Highway 30 in the slipstream of the Babylon Bar. A muddy lane spread like chunky peanut butter from the Babylon’s tarmac parking lot to a gravel pit and still-water slough. Forty years before, the derelict docks across the road had been busy with barge traffic. Commerce bypassed the backwater now and so did almost everybody else but weekend boaters and fishermen. What had been a pristine watershed south ofSauvie Island was now a dead-end destination for orphaned log booms stuck fast to rotted pilings poking through the marl like a fossilized forest.

The nearby Guild’s Lake industrial area bred clusters of petroleum tanks sprouting like fungi in the mud flats. The Burlington Northern rail yards, shacks hawking tackle and bait, metal fab shops and heavy equipment lots blighted the delta in the rain shadow of the majestic Cascades. It was a hardscrabble zone inhabited by men with bushy sideburns and grimy coveralls scuffing their work boots in beer joints along the Columbia River to its stepchild the Willamette. Flannel-shirted sheet metal workers, laborers, railroad hands, haulers and sawyers looking to shoot some pool, drink a few beers and ogle a bare-breasted dancer bumping to jukebox rock filled the smoky bars after quitting time.

Across from the Union 76 storage tanks stacked like titanic steel checkers along the tracks, a bawdy bar with a neon sign advertising Live Girls & Live Action squatted in the spray from Highway 30. This was the Babylon Bar, a notorious juke joint between the World Wars.

Now the eponymous club hunched in a perennial puddle with its swaybacked roof, faded paint and swollen shingles among its seamy charms. The front door was papered with peeling 70’s rock posters, but its name and fame lived on as a vulgar designation for the region. Central Precinct cops called the depressed strip between the Kittridge Avenue Bridge and Linnton Babylon.

The main thoroughfare cutting through Babylon, slicing off equal portions of residential backwater and light industry, was Saint Helens Road which became Highway 30 as it followed the Columbia River north and west to the Pacific.

Valerie Shargate and her boyfriend Steven Witherspoon wanted to be near the lumber mills, which provided paychecks to high school dropouts like Steve with no marketable skills other than the labor of their muscles. Affording a place of their own meant settling beyond the trendy Pearl District with its row houses and coffee bars for the rivertine byways of Babylon where the air reeked of diesel fuel and creosote.

Shargate and Witherspoon rented their weather-beaten bungalow for four-hundred and fifty dollars a month. It was a real bargain considering they got a washer and dryer that worked and a promise of a front lawn when the bark dust and delta mud oozing from the ground like chocolate pudding dried out. Valerie and Steve weren’t too particular. They barely paid the rent since Steve had been laid off at the Linnton mill and Valerie quit her job as a hairdresser after she hurt her back in an auto accident. They were barely getting by. The hard times created more stress than the shaky relationship could weather, and Steve had moved out a couple months before Valerie’s murder.

Her body had been found by the Pacific Gas and Electric worker five hours after her heart stopped. In the light of day, the scarlet swathes on the door and porch were silent witness to the carnage inside which awaited the arriving officers. There were bloody signatures everywhere. A puddle of spilled milk in front of the refrigerator was as pink as raspberry Kool-Aid. In the bedroom where Valerie lay spread-eagled on the floor, her juices pooled around her. A red trickle ran down the slope of the linoleum and soaked the carpeting in the hallway. Her night-clothes had been ripped and slashed, and the first thing that caught the lawmen’s attention was a clear handprint on her breast where the killer had used her rib-cage for leverage as he plunged the blade deeper.

It was easy to see how the murderer had entered through the kitchen window using a gas can for a makeshift step. At the back door, the chain lock had been undone from the inside with more bloody fingerprints smudged on the casing and woodwork. It seemed he had slipped in, stabbed the victim and then rummaged through her refrigerator and cupboards before letting himself out the back door. A trail of bloodied loot marked his retreat.

The patrolmen took a good look at Valerie from the bedroom window, made certain the killer was long gone and then stood back, secured the area and called for backup. They never got the credit, but patrol units who handed over a pristine crime scene to the detectives were high on the list of Homicide’s Most Wanted.

When senior Detective Sergeant John Bowers and his partner Sergeant Minola Raye arrived, they did a slow walk-around trailed by the uniforms first at the scene along with the Criminal Identification Division techs. CID, the Bureau’s crime scene unit of criminalists, forensic technicians and specialists from the Investigative Branch, worked the murder scene and processed every possible source of evidence—tire impressions and foot prints with sole and tread patterns as distinctive as human genomes, fingerprints, blood and urine, hair and fibers, seeds and leaves, insect remains. A video of the entire house, inside and outside, was also shot before the homicide detectives entered. A helicopter provided an aerial overview, which would also be studied. There was so much blood evidence, it was difficult for John Bowers and Minnie Raye to traverse the kitchen and living room without making tracks of their own.

The lead detective’s primary concern in working a new crime scene was in keeping it intact. It was easy to restrict civilians from the cordoned area by posting officers to scribe all entrants and admit only those personnel actively assigned to the case. The Command Post set up outside the perimeter helped to maintain order and ensure that the investigation proceeded without unnecessary delay and confusion in clearing unauthorized people from the murder scene as well as coordinating CID, the Medical Examiner’s office, and Bureau detectives. The real problem was official interlopers—nosy cops, VIP’s and wannabe’s who showed up to assist and risked a major foul up with contamination of evidence, leaks to reporters and hindrance to the field officers conducting the investigation.

Over the years, John Bowers had devised a solution to head these do-gooding grandstanders off at the pass. He set up a second VIP Command Center and posted a couple uniforms to greet and deal with the crowd descending on a juicy crime scene: city pols, the Mayor, Chief of Police, prosecutors, county mounties, crime reporters and off-duty detectives wanting to get in on a ripe case. The list of busybodies was endless at times, but with the additional command post in place, the VIP’s and their ilk could boast about getting through the police lines and still be held at bay. Such savvy subterfuges kept the crime scene clean and seemed to satisfy the intruders’ need to get a hand in. One of a homicide detective’s most important skills was in people management—tough guy, bombastic bullshitters were strictly for movie scripts. But when John Bowers arrived at an active crime scene, there was no mistaking who was in control. Anybody without a reason to be there wasn’t. Including Hizzoner Himself and Bureau bigwigs who wanted to argue about it.

At one of his earliest murder scenes as lead detective, Bowers had to deal with an imperious supervisor who barged into the victim’s apartment, tramped through the blood trail, took a leak in the bathroom, washed up, left cigarette butts in the ashtrays, rifled the dresser drawers, dropped a book of matches on the floor and lifted a souvenir bottle of tequila. Then he announced that he was calling in the FBI and Special Forces Unit because the gruesome scene was obviously a cult murder. He held an impromptu press conference at the scene and relished the attention lavished on him from the herd of reporters eating up every gory tidbit he laid out in specific detail. Turned out it was a natural mode—victim died from a massive esophageal hemorrhage and bled to death in her sleep. The mundane autopsy report thus accounted for the misleading picture of sacrificial mayhem and massive blood loss at the scene. If it had been a homicide, Supervisor X would have single-handedly buggered the crime scene and crippled the prosecution’s case.

Once the film crew had completed their initial work, Bowers, his partner Minnie Raye and the Medical Examiner walked through the house on the heels of the senior CID criminalist who had platted a safe course through the carnage. CID numbered markers were set at the pools of piss, blood splatters on the porch and the food items left on the floor. They found Valerie’s purse intact on her dresser just where she had left it. Other than the disarray in the kitchen and the body in the bedroom, the bungalow seemed undisturbed. There was no evidence of a struggle outside the bedroom.

Only a few gawkers who assembled in the muddy lane wondered at the misfortune visited here. Valerie seemed to have no friends to notice her passing, no witnesses to her tragedy, no testimonials to her terror. The only link to the victim was Valerie’s boyfriend Steve Witherspoon, and the police had tracked him to the mill in Saint Helens before the ME had left the murder scene.

Valerie’s killer had left enough prints at the bungalow to be speedily identified by AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identity System. Odds were good they’d score a hit with someone in the database for alcohol or mental health treatment with a history of psychotic episodes. This was not a planned killing, the work of an experienced sociopath. This was chaos, complete disorganization—a real nut case, serious retard or somebody so strung out they didn’t know which way was up. FBI profilers said such a disorganized killing would likely be committed by someone linked to the neighborhood, a white male with a long history of mental disturbance, in his twenties or early thirties with recent personality deterioration. A slovenly, incoherent, erratic loner. In Babylon that description could fit any of the street drifters and psychos wandering the streets since the goodworks gurus had closed down the asylums and cut back funding for the outpatient mental health clinics.

Investigators were checking with the gas and electric companies as well as the owner of the house to compile a list of former tenants. It seemed a good bet that the killer knew his way around Babylon. The break-in and murder may have been the spontaneous act of a demented sociopath passing through, but profiles and case histories pointed to these killers being in close proximity to their victims. Neighbors all needed to be checked out.

Ngo Diem Nuyen, a second-generation Vietnamese CID officer, shouldered a HandyCam video camera and steadied the focus adjustment on a bloody handprint smeared across the bedroom door. Gonna wrap up here, Sarge, he greeted Bowers as he continued filming. See anything we missed?

Look in the bushes behind the fence in case somebody took off thataway?

No fresh prints or tracks. Nothing but a dead possum. Definitely looks like homicide, Sarge. He had an ear missing—dead about a week, I’d say.

We’ll let an academy rookie catch that one.

I figured, he smirked.

You get that window area outside? I don’t want to miss anything around the point of entry—the window, the gas can, the porch.

Nuyen nodded while backing up slowly. His expression telegraphed You gotta ask?

Anything else we might have missed?

I got some good film of the footprints and smudges at the point of entry and the porch. Fred’s got casts poured already. Boot prints and tire tracks. Tread seems to match the Camaro, the vic’s car. There’s some paint chips knocked off the sill. Got the piss, too. And see those splats? He indicated the kitchen floor, which was blotched with bright red patterns marking the killer’s route from the bedroom to the back door. Sucker was bleeding all the way. Trail leads from the vic all the way out to the highway.

Hope she bit his dick off.

They had already alerted area ER’s for patients presenting with fresh bite or scratch wounds.

Bowers glanced toward the open refrigerator. Looks like this guy doesn’t go for healthy snacks. Passed up some cranberry juice cocktail and diet Pepsi. The bottles were smeared with the killer’s bloody paw prints. Crimson juice dripped onto the racks below and stained a head of lettuce caught in the dribble stream.

Deacon’s worst nightmare—a perp with bad nutrition. Nuyen laughed. It was well known that Dr. Wyndham Clivon the Multnomah County Medical Examiner, known as Deacon, was a health food faddist, an organic farmer and horticulturist who disdained most prepared concoctions which fueled his lesser cohorts with sludge-stocked arteries and doughy guts.

Bowers stuck his head in the bedroom doorway as the medical examiner finished his preliminary examination of the victim and was rolling on a second set of gloves. Hey, Deacon, any surprises?

We have everything but the actor in person, John. Left us his blood, urine, boot prints, fingerprints, skin, weapon and part of his shirt. You guys didn’t come up with his drivers’ license, did you?

Not yet.

For a moment, both men looked down at Valerie lying on the floor in a puddle of congealing blood. Her eyes were open, and both hands were frozen in a spastic clench. Imbedded in one bloody fist a piece of flannel stuck out like a price tag. Both cheeks were swollen, and her lips looked like raw liver. Her nightgown was ripped down the middle. The exposed torso was smeared in blood. She smelled like sour dishrags soaking in rusty water—Bowers’ best description of fresh, bloody bodies. Lividity stained a tide line on her pale skin that gave her a two-toned finish.

I’ll take fabric, blood swatches and vag swabs before she’s moved. I want to double bag her to make sure we get everything. The ME was concerned about contamination or degradation of trace evidence on the victim. Anything else you want to look at, John, before we move her?

All this blood belong to the victim? The entire bedroom floor was swabbed in red. The killer’s tracks led from the body to the kitchen and onto the back porch.

Looks like he lay on top of her while she bled out, Deacon explained. Most of this blood comes from the brachial artery.

From the doorway, Reggie Hampton spoke up—he was the resident serology expert with CID. Perp was bleeding when he left the body, he confirmed, pointing behind him. He walked into the kitchen, stood at the sink—washed up it looks like—and then stood in front of the fridge. Trail goes on to the back porch, down the steps and out onto the road. Upper body wound—hand or arm sounds like a good bet. From the knife edge probably or the vic’s teeth. No drag marks. He did her in here, left her here and didn’t come back after he went out to the kitchen.

Thanks, Reg. You thinking only one actor?

So far, I see only one trail, one set of prints inside and out. Pretty hard to move around anywhere inside and not leave a trail in this blood. Right.

He held up a forefinger. One actor with a bleeding wound and a full belly.

Bowers turned back to the ME. Looks like she was caught in bed sound asleep. Sure as hell doesn’t look like anybody was tearing up the joint.

Everything’s pretty clean. Only disturbance seems to be in the kitchen.

Vampire. Vampire referred to a California serial killer who believed he was Dracula and actually drank the blood of his victims. Those murders were random attacks on strangers whose only connection with the killer was that they happened to be in the path of his dementia.

"At least you’ve got a weapon in situ." Deacon nodded at the steel blade wedged in Valerie’s ribcage.

Looks like one of those jobs you order from the late night TV promos—cuts frozen beef shanks like going through butter. Ginsu special—operators are standing by.

The shaft fractured clean at the base. Wish they’d all be this obliging.

You don’t think he did the nasty?

Her period might have turned his damper down.

Didn’t get scared off, that’s for sure. Looks like the guy hung around and fixed himself a little late night snack for crissakes. First case where the perp cleans out the vic’s fridge.

Crime is definitely not a lo-cal occupation, Sergeant. Ever notice most violent offenders are big eaters?

That little forensic gem slipped right by me, Doc. Maybe we need a new field on the VICAP. That was the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a data report filed on homicides to match up crime MO’s with those from other jurisdictions. This forensic tool sprang from the frustrations of homicide cops who figured that if law enforcement could share in a pool of common characteristics left by killers at crime scenes from all over the country, the net could be cast nationwide in tracking serial killers.

The pathologist winked. Maybe you ought to think about setting out Twinkie traps.

That sounds like a helluva idea.

They both took a final look around. Valerie’s blood was splattered on the floor, on the walls, on the mattress and box springs and on the plastic lampshade resting beside her punctured body. There were bloody footprints tramped everywhere, bloody handprints on the doors, refrigerator and rivulets of blood running into the sink. A bloody boot print was stamped on