Carved in Blood (Evan Lane Mystery Book 1) Read online

  Carved in Blood

  E.R. Fallon

  © E.R. Fallon 2016

  E.R. Fallon has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.

  For Scarlett

  Table of 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 1

  Sixteen years ago, my best friend and neighbor, Ben, was murdered by my mother. I was seventeen. She killed other boys in and around our small town, too. Some of them were boys I knew.

  She was imprisoned. Alice Lane. My mother. Better known to you as the ‘Lovely Butcher.’ My mother, a beautiful woman with dark hair and light eyes, who had worked as a mathematics teacher at our local high school, confessed to Ben’s murder and to those of the others. Mack, the detective who arrested her in our hometown, Freedom Village, became a mentor of sorts to me, but he and I hadn’t spoken in a long time.

  Alice’s case was famous, partly because she came from a prominent family in the region, and because of the lurid nature of her crimes and her physical beauty. Fifteen years ago you couldn’t turn on the television or open a newspaper and not hear or read about her. Ever since then, I’ve had an interest in murders.

  I was an only child, and I didn’t remember my father, but I’d seen pictures and videos of him, so after my mother was imprisoned, it was just me. I hadn’t known how I’d survive. But I had. And I always would. At eighteen, I fled our town for the Navy. After that, I moved to the city to further disappear from my past. I did well on my own.

  My name is Evan Lane, and I used to be called Evelyn Lane, but I always was Evan.

  I didn’t visit my mother, the killer, in prison, and I’d stopped writing to her when I changed my legal name to reflect my gender identity. Her prison wasn’t close to where I lived but I also didn’t visit her because I would have felt funny seeing her because of my job as the crime scene clean-up supervisor for the city of Seven Sisters.

  I was paid by Seven Sisters to supervise the city’s very first official crime scene clean-up crew, where we mostly dealt with murders committed under ordinary—and sometimes strange—circumstances. I didn’t get into my line of work because I was fascinated by grisly crimes, because of what my mother did. Part of my ambition was to make good, because my mother couldn’t do that herself. But really what I enjoyed most was the act of getting rid of the bad things, of cleansing homes and businesses, and other places, of all that despair, and bringing in good, clean hope.

  My girlfriend, Sammie Bai, was the reason the city decided to pay for someone to clean up the aftermath of its constant stream of crimes, which increased as the weather got hotter and more people walked its gritty streets.

  Sammie had retired early as a narcotics detective and ran a non-profit organization for the families of crime victims. She’d retired because she had difficulty hearing in her right ear after being present when a meth house exploded during a raid.

  Her younger sister was murdered by a home intruder while Sammie was away at college, and afterward Sammie decided she wanted to help the often overlooked victims of violent crime—the murder victim’s family members, and those who owned the businesses or residences where the murders occurred or where a body was disposed of. Sammie didn’t like that often it was up to the victim’s family members, who sometimes also owned the places affected by the death, to have to arrange and pay for the cleanup. So, she petitioned for change and accomplished it. In the process the city ended up paying for the tidying up of any place affected by a messy crime.

  They paid for the cleaning after the body’s or bodies removal to the morgue. And because of that I met the love of my life, thank God. At the time, I was working for the city’s medical examiner’s office as a technician. It was a job I wasn’t very good at, apparently, since the ME suggested I apply for a positon with Seven Sister’s new clean-up crew, where she implied I’d be a better fit. I never was diagnosed with OCD, I think, but I was obsessed with getting places spotless. And the ME? It turns out she was right. After a couple years with the clean-up crew, I was promoted to supervisor.

  Something was troubling me. I hadn’t discussed it with Sammie but it kept me up well into the night. Several young men had been murdered in the Seven Sisters area in the past two months. The other day we’d done a clean-up near the high school, where a boy’s body was discovered in an empty, weedy lot behind the school’s main building. The young man wasn’t a student, and the case had received merely a small mention in the media because the victims were nameless street hustlers and addicts. In comparison, Alice had murdered average boys in our town.

  I was chatty with a few cops in the city but they hadn’t revealed a lot of details about the deaths. I did know first-hand that the crime scenes had been pretty neat. Sammie was friends with a few of the homicide detectives but she hadn’t talked about the case to me. We sometimes chatted about work in bed late at night. But I could tell the murders had been on Sammie’s mind like they’d been on mine, and I wondered whether she thought like I did: My mother couldn’t be abducting and killing the boys from deep inside her cell, so, then, who was?

  Sammie had already left for work when my phone rang. Paige, our elderly dachshund mix, waddled up to me for her morning belly rub. Sammie had fed the dog before she left. We didn’t get to kiss each other goodbye that morning because I wasn’t out of bed when she left. Sammie liked to rise early. Sometimes she nudged me to wake up and kiss. That time, she didn’t. And I wondered what that meant.

  I saw the call was important and set down my coffee cup to answer the phone. I was in my pajamas, it was early in the morning, and we already had to cope with a scene. I spoke to Chief Gilani on the other end and he explained the general scenario. I rarely got to hear the top secret details but I received the basics: a body had been found in an apartment in one of the city’s new luxury buildings. The fact that it was an upscale building wasn’t surprising—gentrification had become a trend in the city. What was odd was the fact that Gilani had said the manager stated the apartment was vacant, with the rent being paid by someone who didn’t reside in the country.

  “Be discreet at the scene,” Gilani said. “The manager gave us a lot of shit about this and us making his building look bad. He’s a real piece of work. I said, listen pal, things could be worse, at least you aren’t the dead guy. Anyways, he wants you in and out of there fast.”

  “He’s lucky he doesn’t have to pay for anything.” I gave a dry chuckle.

  “I know, right? The city’s footing his bill. The lucky bastard.”

  Gilani gave me the address, which I entered into my phone. Then I pushed him a little because I knew I could. “Was the body male?” I asked. By the time my crew arrived, the bodies were removed from the scenes. “A street kid?”

  Chief Gilani’s silence told me yes and yes. “Are you notifying the homeless youth in the area?” I asked.

  “We’ve told our foot patrol units to spread the word,” he said. “But you know how those kids never stay in one area for long so it’s difficult to reach them all.”

  “Not surprising when your guys are always busting them for loitering,” I said sarcastically. “It’s odd to find them—the bodies—thi
s fast, isn’t it? It’s been a little easy.”

  “Maybe she wants them to be found,” he said.

  My throat burned but I hadn’t sipped the coffee in a while. “She?”

  “Or he. But my hunch is our perp’s a lady.”

  “You have leads?” Chief Gilani often told me things if I pushed him hard enough, and for long enough.

  He sighed on the other end. “The CCTV cameras near the scenes didn’t capture anything relevant. But we found a note on the body at the apartment when we arrived on scene yesterday. The coroner took the body away earlier this morning. The media doesn’t know about the note so it goes unsaid that this information is between us.”

  Sammie and I hadn’t watched the news the night before, and I wondered if the media had given the kid’s death more than a few seconds’ mention. No one missed those boys. Hell, most of their families hadn’t bothered to file a missing person’s report. So why should the general public have given a damn? “You got it,” I said. “Where was the note?”

  When the chief said, “On him,” I gulped. “Carved into the body, right across the guy’s torso. Rancid stuff.” I heard shivering in Gilani’s voice.

  I was silent for a few moments. “A message for who? For you guys, for the cops?”

  “Nah, for someone named Evelyn.”

  Evelyn. That was my birth name. It felt like my heart would leap out of my chest and I started to rise from the chair but my unsteady legs couldn’t hold me for long and I sat down again. I rested my arms on the table and pushed the coffee away from me, for how could I drink that when I couldn’t breathe? “Are . . . are you going to try to find them?”

  “This Evelyn person?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sure, if we can, to see what’s the connection to our killer.”

  “You don’t think they—Evelyn—could be responsible for the deaths?”

  He refrained from answering. “The handwriting on the dead guy was small, feminine looking, that’s why I said that thing about our perp being a woman. Wipes the blood off the letters after she’s done, like she takes pride in her art. She strangles them.”

  “Must be a strong woman. How? She uses her bare hands?”

  “No. Some kind of cord, like an electrical cord. Easy to get at a hardware store. And we didn’t find any prints. Not yet anyway. The lab’s running additional tests for us.”

  “Maybe she’s an electrician.”

  “An electrician? Anything’s possible.” Gilani laughed at the dark humor only years of police work could make someone appreciate.

  But I breathed out in relief, because my mother had used her bare hands. Mack had said that conveyed an active, intimate rage on her part. Despite my mother being incarcerated, a part of me was worried. They’d never found my mother’s prints, or fibers and hairs belonging to her, at the crime scenes or on her victims.

  Ben’s body had been discovered in the woods where kids went to drink or smoke pot behind the high school gym, and where we’d frequented together. Several people in the town had said they’d seen me near the woods on that day. I was interviewed by Mack early on in the investigation but never considered a suspect. But I knew I hadn’t been in the woods with Ben.

  In fact, they’d never found any forensic evidence tying my mother to the crimes. She’d been convicted based on a very detailed confession. Alice had known features of the crimes that only the killer would have known, like that on the day Ben was murdered, he’d been wearing a bronze ring with his initials that his father had given him. The ring was never recovered by the police, and my mother claimed she’d disposed of it in the river, which was dredged by the law but the object never recovered.

  “What did the message say?” I asked. “You mentioned who it was addressed to but not what was written.”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Come on, I’m curious. I’m going to have to clean up the damn mess. I should at least know a little about the person who created it.” I risked annoying him.

  When I’d almost given up, the chief said, “The scene’s fairly neat. Minimal blood.”

  “He cleaned up after?”

  “No, it doesn’t seem that way. It looks like it was just a dumping ground.”

  “Like the last few times. Any leads on where he’s killing them? And his reasons for moving them to these places?”

  “Not yet. She’s tricky to pin down. No one here gets the motives, not yet anyways.”

  “You’re so sure it’s a woman. So, you do think he’s—she’s—a serial?”

  “Another body—looks that way, probably, yeah. But, really, it’s hard to pin down. The vics are being strangled and mutilated with the writing, but the dumping pattern is erratic. The media isn’t paying attention, so, publicly, no one’s connected the dots. Gives us some privacy to work on it.”

  I made another attempt. “What did the writing say?”

  Gilani sighed. “Miss me, Evelyn?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what it said: Miss me, Evelyn?”

  A cold sweat broke out over my skin and I trembled. I dropped the phone to the floor and then quickly picked it up.

  “What the hell just happened?” Gilani asked.

  “Nothing. I dropped my phone.”

  “Evelyn. Kind of sounds like your name.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I was kidding, buddy.”

  “Oh,” I said, and pretended to laugh.

  “Anyway, that’s what the message said. Same as the first.”

  “You’re saying the first body had the same thing?”

  “Yep. She’s leaving the bodies so that they’re found. She’s proud of what she’s doing. She’s mocking us. Must be a real sick bitch.”

  My mother had been more discreet. I admired Gilani’s ability to keep his cool when confronting injustice. A vulnerable sense of guilt over what my mother had done inundated me every time he said she. “The first body had those exact words?” I asked for the sake of saying something.

  “Yeah, Evan.”

  I breathed out and didn’t speak for a couple seconds. “Are the crimes sexually motivated?” I didn’t believe my mother’s were.

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “A female serial killer’s crimes almost never are.”

  “That’s true. Sounds like you’ve done some research. Is this a topic that interests you?”

  “Because of my work,” I said quickly.

  I waited for Chief Gilani to ask me more but he accepted my answer. “Listen, I got to go. Good luck with the clean-up. Tell the other guys I said hi. And remember to shut up about all this. Media’s not really reporting on the cases anyway. It’s just another dead junkie to them, you know?”

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” I said.

  I didn’t tell him goodbye, and I dumped the remainder of my coffee, which now looked greasy and cold, into the sink. Sammie was the only person who knew the name I’d been assigned at birth, and I trusted her more than anyone in the world.

  I texted my crew with the news that we had another job on our hands, and I got dressed. It was autumn, and chilly enough to need a jacket, so I put one on and left the house after giving Paige a goodbye pat.

  I used to have my crew drive to a scene, but lately I’d been picking them up in the work van and taking them there myself. Not out of the kindness of my heart exactly, but because parking was limited in the city, and the last thing I wanted to worry about was where everyone would park once they arrived at the scene. A police escort and special privileges would have been appreciated at the time but hadn’t seemed likely.

  I hadn’t showered. I did that when I returned home because even with wearing protective suits, sometimes a clean-up got messy.

  The van we used for the jobs was parked in a municipal garage a few streets down from where Sammie and I shared our small apartment. I exchanged pleasantries with the guy who ran the garage’s front booth and found the van at th
e back of the dim, cold space. Josh, my right-hand man, who had been with my crew the longest, had parked it there the other day after our last gig. The van was already loaded with our gear. Unfortunately, the number of engagements we had every week conveyed to me how unsafe the city I lived in was.

  We weren’t one of the most popular employees to the city, but the public liked us and that was enough for me to wake up with a smile on my face most days. Hell, some days you had to force yourself to smile when you had a job like that. When you had to see the horrors we saw.

  I hadn’t eaten, and after the details Chief Gilani gave me about the message, I hadn’t felt like eating anything. Because it was early and Josh and Em both had kids living with them who needed their help getting ready in the morning, they often didn’t have time to eat before meeting me at that hour. I swung by the donut shop and picked up a plain donut for myself just in case I felt like eating later, hot breakfast sandwiches for the crew, and three large coffees.

  My hands weren’t shaking as the smiling young woman at the drive-thru window passed me the warm bag of food and the coffees in a tray, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t alarmed by what had been carved into the victims’ flesh. In my line of work it didn’t pay to be fearful, so over the years, I’d built up a great wall of strength around me. I secured the coffees in the cup holders, tossed the bag of sandwiches on the passenger floor and the cardboard tray in the backseat, and paid the girl.

  I headed out of the parking lot in time to encounter the morning commuters in the city’s main thoroughfare and made my way toward Em’s neighborhood. In the evenings Seven Sister’s population thinned out considerably, when the workforce fled home to suburbia. Once people got to be a certain age they left the city for the leafy suburbs, except for a few die-hards, like Sammie and me. And Josh.

  Em was only in her mid-twenties and still meshed with the city’s vibrant, youthful scene. She lived in an industrial part of town, where old warehouses had been turned into artists’ lofts. Em was a DJ who moonlighted with me because she needed the cash to raise her kid on her own. She reminded me often that she was working for me because she had to, but I liked to think the work would grow on her over time and she’d come to enjoy it, even if only a little. Em was a talented person from what I heard when I saw her perform at a nightclub once. She’d invited Sammie and me, and I’d told Em that she was so talented I, too, wished she would no longer be working for me someday, that she’d go on to better places.