Cold Hit

Chapter 16

An hour later I finished my profile on the unsub and flagged Judd Underwood over. He veered toward me.

"All done?" he asked pleasantly.

"Yes, sir." I handed four pages of profile material to him.

"Good. Follow me."

He headed out the door, into the lobby. I didn't know what the hell he was up to, but I tagged obediently after him. He was waiting for me outside the bathroom door.

"Come on, I want to show you something," he said.

I followed him into the men's room, wondering what the hell was going on. Then he dropped my four-page report into the urinal, unzipped his pants, took out his pencil dick, and started pissing on it. His yellow stream splattered loudly on the paper. When he was done he zipped up and turned to face me.

"That's what I think of your ideas," he said, his voice pinched and shrill. "On this task force there will be only one profile and one profiler. I'm it. Get the murder book and come into my office."

I wanted to deck him, but seventeen years in the department has taught me that the best way to survive assholes is to wait them out. So I choked down my anger and followed Agent Underwood out of the bathroom and across the squad room, stopping to retrieve the murder book on the way.

Underwood's office was very large, but had no walls. He had instructed someone from maintenance to chalk out the perimeters on the gray linoleum floor. I was surprised to see that he swerved to avoid walking through the nonexistent south wall and entered through the chalked out opening that served as his door.

I stopped at the line on the floor and looked in at him.

Did he really expect me to walk around and not step over it? I paused for a moment to deal with this ridiculous dilemma. I was already in pretty deep with this guy, so I skirted the problem by finding my way into his office through the marked-out door.

Welcome to The Twilight Zone.

I waited while he sat behind a large, dark wood desk that he'd scrounged from somewhere. It was the only mahogany desk I'd ever seen at Parker Center and I had no idea where it had come from. He also had an expensive looking, oxblood-red executive swivel chair, and some maple filing cabinets. All that was missing was an American flag, the grip-and-grin pictures, and a wall to hang them on. His cell phone sat on a charging dock in front of him. Several folders decorated one corner of his blotter. The five Fingertip case reports were stacked front and center, the edges all compulsively aligned. Taking the invisible office and all this anal organization into account, it seemed Judd Underwood had a few psychological tics of his own. But who am I to judge? I only had two semesters of junior college psych where I didn't exactly bust the curve.

"Where did you get all that hopeless nonsense?" he sneered.

I smiled at him through dry teeth. "Since I got this case, I've been studying up on serial crime. I've read all of John Douglas's books on serial homicide, Robert Ressler's too, Ann Burgess and Robert Keppel "

"Okay, okay, I get it. But it's one thing to read a book, it's another to actually go out and catch one of these sociopaths. Since you obviously like reading about it, I suggest you pick up my book Motor City Monster. It's on Amazon dot com. Been called the definitive work in the field. In fact, let's make that an order. You need to get some facts straight. Have it read by Monday morning."

"Yes, sir."

He tapped a spot on his desk. "Put the murder book there." I set it down while Agent Underwood settled into his executive swivel and picked up a folder. It was my two-week report. Every homicide detective routinely files a TWR with his or her supervisor. It details the workings of all active investigations. Underwood ran a freckled hand through his orange bristle, then opened the folder, licked his index finger, and slowly started to page through it, leaning forward occasionally to frown.

Once, about two years ago, I was working a fugitive warrant that took me to Yellowstone Park. It was rattlesnake season and I hate snakes. I was paired up with a park ranger who told me that when dealing with poisonous reptiles, the way to keep from getting bitten was to give them something more interesting than you to think about. It was time to put that strategy to use.

Underwood looked up from my TWR. "I hope you and your partner are getting in some nice days at the beach, because, if not, this whole last two weeks has been a total waste of time."

I launched into action. "Agent Underwood, I have a plan to draw your unsub out." Notice the clever possessive pronoun.

Disinterested gray eyes, magnified and skeptical, studied me behind those thick wire-rimmed lenses. Undisguised contempt.

"Really?" he finally said, stretching it way out so it sounded more like a wail than a word.

"Yes. I think we should throw a funeral for one of these John Does."

Underwood steepled his fingers under his chin and scowled at me. Then he heaved a giant sigh that seemed to say that dealing with morons was just one of the ugly realities of command.

When he next spoke, he enunciated his words very carefully so that even a fool like me wouldn't get confused.

"It probably hasn't occurred to you, but since the advent of DNA, we no longer hold unidentified bodies at the morgue. All of those previous John Does have been buried. Since you've been so busy misprofiling this unsub, it may have escaped your notice, but Mister Collins has requested that his son be immediately flown back to Seattle, leaving no corpses for your little scam." Then he tipped back in his swivel and regarded me smugly.

"John Doe Number Four is still available," I answered. "He's the one we found at Forest Lawn Drive seven days ago. I checked with the coroner and he's still on ice. We give him a phony name, publicize the hell out of the funeral, get some retired cops to be his mom and dad and see who stumbles in."

I could see he instantly liked it. It had flair. It was the kind of thing Jodie Foster might have come up with in Silence of the Lambs. But this only registered as a glint in his stone-gray eyes. His face never even twitched and you had to be trained at reading assholes to spot it.

"Our budget is limited," he equivocated.

"I can get Forest Lawn to work with us. I know a woman down there who's a funeral director. What if I could set it up for under three thousand? I'll get him embalmed on the cheap so we can have an open casket. We'll put on a full media blitz. I'm pretty sure I can rig it in a day or so."

He sat there running this over in his pea brain. It's a well-known fact that some killers have an overpowering urge to attend the funerals of their victims. Judd Underwood should have suggested it himself instead of filling our briefing with psychobabble and lunar charts. But that's a complaint better left to the book and movie guys milling in the squad room beyond the invisible walls of his office.

"You get it set up for under three grand and I'll get Deputy Chief Ramsey to approve it."

I didn't believe that Forrest was part of the Fingertip case, so why stage an elaborate funeral to see who shows up? Well, I had a devious plan building in the back of my head that might solve all of my problems with one brilliantly deceptive move.

I started to leave, stupidly moving to my right before I remembered and skidded to a halt. I had almost walked through the south wall again.

"Sorry," I muttered. "I keep forgetting that wall is there."

"I'm not a complete moron," Underwood said. "The reason that line is chalked out is so the contractors who are coming in this evening will know where to hang the partitions."

"Thank God for that," I muttered.

"I don't like your attitude, Detective."

"Don't feel bad. Nobody does. I'm not even sure I like it most of the time."

Then I stepped over the chalk line into the squad room where I used my cell phone to call my friend Bryna Spiros at Forest Lawn. Once I had her on the line, I explained what I needed. She cut me a great deal. Twenty-five hundred for everything, flowers, all park personnel and security services, even a priest to say a few words. I told her I'd have Rico From Pico get in touch to make arrangements for the body to be sent over for embalming. She said she'd loan me a casket at no charge because it was scheduled to be burned in a cremation later in the week.

With all this in the works, I decided to head up to Special Crimes to talk to Cal. On my way out two of my new task force brothers were shooting the bull by the elevators.

"Judd Underwood is legendary," one of them said.

I let the open elevator go and started stalling, fiddling with the buttons. I wanted to hear this.

"Over at the Eye, they call him Agent Orange because he defoliates careers. If something goes wrong, he'll pin it on the guys working with him."

A second elevator opened and Deputy Chief Michael Ramsey hurried out. He was tall, milk-white, and looked like a forties matinee idol, complete with the oiled black hair and pencil-thin moustache.

He turned and faced me. "You're Scully."

I reached out and stopped the elevator door from closing.

"Yes, sir."

"I'm looking for you to put this Fingertip deal down fast. Can you make that happen for me?"

"Gonna try."

"That's the ticket," he said with false enthusiasm. "We got a storm blowing in on this one. You wait 'til it's raining to pitch a tent, everybody gets wet." Sounding like a scout leader giving out instructions before a jamboree.

We stood there looking at each other. Me in the elevator, him in the hall. No connection. Nothing. We'd actually run out of small talk in less than ten seconds. So to end it, I slid my hand off the door and the elevator closed, cutting him from view.