Posted by Derby on June 29, 2000 at 23:02:56:
OPERATION NEW PROMETHEUS
Part 2
If you've got to kill somebody, Gina decided, it was best to do it while you were off duty. Saves paperwork. The two-hour interrogation by the Tacoma police was boring and tedious, but it was nothing next to the forms and reports she'd had to do after shooting Ainsworth. The local cops weren't hostile, in fact they were downright friendly. When a fellow officer kills somebody, the police usually assume she has good reason for it. The fact that the maid had been armed, and that Gina had not been, simply confirmed this preconception in their minds, and it weighed further in her favor that Gina had answered their questions without asking for a lawyer. So by noon the police had released her, telling her not to leave town, and had proceeded to write up the dead maid as a druggie, killed in self-defense in the course of an armed robbery to finance her habit.
Gina had missed her morning appointment, but she was still scheduled to meet Anne Kaufman, one of Ainsworth's co-workers, at 1:30 pm at Weinmuller Park. So at 1:26 Gina found a parking space at the park and stepped out of her Olds. She was wearing white pumps, a white beret, and an unadorned sleeveless button-up white dress cut just above her knees, emphasizing the rich, dark hue of her skin. She wore no jewelry.
The purse hung on Gina's shoulder was open. She squeezed the handgrip of the Glock in its sewn-in holster, and mimed drawing and aiming it three times. Gina didn't like handguns; she was at home with rifles. Pistols and revolvers were messy, imprecise, and less reliable. But a woman couldn't walk around with a rifle all the time, and the Glock was as good a pistol as any: accurate as pistols go, light in the hand and it packed plenty of punch. It was boxy-looking and ugly too, but you couldn't have everything.
Anne Kaufman was sitting alone at a picnic table, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. Anne was pretty, mid-20s, vaguely resembling a younger Goldie Hawn, but with hollower cheeks and hair more ash blond than golden. She sported heavy blue eyeshadow, jeans, sneakers, and a University of Washington T-shirt. The remains of a Chinese meal littered a paper plate in front of her.
"Hi, Anne, I'm Gina Jefferson," said Gina, settling down on the park bench.
"Good to meet you." A thick, husky voice, surprising coming from that thin frame. It sounded almost as if Anne had recently been crying, but there was no telltale redness or smudged makeup around her nose or eyes.
"What I'm gonna do is ask you some questions about Victor Ainsworth," said Gina, taking a notepad and pen from her purse. "You're not under suspicion of anything, and nobody's going to be arrested. I'm just gathering some info for a police study of . . . of why people do things like what Victor did." Gina wasn't just stretching the truth, she was tying it in knots, but she had never been burdened by compulsive truthfulness.
"OK." Anne sipped her coffee.
"How long did you work with Victor?"
"Two, three months. Closer to two."
"And just to refresh my memory, your company is called . . ."
"American Digital Enterprises."
Gina scribbled on her pad. "Did Victor seem to have been under any abnormal pressure?"
"No."
"No major deadlines, no salary cuts?"
"Shit, no. They just hiked our pay six percent, and I hear he got more than that. All the time I was working with him, we were just beta testing an upgrade. It's about as stressful as . . . as walking an old dog. Boring. Vic could have done it in his sleep; he was good."
Scribble. "No overtime, no pressure on this upgrade?"
"Overtime, hell! Four hours a day was all we needed to stay on schedule. Often as not I spent half the day surfing." Anne dragged on her cigarette, puffed a cloud of smoke that the wind blew over into Gina's face. Gina avoided gagging with an effort.
"Did you notice any changes in his behavior during the time you worked with him?"
"No. He wasn't all that sociable, thank God. Most of the software techs just want to cop a feel every time they see me." Anne dragged and puffed again. "He was just kind of distant friendly, liked to crack jokes. Brought in donuts every two or three weeks. Not a bad guy really. I mean, not ‘til . . ." She stopped, sipped her coffee as if to clean the last two sentences out of her mouth.
This lady sure says ‘no' a lot, Gina thought. She decided to phrase her questions slightly differently. "Friendly but reserved? Does that describe him for all the time you worked with him?"
"Yeah, more or less. I'm sorry, but I really didn't see any signs he was going to do something crazy."
"Joking and humorous? As much when you started working with him as when he disappeared?"
"Yeah. Internet type jokes, you know. He told one the last day he showed up."
This kept sounding more wrong to Gina. Humor, she thought, is a pressure release valve. People who keep a sense of it rarely crack. "He take his work home with him?"
"I don't know. Anybody can dial up the office network from home, so he could have. But with that easy a project, why would he want to?"
Scribble. "And you were beta testing this, this upgrade the whole time you worked with Victor?"
"Yeah. The whole time." Drag. Puff.
"What was he working on before that?"
"Oh. Alpha-coding VSA. Stands for Virtual SysAdmin. Big vertical app."
Scribble. "Did he have any bad performance reviews, negative evaluations on that?"
"No way. Everybody says Vic did a bang-up job on VSA. It's going to be one of American Digital's big money makers. That's why he got the king-size raise, so I hear. Him and most of the others who worked on it."
Scribble. "He ever express any worries about how VSA would perform?"
"No. Never talked to me about it at all. That was all before I worked with him, remember." Sip.
"Right. Did Vic seem to have a happy family life?"
"Well, like I said, he didn't talk much, but when he did he'd say he'd taken his family on vacation somewhere, or how one of his girls had lettered in tennis or band. Had pictures of his wife and girls on his desk. Sexy daughters, there must've been teenage boys circling the house like dogs smelling a bitch in heat." Drag. Puff. "And I told you he never copped a feel on me, so I say he must've been getting laid."
Scribble. "How old were the kids?"
"He said the younger one just turned eighteen right after I started working with him."
"Suzette?"
"I don't remember their names." Sip.
"Who else worked with him on this previous project, this VSA?"
"Shit, there must've been twenty people working on it with him. Lead programmer was Debbie Bernhardt."
Scribble. "What's her extension?"
"Doesn't have one. Doesn't work for American Digital anymore."
"Oh. Who else worked on the project?"
"Mark Bannon was lead software engineer. I guess Mary Ellen Nespory was on it, too. Joe McCloud, Pam Shields. Um..."
Scribble. "Can you give me their extensions?"
"They don't work here any more either."
"I don't get this. You say the project went well and the company figures on making a pile of money off this application? So why fire five people who worked on it?"
Drag. Puff. "They weren't fired. They quit. Just about everybody who worked on VSA has headed on for greener pastures. I guess they figured they were too hot and sexy to work for little old American Digital any more. I don't know who they went to work for." Anne looked at her watch. "Look, my lunch break ends in ten minutes. I need to start heading back soon."
"Sure. Just a few more questions. Do you know anyone who worked with Victor on VSA who hasn't quit?"
Sip. "Well, there were three. Rosie Bickford, John Simmons, and Traceeee . . . what was her name . . . Tracy Skerritt. But they're dead."
Gina pricked up her ears. "You're telling me three out of twenty people who worked with Victor died?"
Anne shrugged. "John had some kind of boating accident out on Puget. Tracy got cut up by a mugger. Rosie's husband shot her."
Scribble, underlined. She definitely needed to check those accident and crime reports. "What was Victor working on before VSA?"
"I don't know. That was before I came to work here." Anne looked at her watch again and stood up. "I really need to go now. Sorry I wasn't more help."
"That's all right. Thank you for your time." Gina rose and offered a hand to Anne, who shook it perfunctorily. The two women walked off in opposite directions. Gina got in her Olds, consulted her map, and drove away. She was thinking furiously. The people who worked with Ainsworth on his last important project are all gone or dead. That's just too neat. But even if Ainsworth killed them, that doesn't explain why Blond Chinese Girl was in my room this morning. Dead people don't hire assassins. So whoever hired her could also have killed those three programmers. But why? A competitor? Why would a competitor kill the programmers after they finish the app? Were they going to work on some other program, a program that was going to be even more of a powerhouse? And the competitor hired most of them away, and killed the rest? Sure, maybe, but that doesn't get me any closer to why Ainsworth would have pulled this shooting stunt.
Gina drove on, staring at the road, but the traffic lines didn't reveal any answers.
On the other side of the park, Anne Kaufman was crossing the street, heading for her car. She didn't hear the roar of the accelerating Chevy 4x4 until far too late. She whirled her head to the right and saw the massive grille of the truck just before its two tons of steel smashed into her body at 45 miles per hour. There was no time to scream.
The impact snapped every one of Anne's ribs like dry kindling, hurling her through the air like a Barbie doll thrown by an angry child. She bounced off a parked Honda and hurtled head first into the pavement next to it, crushing her skull like a cantaloupe. She rolled over and over until she slammed into the curb and finally stopped. The truck drove on, still gaining speed. There had been no squeal of brakes.
The owner of the corner hardware store stepped out of his front door, murmured a profanity, and slowly approached Anne. He stooped and felt her neck. Her body had a curious rumpled look to it, like an ill-shaped clay statue of a human being, as the broken bones pressed at odd angles against the inside of her skin. The man rose and walked slowly back into his store to call the ambulance. There was no need to hurry.
* * *
The last item on Gina's schedule was the most difficult. She was going to see Ainsworth's widow and children.
Gina wasn't sure if Mrs. Trudy Ainsworth knew that Gina had killed her husband. Gina had not mentioned the fact when she called to set up the interview, but she had not concealed her identity either, and her name had made it into some of the news articles. Gina did not feel bad about herself for killing Ainsworth, not one bit. She had saved Gwen Weber, and probably many other innocent people, by killing him, and Gina was damn proud of that. But just because she didn't feel bad about herself did not keep her from feeling bad about Trudy Ainsworth, who had lost her husband, and Suzette and Kimberly Ainsworth, who had lost their father.
No matter how bad a motherfucker you kill, Gina thought, no matter how much he has it coming, you'll always hurt some innocent people too. The thought put her in a foul mood.
The Ainsworth home was a nice two-story suburban house painted a pleasing medium blue with pale yellow trim. It sported a two-car garage and a broad front porch. Gina parked, went up the porch steps, and rang the doorbell. No answer. She waited a minute, then rang again. Still no answer.
Gina looked at the driveway. A gray Ford Contour was parked in front of the closed garage door. She stepped off the porch, walked over to the car, and touched its hood. It was still warm.
She went back to the porch, rang the doorbell again, and shouted, "Hello?" When there was no answer, she turned the doorknob. It was unlocked, and she pushed the door open to enter the hallway. The kitchen was straight ahead, living room with staircase to the left, dining room to the right. At the far side of the dining room, an open door revealed a little vestibule leading into the garage. Gina walked that way and stepped into the garage.
"Oh, no," she said, wincing.
Trudy Ainsworth's body was hanging from a beam in the back of the garage, behind the two cars. She was not swinging, and there was no eerie creaking; the scene was as still and as silent as some life-size ink sketch out of Goya's nightmares.
Trudy had been a delicate, very thin woman with a pretty, small-boned face, with only a few faint lines to place her in her mid to late thirties. Dark, gray eyes stared hauntedly from her pale visage, and rich dark brown bangs sheltered her forehead. Apparently the pressure of the rope on her jaw had locked her mouth shut, keeping her tongue from protruding through her thin lips. Gina was perversely glad about that; it let the woman retain some of her beauty and dignity in death.
Trudy wore a simple white T-shirt tucked into her dark blue jeans, which revealed her to be rather flat-chested. Her bare feet hung limply, toes only a few inches above the floor. Gina carefully noted that Trudy's feet were pale, not yet discolored by settling blood. She had died less than two hours ago, probably less than one. An eight-foot stepladder stood next to her; the cross brace faced toward her, the rungs away. Apparently she had climbed onto the ladder's head step and jumped off the other side.
Bullshit, thought Gina. Look at the angle of her neck. It's not broken. That woman strangled to death slowly. If she'd jumped from that height, her cervical spine would've snapped like a toothpick.
Gina noticed a letter-size sheet of paper Scotch-taped to the ladder. Without touching it, she bent to read it. In simple Courier typeface, it said:
"I am sorry. I have decided not to subject myself and my children to any more pain. I can't bear it any more, and I can't bear seeing them like this any more. Forgive me. Trudy."
Gina's eyes widened. "My children." Oh my God. She whipped her Glock from her purse and raced out of the garage, ninety percent sure she was already too late, but damned if she'd waste that ten percent chance.
"Suzette? Kimberly?" she screamed, racing up the living room stairs. No answer.
A long hall extended in two directions from the top of the stairs. Gina ran into the room at the far end. A game room, cluttered, but nobody inside. She ran back down the hall to the next door, and she found the first girl's body.
This would have been Suzette, she guessed; it was Suzette's room anyway, with her name hanging in paper cutout letters in a little arch on the wall. The young woman lay face down amid her clothes and stuffed animals, dressed in a short-sleeved black shirt and a red-orange skirt. There was a black flat on her left foot, while another lay a few inches from her brown-hosed right foot. Her jaw-length blond hair was spattered with bright red blood, not yet dry, from a bullet hole in the top and back of her head, somewhere between the parietal and occipital lobes. Blood had splattered on the Celine Dion, Savage Garden and Back Street Boys posters, and dripped slowly down the computer monitor, whose screen saver showed Brad Pitt nearly naked in a swimming pool. A flute lay in an open case, red velvet matching the stained carpet, at the foot of a music stand.
The next room was worse. It was Kimberly's. Almost as messy as Suzette's, but no stuffed animals here. Instead there were a lot of dumbbells and an exercise machine, with tennis racquets, tennis balls and a softball glove strewed on the floor. Trophies in four sports stood on an improvised mantelpiece. There were posters of Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Andre Agassi, Florence Griffith Joyner with "1959-1998" printed below, and a shirtless Frank Thomas wielding a bat. A word processor document was open on the computer, with a diary entry half-completed.
And in the middle of the room lay Kimberly. Apparently she had been getting ready to go swimming. She wore only a black bikini with fluorescent stripes. She lay on her back, legs spread wide open, arms thrown back above her head, framing her face with the hands almost touching, a posture right out of an adolescent boy's fantasy. Her face was like her mother's face revised and perfected by a sculptor who has made a masterpiece from a rough draft sketch: lips filled out, nose softened, cheeks rounded and smoothed. Her lightly tanned body was hairless except for the thick dark brown wavy mane that had fallen over her face. Her full breasts, mildly restrained by the bikini top, were like two round-bottomed tears that her heart had cried. Her hips were gentle and trim, her bare legs sleek and lovely, her feet dainty and graceful.
Gina could tell from the star-shaped entrance wound that someone had jammed a gun right into the middle of Kimberly's stomach and pulled the trigger. The carpet stains on either side of her body and the red smears on her back and her belly, on her arms and her hands, showed how Kimberly had rolled over and over on the carpet, moaning out her life, gut-shot, before throwing her arms back and surrendering to the death that had come to claim her just as she entered womanhood.
Gina knelt next to Kimberly's cold young body, touched the perfectly moulded face, and willed the tears to come. They wouldn't. I've been a cop too fucking long, she thought bitterly.
Then she heard the footstep behind her.
Gina violently threw herself to the side, toward the wall, spinning as she went, raising the Glock as a silencer hissed three times behind her. Florence Griffith Joyner impassively took a bullet in the foot; another hit Frank Thomas' testicles and ricocheted from a solid object behind the wall. Gina landed in a sitting position against Kimberly's closet door, saw a human silhouette standing in the doorway and bracketed it with four shots. A high-pitched, unmistakably feminine voice gave a distressed cry, and the silhouette stumbled backward, back arched, clutching its chest with both hands. Then it fell heavily on its back, drumming the floor intermittently with hands and feet. The sulfurous smell of burnt nitrocellulose clouded the room.
Gina pushed herself up the wall, her aim never swerving from the woman out in the hall. Once on her feet, she walked carefully through the doorway, scanning in both directions for further dangers. There was no sign of movement.
"Ahhh. Ohhhh! OHHHHH-ohhhh-OHHHHH!" said the woman on the floor. Blood flowed from her mouth, coating her chin, cheeks and throat. She relaxed visibly, eyes staring straight upward.
The woman wore a shiny black leather catsuit and sported long straight red-brown hair. She looked like nothing so much as Uma Thurman's rendition of Emma Peel in that third-rate movie The Avengers. A silenced .45 lay near her outstretched hand. Gina had hit her twice, once in each breast, and the leather that coated her shapely chest was hot with sticky crimson. Gina wondered whatever had possessed the woman to wear something so impossibly theatrical. Checking each wrist for a pulse, the policewoman determined that the female killer was dead.
Gina exhaled through pursed lips. The situation was tricky. This time, she had been armed as well as the killer. There was no way she could prove that the other woman had fired first. She could not even prove that this black-clad woman, rather than Gina herself, had murdered the Ainsworths. And Tacoma's finest were not likely to believe, even from a fellow officer, that she had been required to kill in self-defense twice in one day. At the very least, she was going to be booked, charged, and jailed. With a skilled lawyer she had a good chance of getting the charges dismissed, and an excellent chance of walking at trial. But she would be in jail for at least a month, and might very well lose her job. No judge granted bail in murder cases. And for that month or more she would be behind bars. She'd have no gun, no place to run, and whoever had sent people to kill her twice would only have to bribe an inmate or two, or six, to kill her. Gina was gut-deep sure that if she reported this crime and turned herself in, she would never live to see the charges dismissed.
In this case, Gina decided, the law and police procedure could go fuck themselves. She was not going to turn herself in. But she was going to search this lady and find out everything she could before somebody else decided to try and perforate Mrs. Jefferson's little girl.
First, she got her radio from her purse and checked the local police band to see if the authorities were on their way. No one could have heard that silenced .45, but someone might have heard the Glock, and it would be very embarassing to be interrupted by the police. But the radio traffic revealed no squeal, no officers dispatched to this address. So she went through the woman's pockets, unzipping the unobtrusive black zippers. She found three spare magazines for the .45 under the woman's left breast, nothing under the other one. She ran her hand along a sultry smooth hip and found a billfold with three hundred dollar bills, but no credit card, no driver's license, no cards or ID of any kind. The other hip pocket contained two spent .45 brass. Gina carefully felt over the womans back, lifted her buttocks and ran her hands down her legs, but could find no other pockets.
Gina unzipped the catsuit, causing a fresh river of trapped blood to flow over the woman's chest and down her shoulders. The woman was naked under the leather. One bullet had entered high in her left breast, the other had struck half-in, half-out of her right areola, at three o'clock from the nipple. Gina saw that she was going to get her white dress covered with blood if she went on with this operation, so she went into the bathroom, took her clothes off, and carefully hung them up, leaving her pumps in the corner. Then she returned to the corpse, taking her Glock with her just in case.
Gina removed the woman's gloves and looked inside for an identifying mark. Nothing, though she could see where the tags had been carefully scissored off. Gina gripped the woman's left cuff and tugged on the corpse's shoulder, working the arm free of the leather. She probed down the empty sleeve, but could find nothing else inside. She repeated the process on the right sleeve, this time revealing a tattoo on the dead woman's arm. It was a flower, with the word "MEN" rendered in the center. They have their uses, Gina allowed.
Getting the body's legs out of the catsuit was tough. The boots were not separate. Gina had to lift the corpse up under the armpits, stand behind the corpse, wrap her feet around the boot, and then pull the whole body upward. She grunted and strained, and it took all of her weightlifter's muscles to get the foot loose. Then she had to do the same with the other boot. She wondered what Deirdre back at the Department would do if she could see Gina at this moment, and doubled over laughing at the thought, letting the body drop to the floor. Deirdre was the self-proclaimed "office dyke" and would doubtless have something choice to say.
Fortunately, after the woman's feet were loose, Gina was able to lay her down on her belly, slide a foot under the leather and plant it in the woman's crotch ("You go, girl," Deirdre was saying in Gina's mind), grab the legs of the catsuit, and pull them off a few inches at a time. And when it was done, the corpse revealed . . .
Nothing. Nothing inside the pant legs, nothing on the woman's legs. They were a magnificent pair of legs. Deirdre doubtless would have approved. But they yielded not an inkling as to the woman's identity or purpose. There wasn't a goddamn clue on the whole body except that stupid tattoo. Gina sat back on the floor and swore with feeling. Well, maybe she could get her friends back at the Department to run their database and see if there were any prior arrestees with that kind of tattoo in their records. But even if her dead assailant had been previously arrested, what were the chances that anyone had noted the tattoo about men?
Gina's eyes opened wide as realization exploded in her mind.
Not men. MEN.
She got slowly to her feet, heart pumping fast, and walked to the bathroom, naked and barefoot. She pulled her notebook from her purse and deliberately read through the pages. And there was the name.
Mary Ellen Nespory. MEN.