The Butcher

  The clock told him it was 3:52 a.m. Every night was like this. It would be an hour or two before he’d be able to fall back asleep.

  How did the Chief do it? How did he sleep?

  Grandpa sleeps just fine because Grandpa is a psychopath, that little inner voice whispered, and Matt lay back down, taking deep breaths to try to restore his heart rate to normal.

  Eventually, blessedly, he slept.

  * * *

  The men’s bathroom mirror showed every line, crease, and wrinkle on Matt’s sleep-deprived face. Cold water helped a little to reduce the puffiness around his eyes, but there was nothing to be done about the dark circles. He looked five years older than he had two weeks ago, and felt about twenty years older than that.

  And, of course, today was the first day the camera crew would be here.

  It wasn’t officially show footage, more like a trial run, according to Karen, who was back in town. So far he’d successfully managed to keep all of their conversations to restaurant-related matters, and she seemed to finally be getting the hint that he wasn’t interested in anything more than that. At least he hoped so.

  Bernard was waiting for him when he exited the bathroom.

  “Oh no. No no no,” the producer said, looking up at Matt. He stood with a hand on one skinny hip, dressed head to toe in black save for the flashy white leather belt around his waist. A black cross-body bag (a “man bag,” as Matt often thought of them) completed the producer’s look. “Honey. What happened? Pardon my bluntness, but you look like absolute shit.”

  “Exactly what I needed to hear, Bernard. Thank you.”

  “I’m not trying to be an asshole, although I know I probably sound like one, but honey.” The producer’s face was twisted into a frown. “Welcome to the world of high-definition TV, where the cameras pick up on everything. Back into the restroom. Quick quick.” He snapped his fingers and shooed Matt back into the men’s room.

  “Over there,” Bernard said, pointing to the middle of the long counter where the sinks were. “That’s where the lighting is best.” The producer whipped out a small black kit from his man bag.

  “What’s that?” Matt said, suspicious. “That better not be makeup.”

  “That’s exactly what it is, and you will stand still while I apply it, and thank me when I’m done.”

  “Hell, no.”

  Bernard gave him a look. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re going to be on television. The lights are incredibly bright, and did you hear me when I said ‘high definition’? Everybody needs a little help. Trust me.”

  Matt sighed. He decided he didn’t have the strength to argue. “Fine, do what you want. I don’t care.”

  “You will when I’m finished,” Bernard said in a singsong voice.

  He closed his eyes and felt Bernard’s fingers on his face, dotting God knows what onto his cheeks and under his eyes. He felt a powder puff and then a brush, and then some kind of balm being applied to his lips. A few stray eyebrow hairs were tweezed, and then his brows were combed. Then he felt Bernard’s fingers in his hair, and there was some kind of spray applied.

  “Okay, open your eyes,” Bernard said, and Matt did as he was instructed. “Look up.” Standing on his toes, the producer put some Visine into Matt’s eyes and he blinked in reflex. “Good. That’s better.”

  Matt looked into the mirror once again and was surprised. Goddammit, he did look a lot better. His skin was glowing and the hollows in his cheeks weren’t as prominent. His eyes were clear. Wow. He could see why girls liked makeup so much. What a difference.

  “How’d you get the puffiness to go away?” he said, touching the area under his eyelashes that had been swollen only moments ago. “That’s amazing.”

  “Hemorrhoid cream. Works like a charm.”

  “Dude. That’s totally gross.”

  “You asked.” Bernard dug through his man bag again. “Your energy is still for shit, though. You need to pep up, and you have two options.” He held up a small bottle of 5-hour Energy in one hand, and a tiny vial of what could only be cocaine in the other. “Pick one.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Matt stared at him. “I’m not taking drugs to be on a fucking reality show.”

  “Unscripted television, for the love of God,” Bernard said, thrusting the 5-hour Energy drink toward him. He slipped the vial of coke into his pocket. “Drink up, quick quick. Everybody’s waiting for us.”

  Matt downed the energy shot in one gulp. He was starting to think that maybe the rumors were true about the Fresh Network. These people were definitely more than a little suspect. In his wildest imagination, he couldn’t imagine being offered cocaine by anybody who worked at the Food Network.

  “Ready?” Bernard said, heading back toward the door.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Matt said.

  As soon as he stepped out, the camera was right in his face. Bernard was right, the lights were insanely bright.

  “You look fantastic.” It was Karen’s voice, and Matt squinted. He hadn’t noticed her standing behind the camera guy and could barely make out her outline. “Okay, so we’re going to film you for a little bit here, then follow you to your food truck out in Kirkland and do a few hours of filming there.”

  “Got it.”

  “Tip number one—don’t ever look directly at the camera.” Karen stepped forward, and Matt felt her fingers in his hair as she smoothed it. “Tip number two—act natural. Be yourself.”

  “Okay,” Matt said with a grin. “But just remember, you told me to.”

  27

  Sam sat in an interrogation room at the East Precinct, the fluorescent lights bright above her head. The table was metal and rectangular and there were four chairs. It had been ten minutes since she’d been ushered in, but she was in no particular hurry. She couldn’t deny she was a little tickled to be here, and that it was kind of cool that Sanchez had asked her to come to the precinct immediately. Fingering the visitor’s badge clipped to her shirt, she wondered if they’d let her keep it.

  A small camera was mounted up in the corner of the room, and its light was flashing green. She didn’t know if that meant she was being recorded, or just watched. Reflexively, she smoothed her hair, tucking a loose tendril behind her ear.

  The door to the interrogation room opened and Detective Robert Sanchez finally entered, armed with two Starbucks coffee cups.

  “And here I was expecting a generic Styrofoam cup filled with whatever that sludge is you call coffee,” Sam said with a smile. “Starbucks doesn’t fit with the image I had in my head of making an official statement at a police precinct.”

  “Ha.” Sanchez took a seat across from her and slid her cup across the table. He was dressed in a dark gray suit, one of his better ones, and his tie was actually knotted, albeit loosely. “You’ve been watching too much Law & Order, my sweet. One of the detectives was going for a Starbucks run so I put in an order. Soy chai latte, right?”

  “Aw, you remembered.” Sam took a sip.

  “Okay.” The detective took a long sip of his coffee, then leaned back in his chair. He looked tired. “Let’s get this over with because I’m sure you’re a busy girl, and God knows I’m a busy guy. When was the last time you talked to Bonnie Tidwell, otherwise known as Joyce Kubacki? I need you to be specific, Samantha. I need an exact time frame.”

  Sam’s eyes wandered up to the camera again. “Are we being recorded?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s watching us right now?”

  The detective sighed. “A couple of really experienced police officers. Actually, I have no idea. Wave if you want to.”

  Sam lifted a hand and wiggled a few fingers. “I last saw Bonnie six days ago,” she said. “I drove her back to her motel and we said our goodbyes.”

  “Did you walk her inside?”

  “No, I just dropped her off out front.”

  Sanchez took another sip of his coffee. “And how did you leave things with her?”

  “Uh . . .” Sam
had to think for a moment. “We talked for a few minutes in the car before she got out. She promised to get in touch with me when she got back to Sacramento. Then she double-checked that she had my address because she was going to send me a box of photos that she had of my mother and me. We hugged. I thanked her for meeting me, asked her to reconsider telling me the Butcher’s name. She said she’d think about it, and would let me know if she had time for dinner before she headed back home. Then we said goodbye.”

  Sanchez looked up. “What do you mean by ‘get in touch’? Was she going to call you? Email you? What?”

  “Actually, I never gave her my cell phone number. All the communication we’d had up till then was done through the online forum, and I started kicking myself the next day when I realized I had no other way of getting in touch with her. That’s why I stopped by the motel again, and that’s when the clerk told me she checked out. I just assumed she decided to head home early, and I won’t lie, I was pissed. I was hoping she’d talk to me.”

  “What was the name of the website again?”

  “TheSerialKillerFiles-dot-com.”

  Sanchez nodded. “So after you dropped her off at the motel, you never communicated with her again?”

  “Nope. I did try,” she added, as if this somehow made a difference. “I sent her a whole bunch of messages through the forum, but she never responded.”

  “I’m going to need a copy of all the exchanges you had with her on the forum. From the time you first met. Better yet, give me your login info and I’ll print it out myself.”

  “No problem.”

  “Anything else that you can think of that I should know about?”

  “Nothing comes to mind.” Sam slumped a little in her chair. “This isn’t much help, is it?”

  Sanchez waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it, I didn’t think it necessarily would be. If you’d have thought of anything you would have called, so we’re just crossing i’s and dotting t’s.”

  “You said that backwards.”

  The detective was quiet for a moment. “Did Bonnie/Joyce tell you she had cancer?”

  Sam sat up straighter. “No. Did she?”

  Sanchez nodded. “The medical examiner confirmed it. We subpoenaed her medical records from Sacramento. Looks like she was stage four pancreatic. Nothing anyone could have done for her. That kind of cancer works quickly.”

  “Oh God.” Sam put a hand over her mouth. “Bonnie never said a word. Do you think that’s why she came up here?”

  The detective shrugged. “I can’t even begin to guess what her motivations were, but it’s as good an assumption as any. She probably figured she had nothing to lose by telling everything she knew, whatever that might have been.”

  “She knew the Butcher’s real identity.”

  “So she said.”

  “You still don’t believe that, do you?” Sam frowned, frustrated. “When we talked the other day you sounded like you weren’t ruling out my theory after all. Because that girl from Marysville was missing her left hand. Come on, Bobby, I thought you were finally with me on this.”

  Sanchez turned and looked right into the camera. He made some sort of hand signal and waited. A few seconds later, the green light stopped flashing. Then the light was red. And then it went out entirely.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “You turned off the camera?”

  “That’s because we’re about to have a personal conversation, and I don’t want anyone listening.” The detective’s expression was serious. He laced his fingers together on top of the table. “There’s something I need to tell you. About the Butcher.”

  “Okay.”

  “First, the disclaimer.” Sanchez’s eyes bored into hers. “What I’m about to say, I shouldn’t be telling you. You’re a civilian, you’re too close to the situation, and you’re going to freak out. All good reasons I should keep my mouth shut, but I’m not going to, because after everything you’ve been through, I feel you need to know. I believe you’ve earned it. But that’s me being a friend, not me being a cop.”

  “Okay,” Sam said. She had absolutely no idea what Sanchez was about to say, but that was certainly one hell of a disclaimer. “I understand. I won’t say anything to anyone, Bobby.”

  “ ‘Anyone’ includes Matt. And the Chief. And whoever else you might be tempted to tell.”

  “I understand.” She refrained from mentioning the argument she’d had with the Chief earlier, and the fact that Matt’s grandfather might not ever speak to her again.

  “Disclaimer number two,” Sanchez said. “It was agreed at the very highest level that this information was not to be made public. When you freak out, I want you to keep that in mind, okay? I only found out myself this morning, by accident.”

  “I hear you. You’re killin’ me, Smalls,” she said, quoting The Sandlot. She reached for her latte, then changed her mind. She was now too wound up to drink anything. “Just tell me before I pass out.”

  “The Butcher had another element to his signature.” Sanchez took a breath. “It wasn’t just the hands.”

  “What?”

  “The Butcher kept hair,” Sanchez said. “From the victims. A small swatch of it, near the nape of the neck. But not all the way under. It was like he parted the hair through the middle and snipped a piece off, as if he didn’t want us to know he did it. Which he probably didn’t. But all the Butcher victims had a swatch of hair snipped off. Every single one.”

  “Including my mother?” Sam held her breath.

  “Yes.”

  She sat back in her chair, trying to process this new information. Her head began to pound. “Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying because you know I’m about to freak out. You’re telling me that the Butcher kept hair from his victims? And you’re confirming that my mother was a Butcher victim?”

  “The answer to your first question is yes. The answer to your second questions is, it’s a definite possibility.”

  “And you found out about the hair how?” Sam paused. “Or maybe an equally important question is, how the hell did you not know about the hair before?”

  Sanchez was prepared for the question. “The detective who’s working the Jamie Chavez murder case in Marysville asked for the Butcher files to be sent over right away. Her missing left hand flagged him, which was understandable, but he thought he was probably looking for a copycat. That’s what we all assumed as soon as we heard about it. He didn’t think anything would come of it, but he wanted to see the old Butcher files anyway, just to compare the notes from those murders to Chavez. No problem, right? It’s his case, he can investigate it however he wants. So we boxed up all the files and sent them over. He then called me this morning. Asked me if I was aware that the medical examiner’s files from the Butcher cases were all missing.”

  “Medical examiner’s files are missing how?”

  “They’re gone,” Sanchez said. “He said none of the ME’s reports are in the files. I have no idea where they went; I just assumed everything would be in there. I asked Records, and they have no idea, either. Nobody can even verify when the ME’s files went missing. Back in the eighties, there was no backup system. So if the hard copy reports are gone, they’re gone.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, confused. “So what does that mean?”

  “Well, it was bugging me, so I decided to track down the ME, the one who worked the original Butcher cases. His name is Cam Bradbury. He’s in his early seventies, retired, and lives in Portland now.”

  “Okay.”

  “He wasn’t even surprised when I called asking about the missing files, said he figured that somebody, eventually, would notice. What he told me was that the Butcher had another element to his signature. Everybody knew about the hands, of course, because that was made public. But nobody knew about the hair.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was advised to leave that part out.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, her mind working. “But that happens, right? The polic
e don’t always release everything to the media. For lots of reasons.”

  “That’s true. But internally, the missing hair should absolutely have been in the autopsy reports.”

  “So why wasn’t it?”

  “Like I said. Bradbury was instructed to leave it out.”

  “By who?” Sam said, still confused. “And . . . why?”

  “By Captain Edward Shank, lead detective on the case.” Sanchez grimaced. “Bradbury said that Edward Shank made it very clear he didn’t want the hair mentioned anywhere, that it was to be kept secret. Nobody on the task force even knew; it was only Shank and Bradbury. The ME said that at the time, the Chief wanted to minimize leaks, to help distinguish the real Butcher murders from the copycats. And back then, leaks were rampant at Seattle PD. Stuff was always getting out.”

  “Yes, and there were two copycat murders already.” Sam rubbed her temples. “Okay, so I get why Edward wanted that kept out of the reports during the investigation, but once Wedge was shot, shouldn’t there be full disclosure?”

  “That’s an excellent question, and one we’ll have to ask the Chief. It’s possible he might have forgotten he’d had that info redacted earlier, what with all the media coverage after Wedge was shot. But whatever the reason, the reports are missing. And while Bradbury has no reason to lie, I can’t actually confirm if what he’s saying is true. Because the reports are just gone.”

  “And you can’t exhume the bodies because hair decays after a year or so,” Sam said, recalling what she’d read in her homicide investigations textbook. The same textbook, ironically, that had been a Christmas gift from Edward Shank.

  “Right.”

  Sam leaned back in her chair and stared at the detective. “So what about Jamie Chavez? Was she missing a swatch of hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what about Bonnie Tidwell?”

  “Yes. Her, too.”

  Sam closed her eyes as the weight of it finally hit her. “So you’re looking for the Butcher. Holy shit.”

  “We could very well be.” Sanchez wrung his hands. “I personally think so, but we’ll have to be very careful about how we present this to the public. It’s one thing to be searching for a new Butcher. It’s a whole other thing to be searching for the old one.”