Surgeon – Chapter Seventeen

NOT EDITED

Chapter Seventeen

8:13 AM; CLINSTONE POLICE DEPARTMENT, LAB

“Based on your thirteen-minute difference on punctuality, can I assume you had a second breakfast?” Bo asked without looking up from his computer.

Jacob laughed. “Damn straight, I did.” Bo chuckled softly and patted the seat beside him. Jacob crossed the room and sat down beside Bo. “What’s up?”

Bo cleared his throat. “I thought you might want a, uh, walkthrough, of sorts, on this case.”

“That’s what you were working on earlier, right?” Jacob asked. Bo nodded. “Pssh, and you said you weren’t working on the case.”

Bo smiled faintly. “I’m quite the liar when I want to be.”

“You’re damn good at it. You don’t have a tell.” When Bo didn’t respond, Jacob cleared his throat. “Well, show me what you got.”

Bo rubbed at the back of his neck. “There’s a lot of… assuming going into this. A lot of it isn’t fact,” he said.

“Cases can never be completed without assuming somewhere along the line. It’s how we connect the dots.”

“There is… a lot of information that I’m going to spit out, here. If you need me to stop so that you can gather how insane I am, tell me and I’ll give you a few minutes to recover before I overwhelm you again.”

Jacob chuckled. “Sure thing, Bo.”

Bo opened up a document on his laptop. A timeline. “Sometime between eight o’clock AM on Saturday, December twenty-first, 2019 and Monday, December twenty-third at noon, Tess Brown is kidnapped, presumably from her home. Monday, December twenty-third at twelve-fifteen PM, Tess Brown is reported missing by her boyfriend. Tuesday, December twenty-fourth, 2019, sometime before ten in the morning, Natalie Lambert, fifteen years old, is kidnapped. Her parents arrive at the station at ten, and fill out a missing person’s report The AMBER Alert goes out fifteen minutes after the report’s filled out, ten forty-six AM. Thursday, December thirty-first, 2019 at ten-thirty PM, Victor Law is killed in his home in Clinstone. Mister Law is poisoned with conium maculatum, known as hemlock in layman’s terms. He’s killed to guarantee that Cleo Marshall will be lonely and desperate because she’s been ditched on New Year’s Eve.

“At eleven PM, Tess Brown is killed, presumably, in the killer’s kill room. She’s chloroformed rather heavily and her throat is slit with a five-inch, partially serrated tanto-point pocket knife. In line with the fact that we know he’s trying to replace someone, his kill room is most likely in his actual house. Basement, probably.

“Killer arrives at Ivory Hill before eleven forty-five PM so that he can scout Cleo Marshall, watch her, wait until she’s at her most desperate. We can assume that didn’t happen until shortly after midnight. So, after midnight strikes, on January first, 2020, the killer approaches Cleo Marshall at the bar and buys her a drink. It’s probable that he flirted with her, called her beautiful, called Victor foolish for leaving her alone. He talks her up, makes her feel good about herself, and convinces her to go home with him.

“He’s not drunk. He wouldn’t have wanted to inhibit his senses like that, nor would he have wanted to be forced to take a cab or find someone to drive them. He doesn’t want to be seen by anyone. He wants to blend in with the crowd, be nothing but an average guy. His goal isn’t to stick out, or else he would be ID’d long before he completed his work.

“He takes Cleo Marshall to his house and takes her to her room. Presumably, a cell of some sort, designed to look like the original bedroom of the person that Cleo Marshall is supposed to replace. It probably has a cell door rather than a wooden door. It’s not a solid surface because he needs to be able to see her without opening the door and running the risk of her escaping.

“Natalie Lambert has been in a room since Christmas Eve. Assuming the rooms are in a basement, side-by-side, the girls likely can’t see each other. They aren’t fixed yet. They don’t look like the women they’re supposed to replace, so they can’t see each other until they look exactly like the women they’re replacing.” Bo cleared his throat. “You still with me?”

In silence, Jacob nodded.

“Thursday, January second, Tess Brown’s body is found in a dumpster outside of the Clinstone ER. We get to the alleyway just after eighty-thirty that morning. Based on Miss Brown’s autopsy, we know that he’s feeding them. Most likely three meals a day, most likely on a strict schedule. Like… breakfast at six, lunch at noon, and supper at six. Before he goes to work, lunch break, when he gets home.

“Monday, January sixth, 2020, Victor Law’s body is found in a dumpster outside the Clinstone Community Center. We get there around ten AM. His corpse has been hidden somewhere relatively warm before being dumped in the dumpster. Otherwise, the cold outside would have slowed down the decay process.

“Tuesday, January seventh, 2020, Jane Bishop is killed in her home around nine-thirty AM. She’s home alone, doing college homework, when the killer comes in, grabs her from behind, and chloroforms her. He draws two pints of blood through her arm before injecting her with etorphine. He undresses her, cleans her skin, and removes her breasts. This is done with a number ten surgical knife. She’s dead by the time he’s finished, and then he leaves. As I’ve told you before, Jane Bishop isn’t the only victim like this in Clinstone, but we won’t go into that right now.

“Jane Bishop is O-negative type, just like Natalie Lambert. The breasts will, more than likely, be surgically attached to Natalie Lambert’s chest after her own breasts are removed. The killer doesn’t want implants. He wants something that looks entirely real, feels entirely real, and that’s why he needs to kill another woman for them. And, truthfully, he has most likely already done the surgery. Which is good for us, because it means she didn’t die, or else we would’ve found her body.

“Now, this is where I’m going to throw a wrench in everything,” Bo said. He cleared his throat. “I believe there are likely two killers.”

Jacob’s brow furrowed. “Why do you think that?”

“Killer’s have comfort zones. The ones who don’t want to taunt the police, anyway. He’s not doing this for fame. He’s doing it to replace someone he lost. Tess Brown and Cleo Marshall were and are forty-four. Natalie Lambert is only fifteen. The age gap is too great. Jane Bishop was only in her twenties. The age gap is drastically greater than what most comfort creatures are, well, comfortable with. So we assume we have two killers. One of them kidnapped Tess Brown and Cleo Marshall, and killed Tess Brown and Victor Law. The other killer, a younger man, kidnapped Natalie Lambert and killed Jane Bishop.

“They’re both intelligent, both have experience with drugs, medicine, knives, and surgeries. One of them, probably the younger one, is a veterinarian, and that’s how he got his hands on etorphine,” Bo said. “The other one, the older of the two, could also be a vet or a doctor, a surgeon. If that’s the case, the older one is most likely the ones performing the surgeries on the women.

“The older man makes a lot of money, based on his cologne and his suits, as described by Will Foreman at the bar. He’s most likely a surgeon, possibly plastic surgery, simply based on possible income.” Bo opened a new document, a fingerprint. “I told you that Cleo Marshall probably wasn’t the one that removed that top sticky note, and I was right. I pulled a fingerprint off of it, a thumb, but it’s not in the system. See this line?” Bo asked, touching his finger to a place on the screen.

“Yeah,” Jacob said, nodding.

“It’s a scar. The older of the two men has a scar on his thumb. That makes him a lot easier to find, Detective,” Bo said. He reached over and grabbed a thin stack of papers that were paper clipped together. He laid them down in front of Jacob. “That’s everything I just told you. That’s all I have.”

Jacob stared at Bo for a moment, his lips parted slightly. “What the fuck was this department doing before you?”

One corner of Bo’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Working and solving cases just the same as every other department that’s never had me in it,” he said. He stood up, shutting the lid of his laptop. “I’m not special, Detective Mason. I just… get things done a little quicker than other analysts. You’d eventually arrive at the same conclusion without me. I’m not special. I’m just a lab geek.”

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