The Unseen - A Mystery (The Baudin & Dixon Trilogy Book 2) Page 4

  “We got a body,” Jessop said.

  “I know,” Dixon said. “We were out with Sanchez all day, looking.”

  “Not that. A new body. There’s some interests here that want this handled quietly, and I told them we would.”

  A year ago, Jessop would have shouted that order as though it were a commandment. Now he seemed unsure, as if he didn’t know how they would respond.

  “What interests?” Baudin asked.

  “This is rural country. The meat, oil, and leather industries are big here. Employ a lot o’ people. They just don’t want bad press, that’s all. Nothing underhanded.”

  “What’s the body about?”

  “Just got the call now. Down at the slaughterhouse. You two head out there. And handle this as quietly as possible. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dixon said.

  They left the office and headed back to Dixon’s car.

  It was late evening as they drove down to the slaughterhouse. Baudin tried his daughter’s cell phone, and she answered right away.

  “Hey, Daddy.”

  “I’m gonna be a little late for dinner, baby. If you want to wait, we can go to that pizza place you like.”

  “Sure, I’m not really hungry right now anyway.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you in a couple hours. And do your homework.”

  He slipped the phone back in his pocket and noticed Dixon trying not to look at him. The pain was written clearly on his face. A year ago, he’d had a son and a wife. Now, he had neither. He was alone, and Baudin didn’t know how to convince him otherwise.

  “She won’t wait forever,” Baudin said.

  “Who?”

  “You know who. She’ll eventually need a man in her life, and she’ll move on.”

  “Good for her. She should.”

  He shook his head. “You are about the stubbornest son of a bitch I’ve ever known.”

  “How am I supposed to be okay with it, Ethan? You tell me how to be okay with it, and I will.”

  Baudin watched as the final rays of the sun set and darkness began to swallow the city. “You just let it go. It’s not as hard as you think. It’s like pulling talons out of your soul. They got you now, but they’ll pull out when you let it go.”

  “I don’t think I can do that. When I look at her, I’ll always just think of him.”

  The slaughterhouse, Grade A Meat and Packaging, was off the freeway. Several semitrailers in front blocked the view from the freeway. Baudin knew it was so people couldn’t actually see how the pigs were treated.

  “You know you can’t even film in a slaughterhouse,” Baudin said. “It’s a felony to film in there. How can you eat something, put it into your body, when the people that make it made it a felony to even see how it’s made?”

  “’Cause everything that’s bad for you happens to be delicious. My grandfather woke up to a beer and fried bacon and sausage every morning, and he lived to be ninety-five. Outlived every vegetarian, vegan, and whatever the fuck I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Doesn’t mean he felt good doing it.” He paused. “You know the Hindus think animals have prana, energy, and if an animal is killed, the energy rots. It turns dark. And when we eat the meat, we ingest that dark energy.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe they just haven’t been over to Pat’s Barbeque and had their ribs.”

  Dixon parked in the visitor lot out back, and they got out of the car. The entrance was a steel door with no windows. The door was locked, but Dixon pressed the call button on the intercom next to it.

  “Yeah?” a male voice said.

  “Detectives Dixon and Baudin with the CPD.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah, come on in.”

  The door clicked open, and Dixon held it for Baudin.

  Inside, the smell overpowered his senses. The putridness was something he had never experienced. He began breathing through his mouth, but he could tell from the warm air that he was ingesting something through the air, and whatever it was, he didn’t want it.

  A few paces in from the door, the darkness took over. He didn’t move until his eyes had adjusted. Once he could see, he took in the hanging lightbulbs, the dirty floors, and the rusted metal that made up the entire slaughterhouse.

  A man came out of an office, leaning to the side in an awkward gait. The blue cap on his head said Vietnam Veteran.

  “I called you guys like two hours ago.”

  “Sorry,” Dixon said, “we just got it. You Henry Peck?”

  “No uniforms been out here?” Baudin asked.

  “Yeah, there was an officer, but he sat outside for an hour and then said he had to go. Said detectives would be by and not to touch anything.”

  Baudin shook his head and glanced at Dixon. The murder scene had been left unattended. Baudin had seen things like that frequently over the last year. Murders were so rare in Cheyenne, none of the uniformed officers knew the protocol. He just hoped the scene hadn’t been contaminated beyond use.

  “Well,” Henry said, “follow me.”

  He led them over a metal bridge that shook as they marched across. Underneath were droves of hogs, all packed in so tightly they could hardly move. They made entirely discomforting sounds, and Baudin thought they sounded like human children.

  “Right this way,” Henry said.

  Beyond the bridge was a wide-open cement floor. Though the floor had been cleaned recently, the black bloodstains that dotted it from wall to wall remained. Baudin kept his eyes up, away from the floor, and observed the equipment instead.

  They crossed another metal bridge, and Henry stood at the railing, looking down at a steel vat of meat. Inside the vat was what looked like a metal drill with sharp edges encircling it. The meat, still very bloody, swirled in a counterclockwise pattern.

  “What am I lookin’ at?” Dixon asked.

  Henry pointed to the corner of the vat. “Right there. One of our processors caught it.”

  Baudin took out his phone and turned on the flashlight app. The bridge splintered off and circled the vat. He strolled around the edge to the corner Henry had pointed at and ran the light over the meat.

  Tucked in the corner was the upper torso of a white female. She had been cut in half at the waist and one of her arms was missing. The other arm lay above her head, a tattoo on the wrist. Her face was still mostly intact. Her eyes were milky white and gave her a ghostly appearance.

  He turned off the light. “Call forensics out here.”

  11

  The slaughterhouse would’ve been shut down if the investigation had begun during the day. That would’ve meant lost work time. Baudin wondered if Jessop had agreed to wait until closing time to send detectives.

  The forensic techs mumbled among themselves when they first came out. The theme of the conversation seemed to involve how much of the woman had been ground up with the meat and whether the plant would really do a recall or just let it slide.

  Once they began the work, photographs, video, measurements, and analysis of the surrounding meat began. Baudin hung back while Henry gathered a list of employees and anyone who had visited Grade A that day or the night before.

  Baudin lit a cigarette and sat on the floor, his back against the wall, while Dixon sat in the office with the man. They were chatting about something, football probably, and Baudin had no interest in listening in. Instead, he closed his eyes in meditation and was gone until the cigarette burned down to a stub and burnt his fingers. He put it out on the floor then tossed it in a trashcan by the office.

  “How’s it coming?” he asked.

  “Thirty-nine employees here yesterday. No visitors. Henry here says they would’ve noticed a body in the meat right away, so it had to have happened today.”

  “I don’t think it’s an employee.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they wouldn’t put themselves at risk by bringing it into their work. Unless they’re a disorganized-personality killer. But if they’re disorganized, they’re probably schi
zophrenic or schizoaffective, something like that, and can’t control themselves. They’d be on our radar right away.”

  “So you’re saying someone snuck into the slaughterhouse and shoved that body in there without being noticed and then took off?”

  “I’m sayin’ I don’t know what this is.” He paused. “Can I talk to you a second, Kyle?”

  Dixon followed him out.

  Baudin stopped on the first walkway away from everyone else, and looked at the hogs, which had settled down some. “I don’t think we should take this.”

  “Take what?” Dixon said. “This body? We caught it. There’s nothin’ we can do.”

  “We can turn it down. We got enough detectives to hand it off to someone else for a while.”

  Dixon looked back at the office. “What the hell are you talking about? We caught it—it’s ours.”

  Baudin shook his head. “This type of killer’s not gonna be easy to catch, man. It’ll take too much time away from the list.”

  “The list? Are you shittin’ me? Your crazy conspiracy theory doesn’t qualify as a good reason to turn down a homicide, Ethan.”

  “The list is all that matters. We have to focus on it. The man that did this”—he motioned to the body in the vat—“isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as the men we’re after. He can’t do as much damage.”

  Dixon stared at the body as the coroner’s people lifted it out of the vat and laid it on a black body bag. “Looks plenty dangerous to me.” He exhaled. “Look, just sleep on it, okay? There’s not much to do here. You go be with your daughter and just sleep on it.”

  He shrugged. “All right, but it’s not gonna help. The list is all I care about.”

  “How do you know this isn’t part of it?”

  Baudin was silent for a moment then looked back at the woman’s body. The flesh on her belly where she’d been cut was ragged and torn. All her organs were missing.

  Baudin drove down the interstate, thinking about the body in the vat. The woman looked young, maybe twenty. In a small town, maybe people thought they could get away with more or that the police were incompetent and wouldn’t catch them. If the murderer was an employee, all the detectives would have to do was interview thirty-nine people and pick the top suspects before grilling them. It was also possible that the killer didn’t work there and was clever enough to sneak in and leave the body, hoping the grinder would take care of it. If so, solving the crime would consume Baudin’s time and thought, taking his energy away from the list.

  In front of the Grant View Apartments, he stepped out of the car. The stairs leading up quivered as he climbed, and he stopped on the top step then looked out over the parking lot. It was quiet there.

  He knocked on Candi’s door, and she answered, wearing a long T-shirt with no pants. She smiled at him as she left the door open, and he stepped inside. He collapsed onto the lounge chair and checked the clock on his phone. He had to pick up Heather in the next twenty minutes so they could go for a late dinner.

  “You wanna drink?” she asked.

  “No. Thanks. Did you find anything about my girl?”

  “A little. Mike Sandoval has been dating a call girl named Dixie. She works for that escort agency downtown, Glass Toys. He apparently sees her quite a bit.”

  “You got a last name?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry, hon. Rarely last names in this business.”

  He took out a cigarette. He’d smoked enough today that he had a sour taste in his mouth already, but he needed something to occupy his hands. So instead of lighting it, he just let it dangle from his mouth and pulled it out every few seconds. “That’s good enough,” he said.

  “Now I have a favor to ask you.”

  “What’s that?”

  She crossed her legs, and Baudin could see she wasn’t wearing underwear. He looked away, and it made her grin. “Some of the girls are frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “They think we got us a chicken hawk. A john that’s been attacking the girls.”

  “What kind of attacks?”

  “Nothin’ I’ve seen. But a couple of the girls went missin’ ’bout a week ago. Girls leave all the time, but even among whores, we got friendships. They say goodbye, and we have a dinner or go see a movie or somethin’. These two just left with a john and never came back.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  She chuckled. “Police don’t do shit. Other than get free blowjobs. No, I told them I would come talk to you.”

  Baudin opened a note-taking app on his phone. “Describe the girls and give me their names.”

  “First one’s Shelly. I don’t know her last name. Black hair, Asian, real skinny. Has a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder. The other one I know better. Hannah Smith, but she goes by Diamond. White girl. A tribal band tattoo that goes around her wrist. Last week, they got into a truck and then was just gone.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Shelly’s maybe twenty-five, and Hannah’s nineteen.”

  Baudin froze, his thumb over the keypad on his phone. “What wrist is her tribal band around?”

  “I dunno. Right one, I think. Yeah, right one.”

  He closed the app and opened his text messages. He texted Dixon and said, You still at the scene?

  Yes.

  Send me a picture of the vic’s tattoo.

  After a few seconds, Baudin got the picture. He showed it to Candi. “That it?”

  She nodded. “That’s it. How’d you get that?”

  Baudin put the phone back in his pocket. “I think I’ll take that drink now.”

  12

  The next morning, Baudin swung his feet out of bed, his head still spinning with drowsiness. He forced himself up and to the shower. He brushed his teeth in the shower then pressed his forehead against the tile, staring down at the water swirling over the drain. He didn’t know how long he stood there, but when he got out and dressed, he had a couple of voicemails on his phone. One was from Dixon, asking for a callback.

  “Hey, you up?” Dixon said by way of greeting.

  “Up as can be. What did you need?”

  “Got a hit on our body. Ran the prints of the right hand through IAFIS. Her name’s—”

  “Hannah Smith.”

  After a long silence, Dixon asked, “How the hell did you know that?”

  Baudin went into Heather’s room and saw that she had already left for school. He checked the clock on his phone: 10:17 a.m. He remembered waking up at eight in the morning. Had he really wasted two hours already?

  “She’s a working girl. Candi, the one at the Grant Apartments, asked me to look into her disappearance and she said she had a tribal band around her wrist. I remembered that our girl did, too.”

  “Shit. So it could be just about anybody in the city and anybody passin’ through, huh?”

  “The types of predators that target prostitutes want easy targets. Someone that will come back with them willingly because they don’t have the charm or the intelligence to get them to the kill spot on their own. It’ll be someone that has either mental or physical disabilities. At least a really low IQ.”

  “So, does this mean you’re helping with this body?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want it to take time away.”

  “What is it with you and this list? What if you’re wrong?”

  “I’m not.” He paused, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the window over the kitchen sink. “It’s here, Kyle. It’s spread itself over this city and is eating it alive.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout half the time.”

  He leaned against the sink. “I just don’t know if I can spare the time.”

  Dixon sighed. “She was a person, too, Ethan. Remember? She’s a person. That’s what you said about our last vic. She’s a person. Well, Hannah’s a person, too. You can go chasing men that may or may not be hurting people, or you can stop one that we already know is taking lives. Your call.”
>
  Baudin waited a beat before saying, “I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

  A silent revulsion filled Baudin, something that he wasn’t even sure was really there. As he pulled to a stop in front of the slaughterhouse, he realized his body was reacting to just the thought of smelling the interior of that place again. But he had no choice.

  He got out of the car, and instead of going through the door again, he hurried over to a fence on the other side of the building. Poking his head over, he watched a stream of pigs being led from one building to another. They were covered in feces, and several of them had open, festering wounds and bite marks. He’d heard that animals in captivity developed psychosis over time and became cannibals. Some would even kill themselves by bashing their heads into walls.

  A couple of employees were herding the animals. One was whipping them, and another was laughing. Baudin watched them until the last pig had entered the other building, then he hopped the fence.

  The ground was coated in fecal matter and rotten food. He breathed out of his mouth as he quietly hurried to the door the pigs had disappeared through. Opening it, he was again hit with a smell that made his eyes water. He followed the sound of the men and the pigs, taking each step gingerly and staying far enough back that he might pass for someone just heading in the same direction.

  The men walked past several vats like the one Hannah’s remains had been found in. Neither of the men looked inside any of them. Most of the vats were off, but a couple were running. The large metal drills spun, pulverizing the meat before it was drained off and sent elsewhere in the plant for further processing and packaging.

  The man who had shown them around, Henry, had lied to them. The workers didn’t look into the vats. They were like background noise. No one would have noticed a body unless they were examining the vat up close, perhaps while cleaning or prepping for the day.

  He headed out of the building then hopped the fence again. Going up to the door, he took a moment to snort out of his nostrils, trying to remove the scent of dead and dying flesh. Then he hit the intercom and was buzzed in.