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Blake Harris turned 50 years old that May. He would complete his thirty years with the Memphis Police Department in four months and was looking forward to fishing and drinking beer all day. That was before a murder case crossed his desk that would change his life forever.
Blake had no children but he did once have a wife. For some men there is but one true love, and Beth was his. He lost both Beth and their son in childbirth, and the blow almost killed him. He sat many a night after their deaths with a bottle of whiskey and a loaded gun, wondering why he should go on living. In the end, it was his job that saved him – specifically, a murder case that fell into his lap.
There had been three home invasions in a row, all of them taking place on his beat. People were shot at all three houses, with two dead and four others in the hospital. The detectives on the case thought it was an outsider from the low-rent housing complex a mile from the crimes.
Blake wasn’t so sure. He began to take his own car and drive his beat at night. It filled those empty hours he had been spending with the bottle and gun. It also provided him with some sort of a reason to live. At 12:06 a.m. on March the 3rd, he heard the gunshots that put him on the path he was now coming to the end of.
A tall figure wearing a ski mask ran from a house two doors down from where he had pulled over to the curb. It was crazy – he couldn’t believe the guy was running right at him. Blake stepped out of his car, raised his gun, and yelled for the figure to stop. In answer to his command, a shot rang out and Blake felt like he had been hit with a baseball bat. He couldn’t remember firing his weapon, but a bullet from his gun had entered the killer’s head right above the left eye, killing him on the spot, a white male who lived in the neighborhood. Blake spent a week in the hospital recuperating from a chest wound and two weeks on medical leave. He returned to work on light duty but with the rank of Detective First Grade.
He had always hoped to make detective. It was his goal in life. Blake had wanted to be a detective ever since he was a kid. He had taken the exam and passed with high marks, but there were no openings, so when the sergeant job became available, he took another test and accepted it instead. Had he not been married, who knows? – he might have pushed harder. However, in the end, nothing would have changed.
He put a huge number of cases under his belt over the next many years, with medals and awards hanging all over his wall, and he felt proud of the job he had done. Up until a week ago now, he was the head detective: Detective Captain Blake Harris. Now a younger, fresher face sat behind his old desk, and he was just yesterday’s hero on his way out.
Other than fishing and drinking beer, he hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do after the police force. Women had come and gone over the years. Some stayed longer than others, but in the end, they all came to understand that to Blake they would never be the real thing. No one could compete against a memory, and Beth would always be in his heart.
Blake put off opening the file on his desk. He knew it was his last case and he might not even finish it before retiring. His job might only be to do all the grunt work before it was handed off to the next detective on the list.
He flipped the file open and was struck by the photograph of the good-looking young man lying on the autopsy table. He looked to be asleep. In all of Blake’s years, he had never seen such a peaceful look on a murder victim’s face.
He glanced quickly over the report. There would be time to read it in more detail after a visit to the morgue. The victim’s name was Tomas Warner, and his age according to his driver license was 23.
Blake wondered about “Tomas,” which seemed to be Hispanic, and the kid looked like he might be Hispanic. But “Warner” was not Hispanic. The first thing to cross his mind was that it could be a hate crime.
The young man was killed between around 10:00-10:30 the night before, and the body was found by a passerby at 11 p.m. in the Cooper-Young area of town. There was one stab wound to the base of the skull, which caused instant death. No other marks were found on the body, and robbery didn’t seem to be the motive, because there was $103 in his billfold and his watch and ring were untouched.
Blake closed the file, stood, and put on his jacket. He opened his desk drawer, removed his gun, and slid it into his holster. He walked to the elevator and as soon as the doors opened, he stepped in and punched basement.
He chose to drive his own car. The new Head of Detectives had his old one and Blake didn’t like sharing cars with the other detectives. Some were messy as hell and others would haul their arrestees instead of waiting for a patrol car. The smell of vomit and piss never came out of those cars.
He also liked to drive his new Jeep Wrangler. He felt that if you’re going for a life of fishing and drinking beer, as he was about to do, then a Jeep is the thing to own.
He pulled out of the police garage at 201 Poplar into the traffic of downtown Memphis. Only one morgue and one medical examiner served all of Shelby County, and they were located in the University of Tennessee Medical Center off Union Avenue. Blake took a few back streets to avoid as much traffic as possible. Upon arriving he parked around back and locked his Jeep. The morgue was a creepy place to enter from the rear.
He walked through the back door and past the big furnace that incinerated body parts that were no longer needed. Blake took a right down a long white marble hallway and up the short flight of stairs at the end. At the top of the stairs, the scene changed to more that of a hospital. There were glass doors with department names and personnel printed on them, and the medical smell was everywhere. Halfway down the hall Blake turned to the left and pushed open the two wide doors that led to the morgue. He traversed the short hallway with the viewing window and then took a right into the business area of the morgue. Standing over a metal table cutting away at some poor soul was Dr. Morgan Keeler.
Blake called out, “Hey, Morgan, you got a little time to spare for an old friend?”
Dr. Keeler turned, holding a bloody saw high in his right hand. His rubber apron and face shield were splattered with blood.
Blake smiled. Over the many years, they had become friends, but once Blake made Captain their meetings became fewer and they had drifted apart. It was nice to see his old friend hadn’t changed.
Morgan set the saw down on the body, took off the shield and apron, and hung them on the metal pole that ran up from the table, and then he peeled off his gloves. With a bigger-than-life smile, he headed toward Blake, threw his arms around him and laughingly said, “My, how far the mighty have fallen. The Captain of Detectives in my morgue. What happened? Was there a revolt at 201 Poplar and you’re the only one left?”
Blake pushed back and said, “It’s damn good to see you again, Morgan.”
“You too, Blake. Now, what can I do for the Captain of Detectives?”
“First thing is, I’m no longer the Captain of Detectives. I’m just Captain Harris, a lowly detective looking to sit at the feet and hear the great wisdom of the almighty medical examiner.”
“I heard you were on your way out. Do you really think retirement is going to work for you?”
“I don’t know, Morgan, but I’m going to give it a shot. In the meantime, I believe you have the body of Tomas Warner in here.”
Keeler turned and headed down the row of tables. “He’s down here at the end. It’s a strange one, not sure what to make of it. It’s the first one like it to cross my path in all these years.”
“What’s so strange? The report says he died from a knife wound to the base of the skull.”
“It’s the type of weapon that was used.” Keeler drew the sheet back from the body. “It’s called a push knife. The knife has a ‘T’ handle that fits in the palm of the hand, with the shelf passing between the fingers, and the blade becoming part of a closed fist.”
“Well, it isn’t something I’ve ever run into either. But is it all that strange?”
Morgan turned on the light and lit up an X-ray of the wound. “Blake, it takes a lot of skill to place a blade like that in a spot the size of a quarter. With a long blade, you can see the tip and that gives you an aiming point. But with a push knife, all you have is your fist to guide the blade. Whoever did this, it isn’t his first rodeo.”
“Come on, Morgan, it’s a little early to be crying serial killer!”
Morgan threw the sheets back on the two tables beyond. “Then how do you explain the same stab wounds made by the same knife on these other two men?”
“When the hell did these come in?”
“Your body came in about 12:00 midnight from Memphis. The second showed up at 1:35 a.m., and number three at 2:45 a.m. You have one Hispanic killed in Memphis, one black killed in Bartlett, and this white guy killed in Germantown.”
Morgan pulled the sheets back over the two bodies and returned to Tomas. “I’ll bet all my retirement there aren’t that many killers in the entire State of Tennessee skilled with that kind of a knife. This guy killed three people in one night. You have a serial killer out there someplace.”
“We’ll see, Morgan. In the meantime, I have only this one case. Has Tomas Warner’s mother been here to I.D. her son?”
“She was here first thing this morning, and I’ve been ordered to release the body by this afternoon. The lady has juice upstairs, so I’d be careful if I were you.”
Blake headed for the hall. “I guess she’ll be my next stop. Maybe she can shed some light on this idea of yours about a serial killer.”
“You might want to wait, Blake. She’s getting ready for a funeral and I doubt you would be a welcome sight at her door.”
“Thanks for the advice, but I was going to give her a week or so anyway. I need to contact the other captains and get their input before we start calling this a serial killing. I also want a little more background on these victims. See you later, Morgan.” Blake started for the door.
“Don’t be such a stranger. We need to grab a couple of beers and catch up.”
“We’ll do that, Morgan. See you later.”
| Copyright © 2019, 2020 by Ed Rogers |
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