“Becca. Wrong place wrong time?”
“More like he knew her or had seen her and she was easy to subdue.”
“But that makes a connection between him and Becca, if they were in proximity.”
“Exactly. The library. And thinking about it, I think Nick is right.”
“Why?” But already Carina was putting together the pieces.
“Because the killer is immature. He was angry that Jodi messed up his plan. Ruined his fantasy. He had to take a woman that night. He had it all thought out. Probably had all the supplies on hand. Becca was there, she was nice to him, he waited for her.”
“It makes sense. Doesn’t help with figuring out who’s next.”
“Chief Causey said you have a twenty-four/seven watch on Abby and Kayla.”
“If his plan was Jodi all along, and Becca was just convenient, then Abby and Kayla could very well be in danger.”
“I agree. I also think he has other women he’s stalking. Probably connected with where he goes to school or where he works.”
“I have an undercover cop at the library during the hours he is most likely to be there, but now I’ll put one on-site full-time.”
“Good.”
Carina glanced at her watch. “Jodi Carmichael’s autopsy is in an hour. I have to pick up Nick and head over there. Do you want to observe?”
“At the beginning, then I need to meet Andrew at the courthouse. By the way, I like him,” said Dillon.
“Him who? Andrew?” She scrunched up her nose. Though she respected her former brother-in-law as the district attorney, she and her brothers had never liked him.
“The sheriff.”
“You were just lecturing me about what he was doing hanging around the case.”
“Hmm, not quite. I was just curious, mostly.”
Carina playfully hit him.
“Seriously, I like him. He’s one of the good guys.”
Carina shook her head. “Get out of here so I can lock up. I’ll meet you at the morgue.” She didn’t know what to make of Dillon’s pronouncement, but decided not to look too deeply at it. It made her feel, well, like a teenager again when Dillon put his stamp of approval on her boyfriends.
But she was secretly pleased. Dillon’s instincts about the men in her life were usually accurate.
It took less than two minutes to back out of her garage and drive the block to her parents’ house. She ran up the stairs to the garage apartment and pounded on the door. “Hey Nick! You decent?”
No answer.
She ran back down the stairs and through the side door into the kitchen. Nick was standing at the sink rinsing dishes and loading the dishwasher. Nick was a big guy, broader than her dad, built more like her brother Connor, the PI. He looked strange in her mother’s kitchen, but at the same time oddly domestic, almost like he fit.
She shook her head. It was all Dillon’s fault, coming into her house telling her he liked Nick. What was with that? She knew better than to get involved with cops. No matter how sexy they looked doing dishes. Especially since he would be going back to Montana, and that would be that.
But it wasn’t like he worked in the San Diego Police Department, so technically he wasn’t a colleague, so she wouldn’t be breaking her rule.
That’s it. She had to do something to stop thinking about Nick carnally. Right now she was thinking about him doing the dishes naked. Now that was sexy. A man doing the dishes was one thing, doing them sans clothing was just plain fun.
She really needed to get him out of her system.
“Cara, darling.” Her mom came out of the walk-in pantry, a smile on her round face. “Let me get the fruit salad from the refrigerator. Do you want some toast?”
Carina jumped, blushed. Had she ever blushed before? She didn’t think so. But her mom had caught her thinking about sex, and Carina was positive her mother could read minds.
“No, Mama, I’m fine. Really.”
Her mother stared at her closely, eyes narrow. Carina put on a blank face and pushed all thoughts of Nick’s naked body from her mind. “What did you eat this morning? You don’t eat breakfast, so don’t lie to me.”
Food. Her mom’s favorite pastime was feeding her, so maybe she hadn’t seen the lust on her face. “I had coffee.”
“Pshaw! Coffee!”
She opened the refrigerator. Carina glanced at Nick, who’d finished with the dishes. He was grinning, trying to suppress a laugh. For the first time, she saw him relaxed. She wasn’t surprised; her mother had that effect on people.
She caught Nick’s eye, wrinkled her nose at him.
“Mama, we have to go. Duty calls.”
“How can you do anything on an empty stomach?”
“I promise, I’ll have a good lunch.”
“No come bien, míja. Solamente trabája, trabája, trabája. ¡Madre de Dios! ¿Como te ayuda?”
“Mama, stop that.” Carina turned to Nick. “She said I never eat.”
“I know.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“Some. Enough to get by.”
Her mother smiled broadly. “I knew I liked Nicholas the moment he walked into my home.”
“Mama, we have work.”
She glared at Carina. “Work, always work. It’s Saturday.” She shook her head. “I raised a house of workaholics. Even Lucy is upstairs doing homework!”
“I don’t believe it,” Carina laughed. “Homework on a Saturday morning?”
“She’s on that computer Papa bought her last year. She never gets off.”
Carina glanced at Nick, his expression turning as serious as hers. She’d never really talked to Lucy about the dangers of being online. Even though Lucy was a smart kid, online predators were viciously smart. Street smart. She needed to talk to Lucy about being safe, but she’d have to do it later.
Her mom smiled widely at Nick. “You’ve been very helpful, Nicholas.” She surveyed the dishwasher, closed it. “My sons tend to be rough with my dishes. You have good hands.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Rosa.”
“Mama, we really have to go,” Carina said. She glanced at Nick. “Autopsy,” she mouthed.
“I’m ready,” Nick said. “Thank you for a delicious breakfast, Mrs. Kincaid. Unlike some people,” he glanced at Carina with a half-smile, “I appreciate a good morning meal.”
“Kiss-ass,” she said.
“Carina Maria!”
She cringed, gave her mom a hug. “See you later, Mama.”
“Don’t know where you learned that language,” her mother said as they walked out.
In the car, Nick said, “Your mom is a great lady.”
“You are such a kiss-ass, Nick Thomas.”
She thought he’d smile, joke back with her, but instead he grew serious.
“Is something wrong?”
“I like your mom. And your dad. They’re really genuine people.”
If there was one thing that endeared someone to Carina, it was appreciating her parents, quirks and all. Her heart warmed and she pictured Nick in her mom’s kitchen. He fit in well.
She was in serious trouble. “I like them, too,” she said, trying to keep the conversation light. “What about your parents?”
Nick didn’t say anything for several minutes. Carina itched to ask a follow-up question, anything to get the conversation moving. She hated the silence.
Finally, he said, “We had what I thought was a normal family. My dad was in the military, like yours, but not career. He had two years in Vietnam, when Steve was a baby. I was born nine months after his discharge.”
Carina was about to make a joke, but a quick glance at Nick’s face as she turned the corner to the main road told her this wasn’t funny, not to him.
“Dad joined the reserves because he missed the military, was gone one weekend a month minimum, volunteered for everything. I don’t think my parents loved each other, not like yours. But they had, I don’t know, something. It was Steve
and me, though, all the time. I followed him around everywhere. I wanted to be more like him, I guess. Confident and outgoing.”
“I like you just fine the way you turned out,” she said.
“I don’t have many complaints. I had a good life for the most part. Normal. But after my father died, my mother didn’t really have the heart to keep going. She died a couple years later.”
I’m sorry seemed so inadequate. “I’m lucky, I know,” Carina said instead. “We had some rough spots over the years—I was an army brat until I was sixteen. We moved all over the country. I hated it. When my dad retired here, it wasn’t soon enough for me. But even with all the moves, the new schools, making new friends, my family was always there.”
“Yes, you’re very lucky,” Nick agreed.
TWENTY-SIX
WHEN CARINA AND NICK ARRIVED at the coroner’s laboratory, Jim was already there. “You didn’t tell me you were coming in today.”
“I have no life outside work anymore,” he said pointedly.
“You didn’t ever have a life outside work,” Carina retorted.
“Ouch.”
“Children,” Chen said as he walked into the room.
Carina sobered up as Chen’s assistant wheeled the gurney into the autopsy room with the prepped body of Jodi Carmichael. They were in the main room, which Carina appreciated. The smaller room had a lower ceiling and was a third the size, putting Carina closer to the proceedings. Here, she could stand back and look at other things—cabinets, tools, lights—if she couldn’t stomach the autopsy. And three in one week? It had to be a record for her.
Dillon walked in and Chen said warmly, “To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“If you don’t mind I’d like to observe.”
“By all means, Dr. Kincaid. Glad to have you.”
“I need to leave early, but I wanted to get a sense of the killer’s mind-set. The body looks abused.”
“Yes. However, most of it occurred postmortem. She had been dead several hours.”
Dillon frowned. “She was sexually assaulted, correct?”
He nodded. “After Dr. Gage told me she had been drugged, I took the liberty of running a tox screen last night. A near-lethal dose of Rohypnol was in her system.”
Rohypnol, the so-called date-rape drug, was too often deadly. Some jerks gave it to their girlfriends thinking they’d become more compliant in bed. Others drugged their dates in order to get past first base. But sexual predators used it to knock out their victims. The women didn’t pass out immediately. Some became more susceptible to suggestions, others fell asleep, others acted like themselves but didn’t remember anything while on the drug.
And many died.
“Did the drugs kill her?” Carina asked.
“I don’t know yet, Detective,” Chen said. “From the levels in her system, I don’t think so, but I’ll know more when I inspect her organs. It may have been a contributing cause.”
He continued. “I have the victim’s medical records, which indicate that she had a history of asthma and was allergic to latex.” Chen continued his visual inspection of the body, documenting each external wound. While he did that, Nick said to Dillon, “No plastic wrap. Why?”
“She died on him. He didn’t have time.”
“There was no postmortem sexual assault,” Jim interjected. “He didn’t need the plastic to keep evidence off her body.”
“He gets his thrill from killing her during the rape,” Dillon said. “After she’s dead he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. Gets rid of the body as quickly as possible.”
“Like a snuff film,” Nick said, and everyone grew silent.
“Yes,” Dillon said finally. “The suspect Scout’s profile says he’s studying computer science and photography.”
“I’ll pull Vice into the equation to watch and see if any films or photographs of the murders start showing up.”
“He’s not going to want to share,” Nick said.
“Why?” Dillon asked, curious.
“It’s just my gut feeling. I don’t have anything to base it on. I just think these are his women, he wants to keep them for himself. He might have pictures, or maybe even filmed the murder, but it will be for his eyes only. For his pleasure, no one else’s.”
Chen cleared his throat to indicate that he was getting started, then he cut open her chest.
Carina never felt the need to “be strong” and watch something that thoroughly disturbed her, so she turned her head and took a deep breath. The smell she could handle. She’d smelled far worse—her second homicide was a week-dead decomposing prostitute in a Dumpster in the heart of the Gaslight area. In general she could handle dead bodies in various states of murder.
But watching an autopsy seemed too clinical. Scientists dispassionately documenting injuries, weighing organs, as if the human body was a thing. It made her feel vulnerable, mortal. She didn’t want to think about what would happen to her own body after she died.
Jim walked over to the table. “Just what I suspected.”
“What?” Carina couldn’t help but ask, turning her attention back to the autopsy.
“Asphyxiation,” Jim said, “from anaphylactic shock.”
“Why didn’t Angie die the same way?”
“She wasn’t allergic to latex,” Jim explained. “In this victim, her airways became clogged with hives. With no medication to reduce the swelling, she suffocated.”
Carina pictured Jodi tied to a bed, struggling for her last breath, alone and scared. Her stomach flipped and she turned away from the dead girl’s corpse.
Nick touched her lightly on the small of her back, cleared his throat. “He came in and found her dead. Became enraged and punched her.”
“Repeatedly,” Chen said. “Two broken ribs, the nose, severe postmortem damage.”
“Her abdomen looks like pulp,” Jim said, disgusted. “She’d been dead about four to five hours before he found her.”
“Did he use his bare hands?” Carina asked.
“Absolutely. He may have had on gloves of some sort, but I don’t see any latex or fiber residue under the microscope. And if he’d used a hammer or another object the wounds would have a smaller center. These are fist-size impressions.”
“But if he didn’t use latex gloves, how could she have died from a latex allergy?”
“Some glues have latex in them. I’m going to check for latex on the glue samples when I get back to the lab.”
“His hands would be damaged, wouldn’t you say?” Carina asked. She couldn’t rid her mind of the image of Jodi fighting for breath as her body swelled up.
“Very likely. Bruised. Possibly split, especially on the knuckles.”
“He’s like a kid with a bug jar,” Nick said.
“Excuse me?” Jim looked over his shoulder. Nick had even attracted Chen’s attention.
“Essentially, he has a woman in a jar. She’s restrained, trapped. He can watch her if he wants. Prod her. Attack her. He touches her to see how she reacts. Rapes her for the sensation, then uses convenient items so he can watch. Like pulling the wings off a fly. It can’t go anywhere, can’t escape. When the bug finally dies, sometimes a kid gets mad. How dare the bug die on him. Stomps on it. Shows it how powerful he really is, though he really feels small and helpless because he couldn’t keep the bug alive long enough to do everything he wanted.”
No one said anything for a long minute.
“Sheriff, I think you’re right,” Dillon said. “She died before he wanted her dead. She shattered his fantasy. The ultimate high for him is sex and death.”
Dillon looked at everyone in the room. “He’s going to act again, and soon. Jodi cheated him and he’s angry. But because he’s angry, he has a greater chance of slipping up.”
Carina prayed they caught a break before another woman died.
His skin prickled, as if a spider were crawling on him. He batted it away, and it was replaced by another phantom spider.
It was Jodi’s fault. She’d ruined everything. She wasn’t supposed to just die like that. She wasn’t playing her part. In the back of his mind he kept thinking that somehow he’d forgotten something, that maybe he’d made a mistake. So he kept replaying everything in his mind. From going in through her window—he’d worn gloves—to putting her in the trunk—no one had seen him—to cleaning her body. He’d covered all bases.
So why did he feel so odd?
The high he’d had after Becca plummeted, and he didn’t know what to do. He watched his special tapes over and over. They didn’t help.
He watched the slide shows he’d made of Angie and Becca. That was a little better, but then the show he had of Jodi reminded him of his failure.
When his father disappeared, he knew it was his mother’s fault. She was loud and disrespectful, and she slept with other men. Even then as a child, he’d known it. He’d seen it. For years he’d blamed his mother and wished he had the courage to kill her with his bare hands, watching her eyes bulge, squeezing her throat until every bone in her neck broke.
But it was his fault, too. His failure as a son. If only he’d been older, smarter. If he’d followed his father and begged him to take him, too.
For a long time he’d thought his father was back in prison, but his mother denied it. Said he wasn’t coming back and to forget him. How could he do that? How could he forget his own father?
His dad would understand the feelings. The pictures that popped into his mind all the time.
When he looked in the car next to him and saw a pretty woman, he could imagine her naked and bloody beneath him—a vision so vivid he believed he could touch her and feel warm blood on his fingers.
Or when his mother was around and he dreamed so distinctly of going into her bedroom and cutting her throat. He’d wake up after that smelling blood, certain he’d done it, needing to check that he hadn’t somehow killed his mother in his sleep.
He never had.
Or when he saw his brother and wondered if he had the same feelings, that maybe if he talked to him and explained everything clearly, he would have a partner. Someone to help. Someone who understood.
But he didn’t dare go after his mother, and didn’t dare tell his brother. It was just him, alone. He had to figure everything out.
Speak No Evil Page 23