Silenced lk-4

by Allison Brennan

  The floor was covered with pink water from the naked female victim who had bled out in the tub. One stab wound to her chest, plus her left wrist cut so deeply her hand had nearly separated from her arm.

  The victim’s body disappeared into water darkened by her blood.

  Lucy had to close her eyes, just for a moment. The violence in the main hotel room was disturbing, but Lucy had seen crime scenes like that before.

  The body in the bathroom was a whole new level of gruesome.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Genie demanded, her voice cracking.

  Lucy opened her eyes and looked at the mirror. The killer had written another message on the mirror.

  Run, run as fast as you can

  “You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man,” Lucy whispered.

  “What?” Genie spun around, pushing Lucy away from the door.

  “I was finishing the rhyme.”

  “He’s taunting us. He thinks I won’t catch him? Watch me. I’m going to nail the bastard.”

  “It could be a taunt, or it could be a message to the others.”

  “What others?”

  “One of the six,” Lucy said.

  “You’re talking Greek. Six?”

  “From his message yesterday.”

  “So we have three more victims today, he’s going to kill two more?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you just said-fuck it. I don’t want to know. Taback! Where’s the security? The manager? Has someone gotten me the damn ID on our vics? Anything?”

  Three dollars.

  Genie stormed out of the room. Lucy stayed while DC forensics photographed the scene. The coroner hadn’t arrived, so no one had touched the bodies.

  Lucy walked the scene, starting at the door.

  Without more information, she couldn’t figure out what exactly had happened-if the male victim had been followed into the room, or if someone was waiting inside. Or if he had known his attacker and let him in.

  The male victim had his back to the door. He was of average size and build, approximately five foot ten, lean, dressed in beige slacks and a button-down shirt that had once been white. His shoes were leather loafers, the soles worn but the tops polished. A man who walked outdoors frequently as part of his job, common in the Beltway.

  A hotel card key was next to his body, a small overnight suitcase next to the door. She closed her eyes, pictured what she would do if she had an overnight bag. Unlock the door-push the key in, wait for the beep, open. Put the bag down, particularly if it was heavy. Close the door. Bolt it.

  The door hadn’t been bolted. The maid had come in and found the bodies.

  The male vic had been killed quickly-his throat deeply slashed just like Nicole Bellows’s. Grab, slash, drop. The blood spatter indicated the attacker grabbed him from behind, used his left hand, slit his throat hard and fast, showing the killer was not only as tall or taller than the victim, but also physically strong.

  It took both strength and a good knife to slice the neck so deeply.

  No sign of hesitation, no sign of struggle.

  Why hadn’t anyone screamed?

  The woman was fully clothed and near the bed, her body huddled in a protective fetal position. Castoff left the ceiling dotted with arcs of blood. Lucy couldn’t even count the multitude of wounds on the victim, and she was only looking at her back. Her head was buried in her arms and Lucy was relieved she couldn’t see her face.

  Man-quick death. Woman-brutally murdered. Young woman in the bathroom-possibly quick. Lucy hadn’t been able to tell what came first, the chest wound or the wrist.

  Except …

  She went back to the bathroom doorway and pulled the door closed. Opened it. The door swung toward the bathtub, but the killer would have been visible in the mirror-unless the mirror was foggy with steam.

  The girl in the bathtub may have jumped up-which would account for the water on the floor sloshing over. He had to stab her to keep her from screaming. To pull her up out of the tub to slit her throat would have caused a mess, an opportunity for the girl to scratch him or scream for help.

  Lucy looked at the angle of the wound. She pretended to hold a knife. Adjusted her hand to throw the knife. The doorway was approximately six feet from the entry wound. He stepped, threw the knife into her chest-that’s why the wound was more horizontal than vertical. It was the angle at which he threw it, because he was left-handed, standing, while she was reclining in the tub-possibly trying to get up.

  The killer threw the knife without hesitation. He then either had a second knife, or he pulled the knife from her chest-

  Lucy looked around, saw faint marks that could have been blood spatter, but the moisture from the bath had caused the trail to nearly disappear.

  He then slit her wrist deeply, dropping her hand in the water to facilitate bleeding out.

  She wasn’t dead from the wound to the chest. If she were, there wouldn’t have been so much blood in the bathtub.

  She had convulsed or tried to get up, causing more water to slosh out, leaving the tub only half-full.

  Had he watched her die?

  No. He didn’t get his thrills from watching death. Nicole Bellows at the Red Light, the male victim here, fast kills, a job, get it done and get out.

  No, he didn’t need to get out immediately. He wanted to leave the message.

  She turned to the mirror. He’d wiped steam from the mirror, the quick strokes of his hand or arm visible, along with blood smeared across the mirror.

  Did he reach over to the girl for her blood or take it from his knife?

  The knife, Lucy guessed. The message faded near the end. He’d gone back to the knife-or body if Lucy’s hypothesis was inaccurate-three times, the blood thicker on the first Run, then on as, and finally on the last word can.

  Each letter dripped down the slick surface, drying in long streaks.

  Who are you talking to? Why this message? Are you engaging the police? Think you’re uncatchable? Or are you writing to someone else?

  He’d changed the first rhyme slightly, but not the second rhyme.

  Wendy James’s killer also left a message.

  Not every killer left a deliberate message.

  She’d thought about the similarities when she was at the morgue, but dismissed them.

  Now, she couldn’t.

  And this guilty whore don’t cry no more.

  Not a children’s rhyme, but Lucy had an ear for languages and there was a very familiar rhythm to the message, it had the exact same beats as other common rhymes, but Lucy couldn’t pinpoint which one he’d used, if he’d done it on purpose.

  “Kincaid!”

  Genie stepped back into the room.

  “Yes?” Whatever was in her head disappeared. She would go home and analyze the line structurally against popular children’s rhymes. But she was 90 percent certain that the man who killed Wendy James had killed Nicole Bellows and these three victims.

  “I just spoke to the manager and security chief. We have an ID on two of the victims. Christopher Taylor and his wife Jocelyn.”

  “And the girl in the bathroom?” She appeared too old to be their daughter.

  “Unknown.”

  “I want you to see something,” Lucy said.

  Genie grimaced, but followed Lucy to the bathroom.

  “There are two cell phones submersed in the sink.”

  “I already made note of that. CSU will bag them, see if we can get anything off them.”

  “Look at the victim’s arms,” Lucy said.

  “Just tell me, Kincaid.”

  Genie avoided looking at the girl. Lucy hadn’t pegged Genie as being squeamish, but yesterday the body had been removed by the time Lucy and Noah had arrived. Today’s crime scene was far more grisly.

  “The girl was a cutter, though not recently.” Her arms, which floated on the surface of the bloody water, showed the telltale scars of a longtime cutter. Her hair was long and dyed bri
ght red, the roots showing her to be a natural blonde. “But what’s more interesting are their belongings. Backpack, stuffed like an overnight bag. Toiletries-all for women. I don’t think the male victim was staying here.”

  “Or he kept everything in a razor kit.”

  Lucy looked around. “And put it back in his suitcase? I don’t know. But look at this backpack-it’s old, ratty, hardly worth keeping. Do you bring a backpack like that to a hotel like this?”

  She pointed to a small, open tin that held three blue pills.

  “These are unmarked. Look at the edge of the capsule-illegal lab, I think.”

  Genie concurred. “Barbiturate?”

  “Probably a benzodiazepine.” Lucy and Genie walked back to the main room. “Jocelyn Taylor was overkill, this victim was quickly killed. If she was drugged first-self or forced-it might explain the lack of fight.”

  “Whatever it is, we have a bigger issue,” Genie said. “Taylor is the chief of staff to a newly elected congressman, Dale Hartline. His wife is a social worker for a nonprofit group. They live in Chevy Chase. Checked in here Tuesday before eight in the morning-paid extra for that privilege. But get this-security cams have five people in this room and next door.”

  “Adjoining room?”

  Genie jerked her finger toward a door on the far side. “Two double beds. The Taylors didn’t register any other guests and only asked for two room keys, but we definitely have five in here. Unfortunately, the security cameras only monitor the lobby and garage. But they’re having a shitload of problems with the feed-damn! I must be over five bucks by now.”

  She continued. “If there was no message on the damn mirror, I would never have thought the Nicole Bellows case was connected to this, but now? It makes no sense. Cheap-ass motel, five-star hotel. Black street hooker, white congressional staffer. Maybe he was into kink? Maybe the dead girl in the bath is a hooker? Wife watches? Pimp gets pissed? Fuck if I can figure it out.”

  Three dollars, seventy-five cents.

  Lucy understood Genie’s frustration.

  “Detective?” One of the CSU officer’s came from the adjoining room with a large plastic bag full of clothing.

  “Tell me the killer left his clothes and his name is sewn on the label.”

  He cracked a smile. “A couple T-shirts, tank tops, pajama bottoms. Found them in a drawer. They reek of smoke, and I’m not talking tobacco. Whoever wore these were in or near a fire.”

  Genie ordered the cop monitoring the door, “Taback, find out if the Taylors had a fire at their house.”

  The crime scene investigator interrupted. “Already checked. Negative.”

  Genie threw her arms up. “Guess that would have been too easy. Check all structural fires in the city in the last seventy-two hours. See if there’s any reason that the Taylors or the girl in the bathroom could have been in any of those locations. Did we get the girl’s face into the database?”

  “They’re running her through now-we can’t get prints because her body’s waterlogged, maybe the morgue can.”

  Genie looked at Lucy. She shook her head. “Doubtful, but there are some computer programs that may be able to extrapolate. It really depends on what they have to start with.”

  The investigator continued. “There’s evidence that the killer showered in the other bathroom. A towel with blood, a smear on the tile. We’re processing the room carefully hoping to get hair or fiber samples.”

  “The killer showered?” Genie said.

  Lucy said, “He had to. He stabbed three people to death. He’d have had a lot of blood on him, and even if he managed to elude the security cams, he wouldn’t want to be seen in bloody clothes.”

  “So he showered, brought a change of clothes with him? That takes a lot of planning.”

  “He didn’t shower at the Red Light Motel, maybe he realized he had more blood on him than he expected,” Lucy offered. “So he came better prepared this time.”

  “Well shit.”

  Four dollars.

  “Coroner’s here,” announced the uniformed officer standing at the door.

  “Send ’em in.”

  To Lucy, Genie said, “Let’s go see if security fixed their technology screwup.” She paused. “‘Screwup’ isn’t a swear word.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Lucy crowded into the small security office with Genie, two cops, the manager, and security chief. She stood near the back, barely able to see the laptop monitor on which the head of security had downloaded the tapes from the last twenty-four hours.

  Genie gave a quick rundown on the timeline.

  “Jocelyn Taylor checked in alone at eight A.M. Tuesday morning, but the reservation was made an hour earlier over the phone by her husband, Chris.”

  Officer Taback added, “You said three girls were with her, correct?”

  “Yes. After she checked in, she went back to the front, where we presume she got into her car and drove into the secured garage. Free parking if you’re a guest, just slide your room key into the kiosk. That was at eight ten in the morning.”

  The security chief, Tom Wright, flipped the screen to a wide-angle garage shot. “The garage is hardwired into the system-it’s older than the hotel’s security system, more secure, but takes more people and space to maintain,” he said. “Mrs. Taylor parked near the elevator and three girls got out.”

  Lucy recognized the victim, who was the tallest of the three, but not the other two girls. One was in her early twenties, but the other was definitely younger, with the awkward movements of a young teen who had recently grown. Thirteen? Fourteen?

  Genie said, “We’ll take the best head shots of the girls and distribute them widely so we can ID them quickly. We’ll send them to your cell phones to show witnesses. We need to know who these girls are, so we’re doing a complete canvass of the hotel and nearby restaurants.”

  Wright flipped to the hotel system. The feed was much clearer than in the garage, and in color instead of black-and-white.

  “The girls went to the room with Mrs. Taylor, and until last night, none of them left.”

  “Do you notice that each of the girls has a backpack,” Lucy said, “but Jocelyn Taylor has no luggage?”

  “She left Tuesday afternoon and returned a few hours later with shopping bags. Then she left and didn’t return until Wednesday afternoon.”

  “So she wasn’t staying here,” Genie said.

  “Doesn’t appear that she was,” Wright said. “On Wednesday evening she left the room, met her husband in the lobby. They walked out-didn’t take their vehicles-and came back nearly two hours later with carryout from a nearby restaurant.”

  Taback said, “CSU found a receipt in the room for two meals eaten at the restaurant, and a large carryout order charged separately. We didn’t find any food bags, only one half-eaten container.”

  “At ten thirty P.M., approximately thirty minutes after the Taylors returned, the brunette and the blonde left,” Wright continued. “You can see they’re each carrying a backpack and the younger teen has the food. They went to the garage, and footage shows them leaving in Jocelyn’s car.”

  “Do we know that the Taylors were alive at that point?” Lucy asked.

  “Chris Taylor made two phone calls between ten thirty and eleven P.M., and we’re tracing them now,” Genie said. He also called down to the desk asking for a six A.M. wake-up call. The hotel rang three times, ten minutes apart, and there was no answer.”

  “Did they find the bodies then?”

  “No,” Wright said. “Housekeeping found the bodies just after eight this morning. Last night, Taylor left the room at eleven fifteen and went to the garage, removed a suitcase from his car, and shortly after that, the main hotel security went down until twelve-oh-three A.M.”

  “Jammed,” Lucy said when she saw the fuzz on the screen. “It was jammed-very easy to do with wireless. The hotel is on wireless, correct?”

  The security chief nodded. “The garage is hardwired, but the hotel
security cameras were upgraded to a secure wireless network.”

  “Not very secure,” Taback muttered.

  Lucy glanced around and wished Noah had arrived. She’d called him right when she got the call from Genie. He was in the middle of a meeting, but said he’d be over as soon as he could.

  “We called our IT department and they were working on the problem when it resolved itself,” Wright said. “We’ve had some glitches with the system, but it had never been down for this long before, hotel-wide.”

  “We need copies of film from all security cameras in the immediate area,” Genie said. “Two-block radius.”

  Taback nodded. “We’ll get it.”

  Lucy said, “Downed network, master pass key, killer who showers after killing three people? I think we’re dealing with a professional. Premeditated, planned attack.”

  “There’s more,” Wright said. He fast-forwarded the tape. “We get visual shortly after midnight. At one forty-five A.M., one of the two girls returns.”

  Lucy watched as the brunette parked in the garage. “Is the other girl in the car?”

  “Negative,” Wright said. “We have a camera at the entrance and unless she was lying down in the backseat, she wasn’t there.”

  The brunette had a backpack and went in the elevator. “After hours, all floors are locked unless you have a room key,” Wright said. “She used the room key to access the sixth floor. Seven minutes later, she’s back in the garage.” While he spoke, he fast-forwarded through the film until they could see the brunette exiting. Though the film wasn’t sharp, it was obvious the young woman was in distress. She left the garage in Jocelyn Taylor’s car.

  “She’s not a suspect,” Genie said, “but she’s definitely a person of interest. Why didn’t she report the crime? What happened to the teenager? Who are these girls? How are these murders connected to Nicole Bellows at the Red Light?”

  “They’re connected?” Taback asked.

  “I see a lot of homicides each week, but rarely does the killer leave a message. Two messages in two days?”

  Three messages. But Lucy didn’t say anything. She had to run her theory by Noah first. She wasn’t going to overstep her place again.