Dark Echoes: (Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 7)

by Savannah Kade

  The process was even more disturbing when the body on the autopsy table was as small as Kaylee Schulte’s. The case was so bad that the best news was that her skull had been slightly caved on the upper right side by a blow hard enough—the medical examiner was certain—to have rendered her unconscious almost immediately and probably kept her so during the ritual that had left her dead. After the autopsy, there was no doubt her death had been bizarre.

  “The cuts on her hands and face are nothing compared to what is on the rest of her,” Dr. Grunholdt had warned him as he pulled the sheet back. Gashes about four inches long ran up one leg and down the other. “They cover her arms to the backs of her hands.” He pointed as Ethan had looked with a clinical eye. Sometimes they were parallel, sometimes they crossed, and sometimes they met at an angle.

  “It looks as though her clothing was removed, the marks carved into her, and then after she died she was put back into her clothes and her body left in the woods.” Something about the way the blood had pooled in the cuts led Ethan to that conclusion.

  Dr. Grunholdt had nodded in agreement, adding, “Kaylee passed at some point during the cutting.” Then he’d used the word “ritual” and went back to conducting the formal autopsy.

  Dr. Grunholdt had looked up at him a few times, but Ethan stood silently watching as the medical examiner went about his macabre job. In another lifetime, Grunholdt should have been a pediatrician. He could have played the kindly older doctor on a hospital show on TV. Instead, though he probably should have retired years ago, Grunholdt was standing over a murdered child.

  When they were done and the doctor had stitched up the Y-shaped incision he’d started with, Ethan had heard most of the reporting that would go into the autopsy files. That was why he had come. He’d needed to watch. He had to listen to get the information before anyone else, and he’d wanted to be able to ask his questions. He now knew too much. Though no one yet had the toxicology report or the labs, he’d looked to Grunholdt as they walked down the hallway.

  Ethan stopped them and looked the doctor square in the eyes. “It’s not random, is it?”

  Grunholdt had shaken his head. “I don’t know what it is or what those marks mean, but they mean something. You’ve got a case on your hands, sir.” That had been it. The older man had dismissed him and left Ethan to pull off his paper booties, gloves, and paper robe. He stuffed them into the designated trash and headed down the hallway.

  Shit, he’d thought. He’d been hoping against hope since yesterday that the cuts on her face and hands would be the extent of it. He’d fervently hoped it was more benign than it appeared. A high percentage of cases that looked like cult murders were accidental. Then the killer somehow found the guts to add a few cuts to the body, to throw suspicion in a different direction. But this morning had made it clear that wasn’t what had happened to Kaylee.

  In fact, Grace Lee had informed him that rigor mortis and some of the debris stuck in Kaylee’s hair and on her clothes indicated she’d been laid out like a starfish originally. Though Ethan had checked up the embankment the first day, he was going to have to go back. They’d missed something.

  Everything now seemed to be falling into place—the worst place possible. The Schulte family’s insistence that their daughter had not run away had become much, much more credible. The parents’ demands to see the body would now also be harder to ignore, and what they saw would be harder to take.

  Ethan had worked late into the night writing up reports. When he’d finished that task, he started sending those reports out with requests. Now, as he walked his way through the Dark Falls PD, he got interaction from the officers for the first time. Many looked at him as if to ask, “How’s it going?”

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t yet ready to tell them the Schulte case was worse than they’d imagined. The entire PD had been hoping she’d turn up alive, and they were now hoping it would be a case of a little girl lost in the woods that had become fatal. It would be an unfortunate outcome, but at least that kind of thing was preventable. But he was going to have to disavow them of that notion, as well.

  Tucked inside his office, for the first time glad for the closed door and the closed communication, he turned on his computer and waited for information from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit to load. He was hoping for an additional response from his cousin. She’d previously worked for the BAU and was now a field agent. If he was lucky, she’d work up a profile. She’d been damned good at it, and he considered himself lucky to have that connection. He was also looking for responses to inquiries he’d sent to as many other branches as he could. He was looking for similar cases.

  Aside from a few expected return emails, his inbox was disturbingly empty. Ethan sighed and buckled down to do his own search.

  After several hours, he’d amassed a good handful of cases. The problem was, they were only similar. None was the same; something ruled out each one.

  Ethan was back at square one.

  Everything about Kaylee’s body screamed of a serial killer.

  But nothing matched.

  Chapter Twelve

  By noon Sunday, Risa was bored out of her skull.

  Leah had plans for the day. While she’d spent all of her Saturday entertaining her disabled friend, it wasn’t going to happen again. Risa’s firefighter friends were on shifts. So she wouldn’t be seeing them today.

  Risa had a handful of other acquaintances, but they weren’t necessarily the kind that she would call to help her carry her crutches down the stairs. They were more the kind she hung out with on the weekend or went to parties with.

  Risa had always been one for action, so with her job now taken out from under her, her life was so unstructured that it was already driving her crazy.

  Typically, with twenty-four hours on and forty-eight off, she often needed something to fill the time between shifts. She picked up extra work whenever someone needed their position covered, enjoying the overtime and using it to build her savings account. But for the other days, she found a nice, cushy volunteer position at the library.

  They were wonderfully flexible about it, too. Sometimes she thought she would make it in after a shift, and then the shift would have been so horrifyingly exhausting that she’d sleep most of the next day and never get to the library. Other times, she managed to show up on both of her off days. Still, they always seemed happy to have her.

  With a plan in mind, Risa got dressed. She pulled on a pair of capri pants, grateful that they fit with the boot. Again, they weren’t what she would have chosen, they were just the only thing that worked. At least she could wear whatever shirt she wanted.

  Then, sunscreen and a little bit of makeup later, she was out the door. She stepped out and looked down at the doormat. Still aligned exactly where she left it. Good.

  Just being outside of her apartment felt better. Or it did until she looked down the staircase to the street and spotted somebody moving just out of the frame the doorway made.

  She wasn’t sure if they’d been watching her or not. Had they been looking up the staircase and ducked out of the way as she caught them? Probably it was simply someone walking down the street and had nothing to do with her whatsoever.

  Though she’d managed some sleep again last night, it had come in fits and spurts. She did not think her paranoia was justified, but the cuts on Kaylee Schulte’s hands and face were disturbing. Even Ethan had not been able to say it wasn’t a serial killer, which meant her asking about it hadn’t been the first time it had crossed his mind and he couldn’t rule out the petrifying possibility.

  As far as Risa knew, Ethan had been on the Schulte case from the moment that Kaylee was first reported missing. He was the only local FBI officer, and it was a missing child case—bringing in the FBI was standard protocol for missing kids. For almost five days straight, she’d seen evidence of him out and around in the city, hunting down leads, leading grid searches in the woods, and more.

  That was the thing, she thought. Th
ey knew Kaylee’s body had not been there two weeks earlier. All those sections of the woods had been searched right after she disappeared. Risa was on the official Search and Rescue Squad, so she knew this.

  That gave a much narrower time window for her body to be dumped. Ethan had probably figured that out the first time he stood on the trail. Risa tried to put her morbid thoughts away and look toward a day at the library.

  As Risa drove, she found she couldn’t shake the ideas she was developing about Kaylee. They already knew that where she had found the body—on the trail—was almost definitely not where it had been left. As Dr. Lee said, it looked like it had slid down the embankment, which meant Kaylee had been abandoned farther up.

  Risa knew the general area relatively well. Though she’d never run that trail before, she’d been all through the woods. Her team was called out whenever there was a search—so she was usually included. She was certified for the rescue teams, but with no one to yet rescue she’d been out making search grids with everyone else. She hadn’t been assigned to that area though. Risa and her team had been in another section of the park, miles away.

  As a firefighter and Search and Rescue and Evacuation team member, she’d been one of the team leaders. Even though the teams were mostly civilian and untrained, no one should have missed a body laid out on the ground. They formed human chains and moved through the woods fingertip to fingertip.

  So she didn’t think they could have missed Kaylee if the body had been there during the initial searches. Also, Risa had been in that exact area on another search long before this, and she thought she remembered areas that could be reached from the other direction, maybe even a flat spot or two. Perhaps that was where they had left Kaylee’s body.

  Another question Risa had was: how long had Kaylee been dead? Given what Dr. Lee said, it looked like about a week or two, but anything was possible. Even Dr. Lee didn’t like to commit to a solid timeframe.

  Risa had a lot of questions. The only person she could ask was Ethan, and he was far too busy to answer. She suspected that he might need someone to talk to, as well. Or maybe he was doing just fine—it was his job, after all—and that was just wishful thinking on her part.

  Still, she wondered if he thought of Kaylee’s death as a personal failing. He’d been the agent on the case to find her. Risa was more than a little curious if it made him feel better or worse that Dr. Lee had declared it was possible that Kaylee was dead before they’d even finished doing their grid searches. When Risa put those pieces of information together, it meant that Ethan had been hunting for a girl who was already long gone. And Kaylee had been killed somewhere else and then taken out in the woods and left. That was a very sobering thought.

  Risa pulled up to the library and parked in one of the handicapped spots before pulling out of it again. Shit. Though she would have qualified for a temporary tag, she’d not thought to ask for one when she was at urgent care. After a moment, she decided she didn’t need it. She had crutches, and she’d be okay. Things looked worse than they were.

  Truly, the boot was overkill, but as a firefighter, she was trying to heal as fast as possible. She’d been grateful the doctors understood. She’d iced it again several more times in an attempt to speed up the process. But she wouldn’t have any input on how it was doing until her appointment the day after tomorrow.

  She suspected she wouldn’t be able to serve her next shift, either. She hoped she wouldn’t miss more than two days of work, but she had to brace herself for the possibility. Missing work would mean a lot more time to volunteer at the library. So she headed inside, where she found Cara and Alan behind the front desk.

  Alan was pushing hard to take over as head librarian. Carol Kastrop, the current librarian, was well past retirement age and refused to listen to anyone who suggested it was time for her to step down. If Risa listened to Alan and Cara, it was about a decade past time.

  “Oh my God, Risa, what happened to you?” was Alan’s greeting as she came around the corner and into the adult section of the library.

  Risa laughed. It was just like Alan to be so deep in the library, so full of knowledge, and yet have no idea what had happened to her despite the fact that the news of the body was all over town. She took a minute to explain.

  Cara twitched an eyebrow at her. “Well, you’re not shelving stacks today then. I guess you get to read to kids in the children’s room.”

  Five exhausting hours later, Risa was grateful for the work. She was glad to have been useful, but she’d been more than ready to head home. She’d picked up food along the way. The combination of her odd hours and lack of real kitchen skills made for a diet of snacks and leftovers most of the time.

  Parking in her assigned spot, she contemplated the way the building was structured for the first time. It hadn’t really mattered before she had a bum ankle, but now it was a pain that the residents parked around back. Hopping out as gracefully as possible, she followed the small alley to the front of the building. Her newly found, easy rhythm with the crutches was impeded by the bag dangling from her hand. Eventually, she made it to the stairs, but she stopped cold when she saw someone standing in front of her door.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Early Monday morning, Ethan was back at his desk. The precinct, though always alive at some level, had yet to get crowded with the nine-to-five staff that filled in all the other positions around the on-duty officers.

  He’d spent Sunday on the trails, tracing various routes up the hill, looking for the place where Kaylee might have originally been laid out. He spent another part of Sunday with Dr. Grunholdt at the morgue. He’d stood by as the Schultes viewed their daughter’s body for the first time.

  He’d been watching for any strange or unusual reactions from them. That was an unfortunately necessary part of his job. More than one parent had killed their own child, and they’d often been caught by their inappropriate reactions or the language they used when talking about the missing child. He’d spotted nothing like that with the Schultes. Still, if he hadn’t shown up when they saw the body for the first time, if he hadn’t at least taken note of their reactions, he would have been remiss. With too many i’s to dot and too many t’s to cross, Ethan was sleeping little and subsisting on cheap sandwiches and the thick coffee sitting next to him.

  Not only had he hiked the woods alone yesterday, he’d found the scene had been messed with. He’d stood there, angry at whoever had done this, but angry at himself, too. He shouldn’t have allowed the guard officers to leave the scene. They’d thought the yellow tape would suffice. But they’d also thought they’d gotten everything they needed.

  Shit! The swear echoed in his head, even though he hadn’t said it out loud. He wanted to yell to the heavens, but he couldn’t reverse the damage. The PD had already struggled to spare an officer to guard this patch of woods. Ethan understood that stress; there was always a worry about allocating the limited officers they had. He should have made them keep a man out there, but he hadn’t.

  Now, he almost slapped his desk in frustration. He wanted the toxicology report to come back, but it felt like the lab was running at a snail’s pace. He looked at the calendar and realized it had really only been three days. But oftentimes any drugs used in an abduction were searchable in the FBI database. If anything popped, he could connect this case to others. And Ethan desperately needed this case to connect…to anything.

  He’d sent out emails to every jurisdiction that hadn’t replied to him the first time around. He opened an email from his cousin and found she’d not been able to help him.

  “Sorry,” she’d said, “It’s only one killing. It’s not enough. Get another one and I can do a profile.”

  He’d emailed back, “But, isn’t this almost definitely a serial?”

  She’d replied quickly. “No doubt. Sorry to say so, Ethan. Love, El.”

  He had actually yelled then. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” as loud as he could standing there in his office. It was relatively sound
proof, and luckily there weren’t that many other people around. The few officers who sat at their desks right now might’ve looked through the glass and seen that he was ranting, but he no longer cared.

  He was leaning on the local police heavily, setting them on a case to find out who had messed with the site and how the site might have been altered. He was hoping it was teenagers. Once corralled, they tended to crack like eggs and tell everything.

  He was also hoping another precinct would have a similar case, but given that the body was found in a national park, it was entirely possible the killer was not from around here. His cousin’s confirmation of his own belief—that this was the work of a serial killer—was thoroughly disheartening.

  He desperately wanted it to be a one-off case. It would be easier to solve; there would be more evidence. Serials were serials because they were good at it. If they weren’t, they got caught early without too many kills under their belts. Many never reached the stage this one had.

  This guy managed to abduct a girl, keep her for several days, kill her at another location, and then get the body—unnoticed—into the woods. He’d left it in a spot where no one would find it for another week or maybe longer. That took a level of prep and planning that wasn’t generally possible with a first kill. Accidents and adrenaline usually caused first-timers to do something stupid.