“I think I need a Coke,” she said, swallowing against the wave of nausea that surged up.
“Been reading the autopsy reports?” asked Ian with a sympathetic shake of his head as he rose from his chair.
“Yeah.”
“Come on,” he said, coming around to her side and taking her arm to help her to her feet. “You need some air.”
“And a cigarette,” Trisha ground out against her teeth as her stomach rolled.
“And a Coke,” Ian added with a chuckle.
He grabbed their coats and propelled her through the offices, calling out for a deputy to grab her a drink, and took her out a side door into the gravel parking lot.
Trisha dug out a cigarette, lit it up, and inhaled deeply. The gentle buzz soothed her nerves and the slow breathing helped calm the fluttering in her stomach. Ian came over to her with the soda, crossed his arms, and studied her.
“I’ve been doing this job a while,” Trisha mused, her mind skittering past the immediate memory of what she had just read. “But I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anything this sick. This is…this is evil.”
“You gonna be okay?” Ian asked.
“Yes. Of course. I just have to get my mind back in the right place to deal with this. Goddamn, it’s cold out here in February!”
Ian chuckled, and the sound grated on her. What exactly was there to laugh about? She was queasy, nervous, and freezing her ass off.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“Well, just the fact you’re actually human underneath it all.”
Trisha admitted the truth of this with a brief, twisted smile. She took another drag on her cigarette and shook her body out, trying to loosen the tightness hours of reading had left her with.
“Yeah,” she said, blowing out a wisp of smoke. “I’m human. So are you. So’s our killer. What’s your point?”
“No point. Just observing.”
Trisha gave a short, mirthless laugh. She threw down her cigarette and stamped it out.
“Let’s go inside,” she said. “It’s fucking cold out here.”
“Excellent, insightful observation,” Ian murmured, and she spun on her heel and stared him down.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to slap him or rip a hole in his psyche with a few well-chosen words. Or kiss him. Whoa. Where did that come from? Sure, she had definitely felt attracted to the sheriff’s brother, Ger, earlier. What red-blooded woman wouldn’t have been, especially the way he had held her hand for a moment too long and looked into her eyes like he had seen the sun for the first time. Ger was one thing, but this big, uncooperative, aggravating sheriff in front of her was totally different.
A surge of crazy, jump-his-bones-in-the-snow desire washed over her, and she felt her nipples and pussy tingle to life at the thought of him pushing her up against his cruiser and taking her right here. For a moment, she could almost feel the roughness of his uniform pants against her bare thighs and the heat of his lips on her cold skin.
She stared into his hazel eyes, feeling the tension between them stretching out, heightening. His expression darkened, and his lips parted slightly as he held her gaze. He loomed over her, making her feel fragile and feminine for the first time in a long time—longer than she could remember. Her breath caught in her throat, and she was sure that she saw his muscles tense the slightest fraction in preparation to grab her.
Suddenly, the door to the building opened, and two deputies came out, heading for a cruiser. The tension slackened between Trisha and Ian, and she scrambled to pull her mind back into order faster than he did.
“Come on,” she called back over her shoulder as she turned and stalked toward the building. “Let’s get inside before I freeze my nuts off.”
The chuckle behind her was a little too deliberate and let her know that he had guessed something of what had flashed through her mind, hinting that maybe he had thought the same thing.
Get it together, Blacke. Pull it the fuck back together. You’re top of the game, not some fucking rookie.
“Let’s go over what we have,” Trisha said, shrugging off her coat and forcing herself to look Ian steadily in the eye. “I’m organizing my thoughts, and this will definitely help because I’ve got some blanks I want to fill in.”
“You’ve got the floor, agent.” Ian leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. All sense of flirtation was gone. This man was all business now, a formidable opponent to lawbreakers. She read in his posture continued mistrust, but was it still of her?
“What we are dealing with is an UNSUB, or Unknown Subject, who is a highly organized killer,” she said, starting to shift her thinking and pull all the threads together. Pacing helped. “We have seven victims, five prostitutes and two teenage female runaways. All seven were under five-feet-five, and all weighed between ninety-eight and one hundred ten pounds. The victims were last seen in Bangor, Waterville, and Orono. Dump sites were along Interstate 95 between Waterville and Orono. Except the last one. The last dump site was here in Elkville, or rather in the woods up around the Elkville Forest Preserve. That’s a big fucking break because that means your UNSUB screwed up. He had to break his pattern for some reason. Figuring out the reason is part of what will help us understand where he’s at in his cycle.”
She closed her eyes and drew in a slow, steady breath. “His victims show a modus operandi of increasing sophistication. The first victim had the breasts and buttocks removed from her body. The cuts were hesitant. The face was beaten to dehumanize or depersonalize the victim. However, by the last victim, the UNSUB is beheading the victim and expertly butchering the body. He is literally taking cuts of meat with a much cleaner, sharper cut, as if he’s got the proper tools now. The beheading is a much more energy efficient way of dehumanizing the body. The viscera are missing in the last few cases as well. All the victims are killed with blunt force trauma to the back of the head. He doesn’t want to see his victim’s faces. He may also be afraid he won’t be able to overpower them without a blitz attack. The kill is not important to him. What is important is the postmortem butchering. This is what his signature is. This is the part of the crime that will remain the same, no matter how the modus operandi changes. He needs this mutilation for satisfaction.”
“Satisfaction?” Ian spat. “Wait, don’t tell me. It gets worse.”
“Yes. There may be an element of cannibalism involved, given how the bodies were treated. There’s most likely a sexual gratification either from the mutilation itself or from the cannibalism.”
“I know it’s probably based in research and all that, Agent Blacke, but I just…I just don’t see it.”
“Sexual violence against women is about dominance and control. This Butcher of Bangor probably has little-to-no control over his life. This is his supreme act, his way of sticking his finger to the universe and asserting what he thinks would be his true nature if he was allowed to be who he really was.”
“So that’s his profile? He has no control over his life?”
Trisha gave Ian a wan smile. It was 6:15, and she was exhausted. Ten more minutes of laying this out. Twenty-two minutes to packing up for the day. Thirty-five minutes to dinner.
“The UNSUB is a white male, age thirty-to-forty,” she said, putting together the puzzle pieces in her brain. “He is average or below-average height. He has a domineering mother who was probably physically abusive of him when he was a child and continues to be emotionally abusive of him today. He may live with his mother, still. He has almost no social skills. He tends to blend into the background. He has trouble with women and has never had a successful relationship with a woman. He may have graduated high school, but that was it for education. He works in a menial job and drives an older vehicle that is well-maintained. He likes to hunt or fish when he can, or he may have experience in the meat-packing industry or the meat department of a grocery store. This is where his skill with a knife may have come to him.”
Trisha paused and rolled ideas around in her
head. Nothing felt right just yet.
“I have a lot of questions,” she said, folding her arms and leaning back against the wall. “I’m not ready to call it one way or another on most of them. I need to finish reviewing the evidence tomorrow. So far, though, I’m thinking this man lives in a run-down house. He’s not man enough in his mother’s eyes to keep the house up the way his father did. These killings started in December, and we’re mid-February now. Almost Valentine’s Day. The pace of his killings has picked up, and he made his first mistake with the dump site. We can triangulate him now to somewhere between Bangor and Elkville. I’m thinking it’s either Elkville or Blue Moon, with Blue Moon being more likely. He’s still trying to dump away from home, I think.”
She paused, noticing that Ian had gone absolutely white, and there was a genuine look of pain on his face.
“Sheriff?” she asked cautiously. “You all right?”
“I’m…I’m from Blue Moon,” he replied. “I know everyone in town. I can’t see anyone there doing this.”
“I know it’s hard when something like this hits close to home,” Trisha said, slipping into the established patter she used to comfort local police officers when they realized that there were monsters next door. “But, you have to keep an open mind. It’s the only way we’re going to catch him.”
“He’s an Elkville man,” Ian said with a sudden fierceness. “Guaranteed.”
“I’m pretty sure there are Elkville men who would say the same about Blue Moon men.”
At this point, Trisha backed off. Ian literally looked like he was going to be sick.
“You know what?” she announced. “Let’s call it a day. I’ve been on the road since four this morning, and I want a drink and my bed. Not necessarily in that order.”
She glanced over at Ian, who looked like he was still staggered but recovering. He finally stood up straight, stretched out his arms, and nodded.
“How about some dinner?” he asked, his oh-so-seductive cocky grin slipping back into place as if someone had flipped a switch. He came over to her side as she began to pack up her laptop and files.
“I don’t think so,” Trisha replied, feeling the contempt oozing out her pores at this clumsy pickup line.
“How about I tell you I have a domineering mother who ordered that Ger and I to come for dinner tonight?”
“Is she a good cook?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Hmm.”
“Look, there’s a couple of dive bars around here, but it’s February on the coast of Maine. Other than McDonalds forty miles back outside of Bangor, you’re not going to get any decent food around here. Plus, I’ll drive you there and back.”
“Can we stop by a liquor store on the way back? My motel room doesn’t have a mini-fridge, and I will be needing vodka.”
“Sure thing. I won’t even card you. So, you coming?”
“Why the hell not? I’ll need to stop and get some flowers or wine or something.”
“Nah, you don’t need to do that.”
“I can’t show up empty-handed, Sheriff.”
“Sure you can.”
“Unlike some people, Sheriff, I have manners.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“You wouldn’t know good manners if they slapped a pair of cuffs on you and booked you for felony possession of a bad attitude!”
Ian laughed, and Trisha realized how close their faces were. They had leaned in toward each other enough so that one move would have his lips on hers…or hers on his. They both fell silent as the electricity began to thrum between them, and Trisha felt her skin begin to prickle with the need to be touched. Her heart began to beat wildly, and her rational self was in hiding somewhere. She wanted Ian McDade to kiss her…and not to stop.
“Hey, Sheriff?”
The slightly squeaky voice of one of the deputies crashed the silence, and Trisha jumped back, feeling like the plug had been suddenly yanked out of her emotional socket. It was only a small consolation that Ian pulled back, too, the look on his face pained and overheated.
“Sorry, uh, yeah,” the deputy gulped. Trisha noticed his badge proclaimed him Deputy Duke, and she felt a terrible urge to laugh. “Shift’s changing and we need you to sign some stuff for us.”
“Coming,” Ian replied. “Why don’t you get going? I’ll pick you up at the motel in about twenty minutes.”
“Twenty-three minutes,” Trisha flipped back at him.
He paused, then flashed a grin at her, leaving her not quite sure who had won that round.
* * * *
He sipped his coffee and made a show of stirring in more sugar while he listened to the pimply kid behind the counter talk about the Butcher of Bangor.
The gas station was too bright. The light hurt his eyes. The coffee was rancid, too, but it was better than nothing.
“They say that they’ve got the FBI down here now,” the kid gushed. “Right here in Elkville.”
“If you ask me, they should be looking in Blue Moon,” replied the older man, counting out his dollar bills for a pack of cigarettes and a lotto card. “Freaks. All of ’em fuckers.”
He watched the man from the corner of his eye, inwardly enjoying a debate about whether he was worth killing. He’d probably be dry. Chewy and sinewy with slimy old tendons.
He hurriedly took a big sip of coffee to hide the sudden salivation that literally made him want to lick his chops. The coffee was too hot and burned his tongue.
“Ah, goddamn motherfucker!” he swore, then turned and realized that the old man and the kid were watching him with startled expressions on their faces.
He grinned sheepishly and gestured to the paper cup in his hand.
“Coffee’s hot. Burned myself.”
The old man gave him a patronizing nod, and the kid openly goggled at him as if he was laughing at him. They both went back to talking about the price of gas and the weather. Stupid fucks. It was winter in Maine. What was there to talk about? It was cold and would probably snow. It would probably snow and snow and snow until goddamn April.
He could feel his ears burning, and his thoughts blurred as if some kind of static signal was disrupting the transmission.
Eat, his thoughts said. Eat, and everything will be okay.
Nobody would ever know.
He could do this. He wouldn’t screw up this time, wouldn’t panic. He’d dump the body down by Augusta this time. Throw that FBI hotshot off the scent. They’d be so confused. Maybe he’d drop the next one down near Lewiston-Auburn or even Portland. Maybe he’d drag it to the ocean and let the currents take it.
He’d just keep on being careful. No more mistakes. No miscalculations. He could do this. He was smart. He hadn’t been caught yet. Even mother dearest hadn’t figured out what he was doing. He loved that he was keeping this one, all-powerful fact from her, even as he sat at the dinner table and sank his teeth into a nice, fresh piece of…her Sunday pot roast.
He shivered and giggled a little as he walked out into the night.
Chapter 3
“This is the best pot roast I’ve ever had,” Trisha said with a courteous smile.
Ger’s glance flicked from the beautiful woman across from him to his mother at the foot of the table. Barbara McDade stretched her lips into what could have been a smile.
“Thank you,” she replied.
And that was it.
The long moment of silence hung heavily over the table. Trisha looked slightly taken aback. Ian appeared to be in pain. Their father sat with his eyes fixed on his plate. Ger sighed inwardly. Bob McDade was as unobtrusive as he was oblivious sometimes. He turned and looked at his mother.
Ger studied his mother, as if seeing her for the first time. She looked worn and old, like a sandy piece of leather rubbed down to the last layer, with graying yellow hair, thick sallow skin, and watery blue eyes. Had life in Blue Moon really done that to her?
If it could beat down a fierce woman like his mother, how would someon
e like Trisha Blacke be able to deal with it?
He would just have to find a way, because as far as he was concerned, Trisha Blacke was going to find herself married to him and Ian sooner rather than later. Ger’s heart swelled at the thought of waking up to her sweet face in the morning. Other parts of his body swelled at the thought of her in bed with him and Ian at night, writhing with pleasure at their touch. He didn’t have to think about this. He didn’t have to get to know her better. Every instinct he had—animal and human—hummed with the knowledge that this woman was the only one in the world for him.
“Do you like to cook?” he asked Trisha, hoping to break the awkward silence and get her attention focused on him.
“No,” she replied with a rueful grin. “I travel too much to ever keep anything in my fridge, really. And when I’m home, I’m working so late that I’m just exhausted when I get home. All I want is a drink and my bed.”
Her smile, like her spicy, complex natural scent of nutmeg, sugar, and pepper, had him drowning in desire.
“How do you keep house, then?” Barbara asked sharply.
Ger and Ian traded looks, and Ger furrowed his brow and opened his mouth to say something in Trisha’s defense. Only, it seemed his woman was just as quick on the draw.
“Oh, I don’t keep house,” Trisha said sweetly but with an unmistakable glint in her eye. “I have a maid service come in once a week. She’s great. She does my laundry and cleans my house. The only thing I end up having to do is get my dry cleaning. It’s like having a housewife without the hassles.”
“Housewives do more than just cook and clean,” Barbara replied crisply.
“I’m sure they do, Mrs. McDade. I know I couldn’t do what most housewives do, just as I’m pretty sure most housewives couldn’t do what I do. Everybody has a talent, and the trick is to make the most of yours and let others fill in around you. That way, everybody fits together.”
Ian made a sound somewhere between a snorting cough and a grunt, hiding his mouth with his hand. Ger just grinned openly, bursting with love for Trisha’s spirit and quick wit. He didn’t approve of his mother stepping over the line like she had, but he was glad Trisha could stand up for herself. He would make sure this sort of thing didn’t happen again.
Blacke and Blue Page 2