"Trash was dumped in this Dumpster around eleven-fifteen," Marsh continued. "No body there then."
So the body hadn't been here long, not long enough to begin to smell. The scent was all in Claire's head. She took a deep breath through her mouth as she walked down the slight embankment to the Dumpster. To Anne.
Once again, the body had been cruelly discarded. Anne lay haphazardly on her stomach, one knee caught under her, both arms flung outward. She was pale, waxen and very thin. Claire couldn't see her entire face—one cheek pressed into the loose gravel around the Dumpster—but there would be no need to ask Mrs. Hopkins to identify the body. Claire recognized immediately that it was Anne. Sweet, full of life Anne, who was no longer full of life.
Claire pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves she had stuffed in her pocket before getting out of her car. She walked around the body, the camera bag swinging on her shoulder. As she continued to breathe through her mouth, she reminded herself that the nauseating smell was in her head and that she needed to get a grip on herself.
As she stalled for time, waiting for the gag reflex to pass, she touched the white and red object she had noticed when she approached the scene. It was a cheap umbrella. Anne's? They'd had a downpour the previous night. Close to the time she had left work. It made sense she would have an umbrella... but it didn't look to Claire like the kind of umbrella a college kid would carry. It was one of those big ones, used by golfers. Was that a connection to the golf course?
"There've been no objects left with the bodies prior to this, other than purses," Marsh offered.
"I want it bagged when we're done with photos. Maybe we can get some prints off it. She didn't carry it here." Claire zeroed in on the small crocheted purse still looped over the girl's arm. "The purse, too." She glanced at the umbrella again, sensing it told her something about Anne's killer—she just didn't know what.
Claire took the heavy aluminum flashlight from Marsh's hand and crouched beside Savage, flashing the beam over the girl's body, hoping to find some clue as to who had done this to her. In the harsh white light, her skin seemed almost transparent. She, too, had been bled to death; Claire didn't need a medical examiner to tell her that.
An ambulance siren wailed in the distance.
"I've got the club manager here," someone called from behind.
Claire pulled her camera out of her bag and began to snap photos. They would get better pictures once Anne was taken to the morgue, but it was important that the scene be recorded just as the killer had left it.
"Chief—"
"Give me a minute," she snapped, rising from her knee. "And back up." She elbowed an officer behind her. "Give me some room." She took another photo, getting the umbrella in. "Savage?"
"Chief?"
She gestured slightly with her head for him to draw closer. She clicked off another picture. "You've done enough here tonight; you're relieved from this scene."
"I'm not off until seven, ma'am."
"I know; leave your partner here. You know where I live?" she whispered, clicking off another photo, forcing herself to focus on the crime scene in front of her. The dead girl sprawled on the gravel and not her teenage daughter, sprawled asleep on her bed at home.
"Sure."
"Go park in my driveway, lights off, and keep watch on my house. Keep your radio on." A waste of city funds? At this point she didn't give a crap. What was the city going to do? Fire her? How many applicants did they think they would get while there was a serial killer loose in their town? "We'll call if we need you dispatched elsewhere."
"What about Patrolman Jacobs?"
"I'll take care of him."
"Yes, Chief."
"And Savage—"
He turned back. "Chief?"
"You fall asleep and I'll have your balls in a Ziploc bag in my freezer next to the ice cream pops. You understand?"
"Yes, Chief."
The young police officer disappeared into the knot of men gathering at the scene, and Claire continued to take photos. She had two rolls of film. She'd take all forty-eight shots, and then she had to go. She had a feeling Mrs. Watkins was waiting up for her.
* * *
"You read the paper this morning? "Jillian asked Millie as the store owner walked out front to say good morning. Jillian was dusting some hand-thrown pots she had found stacked in the store room.
"Didn't have to. Had breakfast at the diner. Everyone was talking about Anne."
"That poor girl's mother." Jillian carried one of the pots to the front window. She had seen some tropical plants marked down in the grocery store and thought she might get one, reasoning that if customers could see the piece being used as a planter, Millie might be able to move a couple of them. "The paper said she was a widow and that the girl was her only child."
"Anne grew up here in Albany Beach. We all knew her. Many of us saw her first communion, watched her cheer the football team on in her cute little rah-rah skirt, read about the scholarships she had gotten to go to college, and congratulated her in person."
"What kind of sick creep would do such a thing?" Jillian crouched and spun the pot around to show off what she thought was the best side. "The paper said she worked right on this boardwalk a couple of stores down from here—the sub shop."
Millie nodded, slipping change into the cash register for the day. "I spoke to her the day before she disappeared. She made me a spicy Italian. She always remembered I liked hot peppers, but not sweet."
Jillian caught movement outside the shop's front door and spotted Jenkins unfolding his easel. The bucket he sat on when he painted now served as a container to transport his supplies. "I'll be right back. I want to say hello to Jenkins."
"You mind the counter this morning. I'll be in and out."
Jillian nodded as she pushed through the glass door, the brass bells jangling over her head. "Morning, Jenkins."
He didn't look over his shoulder at her, but continued to set up his easel. He had another seascape in progress. This one had some kind of stone turret Jillian had spotted along the beach as she drove into town, painted in the foreground. "Nice," she said. "I like the tower. It looks like a little lighthouse."
Jenkins tipped the white plastic bucket upside down and settled on top of it. "Built in World War II. Watch towers to look for German U-boats."
"Wow," she mused, taking a closer look.
"Weren't built to last beyond the war," he grunted. "Made mostly from sand. A little spit. After sixty years, they're falling apart. 'Nother sixty years, they'll all be gone." He reached for a tube of paint and squirted a dot of blue on a piece of cardboard that looked as if it had been ripped off a box. "The Lord giveth, He taketh away."
Jillian studied the old man for a moment, suddenly getting the strangest feeling. He still hadn't looked at her. "I... just wanted to thank you for the lead on the job. Millie hired me."
"I know that." He squirted another gob of paint on the cardboard pallet. Yellow.
She looked at him, at the painting on the easel, at the ocean that stretched out before them beyond the boardwalk, and back at him again. What was it about him that was so strange? Not scary strange. Just... weird.
"Well, I better get to work."
He nodded. "You gettin' settled into the cottage?"
"Yeah. It's nice there. No air conditioning, so it's a little hot in the afternoons, but I get a nice breeze at night."
"Don't like air conditioning. Never had it," he grumbled. "Makes me cold to my bones." He had added other primary colors to his cardboard pallet and was now dabbing at the white with his brush.
Jillian grabbed the door handle to the shop. "If you need anything, a drink or something, give me a holler."
"Got my water bottle." He drew the paintbrush across his pant leg leaving a streak of white on the layers of other paint colors. "I freeze 'em at night. Stay cold all morning that way."
She smiled and went back inside. It wasn't until she reached the jewelry counter that she halted and lo
oked back over her shoulder. "Oh, my God," she murmured. "He's blind."
"What?" Millie stood up from where she had been stooping behind the counter, pulling out a box of silver chains.
"Jenkins," Jillian said, pointing in the direction of the old man seated outside the shop door. "He's blind."
Millie pulled two chains from the box and returned it to its place under the counter. "Sure is. Been blind as long as I've lived here."
Jillian stared through the shop window glass, between the words "Come in, it's cool inside," at Jenkins' half-completed painting. "But the seascapes—"
"Memory, apparently." Millie stood up again. "You look close, you'll see they're all the same. He might throw in a seagull here, a crab there. It's why we only sell one at a time. People like the idea of owning one of a kind."
Jillian kept staring through the glass. "I'm so embarrassed."
"Why?" the older woman asked incredulously. "Because he's blind?"
"Because I didn't notice."
Millie chuckled. "My mama always said we've all got handicaps, some are just easier to see than others and those are usually the lucky ones. I'm going in the back for another cup of coffee and my morning constitution. Call if you get busy."
Millie disappeared into the back, and Jillian walked around the glass counter top to the stool where she could sit and wait for customers. She thought about what Millie had said about handicaps. Wasn't that the God's honest truth?
Look at her own predicament. Talk about a handicap.
The previous night she had dreamed again. Almost the same dream. Everything seemed to come in a different order, but it was the same place. The same incident. She remembered the shower running. The close room. The cloistering, musky scent of sex. The rhythmic tick of a ceiling fan stirring the warm air.
Jillian sat down on the stool and closed her eyes. In that instant, she was in the bedroom again. It was hot, sticky. Someone needed to turn up the air conditioning. The bed sheets were rumpled. There was someone still there, long, bare limbs tangled in the sheets.
Jillian knew she shouldn't be there, but she couldn't help herself. Couldn't stop herself.
Then she heard the laughter again. Feminine laughter. Playful. Husky. Sexual. Jillian's eyes flew open.
She was breathing hard, her heart fluttering in her chest. Sweat had beaded above her upper lip. She slid off the stool and walked to the thermostat on the wall to check the temperature. It read seventy degrees. Plenty cool enough, but she turned the control down another notch anyway.
The bells rang behind Jillian and she jumped, startled. She spun around.
"A little too much java this morning?" Ty strolled through the door. He was dressed in a pair of ratty but clean jean shorts and a T-shirt that said ROOTS. A Canadian clothing company.
Jillian wondered how she knew that. Did she own a T-shirt from the same company?
"You startled me. It's early for customers."
"You met Jenkins?" He hooked a thumb in the old man's direction.
She nodded, returning to her perch on the stool. She was still a little shaky. "The other day. He was the one who told me Millie might be hiring."
"You think you've got a whacked-out story. You should hear his." Ty leaned on the glass counter and pushed his sunglasses onto his head, taking blond hair back with it. "Get this. He served time in prison for killing his wife. Second, third wife, something like that. Stabbed her twenty-seven times."
"He murdered his wife? "Jillian breathed. It was hard to see the white-haired old man as a cold-blooded killer.
"Says he doesn't know. Drunk out of his head. Blacked out. He said it used to happen to him all the time when he drank hard. There was another man there that night, too. Stepson or something. I heard talk over the years that the kid did it, and Jenkins went to jail to cover for him."
Jillian looked through the window at the old man. He was dotting streaks of color to the sand in the painting. He had added a seagull in the sky. It was hard to believe such an innocent-looking man could have ever done such a thing. And blind, too.
She glanced back at Ty. "He stabbed someone twenty-some times, blind?"
"Wasn't always blind, I guess. He's got health problems from the drinking. Diabetes took the eyesight. Since I was a little boy, the gossips have been saying he was on his last leg." Ty glanced over his shoulder. "He's looking a lot healthier these days than some of them. Outlived a fair number." He turned back to Jillian, slapping his hand on the counter. "I'm off today. Wanted to see if you wanted to hang out. I might do some surfing this afternoon if the waves are decent."
He made her feel like she was twenty again. The scary thing was, she liked it. She had a feeling she hadn't enjoyed twenty nearly as much as she should have. "I told Millie I would work until five. She has to go out to some Chamber of Commerce meeting later, or something."
"No problem. We can't surf until after lifeguard hours anyway. We'll be on Third Street. The city designates different streets for surfers each week." He lowered his sunglasses over his eyes. "Come on down. We'll grab something to eat afterwards."
Jillian knew all the reasons she shouldn't. "Sounds good. Maybe I will."
He lifted a shoulder and headed for the door. "If you don't feel like it, no worries." He pushed through the door, lifting his hand in peace.
Jillian signed back and then laughed at the absurdity of it. A thirty-something woman saying "Peace, man." She laughed all the way across the room to rearrange a display of silver toe rings.
* * *
"Martha? Claire Drummond." Claire sat on the edge of her desk, phone cradled to her ear, photos of a dead girl spread in front of her like some morbid collage. "I hate to be a pain in the butt, but do you have anything good for me on the autopsy of Anne Hopkins?" Claire held her breath, hoping the dead girl had left some lead.
"Like the sick son of a you-know-what's name who did it written across her belly?" Martha Pierre asked. She had a throaty voice like a middle-aged woman who smoked too much, drank too much. Which was entirely true. But who wouldn't in her line of work?
"Sorry," Martha said, sounding like she meant it. "No fingerprints. Again. He's wearing latex gloves, I'm sure of it now. I found a smudge of the powder that's inside some gloves to make them go on easier."
"Latex gloves, like surgical? The kind you would wear in a hospital?"
"Could be, but you can get them anywhere. When I had my father home just before he passed away, I bought them by the box at the Big Mart. My neighbor uses them when she cleans her toilet. Drugstores, grocery stores; everyone carries them."
Claire sighed. Generic. As generic as the red and white umbrella which also showed no fingerprints. The only clue there had been was that the lab she sent it to seemed to think it had been wiped down. And Anne's mother was sure her daughter didn't own an umbrella; she said it wasn't in her nature. So the umbrella had likely belonged to the killer, not the victim. It wasn't much, but it was something.
"She was bled to death like the others, too," Martha continued her oral report. "Again, he used something very sharp with a thin blade. Could be a scalpel. Like the latex gloves, you can get one anywhere. Hospital, doctor's office, school biology classroom, a campus bookstore. But this cutting is the creepiest thing I ever saw. Wrists slit again, as you already know. Not the ankles, though. Guess that didn't work for him. As soon as the blood clotted, he'd cut her again. That's my guess. Must be why there were so many small cuts."
Claire heard the flick of a lighter. Martha breathed deeply as if inhaling on a cigarette.
"That's it?" Claire said after a moment. "That's all that's in your report?"
"All that's going to help you."
Claire exhaled in frustration. This guy was smart. He wasn't leaving her anything she could use to track him down. He didn't want to get caught. "Listen, Martha, thanks. I know you ran this through quickly for me, and I appreciate it."
"We want you to nail this creep, too. Never know when the guy will decide to mov
e north above the canal to fresh hunting ground."
Claire didn't think the killer had any intention of going anywhere. He was too comfortable in Albany Beach. He was home. But she kept that thought to herself. "If you could fax copies of your report, that would be super."
"You bet. Check's in the mail."
Claire hung up the phone and glanced at the photos of Anne's body. She knew she had to find the connection between the college girl and the other murdered women, but what was it?
Claire groaned, leaned forward, and rested her forehead on the desk for a moment. What possible connection could there be between these women who were both locals and outsiders? Anne had only been here a few weeks, home on summer break. April had been on vacation, here less than a week when she was killed. Phoebe and Patti had lived here on and off their entire lives.
Think. Think. Think.
She had already come to the conclusion that some of the women didn't know each other at all. Some in passing. Her gut feeling was that they were not associated with each other. The killer was singling them out somewhere in town. The link was the place, not the women. Where was the question. Where could all of these women have gone where a man might have been waiting? Watching. Choosing his next victim. Claire had been reading up on serial killers who killed in one location, and she knew that was how they worked. First they watched women, then they made their selection and watched her some more. Part of the process was the chase. What was really frightening was that from what Claire read, she could safely assume that with Anne dead, the killer already had his next victim picked out.
Claire was so frustrated that she could have screamed. She flipped though the legal pad where she kept her notes to a blank page and began to make columns with each dead woman's name as a heading.
If she could figure out where he was choosing them, she was sure she would be taking a step in the right direction. And since April was the one who had been here the shortest time, that was where she needed to begin.
Claire wrote below each woman's name where she had disappeared from, or at least as close as they could figure. Then she reached for the phone. She would reinterview all the families, co-workers, and friends, starting with April's. Maybe if she could figure out where these women had all been, she would know where to find the killer.
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