The stench of refuse stained his nostrils, but Linc still took in a deep, healthy breath—along with the vile scent—as he came up next to her, his green eyes searching her face.
Her wide brown orbs remained locked to the ground next to the massive steel waste bin, and he followed her gaze, a cringe crossing his face at the sight that met him.
A young woman with a hot pink pixie haircut lay facedown on the asphalt next to the trashcans. Her skin was just as pale as Linc’s had been a moment earlier when Veda’s scream had rendered the blood in his veins ice cold. This woman, however, would never experience the stroke of luck Linc just had. Her lungs would never unglue themselves after a scare that had sealed them shut. Her blood would never resume pumping after going ice cold in her veins. Her veins would remain frozen forever. That much was clear.
The woman’s denim miniskirt was bunched around her waist, and her white panties pooled around her ankles. Her feet were bare and sickled. The fresh blood soaking her panties was also splattered all over her body, staining her fair skin. What little he could see of her face was unrecognizable. Linc couldn’t decide whether it had been burnt off, or melted off. Her lifeless blue eyes, lids charred, were wide open, staring into an abyss that mere mortals had yet to know.
He reached into his pocket and seized two items: his car keys and his cell phone. His keys sang out into the air as he dialed a number and put the phone to his ear, waiting for it to start ringing before he looked at Veda, who still hadn’t managed to tear her wide eyes away from the sight.
The keys in his hand jingled as he pressed them into her stomach. “Go wait in my truck.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t look at him.
Linc frowned at her, wondering if she was in shock. “Veda.”
She jolted and snapped her eyes to his, drawing in a deep breath that made her chest swell.
“Take the keys and go wait in the truck.”
Veda nodded absently, covering his hand—but not the keys—with her trembling fingers. She snuck another look at the body from the corners of her eyes, horror flashed across her face, and she was immobilized once more.
Linc raised his eyebrows at her. “You good?”
She considered his question, eyes still on the girl, brown cheeks glowing redder every second, before she finally managed a sharp shake of her head. “Nope.”
He pressed his keys against her stomach a little harder. “My truck. Now.”
This time, Veda took the keys before stumbling backward, sputtering a slew of words Linc couldn’t understand.
He placed a hand on the small of her back as she struggled to find her footing, feeling how badly she was shaking. He gave her a soft push.
That push was apparently all Veda needed because she turned on her heel and hurried away, racing toward Linc’s black pick-up truck, which was parked just a few feet out.
“Lock the door,” Linc called after her as she ran, swallowing thickly when the person he’d just called finally picked up. “Yeah, this is Detective Lincoln Hill.” He recited his badge number. “I’ve got a possible homicide at Dante’s Bar and Grill and need a forensics team down here as quickly as possible.”
——
Yellow crime scene tape stretched from the front door of Dante's and all through the parking lot, wrapped around recycle bins to help keep it taut. The alleyway had been blocked off by tape as well, with a lone officer standing guard to make sure no pedestrians tried to enter. The previously dim lot was now aglow with the colorful flash of police lights sitting atop several parked cruisers, the tranquil quiet of the marina invaded by scattered conversation and the piercing beeps of police radios.
Both Linc and his partner, Detective Samantha Gellar, kneeled down next to the body as a forensics team perused the alleyway. Linc’s face stayed curled and pinched, his nose wrinkling as each new breath filled his nostrils with a vile scent he couldn’t put his finger on. Unable to decide if it was coming from the overloaded trashcans looming above them or the decomposing body face down between them, he tried to hold his breath.
Wearing a black business suit, with her long brown hair wafting with the night breeze from where she’d tucked it behind both ears, Sam’s nose was wrinkled as well as she surveyed the woman’s vaginal area. One of her latex gloved hands was cradled on her bent knee, highlighting her willowy frame. Her other gloved hand pinched a pair of tweezers, which she used to push the dead girl’s torn clothing every which way, exposing her ghostly skin in search for any clues.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Sam said, brown eyes cringing as she used the tweezers to survey the girl’s labia, raw and beet red between her splayed thighs. “Well, she hasn’t been here for very long. The trauma to her genitals looks recent. Still swollen and irritated. Blood is fresh. She was definitely raped.”
“No one heard or saw anything.” Linc swallowed heavily, voice grim. “No identification, no handbag. Blood on the underwear, bruising all over the body, every tooth pulled from the root, fingerprints seared off.”
“Fuck me…” Sam whispered, shuffling up the body, moving the woman’s clothes with her tweezers the whole way.
“Looks like blunt force trauma to the head,” Linc added, nodding at the deep wound that sliced a bloody line across the back of the woman’s hot pink hair.
“Clothes ripped to shreds.” Sam pushed the girl’s torn purple shirt off her shoulder, speaking absently the whole time. “She went down swinging that’s for sure…” Her voice trailed away as she spotted something, and she shuffled her feet, craning her neck down to get a closer look.
Linc followed her eyes, and when he caught sight of what Sam had seen, his face fell.
Sam’s wide eyes flew up to him as she tapped the tattoo of a black bird on the girl’s shoulder. “Blackbird tattoo,” she breathed.
But Linc didn’t need an explanation.
“I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.”
He could still hear the terror in Zena Jones’s voice. Zena Jones, the underage girl he’d found in the same car that had kidnapped Veda. The underage girl who, when he’d found her, had had the same blackbird tattoo branded onto her shoulder against her will—with a dirty needle that had given her an infection. The underage girl who’d been abducted and forced into sex trafficking. Who Linc had sworn to protect if she just told him what she knew. Zena Jones, the underage girl who had finally broken and told him everything she knew, only to end up dead anyway. Killed by a monster he couldn’t find. A monster he couldn’t see. Zena Jones, the underage girl who’s father Linc was convinced had a hand in her disappearance, but who still walked free due to lack of evidence.
“You swore you’d protect me.”
A grimace crossed his face, and he was forced to avert his eyes, not wanting Sam to notice that they’d begun to burn.
Sam seemed to read his mind. “It’s not your fault, Linc.”
Linc shook his head, still looking away as Zena’s face continued to pervade his mind. “I swore to protect her, and I didn’t.”
“We can’t save everybody. We can try like hell, but we can’t save them all.”
He waited until the burn subsided, forcing Zena’s youthful face and soft voice from his mind completely before clearing his throat and looking back down at the body.
“Definitely trafficked,” Sam said.
Linc nodded his agreement.
Hundreds of girls had come up dead on that island with the same tattoo. Most of them missing for months before they finally turned up dead, reappearing with a blackbird tattoo that they hadn’t had before they’d disappeared. It had been confirmed by the department that the tattoo was the brand of a pimp. Which pimp, they didn’t yet know. Again, a monster they couldn’t find. A monster they couldn’t see.
“Starting to feel like whoever’s branding these girls is trying to tell us something,” Sam said. “They went out of their way to char her face and fingernails off but left the blackbird tattoo?”
<
br /> “They want us to get the message,” he growled.
And he definitely got the message. After the death of Zena Jones and the arrest of Penny Nailer, the woman who’d orchestrated her abduction—and the abductions of many others—the message really was loud and clear: Stop. Stop pursuing this, or more girls will turn up missing. Stop pursuing this, or more girls will turn up dead. Stop pursuing this, or we’ll make sure their deaths are as savage and gruesome as humanly possible.
The message couldn’t be clearer.
But Linc had no plans on stopping. Even if it came at the expense of his own safety—his own life—he was going to find out what the hell had happened to the dead girl lying before him. He was going to find out what the hell had happened to Zena Jones. Even more than all that, he was going to find out what had almost happened to the woman who, just one night earlier, had torn his heart clear from his chest.
His eyes flew toward his truck, where she was stilled locked in, craning her neck from the passenger’s seat, watching the scene through his windshield with morbid curiosity, and he made that vow to himself one last time.
He’d find out what the hell was going on, on that island.
And he’d do it by any means necessary.
7
Veda’s eyes widened from the passenger’s seat of Linc’s truck when he looked up from where he was crouched next to the dead body and right at her. Even from across the parking lot, through hoards of bustling forensics investigators, several parked police cruisers, and even the thick glass of his windshield, Veda swore she felt his heated green eyes enter her body and read her every pervasive thought.
How much do you know? Her mind screamed at him the question she could never ask out loud.
Unable to grapple with the answer, she broke their gaze, eyes falling to her lap as she slumped back into the smooth leather seat with a huff. Moments after climbing into Linc’s truck, heart still in her throat at the sight of that dead woman, Veda had turned the car on, but not the engine. The heat wafting through the air vents warmed her bones, even as they tried to go cold. The R&B fluttering through the radio speakers eased her thoughts with slow, sultry tunes, but didn’t completely soothe her.
Her mind still raced.
Does he know you’re going alphabetically? She flinched at the thought.
Does he know it’s you? She shook her head convinced Linc didn’t know she was The Chopper. If he did, she would’ve seen it in his eyes. The change in his demeanor would’ve been too keen to miss. She would’ve smelled it on him. Something had certainly changed in Linc, but that was only because she’d broken his heart the night before. Not because he knew she was the madwoman running all over town castrating people.
No, he didn’t know she was the Chopper, but he did know more than she’d originally imagined. She didn’t know why she was surprised. As lead investigator on the case, he’d gotten to know The Chopper better than he knew himself. He knew The Chopper like a friend. Like family.
But, still, he didn’t know everything.
Desperate for distraction, assuming it would be a while before Linc was finished, Veda sighed and grabbed her cell phone, tapping away at the screen. She wasn’t one to Google herself, but that night, she couldn’t help opening a search engine and typing “The Shadow Rock Chopper”.
Usually, when she did a search on The Chopper, she was forced to prepare herself for the barrage of results admonishing her for taking God’s work into her own hands. For ignoring her desperate need for invasive psychotherapy. For being an all around shitty human being. Only every once in a while did a rare article or blog post pop up praising her.
Not that she was looking for praise. She didn’t care to be praised or condemned. She just wanted those bastards to pay for what they’d done.
It was the rest of the world that wanted to make it deep. The rest of the world that wanted to dissect her motivations. The rest of the world that wanted to get all the way down to her hot, gritty center—a molten lava core she had no interest in unearthing. The police and the media had made the mistake of painting The Chopper as a pioneer of sexual vengeance, and that narrative had left the general public chomping at the bit to figure her out. Sometimes Veda wondered if they cared about her quest for revenge, and what it meant for her life, more than she did.
Still, as she perused the news results, a slow smile grew on her face at each title that met her.
“The Chopper’s 5th Attack, More Brutal Than Ever.”
“The Chopper was Furious with Liam O’Dair—and She Wasn’t Wrong.”
“Inside The Chopper’s Hit List.”
Yes, Liam O’Dair, her number five, was truly a terrible person. She’d known it all along, and for the first time since her initial attack, she had the pleasure of the world knowing it too. Not only was Liam O’Dair an absolute prick, he was a rich prick. A rich prick who’d escaped justice—and jail time—for spiking his pregnant girlfriend’s smoothie with an abortion pill and killing their unborn child. A rich prick whose father had thrown enough money at the problem to get his son acquitted of all charges. A rich prick who’d been spared the discomfort of taking responsibility for his shitty actions—a discomfort that millions of poor people were forced to endure every day. And, man, were those millions of poor people pissed off. Veda abandoned the news results to take a look at the blog results, which always promised more colorful reactions.
They didn’t disappoint.
“Do We Really Care About What Happened to Liam O’Dair?”
“Why Liam O’Dair Can Kiss My Black Ass.”
“Why The Chopper Should’ve Forced O’Dair to Eat His Own Genitals.”
“Here’s Why The Chopper is a Modern Day Hero.”
Veda sighed, a slow Cheshire grin growing to life on her face. She was sure that Googling herself would prove detrimental somewhere down the line. If she allowed it to become habit-forming, she’d surely transform into a full-blown narcissist in no time flat. At that moment, however, it felt good. It felt good to have everyone on her side. But even as the entire world, including the media, joined together to celebrate the suffering of her number five, the smile it had put on Veda’s face slowly vanished.
In seconds, it was completely gone, replaced with a heartfelt pout.
It was just such a terrible pity.
Now that everyone loved The Chopper, The Chopper might have to stop.
Not because she wanted to.
No.
She lifted her accusatory brown eyes back up to the windshield and caught sight of Linc. Her pout deepened. He and his partner, Sam, were still kneeling next to the dead body, currently in the process of trying to turn it over.
Veda took a deep breath when her chest began to burn. The blessing Linc had bestowed on her when he’d let her go the night before might’ve actually been a curse. A curse because now she didn’t know if it would be safe to finish what she started. If him being one step ahead of her was just a fluke, or a sign of things to come. He’d let her go once, but Veda knew Linc well, and she knew he wouldn’t do it twice.
His moment of compassion had been a one-time thing.
If she struck again, and he caught her, she was going to jail.
It should’ve been enough to discourage her.
It should’ve been enough to stop her.
It should’ve been enough to make her take a good long look at her choices, and choose a different path.
But instead, Veda took a deep breath, one that made her nostrils flare and filled her chest to the hilt, deciding, once and for all, that she’d never stop. Linc had come close to catching her once, yes, but now that he had a dead woman on his hands, he’d be deeply distracted trying to find that dead woman’s killer. She’d use his moment of distraction to continue her quest unnoticed. She’d figure out where she’d gone wrong the night before and never do it again. She’d change up the pattern she’d been sticking to like glue in order to throw him off her trail. She’d shake things up in a way that made her t
erribly uncomfortable, but a way she now realized was necessary.
But she wouldn’t stop.
She couldn’t stop.
Not until she finished destroying the five monsters who’d yet to meet their fate.
Not until she finished destroying them all, including number ten—whoever he was.
Not until she finished destroying every last monster who’d destroyed her, ten years ago, on that sleepy island called Shadow Rock.
——
Across town, his body still ebbing and humming for the orgasm that had been stolen from him in the ally, Gage’s fingers trembled as he dialed a number on his cellphone. He wasn’t sure if they trembled for Veda, for the person he was calling, or for the cruise ship that awaited his arrival several miles away. The ship he’d be boarding in less than an hour. That would carry him away from Shadow Rock for a full month.
He swallowed thickly while rotating the steering wheel with the palm of his hand, pulling his Phantom to the side of the quiet, deserted road. Kirk Forest flanked him on both sides of the road. Tall trees with naked limbs abandoned by fallen leaves soared high into the foggy evening sky. So dense they drowned out the moonlight, leaving nothing but a mist so thick it swallowed the rest of the road whole, making Gage feel like he was looking into an abyss.
He killed the engine while bringing the phone to his ear, pushing open the door and stepping out onto the street.
Linc answered on the first ring. “You there?”
“I’m here,” Gage said, slamming the door closed and swallowing thickly, wide eyes searching the noiseless surroundings, trying to ignore the chills racing down his spine.
“Any witnesses?”
“Just me. Where is it?” Gage asked, desperate to get out of there as quickly as possible.
“If you followed my coordinates exactly there should be a ‘Deer Crossing’ sign straight ahead.”
Gage caught sight of that sign.
Linc’s deep voice continued before he could confirm. “At the bottom of the post, there’s a map.”
Raw (Revenge Book 6) Page 5