by Jo Robertson
“What your colleague called the loopy eight?” The medical examiner lifted the girl’s right leg and touched a gloved finger to the infinity sign cut into her thigh. The mark was fresh, and blood clotted around its edges.
Slater nodded. “Looks like the one on Jennifer Johnston’s body.”
Even if it wasn’t a clear match, Kate knew the two deaths were connected. She gazed long at the girl’s body, and then she turned to Slater with a hard stare.
“It’s him.” She turned away and inhaled deeply, wanting to purge the smell of death. She glanced back at him. “The cannibalization says he’s losing control.”
Chapter Seventeen
Back in her cubicle Kate examined the field report and crime scene photos while Slater and Bauer contacted the parents of the dead girl to verify identification. A bystander at the scene claimed he knew her, a high school student named Alison Mathews.
Kate shifted in her seat, feeling like a thousand nails pounded inside her skull. Four aspirin later, she felt no relief, gave up, and simply stared at the pictures lying on her desk. Noises from the bullpen hummed around her while the sharp, colored pictures of the killer’s recent victim gradually blurred to an old grainy crime scene photo.
A girl in a yellow dress, though in the photo only white and black and shades of gray showed. The dress splotched with dark areas where the blood had coagulated and dried a deep rusty brown. The once radiant face and the long hair, the color of wheat fields and daffodils, turned to straw and matted with frozen debris. The pieces of flesh torn from her arms and legs, the sly faces of the rats.
Kate shuddered involuntarily.
The father’s gaunt face, his shrunken body and hunched shoulders. The mother’s wails, the inconsolable moaning night after night as the girl listened through the wall, shoving her knuckles into her mouth so that her own sobs would not grieve her parents more.
The dreaded darkness and the awful nightmares.
Abruptly Kate grabbed the stack of reports and files from her desk, shoved them into her briefcase, and left the office. She wasn’t accomplishing anything here.
Driving straight to her apartment, she tackled mundane chores, lined the kitchen shelves with paper and tried to distract herself. Stupid because she wasn’t going to be here long enough for shelf paper to matter. She gazed at the paltry furnishings and nearly bare refrigerator.
What a sad, empty place, she thought. When had her life become so consumed with chasing a killer that it wasn’t really a life at all?
Much later she lit candles in the bathroom. Stripping off her clothes, she ran a steamy bath and slid in, soaking until her fingers and toes were rubbery. She banished thoughts of the dead girls by fantasizing about Slater, a totem against the demons in her mind.
His thick hair crept over the collar of his shirt, his trousers never lost their crease, and his jacket fitted elegantly across his broad shoulders. Like a businessman, she thought, not like a cop at all. His large, broad hands had fingers long and tapered as a musician’s. She allowed herself to imagine those hands cupping her face, moving down her shoulders, smoothing over her breasts.
She smiled dreamily and ran soap over her cooling body. Tiny flames burned in the pit of her stomach. Damn it, she admitted, she wanted Slater.
Unplugging the drain, she wrapped herself in a terrycloth robe and took a bottle of water into the den to study the reports. It was nearly eight o’clock when the doorbell rang. She was tempted to ignore it, but the banging and shouting started a minute later.
“Come on, Myers. I know you’re in there. Open the door.”
Slater.
She peered through the security peephole and eased open the door, keeping the chain in place. “I was resting, Slater. What do you want?” She was pleased that her voice sounded cool.
“Pizza. You have to eat. Open the door,” he repeated, an engaging smile on his face.
“I’ve already eaten and I’m really tired. I’ll see you in the morning.” She started to close the door, but Slater wedged his foot in the opening.
“No way. This is an extra large and it’ll be cold by the time I get home. Let me in. I’ll eat and run.” He lowered his voice. “I promise.”
When she hesitated, he indicated the six-pack of beer in his other hand. “I’ve got refreshments, too. Come on, Myers. Don’t be a party pooper.”
“I didn’t realize there was anything to celebrate.”
“Poor choice of words. I’m just saying I don’t want to be alone right now and you shouldn’t either.”
“A lot you know about what I want,” Kate grumbled, but she slowly slid the chain off the hook and opened the door, leaving Slater to enter on his own.
He found his way handily around the kitchen, getting plates, forks, and napkins from the cabinet and drawers, and placing them on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the sofa. By the time Kate returned from her bedroom, wearing sweat shirt and pants, he’d demolished several slices of pizza.
She eyed the half-empty pizza box. “You must be starved.”
“Skipped lunch. Wasn’t in the mood.”
She took a slice from the box and chewed idly at one corner. “This is good.”
“Dino’s Pizzaria. Best damn pizza in Placer Hills.”
“Better than the one I worked at when I was a teenager,” she offered. “It was my first job and I came home every night smelling like beer, but – ”
“ – it was really the smell of cheese,” Slater finished. “We had the same experience.”
She offered a small smile. She’d never admit it, but she was glad he’d stopped by. Today had been stressful, seeing another body and knowing she’d been right. Part of her didn’t want to be right, and she was glad not to be alone with her dark thoughts and memories.
“I had to work to help my mom with expenses,” she continued with a tiny shrug. “It wasn’t so bad.”
“What about your father?”
“He wasn’t – wasn’t around by the time I graduated from high school.”
“What happened?”
She lifted one shoulder and frowned down at her pizza. “It’s not very interesting.”
“Everything about you is interesting, Myers.”
She remembered her bathtub fantasy and flushed.
“You live in southern Cal all your life?” Slater asked.
“My father’s company transferred him to Idaho when I was six. My parents liked it there because they’d grown up in a small town and thought it would be a safe place to raise my sister and me. We moved to Los Angeles later.”
“The four of you, huh?”
She leveled a look at him that was meant to stop his prying, but he persisted anyway. “Why’d you leave Idaho if your family liked it so much?”
“It didn’t seem so great after a while.”
He studied her a long moment, poised to ask more questions, and she decided to change the subject. “What about you, Slater? You have any skeletons in your closet?”
“A few. Doesn’t everybody?
“You tell me.”
“Born and raised in sunny California, the Bay Area. Went to high school in San Francisco, college at Berkeley. I’m a pretty boring guy.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” She paused before taking a drink of her soda. Something about Slater made her want to tell him things – secrets, maybe. The magnetic draw she’d felt when they’d looked at each other across the table at Rusty’s pulled at her now.
“Actually,” she continued, “my dad left us when I was seventeen. After that, Mom and I moved to California.”
“Just you and your mother?”
She nodded slowly.
“What about your sister? Did she go with your father?”
“No, he left on his own. One morning I woke up and he was gone. No note, no explanation, no goodbye.”
“That must have been rough.”
She felt the familiar sense of panic. “Yes.”
“What happened to your siste
r?”
She rose and walked around to the back of the sofa. Suddenly her hands had difficulty remaining still and her feet needed to move. She ended up at the front window, fiddling with the drape. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
Slater came up behind her. “Are you okay?”
“It’s just the job, finding that girl’s body today, knowing I was right about the killer.”
He paused a moment as if weighing his words. “Seems like it’s more than that.”
“Well it isn’t,” she snapped as she whirled around.
He stood so close to her she could feel his warm breath on her forehead. His eyes were burning shards of darkness in a worried face. It would be so easy to like him, she thought, to count on his strength.
She steeled herself, wondering why she hadn’t just lied to him, knowing she was picking a fight. “I’m fine. You didn’t need to come running over here to check up on me.”
“I wasn’t checking up on you,” he contradicted. “I was concerned.”
“You don’t need to be. I can take care of myself.”
He placed his hands gently on her shoulders. “Kate, I know it’s none of my business, but you’re going to have to come to terms with this sooner or later.”
“With what?”
“Whatever’s eating away at you.”
She forced herself to step back and let prickliness take over. She’d fall apart if she tried to lean on a man like Slater. She never wallowed in self-pity and now, more than ever, she needed to keep it together. She was so close to the end.
She squared her shoulders and strode toward the front door, tilted her chin. “You’re right, Slater. It isn’t any of your business.” The expression on his face changed from concern to annoyance. “You weren’t needed here tonight.”
“You’re right, absolutely right. You’re a big girl. You don’t need my help. Hell, you don’t need anybody’s help because Kate Myers has all the answers.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re real good at figuring out other people’s problems. Real quick to understand the freaky minds of the psychos you profile, but you don’t know a damn thing about regular people. And I don’t think you understand very much about yourself either.”
Kate clenched her jaw so tightly she thought she’d break a tooth. She wouldn’t cry, she told herself. “That’s quite a speech,” she said coolly.
He scraped a palm over his jaw. “You’re not the only one who had a bad day today. I had to call two parents on vacation to tell them their only daughter was butchered. I think we’ve all had a tough time.”
She stood still as a statue. “You should leave now.”
“Sure,” he said after a long moment, throwing a disgusted look at the remaining pizza. “You can finish it. I’m getting a little sick.”
The slamming of the door rang in her ears long after he stormed out into the wet night.
The echo of Slater’s steps receded. Kate stiffened her spine, knowing if she let her guard down even once, she’d fall apart. She was sick to death of being tough, exhausted from the years of searching. She wanted to give up, but she couldn’t, and she couldn’t count on a man like Slater to pick up the shattered pieces of her life, either.
The recent victims reminded her of that.
She sank onto the sofa, glanced at the pile of folders on the coffee table. This monster was the same one who’d terrorized her family all those years ago. She knew it in her bones, felt it in every muscle and nerve in her body. She wouldn’t stop until the killer was relegated to hell because he wouldn’t stop until they caught him.
Of his own volition, he’d never cease his bloody work. The dark desires that compelled him to maim and torture never went away. He would never be cured.
She’d spent a lifetime learning that.
Exhausted, she removed her clothes, dropping them wherever she took them off, and made her way to bed, crawling in with just her panties on. She burrowed deep beneath the covers and prayed she wouldn’t dream.
The jarring of the doorbell awakened her from a groggy sleep. What? She dragged the alarm clock to her face to see the luminous digital readout. Twelve-thirty. Slipping on an oversized tee shirt, she padded to the door. “Who is it?”
“Kate, let me in. It’s important. It’s about the case.”
Slater – again.
Chapter Eighteen
The watcher had last gone by the name of John Smith, though he’d been Patrick Cervantes in a state far from California, and Joshua Hart in yet another state. And in Idaho, the state of his birth, where his whore of a mother had dropped him off like a sack of dirty laundry, he’d been given still another name. Unfortunately, necessity required that he now use his real name.
For this reason tonight he drove carefully through the dark streets, taking a great risk.
He’d grown fond of the name Smith and often thought of himself by that fitting choice. Smith, the most common name of all, and John, his grandfather’s given name. The irony of his anonymity being attached to this very plain name amused him.
Smith glanced at the hand gripping the steering wheel, at the other dangling from the open window. Those were his only unusual traits. He worked his jaw up and down. A double legacy from dear old grandfather.
He imagined the old man’s hands, stretching down from a great height to smack him across the face. Or to jerk his pants down and whack him hard on the ass, his grandfather’s hands harder than any school paddle. Over the years Smith had found his own oversized hands very useful.
The watcher tapped his foot on the car’s rubber mat. Tonight he hunted with a vague restlessness – a frenzied, careless search – instead of the measured, deliberate forays he usually went on. The cool, deliberate part of his mind knew it was too soon, but the other side—the blood lust, the screw-them-all part of his brain—compelled him.
He couldn’t be responsible for what happened tonight. Going against plan wasn’t his fault. He pursed his lips and kept driving one-armed through the inky night, feeling cheated from his last, unsatisfying experience. It was the bitch’s fault.
He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel of the shit-brown Nissan, slightly dented, but otherwise remarkably ordinary, a vehicle no one would remember, one he’d taken in Reno and outfitted with stolen California license plates. Dumping the Pontiac instead of driving it over the border into Canada had been a foolish mistake, he realized. That could come back to bite him in the ass.
Fuck, he’d give his soul for a cigarette, but he wasn’t foolish enough to litter the car with butts. Saliva provided DNA, something he hadn’t considered all those years ago. DNA was a big deal now. After decades, police sometimes caught up with criminals just by tying them to a sample of blood, saliva, semen, even skin and sweat.
The sweat gathering beneath his hairline reminded him of that. He rolled down the passenger window and let the cool air circulate, breathing in a deep lungful of the chilly night as he stopped at a red light. A woman walked across the pedestrian lane. Trim, well-dressed, her hair a carefully coiffed silver blond.
The age his mother would be.
Sometimes he thought he remembered her bending over him, voice soft and face pretty in the glow of a nightlight. Then the image of a man intruded and she stumbled, drunk and laughing, onto a dirty mattress. When she finally sat up, her red-lipped mouth was smeared, her clothing mussed, her face a garish mask.
She’d died when he was old enough to remember the sight of her dead body, but little else. All he had were vague, fragmented flashes of memory.
He could hardly remember when he’d first gotten the urge for hunting. After the debacle of Mary – that’d turned out all right, though – he’d set off for Reno.
When was it? Years ago, ’89,’90, later? Almost winter, but he remembered the sun at his back slipping its orange and pink hues into the horizon. He hadn’t worried that anyone would wonder why a teenager was hitchhiking alone on a maj
or interstate. He was tall for his age, and no one could tell he was barely seventeen.
A year younger than Mary. Mary, the bitch who’d reneged on her promise to teach him things.
He’d headed eastward on Interstate 80 toward Winnemucca and the salt flats, and then to Salt Lake City, before traveling on to Idaho, with some vague thought that he’d trace his mother’s footsteps there. No one would bother to come looking for him. He supposed his uncle might try to find out where he’d gone, but he didn’t really think the man cared enough to get involved in his nephew’s disappearance. Certainly not Grandfather or Grandmother.
A fleeting picture of his grandfather’s unforgiving features caused his hands to tremble on the steering wheel. The old man had power even from the grave. It’d be just like him to try and rise up from the dead, but Smith wouldn’t bet on the success of that resurrection.
He felt himself losing control as he tapped his foot faster against the floorboard and the chant sounded in his head. Ding, dong, he’s dead, he’s dead, Ding, dong. Finally he regained control and each phrase was an imagined blow smashing his grandfather’s hateful face.
The traffic light changed and Smith pulled out.
God, he wanted a smoke, but he’d been careful over the years to see that his DNA didn’t end up in any databases, and he refused to risk it now by smoking. He’d never been in the military, never taught school, never applied for any job that required fingerprinting. He’d always been very careful. He might’ve left a lonely DNA sample out there, but he was confident the cops had nothing to match it with.
More important, he’d never been arrested.
States routinely tested inmates, and though rules were different from state to state, they all had DNA records for violent offenders.
Smith almost giggled. Offenders – the term they now used for prison inmates. So politically correct, as though the criminal had committed a social faux pas. Excuse me, did I offend you by slashing your arm off? He laughed out loud. Small wonder he’d never been caught. Only an idiot would call Smith an offender. He’d definitely offended plenty of bitchy girls over the years.