by Meg Gardiner
Brandon’s momentary triumph, the holding-on-by-his-fingernails hope, drained away. Howling, he threw his head back and sank to his knees.
Berg and a deputy managed to get him to his feet and walk him up the slope. Emmerich remained at Shana’s side.
Rainey said, “The skin isn’t reddened where the tape was stuck?”
Emmerich shook his head. “Applied post-mortem.”
His face was stark. He was considering the implications. “She’s his. The UNSUB wanted to make that absolutely clear. He—”
He stopped. Touched the fabric of the nightgown. “Wait.”
Caitlin and Rainey drew closer to get a better look.
It took only a few seconds, now that Caitlin focused on it. Filmy, sheer, the nightie draped Shana from shoulders to midthigh. It was creamy white, and the fabric was microfiber. Shit.
She straightened. “It’s different from the fabric Brittany Leakins’s dog dragged home.”
“Two nighties,” Emmerich said.
“But the trailing dogs led us straight to her.”
Emmerich looked lost in thought, then turned sharply. “The scent item the K-9 officers used. We missed it.”
“They didn’t use the torn strip of fabric the retriever brought home?”
“That went straight to the crime lab. It’s evidence. They were smart enough not to contaminate it further.”
“We got to the Leakins home after they gave the bloodhounds a scent article.”
Emmerich shouted up the hill. “Berg.”
The detective was out of earshot. Emmerich got on his phone.
A minute later, cell to his ear, he eyed Caitlin and Rainey. “They were looking for Shana Kerber, so they used a sweatshirt that belonged to her. They got it from her house this afternoon.”
Caitlin said, “But if the first strip of fabric was from a different article of clothing . . .”
Into the phone, Emmerich said, “Get the K-9 unit back to the Leakins house.” His voice was urgent. “There’s another woman out there.”
10
They reached the Leakins house as the last violet glow of sunset was ghosting to indigo. Jupiter stabbed the horizon in the west. This time, the K-9 unit waited for Detective Berg to bring a sealed brown paper evidence bag from his car. The dogs circled, anxious to work. Berg slit the seal and with gloved hands removed the bloody strip of white fabric Shiner had brought home. A dog handler presented it to the bloodhounds. The dogs sniffed, alert and straining.
The K-9 officer said, “Get it, girls.”
The bloodhounds lowered their noses to the ground. Within seconds they caught the scent. They took off across the yard, under the split rail fence, and aimed for the woods.
Berg returned the torn fabric to the evidence bag, resealed it, signed it, and locked it in his car. He wordlessly approached the FBI team.
They turned on their flashlights and followed the dogs across the field into the trees.
The bloodhounds had a strong scent and moved in tandem, quickly, the clasps of their leads clicking against their harnesses. The oaks gave way to cedars—gnarled and dark, a blackening thicket. Branches clawed at Caitlin’s hair and sleeves. The light overhead turned to a scrim of gray seen through jet-dark greenery. She swept the beam of her flashlight across the ground. The cold was penetrating.
They were far past the spot where Shana had lain, deep in a tangled cedar forest, when the dogs slowed and disappeared over a ridge.
When the team climbed over the tangled roots of a dead tree and emerged in a clearing, Caitlin stopped. The bloodhounds were silently circling something, but at a distance.
Just beyond the dogs she saw it. They all saw it. A form on the ground, in a soft depression in the earth. She was dressed in white.
She was struggling to crawl.
Caitlin’s heart jacked into overdrive. “Jesus.”
She burst past Berg and the dog handlers, throat tight, running. Under the swinging beam of her flashlight, the girl juddered helplessly.
“Come on. She needs—”
A thick smell hit her, gamey and putrid. A low grunting came from the darkness. Caitlin stopped, horrified.
The girl was dead. In the shadows, a feral hog was gnashing her with its tusks.
Mouth dry, Caitlin ran at it, yelling and waving her arms. The pig looked at her with tiny black eyes, then spun and dashed into the undergrowth. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
The dog handlers and Berg looked at her like she was crazy.
One of the K-9 officers shook his head. “Them things are mean.”
She was breathing hard. “It was disturbing the scene.”
And chewing on the body. A sick shiver ran through her.
The clearing abruptly fell silent, as if all life within the forest had emptied away. Caitlin looked down at the disturbed ground before her.
The body was garbed in a white nightgown. When they turned their flashlights on it, Caitlin immediately saw that it was the nightgown from which the torn fabric had been taken by the golden retriever. She stilled, trying to take in the whole scene. Her field of vision, which had been narrowed to tunnel focus by adrenaline, slowly expanded.
The young woman’s wrists were viciously slashed. The cuts ran diagonally up the inside of her forearms, along the line of the radial artery. Maybe ten centimeters—four inches. The cuts had severed arteries, veins, muscle, and tendon, exposing the interior of her arms like cuts in raw steak. To the victim, it would have been excruciating. But she would have lost consciousness in under a minute.
Caitlin’s hands went to the scars on her own forearms. They weren’t as deep, but they were plentiful. Like the victim’s, they’d been made with a razor blade. Unlike the victim, she’d made them herself. A lifetime ago.
The beam of the flashlight caught the redness around the victim’s wrists, about three inches wide. Her skin was dusty and had marbled from the breakdown of red blood cells staining the walls of her vascular system. But the signs were clear.
“Ligature marks,” she said. “Skin irritation. Duct tape.”
Detective Berg knelt beside the body. “It’s Phoebe Canova.”
Caitlin stepped back mentally, seeing the victim’s body in its entirety. Her field of vision continued to expand.
Then goose bumps rose. Around Phoebe’s body, maybe six feet away, photos were stuck in the ground like headstones. They were Polaroids.
Caitlin stepped back physically. The photos showed women in white nightgowns. They were blond. Some were alive and terrified. Most were dead.
Rainey spoke in a low voice. “Holy Jesus. How long has this guy been killing?”
Caitlin counted the photos. There were twelve.
11
The harsh fluorescent lights were buzzing when Caitlin and Emmerich arrived back at the Solace sheriff’s station. Rainey remained at the crime scene with Detective Berg. The station, after business hours, was nearly empty. Emmerich pinned fresh crime scene photos to the boards.
He loosened his tie. “Let’s develop the profile.”
The photos were clear, sharp, and grim. Phoebe Canova’s wilted body, tossed by the feral hog, lay splayed on the ground. Under the camera flash, the baby doll nightie bloomed a shocking, otherworldly white. The nightgown, and Phoebe’s skin and hair, were streaked with dirt and blood. But beneath the grime, Phoebe’s cheap blond dye job had been washed and brushed. And makeup had been applied to her now green-gray skin. Her lipstick was ruby red.
The UNSUB—one calculating, remorseless predator—had done this. Then he had left Phoebe in the forest for animals to savage.
The sight of the hog seemed to fill Caitlin’s head. She saw again its tiny gleaming eyes, its tusks gnashing Phoebe’s body. What was the Bible story about Jesus casting demons into a herd of swine?
A bon
e-cold ache sank into her. A devastating serial killer was at work. What kind of man could do this?
“Hendrix.”
She looked at Emmerich. “Yes, sir.”
“Raise the shutters.”
For a moment, she thought he meant the windows.
“These crime scenes have given us a wealth of information. We need to mine it,” he said.
“I’m assimilating it.”
Emmerich quieted until she gave him her full attention.
“You’re standing halfway across the room from the evidence.”
Caitlin fought, constantly, to keep emotional distance from the cases she worked. And Emmerich knew why. Her father, Mack, had been a homicide detective—the original investigator on the serial killings committed by the Prophet. The case had bled into his off-duty hours, his home life, and his tormented mind. It shattered him and tore his family apart.
As a teenager, it had led Caitlin to despair and self-harm.
In her wallet, she carried a scrap of paper on which she’d written her goals before she pinned on a sheriff’s star. Dedication. Persistence. Job stays at the station.
She worked, every day, to brand those words on her heart. Because when she ignored them, she slipped from relentless pursuit into dangerous obsession.
She stood rigidly still.
“The only way to find the line is to approach it,” Emmerich said. “And we need a deep dive here.”
To track the UNSUB, she had to get inside his mind and understand his methods. How was he selecting and hunting these women? What was driving him to kill?
Emmerich wanted her to open up. To let the UNSUB in.
She nearly let out a hysterical laugh. When she opened up, she knew, she bled.
His expression was calm and patient, but charged with expectation.
She knew little about Emmerich’s personal life. He was divorced, with two teenage daughters whose photos filled his office. He enjoyed fly fishing. He was an Eagle Scout. In his twenties, he had hiked the Appalachian Trail. He’d been with the FBI for eighteen years, plunging headfirst into the dankest, most violent cases in the country.
His back was straight, his shoulders level. The lights cast his shadow in multiples across the floor.
Caitlin sometimes wondered if Emmerich was the man her father could have been. Investigating the Prophet slayings had poisoned Mack Hendrix, literally and emotionally, and broken their family. If it hadn’t . . .
“These crime scenes reveal the killer’s signature and indicate his paraphilia,” Emmerich said. “We start there and work outward to connect it to his identity.”
His hands, as often, hung at his sides, as if he were a gunslinger ready to draw. His stern countenance was underlain with compassion. His empathy was genuine, and it warmed her. And she knew he hoped to draw out her own empathy in return—to get her to understand and share the feelings of the UNSUB.
She approached the board. “You mean we have to search for a homology.”
In biology, a homology meant that different creatures had a similar structure because of shared ancestry. In archaeology, it referred to beliefs or practices that shared similarities due to historical or ancestral connections.
In criminal profiling, it was the elusive point where character and action came together.
With this offender, character and action had come together at least twelve times. And the results had been put on display in the cedar forest. Caitlin stared at the crime scene photos of Shana Kerber and Phoebe Canova, laid out in white, surrounded by Polaroids.
“Paraphilia hardly covers it,” she said. “He’s trying to perfect a hell of a fantasy.”
She walked slowly along the board, taking in the full flow of the information. The missing women’s photos. The map of Texas with I-35 highlighted in red. The abduction sites.
“The forest displays are the climax of the killer’s sexual psychodrama.” Cherry on the UNSUB sundae. “Before he ever spots a potential victim, he has his script worked out.”
“He’s meticulous,” Emmerich said. “And confident.”
“He maintains control throughout his crimes.” Movie theater. Main Street. Farmhouse. “There’s no sign of struggle at any abduction site. He gets victims to lower their guard or go with him willingly.”
He started to take shape in her mind. “He has a well-honed facade of sincerity and the ability to manipulate women.” She tapped a photo of Phoebe Canova’s car at the railroad crossing. “The open driver’s window suggests he uses a con to gain the victims’ confidence, then overpowers and takes them in plain sight.”
Emmerich crossed his arms. “Agreed. What does he do when he’s not committing murder?”
“Stays clean. He’s good at not getting caught.” She thought for a second. “He won’t have a criminal record.”
“Unfortunately for us.”
“The fact that the killings occur on weekends suggests he has a nine-to-five job.” She turned it over in her head. The empty car. The movie theater. An undisturbed house. “He’s persuasive and gregarious. The job may involve sales.”
“He compartmentalizes.”
“Yes. He keeps up a seemingly normal life. He’ll have a wife or girlfriend.”
Down the hall, the back door of the station buzzed open. Rainey came in.
Emmerich said, “Status?”
“Forensic unit arrived. They’ll be working those scenes at least twenty-four hours.” She noted the new crime scene photos. “Signature, clearly. Elaborate and specific.”
Caitlin said, “Staged by a man who looks like Mr. Ordinary. Somebody who keeps the monster in a mental cage.”
“And when he unlocks it, he kills,” Emmerich said. “Viciously. He’s a grandiose narcissist. His rage and sense of entitlement drive him to destroy the happiness of others.”
Caitlin stuck her hands in her back pockets. “He’s got to have burning memories of rejection that stoke him. Convince him his actions are justified. Women hurt him, so he hurts women.”
Rainey shook her head. “You’re suggesting he’s an anger-retaliation rapist, motivated by a desire to humiliate the victim. But these attacks go beyond revenge.” Her cool facade flickered, and for a second, revulsion edged in. “He’s an anger-excitation rapist and killer.”
Caitlin considered it. “A sexual sadist. Asserting power and instilling fear are what excite him.”
Emmerich began to pace. “Anger-excitation rapists stalk victims by car and range outside their own neighborhoods. His vehicle will have a kidnapping kit. Duct tape, zip ties, box cutter, ski mask or panty hose.”
Caitlin examined the crime scene photos. Slashed wrists. Heavy cosmetics, almost Kabuki. Pristine nighties.
“All his victims bled copiously, but half the nightgowns have no blood on them. The cosmetics are slathered on. He dressed them and made them up after death.” She turned. “He reduces them to objects in a twisted fantasy. Nothing more than dolls for him to possess, control, and ultimately destroy.”
Rainey drew nearer to the board and examined the copies of the Polaroids. “I expect he takes multiple photos and keeps some as trophies. These, at the scene, they’re calling cards. Planting the photos—he’s staking his claim to being the creator of these objects. Declaring ownership, as author of the fantasy.”
Caitlin frowned at the photos.
“What?”
“The slashing of Phoebe’s wrists disturbs me.”
“It disturbs all of us.”
“The killer prepares these women like a sacrifice. It’s suicidal ideation, forced upon the unwilling.” She paused. “Phoebe Canova had been missing for almost three weeks.”
Emmerich continued to pace. “But the ME estimates she’s been dead two weeks.”
“He kept her alive. He tortures his victims both physically and mentally.”
“Terror. Surrender. Despair. Submission.” Caitlin shook her head. “Destroy them emotionally, and he takes their souls as well as their bodies.”
“Why does he attack on Saturday nights?”
“Busy during the week?” Caitlin said.
“Maybe.” Emmerich crossed his arms. “This started in August. What triggered it?”
Rainey shook her head. “No way to know, yet.”
“And why is he accelerating his kills?”
Rainey looked thoughtful. Caitlin stepped into the silence.
“He got a taste for it.”
Emmerich raised an eyebrow. “Judging from the Polaroids he planted around Phoebe Canova’s body, he’s had a taste for some time.”
Rainey said, “I get what Caitlin’s saying. He’s becoming brazen.”
“He’s succeeding at abducting and killing these women without getting caught,” Caitlin said. “And success breeds confidence.”
Emmerich nodded. “He has a compulsion. And once he gave in to it, he couldn’t stop. Killing has become more than a need or pleasure. It’s become a habit.”
“And with every murder, he becomes more adept. More self-assured. And more convinced that he’s . . . invisible.”
Emmerich, already somber, seemed to draw in on himself. “Finding the bodies tonight blows that out of the water.”
“No,” Caitlin said.
She flushed, realizing she’d contradicted the boss. But Emmerich merely looked at her with curiosity—and maybe a hint of amusement.
“Finding the bodies spoils the killer’s dollhouse game, with these victims,” she said. “But it doesn’t lead back to him. Not yet. Given his ego, he’s still going to think that when it comes to grabbing victims, he’s invulnerable.”
“You don’t think he’s going to back off?”
“Discovering the bodies, by itself, won’t do it. And Saturday night is coming fast. We should presume we have only days to stop him.”