Kateri slid in, placed her walking stick in the back and watched the young officer as he crossed in front of the headlights. His mouth was pinched as if he wanted to vomit, and he walked like a man suffering from a massive hangover. But he’d been fine yesterday … and he’d been on duty all night. The boy was not hungover. He was sick in his heart and soul. He started the car and headed out of town and down the dark and winding coast highway toward the crime scene.
“You were the first responder?” she guessed.
“Yes.” In the dash lights, he looked scared … no, not scared. Haunted.
“You want to fill me in?”
“No.” That was all. No description, no details, no excitement. The young officer was uncharacteristically silent.
So it was bad. Very bad.
She patted his hand on the steering wheel.
He jumped as if someone had sneaked up on him, as if what he’d seen made his skin hurt.
“Sorry.” She removed her hand. “Sorry. As soon as you drop me off, you should go home. See your folks. Talk to your father.” Who was a former cop, disabled while in the line, but proud of his son and more capable of helping him than anyone she knew.
“I can drive you back.”
“I know you can. But your shift is over and I think there will be plenty of police presence, don’t you?” He did not need to view the scene again.
Moen nodded jerkily. “Okay. I’ll drop you off and head back. I have to file the report, anyway.”
She wanted to tell him to forget it until later that day. But if he wasn’t going to talk, she needed that report. “Right. If you would.” She pulled out her phone, dialed. “Let me video chat with Bergen. Get an update.” Her phone connected to the car, rang half a ring.
Bergen’s face lit the small screen in the middle of the dash. “Sheriff. Another slashing. No one local, not a big woman, not this time. A petite tourist, single, forty-five, taking the long way around to visit her kids in Portland. Stopped in Virtue Falls to pick up dinner, drove down the highway to Lupine Point. Got out to picnic. Cheese and crackers and baby carrots were scattered toward the front of the car. I’d say she pulled into the pocket park, found an isolated overlook, sat on the hood to eat her lunch and enjoy the sunset. He snuck up on her…”
Behind him, she saw floodlights, men moving from one place to another, serious expressions and the occasional angry glance.
Bergen continued, “He used a scalpel? A razor blade? Something sharp. Mike doesn’t know what. Not yet. Cut along her jawline, traced the line around one ear. I’ve never seen anything like it. She bled…” Bergen gestured randomly.
“Who is she?” Kateri asked.
“According to her driver’s license, she’s Carolyn Abner of Springfield, Missouri.”
“Her driver’s license was on her?” Not good.
“It was in her purse. Which was in her car. Keys in the ignition. Robbery was not the motive.”
Which left little motive except … murder for the joy of it.
“Coroner is here,” Bergen said. “Preliminary—Mike says she’s been dead at least eight hours. At one point her killer crushed her windpipe. But cause of death was bleeding, not suffocation. She fought. She’s got bruising and scrapes on her knuckles and two torn fingernails.”
“Let me see.”
“You aren’t going to like it.”
“Do you like it?”
He turned his camera and pointed it at the scene.
First Kateri saw the congregation of lights against the ground. Then she saw their coroner, Mike Sun. He moved back on Bergen’s command. Bergen zoomed in and Kateri saw the body.
Carolyn Abner rested on her back, her eyes open, staring toward the sky. Blood had poured from the incisions along her jawbone and up past her ear and cheek. Blood had filled her blondish hair and turned the strands into a gruesome, clotted black. Her face was eerily clean, as if the killer had wiped any trace of blood away from her pale skin.
Kateri fought the same sickness that afflicted Moen and Bergen. “Mike, anything you want to tell me?”
“Look at this.” Mike gestured Bergen closer. “I just found this. Right here, right at the point at her temple where he stopped cutting, there’s a tear in the skin. I couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t some symmetry here.”
“Right. Symmetry.” Mike was five-foot-five, half-Chinese and half-Aleut, raised in Virtue Falls and had been with the city most of his career. He was a good guy, a good coroner, and Kateri trusted his findings—and his intuitions—implicitly. If he said there should be symmetry, then he was right.
“If he’s going to cut half her face, why not the other half? But it looks like he screwed up, tugged at the delicate skin here and it tore.” In a characteristic gesture, Mike swiped his shoulder-length straight black hair off his forehead. “That’s why he stopped. I think otherwise he would have kept right on cutting.”
Moen rolled down the window, slowed the car.
She glanced at him.
Maybe it was the dash lights, but he looked green.
He came to a stop on the shoulder of the dark, isolated highway, opened the door, unclicked his seat belt and vomited on the pavement.
She reached back into the first-aid kit, got a cold pack, broke it to release the chemicals and placed it on the back of his neck.
“Kid sick?” Mike asked.
“Aren’t we all?” Kateri countered.
Around the lighted circle, heads nodded.
“We’re almost there,” Kateri said to the men on the scene. To Moen, she said, “Can you drive?”
He pulled himself back into the car and put the car in gear.
She wanted to tell him to put on his seat belt, but she knew he was afraid he was going to be sick again.
He slowed at the sign for Lupine Point, turned onto the narrow, winding road and pulled into the usually quiet parking lot packed with bright lights and grim-faced police.
“You going to be okay to get home?” Kateri asked Moen.
“Sure, Sheriff. I’m fine.”
Stick in hand, she got out and watched him drive away. Moen had dreamed of illustrating graphic novels. Maybe this would give him the push he needed to follow his dream. Or maybe, like a hot flame, it would harden him into steel.
She limped over to the body and the men surrounding it.
Her officers had fanned out in the parking lot, the grass and up the dune toward the beach. Most of them were in uniform; all of them carried flashlights and occasionally one would call Officer Bill Chippen over to take a photo. These guys knew the procedure all too well.
She glanced at Carolyn Abner, but didn’t quite look at her straight on. There was no need, and she had to be steady and on her feet for the next God knew how many hours. She asked the first, most important question. “Bergen, do you think John is doing this?”
“I sure as hell hope so,” Bergen said.
He was so prompt and emphatic, she almost laughed. Except that the truth was so awful.
He continued, “Because if it’s not John Terrance, we’ve got not just one sick bastard on our hands, but two.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it. Give it to me straight.” But he only said what they all were thinking. “How did this guy arrive at the scene?”
“Don’t know. Too much evidence, we’re working to narrow it down. Car probably. All kinds of tracks. It’s the high season for bikes, and those tracks are here, too.” Bergen pointed toward the beach. “And he could have parked down at the dunes and walked up the trail or along the beach. It’s only a couple of miles.”
“Mike, any of his DNA?” she asked.
“She should have flesh and blood under her fingernails.” Mike lifted one of her hands. “He cleaned them out. I’ll have to get her back to the morgue to see if he dropped a hair or missed a molecule of skin.”
Kateri stared at Carolyn Abner’s circled, rigid fingers, at the wide silver ring, the torn nails and the broken skin over the knuckles. Then she h
ad to look at her, all of her, and acknowledge the woman beneath the tragedy.
Carolyn Abner was dressed like a typical summertime tourist, in loose white capris and a pink sweatshirt jacket. Her hair was styled in a bob. She’d lost a sandal. Kateri thought of all the other tourists, some already spooked by the specter of John Terrance, some completely unaware, some determinedly going on with their vacations. She thought of Terrance, belligerent, skinny, scrawny, so mean he starved his own dog to ensure the beast was vicious. She was going to have to do something, and fast. “It’s our second slashing, and fatal. When I get back to City Hall and pull the preliminary reports together, I’ll call Garik Jacobsen at the FBI and see what he knows.”
Mike Sun reached up and punched Bergen on the thigh. “I told you she’d think of it herself.”
Bergen smiled with genuine relief. “Yeah, baby. That is best news I’ve heard this week.”
So. They’d been talking about her, speculating what her next course of action should be. Kateri wanted to punch them both on the thighs. She contained the urge and in an excessively pleasant voice said, “It’s the logical course of action. No one understands the situation in Virtue Falls better than Garik, who grew up here, whose wife was almost killed by the last serial killer in town. Garik, who was the former sheriff.”
Mike and Bergen exchanged glances.
They were both married. Maybe they’d recognized something about her tone.
Because Bergen said, “He’s in the position to know all about serial killers. That’s why we need him. Not because we think that you…” He trailed off.
Mike picked it up. “Really, it’s not that you aren’t doing a great job in this case. It’s not your fault Terrance threw his son’s body out and disrupted the chase. Everybody knows that. And this slashing thing is just bad—”
Bergen surreptitiously kicked him.
They were so stupid. She said, “You guys never know when to shut up, do you?”
“No, ma’am,” Mike said.
“That’s what my wife tells me,” Bergen said.
She pointed at them both. “I need reports and photos as soon as I can get them. Bergen, I’ll take your car. You catch a ride with Mike. In the hearse.”
Bergen groaned, then intercepted a withering glance from her. “Absolutely. You take my car. I’ll ride in the hearse. And actually … someone should accompany the body to the morgue and talk to the family when they arrive.”
That lessened Kateri’s ire. “You’re right, my friend, and thank you for thinking of that.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Kateri sat at her desk in her office, pulled in the evidence from her guys, compiled the reports and the photos, and by nine A.M. she was calling Garik’s private line. A female answered, her tone businesslike, proving not even his cell phone was his own during FBI business hours. Kateri said, “Garik Jacobsen, please. This is Sheriff Kateri Kwinault from Virtue Falls. I’d like to speak to him about a situation we have here.”
“Let me see if he’s in.” Which translated meant, Let me see if he wants to speak with you.
He came on the line right away and for some reason, his voice sounded amused. “So … what’s this I hear about the Virtue Falls sheriff shacking up with a bouncer?”
Kateri had been concentrating on the gruesome photos of the murder. Caught off guard, she stammered, “A … a bouncer? You mean Stag? He’s more than a…” She realized Garik was pulling her chain, and said, “How did you hear about it?”
“When half the law enforcement in Western Washington is deployed to Virtue Falls to catch John Terrance and their chase comes to such a walloping finish, you know what they do afterward.”
“They gossip. I know. But really? Why would they care who I’m sleeping with?”
“You’re a female sheriff—that’s still pretty rare in the business—you’re famous and you’re hot.”
She looked down at her scarred hands, at the walking stick leaning against the wall. “Hot, huh?”
“Every day.”
Yep. She liked Garik. He was smart, sharp, with a lot of law enforcement experience. When he recommended her for the interim position of sheriff, the city council had gone along. She’d had to win the election on her own, but he’d given her the push she needed. Maybe more important, he was dedicated to his mother, his wife and his daughter. Good guy.
He was still laughing at her. “Plus the cops all know I’m from Virtue Falls, so I got a call right away. Plus…” He let that dangle.
“Your foster mother told you.”
“Margaret Smith knows all.”
“She’s almost one hundred years old. How does she hear this stuff?”
“She’s charming, she has connections and she runs the Virtue Falls Resort. Everyone tells her everything.”
Yep. Kateri liked Margaret Smith, too.
He continued, “Stag Denali, huh? I remember him. Good catch. He’s quite the arm candy.”
“I don’t know that that’s what he signed on for.”
“He’s a tough guy. He’ll bear up under the strain.”
They laughed, then Kateri got down to business. “We had a second slashing in Virtue Falls. This one ended in a death.”
“Slashing? John Terrance?”
“We’d like to think so.”
“But you don’t.”
“There is reasonable doubt.” She filled him in, sent the files on the first slashing and the preliminaries on the second, and promised the autopsy when Mike Sun had finished.
“Looking at the pictures now…” She could hear him clicking through the photos.
“See anything familiar? Does the FBI have reports of similar attacks anywhere close? Or far? Past or present? Have you heard anything?”
“No clusters of slashing attacks that I’m aware of. The only things the victims had in common was that they’re white and female?”
“And that the slashing was to their faces. That coincidence seems unlikely.”
“Agreed. Let me look around at FBI reports, talk to some people, get back to you. In the meantime, you eliminate or confirm Terrance as a suspect.”
“You mean, catch him?”
“You’ve only got a little time before Virtue Falls goes from quiet hysteria to a riot.”
“I am aware. But he’s gone to ground.”
A short, portly man stepped into the doorway and rapped briskly on the sill.
This could not be good. “Garik, I have to go. City Councilman Venegra has arrived for a visit.”
“Viagra Venegra? Isn’t that the guy you arrested last week?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Along with most of the city council and the school board?”
“Yes, I did.”
“For getting involved in a fight between two members of the school board in front of the courthouse that became a riot involving every politician in town?”
Shut up, Garik. “That is correct.”
“Think he might hold a grudge against you?”
She checked out Venegra’s scowl. “Absolutely! I’ll keep you posted as events unfold. Call me as soon as you’ve got something.” She hung up on him and gestured to a seat. “Come in, Councilman. What’s on your mind?”
He gripped the arms of the chair as he lowered himself down and he winced as he settled on the cushion.
On that fateful day last week in front of the courthouse, Venegra’s wife had discovered he was having an affair with Mona Coleman and she had bunched up her fist and landed a good solid hit. That was part of what precipitated the riot …
Kateri refrained from asking how his nads were feeling.
“Who were you talking to, sheriff?” Venegra asked.
As if he had the right to know. As if she reported to him. Which she did not. But she knew damned good and well he’d heard at least some of her part of the conversation and so she told him, “Garik Jacobsen at the FBI. In case you haven’t heard, we have a situation here in the county.”
“I’m
glad to hear you admit that. For as little as you’ve done to apprehend John Terrance, I thought you were unaware of the danger lurking on every corner. When are you going to catch John Terrance? The citizens of Virtue Falls didn’t vote you in and expect you to prove your incompetence in the first week.”
He was a nasty little sexist creep. Kateri wondered what Mona saw in him—and Kateri didn’t think much good of Mona.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” he demanded.
“Is this official business, Councilman? Because I’ve got citizens to interview, calls to make and—”
“This is official business. The Virtue Falls City Council is in charge of the finances of this city and this adverse publicity that you have garnered by letting John Terrance run around the county unchecked when the Fourth of July, the date of our country’s independence and the largest moneymaking week for Virtue Falls businesses … this is ruinous!”
She was staring, she realized, with her mouth cocked sideways. “You’re not complaining because the citizens of Virtue Falls are in danger, but because the city treasury is in peril?”
“When the town’s profits are disrupted, do you imagine the citizens will be happy?”
She had been up for hours. She’d viewed the scene of a gruesome murder, grieved for a woman she had never met, worried that others would suffer the same fate, dealt with paperwork, listened to police reports, dealt with more paperwork, organized photos, called the victim’s family, comforted Carolyn Abner’s children, persuaded them to authorize the autopsy … and now Kateri faced an indignant, moneygrubbing politician who looked like a bug-eyed snake who had swallowed an egg.
But she had to be fair … “You have heard a woman was discovered early this morning at Lupine Point, murdered by a slasher?”
“What? What? Murder?” Venegra put his hand over his heart as if to still the palpitations.
Kateri thought he’d be better off putting his hands on his aching testicles.
In a booming voice, he asked, “Did you catch the killer?”
“We have no suspects.”
“Is the victim someone local?”
“A tourist.” Kateri’s sarcasm got the better of her. “Is that better for business or worse?”
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