A Righteous Kill (2 page)

“Ramirez,” he barked.

The feminine voice on the line had become the extent of his nightlife lately, which was just a damn shame because she was at least twenty years older, married twice that long, and a grandmother of twins. “Local PD just received a 10-90 from the river bank. Indigent reported it in from Cathedral Park.”

Every now and again, it sucked to be right.

“Figured I’d give you a heads up because that’s your part of town.” Beatrice Garber, the graveyard dispatcher, knew he was close to Cathedral Park because he’d barely waved goodbye to her fifteen minutes before when he’d finally left his office at FBI Headquarters.

“Uh, Bea, I’m at the ass-end of a fourteen hour day. I
have
to get some sleep.” Five years ago, he’d have jumped at the call. Five years ago, he’d still been in his twenties. “Does the dead body for sure fit the M.O.?

Bea paused. “The victim is described as a red-haired female found draped in white vestments and a red robe.”

“
Fuck
!” he exploded, pounding on his steering wheel. “Goddammit!” It was what he’d feared. The reason he’d been pushing himself to the limit these past umpteen months. He’d promised himself John the Baptist wouldn’t evade him long enough to take another victim. “That cock-sucking son of a—”

“Still here,” Bea chirped, her tone half amusement, half censure.

“Responding,” Luca flipped the switch to his lights. “Call Di Petro, CSU, the lab and—”

“Already on it.”

Throwing his phone to the passenger seat, he jammed the gas pedal to the floor and his car leapt forward like a predatory cat, roaring past thinning Friday night traffic.

With thick clouds threatening to dump their contents any moment, the water of the Willamette River couldn’t be seen tonight. Rather, it seemed like a wide ribbon of darkness cutting through the bright lights of Portland. The cityscape downtown would reflect off the water, creating insubstantial renderings of architectural giants of the northwest.

He took the turn onto Pittsburgh Avenue on two tires, cranking the wheel and skidding to a halt next to the only other police unit in the small Cathedral Park lot. Ten more minutes and this place would be lit up with more flashing lights than a downtown rave.

He lunged out of his car. The humid October chill punched into his lungs, making him feel like he inhaled ice cubes. At least it finished the job his adrenaline had started. He was awake and in the moment.

The north side of the riverbank was a swath of inky darkness, despite the traffic lights over St. John’s Bridge and some soft, ambient street lamps illuminating the famous stone stanchions bearing the viaduct over the park.

Glancing at the police car as he passed, he saw that the back window of the vehicle had been kicked out, the safety glass one cracked chunk on the ground reflecting the alternating flashes of red and blue from the lights. Luca cased the vehicle leading with his gun, searching for an injured cop. Finding none, he scanned the empty night with his eyes and weapon.

Had they captured the suspect? Had he escaped?

Danger thrummed through his veins as he vaulted over the concrete barrier and plunged through a thin line of trees to the water’s edge. He jogged toward the beams of two flashlights several yards down the riverbank, keeping his duty weapon at his side.

Two police beams blinded him and he heard the click of gun safeties being released. “Stop right there,” a uniform commanded. “This is a secure scene.” A fat rain drop hit the bridge of Luca’s nose, amping up his urgency to get a look at the body before any evidence was washed away in a storm.

“FBI. Special Agent Ramirez. I’m going to use my left hand to show you my badge,” he warned. He knew better than to make any swift arm movements at a fresh murder scene.

“Let’s see it,” came the clipped reply.

Luca kept advancing, but reached in his jacket pocket and flashed the badge and ID that clearly identified him as a Fed.

The officers lowered their weapons.

“Is the body one of
his
?” Luca didn’t have to say the name.

“Looks like.” The uniforms dropped their beams and refocused them on a still, white bundle wrapped in a swath of crimson. Luca had to blink to clear the blind spots and let his eyes readjust to the darkness.

Upon first glance in the darkness, someone could mistake the limp, dirty bundle as a heap of garbage washed up into the narrow bank, but that was blatantly impossible. Luca looked upriver and made a few instantaneous calculations.

Cathedral Park was situated at a bend in the Willamette that gave the cursory illusion of a scenic suburban park. When, in fact, it was positioned between two of Portland’s largest water industrial complexes. Around the west bend, Swan Island Basin and Northwest Industrial launched dozens of ships and conducted abundant trade. From the eastern edge of the park, almost all the way to where the Willamette merged with the Colombia, lay several square miles of blue collar paradise, including everything from tire disposal and recycling, to transport management.

Luca noted the shadowed juts of ancient pylons lining the entire west side of the river and scanned the locations of driftwood along the banks and their distances from the thin tree line. This body would have had to miraculously steer through the maze of pylons to reach the shore, let alone sit three feet clear of the water’s edge.

Another cold drop hit the crown of Luca’s head. ”Did either of you move the body?” he demanded.

The senior partner narrowed his beady blue eyes and hiked his gun belt higher on his considerable paunch. But the young African-American kid with him just shook his head.

“This is now
my
secure scene. Got it?” He was too exhausted and pissed-off to bother with inter-agency diplomacy, taking charge before Officer
McTubby
thought of some bullshit regulation to gum up his night. He was in no mood to wait for more federal back up. “Get on the radio and tell area patrol to be on the lookout for whoever kicked out your window and escaped from the back of your squad car. Then get an ETA on Coroner and CSU.”

He and the older officer weighed about the same, but at 6’2” Luca had a good five inches on the guy. Also, Luca’s heavy frame was a product of regular weight training and weekend contact sports as opposed to stale doughnuts and a few too many Rueben sandwiches. He’d bet his favorite Sig Sauer the guy was a diabetic. He turned to the kid, dismissing two hundred plus pounds of sputtering temper. “Tell me what we have here.”

His eyes widened, showing brilliantly white against his dark face. “He—he escaped?” Looking grim and humiliated, the young officer did his best to recover. “We were patrolling the park when we got the call from dispatch a couple of minutes ago. A local transient who claimed to have pulled her out of the river called 911.” Luca started walking toward the body, taking latex gloves from his pocket. He waited for the kid to tell him something he didn’t already know. “The homeless guy was in full psychotic meltdown when we got here, I thought O’Reilly had secured him in the squad car.”

O’Reilly. The fat bastard was added to his shit list for not securing the indigent. It was a rookie fuck up that could cost lives.

“Well, he didn’t,” Luca blandly stated the obvious. Despite the distance and the sounds of traffic, the officers should have heard the commotion of the broken window. His face started burning as his blood pressure spiked. “Keep your flashlight on the body,” he ordered, furious with their incompetence.

Luca forced himself to notice the small things first. To separate the victim’s parts from the whole of a human corpse. He started with her hands.

The nails weren’t painted or fake, just shaped and groomed. Not like the others

“Does John the Baptist really drive stakes through their hands while they’re still alive?” The officer used the name the public and media had dubbed the most prolific serial killer the nation had seen in decades.

“Like what nailed Jesus to the cross.” Luca rolled the gloves on and lamented the light sprinkle of rain he could hear plunking into the river. Though it didn’t matter to her anymore, he squelched the need to cover the small and mostly naked woman and protect her from the freezing rain.

Squatting down next to her, he eased the delicate fingers open. Jones gasped and swore. Luca had passed that stage of law-enforcement a long time ago. A hole about an inch or so long and one-fourth as wide punched through the palm. Blood mingled with water and river filth staining her pale flesh.

There was still some elasticity to her skin and he could move her fingers easily, so rigor mortis hadn’t set in.

This was a fresh kill.

Luca squinted as though the night could provide some answers. John the Baptist could be close. Maybe even watching them. He let out an exasperated breath as the sprinkle turned into a drizzle, slicking his thick hair to his skull and making him shiver in his suit coat.

Honestly, the rain wasn’t much of a complication. It was wishful thinking on his part that there would be evidence to wash away. The son of a bitch never left any. Just another pretty red-head with holes in her hands and a stab wound to the side before she was baptized in the river. Usually the body was wrapped tight in white and red vestments like a gruesome burrito, but this one was naked to the waist, the vestments tangled with her lower half and mucked up with river sludge and blood.

Sirens wailed in the distance, some coming from the direction of the University, others racing across the bridge.

O’Reilly trudged up to them, slightly out of breath. “This whore must have been one of the high-class, expensive ones,” he remarked without taking his eyes from the victim’s perfect, pale breasts.

Luca met Jones’s look over the dead woman’s body. He was glad to see his disgust mirrored in the younger man’s eyes. In this job, you met all kinds of cops. They weren’t always the good guys. Sometimes the criminals had a more respectable code of conduct.

Luca gathered his fortitude and looked down. Her eyes were closed. Thank God.

O’Reilly had grabbed his camera from his car and began to snap pictures, as per protocol. The idea of the lousy cop having those photos made Luca ill. Objectively, the fucker had been right. This was one of the better-looking victims. She hadn’t just been pretty, she’d been beautiful. Young, mid-twenties, with a lithe body that was obviously, he noticed the lack of body hair, well-groomed. The expected stab wound still seeped a little from the left side of her toned waist. The blood mixed with rainwater and ran in chaotic pink rivulets to the vestments beneath her.

Her ivory skin was flawless except for a few bruises and ligature marks around her wrists and ankles. She’d been tied up for an indeterminate amount of time, like all the others.

And she’d gone through hell before she died.

Exhaustion was settling into his bones again. Or was it just weariness? Poor kid. Luca didn’t care what life she led before this. She could have been the whore of Babylon for the hell it meant to him. Most of the previous victims had been. Didn’t matter. She was alive before now. A person with needs, wants, aspirations, hope—pain. Maybe she had someone who’d loved and missed her. Maybe not. But
she
mattered. She deserved justice. Whoever she was.

Luca could hear footsteps, the calls of his colleagues. He took a painful breath. “We need to ID her as soon as—”

“
Holy
shit
!” Jones reared back and pointed in astonishment.

The camera shattered where O’Reilly dropped it onto the rocky bank.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Luca barked.

Then he saw it. The corpse shuddered. Once. Twice. Then her chest heaved violently.

“Get me a fucking ambulance and do it
now
!” he yelled.

Jones scrambled to yell into his shoulder radio, the broken camera a forgotten casualty of the moment.

Luca dropped to his knees and started chest compressions before rolling her jerking body to the side. Convulsing violently, she heaved up an alarming amount of dirty water before sucking in a screeching breath, only to cough up more. The shock of the freezing downpour must have somehow roused her, and her body struggled to breathe through the water in her lungs.

“That’s it. That’s good. Keep coughing,” he urged, making sure she was posed so as not to aspirate anything she coughed up.

“Th-that’s not possible,” O’Reilly stuttered. “She was cold. She wasn’t breathing. S-she had no pulse!”

“Where’d you check it?” Luca barked over his shoulder, giving her a few encouraging slaps on the back.

“Her right wrist. I didn’t wanna disturb the body.” O’Reilly’s voice lifted to a shrill whine.

“I’m going to have your badge, you dumb-fuck,” Luca snarled. Checking the right wrist of a victim who wasn’t breathing and bleeding from multiple wounds? Could he have checked a weaker place for a pulse? Anyone who knew anything checked the neck. Could he have even
felt
a weak pulse through his sausage fingers?

Luca wrenched his suit jacket off his shoulders and wrapped her nakedness with it, not just to warm her, but to shield her from the officer’s beady eyes. He was pleased to see that more desperate breaths were being drawn into her shuddering body through the coughs.

She wouldn’t be alive for long if her wounds weren’t seen to. “Where’s that goddamned ambulance?” he shouted.

“On its way,” someone yelled back. “There’s a station not four blocks away, they’ll be here in two minutes.”

He hoped they had two minutes. The news that they were dealing with a live victim spread through the gathering law-enforcement crowd with the speed of a fire in a library. The more people showed up, the more likely someone competent would get him a mother fucking first aid kit.

“Here.” An open black plastic box full of bandages, pills, antiseptic, medical tape, and other first-aid odds and ends was shoved into his hands. He looked up. PPD homicide detective Regan Wroth knelt at the other end of the kit.

Luca liked her. Hell, he’d tried to get into her pants more than once, along with the rest of the Portland law-enforcement community.