Carved in Darkness (20 page)

“Possibly.” His eyes shifted away from her face. “But it won’t belong to that girl down there.”

She couldn’t explain why, but she believed him. “Why are you carrying a knife?”

“Because guns make noise.”

His answer solidified everything she’d feared about him. She looked around. They were alone. “Why did you come back?” she said.

“You know why.” Again, he looked at her like she was stupid.

“I told you not to. I told you to leave,” she said, practically mouthing the words.

“I made a promise to Lucy.” Translation: what she wanted meant nothing.

“It’s been fifteen years—”

“For you. For me, it’s been a year and two days. He killed my sister, and Lucy knew it. She got scared, asked me to look after you.”

“And you agreed,” she said. She knew the story she’d been fed, but she didn’t believe a word of it.

“Yes.”

“But not so you could look out for me. You came here to bait a trap.” She forced herself to look at things objectively and couldn’t blame him. What would she be willing to do? Who would she be willing to sacrifice to exact revenge on the person who hurt her family? The answer was anything and anyone.

He nodded. “I hoped I could do both, but … ” he looked away again.

She took a step closer. “But what?”

“I waited too long.” He looked at her again, and she watched the truth darkened his eyes to the color of coal. “I let myself—feel sorry enough for you both to get involved past my own agenda.” He gave the cuffs a rattle. “I regret it now.”

“Where’s Lucy?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. The day you spotted me she left me a bunch of voicemails. Mostly it was just her yelling at me for being such an idiot, but on the second to last one she said … ” He swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “She said,
Michael, who did you tell?
I could hear someone, a man, call out to her in the background, but I didn’t recognize the voice.”

Sabrina’s lungs felt dry, shriveled. “What did the last one say?”

“Nothing. There was someone there, but whoever it was didn’t say anything.” He narrowed his eyes. “I think we both know what happened, Sabrina.”

Yes. She knew better than anyone what happened to Lucy.

“She could be hurt, maybe—”

“I sent Tom to look in on her.” He said the name like she was supposed to know who he was talking about. “By the time he got there, she was gone. The note on the door said she’d gone to Shreveport.”

Hope re-inflated her lungs. “She has a sister there,” she said, but he just shook his head.

“No. Tom checked … Loraine hasn’t heard from her in days.”

“And you trust this Tom guy to tell you the truth? How dumb are you? If he lives in Jessup, he could be—”

“Tom Onewolf.”

It was like he’d spoken to her in a strange language she barely knew. Her brain strained to process the words into something she could understand. “Tommy?” Her hand reached up and latched onto the ring that hung around her neck.

“Yeah.” His eyes traveled down and settled on the hand she kept clutched to her chest. “He goes by Tom these days.” He glanced over her shoulder, totally unconcerned with the pain he’d just inflicted. “Your lackeys are almost done.” He looked back at her.

Guilt over what’d happened to him and how she’d left things began to pile up. She’d run like a coward, left him with no explanation. She pretended it was for the best and maybe it had been, but he deserved better.

She pushed Tommy out of her mind. She couldn’t think of him. Not now.

“It doesn’t mean she’s dead. He’d keep her alive, use her as bait—” she stopped herself. She was grasping at straws and she knew it. The bait lay in the woods behind her. He’d want to punish Lucy for keeping her from him all these years. And he’d want to punish her for hiding. Lucy was dead.

Two birds, one stone.

THIRTY
-
TWO

S
ABRINA WATCHED THE
ME
van pull up to the scene. The sun and shadows thrown by the dense canopy of trees made it impossible to tell who’d caught the case, which coroner had been sent to the scene to collect the body and secure any evidence that might have been left on it. But she had her hopes. When Mandy Black hopped down from the passenger seat, Sabrina’s hopes were realized.
Finally
, something had gone right. She could count on Mandy to do her job. She was the best the coroner’s office had to offer.

She put Michael in the back seat of the patrol car. So far he was behaving himself, but she wasn’t sure how long that was going to last. Studying the knife in her hand, she wondered for the umpteenth time in the last thirty seconds how in the hell she was going to fix this mess. She looked at her watch. Her replacements were undoubtedly on their way, so she didn’t have much time.

The urge to hand the knife and Michael over to Bertowsky and just
leave
was a strong one. So was the one that tried to convince her that going home, packing a bag, and hitting the road was her sanest course of action. Lucy was dead. The man who abducted her not only knew she survived, he knew where she lived. He’d dumped a body in her neighborhood.

Run. It’s what you do best. Run before you get them all killed …

Fourteen years ago, it’s exactly what she would’ve done, but not this time. She wasn’t running.

She was going back to Jessup, and Michael was going with her.

“Hey, I heard it was you, but I thought it was some sort of mistake,” Mandy said, walking toward her. “You transfer over from Central Station?”

“No. I live over here. Found her on my morning run,” she said, surprised at how calm she sounded, given what she was about to do. “Hey, you got a pen I can borrow?” She patted the front of her yoga pants and smiled, “I forgot to bring one.”

Mandy smiled and unclipped a solid-looking retractable ballpoint from the pocket of her jacket. Perfect. “Keep it. I’ve got boxes of ’em. Ready?” She nodded toward the crime scene.

“Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute, I’m just finishing up with a suspect,” she said, taking a few steps back.

“Okay I’m gonna grab my gear and get started, meet you there,” Mandy said before heading for the van. Sabrina watched her for a few seconds, making sure Mandy was preoccupied before returning to the squad car.

He was giving her another thirty minutes. If he was still in cuffs or, even better, arrested for some trumped-up weapons charge designed to hold him until they could run his prints, he was going to pull a Houdini and disappear. Getting his cuffs in front of him would take minimal time and effort. Getting them sprung would take a little longer, but it wasn’t impossible. Patience and opportunity were all he needed. Michael was never really good at waiting, but it was something he had taught himself over time, something he’d needed to survive. And he’d found that if you waited long enough, opportunity always presented itself for the taking.

He shifted his gaze to the windshield just in time to see Sabrina finishing up with a cute blonde he guessed was the coroner. She turned and made her way back to the car, opening the front driver’s-side door. She said nothing, just leaned in across the bench seat to tap a few keys on the onboard computer bolted to the squad car’s dash. Her other hand came to rest on the back of the front seat, flush against the wire mesh that separated them. Her fingers were curled around something long and thin. She seemed to pay him no attention at all, like he wasn’t even there. But he knew better.

At first he took her refusal to look at him as a childish attempt to snub him. He was about to say something snide when a faint clinking sound drew his attention away from her face. He looked down to see a ballpoint pen fall to the floorboard on his side of the mesh. She looked at him for one long second before she straightened herself and shut the door behind her. The implication was clear: she was giving him a way out.

THIRTY
-
THREE

S
ABRINA DUCKED UNDER THE
yellow tape and made her way to where the coroner crouched over the body. From where she was, she could see that Mandy had uncovered the remainder of the body. She had to force herself to cross the distance between them.

“What’s it look like?” she said, crouching next to her. She made herself look.
Just another case. Just another body.

Mandy shook her head. “She’s in full rigor and liver temp puts TOD sometime between two and three a.m. Nails were recently clipped and scrubbed but I found something fairly interesting.” She gestured toward the victim’s hands, encased in plastic evidence bags. Around her left wrist was a red satin ribbon, tied in a bow. Strung through one of the loops was a fancy gift tag shaped like a birthday cake.

She felt her chest constrict around her lungs.
Just another case. Just another body.

“Glove me?” She held her hand out and smiled when Mandy slapped a pair of purple latex gloves into her palm. She snapped them on before pulling out her cell and activating the voice recorder app. “Victim has been found naked, face down in a clearing just south of trail seven in Mount Davidson Park. There are ligature marks on both wrists and ankles, indicating that she’d been bound for an extended period of time. There is a red satin ribbon tied around her left wrist. Attached is a gift tag with a hand-written message that reads
Happy birthday—sorry I missed it.
Abrasions on her heels, coupled with the drag marks found at the scene, indicate she was dragged and dumped.” She looked up at the uniformed officer standing a few feet away.

“Tire tracks?” she said.

Nodding, he pointed up the hill. “Yeah, the car entered from the east and continued on like you said.”

“I want casts,” she said, shoving her cell into her pocket. “and a tech to process the area surrounding those drag marks. Our guy might’ve dropped something.”

The uniform nodded and made his way up the hill while she moved around to the front of the body, kneeling directly behind the victim’s head. She looked at Mandy. “Let’s get her rolled over.”

Mandy spread out a length of large plastic sheeting to roll the body onto in order to preserve any evidence they may have missed. Mandy knelt at the victim’s feet, placing her hands on either calf, well above the ankles, giving her a look. “Ready,” she said.

“
Turn.
” Sabrina concentrated on her own breathing, working to keep it steady. The body rolled, coming to rest face up on the plastic sheet.

All of a sudden there was a swirl of activity around her: gasps, someone muttering “Sweet Jesus,” the click and whoosh of a camera.

Then it was gone. The sounds, the people—sucked into a vacuum they couldn’t escape. She remained crouched, staring down at what had once been a face. It wasn’t a face anymore. It was a nightmare.

One she couldn’t look away from.

Lifting her hand to her face, she realized she held her cell. She reactivated the recorder app. “Victim is female, approximate age between sixteen and nineteen. Multiple stab wounds, concentrated in the genital and breast area, consistent with sexual mutilation. The victim’s eyes have been removed and her mouth has been sewn shut with what appears to be medical suture. The word
run
is carved into her abdomen.”

Just another case. Just another body.

“He’s an enucleator.”

She looked up. “Huh?”

“An enucleator. He removes his victim’s eyes,” Mandy said, indicating the dead girl’s face. Mandy’s eyes narrowed on her face. “You alright?”

Enucleator.
Yes, she knew what that meant. She looked down—the empty sockets glared at her, accusing her for what had been done.

“Fine.” She looked away, concentrated on the stab wounds. “What do you think, Mandy? These look like they might be a match to the knife Bertowsky took off the suspect?”

Mandy leaned in close and examined the wounds. “Let me see it.” A nearby uniform handed the ME the knife; she turned it this way and that, visually measuring its length and width. She looked at the body again, running a light fingertip over one of the many stab wounds. “No. This knife has a double-edge, like the knife that was used, but no serration. Do you see where this skin here looks chewed? This knife wouldn’t have done that kind of damage. It’s like comparing a steak knife to a scalpel.” She handed the knife back to Sabrina. “This isn’t your murder weapon. My guess is you’re looking for a large hunting or tactical knife. Possibly a KA-Bar.” Mandy looked up at her. “Hey, you sure you’re okay?”

She looked up from the body and secured the knife in her waistband. “Yeah, let’s get her bagged.” Together they gripped the thick plastic sheet and hefted the body into the waiting bag. Mandy reached for the zipper to pull the bag closed. She continued to stare into it, at what’d been carved into the girl’s stomach. It was a message for her.