Karen Vail 01 - Velocity (2 page)

The woman swayed and groped for the steadying assistance of chair backs as she steered herself sloppily toward, and through, the front door. The painful brightness of a spotlight mounted along the eave blasted her eyes. She waved a hand to shoo away the glare.

THE MAN WATCHED the bar’s battered wood door swing open, revealing a disheveled redhead. The light over the front entrance struck her in the face and she swatted it with a hand to fend it off, as if it was a swarm of flies. In that brief instant, she looked pretty hot. At least at this distance.

Her gait stuttered, stopped, then restarted and stuttered again. Drunk, not oriented to her surroundings.

He could not have ordered up a more perfect dish if he had spent hours searching for the recipe.

A CHILL SWIRLED AROUND the woman’s bare legs. She swung her head around the parking lot, trying to recal where she had left her car.
To the right? Yeah, the
right.
She stumbled off in the direction of a red sedan, concentrating on putting one foot squarely in front of the other.

Ahead, a man was approaching, headed toward the bar. “He’s mean,” she said to him. “Kevin is. He’l take your money, then kick you out.”
That’s what he did to
me. Kicked me out.

As she passed him, something clamped against her mouth—grabbed her from behind—squeezed and—

Can’t breathe.
Gasp
—Scream!—can’t.

Heavy. So—tired. Go to sleep. Sleep.

Sleep
. . .

THE REDHEAD’S MUFFLED SCREAM did nothing but fil her lungs with a dose of anesthesia. Seconds later, she slumped against the man’s body. He moved beside her, then twisted his neck to look over his shoulder, canvassing the parking lot to make sure no one had been watching.

The bar door flew open and a bearded man in jeans and flannel shirt ambled out.

He stopped, put a cigarette and lighter to his mouth, then cupped it. As he puffed hard, the smoke exploding away from his face in a dense cloud, his eyes found the man. “Everything okay?” he asked, squinting into the darkness.

The man covertly crumpled the rag into the palm of his hand, out of sight. “Al good. Little too much juice, is al .”

“I saw,” the witness said in a graveled voice. “Bartender sent her on her way.

Need some help?”

“Nah, I got it. Just glad I found her. Been looking for two hours. But—good boyfriend, that’s what I do, you know? One in the goddamn morning. Unfucking believable. Not sure it’s worth it, if you know what I mean.” He shook his head, turned away, and walked a few more steps, ready to drop and run should the witness persist in his questioning—or pul out a cel phone.

Since no one knew which car was his, if he needed to bolt he had time to circle back later and pick it up. Or he would leave it. It was untraceable to him, that much he’d planned in advance. If it was safer to abandon it, that’s what he would do. He was prepared for that. He was fairly sure he’d thought of everything there was to think of.

The flannel-shirted witness glanced back twice as he walked toward his pickup, then unlocked it and ducked inside. The dome light flickered on, then extinguished as the door slammed shut. His brake lights brightened, and a puff of gray exhaust burst from the tailpipe.

He shifted the woman’s unconscious weight and wrapped her arm around his neck. He walked slowly, waiting for the man’s truck to move out of the lot. Then, with a flick of his free hand, he slid open the minivan door. After another quick look over his shoulder—al was quiet—he tossed her inside like a sack of garbage.

AS HE DROVE AWAY, careful to maintain the speed limit, he swung his head around to look at his quarry. The woman was splayed on the floor directly behind him. He couldn’t see her face, but her torso and legs were visible.

And then she moaned.

“What the fuck? I gave you enough to keep you down for at least twenty minutes.”

Perhaps he had been too conservative in figuring the dosage. He took care not to use too high a concentration, as excessive parts per mil ion could result in death

—and he didn’t want to kil her.

At least not that way. His first time with a woman, it had to be special.

He bit down and squirmed his ass deeper into the seat, then gently nudged the speedometer needle beyond 45. Any Highway Patrol officer would give him some leeway over the limit. It was taking a little risk, but hel , wasn’t this al one giant gamble on timing, luck, planning, and execution?

Real y—how can you kil a person and not incur some degree of risk?

He rather liked it. His heart was thumping, the blood pulsing through his temples

—and a look into the rearview revealed pupils that were wider than he’d ever seen them. What a fucking rush. Al those wasted years. He had much time to recapture.

He checked al his mirrors. No law enforcement, as best he could see in the dark. Fast glance down at the woman. Her legs moved—she was waking.

Heart raced faster. Hands sweaty.

But real y—what could she do to him? Scream? No one would hear her in this deathtrap. Scratch him? Big whoop.

He hit a pothole, then checked on her again—and in the passing flicker of a streetlight, saw a flat metal object poking out of her purse. What the—

He yanked the minivan over to the curb and twisted his body in the seat to get a better look. It was.

A badge.

He fisted a hand and brought it to his mouth. What to do? Is this good or bad?

Wel , both. He felt a swel of excitement in his chest and forced a deep breath to calm himself. Could this be better than sex? Sex . . . why have to choose? This real y could be like his first time with a woman. But not just a woman. Some kind of cop.

He pul ed away from the curb and had to keep his foot from slamming the accelerator to the floor. Slow—don’t blow it now.

A moment later, his headlights hit the street sign ahead. He flicked his signal and slowed. Almost there. He grinned into the darkness. No one could see him, but in this case, it didn’t matter. It would be another one of his little secrets.

HE LEFT THE WOMAN in an abandoned house at the edge of town. He thought about bringing her back to his place, where the other body was laid out in the shed.

But he nixed that idea. One corpse was enough to deal with. It would soon start to smel , and he didn’t want a neighbor cal ing the cops on him. If they found one of their own in his house, they might kil him right there. Forget about a long prison term. He’d be executed. It was an accident, they’d claim. Resisting arrest. They did that kind of stuff, didn’t they? He wasn’t sure, but he couldn’t take the chance.

He needed to get to a coffee shop to sit and think al this through. Now that he was deeply committed, the reality of how far he’d gone began to sink in. And although he thought he had prepared properly, he was concerned he had rushed into it, letting the swel of anticipation cloud his planning. Certainly he hadn’t figured on kil ing a law enforcement officer. But how could he have known?

As he drove the minivan back to where he had parked his car, he wondered if he could use this vehicle again. There was no blood, and he could simply vacuum it out or take it to a car wash for an interior detailing. If they did a good job, there’d be no personal y identifiable substance of the redhead left inside. And then he wouldn’t have to search again for an untraceable minivan. Stil —what if someone had seen it in the Lonely Echo’s parking lot and that guy in the pickup was questioned by police? He could give them a decent description of him. No. Better to dump the vehicle and start from scratch.

But as he pul ed alongside his car and shoved the shift into park, he realized he had made a mistake. No one would find the woman’s body for days, if not longer.

He slammed a palm against the steering wheel. What fun is that?

Can’t go back—that would definitely be too high a risk.

Turn the page, move on.

He thought again of the evening, of what went right, and what he could’ve done better. He didn’t get caught, so, overal , he’d done a pretty damn good job. But something else he had learned this past week was that perfection was rarely there in the beginning. But it would come, eventual y.

He would keep seeking until he found it. The next one he would do differently.

2

S
meared blood enveloped the hands and face of FBI profiler Karen Vail. It wasn’t her blood—it came from a col eague who had just died. But blood did not differ among serial kil er, philanthropist, husband, vagrant, soldier, or prostitute. Young or old. American or foreign. Blood was blood. And when it got on your skin, it al felt the same.

No, that’s not true. Some blood did feel different; the blood coating Vail’s fingers did not have the usual slippery, wet consistency that she had felt many times—too many times—in the past. No, tonight it felt like pain. Guilt and heartache.

But as the van carrying Karen Vail rocked and lurched, she realized the pain and guilt and heartache were not coming from the blood on her skin, but from the injury that festered in her soul. Her best friend and lover, Detective Roberto “Robby”

Hernandez, had vanished. No note, no secretly hidden message. No indication last time they had spoken that anything was wrong.

In fact, just the opposite. They’d had passionate sex only hours earlier.

And now he was missing.

John Wayne Mayfield, the serial kil er who might have had something to do with Robby’s disappearance, was likely deceased, and a police sergeant who could have provided answers was growing cold in the morgue. But this man, Detective Ray Lugo, who had ties to the kil er—ties Vail had yet to explore—did not mean anything to her.

His had just been blood, like anyone else’s.

Now pain and guilt. And heartache.

“TURN THE VAN AROUND!”

Vail shouted at the driver, but he couldn’t hear her. She was locked in the back of a state Department of Corrections transport truck, a thick metal cage surrounding her. Symbolic in some sense of what she felt.

Beside her, Napa County Detective Lieutenant Redmond Brix and Investigator Roxxann Dixon, stunned by the loss of their col eague, had watched Ray Lugo’s body being off-loaded at the morgue. They were now headed back to the Hal of Justice to clean up and retrieve their vehicles. But Vail had other ideas.

“Get us back to the Sheriff’s Department,” she said to Brix.

Shoulders slumped and defeat painted on his face like makeup, Brix rol ed his eyes toward Vail. “Why?”

“We don’t have time to wash. We’ve gotta do something. We have to figure out what happened to Robby. The first forty-eight hours are crucial—”

“Karen,” Dixon said, a hand on her arm, “we need to take a breath. We need to sort ourselves out, figure out what everything means, where we go from here.”

Vail grabbed her head with both hands and leaned her elbows on her knees. “I can’t lose him, Roxx, I can’t—I have to find out what happened. What if Mayfield—”

“You can’t think like that. If Mayfield kil ed Robby, don’t you think he would’ve said something? Wouldn’t a narcissistic kil er do that? Rub it in your face?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. I can’t think.” Vail took a deep breath. Coughed—she’d inhaled smoke from a fire a few days ago and it hadn’t ful y cleared her lungs yet—

and then leaned back. “He kind of did just that, Roxx. When we interviewed him. He was gloating that we hadn’t real y figured things out. We’d caught him, but that wasn’t everything. That’s what he was saying. That he was smarter than us.

Superior to us—” She stopped, then turned to Dixon. “
Superior.
Superior Mobile Bottling.”

“We’ve been down that road,” Brix said. “César Guevara was a dead end.”

Guevara, an executive of a mobile corking, labeling, and bottling one-stop shop for wineries that lacked their own in-house production facilities, had been their serial murder suspect until the task force failed to turn up anything compel ing linking Guevara to the victims. When John Mayfield emerged as the Crush Kil er, Superior Mobile Bottling—and César Guevara—fel off their radar. Vail shook her head.
That was only a few hours ago. So much has happened in such a short
period of time.

“I don’t think anything’s off the table now,” Vail said. “We missed something. I’ve had that feeling al along. Something wasn’t right, I just couldn’t figure it out.” She dropped her head back against the metal cage. Tears streamed from her eyes, streaking down the dried blood on her cheeks.

Dixon put an arm around her and pul ed her close. Vail felt immediate guilt: Dixon had just suffered her own loss—Eddie Agbayani, her estranged boyfriend, someone she loved—had been John Mayfield’s final victim. But at the moment, Vail could not summon the energy, the outward empathy, to grieve for her friend. She had only enough strength to keep herself together, to keep her wits about her before she fel apart and lost it.

“We’l figure this out, Karen,” Brix said. “We may’ve caught Mayfield, but we’re far from solving this case.” He pul ed his phone. “I’m getting everyone back to the Sheriff’s Department. We’l hash this out.”

As Brix sent off his text message, the Department of Corrections van pul ed in front of the sal y port rol -up door in the jail’s parking lot. “Hold it,” Brix said. Vail had used her shirt to keep pressure on Lugo’s neck wound. Brix quickly unbuttoned his uniform top and helped Vail into it.

They got out, then climbed into their cars, frigid air sneaking into the vehicle like an unwanted passenger. Vail was silent for most of the short drive, lost in a fugue of disbelief and depression.