Kill Me Once (3 page)

Doug Freeman read Dana’s thoughts. ‘Drug problem,’ he said. ‘Apparently the mother left last night and didn’t come home until a couple hours ago.’

Dana shook her head. The killer had probably been watching the little girl for weeks to know that the mother would be gone all night. No doubt it was a common occurrence with the woman. But when she’d left last night she’d let the fox slip right into the henhouse unimpeded and that had cost her daughter her life.

Dana forced back the anger she felt rising in her chest and continued to examine the body. The undersides of the little girl’s arms and legs looked bruised, a purplish colour where the blood – no longer circulated by a beating heart – had settled into dense pools beneath her soft skin.
Lividity
, they called it.

Dana glanced down at her watch again and estimated the time of death at eight a.m. before jotting it down in her notebook. Extensive documentation was a focal point of the US Department of Justice’s
Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for Law Enforcement
– the research report that had come out in 2000 under the then Attorney General Janet Reno. Even though each federal agency had its own idiosyncrasies, as a general rule they all tried to follow the guide when it came to matters of evidence identification and protection. For her part, Dana considered it nothing less than her personal bible.

The manual was a step-by-step explanation of how to process crime scenes, and Dana had memorised it early on in her career. Some people kept diaries as a way of chronicling their lives. Not her. If anybody ever wanted to see a record of
her
existence, all they had to do was take a look at the cardboard box in the back of her closet – the one filled with a hundred notebooks similar to the one she was holding right now.

Shootings. Stabbings. Strangulations. They were all in there; all filled with questions pertinent to each case, some of them answered, too many not.

Where exactly had the bullet entered the skull? In the front or back? Which ribs did the knife separate before piercing the wildly beating heart? Had the killer used a cord to choke the life out of his helpless victim, or had he simply used his bare hands to get the job done?

The notebooks were what defined who Dana was now. Not much of a life, she knew, but at least she was still alive, which was a hell of a lot more than she could say for poor Jacinda Holloway.

The little girl’s naked corpse had been posed, frozen in death in the middle of some perverse jumping jack: arms lifted in a
V
over her head; thighs forced three feet apart below her mutilated torso. A broken-off broom handle jutted from between her legs.

Dana gritted her teeth and slid her stare over the length of the defiled body. Viscous fluid leaked down from the little girl’s split-open belly to the tiny hairless triangle between her toothpick-thin brown thighs. Her brown eyes were fixed and staring straight ahead, slightly rolled up into the back of her head as if she was trying desperately to look at her own eyebrows. The look of surprise etched on her small brown face would remain there for ever.

There had been a time in Dana’s life when a horrific sight like this would have wrenched her perceptions adrift and caused the entire room all around her to melt rapidly away into some sort of surrealistic Dali painting. But those days were most decidedly in the past: she was a consummate professional now – right down to the point where it had robbed her of the ability to express even the most basic human emotions. Anger wasn’t an option for her. Not any more. Neither was grief. Emotions only got in the way.

If you never cried, your vision never got blurred, right?

She stretched her neck and looked sideways at Freeman. ‘You done yet?’

The photographer got the message at once.
Pound sand
. ‘Yes, ma’am. She’s all yours.’

Dana gave him a small smile that never quite reached her pale blue eyes – not that he could see it through the mask, anyway. ‘Thanks, Doug.’

The room was buzzing with harried crime-scene technicians bumping shoulders in their haste to catalogue every last carpet fibre in the place, but a quick once-over told Dana everything she needed to know. Ritual child killing. Posed body. Grotesque sexual molestation.

The maniac who’d already murdered four little girls around Cleveland had struck again.

She slid her tongue across her teeth in disgust. They’d been after the Cleveland Slasher for three months now but hadn’t come up with even a solid
clue
yet, which was highly unusual in serial-killer cases. Normally these guys were so focused on taking care of the raging hard-ons poking out of the front of their pants that they left more than enough evidence behind to point out their identities. But that wasn’t the case here. Not with this guy. He was different. Something other than the overwhelming compulsion to control weaker people through sex was driving him to kill.

But what was it?

Dana shook her head to clear the thought away and forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. Sighing, she quickly ran through the facts they knew: five dead bodies in ninety days. All five little girls under the age of ten. All five raped with a broom handle and split right down the middle like autopsy patients. As far as evidence went, the cleanest crime scenes she’d ever come across.

But maybe even this guy – as good as the bastard undeniably was – was starting to get just the tiniest bit sloppy now. In his apparent rush to leave the apartment he’d left the murder weapon behind this time – a wickedly serrated hunting knife coated in dark dried blood that now lay on the uneven floor right next to the lifeless little body that he’d so viciously hacked to ribbons.

Transfixed by the sight of the weapon, Dana was immediately stung by just how
insignificant
it looked. No more than six inches long with a cheap plastic handle. Something you could easily pick up at Wal-Mart for the grand total of fifteen bucks.

How could something so
mundane
do so much irreversible damage?

She turned to a passing crime-scene tech and pointed to the knife. ‘Has that been photographed yet?’

The woman nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Good. Could you bag it up for me now? I’d like for you personally to take it over to the lab for analysis.’

The woman bristled, looking slightly irritated at the assignment.

Dana lifted her eyebrows. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

The woman blushed. ‘No, ma’am.’

‘Great. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate all your help.’

As the female tech bagged the knife Dana quickly scanned the rest of the room. Five feet away from the eviscerated corpse a silver-framed photograph sat on a chipped mahogany end table next to a plastic-covered couch. Yesterday Jacinda Holloway had been an especially beautiful little girl. A tiny little thing with a toothless grin. No more than three-five or six, sixty pounds soaking wet. Big glossy brown eyes and a round angelic face accented by tight intricate hair braids and an array of colourful plastic barrettes that sprouted from her head like cornstalks.

Today was a different story.

‘You OK, Special Agent Whitestone?’

Irritated by the interruption, Dana swivelled her head to the left and watched a Cleveland cop lean over with a pair of long metal tongs to pluck a bloody white surgical glove off the floor. Sergeant Gary Templeton straightened back up and held the glove in front of his eyes for a closer look. ‘Sick bastard coated the inside with moisturising lotion again,’ he reported grimly.

In his early forties, Templeton, a decorated fifteen-year veteran of the force, had been at each of the four previous murder scenes, finally requesting FBI assistance after the third one. Normally it was the smaller departments that asked for help from the feds – lab personnel and facilities were just too expensive for them to afford – but Cleveland PD was large enough to maintain those resources for itself. What they needed here was
investigative
help, so Dana had been assigned to the case, effectively taking control.

Following 9/11 the FBI’s role had changed dramatically. They routinely worked more closely with local law enforcement now, partnering up even when there were no direct federal implications. One thing was for sure: they’d come a hell of a long way since the 1960s, when J. Edgar Hoover’s guerrilla tactics had the Kennedy administration shaking in its boots. These days the feds and locals were at each other’s disposal practically upon request, with little of the boundary-protecting or rancour that had defined their relationship in the past. There were still pockets of resentment on both sides, of course, especially when the FBI barged into local investigations uninvited, but that wasn’t the case here: when Templeton had noticed the similarities at the Holloway apartment to the previous murder scenes it had been he who’d called Dana away from the crowded bar.

Dana looked him over again. Close-cropped silver hair framed a rugged face punctuated by piercing blue eyes. Hard muscles like croquet balls strained against navy-blue shirtsleeves. The first time she’d laid eyes on him three months earlier she’d instantly pegged Templeton as a pumped-up Richard Gere with a gun, spliced with a healthy dose of Clint Eastwood for good measure. An excellent cop and definitely not the kind who spooked easily. So when she’d heard his voice on the other end of the line when he’d called her to the scene earlier in the night she’d immediately known that the Cleveland Slasher had struck again.

The moisturising lotion the killer was using was an old trick. It had been the same thing at each of the four previous murder scenes. He always left one glove behind, always coated it with lotion to absorb the oil on his finger pads and prevent them from lifting prints. Normally fingers moved around inside gloves sufficiently enough to smear prints and make classification almost impossible, but this guy was obviously being very, very careful. Still, how was he managing to avoid leaving some type of print when he pulled the gloves
on?
A second pair of gloves? Tape, maybe? Dana didn’t know, but his little measures had worked like a charm. So far they hadn’t been able to lift even a smudged
partial
.

Templeton dropped the bloody glove into a large plastic evidence envelope and pressed the self-sealing flap into place. ‘No doubt it’s the same guy, right?’

Dana shook her head. ‘None.’

‘Other than that, what are your initial impressions?’

Before she could answer him, the flashbulbs started popping in the room. Dana turned toward the commotion and saw Doug Freeman standing in the middle of a pack of photographers, all of them huddled around a rickety prefab TV stand shoved against the south wall.

‘What the hell’s going on over there?’ she asked sharply.

Freeman lowered his expensive camera in the middle of the fray and let it dangle from the leather strap around his neck. ‘You’d better come over here, ma’am. I think we just found something.’

Dana’s knees cracked as she rose to her feet and smoothed the black Malandrino skirt into place around her slender legs. The pack of photographers parted for her like the Red Sea on Moses’ command as Doug Freeman lifted a shaking hand and pointed to a colour photograph wedged underneath the front of the VCR. Dana took a small pair of rubber-tipped tweezers from her purse and removed them from their plastic casing before plucking the photograph out. Her breath caught in her throat as she examined the find.

A huge palm in the centre of the frame dominated the majority of the photograph. Bony fingers were bent slightly forward, like those of an evil magician getting ready to hurl a ball of fire at his enemies. The fingernails on the hand were sharp and overly long, the centre of the palm coloured in with a crudely drawn pentagram.

Dana turned to Freeman and frowned. ‘What
is
this?’

The photographer shook his head. ‘No idea, but whatever the hell it is, it’s definitely been cropped and blown up. Probably with Photoshop.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘It’s way too pixilated to be the whole frame,’ Freeman said, studying the picture. ‘It’s gotta be a close-up of a larger photograph. I’m almost sure of it.’

‘Do you have enough documentation yet?’ Dana asked – photographs were always prime evidence in trial cases.

‘Yeah.’

She nodded and slipped the photo into a manila evidence envelope before tagging it. ‘Get the hospital on the phone and find out if it belongs to the family.’

‘Right away, ma’am.’

As Freeman moved away, Dana tucked a loose strand of short blonde hair behind her right ear and savoured the sudden tingling sensation in her stomach. The dizzying rush of adrenalin she got from investigating murderers hadn’t subsided in the thirteen years she’d been on the job and she doubted it ever would. Something about the psychology of a killer fascinated the hell out of her. It was like passing the twisted wreckage of a twenty-car pile-up on the highway. You knew you shouldn’t look, but who could resist?

Freeman flipped his cellphone off a moment later. ‘Photograph doesn’t belong to the Holloways,’ he said. ‘The nurses got the mother to stop crying long enough to confirm that much.’

Dana chewed on her lower lip, unconsciously fingering the small gold crucifix hanging from a delicate braided chain around her neck. ‘You said the picture was Photoshopped, right?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Is there any way of finding out what the larger photograph is?’

Freeman shook his head. ‘There’s no database for that kind of thing, ma’am. It isn’t like plugging a search term into Google.’

‘So there’s
no
way of finding out?’

‘Not unless somebody recognises it.’

‘I don’t suppose
you
recognise it,’ Dana asked hopefully.

Freeman shook his head again, this time in an apology. ‘No, ma’am. I sure as hell don’t.’

Dana thanked him and moved away before finding Templeton and pulling him aside. The first four autopsies had been little more than quick visual checks since the cause of death had been rather obvious – not to mention that the Cuyahoga County coroner was a doddering old fool who hadn’t quite warmed up to the notion of being told what to do by the feds yet – but Dana wanted to make sure they dug deeper on this one. ‘Let’s get a full workup this time, OK, Gary?’ she said. ‘I don’t care what that asshole Johnson says. Go to a different ME if you have to. Just get it done.’