“I’ll be back first thing in the morning,” I said. “We’ll talk about this then.”
She rolled her eyes at me but didn’t answer. It wasn’t until I was almost all the way out of the house that I heard her speak up at all, somewhere behind me.
“It is first thing in the morning,” she said.
CHAPTER
30
I WASN’T THE FIRST ONE ON THE SCENE THIS TIME. BESIDES THE CRUISERS parked at the picnic area just off Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park, there were several unmarked cars in the lot when I got there.
The action was across the grass, at the edge of the woods, where Rock Creek itself runs through the park’s seventeen hundred acres. We’d have kliegs up soon, but for now everyone was working with flashlights and headlamps.
I found Sergeant Huizenga leaning against the edge of a picnic table, signing off on something for a uniformed officer and talking on the phone at the same time.
“Yes, sir, I know. Yes, yes, we’re all over it. We will.”
I figured it was either the chief or the mayor himself on the line. Not too many people get a willing “sir” out of Marti Huizenga. She’s a good cop, but her temper gets in her way sometimes.
“We’re screwed, Alex,” she said, just as she hung up. “We could solve this tonight, and we’re still screwed. I’ve got the mayor’s command center so far up my ass, I can’t even breathe. How did they even know about this yet?”
It was a rhetorical question more than anything. Not all mayoral administrations are created equally, and this one had a strong tendency to step in sooner rather than later. The fact that we were now getting a substantial boost in resources from the city only exacerbated the situation. Increased resources meant increased oversight, accountability, and yes, sometimes meddling. Just one of the reasons I tend to avoid upward mobility at the police department as much as I can. I like working the cases, not the politics, where I can help it.
I followed Huizenga into the woods and down to the creek bed where the body had been left.
Errico Valente was already there, along with Tom D’Auria. Valente was the lead investigator on the Darcy Vickers case, and D’Auria is MPD’s Homicide Division captain. It didn’t look like anyone was sitting this one out.
At their feet was a nude victim, facedown along the edge of the water. She’d been there long enough for postmortem lividity to set in, with a line of bright red coloration along the lower parts of the body, where her blood had settled by gravity since the time of death.
If the previous case was any indication, she would have also lost quite a bit of blood in the attack, but a quick scan of the ground around her didn’t show any signs of it. No loose hair, either, even though she’d obviously been sheared nearly down to the scalp. That told me she’d been brought here from somewhere else.
“Do we have an ID?” I asked.
Valente shook his head. “Jane Doe, so far. Stab wounds are in the chest, abdomen, and upper thigh.”
“Just like Darcy Vickers,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
Psychologically speaking, we were looking at a whole new kind of perpetrator now. This was my worst nightmare—someone who seemed to be getting a taste for his craft. The first murder had gone sufficiently well, which meant there was no motivation to stop. Just the opposite. The resting period between Darcy Vickers and this young woman had been statistically very short. If he wasn’t already thinking about what he wanted to do next, he would be soon.
Also, it seemed pretty clear now that our killer had a type. The nudity was a departure from the Vickers case, but the physical similarity between the two victims was striking. This girl looked like she could have been Ms. Vickers’s daughter, with her pale white skin, remnants of blond hair, and well-proportioned, athletic body.
I thought about the old man we’d seen on the security video from the parking garage where Vickers was found. Could someone like him have gotten her all the way out here? Maybe. Was that what happened?
The girl’s back and legs were streaked with mud. By all appearances, she’d been brought to the top of the bank, rolled down, and left behind. But there was something about the way her right arm was cocked over her head that I didn’t quite buy.
“Does that positioning look natural to you?” I asked the others.
“Why?” Huizenga said. “What are you thinking?”
I came around to get a better look, and shined my light down. The girl’s hand on that side was closed in a loose fist, except for the index finger, which was extended. Or pointing, maybe, straight downstream.
“How wide’s our perimeter so far?” I asked.
“Just what you see,” Valente said. There were a handful of crime-scene techs scanning the banks around us, but it didn’t look like any of them had gotten more than thirty feet from the body so far.
“What are you thinking, Alex?” Huizenga asked me.
“I’m not sure.” Maybe I was thinking too much. Maybe not. “I’m just curious. Walk with me?”
Huizenga and I left Valente and D’Auria with the girl and started picking our way downstream.
It didn’t take long, either. After a hundred feet or so, we came around a shallow bend and my light landed on something straight ahead.
It was another body, I realized all at once. It sent a fresh wave of dread straight through me. What the hell were we up against here?
“Oh . . . God,” Huizenga said, and then shouted over her shoulder. “Let’s get some backup over here! Now!”
I ran over to check vitals, but even before I knelt down I could see there was no chance. It was a young man this time. White. Fully clothed. He’d taken a single gunshot to the face, and there were several fresh stab wounds, all around the groin.
Another Cory Smithe.
He’d been left at the water’s edge, like our Jane Doe, with one arm extended out over his head. His hand on that side was clenched into a loose fist, and his index finger was pointed back upstream, the way we’d just come.
CHAPTER
31
BEFORE ANYONE REACHED US, HUIZENGA SWUNG AROUND AND SHINED HER light up into the woods on the opposite bank.
“What is it?” I said.
“Shh!”
She put a hand on my arm and pointed. That’s when I heard it. Someone was moving through the woods, breaking twigs and going at a good clip over dead leaves and soft ground.
Huizenga started up that way a beat before I did.
“Whoever you are, this is the police. Stop right there! Don’t make me chase you!”
I’ve got legs almost twice as long as hers, and by the time I was up the bank and past the tree line, I’d already left her behind. My Glock was out in one hand, my Maglite in the other. Maybe this was just some homeless person we were chasing, or a curious kid, but if not—I wanted this guy, bad.
About twenty yards in, I stopped and listened. Whoever it was, they’d been heading toward the Sixteenth Street side of the park, but now he—she? he?—had turned and was running parallel to the creek instead.
Meanwhile, I could hear Huizenga on the radio, somewhere behind me.
“—any available units to Sixteenth Street, north of Sherrill Drive. We’ve got an unsub, on foot, possibly headed out of Rock Creek Park—”
I took off at a sprint again, catching a few low branches in the face as I went. The adrenaline was driving me as much as anything right now.
Again, the footfalls ahead of me changed direction—but this time I caught him with the beam of my light. It was a man, anyway, in dark clothes. That’s all I saw. He’d just disappeared up and over a small rise, straight ahead.
I was right behind him, and a few seconds later I spilled out onto the pavement of Sherrill Drive. The road curved here, in a hairpin turn on its way out of the park. There was no sign of the guy, though. Had he kept going, back into the woods? Turned and run up the road?
If I’d had another half second, I would have realized why
I didn’t hear him running anymore. But the next thing I felt was something hard, slamming into the back of my head. My knees buckled, and what little vision I had in the dark blurred out completely. Pain shot down my neck and back as I hit the pavement.
I tried to jump right up, but it was no good. Everything spun. The ground turned sideways, and I was down again.
“Alex?”
I heard Huizenga now, moving through the woods behind me.
“Sixteenth Street!” I shouted back. “Keep going!”
I wasn’t even sure about that, but a guess was better than nothing at this point. All I could do was kneel there waiting for some sense of equilibrium to come back while the seconds ticked away—when seconds mattered.
By the time I finally caught up to Huizenga, our guy was gone, gone, gone.
CHAPTER
32
I MISSED A GOOD HALF HOUR WITH THE PARAMEDICS BEFORE HUIZENGA would let me get back to work. There was no concussion, just a gash and a bad headache. Even then she wanted me to go home, but she didn’t insist.
By the time I was back in the loop, Chief Perkins was on-site, along with Jessica Jacobs as well. Jacobs was the primary investigator on the Cory Smithe murder. By all indications, we either had one very busy psychopath on our hands, or more likely, two cases that had more to do with each other than we’d previously imagined.
Neither of the latest victims had been identified yet, but it had already been decided that MPD was going to hold a major press conference later that morning, to report out on the situation.
“Are we sure that’s a good idea?” I said. “I know I’m coming late to the conversation, but—”
“You also weren’t on the receiving end of the mayor’s calls,” Huizenga told me. “It’s done, Alex. This is our reality now. Let’s move on. Tell us what you’re thinking here.”
For better or worse, I’m the go-to profiler in the Homicide Division, not that there’s any official title to that effect. Either way, I’d already started working up a few new ideas.
“Assuming we’re talking about two killers,” I said, “I’d say they’re both white, like their victims, just going by statistics. Also bright, and well organized—but angry, too. Not necessarily about the same thing.”
It wasn’t such a stretch that murder and anger would go hand in hand, but that was the quality that struck me the most about all four of these homicides. None of them were simple or straightforward, in terms of methods. The knife work in particular had gone above and beyond the necessary, in terms of strictly taking lives.
That meant there was some emotion to it. Maybe some level of fantasy playing out here as well. And almost certainly some kind of high-functioning psychosis, which is the slipperiest aspect of all when it comes to pinning down any perpetrator.
Much less two of them.
I gave the others my spiel, and then shut up and listened again while D’Auria divvied the work to be done in the coming hours. If nothing else, we had a pretty good investigative machine up and running.
Valente was going to work IDs on both victims. Jacobs would run the 6 a.m. briefing at headquarters. Chief Perkins was going to be with the mayor’s people for the next few hours, and then D’Auria would be the face of the department for our press conference, while the rest of us stood behind him in a show of force. Sometimes, it is about appearances, and Washington was going to need some reassurance that MPD was on this.
Huizenga and I were both going to start pulling teams together, to go back through every report and witness account, and reinterview every first responder on all four of these murders. We’d also need to start from scratch on our victims’ profiles. Maybe there was some connection, some cross-reference we’d missed. There had to be.
Something was attaching these cases to each other. We just had to figure out what it was.
CHAPTER
33
JUST AFTER THE SUN CAME UP, I STOLE AN HOUR I DIDN’T HAVE AND SWUNG back by the house before Ava left for school. Jannie and Ali were already gone when I got there, but Bree had told Ava she’d write her a note for being late. We had to talk.
There were plenty of reasons to be concerned. The smiling, happy Ava from Kinkead’s the other night had turned out to be a momentary bit of sunshine. Most of the time these days she was sullen, withdrawn, and almost impossible for me to get through to. What I’d just seen the night before only added another layer.
“I wasn’t high,” she insisted, almost as soon as we sat her down in the living room. “I wasn’t! Serious.”
“You were pretty out of it, Ava,” I said.
“Whatcha want me to say? Swear to God, okay?”
I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. I wanted to, desperately, if only to establish some kind of mutual trust. But Ava was also an easy liar, and that wasn’t a pattern I wanted to reinforce. I wanted her to use those smarts of hers for something more than a quick lie and squirming out of trouble.
“Why were you still dressed, in the middle of the night? Did you sneak out?” Nana asked.
For the first time, some of the fire went out of Ava’s eyes. She jutted out her jaw and looked at the floor, answering and not answering at the same time.
“We can’t have that, Ava,” Bree told her. “Not even a little.”
“I know,” Ava said. “But I wasn’t on anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Either way,” Nana said, “things are going to change around here. No more running out to the store, or whatever it is you’re doing with your friends around Seward Square. No more dawdling on the way home from school like you’ve been doing. And absolutely no leaving the house by yourself at night. Don’t test me on that, Miss Ava.”
“Whatever,” she said, and started up. “Can I go now?”
“No, you can’t go,” Bree told her. “Sit down.”
Ava sat back again and folded her long arms over her chest. She was two years younger than Damon but just as tall and lanky.
“Ava, do you understand where all this is coming from?” Bree said. “We love you. We don’t want anything bad to happen to you. If it did, that would be like something bad happening to us. Does that make any sense?”
Ava tossed off another shrug, but I could see her getting smaller, the longer this went on. She was breathing through her nose, and if I wasn’t mistaken, trying not to cry.
So far, I’d been holding back. The truth was, Ava responded better to Nana and Bree than she did to me. But I didn’t want to stay silent anymore. I pulled the hassock around and sat down right in front of her. She was going to hear me.
“Do you want to be part of this family?” I asked her.
“Huh?”
“I’m not saying you have a choice about where you live right now. You’re kind of stuck with us for the time being,” I went on. “But what I am saying is that there’s a family in this house, if you want one. Do you?”
Nana, Bree, and I had all agreed that we’d wait until the end of the school year to think seriously about adoption, either way. The foster system was still overseeing Ava’s case, and maybe I shouldn’t have said anything yet. But then again, I was the one who’d been dragging his feet.
Ava seemed to fold in on herself a little more, pulling her arms tight around her own thin frame. When I saw the first tear start down her cheek, I didn’t think about it. I just wrapped her up in a hug and held on tight.
At first, she stiffened up. But then, all at once, she broke. It was like she’d turned into a rag doll in my arms, and she started sobbing like I’d never heard her before. Nana reached over and put a hand on Ava’s back. Bree did the same from the other side, and none of us said anything for a long time.
In fact, Ava was the first one to speak.
“I miss my mom,” she said against my chest. That was all she got out before she started crying, even harder, as if just saying it was its own kind of pain.
“Of course you do,” I said, rocking her gently. “I would, too.”<
br />
It was heartbreaking. Nobody had ever shown Ava what it meant to really be there for her. She’d had a nonexistent father, and a mother whose drug addiction was stronger than their own relationship had been. But she was also the only mother Ava had ever known. I would have been more concerned if she didn’t miss her.
We still had a lot of talking to do, and a lot of issues to address together—eventually. For the moment, though, it seemed like what Ava needed more than anything was to cry.
Maybe it was even a step in the right direction.
CHAPTER
34
OUR PRESS CONFERENCE WAS SCHEDULED TO START AT TEN THAT MORNING. For something as big as this, we use the largest all-purpose space at headquarters, which also happens to be the lineup room. The only difference was that we were the ones lining up this time.
Everything was hopping when I got there. We had at least eighty reporters in chairs, and maybe twenty news cameras across the back wall. Channels Four, Five, Seven, and Nine were all going live, I was pretty sure. The nationals were probably here to test the waters, and see what might be worth putting on the teleprompter for Diane Sawyer or Brian Williams that night.
At the front, on a small, low stage, the podium was already covered with a sloppy bouquet of microphones. A heavy blue curtain had been drawn across the one-way glass.
It looked like D’Auria was getting ready to start, so I went and took my place behind him with the other primaries—Huizenga, Jacobs, Valente, and Chief Perkins. It was a deliberate image for the cameras, to be sure. Washington was going to need to know—and see—that MPD was on top of these murders.
At ten o’clock exactly, our public information officer, Joyce Catalone, closed the secure door to the hall and nodded at D’Auria to go ahead. He stepped up to the mikes and started right in.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m Commander Tom D’Auria with the Metropolitan Police Department. I’ve got a prepared statement regarding the events of the last twelve hours, and then we’ll have some time for questions.”