Should Be Dead (The Valkyrie Smith Mystery Series Book 1) (2 page)

“Thanks, Laura.”

“One more thing, Nate. I’ve got Jane Rysdale, the school superintendent on the phone. She’s worried about one of her teachers. Kelly Brooks was supposed to chaperone a dance this weekend, but she never showed. She was absent from work today. She didn’t call in, and hasn’t been answering her phone. The superintendent asked if we could have someone drive by the house. It’s in Armstrong Woods.”

“Ten-four, Laura. I’m just a few miles outside Stumptown. I’ll swing by.”

Nate pulled off the road and watched the van’s single glowing red taillight disappear into the fog. “You don’t know how lucky you just got, buddy,” he said under his breath. He spun the wheel and guided the cruiser back towards town.

Scattered rays of moonlight were shining down through the trees, illuminating the fog in ghostly patches as Nate approached the Brooks home. He pulled into the drive and parked next to a shiny green Land Rover. The house, a two-story Victorian with steep gables and dormers, looked like something out of a fairy tale. It was white with red and gold gingerbread trim, a stained glass front door, and decorative wrought-iron railings on the porch.

Nate climbed the front stairs and found the door ajar. He rested the palm of his hand on the handle of his Glock as he stepped closer, rapping his knuckle on the doorframe.

“Mrs. Brooks?” he called out. “Is anybody home?”

There was no answer. He pushed the door open, and the putrid smell of decay washed over him. Nate drew his firearm, reaching for the light switch with his left hand. The wall switch was moist and sticky. The fluorescent bulbs flickered slowly to life, at first barely illuminating the room, then gradually warming to a sterile, white light. Nate hesitated at the threshold, glancing back and forth between the blood smears on the semi-gloss yellow walls to the pools of dark liquid oozing across the hardwood floor. He glanced at his left hand and saw blood on his fingers. Nate felt bile rising in his throat, but he forced it back. He squeezed the mic button on his radio:

“Laura, it’s Nate. I need backup at the Brooks place.”

“Ten-four. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know yet. Just get somebody here!”

Nate moved deeper into the house, expecting to find a body lying on the floor near the pool of blood. He stepped around the couch. Strangely, there was no one there. He turned, scanning the doorways. No movement. No sound.

Nate gave the kitchen and guest room a quick look, and found them unoccupied. With his gun still drawn, the deputy climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor. He found the master bedroom empty, the curtains fluttering before an open window. The bed was a mess, the covers pulled back and dangling to the floor, one pillow lying on the floor next to the nightstand. Nate moved on to the next room.

This was a child’s room, filled with toys and decorated with posters of Disney and anime characters. A sliver of moonlight shone down through the dormer windows, illuminating a small figure huddled beneath the blankets. The figure wasn’t moving, and a glistening pool of blood had formed under the bed. Nate couldn’t bring himself to turn on the light. He went back downstairs.

Near the back door, Nate picked up a bloody trail on the floor and he followed it out back, where it vanished among the ferns beneath the redwoods. He turned slowly, pistol raised, scanning the property with his flashlight. Waves of fog wafted through the trees, obscuring his line of sight, offering glimpses of moonlight-drenched forest.

A creaking noise in the limbs up above caught his attention, and Nate craned his neck back. The flashlight beam illuminated two dark shapes hanging upside down from the trunk, fifteen feet in the air. He stepped closer.

The victims weren’t hung, he realized as the light flashed across their naked bodies. They had been
nailed
to the tree trunk, upside down, suspended by their ankles, arms spread wide as if in crucifixion. Their eyes had been cut out, and empty black sockets stared back at him. Each had a gaping wound located on the torso. Nate forced himself to look away. He doubled over and vomited.

As he struggled to regain his composure, Nate saw the tracks of a vehicle leading away from the house, back towards the main road. Judging from the size of the tires and the depth of the tracks, it had been a large vehicle. An SUV, or perhaps a truck…

Not a van,
he thought as a knot twisted up in his gut.
Please God, not a van
. Nate hit the mic button on his radio again.

“Laura?”

“Nate, is that you? Hang in there, help is on the way!”

“Call the coroner. And wake up the sheriff.”

Nate spat the taste of vomit out of his mouth, and for the first time in his fledgling career, wished he hadn’t become a cop.

Chapter 3

Michael and Kelly Brooks had moved far away from the city in search of a quiet, safe place to raise their son. They found a small parcel of land deep in the heart of Sequoia County’s redwoods, just ten miles from the Pacific and three miles outside of Stumptown. It was an enviable piece of wilderness, a serene place; the antithesis of the hustle and bustle of the city life they had sought to escape.

The neighbors were friendly but remote, the community artistic, eclectic, and unashamedly liberal. It was, in their opinion, the perfect place to start a family. The Brooks had found their ideal home. Unfortunately, the killer had been looking for exactly the same thing.

Michael Brooks had been twenty-eight, his wife Kelly twenty-seven. Their son Blake had just turned five. The child had been murdered first, quietly in his room, while he slept.

Thank God for that,
thought Sheriff Diekmann, standing on the front porch, gazing absently at the collection of vehicles assembled out front. At least the boy hadn’t suffered like his parents.

Bill Diekmann was dressed in his typical apparel: blue jeans, old boots, and a worn out baseball cap with the letters
CAT
emblazoned in yellow across the front. He wore a star on his shirt, a revolver on his hip, and that was as close to a uniform as he ever got, except at ceremonies and funerals.

The lights were flashing on one of the cruisers, the eerie strobes of color dancing across the scene like fireworks bursting in the low-lying fog. A dozen people stood around the drive, talking in lowered voices, waiting for the coroner to let them into the house. Riley White, the owner and editor of
The Redwood Herald,
appeared next to the sheriff. His short black hair was parted perfectly down the middle and slicked almost straight back. He looked like a throwback to the fifties, Diekmann thought. The
eighteen-fifties.
Riley was only twenty-eight, but dressed like he was seventy.

“Does this sound about right?” Riley said, holding up his Android tablet. “The killer tortured the young couple, violently raping Mrs. Brooks numerous times before finally ending her life. He had spent hours savoring his crime, relishing Michael’s horror as he watched on helplessly. The couple had long since realized that no one would hear their screams. No one would come to their aid-”

“That’s a bit sensationalist, isn’t it Riley?”

“Just the truth, that’s all.”

“You’re not really going to report all of this, are you?”

 “Are you asking me not to?”

Diekmann took off his baseball cap and scratched the back of his head. “Let’s hang onto the details for now, shall we? Whatever information we hold back might help us convict the killer. Besides, your readers don’t really want to know about all that happened here. The truth would just frighten them. They’re already going to be worried enough.”

“All right. I’ll print names and ages for now, maybe a few minor details. I’ll leave the rest up to the imagination.”

“What about the
Democrat?”
Diekmann said. He was referring to The Press Democrat,
the only real competition Riley had. The difference between the Herald
and the Democrat
was that the Democrat
was a top-notch operation, with a huge building in south Santa Rosa and at least fifty full-time employees.

Their recent takeover by The New York Times meant that financially, the Democrat
was a juggernaut, especially compared to Riley’s little independent operation. They also had a state of the art website, updated religiously every hour, mostly by people who lived three time zones away. By way of contrast, Riley’s website was a Wordpress blog that he tried to update once or twice a week, when he found the time. Riley
had an assistant editor named Jacquelyn and two part-time interns. All three were taking classes at the university, hoping to get
real
news jobs after graduation. Distribution for his paper was mostly through local coffee shops.

“I can’t speak for the
Democrat
,” Riley said. “If they don’t get somebody here soon, they won’t have a story anyway.”

A swirling mass of fog blew through the clearing, reducing visibility to just a few feet. The police lights pulsed with an alternating blue and red glow, and a strange silence fell over the scene. A shiver went through the tree branches and a gust of wind drove the fog back into the woods. Diekmann’s eyes widened as he realized that a woman had appeared in the clearing in front of the house.

She was tall and thin, dressed in black and leaning ever so slightly on a long hardwood cane. Despite her disability, the woman projected a sort of quiet confidence, with her shoulders thrown back and her chin held high. Jet-black bangs fell down over her eyes, and she fixed the sheriff with a dark gaze that seemed to reach inside him, right into his very soul.

It seemed strange that no one had noticed the headlights of her sleek black sedan moving through the redwoods, or had heard the low rumble of its powerful engine approaching the scene. No one had even realized she was there, until she appeared in their midst. All eyes were on the woman as she strode forward, straight for the sheriff. The gravel driveway crunched under the soles of her shoes, the cane swinging forward in straight, fluid motions and then gliding back behind her with every other step.

She favored her right leg, Diekmann realized. Perhaps she had suffered a broken hip at some point.

“Special Agent Valkyrie Smith,” the woman said, flashing her identification as she approached the porch. Diekmann tugged the brim of his cap as he looked her up and down.

“Who called the feds?” he said.

“No idea, sheriff. It’s possible that the description of your crime scene may have triggered an alert.”

“What kind of alert?”

“I’d prefer not to get into it right now,” she said. “Not until I’ve seen everything with my own eyes. Do you mind if I take a look around?”

 “Help yourself,” Diekmann said. “But watch your step in there, it’s
unpleasant.”

“Thanks, sheriff.”

Diekmann stood aside as Valkyrie climbed the steps. She crossed the porch and entered the house without a backwards glance. As she disappeared inside, Diekmann turned back to see the entire crowd gawking.

“Get back to work,” he grumbled.

Chapter 4

Val stepped across the threshold and took it all in. Henry Halverson, the balding, middle-aged coroner was talking quietly into a voice recorder. His assistant -a thin, wide-eyed man with wild brown hair- snapped photographs of the blood on the floor. Neither paid any attention to Valkyrie as she entered the room and stood there, leaning on her cane.

Val’s gaze flitted from the spray patterns on the walls and ceiling to the bloodied instruments of torture lying casually discarded about the room. It was almost as if the killer had had no concern about hiding the evidence, she thought. Or wiping away his prints… must have been wearing gloves. Her gaze fell on the cryptic message scrawled in blood above the mantle. Val approached the fireplace and stood there, head tilted to the side; face intense as she studied the strange symbols.

Apparently satisfied by what she had learned, she circled the room and then strode out the back door without a single word. A few minutes later, Sheriff Diekmann entered the house. He threw a glance around the room and looked at Henry, who had knelt down to study the blood on the sofa.

“Where is she?”

Henry glanced up at him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a bloody gloved finger. “Who?”

“The fed. She was just in here.”

“I think she stepped out back, Sheriff,” the assistant volunteered. “Must’ve gone outside to check the bodies.” The assistant looked a little green around the gills. Diekmann didn’t blame him.

“You look like I feel,” he said.

Diekmann followed Val, half-expecting to find her doubled over, puking her guts out in the back yard. Instead, he found himself alone in the quiet mist-filled clearing. The bodies were still hanging there, just a few yards from the back door, waiting for Henry’s final okay to remove them. Judging by the amount of evidence lying around, it still might be a few hours.

Valkyrie Smith was nowhere.

Diekmann circled around the cottage and found the emergency personnel still milling around the parking area. Riley was conversing with the attractive young redheaded reporter from the Democrat, who had just arrived
.
Diekmann instantly knew that Riley’s cooperation wasn’t out of journalistic integrity, or anything so high-minded. Riley was gearing up his courage to ask her out. Not that he ever would. The guy was too shy, too unassertive. Diekmann had been expecting Riley to come out of his shell for years. From the looks of things, it might never happen. Riley was about to turn thirty, and as far as Diekmann could tell, had never had a real date. Diekmann had a strong suspicion the journalist was a virgin.

“Riley,” Diekmann said, waving him over. Riley excused himself and hurried over to the sheriff. Diekmann took the reporter by the shoulder. “Did the fed leave?”

Riley glanced around the clearing. “I didn’t notice anything.”