The Kill (5 page)

“Well?”

He sighed, and she knew she’d won him over, at least a bit. “What do you want me to do?”

“Be my boss.”

“Your boss?”

“Call ahead to Seattle and tell them I’m coming.”

“I don’t understand—oh, no.” He stood and started pacing. “No, I won’t let you put your job on the line chasing a theory. You’re not an agent anymore. You gave it up nine years ago to work here. I’m not an agent, either. I can’t just assign you to a case. No.”

“This is important, Greg. I may not be an agent, but I know how to do the job and more important, I know evidence. I know this case better than anyone else.”

She came from behind her desk, rested her hand on Greg’s arm, imploring him with her eyes. “Please, Greg. I’ll be careful. But I have to do anything I can to stop this killer. Please.”

Greg stared at her hand. She’d surprised herself: she didn’t like touching people. It had been a sore point in their marriage. She’d often jumped when Greg reached for her.

She loved him, in many ways. He was smart, very smart. Attractive, with light brown hair peppered with gray and intelligent blue eyes. Physically fit, even though he was nearly ten years her senior. They shared a love of science, a faith in facts. They were workaholics, both relishing problem solving and long days in the office. Their mutual love for science had kept their marriage intact for a time.

But Greg wanted more from her than she could give.

Why had she even married him in the first place? She often wondered. He was safe. He never pried, never questioned her, never challenged her quirky ways.

But she hated giving up her private space. Didn’t like sharing a house with someone. Sex was fine, but she couldn’t give herself over completely to him. Not just her body, but her mind. Her dreams.

Her nightmares.

When he’d said he wanted children, she wanted out. How could she bring another human being into such a violent world? How could she ever hope to protect her child from evil?

She would never take the risk. Never give birth to a beautiful child who could all too easily die a painful, brutal death.

She dropped her hand and turned away. She’d thought she convinced Greg to help, but maybe she really was on her own.

“All right,” he whispered. “Exactly what do you want me to do?”

Her heart rate raced. He
would
help her. “Call the Seattle chief of police and tell them you have someone familiar with the case willing to come out unofficially with information that might help them catch a killer,” she said quickly before he could change his mind. “They might hem and haw, but they’ll take the help—they have PR problems, too. If it ever got out that the FBI offered assistance and they didn’t take it, they’d get blamed for the next murder.”

Greg didn’t hide the surprise on his face. “That’s quite—Machiavellian,” he said.

“I’m willing to do whatever it takes to stop this predator.”

Greg took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Sighing, he put his frames back on and said, “I’ll do it. But don’t make me regret it.”

Zack Travis slammed the phone receiver down on his desk so hard the mouthpiece broke. He stared at the chunk of plastic and blinked. Why did he let Vince Kirby get to him?

He knew why, but didn’t like to think about it.

He looked up and saw a couple of the guys in the bullpen staring at him.

“Kirby,” he said, and several heads bobbed in understanding. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief that he didn’t have to explain further. Yeah, they all hated the reporter who portrayed their department as incompetent and overpaid (now, there was a real joke). But Zack’s reasons were more personal than the newspaper’s animosity toward the Seattle P.D.

Damn Kirby. Just talking to him brought back conflicting memories. Anger and deep sadness. Because every time he talked to Kirby, he thought of his dead sister. Having him reporting this case was going to poke at old wounds, but Zack was determined not to let Kirby get under his skin any more than he already had.

“What’s up?” Boyd asked, jerking Zack from his thoughts.

Zack picked the broken plastic off his crowded blotter and tossed it into the trash. “Kirby’s running with the damn serial killer angle.”

“Oh.” Boyd frowned and looked down at the pen he twirled between his fingers.

“What?”

“Maybe he’s right,” Boyd said.

“Hell, I
know
he’s right, but the last thing we need is every friggin’ mother picketing the station, or a copycat pervert snatching little girls off the street. One twisted killer is enough.”

Two girls, abducted, raped, and stabbed to death. One was nine, the other eleven. Both had blonde hair. Both were playing with friends and wandered only a short distance away. He wished he could picture them alive, playing, laughing. Instead, he could only picture them under the coroner’s knife.

The first, Jenny Benedict, had been in a park with neighborhood friends. She went to get water from the fountain and two girls saw her willingly walk off with “some guy.”

When Zack learned the father was allowed only supervised visitation with his daughter because of a bitter and prolonged custody battle, he wanted the man to be guilty. He tried everything to get him to confess. But in the end, Paul Benedict wasn’t a murderer. He was a father beyond grief, as destroyed by the news of his daughter’s murder as any innocent man would be. More so, perhaps.

I should have been there. Protecting her
. Benedict’s words haunted Zack. Too close to the way Zack felt about his sister Amy.

I should have been there.

But what could he have done? Amy hadn’t been a little kid, and she sure as hell hadn’t wanted anything to do with her brother, the cop.

The second girl, Michelle Davidson, had been riding her bike when she raced ahead of her friends, trying to beat them home. Her bike was found in the yard of her next-door neighbor. Michelle was found dead three days later.

That was early yesterday morning, thirty-six hours ago. Now the press was all over him. They didn’t care that the parents were grieving or that he’d slept no more than four hours a night since the first victim was murdered three weeks ago, or that he spent two hours yesterday afternoon watching the autopsy of someone far too young to die.

“Did you run the killer’s M.O. through the computer?” Zack asked Boyd. The single best thing about the young rookie was his skill with all things electronic, in particular, computers. It would have taken Zack endless hours to plug in the information with his hunt-and-peck-and-erase system, and then he’d probably have to redo it because of mistakes. But Boyd was of the next generation. He was a whiz with the damn thing and took over that end of their work.

Boyd nodded. “I printed out the report. There are several unsolved cases. Seven years ago in Austin, Texas, four blonde girls were abducted in a six-month period. No suspects, no witnesses. The bodies were displayed in the same manner.”

“Fully clothed, underwear missing, hair cut,” Zack mumbled.

“Ten years ago in Nashville four girls were killed who matched the M.O. An eyewitness gave a description, but it didn’t lead anywhere.”

“Do you have it?”

“Nashville is digging it up and said they’d fax it by the end of the day. But there wasn’t enough information for a composite.”

“At least it’s something.” Like hell it was. Zack glanced at his watch. It was already five o’clock here; there’s no way Nashville would be getting them anything tonight. “What about the tattoo?”

Jenny Benedict’s abductor had some sort of tattoo on his upper left arm. The two girls who watched her leave couldn’t tell what it was, but a tattoo was better than nothing.

“The Nashville witness also mentioned a tattoo, but no description of it was in the file. I asked them to check on it.”

“Two cases?”

“You said go back ten years. That’s what I found.”

Zack’s instincts screamed that this guy had left a lot more than eight dead girls in his wake before hitting Seattle. He was too damn slick; he had to have had practice. And since Zack suspected that he’d been at this for a long time, the killer might have left something more of himself at the beginning of his crime spree.

Serial killers worked hard to perfect their murders. They preyed on humans for their own sick pleasure. Though they often looked normal, acted normal—even charming, like Ted Bundy, or attractive, like Paul Bernardo—beneath the surface they felt no remorse, no empathy for their fellow human beings. They were cunning, and constantly striving to commit the perfect crime.

Right now, Zack didn’t have much to work with. The trace evidence they’d collected at the two crime scenes was still being analyzed. Their best bet at this point was carpet fibers collected from the victim’s clothing. Unfortunately, the samples were from two different vehicles, which didn’t make sense to Zack. One was a late-model Ford Expedition, the other a late-model Dodge Ram. Two very popular trucks that could belong to one of thousands of men in Seattle alone. This morning they’d run registration reports for both types of vehicles. Now, they were manually comparing the lists to see if any address had both truck types registered. Zack didn’t expect the results until tomorrow. He’d been frustrated that with all the technology they had, and the ability to run instantaneous registration reports for the two vehicles, running a comparative match was impossible because the “program didn’t work that way,” he was told. What was the point of technology if it couldn’t do what he needed?

This morning, the coroner had sent a DNA sample to the state lab. Even though Doug Cohn had asked the state to rush the analysis, it could still take weeks, maybe months. Once complete, he’d enter the information into the national DNA registry, CODIS, and see if there were any hits. Unfortunately, with tight budgets across the country, law enforcement primarily entered DNA information only in active cases. Ten years ago it wasn’t a common practice, and twenty years ago—forget it. All the cold cases had to be entered manually, and unless there was funding for it, the work was done haphazardly if at all.

But DNA was only good if there was a suspect to go with it. Zack hoped that whatever Doug Cohn preserved from Michelle Davidson’s body would match a known offender in the registry, though he didn’t expect miracles.

Then there were the odd marks on the victims’ forearms. Both Jenny and Michelle had twelve small, almost uniform, punctures made with some sort of extremely narrow, sharp object. It could be a fine-tipped knife, like a scalpel. The marks weren’t made with the same knife that killed them, but the coroner said with certainty that they were intentional.

“Do you think—?” Boyd began before he was interrupted by the bellow of Chief Princeton.

Princeton wasn’t really his name but he strutted around like God’s gift to women, complete with a master’s degree from some Ivy League school. Zack had been tired and drinking at the blue bar down the street with a bunch of the guys late one night. Earlier in the day, the chief had been playing politics with the mayor and they’d been overheard talking about their respective alma maters. Zack didn’t know who had come up with the nickname “Princeton” for Chief Lance Pierson, but it had stuck.

During the two years Chief Princeton had been in charge, Zack learned to respect him. The chief was good at schmoozing with the politicos, something that needed to be done and that Zack detested, and Princeton backed up the boys in blue 110 percent. That went a long way in Zack’s book, even though the chief often acted like his extra year in college and some brainy Latin award made him smarter than his men. They’d developed a good working relationship, and when the chief had learned about his nickname, he laughed it off.

“Detective Travis. My office,” Pierson ordered.

Boyd jumped at the chief’s call. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Down, Boyd,” Pierson said. “Just your FTO.”

Zack told Boyd, “Run over to the lab and see if they have any word on the trucks.” Zack would have preferred to do it himself.

He crossed the bullpen. “What’s up?”

“There’s someone you need to meet,” Pierson said.

“You’re not setting me up for another glad-handing with the mayor.” His chief constantly tried to get Zack to play politics.

“It’s about your homicide case.”

Though Zack had four active homicide cases on his docket, only one commanded his attention now.

“What?” Zack didn’t want to be blindsided.

“Someone who might be able to help.”

Pierson wouldn’t say anything else, and Zack followed him to his office, curious but apprehensive.

Through the glass window Zack saw a slender golden-haired beauty sitting in the chair across from Pierson’s desk, her profile classic and elegant, with perfectly carved features and luscious red lips. He blinked when he realized she was wearing only lip gloss, not lipstick—or if it was lipstick, it was the most natural-looking color he’d ever seen. He’d seen a lot of colors. Hell, he’d kissed a lot of lips.

As the men approached the door, she turned fully to face them, as if she didn’t like having her back to anyone.
Cop
. Zack would know, he never sat with his back to the door, either.

But this little number dressed too well to be a cop, complete with an expensive-looking pale gray suit and blue silk blouse. And were those pearls around her neck? She looked nothing like the hot, flashy bimbos Chief Princeton liked to date. Far too classy. And she looked smart.

Pierson walked in, smiling solemnly at the woman. Zack leaned against the doorjamb, not stepping inside until he knew what was up.

“Agent St. Martin, I’d like you to meet the detective in charge of the case you’re interested in. Detective Zack Travis is, frankly, our best cop here. He’ll certainly be able to help you.”

Zack vaguely heard the compliment. He was irate after hearing the first word.
Agent
.

“What’s this?” he asked through clenched teeth. “You brought in the Feds without talking to me?”

He didn’t have anything personal against the FBI. But every case Zack worked in which the Feds got involved, they caused more problems than their presence was worth. Not to mention they became all proprietary with evidence, kept local cops out of the loop, and generally acted like they were superior.