The Watcher (16 page)

“I won’t know definitely until I get her back to the morgue, but my guess is ten, twelve hours at the outside. Rigor has fully set in, but not abated yet, and there’s no significant decomposition. The killer wanted us to think she died of strangulation, but see these marks? And the cut throat?”

Wilson pointed with a gloved finger to the depression marks beneath the severed tissue. “Had these marks been made
before
death, they would be more prominent, more bluish-black because the heart was still beating. There would be more blood from the neck wound. She has the same kind of trauma to the torso and extremities as the Johnston girl, but she didn’t die from either strangulation or the cut throat.”

“The prick tried to cover up the similarities to the first case,” Slater muttered.

Wilson turned the girl’s face toward them and pointed to her neck and shoulder. “Ah, what have we here?”

“Jesus, what are those?” Slater asked.

“Bite marks,” Kate replied, touching the side of her neck, almost feeling the feral rip of teeth into flesh. “He bit her.”

“Not only that,” the M.E. continued, “but he tore off pieces of her flesh. He literally chewed her skin. See these teeth marks?”

“Can we get trace?” Slater asked.

“I’m afraid there’ll be no DNA,” Wilson continued. “Notice the smell?”

“What smell?” Slater asked.

Kate knelt beside the body and placed her face to one of the bite wounds, inhaling deeply. “Bleach. He doused the wounds with chlorine.”

“Yes. A crafty fellow, our killer,” Wilson confirmed, clucking his tongue.

“It’s the same guy, isn’t it?” Slater asked.

Wilson nodded. “He tried to cover the real cause of death by strangling her postmortem, then slitting her throat. My guess is she died from one of the stab wounds. From the little I can see there is similar evidence of battering and genital mutilation, postmortem. I’ll know more during autopsy.”

“Did you check for a mark inside the thigh?” Slater asked.

“What your colleague called the loopy eight?” The medical examiner lifted the girl’s right leg and touched a gloved finger to the infinity sign cut into her thigh. The mark was fresh, and blood clotted around its edges.

Slater nodded. “Looks like the one on Jennifer Johnston’s body.”

Even if it wasn’t a clear match, Kate knew the two deaths were connected. She gazed long at the girl’s body, and then she turned to Slater with a hard stare.

“It’s him.” She turned away and inhaled deeply, wanting to purge the smell of death. She glanced back at him. “The cannibalization says he’s losing control.”

Chapter Seventeen

Back in her cubicle Kate examined the field report and crime scene photos while Slater and Bauer contacted the parents of the dead girl to verify identification. A bystander at the scene claimed he knew her, a high school student named Alison Mathews.

Kate shifted in her seat, feeling like a thousand nails pounded inside her skull. Four aspirin later, she felt no relief, gave up, and simply stared at the pictures lying on her desk. Noises from the bullpen hummed around her while the sharp, colored pictures of the killer’s recent victim gradually blurred to an old grainy crime scene photo.

A girl in a yellow dress, though in the photo only white and black and shades of gray showed. The dress splotched with dark areas where the blood had coagulated and dried a deep rusty brown. The once radiant face and the long hair, the color of wheat fields and daffodils, turned to straw and matted with frozen debris. The pieces of flesh torn from her arms and legs, the sly faces of the rats.

Kate shuddered involuntarily.

The father’s gaunt face, his shrunken body and hunched shoulders. The mother’s wails, the inconsolable moaning night after night as the girl listened through the wall, shoving her knuckles into her mouth so that her own sobs would not grieve her parents more.

The dreaded darkness and the awful nightmares.

Abruptly Kate grabbed the stack of reports and files from her desk, shoved them into her briefcase, and left the office. She wasn’t accomplishing anything here.

Driving straight to her apartment, she tackled mundane chores, lined the kitchen shelves with paper and tried to distract herself. Stupid because she wasn’t going to be here long enough for shelf paper to matter. She gazed at the paltry furnishings and nearly bare refrigerator.

What a sad, empty place, she thought. When had her life become so consumed with chasing a killer that it wasn’t really a life at all?

Much later she lit candles in the bathroom. Stripping off her clothes, she ran a steamy bath and slid in, soaking until her fingers and toes were rubbery. She banished thoughts of the dead girls by fantasizing about Slater, a totem against the demons in her mind.

His thick hair crept over the collar of his shirt, his trousers never lost their crease, and his jacket fitted elegantly across his broad shoulders. Like a businessman, she thought, not like a cop at all. His large, broad hands had fingers long and tapered as a musician’s. She allowed herself to imagine those hands cupping her face, moving down her shoulders, smoothing over her breasts.

She smiled dreamily and ran soap over her cooling body. Tiny flames burned in the pit of her stomach. Damn it, she admitted, she wanted Slater.

Unplugging the drain, she wrapped herself in a terrycloth robe and took a bottle of water into the den to study the reports. It was nearly eight o’clock when the doorbell rang. She was tempted to ignore it, but the banging and shouting started a minute later.

“Come on, Myers. I know you’re in there. Open the door.”

Slater.

She peered through the security peephole and eased open the door, keeping the chain in place. “I was resting, Slater. What do you want?” She was pleased that her voice sounded cool.

“Pizza. You have to eat. Open the door,” he repeated, an engaging smile on his face.

“I’ve already eaten and I’m really tired. I’ll see you in the morning.” She started to close the door, but Slater wedged his foot in the opening.

“No way. This is an extra large and it’ll be cold by the time I get home. Let me in. I’ll eat and run.” He lowered his voice. “I promise.”

When she hesitated, he indicated the six-pack of beer in his other hand. “I’ve got refreshments, too. Come on, Myers. Don’t be a party pooper.”

“I didn’t realize there was anything to celebrate.”

“Poor choice of words. I’m just saying I don’t want to be alone right now and you shouldn’t either.”

“A lot you know about what I want,” Kate grumbled, but she slowly slid the chain off the hook and opened the door, leaving Slater to enter on his own.

He found his way handily around the kitchen, getting plates, forks, and napkins from the cabinet and drawers, and placing them on the glass-topped coffee table in front of the sofa. By the time Kate returned from her bedroom, wearing sweat shirt and pants, he’d demolished several slices of pizza.

She eyed the half-empty pizza box. “You must be starved.”

“Skipped lunch. Wasn’t in the mood.”

She took a slice from the box and chewed idly at one corner. “This is good.”

“Dino’s Pizzaria. Best damn pizza in Placer Hills.”

“Better than the one I worked at when I was a teenager,” she offered. “It was my first job and I came home every night smelling like beer, but – ”

“ – it was really the smell of cheese,” Slater finished. “We had the same experience.”

She offered a small smile. She’d never admit it, but she was glad he’d stopped by. Today had been stressful, seeing another body and knowing she’d been right. Part of her didn’t want to be right, and she was glad not to be alone with her dark thoughts and memories.

“I had to work to help my mom with expenses,” she continued with a tiny shrug. “It wasn’t so bad.”

“What about your father?”

“He wasn’t – wasn’t around by the time I graduated from high school.”

“What happened?”

She lifted one shoulder and frowned down at her pizza. “It’s not very interesting.”

“
Everything
about you is interesting, Myers.”

She remembered her bathtub fantasy and flushed.

“You live in southern Cal all your life?” Slater asked.

“My father’s company transferred him to Idaho when I was six. My parents liked it there because they’d grown up in a small town and thought it would be a safe place to raise my sister and me. We moved to Los Angeles later.”

“The four of you, huh?”

She leveled a look at him that was meant to stop his prying, but he persisted anyway. “Why’d you leave Idaho if your family liked it so much?”

“It didn’t seem so great after a while.”

He studied her a long moment, poised to ask more questions, and she decided to change the subject. “What about you, Slater? You have any skeletons in your closet?”

“A few. Doesn’t everybody?

“You tell me.”

“Born and raised in sunny California, the Bay Area. Went to high school in San Francisco, college at Berkeley. I’m a pretty boring guy.”

“Somehow I doubt that.” She paused before taking a drink of her soda. Something about Slater made her want to tell him things – secrets, maybe. The magnetic draw she’d felt when they’d looked at each other across the table at Rusty’s pulled at her now.

“Actually,” she continued, “my dad left us when I was seventeen. After that, Mom and I moved to California.”

“Just you and your mother?”

She nodded slowly.

“What about your sister? Did she go with your father?”

“No, he left on his own. One morning I woke up and he was gone. No note, no explanation, no goodbye.”

“That must have been rough.”

She felt the familiar sense of panic. “Yes.”

“What happened to your sister?”

She rose and walked around to the back of the sofa. Suddenly her hands had difficulty remaining still and her feet needed to move. She ended up at the front window, fiddling with the drape. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

Slater came up behind her. “Are you okay?”

“It’s just the job, finding that girl’s body today, knowing I was right about the killer.”

He paused a moment as if weighing his words. “Seems like it’s more than that.”

“Well it isn’t,” she snapped as she whirled around.

He stood so close to her she could feel his warm breath on her forehead. His eyes were burning shards of darkness in a worried face. It would be so easy to like him, she thought, to count on his strength.

She steeled herself, wondering why she hadn’t just lied to him, knowing she was picking a fight. “I’m fine. You didn’t need to come running over here to check up on me.”

“I wasn’t checking up on you,” he contradicted. “I was concerned.”

“You don’t need to be. I can take care of myself.”

He placed his hands gently on her shoulders. “Kate, I know it’s none of my business, but you’re going to have to come to terms with this sooner or later.”

“With what?”

“Whatever’s eating away at you.”

She forced herself to step back and let prickliness take over. She’d fall apart if she tried to lean on a man like Slater. She never wallowed in self-pity and now, more than ever, she needed to keep it together. She was so close to the end.

She squared her shoulders and strode toward the front door, tilted her chin. “You’re right, Slater. It isn’t any of your business.” The expression on his face changed from concern to annoyance. “You weren’t needed here tonight.”

“You’re right, absolutely right. You’re a big girl. You don’t need my help. Hell, you don’t need anybody’s help because Kate Myers has all the answers.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re real good at figuring out other people’s problems. Real quick to understand the freaky minds of the psychos you profile, but you don’t know a damn thing about regular people. And I don’t think you understand very much about yourself either.”

Kate clenched her jaw so tightly she thought she’d break a tooth. She wouldn’t cry, she told herself. “That’s quite a speech,” she said coolly.

He scraped a palm over his jaw. “You’re not the only one who had a bad day today. I had to call two parents on vacation to tell them their only daughter was butchered. I think we’ve all had a tough time.”

She stood still as a statue. “You should leave now.”

“Sure,” he said after a long moment, throwing a disgusted look at the remaining pizza. “You can finish it. I’m getting a little sick.”

The slamming of the door rang in her ears long after he stormed out into the wet night.

The echo of Slater’s steps receded. Kate stiffened her spine, knowing if she let her guard down even once, she’d fall apart. She was sick to death of being tough, exhausted from the years of searching. She wanted to give up, but she couldn’t, and she couldn’t count on a man like Slater to pick up the shattered pieces of her life, either.