Blood Dahlia - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries) (10 page)

17

As soon as Rosen walked into the field office building, he knew something was wrong. One of the younger agents looked at him just a little too long. Nothing really revealing, but enough that told Rosen something had happened last night and that everyone had already heard about it.

When
he stepped off the elevator on his floor, his suspicions were confirmed. One of the secretaries came up to him and said, “Kyle needs to speak with you, Arnold.”

“
What about?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“Heard what?”

“You really need to get a TV.”

“I will. What is this big secret I’m supposed to know?”

“Somebody dumped a body on the
director’s front porch.”

Rosen stared at her, unable to say anything
for a moment. “Which director?”

“Gillian
, Arnold. She got home and saw a body sitting on her swing bench.”

“Shit,” Rosen said, his eyes drifting to
Kyle’s office.

He tried not to panic. It could be anything. Some nutjob digging up corpses at the cemetery. He’d had that once before, a case in
New Mexico. Two high school students thought it’d be funny to dig up corpses and arrange them in inappropriate poses around the high school.

But somehow, he knew that
was not what it was. His gut told him this was something much, much worse.

He marched to Kyle Vidal’s office. Giovanni was already sitting there. Rosen walked in and shut the door behind him. He sat down across from Kyle and waited for him to speak first.

“You’ve heard?” Kyle said.

“I did.”

“I don’t think I need to tell you what it looks like when a body is dropped off on the porch of the director of Behavioral Science. It makes me, and it makes the Bureau, look bad.”

“Do we know who the victim
is?” Rosen said, avoiding the bait that would just lead to him getting criticized for something he couldn’t have possibly controlled.

Kyle exhaled, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He looked tired, Rosen thought.
Kyle had probably been informed and called into the field in the middle of the night.

“
Not yet. I’ve been getting updates, but you’ll have to get over there yourself.”

Rosen nodded. “We’re on it.”

As he went to leave, Giovanni followed him. Kyle said, “And Arnold?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s missing her face.”

He hesitated at the door. “I’ll handle it.”

“You better. PR is something the Bureau’s really concerned about lately, with all the NSA information leaks. Everybody already dislikes us. They can’t think we’re incompetent, too.”

Rosen nodded and left. He waited until they were down the hall before he asked, “When did you find out?”

“This morning,” Giovanni said. “Someone posted it on my Twitter feed.”

“This isn’t good. I’ve never seen someone so brazen. I mean
, we’ve gotten notes and things before, but nothing like this.”

Rosen pulled out of the parking lot and was silent as he drove to the interstate. Only when he was nearly
there did he realize he didn’t know exactly where he was heading. He’d never been to Gillian Hanks’s house.

“Find
out where it is, would ya?”

“I know where it is. Take the sixty-six
up to Falls Church.”

“How do you know where our boss lives?”

“I was invited for a party once.”

Rosen glanced
over. “What kinda party?”

“I don’t know. Just something welcoming new agents to the field.”

“Oh.”

The interstate was relatively clear
, and Rosen got into the far left lane, weaving between a few cars before settling into the middle lane. The drive was long, and he felt like talking, but Giovanni seemed completely preoccupied by his phone.

“Those things will rot your brain.”

“What will?” Giovanni asked.

“Being on your pho
ne that long. It’s not natural.”

“How do you know?
Maybe this is how our brains were meant to work.”

Rosen glanced out the window. A minivan with several screaming children passed them by, easily going t
hirty miles over the speed limit. “I sometimes wish I could pull people over,” Rosen said.

“You got an attachable siren in here, don’t you?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant it’d be a massive headache to do it. I’d have to come testify in traffic court, and Gillian would be wondering why the hell one of her special agents, that should be chasing murderers, is pulling people over for speeding. Just one of my pet peeves, though. People speeding with children in the car.”

“Whoa.”

“What?”

Giovanni was silent a moment. “Someone on the scene posted a picture of the victim. It’s bad.”

“Who posted it?”

“I don’t know.
Maybe someone walking by. It’s in the comments section of an article about it on the
Post
.”

“Shit.”

Another fifteen minutes and Rosen found the exit near Falls Church. The town was quiet and picturesque. He saw a diner with a sign in front that said, “Smile, Mother Earth is Watching!” The streets were narrow, and the main road cutting through town seemed to go all the way from one end of the valley to the other. Giovanni directed him until they came upon a scene like a circus.

At least four news
vans were already there, lined up just outside the police tape. Several people from the local Sheriff’s Office were there, as were the coroner’s people. Rosen parked away from them, hoping to avoid any reporters, and he and Giovanni got out of the car and hurried up the sidewalk.

They ducked underneath the police tape and showed their badges to someone from their office
who let them through to the house. Luckily, Gillian was out. He hoped she was at the office. Something about her had always unnerved Rosen—the way she would look into people with that icy stare of hers, as though she could tell the instant she was told something that wasn’t one hundred percent truthful. But, as far as Rosen was concerned, she was the best criminal investigator he had ever seen. Better even than Mickey Parsons. Something about the way she thought was so outside of normal bounds that he had a feeling crime scenes didn’t look the same to her as they did to everyone else.

Rosen walked to the porch and saw the body slumped in the swinging bench. The
corpse was still wrapped, but the head was exposed, long strands of blond hair on a faceless skull. He glanced at Giovanni, who was staring at the sight unblinkingly.

“You okay?” Rosen said.

As if snapping out of a trance, he blinked and said, “Fine.”

Rosen walked up to the porch as one of the Bureau’s forensic techs photographed the scene. Another was using red string to determine blood trajectory from a puddle by her feet. Rosen could tell immediately
that the blood had dripped down her leg onto the porch, and there were no blows to the woman to determine trajectory from. But he figured the tech wanted to do every single thing possible.

After a few seconds,
the tech determined the same thing Rosen had and wrapped up the string. He turned to another tech and said, “The blood is dripping down from her leg. She has some injuries we can’t see.”

“Her tongue’s cut out, too,” the other tech said, snapping another photo.

Rosen hadn’t noticed. He slipped some glasses out of his pocket, glancing around to make sure no one saw, and put them on. Leaning close, he could see clearly that the woman’s tongue had been slashed about halfway down. The edges of the cut were clean. He used something sharp.

“
ID?” Rosen said.

“
Not yet,” the tech with the camera replied. “They cut off her fingers, so no prints. We’ll have to do it with the teeth.”

Rosen nodded. He looked around
at the crowds just beyond the police tape. A young deputy from the Sheriff’s Office stood sipping coffee out of a paper cup, and Rosen went over to him. “Deputy, clear these people out, would ya? This is my boss’s home.”

“Sure thing.”

Rosen turned back to the body and leaned against the porch, letting the techs work. They would reconstruct what happened—how the body was laid down, how it was carried, and probably how far. But he didn’t care about that much. What he cared about was why someone would do this. The killer had to have known the entire FBI’s resources would be unleashed to find him. An insult like this couldn’t go unanswered. So he either had to be really crazy or so confident they couldn’t find him that he didn’t care. Either way, it gave Rosen a tight feeling in his gut.

“We’re dusting for prints,” the tech said. “Looks like it’s just some garbage bags spread over her body. That type of plastic holds prints pretty well.”

Rosen watched as two techs peeled off the garbage bags, revealing pale, almost waterlogged, skin underneath. “I don’t think you’re gonna find anything.”

18

Liberty Park was a lush green this time of year. The trees were tall, providing shade to the joggers circling the park. A few people were out with their dogs, and some were throwing a Frisbee around on the massive lawn between the man-made pond and the gazebo.

Sarah King walked casually under the trees. She let the cool morning breeze flow through her hair. The pond water wasn’t the cleanest, but it wasn’t exactly dirty either
, and the way the sunshine shimmered off of it reminded her of the lake near her home when she was growing up. The only body of water she’d seen until she was eighteen years old.

“Where are the ducks?”

She turned to see Giovanni Adami standing behind her, his hands in his pockets.

“How’d you know I was here?” she said.

“Would you believe me if I told you I was psychic?”

She grinned. “No.”

“Then it’s a block from your house, and I decided to drive by and give it a shot.”

He began strolling next to her, watching the way the sunlight reflected off the water. She noticed that his shoes were freshly shined
, and she wondered if he did that every morning.

“I come here to walk and clear my head. It’s usually
empty except for the joggers.”

“It’s nice.
Better than the one close to my apartment.”

“Did you grow up around here?”

“No,” he said with a chuckle. “I grew up on a ranch in Arizona.”

“You’re kidding
.”

He shook his head. “Nope. My dad was a rancher
, and I grew up with the whole bit. Breeding cows, wrangling horses, raising chickens… Of course that’s impossible now. The big corporations have taken over, and the small ranchers are all outta business. It’s scary how little people know about what they’re actually eating. My dad and I always wanted to change that.”

“You sound like you care about
it.”

“I do. It’s my passion.”

She looked at him, trying to imagine him in overalls getting up at four in the morning to wrangle a calf. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t see it. “The FBI isn’t your passion?”

“No. It was just a logical step after the army
and being a beat cop. I joined to get out of my small town, and now all I can picture is going back. The worst thing that ever happened in my town was that my uncle may or may not have urinated off the roof of city hall when they increased our property taxes.”

She chuckled. “Sounds like a charming place
.”

“There
are trade-offs, though. The only thing in town was a Walmart. People on dates would literally go hang out at the Walmart because there wasn’t anyplace else to go.” He was silent a moment. “But compared to the stuff I’ve seen now, that seems like paradise.” He stopped and looked at her. “How’d you know about that boy?”

“I told you. I saw him.”

“He’s following me around?”

“No. I just saw a flash of what happened. It was in my head
; he wasn’t here. But I saw that he was scared and didn’t know where he was.”

“C
an you control when the flashes come?”

She nodded. “Sometimes. I’ve been working on
keeping them out. When Agent Rosen convinced me I should help you, I let them in a little, and it’s been hard keeping everything out again. When I open myself up to it… it’s overwhelming. I feel like there’s another world layered over this one.” She started walking again, and he sauntered alongside her. “I read once about these schizophrenics that would complain of hallucinations, and I thought that’s what they were. I thought I was just crazy. But I think the difference between a crazy person and me is that I’m right most of the time. If I wasn’t, I’d be locked up, too.”

Giovanni watched his feet a moment on
the wooden planks as they crossed a bridge over the pond. “I um…”

Sarah saw a woman in bell-bottoms holding a child
. They were somewhere in an apartment, the sun bright outside the windows. She was singing to it, and as the child fell asleep, the woman planted a kiss on its forehead.

She hesitated and then said, “You want to ask about your mother, don’t you?”

He looked at her as he stopped again and leaned back on the railing of the bridge, as though he couldn’t keep his own bodyweight up anymore. He didn’t speak for a long time, and Sarah got the impression that he couldn’t speak. So she let him gather himself.

“She killed herself when I was ten. For a long time, I thought it was my fault.
I thought I’d done something… Like she didn’t love me enough to stick around.”

“I…”

She stopped as she saw the woman sitting in a chair, the same woman that had been holding the child. Now the woman was taking a handful of pills and washing it down with a bottle of brown liquid. She was in pain. So much pain that she screamed herself hoarse. The pills weren’t putting her to sleep like she thought. They were tearing her up on the inside.

The woman flopped down ont
o the floor, writhing in agony and vomiting, before her eyes darted up, as though catching Sarah peering in on her.

Sarah closed her mind as fast as she could. The
scene sent ice through her veins, and she didn’t want to see any more of it.

“What?” Giovanni said. “What did you see?”

“She killed herself with pills,” she said, looking down at the water. “She went peacefully. No pain,” she lied.

He nodded. “
I knew about the pills. But I’m glad to hear that she wasn’t in pain. You know when you’re a kid you forget that your parents are people too. That they have their own hopes and fears… their own demons. So when something like that happens… I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

“When something like that
happens, they stop being your parents and they become just a person. A fragile, confused person.”

He nodded sadly, staring
out over the water. “Something’s happened. That’s why I came down here.” He shyly looked at her. “Aside from wanting to see you.”

Sarah felt herself blush but couldn’t tell if it showed. “What happened?”

“I’ll show you.”

Sarah kept her eyes forward or out her window as
Giovanni drove them down to Falls Church. She noticed that he preferred to keep one finger on the steering wheel, his hand resting on his lap. His head lay back on the headrest as though he were sleeping. It seemed almost like a forced relaxation.

As she was looking at him, she noticed the scar sticking out from the sleeve on his right arm.

“What happened there?” she said.

He saw where she was looking. “Old knife wound.”

“You were in a knife fight?”

“No, I wish that was it. My stupid brother had a hunting knife and slipped on the porch and fell into me. It went through one side of my forearm and out the other.” He drove a moment in silence. “So how come you can see some things but not others?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in it.”

“I didn’t say I’ve changed my mind. I’m just curious.”

“I don’t have control over it. It doesn’t work that way. It comes when it wants and shows me what it wants. Sometimes I can keep the images and sounds out, and sometimes I can’t.”

He looked
at her and then back at the road. “I don’t think I could handle giving up control like that.”

“Nothing in life is easy. That’s what my dad always used to say.”

Giovanni changed lanes as they approached their exit. “You talk to him much?”

“Not in years. He doesn’t have a phone
, so the only way is for me to drive down there. I think I make them uncomfortable. I’m like a reminder of their failure with me.”

“I doubt it’s as bad as that.”

“You don’t know what the Amish community is like. Technology isn’t just frowned on; it’s evil. In their eyes, I’ve rejected God to go out into a world of sin.”

“You think you could ever go back?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to. I’ve gotten used to the noise of cities drowning everything else out. I don’t want to lose that. But sometimes I just miss the simplicity. Everything’s good or evil there. There’re no gray areas.”

Giovanni took the exit
, and before long, they were pulling up to Gillian Hanks’s house. He parked in the driveway and turned the car off.

“There were news
vans here, but it looks like they’re all gone.”

“Is there a…”
Sarah said, trailing off.

“A body?”

“Yeah.”

Giovanni shook his head as he looked out past some police cruisers. “No, that was
removed hours ago. Right now it’s just forensic people going through the house and searching the neighborhood for anything we can use. They’ll probably be gone in a couple of hours, too.”

She looked
at him. “Why did you bring me here, Giovanni?”

“I just… this is a big deal. That house belongs to my boss.
Everybody’s boss, actually. The director of Behavioral Science. Somebody dumped a corpse on her porch. There’s a lot of pressure, and Agent Rosen doesn’t think there’re gonna be any leads. He thinks this guy is too smart. So I figured, why not bring you up here?”

“What do you want me to do?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just look around and tell me if you see anything, I guess.”

Sarah stared out of the windshield
at the home. The neighborhood was pleasant and quiet. The streets were clean, and under the open blue sky, the sunlight rained through the trees, speckling the sidewalks.

Stepping out of the car, Sarah opened her mind. But only slightly. Just enough to let something in. But nothing came. No impressions, no sounds or images. Nothing but her own thoughts.

Giovanni had come around the car and was waiting for her on the lawn. As she joined him, she focused her mind, and still nothing came. Not a drop of feeling. She began walking toward the house, and he followed. Giovanni hung his badge from a chain on his neck. One of the Sheriff’s Office people eyed them but didn’t stop them.

Sarah stood directly in front of the home, staring up at the empty windows.
The pleasantness of the home had turned to something more sinister now that she knew what had occurred here. The sites of murders were always dark places.

Some places had a light, airy feeling
, like a children’s park or an elementary school. These were places that Sarah could spend a lot of time in. They made her feel pleasant, and a calm euphoria would melt over her.

But some places had the opposite effect. She’d once gone into a cemetery because she’d taken a wrong turn. The place instantly filled her with
grayness so heavy that she couldn’t move. Her legs, arms, even her head seemed to stop responding, and the car went off the paved road and hit a tombstone. It took the paramedics to pull her out of the car and get her away from there.

Though the feeling of light and warmth she had i
nitially felt was gone, replaced by something colder, it still didn’t feel like death. It didn’t feel like much of anything.

“Sorry,” she finally said, after several minutes of standing in silence. “I just don’t see anything.”

“Let’s go up on the porch.”

She followed him up the steps
, and he stopped near some porch furniture. A side table, a swinging bench, and two patio chairs.

“It happened on that bench,” he said. “That’s where Gillian found the body.”

Sarah hesitated a long time, staring at the bench as though it could somehow speak to her. She took a step closer and rested her hand on it, but still nothing came to her. She felt foolish now but didn’t want to show it. So instead she scanned the porch as though looking for something.

Finally, she said, “I’m sorry. There’s nothing here.”

He nodded. “Thanks for coming anyway. Come on, I’ll give you a lift back.”