BLUE MERCY (33 page)

“He wants to see them die.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

“What?” Finn asked behind her.

“He watches them bleed. Only, he wants
them
to see it too. He wants to witness their fear as they’re dying. That’s part of the thrill for him.”

The pump of DeSousa’s spray bottle continued while the gleaming red button on the video camera pierced the blackness. More spray. More fluoresced blood. This time a partial footprint in blood. Then another. Bare feet across the tile floor from the tub to the toilet, then the sink. Had he been naked?

“Get close-ups of those,” Kay said. “Maybe we can get a patent print.”

DeSousa had come full circle in the small room. The luminescence was dying now as the chemical compound of the luminol ate up the proteins in the blood.

“That’s it.” DeSousa’s voice was muffled by his mask. “We’ve hit everything.”

Kay felt shaky, wanted to blame the chemicals, but knew it was much more than that. She groped for the door. “I need some air.”

“Go on,” DeSousa said. “We’ll finish up.”

She was vaguely aware of Finn following her as she left the damp room, crossed the foyer, and pushed her way out the front door. The night’s heat felt cool compared to the thick air of the bathroom. She filled her lungs, steadied herself at the porch’s railing, and surveyed the crush of response vehicles. Farther down Keystone, the media had arrived with their satellite trucks. She spotted Jane Gallagher from WBAL under a huge, black umbrella.

Kay turned her back to the circus. In the flashing blue strobe of the radio cars, Finn’s face was unusually pale. And he looked older. Clearly he’d been as affected by the visuals in the bathroom as she had. This wasn’t the kind of stuff a murder cop in Baltimore saw daily.

Finn patted his jacket for cigarettes, reconsidered briefly, then withdrew the pack anyway. Tapping one of the Marlboros out, he offered it to her. “You probably could use one too,” he said.

She could almost taste the sweet, rolled tobacco. She looked at the cigarette, wanted it, then pictured Eales: his moist lips pinching the unfiltered end of her stale Camels.

“No, thanks,” she said.

Leaning against the porch railing, Finn lit up. He took in several long drags and scanned the sea of crime-scene vehicles and personnel. But his gaze seemed unfocused.

“How the hell do you do it?” he asked eventually.

“Do what?”

“What you did back in there? It’s like you can see this asshole work or something.”

“I just look at all the pieces. Let the evidence tell me.”

“Naw, there’s more to it than that, Kay. I look at evidence every day and I can’t do what you just did in there. You’re inside this guy’s fucking head.”

“I guess you just gotta think outside your own box, your own set of perceptions of the world and the way it should
work. Letting go of who you are and how you view things. You have to see it through their eyes, think like them.”

Finn gestured with his cigarette to the front door. “But this guy? How can you think like
him?
He’s a fucking nutcase. Probably hears voices in his head.”

“I doubt that.”

“After what you saw in there?”

“The guy’s not psychotic. If he was, he couldn’t have pulled it off. He’s smart, Finn. Organized. His pattern is based on his needs, and he’s following it with passion. But he’s also cool enough to mastermind what he did tonight, killing that kid.”

“So, where do we go from here?” Finn asked.

“I don’t know.” She was too exhausted to think. “What I
do
know is that we’ve got all the evidence we need to build a case against this guy. It’s all in there.” She nodded at the open door of 311. “We’re fucking buried in evidence. We’ve got this guy’s prints, we’ve got possible DNA. Once the lab gets through with this house, we’ve probably got Hagen
and
Beggs in there too. And we can’t do shit with any of it until we get someone to match it all to.”

Finn finished his cigarette, then squashed it out against the porch rail and pocketed the butt.

“Come on. I want to tear this house apart. There’s gotta be something.”

They worked long into the night, side by side with the Mobile Crime Lab, going over every corner of 311, but found nothing to point them in any direction. Gunderson
had made an appearance, then left sometime after midnight. Kay and Finn didn’t head out until the last technician had packed up, leaving the house under surveillance. Even then, Finn had sensed Kay’s reluctance to leave.

At Headquarters, they’d typed the twenty-four-hour reports and Kay had sifted through the disappointing results from the search on Bates’s house. It was almost 3 a.m. before Finn steered them up Hamburg Street and parked outside Kay’s.

Inside, the apartment felt good—a sanctuary from everything they’d seen tonight. Kay looked wrecked, and Finn could sense the weight of the kid’s murder still on her as she handed him a soda from the fridge. He watched her grab for a beer, then opt for a soda as well. They sat on the couch, drinking in silence. Being home seemed to relax Kay, take the edge off, and Finn hoped she would be able to let go of the case for even a few hours.

He should have known better.

“Patricia Hagen knew him,” she said. “Ten forty-five at night, she’s not going to some stranger’s house. Somehow she knew him. And she had to have trusted him to some degree.”

“We’ve gone through Hagen’s employee list and there’s nothing there. No one connects to Eales except for Bates.”

“What the fuck are we missing?” Kay’s grip on the soda can threatened to crush the thin aluminum. “I feel like we’re spinning our wheels, Finn. I mean, where the fuck
are
we with all this? What are we doing?”

“We’re doing the legwork, Kay. We’re getting the evidence that’s going to guarantee the son of a bitch gets a needle in his arm.”

“Yeah, well, we gotta get him first, don’t we?” She settled her head back on the top of the couch and stared at the ceiling.

Finn knew she didn’t care about evidence. Not after tonight. Now, more than ever, Kay wanted the man who’d slipped through her fingers. The man who’d killed Jason Beckman and three women, maybe more. The man who may have shot Spencer. The man who was probably laughing at her right now.

Tonight, the hunt had become far more personal for Kay.

And it was becoming personal for Finn too. All he had to do was imagine Kay in the alley behind 311, standing with the man who’d so coldly slaughtered the kid tonight for no other reason than sport, and Finn wanted him in his own hands.

“It’s Eales.” He heard the exhaustion in Kay’s voice. “He’s the common denominator.”

“Then let’s get some answers from him. I want to talk to him myself this time,” Finn said, finally voicing what he’d been thinking all night.

Kay closed her eyes. He thought she nodded.

There was only the rattle of the AC unit in one of the tall windows overlooking Hamburg Street and the Hill. Spencer’s cat stalked into the room, regarded them briefly, then took to an empty sill to watch the street below.

Finn’s thoughts went back to the bathroom in 311. The big tub. The fluoresced blood.

“I just can’t let go of the cuts to the girls’ chests,” Kay said eventually. “Even the premortem ones, they’re not about subduing his victims. He’s using the ketamine for that.”

“Subduing them for what though? Sex?”

“I think it’s more about power.”

“Well, what if it’s both, Kay? What if part of it
is
sex. I know there hasn’t been any evidence of penetration, but what about masturbation? What if …” He didn’t like the images that flashed in his brain then.

“What if what, Finn?”

“What if he … let’s say he gets into the tub with them. The wounds were inflicted before
and
after the women were dead. So what if he’s jacking off on them, Kay? In the tub? Before he bleeds them? Then again after they’re dead?”

“Okay. Go on.”

“And maybe he’s a breast man. Maybe he’s jacking off on their breasts, and while he’s doing that, he’s got the knife … I don’t know, maybe he’s holding it against his dick.”

“Jesus, Finn.”

“Look, after Jonesy told us about the knife, I checked the internet. Searched single-edged lock-backs. Some of these knives are pretty narrow-handled. Even Jonesy said it’s probably the kind that’d fit in the palm of your hand.

“I may be completely off base, but I think, maybe, the blade’s making contact when he’s actually coming. That’s why there are sets of marks in one direction, and others at slightly different angles. He’s doing it more than once, using the knife. Different sessions. This guy, Kay, maybe this guy’s in love with his blade.”

When Kay stared at him then, Finn imagined her thoughts were back at 311.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said suddenly, as though needing to wash away the images Finn’s theory had provoked. “You hungry?”

“Yeah, you got anything?”

“No. But you could go get something. Bring it back.”

He left her to shower and drove to the Sip-and-Bite on Boston Street, serving up the only twenty-four-hour gyros. He ate half of his on the way back to Federal Hill and tried to let go of the mental images from tonight, as well as the ones his own brain had created.

What he’d seen at 311 had spooked him. Years of working drug murders had a way of dulling you to the violence. Drug shootings started to make sense after a
while: a kid getting killed over a $20 pack of rock or for crossing onto someone else’s corner became commonplace. But this …the man who’d slashed the kid’s throat was a butcher, a psycho with a warped agenda. It went beyond the usual framework.

The water was still running when he dropped the takeout containers onto the kitchen counter.

“Kay?” He called several times, but got no response.

In the open doorway of the bathroom, the steam washed over him. Through it he could just make out her figure behind the textured glass of the shower door. She stood, leaning against the front of the stall.

“Kay? You all right?”

She didn’t move, even as he crossed the room.

“Hey. You okay?” This time Finn slid the door open an inch. With her head bowed under the pounding water, she looked lost. When she turned to him, her eyes were swollen from crying.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She reached for him then, saying nothing. Her hand was hot against his arm, her skin red from the scalding water. She drew him closer.

The water flowed off her, drowning their kiss and drizzling to the floor. One wet hand pressed against his cheek, while the other moved to his belt, fumbling with the buckle.

“Damn it, Kay,” he mumbled against their kiss, and tried to push her away.

“What?” She didn’t let him go.

“I worry about you.”

“I know.”

“I want to be there for you.”

“You are, Finn. I promise.” And in her kiss, Finn believed it at last.

Later he didn’t remember undressing, only the hot needles of water stinging his back and the heat of her skin against his. Even as he kissed her, he could feel a shift in Kay’s need. A sense that this, tonight, was more than they’d ever shared. It was more than sex for the sake of feeling alive, for escape and for blocking out the job as they had in their past.

They made love in the shower. An intense but gentle union. And later in Kay’s bed, as they made love again, Finn felt a softness return to her. A vulnerability. A giving of herself at last. She looked at him when they came together, and afterward she cried.

Only much later did Kay speak, jarring him from the first stages of sleep. “I had him, Finn,” she whispered. “I had him.”

“I know.”

“I keep trying to see his face. To remember anything about him.”

He kissed her breast, then found her lips in the dark. But she didn’t return his kiss this time.

“I had him,” she murmured again. “Do you know what that feels like?”

“We’ll get him, Kay.”

“If he kills again … it’ll be on me.”

“No.”

Traffic noises from the Key Highway filtered through the open window. A salt-tinged breeze, smelling of yeast from the H&S bakery, billowed the curtains. He listened to Kay’s heart, knowing she would find no peace in his words.

“He killed Spence,” she whispered into the darkness. “It wasn’t Eales. It was him. And I had him.”

“You’ll have him again,” he told her. And the day she did, Finn hoped he was there to stop her from murdering the bastard.

THE VACANCY SIGN
for the motel on Pulaski flickered red into the early-morning hours. The place was a dive. That’s why Roach had chosen it. He knew the lard-ass at the desk would barely look at him when he asked for the room, wouldn’t notice his hands shaking as he pushed the cash through the slot.

The encounter with the trooper on the JFX had left him agitated. He’d tried to talk his way out of the speeding ticket, but the wide-necked ape might as well have been deaf. Roach tossed the ticket on the nightstand now.

The room stank. He’d thrown open one of the unscreened windows and let the night’s heat and exhaust fumes from the parking lot waft in. With the vomit-green bedspread thrown to one side, he sat on the sagging mattress and studied the spider that shared his room. Her web spanned the far corner, and for the past ten minutes she’d set about repairing the damage left by a moth an hour ago. Now she hung, idle, her work done. Waiting for the next. Patient. Confident more would come before she’d return to feed on the silken sack.

He liked the company. Felt a kinship with her, as though their lives paralleled. Certainly more than the roaches of his youth. He remembered the ones he’d kept as a kid. The big-ass tropical ones that filled the palm of his hand with their cool bellies, their barbed feet tickling his skin as they climbed his bare arms.