Dead Center (The Rookie Club Book 1) (6 page)

"This won't take long," she told him.

"Then I leave."

It wasn't a question, so she didn't answer it.

Marchek touched nothing. Instead, he used a foot to kick the chair out then turned to sit. Held his hands in his lap. He hadn't touched anything. He was a neat freak and the tendency not to touch anything could be part of that. But she also thought he was wary of leaving prints. Criminals tended to create wonderfully elaborate conspiracy theories about how police entrapped them. Even the guilty ones.

"It's amazing what science has done for forensics," Washington said. "Tests can show that two pieces of duct tape came from the same plant and how close in time. We can actually prove that two samples came from the same roll even if they're not successive pieces."

She watched Marchek. A corner of his mouth turned up. A smile. She paused, let the information sink in a bit.

He lifted a hand, focused on his thumb. Ran a finger across it like he was petting a tiny animal.

"You're in trouble, Michael."

One cheek bounced in and out like he was chewing on it.

She continued. "This will be three strikes. No chance of parole next time."

He ran his finger along the thumb more slowly as though considering an offer. Something about the motion was childlike.

She felt close to something, considered her options.

"It'll be easier if you cooperate with the investigation," Washington added.

Marchek glanced at Washington. He turned his gaze to Jamie. "I've been reading up on serial rapists."

Washington raised a brow.

Jamie was silent.

He nodded. "Since you seem to think I am one, I thought I'd brush up on how they work. All sorts of different ones, aren't there?"

She didn't respond.

Washington's phone buzzed on his hip and he left the room to answer it.

The motion didn't seem to disturb Marchek. He rubbed his finger more slowly. "I've been reading about what they do to their victims. Modus operandi and signatures. Truly, you have an intriguing job, Inspector." He drew out her title.

"What kinds of things did you read about?" she asked.

Marchek smiled. Not the tight, fake smile, but a real one. Joy. He was genuinely happy.

Something rolled in her stomach.

The smile grew a little. He knew he was getting to her. She kept silent.

"I read about men who bite and then cut pieces of skin from their victims," Marchek went on. "And, of course, the ones who take things—mementos."

"What kind are you?"

Marchek's smile vanished. His eyes stayed flat. He was playing. "Silly inspector. I've already explained I have nothing to do with any of this."

Washington returned to the room, frowning.

She nodded. "Okay. If you were a rapist, Michael..."

"What type would I be?"

She nodded.

His finger moved more quickly across the knuckle. A smooth, repetitive motion—up, back, up, back. Then it stopped. He rested his hands in his lap. "The difference between your rapists and me is that they consider this an art." He frowned. "You and I, we see it as an atrocity, a crime." He focused on the far wall. "If I were a rapist, which, of course, I'm not, I'd have to be one of those people who saw it as art."

"And if you saw it as art?"

He shrugged.

Jamie watched his expression. His eyes neither widened nor narrowed; his lips remained passive in a flat line. "It would be like one of your little models, Michael?"

His gaze shifted back to her. Nonplussed. Almost bored. "If there's nothing else we need to discuss, Inspector, I really should be going. I work early tomorrow."

"I'm going to catch you, Marchek."

"You're making a mistake," he whispered. His shoulders shifted up, his spine straightened. He focused on her.

She held his gaze. "I don't make mistakes."

The air in the room stopped. Somewhere someone shouted, but Marchek didn't blink, didn't look away. He leaned forward, hands hovering just over the table. Somehow, he managed to hold them there without making contact with the surface. His eyes widened and there was the flash of green. He stood then and pushed the chair back with his legs and rose. "I'm leaving now. Unless you can charge me with something."

Gone was the awkward child.

She rose as well, put her hands in her pockets. Kept her voice calm. "I'm going to let you go today, Michael. But watch these last steps. I'll be on your every move. And when I catch you again, you're going to jail for life."

He stared.

"You know it, don't you? You'll rot there."

He smiled, shook his head, like a parent listening to the nonsense of a child. "You should be careful, too, Inspector." His smile disappeared, but his voice remained even, almost friendly. "Whoever attacked that woman is still out there."

She grinned back. Faking it to show him he wasn't getting to her. She held the smile taut until tremors rose in her cheeks. "Watch yourself, Michael. You'll be back here before you know."

"See you soon, Inspector."

With that, Marchek turned and walked from the interview room.

She turned to Washington.

He shook his head. "The hair doesn't match Osbourne."

She had nothing to keep him on. The CSU hadn't found anything in his place and the blond hair didn't match.

She sank back into the chair and dropped her head in her hands.

Washington touched her shoulder. "You tried."

She didn't answer. She had to do better than try. She put Emily in Marchek's way. Now she had to clean up the mess.

"Call if anything comes up," Washington said. "I'm heading home."

She nodded to him. When the door clicked shut, she crossed her arms, replaying what Marchek had said. He'd be the kind of artist who thought of his work as art. What did that mean? What did an artist do?

She thought back to the first police officer who had been assaulted. Shawna Delman. Delman was the single caretaker for a younger brother. Only two months on the job, she'd been brutally raped. A month later, she overdosed on heroin.

A signature. The image kept flipping in Jamie's brain. Michael Marchek. A logo to claim his victims. She sifted through the memories for a signature.

Back at her desk, she lifted the file of pictures and took it back to the interview room. Slowly, she spread them out, studied them one by one.

There, twenty pictures in, she found a photograph of the small, rough cut on Emily's inner right thigh.

Jamie stared at it, squinting. It was almost like a crude W.

Her heart pounding, Jamie rotated the picture one hundred eighty degrees. She gasped.

If Emily Osbourne looked down at it, the cut would look like a child's M.

"Bastard."

Chapter 7

Cigarette in hand, Jamie ended the call with her surveillance team and blew the long line of cigarette smoke out the open bedroom window. Three o'clock in the morning and she had nothing. Patrol followed Marchek from the station and he'd gone straight home. Lights were out within thirty minutes. Nothing since then. There was no sneaking off to some secret hiding place, no sliding into a car registered in someone else's name so he could ditch his rape kit. Nothing. He'd gone to bed. Of course he had. It was three o'clock in the damn morning. They should all be in bed.

Surveillance had confirmed his presence twice in the last hour through a window. Captain Jules had conceded to twenty-four hours of surveillance on Marchek. Almost fifteen percent used up on Marchek sleeping. She should have known Marchek wasn't dumb enough to get caught like this. She pictured his thin frame bent over one of his model airplanes. Saw the same thin, hairy figure lying in bed, surrounded by the smell of bleach, dreaming of his next attack. She shuddered, forced him away.

Without more, there was nothing to go on. It was impossible to link him to the cut on Emily Osbourne's thigh without more evidence or a confession. Since she wasn't getting the latter, she had to focus on the former.

She sighed, stared at the thrashed bedcovers. A messy bed always reminded her of her ex-husband. Tim never slept straight. Facedown, he wiggled deep into the bed until his feet hung over the end, head buried somewhere in the middle, legs usually sprawled in opposite directions. He slept well, hard, the way children did. Unlike Jamie, who slept up at the top, on her back, hands to her sides like a soldier at ease. Her head raised on two pillows, she molded the sheet across her legs, smoothed it on either side. Stared at the ceiling for long stretches most nights.

For a lot of police officers, how they slept, if they could, was well-guarded secret. Like the little superstitions of baseball players before a game. The process of getting there was often a ritual, or they went without. Because sleep was easy for him, Tim hadn't understood that. He kicked and shifted in the bed, never disrupting his own sleep, only hers.

In the swell of the wrinkled bed sheets, Jamie pictured Devlin and Tim. Curled up under the covers, two sets of feet hanging over the end. Jamie dragged on the cigarette, stared at the bed like the enemy.

She dropped the cigarette into a glass of tepid water on the bedside. The flame snuffed out with a hiss. Beside the glass was a bottle of Febreze room deodorizer, which she waved through the air. The bottle was new, one she'd bought to replace the one she'd killed a few days back. It was only spraying it for the first time that she realized it was the scent she used before she saw victims at General Hospital. She wondered if there was any significance to the lavender or if her job had so blurred into her life that there was no separating them. Home, work, the car, the hospital all one continuum of victims and rapists.

She left the window open, hoping to dissipate the smell and padded into the bathroom. She wanted a drink but refused to let herself focus on the alcohol. Don't think, just sleep. In the bathroom, Jamie walked through her nightly routine to ward off the smell of cigarettes. She showered again, brushed her teeth three times, painted them with the Crest whitening paste, and put her molds in. Some nights she thought she should just quit smoking. Definitely not tonight.

In the mirror a set of tired eyes looked back. Eyes Tim had once told her were like mood indicators. Blue when she was calm and peaceful, sea green when she was feisty or angry. Now they always looked a flat steely gray-green to her. She wondered what mood that was. Depressed?

Back in the bedroom, she remade the bed with military precision, changed into generic gray sweats that had once fit but were now two sizes too big, added a long-sleeved T-shirt from her police academy days. Near her left breastbone a hole cut between the yellow N and C of Francisco. Through it, she could feel the tail end of the snaking scar from an old knife wound. A routine traffic stop gone bad.

As she sank onto the edge of the bed, restless exhaustion overcame her. The sheet corner, carefully folded back, was waiting but the desire to sleep had waned. Eighteen months Tim had been gone. Eighteen months and she still missed his fidgeting in bed, the way his hand sought out her thigh in the dark. The way he met her with a cup of coffee after a bad night at work, the way he always seemed to know which nights had been especially rough. Her life remained suspended in the months after he left. After she'd thrown him out. After she'd bought this house, moved in but never really lived here.

Outside, the bedroom light cast shadows across the overgrown yard. Occasionally, they seemed to move like people but Jamie had long since gotten used to the strange ghostly figures. Inside was no better. The house's windows were still bare of blinds or curtains. But for the old striped couch she and Tim had picked out at Ikea early in their marriage and a TV without cable, the living room stood empty. The kitchen housed a small worn oak table that Jamie had picked up at a garage sale. On one end was an older model Gateway desktop and at the other, a stack of unopened mail. The only thing on the three-person breakfast bar was a single, tattered place mat where she ate. Mismatched dishes and glasses and some silverware occupied some small percentage of the kitchen's cabinets and drawers along with a few pots and pans.