Run the Risk (25 page)

“We have a relationship. I wouldn't hurt you.”

“We don't have a relationship. You have my daughter.”

A strange animal-like laughter came through the phone. “Look down at your feet.”

“What?”

“Look down.”

Dread spread through me like a raging virus.

“This is what happens to people who lie to me,” he whispered.

I looked down at my feet. In the dim light I could just make out the unmistakable shape of a human finger. I felt a horrible rising in my stomach and I put my hand to my mouth to suppress my shock.

“Oh, God,” I whispered as my eyes flooded with tears. No, no, no . . .

“It's not your daughter's, but it could be. I'm holding her hand right now.”

I squeezed the receiver trying not to scream. I tried not to picture his fingers wrapping around my daughter's hand, but I couldn't stop it. He had let loose a storm inside me. My knees buckled for a moment, and I reached out and took hold of the phone booth to steady myself.

“It belongs to the garbage I took from the FBI.”

“You—” I swallowed the rest of the words. Play his game, I said to myself, play it right to the end. Right to the
moment when I kill him and send him back to the hell he crawled out of.

“Have you decided yet?” Gabriel said.

“Decided what?”

“Are we partners? Are you going to save your daughter's life, or a stranger who means nothing to you?”

I took a deep breath and exhaled heavily.

“Have you decided?”

“No,” I said in a barely audible whisper.

“You will.”

“No, I won't.”

He seemed to almost laugh, as if whatever I said to him he had already scripted.

“Lieutenant, you have no idea what you're going to do for me.”

The line went dead. The receiver fell from my hand and I stepped back to get away from the finger at my feet. I wanted to believe that I was trying not to contaminate evidence, but in truth I was just horrified. I quickly scanned my surroundings for any movement, but I already knew it was futile. He wasn't here. There were no crosshairs lining me up. He had wanted me alone for the sole purpose of escalating the terror. He had reduced me to a frightened woman alone on a dark street.

“You bastard,” I said, barely able to form the words. “That's the last time . . .”

I stood for a moment on the verge of shaking with anger. I took a breath and held it for a second, then another, and another.

I reached for my cell phone but stopped. My eyes drifted back to the severed finger. I was missing something. What had just happened here? Nothing Gabriel did was casual. Everything had a reason, even the smallest details. I replayed his words in my head . . . “It belongs to the garbage I took from the FBI.”

I stepped toward the finger and knelt down to examine it. The cut at the base had the clean precision of a surgeon's knife. The wound was covered with a light layer of blood
that had begun to thicken and dry. There was a line of dark dirt under the curve of the nail. It appeared to be an index finger. It was lying on the pavement as if pointing toward the school behind me. I turned around and looked into the schoolyard beyond the fence. Nothing presented itself, just an empty parking lot.

I walked over to the fence and began to follow it along the perimeter to a gate thirty yards to the right. It was closed, but the chain securing it hung limp, one of its heavy steel links severed as cleanly as the finger. I unlatched the gate and pushed it open. A hundred feet across the dark parking lot, the glow of a light that I couldn't see from the phone booth appeared between two buildings. I picked up my cell and called Harrison. He answered before the second ring.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I don't think he's here, but hold the perimeter until I call you back.”

I hung up and started walking across the dark parking lot toward the light. The sound of small bits of gravel under my shoes shouted my presence with each step as if I were walking on glass. From somewhere out of the darkness, a mockingbird let loose a series of repeating songs that sounded like a car alarm come alive. Involuntarily, my hand drifted to the handle of my Glock. At the edge of the light, the gap between the two buildings opened into an alley that ended at a service entrance fifty feet farther on. Illuminated under the bright halogen light at the end of the alley was a large green Dumpster.

There were no windows in the buildings lining the alley. Aside from the door at the end, the only way in or out was where I stood.

“Garbage,” I whispered to myself, repeating Gabriel's words.

I started to reach for my phone but stopped as the
thump thump thump
of the department's helicopter pierced the night as it slowly began to circle in the darkness.

I pulled my weapon and started down the alley. As I
approached the Dumpster, several palmetto bugs the size of mice scurried out of the light and into drains that disappeared under the buildings. The sickly sweet odor of rotting garbage hung in a radius of about five feet around the Dumpster. From inside I heard the faint sound of hundreds of tiny legs moving across paper and metal. I raised my weapon and reached for the plastic lid that hung unevenly around the top edge. As I raised it, something ran across the tips of my fingers. I flung it open, pointing my Glock inside. A flight of flies sped past my face as a wave of stench rose up, and I stepped back.

The floor of the Dumpster appeared to be moving, alive with hundreds of roaches foraging in fast-food wrappers, soggy boxes of pizza, and cans of Coke and Mountain Dew.

The body was upright, sitting on its knees, slumped slightly forward, the arms tied behind its back, bound just above the elbow with silver duct tape. A large, open wound on the top of the neck exposed the tendons, muscles, and bones that used to connect to the victim's head, which had been taken. The index finger on his right hand was missing. There was little to no blood present on the Dumpster's floor. He had been killed somewhere else and placed here. I recognized the blue T-shirt and jeans as those Philippe had been wearing. Through the moving carpet of insects, I could see that his feet were bare, just as they had been when Gabriel pulled him through the window of the safe house.

I stepped back and looked out through the alley toward the street. The sense of hope for Lacy that I had resolutely clung to vanished with the speed of a single heartbeat. I holstered my pistol and picked up the phone and called Harrison.

“I have a crime scene here,” I said before he could say anything. “Philippe is dead.”

I hung up and started back toward the street but stopped before I got ten feet. Jesus. The image came to me like the faint glow of light in the east at sunrise, gradually turning the sky from night to day. I turned and looked back toward
the Dumpster. Was it possible? I couldn't be wrong. Not about this. I'm too good a cop.

I walked back to the container and looked inside at the tape binding the victim's arms. It wasn't possible. It just couldn't be. But I wasn't wrong. The dark echo of a previous horror rose like a muted scream in my memory. I had seen this before.

HARRISON EASED HIMSELF
up the side of the Dumpster to look inside with the tentative steps of an acrophobe approaching the edge of a cliff. When he was sufficiently close to get a clear look over the lip, he leaned slightly forward and stared at Gabriel's work with the repelled curiosity of a viewer examining the gory tableau of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Nothing feels real about an incomplete human body. I always imagined it was a defense mechanism we keep hidden deep inside from some dark ancestral place that allows us to disconnect from the mayhem that was once a nearly daily experience.

“I've never seen . . .” Harrison said, letting the thought drift before picking it back up. “It doesn't look real,” he said softly.

“Without eyes or a face, we share nearly nothing in common anymore. What's left is like an empty room that hasn't been lived in for years,” I said.

I noticed Harrison's eyes drift down the length of Philippe's arms to his hands, one of which was still clenched
in a fist as if the pain of death was so great the hand refused to let go of it.

“Except for the hands,” he said. “We still share that.”

He was right. After sight, the next sensation that brings meaning to a life is touch. From a baby's gentle soft fingers, to the paper-thin wrinkly skin of a great-grandmother's hands. We hold, we touch, we create, we even destroy with them. And when our voices falter or words are insufficient, we speak with them.

Harrison turned away and looked over to me, his eyes narrowing into a question. “You've seen something,” he said.

“Look at the way the arms are bound just above the elbows.”

His eyes moved back to the bright duct tape pinching the arms nearly together.

“There's something about that?”

Harrison studied the body for another moment, then turned and looked at me as he realized there was something else in my reaction.

“That means something to you, doesn't it?”

I nodded. “I think it means Gabriel may have made his first mistake.”

He shook his head, not understanding. “I'm not following.”

“Eighteen months ago we found the body of a transient in a wash at the base of the foothills. We never identified him. The case is still open under a John Doe.”

“You think there's a connection?”

“He was on his knees, his throat was cut, and his arms were bound in the same way with duct tape. It was one of the things that never made sense about the case. Why execute a homeless man? But there was nothing that tied it to any other open cases.”

Harrison thought for a moment, as if trying to construct a bridge from one death to another over the course of nearly two years, then shook his head.

“According to Philippe, Gabriel arrived in the country just two weeks ago.”

“But he disappeared in France two years ago.”

“You think Philippe was wrong.”

“Or lied, or was lied to.”

“Just because of the way the arms are tied?”

I glanced back into the container at the body.

“I've investigated nearly two hundred homicides, maybe twenty of those involved the binding of the victims' hands together, and in every one of those cases, the hands were tied at the wrists.”

“Except for these two,” Harrison said.

I nodded.

“Two out of two hundred is not coincidence. I'd bet my career that Gabriel killed the transient.”

I turned from the Dumpster and looked toward the flashing lights of the patrol cars on the street. The terrible truth of my life struck me in the chest, causing my heart to skip. How many nights had I stood on damp pavement combing through the remains of violence? How many moments had I missed with Lacy in exchange for the privilege of sorting through the last moments of a wife, beaten to death by a drunk husband's fists? Or a ten-old-year girl whose skull was splintered by a gang member's twisted sense of respect. What kind of person would choose this? What kind of a mother would trade kissing her daughter good night for that?

“I hate this,” I said silently.

I turned and realized Harrison was staring at me, waiting to ask a question.

“How does this help us?”

I pulled myself back to the present.

“A serial killer doesn't just turn off the impulse to kill. It's primary to their existence, it's how they find their place in the world. And his vanity couldn't let the killing of the transient go unrecognized. The tape on the arms is his way of staking a claim.”

I started walking back to the street with Harrison a step behind.

“You think he wanted you to know it was him?”

“In the nightmare he's living, he thinks of himself as an artist. The idea that someone else could take credit for something he's done would be an anathema to him.”

“So . . .”

“We go through everything from the transient's death: every interview, every location, every shred of evidence that by itself meant nothing. Maybe there'll be a connection.”

“There's something I'm not understanding, Lieutenant,” Harrison said.

I turned to him as he continued.

“We're assuming that nothing he's done has been an accident, or is random, that everything has a purpose.”

“I think that's a safe assumption,” I said.

“Then why didn't Gabriel leave the head in the Dumpster?”

I took two more steps and stopped. Lord, I had missed that.

“He doesn't want us to ID him. Unless Philippe's fingerprints are on file, without a face, dental records, DNA's only useful if you have something to match it against; identification would be impossible.”

“I was thinking that, too,” Harrison said.

The implication hung in the space between us as though awaiting understanding.

“Something about Philippe is a threat to him, even in death. We figure out what that is, and . . .”

I didn't dare take the next leap of imagination. One step at a time. If I started thinking too far ahead, I might miss something and bypass it without notice. One missed step, and the entire house of cards could tumble. And I would lose my daughter.

“It's something, at least,” Harrison said.

I shook my head. “It's more than something.”

I glanced at my watch. It was going on eleven
P
.
M
. The minutes were racing by as if they couldn't wait for the dawn. I looked back once more at the Dumpster as a
photographer's flash illuminated the scene in a brief explosion of white light.

It was more than just something; it might be everything.