Waking the Queen (6 page)

 I felt dirty just looking at the place and I pulled on my latex gloves to both protect the scene and provide a barrier between my skin and the filth. Yeah, I had no problem being wrist deep in another person’s entrails, but squalor made me nauseous.

 Grimes’ car was already there. How did he always beat me to the scene? I didn’t want to deal with him yet, I’d hung up before he could say anything else, but this was my job. My personal shit and ascension would have to wait. No matter what else I might be, I was a cop.

 There was already a crowd gathered at the boundaries of the yellow crime scene tape. News vans were pulled up, so I hurried toward the entrance. The last thing I needed was to be on the news. I liked what I did, but I liked anonymity better. I didn’t want to deal with some asshole who thought he was Hannibal Lecter and I was his Clarice. The very idea of my existence, a predator who hunts her own, would be too much of a curiosity to be resisted. Especially because I am a woman. Yes, I am a shining star, but no one outside of law enforcement knows my face or my name. I’m just another one of the bodies in blue.

 I flashed my badge at the rookie guarding the door and I followed the stream of foot traffic up to the second floor and into the room.

 The room was already full of personal—forensics, and Tommy Anderson, Jason Grimes, and the Captain, Marcus Stratovich.

 “This is ugly,” Stratovich warned me.

 I scrubbed my hand over my face and sighed. Usually, I’d relish a challenge, a new hunt, but my plate was already full. Yet, that familiar tingle of excitement tightened in my gut.

 “I imagine so if you’re here. What do we have?”

 “Two bodies. Grimes will fill you in. I have to talk to the press,” Stratovich said.

 I didn’t want Grimes to fill me in. I wanted him to fuck off and never speak to me again. I looked around the room for him before I could stop myself and when our gazes locked, he headed toward me. Petty though it was, I turned to Anderson before he could reach us.

 “Fill me in, Detective.”

 “So I finally get to see the great Brynn Hill in action.” Anderson smirked and made no effort to tell me what information they’d collected so far.

 That’s probably what I deserved for being petty and not doing my damn job like a professional.

 “Grimes is charging over here like a bull with a taser to his balls. Don’t say you two had a lover’s spat?”

 “Bite my bag, Anderson. Are you capable of providing the information I asked for or not?”

 “I didn’t know you had a dick, Hill. But it makes sense.” He nodded. “So tell me, does Grimes catch or pitch?”

 “He catches, but his dick is still bigger than yours. Now get out of the way and let the adults work.” I turned to Grimes. “What do we have so far? I’ve asked this question three times and no one can tell me what the fuck is going on.”
 “No one knows what’s going on.” Jason shook his head.

 Finally, the crowd around the bed shifted and the flashes from the cameras stopped and I could see what the big deal was.

 There were two bodies twined around each other nestled in a hollowed out center of the box spring. As I approached the bed, everyone moved for me, the parting of bodies was like pulling back curtains at a freak show.

 I knelt by the side of the bed to get a closer look at them. My first thought was that these were old kills because their skin was like dead leaves, brittle and wrinkled, almost mummified. I couldn’t get a distinct picture of their features because of the emaciated state of the bodies. Each woman’s nails had been freshly painted, perfect French manicures. No chipping in the polish and more importantly, no space of blank nail between the polish and the cuticle. Contrary to popular belief, hair and nails don’t grow after death, but as the body loses fluid, the skin shrinks back from the nail. I supposed it was possible that the perp had painted them before dumping them, but why keep them so long that their skin decayed? And how had he managed to pose them after such decay had set in?

 More importantly, I could see no obvious signs of the cause of death. No ligature marks, no wounds. This killer was most likely male and men preferred more symbolically phallic ways to kill, like with a blade, rather than poison. But I didn’t see any outward evidence of poison either. The only thing was the condition of the flesh. We’d know more after the autopsies.

 “Forensics already get samples of skin and hair?” I looked up around the room, waiting for an answer. “Jenna,” I called out when I saw my favorite forensics tech, Jenna Harris.

 “Already on my way to bag their hands. We’re not sure what to do about transport to keep them intact. The coroner may have to process them here,” Jenna answered me.

 I nodded. She was so meticulous; I knew we’d have DNA from every person who’d even thought about breathing inside that room.

 There was something about the posing, something ritualistic. Night blooming jasmine had been woven into their hair, binding them together. This wasn’t the average misogynist who hated his mother and thought all women were whores. He wasn’t a religious freak either, even though I knew the flowers had some significance to him on a spiritual level.

 Damn it, what was he trying to say? He wasn’t saying anything about the girls, they were…props. Yes, they were there to give his message form. The girls themselves were incidental. Which made my job a whole lot harder. If he’d chosen them for a particular reason, it would be easier to predict a pattern. A predator could be found by tracking his prey. But if anyone could be his prey… Damn. Damn. Damn. I wasn’t ready to share that with the rest of the class though. As far as I knew there were no examples of serial murderers who didn’t have a specific type of prey they favored. As Stoker’s Dr. Seward had said of Renfield, “I shall have to invent a new classification of lunatic for you.”

 For a brief moment, I wondered if I was wrong. I hadn’t been wrong yet, but I knew I wasn’t infallible. Maybe there’d be a commonality among his victims that wasn’t visible yet. These were only the first two we’d found and I knew there’d be more.

 No, I could almost feel the killer’s irritation where my logic went stray of his intention.

 I scrubbed my hands over my face again in a tired motion. “This is just the first. It’s definitely a serial.”

 “How can you tell? Because they’re whores?” Anderson asked.

 Jenna glared at him. “Can’t you at least call them working girls and have some respect for the dead?”

 “If they didn’t respect themselves while they were alive, why should I go out of my way to “respect” them now? Fuck ‘em. I mean, are they not whores? Does what they did in life change because they’re dead?”

 “God, Anderson. You’re such a dick,” I sighed. We don’t have irrefutable proof that they were “working girls.” Anderson just assumed they were because that’s what he thought of all women.

 Although, looking at their clothes, it was a likely assumption. They were both wearing miniskirts, belly shirts, fishnets and heels. My assumption wasn’t based on the type of clothes specifically, but the type taken with the condition of the garments. The material seemed worn and threadbare, not what a woman would wear clubbing, but it didn’t seem decayed as it would be if the women had been killed in them and left to molder somewhere for years.

 “Why do you think this is a serial, Hill?” Grimes put his hand on my shoulder. “Aside from the fact they’re prostitutes and they’re among the most common prey for serial killers.”

 I shrugged him off pointedly and stood. “There’s a ritualistic element. See where the flowers are woven in their hair? It links them together. And how they’re posed? Someone took a lot of time with these bodies.”

 “But how did they get them here in this state?” Jenna asked.

 I shook my head. That I did not know. Something prickled at the edge of my awareness and I tried to focus on it, to shut out everything else and hear the voice. The faintest brush of something against my conscious mind yet again. This was how it happened. This was how I heard them and climbed inside their heads to hunt them.

 A connection crackled and I opened myself to it, to the link that would bind us together until I killed him.

 Until Anderson spoke. “Oh, everyone’s waiting for the mystery profile. I can tell you right now. Average white male, between the ages of twenty and forty, well to do, quiet, and—”

 “Motherfucker,” I growled as the connection was severed and that sixth sense went dark. “Anderson. Is this your first scene with a profiler? Shut up and let me think.” I pushed my hands through my hair. “And that’s not what I was going to say anyway. It’s possible he’s not white. Serial killers tend to hunt within their own ethnic groups. One of these women is a Latina and she belongs to MS-13.” I pointed at the other corpse. “This woman is African-American and she has no gang affiliation. At least from what I can make out on her skin.”

 Their tattoos glowed for me now. Even on the emaciated, papyrus-like skin. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it brought all of the earlier fuckery slamming back into me. Rather than think about it, I looked back at the bodies.

 Their mouths were closed, lipstick still bright on them as if it had been freshly applied, the same with their rouged cheeks and eye makeup. That didn’t fit with any process of mummification I’d heard of. The soft, cartilage in their cheeks and nose, ears, mouth and eyes would be gone, but the closed eyelids weren’t sunken and the lips were full and fleshy.

 “How soon can we get an autopsy?” I couldn’t keep the excitement from my voice.

 “I don’t know what the coroner is going to be able to get from—” Jenna broke off and I hoped she was seeing the same thing I saw. That the skin was more like tanned leather than papyrus.  

 It sucked that I needed Jenna to ask for a rush on the autopsy, but if the coroner knew it was from me, she’d move it to the bottom of her priority list. Her niece had disappeared more than two years ago and I’d done my best to find her, followed up leads in my spare time, but she was convinced that I hadn’t done enough. That I didn’t want to find her. I guess it would be easier to focus all that pain and energy on someone else rather than admitting it was time to grieve. I’d done the best I could. One of only five cases I hadn’t been able to close.

 “So that was it?” Anderson interrupted me again. “The Captain wants me here to learn from you and that’s all you have to offer?”

 “What am I, a crystal fucking ball to magically tell you his name and favorite color just from looking at the empty husks he left behind?”

 “Yeah, why not, Hill? I thought you were the department’s secret weapon. This doesn’t take any talent.” He snorted and shoved his hands in his pockets.

 I was usually very controlled and I never let my emotions get the best of me. I usually tried to avoid them completely, that helped a lot with my job, but Anderson pissed me off. I stepped close to him, literally toe to toe, my steel toe Doc Martens against his Redwings. We stood eye to eye. “Stop pushing, Anderson.”

 “Or what?” His pupils had dilated and I could see the rapid tattoo of his pulse quicken in his throat. His mouth opened slightly and he inhaled as if he tasted the air. Or my pheromones. This turned him on. Maybe he was aware of what he was after all.

 “Or I’ll turn my “nonexistent talent” on you, Tommy.” I hissed.

 “Fuck you, Brynn. Go for it.” His eyes had gone cold and empty, but I wasn’t afraid. Tommy had talked himself into believing he was the Big Bad Wolf. He didn’t understand that there were things bigger and badder than he was stalking the dark.

 “You want to do this? Really? Because I know what you are, Tommy. I’ve always known and I’ve been waiting.” I nodded. “You fit the standard profile, an average white male, twenty to forty. You’re not well to do, but you’re average. You like the spotlight, you think you’re stronger, faster, smarter than everyone else and you have a Napoleon complex. You don’t wear the uniform because you want to serve; you wear it because you want to be served. You like the power it gives you, the blue wall to hide behind when you finally cross that line.”

 His eyes widened, but I continued on. “You haven’t crossed the line yet because you don’t have the sac. You’re still afraid of your desires, but when you’re drunk, that fear goes away. You cruise the ghetto and watch all of the
whores
, imagining them draped in blood and pain, but you never solicit one. Not because you’re a cop, but because you know there’s no coming back. You’re a sadist. You probably jerk off looking at crime scene pictures and imagining it’s
your
work, that you were the one brave enough to create something so beautiful. And you want to work with me, learn about what I do and how I do it so you can hide, blend in, and destroy any clues that could lead to who you are. But you’re too arrogant to remain anonymous and when you do cross that line, I’ll be waiting for you, Tommy Anderson.”