Scene of the Crime (An FBI Romance/Thriller #68)

Prologue

Just Outside Of

Salt Lake City

Small Town

Unknown Time Before…

There was something to be said about seeking out the perfect specimen and studying it. There was nothing more special than crossing paths, and having your eyes meet with that one particular person.

And just knowing.

They were the ones who were meant to be, and needed for the grand scheme of things.

That was exactly how it worked for him.

He’d be going about his day, and he’s see them, but they were always just out of reach. That was always the way it happened too.

That was just his luck.

Or maybe it was Fate enjoying the thrill of the hunt herself, and egging him on.

Honestly, he wasn’t the least bit annoyed by having to work for it.

After all, he had been taught that life didn’t hand you everything. Sometimes, you had to work hard for it, and make that magic happen.

Why did some people get handed shit and others not?

He had no clue.

It was just the way of the world. With each gift came a burden you were forced to carry, and this was his burden.

So, he would take what he wanted, study it, to make sure it was perfect so that he could reach his ultimate goal.

What he wanted more than anything was to be the very best. To have a streak of luck so wide that nothing ever went bad for him. Granted, that was a pipe dream, though, since he needed to make his own way in life.

But still...

He would do anything to ensure that good fortune going forward, so that he was a lucky son of a bitch, and not just a son of a bitch.

Because he had big plans.

He was going to be famous.

So, in order to reach that goal, he took fate into his own hands, and he began doing what needed to be done to make a name for himself.

He began making different choices. Because why be bad if no one knew it?

Oh, and bad he was.

One by one, he followed them, and when he finally made their deaths inevitable, he was in his glory. He set up a plan, and he executed it.

Pun intended.

Most definitely.

Oh, but it didn’t stop there. He was smarter than that, or he liked to believe so.

Yes, he killed them, but it always looked like it was nothing more than an accident. It always looked like it was a death that Fate handed out.

He was the mastermind behind it.

And he got away with it.

Why?

Well, maybe it was because he was damn good at what he did. Smart people were the ones who would take over the world.

Not the quiet.

Not the flashy.

The smart ones.

They were the true movers and shakers who helped the rich ones survive.

And he was good with that.

After killing them, when they were buried, he’d make sure that he found them again. When he did, he would go to their sacred resting places and dig them up.

Yes, dig them up.

BY HAND.

It only took a few hours, since he was in perfect shape, and it was time to reflect on their little moments together. It was precious time, and he liked it a great deal.

So, he cherished it.

In the middle of the night, before their original graves could heal over, grass making them pristine, he would open them up, and take his treasures.

That was also one of the best parts.

The collecting.

The act of killing them was fun, but the act of removing what had gotten them killed in the first place…

That was even better.

With time, he perfected it, and that just proved that brawn and brains overcame anything else life handed you. Money came and went, but your intelligence…

That was what saved a person every single time.

At the beginning, when the media found out there were grave robberies, they had given him a name, and he was proud of it.

The Grave Robber.

In fact, he was more than proud of it. The whole thing tickled him pink. The idea that he would go down in history as someone who would be remembered for what they did…

He deserved it.

Maybe he was sick, but that was the best part of it. It made it fun.

He had a legacy, and that was the most important thing to him.

He would never be forgotten.

No matter how long he’d been dead, that name would carry on, and how he traumatized the community with his actions. Like the best serial killers before him, all that mattered was the trail of mayhem remaining in his wake.

Jeffrey Dahmer.

John Wayne Gacy.

Jack the Ripper.

They all had a legacy they left behind, and one day, when he was dead and gone, he would too. It was crafted when he was a child, and it was perfected as an adult.

Everyone had to be remembered for something, right?

Well, this was his thing.

He would unearth them, take what he wanted, and close them back up.

Luckily for him, he’d only been discovered a couple of times, and when he was perfecting his craft.

Thus, the media giving him that name.

What they didn’t know was that he’d actually done the deed more than twenty times and had been practicing for a very long time.

Since childhood.

He had been honing his craft, and that was something he was very proud of, too. It took dedication to stick with something for as long as he had.

Old people.

Young people.

Women.

Men.

No one was free from his grasp, but only when it came time to dig them up, he only dug up the women. They were the ones he liked seeing the most.

They were pretty and he hated that he was attracted to them.

Still, that was his favorite part. There was something about that innocence as they laid there so peacefully in their pretty dresses, off to the next realm, or wherever the soul went. There was something about their eyes since they were the windows into the soul.

He would take the ones he favored, following in life because they were special to him. They reminded him of the one he wished to decimate.

So he did.

The woman hit by a car while she was running.

Oh, did he do that?

His bad.

The woman who went missing after working a late shift at the hospital.

Yeah, that was him, too.

He admitted it.

She was just too pretty not to take.

That might have been a little impulsive of him, but still, he liked to think of himself as a connoisseur of pretty things.

In a world of ugliness, he liked to admire the lovely things that were just out of his reach.

Until he reached out and took them.

So what if he enjoyed them a little…expired?

It wasn’t anyone’s business but his own.

That was between him and his maker. Since they couldn’t catch him killing them, they wouldn’t catch him enjoying them.

Like tonight.

About a week ago, a woman was found sitting behind a dumpster with a needle in her arm. Yes, he drugged her, pumping her body full of meth to make it look like an overdose.

Spoiler alert.

It wasn’t.

It was him.

It was always him.

As she twitched and convulsed on the floor of the building where he did his dirty work, he enjoyed the show.

That beautiful dance at the end…

It sent chills down his body, and made him giddy with watching life dissipate.

There was something so gratifying about watching the beautiful woman meet her maker.

By his hand.

And his hand alone.

Watching her lost in the drugs, when she’d never touched them in her life, was something so deliciously wicked.

She was a virgin for him and his depravity.

And he loved it.

Watching her be tainted, but how the pleasure cascaded over her face as that wash of drugs took over.

That made it special.

That made it beautiful.

She blossomed like a flower for him on that dirty floor.

As she writhed, frothing at the mouth as her heart gave up, he enjoyed seeing her last few minutes. Pebbled nipples, tensing thigh muscles, it was all a delicious dance meant only for him.

In life, she never would have tried the drugs, but she’d never forget how good they made her feel.

Now, in death, she was his captive audience, and if he could, he’d make her feel even better.

Or she would be when he finally unearthed her.

Later.

It was a staging masterpiece to take her to a place she often frequented with her friends, and to place her behind the building by the dumpster.

Never let it be said he wasn’t observant.

He.

Was.

She looked so lovely, her pale skin glowing in the moonlight, and the tourniquet on her arm with a needle sticking out of her flesh.

They’d assume she shot up out here, and met her maker.

And that was exactly what he wanted them to think. It was setting the scene for his reign of terror.

For one day, they’d figure out what he was doing, and the chase would begin. Oh, and that was another exciting moment that he was anticipating.

Yes, please call out the big dog on him. Because that was what he craved.

Almost as much as he craved her.

As for his lovely flower…

She’d been buried, and he’d gone to the funeral. In the book at the entrance of the chapel where the ceremony was being held, he signed his name.

Well, not his name.

A NAME.

He wasn’t stupid.

That funeral home was the most popular one in the city, and they got all the good business.

HIS.

BUSINESS.

Oh, and for a myriad of reasons too. If anything, he was good at leaving clues, just waiting to see who figured them out, and who didn’t.

At the funeral, he’d admired her.

Then, he’d stayed for the entire service. It was full of crying people, and family that couldn’t believe that they didn’t see the signs of her addiction.

Well, no duh.

That’s because there weren’t any.

She’d never done drugs in her entire life. That was what made the show even better.

He’d fooled everyone.

He’d fooled the cops.

He’d fooled her family.

With intelligence came power. For now, he was officially just like one of the greats that came before him, Gacy, Ripper, and Dahmer.

Just like the others, he’d managed to outsmart everyone and gave the victim of his lust and depravity a whole other story.

That made him a mastermind of their fate.

Little did they know that he just wanted their dead bodies for his own.

The Grave Robber was going to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Such.

Pretty.

Fruits.

When that pretty little ‘druggie’ was lowered into the ground, he knew to wait a day or three until the family had moved on.

They always did.