Chapter 5 #4
“You didn’t read those details in the newspaper?
” Just about every damned thing about the murder scene was outlined in print as well as on every news channel from here to LA.
Except for the one detail they had excluded from all reports.
Nausea roiled in his stomach as the grotesque letters scrawled on the victim’s body shimmered in front of his retinas.
“I want to know what you saw that morning.”
His guard went up. How did she know he’d been at the scene that morning?
His presence hadn’t been reported in the media.
She was fishing again. Had to be. He could lie.
But, as she studied him like an amoeba under a microscope, he understood with complete certainty that she would recognize the lie.
It was more than the way she looked at him.
It was her too-laid-back-and-yet-completely confident posture.
The cool, I-see-everything look in those eerie blue eyes.
“I didn’t say I saw anything that morning. I said I saw the crime-scene photos.”
“But you did . . . see something that morning. You were here.”
“Why the hell would you say that?” She was pushing his buttons and it was working.
“You have that look, Conner. The one that says I was here and I saw things I never want to see again.”
He started to take a stab at a subject change by reminding her to call him Kale, but the way his gut churned he wasn’t sure he wanted to open his mouth.
“So”—she turned her attention back to the chapel with its cold stone floor and century-old wooden canopy—“when you stood here in the freezing cold with the tang of coagulating blood rushing into your lungs, tell me what you saw.” When he didn’t answer right away, she went on.
“You told me we were on the same side. Now’s your chance to prove your claim. ”
He thought about that for a few seconds.
Then he caved. Cooperate as much as possible, that was what the mayor had said.
“There was a lot of blood.” He closed his eyes and forced his mind to relive that morning.
He and the chief had been having coffee at Cappy’s.
The same way they had a thousand times. Fate, bad luck, whatever, the call had come in and Kale had ended up riding out here with Willard.
“She was lying here, right?”
Kale opened his eyes and stared at Newton. She lowered into a crouch, studied the place where Valerie Gerard’s mutilated body had been positioned.
“Yes.”
The lone word echoed around him, haunted him. He shouldn’t talk about this . . . not with her.
“Was it unusually cold that morning, Conner?”
He nodded, then remembered that she wasn’t looking at him. “Damned cold. The stone path was icy.” The chief had fallen twice in their haste to scramble up the slope.
“The medical examiner said she’d only been dead a few hours,” Newton prompted.
“Between three and four, but the temperature made it difficult to nail down a more exact time frame.” Kale stared out at the ocean, couldn’t bear to look at the bloodstains any longer. “No one should die that way.”
“The medical examiner’s preliminary assessment,” Newton said as she pushed to her feet, “indicated that the victim was alive while her lips were sewn closed.”
Kale didn’t want to hear this. He’d seen it in his dreams every night for almost a week.
“But that wasn’t the worst of it,” Newton continued as she moved around the place where Valerie Gerard had gasped for her final agonizing breath. “She lived through more than a hundred lacerations and gouges. Some seemingly pinpointed to nerve centers to optimize pain.”
“That’s right.” His heart pumped harder with each passing second. He wanted to puke each time the images from that morning floated before his eyes.
“And yet, no real evidence was left behind. Just a few footprints. Too indistinct or contaminated to make a decent impression.”
That was partly his fault. He’d been so shocked, he’d rushed to help. The chief had tried to hold him back. The next thing Kale remembered, there were people everywhere and things got out of control. He’d never seen grown men cry like that; then he’d realized he was crying, too.
He felt sick.
Enough. “We done here?” She obviously knew the facts the same as he did.
Newton crossed to where he stood, lifted the tape, and slipped beneath it.
He hoped that was a yes.
“That’s the thing that bothers me, Conner.” She folded her arms over her chest and stared directly at him. “How is it that some twisted piece of shit brought that girl up here, sewed her lips shut, then played psycho surgeon without leaving a single piece of evidence?”
Anger ignited amid all those other emotions churning in his gut.
What the hell was she saying? “That’s what we’re trying to figure out.
” He reached deep for calm, couldn’t find it.
“That’s the thing that has folks believing this somehow relates to a curse.
” Or the devil himself. He hated to bring that up, but, after all, that was the reason Sarah Newton had come.
The rag she worked for, Truth Magazine, had made its place in the print and digital world by allegedly exposing the truth wherever the unexplained was sold.
This sure as hell was unexplained so far.
Newton stared at him without saying a word for about ten more trauma-filled seconds, amping his tension to an explosive level.
“This was no paranormal event, Conner. This was plain old carefully planned and painstakingly executed murder. By someone who knew the victim well enough to hate her enough to do all that you saw that morning.”
She made it sound so neat and easy when no less than twelve cops, local and state, had been working this case, and not one had reached such a concise deduction. “That’s just another theory, Ms. Newton. What makes yours so special?”
She laughed softly, but there was no amusement in the sound. “There’s nothing special about it. But I will do one thing as damned fast as I can.”
He shouldn’t have let her bait him. “And just what is that?”
“While everyone else is still running around in circles trying to do the PC thing”—she inclined her head and stared at him another long moment—“I’ll prove my theory.”
He shook his head, couldn’t help himself. “I sure as hell hope you can. But I have to tell you, that’s a pretty damned ballsy statement.”
She wasn’t put off in the least. “It’s actually quite simple.
You see, I don’t have any friends or family here.
I don’t even know anyone except you. I’m not ethically bound by the same rules and restrictions as your fourth-generation chief of police.
So I’ll step on toes, I’ll piss people off, I’ll do whatever it takes to find one thing. ”
She held his gaze a second, then another. “The truth.”