Book Excerpt
LIE TO ME A Samantha Beacher Mystery
Page 16
The bodies had been discovered by a maid.
Samantha Beacher stood at the edge of the crime scene, her eyes trailing past the bloody footprints, towards the room where the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Blecher—beloved parents, upstanding business leaders, generous philanthropists—lay bludgeoned to death. Their eight-year-old daughter, Missy, was missing.
“Pretty gnarly, right?” Cass, her friend and head of forensics, appeared beside her.
“Did you look in their mouths?” Sam asked, ignoring the obvious.
Cass blinked, confused. “Their mouths?”
“For the rest of the message...”
She had spent years in therapy to avoid bringing her own trauma to a crime scene. The emotions could easily cloud her judgment on a case, but now, the coffee she had drunk on the way over turned inside her stomach.
Moving on instinct, she grabbed a pair of vinyl gloves from a box. Bending down to Mrs. Blecher, opening her mouth, she dug one hand past her teeth, and tongue, till her fingers were into her esophagus. Finally, she felt the tiny paper edge of a wing, pulling out a small origami swan.
“It can’t be,” Cass gasped.
Sam opened the swan. Inside, the killer had written the words REMEMBER ME .
Sam had been assigned to hundreds of murder investigations, but this one was the first case since being a rookie to make her hands shake. She knew this butcherer. Intimately. There was no doubt in her mind that this was the handiwork of the Origami Killer.
The only thing she didn’t understand was how. The man who had murdered her own parents, then kept her chained inside a dark cell for nine days, had been executed ten years before.
“Get a photo of that,” Sam said, tossing it down to the floor.
She removed her gloves, glancing down at her watch. It was seven thirty on a Monday morning. The house had been empty all weekend. Missy Blecher only had five more days to live. Sam wasn’t going to waste any more time. Leaving the forensics to Cass, she turned to exit the Blecher estate.
“Where are you going?” Cass called after her.
“I’ll call you later,” she said.
A child was missing, after all, and the clock was ticking. And Sam had learned twenty years earlier—chained up in the prison of a sick and twisted deviant beneath the Earth—that the only way to solve a mystery was to unravel it piece by piece.