Chapter 3
BOONE
Today’s homicide will be forever burned on my retinas. As a junior detective, I’m still getting my feet wet, and the scene we walked in on was the perfect juxtaposition of art and gore.
Classic Baroque composition meets old school Rob Zombie.
I was checking in with my mentor and department crime-scene manager, Joni Sampson, when the call came in from a local WhiteHat group that monitors the Hell_AI app—the most recent iteration of the dark web.
They discovered a bidding war over a little girl in Central Austin, along with a winner and, most importantly, an address.
Joni had officers from the local substation do a safety check. When they arrived at the buyer’s house, the door was ajar. When they went inside, they discovered the dead bodies, but no trace of the little girl.
Joni loves to make fun of my “useless art degree,” but when the officers sent her the initial crime-scene pics, she shared them with me and asked for my take.
Having minored in art history, I knew immediately that the killer’s inspiration had come from Guido Reni’s depiction of Salome carrying the head of John the Baptist. It’s a scene many artists have painted, but the calm, beatific expression on John’s face in Reni’s painting always stayed with me.
In the middle of such a horrific tableau, it’s especially haunting.
Joni invited me to ride along and answer the team’s questions, as well as share my thoughts.
After seeing everything in person, we agreed that it looked like the killer had worked with what was in the house and that this wasn’t his first kill.
His attention to detail—the set of the mouth on the headless man, the way the second man’s hands gripped the platter—bordered on obsessive.
As Joni dispatched detectives to interview the neighbors and get any video they might have from their doorbell cameras, the supervisor at the local police substation called to let us know that a little girl named Sara had walked into the front office asking for her mommy.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more relieved in my life.
The mother of the little girl arrived ahead of us and was, understandably, barely holding it together. Despite her distress, she trusted Joni, allowing her to ask the little girl a limited scope of questions.
Sara—tiny for her age, pretty as a picture, and without a scratch on her—had no idea how close she came to oblivion. I stood with Sara’s mom and watched, fascinated, as Joni gently elicited answers in her incisive, careful way.
Sara’s lisp stole my heart as she talked about how her dad picked her up early from daycare and bought her “ice cweam” before taking her to his “fwiend’s howse.”
Every time her little speech impediment asserted itself, a very dark part of me cheered on whoever had turned her father’s and the buyer’s last minutes into a grotesque vignette.
Good.
Ugh. I am unwell.
Sara explained that an older masked man with a “funny voiwce” surprised her dad and her dad’s friend, scaring them. Sara thought that was the height of comedy, giggling hysterically in the retelling.
Joni asked about the guy with the funny voice and discovered there had been another masked man “with spark-y bwue eyes and scawy cartoons on his hands,” who walked her to the station and watched her go in before leaving.
From what we could tell, Sara didn’t see any of the horror show and understood little of what was going on. Her mom agreed to update us if Sara remembered any other details.
After Sara and her mom left, Joni and I debriefed over stale coffee and a shared cigarette she fished from the bottom of her purse.
“Has anyone told you the department rumor?” she asks on a smoky exhale.
“About how Janice never contributes to the coffee, even though she drinks it more than anyone else?”
She laughs, the sound rusty after a day like today.
“No, but you’re not wrong,” she says, handing me the cigarette. “This is not unique to our city, but there have been rumors of a vigilante going around and killing really, really bad people in the Austin area for decades and getting away with it because there’s never enough evidence.”
My mouth falls open. “Are you serious? How could there not be enough evidence?”
She upnods me, and I hurry to take a hit of nicotine.
God, this tastes terrible.
“The crime scenes are immaculate. Never once has there been a single fingerprint, drop of DNA, or even a fucking hair follicle.” She takes the cigarette from me, another long inhale.
“Though most of the assholes in question have much, much easier deaths than what you saw today,” she says through a stream of smoke.
“Easier how?”
She tries to hand the cigarette back to me, and I gesture for her to finish it off. She takes another puff and gives me a long look as she exhales all those lovely carcinogens.
“There’s a suspicious number of really bad people—the worst of the worst— suddenly dying of previously unrecorded health issues,” she says, popping her brows.
“Think stroke, heart attack, aortic dissection, weirdly virulent cancers.” She drops the cigarette and stubs it out with her boot.
“Or they fall off the face of the planet entirely.”
“Jesus.” I palm my forehead. “I’ve literally never heard of this. Not a news headline, not a podcast, not a rumor, nothing.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” She lifts a shoulder. “Personally, I can’t tell if it’s a collective, unspoken collusion, or if there’s someone with their thumb on the scale.”
“Maybe all of the above,” I say, left to wonder if my father ever had a case like that, one where he looked the other way.
I doubt it, but if he did, it’d be because he thought it was the only way to keep the community safe.
“Given the scene you just witnessed, do you feel bad for the victims?” she asks, and I wonder, not for the first time, if she’s testing me.
“No,” I say honestly.
“Yeah, me either.”