CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Yeah, I understand that, I’m just trying to confirm that you two were playing together.
No, you’re not in trouble.” Marcus sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger.
“Dude, if I thought you had anything to do with it, I’d be flying to Des Moines to talk to you.
You live in freaking Des Moines. I know you didn’t kill someone in Chicago.
Was Michael Parker playing Guild Wars with you last night? ”
He rolled his eyes, pointed a finger gun at his head, and dropped his thumb. Kate frowned at the tasteless joke, but Marcus had resumed his pacing of their hotel room. “Okay, got it. Hey, thanks very much.”
He hung up and sighed. “Good God. It’s like there’s a language barrier between us and anyone under the age of twenty.”
“We’re not cool anymore, sorry to say.”
“I don’t want to be cool; I just want to know if Michael’s alibi is legit.”
“Is it?”
“Kid says Michael was playing with them. Took me fifteen minutes to convince him he didn’t need a damned lawyer, but he backs Michael up.”
“Do we believe him?”
“I believe that I really don’t want to call any more teenage gamers.”
“I can call if you want me to.”
Marcus sighed. “Honestly… Yeah, I believe him. Michael strikes me as the type to show up and stab Derek Hammond on impulse. He doesn’t strike me as the type to spend an hour carving an essay in shorthand on the desk after.”
Kate frowned. “Shit. He mentioned the commandment killings.”
Marcus snapped his head toward her. “What?”
“During the interview. He mentioned that Hammond was one of the commandment killings. We haven’t released that information to the media.”
“Shit, Kate.”
Marcus rolled his eyes and grabbed his shoes. Kate’s chest stung, and she said, “I’m sorry. He mentioned my father, and—”
She clammed up, but it was too late. Marcus spun around and glared at her. “And it’s happening again.”
It wasn’t a question.
“No, it isn’t happening again. I made was a mistake. We’ll go correct it now, and everything will be fine.” Marcus sighed heavily. “Marcus, it’s not…”
She stopped herself, once again too late.
“It is a big deal, Kate! Damn it…” He shook his head.
“You know not every murder we investigate is about you, right? I get that Cox said some shit to you, but do you get that Cox is a pathological liar who might want you to believe it’s about you because it makes you emotional and rash and weakens your ability to investigate? ”
She flinched and stared at him, but he didn’t back down or apologize. “I’ve stuck my neck out for you time and time again. Winters might lose her job because of you. And every single damned time Cox’s scent is anywhere near a case, you do this. You lose control and fall apart.”
“How am I falling apart, Marcus? I’m exploring a very real and very valid avenue of investigation.”
“Have you confirmed with Winters that this is a commandment killing?”
“She sent us here because it’s a commandment killing.”
“So, no.”
Kate’s nostrils flared, but her anger came from guilt, and she knew it. She might not be losing control, but Winters had asked her time and time again to keep her in the loop any time Cox was even tangentially related to an investigation.
Because Kate had lost control before.
“Well, you don’t have to stick your neck out for me anymore,” she said curtly.
“That’s not what I’m—”
Her phone buzzed. Marcus fell silent, looking over her shoulder, frowning darkly. Kate picked up the phone, and her heart dropped all the way to her feet. “Shit. It’s Whitaker.”
“Lovely.”
She answered, and Whitaker said, “Hey, guys. I’m sorry to tell you this, but we have another body. Looks a lot like Hammond’s.”
Her shoulders slumped, and Marcus didn’t need to ask what happened to know. Kate lifted a trembling hand to her face. “Who?”
“Lady named Michelle Santos. She’s a nurse at Midwest Regional Hospital.
Neighbor found her. Heard the smoke alarm from next door and came in to see a pot pie burnt to cinders in the oven.
Michelle was lying in front of it. The oven, not the pie.
Same wounds. Same weird ass symbols but this time carved into the floor next to her. ”
Kate nodded. “Where was this?”
“Buffalo Grove. It’s about forty-five minutes up the lake.”
Kate sighed. They’d dropped Michael Parker off at his home a half hour ago. That meant there was no way he could be the killer.
She sighed. “Okay. Thank you. Send me the address. We’ll meet you there.”
“Sure thing.”
She hung up and passed the news along to Marcus.
He listened without interruption, a wonderful skill of his that he applied even when he was royally pissed at her.
When she finished, he said, “Okay. Well, Michael’s not the killer.
I still want to know how he knew about the commandments, but I’ll delegate that to the police department while we go figure out what happened to… What was her name again?”
“Michelle Santos.”
“Right.” He scratched the top of his head and muttered, “What a day.”
“Worse for Michelle than for us.”
***
The mask Kate wore would stop asbestos particles from entering her lungs, or so the firefighters on scene assured her, but it did nothing to stop the acidic carbon odor of crisped pot pie, twisted aluminum, and evaporated Teflon from mixing with the metallic scent of blood to turn her stomach.
The fire was long put out, but a haze still filled the air. It lent a strange combative aspect to the scene, as though Kate had come across a fallen soldier rather than a murdered nurse.
“Christ, what a mess,” Whitaker remarked. “Killer could have at least turned the oven off.”
“I think the six pints of blood soaking into the floor might be a little more problematic than smoke dust,” Marcus said.
Michelle Santos had indeed vacated all of her blood. She lay face down on the floor, allowing every ounce of the fluid to escape through the hole in her chest. It occurred to her that she hadn’t asked the ME about the murder weapon yet. She made a note to call after she was done here.
In the meantime, she studied their newest victim. Santos was in her mid-forties, of a sturdy build with strong forearms and thick thighs. Her chestnut brown hair was cut into a shorter style, not Pixie cut and not Karen chic but somewhere in between. She was barefoot but still wore her scrubs.
“Same thing,” Whitaker said, gesturing at the body. “Stabbed through the heart. Pretty much says everything.”
“How did the killer enter?”
“Neighbor says the back door was unlocked when she came over.”
“Have we confirmed her alibi?”
“We’ve confirmed that she can’t stand straight without her walker. That good enough?”
Marcus nodded. “Okay, so we have a real estate baron accused of murdering his partner. Any reason why a nurse might have been offed?”
Kate grimaced. “Do you have to talk like that?”
“Right now? Yeah, I do. I’m mad. Talking like this helps when I’m mad.”
“All right.”
Whitaker shook his head. “I assume the killer thinks she killed someone too?”
Kate glanced at the cipher scrawled into the fake wood flooring. The top line here, as at Hammond’s scene, was THO*U SHAULT TPHOT KEUL.
“They do,” she agreed. “Whitaker, look her up in court records. See if you can find the skeletons lurking in her past.”
“Yeah,” Whitaker said. “Sure thing.”
He seemed excited to get out of the house.
Kate couldn’t blame him. She’d encountered plenty of more gruesome scenes, but there was something viscerally disturbing about seeing someone’s body face down in a pool of their own blood.
The killer hadn’t bothered to stage her. They just stabbed her and let her fall.
That was another difference between these murders and the previous commandment killings. In the previous murders, the bodies had always been moved, even if only a little bit. But both Derek Hammond and Michelle Santos had been left where they fell.
“I’m gonna talk to the neighbors,” Marcus said. “See if they noticed anyone suspicious. A vehicle or something.”
Kate nodded. Marcus stepped outside, and Kate took pictures of the cipher and the scene.
This message was just as long as the previous one.
That told Kate that the killer and victim hadn’t made noise.
If the next-door neighbor cared enough to walk over on her walker and enter a smoke-filled house to check on Santos, then she would have reacted immediately to a scream.
Did the victims recognize the killer? Could that be why they didn’t cry out or try to run?
She thought of Derek Hammond’s face, the resigned expression cast up to Heaven as he sat in his chair, his life’s blood drained to the floor. Maybe they both believed they deserved their end.
She stepped out of the house to find Whitaker smoking a cigarette. He saw her and dropped it on the ground, tamping it with his foot. His face was a waxy color that reminded her a little too much of the dead body in the living room behind her.
“Sheesh,” he said. “Don’t know what it is about this that gives me the creeps so much.”
“These killings tend to have that effect on people.”
“You think it’s that guy again?” Whitaker said. “Cox?”
“Well, he’s in prison, but yes, I think he influenced this killer just like he’s done before.”
“God.” Whitaker shivered. “It’s like he’s Satan or something whispering into people’s ears.”
Kate allowed herself a small smile as she imagined Cox reacting to being called Satan.
It was an apt analogy, though, wasn’t it?
The Mormons believed that Lucifer was once God’s most cherished companion, equal to Jesus in stature.
His fall came not because he wanted to supplant God but because he had a different idea about bringing people to God.
Jesus wanted to show people the way to a close relationship with God and leave the choice up to them.
Lucifer wanted to force people to comply with God’s commandments and believed forgiveness was inappropriate.
There was only obedience. Only judgment.
Forgiveness, if it was granted, came from absolution, and absolution came from sacrifice.
“Did you get information on Santos yet?”
“Court didn’t have anything under that name,” Whitaker told her. “I gave them her social security number, pulled it from the card in her wallet. They’re looking into it, and they’ll get back to me.”
Kate nodded. Marcus trudged across the lawn to them. The flashing lights of the police cruisers and fire engines made him look larger somehow, like a mammoth churning through fog.
“Neighbor didn’t see anything, but there’s a service road in the ditch behind the neighborhood. The killer would have to climb a chain-link fence, but that could be where they got in. I saw tire tracks. Looks like a compact vehicle, narrow width.”
“I’ll have Buffalo Grove PD take a look,” Whitaker said. “In the meantime, unless you guys want to keep digging around here, I say we go back to the precinct. As information comes in, we can organize it and build a profile.”
Kate nodded again. She nearly asked Whitaker for one of his cigarettes, but Marcus was pissed enough at her without seeing her smoking a cancer stick. “All right. That works for me. We’ll follow you.”
As they drove away from the scene of Cox’s latest victim, Kate tried to put herself in the shoes of the killer.
At the core of every commandment killing was the belief that the killings were justified.
These weren’t murders, they were corrections.
From the killer’s mind, she was only fixing mistakes made by others, bringing the world more in line with the one God intended.
Only it wasn’t God. Cox might not realize it or accept what he knew deep down to be the truth, but it wasn’t God he was serving.
Every sect of Christianity believed that Jesus was God’s chosen messenger, His Son sent to absolve the world of its sins through kindness and love.
Only one of God’s children rejected that message and insisted that punishment and sacrifice was the true path to salvation.
When Cox got on his knees to pray, it wasn’t Jesus who heard his prayers.
And it wasn’t the Holy Spirit who guided the knife that killed Michelle Santos.