Читать книгу Dark Matter - Cameron Cruise - Страница 9

Detective Stephen “Seven” Bushard stared at the body lying in the mud. The girl appeared nestled in the cordgrass, her legs and arms disappearing into the knee-high vegetation. She wore jeans and a Roxy T-shirt, the surfing brand, a favorite with young girls here at the beach.

The officer on the scene, one of Huntington Beach’s finest, had told Seven’s partner some Iron Man stud training for his next triathlon had found the body. This section of the wetlands, the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve, featured a one-and-a-half mile loop around a water inlet, the walking trail was part of a three-hundred-acre coastal sanctuary for wildlife and migratory birds. After thirty years of litigation, the restoration project had been the compromise between environmentalists and developers. Already minimansions with multimillion-dollar views had sprouted where Shoshone Indians had once hunted on the mesa. People still found cogged stones in the area, artifacts from an eight-thousand-year-old burial site soon to be paved over. Progress, Seven thought. Go figure.

Seven crouched down for a closer look. He had almost sixteen years on the force, eight of them in homicide, but he would never get used to this.

The way the girl was curled up in her bed of grass, she appeared to be sleeping. Her head was turned toward him, but three-quarters of her face was buried in the mud. Still, he could make out her youthful features.

Jesus, she’s just a kid.

He had to give the cop in him a mental kickstart. The wetlands might not be his jurisdiction, but if someone thought it was important for him to be here, he’d damn sure get the job done.

He took off his sunglasses to better examine the body. Most likely, the tide had dragged the victim here via the channel that cut through the Pacific Coast Highway. The waterway refreshed the wetlands with ocean water. To the tide, she’d be so much trash floating like the detritus left behind by the beachgoers every summer.

Seven took out his pen from inside his jacket and used it to gently push aside the cordgrass, exposing the girl’s left hand. There was obvious bruising around the wrist.

She’d been tied up.

He tried not to imagine the worst. Rape. Torture.

He pocketed his pen, searching for that objective observer inside. He’d given himself the pep talk on the ride over; he’d get it back, that ability to compartmentalize. The last year hadn’t tainted him forever. Any second now, he’d be able to hover over the dead girl’s body and search for clues like a good cop.

Only, the details that popped for him had nothing to do with murder. The glitter nail polish…her thick blond hair coiled in ringlets. When she was alive, those curls would circle her face like a crown.

He turned away, acting as if he was giving the crime scene investigator free rein to snap more stills. He stared up, focusing on the cloud cover overhead. The haze made for a steely morning sky. The same dull color reflected off the water trapped in the low marsh. The tide differentials would be at their highest this time of year—probably why the body was beached here.

Just last week, Seven had brought his eleven-year-old nephew to the Bolsa Chica. They’d been fishing down by Warner and the PCH. Posted signs told visitors of the Belding’s Savannah Sparrow, an endangered species that bred and nested here. Shore crabs grazed on algae and snowy egret high-stepped through the pickleweed. But Nick, he’d been all about the brown pelicans, watching them dive-bombing into the water for fish.

Really, the place was idyllic…if you didn’t count the dead body.

His partner, Erika Cabral, came to stand next to him. Her sunglasses looked huge on her face—designer, no doubt, the kind celebrities wore. Erika always said there wasn’t much she couldn’t fix with a little retail therapy.

“So why’d we get the call?” he asked. “Last time I checked, this is some sort of jurisdictional no-man’s land for the sheriff and Huntington Beach PD to sift through.”

She nodded. “An interesting question, no doubt.”

He gave it a minute. It was never good when Erika tried to hide something from him.

“That’s all you got?” he asked. “An interesting question?”

“A woman of mystery, that’s me.”

The Latina had always been a girly girl, one who regularly kicked his butt on the firing range. She was all of five feet two inches tall and had the classic good looks of a Penelope Cruz—dark hair, dark eyes, and lots of curves.

Only lately, Seven noticed she’d stepped it up a bit. Nice sweaters worn under fitted jackets, lip gloss that made her mouth look shiny and wet…as if the sexiest detective in Orange County needed any help in that area. The other day, she’d even mentioned that four letter word: diet.

And her hair. No more messy French twists or ponytails. Last week, he’d made the mistake of lobbing some weak compliment. The next thing he knew, he was listening to how she’d straightened her hair then used some big-barreled curling iron to get just the right wave, like she’d been possessed by the spirit of Revlon.

He figured there was a man involved. He hoped to hell it wasn’t that dick of a reporter he’d punched out last year. But then, Erika did like a challenge.

“So now we’re playing twenty questions?” he asked, still wondering what business two detectives from Westminster had in the Bolsa Chica.

“You say it like it’s a bad thing. Look, don’t stress, Seven. Why don’t you try taking a couple of breaths? Like this.” She demonstrated. “In through the nose, out through the mouth. It’s yoga. Good for whatever ails you.”

He gave her a look from beneath his aviator glasses. “You do yoga?”

“You think I keep this figure sitting behind a desk?”

He was thinking more like Krav Maga. Despite her petite size, his partner could kick some serious ass.

“You should come to a class with me sometimes.” She made an elaborate gesture with her hands around his head and shoulders. “Your aura. It could use some work.”

He didn’t let her see him smile. If there was anyone on this planet who didn’t believe in auras, it was his partner. Her Cuban mother had seen to that, spending a small fortune on espiritistas and santeros who promised cures…for the right price.

She nodded toward the body. “What do you see?”

“Ligature marks on the wrists.”

“The ankles, too.” She took a minute. “She hasn’t spent too much time in the water.”

He nodded. “Maybe she was dumped. She’s not a floater.”

A submerged body, a floater, decomposed at an accelerated rate. Within a day, or even hours depending on the temperature, anaerobic bacteria trapped in the intestines produced gases that distended the stomach cavity and bloated the body beyond recognition. Other than a little mud, the victim before him looked pristine.

“Not a drowning?” Erika ventured.

“Or a crime of passion.” He indicated the ligature marks. “Whoever killed her took his time.”

“Poor baby.” She seemed to be talking to the girl as if she could hear her. “We’re going to find the piece of shit that did this to you.”

Watching Erika there beside the girl, Seven got a flash of a different, even more disturbing image. His nephew, Nick, lying there in the mud.

Jesus, the girl was only a few years older than Nick.

He looked away, obliterating the image and getting back to business. “So who are we waiting for?” he asked, deducing that someone of authority had made the call to put them on the case. He glanced around at the milling law enforcement. “Or are we just supposed to stand around? Maybe twiddle our thumbs?”

She turned to look at him. “What? You want to go fishing? Maybe take a jog around the loop?”

“I was thinking more like roust a couple of budding ornithologists.” He nodded toward the wooden footbridge with its viewing platform. He could just make out the bird watchers and their telephoto lenses trained on the crime scene. “Maybe even before our victim shows up on the front page of the paper.”

“They’re birders,” Erika said, turning to look in their direction.

“Ornithologists, birders, same difference.”

“Actually, ornithology is the scientific study of birds.” She nodded toward the guys wearing camouflage and standing next to binoculars so big they required tripods. “The birders?” She lowered her voice suggestively. “They just like to watch.”

This time, he gave her the satisfaction of seeing him smile.

The word game had started last month after a night spent watching a rerun of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A couple of beers and several artery-clogging bowls of buttered popcorn later, they both claimed the superior vocabulary. Seven was pretty sure Erika kept score…and that she was ahead.

Having done her duty and sicced a uniform on the birders, Erika knelt next to the body. “Come look at this.”

Erika took out a pen from her jacket and carefully separated the strands of hair covering the girl’s neck.

“See that?” she asked.

There was a red mark on the neck, like a prick of some kind. The skin around it appeared discolored.

He crouched down alongside the girl and frowned. “What the hell is that? An injection site?”

“She has another one here,” Erika said pushing aside the cordgrass with her pen to indicate the top of the girl’s hand.

“Doesn’t look like track marks. Could it be some sort of bug bite, or a crab or a fish having had a go at the body?”

Erika shook her head. “Too uniform.”

His cell went off. Without taking his gaze off the strange mark, he reached for the phone on his hip. But it rang only once, stopping before he could answer.

“How’s Beth doing?” Erika asked, not even trying to disguise her distaste.

He ignored her and focused on the body and the curious marks. Erika assumed the call was from Beth, his sister-in-law, par for the course the last two years. That’s when Seven’s older brother, Ricky—the happily married man and Nick’s father, the perfect son to Seven’s prodigal—had pleaded guilty to second degree murder. Ricky, a plastic surgeon, had killed a male nurse, the man who’d been his lover.

Beth, Ricky’s wife, hadn’t exactly taken her husband’s betrayal in stride. She’d fallen into the bottle. It had been up to Seven and his family to keep the pieces together for Nick.

But now Beth was in AA. She was studying for her broker’s license. Sure, she’d lost the waterfront home and the fifty-five-foot yacht, the condo in Big Bear. She and Nick lived in a small house that Seven owned with his father…and she seemed happier than ever.

Only, Erika wasn’t the forgiving type. She hadn’t bought into Beth’s new lease on life, or the fact that she’d given up on her game of musical chairs with the Bushard brothers. According to Erika, Beth was only waiting for the ink to dry on her divorce papers before she made her move on him.

Out of the corner of his eye, Seven caught sight of a familiar movement. A strange prickling heated the back of his neck. Standing, he could feel his heart pumping hard as his body acknowledged the threat long before his brain could put the pieces together.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath.

Someone of authority had just arrived, all right.

The woman marching toward them was blond and tall with the lanky build of an Olympic high jumper. Her long-legged stride forced the tech beside her to give a little skip just to keep up. She wore black slacks and a blazer with a simple white blouse, and accessorized with the requisite dark aviator glasses. But the thing that stood out—what made him instantly recognize her—was that damn BlackBerry in her hand.

She was headed straight for Seven and Erika, instructing the crime-scene tech jogging alongside, while no doubt browsing the Web on her BlackBerry. Special Agent Carin Barnes liked to multitask.

“Getting back to those twenty questions,” he said to Erika. “Why exactly did two Westminster detectives get called in here?”

Erika stood, training her gaze on the blonde. “I think you skipped the part about it being bigger than a bread box.”

“A hell of a lot taller, anyway,” he said.

Bright and early, Erika had given him a call. A DB—a dead body—in the wetlands. Female. Very young. He’d gone into automatic; his partner was calling him to the scene of a crime. Why ask questions?

He frowned. The fucking FBI.

“Since when do you have an in with the feds?” he asked Erika.

She lowered her sunglasses for his benefit. “Honey, I have an in just about everywhere.”

She popped the glasses back on the bridge of her nose and stepped toward the approaching agent. Since he’d last seen Special Agent Carin Barnes, she’d clipped her hair boy-short. It was a valiant attempt at looking the part of tough federal agent but there was too much of willowy blonde there to achieve the proper effect.

The women shook hands. Seven and Carin Barnes were of a height, just under six feet. Standing next to Erika, the two made a curious picture: A Viking warrioress looming over a Pictish princess. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he knew those two wouldn’t waste time on pleasantries.

“Special Agent Barnes,” he said, bracing himself as the FBI agent came to a stop before him. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“I assume that’s your attempt at levity,” Barnes said, pocketing the BlackBerry, “which we both know is wasted on me. This isn’t the killer’s only victim. Megan Tobin of Henderson, Nevada. We found her last month, dumped just like this. She’d been cutting school. According to her best friend, she was meeting someone, an older man. Possibly a love interest. Megan was the second vic. We found Mark Dair three months before her, same MO.”

“Anything on Megan’s computer?” Seven asked.

A lot of times, these kids were lured into meeting some stranger after prolonged discussion over the Internet.

“Nothing,” Barnes responded.

“You’re sure they’re connected to our vic?” Seven asked.

“All three had these stones in their hands.”

She held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a flat, rounded stone, the kind used by kids to skip on the water. The surface had been carved with curious markings that reminded Seven of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

“An artifact?” Erika asked, not bothering to hide the surprise in her voice.

The fact was, Barnes wasn’t your ordinary FBI agent. She worked for NISA, the National Institute for Strategic Artifacts. The agency always reminded Seven of that last scene in that Indiana Jones flick, where a forklift takes the crated Ark of the Covenant and stores it in some enormous warehouse, giving the idea that the thousands of crates lining the aisles were filled with similar treasures never again to see the light of day.

Erika and Seven had first met Special Agent Carin Barnes ten months ago, while working on the fortune-teller murders. NISA stepped in when it turned out a local business tycoon, David Gospel, had managed to amass a sizable collection of mystical artifacts—all through the black market in antiquities. Unfortunately, the collection cost the man his life.

The story went that one of the artifacts was possessed by some evil spirit, having a kind of Hope Diamond curse. The spirit could attach itself to anyone who messed with the artifact—a crystal about the size of a man’s fist, called the Eye of Athena—turning them into rabid killers. Gospel’s wife ended up shooting him, but not before she and her son amassed some serious carnage.

Of course, Seven didn’t buy into the hocus pocus. One of the victims had been Gospel’s mistress. Seven liked the old-fashioned motive: Her man had done her wrong and Mrs. Gospel flipped her lid.

After they’d wrapped up the case, Seven had done a little research on NISA, but he hadn’t come up with much. It appeared that anything on the mysterious branch of the FBI was buried so deep, there was no sign of it on paper. Not even the conspiracy buffs on the Net had gotten wind of it.

“How many victims are we talking about?” Erika asked.

“This is our third. I think we’ll find our vic was drowned. That she’s fourteen years old. She would be missing exactly three weeks.”

“Jesus Christ,” Erika whispered. “A serial killer?”

“Toxicology?” Seven asked.

Barnes gave him a sharp look.

“Detective Cabral found what looks like injection sites at the jugular and on the back of her hand,” he said by way of explanation.

Barnes nodded. “We’re still sorting that out.”

Which was FBI-speak for he was on a need-to-know basis. Damn feds.

She turned with the precision of someone who hadn’t wasted her time during those drills at the academy. He’d give odds Special Agent Barnes had been at the top of her class at Quantico.

Just then, Barnes stopped and pivoted back, almost as if she’d forgotten something. She frowned, completely focused on Seven.

She took off her sunglasses. Her normally gray-blue eyes looked the color of gunmetal.

“Has Gia Moon contacted you?” she asked.

The question brought on a strange tingling sensation straight up his spine. He didn’t know why—there really wasn’t a connection—but he thought immediately about his cell phone and that single ring, almost as if whoever had called had changed their mind.

Gia.

“The psychic?” Erika asked, for the first time not looking so pleased with her buddy, Special Agent Barnes. “She called you?” she asked Seven, the question, almost an accusation.

“I haven’t heard from Gia in months,” he answered.

A genuine smile changed the agent’s normally guarded expression. For an instant, Barnes looked years younger than her thirty-five. He wasn’t sure why, but he found the expression disturbing.

She cocked one brow. “Interesting.” To Seven, she added, “You’ll let me know when she calls.”

Erika and Seven watched the agent stride off to meet with the local hoi polloi. Seven recognized investigation teams from both the city and the county. But then murder in the marshlands was heady stuff for the normally quiet beach community.

“I notice she didn’t say if she calls you,” Erika said.

Seven took out his cell. He had one missed call. He stared at the LCD screen, and punched up the number.

A name popped up: Gia.

That’s how he’d programmed her number into his cell, by her name.

“Why would Barnes bring up Gia Moon now?” Erika asked.

“The usual reason,” he told his partner, putting the phone away before she could see the screen. “To mess with our heads.”