Читать книгу I'll Be Watching You - Tracy Montoya - Страница 9

Stifling a yawn with his fist, Detective Daniel Cardenas wondered not for the first time what the hell he was doing up at oh-dark-hundred in the morning, several hours before his shift was supposed to start. His dashboard clock read 3:07 a.m. as he maneuvered his unmarked Crown Victoria slowly through the gauntlet of blue-and-whites lining East Alvarado Street, their flashing lights creating an eerie, pulsing red halo around the small neighborhood. It was normally considered one of Monterey, California’s, “safer” areas.

Not tonight, obviously.

When his partner had called him down here, she hadn’t bothered to give him any details. But something in her normally no-nonsense voice had sent his cop sense into overdrive, and he knew it was shut-up-and-go time. So he shut up, hung up and went. All without his usual morning jolt of caffeine.

God, he would have sawed off his right arm for some coffee.

Pulling his car alongside the curb, about a block away from the small shotgun-style bungalow at the center of all the activity, Daniel got out and made his way back toward 447 East Alvarado. Radio chatter had indicated a homicide had taken place, and from the fact that every cop in the metro area and then some seemed to be parked on this one street, it wasn’t going to be a pretty one.

He walked under a streetlight, and the sudden brightness of its tungsten lamp shining down upon him made his head throb. Ahead, some neighborhood residents huddled together in a tight, worried-looking group, occasionally craning their necks or shuffling from side to side to see what was going on. Unfortunately for them, an ambulance with two very jittery-looking EMTs leaning against it blocked their view. As if sensing his approach, one of the women onlookers turned around and broke away from the group when she saw him.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, tightly clutching the lapels of her ratty red bathrobe together with one hand. “Are you with the police? Because I didn’t know the girls who lived there well, but…”

“Ma’am, at this point, I don’t know any more than you do,” he said politely. “But—”

“It’s our right to know,” she said, falling into step beside him. “Our taxes pay your salary, young man. I won’t—”

Without breaking his stride, Daniel slanted a cool look at her.

“Oh, well, I—” Patting her hair, she scurried back among her friends, the rest of her statement hanging unfinished in the air. He wasn’t allowed to dole out any information to people who weren’t next of kin this early in the game. And he definitely wasn’t spilling his guts to the neighborhood gossip at any point. They were pretty much the only ones who tried to play the we-pay-your-taxes card.

Then again, if she’d come at him with a double-shot espresso, he might have been persuaded to make something up on the spot.

As he approached the yellow tape that cordoned off the scene, a street cop strode across the front yard to meet him, backlit by one of the homicide squad’s portable spotlights. Daniel flashed his badge, then ducked under the tape without waiting for the guy’s blessing. As expected, the uniform gave him a curt nod and backed off.

“Cardenas!” A. J. Lockwood, a seasoned detective who’d been with the MPD since the beginning of time, bounded down the home’s front steps and crossed the yard to Daniel. Judging from his expression, whatever was inside was going to be bad. Generally, the grislier the scene, the blacker Lockwood’s dark sense of humor became. But tonight the man’s ever-present sardonic grin was nowhere in sight.

Not a kid. Please don’t let it have been a kid.

“Janie Sanchez, graduate student at the Language Institute,” Lockwood said in greeting, not even bothering with normal pleasantries like “hello” or “you look like hell.”

“She’s our homicide?” Daniel asked.

“Oh, yeah.” Lockwood’s square jaw clenched and worked, but instead of launching into a description of the scene, he merely narrowed his flinty gaze at Daniel. “So what do you look so chipper for? I’ve been up for an hour now, and I still feel like hell. Borkowski says she got ahold of you, like, two minutes ago, and you look as if you were lying in bed in that suit, waiting for someone to call.”

Truth was he felt about as chipper as a pile of roadkill. An uncaffeinated pile of roadkill.

Then again, he’d long ago realized that what was going on inside his head didn’t often show up on his face, whether he realized it or not.

“Who’s that over there in the bushes?” Daniel asked, jerking his head toward the cop bent over the shrubbery a few feet away, making the most god-awful noises.

“Rookie. He’s been yakking all over the place since he got here.”

Great, one of those cases. “That bad?”

Lockwood gave a small grunt that would have been a short laugh under normal circumstances. “Worse. I felt like yakking. Don’t tell anyone.” He glanced back at the house’s open doorway, which was blocked by a short, stocky uniform who looked like a human fireplug, standing guard. Someone had drawn the curtains inside.

“It’s…” Lockwood blew out a long, slow puff of air. “Damn, Cardenas, I think he’s back.”

With that one sentence, the fatigue Daniel felt abruptly vanished. There was only one “he” in their shared history on the force—maybe even in the history of the entire city—that could make a rookie lose his breakfast and put the fear of God into a veteran like Lockwood.

Impossible.

Pushing past Lockwood without so much as a goodbye, he propelled himself through the small mass of his colleagues milling around outside, past the cluster of EMTs standing around with nothing to do. Taking the three front steps in two strides, he entered the house, all but ignoring the crime-scene techs taking flash photographs in the front sitting room as he followed the noise to the living room in the middle.

The few detectives in the room parted like the Red Sea when he entered, revealing his grim-faced partner standing over a body. Detective Liz Borkowski looked up as he approached, her normally pale, Irish-and-Polish complexion gone as white as bone.

“Five-point ligature marks on the ankles, wrists and neck,” one of the crime-scene techs murmured from a few feet away, obligingly describing the horror in the room to another tech who held a video camera.

Janie Sanchez’s body lay sprawled out on a blood-soaked rug in front of the living room’s brick fireplace. She’d been deliberately posed in a demeaning, spread-eagle fashion, her head tilted to the side, giving her the look of a broken marionette. Her glassy, unseeing eyes stared at something beyond the ceiling.

He’d seen this all before. He could have described the scene to the crime lab’s video camera with his eyes closed.

Because he still dreamed about the others. They all did.

“…fishing line still wrapped around the victim’s ankles and wrists…” The tech’s monotone was the only sound in the room besides everyone else’s breathing. “…defensive wounds on her hands…”

The vulnerable, taut skin on Janie’s bare stomach had been carved through repeatedly with a knife that had left her abdomen raw and mutilated.

Somebody’s sister. Somebody’s daughter.

“…multiple lacerations on her body, concentrated mostly on her abdominal area, where they appear to be in a gridlike pattern…”

Detach. He had to forget about who she’d been, and focus on who had killed her.

But how did you tell someone their daughter, their sister, their friend and neighbor had been killed by a ghost?

A ghost that hadn’t walked for four years.

Where’ve you been, Elijah Carter?

The newspapers had come up with a more colorful name for the man who’d stalked and killed eleven women, who’d crossed the country from Louisiana and California, escalating until the last few had died not mercifully or quickly, but a long, slow, torturous death he wouldn’t have wished on the worst of criminals. They called him The Surgeon. Because he liked to carve up women in his special, singular, painstaking way.

Daniel refused to call him that. Whatever he was, he was still just a man.

A man who’d apparently risen from the dead.

He crouched down beside Janie and found himself staring at one of her hands. Her slim fingers curled slightly upward, tipped with bubblegum-pink, carefully tended nails that were now caked with blood. Her wrists were red and swollen from where he’d tied them.

He looked at her face. She’d been a pretty girl.

Somebody’s sister. Somebody’s daughter.

“Who found the body?” he asked Liz, as she knelt down beside him.

“Roommate,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse. “She’s outside.”

“…multiple lacerations to the abdomen, cuts most likely made with a serrated-edge blade,” the tech droned on.

Serrated edge. Because Elijah Carter liked to rip, not slice.

“What do you think, Liz?” he asked quietly, and every person in the room strained to hear his partner’s answer. Along with Lockwood, the two of them had been on the special FBI-Monterey PD task force four years ago that had cornered Elijah Carter on the rock-strewn shores of the Pacific Ocean. They’d been down this damn road before.

Something small and vulnerable flickered across his partner’s face. She was probably thinking of her own daughters, one just a couple of years younger than Janie Sanchez.

“Copycat.” She lifted her head to look him square in the eye. “Unofficially speaking.” She pointed with a latex-gloved hand to the victim’s torn-up stomach. “Carter used to carve a very precise grid into his victims. Three lines down, four across.”

She would know.

“This victim has four lines down, four across. And that’s not the only thing that’s off.” Borkowski bent down to trace a finger gently along the vicious bruising across the young woman’s neck.

“That looks as if someone strangled her with a strap of some sort,” Daniel said, crouching down on the other side of the body. “Carter liked to use his hands.”

“Exactly.”

“Signatures can change over time, Borkowski. Sure we have some variation, but the overall theme is still there.”

Signatures were behaviors that went beyond what was necessary to commit a crime, and fulfilled a killer’s twisted psychological needs. Repeatedly strangling his victims and reviving them was one of Carter’s signature behaviors. Cutting that grid into her abdomen was a signature behavior. He’d changed things up a bit, but it still might be Elijah Carter. Or, as Borkowski obviously hoped, it might not.

“The M.E. will have to tell us for sure, but I think she may have been sexually assaulted, too,” Liz said. “Carter never did that. That would change his MO. Which just doesn’t happen.”

Daniel made a point to keep his focus steady on the contusions on Janie Sanchez’s neck. It seemed like another violation to look at the rest of her body while having this discussion.

“Dammit, Cardenas, it has to be a copycat.”

He jerked his head up in surprise—his tough-as-nails partner never let her emotions show. Not like that—imposing her own interpretation on a crime scene because she couldn’t bear to think of the alternative.

She didn’t meet his eye, instead rising from the ground. Squaring her shoulders, she came back to herself and started barking orders. She swept from the room, and everyone else hustled to comply with her commands, obviously relieved to have something to occupy their too-busy minds.

As Daniel rose, Lockwood approached him.

“Up until 1905, it was legal in China to execute someone for a capital offense by lingchi , or the ‘death of a thousand cuts,’” Lockwood murmured as he, too, stared down at the body.

Daniel knew what he was talking about. The ancient form of capital punishment was reportedly as gruesome as the name suggested, with the executioner inflicting multiple nonlethal cuts all over the victim’s body, prolonging death until said victim finally expired from his cumulative wounds.

“Janie Sanchez died of a thousand cuts,” Lockwood continued. “Borkowski might want to insist it’s a copycat, but I don’t know…I’ve never seen another man who did that to his victims.”