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