Skye Cree 02: The Bones Will Tell Page 15

  Her hands snaked under his shirt where she ran her nails along his toned stomach. While working his boxers down and off, the breath whooshed out of her as he deftly reversed their positions.

  Hunger roared up. Limbs tangled. Lips met. Tongues mated. Teeth nipped at soft flesh, grazed along tender skin.

  His mouth settled at her breast. Suckling, long and hard, he lingered, drawing out the pleasure for both of them before moving down her body. Hovering over her, and then into her.

  Warmth spread. The ripples made her shudder like rolling sprays of sea and foam. The spurt of climax burst forth powerful as lightning streaking across a thundery sky. Longing for more took root and bloomed as Josh drove, pumped, harder, faster. Glassy layers built, fast and hot, glory waiting at the edge.

  Sinking, they plunged in free fall through the brilliant shine of shimmering gilded tide. The ebb and flow rushed them along melding heart and soul as one.

  After a night tossing and turning, Josh wasn’t surprised when the phone woke him at ten minutes after eight. Trying not to disturb Skye, he rolled to his left to reach the ringing cell. Squinting, he grappled with the device before sticking it to his ear. The guy on the other end didn’t bother with preliminaries.

  “Look, I hate to do this since it’s a rainy Monday morning, but I need you guys out at Brittany’s Landing A.S.A.P.”

  Josh recognized Harry’s voice. “So that’s where he hit. Skye and I wondered. That’s only eight blocks from here. Let me guess. Single woman alone who lived in a gated community, felt safe and secure behind the walls. Our psycho had been there before and tampered with an upstairs balcony door to get in. He started the attack by slicing open her arm first…her right arm. It was another violent assault because he got pissed off that she wouldn’t do what he wanted fast enough.”

  “How the hell do you know all that?” Harry barked.

  “Let’s just say, I had a restless night. Give me the address.”

  Forty-five minutes after Harry’s call and sitting in traffic for a short eight blocks, they pulled up to a gated subdivision. The place was fairly typical of an area that hadn’t needed a wall when the homes were built decades earlier to keep people out. But today, with all the police cars coming and going, the sliding gate between two stone pillars had been left open. After all, its presence hadn’t prevented a serial killer from breaching the false sense of security.

  They passed manicured lawns covered with autumn leaves and orderly flower beds bursting with fiery colors. While the tips of evergreens, heavy with rain dipped and swayed in the breeze, the dreary morning couldn’t hide the fact that murder had taken place in the otherwise peaceful setting.

  The address turned out to be what was commonly referred to in the region as a “Seattle box” also known up and down the West Coast as an “American Four Square.” This one wasn’t a typical “Prairie School” design but more in the vein of Spanish revival with its arched portico, red-tiled roof, and painted white stucco exterior.

  “Hard to believe such horror occurred in such a cute little house,” Skye noted, crawling out of the Fusion.

  “Maybe that’s why he picked it. Look around you,” Josh pointed out. “This one is more ornate, sticks out from the rest because of its color and unique design, a tad more upscale than the others.”

  “You’re right,” Skye agreed, scanning the row of houses. “It does make a statement, attractive outside and trendy. He might consider the house and the gate something of a challenge.”

  “And the woman inside,” Josh finished.

  Harry met them at the curb, tossed two pairs of latex gloves at them. “Put these on. You know the drill. I appreciate you getting here so fast. Our victim is Kathy Monroe. Single but lives with her mother, Louise Monroe. Louise happened to be out of town on her first vacation since getting her daughter out of high school.”

  “High school? How old is Kathy?”

  “Just twenty years old, Skye. Youngest one so far. We haven’t even been able to get hold of the mother yet. Coroner’s here, but I’ve held the crime scene techs at bay because I wanted you guys to take a look at the bedroom first.”

  Harry sent Josh a steely glance and said, “You may think you know what he did in there, but if you ask me, it’s another one for the books. He went ballistic on the victim. Cut her face up, cut off a breast, mutilated the rest of the corpse.”

  Josh cringed. “The one on the left, the left breast, that is. I forgot to mention that when you called. I wasn’t fully awake yet.”

  “What a homicidal freak,” Skye uttered as they followed Harry into a rustic Saltillo entryway with bold tones in cinnabar and spattering flecks of blue and jade-green accents. Skye did her best to get her mind off what waited in another part of the house.

  Harry went up a curved staircase with Mexican inlaid tiles dotting the steps. Just as she’d decided that maybe the iron sconces on the walls added a nice touch, they reached the second floor landing—and she caught the iron smell of blood and death. Without anything on her stomach, Skye almost gagged.

  But all of a sudden Josh stopped outside one door to the right of where they walked. Skye peered inside, saw it was the master bedroom. She watched as Josh drifted farther into the interior until he stood at the French doors. Even with the dismal weather outside, a wash of pearly light snaked in, one slice stretching across the room causing an eerie glow.

  “He came in through here. Before that he used a chair from the patio to climb up to the roof and swing over to this balcony.”

  “Why didn’t he just use the front door?” Skye wondered aloud.

  “He’s an adrenaline junkie,” Josh answered flatly.

  “That plays into our local athlete theory,” Skye pitched back.

  “Local athlete?” Harry asked with a surge of disdain rolling through him at the prospect of that. He rubbed his aching temple. “That’s all we need is to learn this bastard is in the public eye. You really think this guy might be well-known in the area?”

  “Why else wear the mask?” Skye said. “If just one person recognizes him and you guys get any type of decent composite, he’s toast. He knows it. So he protects his face.”

  “Maybe he has scars or tattoos on his face that stand out. That would be noticeable to a victim,” Harry said hopefully.

  “Or maybe he’s a cop or a firefighter,” Skye countered, shooting Harry a challenged stare. At the incredulous look Harry gave her, she added, “They’re known adrenaline junkies, Harry. It’s a fact. You have to keep an open mind here.”

  “Without a survivor to ID him, everything is speculation,” Josh surmised. When Harry grumbled at that, Josh went on, “Whatever he is, by the time he walked in through these doors, he was already wearing the mask. So it figures that hiding his face is the first step once he decides to head inside. There has to be a reason he hides his face, Harry.”

  “At this point, I just don’t want to consider that our guy’s a cop, okay?” Harry fired back.

  “I know you don’t,” Josh said in response. “But Skye’s right. Keeping the door open to possibilities will maybe catch him in the net faster. Whoever he is he’s physically fit.”

  Josh took a few steps over to the bed. “This is where he took off his clothes. Once he got undressed, he took out his knife and his gun from the black bag he carries. But it was the knife he took down the hall with him to use on the victim. He left the gun behind. Not his usual norm.”

  “He didn’t use a gun here?” Skye asked, glancing over at Harry for confirmation. When she saw Harry bob his head, she asked Josh, “Any chance you see this guy at all before he puts on his mask, say when he’s climbing up.”

  Josh shook his head. “It’s too dark. It’s always some damn thing that prevents me from seeing this guy’s face. I’m sick of it,” he groused as he realized he’d spoken out loud.

  “Okay, you have most of it right,” Harry admitted. “We found a sturdy teak chair under the lowest eave of the house that helped him get up onto
the roof where he crawled along to the balcony. And once he finished with Kathy, the man pretty much strolled out the front door, leaving the chair right where he’d left it.”

  “He doesn’t seem concerned about leaving his DNA behind.”

  “That and the fact he doesn’t seem to care about taking the time to tidy up his crime scenes anymore either. Come on, I’ll show you what I mean. You need to see this.” Harry took a right out the door and continued down to another bedroom, this one smaller in size.

  “The coroner started counting stab wounds but quit after reaching one hundred,” Harry said as he stood back to let Josh and Skye get their first peek.

  This time it was Skye who wasn’t prepared for the viciousness of the attack. Her gloved hand flew to her mouth while she used the other one to steady herself on the doorframe.

  Kathy’s nude body lay on the floor to the left of the bed, her head bumped up against the nightstand, a bloody mass of tissue and bone. He’d done his best to pose her but since he’d obviously hacked his way down Kathy’s torso in a fit of frenzy, there wasn’t much left intact to prop up.

  The blood splatter indicated overkill and would likely help some tech in the lab to provide the angle of impact. But Skye didn’t think it’d be necessary. Josh was right. If the madman had brought a gun here he had settled for the knife. He’d spent some time over the twenty-year-old in order to dice and chop.

  Skye glanced at the walls. Cast-off might show his swing and movements, maybe even the depth of his rage. But again, Skye didn’t need an expert to tell her the killer’s wrath had caused him to lose control in this very spot. So much so that he had left telltale signs. One of which was Kathy’s mutilated lower abdomen. Because he’d left her legs spread, Skye could make out the disfigured genital area.

  “This guy is sick. He’s either trying to make a statement or he’s losing it flat out,” Skye mumbled, as she bit back the urge to barf.

  “Probably both,” Harry agreed.

  Skye had just started to back out to find a bathroom when she thought of something. “I don’t understand. Why do this kind of carnage to the bodies of Tracy and Kathy, but not Julie and Sylvia? Even though he spent extra time with Sylvia and Julie our guy didn’t go off on them, not like this, while Tracy and Kathy caught most of his blade work.”

  “It’s all about how angry he happens to get during the assault. Julie and Sylvia probably did their best to give him what he wanted early on,” Josh reasoned. “He rewarded them by not chopping them up.”

  “But the result is the same,” Skye uttered in agreement, clearly fighting to keep the one cup of coffee she’d had down. “Even if they cooperate, he has no intentions of letting them live.”

  Josh nodded. “He goes out to kill with a certain amount of surface rage anyway right on the fringe. But then if things don’t happen to go exactly as he’d planned, he lets the fury loose for real. And if you ask me, it’s getting worse.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.” Skye turned to study Josh. “An adrenaline junkie would want it to get worse, egg it on, wouldn’t he?”

  “In order to keep upping the ante each time, making sure he took it up a notch? Yeah, he would. He’s losing patience with his targets a lot quicker than he did before. When he might have spent some time talking to them, maybe trying to calm them down in some way with reassuring words so they wouldn’t panic, now he just starts cutting.”

  “And doesn’t know when to stop,” Skye finished.

  Chapter Sixteen

  By six o’clock in the evening, single mom Janie Holliman was about ready to drop. She’d already put in twelve hours on her feet, nine of which occurred at her busy hair stylist job—where she routinely had to deal with difficult customers—mostly walk-ins who weren’t regular clients and liked to grumble.

  If her day had only ended then and there when she had walked out of the salon, it might’ve been different. But after picking up her three-year old son, David, from daycare, she’d noticed he was running a fever. His little chubby cheeks had been beet red and he’d kept grabbing at his left ear. A sure sign an ear infection loomed. Another stop at the urgent care facility had confirmed her suspicions. Poor baby had to start a round of amoxicillin which meant a second stop at the pharmacist to get his prescription filled.

  Janie didn’t reach her little bungalow in Olympic Hills until almost six-forty-five. She’d barely gotten dinner prepared, when her ex, and David’s father, decided to change his visitation days for the upcoming weekend, which meant she’d spent twenty minutes on the phone with another irritable male.

  But after finally getting her cranky toddler to go down for the night, Janie poured herself a glass of wine, a decent chardonnay she’d tossed in the cart as an afterthought while she’d waited for the pharmacist to fill David’s prescription at the drug store.

  Sinking down on the sofa, she resisted the urge to sigh at getting to sit down. She pulled the afghan from off the back of the couch and wrapped it around herself, got comfortable. She clicked the remote past reruns of The Golden Girls and opted instead for an episode of Friends. But as the wine kicked in and the long day caught up with her, she noted the time on the cable box. It read ten-fifteen. As her lids began to flutter closed, right before sleep took hold for real, Janie’s last thought was of her son. She hoped like hell the antibiotic she’d given her baby boy would work its magic and make him feel better by morning. Knowing full well his daycare wouldn’t take him if he showed signs of being ill, she couldn’t help but wonder how angry her boss would be when she had to call in sick tomorrow.

  Exhaustion and the wine soon had her drifting off.

  An hour and a half later a sound woke her from a deep sleep. Before her eyes could open, she thought she heard something outside the house. A stray cat or dog maybe?

  Minutes passed as she fought the dregs of sleep and the inability to come fully awake. Ignoring the patter of footsteps coming from somewhere in the house, she thought she heard a dragging sound.

  She groaned slightly and moved her head a little deciding she should probably get up to check on David. Had her three-year-old gotten up to pee or worse, to throw up? Or maybe he did feel better and he’d gotten up to play with his brand-new race-car set.

  But about the same time Janie tried to toss off the throw and stand up, her eyes landed on the nude man no more than three feet away standing at the end of the couch.

  Janie knew she was in trouble when she saw the mask that covered his entire face, even his neck. In the dim light, the God-awful cloth had an eerie sheen to it. Just as she opened her mouth to scream, a gloved hand clamped down over her mouth, his other hand closed tightly around her throat. Janie felt the strength in his fingers as he lifted her head off the cushion, all the while keeping his grip squeezed so that she had a hard time swallowing, even breathing. The thought went through her mind he could easily snap her neck.

  “Make a sound and I’ll kill your son. Nod if you understand me,” the man whispered.

  Janie’s head moved up and down as she sucked in his breath and smell, a sickening blend of cinnamon Tic Tacs and aftershave. The familiar scent of Paco Rabanne drifted to her nose. The strong fragrance had her looking up into his brown eyes. Vacant and cold, she could tell they simmered with anger and a lot of it.

  She watched him reach down to the floor with one hand, retrieve several short strands of nylon rope.

  While he looped the first cord around her wrists, her son ran into the room.

  Three-year-old David yelled, “Mommy, mommy, who’s dat man?”

  The second Janie saw her attacker turn his head toward David, she bucked. Hard. With her entire body. The force was enough to jostle him off her. Janie clenched her hand into a fist and belted the asshole square in the side of his nose. She hit him so hard, blood squirted back onto her hand. When he rolled off her, holding both his hands up to his now broken nose, Janie didn’t stop her momentum. Determined, she brought her foot up and kicked his crotch as hard a
s she could. Janie never waited for him to double over.

  Scooting off the sofa, she scooped up David and bolted for the front door. Flipping the lock back, she threw it open and dashed outside. As soon as she reached the yard, she never stopped running. With her son clutched to her chest, she started screaming her head off—all the while making a mad dash across the lawn to Tara Cosgrove’s house next door.

  Janie didn’t quit until she hit Tara’s front porch where she bounded up the steps and began hitting the doorbell in rapid succession. When that did nothing, she started pounding on the door until she saw a light finally come on inside the house.

  As soon as Tara’s husband, Charlie determined it was their neighbor, Janie, he turned the lock to let her in. Janie pushed her way inside. As she rocketed past Charlie, only then did she allow herself to fall apart.

  The single mom collapsed on the floor.

  Officers Curtis Broward and his partner, Gary Pitts arrived on the scene seven and a half minutes after Charlie Cosgrove dialed nine-one-one. Charlie met them on the lawn. Pointing over to Janie’s little cottage, he directed, “That’s where it happened. She and her boy are in my living room scared to death.”

  After getting the story from Charlie, both cops did a cursory walk-thru of the little two-bedroom house, then checked the small backyard. It didn’t take long for them to realize the perp had left the premises. After interviewing Janie Holliman and getting a vague description of a naked assailant, wearing a mask over his face, approximately six feet in height, Officer Broward put out a BOLO for a prowler in the vicinity.

  After discussing it with his partner, Officer Pitts decided to file the incident report as an attempted rape. Neither man thought to call anyone on the task force.

  In sleep, Josh replayed the woman’s escape with her little boy. As if rooting from the sidelines, he breathed a heavy sigh of relief the minute she’d gotten outside as she ran across the lawn carrying her son. He might not know her name, but he knew what she looked like, knew the fear he’d seen in her green eyes.