Body of Lies (22 page)
He held her until he was certain she slept; then he carried her to his room where they would both be more comfortable. After arranging her under the covers, he went to the bathroom to wash up. When he returned to the smaller bedroom to retrieve his weapon, a thought occurred to him. How had Alex known that there were condoms in the nightstand drawer? Even he'd forgotten they were there. He wondered if there were more of them in there should the need arise. He hadn't had much reason to take a condom inventory of late.
He picked up his gun from the nightstand with one hand and slid open the drawer with the other. Amid a smattering of condoms lay a little .22 revolver that he knew didn't belong to him.
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Alex woke again while it was still dark. She didn't immediately recognize where she was but she knew the man lying beside her. His nose was buried against her neck and his arm draped over her belly. She inhaled and stretched without dislodging his contact with her body.
She let her breath out in a long slow sigh. If it weren't for the fact that they were both here and both nude, she could have imagined that last night had been a dream. She'd spent years wondering what it would be like if the two of them even got in the same bed again, but the reality outstripped what she'd imagined: sexy, hot, sweaty sex that rocked her down to her toes. It wasn't pretty but it was what she'd wanted. Other women might long for romantic interludes and pretty words. She preferred the honesty of what they'd shared.
She shifted on her side to face him more fully. His hand went to her hip, stilling her. “Quit wiggling around,” he said in a rough, sleepy voice. “I have to get up in an hour.”
She hadn't realized he was awake. The smile on his face told her he was teasing her, but he still hadn't opened his eyes. “I'm not wiggling. I'm getting comfortable.”
“Then come here.” He turned onto his back and pulled her into his arms. “Now hush.”
She laid her head on his shoulder and let her hand wander where it wanted to, over his chest, his belly, and lower. She liked his body, though it wasn't as tight as it had been in his twenties. He possessed a man's physique, not a boy's, now. She liked it especially that he groaned and his body jerked as her fingers closed around his shaft. She leaned up and whispered, “And I thought you said you wouldn't be up for another hour.”
He opened his eyes then and looked down at her incredulously. He shook his head. The Alex he'd known would never have made such a comment. Maybe he should understand right off that she wasn't the same girl anymore.
He flopped back against the pillows and closed his eyes. “Are all of you shrinks such perverts?”
She answered honestly, “Pretty much.”
He chuckled, but the next time he spoke his voice was more serious. “What are we doing here, Alex?”
She answered him truthfully again. “I don't know.” She only knew she didn't want to kill it through analysis. She didn't want any promises from him and she had none to give. She'd managed to do the impossible: let him in a little without giving away all her secrets. She never would if she could help it.
Last night he'd held her, he'd comforted her, and he'd loved her. That was enough for now.
She leaned over him and pressed her mouth to his. He responded by pulling her on top of him to straddle his body. And in a moment, nothing else mattered.
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Joe Morgan wanted no part of the Amazon Killer. Not since the night he'd discovered the man's handiwork in an abandoned car. But he'd been pulled from his regular assignment to help the CSU and the detectives sort through, sift, and bag up any of the crap in this old abandoned house where they'd found Walter Thorpe's body. They'd been at this for hours.
Well, mostly he was there to guard the perimeter from the prying eyes of the curious, be they civilians or cops. It was a need-to-know basis and most of the people here didn't need to know jack.
The real pain-in-the-ass part was that a case like this brought out the brass. Like he was really going to tell the chief of detectives or the deputy commissioner their presence wasn't wanted inside. Let one of the brilliant geniuses from the dick squad handle that.
The very worst part was he had to take a wicked leak, and a smoke wouldn't do him any harm either. One of the home owners about a half mile back had opened her house to them, offering them coffee and the use of her john. When it came his turn, he took a shortcut someone had found through the brush. It wasn't much of a path and it was mostly overgrown. He didn't have any problem finding the house, but on the way back he noticed something peculiar. At one point the path seemed to fork, one way leading back the way he'd come, that seemed to lead off away from the house.
He followed the second path, more out of curiosity than anything else. Maybe this was a shorter shortcut than the first. He could see the house, maybe a hundred feet in the distance.
What drew his attention next was the sound of the tall grass rustling. Up ahead he saw movement in the foliage and figured it was maybe rabbits or raccoons or skunks. God only knew what lived out here only five minutes from civilization. He shone his flashlight on the area, but found nothing.
Laughing at himself he shook a cigarette free from his pack. He was still far enough away for no one to notice him in the moonlight. He paused for a minute to light his smoke, when the ground beneath him shifted. He found himself tumbling down a set of stone steps trying as best he could to protect himself and his weapon from the fall.
When he reached bottom, he lay there for a moment, trying to assess the damage before he got up. His left shoulder ached and his right ankle throbbed, but other than that he seemed okay. He stood and turned on his flashlight. He was in a large square room with a low ceiling. The walls were made of stones piled one on top of the other. The smell of damp musty earth pervaded his nostrils.
Everything in the room was made of metal, save for the mattress on the neatly made single bed in the corner of the room. A large metal table sat in the center of the room. Metal shelving ran the length of two of the walls. Careful not to touch anything, Joe moved closer to take a better look at what they contained. Wicked-looking knives were laid out on one shelf on top of a blue cloth as if they were a surgeon's instruments. Several strops in various widths lay coiled on another shelf.
Everything about this place was obsessively neat; even the line of jars that sat on one shelf were spaced equidistant from one another. He shone the flashlight on the first of them. Something floated in cloudy liquid inside. He counted eight full jars and then and empty one. The last contained the unmistakable shape of a pair of balls.
Joe turned and vomited onto the earth floor. He retched until there was nothing left to bring up. He knew what he'd found and it terrified him to be there alone and injured. Forgetting the stairs behind him, he pushed forward to a passageway cut out of the far wall. He found himself in a narrow tunnel that was pitch-black and spanned as far as he could see.
It wasn't as bad as he thought since the tunnel curved upward and he could hear the sound of familiar voices once he'd gone a couple of feet. After he'd gone about as far as he could go, he felt along the wall with his fingertips. A thin panel of wood was loosely nailed to a wooden frame. He pulled back the panel that turned out to serve as the back of the only closet in the house where Thorpe's body had been found.
Twenty
Zach stood beside the bed watching Alex sleep. She looked so peaceful he was tempted not to wake her to tell her he was going. Considering how well it went over the last time he'd tried that, he decided against it. He sat on the bed, braced a hand on either side of her, and leaned down to kiss her shoulder. “Baby, wake up. We've got to go.”
She turned onto her back, dislodging the covers around her. He tried to concentrate on her face rather than her bare breasts, but wasn't entirely successful.
She smiled a knowing, sleepy smile. “Did you just call me baby?”
He chuckled. He'd surprised himself when that word slipped out of his mouth instead of her name. “What? Too much?”
She lifted her shoulders in a way that suggested she was considering it. “I don't know. I don't think anyone aside from my mother has ever called me by any sort of endearment. The closest my father got was âlittle girl' and that was a put-down, a reminder that I amounted to less than big bad him.”
Zach smiled, remembering that he'd once tried to give her a nickname a long time agoâsquirt or munchkin or something. She'd stared at him with a look of such unconcealed disgust that he'd given it up.
But what about her ex-husband? No sweeties or honeys or sweethearts from him, either. He guessed that wasn't too surprising either since she'd practically confessed to him that her marriage had been loveless, or tenderness-free, maybe. God, he hoped he never had the displeasure to meet that man.
In regard to the topic at hand, he said, “I'll try it out a few more times. You tell me what you think.”
She reached out and touched her fingertips to his cheek, the first time she'd touched him of her own volition in a nonsexual way. “What's going on?”
He'd intended from the start to go back to the precinct to continue working on all the loose ends he'd dropped every time a new piece of evidence presented itself. He hadn't finished reinterviewing the girls' families or tracked down the perverts on the list Alex had given him. With McKay off the case, the rest of them would have to take up the slack.
Smitty had called a few minutes ago to tell him they'd found the prime crime scene. One of the uniforms had literally stumbled onto his work area. Zach wanted to see it for himself. “They found the primary crime scene.”
She sat up. “When? Where? Why didn't you say so?”
“I just did. Now hurry up and get ready.”
He started to rise but she pulled him back with a hand on his arm. “Why do I get the feeling that you're not all that enthused about going?”
She misread him. He wasn't all that enthused about her going. He wanted her somewhere safe with someone who would protect her in his stead. But he knew how she would feel about being left behind. They'd invited her to this dance and she'd want to stay till the last song played. He knew he would, too. That's why he'd contemplated leaving without waking her for a second and a half. Considering how well that had worked the first time he'd tried it, he decided to skip it.
She gritted her teeth and huffed out a breath. “Don't tell me it's some kind of macho crap. I let you sleep with me, and now you want to treat me like a girl. I am not some helpless female.”
“I know that. By the way, where'd you get the gat?”
She laughed at his use of slang, as he knew she would. He didn't want her angry with him over feelings that were, to his mind, natural. What kind of man didn't want to protect a woman he cared for?
“It was a present from my father when I was fourteen.”
Something about the way she said that made him want to question her on that. Sammy had never mentioned giving Alex a gun or any other weapon.
“Don't worry. It's registered. I have a carry permit and, though I haven't been to a range in a while, I know how to use it.”
He'd already assumed the first two and was glad for the third, even though he hoped she'd never have to test her prowess. Still, they needed to go. “I'll be waiting for you downstairs.”
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Alex stood in the middle of the room surveying her surroundings. The area had been photographed and the scent of black powder and other chemicals used for lifting prints reached her nostrils, but the room had been left basically intact until she and Zach got there.
Her gaze traveled from the tidily kept bed to the rows of shelving to the huge vat-sized tub over which hung a pair of inside-out industrial-type gloves pinned to a bit of clothesline. There was a small refrigerator and a hot plate that sat on top of a small table in the corner of the room. The presence of these items and the generator found in an alcove to the side suggested the killer had spent part of his time living here as well. Or did he only eat and sleep here when there working on one of his victims?
She wrapped her arms around herself as she contemplated the large metal table that was the focus of the room. Each of its corners was outfitted with a leather restraint. That was consistent with the m.e.'s reports that she had seen, as there were ligature marks on the girls' wrists and ankles. This is probably where he did it allâfrom the mutilations to the rapes to the strangulations. He could do it all here with no threat of discovery, no one to hear the girls scream, no one to help them.
She shivered, not from cold, but from the unnamed, unseen presence in the room. She wouldn't call it evil since she didn't conceptualize evil in that way. But there was sickness, depravity; probably generations old judging by the age of nearly everything in the room, save for the shelving. That was new.
She wouldn't call it evil, because killers didn't spring from the womb; they were made by other humans, formed by abuse and violence or merely neglected into existence. Innate tendencies might explain why some victims of abuse turned violent while others did not, but it couldn't explain it all. She wondered what had been done to this man, probably in this very room, to give birth to such cruelty.
“Shades of OCD, huh, Doc?”
Alex focused on Smitty, who had come up beside her. She nodded. The highly ritualized killings, the degree of orderliness exhibited here spoke of the kind of obsessiveness characterized by the disorder, which often manifested as a means to make sense and order out of a chaotic environment, a means of asserting control.
“So why'd he let us find this place?” Smitty asked.
That was the question Alex had been pondering since she'd found out that the place where Thorpe had been discovered was directly above his kill site. Although they'd stumbled on the place from what she understood, the killer had to figure they might have found the entrance down here by searching the house.
An optimistic assessment might be that he was giving up. He'd dumped Thorpe and exposed this place because he didn't need them anymore. But then there was the empty jar on his shelf, the one waiting to be filled. He had one more kill to go, and she didn't have to reach too far to imagine who his next target might be. That's why he'd sent her the flowers. The empty jar was a message, too.
To Smitty, she said, “He doesn't need it anymore. He's got something else planned.” What that might be, she had no idea, which made the prospect more terrifying.
Zach came over to them then. He'd been talking with one of the CSU guys. “Had enough?” he asked.
“They didn't find any fingerprints, did they?”
“No.”
“Any traces of blood or fluids?”
“Absolutely nothing so far, but then they haven't really gotten started yet.”
In other words, the lab guys had been waiting for them to look their fill before removing what they could and examining what they couldn't here. She didn't really need to see the techs do their thing. Besides, anything they found would be reported to them whether or not they were in the room. She'd seen enough. It was time to go.
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“You're awfully quiet over there,” Zach said after they'd been driving for about ten minutes. Alex had spent that time staring out the window, pensive.
She turned her head to look at him. “You may think this is crazy, but I was feeling sorry for Walter at the hands of that madman. Sure, he was a scumbag rapist and there would probably be a line of women willing to castrate him, but still. Have they done his autopsy yet?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“I wouldn't be surprised if they found he'd been tortured first, or dismembered while alive. This guy gets off on pain, inflicting it, watching its effects on others. Does anybody deserve to die like that?”
He could think of a few folks he'd like to put in this killer's path, but he knew what she meant. He recognized her sentiments as evidence of an innate compassion and a loyalty to her patients despite their own illness. She'd done a better job of hiding her tender feelings as a girl, masking them behind an aloof manner and a sharp tongue. As a woman, she didn't seem so averse to showing them, at least not in front of him.
“Has anyone notified Thorpe's sister that he's dead?”
He didn't know. “I can find out.”
“I'd like to talk with her.”
He thought he knew her reasoning, but asked anyway. “Why? She claimed not to know anything about what her brother was up to.”
“That was while he was alive. She may have thought she'd implicate Walter in some way by speaking. But obviously Walter knew who we were looking for, otherwise why silence him both literally and figuratively? Once she knows Walter is dead she may be more willing to talk.”
Now to the real question. “Why you?”
“You may not have noticed this, but not everyone in society is enamored of the police. You guys helped put her brother away. I on the other hand ended up being his advocate, if not completely by design, then by practice. She might tell me things she wouldn't tell you.”
He couldn't argue with that logic. His mind went to the case his brother had been on last year, the one that brought Jon and Dana together and ultimately cost Joanna's husband his life. A lot of strife could have been avoided if one old man who hated cops had been willing to come forward sooner. But he suspected Alex knew something she hadn't told him. “Why else?”
“She called me.”
“A few days ago. She wanted me to let you know that her brother couldn't have committed the murders.”
There was sisterly devotion for you. “Anything else?”
“That they had a pretty messed-up childhood, which I already suspected, and that as far as she knew Walter wasn't obsessed with mythology, which was neither here nor there. She seemed to believe someone was framing her brother, which now seems to be the case.”
“And now you think she knows more than she's telling?”
Alex shrugged. “I don't know, but it would be a good place to start.”
He agreed. Thorpe's sister might know more than she'd been telling. Getting a trip up to her home near Ithaca okayed probably wouldn't be too much of a problem. Getting it cleared for Alex to tag along might be another story.
Then again, it might make more sense to get Alex out of the city. Thorpe's sister wasn't a suspect in any regard and not considered dangerous in any way. From what he understood, she was for the most part a recluse in the small town where she lived. Alex had told him that the sister had divorced herself from her brother's activities, declining to come to his trial. He didn't see any inherent danger in the trip, but still the idea didn't sit well with him. “I'll see what I can do.” But first he wanted to see if he could find the man they were looking for without involving Alex at all.
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Smitty was already at his desk by the time Zach got back to the house. “If it isn't Zach himself,” Smitty said, by way of greeting. “I would have thought you'd spend a little more time enjoying the benefits of the doctor's couch.”
“Don't start,” Zach warned. He knew Smitty meant well and that his comment was intended to signal his approval of the arrangement, but Zach wasn't in the mood. “The sooner I find this perp the sooner I'm sure she's safe.”
The smile eased away from Smitty's face to be replaced with a more sober expression. “Can't argue with that. Where do you want to start?”
“Let's see if we can find this kid and get a description. I've got someone working on the list of screen names Alex came up with.”
Smitty stood and slung his jacket over his shoulder. “Let's go.”
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They found Will Jenkins in the third school they tried. When he realized they wanted to talk to him about the delivery made to Alex's office, he gestured in an exasperated way. “Man, I should have known that was bogus.”
He seemed to think his participation put him in some kind of trouble, which Zach wanted to assure him wasn't true. “We just want to know what happened.”
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