Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) (2 page)

3

Stefan Miles stepped inside the police precinct for the Via Linda district in Scottsdale, Arizona, and stopped for a moment. He looked like a cliché of a special agent with the FBI: black suit, red tie, white shirt. He took off the tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket then took off the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. At twenty-seven and with only two years under his belt at the Bureau, he hadn’t worked with that many Homicide detectives yet but had heard stories.

Several agents told him Homicide detectives saw the feds as a threat. They believed the FBI would swoop in and take over an investigation that had a lot of media attention and was likely to be solved but that the ones that had no leads—and weren’t going anywhere but to the basement in the Open/Unsolved filing cabinets—weren’t touched by the Bureau. Stefan was too new to tell if that were true.

Once, the Bureau had gotten a call from a sheriff in a small county in Maine. It seemed as though he had a serial rapist on his hands. The man would break into women’s homes and force them to perform oral sex but never to ejaculation. He always stopped short. One of Stefan’s instructors at the time, a woman named Jill Menden, had worked her ass off on the case. Night and day, that was all she did: run the leads, speak with the victims, interview local sex offenders. But one night she told Stefan that any man who could control himself enough not to ejaculate during a rape wasn’t going to be sloppy enough to leave any real evidence behind.

After three months of that single investigation, Jill had to tell the sheriff that the FBI couldn’t help him unless the rapist left something more behind.

Eventually, the rapes stopped. Jill suspected the man had been arrested on an unrelated charge and was incarcerated but that the rapes would begin again when he got out. That would make it easy to check prison and jail records to see who was released around the time the rapes began again. But when she called the sheriff to tell him, he wouldn’t take her calls. The sheriff blamed her somehow, even though she’d worked hard. The FBI had a mystique around it, and local police departments expected miracles.

Then again, Stefan had also seen agents treat detectives as though they were yokels and disrespect them at every turn. Maybe in the end, it was just basic tribal fear and distrust of outsiders.

“Excuse me,” Stefan said, walking up to the reception desk. “I’m supposed to be meeting Detective Lunds. My name’s Stefan Miles—I’m with the FBI.”

“Hold on.”

The receptionist typed into her computer, and it dinged a second later.

“He’s comin’.”

“Thanks.”

Stefan wandered around the lobby for a minute and then decided to sit down. Then he stood up because he thought it might look unprofessional, but he realized how ridiculous that was so he forced himself to sit back down. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window with his rolled-up sleeves and thought he looked like Justin Bieber, so he put on his jacket again. Detective Lunds walked up as he pulled out his tie, so he slipped it back into his pocket.

“Agent Miles, nice to meet you.”

“You as well,” he said, shaking hands. “Thanks for the call.”

“Thanks? You like extra work you don’t get any credit for?”

Stefan grinned and hoped he wasn’t turning red. “I meant, thank you for trusting us enough to call. I’ve heard there’s some tension between our two agencies, and I hope that’s not us.”

“Not at all. I’m a simple man. You help me catch this bastard, Agent Miles, and I’ll dance at your daughter’s wedding if you like. Well, in your case,
your
wedding. How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Twenty-seven.”

He shrugged. “Well, gotta start sometime, I guess. Come on back.”

“Thanks, and just Stefan is fine. Agent Miles is my father.”

The detective chuckled as he led Stefan back through the detectives’ bullpen—a multitude of desks and cubicles were crammed together to fit as many police officers as possible. Another staple was the murder board—usually a whiteboard listing every active murder the division was handling. Here, the murder board was transparent, and they used bright red marker. He did a quick count as they walked by, and he estimated about twenty-four open murders. Not too many but enough to keep the detectives busy.

Stefan was led past the bullpen and into a side room. A table was set up with a television on it and a DVD player with several stacks of DVDs next to it.

“You’re gonna wanna sit for this,” the detective said.

Stefan, now a little concerned and intrigued at the same time, sat down in front of the television. The detective queued up the DVD player and then said, “It’s… it’s about the worst I’ve seen, Stefan. I’m sorry you have to watch it.”

The screen came on. Stefan watched for a few seconds and couldn’t make out exactly what was happening, not at first. But then everything came into focus. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute.

His stomach churned, his mind raced, and he was transported back to some primordial mental state in which nothing existed but pure emotion.

“Fuck me!” he shouted.

He got up from the table and turned away. He leaned over a garbage can against the wall and hurled what was left of his lunch into it. After a few violent dry heaves, he could’ve gotten up, but he didn’t want to.

“Turn it off, please,” he said.

“It’s off.”

Stefan rose and wiped his mouth with a pocket square he had in the breast pocket of his jacket. He breathed deeply a few times and then ran his hand through his hair. “You must not think much of the FBI after seeing that,” he said without turning around.

“That’s about the reaction I had,” Detective Lunds said sadly. “I… I, ah, had to take a personal day after seeing this.”

“ID on the child?” Stefan said, turning around, flinching as he glanced at the screen and saw that it was paused but not off.

“No. We guess the age around nine or ten.”

“Are all these DVDs…”

“Not like this, no. These are child pornography. This is the only one that’s… well, where the victim is killed.”

Stefan nodded. “Does he ever—”

“No,” Lunds said, reading his thoughts. “I’ve watched the whole thing, and he never makes an appearance. Not his face. He doesn’t have any tattoos or anything like that. The only thing we can guess from the video is that he’s in his thirties and white.”

Stefan swallowed, the taste of bile still in his mouth. “Can I get some water?”

“Sure.”

He stepped out and came back with a paper cup and set it on the table. Stefan took several sips before setting the cup back down and staring at the still image on the monitor.

“Where’d you get this?”

“The home of Virgil Mendoza. Far as we can tell, he only watches the porn—he doesn’t make it. He said he bought the video from some guy in a porn shop downtown. We’re running with it right now but haven’t turned up anything. I thought… we’re a decent-sized police department, Stefan, but this is beyond us. In twenty-two years of law enforcement, I’ve never seen anything like this. Never anyone killed in that way. I thought we could use the help.”

He nodded. “I’m going to have to watch the entire thing.”

“I know. I have some paperwork to catch up on. Take your time.”

Stefan watched the video several times, hoping the shock of it would go away. It dimmed drastically by the third time, but it never really went away. Something in his hind brain told him this was the worst thing he would ever see, and his mind rebelled against it.

He stopped the video and sat quietly. Closing his eyes, he tried to think of something positive, something that would erase what he just saw, but nothing came to him. Nothing would erase it. It would always be there now, a part of him.

When he rose, he rested his hands on the table and just stood there a moment, as though afraid he would lose his balance, and then he headed out. Detective Lunds sat at his desk typing. Stefan came up and leaned against the desk.

“Those are copies of the originals,” Lunds said. “We can get you some copies if you need them, too.”

He shook his head. “I don’t need it. I’m going to bring in someone more experienced. He’ll probably want a copy.”

Lunds leaned back in his chair. “What I was hoping was that we could get the vic’s face out there and someone would recognize her. A teacher or a parent or someone.”

“That’s a good place to start. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a database, too. We should get some stills over to them.” Stefan paused. “We’re gonna need to talk to Virgil Mendoza, too.”

4

Sarah screamed.

The sound startled her awake. She flung herself out of bed, tripped, and hit the floor hard. She lay there a moment, breathing deeply, until she rolled onto her back and felt the sandy tongue of Biggles licking her face.

She chuckled, an instant release of all the tension and fear bubbling in her gut. She frequently had nightmares. Most of her life, they’d come only once every couple of months, but now they came every week. Waking, horrific night terrors that would cause her to fall out of bed. Once, she even made it to the living room before tripping over her coffee table and face-planting on the rug.

She sat up. Her sweaty shirt clung to her, and she stripped it off along with her panties before climbing into the shower. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she noticed the white streak that ran down her otherwise raven hair. It seemed to surprise her every time; she would forget it and only remember when she saw her reflection.

Two months ago, she’d dyed her hair to get rid of the streak. When she woke the next morning, it was back.

The water heated quickly, and she faced away from it, letting it run down her back. Tipping her head back into it, it ran through her hair, and over her face, down her breasts, and over her stomach. She felt its warmth on every part of her… and just like that, the fear and tension were gone, vanished into whatever darkness they’d come from.

It was only five in the morning, but she didn’t work that day, so she’d have to find something to do. Since her breakup with Special Agent Gio Adami, she hadn’t gone out once, not on a single date. It wasn’t because she hadn’t been asked. It seemed like men were always throwing themselves at her, and she wasn’t sure why. To her, it seemed the baggage that followed her could be seen a mile away. Or maybe men didn’t care about all that.

After her shower, she lay in bed with Biggles until the sun came up. She watched it through the window in the bedroom. The light reflected off the old glass, illuminating the swirling cones of dust in front the windows, and finally landed across her face. She closed her eyes a moment and just felt the warmth of daylight. For most people who suffered from nightmares, daylight meant a reprieve. But not for her. For her, daylight could hold just as many monsters.

Most of the day was spent on the mundane. Groceries first, which she had to carry so she could only get two or three bags at the most. But she didn’t eat much, and the heaviest item was always the cat food. Then she attended an hour-long yoga class and afterward took a nap with Biggles lying at her feet. The day was going to be a pleasant one, she decided.

It wasn’t until she stepped out of her apartment complex that evening to get some dinner before meeting up with Kelly that she saw the first one. A young boy, standing on the side of the road.

She was actually going to walk right past him. He didn’t look out of place, other than the fact that he was standing on the curb just staring out into the street. But then she noticed his legs. They were mangled and bloody, the black blood long since crusted onto the flesh, the cloth torn away in huge patches from his jeans. The boy’s skin looked like chalk, and even from behind, she could see the massive dark circles that engulfed his face and neck.

She stopped and closed her eyes. Opening them again, he was still there.

Sarah approached him. Some of them didn’t acknowledge her, some attacked, some spoke, and some didn’t. It seemed random, and she wondered if there was a pattern there somewhere that she wasn’t seeing.

A frail body accompanied the bruised and battered face. Sarah stood next to him quietly and watched the cars as they passed. One minivan full of children rode by, the occupants staring at her but none of their eyes going down to the boy, and then she was certain that they didn’t see him.

“I want to go home,” the boy said softly.

Sarah swallowed and turned to him. “Where is home?”

“I want to go home,” he said again in the same tone.

She bent down to eye level with him. “Sweetie, where is home?”

The boy didn’t respond. From the tattered clothing and the limbs that seemed bent at odd angles, she knew he’d been killed in a car crash.

“Were you hurt right here on this road?”

“I want to go home.”

Sarah tried to touch him but didn’t feel anything except a slight coolness as her hand passed through. She sighed and rose. What could she do for him? Nothing… except maybe try to let him know he wasn’t alone.

First the headache came, then a stream of blood ran from one nostril. She felt it as a tickle and wiped at it with the napkins she always had to carry in her back pocket. When the bleeding stopped, she sat down on the curb next to him and watched the cars in silence.