Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (6 page)

“Well, we used to be
tight for a while but she changed schools. She was really smart, just one year
ahead of me, fifteen years old. I heard that she started buying drugs from this
guy everybody called Trip. She got really, really into heroin. And when she ran
out of money, Trip put her to work as a hooker. Trained her personally, made
her move in with him. Her mom’s so screwed up, she barely noticed Angie was
gone. Trip even advertised her on his website, made her get a tattoo swearing
she was his forever.”

Riley was shocked. “What
happened to her?”

“Well, Trip
eventually got busted, and Angie wound up in a drug rehab center. That was just
this summer while we were in Upstate New York. I don’t know what happened to
her after that. All I know is that she’s just sixteen now and her life is
ruined.”

“I’m so sorry to
hear that,” Riley said.

April groaned with
impatience.

“You really don’t
get it, do you, Mom?
You’ve
got nothing to be sorry for. You’ve spent
your whole life stopping this kind of thing. And you’ve put away all kinds of
guys like Trip—some of them forever. But if you stop doing what you do best,
who’s going to take over for you? Somebody as good at it as you? I doubt it,
Mom. I really doubt it.”

Riley fell silent
for a moment. Then with a smile, she squeezed April’s hand tightly.

“I think I’ve got a
phone call to make,” she said.

As the FBI jet
lifted off from Quantico, Riley felt sure that she was on her way to face yet
another monster. She was deeply uneasy at the thought. She had been hoping to
stay away from killers for a while, but taking this job had finally seemed like
the right thing to do. Meredith had been clearly relieved when she’d said she
would go.

That morning, April
had left on her field trip, and now Riley and Bill were on their way to
Phoenix. Outside the airplane window the afternoon had turned dark, and rain
streaked across the glass. Riley stayed strapped into her seat until the plane
had made its way through rough-and-tumble gray clouds and into clearer air above.
Then a cushiony surface spread out beneath them, hiding the earth where people
were probably scurrying about to stay dry. And, Riley thought, going about
their everyday pleasures or horrors or whatever lay in between.

As soon as the ride
smoothed out, Riley turned to Bill and asked, “What have you got to show me?”

Bill flipped open
his laptop on the table in front of them. He brought up a photo of a large
black garbage bag barely submerged in shallow water. A dead white hand could be
seen poking out of the bag’s opening.

Bill explained, “The
body of Nancy Holbrook was found in an artificial lake in the reservoir system
outside of Phoenix. She was a thirty-year-old escort with an expensive service.
In other words, a pricey prostitute.”

“Did she drown?”
Riley asked.

“No. Asphyxiation
seems to have been the cause of death. Then she was stuffed into a heavy-duty
garbage bag and dumped into the lake. The garbage bag was weighted with large
rocks.”

Riley studied the
photo closely. A lot of questions were already forming in her mind.

“Did the killer
leave any physical evidence?” she asked. “Prints, fibers, DNA?”

“Not a thing.”

Riley shook her
head. “I don’t get it. The disposal of the body, I mean. Why didn’t the killer
go to just a little more trouble? A freshwater lake is perfect for getting rid
of a body. Corpses sink and decompose fast in fresh water. Sure, they might
resurface later on because of bloating and gases. But enough rocks in the bag
would solve that problem. Why leave her in shallow water?”

“I guess it’s up to
us to figure that out,” Bill said.

Bill brought up
several other photos of the crime scene, but they didn’t tell Riley much.

“So what do you
think?” she said. “Are we dealing with a serial or aren’t we?”

Bill’s knitted his
brow in thought.

“I don’t know,” he
said. “Really, we’re just looking at a single murdered prostitute. Sure, other
prostitutes have disappeared in Phoenix. But that’s nothing new. That happens
routinely in every major city in the country.”

The word “routinely”
struck an uncomfortable chord with Riley. How could the ongoing disappearance
of a certain class of women be considered “routine”? Still, she knew that what
Bill was saying was true.

“When Meredith
phoned, he made it sound urgent,” she said. “And now he’s even giving us the
VIP treatment, flying us directly there on a BAU jet.” She thought back for a
moment. “His exact words were that his friend
wanted us to look into it as
the work of a serial killer.
But you sound like nobody’s sure it is a
serial.”

Bill shrugged. “It
might not be. But Meredith seems to be really close to Nancy Holbrook’s
brother, Garrett Holbrook.”

“Yeah,” Riley said. “He
told me they went to the academy together. But this whole thing is unusual.”

Bill didn’t argue.
Riley leaned back in her seat and considered the situation. It seemed pretty
obvious that Meredith was bending FBI rules as a favor to a friend. That wasn’t
typical of Meredith at all.

But this didn’t make
her think any less of her boss. Actually, she really admired his devotion to
his friend. She wondered …

Is there anybody
I’d bend the rules for? Bill, maybe?

He’d been more than
a partner over the years, and more than even a friend. Even so, Riley wasn’t
sure. And that made her wonder—just how close did she feel to any of her
coworkers these days, including Bill?

But there didn’t
seem much point in thinking about it now. Riley closed her eyes and went to
sleep.

*

It was a bright
sunny day when they landed in Phoenix.

As they got off the
jet, Bill nudged her and said, “Wow, great weather. Maybe at least we’ll get a
little vacation out of this trip.”

Somehow, Riley
doubted that it was going to be a lot of fun. It had been a long time since she’d
taken a real vacation. Her last attempt at an outing in New York with April had
been cut short by the usual murder and mayhem that was such a big part of her
life.

One of these
days, I need to get some real rest,
she thought.

A young local agent
met them at the plane and drove them to the Phoenix FBI field office, a
striking new modern building. As he pulled the car into the Bureau parking lot,
he commented, “Cool design, isn’t it? Even won some kind of award. Can you
guess what it’s supposed to look like?”

Riley looked over
the facade. It was all straight, long rectangles and narrow vertical windows.
Everything was carefully placed and the pattern seemed familiar. She stopped
and stared at it for a moment.

“DNA sequencing?”
she asked.

“Yep,” the agent
said. “But I’ll bet you can’t guess what the rock maze over there looks like
from above.”

But they walked into
the building before Riley or Bill could hazard a guess. Inside, Riley saw the
DNA motif repeated in the sharply patterned floor tiles. The agent led them
among severe-looking horizontal walls and partitions until they reached the
office of Special Agent in Charge Elgin Morley, then left them there.

Riley and Bill
introduced themselves to Morley, a small, bookish man in his fifties with a
thick black mustache and round glasses. Another man was awaiting them in the
office. He was in his forties, tall, gaunt, and slightly hunched. Riley thought
he looked tired and depressed.

Morley said, “Agents
Paige and Jeffreys, I’d like you to meet Agent Garrett Holbrook. His sister was
the victim who was found in Nimbo Lake.”

Hands were shaken
all around, and the four agents sat down to talk.

“Thank you for
coming,” Holbrook said. “This whole thing has been pretty overwhelming.”

“Tell us about your
sister,” Riley said.

“I can’t tell you
much,” Holbrook said. “I can’t say I knew her very well. She was my half-sister.
My dad was a philandering jerk, left my mom and had children with three
different women. Nancy was fifteen years younger than me. We barely had contact
over the years.”

He stared blankly at
the floor for a moment, his fingers picking absent-mindedly at the arm of his
chair. Then without looking up he said, “The last I heard from her, she was
doing office work and taking classes at a community college. That was a few
years ago. I was shocked to find out what had become of her. I had no idea.”

Then he fell silent.
Riley thought he looked like he was leaving something unsaid, but she told
herself that maybe that was really all the man knew. After all, what could
Riley say about her own older sister if anyone asked her? She and Wendy had
been out of contact for so long that they might as well not be sisters at all.

Even so, she sensed
something more than grief in Holbrook’s demeanor. It struck her as odd.

Morley suggested
that Riley and Bill go with him to Forensic Pathology, where they could take a
look at the body. Holbrook nodded and said that he’d be in his office.

As they followed the
Agent in Charge down the hall, Bill asked, “Agent Morley, what reason is there
for thinking we’re dealing with a serial killer?”

Morley shook his
head. “I’m not sure we’ve got much of a reason,” he said. “But when Garrett
found out about Nancy’s death, he refused to leave it alone. He’s one of our
best agents, and I’ve tried to accommodate him. He tried to get his own
investigation underway, but didn’t get anywhere. The truth is, he hasn’t been
himself this whole while.”

Riley had certainly
noticed that Garrett seemed to be terribly unsettled. Perhaps a little more so
than a seasoned agent would usually be, even over a relative’s death. He’d made
it clear that they weren’t close.

Morley led Riley and
Bill into the building’s Forensic Pathology area, where he introduced them to
its team chief, Dr. Rachel Fowler. The pathologist pulled open the refrigerated
unit where Nancy Holbrook’s body was being kept.

Riley winced a little
at the familiar odor of decomposition, even though the smell hadn’t gotten very
strong yet. She saw that the woman had been short of stature and very thin.

“She hadn’t been in
the water long,” Fowler said. “The skin was just beginning to wrinkle when she
was found.”

Dr. Fowler pointed
to her wrists.

“You can see rope
burns. It looks like she was bound when she was killed.”

Riley noticed raised
marks on the crook of the corpse’s arm.

“These look like
track marks,” Riley said.

“Right. She was
using heroin. My guess was that she was slipping into serious addiction.”

It looked to Riley
like the woman had been anorexic, and that seemed consistent with Fowler’s
addiction theory.

“That kind of
addiction seems out of place for a high-class escort,” Bill said. “How do we
know that’s what she was?”

Fowler produced a
laminated business card in a plastic evidence bag. It had a provocative photo
of the dead woman on it. The name on the card was simply “Nanette,” and the
business was called “Ishtar Escorts.”

“This card was on
her when she was found,” Fowler explained. “The police got in touch with Ishtar
Escorts and found out her real name, and that soon led to identifying her as
Agent Holbrook’s half-sister.”

“Any idea how she
was asphyxiated?” Riley asked.

“There’s some
bruising around her neck,” Fowler said. “The killer might have held a plastic
bag over her head.”

Riley looked closely
at the marks. Was this some kind of a sex game gone wrong, or a deliberate act
of murder? She couldn’t yet tell.

“What did she have
on when she was found?” Riley asked.

Fowler opened up a
box that contained the victim’s clothing. She had been wearing a pink dress
with a low neckline—barely respectable, Riley observed, but definitely a notch
above a streetwalker’s typical trashy attire. It was the dress of a woman who
wanted to look both very sexy and suitably attired for nightclubs.

Nestled on top of
the dress was a clear plastic bag of jewelry.

“May I have a look?”
Riley asked Fowler.

“Go right ahead.”

Riley took out the
bag and looked at the contents. Most of it was fairly tasteful costume
jewelry—a beaded necklace and bracelets and simple earrings. But one item stood
out among the rest. It was a slender gold ring with a diamond setting. She
picked it up and showed it to Bill.

“Real?” Bill asked.

“Yes,” Fowler
replied. “Real gold and a real diamond.”

“The killer didn’t
bother to steal it,” Bill commented. “So this wasn’t about money.”

Riley turned to
Morley. “I’d like to see where the body was found,” she said. “Right now, while
it’s still light.”

Morley looked a bit
puzzled.

“We can get you
there by helicopter,” he said. “But I don’t know what you expect to find. Cops
and agents have been all over the site.”

“Trust her,” Bill
said knowingly. “She’ll find out something.”