Once Craved (a Riley Paige Mystery--Book #3) (7 page)

The broad surface of
Nimbo Lake looked still and tranquil as the helicopter approached it.

But looks can
fool you
, Riley
reminded herself. She knew well that calm surfaces could guard dark secrets.

The helicopter
descended, then wobbled as it hovered in search of a place to land. Riley felt
a little queasy from the unsteady movement. She didn’t much like helicopters.
She looked at Bill, who was sitting next to her. She thought he looked equally
uneasy.

But when she glanced
over at Agent Holbrook, his face seemed blank to her. He had barely said a word
during the half-hour flight from Phoenix. Riley didn’t yet know what to make of
him. She was used to reading people easily—sometimes too easily for her own
comfort. But Holbrook still struck her as an enigma.

The helicopter
finally touched down, and all three FBI agents stepped out onto solid ground,
ducking through the churning air under the still-spinning blades. The road
where the chopper had landed was nothing more than parallel tire tracks through
the desert weeds.

Riley observed that
the road didn’t look heavily used. Even so, it appeared that enough vehicles
had passed over it during the past week to conceal any tracks left by whatever
the killer had been driving.

The noisy helicopter
engine died down, making it easier to talk as Riley and Bill followed Holbrook
on foot.

“Tell us what you
can about this lake,” Riley said to Holbrook.

“It’s one of a
series of reservoirs created by dams along the Acacia River,” Holbrook said. “This
is the smallest of the artificial lakes. It’s stocked with fish, and it’s a
popular recreation spot, but the public areas are on the other side of the
lake. The body was discovered by a couple of teenagers stoned on pot. I’ll show
you where.”

Holbrook led them
off the road to a stone ridge overlooking the lake.

“The kids were right
where we’re standing,” he said. He pointed down to the edge of the lake. “They
looked down there and saw it. They said that it just looked like a dark shape
in the water.”

“What time of day
were the kids here?” Riley asked.

“A little earlier
than it is right now,” Holbrook said. “They had cut school and gotten stoned.”

Riley took in the
whole scene. The sun was low, and the tops of the red rock cliffs across the
lake were ablaze with light. There were a couple of boats out on the water. The
sheer drop from the ridge down to the water wasn’t far—a mere ten feet, maybe.

Holbrook pointed to
a place nearby where the slope wasn’t as steep.

“The kids climbed
down over there to get a closer look,” he said. “That’s when they found out
what it really was.”

Poor kids,
Riley thought. It had been some
two decades since she’d tried marijuana back in college. Even so, she could
well imagine the heightened horror of making such a discovery while under the
influence.

“Do you want to
climb down there for a closer look?” Bill asked Riley.

“No, it’s a good
view from here,” Riley said.

Her gut told her
that she was right where she needed to be. After all, the killer surely hadn’t
lugged the body down the same slope where the kids had gone down.

No,
she thought.
He stood right
here.

It even looked like
the sparse vegetation was still broken down a little where she was standing.

She took a few
breaths, trying to slip into his point of view. He’d undoubtedly come here at
night. But was it a clear night or a cloudy one? Well, in Arizona at this time
of year, the chances were that the night was clear. And she recalled that the
moon would have been bright about a week ago. In the starlight and moonlight,
he could have seen what he was doing pretty well—possibly even without a
flashlight.

She imagined him
putting the body down right here. But then what had he done next? Obviously he
had rolled the body off the ledge. It had fallen straight down into the shallow
water.

But something about
this scenario struck Riley as wrong. She wondered again, as she had on the
plane, how he could have been so careless.

True, from up here
on the ledge, he probably couldn’t have seen that the body hadn’t sunk very
far. The kids had described the bag as
“a dark shape in the water.”
From
this height, the submerged bag had likely been invisible even on a bright
night. He’d assumed that the body had sunk, as newly dead bodies do in fresh
water, especially when weighted down with stones.

But why did he suppose
that the water was deep right here?

She peered down into
the clear water. In the late afternoon light, she could easily see the
submerged ledge where the body had landed. It was a small horizontal area,
nothing more than the top of a boulder. Around it, the water was black and
deep.

She looked around
the lake. Sheer cliffs jutted up everywhere out of the water. She could see
that Nimbo Lake had been a deep canyon before the dam had filled it with water.
She saw only a few places where one could walk along the shoreline. The cliff
sides dropped straight down into the depths.

To her right and
left, Riley saw ridges that were similar to the one where they were standing,
rising to about the same height. The water beneath those cliffs was dark,
showing no signs of the kind of ledge that lay below right here.

She felt a tingle of
comprehension.

“He’s done this
before,” she told Bill and Holbrook. “There’s another body in this lake.”

*

On the helicopter
ride back to the FBI Phoenix Division headquarters, Holbrook said,
“So you think this is a serial
case after all?”

“Yes, I do,” Riley
said.

Holbrook said, “I
wasn’t positive. Mostly I was eager to get someone good on the case. But what
did you see that made up your mind?”

“There are other
ledges that look just like the one he pushed this body over,” she explained. “He
used one of those other drop-offs before, and t
hat body sank just like it was supposed to. But
maybe he couldn’t find the same spot this time. Or maybe he thought this
was
the same spot. Anyway, he expected the same result this time. He was wrong.”

Bill said, “I told
you she’d find something there.”

“Divers will need to
search this lake,” Riley added.

“That will take some
doing,” Holbrook said.

“It’s got to be done
anyway. There’s another body down there somewhere. You can count on it. I don’t
know how long it’s been there, but it’s there.”

She paused, mentally
assessing what all this said about the killer’s personality. He was competent
and capable. This wasn’t a pathetic loser, like Eugene Fisk. He was more like
Peterson, the killer who had captured and tormented both her and April. He was
shrewd and poised, and he thoroughly enjoyed killing—a sociopath rather than a
psychopath. Above all else, he was confident.

Maybe too
confident for his own good,
Riley thought.

It might well prove
to be his downfall.

She said, “The guy
we’re looking for isn’t some criminal lowlife. My guess is he’s an ordinary
citizen, reasonably well-educated, maybe with a wife and family. Nobody who
knows him thinks he’s a killer.”

Riley watched
Holbrook’s face as they talked. Although she now knew something about the case
she hadn’t known before, Holbrook still struck her as utterly impenetrable.

The helicopter
circled over the FBI building. Twilight had fallen and the area below was well
lighted.

“Look there,” Bill
said, pointing out the window.

Riley looked down
where he pointed. She was surprised to see that from here the rock garden
looked like a gigantic fingerprint. It spread out beneath them like a welcome
sign. Some offbeat landscaper had decided that this image arranged out of stone
was better suited for the new FBI building than a planted garden would have
been. Hundreds of substantial stones had been carefully placed in curving rows
to create the ridged illusion.

“Wow,” Riley said to
Bill. “Whose fingerprint do you suppose they used? Someone legendary, I guess.
Dillinger, maybe?”

“Or maybe John Wayne
Gacy. Or Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Riley thought it a
strange spectacle. On the ground, no one would ever guess that the arrangement
of stones was anything more than a meaningless maze.

It struck her almost
as a sign and a warning. This case was going to demand that she view things
from a new and unsettling perspective. She was about to probe regions of
darkness that not even she had imagined.

The man enjoyed
watching streetwalkers. He liked how they grouped on the corner and pranced up
and down the sidewalks, mostly in pairs. He found them to be much feistier than
call girls and escorts, prone to easily losing their temper.

For example, right
now, he saw one cursing a bunch of uncouth young guys in a slow-moving vehicle
for taking her picture. The man didn’t blame her one bit. After all, she was
here to do business, not to serve as scenery.

Where’s their
respect?
he
thought with a smirk.
Kids these days.

Now the guys were
laughing at her and yelling obscenities. But they couldn’t match her colorful
retorts, some of them in Spanish. He liked her style.

He was slumming
tonight, parked along a row of cheap motels where streetwalkers gathered. The
other girls were less vivacious than the one who had done the cursing. Their
attempts at sexiness looked awkward by comparison, and their come-ons were
crude. As he watched, one hiked up her skirt to show her skimpy underpants to
the driver of a slowly passing car. The driver didn’t stop.

He kept his eye on
the girl who had first drawn his attention. She was stomping around
indignantly, complaining to the other girls.

The man knew he
could have her if he wanted her. She could be his next victim. All he had to do
to get her attention was to drive along the curb toward her.

But no, he wouldn’t
do that. He never did that. He’d never approach a hooker on the street. It was
up to her to approach him. It was the same even with whores he met through a
service or a brothel. He’d get them to meet him alone somewhere separately
without ever asking directly. It would seem like their idea.

With some luck, the
feisty girl would notice his expensive car and trot right on over. His car was
wonderful bait. So was the fact that he dressed well.

But however the
night ended, he had to be more careful than last time. He’d been sloppy,
dropping her body over that ledge and expecting her to sink.

And such a stir she
had created! An FBI agent’s sister! And they’d called in big guns from
Quantico. He didn’t like it. He wasn’t out for publicity or fame. All he wanted
to do was indulge his cravings.

And didn’t he have
every right? What healthy adult man didn’t have his cravings?

Now they were going
to send divers down in the lake to look for bodies. He knew what they might
find there, even after some three years. He didn’t like that at all.

It wasn’t just out
of concern for himself. Oddly, he felt bad for the lake. Having divers probe
and poke into its every submerged nook and cranny struck him as rather obscene
and invasive, an inexcusable violation. After all, the lake hadn’t done
anything wrong. Why should it be harassed?

Anyway, he wasn’t
worried. There was no way they were going to trace either victim back to him.
It simply wasn’t going to happen. He was through with that lake, though. He
hadn’t yet decided where to deposit his next victim, but he was sure he would
come to a decision before the night was over.

Now the vivacious
girl was looking at his car. She started walking toward him, with lots of sass
in her step.

He rolled down the
passenger window and she poked her head in. She was a dark-skinned Latina,
heavily made-up with thick lip liner, colorful eye shadow, and fierce arched
eyebrows that seemed to be tattoos. Her earrings were big gold-painted
crucifixes.

“Nice car,” she
said.

He smiled.

“What’s a nice girl
like you doing out so late?” he asked. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“Maybe you’d like to
tuck me in,” she said, smiling.

Her teeth struck him
as remarkably clean and straight. Indeed, she looked remarkably healthy. That
was pretty rare out here on the streets, where most of the girls were “tweakers,”
in various stages of meth addiction.

“I like your style,”
he said. “Very
chola
.”

Her smile broadened.
He could see that she took being called a Latina gangbanger as a compliment.

“What’s your name?”
he asked.

“Socorro.”

Ah, “socorro,”
he thought.
Spanish for “help.”

“I’ll bet you give
great
socorro,
” he said in a leering tone.

Her deep brown eyes
leered right back. “You look like maybe you could use some
socorro
right
now.
”

“Maybe I could,” he
said.

But before they
could start settling terms, a car pulled into the space right behind him. He
heard a man call out from the driver window.

“¡Socorro!”
he yelled.
“¡Vente!”

The girl drew
herself up with a rather lame show of indignation.

“¿Porqué?”
she yelled back.

“Vente aquí,
¡puta!”

The man detected a
trace of fear in the girl’s eyes. It couldn’t be because the man in the car had
called her a whore. He guessed that the man was her pimp, checking on her to
see how much cash she had brought in so far tonight.

“¡Pinche Pablo!”
She muttered the all-purpose
insult under her breath. Then she walked toward the car.

The man sat there,
wondering if she was going to come back, still wanting to do business with him.
Either way, he didn’t like it. Waiting around was not his style.

His interest in the
girl suddenly vanished. No, he wouldn’t bother with her. She had no idea how
lucky she was.

Besides, what was he
doing slumming like this? His next victim ought to be classier.

Chiffon,
he thought. He’d almost
forgotten about Chiffon.
But maybe I’ve just been saving her for a special
occasion.

He could wait. It
didn’t have to be tonight. He drove away, gloating over his show of
self-restraint, despite his enormous cravings. He considered that one of his
best personal qualities.

He was, after all, a
very civilized man.