Pretty Dead
Authors: Anne Frasier
ALSO BY ANNE FRASIER
The Elise Sandburg series
Play Dead
Stay Dead
Hush
Sleep Tight
Before I Wake
Pale Immortal
Garden of Darkness
Short stories
“Made of Stars”
“Max Under the Stars”
Anthologies
Deadly Treats
Once Upon a Crime
From the Indie Side
Discount Noir
Writes of Spring
The Lineup: Poems on Crime
Zero Plus Seven
Nonfiction (Theresa Weir)
The Orchard, a Memoir
The Man Who Left
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Theresa Weir
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503944183
ISBN-10: 1503944182
Cover design by Cyanotype Book Architects
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
H
e was hooked on death. No shame in that, Jeffrey Nightingale always told himself. At this point the body count was so high and his appetite for murder so strong that he’d lost track of how many lives he’d ended. One thing he did know—the more he killed, the more he wanted to kill.
Profilers called it escalation; Nightingale called it addiction to the quest for pleasure. Some people did crack or meth or heroin. He killed.
They made it so easy—the cops. Early on, Nightingale had learned to shift and change his MO. He wasn’t an idiot who adhered to the ritual and the pattern. Sure, he’d prefer it that way, but he took his drugs any way he could get them. If that meant switching things up to maintain his high, so what? The high was what counted. And another thing. When you’d been killing for so damn long, it got boring if you didn’t add some variety, if you didn’t experiment—because where was the buzz in doing the same kill over and over? He’d never understood that.
He kept ahead of investigators with false clues and by moving from city to city. Hell, they thought his kills were committed by several different guys. That cracked him up. But now winter had hit with a vengeance. He was sick of snow, and he’d decided to head south. Winter made everything harder, including murder.
The city he’d chosen as his next home wasn’t big, not by Philadelphia standards, anyway. It didn’t have a huge police force, had no substantial FBI presence. It would suit him for a while. Maybe a year, maybe two.
How many kills could he get in before they figured out the murders were connected? He was betting five or six. How many before they started getting the least bit close to catching him? That would never happen. He was too smart and had been in the business too long.
A pro didn’t approach this stuff blindly. He didn’t just pack up the car and head out. It took careful planning. It took fake IDs. It took a new persona. It took an in-depth study of the other team.
From his spot in the Philadelphia coffee shop, Nightingale clicked his laptop keys and pulled up an article he’d already read several times. A piece about a woman named Elise Sandburg who’d been made head detective of the Savannah Police Department. The article included a photo of her, taken in a cemetery that was apparently located right behind the police station. How cool was that? She was attractive, with straight dark hair that fell to her shoulders, and a direct, no-shit gaze, her arms across her chest, white shirt, black slacks, badge on her belt. Standing a little off to one side was a guy in a dark suit.
David Gould.
Since Nightingale was in a public place, he allowed himself only a slight smile. The detective’s name was one he recognized. He remembered every agent and cop who’d pursued him and failed. And it didn’t hurt that Gould was so handsome Nightingale got hard just looking at him.
The photo of the two detectives was like some movie poster or a promo for one of those stupid TV shows that was so popular.
But this wasn’t fiction.
In real life, what came first? The killer or the kill? Were people born to it? Or was it like a drug? One taste and, if you had an addictive personality, you were hooked? He’d read about that kind of instant addiction. And he’d damn well read about other killers. Everything he could get his hands on. He devoured profiler books, and he knew how to avoid the stereotypes. So with each move, he became a different person. A different profile for each city.
He didn’t discriminate. That helped. Sure, he had favorite victims. Who didn’t? His taste was for twenty-something, dark-haired males—younger versions of David Gould—but Nightingale was also what profilers liked to call an opportunistic killer. Those were harder to catch. And in order to play against type, he sometimes went for females. They weren’t his drug of choice—females were a little like smoking pot or drinking when you really wanted to mainline something awesome—but that was okay. He was all about keeping things positive.
And the great thing about his addiction? Other than basic expenses like rope and duct tape and plastic and whatever his chosen persona needed, it cost nothing.
Free. Not many addictions were free.
He closed his laptop, stuck it in his bag, and zipped the case. His chair scraped the wooden floor as he got to his feet.
He’d been coming to the hippie café for almost a year, working remotely at a job he could do from anywhere. Handy when it came to his true calling.
He’d miss this place.
“Meet your deadline?” the barista asked when he saw Nightingale heading out.
“Yep. Hit ‘Send’ a few minutes ago.”
Feeling sentimental, Nightingale dug into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his worn black billfold, opened it, and extracted a five-dollar bill. He tapped it into the tip jar and smiled at the young guy behind the counter.
God, how Nightingale would love to do him.
And by “do” him, he meant tie him up and make sweet love to him for a week or so before finally killing him and dumping his body.
But he wouldn’t.
The guy smiled. “Thanks, man.”
Thanks for not raping and murdering me,
you generous bastard.
“You’re welcome.” Nightingale smiled back, and the smile was heavy with the unshared humor of the moment. “You’re
very
welcome,” he told the barista.
I saved your life today and you don’t even know it.
Sometimes doing nothing was the biggest gift of all.
From a table behind him came the kind of conversation he loved, conversation that was in many ways the payoff, or at least part of the payoff. Kind of like the afterparty that followed a great show.
“Did you hear about the latest murder?” a woman was saying. And then, “I want to move. I want to get out of this town. We could have a serial killer living right next door, for all we know.”
Nightingale turned to see a middle-aged couple seated at a table, hugging their lattes, a newspaper with the dead-body headline between them, an incomplete crossword puzzle to one side. He was near enough to see that twelve down was still blank. Had the puzzle been too tough? Or were they just too dumb?
“Awful, isn’t it?” he asked. He knew how to play this. Years of watching sappy movies, then practicing facial expressions in front of the mirror, had made him a master of the perfect response.
The woman’s eyes locked on him. The horror of what she’d just read could be followed all the way to her marrow. He never got tired of that.
She shook her head. “Terrible.”
“I’m blowing this place,” he announced. This was another thing about him. He loved conversation. He loved engaging people. “Today,” he elaborated.
Her face opened up in a shared understanding of the seriousness of having such awful things going on so close to home—a situation her husband seemed unconcerned about. Right now he had his nose back in the crossword puzzle, a frown on his face, as the woman continued to stare at Nightingale, confusion replacing their brief bit of bonding. “But you aren’t the killer’s demographic,” she pointed out.
“Right,” he said. “But a crazy like that? Maybe he’ll change his demographic. And anyway, how many murders now? Six?” He shrugged. “I just don’t want to live in a town where this kind of thing has become commonplace. I’ve had enough.”
“Good for you.” She glanced at the man across the table. He was still ignoring them. Then she looked back at Nightingale—her partner in distress. “Good for you.”
Yeah, good for me.
He hitched his messenger bag over his shoulder and gave the woman a nod. At the door, he paused. “Twelve down is exsanguination.”
The guy finally reacted. He stared at the folded paper in his hand, then raised his pencil in a gesture of excitement. “You’re right! That was a tough one.”