The Holiday Killer (3 page)

"Why is he targeting me?" Liz asked herself, putting her head in her shaking hands. "How long has he been watching my family?"

"I don't know, Liz. But I think you saw him, or you saw enough of his partner to spook him," Lisa continued, the car heading for the throng of civilians and press trying to glimpse the crime scene from two hundred feet up the road. "You're going to tell the sketch artist about the guy you were talking to, the one who found the body. Anything and everything you remember—anything that could help us find him."

"Why should that guy matter?" Liz asked, her muddled mind moving slowly as she drew out her cell and dialed Phil's number with shaking fingers.

"Because I think—and Bill agrees with me—that the guy who called it in, who said he found the body, is working with the guy who put it there." She sped away, almost running over a cameraman who was too stupid to move, and headed onto the main road. "He gave you a false story, and attacked Larry Malcolm when he decided to vanish."

Liz nodded, then put the phone up to her ear, waiting nervously until Phil answered on the third ring.

"Liz? What's wrong?"

"Have you got Jamie with you?"

"Yes, he's right here, playing with his trains. Liz, what's happened?"

"The Holiday Killer just threatened us, Phil. He said his next victim will be Jamie if I don't take myself off the case."

There was stunned silence from the other end of the phone.

"Phil?"

"I'm going to take Jamie to your mum's house. You do whatever you can to catch the bastard. Rose and I will look after him. Whatever you do, Liz, don't walk away from this."

"But Jamie—"

"We can protect him. Your mum was the police commissioner for twenty years, for God's sake. She has more guns in that house than cushions. We'll keep a constant eye on him, because you've got to keep working that case. You're the only one who can catch this bastard. And he knows it."

"Thank you, Phil." Liz pulled into the police station. "If you see anything weird, if you don't feel safe, I want you and Mum to bring him to me at the police station. Do you understand?"

"I will, Liz. You take care."

"You too, Baby. I love you."

"I love you too."

Liz hung up and opened the car door. The smell of the river wafted on the breeze, bringing the smell of the fish at the docks with it. The cranes above them creaked in the breeze, the gulls cawing and crowing.

A block from the river, the police station managed to smell like rotten fish and sound of drunken men, even when the holding cells were empty of sailors. The station itself was almost a hundred years old, the structure bowed with age and the razing of salt off the river. It was large enough for a force of five hundred, but nowadays, the force was barely a hundred strong for the whole city.

Liz looked up at the place and realized that the station would be a good place for the killer to hang a victim, if he was so inclined—though how he'd get away with it with so many cops around let her dismiss the idea.

"Come on," Lisa called, escorting her up the front stairs to where the captain awaited her decision on whether she would remain on the case. "Let's get this done so we can send you home."

Two months later

Liz put her jacket down on the side table and closed the door behind her. Jamie ran out to meet her, followed quickly by Phil.

"Mommy!"

"Hey, Baby!" She crouched down and pulled him into a bear hug, smiling at Phil over her son's shoulder.

"Eww, you smell like dead people," he complained, pushing away from her and twisting up his face.

"Do I? I'll have to have a shower, then." She climbed to her feet. "Do I have time before dinner?" she asked Phil.

Phil nodded, stepping forward to give her a kiss. "Eww, you definitely stink. Shower, and make it quick. Your dinner will get cold."

Liz headed upstairs toward the bathroom. She smiled when she heard her son playing in the living room, and climbed into the shower, preparing to wash off the worries of the day. She'd spent most of it being interviewed by her father-in-law, Sergeant Bill Donhowi, who then politely asked to stand down from the Holiday Killer case, or at least put her son into protective custody.

She'd been fighting this since Mike's body showed up—since the killer made the threat against Jamie. He'd been safe with Rose, her mum, and a detail of three officers on him at all times, but the department didn't want to expend the money to protect him anymore. Despite Jamie being his grandson, Bill was forced, on the orders of the higher-ups, to pull the officers off protective detail to solve some of the perimeter cases building up in the background, with her so focused on the Holiday Killer.

Bill wanted to take Jamie away, put him in a safe house, away from her.

She was of two minds about letting him.

She washed her hair, thinking. She'd rationalized that the Holiday Killer would wait for the next holiday before he struck, and by then, she hoped to have him in custody. But she couldn't help imagining that Jamie would pay the price for her arrogance. Would she end up getting her only son killed because of a misplaced faith in her own skills?

What if, after this killing, he
didn't
wait until Easter to strike? What if he took the opportunity to indulge something like Palm Sunday, or a holiday from a different country? What if he decided to take two on Easter, and ignore his previous traditions? He'd slaughtered a young girl on Valentine's Day, another holiday tradition, but what if he dropped the holiday theme altogether for the next kidnapping, just to get to Jamie when she was unprepared to counter him?

Good God.
St. Patrick's Day was coming up. What if he struck then?

By the time the water went cold, Liz's relaxing shower had her so tense she could barely straighten her shoulders without them creaking. Grunting under her breath at the stupidity of this situation—one she was partially responsible for—she got dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen.

"So what did you do at work today, Mummy?" Jamie asked, swinging his legs in his chair as he awkwardly lifted some broccoli to his mouth, making a face as though worried it would be hot.

"I talked to a bad guy and then I talked to an artist." She smiled at him, then looked at Phil. "Your dad thinks I'm nuts, but he said to say hi."

Phil nodded, pushing his own dinner around on his plate. He kept glancing at Jamie, clearly wanting to say something, but not in front of the seven-year-old.

They finished dinner in silence, only the clicking of forks on plates breaking the quiet. Jamie, unable to stand the tension, began rattling off the adventure he'd had that day at Rose's, but Liz wasn't really listening. She had too much on her mind.

"Jamie, honey, why don't you go play in the living room with your trucks?" she suggested when he'd finished eating and began to spread sauce around the plate with his fingers. "But wash your hands first, and stay where I can see you."

Jamie smiled and climbed awkwardly from the chair, heading for the living room. She and Phil both waited until they heard the plastic trucks and trains being tipped out onto the floor before they spoke.

"You got another letter from him today, didn't you? What did he say?" Phil asked, getting up to pour himself a drink, then sitting back down. "The same old thing?"

"He reiterated the threat against Jamie, said I was getting too close and he needed me out of the way."

"That was a spectacularly dumb thing to tell you," he said, taking a long drink. "Surely he realizes that you would just fight all the harder, now that you know you're so close. He might as well have told you that you've almost caught him!"

"Which is why I'm so worried about doing this," she answered, stealing his glass and taking her own gulp. "What if he's manipulating me—or trying to manipulate me—into staying with the investigation, because I'm actually very far
off
?"

"So you don't know what to do." Phil sat back in his chair, rubbing his face. "Do you think you can keep Jamie safe by quitting the investigation?"

"I don't think so, I think he's manipulating me. I think that he's coming after Jamie, no matter what. But he wants me to know he is. He doesn't want it to just be a random killing." She wiped at her forehead with shaky hands. "I don't know what to do, Phil."

"Can you catch him, Liz?"

"I think I can. But I don't want to bet our son's life on a maybe."

Phil sighed and rose to stand in the living room doorway, watching their son play. "Can you keep him safe?"

"I can try to catch the Holiday Killer. That's all I can do."

Phil rested his head on the doorjamb, waving to Jamie when the boy looked at him. "You catch him, Elizabeth, and you keep our son safe. You keep this city safe."

Liz smiled and gently pushed past him, sitting down on the mat to play trains with her boy. After a few minutes, Phil joined them, though the glass of beer was never far from his hand.

February faded into March, and Easter crept up slowly on the town, along with a dark, deep sense of foreboding and dread. There were no decorations on the streets, no children to be seen. People hurried from one place to the next, avoiding eye contact with everyone.

Liz drove slowly down the street in the cruiser, watching the people around her. She couldn't believe the city had come to this, to the point where holidays were dreaded instead of celebrated.

Not that she had reason to celebrate, either, she mused, turning a corner. It was two hours into Easter Sunday, and since the first mutilated body turned up on Halloween the year before, she'd come no closer to finding the Holiday Killer.

At home, things had become even more tense. Liz rarely went home, instead working herself to sleep and crashing on the couch in the lunchroom. Phil was left to protect Jamie with Rose, who moved in with them—along with her guns—to keep an eye on the boy when his parents were at work. Liz wasn't exactly thrilled to have so many guns around Jamie, but if they saved her son from the threat of the Holiday Killer, she wasn't going to say a word against them.

She cut someone off, ignoring their horn, frustrated beyond belief. The residue from the handprint on the window in Mike's room had led to an abandoned factory on the north shore of Carver River's northern offshoot, but no further. The residue was that of a specific glue used to seal broken shipping containers in transit on the water—one which they found in barrels around the small room in one of the warehouses. It could have been a lair, but it really just stank of fish and consisted of a mattress thrown in the corner of the room, a small electric light near the head of it.

They'd been staking out the area for a month, but there was nothing to it; if the Holiday Killer had been there, either he was invisible or he'd since decided to find somewhere else to hide. The room had no sign of blood or the bondage needed to hold the kids for an extended period of time, and they were forced to admit there was nothing in the factory.

The forensics guys recognized right away that the footprint found, prominent and deliberate, at the front door of his Valentine's Day victim was a hoax, created by the man holding a boot out and manipulating the way it landed. Either that, or he had a terrible limp that would make it easy to identify him. It was too flat-footed, with no pressure changes to indicate someone actually walking, they explained to her when between guffaws, happy to have one over on the cops.

The radio crackled to life, breaking her from dwelling on her failures.

"This is dispatch, Detective Donhowi, please respond."

Liz almost caused an accident pulling over to get at her radio.

"This is Donhowi. Has he struck?"

"End of Thomas Avenue, on the river. Sergeant Donhowi and Detective Edwards are already on their way."

"Heading over from Bourke West now. ETA five minutes."

Liz hung up the radio and headed into traffic. It was 2 in the morning and the streets were almost empty, people hidden away indoors, doors bolted, their children asleep.

Liz worried about the identity of the victim. Would it be Jamie? Had Phil and Rose lost track of him long enough for the killer to strike? Had she just managed not to hear the notice of his kidnapping on the radio? The uncertainty gnawed at her gut, alternately making her flush with heat and feel like she wanted to throw up. She didn't know what she'd do to her husband and her mother if her son was dead.

Halfway to the scene, she did have to pull over to throw up, leaning out of the window until she was able to calm herself down, the cool night air easing her hot flushes.

Taking three deep breaths, she steeled herself. If it was Jamie, then she was going to deal with it. If it wasn't, she would do what she always had, and get the crime solved. She saw barely ten trucks in the two miles to Thomas Avenue, and not even one car on the way to the docklands. Then she hit the crime scene.

Reporters and police cars had taken over the cul-de-sac and barricaded the road. There was a large crowd of media people there, and they obscured the mucky river's edge from the roadway. The darkness of the night didn't manage to obscure the scene from curious reporters, though, the flashes of mobile phones and cameras momentarily lighting up the scene, the light managing to reach the scene from over a hundred yards away.

Liz climbed out of the car at the wooden barricades, the lights still flashing on the roof of the cruiser, and shrugged between the people and toward the scene. She grabbed a pair of latex gloves out of a box in the back of a cruiser and headed into the crime scene, covering her nose with her mouth. These were marshy lands, and they stank worse than a body left in the sun for three days.

"Donhowi!" Bill called out, waving her over. "We're just dragging him up now."

Dragging?

Liz checked herself at the embankment, staring at the body being brought up from the river. She slipped down the embankment a little to have a look at him, almost falling over in the muck.

The boy was slashed neck to pelvis, his entrails dragging up on shore behind him. Countless fish and other aquatic wildlife had been at him, judging by the state of his intestines.

"Anyone notify the parents?" she asked, looking at the sergeant as she stood up, resisting the impulse to wipe her marsh-mucked hands on her pants.

"We don't know who he is—don't know who to notify." Bill looked her in the eye. "Are you alright, Liz?"

"Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, looking away from the young boy.

"We didn't even hear about this one going missing," the young man beside her said, looking up from the boy's wrinkled hands at her. "It doesn't fit."

Liz nodded a little, thinking. The killer had threatened to take Jamie when she refused to get off the case, but he hadn't. And now this boy was here, dead, eaten by fish. He wasn't displayed for the cops to find, he was barely mutilated, and most of what had been done to him could easily have been done by the marine life.

Could this be a Holiday Killer murder, or was there another murderer loose in this poor town? Was this boy a replacement? Did the killer attack him when he realized that Liz wouldn't let him get at Jamie? Was this a frustration murder, and that's why he was dumped on the bottom of the river?

Was it Liz's fault the kid was dead?

Or was this boy the victim of a completely different killer? Was he a homeless kid the killer had picked up on the side of the road, hitchhiking across the country? Was there someone out there who would miss him?

The questions circled around in her head, making her feel a bit dizzy.

"Who found him?" she asked Bill, ignoring the forensics boy.

"A bunch of divers working overtime. This is the crayfish-harvesting area." He waved at a pair of men in rain boots and rain jackets. "He was attached to one of the crates. The boys say they got the best haul in that crate. Then they saw the body, dropped it back into the water, and called us. Figure the crayfish were … dining, so to speak."

"No use trying to catch those crayfish," Liz mused, carefully picking her footholds and making her way down to the body. His eyes had been removed, though she couldn't tell if that had been the killer or the fish. "Or the other critters feasting on him." She gently lifted one of his arms, looking at his wrist.

His hands and feet were heavily wrinkled, indicating he'd been in the water for at least a few hours, maybe more. The kid could have been in that water for a couple of days, at least, the gasses released during decomposition sifting into the water through the hole in his stomach as they formed, preventing his body from rising. His skin was alternately blanched and blotched, blood pooling in his extremities where he'd rested on the bottom, face down. Around the slash in his torso, the blood was leeched from the skin, turning it a deep, translucent white.

"Did we recover the restraints?" she asked, peering closely at the rope burn marks on his wrists.

One of the forensic divers pulled off his mask as a medical examiner descended on the boy, to find out what he could before the body became too unstable to examine. "There weren't any with him. Just a couple of rocks in his coat pockets to hold his body down. If there were restraints, they were removed before he went into the water. He's too fresh for the lobsters to have eaten through them."

"Which means he was likely dead or unconscious before he was thrown in." Liz put the boy's hand down and looked at his mouth. She opened it and pushed down gently on his chest. A thin, filmy substance welled in his mouth, filled with silt from the river bottom, the bruises of his struggle showing across his shoulders and his upper arms. "Unconscious, but he struggled at the end. He drowned as he bled out."

"The fish couldn't have helped." The sergeant pointed at a fish flopping about in the mishmash of intestines, and grimaced. "And the crayfish. I think we might find a few little ones still in there, and a lot of eggs."

"More than likely." Liz stood up, taking in the sight of the body. Aside from the slit in his torso, which ran to his crotch, and his missing eyes, there were only a couple of burns on his wrists and—she leaned down to check—ankles, where he'd been restrained.

This boy was too old for the Holiday Killer—ten, maybe eleven years old. His clothes were too well maintained for a homeless kid, but also too threadbare to be first-hand. He was from a poor neighborhood, maybe ran away from home and ended up nabbed. Maybe his parents were used to him staying away from home for days at a time. In the poorer districts, it wasn't unique for a kid to go wandering for a month before he turned back up again. The parents eventually stopped worrying and calling the police.

She was starting to get the impression that this was not a Holiday Killer victim.

Bill looked her over. "The Holiday Killer threatened Jamie. We were all worried the man would take him. And yet, here's his next victim, with no action taken against your son."

"Are we sure he's the next victim?" Liz asked, looking at the boy. "No public death, no clear kidnapping, nothing. Just a body found in a watery grave, on Easter morning."

"That's not strictly true," Lisa said, stepping up beside them. "They found three Easter eggs in his pockets. We're going to officially treat it as the Holiday Killer's crime, unless something pops up to make us think different."

"But this one
is
different," Liz said, looking back at the body. "It's completely different from the others. No display, no heavy mutilation,… This death is completely different from those of the Holiday Killer's victims."

"Until you can make a case substantiated with evidence that this was a copycat, or a completely different case, then you will treat this as the same." Sergeant Donhowi looked at Lisa. "I can't believe there's two child-killers in this town, not without evidence. I just can't. Now let's get this boy on the stretcher and get him home."

"We have to work out where home is, first. It's a good thing he wasn't in the water too long; facial recognition might still work." Liz shook herself and looked at Lisa. "Can you organize that? I have to talk to the boys."

Lisa looked at the fishermen and nodded, turning back to the body on the tarp. The forensics team was looking him over, taking photographs of whatever they could, including the assorted wildlife still nibbling on his entrails and skin.

Liz headed over the swampy marsh, wind milling a couple of times as her feet sank deeper into the mud than she expected. By the time she got to where the two divers were standing, she was red-faced and out of breath.

"God, I need a bath," she muttered, stepping up onto the pavement and heading for the fishermen standing uncomfortably near one of the first-responder vehicles, both studiously looking anywhere but at the body.

She smiled at them as the shorter one looked at her, taking off her latex gloves and handing them to one of the forensics boys as he ran past.

"Hi," she said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. "I'm Special Detective Donhowi. I'd like to talk to the pair of you about what you found this morning."

"Are you with the FBI?" one of them asked, hurriedly hiding something behind his back. "It's only, I wasn't meant to be on this shift this week, but my parole officer said I could go with the boat, long as I kept checking in."

Liz filed that away for later. The man had a record, which meant if she tried his prints, he should show up on the database. After the last guy to find a body killed an officer and ran off, she wasn't about to let this pair go without being able to find them again, through any means necessary.

"I'm not with the FBI, Mr. … Jones," she said, reading the name on his jacket, right below the label of the
Dauntless
,
a fishing ship recently involved in a flashy bit of news she hadn't paid much attention to. "How long have you been in town?"

"A couple days, miss," the man said, elbowing his friend. "We came in off the
Dauntless
, the deep-sea vessel, when it came in to drop off the catch. We decided to stay a couple of days, since the area is mad with crays that sell for a lot of money at the markets. We cast some crates, hoping to take home Easter dinner." The man swallowed. "We got permits for them."