Under the Gun (5 page)

Alex put his hands on his hips and looked at Detective Campbell, who shrugged, his
meaty shoulders brushing his earlobes. “We don’t have many details. A runner found
them.” He nodded toward a thin man in papery-looking running shorts, the goose bumps
visible on his legs. The man had his hands clasped behind his back and was fidgeting
or shivering—I couldn’t tell which—as he gave a statement to two officers.

“The guy runs here every morning, usually heads out about five, five-thirty a.m.”

“He runs the Sutro trail?” Alex asked.

The detective nodded.

“What’s he doing here now?” I wondered. “It’s almost four.”

Detective Campbell sucked on his teeth. “Guy said he missed his run this morning,
so he came out on his lunch hour. Put a call into his office and his story checks
out. He was working this morning and checked out around eleven-forty.”

“Okay, so he heads off for a run.” Alex turned, his cornflower-blue eyes scanning
the trail we had just come from. “He would have been up there. Why did he cut off
the trail? What made him come down here?”

I looked up toward the top of the ridge where the trail cut in. The tops of the heads
of the onlookers and officers barricading them could just barely be seen. “He probably
couldn’t have seen much if he was on the trail. Especially if he was running.”

“The guy said he heard something.”

“Heard something?”

“A rustle, something. He didn’t really say, other than something distracted him from
his course.

“He wasn’t wearing earphones, an iPod, anything?”

Detective Campbell shrugged again. “Nah. He’s a real nature type. Says he likes to
run first thing in the morning because it’s quiet or just before the lunch rush. He
likes the peace.”

I wasn’t a runner—far from it, often considering my other options even when something
is chasing me—but something seemed wrong about the runner’s story.

“Excuse me for a second.” Detective Campbell slipped away from us and toward another
officer who was chatting comfortably with a newscaster.

I put my hands on my hips, biting my bottom lip. “This smells fishy to me.”

Alex scanned the horizon. “Yeah, well, we are surrounded by the ocean.”

I rolled my eyes. “Who goes running at five a.m.? It’s still dark. And then running
at noon? Was he going to go back to work all sweaty?”

Alex wasn’t looking at me. “I don’t know, Lawson.”

“Like I said, fishy. I think this guy is searching for an alibi.”

“Going running is a pretty weak one.”

“Right. And who goes running without an iPod?”

“Someone smart, who knows that he may be relatively alone on this trail, so it’s best
to listen to his surroundings rather than the Spice Girls.”

“So sue me for liking classic pop.” I tapped my foot, still unsettled, until it hit
me. I spun to face Alex and leaned in close. “Okay, then. You don’t listen to music
so you can listen for cars, ax murderers, amphibians, sea-creatures, or whatever.
That means the guy takes precautions, right?”

“Lawson, I told you. This is pretty clean,” he gulped, his eyes flitting over the
rapidly soiling sheet. “A relatively cut and dry murder case.”

I looked back at Alex, flicked my gaze over the bodies. “It’s anything but cut and
dry. Did you see those bodies, Alex?”

His eyes flashed and I practically growled. “Don’t you dare tell me this was probably
gangbangers.”

“It’s not your jurisdiction, Lawson.”

“Just tell me this, Alex. What kind of guy takes precautions and runs
toward
a rustle in the bushes?”

Alex paused, but still didn’t look at me.

“Look at him, Alex. The guy is practically naked.”

Alex glanced over to the runner—his legs were bare, his shorts covering little more
than his rear and the tops of his thighs. They were so tight that I could make out
a key ring with a single key on it and something small and rectangular—a cell phone
or a wallet—pressed into the zipped back pocket. He wore a long-sleeved shirt that
was fitted against his thin torso, and sneakers and no socks.

“He’s got no protection and he’s running into the bushes on a practically deserted
trail? Explain that.”

“I can’t. But I can tell you that the blood is pretty fresh on these bodies and whoever
did—did what they did to them—has to be completely covered in it. That guy’s clean.”

I raised a challenging eyebrow and Alex’s inner groan was almost audible. “I’m going
to go ask him a few questions anyway.”

I moved to take a step toward Alex and he put a hand on my chest, effectively holding
me in place. “You’ve got two choices. Go sit in the car or wait here. This is a police
investigation.”

“Don’t patronize me, Alex Grace,” I hissed.

“You’re not a cop, Lawson.” Alex’s eyes had changed from that warm, inviting cobalt
to a steely grey that rivaled the unsettling rage of the ocean. “I don’t need you
here.”

Alex walked away from me and suddenly the hiss of the sea-soaked wind was biting.
I pulled my jacket against it, but the icy fingers still slid down the back of my
collar, whipped up my pant legs, and stung my cheeks. I was left in the clearing with
the two sheeted bodies—dead bodies, I sadly reminded myself—while the police, paramedics,
crime scene investigators, and finally, the coroner, buzzed around taking statements
and photographs or poking through the foliage carefully collecting evidence. I watched
while a younger guy, his black jacket slick with mist, bent down and collected a few
strands of hair with a pair of industrial-sized tweezers.

I squinted at the find when he did—a small bunch, possibly ten or twelve—of brown
hair, about six inches long. I filed it in my mental database when he zipped it in
his evidence bag. He took a careful step and I found myself doing the same thing,
gingerly picking my way through the shrubs and the broken remainders of puzzle bark
suckers. I don’t know how long I wandered, but when I looked up the crime scene and
its surrounding task force were just a few inches tall, the chatter and squawk of
the police radios and onlookers strangled by the sound of the crashing waves below
me. The grass and shrubs were broken here, too, tramped down and spattered with something
tarry and black. I poked at it with the tip of my finger and recoiled, the blood dripping
down to my palm. “Oh, god!” I rubbed my palm against my thigh until it burned.

I did my best to pick around the broken grass and splattered blood, but in my zeal
to be delicate and light-footed, I hooked my toe over the top of a jutting rock and
vaulted forward, landing hard on my chest in the grass. My head bobbed forward and
a starburst of pain shot across my forehead, blinding me. I tried to blink away the
blob of darkness that started in my right eye, but when I looked up, everything was
a watery blur and fuzzy black spots shot across my field of vision. I tried hard to
focus on what was right in front of me: first a few blades of grass. The rock that
sprouted an offensive trickle of my blood. The trees swaying in the breeze fifty feet
in front of me. The shadowy figure that stood there.

Terror overtook the pain and I shoved myself up, feeling the soft earth digging itself
into the tears in my palms. I knew the wind was blowing, slapping my hair against
my cheek and neck; it matted into the blood at my temple, but I couldn’t hear anything,
couldn’t feel anything. I tried to yell, but the wind snapped by and snatched the
scream right out of my mouth.

“Lawson!”

Alex was at the bluff running toward me. I had pushed myself onto my butt and was
shivering, my teeth chattering. I tried to tell him, tried to warn him, but all I
could do was point. Two women had been torn limb from limb twenty feet from me and
there, in the trees, their killer lurked.

“What?” Alex turned, eyes squinted, looking toward the trees.

“There’s a person there!” It was barely a croak, barely audible.

Alex stood up to his full six-foot height, still staring toward the trees. “I don’t
see anything. Are you sure?”

I pumped my head—then stopped. Was I sure? I gingerly touched my forehead. The cut
was sticky and throbbing.

“I hit my head.”

“Yeah.” Alex turned to me, slid an arm under my shoulders to help me up. “Looks like
you banged it pretty hard. Can you stand on your own?”

I strained to look over Alex’s shoulder while he supported me. “Did you see him? Did
he get away?”

“Lawson, there’s no one there. You hit your head.” He went to touch it but recoiled.
“You really did a number on it.”

I tried to squirm out of Alex’s arms but he held me firm. “So you’re saying I’m seeing
things?”

“No,” Alex said, pushing me farther up the bank, “I’m saying you fell and hit your
head and that there is nothing over there now, okay? Don’t make this bigger than it
is.”

“There was someone there, I’m sure of it. He was watching me. Watching the crime scene.”

I looked at Alex hard and his eyes softened as he relented. “Okay. Can we get a medic
over here?” he called. “Romero, Tibbs—Lawson thinks she saw someone.”

I pointed. “There. About fifty feet down.”

The guys took off running and I sunk down on the back of the ambulance tailgate.
Thank you
, I mouthed to Alex. He nodded.

The paramedic began cleaning my wound and I tried not to wince, tried not to squirm
away, but I wanted to turn and stare in the direction the officers ran. “Do you think
it was the killer?”

“Do I think who was the killer?” Alex asked, not looking up from his iPhone.

“The guy that I just saw!” I huffed.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, Lawson.”

I frowned, my eyes sweeping the bluff, then looking back at Alex, at the grizzly crime
scene behind him. My stomach went to liquid as I tried not to look toward the coroner
gathering up the ruined remains of the second body. My muscles tightened involuntarily;
probably in a show of solitary gladness that they were still attached to my limbs.

“I hope it wasn’t him.” I rambled on, “But who else would it be? Don’t psychopaths
enjoy injecting themselves into an active investigation? Or returning to the scene
of the crime to re-experience the joy or whatever?”

Alex cocked a half smile before looking away from me. “Glad to see you’re still a
TV junkie.”

“Hey. I probably watch as much Discovery Channel as I do
The Bachelor
, okay? There’s real learning there. Cut me a little slack.”

I would keep the fact that the Discovery Channel had just come out with another version
of
Hoarders
my personal secret.

Alex and I both snapped to attention when Romero and Tibbs came lumbering through
the grasses. “We couldn’t find a thing,” one of them muttered. “There was nothing
out there.”

Heat washed over my cheeks. “He was there, I swear. I know I saw something.”

Alex looked down at me, his eyes fierce. “Are you sure you checked everywhere, guys?”

Ever since a brush with my half-sister—a fallen angel called Ophelia who was hell-bent
on ruining my life, in a very serious way—I’ve been a little sensitive to the idea
of my seeing things. Mainly because she had the unfortunate (for me) ability to
make
me see things—horrible things, like maggots and blood-bathed murder weapons. It wasn’t
so much the images that bothered me, however; it was the idea of those images making
me feel one-hundred-percent, grade-A, bat-shit crazy.

“I know I didn’t imagine it.”

“We checked everything. There weren’t even any trails in the grass. Sorry, Sophie,
but maybe you just saw a shadow or something.”

A shadow?
I clenched my teeth and tried my hardest to focus, but the pain in my head was like
a humming, buzzing swarm of bees, making it incessantly hard to concentrate.
A standard murder,
I told myself,
not my jurisdiction.

I gingerly touched the bandage the paramedic had just finished winding around my head.
“Any nausea or dizziness?” he asked me.

I gazed back toward the bodies, caught sight of the river of spilled blood. “Nothing
unexpected,” I murmured. I watched Alex as he stepped away from me, leaning in toward
Romero and Tibbs as they talked, each cutting the other off, flailing their arms and
pointing toward either the crime scene or the crest of forest they had just searched.
I bobbed away from my paramedic as I tried to listen in on the officers’ conversation.

“Desecration,” I heard. “Wild animal.”

The paramedic turned my palms facing up and began swabbing. “Hold still,” he said
without looking at me.

“Who called an ambulance? I mean, those girls were already . . .” I let my voice trail
off, unable to say the word.

The paramedic, whose name badge said N. T
ORRES,
glanced through his lowered lashes at me. “I guess someone was hoping.”

I wanted to be professional—stone-faced, matter-of-fact. But I knew that somewhere,
someone was hoping that the police report was wrong, that the body under the sheet
wasn’t their daughter, wasn’t their girlfriend, that she wasn’t dead. I swallowed
back a tortured sob.

“One sick fuck,” I heard the chief say. “Can’t possibly be human.”

Alex turned slightly and caught me staring at him from the corner of his eye. I knew
what he was thinking and it made my stomach burn.

Once the chief had left, Alex came toward me. “Is she ready?”

N. Torres nodded and I bristled.

“
She
can speak for herself.”

Alex went on, unaffected. “Great. Are you ready?”

“Let’s go,” I said, brushing off the back of my pants. We took a few steps. “So, what’s
the official thought on the attacker?”