Once Chosen (A Riley Paige Mystery—Book 17)

by Blake Pierce

  But what was the truth, exactly?

  That was the real problem. She didn’t know what they could have told Meredith. They hadn’t had time to sort it all out themselves.

  Riley and Bill still didn’t know which way things were going in their relationship. When they had a better idea, maybe they could sit down with Meredith and put the record straight. She hoped Meredith would be sympathetic, and perhaps even happy for them.

  After about an hour on the road, they drove on into Winneway, an expensive, history-conscious town. Riley found it incongruous to see that some of the big, handsome homes dating back to Colonial times were now flanked by swimming pools. Riley always found herself ill at ease in such affluent surroundings. People she’d encountered in settings like that tended to treat FBI more like servants than like the professionals they had to be.

  Finally the GPS informed them that they had arrived at Ironwood Park, a vast expanse of well-groomed grass spotted with wooded areas. Colorful autumn leaves made the scene especially pleasant.

  Riley turned onto a curving road that led into the park. Soon they came upon a group of parked vehicles—a couple of police cars, a county sheriff’s car, and a medical examiner’s van.

  “This must be the place!” Ann Marie chirped cheerfully.

  Riley winced at Ann Marie’s lighthearted tone. She felt like warning the girl that they were about to walk into a deadly serious situation—a crime scene with the body of a murder victim still present.

  But Riley thought better of saying anything.

  Just let it be a surprise, she thought, suppressing a wry smile.

  She knew that Ann Marie had seen cadavers during her training at the academy, but only in clinical, forensic settings. Seeing a corpse at a crime scene was a whole different experience—one that Riley felt pretty sure this apparent social butterfly wasn’t ready for. If the rookie couldn’t handle it, Riley would be perfectly happy to send her back to Quantico right away.

  They got out of the car and headed toward a wooded patch that was surrounded by barriers and police tape. Riley was pleased to see that a tent-like structure had been set up among the trees, obviously to protect the crime site. A couple of cops stood sentinel just outside the tent.

  The cops here know what they’re doing, she thought.

  Riley and Ann Marie held up their badges for the sentinels to see, then ducked under the tape and stepped inside the tent. The interior was lit by a couple of standing lights, and it was occupied by several men, a large hole with a pile of dirt on one side, and a covered corpse stretched out on the ground.

  Riley introduced herself and her junior agent to county sheriff Emory Wightman and chief medical examiner Mark Tyler, who had been waiting for them to arrive. The sheriff was a solid-looking man in his forties, although a pot belly indicated that he wasn’t really keeping in shape. The thin and wiry medical examiner appeared a bit older. Both men looked slightly uneasy for a moment, then Wightman finally asked, “I guess you want to inspect the body.”

  “It’s not a pretty sight,” Tyler commented.

  Wightman added, “I guess agents like you have seen plenty of—”

  “Of course,” Riley interrupted him.

  She suspected that the sheriff’s reluctance was because the agents were both women, but even if her young partner might not be up to this, Riley had seen enough corpses not to be daunted by the prospect.

  Without further hesitation, Wightman gently lifted away the cover.

  The sight of the corpse actually took Riley aback.

  The body was in a considerable state of decay from having been buried for a long time. But the truly weird thing was that the victim was wearing a skeleton costume, a black outfit with white bones printed on it.

  A skeleton dressed up as a skeleton, she thought.

  Before Riley could ask any questions, she heard Ann Marie let out a sharp cry—but it wasn’t a cry of distress.

  “Oh, this is so interesting!”

  Ann Marie’s face expressed pleased fascination as she crouched down beside the corpse. She leaned forward for a closer look at the remnants of flesh and hair clinging to the bare human skull.

  This was hardly the reaction Riley had expected from this youngster. She wondered what other surprises her new partner might have in store for her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Riley watched with surprise as Ann Marie peered closely and curiously at the corpse’s face. The victim’s head was little more than a skull with dried skin stretched over it. It eerily mirrored the costume skull mask that had been removed and was lying next to the face.

  The young woman seemed to be perfectly used to this kind of thing. In fact, she took out her cell phone and began to snap pictures of the corpse.

  Riley was startled.

  Doesn’t she know the guys here have surely taken pictures already? she wondered.

  Riley almost told her to stop, but she didn’t want to criticize Ann Marie right here at the crime scene with others watching.

  Ann Marie glanced up at the medical examiner and said, “I’ve not seen many bodies in this condition before. Most of the ones I’ve looked at have been … well, fresher, you might say. This one’s a ‘she,’ isn’t it?”

  Tyler just nodded in response.

  Ann Marie asked, “How long do you figure she’s been buried here?”

  Tyler shrugged slightly. “It’s hard to say,” he told her. “Quite a few months, I guess. I’ll have a better idea when I’ve done an autopsy.”

  Sheriff Wightman added, “We’re quite sure that the victim’s name was Allison Hillis. She disappeared a little more than a year ago. M.E. Tyler will do some tests to make sure this is the same person. But Allison was wearing exactly this sort of costume when she went missing.”

  Ann Marie shook her head and clicked her tongue.

  “How sad that she wound up like this,” she said. “But I guess a year’s a long time to be missing. Hard to expect somebody to turn up alive after all that time.”

  Then peering again at the face she said, “But there’s something unusual about her. She wasn’t just buried a year ago, right after she’d been killed, was she?”

  Tyler tilted his head with interest.

  “Why do you say that?” he said.

  Snapping a tight close-up of the corpse’s hand, Ann Marie said, “Well, I haven’t seen many exhumed corpses, and the ones I have seen came out of coffins, not straight out of the ground. And even the ones that were buried recently looked a lot more decayed than this one—pretty much falling apart, really. The skin’s more intact on this one—almost like she was mummified or something.”

  “Yeah, I noticed that too,” Tyler said with interest.

  “I’ve got a little theory, if you don’t mind hearing it,” Ann Marie said.

  The middle-aged M.E. stroked his mustache and smiled—just a bit flirtatiously, Riley thought.

  “I’d love to hear it,” Tyler said.

  Ann Marie said, “Well, I think she might have been frozen for a while before she was buried here. That might help explain the unusual preservation.”

  Pointing to a spot on the neck, she added, “See these cracks? Those look like freezing damage to me, not regular decay.”

  Tyler’s eyes widened with surprise.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “I was thinking pretty much the same thing.”

  A bit flirtatiously herself, Ann Marie winked at him and said, “Well, you know what they say about great minds.”

  Tyler’s squinted with curiosity. He said to her, “Hey, did you say that your last name was Esmer?”

  Ann Marie nodded.

  Tyler asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be related to Sebastian Esmer over in Georgetown?”

  Ann Marie’s eyes twinkled.

  “He’s my dad,” she said with a note of pride.

  Tyler’s smile broadened.

  “I should have figured,” he said with a shake of the head. “The apple doesn’t fall too fa
r from the tree.”

  “I don’t guess it does,” Ann Marie said.

  Riley felt thoroughly dumbfounded now.

  Who is this kid? she wondered.

  And why the hell does she know so much about corpses?

  But now was no time to sort all that out. She still knew next to nothing about what they were doing here.

  She asked the sheriff and the M.E., “Has the cause of death been determined?”

  “Maybe so,” Sheriff Wightman said.

  “We’re not sure, though,” Tyler added. “I’ll show you what I mean.”

  Riley crouched down beside the corpse with Ann Marie and Tyler.

  Tyler pointed to a place where the costume had been cut open to reveal a wound in the center of the chest.

  “She was stabbed through the sternum, straight into the heart,” Tyler said. “But not with a knife.”

  He fingered the peculiar wound and added, “As you can see, the opening is almost perfectly round. It looks as if she were stabbed by something extremely sharp and cylindrical.”

  A stake through the heart? Riley wondered as Ann Marie snapped a picture of the wound.

  Surely not.

  But the details about this murder were striking her as weirder and weirder by the moment.

  Riley asked, “Do you have any theories about what kind of weapon might have been used?”

  Before Tyler could reply, Ann Marie gasped.

  “Oh, look at these!” she said.

  Now she was taking pictures of indented marks on the costume.

  Tyler said, “Yeah, those are really strange. Take a look right here.”

  He showed Riley and Ann Marie another place where he had cut the costume for a better look at the flesh underneath, revealing that the marks in the costume were matched by indentations in the body. It looked like the body had been beaten by something heavy and hammer-like.

  What really struck Riley was the odd shape of the marks. They were sort of pear-shaped, but they were divided down the middle. Before Riley could bring to mind exactly what they looked like, Ann Marie spoke up.

  “They look like hoof prints.”

  “I think so too,” Tyler said.

  Riley felt a prickle of confusion.

  She asked, “Are you saying the woman was trampled to death by some hoofed animal?”

  Tyler shook his head. “I’m not saying anything just yet. I’m still not sure whether these marks were made before or after the wound to the chest. But my hunch is that they came afterwards, after the victim had already been stabbed.”

  Ann Marie gasped again.

  She said, “And the object that stabbed her was shaped like a hoofed animal’s horn! Like she was gored to death!”

  “It does look that way,” Tyler said.

  Riley could hardly believe what she was hearing.

  She said, “Are you saying this woman was gored in the chest by some large animal, which then trampled her body?”

  Tyler shrugged, “Like I said, I’m not saying anything yet.”

  Ann Marie asked, “But what kind of animal might we be talking about?”

  Sheriff Wightman spoke up with a surprising note of certainty.

  “A goat.”

  Riley looked at the sheriff. She could tell from his expression that he meant exactly what he said.

  “I don’t understand,” Riley said.

  “Neither do I,” Wightman said. “But I am pretty sure more people are going to wind up dead if we don’t put a stop to this. I’ll show you why when we get back to the station. I’m hoping you BAU folks can help make sense of it. Do you think it’s OK for Tyler and his team to take the body to the morgue now?”

  “That would be fine,” Riley said.

  As Tyler began giving orders to his team, Wightman said to Riley and Ann Marie, “Let’s go on over to the station. You can follow me in your car. When we get there, I can brief you completely on what we know so far.”

  Riley’s mind boggled as she and Ann Marie headed back toward their vehicle. This murder was much stranger than she’d imagined—too strange, she suspected, for the local police to deal with on their own.

  Was this going to turn out to be a true FBI case after all?

  As she and her new partner got into the car and started driving behind the sheriff’s vehicle, something else nagged at Riley—Ann Marie’s behavior at the crime scene. It seemed as though the chief M.E. knew more about Ann Marie than Riley did. That situation had to change.

  Riley tried to think of a tactful way to broach the subject. But her impatience got the best of her, and she blurted aloud to Ann Marie, “Who are you, anyway?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  As those four blurted words seemed to echo through the car, Riley immediately regretted the bluntness of her question.

  “Who are you, anyway?”

  Ann Marie was staring back at her with surprise. The rookie seemed to be trying to understand what Riley was asking.

  Riley stammered, “What I mean is … you know so much about dead bodies … and the M.E. seems to know who you are … and …”

  Ann Marie broke into a smile.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Yeah, I guess I must have seemed kind of, you know, ghoulish back there. Well, I grew up around corpses.”

  “Huh?” Riley said.

  “My dad runs a mortuary in Georgetown—Esmer’s Funeral Home.”

  Then she laughed and added, “It’s a thriving business, believe me. Rich people die as much as everybody else. Who’d have thought it, huh? Anyway, Dad’s got a really good professional reputation throughout this area, so even a lot of forensics guys know who he is. That’s why the M.E. recognized my name.”

  Riley tried to keep her eye on the road and the car she was following. But she couldn’t help glancing at Ann Marie, trying to imagine her as a child—maybe even a toddler—hanging around a funeral home. What kinds of things had this fresh-faced kid witnessed in her life so far? Had she maybe even watched as her father carried out embalmings? If so, how young had she been the first time?

  As if in reply to Riley’s unspoken questions, Ann Marie said, “I guess I know the business pretty much backwards and forwards. Which is why Dad’s still not happy that I decided to go into law enforcement. ‘There’s no money in it,’ he keeps telling me. What he really means is, he always wanted me to take over the family business someday.”

  Ann Marie shrugged and said, “Which I used to think would be fine with me—until I solved that murder case and got recruited into the FBI Honors Internship Program. Now I’m really hooked on this business.”

  Business? Riley thought.

  She had never in all these years thought of what she did as a “business.”

  Now Riley’s curiosity was growing. There seemed to be a whole lot about this kid she didn’t know.

  She asked, “Tell me about that case you solved.”

  Ann Marie let out a self-effacing laugh.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” she said. “It would bore you, I’m sure.”

  I doubt that, Riley thought.

  But now was not the time to hear the story. The sheriff was pulling into the police station parking lot, so Riley followed and parked near where he did. She and Ann Marie got out of their car and walked with the sheriff to the station.

  The station was a large, handsome colonial building. As they walked inside, Riley saw that the place was fully remodeled and modern-looking. Riley felt sure it was well equipped with the latest law enforcement technology. The people inside seemed focused on their work. It certainly appeared that Sheriff Wightman was running a competent force, not the primitive kind of local outfit Riley and Bill often had to deal with.

  She found herself wondering if any FBI agents were needed here after all.

  For one thing, she still had no idea why the sheriff thought they might be dealing with a serial killer, not just a one-time murderer.

  As they walked by employees’ desks, everybody seemed to look up and smile at Ann Mar
ie, and she met their eyes and smiled back at them and waved slightly.

  She’s likeable, I guess, Riley thought.

  To everybody but me, apparently.

  What bugged Riley was that the girl seemed to know she was likeable—and pretty. She was clearly basking in all the attention she was getting from the people around her. It didn’t strike Riley as an especially professional attitude for an aspiring BAU agent.

  Riley and Ann Marie followed Sheriff Wightman into a large conference room, where a case folder lay on the table. They all sat down, and the sheriff opened the folder and browsed through its contents.

  “I guess I’d better start at the beginning,” he said. “Last year on Halloween night, a girl went missing—seventeen-year-old Allison Hillis.”

  Wightman pushed a picture of the smiling teenager across the table for Riley and Ann Marie to see. Although she made no comment, Riley couldn’t help comparing it to the skull on the body that had been removed from the grave. Could that have been what became of this healthy-looking youngster?

  She knew that it very well could be. Certain kinds of monsters liked to prey on the young and attractive.

  Wightman continued, “She was last seen walking on her way to a party, dressed in a skeleton costume. Her family started calling around for her that night, and called us the next morning. A few more days went by with no sign of her, and of course her family panicked, and so did everybody else who knew her. Nobody thought of Allison as the kind of kid who might just run off. Of course, my people and I did everything we could to find her, to no avail.”

  Fingering a piece of paper, the sheriff added, “A week later, this note was dropped off at the station.”

  He laid the paper in front of Riley and Ann Marie. It was a message made out of cut-out print letters pasted onto a sheet of blank paper. It read:

  LOOKING FOR THE GIRL DRESSED LIKE DEATH?

  GOOD LUCK.

  NOW THE GOATMAN WILL TAKE HIS TURN

  SINGING THE GOAT SONG.

  “You can imagine that really got our attention,” Wightman said.

  Riley nodded and said, “‘Dressed like death’—that sure sounds like Allison’s Halloween costume.”