He stared after her even after the door closed, wondering how long he’d be able to move slow. And wondering if he wasn’t an idiot for not following her right inside.
* * *
His phone rang at just after six. Adjusting Stanley to the side of the couch—exactly when the pup had crawled up to sleep beside him he didn’t know—he grabbed the phone on the second blues riff. It was Jaylon.
“I haven’t had my coffee yet,” he muttered sitting up.
“Make it to go,” his partner said. “You got your wish.”
His heart thudded and his gut clenched as he stood. “Another body.”
“Yep. Female this time.”
“Female?”
“Outdoors this time, too. A railroad underpass on University Rd, just south of the Scranton Flats. I have the forensics people taking pictures for now. Thought you’d want to see this as untouched as possible.” His partner paused. “How long will it take you?”
“Twenty minutes,” Aaron answered with a quick look at the clock on the wall. He hung up then pulled on his jeans.
“He’s changed gender?” Brianna stood there in her pajamas, her hair slightly mussed.
“Seems so,” he said, reaching for his sweater.
“That’s odd for a serial killer isn’t it?” she asked.
“Usually they’re prey is a certain type, but not always.” He paused. “Mind if I shower here? I’ll be quick.”
“Sure. Towels are in the closet.” She moved to the kitchen. “I’ll start the coffee. Peanut butter toast okay?”
He nodded. “Perfect.”
When he came out of the bathroom, she not only had them coffee and breakfast, but had gotten dressed.
“I know I’m not official,” she said, quickly, “and you can’t take me on a crime scene again without causing trouble, but my car is at the safehouse and would waste your time taking me there before you get to the crime scene. And it sounded like Jaylon wanted you there as quick as possible. My choices are wait until who knows when you’ll get back, call Kirk F in about three hours to come get me, which would drive me absolutely nuts not knowing if Jaylon is right and this is our killer’s second murder or go with you and stay out of the way. So I’m thinking the third option really is the only logical one.”
“Wow. That was some speech,” he said, coming over to get one of travel mugs she’d filled with coffee and add some cream to it. He leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to her lips. “I was just going to ask if I needed to take Stanley out before we left.”
* * *
They arrived in the area known as the Scranton Flats—an area of land just west of the Cuyahoga River, that had gone under major reclamation in the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands. It had native foliage, restored natural riverbanks to harbor freshwater fish and Towpath park for hiking and biking —just a few minutes longer than Aaron had promised his partner.
Aaron turned from Scranton Road onto University Road then drove half a block down, stopping where the police cruisers, unmarked police cars and the crime scene van blocked the area from any street traffic. Not that this little section of town got much traffic, cars or people, from what Brianna could tell.
Just like where they’d found Art’s body the night before. Isolated. Plenty of time for the murderer to pose his victim.
“You can come, too,” Aaron said, taking a last swig from the travel mug.
She studied him a moment. “You sure? I don’t want you getting in trouble having a civilian on the scene or anything like that.”
He shrugged. “My case. My crime scene. If I say you’re okay to come, you’re okay to come.”
They climbed out of their respective sides of the car, Stanley snuggly in Brianna’s arms, and Aaron pressed the old-fashioned door lock button. The undercover car was too old for fancy electronic locks. Then he led them through the police tape barrier, holding it up for her before ducking down under it himself.
“Just remember to stay back and not get in the techs’ way, okay?” He said, his hand resting lightly on the small of her back.
“Got it,” she said, looking at all the people in white, disposable hazmat-style jumpsuits milling about. Up ahead, just before a railroad overpass stood Jaylon talking to Investigator Ramos she’d met the night before.
“Doesn’t look like anyone unofficial is here yet or I’d have you take a film of the crowd,” he said as they neared the spot where the body was.
The early morning sun was just breaking through the dawn and peeking around the buildings to shed light on the area. Brianna could see the victim’s feet jutting out into the roadway, but nothing much else through the maze of people in the shadows of the overpass. Jaylon broke free from the group and headed their way.
“Hello again, Ms. Matthews and Stanley,” he said, offering the pup the last bite of some breaded thing he was eating, while giving Aaron a knowing half-grin that they’d arrived together so early in the morning. “Still keeping guard on your witness?”
“For now,” Aaron said, in a mind-your-own-business tone. The younger man chuckled. “What do we have?”
“Young woman, probably late twenties, early thirties. Asian descent. No physical injuries. No lividity, according to Ramos.”
“Anything else similar?” Aaron asked, moving to the side a little to look at the body.
“She was cleansed head-to-toe, same as Art,” Jaylon said. “This time she was dressed in a long black formal dress and in her lap is a violin bow.”
“A violin bow?” Aaron asked. “Could she have been a concert violinist?”
“Have no idea. But I doubt it. There are track marks up and down both arms. She has no ID on her. Ramos fingerprinted her, so maybe something will come back later.” Jaylon took a step back. “You want to come have a look?”
Aaron looked Brianna’s way. Non-verbally asking her to wait.
She nodded further beyond the crime scene. “Stanley and I’ll go up the road there. That should put us out of the way.”
“Okay, but not too far,” Aaron warned, then walking away with his partner.
A little thrill shot down her spine. He was worried about her safety, even with all the police milling about. Other than Abby and her adoptive parents, she couldn’t remember anyone worrying about her.
Walking on the far side of the narrow road from where the technicians and policemen worked, she waited until she was beyond the tape barrier to let Stanley down. Happy to be down in a new area, he wagged his tail as he tried to pull her to the opposite side of the street where a tree and bushes lined the road. Brianna stood patiently while Stanley marked the area, the cool morning breeze milling about her. Behind her was an abandoned building. Beyond Stanley’s trees and down a slight embankment was the hiking and biking path known as the Towpath the city had developed. The area had definitely seen improvement along the trail, but not quite up to where this little patch of old urban industry still lingered.
Once Stanley had finished, she worked her way back to the police tape barrier, mindful that this was an isolated place and a killer with an agenda was on the loose. One of the patrolmen met her and lifted the tape. She scooped up Stanley and went to stand near Aaron and Jaylon once more.
“And who found her?” Aaron asked.
Jaylon pointed to a young, dark-haired man sitting sideways on the backseat of an open police cruiser, talking with one of the uniformed policemen. “Name’s Mike Connelly, works at the West Side Market. His shift starts at o-six-hundred and he jogs to work from the east side of town. Said he goes past this spot every morning and evening. Didn’t work yesterday, but said the woman definitely wasn’t there Wednesday evening when he went home.”
“So, the body was dumped here in the past two nights.” Aaron said. “Let’s get him down to the station for a formal statement and let him get on to work. Last thing we want to do is cost some poor kid his job.”
Jaylon nodded and signaled the officer standing next to the cruiser they could head to the
station. “Already contacted his boss and explained the situation. Boss was cool with it.”
Aaron turned back to study the body. “What else do we know about her, beside that her blood has been drained and she was a drug addict? Was she a violinist?”
Brianna still couldn’t bring herself to look beyond the black ballet flats on her feet. Which was silly. She’d already seen a corpse. Of course, she’d been shining a flashlight beam on Art, trying to keep the rats from eating anymore of his flesh.
Slowly, she raised her gaze, taking in the ankle length black gown—the kind women members of an orchestra wore. The hands lying overtop of the violin bow in her lap—nails clipped short and freshly painted with a coat of clear nail polish. Her arms with the long, ugly tracks of her drug addiction inching upward to the little cap sleeves of the dress. The scooped, neck of the bodice, exposing the emaciated lines of her collarbones.
With every inch that Brianna saw, her nerves grew a little more itchy, her breath shallower, until finally she saw the young woman’s face, made up of a light covering of powder, the lips covered in a pink lipstick, the thick, long straight dark hair, eyes a slight almond shape, their dull, but familiar brown gaze fixed on the river beyond.
Brianna swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Yes.”
Everyone around her grew silent. She could feel Aaron, Jaylon and Ramos all staring at her. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the body.
“Yes, what?” Jaylon asked, breaking the spell.
Brianna looked at the trio. “Yes, she was a violinist. Quite good when she was young. Considered a virtuoso. Her name is Mia Tanaka.”
“And you know this how?” Aaron asked quietly, almost gently.
Brianna inhaled, then exhaled, tears spilling over her cheeks. “Because she used to live in the women’s shelter. And she was my friend.”
16
Let’s get you a seat.” Aaron grasped Brianna gently by her elbows and maneuvered her away from the body. She’d grown pale and he felt the shivers running through her. The last thing they needed was for her to faint. “When did you last see Mia?”
“About a year ago,” Brianna said, a little more than a whisper after she sat in the back of one of the cruisers, the door open and her feet flat on the broken asphalt beneath the car. “She’d been doing so well…” The words drifted off and she swallowed hard, tears brimming over to slide down her cheeks.
He wanted to pull her up into his arms and hold her close, comfort her, but not here, not now. This was a crime scene, his job. The tentative relationship he had with her was too fresh, too new and still very private.
“Here, drink this,” Jaylon said beside him, cracking the cap off a bottle of water—where he’d gotten it from, Aaron had no idea—and handed it to her.
Brianna took a few sips, blinked, dashing the tears away with her free hand, then picking Stanley up to sit in her lap. The dog sensed her unease and snuggled in tight as she stroked his fur, as much to comfort herself as she did the terrier.
“You okay to talk?” Aaron asked, laying one hand on her shoulder, squeezing it just a little.
She took another, longer drink of the water, then nodded that she’d be okay to continue.
“Detective Jeffers!” one of the uniforms called to Aaron before he could ask Brianna another question. He turned to tell the guy to wait, only to see a tall man with closely cut dark red hair, dressed in jeans and a dark blue windbreaker with big, bold, yellow FBI letters on the upper left chest area, standing just outside the police barrier tape. “This guy says he’s with you.”
Carson Smith. Had to be. He hadn’t talked to anyone else, except Jake, and he trusted Jake. How the hell did Carson get here? Didn’t matter, but since he was, might as well get his opinion on the scene before Ramos started grousing about needing to move the body to the morgue.
“It’s okay. Let him through,” he called, then also waved Ramos over.
“Carson?” he asked, reaching out to shake the other man’s hand. He looked much younger than he’d expected. Thirty-ish, maybe. “Didn’t expect you to make a trip here.”
“Your case intrigued me,” was all he said.
Guy travels all night on his own dime because a case intrigued him? Jake did say he was a very focused profiler. Aaron schooled his surprise and started the introductions. “This is my partner Jaylon Halloway, Investigator Anita Ramos of the Medical Examiner’s office, and this is Brianna Matthews, civilian, but assisting on the case.”
Jaylon lifted one brow his direction. He ignored it. That was the best description he could give at this time as to why she was here, why he was keeping her close. It was his case and so far, Brianna had been instrumentally involved since the beginning.
“Carson is a profiler and I ran through the situation with our first victim with him.” He stopped the explanation, to focus on the FBI agent again. “How did you know where to find us?”
The younger man gave a slight shrug. “I went straight from the airport to your homicide unit. You gave me the address yesterday. When I got there, your captain told me you’d found a second victim. I asked him if he minded me taking a look. He said no and sent me with one of your uniform squads.”
“Did he tell you anything about this new case?”
“I asked him not to. When I can, I prefer to look at a scene from my own perspective and especially if it hasn’t been disturbed, too much.” He leaned sideways, staring past Jaylon’s shoulder to where Mia’s body sat.
“Why don’t you take our guest over to the body,” Aaron said to Ramos with a nod of his head. “He can get his own perspective while Jaylon and I talk with Ms. Matthews.”
“Sure thing.” She gestured to Carson and he accompanied her over, adjusting his long, loping stride to meet hers.
“Kinda odd he just turned up here,” Jaylon said, staring after the pair.
“If he can help us find who’s killing these people and why, he can be as odd as he wants.” Aaron turned his attention back to Brianna, who looked a little less pale. “Feeling better?”
“Yes. It was just such a shock,” she said, still sounding a little shaken. Then she took a deep breath, sitting straighter on the car seat as if steeling her resolve to talk about her friend. “Mia was a heroin addict who came to the shelter after her boyfriend and supplier beat her badly. He threatened to kill her, saying she’d stolen drugs and money from him. She stayed for about a year, slowly getting off the drugs. Methadone first, then she managed to kick her dependence on that, too.”
“And she was a musician?” Aaron asked.
Brianna nodded. “Classically trained. One of those kids you put the right instrument into their hands and they just make it sing. Her parents own a little Asian foods store in the Asiatown area. They scrimped and saved to get Mia private lessons for the violin.”
“So she was a child prodigy?” Jaylon asked, leaning his back against the front door of the cruiser to keep an eye on the scene around them.
“No, she wasn’t one of those, but she was really quite talented. Would’ve gone far if the drugs hadn’t gotten into her life.” Brianna stopped to take another drink of water. “When she was fifteen, one of those expensive violin instructors, the one who promised her parents to get her into Juilliard, raped Mia.”
“Sonofabitch,” Aaron said, and Jalon swore something else under his breath.
“The abuse went on until she graduated high school. She began taking pain pills and managed to hide it from her parents, but her playing suffered. Surprise that, huh? And the promised Juilliard audition?” Brianna shook her head. “That never came through. Still, Mia did secure a scholarship at Case Western Reserve. The stress of college and her self-medicating on opioids took its toll on her. She dropped out after two years. Her parents disowned her, and that led her to living on the streets. When she arrived at the shelter, she had the clothes on her back and her violin.”
“No drugs?” Jaylon asked. “A heroin addict wouldn’t leave without a kit. They�
�d want to know they had their next fix.”
“Especially if she’d been beaten. The pain would increase her need for the drugs,” Aaron said.
Brianna nodded. “True. But Mia had already made the decision to quit. I guess when she got the courage up to leave her abuser, she’d decided to make more than one change in her life. The minute she was in the intake room, where the doctor and nurse do a physical assessment, she let them know she was an addict and asked to go on the methadone program.”
“That did take some guts,” Aaron said.
“That’s why I’m so surprised she was using again,” Brianna said. “She’d been clean for six months and her abuser was no longer a threat.”
“He was in prison?”
Brianna shook her head. “No, he was shot down in a drug deal gone bad.”
“Karma’s a bitch,” Jaylon said, and Aaron couldn’t argue with him. In his opinion, justice had been served.
“So, with him six feet under, Mia thought it was safe to leave the women’s shelter,” he said, and Brianna nodded.
“She’d planned to go back to school to get a teaching degree in music education. Paula and I actually helped her fill out her application and get her a housing scholarship near the campus. We’d meet up for lunch or breakfast every so often.” Tears filled Brianna’s eyes and she blinked hard. “After a few months though, we just lost contact with her.”
“When was the last time you saw her?” Aaron asked as gently as he could.
“The last time I met with her was a year ago. But Flora, one of the other shelter employees, said she’d run into Mia last autumn, just before the cold weather set in. So, October? She was playing her violin.”
“So, she was with one of the bands at one of the parks?” Jaylon asked.
“No. Flora said she was playing for change from the passersby. I don’t remember where.”
“So, she was probably homeless, playing for loose change to feed her habit, since the tracks on her arms suggests she’d been using again.” Aaron paused and called to Ramos, “Anita? Are those fresh track marks?”
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