7 Die For Me

by Karen Rose

“Dr. Johannsen.” It was a haughty, cultured voice that she’d heard before.

  Sophie drew a breath. Not Europe. It was Amanda Brewster. “Yes.”

  “Do you know who this is?”

  She glanced at the box with the mouse and new rage hit her like a wave. She planned to give the poor animal a decent burial after her shift. “You are a sick bitch.”

  “And you have a poor memory. I told you once to stay away from my husband.”

  “And you have poor hearing. I told you that I don’t want your husband. I don’t ever want to see him again. You do not need to worry about me, Amanda. In fact if I were you, I’d be more worried about your husband’s new blonde assistant du jour.”

  “If you were me, you’d have Alan,” she said smugly and Sophie rolled her eyes.

  “You need to get some professional help.”

  “What I need,” Amanda gritted through clenched teeth, “is for every little whore to keep their hands off my husband. I told you the last time I caught you that—”

  “You didn’t catch me,” Sophie said in exasperation. “I came to you.” Which, after trusting that Alan Brewster had really loved her, was Sophie’s second big mistake. She stupidly had thought the wife of a philanderer should know, but Amanda Brewster hadn’t listened then and she wasn’t going to listen now.

  “—that I’d ruin you,” Amanda continued as if Sophie had not said a word.

  The woman hadn’t needed to ruin her then. Alan and his posse had accomplished that on their own, with their sexual innuendo. And they’d started it again.

  Which really pissed her off. She picked up the toy Vito had sent her, wishing it would work through the phone, wishing she could wipe the entire incident off the face of the planet. But that wasn’t going to happen and it was time she dealt with it. She’d run from Alan ten years ago, ashamed of what she’d done and scared of Amanda’s threats to her career. She was still ashamed, but she wasn’t running anymore.

  “Get some help, Amanda. I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

  “You’d better be. Look at you now,” Amanda screeched. “You’re working in a third-rate museum for an idiot. You think your career’s in the toilet now.” She laughed, not a little hysterically. “You’ll be digging sewer trenches by the time I’m done with you.”

  Sophie huffed a surprised chuckle. “Digging sewer trenches” were the same exact words Amanda had used ten years before. At twenty-two, Sophie had believed her. At thirty-two, she recognized the ranting of a mentally imbalanced woman. She probably should pity Amanda Brewster. Maybe in another ten years she would.

  “You’re not going to believe anything I say about Alan, but you can believe this. Send me another package like you did this morning and I will call the police.”

  She hung up and looked around her tiny windowless office. Amanda was right about one thing. Sophie did work in a third-rate museum.

  But it didn’t have to be. Amanda was wrong about one other thing. Ted wasn’t an idiot. Sophie had watched the faces of the tour group this afternoon. They’d had fun, and they’d learned something. Ted was right. He was keeping his grandfather’s legacy alive the best way he knew how. And he hired me to help him do that. So far she hadn’t been a lot of help.

  Because she’d spent the last six months feeling sorry for herself. Big important archeologist forced to leave the dig of a lifetime. “When did I become such a snob?” she wondered out loud. Just because she wasn’t digging in France didn’t mean she couldn’t do something important here.

  She looked at the boxes that filled her office, stacked floor to ceiling. Most of them were filled with pieces of Ted the First’s collections that Ted and Darla hadn’t been able to find room for in the main museum. She’d find a place for them.

  She looked at her hand and realized she still clenched Vito’s memory zapper. Carefully she returned it to its box. She’d put her personal life back on track when she met Vito for dinner. She’d start putting her professional life back on track right now.

  She found Ted in his office. “Ted, I need some space.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What kind of space? Sophie, are you leaving us?”

  Her eyes widened. “No, I’m not leaving. I want more exhibit space. I’ve got some ideas for new exhibits.” She smiled. “Fun ones. Where can I put them?”

  Ted smiled back. “I have the perfect place. Well, it’s not perfect yet, but I have every confidence you’ll whip it into shape.”

  Tuesday, January 16, 4:10 P.M.

  Munch had spent the first half hour of their drive telling Greg Sanders about the documentary he was making. It was a fresh look at daily life in medieval Europe.

  God, Greg thought. What a yawner. This would have been worse for his career than Sanders Sewer Service. “How about the other actors?”

  “I begin shooting them next week.”

  Then they’d be alone. And Munch hadn’t paid anyone else yet. He should have a lot of cash in his house. “How much farther out is your studio?” Greg demanded. “We must have gone fifty miles.”

  “Not much farther,” Munch replied. He smiled and Greg felt a cold shiver burn down his back. “I don’t like to bother my neighbors, so I live out where no one can hear me.”

  “How would you bother them?” Greg asked, not so sure he wanted the answer.

  “Oh, I host medieval reenacting groups.”

  “You mean like jousting and shit?”

  Munch smiled again. “And shit.” He turned off the highway. “That’s my house.”

  “Nice place,” Greg murmured. “Classic Victorian.”

  “I’m glad you approve.” He pulled into the driveway. “Come in.”

  Greg followed Munch, impatient that the old man took so long walking with the damn cane. Inside he looked around, wondering where the old man kept his money.

  “This way,” Munch said and led him into a room filled with costumes. Some were on hangers, while others were worn by faceless mannequins. It looked like a medieval department store. “You’ll wear this.” Munch pointed to a friar’s robe.

  “Pay me first.”

  Munch looked annoyed. “You’ll be paid when I am satisfied. Get dressed.” He turned to go and Greg knew it was now or never.

  Do it. Quickly he flipped out his blade, moved in behind the old man and hooked his arm around Munch’s neck, pressing the sharp edge against his throat. “You’ll pay me now, old man. Walk slowly to wherever you keep your money and you won’t get hurt.”

  Munch went still. Then in an explosion of movement he grasped Greg’s thumb and twisted. Greg yelped with pain and his knife clattered to the floor. His arm was whipped behind his back and a second later he was on the ground, Munch’s knee in his back.

  “You slimy little sonofabitch,” Munch said and it was not the voice of an old man.

  Greg could barely hear him over the pounding in his head. The pain was excruciating. His arm, his hand. They were burning. Pop. Greg screamed as his wrist snapped. Then moaned when his elbow did the same.

  “That was for trying to rob me,” Munch said, grabbed a handful of Greg’s hair and smashed his head into the floor. “That was for calling me old.”

  Nausea rolled through him when Munch stood up and pocketed his blade. Get help. He slipped his hand into his pocket and fumbled his cell open with his left hand. He had time only to push one button before Munch’s boot came crashing against his kidneys.

  “Hands out of your pockets.” He shoved his boot into Greg’s stomach and flipped him to his back. Greg could only stare in horror as Munch pulled off his gray wig. Munch wasn’t old. He wasn’t gray. He was totally bald. Munch pulled off his goatee and put it next to the wig. The eyebrows were last and Greg’s stomach clenched as panic gave way to cold hard fear. Munch had no eyebrows. He had no hair of any kind.

  He’s going to kill me. Greg coughed and tasted blood. “What are you going to do?”

  Munch smiled down at him. “Terrible things, Greg. Terrible, terrible things.” />
  Scream. But when he tried, all that came out was a pathetic croak.

  Munch threw his arms wide. “Scream all you want. No one can hear you. No one will save you. I’ve killed them all.” He bent down until all Greg could see were his eyes, cold and furious. “They all thought they suffered, but their suffering was nothing compared to what I’m going to do to you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Tuesday, January 16, 5:00 P.M.

  Sober-faced, they’d reassembled to debrief. Vito sat at the head of the table, Liz on his right, Jen on his left. Next to Jen were Bev and Tim. Katherine sat next to Liz, her expression drawn. Vito thought about her having to do autopsies on all those bodies. She probably had the worst job of them all.

  Although informing a family that their nineteen-year-old daughter was dead had been no picnic either. “Nick’s on his way from court,” he told Liz. “They just adjourned.”

  “Did he testify?”

  “Not yet. ADA Lopez thinks it’ll be tomorrow.”

  “Let’s hope so. Well, bring me up to speed so we can get out of here.”

  Vito checked his watch. “I’m also expecting Thomas Scarborough.”

  Jen McFain’s brows went up. “Nice. Scarborough’s a great profiler. But how did you get him so quickly? Last I heard he had a client list months long.”

  “You can thank Nick Lawrence for that.” A tall man with linebacker’s shoulders and wavy chestnut hair came into the room and from the corner of his eye Vito saw both Beverly and Jen sit a little straighter. Dr. Thomas Scarborough wasn’t what Vito thought most women called movie-star handsome, but he had a presence that filled the room. He leaned over and shook Vito’s hand. “You must be Chick. I’m Scarborough.”

  Vito shook his hand. “Thanks for coming, Dr. Scarborough.”

  “Thomas,” he said and took a seat. “ADA Lopez introduced me to your partner outside court this morning. We were waiting to testify. Nick asked me about perps who use torture, and I was intrigued.”

  Vito introduced everyone, then went to the whiteboard where he’d drawn the grave matrix that morning. “We’ve confirmed that the woman with the folded hands is Brittany Bellamy. We compared prints from her bedroom to the vic’s. They’re hers.”

  “So we’ve identified three of the nine,” Liz said. “What do they have in common?”

  Vito shook his head. “We don’t know. Warren and Brittany were on the modeling website, but Claire was not. Warren and Brittany were tortured. The killer broke Claire’s neck, but did no more. There was at least a year between their murders.”

  “The one thing they do have in common is that they were all buried in that field,” Jen said. “I didn’t think the fill dirt was from the field and I was right. The field is mostly clay. The fill dirt used in all the graves is sandier. It probably came from a quarry.”

  Tim Riker sighed. “And Pennsylvania is full of quarries.”

  Liz frowned. “But why use fill dirt from somewhere else? Why not use the dirt he dug from the hole in the first place?”

  “That’s actually an easy question to answer,” Jen said. “The soil from the field gets clumpy when it gets wet. The quarry soil is sandy, so it doesn’t absorb water the same way. It flows. It would be easier to pack a body in sand rather than clumpy clay.”

  “Can we identify where exactly the soil came from?” Beverly asked her.

  “I’ve called in a geologist. His team is looking at the breakdown of the minerals to give us an idea of where that soil naturally occurs. But it’s going to take a few days.”

  “Can we get them to move any faster?” Liz asked. “Get them to up their resources?”

  Jen lifted her hands. “I tried to push it, but so far everyone is telling me that is the fastest they can work, and that is with the maximum resources. But I can try again.”

  Liz nodded. “Then do. The nature of his burial pattern indicates he’s not finished. He could be working on a new victim right now. Two days could make a big difference.”

  “Especially since we’ve disrupted his routine,” Thomas said quietly. “This killer is incredibly obsessive-compulsive. He’s left one open space at the end of the third row, and if his current pattern holds, he’ll be looking for a new victim any time now. When he finds you’ve discovered his carefully planned burial site . . . It’s going to throw him. He’s going to be angry, maybe disoriented.”

  “Maybe he’ll make a mistake,” Beverly said.

  Thomas nodded. “It’s possible. It’s also possible that he’ll retreat, go under and regroup. He went almost a year between the first murders and these recent ones. He could wait another year. Or more.”

  “Or he could find another field and dig another matrix of graves,” Jen said flatly.

  “That, too,” Thomas acknowledged. “What he does next may depend on why he’s doing this at all. Why he kills. What got him started? And why a year between sprees?”

  “We were kind of hoping you could help us with that,” Vito said dryly.

  Thomas’s smile was equally dry. “I’ll do my best. One of the things we need to establish is how he chooses his victims. The last two came from the modeling website.”

  “Maybe the last three,” Tim Riker said. “I ran a search on all the male models at UCanModel that have the same height and weight as Flail Guy.”

  “Stop calling him that,” Katherine snapped, then pursed her lips hard. “Please.”

  There was a raw desperation in her voice that made everyone turn to look at her.

  “I’m sorry, Katherine,” Tim said. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

  She nodded unsteadily. “It’s okay. Let’s just call him three-one, for his grave. I just finished that man’s autopsy. Brittany Bellamy and Warren Keyes suffered horribly, but there’s every indication their ordeal was no longer than a few hours. Three-one was tortured over a period of days. His fingers and thumbs were broken. His legs and arms were broken, his back flayed open.” She swallowed. “And his feet were burned.”

  “The soles of his feet?” Liz asked gently.

  “No, his whole foot. The scarring is total and has a clear delineation. Like a sock.”

  “Or a boot,” Nick said grimly, coming in the door. He squeezed Katherine’s shoulder reassuringly before taking the seat next to Scarborough. “It was one of the torture devices on the websites I found. The inquisitors would pour hot oil down into a boot, usually one foot at a time. It was a very effective method of getting people to say anything they wanted them to say.”

  “But what could our killer have possibly wanted these people to say?” Beverly asked, frustration in her voice. “They were models, actors.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want them to say anything. Maybe he just wanted to see them suffer,” Tim said quietly.

  “Well, they suffered,” Katherine said bitterly.

  Vito closed his eyes and forced himself to visualize the scene, horrible as it was. “But Katherine, something doesn’t make sense. The way his head had sheared off, he had to have been sitting up. If he’d been lying down, I would think the skull would crush, not shear. If this guy was in such horrible shape before he was hit with a flail—or whatever—how did he even sit up to receive the blow?”

  Katherine’s lips thinned. “I found rope fibers in the skin of his torso. I think he was tied so that he was vertical. The pattern of circular bruising was on top of the fibers.”

  There was a moment of silence as everyone digested this latest horror. Vito cleared his throat. “What did you find when you searched the UCanModel database, Tim?”

  “A hundred names, roughly, but knowing about his feet being burned helps. Brittany Bellamy had been a hand model and the killer posed her hands. Warren had the tattoo of Oscar holding the sword and his hands were posed the same way.” Tim pulled a sheaf of papers from his folder and began scanning the list. “There are three that were foot models.” He looked up at Katherine. “What size were the victim’s feet?”

  “Ten and a ha
lf.”

  Rapidly Tim thumbed through the pages, then stopped and focused. “Yes.” He looked up again, triumphant. “But only one has size-ten-and-a-half feet. William Melville. Goes by Bill. He did a shoot for a foot spray ad last year.”

  Vito’s pulse picked up some speed. “Good work, Tim. Really good work.”

  Tim nodded soberly, then looked at Katherine. “Now he has a name.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured. “That means a lot.”

  “When we break, we’ll need to confirm it,” Vito said briskly. “Nick and I will take finding an address for Bill Melville and checking him out. Tim, I’d like you and Beverly to keep working that database. I still want to know who our killer attempted to hire and couldn’t. I also want to know who he’s contacted lately. We need to find him and stop him before he finishes out that row.”

  “We’re meeting Brent Yelton from IT when we’re done here,” Beverly said. “He said he’d try working through the user side but that he’ll probably need help from the website hosts themselves.” She grimaced. “And for that we’ll need a warrant.”

  “You get me the details,” Liz said, “and I’ll get a warrant.”

  “So each of the last three victims was chosen based on a physical attribute,” Thomas said, musingly. “Using the modeling database, he could search for the attributes he wanted. There’s also a certain drama about posing hands, et cetera. Models are accustomed to playing roles in front of a camera.”

  Nick frowned. “Could this guy be filming all this?”

  “It’s a thought.” Vito jotted it on the whiteboard. “Let’s leave it as a thought for now and go on. Computers. Warren’s hard drive was fried. The Bellamy family’s was also fried. But Claire didn’t have a computer.”

  “So he didn’t meet her through the website.” Tim said. “Unless she used a public computer. She did work at a library.”

  Vito sighed. “An Internet session on a public computer fifteen months ago will be hard to trace. That could be a dead end.”

  “What did you find out about where he could have gotten his tools?” Nick asked. “Were Sophie’s contacts any help?”