7 Die For Me

by Karen Rose

  “Not much.” Vito sat back down. “The chain mail was high quality. A mail shirt with links that small runs over a thousand bucks.”

  “Whoa,” Nick said. “So our boy has some funds.”

  “But the mail is available through a number of Web stores.” Vito shrugged. “As were the sword or the flail. It’ll be hard to trace a single purchase, but that’s what we’ll need to do. Sophie did tell me that one of her professors heard that a collection of torture artifacts had gone missing. I’ll follow up on that tomorrow. It was in Europe, so I’ll have to involve Interpol.”

  “Which will add time,” Liz grumbled. “Can’t your archeologist dig some more?”

  Jen winced. “No pun intended.”

  “I’ll ask her,” Vito said. If she meets me tonight. If she didn’t . . . He supposed he’d have to walk away, but he wasn’t sure he could. She drew him in a way no woman had in a very long time. Maybe ever. Please, Sophie. Please come. “Jen, what more have you found at the crime scene?”

  “Nothing.” She lifted a brow. “But that’s something, in a way. We’re still sifting fill dirt and will be for days, but something is missing from the site.”

  “The dirt he took from the graves initially,” Beverly said and Jen touched her nose.

  “We’ve combed those woods and haven’t found any evidence of dirt he removed.”

  “He could have spread it out,” Tim said doubtfully.

  “Could have, and he might have, but that would have required a lot of work. Sixteen graves is a lot of dirt. It would have been easier for him to just pile it off to one side.”

  “Or remove it. He has to have a truck,” Vito said.

  “Or access to one. We might be able to tell what kind. We got a tire print from the access road leading to the field. It’s at the lab.” Jen bent her lips down as she thought. “That resignation letter Claire’s parents gave Bev and Tim was just a copy. We need to get the original. Who has it?”

  A cell phone rang and everyone instantly checked their own phones. Katherine held hers up. “Mine,” she said. “Excuse me.” She got up and moved to the window.

  “The library where Claire worked had the letter,” Tim said. “We requested it today, but they said they had to ‘go through channels.’ They hoped to have it tomorrow.”

  Jen’s smile was sharp. “Good. Let’s see if we can get some decent prints.”

  Katherine slapped her phone shut, then turned to the group, her eyes bright again. “That silicone lubricant you found with Claire’s things?”

  “The lubricant for her prosthetic leg,” Vito said warily. “What about it?”

  “It matches the sample I took from the wire on Brittany’s hands.”

  Vito pounded his hand on the table. “Excellent.”

  “But,” Katherine nearly sang, “it doesn’t match the sample we took from Warren. The lubricant found on Warren’s hands was close in formula, but not exact. The lab called the manufacturer, and they said they had two main formulas but often create custom blends for clients with allergies.”

  Vito looked at the table, processing. “So the sample found on Warren’s hands is a custom blend.” He looked up. “Did Claire buy a custom blend, too?”

  Katherine lifted her brows. “Not in the manufacturer’s records.”

  “So it belonged to somebody else?” Beverly asked.

  “She could have bought it somewhere else, or somebody may have bought it for her,” Liz cautioned. “Don’t assume until you know.”

  Katherine nodded. “True. The manufacturer said her orders came through a Dr. Pfeiffer. You can ask him if she bought anything special. But if she didn’t, either she got it from somebody else or the killer did.”

  Vito rubbed his hands together. “We’re starting to get somewhere. Thomas, after all you’ve heard, what are your thoughts on this killer?”

  “And are we talking just one?” Nick added.

  “Very good point.” Thomas leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “But my gut says he works alone. He’s younger, almost certainly male. Intelligent. He has a dispassionate capacity for cruelty. It’s . . . mechanical. He is obsessive, obviously. This would spill into other areas of his life—occupation, relationships. His knack with creating computer viruses is consistent. He’d be more comfortable with a machine than with people. I’d bet he lives alone. He will have some record of violence in his adolescence, anything from being a schoolyard bully to abusing animals. He’s . . . process oriented. And he’s efficient. He could have just killed two people to use for his effigies, but he combined them with whatever torture experiments he needed to do first.”

  “So an anal, obsessed, cold loner who measures twice and cuts once,” Jen said sourly and Thomas chuckled.

  “Nicely summarized, Sergeant. Add dramatic to it and you’ve got it covered.”

  Vito stood up. “Well, Nick and I and Bev and Tim have things to do. Thomas, can we bring you in as needed?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then we reconvene tomorrow at eight,” Vito said. “Be careful and stay safe.”

  Tuesday, January 16, 5:45 P.M.

  Nick sank into his chair and propped his feet on his desk. “I swear, waiting outside court makes me more ragged-out than if I’d worked a whole damn day.”

  “Did you make any progress finding Kyle Lombard?”

  “No. I must’ve called seventy-five Kyle Lombards while I was waiting outside the courtroom today. I got nothin’ but a dead cell phone battery. No dice.”

  “You can try again tomorrow.” Vito picked a note on his desk. “Tino was here. He went to the morgue to sketch the old couple from the second row.”

  “Hopefully he can work another miracle,” Nick said.

  “He sure hit the nail on the head with Brittany Bellamy.” Vito sat down at his computer and pulled up the UCanModel website and found Bill Melville’s résumé and photo. “Come over here and meet Mr. Melville.”

  Nick came around their desks to stand behind him. “Big, brawny guy like Warren.”

  “But other than size, no resemblance.” Warren had been fair, while Bill was dark and forbidding looking. “He has martial arts experience.” Vito looked up at Nick. “Why the hell would the killer purposely choose a victim that could beat the shit out him?”

  “Doesn’t seem too smart,” Nick agreed. “Unless he thought he’d need those skills. Warren searched fencing sites and was posed with a sword. Bill was killed with a flail.” Nick sat on the edge of Vito’s desk. “I didn’t get lunch. Let’s grab some chow before we check out Melville’s last known address.”

  Vito checked his watch. “I have dinner plans.” I hope.

  Nick face broke into a slow grin. “Dinner plans?”

  He felt his cheeks heat. “Shut up, Nick.”

  Nick’s grin just broadened. “No way. I want details.”

  Vito glared up at him. “There are no details.” Not yet, anyway.

  “This is even better than I thought.” He snorted a laugh when Vito rolled his eyes. “You’re no fun, Chick. Okay then, what did you find out from that Brewster guy?”

  “That he’s an asshole who likes tall blonde girls and cheats on his wife.”

  “Oh. Well, now Sophie’s reactions to the flowers make sense. You said he gave you some names of potential collectors.”

  “All pillars of society and every one of them over sixty years old. Hardly able to dig sixteen graves and move around big men like Keyes and Melville. I checked financials as much as I could without a warrant and came up with nothing suspicious.”

  “What about Brewster himself?”

  “Young enough, I guess. His office looks like a museum, but it’s all out in the open.”

  “He could have a stash.”

  “He could, but he was out of the country the week Warren went missing.” Vito shot Nick a rueful look. “I Googled him when I got back from the Bellamys’. The first thing that popped up was a conference he’d spoken at in Amsterdam on Ja
nuary 4. Airline records show Dr. and Mrs. Alan Brewster flew first class from Philly to Amsterdam.”

  “First class is pricey. Professors don’t make that much. He could be dealing.”

  “Wife’s loaded,” Vito grumbled. “Gramps was a coal baron. I checked that, too.”

  Nick’s lips twitched in sympathy. “You really wanted it to be him.”

  “A whole hell of a lot. But unless he’s an accomplice, Brewster’s only guilty of being an asshole.” Vito brought up the DMV database on his computer. “Melville was twenty-two years old, last known address was up in North Philly. I’ll drive.”

  Tuesday, January 16, 5:30 P.M.

  Sophie was up to her butt in sawdust in the old warehouse that sat at the back of the factory area they’d converted to the museum’s main hall. Ted was right, the warehouse wasn’t perfect, but Sophie could see the potential. And, there were still some places she could smell chocolate if she sniffed hard enough. It had to be fate.

  She looked around the future site of her hands-on “dig.” She hadn’t been so content in a long time. Well, maybe content was the wrong word. She was energized and aware, thinking of all the wonderful things she could do with this huge empty space with its thirty-foot ceilings. Her brain was firing like a machine gun.

  And her nerve endings were firing, too. She was meeting Vito Ciccotelli tonight. She was keyed. Needy. And feeling the edge of her self-imposed sexual suppression all too keenly. She’d never allowed another relationship with a colleague, which meant finding a man outside the dig, in the city. By nature those relationships were surface only, really no more than a way to scratch her itch when it got too hard to handle. But “one night stand” always came to her mind afterward and she hated herself. Vito would be different. She just had a feeling. Maybe the drought would soon end.

  All in good time. For now, she was anxious to explore the contents of the crates she’d dragged from her office. She’d already uncovered some incredible treasures.

  Working in her dark little office, she’d been surrounded by medieval reliquaries and hadn’t even known it. Using a crowbar, she opened a crate and scooped more sawdust onto the floor until she got down to the smaller box inside.

  She heard footsteps behind her a heartbeat before the voice. “You can’t have it.”

  With a gasp she whirled, swinging the crowbar high above her head. Then she exhaled. “Theo, I swear to God, I’m going to hurt you one of these days.”

  Theodore Albright the Fourth stood looking at her from the shadows, his jaw stern. Stiffly he crossed his arms over his broad chest. “You can’t have these things. Children will come in here. They’ll break them.”

  “I don’t plan to put anything valuable out in the open. I’m going to have plastic copies made, and break the copies in pieces—to hide in the dirt for people to find. The way we’d find broken pottery in a dig.”

  Theo looked around the room. “You’re going to make it look like an authentic dig?”

  “That’s my plan. I know your grandfather’s treasures are precious. I won’t let anything happen to them.”

  His wide shoulders relaxed. “I’m sorry I scared you.” His eyes dropped to her hand and she realized she still held the crowbar. Bending at the knees, she laid it on the floor.

  “It’s okay.” Amanda Brewster’s little gift and phone call had left her shakier than she’d thought. “So . . . did you need something?”

  He nodded. “You have a phone call. It’s some old guy from Paris.”

  Maurice. “Paris?” She was already taking him by the arm and guiding him out the door. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she demanded as she locked the room behind them.

  In her office, she shut the door, grabbed the phone and let her mind relax back into French. “Maurice? It’s Sophie.”

  “Sophie, my dear. Your grandmother. How is she?”

  She heard the fear in his voice and realized he thought she was calling with bad news about Anna. “She’s holding her own. That’s actually not why I called. I’m sorry, I should have told you so you didn’t worry.”

  He let out a breath. “Yes, you should have, but I can’t be angry that you’re not calling with bad news, I suppose. So why did you call?”

  “I’m doing some research and was hoping you could give me information.”

  “Ah.” His voice perked up and Sophie smiled. Maurice had always been one of the biggest gossips of her father’s crowd. “What kind of information?”

  “Well, it’s like this . . .”

  Tuesday, January 16, 8:10 P.M.

  “So the victim is Bill Melville?” Liz asked on the phone as Vito turned his truck onto his street.

  “His prints match the ones Latent lifted from his apartment. Nobody had seen him since Halloween. Kids in his building said he always dressed up and handed out candy.”

  “Sounds like a nice guy.”

  “I don’t know about that. He dressed like a ninja. The kids thought he did it to let them know he could handle weapons. Nunchucks, staffs. It was his way of maintaining security. But he did give out good candy, so everybody seemed happy.”

  “Why hadn’t someone gone in his apartment before?”

  “Melville’s landlord did but didn’t find anything. We got lucky. The landlord already filed an eviction notice. Another two days and all of Melville’s stuff would have been in the Dumpster.”

  “Was his computer fried?”

  “Yep. But,” Vito smiled grimly. “Bill printed out a few of the e-mails. Left them on the printer. He was contacted by a guy named Munch to do a history documentary.”

  “Did you get his e-mail address?”

  “No. The printed e-mail only said ‘E. Munch.’ If we had the actual e-mail on his machine we could have clicked on the name to get his e-mail address, but the files are wiped. The good thing is, we have a name to use when we question all the models on the UCanModel website who got hits on their résumés the days around our victims.”

  “So Beverly and Tim were able to get into the website’s records?”

  “Yeah. The owners of the site are cooperating fully. They don’t want all their clients pulling off the site because of a killer. They haven’t handed over any blanket lists, but they will work with Bev and Tim on a person-by-person basis. Bev and Tim are going to start contacting the models who were contacted by Munch tomorrow.”

  “Although it’s not likely to be his real name. Are you headed back to the office?”

  “No, I’m home.” He’d parked behind Tess’s rental and beside a car he’d never seen before. “My nephews are staying with me and I’ve hardly spent five minutes with them. I’m going to help my sister get everyone tucked in, then go grab some dinner.” And if he was lucky . . . His mind wandered to that single kiss. It had tormented him all day, distracting him, derailing his thoughts. What if she didn’t come? What if he had to walk away? What if he never got to taste her full lips again? Sophie, please come.

  Vito got out of his truck and looked in the window of the strange car and saw the back floorboards strewn with McDonald’s trash and ratty old sneakers. Teenager, he guessed. When he opened his front door, he saw he was partially right.

  Multiple teens were gathered around a computer someone had set up in his living room. One kid sat in Vito’s easy chair, feet up as he faced the monitor, a keyboard on his lap. Dominic stood behind the chair, a frown on his handsome face as he looked on.

  “Hey,” Vito called as he closed his front door. “What’s all this?”

  Dominic’s eyes flickered. “We were working on a school project, but took a break.”

  “What kind of project?” he asked.

  “Science,” Dominic said. “Earth–space,” he clarified.

  The kid with the keyboard looked up with a cynical sneer. “We had to create life,” he said drolly and the others snickered.

  Except for Dom, who frowned. “Jesse, cut it out. Let’s get back to work.”

  “In a minute, choir boy,” Jesse draw
led.

  Dom’s cheeks flushed a dark red and Vito realized his oldest nephew had been taking ribbing for his clean-cut ways. He moved to Dom’s side. “What’s the game?”

  “Behind Enemy Lines,” Dom told him. “It’s a World War II fighting game.”

  The screen was filled with the interior of an ammunitions bunker, in which eleven soldiers with swastikas on their armbands already lay dead. The camera looked out over the barrel of a rifle. “This guy is an American soldier,” Dom explained. “You can choose your character’s nationality and your weapon. It’s the newest rage.”

  Vito studied the screen. “Really? The graphics look two or three years old.”

  One of the boys eyed him warily. “You play?”

  “Some.” He’d held the community record for Galaga when he was fifteen, but didn’t think divulging that fact would do more than make him look like a dinosaur. He lifted a brow. “Maybe I’ll learn a few things about taking out the bad guys or fast car chases.”

  The boy who’d just spoken grinned good-naturedly. “Well, you won’t learn anything from this game. It’s just average.”

  “That’s Ray,” Dom said. “He’s a gamer. So is Jesse.”

  “So what’s the big deal with this game?” Vito asked.

  Ray shrugged. “Everything in the game part’s a rehash from this company’s last five games. Game physics, environments, AI . . .”

  “Artificial intelligence,” Dom murmured.

  “I know,” Vito murmured back. “So I repeat, what’s the big deal? The characters are flat and the AI really sucks. I mean, Jesse here just took out a dozen bad boys with armbands and not one of them winged him. What’s the challenge in that?”

  “We’re not playing it for the game,” Jesse said, apparently unoffended. “We’re playing it for the cut scenes.” He laughed softly. “Fuckin’ unbelievable, man.”

  Dom looked around, frowning. “Jesse. My little brothers are here.”

  “Like they don’t hear it from your old man,” Jesse said, bored.

  Dom gritted his teeth. “They don’t. Look, let’s get back to work.”

  “Just a minute,” Vito said softly, his eyes on the screen. He’d let this play out because he was curious, both about Dom’s classmates and what kids were playing these days. He never knew when knowing current kid-speak would come in handy in the interview room. He’d caught many a teen off guard pretending to share their interests. But as soon as Vito’s curiosity was sated, Jesse would be out on his ass.