Kiss Me, Kill Me
( Lucy Kincaid - 2 )
Allison Brennan
Allison Brennan
Kiss Me, Kill Me
PROLOGUE
The deafening music thundered through the warehouse, drowning out the howling wind outside and the raucous crowd that had gathered in this desolate spot in Brooklyn after midnight.
Any other night, Kirsten would be going wild on the dance floor until she collapsed from exhaustion or was whisked away by an unknown guy for anonymous sex that left her feeling both exhilarated and ashamed. For months, she’d lived for these weekends, complete freedom, the chance to be someone else, but tonight she just wanted to go home.
What home? You don’t belong anywhere.
The pounding music made her feel sicker than what she was drinking. She knew better than to drink from the bar, but she’d been so thirsty, and she needed something to take the edge off. She’d built up a tolerance for most of the drugs that flowed with the spiked punch, and she always brought her own water. Maybe it was her nerves, or the fact that Jessie had sounded so strange, that set Kirsten on edge. She wasn’t even supposed to be here this weekend, but Jessie had begged her to come. And where was she, anyway?
A tall, skinny blond guy came up to her with the smile she knew all too well. She hadn’t been in the mood for sex when she’d arrived an hour ago, but whatever was in the punch had definitely loosened her up. The guy wasn’t half bad, probably in college. And Jessie was late.
“You want to party?” he asked, his hand rubbing her arm.
“On the dance floor.”
He glanced skeptically over at the thick crowd. Not everyone came to the underground parties for sex, though the night often ended that way. Most came for the drugs and drinking and music.
She laughed and took his hand, rubbing her thumb lightly across his palm. “New?”
“Just thinking of logistics.”
Her phone vibrated and she almost ignored it. She looked at the number and saw a message from Jessie.
“Hold that thought.” She tapped her phone to see where her friend was.
i see u with that guy. we need 2 talk now. im getting worried. outside 10 min.
What was with the cloak-and-dagger? Kirsten looked around, but didn’t see Jessie anywhere.
She replied.
What’s going on?
“Hey, you want to screw your phone or me?”
“What’s your name?”
“Ryan.”
Jessie sent an immediate reply.
plz, k, need 2 talk 2 u. im freezing.
“I need to talk to a friend first, then I’m all yours.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a full-body kiss.
He pushed her against the corrugated metal wall and pressed his pelvis against hers. “You’re hot,” he said in her ear.
She kissed him hard, his mouth different and unknown. The thrill of the moment hit her, and she forgot everything else. She forgot who she was, where she was, losing herself in the right-now, any-how moment. She smiled as her mind wandered, her body almost forgotten.
“You like that?” a voice whispered in her ear.
“Yes,” she said, though she didn’t know why. Her arms were tight around his neck. Who again? Ryan.
Her phone vibrated. She shook her head to clear her mind, and over Ryan’s shoulder she read Jessie’s latest message.
Don’t be such a slut and meet me outside. Now, Ash.
Slut? What did that make Jessie? But something was wrong. In the back of her mind, something wasn’t making sense. But her head was foggy, and Ryan’s hands were on her bare breasts. How had he gotten so far so fast? She looked at the time on her phone. That couldn’t be right. Had they been making out here against the wall for fifteen minutes?
She knew from experience that the guys at this party who came for sex weren’t easily put off, and her promise to return wouldn’t mean anything to him. What if Jessie was in trouble? She’d been acting so weird, and calling her Friday morning had been so not like her …
Ash.
She’d called her Ash. Short for Ashleigh, her party name.
Jessie knew her real name. “Ashleigh” and “Jenna”-Jessie’s party name-were only for show. Maybe she’d called her Ash because she was in her Party Girl mode.
While Kirsten had been thinking about Jessie’s odd behavior, Ryan had taken his dick out and pulled her dress up. Everything moved in slow motion. It was as if she were watching her body from afar. She knew this feeling, but she hadn’t drunk that much. Had she?
“Condom,” she whispered.
“Already on, Sugar.”
How’d she miss it? She felt him inside her, but didn’t remember him entering; her legs were around him, but she didn’t remember how they got there.
Then he was done. She didn’t know if it took him two minutes or an hour, but they were both sweaty and he had a grin. “Shit, you’re hot.”
“I have to meet my friend.”
“Hurry and we’ll go backstage.”
“Backstage” was a euphemism for getting horizontal in semiprivate. There were offices off the main warehouse, most empty, but people brought in blankets and mattresses, and there was even some old furniture still inside. If Kirsten were sober she wouldn’t even think about it, because the place was filthy.
“Okay.” She started for the door. She had her purse tied around her wrist and felt inside for her phone, but it wasn’t there. She looked and saw that the zipper was open; everything had fallen out. She didn’t even know what time it was. She looked around the floor but didn’t see her phone or money anywhere. She knew she should go back and look for it, but the loud music was making her feel ill again.
She walked outside. The icy air shocked her, but for a minute she felt amazing. And almost instantly sobered, at least enough to feel discomfort from whatever Ryan had done to her against the wall.
What had Jessie wanted her to do? Go out and turn … left?
But it had been much longer than ten minutes. Twenty, at least. Maybe more. An hour? She had no concept of time.
Kirsten turned left and walked as straight as she could. She quickly became cold. The body heat of the warehouse, the dancing, and the spotlights someone had brought in had been enough to keep her warm; now she wanted to get back. Or go home. But her train to Virginia didn’t leave until tomorrow afternoon. She’d planned on partying, then crashing at a nearby motel. With what she made off the Party Girl site, she had plenty of money.
She felt around for her belt and breathed a sigh of relief when she felt her cash in the small zippered pouch. She didn’t keep all her money in her purse, only a few bucks, because she didn’t want to get stuck in the city flat broke if she lost it. No way was she going to call her mother for help. Maybe Ryan had found her phone and she could call Trey. Trey always said he would help her.
But she didn’t want to call her ex-boyfriend. He’d lecture her about her bad behavior and she didn’t want to hear it from him, or anyone.
Someone was lying on the ground. At first she thought there were two people screwing, but she was seeing double. She blinked rapidly and realized that only one person was there. A girl in a pink dress.
“Are you okay?” she said at the same time she realized that it was Jessie and she wasn’t moving.
Kirsten opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. She was paralyzed, couldn’t move, couldn’t call for help, and Jessie was lying on the ground in an odd position …
She could have passed out. Kirsten took a step closer, but somehow she already knew that Jessie was dead. Both her eyes and mouth were open, and one arm was tilted at an unnatural angle.
Kirsten heard movement to the right, t
hen a voice. But the voice sounded a million miles away, faint, as if through a tunnel.
Girls like you …
Had someone spoken? Was it in her head? Unsteady on her feet, for a second she feared she’d faint. She turned and walked toward the warehouse, but she couldn’t see well. Everything was blurry.
Don’t you dare, bitch.
Kirsten bolted at the rough whisper. She ran straight ahead, not knowing where she was going except away from Jessie’s body. The voice wasn’t real, couldn’t be, because she didn’t see anyone, only a shadow. Still, she ran as fast as she could. Her heels caught on the cracked cement and she almost fell hard, but she caught herself and took off her shoes and resumed running as fast as she could. Away from the warehouse, away from Jessie.
Jessie had texted her. She’d called her Ash.
Maybe it wasn’t Jessie who sent her that message.
Someone had been waiting for Ashleigh. Whoever had killed Jessie planned to kill her, too.
Her feet ached, viciously cut on the crumbly asphalt and broken glass. She ran until she saw a small grouping of cars. Maybe she could hide there. Maybe someone had left the keys. She just wanted to go home …
She saw someone just sitting in the passenger seat of a small SUV. She didn’t know if anyone was really following her, but she quickly glanced over her shoulder. No one. But she’d heard the voice! Hadn’t she? Oh, God, she couldn’t think!
Girls like you …
Hearing the voice again, she stumbled and fell, cutting her knees and the palms of her hands. Tears ran down her face.
What was she going to do? Jessie was dead.
Someone was running behind her. Or coming right at her. Kirsten was dizzy and couldn’t think. She scrambled to her feet and tried to run again, but the excruciating pain in her feet brought her back down to the cement.
There was no escape.
ONE
As the cold wind whipped around her, FBI agent Suzanne Madeaux lifted the corner of the yellow crime-scene tarp covering the dead girl and swore under her breath.
Jane Doe was somewhere between sixteen and twenty, her blond hair streaked with pink highlights. The teenager’s party dress was also pink, and Suzanne absently wondered if she changed her highlights to match her outfit. There was no outward sign of sexual assault or an apparent cause of death. Still, there was no doubt that this was another victim of the killer Suzanne had been tasked to stop.
Jane Doe wore only one shoe.
Dropping the tarp, Suzanne surveyed the scene, trying in vain to keep her long, dark-blond hair out of her face. The relentless wind howled across the cracked, weed-infested parking lot of the abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. It had also felled a couple of trees nearby; small branches and sticks skittered across the pavement. That wind most likely had destroyed any evidence not inside Jane Doe’s body.
Though the corpse didn’t appear to be intentionally hidden, waist-high weeds and a small building that had once housed a generator or dumpsters concealed her from any passerby’s cursory glance. Suzanne stepped away from the squat structure and looked across the Upper Bay. The tiny Gowanus Bay was to the north, the New Jersey skyline to the west. At night, it would be kind of pretty out here with the city lights across the water, if it weren’t so friggin’ cold.
A plainclothes NYPD cop approached with a half-smile that Suzanne wouldn’t call friendly. “If it ain’t Mad Dog Madeaux. We heard this was one of yours.”
Suzanne rolled her eyes. Even with her eyes closed, she’d recognize Joey Hicks by his grating, intentionally exaggerated New York accent.
“No secret,” she said, making notes to avoid conversation. Hicks wasn’t much older than she. Physically fit, he probably thought he was good-looking, considering the swagger. She supposed he had some appeal, but the cocky “all Feds are assholes” attitude he’d displayed the first time they’d met on a murder case had landed him on Suzanne’s permanent shit list years ago.
She looked around for his supervisor, but didn’t see Vic Panetta. She’d much rather deal with the senior detective, whom she liked. “Who found the body?” Suzanne asked.
“Security guard.”
“What’s his story?”
“Found her on his morning rounds, about five-thirty.”
It was eleven now. “Why hasn’t the body been taken to the morgue?”
“No wagon available. Coroner is on the way. Another hour, they say. NYPD doesn’t have the resources you Feds got.”
She ignored the slight. “What was the guard doing here last night? Does he patrol more than one building?”
“Yeah.” Hicks looked at his notes. Though Suzanne didn’t like him, he was a decent cop. “He clocked in at four a.m. for a twelve-hour shift. Rotates between vacant properties throughout Sunset Park and around the bay. Says he doesn’t stick to a specific schedule, ’cause vandals watch for that.”
“What about the night guard?”
“Night is either Thompson or Bruzzini. According to the day shift, Bruzzini is a slacker.”
“I need their contact information.” She hesitated. Then-remembering her boss’s command to be more collegial to NYPD-she added, “I appreciate your help.”
“Did hell freeze over since the last time we worked a case?” Hicks laughed. “I’ll get Panetta; I’m sure he’ll want to at least make a show of fighting for jurisdiction.” He left, still grinning.
Suzanne ignored him. There were no jurisdictional issues-after the third similar murder, an FBI-NYPD task force had been formed. Her supervisor was administratively in charge, and she was the FBI point person on the case. Panetta was the senior ranking NYPD detective.
Tired of her hair flying in her face, Suzanne pulled a N.Y. Mets cap from her pocket and stuffed under it as much of her thick, tangled mess as possible. In her small notepad, she finished writing down her observations and the few facts she knew.
This victim, the fourth, was the first found in Brooklyn. Victim number one, a college freshman, had been killed up in Harlem on a street popular with squatters and the party crowd because every building was boarded up. That had been the eve of Halloween. The second victim had been discovered on the south side of the Bronx, ironically overlooking Rikers Island, on January second. The third victim-the one who brought the attention of the FBI to the serial murders-had been killed in Manhattanville, near Columbia University, eighteen days ago. By the time the task force was put together and evidence shared, for all practical purposes Suzanne had been working the case for less than two weeks.
Besides the one missing shoe and the age of the victims-all adult females under twenty-one-two other commonalities stood out: the victims had been suffocated with a plastic bag that the killer took with him, and they’d each been killed near an abandoned building with evidence of a recent party.
Secret or underground parties were nothing new. Some were relatively innocent, with drinking, dance music, and recreational drugs, while others were far wilder. Raves in the United States had started in Brooklyn in the abandoned underground railroad tunnels, and while they still existed, they’d peaked in popularity a while back. The new fad was sex parties with heavy drinking and hard-core drugs. Music and dancing were precursors to multi-partner anonymous sex. Even before these murders, there had been several drug-related deaths associated with sex parties. If the pattern held true, evidence inside this warehouse would show that this Jane Doe had participated in the latter type of party, which Detective Panetta called “extreme raves.”
The press had dubbed the killer the Cinderella Strangler when someone in the know had leaked the missing-shoe detail to the press. It may not have been a cop who had talked-there were dozens of people working any one crime scene-but most likely it had come from inside the NYPD. The press didn’t seem to care that the victims weren’t strangled-they were asphyxiated. The Cinderella Asphyxiator just didn’t sound as good on the eleven o’clock news.
Suzanne had sent a memo to all private security companies in the five bo
roughs asking them to be more proactive in shutting down the rampant parties at abandoned sites, but it was like a game of whack-a-mole-when authorities shut down one location, two more sprang up.
Though only two of the first three victims were college students, she’d contacted local colleges and high schools to warn students that there was a killer targeting women at these parties. Unfortunately, Suzanne suspected that getting through the invincible it-won’t-happen-to-me mentality of young adults was next to impossible. She could almost hear their reasons. We won’t go out alone. We won’t leave with a stranger. We won’t drink too much. Plans for every day of the week, but when it was life or death, Suzanne didn’t understand why they couldn’t party in the relatively safe dorms and frat houses. Those venues had their own problems, but they probably didn’t have a serial killer trolling their halls.
“Suzanne!”
She looked up and waved to Vic Panetta as he strode over. She liked the wiry Italian. He was her exact height, five foot nine, and wore a new wool coat, charcoal gray to match his full head of hair. “Hi, Vic,” she said as he approached. “New coat?”
He deadpanned her. “Christmas present from my wife.”
“Very nice.”
“It cost too much money for a label no one can see,” he grumbled. He gestured at the tarp. “We photographed the area, then put the tarp over the body so we don’t lose any more evidence.”
“Well, the way this wind has been going nonstop for the past couple days, I think we already lost it.”
“You take a look?”
“Briefly.”
“You noted the missing shoe?”
“Duly.”
“Could be under the body.”
“You think?”
“Nah.” He shook his head, then pulled his phone from his coat pocket and read a message. “Good news, coroner is on the way. ETA ten minutes.”
About time, Suzanne thought but didn’t say out loud. “Hicks said you were talking to the security guard who found the body?”
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