“I’m sorry, Felix, I need to take this,” she said as she lifted the phone from her belt.
She turned just as the smile slid off Felix’s face.
“Sergeant Adams,” she stated.
“Chase, it’s Agent Stitts. You need to come out to the barn immediately.”
Chase moved out of the kitchen, and lowered her voice.
“Why? Did we miss something? Did CSU find trace evidence?”
Agent Stitts sighed.
“Call Drake. We’re going to need him, too.”
Chase felt frustration rising in her chest.
“What? Why? What’d they find?”
“We didn’t miss anything, Chase. But the killer returned. And there’s another body.”
Chase felt her blood run cold.
The killer returned…
“Are you serious? The same barn?” she nearly gasped.
“Yeah. I’m on my way now. Want me to pick you up?”
Chase pictured her BMW in the driveway. She wasn’t sure what Agent Stitts drove, but it was more than likely a rental.
Her car would be faster.
“No, I’ll meet you there. And I’ll call Drake.”
Before Stitts could protest, she hung up the phone and started toward the door. She had only just opened it, when she heard Brad’s voice from the upstairs landing.
“Have a good day at school, Felix!”
Chase cursed silently.
“Mom? Where’re you going?” Felix called from the kitchen.
“Brad, can you get down here for a sec?”
“I’m in the middle of shaving.”
“Brad, please.”
Her husband appeared on the top landing, half of his face covered in shaving cream. He was topless, while his waist covered in a towel. His upper body was softer than Chase remembered, and wondered briefly if this was a consequence of age or neglect. He was still in good shape for someone his age, nearing forty, but just wasn’t as ripped as he usually was.
“What? What is it?” he asked, seeing the expression on her face.
Chase looked away.
“I have to go.”
“Chase? What is it? Everything all right?”
Chase continued to stare into the kitchen, unaware that Felix had since come into view.
“Everything’s fine, but I can’t take Felix in. I have to go—I have to go now.”
“What are you talking about? I have a meeting in fifteen minutes. I can’t miss this, Chase. Please. Not today. You promised.”
Chase looked up at her husband, at his pleading eyes, his cheeks and chin half covered in thick shaving cream.
But then she pictured the faces of the two girls, of Melissa Green and Tanya Farthing, dried blood smeared on their dead lips.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I love you both and I’ll see you tonight. I’ll make it up to you.”
Chase exited into the cold before either her husband or son could say anything that might draw her back.
CHAPTER 26
“You were gone all night again,” Ryanne said with a scowl.
Colin ignored her and sipped his orange juice.
“Hey, I’m talking to you,” she snapped. When Colin still didn’t answer, she slapped his arm with the back of her hand still holding a cigarette. A shower of sparks erupted from where it struck his sweatshirt.
He jumped to his feet.
“Shit!”
As he swatted at the still glowing cherry that threatened to set him alight, he spilled orange juice on his jeans.
Ryanne laughed.
“Serves you right. Answer me next time.”
Colin ground his teeth and fought the urge to respond.
That was, after all, what she wanted. And he refused to give in. He turned to his daughters instead, both of whom had their backs to him, their faces locked on the colorful cartoon that exploded across the TV screen.
“Julliette and Colby, grab your boots. I’ll take you to school again today.”
Neither of the girls acknowledged him.
“Julliette? Colby?”
Still nothing.
Ryanne walked over and swatted Colby in the back of the head.
“Ow!” the girl whined, spinning around. “What’d you do that for?”
“Get your fucking boots on. Now!”
Colin cringed. He hated when Ryanne swore at the girls, let alone smacked them. And yet in her backwards sort of way, he could tell that Ryanne was trying to be helpful.
Which meant that she felt guilty.
Good. She started this.
Colin, on the other hand, felt nothing about his little tryst with the girl with the piercings.
“Fine,” Colby whined.
Colin’s heart nearly broke at the sight of tears in his daughter’s eyes. He quickly moved between her and Ryanne, and draped a hand over the little girl’s shoulder, noticing as he did that there was a small black hole on his sleeve.
“And turn off those damn cartoons. I want to watch the news,” Ryanne spat.
Colin eyed his wife.
Since when is she interested in the news?
“Come on,” he said, guiding Colby toward the door. Juliette had since risen with the commotion and hurried after them.
With their boots laced, their jackets done up tight and hats pulled down low, Juliette and Colby stepped outside.
“You have to pick them up again today!” Ryanne called after Colin as he closed the door. “I’m doing my yoga class this afternoon!”
Colin closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Do whatever you want,” he said under his breath. “We both know you’re going to anyway.”
When all three of them were finally in the car, he felt the tension in his shoulders release.
Ryanne was right; he had been out all night. He’d been out all night writing.
And gaining experiences.
If only she knew…
With a smile, he turned to his girls in the backseat, who had started to fight over who got to pick what they were going to listen to on the radio.
“Hey you guys wanna do something different today?”
Colby scrunched up her forehead.
“We have school today.”
Colin shrugged.
“You can skip school today. There’s something that I want to show you guys. What do you say?”
CHAPTER 27
Chase couldn’t believe that she was back here less than two days since she had left.
It was like a horrible case of déjà vu, only this time it was a different girl in the barn. There was an officer on scene, cordoning off the area, and Detective Yasiv was standing by the car smoking a cigarette.
His hand was trembling as she approached, but he made no move to throw it away this time.
“Sergeant Adams,” he said softly.
Chase was furious and fought back the urge to yell at the man. She had put Yasiv in charge of the details, had left it up to him to make sure that everyone dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s.
To ensure the chain of custody was never broken.
Despite her promotion to Sergeant, Chase had no illusions that the Deputy Chief himself was unaware of the errors that had been made during the Butterfly Killer case. She was no fool; she knew that her tenure would last only as long as Dr. Mark Kruk—Marcus Slasinsky—was institutionalized and unable to stand trial.
This wasn’t Mark Kruk bad, but discovering a third body in the barn? That was bad. There was no denying it.
She sighed.
“How the hell did this happen, Hank?”
The man took a drag of his cigarette.
“I have no idea,” he said, while turning to look at the barn. “This is fucked up.”
“There’s an understatement.”
“After the ME cleared the bodies, CSU came and took all of the evidence they could find. They gave the go-ahead, and I called Tommy Wilde and he must have cleaned the place in record time. After
that, it was released back to the owner. I told a uniformed officer to keep watch, but he must have been called to another crime scene.”
“And you’re sure—you’re absolutely positive that the body wasn’t here with the others?”
Detective Yasiv shook his head.
“No ma’am. We had over twenty people comb the place. It wasn’t here. It’s new.”
Chase wanted to chastise the man, to yell at him, but couldn’t really fault him. It was protocol to hold a scene for at least a week, but with CSU and Tommy Wilde coming in, there was no chance that anything would be left behind, let alone a body.
She opened her mouth to say something, when the sound of a car approaching drew her attention. A Taurus pulled up behind her BMW and Agent Stitts stepped out, dressed in a crisp back suit and tie. He strode over to her, his expression grim.
“Sergeant Adams,” he said with a nod, then turned to Detective Yasiv. “Detective.”
“I called Drake, he’s on his way. Just had to wrap a few things up first.”
Chase thought she detected a small scowl appear on Agent Stitts’s face, but it was gone before it fully formed. He tilted his head and stared at the barn.
“Let’s see what we’ve got.”
As Detective Yasiv led them to the scene, Stitts posed the question that was on all their minds.
“Why’d the killer come back?”
Chase thought about this for a moment.
“It’s fairly common for a killer to revisit the scene of their crime. Murderers are addicts of a sort; like a heroin junkie looking to recreate the thrill of their first injection, they come back to try and recreate the feeling of their first kill.”
Agent Stitts nodded.
“True. But rarely are new victims dumped in the location that has already been found by the police.” He offered a side-long glance at Detective Yasiv before continuing. “Too dangerous. Too risky.”
They made it down the embankment in silence. As they neared the door with fresh crime scene tape, Agent Stitts continued.
“And yet, even knowing what we know, none of us thought that the killer would return here. Otherwise, we would have made sure that an officer remained stationed.”
Chase frowned.
“Detective Yasiv volunteers to stay here day and night from now on.”
Detective Yasiv clenched his jaw, but didn’t protest.
“Returning to a crime scene once is one thing, but three times? I highly doubt that,” Agent Stitts added. “But that’s not the question I asked. I want to know why none of us thought that the killer would return to this particular scene.”
Chase didn’t know why she had felt this way, but she most definitely had. To be honest, she hadn’t extended much thought on the issue, but now that Agent Stitts had verbalized his point…
It’s the same reason that I didn’t ask about the lipstick on the other victims. Because of… what had Agent Stitts called it? Intuition. Because of intuition.
Only in this case, her intuition was wrong.
And it wasn’t the first time, either.
Chase resisted the urge to look down at her forearms, even though they were covered by a thick coat and a sweater beneath.
It was Detective Yasiv who answered.
“I guess it was because I thought the killings were random. My thinking was that if the killings were random, then the drop location might also be random—holding no value or meaning to the killer.”
Chase found herself nodding subconsciously. She shared Hank’s sentiment, she realized.
“I’ll buy it. Only now we don’t think that the victims were entirely random, do we?”
Again, Chase nodded.
“Wait—we don’t?” Detective Yasiv asked.
“No,” Chase replied, lifting the tape covering the doorway and stepping into the derelict barn. “We don’t.”
~
The victim, whom they had already identified as Charlotte Banquise based on a recently filed missing person report, wasn’t buried as Melissa or Tanya had been. The killer had taken a calculated risk coming back here, but he hadn’t been so bold as to take the time to even pull the hay over top of her body.
Like the other two victims, her face was pale, her lips a deep maroon. Only this time, there weren’t multiple cuts on her arms. In fact, her arms were pristine.
Instead, her throat had been cut in a ragged gash that ran from ear to ear.
“He’s speeding up,” Chase said as she surveyed the scene. “With the first two, he had taken his time, cut them slowly, let them starve to death or freeze or bleed out. With Charlotte, he was much quicker.”
Agent Stitts got a far off look in his dark hazel eyes.
“Which is the opposite that usually happens. Typically, the first kills are fast, the killer worried that they would either be caught or that they would lose their nerve. But not in this case.” He paused. “Why?”
Chase mulled this over.
“Maybe she fought? Maybe the local PD was closing in? Perhaps they had caught wind of him for an unrelated crime and he had to get rid of the body quickly?”
“Maybe,” Stitts replied. “But then why this location? Detective Yasiv, did the uniforms comb the adjacent woods?”
Henry nodded.
“There were some tire tracks off the road about a mile down. They made some casts, but the falling snow already obscured anything of use. They know that it was a car, front wheel drive, likely nothing bigger than a sedan. They also found some disturbed areas where it looks like a body might have been dragged, but, again, the snow makes it next to impossible to draw any strong conclusions.”
“No cabin in the woods?”
Yasiv nodded.
“They found an old hunting cabin, but it hasn’t been used in years. Cobwebs everywhere. CSU cleared that as well.”
“What about the old man who owns this place? Doesn’t he live nearby?” Agent Stitts asked.
“Yep—five miles down the road. He’s been cooperative, and we’ve gone over his house with a fine-toothed comb. He’s been ruled out, and it is highly unlikely given the state of his house that the killer was using it with or without his knowledge.”
As was her habit, Chase crouched low and stared into the victim’s eyes. They were open slightly, revealing the bottom crescents of what she suspected had once been vibrant green eyes.
Green eyes not that unlike her own.
“And Brent Doakes?” she asked.
“Doakes?”
“Melissa’s boyfriend.”
Yasiv cleared his throat.
“Cleared. He’s been locked up for possession for the past week.”
Chase nodded and returned her attention to Charlotte’s body.
“The killer was rushed with the murder, but not with the body drop. He came here specifically, but why?”
There was no response, and she hadn’t expected one.
There was only one person who could answer that.
The killer.
Chase sighed and started to stand.
“Get CSU in here,” she said. “I doubt they’ll find anything, but I want them to scour ever inch of this place. Again.”
CHAPTER 28
Drake couldn’t believe what he was reading. While at first he had doubted that the story on the e-reader and the bodies in the barn was a coincidence, now he was absolutely certain that it wasn’t.
The similarities were uncanny.
Two bodies, both dead from a combination of blood loss and exposure, half-buried beneath piles of hay in a broken-down barn.
And it didn’t stop there.
In the book, like in life, the women’s lips had been stained with blood.
“Jesus,” he whispered, exhaling slowly.
There were even details about Chase and himself, only the names were different. What they hadn’t included, however, was FBI Agent Stitts. With shaking hands, he finished the book—more of a short story, really—which concluded with fictional Chase and himse
lf wondering who the killer was.
There was no real ending, so to speak.
When he had finished reading, there was no question in Drake’s mind that the only person who could have written this was the killer.
I have to tell Chase, he thought suddenly. And then, as if on cue, his phone started to ring.
He picked it up, and was only half surprised that it was Chase.
“There’s been another murder, Drake. And the body was dropped at the barn. Again.”
Drake’s eyes bulged.
“What? The same barn? Nobody was watching it?”
Chase’s reply was strained.
“No. They wrapped up and then relinquished custody back to the owner.”
“Are you out there now?”
“Yes, as is Agent Stitts and Detective Yasiv. We need your help, Drake. Can you make here?”
Drake glanced at the e-reader on his desk.
“On my way. And there’s something that I have to show you.”
~
Drake pulled up behind a Ford Taurus and slammed his Crown Vic into park.
Thankfully the snow had stopped falling, but the temperature had continued to drop. He pulled the neck of his jacket closed as he walked through the snow to the barn.
Inside, he was met with an eerily similar scene to the one that he had observed the other day.
Detective Yasiv and Chase hovered over the body, while Agent Stitts stood back, his eyes moving about the dimly lit barn.
Drake announced his presence, then went directly to the corpse.
The victim was a woman in her mid-forties, her throat slit, blood on her lips. He swallowed hard, and then instinctively reached into his pocket and fondled the rubber backing of the e-reader buried within.
This was a cluster fuck, the story notwithstanding.
“Did you speak to the parents of the first two victims?” he asked, breaking the silence.
Chase admitted that she had.
“And? Anything of use?”
“Sergeant Adams thinks it might have to do with books… that the victims are somehow connected through books?”
All of sudden Drake had trouble breathing, as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of the barn.
“Wh—what?” he stammered.
Chase gave him a strange look.
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