Agent of Enchantment (Dark Fae FBI Book 1)

by C. N. Crawford

  Despite the fact that half the people here were three sheets to the wind, I could sense an undercurrent of fear beneath their drunkenness. My guess was that whatever lay beyond in Mitre Square was sobering them up pretty fast.

  In all honesty, it wasn’t just that I could sense their fear. I could actually feel it, like a physical charge. And right now, it was building in my system.

  As always, it started with my heart. It began pounding faster and faster, each beat thundering in my ears. My fingertips prickled with what felt like a delicate electrical current. Despite the chilly night breeze, my face flushed, heat waves rolling over my body.

  The first time I had described this to my friends, they’d just stared at me. I’d assumed everyone felt this way occasionally. Sometimes you’re hungry, sometimes you want to sneeze, and sometimes you feel like the emotional energy of the people around you powers your body like electricity. Right? Right?

  Apparently not. This was not a sensation everyone experienced. This happened only to me. And after talking about it a few times, and getting very weird looks, I stopped mentioning it. Energy? What energy? Ha ha, the only energy I know is energy drinks. I’m totally like everyone else.

  Whatever it was, it came from strong emotions. Going to a football game in my hometown was… intense. I’d walk out dazed, a grin on my face, and when someone asked me if I’d enjoyed the game that much, I would realize that I didn’t even know what had happened on the field. I knew what had happened in the crowd. They were thrilled, or disappointed, or angry… and I felt it blazing through my body like a drug.

  But no other emotion affected me like fear did. And right now, an undercurrent of fear flowed through me. It focused me, sharpening my senses. Any fatigue from the flight dissipated completely.

  I began shoving my way through the small crowd, rolling my stupid suitcase behind me. As I did, I glimpsed a media van parked in the road. Damn it. Nothing hurt a serial killer investigation more than public fear.

  I reached the police tape, staring at the horrific scene before me. Spotlights bathed it in white light. About seventy feet away, on the other side of the square, a group of people surrounded a woman’s body. Even from here, I could see the crimson pool glistening on the cobbles beneath her.

  Most of the investigators surrounding the body wore white overalls that covered their bodies completely, surgical masks on their faces. Shoes were covered with white sterile wrappers, and their hands were gloved in blue latex. Only their eyes were visible as they scanned the scene intently, documenting and marking evidence.

  A tawny-skinned man approached, eyeing me. Unlike the crime scene crew, he wore a suit and a gray coat.

  “Gabriel?” I asked when he got closer.

  He nodded, and motioned me through. I raised the tape and stepped under it, then leaned my suitcase against a wall before turning to him.

  He shook my hand, his grip firm. I found it difficult to pull my eyes from his face. Broad-shouldered and tall, he towered over me, and something about his hazel eyes drew me in. Plus, with his bronze skin and strong jawline, he kinda looked like a movie star.

  His body seemed tense. “Agent Liddell,” he said. “I’m glad you could make it.”

  “Call me Cassandra.”

  “Okay,” he said, his tone cold. “Cassandra.”

  It didn’t take a PhD in psychology to pick out the chilliness in his voice. I guess I had a few ideas why he might not be thrilled to have me there. For one thing, American law enforcement agents hadn’t always done well with the British police. We tended to ignore their pesky legal systems and make our own rules. Plus, FBI consultants in general had a reputation of disregarding local expertise. And if all that weren’t bad enough, he was probably terrified I was going to have a chirpy American attitude and say things like “good work, team,” or force him to high-five at the end of the day.

  “Come with me.” He turned and walked away.

  I followed him. As we drew closer, my mood darkened. I began to pick up the details—the red gash across her entire body, throat to belly, and the dark pool of blood beneath her. Lumps of flesh glistened under the lights. A woman stood above her, photographing the carnage.

  “We can stop here,” he said when we still stood twenty feet away. “It’s intense, and I doubt you need to see it up close to profile the killer. We can provide you with photographs later on.”

  “Thanks for caring.” I raised an eyebrow. “I think I can handle it.”

  I marched forward. When I reached the body, I crouched by a man who eyed me warily beyond a pair of glasses. I could have sworn I heard him mutter something about Americans under his mask, but I kept my focus on the victim.

  Up close, bile began to rise in my throat. She was young, no more than twenty, her face full of pain and horror, mouth ajar in a voiceless cry, eyes staring emptily at the night sky. Her dark hair spread out on the pavement between her arms, giving the impression she was falling. The killer had torn her shirt, exposing the top of her ravaged body. A deep slice exposed her internal organs, or what was left of them. The glaring spotlights highlighted her white skin and bones, shockingly pale against her crimson blood. And as if that weren’t bad enough, he’d mutilated her face, slashing perpendicular lines in her cheeks. Dread roiled in the back of my mind. Somehow, the marks looked eerily familiar, like something I’d seen in a nightmare, but I had no idea why.

  I tried not to imagine what she would have felt in those final moments, but the images came anyway. The gash on her throat indicated that the killer was likely standing behind her, but her expression left no doubt—she had felt the hand that gripped her, the blade that cut her.

  I could only hope that the shock of the attack had overwhelmed her, dulling the pain of the knife wounds somewhat—that her mind hadn’t been able to process the horror of what was happening to her. I hoped most of the damage had been postmortem.

  As my mind roamed over the horror of her final moments, I was almost sorry I hadn’t listened to Gabriel. But this was important. This was the murderer’s work, and I had to see it up close. This was his sadistic form of expression, how his mind worked. I pushed my visions of her death to the back of my skull, trying to focus.

  A steady buzz drew my attention. Several flies roamed the open, bloody cavity. When a body was hours or days old, flies were valuable allies of the forensic team. A skilled investigator could estimate the time of death using fly and larvae samples taken from the body. But this corpse was fresh, and the flies were nothing but parasites, using the poor woman to feed their young.

  I waved my hand to shoo the flies away. The coppery smell of blood overpowered me, and I quickly stood up. The flies returned, haunting the woman’s wounds again.

  I struggled with the desire to close her eyes, to soothe the tortured stare from her face. Somehow, that was what hit me the hardest: her eyes. Wide open and in pain. Maybe I couldn’t feel her emotions on a visceral level, but they were written plainly on her face.

  Stepping away from the body, I gritted my teeth, trying to picture the monster who would rip apart four young women like this. How many more would he kill before someone stopped him? Would I be able to help?

  I was pretty sure I would. This was what I did best. I helped find men like him and put an end to their murder binges.

  From the perimeter around the police tape, I felt the crowd’s horrified energy, and it began to build my resolution. I wouldn’t return to the US until we’d put this monster in prison.

  “Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, handing me a pair of latex gloves. I took them and put them on, the synthetic material somehow reassuring.

  “I will be,” I muttered. “Looks like the viciousness is increasing.”

  “That was our impression as well,” Gabriel said. “This one is the worst so far.”

  I looked around the small city square. There were no shop fronts here, just the back entrances of buildings, a fenced-in parking lot, and a tiny road. Still, it seemed impossible that he�
��d slaughtered her in the center of the city without anyone noticing.

  “Do we have any witnesses?” I asked.

  Gabriel shook his head. “No. A passerby found her at twenty past eleven. He saw no one near the body.”

  “Do we have an estimated time of death?”

  “Yeah. Between eleven and eleven twenty.”

  “So he found her only minutes after she had been killed.”

  “Yes.”

  I frowned. “This doesn’t make sense. Someone killed her and disemboweled her completely. It would have taken some time. How did he manage to do that without anyone noticing? Surely people must cut through here to get to the bars and restaurants I saw on Bishopsgate?”

  “There isn’t much light here without the spotlights. And most people out at this time in the City are likely plastered.”

  I looked around. The body was reasonably hidden from the nearby street, but anyone looking a bit carefully would surely have noticed it. “He must have been silent. And calm. This is… extraordinary.”

  “I agree. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Any organs missing from the scene?” I asked, thinking of the previous cases.

  “The heart, at least, but I’m not sure what else. We’ll have a preliminary autopsy report tomorrow.”

  “Did you do a door-to-door? Did anyone hear anything?”

  “We’ve only just found her,” he countered. “And no one lives around here. Unless you wander further east, it’s all empty banks and businesses at this hour.”

  I stared at the woman. “Do we have an ID?”

  “Her name is Catherine Taylor,” Gabriel said. “Nineteen years old. There was a driver’s license in her purse, discarded by the body. We don’t know if it’s a coincidence yet.”

  “Coincidence?” I asked.

  A sigh slid from him. “Jack the Ripper killed a woman called Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square.”

  My throat tightened. Shit. Was he starting to mimic the actual Ripper? “The other victims weren’t killed in places where the Ripper struck.”

  “This is the first that overlaps.”

  “And the other names didn’t match the original Ripper’s victims, right?”

  “No. I imagine he is adjusting his signature as he goes along. But then, I’m no profiler, so perhaps I’d best leave all the complicated stuff to you.”

  I narrowed my eyes. Some British people were under the impression that Americans didn’t understand sarcasm, and perhaps it was best if I just played along. “Right. Best leave it to the experts.”

  He stared at me for just a moment before the medical examiner interrupted. “Detective. Can you have a look at this?”

  Gabriel crossed to the body. As he quietly spoke to the man, my gaze wandered to Catherine’s eyes again. What had gone through her mind in her final moments? Had she thought of anyone she loved, or had the pain overwhelmed her?

  My fingers tightened into fists. I wasn’t sure if it was my own past coming to the surface, the way it sometimes did at times like this, but I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to catch her killer and kick the living shit out of him before I put him behind bars.

  Gabriel knelt close to Catherine’s mouth, inspecting it.

  I leaned over to get a better look. “What is it?”

  “There’s something here. It’s shoved into her throat. Hang on…”

  The man crouching by the body handed Gabriel a pair of medical forceps. Carefully, Gabriel inserted them into the victim’s mouth, grimacing as the metal rattled against the teeth. He struggled with it for a second, before finally removing a small piece of paper, spattered in blood.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  Carefully, he unfolded it, and I peered over his shoulder.

  It was a note, the cursive letters looping over the paper.

  The King of Hearts

  Tears minds apart,

  Deep below the water;

  From Bedlam’s den,

  He lures them in,

  Like lambs led to the slaughter.

  For just a moment I heard the sound of a rushing river, before the noise disappeared again.

  I shook sensation from my mind.

  Gabriel rose, frowning. “What’s he playing at?” he asked, more to himself than anyone else.

  Unnerved, I swallowed hard. “Jack the Ripper left notes, right?”

  “Scribbles on a wall. Some tosh about Jews. But nothing like this.”

  “And this is the first time our current Ripper has left a note?”

  He was still staring at the paper. “The first one.”

  “Well, if you want my input…” I stopped myself short. I needed to avoid coming off like a know-it-all, or I’d alienate him immediately. “Perhaps we can discuss this tomorrow morning. I’ll gather a few ideas during the day, and I’d be interested to know your thoughts as well.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Right. I don’t suppose you have an initial assessment?”

  “I’d prefer to do a bit of research first. But the note and the gruesome display indicate that the killer seems to enjoy the attention of being the next Ripper. Maybe part of his fantasy revolves around the media and the police. The tabloid headlines might increase his obsession. And if so, maybe he’d want to see us working his cases up close.”

  I watched him carefully, interested if he’d get what I was implying. He stared at me for a long moment, before glancing over my shoulder, at the crowd beyond the tape. Then, he turned to the photographer—a middle-aged woman with a very expensive-looking camera.

  “I want detailed pictures of the crowd,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t aim the camera straight at them. I don’t want anyone to avoid the picture.”

  She nodded, pointing her camera at the blood spatter around the body. Slowly, she tilted the lens slightly higher, so that it would catch the people behind the tape. She took a few photographs, nudging the camera left and right. She knew what she was doing. And so did the detective.

  I’d already committed most of their faces to memory—the two men with beer guts in cheap suits who probably had low-level positions in one of the nearby banks; the man in the white hat with track marks up his arm; the cluster of teens who’d convinced someone to serve them beer, at least one of them more interested in trying to get laid than anything else going on here. But photographs would make it easier for other cops to study the crowd after the fact.

  From a far corner of the square, a man in a gray suit approached us, a serious expression on his face. “Detective Stewart.” He nodded at Gabriel. I pegged him at about fifty, his hair silvery gray. He wasn’t bad-looking, like a giant George Clooney. He was at least as tall as Gabriel, and powerfully built. Standing next to them, I felt roughly the size of a young child. Was everyone in Britain a giant?

  “Chief.” Gabriel nodded at him, then motioned at me. “This is Agent Liddell from the FBI. Agent, this is Detective Chief Inspector Steve Wood.”

  “Oh, yes.” DCI Wood’s voice was deep, pure gravel. “The profiler.”

  He didn’t sound thrilled either. It was becoming clear to me that the high brass had gone over everyone’s head when they’d contacted the FBI. Still, he offered me his hand, and I shook it.

  “So what are our preliminary findings?” he asked.

  For a second I thought he was talking to me, but Gabriel cut in, “This murder is slightly different from the rest. More aggressive. More… public. And he left a note shoved in the victim’s throat.”

  “Are we sure it’s the same killer?” DCI Wood asked. “With the different MO—”

  “The MO is the same,” I interrupted. “The signature is different.”

  Damn it. I was doing that American thing.

  The chief glanced at me. “Is that so?”

  “Well, um, perhaps…” I blustered. Ah, fuck it. “The MO is the method used to commit the crime. In this case, cutting a young woman’s throat with a knife is the MO. It’s how he’s killed all his victims. The signat
ure is what he did later to satisfy his emotional needs. Mutilating her body postmortem—that’s his signature. But this time he left a note. His signature has been modified.”

  “I see.” He nodded slowly. “And what does a different signature indicate?”

  It was a sensible question, but his tone clearly implied he thought I was full of shit.

  “Serial killers modify their signatures constantly,” I said. “They evolve and change after each murder. A different signature isn’t unusual, but it suggests that his emotional needs may have changed.”

  He looked at Gabriel. “What are your thoughts, Detective?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I agree with her assessment so far.”

  The crime scene technicians were wrapping the body’s hands with paper bags, and someone had rolled over a stretcher.

  How long would it take to clean all this up? Would tomorrow’s bankers stroll past the large stain on the cobblestones, not knowing why it was there?

  As DCI Wood walked away, I nodded at the crowds. “How are Londoners handling the crimes?”

  Gabriel frowned. “A mixture of fear and rage. They think it’s a form of terrorism.”

  Irritation sparked. “It clearly isn’t.”

  “For now, Wood is keeping the media in the dark, so they’re creating their own narrative. Foreigners did it. That’s the story.”

  I exhaled slowly. If Wood allowed this to continue, people could get hurt.

  Gabriel stared at the body. Under his breath, I heard him say, “The savage man is never quite eradicated.”

  Surprised, I turned to him. “Thoreau. He’s from my home town.”

  He seemed to study me for a minute, as if his curiosity had been piqued. “Where are you staying? I can walk you to the hotel.”

  “No need. I’m only five or ten minutes away—the hotel connected to Liverpool Street Station. And I don’t imagine our killer will be striking again within the next fifteen minutes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Gabriel,” I assured him. “I’m an FBI agent. I can take care of myself.”

  Chapter 3