Ignoring the condescension, I tensed. I’d hoped the killer hadn’t mutilated her while she was still alive. That didn’t match the original Ripper’s signature, nor this one’s previous killings.
Doctor Dixon leaned back in his chair. “I found skin tissues under the victim’s fingernails.”
Gabriel frowned. “Sounds like the killer was careless this time. He thought Catherine was dead, and bent over her, about to cut her up. But she was still alive, and managed to scratch him.”
I nodded slowly. “And that’s why he mutilated her face before she died.”
“Could be,” said Gabriel. “It’s very likely that he was enraged, and wanted to punish her.”
“Maybe.” Dixon twirled his pen. “In any case, I don’t have a full autopsy report yet. Some findings are unusual. I’ll have it finished tomorrow morning.”
“Okay,” Wood said. “Lowe, do we have a DNA match?”
Gracie shook her head. “There was something wrong with the analysis. I’ll run the tests again today.”
Wood scowled, clearly irritated. “What do you mean, wrong?”
“The DNA seems fine, but none of the STR-loci are amplifying properly. I just wanted to double check if perhaps…” She frowned. “If there was a possibility that you may have…” She trailed off.
I had a sense that this was how a British person questioned a superior.
She cleared her throat, trying again. “Is it possible that perhaps someone mixed up the samples, by accident?” Gracie’s voice went high-pitched at the end.
Wood stiffened. “Absolutely not.”
“Right.” Her cheeks went pink. “It’s just that when the samples don’t amplify, it’s because there was a mix-up with the null-controls.”
“In English, please,” said Wood.
“Something went very wrong with the DNA sample,” Gracie replied.
“Send it to the NCA labs if you can’t sort it out yourself.” Wood raised his voice to signal that the subject should be dropped. “Now, the Home Office is granting additional measures to combat this threat. Use stop and search techniques as you see fit, and we will be able to question suspects indefinitely without access to a lawyer.”
And there it was: the reason DCI Wood was perfectly happy for everyone to think these were terrorist acts, which generally resulted in the expansion of police powers. I needed to bring up the subject of the tabloid headlines, and the brewing storm of xenophobia. But I had a strong feeling that if I challenged an alpha male like Wood head-on, it wouldn’t go well. Lucky for me, I could easily rely on one of my favorite tactics: acting like a feckless dipshit. And lucky for me, my accent was doing half the work for me already. It meant I could try to draw them into seeing things my way by asking questions without appearing to challenge their authority. Always let your opponent underestimate you.
I raised my hand. “Um, I have a question.”
Wood raised his eyebrows. “Yes, Liddell.”
“Who does the public think is committing these murders?” I opened my eyes wide, blinking.
“We haven’t told them,” Wood snapped.
“Right, but, like… how is the media reporting it? When they don’t have the answers, don’t they just, like, make something up?”
Gabriel shot me an irritated look. He might have been the one person in the room who knew what I was doing.
“Is this important?” Wood snapped.
I cleared my throat, struggling to continue with this charade. “It’s just that I saw a headline about Muslims and jihadis, and I was confused because it never occurred to me that it might be related to terrorism.”
Wood arched a cautionary eyebrow. “We’re expanding the definition of terrorism.”
“And you’re not worried about public safety and targeting of immigrants?” As I became more annoyed, the act started to fall apart.
Wood fell silent for a moment, his dark eyes penetrating me. “We’ll take your input under consideration, Liddell. But we brought you here to profile the killer. What is your assessment so far?”
Gabriel shook his head. “She only just arrived last night.”
“Actually,” I said. “I have a preliminary profile.” A sleepless night had its advantages, after all. I might have been late today, but I was definitely prepared. “The killer is male, in his late twenties or early thirties. I don’t think he’s psychotic—”
“You don’t think he’s psychotic?” the bald one—Phillip—asked incredulously. “We are talking about the same killer who’s ripping people’s organs out and shoving nursery rhymes down their throats, aren’t we?” Okay, so he was going to get a bit more confrontational.
I took a deep breath. “I don’t think he’s psychotic in the strict sense of the word. I don’t think he’s hallucinating, or completely delusional. He’s able to plan. He’s reading papers, and making decisions based on new information. He was able to find someone named Catherine, and to persuade her to go with him. And the verse he wrote—it seems like nonsense on one level, but the meter scans properly. It’s not complete gibberish.”
Gabriel was staring at me contemplatively.
“He is probably good-looking and possesses a superficial charm,” I continued.
Kind of like that stranger who’d nearly charmed the pants off me in the alley last night. Though why he’d charmed me, I had no idea. His anger toward me had been apparent. At the thought of his hands on my body, my cheeks began to warm again.
Lungfish, taxes, British politicians…
“How do you know he’s good-looking and charming?” Gabriel interrupted my thoughts, his tone skeptical.
Right. Focus, Cassandra. “There are indications that three of the victims went with the killer voluntarily. It’s not unusual. Ted Bundy convinced his victims to follow him to a remote location. I understand that Jack the Ripper was also probably charming. And superficial charm is a common quality in psychopaths.” I waited for a moment, letting this sink in, then continued. “I believe that the unsub learned of the Ripper’s acts and that they inspired him, but I don’t think he’s as obsessed with the Ripper as the media wants us to believe.”
“The unsub?” asked Philip.
“Unknown subject of an investigation,” I clarified.
“Right,” said Wood. “And why do you believe this… unsub is not obsessive about the Ripper?”
“Ripper enthusiasts obsess about the location of the killings. This unsub obviously didn’t care about them at first.”
Gabriel’s dark brows drew together. “Even though he killed a woman named Catherine in Mitre Square.”
“Right.” Gabriel had conveniently handed me my cue. “That was after the tabloids dubbed him the Terrorist Ripper. The nickname appeared only after the third murder. Up ’til then, he was just a nut. But now, he’s a menacing reincarnation. So he plays the role—finding a woman with the right name, taking her to the right place, enhancing the public interest and fear. The murders are part of his fantasy, but the public interest is crucial to it as well. As time goes by, he’ll do other things to draw more attention to himself. Like the note found at the crime scene. It will feed the media’s imagination and fascination with him. Make no mistake, this guy wants fame. And he probably wants to create panic, to…” I trailed off for a moment, struck by the memory of what the stranger had said to me in the alley the night before. “He’s energized by people’s fear. He feeds off it.”
I gripped my pen tighter. He wasn’t like me, of course. My body might react strangely to other people’s fear, but I’d never wanted to hurt anyone.
“What kind of actions can we expect?” Wood asked.
I tried to gather my thoughts. “We can expect—”
The door of the room flung open, and a breathless constable stood in the door, a wooden box in his gloved hands. “This was just delivered via messenger, sir.”
I glanced at the box, and my pulse began to speed up. The box’s bottom was wet. The constable put the box gingerly on the
table, opening the lid, all of us standing and leaning over to peer inside.
Revulsion climbed up my throat, and my jaw dropped. It took me a moment to fully grasp what we were looking at. It was a heart, glistening with dried blood, and through the front, someone had rammed a metal nail with a note.
Gabriel was the first to act. He pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket, slipping them on before he slowly eased the paper off the nail, and held it in front of him. He began reading it slowly.
Hickory dickory dare.
The queen spins thrice with the bear—
Anticlockwise—
The next one dies.
The evil one simply waits there.
Silence lingered after he finished reading the bloody note, then Wood turned to Gracie. “Get that thing analyzed. Fingerprints, DNA, everything. Make sure you do it properly this time.”
“‘The next one dies,’” I said. “He’s letting us know he’s not done.”
The room full of police turned to look at me.
“He’s about to kill again. Soon.”
Chapter 5
The morning went by in a blur. As soon as we got the killer’s package, the intensity in the station thickened. It was one thing to follow the killer’s footsteps, analyzing the crime scenes, trying to locate witnesses, guessing where he’d strike next. It was another thing altogether to get a human heart in the mail.
An undercurrent of rage rippled through the station. I felt it, the anger pulsing through me, coursing through my veins, thicker than blood, clouding my thoughts. It energized me, sharpened my senses. But the tension also frayed my nerves, and every foot scuff had me jumping out of my skin. When Ben Patel made an offhand remark about my crooked visitor’s badge, my temper sparked. I had to grab my chair’s armrests to avoid snapping at him, my face reddening.
In the late morning, DCI Wood had led me to a blue-walled room filled with two rows of wooden desks. He’d assigned me to a spot not far from Gabriel, before going through all the policies and details of the police station—the loo was down the hall; never be late for a meeting; he would reimburse receipts for food purchased between the hours of seven a.m. and five p.m. I nodded, ignoring most of what he said. The FBI was more than capable of paying my expenses.
From my chair, I could see Gabriel hunched over a transcription of the note, frowning as he tried to decipher it, his earlier task forgotten.
Across from him, I opened my laptop and began reading through the history of Jack the Ripper. Just like now, London residents had begun turning on immigrants—though in the nineteenth century, the police had worked to keep mob rage under wraps. The tables seemed to have turned just a bit since then.
As I frowned over a map of Victorian Whitechapel, Gabriel turned to me. “Cassandra. I sent a link to the victim’s Facebook profile and the login information.”
“Thanks.” I clicked on the email, logging on with her password—a random sequence of numbers and letters. Looking at her pictures, my throat tightened. In all of them, she looked happy, almost glowing. Besides being a student, she seemed to have had a part-time job as a yoga instructor. Many of her photos featured her in an assortment of extremely impressive poses—in a bikini on the beach, at the front of a class in a lotus position, her skin bathed in candlelight. She wore her chestnut hair in a loose braid over her shoulder, and apparently, she spent her free time hiking and having champagne picnics in the countryside. An orange Persian cat featured in many of her pictures, along with captions about the cat’s likeness to Wilford Brimley. As she’d dressed up last night in her pretty yellow dress for a night out in London, Catherine never could have imagined what horror lay in store for her.
I swallowed hard. Not for the first time, I was overcome by a desperate desire to travel back in time and warn a victim before it was too late.
In one of the newer photos, Catherine sat on a sofa next to a young woman with bleached-blond hair and full lips, both of them drinking wine, smiling over a half-eaten pizza. When I hovered over the blonde’s picture, the name Gemma Roberts came up. The flatmate. I clicked on her profile, flicking through the images. In Gemma’s more recent photos, her appearance seemed to change—her hair getting more wild, her roots longer, her lipstick slightly smeared. It was like I could see her falling apart as the photos went on. In one, she stood by a rainy window, with a tattoo visible on her right arm—a skull under curling blue waves.
The King of Hearts
Tears minds apart,
Deep below the water…
“Gabriel,” I said without looking up. “Is anyone bringing in Gemma Roberts? The flatmate?”
“Detective Scott asked her to come in.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I want to speak to her.”
* * *
In a tiny interview room, Gabriel and I sat across from Gemma. The room felt claustrophobic—soft blue walls, in case our interviewee got out of hand, and wooden chairs crammed around a plastic table.
Our witness sat across from us, staring at me. With her long sleeves, I couldn’t see that skull tattoo.
She tapped her fingertips on the tabletop, her red nail polish half-chipped off, nails bitten down to nubs. By the three inches of roots darkening her hair, I surmised that she had started going off the rails about six months ago. Black eye makeup darkened the skin under her pale blue eyes. If I had to guess, I’d say she was a drug addict, though I couldn’t be sure yet.
“They told me Catherine was killed,” Gemma muttered.
From my periphery, I could tell Gabriel was looking at me. Gemma didn’t seem particularly broken up about her flatmate’s death, but I was well-versed in masking my reactions to unexpected behavior. I gave nothing away.
“She was,” I said. “The police found her body in Mitre Square.”
Gabriel cleared his throat. “What time did you say Catherine left your flat?”
The girl chewed her nail. “He’s a god, you know.”
Okay… That was particularly unexpected, but I schooled my features to neutrality. “A god,” I repeated, hoping to prompt her.
Her eyes widened, and she leaned forward. “The god from the mirror realm. He calls to me. He wants me to be his servant.” She bit her lip. “And I want to serve him.”
I now had two possible diagnoses for Gemma: schizophrenia or type one bipolar. Given the length of her psychosis, schizophrenia seemed more likely, but not definite.
“Tell me about the god,” I prompted.
Gemma looked down at her ravaged fingernails. “I need a glass of water.”
I glanced at Gabriel, raising my eyebrows.
“Fine,” he muttered, rising.
“Did Catherine know about the god?” I ventured.
Gemma shook her head. “He didn’t speak to her the way he speaks to me. He didn’t choose her.”
Grandiosity and delusions. I’d get nowhere by contradicting them. I had to go into her world. “The god chose you.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m waiting for my water.” For a few moments, she sat in silence, until Gabriel returned.
He slid the glass of water across the table. “What did you and Catherine fight about?” he asked.
I shot him a shut up now look. “The god chose you,” I repeated. “He wants you to be his servant.”
Gemma lifted the glass, staring at the water. “The gods demand fealty. What if Catherine was a sacrifice?”
My muscles tensed. Under the table, I gently touched Gabriel’s leg, signaling him not to pounce all over this. Tread carefully. “A sacrifice?”
Slowly, she traced her finger up the side of the glass. “Long ago, we served the gods at the river. They lined men up on the river banks, cut off their heads.” She dipped her finger into the water. “The head is the seat of the soul. Their skulls sank under the water’s surface, full of dreams and fears, terror and joy.” Gemma dipped her finger into the water, as if mimicking a sinking skull.
Gemma’s gaze met mine, and for just a moment,
it seemed as if an image flickered in her eyes—an image of two gaping-eyed skulls, glaring back at me.
I blinked, clearing the vision. I needed to get a hold of myself before this woman pulled me into a shared psychosis.
“Tell me more about the sacrifices,” I said.
She stared at her own finger sinking deeper into the water, and as she did, the shadows around the room seemed to thicken, claiming the walls like pooling ink. “The gods feed off all the things that make us human.”
I shuddered.
Gabriel leaned forward. “What did you say about the water?”
Good. He’d recognized it too. The King of Hearts tears minds apart, deep below the water.
Gemma pulled her finger from the water, and dipped it into her mouth for a moment, sucking the water off. “We stopped paying the gods fealty. We owe them.”
“Your tattoo,” I prompted. “I saw it on Facebook. Skulls under water.”
“Mmm,” said Gemma.
“Can I see it?”
She pulled up her sleeve, revealing a brutal burn mark where the tattoo had been.
Gabriel inhaled sharply. “You need to get that treated.”
Gemma pulled the sleeve down again. “I had to get rid of it. I thought it might quiet his voice in my mind, but…” Her body went rigid, and goosebumps rose on her skin. Suddenly, she closed her eyes, her back arching. “I can feel him.” She grabbed the edge of the table, apparently gripped by some sort of ecstasy.
“Who?” asked Gabriel.
I kept my features bland. “The god.”
Her eyes snapped open, and she gripped the side of the table. “I want to speak to him. He’s here for me.”
I was losing control of this. “Does anyone else know about the skulls under water?”
“I told you,” she snapped. “The gods. I won’t speak to anyone else but my king. He’s here.”
Okay. So we had not only water, but a king—just like the note. Plus, that whole bit about the sacrifice.
Agent of Enchantment (Dark Fae FBI Book 1) Page 5
