The Avenger

by Jo Robertson

  Barrington flashed an impatient look. "Of course I'm sure. Do you know him?"

  "If it's the guy I'm thinking of, there's a little history." Hell, he and Jack boasted a millennium of history between them, but Slater wasn't about to share that information with Barrington. Anyway, hadn't he heard Jack was dead?

  "Whatever it is," Barrington warned darkly, "don't let it get in the way. Agent Holt will organize and head a task force. I expect full cooperation. ADA Torres will help."

  "Isabella won't be happy about that. She's working on the Vargas case."

  Barrington narrowed his eyes. "That investigation can wait. Anyway, Vargas is Sac County's problem, not ours."

  "How do I get hold of Holt?"

  "You don't. He'll contact you."

  Slater watched Barrington mince his way across the polished linoleum and out the doors of the courthouse. Previous district attorneys had made their offices in this impressive historic building, but not him. The day after he assumed office, Barrington moved his staff into the sleek new complex across the freeway.

  Asshole, Slater thought. Barrington knew the Diego Vargas case was important to Isabella Torres.

  He sighed and leaned back in his over-sized chair, pondering this new information. If the DA was allocating all his resources, including ADA Torres, to the federal case, it must be important. Agent Jackson Holt couldn't possibly be the kid he'd known in high school.

  Coincidence or not, the news was a bitch.

  *

  The call about the dead body at Lake Tahoe's North Shore came in while Jack sat in the Bigler County Sheriff's office. Slater eased his solid length into a worn leather chair that spoke more of comfort than décor, and eyed Jack across a desk unit that looked ridiculously small. When he'd shaken Slater's hand a few moments ago, a surge of testosterone flared between them and he'd imagined the two of them arm wrestling like they used to in high school.

  "Who'd have thought," Slater drawled as he raked his eyes over Jack's physique. The desk phone buzzed. Slater ignored it. "Heard you'd gone back to Texas, got killed in a knife fight."

  Jack didn't speak, just opened his credentials and held them up for inspection. He was taller and thinner than Slater, and he knew his clothes hung on him as if they were tailored to a mannequin in contrast to his old friend's casual jeans and shirt. Slater was broader, probably stronger, and had about twenty-five pounds on him. He had even teeth set in a square jaw, and right now his gray eyes were suspicious in a way that took Jack back in time.

  Someone had gone looking for him, Jack thought, and wondered who had cared enough.

  "So, the feds, huh," Slater commented after a lengthy silence. "Never expected you to end up there."

  Jack laughed harshly and without humor. "You probably thought I'd be on the other side of the law." He leaned backward in the chrome chair until the front legs tilted upward.

  "Frankly, I didn't think of you at all until the district attorney got a call from Washington."

  The jibe rankled. "Good, then I can expect your full cooperation."

  "Why not?" Slater paused, and like a dare added, "As long as you don't disappear on us." The again was implied and set Jack's teeth on edge.

  "What can I do for the federal government?" Slater asked before Jack could react.

  Jack stretched his long legs out in front of him. "I have an old cold case."

  "What's a federal cold case got to do with my office?"

  "We have intelligence that our killer might've run to ground in this area."

  "Out of fifty states and thousands of counties, you think he's holed up in mine?" Slater lifted both brows and lazily rested his chin in his large hand.

  Jack opened his mouth to explain, but the insistent buzzing of the phone stopped him.

  "Hold on." Slater lifted one finger in the air and punched the speaker button. "What's wrong now, Connie?"

  "Dispatch reports a 187 at North Shore, about a half mile past marker 19, two hundred yards from the water."

  "Harris?"

  "Yep, got him on the other line."

  "Patch him through," the Sheriff instructed, looking at Jack with mild curiosity.

  The voice came through the speaker phone, tinny, but deep. "Harris, here, Sheriff. Got a nude body off the highway, laying behind a log near the shore, female, possibly African-American."

  "Say again. Possibly?"

  "Yes sir, body's badly beaten. Can't be sure."

  Jack went very still, all senses on full alert. This time as the headache slammed into him, he managed to control the pain of it. Still, the sounds of crushing bone and spattered blood echoed in his ears. Cries, young female cries, and the whimpers of fear and desperation, terror and pleading.

  He smelled the bone, heard the blood, felt the cries. Mismatches, he thought, and battled back the sensory overload.

  "Goddammit," Slater muttered. "I'll be there in forty." He depressed the call button. "Conn, get the techs out there ASAP." He slammed the phone back in its cradle.

  Not possible, Jack thought, at the same time he mentally calculated the distance between the Utah border, where the fourth body was found, and northern California. It was his man. He felt it in his bones. Pulling out the notepad where he'd taken notes on Olivia's student, he read his own broad scrawl. Keisha Johnson, five foot two inches, African American-Islander, nineteen.

  Shit!

  Slater watched Jack's movement as he reached for his jacket.

  When he reached the office door, Jack stood. "Mind if I tag along?"

  Slater lifted his broad shoulders. "Why the hell not?"

  A little less than an hour later, Jack and Slater stared down at the mass of bloody flesh nestled in the brush around North Shore, the California side of Lake Tahoe. A tall, burly deputy crouched beside the body, looking pale beneath his dusty black skin.

  "Bus is on the way," Slater said to his deputy, his gray eyes unreadable. "How'd you come on it?"

  Harris pointed to the square of red fabric flapping in the cool morning breeze. It was virtually unnoticeable from the highway. "That caught my attention and I pulled off to investigate, climbed down to the rock by the shore."

  "Damn good eye," Slater complimented.

  The headache remained, but Jack couldn't feel the screams and wails up here, this close to the body. It was like the victim could rest now that she'd been found. He turned toward the peaceful, clear waters of the Lake Tahoe for a moment and then looked down at the body again.

  The small mangled flesh was a dusty pink, a hue that might've begun as scarlet and was now pretty enough for a little girl's bedroom. If you didn't look at the tangled pieces of bone and flesh along the length of the body. The Dead Language Killer's handiwork, he was sure of it.

  Harris had secured the scene, although on this section of the lake not a soul was around. Then he'd walked out a second, larger perimeter down to the lake shore, which consisted of brush and rock and very little sand on this side of Tahoe.

  Slater stepped under the yellow crime scene tape of both perimeters and squatted down to examine the body. He snapped on disposable latex gloves. "Be sure to get close-ups of the head and chest areas, Waylon. See this indentation?" He indicated the right side of the smashed head which faced them.

  "Yes sir. You think it was a fall?" Harris looked back toward the road. "She took a tumble down the embankment?"

  Not a fall, Jack thought. The body looked like raw meat, something off the butcher's block, deliberately executed, not accidental. He ducked under the tape and pointed toward several pulpy sections of the torso. "What about these?"

  "I'm thinking blunt force trauma," Slater said. "See these fragments? Slivers of wood."

  "Somebody beat her with a wooden stick?" Shock registered on Harris' young face.

  "I'd guess a hard wooden object, maybe a baseball bat or hockey stick." Jack moved down the torso to the legs. Under the mass of flesh and gore, the legs lay at an unnatural angle.

  "Legs are broken," Slater said
.

  "Yeah," Jack said, but there was no satisfaction in his voice. He rose and dusted off the knees of his pants. "Looks like somebody beat the hell out of her."

  Harris took a deep breath and ventured a quick look at Slater. "She hasn't been dead long. The blood's partially congealed, and she's African-American cause of the hair. It's kinky."

  Jack lifted his brows and shifted his eyes to the deputy's closely cropped head. Harris smiled, rubbing his palm over the wiry bristles. "Mine grew out, you'd see what I mean. And I think under all the… stuff, the skin tone's darker than a white person."

  "He killed her here." Jack pointed to the ground. "Blood loss is too great."

  "Looks like the killer went nuts and kept on smacking at her," Harris added.

  Slater looked around. "How'd she get here?"

  Harris frowned. "Someone drove her?"

  "Doesn't make sense," Slater muttered. "Why would somebody go to the trouble of taking a naked girl way up here and beat her to death? Where are her clothes?"

  "Forced her to disrobe?" Harris asked. "Took the clothes?"

  Slater grunted.

  "This looks like a crime of passion," Jack observed, "but – "

  Slater finished the thought. "It has all the earmarks of carefully planned, premeditated murder."

  Jack was pretty sure he knew who had done the planning.

  On the way back down the mountain Jack made a pitch for joint jurisdiction even though he didn't need to be diplomatic.

  "Why do the feds want to get in on a local matter?" Slater's arm rested lightly over the top of the steering wheel and his voice was mild as if he were talking about the weather.

  "We've got lots of resources, manpower, databases. We could be very useful."

  "That's assuming this case and yours are connected."

  "Look, we need local cooperation to move ahead on our case and your dead body might be connected to it."

  Slater drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and slanted a stubborn glance at Jack. "And if not, what then? Are you going to pull those resources out?"

  Jack warned himself that Slater, in spite of his easy-going demeanor, was no fool. He tried another tactic. "I don't mean to step on your toes, but I'll be honest with you. We've ground to a halt in our investigation, gave up hope of finding the suspect."

  "You sure it's the same one?"

  Jack nodded. "Why don't you take a look at my files when we get back to the office? Maybe you'll see something I missed."

  Slater shrugged noncommittally, but Jack saw the quick flash of interest in his gray eyes. He was on board whether he knew it or not. All they needed now was a quick identification of the body. Jack would lay odds it was Olivia's missing student. His gut told him so, but he didn't relish breaking the news to her.

  They rode back to the courthouse in silence. Jack wanted to mention Olivia, but didn't. Did Slater know she was teaching at the university, part of his jurisdiction? Had he kept in touch with her through the years? Jack felt on the edge of some bizarre reunion, the three of them back together again.

  Slater tagged Connie on their way into his office. "Could you bring us two coffees?" He raised his eyebrows at Jack.

  "Black."

  "Two blacks, Connie."

  "Now, Sheriff, you know I don't do coffee." Connie's voice came through the open office door.

  Slater smiled and broke through the grimness of the morning.

  "Oh, all right," Connie mumbled, "but you owe me big time and I'm not like to forget it."

  While they waited for the coffee, Jack tossed the first folder on Slater's desk. He picked it up and flipped through the pages. "Three cases?"

  Jack nodded. "That's the first DLK victim, Laura Jean Peterson."

  "DLK?"

  "Dead Language Killer."

  Slater sighed. "I suppose there's a story behind that."

  By the time the coffee arrived, he'd riffled through the first case file. After Connie set the coffee mugs down with unnecessary clatter and left, Slater opened the second folder and perused it. He looked up from the file. "What the hell? Crucifixion?"

  Jack nodded and motioned for Slater to read on.

  "Good God, he was alive when he was – holy shit."

  Jack pulled a photo from the bottom of the stack. The crime scene photo showed a naked body with dark pools staining the wrists and feet.

  Slater stared a long moment before reaching for the next folder. "Something tells me I don't want to read another one." He opened the file anyway.

  Jack inclined his head toward the folder. "We thought Angela was the final victim."

  Slater scanned the report. "Blunt force trauma." He looked at the pictures. "Resembles the unidentified body at North Shore."

  "She was a thirty-one-year-old waitress from South Bend, Indiana," Jack added, as if that were the important detail. He sipped his coffee and stared emotionless out the office window into the bullpen where deputies were gathering for the shift change.

  "You've got these memorized?" Slater asked with a sweep of his hand across the desk.

  Jack didn't acknowledge the question. "After Angela, all the leads dried up and my investigation took a nose dive in the toilet."

  "And you're looking for a new lead here."

  Jack threw a fourth folder across the desk. "First this one."

  Slater checked the date on the tab and raised his eyebrows. "Current?"

  "Discovered a few days ago."

  "You think they're all connected." A statement not a question. "And you think my DB at Tahoe is the fifth victim of the same killer."

  In frustration, Jack shoved his fingers through his hair as he rose. "Shit, I don't know if this is the same guy or if it's a damn copycat."

  He grabbed his briefcase, needing to get out of here, needing a break. "When you follow up on your victim, I expect full cooperation." He turned toward the office door and shot his parting words over his shoulder. "I don't want to put the screws to you on this, Slater."

  "Then don't," Slater replied.

  Jack lifted his hand in acknowledgment without turning around, feeling Slater's hard gaze like a target on his back as he made his way through the squad room and out the door toward the metal detector. A queasy feeling ran through his stomach.

  Chapter Ten

  Late that afternoon Olivia and Jack began their uneasy alliance in her office at the university.

  "Did you learn anything about Keisha?" she asked right off.

  He shook his head. "Nothing concrete."

  Olivia looked as if she'd like to say more, but put it aside and folded her hands as she faced Jack across the battered width of her desk. "Tell me about the Latin notes."

  "First the basics," Jack said. "Serial killer, four deaths so far that we're sure of. The UNSUB stopped four years ago, and we thought he'd finished, died or was incarcerated." He paused and reached into his briefcase. "Hopefully dead."

  "UNSUB?"

  "Sorry, criminal code for unknown subject, the person whose identity we don't know. Several weeks ago, we discovered another body similar in M.O. to the first one. M.O., that's modus – "

  "Operandi. I know that one." Olivia tapped a forefinger against her temple. "Latin expert, remember?"

  "Didn't mean to be condescending."

  "Come on, Jack." She flashed that enigmatic expression she'd always had and did the slow blink that was surely unconscious, and which he'd always found intriguing and slightly arousing. Her dark hair glistened in the overhead lighting. The shape of her mouth and the fullness of her lower lip reminded him of their velvet softness against his neck and cheek. Dangerous to go there, he warned himself.

  "The notes," Olivia prompted.

  He shook himself back to reality. "They came after the first two murders," he began and filled her in on the details.

  "And all three notes were penned in Latin?"

  He handed her the plastic bag. The notes were inside, arranged back to back. Each side was labeled with date and loc
ation in the lower right corner.

  She peered curiously at one side and then the other. "'Nunca fidelis,' means – "

  "Never faithful," Jack finished, wryly. "Opposite of the Marine Corps motto."

  "There are how many murders now?"

  "Four." He hesitated, picking his way through the mine field of her worry. "But I need to tell you something."

  A quick flash of concern furrowed her brow. "What?"

  "Did you know the Bigler County Sheriff is Ben Slater?"

  The surprise on her face was genuine. "Our Ben Slater?"

  "You didn't know?"

  "I just moved from the Bay Area a few months ago. I'm still new to the Sacramento area." Her face lit up with delight. "Slater, here? And sheriff? That's bizarre."

  "You haven't kept in touch?"

  "No, he went away to college and… well, we lost track of each other, I guess."

  "He's helping me on the DLK case," Jack said, watching her reaction, "but he doesn't know I've enlisted your aid, too."

  Olivia eyed him cautiously. "Is my involvement a secret?"

  "No, but I'd like the three of us to meet at the end of his shift today."

  "Why?"

  He frowned. "When I visited him this morning, a one eighty-seven call came through dispatch."

  "One eighty-seven?"

  "It's code for murder."

  Her face paled with alarm. "Oh, God, you think it's Keisha?"

  "It's too early to worry, Olivia. Slater will let us know as soon as she's identified."

  "A woman?"

  Jack nodded. "She's probably not your student, and the body's not related to the case."

  Olivia touched his hand. Even in that brief moment he was conscious of the roughness of his skin beneath her cool fingers.

  "Thanks," she said and he heard the reluctant gratitude in her voice.

  Thanks, she'd whispered when they'd made love, that one and only time. After she'd stopped crying and he'd hidden the blood-splotched towel at the bottom of the clothes hamper. After his own tears spilled into her silky raven curls in the same way he'd spilled himself into her young, untried body.