Breaking Creed

by Alex Kava

  She had thought Leandro had given her these things as gifts because he was grateful, because he cared about her. Instead, they were only part of a costume to make her look the role she was playing—the spoiled, rich American kid whose parents could afford to have her go back and forth from their Colombian vacation hacienda to their Atlanta home.

  Now she heard Leandro whisper her name in the dark. He didn’t reach for the lamp. As he made his way to her bed, she watched him through the veil of her eyelashes, not daring to move a muscle.

  She felt his weight on the edge of the bed as he sat down, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Only then did she realize she had been holding her breath. He’d know for sure that she was pretending. Why hadn’t she thought to fake her breathing?

  “Amanda,” he whispered again, as though he were playing along.

  She felt his fingers touch her cheek. So gentle. And suddenly he was stroking her hair.

  “I do not want you to think about Lucía and what you saw.”

  The knot twisted in her stomach as his words immediately brought back the image of the knife in his hand. Of it plunging into the girl.

  “She was not strong like you.” He kept his voice low and quiet and soft. It was the same tone he had used with her before, when he gave her the gifts and when he praised her.

  “Lucía was weak,” he continued, and so did his fingers. “It is her father’s fault that she is dead. It was his debt. Instead of paying it, he sent his daughter to do what he himself would never do. That was his decision to give up his own flesh and blood. He is a small, stupid man.”

  His hand moved from her hair to her shoulder, gentle caresses.

  “You know how he mourned the news of his daughter’s death? A real man would put himself in place to pay off his debt. But no. You know what he did instead?”

  But Amanda knew he wasn’t waiting for her answer as his fingers slid down her arm.

  “He sent me yet another one of his daughters. This one is even younger than Lucía. I am told the bastard has three more at home. He is willing to run through daughters before he is willing to pay back his debt like a real man. You see what I have to deal with, Amanda? How difficult my job is?”

  He shifted his weight on the bed, and now she could feel his breath on her neck. His fingers continued their familiar path, still so gentle and caressing.

  “But you, Amanda. You are strong. Things will only get easier for you, I promise.” His lips grazed her ear, and despite her anger and fear, her body was betraying her, yielding to him as he whispered, “I am so proud of you.”

  No one had ever said they were proud of her before, and so she let Leandro show her just how proud he was.

  One Week Later

  Monday

  10

  THE EDGE OF THE POTOMAC RIVER

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  FBI AGENT MAGGIE O’DELL watched from the riverbank and wondered when she had started associating dead bodies with political fallout. Actually, that was a step up. Floaters used to be a reminder of her divorce. Years ago she’d lost her wedding ring while helping to pull a body from the Charles River. It had been cold that day, the water frigid. Debris ripped apart her latex gloves. Her hands were too numb to care or feel the cuts and scratches from the sharp branches and piercing vines.

  It wasn’t until hours later, after she had warmed and cleaned her hands—pouring rubbing alcohol over them—that she noticed the ring was gone. The worst part—she didn’t remember feeling sadness or even regret, but rather, a calm acceptance. The lost ring seemed to only symbolize what she had avoided acknowledging. Her marriage had been lost long before the ring slipped off her finger and disappeared into the cold, dark waters of the Charles River.

  O’Dell wiped sweat off her forehead. Today was the opposite of that day, with heat and humidity at the other end of the spectrum. It made it challenging for the forensic recovery team, but they were being careful. Not an easy task. Even from fifty feet out she could see that the floater was swollen and bloated. That meant eight to ten days in the water.

  That many days in the water, along with the summer heat, made the recovery even more difficult. The skin would be loose. Tissue and organs would be fragile and susceptible to damage with the gentlest of knocks and jolts. The skin of hands and feet tended to separate from the bone.

  “I can’t figure out why you’re here,” Stan Wenhoff said to her.

  The question could have been taken as an insult, but O’Dell knew the District’s medical examiner well enough not to take offense, or at least not to take it personally.

  He stood next to O’Dell on the muddy riverbank. They were shoulder to shoulder. Neither of them took their eyes off the action in the water. Stan Wenhoff had been the District’s medical examiner for almost twenty years. Over the last decade O’Dell had worked with him on dozens of cases, ever since she was a forensic fellow at Quantico.

  She and Stan had a tempered relationship, but as a rule Stan didn’t much like anyone in law enforcement. He didn’t like having them stand over his shoulder during autopsies, second-guessing or questioning him. And he had no patience for newbies making inappropriate jokes, or worse—getting wobbly in the knees or freaking out about maggots. Nothing personal. It had taken O’Dell a few years and a whole lot of maggots—which she truly hated but had not once freaked out over—to understand how Stan worked.

  As for his comment, she didn’t take offense. She had no idea why she was here either. Lately her boss, FBI Assistant Director Raymond Kunze, had been sending her on all kinds of wild-goose chases. Several of them involved some form of payback or political cover-up. It was a price he seemed willing to pay in order to stay in the good graces of certain senators and congressmen, along with a handful of presidential advisers.

  “Any chance the body’s been dismembered in some way?” she asked Stan in response to why she might be here.

  “Don’t know. Could be.”

  “Well, there you go.” She said it matter-of-factly. No sarcasm intended, and Stan didn’t question or comment further.

  A part of her hated that she’d become a de facto expert on dismembered bodies. In her career as a profiler, she’d seen body parts stuffed into take-out containers, fishing coolers, Mason jars, and even wrapped in butcher paper inside a freezer. But standing in the midsummer heat and anticipating the insects, as well as the smell, she’d almost rather deal with a few body parts than a floater.

  Bodies tended to sink in water. It was one of those things movies and TV shows rarely got right. It wasn’t until days later, when gases started to form and collect, that the body began to float. From the apparent buoyance of this one, O’Dell suspected the gases were in full force.

  “So what are you doing here?” she asked Stan, suspicious of why he had taken this assignment instead of sending one of his assistants. For as much as he hated law enforcement, Stan did enjoy the media. If there was even a whiff of a high-profile case, Stan tended to keep it for himself.

  “What do you mean?” he asked halfheartedly.

  Still, neither glanced at the other. The recovery team was making progress toward them.

  “Why would you choose to be here in this heat? I’m guessing there must be something that piqued your interest.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Stan shrug and knew this was the most admission she’d get from the man. He surprised her when he said, “The call that came in said there was ‘a package in the Potomac.’”

  “A package? That’s creative.”

  “But that’s not even the interesting part,” Stan said, and finally he glanced over at her. “The caller promised that this was only the first.”

  “Oh, wonderful.” O’Dell restrained a groan. Now she understood why she had been sent here. It was just another frickin’ serial killer case to add to her collection.

  11<
br />
  “THE BODY’S BEEN IN THE WATER at least a week.” Stan offered what O’Dell already knew.

  The recovery team had splayed the floater on a tarp spread out on the muddy riverbank. They wouldn’t even attempt to fit the victim inside a body bag. Instead, they’d wrap the tarp as gently as possible around the bloated flesh, sealing up the ends for transport to the morgue. In the meantime, the team backed away and let Stan and O’Dell take a look before one of them started taking a series of photographs.

  The body was male. That was about all that O’Dell could determine. But that alone was unusual. More than seventy percent of serial killers’ victims were female. Being in the water for a week would suggest the body would be washed clean, but debris dangled from the man’s hair, long and wet slimy weeds that made it look like snakes were coiling around his head and into his face. Pieces of his flesh had already been compromised, scavengers in the water—fish or insects—teasing and tasting to see if this foreign object was something they could feed on.

  O’Dell watched as Stan’s short, stubby fingers took temperature readings. Slow and methodical, he began his on-site checklist. She stood over the body, but kept out of the medical examiner’s way, even making sure that she didn’t cast a shadow over him. But while he worked, she continued her own visual examination.

  She had chased her share of serial killers in the past decade. It wasn’t something that she chose to do. It wasn’t as if when she was a little girl, she’d said, “When I grow up I want to be an FBI profiler.” Just like her reputation for being an expert on dismembered bodies, hunting down killers had also developed into an accidental specialty.

  O’Dell had an eye for details that others missed. She recognized patterns and suspected rituals while her colleagues thought she must be crazy. The strangest statistics and the most absurd facts stayed planted in her brain. She could easily become obsessed with a killer’s MO, learning and gleaning psychological tells that the killer never intended to share. And once in a while—to O’Dell’s detriment—a killer became obsessed with her, too.

  Stan had said the caller who tipped off authorities about this victim had called it “a package.” It wouldn’t be the first time a serial killer had made up a clever reference for his victim. Nor would it be the first time that one called and alerted authorities, anxious to display his work. But so far, O’Dell couldn’t see anything that made this floater stand out as a homicide, let alone as the victim of a serial murderer.

  She noticed marks around the man’s wrists and ankles, indents into the now bloated flesh that could have been made from ligatures. She wanted to take a closer look but stopped herself. She waited until Stan noticed them, but the medical examiner seemed to be focused on something underneath the corpse.

  “What is it?” O’Dell asked.

  Stan waved her off while at the same time motioning for the forensic team, calling them over.

  “Can we roll him over? At least onto his side?”

  O’Dell squatted down beside Stan, not waiting for an invitation. She could see the tiny welts on the inside of the man’s legs that had gotten the medical examiner’s attention. They looked like insect bites. That didn’t seem unusual considering how long the body had been in the water.

  They gently lifted and rolled the swollen corpse onto the left side and exposed the backside.

  “Holy crap,” one of the CSU techs said. “What the hell is that?”

  The entire back of the man’s body was covered in tiny welts, large patches of what looked like a rash on his calves, buttocks, and shoulders. What attracted O’Dell’s focus was the tattoo that spread over the entire left shoulder blade. It looked like the Grim Reaper, only there was something very different about it, despite being marred by the skin welts. It was distinctly female, clad in an elaborate robe and holding a scythe along with other items that were lost in the eruptions.

  The others dismissed the tattoo. Stan poked and pressed the patches with a gloved index finger. One of the CSU techs began taking photos. O’Dell stood up and pulled out her cell phone. She zoomed her camera in on the tattoo and took several shots.

  Taking a step back, she noticed that the worst areas—the most densely rashed—were those that would be in contact—unavoidable contact—with the ground or a surface, if the man had been restrained on his back. Maybe tied down. She pulled her eyes away to glance at the wrists and ankles. This close, she could see that ligatures—which were gone now—had cut deep into the skin.

  “Was it something in the water?” another of the CSU techs asked.

  But Stan was already shaking his head.

  “I can’t say for sure until I take some samples, but I think this happened pre-mortem.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I have,” Stan said as he pressed his latex-covered index finger against a particularly nasty area on the victim’s shoulder. “One other time. Not this bad. Nothing like this.”

  “They’re insect bites,” O’Dell guessed.

  On closer inspection, the tiny welts looked like pus-filled blisters. And Stan was right—the skin wouldn’t continue to produce pus and blister like this after the heart had stopped.

  “They’re not just any insect bite.” He looked over at O’Dell and waited for her eyes. “They’re fire ants. And nobody just falls onto a gigantic mound of fire ants and lies there.”

  “Not unless they’re tied down.” She pointed to the wrists and ankles, which were bloated over the telltale markings.

  “If I’m correct about these being fire ants, then this didn’t happen to him anywhere near this river,” Stan told her.

  “How can you be certain about that?”

  “Fire ants can’t survive in areas that freeze during the winter.” He said it without a doubt.

  “So the killer tortured him somewhere else.”

  “Not just somewhere else. It’d have to be at least five or six hundred miles south of here.”

  “Oh great. So the original crime scene could be anywhere.” She pointed to the victim’s shoulder. “Any of you recognize the tattoo?” she asked.

  The tech with the camera hunched over it and clicked off a couple of close-ups. Then he shrugged and said, “Not sure.”

  O’Dell crossed her arms over her chest and stared out at the water of the Potomac. So delivering the “package” here must also serve some twisted purpose in the killer’s MO. You didn’t have to go far along this river to see monuments and historical landmarks from the water’s edge. And once again, she couldn’t help wondering if her boss had sent her out on yet another political goose chase.

  12

  FALCO STARED AT HIS BOOTS. It was better than watching the spiders. He hated spiders. So he kept his eyes on his boots. Mud globbed into the seams where the leather met the sole. The toes were smeared, the heels caked, leaving no signs of the high-polished condition he obsessed over. He had other boots but these were his favorites. These made him walk like a cowboy, and he liked that. They had cost him more than his poor mother made in a month.

  Falco had grown up watching American Westerns, old black-and-white movies that made the actors look tough, the landscape unforgiving, and the women more vulnerable. He liked to wear white button-down shirts with short sleeves and black jeans. Black and white had become his signature. Sometimes Falco even dreamed in black and white. It made the blood look like black motor oil. Cocaine was already white. Lately his dreams seemed to be covered in blood and cocaine . . . fire ants and spiders.

  Falco’s obsession with black and white made it clear—perhaps it was a sign that even his Catholic mother couldn’t dismiss—that he was meant to be an apprentice under the Iceman. That code name brought with it a reputation, and at just its mention, Falco had seen the toughest men show fear, as though an injection of ice had been driven into their veins.

  Few had
ever seen the Iceman or met him. Those who bragged about getting a glimpse usually didn’t live long enough to verify their description. He knew that would be his destiny if he were ever to betray his new mentor. Now Falco realized that no one would believe him anyway, even if he gave an accurate description. The man’s features were bland, ordinary, and unremarkable. Easy to forget.

  Choosing to be called “the Iceman,” although clever, wouldn’t give away the man’s real identity. After all, an assassin “iced” people for a living. Of course, Falco understood there were other reasons, deeper meanings for this nickname. It wasn’t much of a trick, but no one questioned it and neither would Falco dare to.

  “They’re hungry today.” The Iceman’s voice brought Falco’s attention to the tabletop, where he had been trying to avoid looking.

  He didn’t want to watch inside the Plexiglas box as the spiders fed on the carcasses he had helped collect for this very purpose. Their long spindly legs worked like tweezers, dissecting, pulling, yanking. The Iceman was teasing them with food, only to swipe it away. But these buggers were fast . . . and aggressive. Faster than Falco had ever seen.

  The Iceman said they were “special ones . . . deadly ones,” and Falco found himself grateful. He wouldn’t be asked to handle them with bare skin like the others. These required gloves and a delicate touch, and thankfully, the Iceman didn’t believe Falco was ready or skilled enough, so Falco might luck out and not have to handle them at all.

  “They’re Brazilian wandering spiders,” the Iceman continued, and Falco knew there was a lesson coming. He didn’t mind. He actually liked that the assassin considered him worthy. “Their genus is Phoneutria. It’s Greek for ‘murderess,’ which is quite appropriate because they are the world’s most venomous. One sting is more powerful than a rattlesnake bite.”

  He glanced back and Falco knew it was to check his reaction. Satisfied, the Iceman nodded. He poked a long stick through a carefully drilled hole in the side of the spider case. Falco watched as several of the spiders attacked the stick, rearing up on their hind legs. They were fast . . . so incredibly fast. Two raced up the stick until they ran into the Plexiglas wall.