Sweet Dreams Boxed Set

by Brenda Novak

  Taylor’s heart skipped once, then started again in a rush. “You’re telling me this is the same guy?”

  “I definitely don’t want to go there yet, I need to have this analyzed and do the post. But two girls in two days, with similar presentations? Taylor, this isn’t good.”

  “No kidding. I’ll see you in a minute.” She hung up the phone and looked at the car passing her on the left. A harried mom with three kids in the back, all laughing and making faces at her as they blew past. They had no idea what waited for them when they got older.

  Taylor felt the sadness well up inside her and tears prick her eyes. She shook it off and concentrated on an image of the dead girls.

  Thirteen

  Taylor patiently watched Sam gently slice and dice their floater. Once they had retrieved some messy but useable prints and sent them to Lincoln, she’d decided to stay out of the way. Sam was working fast, looking for any similarities inside the two dead girls while she went through the remaining steps of her post.

  Taylor’s phone rang again, and she decided to take a breather and answer it outside. It was Lincoln.

  “Hey, Taylor, how’s it going over there?” The scratch of a match and a quick breath out gave her away. “Smoking again?”

  “Let me worry about my own lungs. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got an ID on the floater.”

  “Whoa, you are good. I didn’t know if the prints were going to be usable at all. So who is she?”

  “Her name is Jordan Blake. But I don’t think you’re going to want to hear the rest.”

  Taylor sank down on the steps, pulling hard on the cigarette, as if a lungful of carbon monoxide would lessen the blow from whatever bad news Lincoln was about to spring. “Shoot.”

  “I played a hunch, started with our local AFIS database. It kicked back several possible matches. I eyeballed them to see if we were close. One was.”

  “Oh, God no, don’t tell me.”

  “She’s a junior at Vanderbilt, Taylor. We have a serious problem on our hands.”

  Taylor began to pace the sidewalk in front of Sam’s building, her mind churning. Two girls dead, both murdered, both from the biggest local college campus? This was going to bring everyone out of the woodwork.

  “Lincoln, get your butt into Price’s office. Let him know what you’ve got. Has anyone filed a missing persons report on her?”

  “I haven’t found one yet. When Sam gives me a solid timeline, I’ll be able to get more specific, but I’ve gone through the past month’s reports and haven’t found any matches, which is totally bizarre. I mean, a Vandy student not being reported missing for this long, by anyone? Something’s not jivin’ here, LT.”

  “None of this is jivin’, Lincoln. Go on and tell Price what’s up, let him decide how to proceed. Sam should be done with the post soon, so I’ll come in the minute I have the preliminaries. And Lincoln? Don’t tell anyone about this. Fitz and Marcus are fine, but no one else. Price is going to call the shots from here, okay? We’re going to have media crawling all over us, and we don’t want to make a misstep.”

  “You think it the same guy?”

  “I don’t know. Until Sam finishes running post and we run all the evidence, there’s no way to know. But the posing, the staging, the sexual assault—we may be dealing with more than a simple predator.”

  “A serial,” he said, and he heard the teeniest bit of excitement in his voice.

  “Possibly. And that, my friend, is top secret information. I’ll be there shortly. Be good.”

  “You, too. There’s a big storm headed our way, too. We’re supposed to have bad weather for the next few days. Be careful.”

  Taylor clicked off the phone, tossed the cigarette under the wheel of a relatively new Mustang convertible. Lincoln wasn’t kidding. The sky was darkening, and she could smell the storm; the dry tang of rain getting stronger by the minute. She looked to the west, saw the first lightning strike. Maybe the storm would improve her mood; she always loved a good rain.

  Knowing she could put it off no longer, she headed back in to give Sam the bad news.

  Fourteen

  Sam was stripping off her gloves and shields when Taylor walked back in. Her heart reached out to her friend. Taylor was exhausted, that much was readily apparent. Her hair was spilling down from her ponytail, her shoulders were slumped and there was no bounce in her step. Her eyes were so gray Sam thought rain could pour out of them at any moment, and the smudges underneath were getting worse. She looked like she had a cold starting on top of it all; she’d been sniffing for most of the afternoon. Sam went to her and surprised her with a quick hug. Taylor hugged her back, quick and hard.

  “You look like crap, Taylor. You need to get some sleep and some sinus medicine.”

  “Thanks, Mom.” She gave her a half-hearted smile. “I don’t have good news.”

  “Neither do I. You want to go first?”

  “You go on ahead.”

  “Well, this one’s cause of death was definitely from the stab wounds. There were two deep ones, got right into her heart. She died pretty quickly. The other wounds are perimortem, and different. They’re vicious, ragged wounds with notches, two more in her chest and one right in the gut. Just missed her liver. From the clean stabs, it looks like he used a regular knife with a serrated blade, the flesh on one side of the wound is torn.”

  “And the others?”

  “Same knife, I think, but he turned it after it went in. Spun it around. A little extra to make it hurt worse. There’s no way to know for certain which were first, but there was a lot of bleeding. She was alive for the torture, unfortunately.”

  Taylor blew out a breath. “You’re saying ‘he’ a lot.”

  “She was raped, repeatedly, over a length of time. There was enough tissue left to show healed tears on both her vagina and anus. There were also fresh tears. Couldn’t get any semen, it was washed away by the river, but she was being roughed up for a while before she died. And…”

  “And?”

  “She may have been poisoned as well. She looks a lot like Shelby on the inside. Her liver has the same characteristics. I took all the samples and had them run over to Simon. I asked him to drop everything and analyze them.”

  “Sam, this isn’t good. Same guy, same point of origin? I’m praying we don’t have a serial on our hands.”

  “You had news to share, too. What was it?”

  “Lincoln got an ID. Her name is Jordan Blake. She’s a junior at Vanderbilt.”

  Sam was quiet for a moment, then whispered under her breath, “Damn.”

  “Yeah, damn is right. Do you have any idea when she was killed?”

  “She hadn’t been in the river for more than a week. Four or five days would be my guess. He could have tossed her in anywhere south along the Cumberland, and it took her this long to float upstream, or she was weighted and broke free. My bet is the latter. He threw her away like a piece of trash, Taylor. There wasn’t any of the reverence or—” She paused, bit her lip. “I don’t want to say gentleness of the previous kill. But Shelby’s death didn’t seem as careless. This one—Jordan—she pissed him off.”

  “What about the herbs?”

  “Like I said, I can’t be sure whether they were herbs, though the stuff I scraped off looked similar to what we got off Shelby. The thing is, if the composition is the same, he was with the body after she washed up on shore. Further proof he weighted her, then let her come to the surface to be found.”

  “Or…wherever he had her, he unweighted her, scattered the herbs on her back and let her float in.”

  Sam thought about that for a minute. “Okay, that works for me too. If he had spread them after she was on the bank, they wouldn’t have been wet, and these were definitely mucky. But recent, the water would wash them away quickly. He was right there, Taylor.”

  Sam watched Taylor fiddle nervously with a ring on her right ring finger. It was a thin silver band, very plain. She’d picked it up in Hawai
i on a brief vacation, and hadn’t bothered to take it off since. It held some symbolic meaning to her. One night, when they’d been very drunk, she told her it was a circle of life and a circle of death. Sam was aghast when Taylor said she didn’t want to take it off, that it was a constant reminder of her failings. Sam had to resist the impulse to reach over and wrench the ring right off Taylor’s finger and throw it in the trash. Taylor Jackson had no failings that Sam could see, other than caring too damn much about her job.

  “Taylor, there’s one other thing.”

  “More? What?”

  “She was pregnant. About six weeks along.”

  Taylor could do nothing but stare. The thoughts were flying, bouncing off each other like bumper cars. None were coming together.

  Sam continued. “It’s possible some of the tearing and damage I found could have been inflicted that long ago. It’s possible that whoever killed her was the father of the child.”

  “You’re reaching there, Sam.”

  “I know. But it could be. You can’t rule it out. If he was the father, it’s possible he didn’t know about the child.”

  “Or he did, and that’s why she ended up in the river, viciously stabbed. Ah, hell Sam, this is just too much. Can you run the DNA you collected from Shelby against the fetus?”

  “I can, yes, but it isn’t going to happen as fast as you’d like. Simon’s already dumped a couple of high profile private cases he’s working on; he’s not going to want to jump through this hoop again immediately. Besides, I’m only bringing it to your attention. It’s possible we have two different killers, despite the similarities.”

  Taylor stood for a long moment, staring at her best friend. Tapped a finger along her leg. “I understand, but I want it done. Please ask Simon to drop everything and work on this, okay?”

  “All right. I’ll ask. I may go over and help him run some samples, speed things up.”

  “That would be incredible, Sam. Thank you. I’m heading back downtown. We need to get a game plan together, find this girl’s family and give them the news before we release any information. You’ll get to me the second you hear from Simon?”

  “I will. Hey, I heard about the grand jury. Are you okay? Do you need anything? I know revisiting all of it won’t be easy.”

  Sam was possibly the only person on earth who Taylor had been completely honest with about that night. Oh, she’d told the truth, she’d just left out the parts that made her look weak and stupid for falling for Martin’s rap. She’d never forgive herself for hesitating. If she’d only gone straight to Price the moment she found out, none of this would have happened.

  She hugged her best friend, long and hard. “Thank you for caring. I’m fine, I promise. It’s only a recitation of the facts, and I want to see his partners go down.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Taylor. Not one ounce of it. Don’t you ever forget it.”

  Taylor smiled sadly. “If you tell me that often enough, one day, I might start to believe you. I gotta run.”

  “Do me a favor? Stop by the drug store and grab some Advil Cold & Sinus. We can’t have you getting sick on us.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said, waving goodbye.

  Fifteen

  He stood in the shadows, watching, felt the breeze kick up, smelled the fire coming from the sky. It was time. He said the words quietly, hands raised.

  “‘And after these things, I saw four Angels standing on the four corners of the Earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.’”

  His voice rose, the ecstasy of the moment driving him. “But I am the fifth angel. And I call upon my brothers to unleash the winds of wrath upon us. Blow away the sins of our people, take those undeserving of my love. Ruin the nonbelievers, allow my vision to caress those worthy of my divinity.”

  In answer, the wind blew harder, and he knew he was blessed.

  Sixteen

  The rain was coming down hard by the time Taylor rolled into headquarters. She was fervently hoping the captain had a plan.

  The squad room was unnaturally quiet, so Taylor wandered out into the hall, looking for he people. Lincoln was walking toward her with a pot of coffee, gesturing to the conference room. She followed him in to find Price, Fitz, and Dan Franklin sitting around the table. Marcus had pulled out a white board; a thick black line drawn down the middle separated it into two columns. She’d have to hold off telling them about the possible herbs Sam had collected from Jordan Blake’s body. She didn’t want Dan Franklin to have the information until they were ready to use it.

  One of her quick-thinking detectives had scrounged up a picture of Jordan Blake. She hung on one side, and a picture of Shelby Kincaid was taped to the other side. It was the first real look she’d gotten at Jordan. There was absolutely no comparison to the ruined body they’d found in the river.

  While Shelby was pretty in an unassuming way, more cute than beautiful, Jordan Blake was stunning. Take-your-breath-away, movie-star, attention-getting gorgeous. How in the world a girl like that could have disappeared unnoticed was a real mystery.

  Fitz shot her a smile and Price nodded a hello.

  “You guys have been busy.”

  “Hi, Taylor. Grab a chair. We’re going through our next steps and putting together all the info we’ve got so far. We’re short on Jordan, obviously. You and Marcus are going to Vandy when we finish and dig everything up on her you can find.”

  Price was smooth and in control, just the opposite of how Taylor was feeling inside. “In the meantime, Lincoln is looking for the girl’s family. There was none listed on her print card, so he’s called over to Vandy to get her personal information.”

  “If they give you crap, let me know. They can get prickly about releasing student information without a court order.”

  “I went the back route,” Lincoln said.

  On cue, the phone on the table rang. Lincoln checked the caller ID, then picked it up. “Lincoln Ross.”

  He hadn’t answered with the standard “Homicide.” That must be the people from Vandy. Taylor was glad to see things were being handled so delicately. He jotted down a few notes and thanked the person on the other end of the line warmly. Taylor raised a brow at him. Wondered who he had called in the favor from.

  Lincoln had the decency to blush. “Old friend,” he muttered.

  “So what’s the deal?” Price obviously wasn’t in the mood to play “tease the detective” at the moment.

  “Jordan is from Houston. I’m going to go call the chaplain, see if he can start working his magic to get her parents notified.” He headed back into the warren to make the call.

  Price continued on. “Taylor, what did Sam have to say?”

  “Her sense is we may have the same killer. On the surface, it looks like two totally different suspects. Jordan had been raped over a period of time and stabbed five times, two that caught her in the heart and killed her pretty quickly. But Sam saw the same liver necrosis as Shelby, the indicator of possible poisoning. She’s sent everything to Simon Loughley with an emergency push. One little snag. Jordan was six weeks pregnant. We could have a set of coincidental deaths here, two different men entirely.”

  “Or we could have one man who’s ridding himself of dead weight.” Price stroked his mustache. “I don’t want any talk outside this room about serial killers, series killers or mass murderers on the loose with a hard on for Vandy coeds. Dan, we need a press conference. We’ll need a very succinct and brief statement for the late news. I’m talking bare bones here. And I want Taylor to be there with you to take a few questions.”

  Both Franklin and Taylor opened their mouths to protest. Price held up his hands. “We’ve had quite enough controversy in this shop, and enough media attention to last a lifetime. Putting Taylor on camera will show we’re back to normal. She is in charge of investigating these homicides, and I want a female face on the case. It will make the coeds listen. And it will help af
ter yesterday morning’s little snafu.”

  Taylor closed her mouth and narrowed her eyes at Price. He simply smiled.

  “Now, Taylor, get a subpoena for Jordan Blake’s records, and do it fast. I want you and Marcus to go back to Vandy and check things out. Be a little discreet. This is eventually going to get out, and I don’t want it to look like we’ve stepped on anyone’s toes. Fitz, I’m pulling you back in full time. You head over to Private Match and sit on Loughley until he comes up with the results.”

  Fitz shrugged. “It’s not going to happen tonight, Price. It takes time to run all those little tests.”

  “I don’t care how long it takes. Just go over and help him out. Y’all are dismissed. Dan, stay behind, we’ll work on the statement. You can call Taylor later with the time she needs to show up.”

  They stood, and Fitz said, “Taylor, can I have a second?”

  “Sure. I need to check on Lincoln anyway.” They left the room, Price barking instructions to Dan Franklin in the background.

  Lincoln was hanging up the phone when they walked in. “Here’s something interesting for you. The chaplain called his counterpart in Houston, who knows Jordan’s family. They ran out to the house—apparently the parents don’t live far from their HQ. Jordan’s parents have been in Europe for the past month. They’ve got another month planned, and their maid didn’t know how to reach them. She said the dad calls into his office every once in a while, so we called over there to have him call as soon as he gets a message. The maid gave them the number of a sister that lives in Washington, DC. They’re trying to get in touch with her, see if she can reach the parents.” He shook his head. “Some family. No one seems to talk to anyone else.”

  “Very sad. Keep after them, Lincoln. If we’re having a press conference tonight, I’d like to be able to use Jordan’s name. Fitz, let’s go in Price’s office.”