Die for Me

by Karen Rose

  Ted smiled back. “I have the perfect place. Well, it’s not perfect yet, but I have every confidence you’ll whip it into shape.”

  Tuesday, January 16, 4:10

  P.M.

  Munch had spent the first half hour of their drive telling Greg Sanders about the documentary he was making. It was a fresh look at daily life in medieval Europe.

  God, Greg thought. What a yawner. This would have been worse for his career than Sanders Sewer Service. “How about the other actors?”

  “I begin shooting them next week.”

  Then they’d be alone. And Munch hadn’t paid anyone else yet. He should have a lot of cash in his house. “How much farther out is your studio?” Greg demanded. “We must have gone fifty miles.”

  “Not much farther,” Munch replied. He smiled and Greg felt a cold shiver burn down his back. “I don’t like to bother my neighbors, so I live out where no one can hear me.”

  “How would you bother them?” Greg asked, not so sure he wanted the answer.

  “Oh, I host medieval reenacting groups.”

  “You mean like jousting and shit?”

  Munch smiled again. “And shit.” He turned off the highway. “That’s my house.”

  “Nice place,” Greg murmured. “Classic Victorian.”

  “I’m glad you approve.” He pulled into the driveway. “Come in.”

  Greg followed Munch, impatient that the old man took so long walking with the damn cane. Inside he looked around, wondering where the old man kept his money.

  “This way,” Munch said and led him into a room filled with costumes. Some were on hangers, while others were worn by faceless mannequins. It looked like a medieval department store. “You’ll wear this.” Munch pointed to a friar’s robe.

  “Pay me first.”

  Munch looked annoyed. “You’ll be paid when I am satisfied. Get dressed.” He turned to go and Greg knew it was now or never.

  Do it. Quickly he flipped out his blade, moved in behind the old man and hooked his arm around Munch’s neck, pressing the sharp edge against his throat. “You’ll pay me now, old man. Walk slowly to wherever you keep your money and you won’t get hurt.”

  Munch went still. Then in an explosion of movement he grasped Greg’s thumb and twisted. Greg yelped with pain and his knife clattered to the floor. His arm was whipped behind his back and a second later he was on the ground, Munch’s knee in his back.

  “You slimy little sonofabitch,” Munch said and it was not the voice of an old man.

  Greg could barely hear him over the pounding in his head. The pain was excruciating. His arm, his hand. They were burning. Pop. Greg screamed as his wrist snapped. Then moaned when his elbow did the same.

  “That was for trying to rob me,” Munch said, grabbed a handful of Greg’s hair and smashed his head into the floor. “That was for calling me old.”

  Nausea rolled through him when Munch stood up and pocketed his blade. Get help. He slipped his hand into his pocket and fumbled his cell open with his left hand. He had time only to push one button before Munch’s boot came crashing against his kidneys.

  “Hands out of your pockets.” He shoved his boot into Greg’s stomach and flipped him to his back. Greg could only stare in horror as Munch pulled off his gray wig. Munch wasn’t old. He wasn’t gray. He was totally bald. Munch pulled off his goatee and put it next to the wig. The eyebrows were last and Greg’s stomach clenched as panic gave way to cold hard fear. Munch had no eyebrows. He had no hair of any kind.

  He’s going to kill me. Greg coughed and tasted blood. “What are you going to do?”

  Munch smiled down at him. “Terrible things, Greg. Terrible, terrible things.”

  Scream. But when he tried, all that came out was a pathetic croak.

  Munch threw his arms wide. “Scream all you want. No one can hear you. No one will save you. I’ve killed them all.” He bent down until all Greg could see were his eyes, cold and furious. “They all thought they suffered, but their suffering was nothing compared to what I’m going to do to you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Tuesday, January 16, 5:00

  P.M.

  Sober-faced, they’d reassembled to debrief. Vito sat at the head of the table, Liz on his right, Jen on his left. Next to Jen were Bev and Tim. Katherine sat next to Liz, her expression drawn. Vito thought about her having to do autopsies on all those bodies. She probably had the worst job of them all.

  Although informing a family that their nineteen-year-old daughter was dead had been no picnic either. “Nick’s on his way from court,” he told Liz. “They just adjourned.”

  “Did he testify?”

  “Not yet. ADA Lopez thinks it’ll be tomorrow.”

  “Let’s hope so. Well, bring me up to speed so we can get out of here.”

  Vito checked his watch. “I’m also expecting Thomas Scarborough.”

  Jen McFain’s brows went up. “Nice. Scarborough’s a great profiler. But how did you get him so quickly? Last I heard he had a client list months long.”

  “You can thank Nick Lawrence for that.” A tall man with linebacker’s shoulders and wavy chestnut hair came into the room and from the corner of his eye Vito saw both Beverly and Jen sit a little straighter. Dr. Thomas Scarborough wasn’t what Vito thought most women called movie-star handsome, but he had a presence that filled the room. He leaned over and shook Vito’s hand. “You must be Chick. I’m Scarborough.”

  Vito shook his hand. “Thanks for coming, Dr. Scarborough.”

  “Thomas,” he said and took a seat. “ADA Lopez introduced me to your partner outside court this morning. We were waiting to testify. Nick asked me about perps who use torture, and I was intrigued.”

  Vito introduced everyone, then went to the whiteboard where he’d drawn the grave matrix that morning. “We’ve confirmed that the woman with the folded hands is Brittany Bellamy. We compared prints from her bedroom to the vic’s. They’re hers.”

  “So we’ve identified three of the nine,” Liz said. “What do they have in common?”

  Vito shook his head. “We don’t know. Warren and Brittany were on the modeling website, but Claire was not. Warren and Brittany were tortured. The killer broke Claire’s neck, but did no more. There was at least a year between their murders.”

  “The one thing they do have in common is that they were all buried in that field,” Jen said. “I didn’t think the fill dirt was from the field and I was right. The field is mostly clay. The fill dirt used in all the graves is sandier. It probably came from a quarry.”

  Tim Riker sighed. “And Pennsylvania is full of quarries.”

  Liz frowned. “But why use fill dirt from somewhere else? Why not use the dirt he dug from the hole in the first place?”

  “That’s actually an easy question to answer,” Jen said. “The soil from the field gets clumpy when it gets wet. The quarry soil is sandy, so it doesn’t absorb water the same way. It flows. It would be easier to pack a body in sand rather than clumpy clay.”

  “Can we identify where exactly the soil came from?” Beverly asked her.

  “I’ve called in a geologist. His team is looking at the breakdown of the minerals to give us an idea of where that soil naturally occurs. But it’s going to take a few days.”

  “Can we get them to move any faster?” Liz asked. “Get them to up their resources?”

  Jen lifted her hands. “I tried to push it, but so far everyone is telling me that is the fastest they can work, and that is with the maximum resources. But I can try again.”

  Liz nodded. “Then do. The nature of his burial pattern indicates he’s not finished. He could be working on a new victim right now. Two days could make a big difference.”

  “Especially since we’ve disrupted his routine,” Thomas said quietly. “This killer is incredibly obsessive-compulsive. He’s left one open space at the end of the third row, and if his current pattern holds, he’ll be looking for a new victim any time now. When he finds you’ve discovere
d his carefully planned burial site… It’s going to throw him. He’s going to be angry, maybe disoriented.”

  “Maybe he’ll make a mistake,” Beverly said.

  Thomas nodded. “It’s possible. It’s also possible that he’ll retreat, go under and regroup. He went almost a year between the first murders and these recent ones. He could wait another year. Or more.”

  “Or he could find another field and dig another matrix of graves,” Jen said flatly.

  “That, too,” Thomas acknowledged. “What he does next may depend on why he’s doing this at all. Why he kills. What got him started? And why a year between sprees?”

  “We were kind of hoping you could help us with that,” Vito said dryly.

  Thomas’s smile was equally dry. “I’ll do my best. One of the things we need to establish is how he chooses his victims. The last two came from the modeling website.”

  “Maybe the last three,” Tim Riker said. “I ran a search on all the male models at UCanModel that have the same height and weight as Flail Guy.”

  “Stop calling him that,” Katherine snapped, then pursed her lips hard. “Please.”

  There was a raw desperation in her voice that made everyone turn to look at her.

  “I’m sorry, Katherine,” Tim said. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

  She nodded unsteadily. “It’s okay. Let’s just call him three-one, for his grave. I just finished that man’s autopsy. Brittany Bellamy and Warren Keyes suffered horribly, but there’s every indication their ordeal was no longer than a few hours. Three-one was tortured over a period of days. His fingers and thumbs were broken. His legs and arms were broken, his back flayed open.” She swallowed. “And his feet were burned.”

  “The soles of his feet?” Liz asked gently.

  “No, his whole foot. The scarring is total and has a clear delineation. Like a sock.”

  “Or a boot,” Nick said grimly, coming in the door. He squeezed Katherine’s shoulder reassuringly before taking the seat next to Scarborough. “It was one of the torture devices on the websites I found. The inquisitors would pour hot oil down into a boot, usually one foot at a time. It was a very effective method of getting people to say anything they wanted them to say.”

  “But what could our killer have possibly wanted these people to say?” Beverly asked, frustration in her voice. “They were models, actors.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want them to say anything. Maybe he just wanted to see them suffer,” Tim said quietly.

  “Well, they suffered,” Katherine said bitterly.

  Vito closed his eyes and forced himself to visualize the scene, horrible as it was. “But Katherine, something doesn’t make sense. The way his head had sheared off, he had to have been sitting up. If he’d been lying down, I would think the skull would crush, not shear. If this guy was in such horrible shape before he was hit with a flail-or whatever-how did he even sit up to receive the blow?”

  Katherine’s lips thinned. “I found rope fibers in the skin of his torso. I think he was tied so that he was vertical. The pattern of circular bruising was on top of the fibers.”

  There was a moment of silence as everyone digested this latest horror. Vito cleared his throat. “What did you find when you searched the UCanModel database, Tim?”

  “A hundred names, roughly, but knowing about his feet being burned helps. Brittany Bellamy had been a hand model and the killer posed her hands. Warren had the tattoo of Oscar holding the sword and his hands were posed the same way.” Tim pulled a sheaf of papers from his folder and began scanning the list. “There are three that were foot models.” He looked up at Katherine. “What size were the victim’s feet?”

  “Ten and a half.”

  Rapidly Tim thumbed through the pages, then stopped and focused. “Yes.” He looked up again, triumphant. “But only one has size-ten-and-a-half feet. William Melville. Goes by Bill. He did a shoot for a foot spray ad last year.”

  Vito’s pulse picked up some speed. “Good work, Tim. Really good work.”

  Tim nodded soberly, then looked at Katherine. “Now he has a name.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured. “That means a lot.”

  “When we break, we’ll need to confirm it,” Vito said briskly. “Nick and I will take finding an address for Bill Melville and checking him out. Tim, I’d like you and Beverly to keep working that database. I still want to know who our killer attempted to hire and couldn’t. I also want to know who he’s contacted lately. We need to find him and stop him before he finishes out that row.”

  “We’re meeting Brent Yelton from IT when we’re done here,” Beverly said. “He said he’d try working through the user side but that he’ll probably need help from the website hosts themselves.” She grimaced. “And for that we’ll need a warrant.”

  “You get me the details,” Liz said, “and I’ll get a warrant.”

  “So each of the last three victims was chosen based on a physical attribute,” Thomas said, musingly. “Using the modeling database, he could search for the attributes he wanted. There’s also a certain drama about posing hands, et cetera. Models are accustomed to playing roles in front of a camera.”

  Nick frowned. “Could this guy be filming all this?”

  “It’s a thought.” Vito jotted it on the whiteboard. “Let’s leave it as a thought for now and go on. Computers. Warren’s hard drive was fried. The Bellamy family’s was also fried. But Claire didn’t have a computer.”

  “So he didn’t meet her through the website.” Tim said. “Unless she used a public computer. She did work at a library.”

  Vito sighed. “An Internet session on a public computer fifteen months ago will be hard to trace. That could be a dead end.”

  “What did you find out about where he could have gotten his tools?” Nick asked. “Were Sophie’s contacts any help?”

  “Not much.” Vito sat back down. “The chain mail was high quality. A mail shirt with links that small runs over a thousand bucks.”

  “Whoa,” Nick said. “So our boy has some funds.”

  “But the mail is available through a number of Web stores.” Vito shrugged. “As were the sword or the flail. It’ll be hard to trace a single purchase, but that’s what we’ll need to do. Sophie did tell me that one of her professors heard that a collection of torture artifacts had gone missing. I’ll follow up on that tomorrow. It was in Europe, so I’ll have to involve Interpol.”

  “Which will add time,” Liz grumbled. “Can’t your archeologist dig some more?”

  Jen winced. “No pun intended.”

  “I’ll ask her,” Vito said. If she meets me tonight. If she didn’t… He supposed he’d have to walk away, but he wasn’t sure he could. She drew him in a way no woman had in a very long time. Maybe ever. Please, Sophie. Please come. “Jen, what more have you found at the crime scene?”

  “Nothing.” She lifted a brow. “But that’s something, in a way. We’re still sifting fill dirt and will be for days, but something is missing from the site.”

  “The dirt he took from the graves initially,” Beverly said and Jen touched her nose.

  “We’ve combed those woods and haven’t found any evidence of dirt he removed.”

  “He could have spread it out,” Tim said doubtfully.

  “Could have, and he might have, but that would have required a lot of work. Sixteen graves is a lot of dirt. It would have been easier for him to just pile it off to one side.”

  “Or remove it. He has to have a truck,” Vito said.

  “Or access to one. We might be able to tell what kind. We got a tire print from the access road leading to the field. It’s at the lab.” Jen bent her lips down as she thought. “That resignation letter Claire’s parents gave Bev and Tim was just a copy. We need to get the original. Who has it?”

  A cell phone rang and everyone instantly checked their own phones. Katherine held hers up. “Mine,” she said. “Excuse me.” She got up and moved to the window.

  “The library
where Claire worked had the letter,” Tim said. “We requested it today, but they said they had to ‘go through channels.’ They hoped to have it tomorrow.”

  Jen’s smile was sharp. “Good. Let’s see if we can get some decent prints.”

  Katherine slapped her phone shut, then turned to the group, her eyes bright again. “That silicone lubricant you found with Claire’s things?”

  “The lubricant for her prosthetic leg,” Vito said warily. “What about it?”

  “It matches the sample I took from the wire on Brittany’s hands.”

  Vito pounded his hand on the table. “Excellent.”

  “But,” Katherine nearly sang, “it doesn’t match the sample we took from Warren. The lubricant found on Warren’s hands was close in formula, but not exact. The lab called the manufacturer, and they said they had two main formulas but often create custom blends for clients with allergies.”

  Vito looked at the table, processing. “So the sample found on Warren’s hands is a custom blend.” He looked up. “Did Claire buy a custom blend, too?”

  Katherine lifted her brows. “Not in the manufacturer’s records.”

  “So it belonged to somebody else?” Beverly asked.

  “She could have bought it somewhere else, or somebody may have bought it for her,” Liz cautioned. “Don’t assume until you know.”

  Katherine nodded. “True. The manufacturer said her orders came through a Dr. Pfeiffer. You can ask him if she bought anything special. But if she didn’t, either she got it from somebody else or the killer did.”

  Vito rubbed his hands together. “We’re starting to get somewhere. Thomas, after all you’ve heard, what are your thoughts on this killer?”

  “And are we talking just one?” Nick added.

  “Very good point.” Thomas leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest. “But my gut says he works alone. He’s younger, almost certainly male. Intelligent. He has a dispassionate capacity for cruelty. It’s… mechanical. He is obsessive, obviously. This would spill into other areas of his life-occupation, relationships. His knack with creating computer viruses is consistent. He’d be more comfortable with a machine than with people. I’d bet he lives alone. He will have some record of violence in his adolescence, anything from being a schoolyard bully to abusing animals. He’s… process oriented. And he’s efficient. He could have just killed two people to use for his effigies, but he combined them with whatever torture experiments he needed to do first.”