Pretty Dead

by Anne Frasier

  “Rain!” someone shouted.

  Rain. Splashing on the body, washing the words away. Not only the words, but clues.

  The careful control and methodical feel of the scene vanished. People scrambled to preserve as much evidence as possible.

  A sheet of blue plastic appeared. As it was spread, the sound of the rain changed to the kind of silly noise that went along with frivolous pursuits like camping or a wedding that had gotten rained out. Not murder.

  Elise found herself sharing a huge black umbrella of mysterious origin with David. The rain and the canopy created their own private world, but nonetheless David urged Elise away from the body in an attempt to find a spot of privacy. Once they were out of earshot of the other officers, he hunched his shoulders toward her and whispered, “Has Savannah ever had a serial killer?”

  Serial killer. There it was. The words hung in the air. She wanted to grab them and stuff them in her jacket pocket, then burn the jacket once she got home.

  She’d been head homicide detective a total of six months.

  She looked up at David, at his blue eyes, his intense gaze, the jaw that always needed a shave, the dark hair, wet from the rain, hanging over his forehead. “I’m not ready for this,” she whispered. A confession for his ears and his ears alone.

  “Nobody is ever ready for this.”

  His words calmed the quaking in her bones. “Didn’t you work a serial killer case before coming here?” she asked. “I know we had Tremain and the TTX murders, but those fell outside of what I consider a standard serial killer profile. Those were personal, for profit. This . . . This seems textbook.”

  An odd and unreadable expression flitted across David’s features while she vaguely recalled something she’d heard about him before he’d come to Savannah.

  “A couple,” he said. “When I was with the FBI. I was called in to profile the Puget Sound Killer.”

  She nodded. “I remember that case. I remember being thankful nothing like that could happen here.” God, she’d been so naive back then. “It was never solved, was it?”

  “No.” As if to reassure her of his skill, he went on. “We were closing in when he vanished.”

  “Maybe an alligator got him.” The words were out before she could stop them. Not the time for sarcasm.

  “Don’t start that.”

  But she felt as though the alligator pitch in reference to Tremain was just as ridiculous. A weak attempt to placate. There, there. “What do you think happened to him? The Sound Killer?”

  “Maybe he was arrested for another crime. Or he got sick and could no longer kill. Or died. Something that physically put an end to the murders.”

  “Like other famous serial killers,” Elise said. “That’s what people speculate, anyway. Because killers don’t just stop killing. Something stops them from killing.”

  “Right.” He glanced over his shoulder, toward the activity and the body, then back at Elise. “Look, I’m good at what I do. You know that, right? I used to be one of the most promising profilers in the FBI.”

  That was before.

  “I’m just saying you aren’t alone,” he told her.

  He was the stronger one right now. In this hour, this moment. “You should have taken the job as head homicide detective.” She meant it.

  “It wasn’t offered to me. And even if it had been, you’re the better person for the position. I’m not exactly the most stable guy in the world.” Before she could either agree or argue, he added, “But I can be. When the situation calls for it. I can be.”

  What a pair.

  They could do this, she reassured herself. And really, who better to catch the perpetrator than someone like her? Someone who’d suffered at the hand of just such a sick bastard?

  Pep talk over, Elise squared her shoulders and turned back to the crime scene.

  The rain was still falling. Not hard, but at a steady rate. The kind of rain she would have liked in any other situation. Coffee-shop rain. Curl-up-with-a-book rain.

  Because of the weather, the victim had been quickly bagged, and John Casper was now overseeing the loading of the body into the coroner van. As Elise watched, a face in the crowd caught her attention. A gray-haired man in a shapeless canvas coat standing on an elevated piece of ground beneath a tree. Elise’s father. Why was he here?

  He might have everybody else eating out of his hand, but she didn’t trust him. How could she trust a guy who’d lived a lie for so many years?

  CHAPTER 4

  Ten minutes later they were heading back to the police department, Elise behind the wheel, wipers going, all three of them silent, thinking.

  “It’s an Egyptian soul glyph,” came a petulant voice from the backseat.

  Elise glanced in the rearview mirror. “What are you talking about?”

  “The body,” Jay Thomas said. “The way it was laid out. An Egyptian soul glyph.”

  She and David shot each other a look, both knowing it unwise to discredit any input, even when coming from such an unlikely source—the pouting reporter in the backseat.

  “I’ll show you.” Jay Thomas bit the cap off his pen. Head bent, he scratched across the surface of his tablet, then passed the tablet over the front seat to David.

  “The head is the round section of the glyph, and the arms represent the soul,” he explained, pointing with the pen. “The glyph itself represents life. Of course, I have no idea what it means in this context. That’s why I wanted to get a picture. Glyph was the first thing I thought when I saw the body.”

  At the next red light, David passed the image to Elise, who gave it a quick perusal. It was a familiar design. Almost as familiar as a peace sign. “I see this everywhere,” she said. It could very well have been something Jay Thomas had unconsciously spotted on a gawker at the crime scene. That was how this stuff worked, how the brain worked when it came to unreliable witnesses. They tended to pull up random information and spout it with a conviction that had to be considered with caution. “On necklaces in discount stores,” Elise elaborated. “My daughter even has one.”

  “Just sharing my thoughts,” he said.

  She returned the notebook to him. “It’s a stretch, but we’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Something was written on her,” Jay Thomas said. Paper rustled as he flipped to a fresh page. “I wasn’t close enough to see, but it looked like the same word over and over. What was the word?”

  Elise took a right and pulled into the department parking lot.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” she said as they slammed doors and headed for the police station. “That’s exactly the kind of thing we don’t want leaked to the press.”

  Pausing in the middle of the sidewalk, Elise went through the photos on Jay Thomas’s digital camera. One boring picture after another. Once she was satisfied that he hadn’t taken any of the crime scene, she passed it back to him. “Next time I’ll break it.”

  He smiled at her, no annoyance or half-hidden anger in his eyes this time. “I think I’m in love.”

  David smirked. “Join the club.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The next few hours were spent at headquarters. While David and Elise sat at their computers accessing databases, their new friend, Jay Thomas Paul, waited in line for lunch.

  “Good idea to send Jay Thomas for food,” Elise said as she stared at her computer screen, her damp jacket tossed over her chair.

  “Genius to send him to Zunzi’s.”

  They both laughed, knowing the popular sandwich shop would have a line a block long and Jay Thomas would be out of their hair for a couple of hours.

  God, we’re the mean kids, David thought, not with pride.

  He finished composing a confidential e-mail to the handwriting analyst at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, then attached a photo of the lettering he’d taken at the crime scene, plus an image from the first victim. Confident the script would be the same, he hit “Send.”

  “Defaeco,” he said. “Is that
a place? A person?”

  Elise clicked some keys as she did a quick search. “In Latin it means ‘to cleanse or purify.’”

  “Hmm.” David leaned back in his chair. “How does that have anything to do with the word on the first body?” They’d speculated that the first word, virgo, had been a riff on the Zodiac Killer, but this new word made the Zodiac Killer nod seem less likely.

  Elise did another search. “Virgo is Latin for ‘virgin.’ So the one thing they seem to have in common is Latin.”

  “The first victim, Layla Jean Devro, was a heroin addict and a prostitute,” David pointed out. “Definitely no virgin. Someone who lived a darker existence. Certainly no innocent.”

  “Right.”

  “So virgin . . . cleansing . . .”

  “Wish fulfillment?” Elise asked.

  “Maybe. Virgin being the opposite of what she was. Or, if you consider this glyph thing your buddy was talking about, then it could be the killer sees these murders as a rebirth.”

  “Not my buddy,” Elise said absentmindedly as she continued to stare at her computer screen. “I’m running the crime-scene photo through FACES to see if it can deliver a match.”

  Her landline phone rang. She glanced at the ID, then picked up. A brief conversation and she was done. “Avery. He’s e-mailing a fingerprint from the morgue.” Another monitor check. “Here it is.” More key clicking.

  David came to stand behind her, one hand on the back of her chair as he watched her transfer the JPG image to IAFIS, the fingerprint database.

  What David hadn’t shared with Elise out there in the park was that the Puget Sound murders had been the case that ruined his life. Not because the killer had gotten away, making David feel like a failure. Well, there was that. It had definitely knocked him down several pegs. But no, the Sound Killer had also ruined his marriage.

  He was never home. His wife had been left on her own with their son in Virginia while David was in Washington State working on the Puget Sound murders. And when he did make it home, he spent every waking second on the case.

  Beth began having an affair.

  They warned you about that stuff when you were training at Quantico. How you had to protect the personal side of your life; otherwise it would go all to hell. He hadn’t listened. He’d been cocky enough to think Beth would be there for him no matter what, because she’d been crazy about him.

  In the beginning she’d done the pursuing. That was how it worked for him. Except when it came to Elise. Females chased him, and he didn’t have to do anything. He could pretty much have his pick, so he’d thought Beth would always be around. Didn’t even consider the possibility of her looking elsewhere. Didn’t even consider it. Dumb, cocky bastard that he’d been.

  “There!”

  He and Elise spoke in unison, their eyes on the monitor.

  An eight-point match. The fingerprint came with a mug shot they both recognized.

  “That’s our girl,” David said.

  “Victim has a record.” Elise scanned the on-screen rap sheet. “Arrested several times for drugs, car theft, vandalism. Prostitution.”

  They knew prostitution and drugs often went hand in hand.

  David dropped back into his chair and grabbed the landline phone. At the same moment, Elise said, “Call Strata Luna at Black Tupelo.”

  David punched in numbers and went for the lounge position: legs out, one hand supporting the back of his head. “Already on it.”

  When Strata Luna, Savannah’s infamous madam, answered, David small-talked a few moments, then got to the reason behind his call. “Do you have a prostitute working for you named”—he motioned for Elise, who slid a piece of paper across his desk—“Portia Murphy?”

  “No, honey, but I recognize the name. Bad news. Really bad news. She tried to get a job at my place, but she was an addict and probably carrying diseases. I think she worked with a pimp named John Riley Blackstone for a while, but no decent pimp’s gonna keep a girl like that for long.”

  David decided it wasn’t the time to point out that the words “decent” and “pimp” didn’t belong next to each other in a sentence. “Okay. Thanks. Oh, and Strata Luna? Confidential conversation.”

  “I never heard a thing, sweetie.”

  “You’re a doll.” He smiled and hung up.

  “Doll?” Elise asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Criterion Collection. I’m slowly going through all the noir movies, and I’m kinda liking the period jargon. I invited you over for movie night,” he reminded her. “You declined.”

  She looked at him a long moment. Those eyes. Those weird, weird eyes were just like her father’s.

  “Right,” she said with feigned disinterest.

  He knew this game. Knew it way too well. Enough to also know there would never be any winners.

  “Who did you invite when I said ‘no thanks’?” she asked.

  Oh man. She’d heard something. But he couldn’t keep waiting for her, waiting for something that was never going to happen. Love the one you’re with. And yet he shouldn’t have done it. He’d known better. And since Elise was bound to find out, he decided to confess.

  “Major Hoffman.”

  She recoiled in shock, and then her eyes went flat.

  He’d seen that expression on her face before—when she discovered he’d helped her dad find a place to stay. David didn’t like that expression.

  He could go into excuses, saying Hoffman came on to him—which was true. It was damn true. The woman wouldn’t leave him alone, but still . . . Someone from work. His boss. Their boss. Not good. Not good at all. And it didn’t escape him that it was close to the very excuse Elise had used for avoiding him. Partners can’t be lovers. So maybe he was trying to prove she was wrong.

  Don’t look at me like that, David thought, then childishly added, You didn’t want me.

  Elise pulled in a deep breath and straightened in her chair. “The major is . . . nice.” She didn’t sound at all convinced by her own words, most likely because lately Hoffman had been summoning Elise to her office more than usual, and David could only guess there was jealousy at play there even though he’d never told Coretta how he felt about Elise. But of course she knew. Hell, the whole department probably knew.

  “She’s funny. Funny clever, not funny weird,” David explained. His words were a weak attempt at convincing Elise that the fit wasn’t bad. Maybe even a weak attempt at convincing himself. He had a sense of humor; Coretta had a sense of humor. Common ground. “You probably wouldn’t know it since you don’t see her much outside work, but—”

  She cut him off. “I can imagine her letting loose.”

  David struggled to remain unreadable. Letting loose was right. The woman was a damn gymnast in bed—another area where she’d made the first move. He’d been thinking dinner and a movie. She’d been thinking dinner and sex. Lots and lots of sex.

  Throughout this exchange, had Elise even blinked? Or glanced away? It came to him that this was how she cracked criminals. It also came to him that this was the method her father had been famous for back in the day, when it was said he could get anybody to confess to a crime. He’d put on his famous glasses with the blue shades, and people would spill their guts. Watching Elise, David decided the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. If he wasn’t careful, he’d soon find himself blabbing about every position he and Coretta had tried.

  The door flew open, and their newly acquired friend with three first names burst into the room, wearing the scent of a diner, his arms loaded down with Styrofoam take-out containers, greasy paper bags, and drinks.

  “The line was a mile long,” Jay Thomas Paul said breathlessly. “But I pulled out my New York Times press ID, and some nice person let me cut in.”

  Praise the Lord and pass the sandwiches. David had never been so glad to see a reporter in his life.

  CHAPTER 6

  The city hall conference room had a vibe David could appreciate. Heavy gold curtains that went from ce
iling to floor complemented pale lime walls and dark woodwork. Underfoot lay an elegant parquet, and behind the podium were flags of the United States and Georgia. In front of a bouquet of microphones, reporters jockeyed for the best spots, each one with a question or two for Mayor Burton Chesterfield.

  Chesterfield was about fifty. Old money, if David recalled correctly. The man had always reminded him a little of Bill Clinton.

  Once the mayor started talking, it was the typical bull—isolated incidents, victim knew the killer—which was exactly why David had tried to beg off the press conference, pointing out that his time would be better spent helping Detective Avery put together a task force. But Major Hoffman and Elise had insisted upon his presence, so here they all were, standing behind the mayor while the man reassured the public—people who’d voted him in and people who could vote him out—that things were under control.

  David wanted to roll his eyes, but he restrained himself, aware of the cameras and the footage that would soon be hitting local and international feeds.

  “If you aren’t the demographic, then you have nothing to worry about,” the mayor said. He went on to spew out the incorrect information that had been dumped into his brain and uploaded to the teleprompter just minutes earlier.

  When the mayor was done, his press secretary stepped forward. “We’re opening the floor for five minutes of questions,” he announced.

  Hands shot into the air. The mayor pointed. David followed the direction of his finger and shouldn’t have been surprised to see a microphone jammed in the face of Jay Thomas Paul. “And what exactly is that demographic?” the reporter asked.

  A decent question.

  While the mayor paused to formulate a reply that wouldn’t cast their fair city in a poor light, Jay Thomas continued with what David supposed could be considered a fill-in-the-blank. “Young women? Young white women?”

  “No.” The strength of that single syllable in no way reflected the shifting feet and the clenching and unclenching of hands the cameras couldn’t see. “Our city is a safe city,” the mayor insisted. “I want to reassure residents and visitors of that. At this point, the targets appear to be women involved in illegal activity. Prostitutes. Race has nothing to do with it. And after discussing the situation with professionals in criminal behavior, we feel that the two crimes are connected and are related to drugs, maybe drug deals gone bad. Granted, that’s not anything to be proud of, but it serves as reassurance that these were not random crimes perpetrated on innocent victims. These were women involved in activities they shouldn’t have been involved in, and these killings were retributions or warnings to others living outside the boundaries of the law.”