Skye Cree Boxed Set Books 1 - 3

by Vickie McKeehan

  Josh shook his head. “It’s too dark. It’s always some damn thing that prevents me from seeing this guy’s face. I’m sick of it,” he groused as he realized he’d spoken out loud.

  “Okay, you have most of it right,” Harry admitted. “We found a sturdy teak chair under the lowest eave of the house that helped him get up onto the roof where he crawled along to the balcony. And once he finished with Kathy, the man pretty much strolled out the front door, leaving the chair right where he’d left it.”

  “He doesn’t seem concerned about leaving his DNA behind.”

  “That and the fact he doesn’t seem to care about taking the time to tidy up his crime scenes anymore either. Come on, I’ll show you what I mean. You need to see this.” Harry took a right out the door and continued down to another bedroom, this one smaller in size.

  “The coroner started counting stab wounds but quit after reaching one hundred,” Harry said as he stood back to let Josh and Skye get their first peek.

  This time it was Skye who wasn’t prepared for the viciousness of the attack. Her gloved hand flew to her mouth while she used the other one to steady herself on the doorframe.

  Kathy’s nude body lay on the floor to the left of the bed, her head bumped up against the nightstand, a bloody mass of tissue and bone. He’d done his best to pose her but since he’d obviously hacked his way down Kathy’s torso in a fit of frenzy, there wasn’t much left intact to prop up.

  The blood splatter indicated overkill and would likely help some tech in the lab to provide the angle of impact. But Skye didn’t think it would be necessary. Josh was right. If the madman had brought a gun here he had settled for the knife. He’d spent some time over the twenty-year-old in order to dice and chop.

  Skye glanced at the walls. Cast-off might show his swing and movements, maybe even the depth of his rage. But again, Skye didn’t need an expert to tell her the killer’s wrath had caused him to lose control in this very spot. So much so that he had left telltale signs. One of which was Kathy’s mutilated lower abdomen. Because he’d left her legs spread, Skye could make out the disfigured genital area.

  “This guy is sick. He’s either trying to make a statement or he’s losing it flat out,” Skye mumbled, as she bit back the urge to barf.

  “Probably both,” Harry agreed.

  Skye had just started to back out to find a bathroom when she thought of something. “I don’t understand. Why do this kind of carnage to the bodies of Tracy and Kathy, but not Julie and Sylvia? Even though he spent extra time with Sylvia and Julie our guy didn’t go off on them, not like this, while Tracy and Kathy caught most of his blade work.”

  “It’s all about how angry he happens to get during the assault. Julie and Sylvia probably did their best to give him what he wanted early on,” Josh reasoned. “He rewarded them by not chopping them up.”

  “But the result is the same,” Skye uttered in agreement, clearly fighting to keep down the one cup of coffee she’d had. “Even if they cooperate, he has no intention of letting them live.”

  Josh nodded. “He goes out to kill with a certain amount of surface rage anyway right on the fringe. But then if things don’t happen to go exactly as he’d planned, he lets the fury loose for real. And if you ask me, it’s getting worse.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.” Skye turned to study Josh. “An adrenaline junkie would want it to get worse, egg it on, wouldn’t he?”

  “In order to keep upping the ante each time, making sure he took it up a notch? Yeah, he would. He’s losing patience with his targets a lot quicker than he did before. When he might have spent some time talking to them, maybe trying to calm them down in some way with reassuring words so they wouldn’t panic, now he just starts cutting.”

  “And doesn’t know when to stop,” Skye finished.

  Chapter 16 Book 2

  By six o’clock in the evening, single mom Janie Holliman was about ready to drop. She’d already put in twelve hours on her feet, nine of which occurred at her busy hair stylist job—where she routinely had to deal with difficult customers—mostly walk-ins who weren’t regular clients and liked to grumble.

  If her day had only ended then and there when she had walked out of the salon, it might’ve been different. But after picking up her three-year-old son, David, from daycare, she’d noticed he was running a fever. His little chubby cheeks were beet red and he kept grabbing at his left ear. A sure sign an ear infection loomed. Another stop at the urgent care facility had confirmed her suspicions. Poor baby had to start a round of Amoxicillin which meant a second stop at the pharmacist to get his prescription filled.

  Janie didn’t reach her little bungalow in Olympic Hills until almost six-forty-five. She’d barely gotten dinner prepared, when her ex, and David’s father, decided to change his visitation days for the upcoming weekend, which meant she’d spent twenty minutes on the phone with another irritable male.

  But after finally getting her cranky toddler to go down for the night, Janie poured herself a glass of wine, a decent Chardonnay she’d tossed in the cart as an afterthought while she waited for the pharmacist to fill David’s prescription at the drug store.

  Sinking down on the sofa, she resisted the urge to sigh at getting to sit down. She pulled the afghan from off the back of the couch and wrapped it around herself, got comfortable. She clicked the remote past reruns of The Golden Girls and opted instead for an episode of Friends. But as the wine kicked in and the long day caught up with her, she noted the time on the cable box. It read ten-fifteen. As her lids began to flutter closed, right before sleep took hold for real, Janie’s last thought was of her son. She hoped like hell the antibiotic she’d given her baby boy would work its magic and make him feel better by morning. Knowing full well his daycare wouldn’t take him if he showed signs of being ill, she couldn’t help but wonder how angry her boss would be when she had to call in sick tomorrow.

  Exhaustion and the wine soon had her drifting off.

  An hour and a half later a sound woke her from a deep sleep. Before her eyes could open, she thought she heard something outside the house. A stray cat or dog maybe?

  Minutes passed as she fought the dregs of sleep and the inability to come fully awake. Ignoring the patter of footsteps coming from somewhere in the house, she thought she heard a dragging sound.

  She groaned slightly and moved her head a little deciding she should probably get up to check on David. Had her three-year-old gotten up to pee or worse, to throw up? Or maybe he did feel better and he’d gotten up to play with his brand-new race-car set.

  But about the same time Janie tried to toss off the throw and stand up, her eyes landed on the nude man no more than three feet away standing at the end of the couch.

  Janie knew she was in trouble when she saw the mask that covered his entire face, even his neck. In the dim light, the God-awful cloth had an eerie sheen to it. Just as she opened her mouth to scream, a gloved hand clamped down over her mouth, his other hand closed tightly around her throat. Janie felt the strength in his fingers as he lifted her head off the cushion, keeping his grip squeezed so that she had a hard time swallowing, even breathing. The thought went through her mind he could easily snap her neck.

  “Make a sound and I’ll kill your son. Nod if you understand me,” the man whispered.

  Janie’s head moved up and down as she sucked in his breath and smell, a sickening blend of cinnamon Tic Tacs and aftershave. The familiar scent of Paco Rabanne drifted to her nose. The strong fragrance had her looking up into his brown eyes. Vacant and cold, they simmered with anger and a lot of it.

  She watched him reach down to the floor with one hand, retrieve several short strands of nylon rope.

  While he looped the first cord around her wrists, her son ran into the room.

  Three-year-old David yelled, “Mommy, mommy, who’s dat man?”

  The second Janie saw her attacker turn his head toward David, she bucked. Hard. With her entire body. The force was enough to j
ostle him off her. Janie clenched her hand into a fist and belted the asshole square in the side of his nose. She hit him so hard, blood squirted back onto her hand. When he rolled off her, holding both his hands up to his now broken nose, Janie didn’t stop her momentum. Determined, she brought her foot up and kicked his crotch as hard as she could. Janie never waited for him to double over.

  Scooting off the sofa, she scooped up David and bolted for the front door. Flipping the lock back, she threw it open and dashed outside. As soon as she reached the yard, she never stopped running. With her son clutched to her chest, she started screaming her head off—all the while making a mad dash across the lawn to Tara Cosgrove’s house next door.

  Janie didn’t quit until she hit Tara’s front porch where she bounded up the steps and began hitting the doorbell in rapid succession. When that did nothing, she started pounding on the door until she saw a light finally come on inside the house.

  As soon as Tara’s husband, Charlie, determined it was their neighbor Janie, he turned the lock to let her in. Janie pushed her way inside. As she rocketed past Charlie, only then did she allow herself to fall apart.

  The single mom collapsed on the floor.

  Officers Curtis Broward and his partner, Gary Pitts arrived on the scene seven and a half minutes after Charlie Cosgrove dialed nine-one-one. Charlie met them on the lawn. Pointing over to Janie’s little cottage, he directed, “That’s where it happened. She and her boy are in my living room scared to death.”

  After getting the story from Charlie, both cops did a cursory walk-thru of the little two-bedroom house, then checked the small backyard. It didn’t take long for them to realize the perp had left the premises. After interviewing Janie Holliman and getting a vague description of a naked assailant wearing a mask over his face, approximately six feet in height, Officer Broward put out a BOLO for a prowler in the vicinity.

  After discussing it with his partner, Officer Pitts decided to file the incident report as an attempted rape. Neither man thought to call anyone on the task force.

  In sleep, Josh replayed the woman’s escape with her little boy. As if rooting from the sidelines, he breathed a heavy sigh of relief the minute she got outside and ran across the lawn carrying her son. He might not know her name, but he knew what she looked like, knew the fear he’d seen in her green eyes.

  Josh came awake, all the way awake. Throwing his legs over the side of the bed, he popped up, rubbed the back of his neck. “We have a survivor.”

  “What?” Skye muttered as she tried to come out of a deep slumber and sit up. “What did you see?”

  “We have a survivor,” Josh repeated. “And the first cops on the scene blew it. They didn’t connect the rape attempt to our guy. But it was him.”

  Because he was shaking, Skye scooted over to him, put her arms around his neck. More awake now, she decided he needed to talk about it or he’d never get back to sleep. “What exactly happened?”

  Josh went over what he’d seen, describing the guy taking off his clothes, how he’d entered through the little boy’s room then crept past the child as he slept, and into the living room where the woman had been napping on the couch.

  “You say the cops didn’t suspect it was an attempt by the serial killer. You know this for a fact?”

  “They didn’t make the connection. Why wouldn’t they make the connection, Skye? This case has been all over every news outlet in the state. If this is an example of police work, this is one reason we can’t nail him. There’s no coordinated effort.”

  “We’ll change that. I’ll get hold of Harry tomorrow.”

  “How many others are out there where the incidents didn’t get linked to our guy?”

  “This one won’t fall through the cracks, Josh. We won’t let it. Did you happen to catch where the attack took place?”

  Josh frowned, scrubbed his hands over his face, thought for a minute. “I don’t know. I’m not sure which neighborhood. But there has to be a way to check the logs of the patrol officers and find out which ones responded to a rape attempt on a woman where a little boy interrupted the attack. How many of those can there be in one night?”

  Chapter 17 Book 2

  Frank De Palo was beyond pissed.

  How the hell was he supposed to explain his fucking broken nose to his trainer? Not only that, for the first time in ten years, he’d failed to control the situation.

  He’d let the bitch get away from him.

  Frank didn’t take failure well. Never had. His fractured schnoz still hurt. The bitch had caught him right across the bridge when he’d been distracted by her kid. If he hadn’t turned his head he’d have been able to take care of both woman and boy. Should’ve taken care of the damned kid beforehand, he thought now.

  Frank popped three more Ibuprofen, even though he rarely took drugs of any kind, and gulped them down with half a bottle of water. He hoped like hell it eased the pain because he had a Goddamned match in less than two hours. What the hell would his opponent think when he walked into the arena with a bandage already stuck across his beak?

  Just thinking about last night had Frank making a fist, ready to pelt the face of his next challenger he faced in the octagon, the place where he ruled.

  For the past three years, he’d dominated the world of Mixed Martial Arts. Since pursuing his dream in MMA he’d discovered his calling. Without really knowing it, he’d been training for the sport most of his life. Originally a long-distance runner in high school, the sport gave him the one-on-one adrenaline of facing an opponent and beating the shit out of him with his superior skill. The game had turned out to be his means of escape. Even if that release valve didn’t last very long, it had more than likely prevented him from getting arrested many times over the last thirty-six months.

  Not only that, it encompassed all the disciplines he loved. Karate. Kickboxing. Jiu-jitsu. Judo. Muay thai. And of course, his first love, wrestling. Since he made varsity three straight years during high school, he’d been good enough to get a scholarship. Since first stepping into the octagon, he’d been able to maintain his welterweight status and the required minimum seven-percent body fat. Physically fit, in shape, he trained daily with Seattle’s well-known fitness guru Mick Hyatt.

  Mick hadn’t really taught him anything he didn’t already know. But appearances were everything, especially if you needed to hide a darker self. No one in their right mind would ever link Frank De Palo, the all-American athlete and MMA star, to his daily early-morning reconnaissance, or his B&E extracurricular activities, or Frank’s personal favorite—outdoing Gary Ridgway, the local man dubbed the Green River killer—in body count.

  While Ridgway had focused on many of society’s throwaways, hookers and teenagers with problems at home, Frank aspired to achieve greater things with better more worthwhile victims. With his strict religious upbringing he refused to go near prostitutes. And teen girls didn’t interest him much.

  But snooty women who considered themselves independent and better than the common guy were a different story. Those types who thought they were so safe, tucked inside their upscale homes and snuggled in their beds where they were most vulnerable, presented a challenge to him. Getting to them, controlling them, and having them were the essence of the game.

  As he took a second look at his broken nose in the mirror, he decided Janie Holliman hadn’t been his first choice anyway.

  Who wanted a woman who’d gone through childbirth? He should’ve passed up the bitch and left her to the sleazebags she’d hooked up with in the past. Obviously, she wasn’t much of a woman in the sack if she couldn’t live with the man who’d fathered her child.

  From now on, he’d avoid single moms. They didn’t really do anything for him anyway. They weren’t worth his time and effort, too slutty. From now on, he reasoned, he’d stick with the hot single women he preferred.

  “Harry, you have a survivor. You just don’t know it. Check the log from last night. You had two patrol officers respond to an attempte
d rape by what they considered to be nothing more than a prowler in the neighborhood who got a little frisky. That prowler was our guy. And he got away.”

  “Goddamn it! I’ve told those beat cops to report anything like that to the task force. Which neighborhood, Skye?”

  “That I can’t tell you, Harry. Before you blow a gasket, I’m not holding back. I just don’t know the answer. But the woman escaped his attack with a little boy in tow. How many times could something like that have taken place last night?”

  “Good point. I’ll go through the incident reports and get back to you.”

  “Let us know what you find out. Because Josh wants to talk to the survivor.”

  The wheels of bureaucratic red tape were slow. Wading through reports took another ten hours before Harry got back to them.

  He had been able to confirm what Skye and Josh already knew. Janie Holliman had barely escaped from a serial killer with her life and probably that of her child. Over the phone Harry tracked Janie down at her mother’s house and got the woman to agree to sit down with all of them to recall what had happened.

  So the next day, Skye and Josh drove all the way out to Redmond because Janie refused to go back inside her little cottage in Olympic Hills.

  Harry met them on the sidewalk in front of a two-story, Tudor-style house belonging to Janie’s parents.

  “It’s probably a good thing she’s staying with someone,” Skye noted. “Just remember to go easy on her, guys. The woman’s been through a life-changing event.”

  Josh and Harry exchanged glances before turning to Skye. “I’m a little insulted by that,” Josh said. “I’m not here to beat her up.”

  “Nor am I,” Harry added.

  “I know that. But having to replay the whole cycle of events is traumatic and will conjure up all the panic and fear she felt at the time. That’s gonna stay with her for years even though she got away.”