Nikki reached for her phone as she unhooked the camera and aimed it at her face. “It’s real.”
“Who are you calling?” the manager asked.
She looked into the camera. “The cops.”
CHAPTER ONE
Sunday, August 11, 11:00 p.m.
Alexandria, Virginia
Two Days Before
Fresh from the shower, he dried his dark hair and walked across the drab, worn carpet of the motel room toward the television tuned to the local news station. Beside it sat a pizza box. He flipped open the top and grabbed the last slice, plucked off the onions and pepperoni, and discarded them into a pile with the others.
“It was a waste to order the extra toppings.” He liked his pizza plain and simple. “But I was trying to be a nice guy.”
The woman behind him said nothing.
After tossing a sliver of onion into the box, he grabbed the remote and turned up the volume. The mattress sagged as he sat on the edge of the bed. The news anchor was blathering on about local traffic congestion caused by a car accident during evening rush hour. “Same old, same old.”
He took a large bite. The pizza was cold and the cheese hard, but he had worked up an appetite and was willing to settle.
The television newscaster continued on about politics, weather, and a soft piece on the elderly, but again did not mention the story he had been expecting for weeks. “Such bullshit. You and I both know she has the story, but there’s been nothing on her site or in the news. She’s got to have figured it out by now.”
Silence.
“It’s a good story, one people will want to know about. The public might not care about the bones of a dead whore, but they’ll care about a missing rich girl.”
He ate the rest of the slice, watching until the thirty-minute news show ended. Pizza grease, smelling faintly of onions, glistened on his fingertips. “Paid two extra bucks for nothing.”
He wiped his fingers on the comforter before he walked to the window. An overhead vent blasted cold air as he pushed back a small portion of the thick oily curtain. Through a window streaked with condensation, he looked up toward the stars, drowned in a sea of lights flooding from streetlights and neon signs.
“I miss Nevada. The stars. Big sky. A man can hardly breathe in the city.”
He let the curtain slide from his fingers as he moved toward the dresser. He opened the top drawer, where he had placed his neatly folded clothes. He pulled on his underwear and then his faded jeans before turning toward the woman.
She was on her back, mouth gagged and sightless blue eyes still brittle with fear as she stared at the popcorn ceiling. Her hands were tied to the bedpost; laid bare were her breasts and the five oozing stab wounds. Blood painted her pale skin red, soaked the bedding, and arched over the headboard and across the framed print of the US Capitol hanging on the wall.
She was petite and so lean her stomach was nearly concave. Unnaturally blond hair framed a pale, hollow face that was unremarkable. Large silver hoops dropped from her earlobes.
The sight of her naked frame awash in her own blood was a shot to his loins, and he was tempted to have another go at her. There was nothing better than fucking a woman in her own blood.
He drew his fingertips over her pale leg, still warm to the touch. The darkness inside him, starved for too long, had finally turned ravenous. Insatiable. “I went for a long time without doing this, and then two of you in as many months.”
The first one had been easy enough to charm. He was a good-looking guy, and when he tried, he could charm the pants off almost any woman. She had cost him the price of five cocktails in a trendy bar.
This one was a pro and had willingly climbed into his car as she’d smiled and asked him how he liked to party.
He traced a finger through the blood, creating a pale path that unveiled a rose tattoo. “After a man gets a taste for death, even the best fuck just doesn’t cut it.”
Reluctantly, he moved from the bed and washed his hands in the bathroom sink. The hot water stung his palm, and when he looked down, he noted the small nick above his lifeline. He remembered how the handle had grown slick as he had plunged it into his date and, on the last strike, how it had slipped. But he had been so possessed that a small cut had barely registered on his radar.
Now, he could see he had been lucky. The wound was superficial and would not need stitches.
He dried his hands on a fresh towel and wiped off the sink, the toilet handle, and the hot and cold shower knobs. Next, he cleaned the remote control and the doorknob before dropping the towel into his backpack.
The cops were going to collect DNA and prints, but this room was loaded with both from all previous guests. Assuming this case even made the priority list, it would be at least a year before the samples got sorted and tested. By then he would be on a beach in Mexico.
“You aren’t that important, girl,” he whispered. “Hookers are a dime a dozen, and cops got better things to do than find me.”
He pulled his still-clean shirt over his head, tucked it in the waistband of his jeans, and shoved his feet into a pair of sneakers. He double knotted the laces for good measure.
A last glance in the mirror confirmed there was no blood on his face. He combed his fingers through his hair and then rubbed the stubble darkening his chin. He could use a shave.
The mirror’s reflection caught the woman’s body lying in the pool of blood now fully bloomed on the white sheets. Soon it would be brown and lose its luster.
He hoisted the backpack on his shoulder. “No one is going to bother you, darling. Room’s paid for until tomorrow. You’ll finally get that rest you were complaining about needing so bad.”
CHAPTER TWO
Monday, August 12, 9:30 a.m.
Quantico, Virginia
One Day Before
The eyes were critical. They reflected secrets. Even when an individual tried to fake it, the eyes still echoed loss, love, fear, or hate. They were the visual portals to the soul. And they were the hardest to capture in a facial reconstruction sculpture.
Special Agent Zoe Spencer stepped back from the clay bust she had been working on for weeks. The woman’s likeness featured an angled jaw, a long narrow nose, and sculpted cheekbones. She had chosen brown for the eyes, a guess based on statistics. And it was not lost on her that the most telling part of who this woman had been was conjecture.
Zoe’s attention to detail was both her superpower and her Achilles’ heel. Many questioned her ceaseless fretting over the minutiae such as a chin’s dimple, the flare of nostrils, or the curve of lips into a grin. Some in the bureau still believed her work was purely art and not real science.
Her sculptures were not an exercise in art and creativity. The point of her work, like this bust, was to restore a murder victim’s identity and see that they received justice. But instead of arguing with the nonbelievers, she simply allowed her 61 percent closure rate to do her talking.
Sculptor, artist, and FBI special agent were her current incarnations, but she’d had others. Dancer. Wife. Young widow. Survivor. Each had left indelible marks, some welcome and some not.
On a good day, Zoe would not change her history. Her past had led her to this place, and she was here for a reason. But on a bad day, well, she would have killed to get her old life back.
She had been with the FBI criminal profiler squad for two years and almost immediately had put her expertise to work. She caught the cases requiring forensic sketches or sculptures not only because of her artistic abilities and expertise in fraud but also because of her keen interview skills. Armed only with questions, a sketch pad, and a pencil, she burrowed into the repressed memories of witnesses and victims, penciling and shadowing those recollections into useful images.
She certainly did not have a master artisan’s skill, but she was good enough. And from time to time, local law enforcement brought her a skull and requested a forensic reconstruction. Such was the case of her latest subject.
The lab door opened. “How’s it going?”
The question came from her boss, Special Agent Jerrod Ramsey, who oversaw a five-person profiling team based at the FBI’s Quantico office. Their team specialized in the more unusual and difficult cases.
In his late thirties, Ramsey was tall and lean with broad shoulders. He had thick brown hair cut short on the sides and longer on the top, a style reminiscent of the 1930s. His patrician looks betrayed the upper-class upbringing that had financed his Harvard University undergrad and Yale law degrees. Naturally skeptical, he was considered one of the best profilers, and though many wanted him in the FBI’s Washington, DC, headquarters overseeing more agents, he had skillfully maneuvered away from the promotions.
Zoe raised the sculpting tool to the bust’s ear and shaved down the lobe a fraction. The artist always wanted more time to tinker. The agent understood when good had to be enough. “I’m ninety percent of the way there.”
Ramsey approached the bust and studied it closely. His expression was unreadable, stern even, but interest sparked in his eyes. He was impressed. “This is better than ninety percent.”
“Thank you.”
Ramsey leaned in, closely regarding Jane Doe’s glassy stare. “It’s really remarkable that you could create this likeness given the damage.”
Nikki McDonald had done Zoe no favors when she had handled and then dropped the scorched skull. “I’ve worked with worse.”