Kill Me Once Read online

  Sweat poured down his temples as he sat on the bed and peeled off his ankle-length socks. He sighed contentedly. The lack of air conditioning provided a temperature exactly how he liked it best.

  Hot.

  It was one of the main reasons he’d come to LA, though certainly not the most important one.

  His Oakley board shorts, plaid Armani boxers and soaking-wet Billabong T-shirt came off next. Completely naked now, Nathan rose to his feet and strode over to the full-length mirror in the corner to check himself out.

  I look stronger, he thought, admiring a shredded midsection positively rippling with lean muscle. I bet I could outrun an entire goddamn country if I really wanted to.

  But it would be just a small group of people he’d need to outlast tonight.

  A cold rush of adrenalin flooded into his loins at the thought, and he felt himself begin to harden slowly. Only a few more hours left now until he’d find out if all his hard work and meticulous preparation were going to pay off. It had taken the laying of a lot of irritating groundwork, to be sure, but now that he had the attention of the thief back in Cleveland, tonight frightened little girls all around the Renaissance City could rest just a little bit easier as a result.

  Nathan laughed out loud – a deep, throaty laugh that filled the room and vibrated his vocal cords like the strings on a perfectly tuned bass guitar. If they’d tried, could they have possibly picked a grander nickname for Cleveland – a city widely considered the shittiest place to live in all of the United States?

  He shook his head to clear the thought away. No matter. As he’d established earlier, names were of no consequence here. And for better or worse he’d moved his one-man act on to the bright lights and fertile hunting grounds of LA. Soon he’d be recognised as the very best serial killer who’d ever lived. But for now it was simply time for the greatest show on earth to begin truly in earnest.

  Lights.

  Camera.

  Action.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cleveland, Ohio – 8 p.m.

  What unspeakable things my eyes have seen.

  The line from an old TV movie flashed through Dana Whitestone’s mind as she slipped on a pair of paper shoe-covers and watched a balding forensic photographer named Doug Freeman lean in for a close-up of the little girl’s spilled intestines. The flashbulb popped brightly once, followed by the electric sound of rewinding film. Not for the first time, Dana wondered how Freeman had the stomach for his job. How did any of them?

  A uniformed Cleveland cop nodded to her and scribbled something down on a clipboard. As the first person at the crime scene he was responsible for establishing the perimeter, closely monitoring everyone who entered and exited. The fewer people inside the yellow tape the better the chance of maintaining integrity.

  They were on the seventh floor of a Section-8 apartment complex on the east side of Cleveland, the hardest hit sector of a hard-luck city recently named the second-poorest metropolitan area in the country. Last year they’d been Number One but this year Detroit wore the tinfoil crown.

  Dana had been on a dinner date downtown when she’d received the call but she hadn’t been especially sad to leave. For all their silly commercials, Match.com had slim offerings in the boyfriend department. Still, idly picking at a dozen mild chicken wings and washing them down with a quick succession of ice-cold Miller Lites while an overweight accountant from Parma stared at her breasts across the table had to be better than this.

  She tied a paper mask over her mouth and nose and glanced around the apartment to make sure that everyone else was wearing the proper protective gear. Dana didn’t want to miss out on the chance of catching a killer simply because somebody in the room had a cold. ‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

  The photographer looked up with his own mask tied on, making him look like a crestfallen surgeon documenting a hopelessly botched job. ‘Jacinda Holloway,’ he said. ‘Eight years old.’

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘The mother.’

  ‘Where’s she now?’

  ‘Hospital.’

  ‘Nervous breakdown?’

  ‘You got it.’

  Dana crossed into the room along the established entry/exit point – a crucial element in all crime scenes – and knelt beside Freeman for a closer look. Automatically shifting into investigator mode, she popped two pieces of Citrusmint Orbit into her mouth to mask the smell of beer and pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves.

  She reached out a hand and lifted a slender wrist six inches off the floor, then did the same with a swollen ankle. No need for emergency medical care, that was clear, and Dana was thankful the EMTs had recognised that. Few people compromised crime scenes more than medical personnel. Not that Dana blamed the EMTs for their zeal. Saving lives was the most important consideration, after all – even more than catching killers.

  She squeezed her fingers gently around the girl’s ankle and frowned. Full rigor mortis had set in, indicating that she’d been dead for about twelve hours. Dana glanced down at her watch. At eight a.m. the little girl should have been in school learning her times tables, not lying dead in a pool of her own blood. Still, school wasn’t always Priority Number One in this neighbourhood. That said – why hadn’t the mother found her earlier? And why had the little girl been left unsupervised in the first place? She was only eight years old, for Christ’s sake. Much too young to look after herself.

  Doug Freeman read Dana’s thoughts. ‘Drug problem,’ he said. ‘Apparently the mother left last night and didn’t come home until a couple hours ago.’

  Dana shook her head. The killer had probably been watching the little girl for weeks to know that the mother would be gone all night. No doubt it was a common occurrence with the woman. But when she’d left last night she’d let the fox slip right into the henhouse unimpeded and that had cost her daughter her life.

  Dana forced back the anger she felt rising in her chest and continued to examine the body. The undersides of the little girl’s arms and legs looked bruised, a purplish colour where the blood – no longer circulated by a beating heart – had settled into dense pools beneath her soft skin. Lividity, they called it.

  Dana glanced down at her watch again and estimated the time of death at eight a.m. before jotting it down in her notebook. Extensive documentation was a focal point of the US Department of Justice’s Crime Scene Investigation: A Guide for Law Enforcement – the research report that had come out in 2000 under the then Attorney General Janet Reno. Even though each federal agency had its own idiosyncrasies, as a general rule they all tried to follow the guide when it came to matters of evidence identification and protection. For her part, Dana considered it nothing less than her personal bible.

  The manual was a step-by-step explanation of how to process crime scenes, and Dana had memorised it early on in her career. Some people kept diaries as a way of chronicling their lives. Not her. If anybody ever wanted to see a record of her existence, all they had to do was take a look at the cardboard box in the back of her closet – the one filled with a hundred notebooks similar to the one she was holding right now.

  Shootings. Stabbings. Strangulations. They were all in there; all filled with questions pertinent to each case, some of them answered, too many not.

  Where exactly had the bullet entered the skull? In the front or back? Which ribs did the knife separate before piercing the wildly beating heart? Had the killer used a cord to choke the life out of his helpless victim, or had he simply used his bare hands to get the job done?

  The notebooks were what defined who Dana was now. Not much of a life, she knew, but at least she was still alive, which was a hell of a lot more than she could say for poor Jacinda Holloway.

  The little girl’s naked corpse had been posed, frozen in death in the middle of some perverse jumping jack: arms lifted in a V over her head; thighs forced three feet apart below her mutilated torso. A broken-off broom handle jutted from between her legs.

  Dana gritted her teet
h and slid her stare over the length of the defiled body. Viscous fluid leaked down from the little girl’s split-open belly to the tiny hairless triangle between her toothpick-thin brown thighs. Her brown eyes were fixed and staring straight ahead, slightly rolled up into the back of her head as if she was trying desperately to look at her own eyebrows. The look of surprise etched on her small brown face would remain there for ever.

  There had been a time in Dana’s life when a horrific sight like this would have wrenched her perceptions adrift and caused the entire room all around her to melt rapidly away into some sort of surrealistic Dali painting. But those days were most decidedly in the past: she was a consummate professional now – right down to the point where it had robbed her of the ability to express even the most basic human emotions. Anger wasn’t an option for her. Not any more. Neither was grief. Emotions only got in the way.

  If you never cried, your vision never got blurred, right?

  She stretched her neck and looked sideways at Freeman. ‘You done yet?’

  The photographer got the message at once. Pound sand. ‘Yes, ma’am. She’s all yours.’

  Dana gave him a small smile that never quite reached her pale blue eyes – not that he could see it through the mask, anyway. ‘Thanks, Doug.’

  The room was buzzing with harried crime-scene technicians bumping shoulders in their haste to catalogue every last carpet fibre in the place, but a quick once-over told Dana everything she needed to know. Ritual child killing. Posed body. Grotesque sexual molestation.

  The maniac who’d already murdered four little girls around Cleveland had struck again.

  She slid her tongue across her teeth in disgust. They’d been after the Cleveland Slasher for three months now but hadn’t come up with even a solid clue yet, which was highly unusual in serial-killer cases. Normally these guys were so focused on taking care of the raging hard-ons poking out of the front of their pants that they left more than enough evidence behind to point out their identities. But that wasn’t the case here. Not with this guy. He was different. Something other than the overwhelming compulsion to control weaker people through sex was driving him to kill.

  But what was it?

  Dana shook her head to clear the thought away and forced herself to concentrate on the task at hand. Sighing, she quickly ran through the facts they knew: five dead bodies in ninety days. All five little girls under the age of ten. All five raped with a broom handle and split right down the middle like autopsy patients. As far as evidence went, the cleanest crime scenes she’d ever come across.

  But maybe even this guy – as good as the bastard undeniably was – was starting to get just the tiniest bit sloppy now. In his apparent rush to leave the apartment he’d left the murder weapon behind this time – a wickedly serrated hunting knife coated in dark dried blood that now lay on the uneven floor right next to the lifeless little body that he’d so viciously hacked to ribbons.

  Transfixed by the sight of the weapon, Dana was immediately stung by just how insignificant it looked. No more than six inches long with a cheap plastic handle. Something you could easily pick up at Wal-Mart for the grand total of fifteen bucks.

  How could something so mundane do so much irreversible damage?

  She turned to a passing crime-scene tech and pointed to the knife. ‘Has that been photographed yet?’

  The woman nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Could you bag it up for me now? I’d like for you personally to take it over to the lab for analysis.’

  The woman bristled, looking slightly irritated at the assignment.

  Dana lifted her eyebrows. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

  The woman blushed. ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Great. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate all your help.’

  As the female tech bagged the knife Dana quickly scanned the rest of the room. Five feet away from the eviscerated corpse a silver-framed photograph sat on a chipped mahogany end table next to a plastic-covered couch. Yesterday Jacinda Holloway had been an especially beautiful little girl. A tiny little thing with a toothless grin. No more than three-five or six, sixty pounds soaking wet. Big glossy brown eyes and a round angelic face accented by tight intricate hair braids and an array of colourful plastic barrettes that sprouted from her head like cornstalks.

  Today was a different story.

  ‘You OK, Special Agent Whitestone?’

  Irritated by the interruption, Dana swivelled her head to the left and watched a Cleveland cop lean over with a pair of long metal tongs to pluck a bloody white surgical glove off the floor. Sergeant Gary Templeton straightened back up and held the glove in front of his eyes for a closer look. ‘Sick bastard coated the inside with moisturising lotion again,’ he reported grimly.

  In his early forties, Templeton, a decorated fifteen-year veteran of the force, had been at each of the four previous murder scenes, finally requesting FBI assistance after the third one. Normally it was the smaller departments that asked for help from the feds – lab personnel and facilities were just too expensive for them to afford – but Cleveland PD was large enough to maintain those resources for itself. What they needed here was investigative help, so Dana had been assigned to the case, effectively taking control.

  Following 9/11 the FBI’s role had changed dramatically. They routinely worked more closely with local law enforcement now, partnering up even when there were no direct federal implications. One thing was for sure: they’d come a hell of a long way since the 1960s, when J. Edgar Hoover’s guerrilla tactics had the Kennedy administration shaking in its boots. These days the feds and locals were at each other’s disposal practically upon request, with little of the boundary-protecting or rancour that had defined their relationship in the past. There were still pockets of resentment on both sides, of course, especially when the FBI barged into local investigations uninvited, but that wasn’t the case here: when Templeton had noticed the similarities at the Holloway apartment to the previous murder scenes it had been he who’d called Dana away from the crowded bar.

  Dana looked him over again. Close-cropped silver hair framed a rugged face punctuated by piercing blue eyes. Hard muscles like croquet balls strained against navy-blue shirtsleeves. The first time she’d laid eyes on him three months earlier she’d instantly pegged Templeton as a pumped-up Richard Gere with a gun, spliced with a healthy dose of Clint Eastwood for good measure. An excellent cop and definitely not the kind who spooked easily. So when she’d heard his voice on the other end of the line when he’d called her to the scene earlier in the night she’d immediately known that the Cleveland Slasher had struck again.

  The moisturising lotion the killer was using was an old trick. It had been the same thing at each of the four previous murder scenes. He always left one glove behind, always coated it with lotion to absorb the oil on his finger pads and prevent them from lifting prints. Normally fingers moved around inside gloves sufficiently enough to smear prints and make classification almost impossible, but this guy was obviously being very, very careful. Still, how was he managing to avoid leaving some type of print when he pulled the gloves on? A second pair of gloves? Tape, maybe? Dana didn’t know, but his little measures had worked like a charm. So far they hadn’t been able to lift even a smudged partial.

  Templeton dropped the bloody glove into a large plastic evidence envelope and pressed the self-sealing flap into place. ‘No doubt it’s the same guy, right?’

  Dana shook her head. ‘None.’

  ‘Other than that, what are your initial impressions?’

  Before she could answer him, the flashbulbs started popping in the room. Dana turned toward the commotion and saw Doug Freeman standing in the middle of a pack of photographers, all of them huddled around a rickety prefab TV stand shoved against the south wall.

  ‘What the hell’s going on over there?’ she asked sharply.

  Freeman lowered his expensive camera in the middle of the fray and let it dangle from the leather strap around his nec
k. ‘You’d better come over here, ma’am. I think we just found something.’

  Dana’s knees cracked as she rose to her feet and smoothed the black Malandrino skirt into place around her slender legs. The pack of photographers parted for her like the Red Sea on Moses’ command as Doug Freeman lifted a shaking hand and pointed to a colour photograph wedged underneath the front of the VCR. Dana took a small pair of rubber-tipped tweezers from her purse and removed them from their plastic casing before plucking the photograph out. Her breath caught in her throat as she examined the find.

  A huge palm in the centre of the frame dominated the majority of the photograph. Bony fingers were bent slightly forward, like those of an evil magician getting ready to hurl a ball of fire at his enemies. The fingernails on the hand were sharp and overly long, the centre of the palm coloured in with a crudely drawn pentagram.

  Dana turned to Freeman and frowned. ‘What is this?’

  The photographer shook his head. ‘No idea, but whatever the hell it is, it’s definitely been cropped and blown up. Probably with Photoshop.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It’s way too pixilated to be the whole frame,’ Freeman said, studying the picture. ‘It’s gotta be a close-up of a larger photograph. I’m almost sure of it.’

  ‘Do you have enough documentation yet?’ Dana asked – photographs were always prime evidence in trial cases.

  ‘Yeah.’

  She nodded and slipped the photo into a manila evidence envelope before tagging it. ‘Get the hospital on the phone and find out if it belongs to the family.’

  ‘Right away, ma’am.’