“I’ve asked for some help on this one.”
“Oh. Okay.”
The two detectives were in the war room—really, just the Wayne County Sheriff Department’s smaller conference room—and staring at the corkboard on which were pinned the crime scene photos of the Joshua Musgrave murder.
The images were graphic to say the least.
Gloria Athens continued, “There’s something wrong here. This one’s different.”
That may have been but, in truth, Henry Trimble was surprised that his boss was calling in hired guns. Her skill in investigating violent felonies was renowned throughout the state. If this homicide was ‘different’ it was way different.
He also knew that Athens—the Senior Criminal Investigations Division Detective of the WCSD—had an ego; for her to share the spotlight on a gruesome murder like this one meant the stakes were high. The nature of the murder suggested that the killer might strike again.
“Who’d you ask?” Trimble’s thumbs were hooked through his belt, a 32-incher, with the metal tongue in the last hole. Been skinny all his life. With the mop of brown hair, which had a mind of its own, he could be a youthful farmer, if you swapped out the Macy’s suit for faded blue denim Oshkosh. And a dark suit and white shirt it was today, every day; Athens had told him, “Appearances intimidate. Look like an FBI agent with a warrant. And never, ever smile on the job.”
He had an idea Athens could sense his confusion, or concern, even if he himself wasn’t sure what his reaction to the outside help would be.
“They’re good people, Trimble. You met ’em last month. Chatham County CID.” Athens’s voice was rough, as if she’d chain-smoked. But she never had, at least in the year Trimble had been assigned to her.
“That workshop?”
Athens confirmed with a nod.
Chatham was two counties over and similar in geography, demographics, and size to Wayne, though more rural, but that was splitting hairs.
“Barney Stand and his junior partner. Can’t remember his name.”
Trimble did. “Dan Gebbert.”
“Right. They had something similar a couple months ago,” Athens said, eyes still on the corkboard.
“Knifing?” Trimble asked.
“I think it was a beating, but a homeless man. Or woman. Random, it looked. No theft or other reason they could see.” She glanced at her watch, a big, old Timex. “They’ll be here soon.”
Henry Trimble was getting a sense of how policing was also about power and image and career, as much as solving crimes. A lot of outsiders wouldn’t have wanted to make the trip to another jurisdiction—they’d be seen like hired help—but an invite from the famed violent-crime-expert Gloria Athens? That’d be a feather in Stand’s cap.
Uniformed and suited deputies were leaving for the evening; several waved through the large glass windows that were the conference room’s walls, in sore need of Windex. Trimble wished he could leave too, to get back to his modest ranch house in the hinterland of Wayne County for dinner with his wife and young son, Todd. But it would be yet another late night.
That was the downside of working with Gloria Athens.
The upside was you were working with Gloria Athens.
The forty-five-year-old, or so, detective now slipped her hands into the pockets of her bulky dress slacks. Her white blouse was large too. She would occasionally bring to work plastic containers of tuna, without mayo, and carrots and baby tomatoes. The diet then morphed back to pizza and burgers, more from convenience than indulgence. She was a large woman, freckled and redheaded, and she had better things to do than trouble herself about the transit of calories into her body.
She now paced back and forth in a gentle sweep, her eyes on the board that described, in cold, bloody detail, how Joshua Musgrave had come to die in the abandoned Harper Manufacturing plant.
His death had been among the more unpleasant ways to depart the earth.
Trimble was sweating. The March day was cold, which meant the unstable heating system in the Wayne County Public Safety Building was working overtime. Both officers had doffed their suit jackets, but that was doing no good. One window overlooked the gray, damp evening, but it had been painted shut years ago.
As always, Gloria Athens wasn’t paying attention to the heat, like she didn’t pay attention to the cold.
All that mattered to her at the moment was the corkboard.
Joshua’s last hours.
She was staring, staring, trying to force herself into the mind of the person who had slashed Joshua to death.
She’d explained to Trimble how she did this, a harrowing and edgy practice. But it was necessary. She had to become the person who’d committed this terrible crime, and that, in turn, might point her toward where he was living, where he worked, where he was going to strike next. Who he was sleeping with. What he did for hobbies.
Now, Trimble could see that Athens returned again to the pictures of the bloodstains.
The blood.
That was the thing.
The blood.
* * *
Detective Barney Stand was a solid man, fifties, broad shoulders and a round belly that enhanced his stature; his lean face would have given him a gaunt look if he’d weighed less. He was six foot two inches and had dark eyes beneath white brows, which matched his mane of hair. Stand had presented one of the lectures at the seminar last month—on forensics.
His junior partner, Dan Gebbert, was smaller, but built like an athlete. A baseball player, Trimble assessed. They’d had lunch together, this foursome, at the conference. Stand was somber but smart. Gebbert, younger, had a sense of humor.
Stand wore black slacks and a dark, dusty, and wrinkled sports coat—it was plaid when you got up close—and Gebbert was decked out in a snug-fitting suit, which would have been stylish if it weren’t some odd shade of beige. It nearly matched his sandy hair.
“Detective Athens,” Stand began.
“Aw, we’ve got a history. Practically married. Let’s do Gloria and Barney.”
Hands were shaken all around. Trimble was amused that both of the visitors glanced toward Athens with a modicum of awe.
“Appreciate you coming to our small burg.”
Stand said some pleasantry, but his eyes had moved from Athens to the case board, and he was regarding it with still eyes.
“Coffee. You’ll have some coffee?”
There was a pot in the room, in the corner. Athens lived on it. She admitted it was an addiction. She liked it black and bitter and strong. The smell suggested the brew had been sitting for a spell, which it had. The newcomers declined. Athens poured a cup and sipped.
Stand, eyes still on the board, said, “Brief us.”
“Henry?”
“Sure. Two days ago a homeless man was wheeling a bag of cans and bottles—for the deposit? He had a cart like movers use?”
Trimble reminded himself to can the questioning tone; he fell into this sometimes—mostly when he was nervous. Detective Athens had told him to watch it. “Makes you sound weak.”
“We think he stole it from the Home Depot. He was wheeling it along Fourth Street. Tough part of town. Used to be the mills and warehouses, but when the work got sent over to Japan or China, the place went downhill.
“When he got to the Harper Manufacturing plant he left the bags out front and went inside.”
“To pee?” Stand suggested.
Athens said, “Joshua—we’ve known about him for some time—wouldn’t need someplace private. He was disposed to pee wherever he wanted.”
“Middle of Thompson Street once,” Trimble said. “Rush hour.” To the extent they had rush hour in Wayne County—even here, in Garvey, the county seat.
Trimble continued, “Probably looking for a place to move into. There’s a camp under the train trestle but there’s been some complaints, so the homeless’re moving.”
Athens took up the narrative. “The killer got him just inside.” She pointed to a diagram and a series of photos of the interior of the plant.
“He was stabbed to death beside a wall that separated the plant floor from the warehouse.”
“Who found him?”
“Our one lead,” Athens said. “Except it isn’t.”
“Anonymous call from a pay phone,” Trimble explained. “Somebody saw a white male, light hair under a stocking cap walking out of the factory fast. He was holding a rag that looked bloody.”
Units had responded and found Joshua inside, dead.
“We got the rag but no other DNA, other than Joshua’s, or prints. Some fibers consistent with cloth work gloves, but no way to trace them.”
“CCTV of the unsub?” Gebbert asked.
“That part of town,” Athens said, “is lucky to have electricity. High tech does not figure in the picture.”
Trimble added that he’d canvassed a tent community near the trestle and a shelter where Joshua had spent some time. “Like a lot of homeless, he avoided the shelters. They get bullied, robbed.”
“Ice or fent heads hit him for change?”
Meth and fentanyl were the bane of small, rural towns, where unemployment could reach 25 percent. Garvey was lucky, though, in that most of the young people—the sort who’d be tempted to smoke and shoot up—headed elsewhere for college or work. Wayne County was known as a fine place for growing up. But when you hit eighteen it was best to put the town in your rearview mirror.
Athens said, “We’ve got a few cookers and users, but we talked to the usual suspects and none of that panned out. Anyway, he wasn’t robbed. He still had twelve dollars on him.”
Trimble added, “Nobody knew of any disputes he’d been in with anybody. He was a feisty guy, not particularly pleasant, but there was no reason we could find to murder him.”
He was not, in Athens’s term, ‘kill-worthy’. But Trimble wasn’t as hardened as she was and tried to avoid flippancy. His day would come, he supposed. He took another look at the bloody crime scene and took a deep breath, controlling it.
“So,” Athens said, “random, I’m thinking. Thrill kill.”
“Vigilantes?” Stand asked.
Athens said, “People around here don’t like homeless. They rough ’em up a little bit, toss a soda on them. Usually it’s drunk college kids from Fayette. Never heard of murder.”
“Luck tracking down the caller?” Gebbert asked.
“We dusted the pay phone, but it was near a call center—immigrants and migrant workers phoning home. There were seventy-two partials. The ones we could read were negative at IAFIS. No footprints. No car tread marks. Canvasses were zero. But here’s where we hope you can help.” Her eyes turned to the crime scene photos. “Look at the blood spatter.”
Athens was the preeminent violent crimes investigator in this part of the state, but her skills were mostly psychology and general detection. She wasn’t a forensics expert—she found the subject work boring.
Barney Stand, on the other hand, was known for his skill in crime scene analysis. And his main specialty: blood pattern analysis.
From his days at the academy, Trimble knew something of the technique. Using physics and the science of fluid dynamics, experts can often learn volumes about a crime by examining how blood hits a surface when the victim was stabbed or shot (or blown up, though that happened with zero frequency in Wayne County).
BPA—bloodstain pattern analysis—traces its modern origins to a Polish professor and criminalist, who wrote a paper on the topic in the late 1800s: ‘On the Formation, Form, Direction, and Spreading of Blood Stains After Blunt Trauma to the Head’, which while not the snappiest of titles succinctly and accurately described content. It attracted the attention of law enforcers around the world.
The two visiting detectives turned their attention to the photographs on the corkboard.
Athens said, “The spatter seemed unusual to me. But couldn’t exactly say how.” Stand walked closer. “There was a case I ran a few years ago. The perp used a knife he’d made himself. It had a hook at the end. He slashed and then pulled.”
Gebbert said, “The pattern’s similar, sure.”
“Helpful. Maybe a homemade weapon.”
Gloria Athens wore her hair piled up on her head in a carefully arranged nest, which she kept in place with pencils—the old-fashioned yellow kind. She extracted one now and pointed out several portions of the blood spatter photo. “Now, this is the big mystery. Here you can see the droplets and streams were all traveling in the same direction. Away from the Joshua’s body. But look at these.” She touched round dots of blood at the top and bottom of the photo.
“They don’t indicate any movement at all,” Gebbert said, frowning.
Most blood spatter in a violent crime appears like a comet, or sperm: a head and tail.
The dots Athens was pointing out were round.
“They hit the wall straight on.”
Stand moved closer yet. “Maybe Joshua managed to get to his feet and some of the drops hit the wall at ninety degrees.”
“No,” Trimble said. “Once he was down, he stayed down.”
Stand said, “Do you have close-ups?”
Athens nodded toward Trimble, who went online and called up the digital crime scene photos. Stand was apparently familiar with the photo software and sat down at the keyboard to enlarge the images he was interested in.
Gebbert beside him said, “The hell is that?”
Stand gave a soft chuckle. “They’re not drops. Look.”
Athens leaned closer. Trimble too. The roundish, red marks were uneven, a rough circle with a random pattern inside.
Athens said, “I don’t understand.”
Stand eased back. “They were put there intentionally. Like from an ink stamp. Probably he used a stick, because it’s uneven. He dipped it in the victim’s blood and pressed it into the wall. You can see some dots’re faint, like he ran out of, quote, ‘paint’ and had to replenish the brush.”
There were dozens of the marks on the wall.
“Why on earth would he do that?” Athens asked, focused on the hard-copy photos. Joshua Musgrave’s killer was apparently one perpetrator whose mind she wasn’t able to slip into.
It was Henry Trimble, staring at the photo of the wall, who suddenly understood. He said, “He’s writing a message.”
Athens turned a cool glance his way. He knew she didn’t like unsubstantiated theories, especially those that were just plain weird.
Trimble said, “If we draw lines between them, I think they’ll make letters, or numbers, or maybe it’s a drawing.”
Athens seemed less skeptical now. She asked Stand, “That homeless killing you had a few months ago? This case parallel anything about that one?”
“Other than being homeless, not really.” Stand explained that the body of a fifty-year-old woman had been discovered in the woods beside the Chatham River. They didn’t have an ID for the woman, officially known as UF, or Unknown Female, though Gebbert and Stand gave her a name: Chatham Mary. She had not been stabbed, but had been beaten to death with what was probably a hammer—never recovered. There was virtually no evidence in that case either, and no witnesses.
“She’d lost plenty of blood but the body’d gone undiscovered for at least a month. If there were messages, they’d’ve been washed away by storms.”
Athens looked at the photo of poor Joshua. “So, Barney,” she said, with a cynical tone in her voice, a sound Trimble recognized, “you still getting pressure to back-burner the case?”
He chuckled. “I am, yep. From the chief to the County board to the mayor. The attitude was: she was homeless, who cares? Let’s go after the druggies.”
Trimble vaguely remembered that he’d mentioned something about that at the lunch during the conference last month.
Athens sighed. “I’m getting the same thing from the top.”
Trimble hadn’t known that the powers that be in Wayne County weren’t happy with the case. But, at twenty-eight, he wasn’t privy to the politics of policing.
She added, “But I see your posts for requests on the wire. Basically, you’re telling ’em to hell with it; you’re following through.”
“Homeless or not, she was a human being. I’m going to close it.”
Athens nodded. “And we’re going to canvass till we drop, to find that guy with the bloody rag. Aren’t we, Trimble?”
“We are, Detective.”
She turned to the photo of the bloodstain. “Message, hmm? What’re you saying? If you’re saying anything?”
Stand said, “Let’s figure it out.”
Athens said, “Give me a pen. And some paper.”
Trimble jumped to. He always did when she asked for something in this tone. Athens was in what he called her volatilely obsessive mood.
She plucked the largest picture of the bloody wall from the board and set it down on the table. She placed a white sheet of printer paper over it.
“Shit. I need to see through it. Tracing paper. I want some tracing paper!”
“Well.” Trimble too looked around, though it would be a futile search. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Department was not like Todd’s third-grade class, with art supplies at every turn. “I’m not sure—”
She said, “The glass,” pointing to the window of the conference room, overlooking officers’ cubicles.
An impromptu light table, Trimble realized. He taped the blood pattern photo onto the glass and the blank sheet over it. He placed a desk lamp on a chair just outside the room, shining at the image and paper. Athens took her hair pencil and began drawing small dots on the white sheet. In a distracted voice, as she labored, she explained that it wasn’t odd for homicidal sociopaths to leave messages at the scenes. Postmortem arranging of the corpse was the most common, but many killers left written notes, either explicit or word games that needed to be unpacked to make sense.
She finished and pulled the paper off the glass then replaced it on the corkboard. There were two-dozen dots, in two horizontal bands, suggesting words or sentences.
But no obvious letters, numbers, or images appeared.
Trimble pulled a large glossy whiteboard from the corner and reproduced the dots in the exact position on it. He realized that, without thinking, he’d marked them in dark red, similar to the shade of blood they were based on. He then took up a black marker and, as they came up with ideas, he’d draw lines between them to try to make words.
The first letter was likely a V, though it might have been part of a W; the letter to the right was unidentifiable. Trimble believed the last letter on the top band of dots was probably an S or a 5.
They got an O or a Q.
Trimble said, “Wheel of Fortune.”
Gebbert smiled, but Athens stared at him blankly.
“A TV show.”
Gloria Athens was known for working, working, and more working. Trimble had no idea what she did for relaxation and entertainment, but suspected television was not on the agenda.
“D,” Stand said. “I see a D.”
“And that’s a G,” Athens said. “No. I think a C.”
In ten minutes, Stand snapped his fingers.
“Got it!”
He took the marker from Trimble and wrote out:
VAYA CON DIOS
The Spanish farewell: Go with God.
Gebbert said, “The perp’s religious? Killing in the name of religion?”
But Trimble could see Gloria Athens looking off, with a frown. Her mind was racing. She looked to Trimble and said, “Little San Juan?”
Ah. Interesting.
“Could be.”
She explained to the out-of-towners that a poor Latino neighborhood was not far from Fourth Street, where the killing had occurred.
Trimble said, “There’s been some growing gang action there.”
Stand was nodding. “That could be it.”
To get jumped into a gang, a prospective member sometimes had to commit a crime, even occasionally a murder, to prove he had the steel to be part of the crew.
She was nodding slowly. “We have some contacts there. I know some of the players. Trimble, let’s go talk to some people.” A glance toward Stand. “You two stay here and see if you can figure out the rest of the message.” Then she paused. “Trimble, you do speak Spanish, don’t you?”
“Uhm, actually, I took French.”
“French? What the hell good is that?”
Stand’s younger assistant, though, Gebbert, said he had a working knowledge of Spanish.
Athens asked Stand, “Okay if he comes with me?”
“Sure.” The detective was distracted, staring at the blood pattern pictures.
“Better if Mr. Wheel-of-Fortune stays here anyway,” she muttered, with a nod toward Trimble.
She and Gebbert took their coats and headed out the door.
For the next half hour, Stand and Trimble tried to decipher the rest of the clues. He kept in mind that even though the top message was all letters, the lower one still might involve numbers or images.
They weren’t having much luck. The bottom line was considerably harder. They came up with a few possible letters, but no words jumped out. Trimble was half-thinking he should call his wife (they both loved the TV game show, watching it every night—when he was home; she was a much better player than he was). But he decided not to call her. He wanted to keep her as far away from the seamy side of his job as possible.
His mobile hummed. It was Gloria Athens.
“Detective,” he said.
She asked bluntly, “What’ve you found? Any more messages?”
“A few letters, but they don’t make any words. We’re still at it.”
“Dan Gebbert and I’re back at the scene. The Harper plant. We’re looking for the stick he used as his paintbrush. After that we’ll get over to Little Puerto Rico. Call me if you find anything.”
He said, “I will,” but she’d already disconnected.
Stand and Trimble stared at the whiteboard and, through trial and error, wrung a few more letters out of the pattern of the dots. They got a J and an E.
The minutes rolled past slowly.
A letter A emerged. An N. A number: 4.
And finally, with a jolt in his gut, Trimble saw the answer.
“It is a gang initiation.”
“What?”
The young detective strode to the board and took the marker, then added the final sentence.
VAYA CON DIOS
YOU AND MARY—the MT-14s.
The MT-14s were a vicious crew, with affiliates in a dozen states. Drugs, guns, prostitutions.
Trimble said, “Mary would be your victim.”
Stand nodded. “So, the cases are related. The motive…” His voice faded.
Trimble realized that Stand had stopped moving. In fact, it seemed he’d very nearly stopped breathing.
“No,” Stand whispered.
“What, Detective?”
Stand, his face awash with confusion, said, “When I said Dan and I called the victim ‘Chatham Mary’ I meant that literally. Only we did. We came up with that ourselves. Unknown Female was too cold, not respectful.”
Trimble’s thoughts were arriving at the same place that Stand’s had. But it seemed impossible.
Trimble asked, “Somebody else must’ve heard.”
“Who?” Stand asked sharply. “Maybe the name’s in case notes, but it’s not public. Nothing in the press. Jesus.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Not long. But it doesn’t matter. Dan’s the most straight-laced cop you’ll ever find.”
“And Ted Bundy was the most normal, cheerful law school student you’d ever find.”
Trimble thought to himself: And he speaks Spanish. If you wanted to blame a Latino gang for a killing you committed, that skill would come in handy.
Stand swept up the phone. He said to Trimble as he waited for an answer, “Dan’s not married. He lives with some roommates in an apartment near the sheriff’s headquarters. I’ll find where he was on the night of Joshua’s murder.”
When he got through to somebody, he had a conversation. Trimble could easily see his face was troubled by what the person on the other end of the line was telling him. He disconnected.
He nodded to the board. “Your victim was killed on Tuesday.”
“Right.”
“Every Tuesday, Dan works out. He starts at the gym and then goes for a fifteen-mile run. He was out last Tuesday from six through ten.”
The exact time Joshua was killed.
Trimble muttered, “And the man spotted by our witness, the man with the rag. Blond. How many blond Latino gangbangers do you know?”
“Shit. I should’ve thought of that.”
Trimble was pulling out his phone. “Maybe there’s another explanation, but I’m calling Detective Athens.”
She picked up on the third ring. “Trimble. You figured out the rest of the message?”
“Listen to me carefully, Detective. Is Dan Gebbert near you?”
She paused. “That’s correct.” Her instincts had kicked in immediately and she’d forced her voice to sound normal.
“It’s possible he’s the killer. Maybe not likely. But possible.”
“I see.”
“I can explain it all later. But you have to get out, without letting him know you suspect anything.”
In a light, carefree voice she said, “Oh, I’m sure that can be worked out. Thanks—” Her voice stopped. Then she barked, “Wait. No!” There was a thud. She screamed, a wrenching sound.
The phone went dead.
A new blood pattern, fresh and bright crimson, was spread across the floor of the Harper Manufacturing Company.
The splashes and splatters were quite evident; the Sheriff’s Department crime scene unit had set up fierce halogen spotlights inside.
In this display of blood there was a communication too, though it was not delivered via a mysterious code to be deciphered. The message was simple and straightforward: that the person that had lost this much blood could not possibly still be of this earth.
Stand and Trimble stood silent over the green bag enwrapping the corpse.
Other officers and deputies were arriving. Medical people.
The press too, of course. How they loved their serial killers. Nightly news just can’t get enough.
The figure appeared in the doorway and walked toward them, limping.
Trimble looked toward Gloria Athens. He’d debated embracing her. That concept was alien in the extreme and he settled for a sincere nod.
She turned to Barney Stand. “I’m sorry.”
He said nothing. His face was grim.
The County Sheriff arrived. Tom Bodwin was a massive man, whose gruff, scowling visage deceived; he was soft spoken and a kind, fair, thoughtful boss.
Athens said, “I was looking for the stick he used to leave the messages.” A glance to Bodwin. “I’ll explain that later. I’d found one that might’ve been used and was bending down to pick it up. That’s when Detective Trimble called and told me they suspected Gebbert might be the killer. I tried to play it cool but there must’ve been something in my body language… Gebbert came up behind me and hit me across the shoulder with that two by four.”
She pointed to the beam, tagged with an evidence note.
Stand asked, “He say anything?”
“Just, ‘Son of a bitch.’ Maybe something else. I was on the ground, stunned, you know. He turned away for a moment and I managed to roll away and get to my feet. Over there.” She pointed. Crime scene numbers littered the floor. “He was holding that.”
An evidence bag held a wicked-looking weapon. It was like a razor-sharp filleting knife with a hook on the end.
“Ah,” Stand muttered. He seemed shell shocked.
“I went for my weapon and he thought he could beat me. I fired three times, four. I really don’t remember.”
One of the slugs had torn through Gebbert’s neck, hence the cascade of red.
“I tried to stop the bleeding. But…”
Bodwin said, “So, he’s responsible for the homicide in Chatham and ours here. Left the message to blame the MT-14s for it. Why? What was his motive?”
Athens reminded, “Thrill kill.”
Bodwin cocked his head. “You know, I seem to recall there were three other homicides in the western part of the state. We should cross-reference Gebbert’s whereabouts when they happened.”
Stand said, “Better if I don’t handle it, though. I’ll probably be on administrative leave till they get this worked out.”
Trimble was thinking: Yeah, having your partner of several years be a serial killer is going to create a big stew pot of problems.
The detective from Chatham County just stared at the body bag. Trimble supposed he’d be running through the times that Dan Gebbert had acted odd, been particularly reclusive, had spent just a little too much time in the autopsy room or morgue, maybe let his gun linger on the body of a suspect, debating whether or not to pull the trigger. Wondering when the young man had snapped and decided to start recreating crimes of the sort he’d been investigating. Trimble had learned this was a phenomenon, police feeling they were justified in stepping over the line.
Maybe Gebbert had asked for the assignment to be Stand’s protégé because of the blood.
Gloria Athens winced as she rubbed her shoulder. Henry Trimble had the absurd idea to wrap his hands around her muscles and massage. But he, of course, did no such thing.
The sheriff said, “Take a couple days off, Detective.”
She looked at him as if he’d said, “I heard the moon is a Hollywood prop,” and Trimble knew she’d be back in the office at 8:00am tomorrow.
Trimble said, “You want me to get you some coffee, Detective?”
“I’m good, Trimble. Go on home to your wife.”
* * *
The only thing Gloria Athens didn’t like about the precious soak she took nearly every evening was walking past the full-length mirror in the hallway between bed- and bathroom.
That extra fifteen pounds, which absolutely refused to go away, sat like a sluggish reminder of the passing years. Still, it didn’t bother her enough to remove the damn mirror, which she could do pretty easily. Being handy with tools. And strong.
Time was a precious commodity.
Tonight, her hair tucked up under a shower cap decorated with daisies, Athens now sank into the expansive tub, a whirlpool model, though today the jets were silent. She was concerned the shooting water would be too powerful on her shoulders, sore and raw from the incident earlier tonight at Harper Manufacturing.
In the bathroom of the thirty-year-old Colonial, there was a two-sink vanity and a wicker laundry hamper, on which Jack, her Maine Coon cat, presently sat preening and studiously ignoring his mistress. She could hear the purring from here. Jack was content.
And so was Gloria Athens.
She believed that she’d pulled it off.
What people often didn’t realize was that studying something intensely can lead to an obsession. And that obsession, like any addiction, often means that simply studying is no longer enough. She thought of the famous concert musicians: years and years of training, devoting themselves to mastering the literature of the great composers. Yet simply practicing in the dull, dim rehearsal space, or your living room, hour after hour, while you ignore the fragrant smells of dinner being prepared by the neglected wife? That would be hell.
At some point musicians know it’s time to launch themselves into the real world.
A phenomenon, Athens had learned, that applies to murder too.
She knew exactly when this moment occurred within her.
Six years ago.
Athens had studied psychology, pathology, medicine, police procedure, interrogation and interview techniques. She practiced transforming herself, mentally, into the most heinous of killers. She learned nearly every theory of why violent criminals were violent. How they killed or maimed to achieve the more intense high. What a killer might do to sublimate his or her urges and lead a straight life (very, very little). She had used these skills to become the most successful violent crimes investigator in the state.
That night six years ago, a chill October, she was walking home and reflecting on a case she’d just closed: a domestic abuse homicide, a husband who’d tortured his wife to death.
She was, for sure, pleased she’d collared the perp. The chief had praised her for the arrest, as had the press. She’d earned the tearful gratitude of the victim’s family.
But Gloria Athens had been nagged by something else, and couldn’t figure out what.
Until it occurred to her: Envy.
She envied the husband who’d put his sadistic and lethal urges into practice, while all she could do was study, observe, analyze.
She felt empty. And angry that the satisfaction of completion was denied her.
It was like watching cooking shows on TV and never stepping up to a stove.
She needed more.
But she dismissed the thought immediately. She didn’t dare commit a violent act herself.
No, no. Of course not.
Walking through the cold, dark night on her way to home and kitten Jack, she thought: What a foolish idea.
On the other hand.
If anyone was suited to getting away, literally, with murder, it was Gloria Athens.
For one thing, she knew homicide investigation techniques cold. She wouldn’t make any of the classic mistakes that most murderers did: in the areas of forensics and surveillance, for instance. And—the kicker—there’d be no motive for committing the murders. With no apparent reason to kill the victim, she wouldn’t fall into the bag of initial suspects.
Her motive would be killing for the thrill of it, the rush. Blood would be her fentanyl, her cocaine.
Something to ease the churning need within her to graduate from student to practitioner.
Did she dare?
She revised her answer to a tentative, Yes.
And so, a few days later, she used a hammer to beat to death a young man who was in a small-time crew about fifty miles away.
Oh, it was a high like nothing else she’d ever experienced: no longer tepid professional satisfaction at observing carnage. Now, she reveled in it.
About twice a year she’d travel discreetly around the western part of the state, targeting those whose deaths wouldn’t draw much attention, always in locales where there was no CCTV, no witnesses.
She tried telling herself that she was doing them a favor—the homeless, the druggies—killing them, putting them out of their misery. But that was a lie. She didn’t give a shit about them. She wanted them to die and die bloody, at her hand, hands armed with tools and baseball bats and knives.
But then came the homeless woman, dozing beside the Chatham River after a binge. The woman who became Unknown Female, or Chatham Mary.
Hers had been a very satisfying, and very bloody, death.
All good.
Until Detective Barney Stand got on the case.
She always made a note to read the interagency police reports in the jurisdictions where she’d killed someone, and she learned that Stand was looking at the case as a holy grail.
How to stop him?
She signed up immediately for the law enforcement continuing education seminar last month, which would give her an excuse to meet Stand and to find out about the case. She’d learned about his little puppy dog assistant—Dan Gebbert—and decided the odd kid would make a good fall guy.
If Gebbert was revealed as the killer, Stand would be disgraced for missing the man’s guilt. And the police brass, uninterested in solving the Chatham case, would drop it. Stand might even be fired outright.
One could always hope.
While the seminar was underway, she’d slipped into Stand’s office and rifled through the files; his notes suggested that only Stand and Gebbert referred to her as ‘Chatham Mary’.
A perfect clue to plant to draw suspicion to the young detective.
But Athens knew it would look better if somebody else came to suspect Gebbert. That’s why Joshua had to die: to get the Chatham detectives here and have Stand and darling Henry Trimble connect the dots—literally—to implicate Stand’s unfortunate protégé.
With her dawdling at the crime scene in the factory, looking for the ‘paintbrush’ branch (which was long gone), Stand and Trimble, back at headquarters, finally deduced that Gebbert might be the killer.
Trimble had called to break the news to her. And she had given a grunt and a desperate scream, then disconnected the phone (she could only imagine what Trimble’s expression would have been).
Dan Gebbert, who’d been outside the factory, came running, with his gun drawn, eyes wide.
Athens had laughed. “Only a rat, sorry.”
He’d smiled and put his gun away.
Which was when Athens drew hers and shot him in the face and neck.
He dropped so fast, he didn’t even have a chance to look astonished.
When he was down, Athens—in latex gloves, of course—took from her purse a plastic bag containing the weapon she’d used to kill Joshua, an ornate knife with a hooked blade (she’d stolen it at a flea market). She pressed the handle and blade against the dead cop’s fingers and left it there, then she’d fallen backward against the two-by-four beam, as if he’d hit her with it. This too she placed against his hands, to transfer prints and DNA.
One final touch: she’d taken the hammer she’d used in the Chatham Mary killing from her trunk and transferred his DNA and prints to the tool. Tomorrow she’d pitch it into the backyard of the house where he lived in Chatham.
All nice and tidy.
She now asked, “What do you think, Jack? Did I pull it off?”
If his purring were any indication, she had.
Any other issues?
Well, only one.
Her own assistant. Henry Trimble.
He was a smart kid and he tended to stick to projects he’d been assigned and see them through to completion, which was, in a way, her fault. She insisted on discipline.
If anyone would notice inconsistencies about the Joshua Musgrave murder, it would be clever Henry.
But she’d keep an eye on him.
She wasn’t going to give up her addiction. Somebody else in a different county would die in a month or two. And Trimble might become curious.
So she had a plan for him too, though Gloria Athens hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
One thing she’d learned in the business of policing: good assistants were hard to come by.