The call came in the middle of the night, but David was on the night shift and already awake, patrolling the stony, empty town, and so he was the first person at the scene. It was like some kind of still life painting. The empty car sitting in the open lot, lit harshly by the distant streetlight and the neon glare of the sign in the loan shop’s window.
As soon as he saw the body and the unmistakable pattern across its skin, he sent a message to the unlisted number that went to Erickson. But the FBI must’ve been listening in to the dispatch call, because a handful of black sedans arrived all at once within a few minutes.
Erickson stepped out, followed by eight agents, and walked straight past David. David opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it.
The agents went to work, roping off the scene, poring over the concrete for footprints or any other evidence, photographing the bodies. Erickson stood to one side, surveying, his back to David.
He was being punished. He knew this. He’d been out on rounds in his truck the previous morning when a message came from Erickson: What the fuck did you do?
He’d had no clue what the old agent meant. Then Andrea called over the radio. She was getting one call after another. People scared about the serial killer. Or pissed off that the sheriff’s department had been hiding it.
On his phone he opened a news app. There it was. A killer stalking the county. An official source. Charlotte’s voice, spreading this news.
Their conversation replayed. He could see it now. She’d set him up, all that talk of reconnecting. Then her big bluff, mentioning the serial killer so casually. Obviously, she had done some digging, put together a few pieces. But she hadn’t known for certain. It wasn’t until he took the bluff that she had her source. Hell.
Then David’s phone had begun to buzz, something it had only finally stopped doing a few hours earlier. Dale had called, furious that David had kept details of the investigation from him. One local after another, demanding to know if they were safe, demanding to know why David had lied. Because they made me! he wished he could say. But instead he repeated the same thing over and over. I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.
It was why David took the night shift. To show the town that he was out on the streets. And because he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep, not with Charlotte’s betrayal raging in his mind.
After a couple of hours in the frigid air, Erickson turned from the scene and walked beside David. His hand worked furiously over the lighter in his pocket.
“I fucked up. I know I fucked up,” David said. “She came to me already talking about the serial killer, and I didn’t . . .”
“I had to convince Priest not to throw you in a big, dark hole,” the agent cut him off. “She still might.”
He took the lighter out of his pocket, held it up as if to inspect it, then pocketed it again and continued.
“We know the reporter is your cousin. She used you; it’s what reporters do. Just don’t let it happen again. The leash you’re on is real fucking short, kid. And things are about to get real fucking messy. At least she didn’t know about the patterned cuts. We aren’t completely fucked.”
David let his silence serve as an assent.
“All right,” Erickson said. “What do you see here?”
It took a moment for David to realize the agent was talking about the crime scene. He surveyed it again, letting thoughts flow freely.
“They’ve used this corner for a few months now. We knew they were set up here. Everyone did. But we couldn’t do anything about it.”
They walked forward, to the Mustang.
“It’s our guy,” David continued. “No question about that. The dealer was sitting in his car. He probably thought it was someone coming to buy. Then the killer was too close.”
Erickson pointed into the car.
“Found a pistol in the center console. Poor kid didn’t even have time to reach for it.”
The four fingers of the victim’s right hand rested on the floorboard. Each perfectly bisected. David peered in at them, then leaned over the body on the ground. The head was perfectly in place, so that the only way to tell the neck had been slit open was from the trail of dried blood running down from the straight incision.
“The thing I can’t figure out is the murder weapon. It was the same with Kapoor’s arm and with Jason’s . . .” David couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence. “The cuts are so flawless. But he attacked through the window. There wasn’t any room to wind up, to really put any force into the blow. But he still almost cut through the victim’s neck. I’ve never seen a blade that can do that.”
David let the image from the night of Jason’s death return to his mind’s eye. The long blade, curved at the end.
Erickson seemed to be searching his own memories.
“I can’t either,” the agent said.
They walked on, around the corner of the building. Another young man. This one stripped completely naked. Body splayed out. Chest punched through. Skin laced with spirals drawn in red. His face was frozen in wide-eyed horror.
“No surveillance footage?” David asked.
Erickson shook his head. “Whoever our guy is, he’s smart. He’s looking for opportunities. I hate to say it, but he’s getting better. More refined. You see that sometimes with spree killers. They start out nervous, reckless. Then the more they do it, the more they stay in control.”
David looked past the body. A pile of small baggies sat on the ground next to a drainpipe, where they’d presumably been hidden.
“He didn’t take the drugs.”
“No,” Erickson agreed. “Or the money from the car. What do you make of that?”
Why was the old agent suddenly bringing him into the investigation? Asking him questions? Only minutes before, he was sure he’d be taken off the case entirely.
“The past couple of years, I noticed that most people who turned up dead were mixed up in drugs in some way. Deals gone sideways. Or someone ripping off someone else. Nine out of ten homicides, it was something like that. These are drug dealers, so my first instinct is that this has to be about drugs. But because nothing was taken, it feels more like it’s symbolic. The killer is making a point.”
Erickson rubbed his hands against the cold.
“Pretty weird coincidence, you making that bust the other day, then this right after,” he said.
So much had happened in the past day that David had lost hold of his anger over the FBI’s seizure of his evidence.
“What the hell was that about?” David asked.
“There are a couple of Mexican cartels with operations in Colorado that we’ve been investigating for years,” Erickson explained. “You just happened to stumble onto one of their drivers. They’re both moving in here—they see it as an emerging market. We think there’s a war starting up between them. We’ve had bodies turning up. Mutilated bodies.”
“Hell,” David muttered. “Then this could be part of a drug war?”
That would mean that all the killings connected to it somehow. Could Kapoor and Holly have been tied into a cartel? It didn’t seem likely, but he’d long since given up expecting the best of people.
“Did your cousin use drugs?” Erickson asked, his voice emotionless.
“No,” David responded, louder than he’d intended. Then he added, “I would’ve known.”
Even as he said it, he was remembering Tabby’s claim. That Jason was cheating on his wife. He’d decided it wasn’t true, but still it nagged at him.
“We need to go to the courthouse. Look over the scene. Then start digging through your cousin’s records,” Erickson said.
David’s jaw clenched.
“Sure,” he said. “In the morning.”
As they walked back out around the building, they saw the four TV news vans that had pulled up around the perimeter of the scene. Erickson looked at David with a hint of warning. David nodded back. Not another word.
Charlotte waited with the other reporters and camera crews, each jostling for position, trying to frame a shot of the blue Mustang to capture just a little of the motionless legs on the ground behind it.
Michael, her cameraman, had heard the news over his police scanner and called Charlotte to wake her. Since she’d been on air, the other stations had scrambled to catch up to the revelation that the killings were connected. The race was on now, she knew. She’d have to work even harder to keep ahead, to make this story hers.
Just then, she saw him. David. Crossing the parking lot, keeping wide of her and the others as he headed toward his truck.
Staying behind the yellow tape, she angled toward him.
“David,” she called out.
He kept moving, and so she sped up, finally catching him, standing between him and his truck.
“David!”
He faced her, and the instant that she saw his expression, she regretted approaching him. He knew what she’d done. She could see it. And not just that—it had cost him.
“I . . . I didn’t mean . . .” she started to explain.
“I have nothing to say to you,” he declared, clearly straining to keep his voice level.
She reached out.
“I’m sorry. Really.”
He slapped her hand away.
“I don’t know you. Get the hell away from me.”
He was gone all at once, and she turned to see Michael there, his camera held in front of him.
“I got it,” Michael said. “All of it. That was great stuff.”
She forced herself to ignore David’s words, the ones that still echoed inside, and turned back toward the crime scene.
“Delete it. We have a murder to cover.”
The man knew what to expect this time. He saw the game the sheriff and the FBI were playing. They denied that he existed, denied that the killings were linked. They stood up in front of the cameras and claimed that the two murders overnight had no connection to anything else.
He looked her up, the reporter who had first announced his existence. It was right to choose her. She had seen what all others had been blind to, after all. On the network’s website, her profile had a link to an encrypted messaging service. His thoughts returned, as they often did, to the sheriff. The poor, clueless sheriff, who had fallen into something far deeper than he could fathom. It was time he began to understand.
The man clicked the link.
Now the real fun would begin.