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THURSDAY. 8:52AM.
As Detective John Hoffman stood over the body, two thoughts entered his mind. The first was how unlucky he’d been to get stuck working a case like this, and the other was of the blood that was sure to get on his brand-new shoes. It was scenes like this that made him miss his days with the Anchorage Police Department. Working for the FBI had its benefits, but John wasn’t a fan of witnessing Death’s handiwork on a regular basis. He missed the simplicity of traffic tickets and domestic disturbances, and still couldn’t fathom the events that led him here. Every case he was assigned chiseled away at him piece by piece, collecting its own form of emotional trophy. As the years passed, he’d grown tired of the life he’d been living and resolved himself to the promise that his next case would be his last.
A promise he’d broken six times already.
Cars zoomed across the bridge overhead as John surveyed the scene. He couldn’t help but appreciate the location the killer had left the body. There was no messy attempt at burying what had been done. Rather, the exact opposite. The killer left the body somewhere it was sure to be found, which made John’s life a tad easier.
Glenn Highway was one of the most traveled routes in Alaska, and one of the few that connected to Anchorage. Since making Detective, John had witnessed many crime scenes where victims were dumped in lakes and rivers, or half buried beneath dirt and horse shit. This was different.
The call came in earlier that morning about an injured hiker where Glenn Highway bridged over Eagle River. A concerned commuter had seen the figure laying a few feet from the riverside, assumed they’d gotten lost or drunk before passing out, and called the police to report it.
As John stood over the body now, the wheels in his mind were turning. He absorbed every detail in the hope that it would help him put together the pieces of a much larger puzzle. The killer had treated the body with some measure of care. They’d lain the man out on his back, with his head tilted so that it was resting on his shoulder. His left arm was flat against his side, and his right was bent outward at the elbow. In his hand was a small wallet-sized photo of a woman and two young children. The killer had positioned the victim in such a way that, if his eyes had been open, it would look as if he were staring at the photo of his family.
John knelt beside the body and braced himself. He’d been expecting the stench of death to grip him; that rotten sweetness to which he’d become accustomed. The scent, however, never came. Instead, an aroma much more pleasant in comparison enveloped him. John knew in that moment that the responding officers had been right to call him in. This wasn’t just another crime of passion or revenge; this was the reason he was back in Anchorage for the first time in six years.
He had to check, though. He had to be sure. John grasped the victim’s left arm and prayed he wouldn’t see the marks.
The marks were there.
Etched into the man’s wrist was a series of letters and numbers: ‘H(2)-F(3)-B(2)’. Markings like these had been carved into the wrists of two other murder victims found the week prior. That told John two very important things: He was indeed hunting a serial killer, and there was no getting out of this case.
John eased the arm back into its original position and turned his attention to the cheap brown wallet resting about a foot away. He picked it up in a gloved hand and opened it. According to the ID inside, the deceased’s name was Ted Novak. He was thirty-eight years old and, from what John could tell, was a happily married family man. A second ID identified him as a Boy Scout Leader. The more John learned about the man, the more his stomach did cartwheels. He didn’t deserve the evil that had befallen him, and it only served to fuel John’s determination to catch the bastard that killed him.
John set down the wallet and reached into the breast pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a small metal flask and brought it to his cold-cracked lips. The whiskey flowed freely and brought warmth to his belly. Before anyone was the wiser, he returned the flask to its hiding place, and turned his attention back to the body.
“Hoffman,” came a voice from behind him.
John recognized it, and his body tensed instinctively. A violent shiver shot down his spine as he fought to collect himself before turning to face his adversary. The voice belonged to a woman named Rose Fayneir; John’s superior and a total hard ass. He hated everything about this woman. Her voice, her mischievous grin, and, most of all, her trademark ponytail that was pulled back so tight that he wondered how she had any hair left. He could feel her icy stare on the back of his neck, and, for an instant, wished he could trade places with the man on the ground. For a woman named Rose, she was nothing but thorns.
John’s knees ached as he pulled himself to his feet and turned to face the dragon lady. Through clenched teeth, he muttered, “What can I do for you, ma’am?” Rose rarely dragged herself out to crime scenes, so John knew that whatever reason she had for being there would be something that pissed him right off.
Rose was in charge of the FBI’s Northern-most division, and she detested it. It was the least funded—naturally—as most crime this far North was nothing compared to what went down in Washington or New York. The most action she got was when felons thought they could escape into the Alaskan wilderness and live undetected in some Breaking Bad-like scenario. Rose wanted to make a name for herself so that she could move elsewhere and lead a team that actually mattered; a sentiment she’d expressed to John on multiple occasions, and usually after one too many cups of coffee. Boredom plagued her, and so did the insatiable urge to catch bigger fish.
Rose had put into action a ploy to make herself, and her work, more noticeable. She’d recruited the best of local law enforcement and made it her mission to hold and maintain the lowest murder rate in all the United States of America. Under normal circumstances, it would be under police jurisdiction to handle homicide cases, but if a case was proving difficult or if it might turn into something more, she would send out one of her disciples. For this case, she’d chosen John, much to his dismay.
A sly smile played on her lips. “Do you like your job?” she asked him, as she twirled the end of her ponytail around her fingertips.
“Not in the slightest,” he answered with a bold shrug. There was no point in hiding it. She knew he’d been planning to retire his badge, and that he was going to do so eventually.
Her smile grew wider. “Oh, but you’re so good at it, which is why I’ve got a job for you.”
She was leading up to something big, and the thought alone scared John to his core. He’d rather face down a hundred known killers than converse with her for more than a minute at a time.
“It wouldn’t have anything to do with the gentleman at your feet, now would it?”
He had no intention of playing her games, and couldn’t care less what she wanted from him. He took extra care to hide the effect she had on him, but was almost certain she’d noticed.
Fayneir pursed her lips in response to his tone, but let it slide. “See that kid over there?” she asked, her smile returning in full force.
John followed her gaze and had no trouble picking out who she was referring to. ‘The kid’ wasn’t really a kid, as he looked to be in his mid to late twenties, but inexperience radiated out of him with every question he asked the other officers, and with each note he scribbled down.
“No,” John said, as realization hit. All traces of sarcasm had vanished, and what remained was cold and unfriendly.
“You don’t see him?” She enjoyed making him squirm and planned on taking full advantage of his discomfort.
“No to what you’re asking.” His response was colder this time.
“I haven’t asked you anything.” Her calm demeanor was diminishing, and John braced himself for the fallout.
He sighed. “No to what you’re going to ask.” He spoke the words slowly in one last attempt to assert his position. His superior was half his size, but her presence was suffocating. Although petite, most men found her intimidating. She had a voice and had no problem making it heard.
“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m not asking anything, I’m telling you.”
There it was. John’s unwillingness to play the game had released the dragon from her cage. The playfulness vanished from his superior’s voice, as had her smile.
“Look, Rose—” Her glare cut him off. “This is my last case. Give the kid to someone else.”
“You’ve been saying that for months. The kid’s yours.”
John’s stomach bubbled and threatened to make a bigger mess than the crime scene itself. “You can’t just—”
She cut him off again. “Walter!” she called. The kid jerked his head in her direction and trotted over. When he reached them, she gestured to John. “Walter Mavis, this is John Hoffman. Your new partner.”
“Mr. Hoffman, I can’t tell you how excited I am to be working with you,” he said, offering his hand.
“I don’t believe this,” said John as he turned away, ignoring the gesture and making no attempt to hide his rudeness.
Fayneir’s smile made another appearance, and John could tell this arrangement pleased her. “Have fun, boys,” she said, as she turned to take her leave, but stopped short and once again faced them. “Oh, and John? I have more important things to do than make sure you’re doing your job. Enjoy your last case, but whatever you do, don’t make me come back here.” With a wave of her manicured hand, she left them.
“She’s terrifying,” Walter said when she was out of earshot. The two men watched as she climbed into her black Cadillac and pulled away from the scene.
“Tell me about it. She’s worse than my ex-wife.”
“So what now, partner?” Walter asked. His enthusiasm made John want to hurl more than the stench that still hung thickly in the air. There was no way John could stand to work with this kid if he was going to act like a pathetic little puppy dog still waiting to be housebroken.
John let out a groan. “First off, I’m not your partner. At most, I’m your instructor. Do what I say, and we’ll get along fine. You got that?” He watched as Walter scribbled something down in his small notebook.
“Got it,” Walter said, without missing a beat.
John stared at him, bewildered. “Did you just write that down?”
“No, Sir,” Walter stuttered as he shoved the book into his open coat pocket.
It was late spring, but there was a chill in the air and John wondered how this kid wasn’t shivering. He missed the days when he was young and his body produced enough heat for him to get away with such things. Now he was nothing but a forty-four-year-old man with the gut that went with it. He’d taken up drinking when his wife left him six years prior. At least, that’s what he told himself.
“Whatever,” he said. “Let’s get one thing straight. If you’re a spy, you’d better tell me now.”
Walter’s brow furrowed. “I’m a student at the University of Alaska. I’m studying Criminal Justice.”
“A student?” John wasn’t expecting that. Rose had plucked him from his own inconsequential position years earlier, but this was the first time she’d ever recruited a student. “So Rose didn’t send you here to spy on me?”
“To spy on you? No, Sir. I’m here to learn from you. She said you’re the best.”
John choked on his laugh and clasped Walter’s shoulder. “You must have really ticked someone off if you ended up with me. Trust me, kid. This is a punishment, not a blessing.” John watched as Walter’s eyes flickered down to the corpse, and he wondered if this was the first murder victim the man had seen. “Are you familiar with the case?”
“I’ve been through the files, yes.” Walter kept his eyes cast down.
“Okay,” John said, pushing the boy a step closer to the body. “Let’s do this then. Tell me what you see.”
“I see a body.” His voice trembled, so he cleared his throat.
John rolled his eyes. “That’s an excellent grade one answer. Anything else?”
Walter took another nervous step forward and knelt down beside the victim. “What’s that smell?” he asked. “That’s not...”
“No, it isn’t,” John confirmed. “That’s a pine-scented cleaner mixed with apple cider vinegar. “
“But why?”
John had wondered that too, at first. This was the third body found that gave off this heavy scent, and there was only one logical reason for it. “Bears,” he said.
“Bears?”
“They don’t like the smell. The killer wanted us to find the victim intact.” It was both clever and bold.
Walter nodded, making a mental note of the detail. He gestured to the victim’s exposed leg, just below the hem of his shorts. “Something didn’t seem to mind,” he pointed out.
The kid was right. An animal had definitely taken advantage of the opportunity and attempted to grab a free meal, but had since moved on.
John shrugged. “A deer, most likely.”
Walter chuckled, as much as the situation would allow. “Yeah, okay,” he said, continuing his examination of the body.
“You think I’m joking? A deer wouldn’t pass up a free meal, even if that meal was meat. The only reason this one gave up was because their teeth aren’t strong enough to get through the skin. If our guy had a deeper wound on him, I guarantee the deer would have taken more than a few nibbles.”
The color from Walter’s cheeks drained, and he took a moment to compose himself. “An animal didn’t do these though,” he said as he moved a gloved finger across several of the thin cuts that ran along the man’s arms and exposed chest. “Bruising, lacerations, contusions... Signs of severe blood loss—which is most likely what killed him. He’s thin, so possible starvation, and... Are these burns?” he asked, touching one of the faint red blotches on the victim’s face.
John nodded. “Not bad, Textbook.”
Walter clasped a hand around the victim’s wrist. As rigor mortis had already set in, it took some effort for him to flip over the man’s arm, so that the bottom of his wrist was upright. John could tell by the stiffness that the man had likely been dead for less than thirty-six hours. Temperature was a factor, but if he were to wager a guess, he’d say it had been approximately twenty hours since the murder had taken place.
Walter examined the raw flesh and the numbers and letters that were carved into it. With his hand still holding the victim’s arm in place, he turned his head toward John. “Do you know what these markings mean?”
“You’ve read the files. What do you think they mean?”
Walter switched his attention back to the markings. He brushed a glove finger over them, as if he were trying to decipher braille, and grimaced. After a moment, he shrugged. “A way of cataloguing his victims; giving them a serial number, so to speak.”
It wasn’t a bad guess. The kid had brains and knew how to use them; however, John knew that this theory couldn’t be the case. It was too easy. Everything he knew about the killer, or thought he knew, based on everything from where he left his victims to how he killed them, told him that the man was smart. He wouldn’t need to catalogue his victims, nor would he want to mark up the bodies he’d been so careful to display and protect. He knew the markings had to be some sort of message to someone, or a way of shaming the victims somehow. Something about it didn’t yet add up, but John was going to figure it out. If this was his last case, then he wanted to do it right—and before any more lives were lost.