A killer far worse than insane.

 

Redheads

© 2013 Jonathan Moore

 

Chris Wilcox has been searching for years, so he knows a few things about his wife’s killer. Cheryl Wilcox wasn’t the first. All the victims were redheads. All eaten alive and left within a mile of the ocean. The trail of death crosses the globe and spans decades. 

The cold trail catches fire when Chris and two other survivors find a trace of the killer’s DNA. By hiring a cutting-edge lab to sequence it, they make a terrifying discovery. The killer is far more dangerous than they ever guessed. And now they’re being hunted by their own prey.

 

Enjoy the following excerpt for Redheads:

The dead girl’s apartment was easy to spot. It was the only one on the third floor with dark windows. All the others blazed with light, and no wonder: the newspaper didn’t have all the details, but had printed the worst. Chris followed the boardwalk around the side of the converted cotton warehouse. Her four windows faced the ship channel between Galveston and Pelican Islands. That was probably a factor. These things always happened close to the ocean.

Chris had flown to Houston from Honolulu that morning to break into this girl’s apartment. It was another marker on a trail that began with Cheryl and twisted through thirty-six other homes and apartments and rented rooms, and disappeared into the darkness ahead. He had spent the entire flight hoping something in the apartment would light the way. 

He said the girl’s name aloud, just to give her another breath of life. 

Allison Clayborn. 

She’d lived in Galveston just two years, doing research for a green energy company called Gulf Solar. Three days a week, she taught an engineering class at Rice University. She’d grown up somewhere in central Texas. 

Chris could picture her as a teenager in the scrubby Texas hills, riding in the back of a pickup truck with her red hair blowing back, the sun lighting the freckles splashed on her otherwise white shoulders. 

He could picture her in a white lab coat, looking at a spreadsheet on her laptop and chewing on the end of a pencil. 

He could also picture her dead. 

She would have had lovely breasts, and they would have been cut off or cut up, and possibly cooked if she had a cast iron skillet in her kitchen. He hadn’t seen the coroner’s report yet, but he knew her liver would be gone. If she’d fought—if she’d scratched and clawed—her fingertips would be missing from the first knuckle. Her breasts and liver would have been taken to feed some kind of sick hunger, but the fingertips, he thought, were taken for a different purpose: to keep the police from finding the killer’s DNA under Allison’s nails. But Chris knew other places to look for that.

 

Her condo faced Harbor Street, where a few giant live oak trees cast wide shadows from sidewalk to sidewalk. The entrance was an ornate cast iron gate framed by gas lamps. Behind the gate, stone steps led through an archway to paired oak doors. He walked to the gate, taking out his bump key. The lock was a Yale pin tumbler no different than the latch on the front doors of most suburban houses. It wouldn’t be a problem. 

Chris fit his mechanical bump key into the lock, pulled the spring-loaded trigger three times to knock the vertical tumbler pins clear of the lock cylinder, and twisted the plug with a small torsion wrench. The lock opened in less than five seconds. It took his breath away to think how unguarded Allison’s life had been. Or Cheryl’s, or the lives of the thirty-six others he’d found. 

He passed through the front gate and up the steps. Standing in the gas lit entryway, he opened the oak door and went into the elevator lobby. The lift was a brass cage that rose through the center of a stair case. The stairs were dark wood with heavy railings, padded down the center in a long stripe of red carpet. He climbed to the third floor and found the door marked 304. There were no sounds. At the end of the hallway a polished wooden chair sat before the window sill. No policeman sat guard in the chair. He saw no security cameras. An official seal was taped along the length of the doorjamb, and an orange sign was fastened in the center of the door with the Galveston Police Department emblem and DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF LAW in large red print. 

The last forensic team had sliced the seal in half with a razor, and hadn’t replaced it. The police were done with the apartment. But the cut seal was still there, so the cleaners hadn’t come. He thought about that for a moment. The timing was critical because the cleaners would destroy what he was looking for. He was already wearing latex gloves, so he simply bumped Allison’s lock, stepped quickly inside her home, and shut the door behind him.