It was nearly five a.m. when I returned to the station. I sat in the parking lot, debating a sip from the bottle within the coolie bag. I opened the bottle and sniffed the contents. The smell wasn’t anything out of the ordinary—metallic yet sweet, but something had made me sick, and I didn’t intend to take any chances. Twirling revolutions in my chair, a coping mechanism I hadn’t been able to overcome, I felt disappointment weighing heavily on my shoulders. I felt sure forensics would have uncovered evidence that would prove at least one of the rapes and murders had occurred at Cahill’s residence.
With plans to check my email and call it a night, I opened an email marked Urgent, forwarded from Detective Franklin with a request I respond, the original sender Liberty, Missouri, Chief of Police Bernard Stapleton. I rolled my eyes and raked both hands through my hair; it was no secret that Franklin avoided any communication requiring much more than a yes or no response. It was also no secret that he considered the other detectives, including me, little more than his personal gofers.
The email detailed the murder of Celine Dover, twenty-two, a college student at William Jewell College in Liberty. A farmer had discovered her remains a month ago within a soybean field northwest of Liberty, near the Kearney, Missouri border. The ME estimated her time of death a few days prior to discovery. There were no witnesses and the killer succeeded in leaving no evidence behind—the exception being a scrawled inverted crucifix on the inside of the victim’s thigh, the same mark ME Joy Trumbull had recently brought to my attention.
After careful consideration, I shared the Jane Doe discovery with Chief Stapleton, with the insistence that the carved inverted crucifix—the singular piece of evidence linking the victims—remain confidential until further notice. I hit send before opening an image he’d attached of the victim. That simple inclusion convinced me of Stapleton’s compassion for the victim, his resolve to find her killer, and that he felt certain by humanizing the victim his determination would prove infectious to the KCPD. He was right; staring back at me was a beautiful young woman with brown hair, seafoam green eyes, and a toothy smile—dazzling despite slightly overlapping front teeth.
Candlelight illuminated the window shade within Raina’s bedroom when I arrived home. I crept inside with plans to retrieve a chilled bottle of blood from the fridge before either she or Fane realized I was there. After verifying a lot number different from the bottle inside my coolie bag, I unscrewed the top and sipped cautiously. Convinced I hadn’t suffered any ill effect from the small quantity, I tucked the bottle away in the fridge and sauntered toward Raina’s bedroom, her melodic giggling filling the house with everything wonderful.
I watched them from the doorway. Their backs to me, Fane acknowledged my presence with an ear suddenly perked in my direction. Raina instantly popped upright, her usual smile, which always greeted me, replaced with a concerned frown.
“Who is that with you, Mummy?”
“It’s just me, Raina,” I said, inching toward her.
She backed away, shaking her head, and clung to Fane.
“Raina, what’s wrong?” When she didn’t answer, I looked to Fane and tried to make sense of his expression. Was it shock? Disappointment? Fear?
“I hear the beat of your heart and that of another,” she said, pointing a tiny accusatory finger. She began to cry. “Please, Mummy. Why won’t you tell me?”
I opened my mouth, desperate to form a response. “Baby, I don’t know what you mean. Fane, what’s going on?”
Crimson flashes sparked across his retinae. By Raina’s side one moment, mine the next, Fane propped an ear against my pelvis. “A grave misfortune inhabits your womb,” he whispered.
I pushed him away, and he toppled over. “That isn’t funny, Fane.”
“If only I were playing a cruel trick,” he said, and his horrified gaze convinced me he wasn’t.
“Oh, God. I can’t be pregnant,” I said, more to myself. How could I have been so careless? “But it was just the one night,” I whispered to Fane, who served me a justified smirk.
“Careless, indeed. I, for one, find our distinguished warrior’s virility not the least bit surprising,” he said with a concerned expression. “Do not fault yourself, dear friend. For I doubt a chastity belt, your modern-day voodoo, or a cork for that matter, could have staved off his potent seed. Go, seek your mother’s counsel,” he whispered urgently. “I shall do my best to distract Raina. Until the matter is resolved, your absence is most advantageous . . . for her sake. Be gone,” he said, pushing me toward the door. “I shall communicate your excuse.”
I backed from the room, lightheaded, reeling from Fane’s pronouncement and his atypical gruffness. I experienced the familiar twinge deep inside my head, like a feather tickling my brain. Bianca must have sensed something wrong and attempted to access my thoughts. I immediately thought about nothing but the homicide cases. I knew what she would recommend. I knew what the Realm would demand I do.
After packing a duffel bag and grabbing a dusty sleeping bag from a closet shelf, I wrenched the rickety doors open and lugged everything inside the carriage house. Discovering a heap of rags in a corner and a stapler on a workbench that hadn’t been in use for decades, I covered the windows with the rags and stapled them in place.
My back against the door, I sank to the concrete floor, my fingers tracing the letters—the initials of bygone residents—immortalized in the cement decades ago. Zippered within the sleeping bag soon after, I struggled to keep my mind off the life growing within me and eventually fell asleep with Tristan foremost on my mind.
When I woke, just after sunset, I slipped from the carriage house and stole one long look toward the house, then I threw myself behind the wheel and steered the car toward the station. The sky clear, stars twinkled overhead. One in particular blinked randomly, as if confirming it knew my secret and passionately disproved.
Detective Franklin raised his head when I slung myself through the doorway. Six feet and two inches of hard lean muscle pitched his small office chair forward, rusty springs and worn leather creaking in response.
“You look like shit,” he offered pointedly.
“Nice to see you, too.”
He bolted upright, his bulky silhouette reflected in the window, and dropped a folder on my desk, the velocity so fierce it parted my bangs. “I spent most of the day and evening compiling this crap. Inside, you’ll find information that may shed some light on your killer. Once you make the arrest, I expect the majority of the credit.”
I threw myself into my chair and leaned into the split-vinyl headrest. “What kind of information?”
He tapped the manila folder and narrowed his eyes. “You expect me to read it to you, too? Where’s your commitment, Crenshaw? Sometimes, in order to solve a case—”
“Don’t patronize me, Detective.”
“And don’t interrupt me, Detective. It pisses me off. Serial killers, and that’s the angle you’re working, don’t hit the floor running one morning because they’ve decided to go out and savagely rape and murder women. The murders aren’t random. Those particular offenders plan every detail. And they have an uncanny sense of the walls closing in, and they get the hell out of Dodge. I contacted some of my law enforcement buddies in both Arkansas and Oklahoma. I’m surprised, and more than a little disappointed, that you didn’t think to expand your search. That would have been my first move.”
I resisted a harsher retort but not the shit-eating grin. “I guess that’s why you’re the Lead Dick, Detective.”
He bent at the waist, his nose within an inch of mine. “And don’t you forget it. I’m headed out. A look inside,” he said, indicating the folder, “chronicles similar murders within a tristate area. Bon appetite and you’re fuckin’ welcome.”
I sneered at the back of his head, which competed with an intricate spider web draped across the header as he swaggered out the door. I plied the contents from the envelope and spread them across my desk. The mugshots caught my attention first, and I separated them into groups of ten. Franklin had meticulously attached the arrest records and other pertinent information, a kind of criminal bio. I was midway through the second stack of mugshots when a chronicle of the convict’s distinguishing marks caught my attention—a crescent-moon birthmark on his right forearm, a two-inch scar on his left cheek, and a Petrine cross tattoo extending from the top of his head to the base of his skull. David Lee Snyder, twenty-nine, had spent half his life sneering at prison guards and pissing in a stainless-steel toilet. His rap sheet read like an instructional booklet on How to Fuck Up Your Life. Early on in his criminal career, he’d had to answer for multiple acts of vandalism and animal cruelty, specifically cattle mutilation. A year later, at the ripe old age of seventeen, Snyder escaped a conviction charge on two counts of criminal stalking, both women suddenly developing a case of amnesia when the time came for them to testify against him. Arrested and convicted multiple times for possession of various quantities of methamphetamines (a local gang member the suspected trafficker), the amount, not surprisingly, escalated with each arrest. Following his last apprehension, Snyder failed to evade a conviction. Because the aggravated assault occurred during a narcotic transaction and the arresting officers discovered Snyder’s twelve-inch Bowie knife, a federal judge extended him an invitation to Fort Leavenworth Prison. Handed down a sentence of ten years, Snyder served twelve, awarded two additional years for bad behavior after beating a fellow inmate to a bloody pulp.
Twisting the ends of my hair into a coiled mess, I forwent a deep dive into NCIC, mainly because I knew the National Crime Information Center had always been Franklin’s go-to information gathering source. Instead, I ran Snyder’s name through CHRI, hoping I’d be rewarded with a list of known associates. Hitting a dead-end, I exited the Criminal History Record Information site and decided to share what little information I had with O’Leary.
He answered on the first ring. I opened the conversation with the very real possibility that one of Callie Sutherland’s killers lay naked and stone cold on a slab in the Jackson County Morgue. The connection was bad due to an unexpected thunderstorm—the lights flickered on and off, golf-ball-size hailstones pummeled and pocked the metal roof, but I thought O’Leary had requested the killer’s name. I saw no reason not to share the information. His response crackled in my ear—words reduced to random syllables—following a blinding flash of pitchforked lightning. An alarming pop punctuated the perpetual hiss emanating through my earpiece, and I nearly dropped the phone. The line went dead, leaving me little choice but to wait out the storm.
An opaque wall of rain obscured everything outside the row of aged wood-framed windows, thick coats of paint failing to disguise widening weather cracks and years of structural neglect. The lights blinked off, on, then off again, and my eyes adjusted to the claustrophobic darkness instantly. The generator hummed, vibrating the building, and the lights glimmered lazily, gradually dappling the room in a despondent glow. Outside traffic lights slept, while powerlines shook in an epileptic-like frenzy. Rain swamped the squalid street as though it were a sinner afforded baptism, the oil slick beneath sheets of rainfall shimmering like glistening cellophane.
My desk phone trilled an annoying b-r-ring, and I raced from the window to answer it.
“The weather any better there?” O’Leary greeted.
“The rain’s really coming down.”
“The weather bureau just canceled the tornado warning for Cass County, but, sorry to say, they extended the one in your neck of the woods.”
The wind picked up, howling over my reply, and neighborhood debris swirled over the road. A spidery oak limb groaned then cracked and hurtled toward the window. I ducked under the desk instinctively as the impact fissured the glass and buckled the gutters.
“Detective Crenshaw?” O’Leary shouted.
“Still here,” I said, both eyes opened wide and locked on the storm.
“Maybe you should take cover.”
I choked on a laugh. “Here? That’s a fool’s errand . . . no basement. I’ll be fine. I didn’t catch your response before the line went dead earlier.”
“And I didn’t catch the name of the guy on the slab.”
“Jacob Cahill.”
He produced an anguished sigh. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“What about David Snyder?”
“Snyder . . . Snyder . . . David.” I could hear him snapping his fingers in an attempt to jog his memory. “Can’t help you there, either.”
“There’s another reason for my call. A colleague has recently provided me considerable information on convicts bearing similar tattoos. I haven’t had a chance to go through everything yet, but if there’s anything I think might be of help, I’ll make sure it reaches your desk.”
“I appreciate that. The APB I issued remains in effect, and I don’t know a detective or a beat cop who hasn’t committed the forensic sketches to memory.”
In my experience, the momentum behind an all-points bulletin was always short-lived. And renderings from a sketch artist tended to fade away much more quickly than a photograph. But because the Belton PD was a much smaller organization, the community more closely knit, it was possible the killers remained on every cop’s radar twenty-four seven.
While the storm raged north to other counties, I spent the next few hours leafing through the information acquired from Franklin. My head pounded and my eyes felt like two marbles in a sandpit. I paid particular attention to the notations regarding physical disparities, as none of the headshots captured the suspects from behind. It eventually became clear that the majority of the criminals Franklin had amassed in the file remained housed within the walls of one penitentiary or another and, therefore, couldn’t be guilty of either the Sutherland or the Jane Doe murder. I resisted a compulsion to shoot Franklin an email and thank him for wasting my time. Had he omitted the files on those behind bars, I could have wrapped up the process hours earlier. To compound my frustration, I also didn’t uncover any obvious connection between David Snyder and Jacob Cahill.
Guilt needled its way in as my gaze darted to Burke’s vacant office. Now that those involved in the sex trafficking racket were behind bars, my assignment was the unsolved gang-related homicides, not the Sutherland and Hanover cases. Regardless, I planned to shadow David Snyder at every opportunity. I searched the file for his last known address and entered the information into my cell phone. With my thoughts once again straying to Tristan and our unborn child, I needed a distraction and decided to focus my attention on the unsolved homicides Burke had assigned me.