"He cut it out of her, he cut it out of her, he cut it out…"
Kate sighed.She gave Jenna a sympathetic smile, then got to her feet and addressed the officer.“Call a paramedic van to take her to the hospital.She needs to be observed.”
The officer nodded.“Poor kid.Probably never seen anything like that before.Hell,Iain’t never seen anything like that before.”
Kate, unfortunately, had.She gave the officer her business card.“Leave that with the hospital and tell them it goes with Jenna, and she’s to call me when she’s ready to talk.”
The officer took the card and nodded.“Sure.Good luck, Special Agent.God knows you’ll need it.”
He sat with Jenna while he called for the ambulance.The shaking and muttering didn’t pause.
Rivera glanced at her and swallowed.Seeing someone affected that badly was sometimes more disturbing than the actual crime scene.He recovered quickly, though."So, the security officer for the building heard Miss Fritz screaming.Lobby security camera shows him jogging out of the lobby toward the office.He looks through the window, and she comes sprinting out, screaming, 'He cut it out of her!'Goes inside to investigate and sees the crime scene.Calls the police.The police get here three minutes later, confirm the MO matches our guy, then call the Field Office.They page me, I get you two, and here we are."
“Was anyone else in the building besides Miss Fritz, Dr.Hammond, and the security officer?”
“Couple other security officers on floors four and seven.Shortly after the ground floor guy responds, we see them heading for elevators and coming downstairs, so he must have called them after he talked to the police.”
Kate nodded.She glanced through the open door of Dr.Hammond's office and saw Marcus moving around, taking pictures, and looking for evidence.He still wore the scowl he had coming into the office.
“I want security footage for the whole building,” she told Rivera.
“The cameras covering the first-floor offices, the rear entrance, and the parking garage were all disabled,” Rivera informed her.“The killer cased this place out well.”
Kate sighed.“I also want the security guards interviewed.Any reason they’re still not here?”
“PD said they confirmed their alibis.The security footage from the second floor and the first-floor lobby seems to corroborate that they weren’t here at the time of the murders.”
“Interview them anyway.They might have heard a noise and dismissed it or remembered someone notable, someone who didn’t sit right.”
Intuition was a powerful and underrated tool in investigations.Most ordinary people couldn’t fathom real violence, but they retained the instinctual fear of danger.Most of those prickles were dismissed, but when violence did occur, the brain took a snapshot of the information and remembered it in case the danger was encountered again.
Rivera nodded.“Right.I’ll get that started.”He glanced through the door of the office.“Can’t say I’m jealous that he gets to look at that.”
“I don’t know if I would say he ‘gets’ to look at it.”
“Exactly my point.”
Rivera left the office in a hurry, eager to rid his nostrils of the scent of blood.Maybe the smears of blue-white light outside would scrub the sensation from his mind.
Kate joined Marcus in the office.She wasn’t particularly eager to see what was waiting in there either, but she didn’t have anything else to do, and she didn’t want to get into the habit of avoiding Marcus each time they argued.They’d have to be partners even if their relationship didn’t work out, and she didn’t want any wounds between them to harden into scars.
A cipher was inscribed on the coffee table in the center of the office, in between the chaise lounge on which Dr.Hammond lay and the matching high-backed chair where she would have sat when talking to patients.
She looked at the body of Dr.Patricia Hammond and frowned slightly when she found the sight less shocking than the scene in the Carlton’s home.She didn’t like to think that she could become desensitized.Then again, being sensitive to what she was witnessing might just leave her catatonic like Jenna Fritz.
“I followed up on Sterling,” Marcus volunteered.“He was in court up until ten minutes ago.Couldn’t have been him.”
Kate nodded.Her eyes took in Dr.Hammond’s wide, frozen eyes and distended toothy grin.The doctor was in her late forties or maybe well-preserved early fifties.Her hair was brown but graying at the roots, and her body type was what Kate thought of as pleasantly plump.The laugh lines at the corners of her mouth had hardened to waxy canyons.
The rest of her was limp.In fact, as Kate looked more closely at Hammond's face, she saw it wasn't set with rigor but rather flattened, as though the killer had held her face still probably while they were cutting her throat out.
Kate wondered if that was what Jenna was referring to.Her eyes drifted to the gaping rawness in between Dr.Hammond's legs, and she decided Jenna probably wasn't talking about Hammond's throat.
At least our killer is consistent.
“Do you remember her name from the list?”Kate asked.
“No,” Marcus replied curtly.“She wasn’t on the list.”
Kate met his eyes.“Not at all?”
“Not at all.I spent the entire day going over that list with a fine-toothed comb.Dr.Patricia Hammond never once attended one of the Carlton’s parties.It’s not clear if they even knew each other.”
Kate looked back at the mutilated therapist.Her stomach was finally turning.
If Hammond wasn’t on the list, that meant the killer wasn’t just targeting the Carlton’s network.That meant that they had no idea who the next victim might be.
It was a safe bet that whoever they were, the killer wouldn’t give them long to repent before they took God’s judgment into their own hands once again.
