She answered, and Whitaker said, “Hey, guys.I’m sorry to tell you this, but we have another body.Looks a lot like Hammond’s.”
Her shoulders slumped, and Marcus didn’t need to ask what happened to know.Kate lifted a trembling hand to her face.“Who?”
“Lady named Michelle Santos.She’s a nurse at Midwest Regional Hospital.Neighbor found her.Heard the smoke alarm from next door and came in to see a pot pie burnt to cinders in the oven.Michelle was lying in front of it.The oven, not the pie.Same wounds.Same weird ass symbols but this time carved into the floor next to her.”
Kate nodded.“Where was this?”
“Buffalo Grove.It’s about forty-five minutes up the lake.”
Kate sighed.They’d dropped Michael Parker off at his home a half hour ago.That meant there was no way he could be the killer.
She sighed.“Okay.Thank you.Send me the address.We’ll meet you there.”
“Sure thing.”
She hung up and passed the news along to Marcus.He listened without interruption, a wonderful skill of his that he applied even when he was royally pissed at her.When she finished, he said, “Okay.Well, Michael’s not the killer.I still want to know how he knew about the commandments, but I’ll delegate that to the police department while we go figure out what happened to… What was her name again?”
“Michelle Santos.”
“Right.”He scratched the top of his head and muttered, “What a day.”
“Worse for Michelle than for us.”
***
The mask Kate wore would stop asbestos particles from entering her lungs, or so the firefighters on scene assured her, but it did nothing to stop the acidic carbon odor of crisped pot pie, twisted aluminum, and evaporated Teflon from mixing with the metallic scent of blood to turn her stomach.
The fire was long put out, but a haze still filled the air.It lent a strange combative aspect to the scene, as though Kate had come across a fallen soldier rather than a murdered nurse.
“Christ, what a mess,” Whitaker remarked.“Killer could have at least turned the oven off.”
“I think the six pints of blood soaking into the floor might be a little more problematic than smoke dust,” Marcus said.
Michelle Santos had indeed vacated all of her blood.She lay face down on the floor, allowing every ounce of the fluid to escape through the hole in her chest.It occurred to her that she hadn’t asked the ME about the murder weapon yet.She made a note to call after she was done here.
In the meantime, she studied their newest victim.Santos was in her mid-forties, of a sturdy build with strong forearms and thick thighs.Her chestnut brown hair was cut into a shorter style, not Pixie cut and not Karen chic but somewhere in between.She was barefoot but still wore her scrubs.
“Same thing,” Whitaker said, gesturing at the body.“Stabbed through the heart.Pretty much says everything.”
“How did the killer enter?”
“Neighbor says the back door was unlocked when she came over.”
“Have we confirmed her alibi?”
“We’ve confirmed that she can’t stand straight without her walker.That good enough?”
Marcus nodded.“Okay, so we have a real estate baron accused of murdering his partner.Any reason why a nurse might have been offed?”
Kate grimaced.“Do you have to talk like that?”
“Right now?Yeah, I do.I’m mad.Talking like this helps when I’m mad.”
“All right.”
Whitaker shook his head.“I assume the killer thinks she killed someone too?”
Kate glanced at the cipher scrawled into the fake wood flooring.The top line here, as at Hammond’s scene, was THO*U SHAULT TPHOT KEUL.
