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I groaned. “First of all, please don’t call this sicko my guy. Second, we don’t know if he selects his victims at random. I have no third point, but it always sounds better if there are three things to bring up.”
Rayesh laughed at my tired old joke. She said, “I’d still like you to take a look at this crime scene and give me your thoughts.”
“Is it bad?”
Rayesh shrugged. “There’s a dead girl inside. That’s always bad. But I’ve seen worse.”
That surprised me. The murder cases we were investigating all had shocking crime scenes, all the same kind of blood-soaked mess, which was part of why they all pointed to being the work of a single killer. But after I followed Rayesh through the checkpoints to Marilyn Shaw’s second-floor apartment, I agreed that this one could have been worse. Yet she was also right about the similarities.
The body of a young woman with blond hair lay on the floor near the front door. She’d been stabbed in the chest. The entire front of her white blouse was stained a rust color.
“Looking at the body, it appears the killer stabbed her as soon as she opened the door. Then he stabbed her again in the eye,” Rayesh said, pointing to the woman’s right eye. “It has to be the same guy.” A small pool of blood and fluid had dried on the hardwood floor where the victim’s disfigured face rested.
I looked around the apartment. The murderer’s MO ticked the same boxes, but the scene seemed…off. It was too clean, too undisturbed. It was clear that the killer had spent a lot of time at all the other scenes—this one felt more perfunctory. Had he been interrupted?
It would take time and forensics to compare all of the evidence, but my gut was telling me something was wrong here. “I don’t know, Raina. Something about the scene as a whole feels different,” I told her. “I’m not sensing the method behind the murder. There’s no blood spread on the walls. I don’t see anything else disturbed. This killer I’m tracking, he’s deliberately messy. He’s into grotesque displays, throwing around a lot of blood, the dramatic way he always stabs all his victims in the left eye, and so on. This seems almost tidy by comparison,” I said, shaking my head.
“Back up a second,” Rayesh said. “Which eye?”
“The left one. Always the left eye.”
“Well, Marilyn Shaw’s right eye is the one he stabbed this time.”
Why had the killer made a change? Was he trying to taunt us?
What was it about the Staten Island case that made me so uneasy?
Chapter 27
It was after lunch by the time I got back to the office. The Staten Island crime scene still bothered me. Not the way Elaine Anastas’s had, with the blood and gore, but because of the subtle changes in the killer’s procedure.
The blotter on my desk was bloodstained. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. All the bloody crime scenes I had visited were finally messing with my head.
I used the end of a pen to touch a droplet of blood. It was fresh. I looked at the floor and saw another drop a few feet away. I followed the drops like an old tracker and was not the least bit surprised when they led me to Brett Hollis.
I stood next to my young partner’s desk, staring at his bandaged nose. It looked a little worse today, even though it was healing, since now he had two black eyes to go with it.
I said, “What were you doing at my desk?”
“What makes you think I was at your desk?”
I gave him a look and pointed at his own desk, which was speckled with a design of tiny red drops that looked like the solar system.
Hollis quickly touched his nose, then looked down at the blood on the end of his finger. He mumbled, “Shit.” Then he looked at me and sai
d, “I was reading some of the reports that came in to you from San Francisco. I’ve also been searching the internet for similar cases, like the ones we found in Atlanta.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Just that there may have been an uptick in unsolved, brutal homicides in major cities. The kind of homicides that aren’t obviously related to the drug business or classified as crimes of passion. It doesn’t take a whole lot of murders like that to raise the average in the whole country. That’s why I think it’s significant. But I can’t say for sure the homicides are related to our cases.”
I nodded. This kid was showing some real signs of creativity and intelligence. I could work with that.
Before I could even make it back to my desk, I noticed Dr. Jill St. Pierre barreling through the office at the only speed she knew: fast. The Haitian-born forensic scientist had been profiled by New York magazine for her brilliance in the lab. I’d worked with her—I didn’t need to read an article to know how smart she was.
She smiled as she approached and said, “Being engaged agrees with you, Bennett.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but any benefit I’ve gotten from being engaged has been negated by these homicides. Please tell me you have something for us, that you didn’t come all the way uptown to compliment me.”
