AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dvornic hesitated, then nodded. He’d obviously moved on quickly from the museum.
But it was an alibi, one that would be easy for them to check. One that would make it impossible for him to be the murderer. Paige felt a wave of disappointment flooding through her.
She was still thinking about that when Detective Basman’s phone went off. He answered, even though they were still in the middle of the interrogation room.
“Yes, what is it? What? When? Ok, we’ll be right over.”
“What is it?” Paige asked him.
The tension on Basman’s face gave her a clue as to what he was about to say.
“There’s another body.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Step back! All of you step back!”
Around Paige, the local PD were trying to push back reporters and bystanders from the cordoned off limits of the crime scene, looking harassed as they did it as if they weren’t used to managing this kind of situation. But then, it was a small town. They probably didn’t get that many murders.
Paige headed up to the crime scene tape with Christopher and Detective Basman. The cop keeping people out looked relieved to see them as if expecting everything to get a lot easier now that they were here. Paige wished that she could promise that would be the case.
“What do we have, Kirby?” Basman asked. He obviously knew the officer in question.
“A woman was found by a passerby maybe a half hour back,” the uniformed officer replied. “The same as the first two. We’ve tried to contain the scene since then, but there are a lot of people trying to get close. The coroner’s people are in there now, along with a CSI team.”
Meaning that they didn’t really know anything yet because the whole thing was too recent.
“We should get in there,” Christopher said. “Maybe with a more recent crime scene, we can find something to work with.”
Paige nodded and stepped past the crime scene tape, stepping into the newest murder site. She braced herself for the moment when she would see the body, but even so, it was hard.
A woman who had to be in her early forties dangled almost as if being cradled by an invisible hand in a web of ropes that hung from a bracket set into the back wall of the café.
The victim was blonde and wearing a dress that looked designed to make a statement, so brightly colored and old fashioned that it might have come from a hundred years ago. Paige found herself wondering if the killer had started to dress his victims, except that didn’t fit with either of the other murders. The victim had sharp features that would have looked distinguished if not for the way she was displayed. Even from where she was, Paige could see the stab wounds on the front of the victim’s body, pointing to the same method of killing.
The first thing Paige noticed was that it was another killing right off the boardwalk, in a small courtyard behind a café that still offered a glimpse out towards the ocean. It was a little further along the boardwalk than before, but that link was still there.
“Do you have officers patrolling the boardwalk?” she asked Detective Basman.
“Some,” the detective replied. “But the chief of police and the mayor have both made it clear that too many cops make it look like we’re panicking. They say it’s bad for business.”
“And having people killed along your boardwalk isn’t?” Christopher asked.
“Hey, I’m just repeating what they’re saying. I’m not saying that I agree with it. But I’m not the one with the power to put cops on every inch of the boardwalk.”
Paige doubted that it would help. If the killer saw cops everywhere, he might stop for a while, but the moment he saw an opportunity, he would strike again.
For now, arguments over the numbers of cops on the beat didn’t matter. What mattered was the body of a middle-aged woman dangling in the middle of the courtyard, hanging from a decorative bracket like a marionette. It was almost as if she was lying down, her arms dangling behind her towards the ground and her hair falling free as her head lolled back.
Paige felt a familiar sense of horror at seeing a murder victim like that and had to fight to push it back. As much as her mind threatened to drag her back to when she’d been a fourteen-year-old finding her father’s body, this victim needed her to stay in the here and now. Paige had to stay focused if she was going to be able to catch the killer who had done this.
“The killer must have picked the spot beforehand,” Paige said. “Otherwise, he couldn’t have known that it would be deserted.”
“Or he just followed his victim until he found a spot that was quiet enough,” Christopher argued.
That didn’t work for Paige, though. “If it were just the murder, then maybe, but this whole thing of setting the scene like this? That took time. He had to know that he wouldn’t be disturbed for it.”
“Or he’s had enough practice that he worked quickly.”
