Allison Brennan - Kiss Me, Kill Me

Girls like you …

Had someone spoken? Was it in her head? Unsteady on her feet, for a second she feared she’d faint. She turned and walked toward the warehouse, but she couldn’t see well. Everything was blurry.

Don’t you dare, bitch .

Kirsten bolted at the rough whisper. She ran straight ahead, not knowing where she was going except away from Jessie’s body. The voice wasn’t real, couldn’t be, because she didn’t see anyone, only a shadow. Still, she ran as fast as she could. Her heels caught on the cracked cement and she almost fell hard, but she caught herself and took off her shoes and resumed running as fast as she could. Away from the warehouse, away from Jessie.

Jessie had texted her. She’d called her Ash.

Maybe it wasn’t Jessie who sent her that message.

Someone had been waiting for Ashleigh . Whoever had killed Jessie planned to kill her, too.

Her feet ached, viciously cut on the crumbly asphalt and broken glass. She ran until she saw a small grouping of cars. Maybe she could hide there. Maybe someone had left the keys. She just wanted to go home …

She saw someone just sitting in the passenger seat of a small SUV. She didn’t know if anyone was really following her, but she quickly glanced over her shoulder. No one. But she’d heard the voice! Hadn’t she? Oh, God, she couldn’t think!

Girls like you …

Hearing the voice again, she stumbled and fell, cutting her knees and the palms of her hands. Tears ran down her face.

What was she going to do? Jessie was dead.

Someone was running behind her. Or coming right at her. Kirsten was dizzy and couldn’t think. She scrambled to her feet and tried to run again, but the excruciating pain in her feet brought her back down to the cement.

There was no escape.

As the cold wind whipped around her, FBI agent Suzanne Madeaux lifted the corner of the yellow crime-scene tarp covering the dead girl and swore under her breath.

Jane Doe was somewhere between sixteen and twenty, her blond hair streaked with pink highlights. The teenager’s party dress was also pink, and Suzanne absently wondered if she changed her highlights to match her outfit. There was no outward sign of sexual assault or an apparent cause of death. Still, there was no doubt that this was another victim of the killer Suzanne had been tasked to stop.

Jane Doe wore only one shoe.

Dropping the tarp, Suzanne surveyed the scene, trying in vain to keep her long, dark-blond hair out of her face. The relentless wind howled across the cracked, weed-infested parking lot of the abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. It had also felled a couple of trees nearby; small branches and sticks skittered across the pavement. That wind most likely had destroyed any evidence not inside Jane Doe’s body.

Though the corpse didn’t appear to be intentionally hidden, waist-high weeds and a small building that had once housed a generator or dumpsters concealed her from any passerby’s cursory glance. Suzanne stepped away from the squat structure and looked across the Upper Bay. The tiny Gowanus Bay was to the north, the New Jersey skyline to the west. At night, it would be kind of pretty out here with the city lights across the water, if it weren’t so friggin’ cold.

A plainclothes NYPD cop approached with a half-smile that Suzanne wouldn’t call friendly. “If it ain’t Mad Dog Madeaux. We heard this was one of yours.”

Suzanne rolled her eyes. Even with her eyes closed, she’d recognize Joey Hicks by his grating, intentionally exaggerated New York accent.

“No secret,” she said, making notes to avoid conversation. Hicks wasn’t much older than she. Physically fit, he probably thought he was good-looking, considering the swagger. She supposed he had some appeal, but the cocky “all Feds are assholes” attitude he’d displayed the first time they’d met on a murder case had landed him on Suzanne’s permanent shit list years ago.

She looked around for his supervisor, but didn’t see Vic Panetta. She’d much rather deal with the senior detective, whom she liked. “Who found the body?” Suzanne asked.

“Security guard.”

“What’s his story?”

“Found her on his morning rounds, about five-thirty.”

It was eleven now. “Why hasn’t the body been taken to the morgue?”

“No wagon available. Coroner is on the way. Another hour, they say. NYPD doesn’t have the resources you Feds got.”

She ignored the slight. “What was the guard doing here last night? Does he patrol more than one building?”

“Yeah.” Hicks looked at his notes. Though Suzanne didn’t like him, he was a decent cop. “He clocked in at four a.m. for a twelve-hour shift. Rotates between vacant properties throughout Sunset Park and around the bay. Says he doesn’t stick to a specific schedule, ’cause vandals watch for that.”

“What about the night guard?”

“Night is either Thompson or Bruzzini. According to the day shift, Bruzzini is a slacker.”

“I need their contact information.” She hesitated. Then-remembering her boss’s command to be more collegial to NYPD-she added, “I appreciate your help.”

“Did hell freeze over since the last time we worked a case?” Hicks laughed. “I’ll get Panetta; I’m sure he’ll want to at least make a show of fighting for jurisdiction.” He left, still grinning.

Suzanne ignored him. There were no jurisdictional issues-after the third similar murder, an FBI-NYPD task force had been formed. Her supervisor was administratively in charge, and she was the FBI point person on the case. Panetta was the senior ranking NYPD detective.

Tired of her hair flying in her face, Suzanne pulled a N.Y. Mets cap from her pocket and stuffed under it as much of her thick, tangled mess as possible. In her small notepad, she finished writing down her observations and the few facts she knew.

This victim, the fourth, was the first found in Brooklyn. Victim number one, a college freshman, had been killed up in Harlem on a street popular with squatters and the party crowd because every building was boarded up. That had been the eve of Halloween. The second victim had been discovered on the south side of the Bronx, ironically overlooking Rikers Island, on January second. The third victim-the one who brought the attention of the FBI to the serial murders-had been killed in Manhattanville, near Columbia University, eighteen days ago. By the time the task force was put together and evidence shared, for all practical purposes Suzanne had been working the case for less than two weeks.

Besides the one missing shoe and the age of the victims-all adult females under twenty-one-two other commonalities stood out: the victims had been suffocated with a plastic bag that the killer took with him, and they’d each been killed near an abandoned building with evidence of a recent party.

Secret or underground parties were nothing new. Some were relatively innocent, with drinking, dance music, and recreational drugs, while others were far wilder. Raves in the United States had started in Brooklyn in the abandoned underground railroad tunnels, and while they still existed, they’d peaked in popularity a while back. The new fad was sex parties with heavy drinking and hard-core drugs. Music and dancing were precursors to multi-partner anonymous sex. Even before these murders, there had been several drug-related deaths associated with sex parties. If the pattern held true, evidence inside this warehouse would show that this Jane Doe had participated in the latter type of party, which Detective Panetta called “extreme raves.”

The press had dubbed the killer the Cinderella Strangler when someone in the know had leaked the missing-shoe detail to the press. It may not have been a cop who had talked-there were dozens of people working any one crime scene-but most likely it had come from inside the NYPD. The press didn’t seem to care that the victims weren’t strangled-they were asphyxiated. The Cinderella Asphyxiator just didn’t sound as good on the eleven o’clock news.