Jo Robertson - The Avenger

"What's a federal cold case got to do with my office?"

"We have intelligence that our killer might've run to ground in this area."

"Out of fifty states and thousands of counties, you think he's holed up in mine?" Slater lifted both brows and lazily rested his chin in his large hand.

Jack opened his mouth to explain, but the insistent buzzing of the phone stopped him.

"Hold on." Slater lifted one finger in the air and punched the speaker button. "What's wrong now, Connie?"

"Dispatch reports a 187 at North Shore, about a half mile past marker 19, two hundred yards from the water."

"Harris?"

"Yep, got him on the other line."

"Patch him through," the Sheriff instructed, looking at Jack with mild curiosity.

The voice came through the speaker phone, tinny, but deep. "Harris, here, Sheriff. Got a nude body off the highway, laying behind a log near the shore, female, possibly African-American."

"Say again. Possibly?"

"Yes sir, body's badly beaten. Can't be sure."

Jack went very still, all senses on full alert. This time as the headache slammed into him, he managed to control the pain of it. Still, the sounds of crushing bone and spattered blood echoed in his ears. Cries, young female cries, and the whimpers of fear and desperation, terror and pleading.

He smelled the bone, heard the blood, felt the cries. Mismatches, he thought, and battled back the sensory overload.

"Goddammit," Slater muttered. "I'll be there in forty." He depressed the call button. "Conn, get the techs out there ASAP." He slammed the phone back in its cradle.

Not possible, Jack thought, at the same time he mentally calculated the distance between the Utah border, where the fourth body was found, and northern California. It was his man. He felt it in his bones. Pulling out the notepad where he'd taken notes on Olivia's student, he read his own broad scrawl. Keisha Johnson, five foot two inches, African American-Islander, nineteen.

Shit!

Slater watched Jack's movement as he reached for his jacket.

When he reached the office door, Jack stood. "Mind if I tag along?"

Slater lifted his broad shoulders. "Why the hell not?"

A little less than an hour later, Jack and Slater stared down at the mass of bloody flesh nestled in the brush around North Shore, the California side of Lake Tahoe. A tall, burly deputy crouched beside the body, looking pale beneath his dusty black skin.

"Bus is on the way," Slater said to his deputy, his gray eyes unreadable. "How'd you come on it?"

Harris pointed to the square of red fabric flapping in the cool morning breeze. It was virtually unnoticeable from the highway. "That caught my attention and I pulled off to investigate, climbed down to the rock by the shore."

"Damn good eye," Slater complimented.

The headache remained, but Jack couldn't feel the screams and wails up here, this close to the body. It was like the victim could rest now that she'd been found. He turned toward the peaceful, clear waters of the Lake Tahoe for a moment and then looked down at the body again.

The small mangled flesh was a dusty pink, a hue that might've begun as scarlet and was now pretty enough for a little girl's bedroom. If you didn't look at the tangled pieces of bone and flesh along the length of the body. The Dead Language Killer's handiwork, he was sure of it.

Harris had secured the scene, although on this section of the lake not a soul was around. Then he'd walked out a second, larger perimeter down to the lake shore, which consisted of brush and rock and very little sand on this side of Tahoe.

Slater stepped under the yellow crime scene tape of both perimeters and squatted down to examine the body. He snapped on disposable latex gloves. "Be sure to get close-ups of the head and chest areas, Waylon. See this indentation?" He indicated the right side of the smashed head which faced them.

"Yes sir. You think it was a fall?" Harris looked back toward the road. "She took a tumble down the embankment?"

Not a fall, Jack thought. The body looked like raw meat, something off the butcher's block, deliberately executed, not accidental. He ducked under the tape and pointed toward several pulpy sections of the torso. "What about these?"

"I'm thinking blunt force trauma," Slater said. "See these fragments? Slivers of wood."

"Somebody beat her with a wooden stick?" Shock registered on Harris' young face.

"I'd guess a hard wooden object, maybe a baseball bat or hockey stick." Jack moved down the torso to the legs. Under the mass of flesh and gore, the legs lay at an unnatural angle.

"Legs are broken," Slater said.

"Yeah," Jack said, but there was no satisfaction in his voice. He rose and dusted off the knees of his pants. "Looks like somebody beat the hell out of her."

Harris took a deep breath and ventured a quick look at Slater. "She hasn't been dead long. The blood's partially congealed, and she's African-American cause of the hair. It's kinky."

Jack lifted his brows and shifted his eyes to the deputy's closely cropped head. Harris smiled, rubbing his palm over the wiry bristles. "Mine grew out, you'd see what I mean. And I think under all the… stuff, the skin tone's darker than a white person."

"He killed her here." Jack pointed to the ground. "Blood loss is too great."

"Looks like the killer went nuts and kept on smacking at her," Harris added.

Slater looked around. "How'd she get here?"

Harris frowned. "Someone drove her?"

"Doesn't make sense," Slater muttered. "Why would somebody go to the trouble of taking a naked girl way up here and beat her to death? Where are her clothes?"

"Forced her to disrobe?" Harris asked. "Took the clothes?"

Slater grunted.

"This looks like a crime of passion," Jack observed, "but – "

Slater finished the thought. "It has all the earmarks of carefully planned, premeditated murder."

Jack was pretty sure he knew who had done the planning.

On the way back down the mountain Jack made a pitch for joint jurisdiction even though he didn't need to be diplomatic.

"Why do the feds want to get in on a local matter?" Slater's arm rested lightly over the top of the steering wheel and his voice was mild as if he were talking about the weather.

"We've got lots of resources, manpower, databases. We could be very useful."

"That's assuming this case and yours are connected."

"Look, we need local cooperation to move ahead on our case and your dead body might be connected to it."

Slater drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and slanted a stubborn glance at Jack. "And if not, what then? Are you going to pull those resources out?"

Jack warned himself that Slater, in spite of his easy-going demeanor, was no fool. He tried another tactic. "I don't mean to step on your toes, but I'll be honest with you. We've ground to a halt in our investigation, gave up hope of finding the suspect."

"You sure it's the same one?"

Jack nodded. "Why don't you take a look at my files when we get back to the office? Maybe you'll see something I missed."

Slater shrugged noncommittally, but Jack saw the quick flash of interest in his gray eyes. He was on board whether he knew it or not. All they needed now was a quick identification of the body. Jack would lay odds it was Olivia's missing student. His gut told him so, but he didn't relish breaking the news to her.

They rode back to the courthouse in silence. Jack wanted to mention Olivia, but didn't. Did Slater know she was teaching at the university, part of his jurisdiction? Had he kept in touch with her through the years? Jack felt on the edge of some bizarre reunion, the three of them back together again.

Slater tagged Connie on their way into his office. "Could you bring us two coffees?" He raised his eyebrows at Jack.