Ted Dekker: The Bride Collector

Brad would have preferred to spend more time alone with the victim, but the opportunity had passed. “No ID. Discovered an hour ago by two teenagers.”

They stared in a moment of silence.

“She’s beautiful,” Kim said.

“Yes.”

“This makes four.”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

The pathologist approached opposite Nikki, who remained quiet, lost in thought as she studied the body with searching eyes.

Kim sank to one heel and gently lifted the woman’s toes for a better view under the foot. “Care to tell us how you think it happened before I begin my preliminary examination?”

He wasn’t ready, of course, not yet, not without a complete analysis of evidence still to be gathered. But he’d been credited with an uncanny ability to accurately judge events from the thinnest of evidentiary threads. He’d cracked three major cases in the Four Corners region since leaving Miami and joining the Denver field office a year ago. At thirty-two years of age, he was on the fast track for high ground-much higher ground, according to his superiors.

But unlike them, his motivation had nothing to do with climbing an organizational ladder.

“Male, size eleven by the shoe prints. They were here for a while, maybe a day…”

“How so?” Nikki asked.

A distant murmur carried to him: an officer speaking to the curious driver of an approaching car outside, instructing him to head back to the main road. The roof over their heads ticked as it began to cool in the late afternoon.

“That smell. It’s baked beans. He was hungry, so he ate. You won’t find the can. He wouldn’t leave any DNA evidence in here.”

“She was alive when he brought her here?”

“Yes. And he killed her like the others, by draining her blood from her heels. No struggle. A tarp under the table caught most of the trace evidence-bodily fluids, skin cells, hair. He was careful not to use too much force, keeping her on the edge of control and submission. She was lying prone, sedated, conscious and fully aware when he numbed her heels and drilled up into them. He was forced to clean up the blood on the table and floor where it ran off the tarp. Then he sealed the wounds, lifted her into position, held her long enough for the glue on her shoulder blades to cure on the wall, reopened the wounds on each heel, and watched her blood drain into a three-gallon bucket.”

All of this, Brad had guessed from the markings on the table and floor, the ring from the bucket beneath the woman’s heels, and the lack of bruising. The physical evidence had painted a picture in his mind as clearly as if he were staring at a Rembrandt.

“He did it out of respect, not rage,” Brad said.

“Love,” Nikki said.

He nodded, even willing to go that far. “Love.”

“Both heel wounds are plugged with the same fleshy putty we found on the other three,” Kim said, standing. “And what kind of love is this?”

“The groom’s love,” Brad said, savoring his response.

Special Agent Frank Closkey spoke from the door. “Sir?”

Brad held up his hand without looking back. “Give us a few more minutes, Frank.”

The agent retreated.

Kim continued her initial examination, gently prodding the woman’s flesh, checking her eyes, lifting her hair, inspecting the backs of her shoulders. But Brad already knew what she would find.

The question was, Why? What motivated the Bride Collector? How did he make his selections? What good or evil did he think he was doing? What had been done to him to motivate his taking of life in such a manner? Who had he decided to kill next? When would he take her?

Where was he now?

The questions spun through Brad’s mind as one, yet distinguishable. Some were clearer than others, but all whispered from beyond, tempting him to listen because each question already contained an answer. He simply had to find it and unpack it.

Nikki paced with one arm pressed against her belly, the other propping up her chin. It struck him that like her, two of the victims had been brunettes. Like her, all four had beautiful complexions.

What would enter the killer’s mind if he were staring at Nikki through a hole in the wall at this moment? Brad pushed back a fleeting impulse to check the wall behind them to see if there might indeed be a hole, filled with a single eye peering in at them.

Instead, he let his eyes wander over Nikki-her calves well defined beneath the hem of the black skirt. Her wavy long hair cascading on her shoulders, her eyes bright with question. Her forefinger absently brushing full lips. A perfectly symmetrical face.

Would the killer feel any desire?

No. No it wasn’t desire, was it? She was beautiful, but beautiful women filled the world. Something else drew the Bride Collector, in the same way that something else was drawing Brad now, though he had a difficult time putting a finger on it.

Of the numerous women he’d dated over the past ten years, only four relationships had lasted two months or more, each ending sooner than the previous one. Nikki had once accused him of playing the role of bad boy. He thought picky was a better label. He had taste, after all.

After what he’d been through, he needed to be picky.

Nikki was thirty-one, married once at age nineteen, divorced six months later. She held her doctorate in psychology from CSU. Highly intelligent, witty, reduced to deep introspection by scenes that left most people heaving.

This would excite the killer, wouldn’t it? And if Nikki came on to the killer, would that excite him?

No, Brad thought.

“He would like you,” Brad said.

Nikki glanced back at him, arm still around her waist. “Excuse me?”

He caught himself. This was one of those frequent times when honesty might not be so wise.

“I was just thinking that he liked her. You. That is, speaking to the victim. He. He would like you, meaning he would like her.”

Kim saved him. “Speaking to cadavers now, Brad? Don’t worry, I do it all the time.”

“You were looking at me when you said it,” Nikki said.

“So I was. I tend to do that.”

“What, stare at women? Or specifically at me?”

“Both, on occasion.”

A faint smile turned the corners of her mouth up. She winked. Not a full wink, but the movement in her right eyelid was unmistakable. Or was it?

Nikki turned to face the wall, leaving Brad to feel somewhat dirty. In an attempt to help the woman on the wall, he’d somehow violated her privacy. Yet her story was still unknown and demanded respect.

Silence. Remorse. Shame.

“Sir?” Frank’s voice intruded again.

Brad turned from the wall and walked to the door. “Bring the team in. Photograph every inch, dust every exposed surface. Blood, sweat, spittle, hair; bag and tag the air if you have to. I want preliminaries from the lab this evening.”

“Um… It’s getting late. I don’t-”

“He’s staring through a peephole at another woman already, Frank. We have less than a week to stop him from showing that woman his love. Preliminaries tonight.”

Brad left the shack thinking he might have chosen better words to express the urgency burning across his nervous system.

FBI FIELD OFFICE, Stout Street, Denver, 9:00 PM.

Nikki Holden stood next to Brad beside the stainless-steel examination table in the basement morgue. Watching Kim gingerly turn the body onto its back, she noted the pathologist’s care not to disturb the shoulder-blade skin they’d cut to release it from the wall.

The victim was a twenty-one-year-old named Caroline Redik. The name had surfaced when the lab ran her prints through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, better known by its acronym, AFIS. The ever-expanding database now included anyone who’d applied for a passport, which Caroline had done before taking a trip to Paris one year earlier, for reasons yet unknown.