Ted Dekker: The Bride Collector

Calm and delicate, Kim labored with a plastic face shield in place. Not much could ruffle the forty-three-year-old. She was as comfortable dipping her hand into a bloody gunshot wound as, when it mattered, peeling back the layers of society’s skin with a well-placed question. She kept her blond hair short. Easier to keep out of the way. If there was a mother in the office, it was Kim. Her manner created an interesting but somehow fitting contrast with her well-known love for a smorgasbord of men.

Nikki turned her attention back to the body. The skin was very pale, translucent, showing the blue veins beneath. She lay prone, looking like a dressmaker’s dummy, displaying perfectly formed breasts, a flat belly, and well-defined hips. Nikki found her rather bony, actually. While affixed to the wall, her flesh had settled over her bones and given her a less emaciated appearance. On her back, however, she looked quite gaunt.

The eyes stared up at the ceiling, blue but lifeless. Her makeup was far more obvious under the bright halogen lights than it had been before the evidence team illuminated the shack. The eyeliner and eye shadow had been carefully applied, evidence of a steady, experienced hand. Was the killer a cosmetologist? Or a drag queen, even? Nikki could just see vertical streaks running down from the corners of her eyes and ruining the perfect surface, as if poor Caroline had cried before the final application.

Nikki recalled a memory of her father holding her shoulders when she was twelve. He’d knelt and brushed a tear from her right cheek, where a dime-size birthmark had once darkened her skin. “You are beautiful, Nikki, and your birthmark makes you even more beautiful. You don’t need to cover it up. And if the boys don’t see that, it’s only because they’re foolish, prepubescent puppets of the system.” Then he’d kissed her on the cheek.

The memory still brought a tightness to her throat, maybe because his noble ideals hadn’t really survived him. She’d had the brown mark surgically removed when she was eighteen.

If she had it to do over again, would she remove it today?

“… drugs in her system,” Kim was saying. “Benzodiazepine, the same psychoactive sedative he’s used on all four. More than enough to make her susceptible to suggestion.”

“No sign of sexual contact?” Brad said.

“None.”

Nikki caught Brad’s sharp look. “That doesn’t mean this wasn’t a sexual act,” she interjected.

He offered her a slight nod. Just that, a simple gesture of acknowledgment and appreciation for her input. Funny how he could lighten her mood without the slightest knowledge of his overall effect on her.

The other women in the office insisted he was a dead ringer for a blond-headed George Clooney, ten years younger, perhaps. She could see the similarities. The dark, perpetually smiling eyes, probing deep. The short hair, the soft boyish face, slightly elongated. The quintessential look of a perfect gentleman reinforced by his often thoughtful and polite demeanor.

But her closer working relationship had taught her that those qualities didn’t make Brad a soft or pliable man. If anything, his edges were rougher than they first appeared. Clean on the outside, giving great attention to detail, but confident enough to say what was on his mind whenever he saw fit.

His unapologetic talent for drawing women with his boyish good looks and strong conviction was tempered only by his notorious refusal to commit. Which, in turn, made him a considerable mystery.

To Nikki’s way of thinking, he carried all the markings of a man with a past so deeply scarred that he was compelled to build walls of self-preservation. Which was why she had resisted her own attraction to him for so long. Even if he was interested in her, as she suspected, she wasn’t sure she was interested in a man she couldn’t quite peg. As a psychologist, it was her job to analyze people down to their uttermost depths. The fact that she could not do so with Brad nagged her with an unshakable sense of wariness.

His eyes were soft and kind, but what lay hidden behind those eyes gave her pause. The unknown. She’d misjudged a man once before and wasn’t eager to do it again. Her training in behavioral science hadn’t made her any more trusting.

“He wouldn’t grow impatient,” she said. “He would relish his time with her.”

Another nod, this time looking at the cadaver. “He would.”

Kim looked up, then turned to the victim’s other side and dramatically ran her index finger over the foot, tracing each toe. Always one for theatrics when the opportunity presented itself.

“She took care of her feet. The toenail polish is fresh, applied in the last twenty-four hours. But she’s taken care of her feet, her whole body for that matter, for a long time.”

“He likes to apply makeup and give pedicures,” Nikki said.

A half-inch hole, now bloodless and black, ran up into the heel. “He used the same half-inch bit size, maybe the same bit. Ran it directly through the skin, the calcaneus bone, severing the peroneus longus tendon, and into the anterior tibial artery. Everything’s as it was with the other three, except for this.” Kim traced her finger down to the victim’s right heel. “This is what’s new.”

She picked up a small roll of bloody paper, maybe two inches long, and held it up between her thumb and forefinger. “This time he left this in the right heel.”

Brad stepped forward. “Writing?”

“I can see some markings, yes. But I haven’t unrolled it yet. I thought you would want a look before I sent it up to the lab.”

Brad’s face lightened a shade.

The killer had left them a message.

SPECIAL AGENT IN Charge James Temple sat against the edge of the secretary desk on the conference room’s north end and gazed at them with brown, glassy eyes, hands folded up by his chin. Nikki leaned against the wall, arms crossed, fixated on the enlarged photograph of the Bride Collector’s note on the screen. Two other agents, Miguel Ruffino and Barth Kramer, lounged in chairs, their focus divided among the note, the SAC, Nikki, and Brad, who paced at the head of the conference table.

There was a reason these two would always be good, but not great, at their jobs, Brad thought. They lacked the obsessive personality required to bring inordinate focus to any single task.

“So this is it,” Temple said to Brad’s left. “We have us a certified wacko. A freaking lunatic from some funny barn who’s out there drilling holes in women to make a point.” He looked around with a bemused look. “No pun intended, of course.”

Ruffino and Kramer guffawed, just as Nikki shot the SAC a sharp look. “I wouldn’t put it like-”

“Spare me the psychobabble.” Temple stood and shoved his hands into his pockets. “If this isn’t certified crazy, I don’t know what is.”

The man stood maybe three or four inches shy of six feet, wiry as a bull snake. He shaved his head and took pride in his body, which he regularly and rigorously brought into submission at the gym. The man was a misfit in Denver, Brad thought. In the Southeast, from which he’d been transferred a month earlier, his attitude would have been less of a problem. But up here, gunslingers were frowned upon, and James Temple was most definitely a gunslinger-hotheaded, quick to conclusions, and choleric to the bone.

“On balance, most pattern killers are mentally stable,” Nikki said. “They are well educated, financially stable, often good looking, seemingly well-adjusted people. Unlike mass murderers, whose delusions feed beliefs of supremacy, serial killers act for personal gain or revenge. They do so in a calculated, thoughtful way. Hardly your freaking lunatic.”