Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

Personal, then.

Come, it’ll be special. Wait until you see the view.

He walked on, his head down, careful to avoid the marked evidence. Usable footprints would probably be doubtful, given the amount of activity on an average construction site. But he wasn’t about to make the forensics guys’ job any harder.

The bits of information continued to churn in his brain, coming together like puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit and had to be repositioned. At some point, the entire puzzle would take shape, but for now, he simply played with the pieces.

A thirty-eight-year-old operator. Lived with a roommate. Unmarried.

A spinster? Maybe a dating-service scam?

Reaching the exterior walls of the building, he heard Wyatt and the others talking to the local detectives. Again, he barely listened, continuing to move toward the core of the facility, to the construction elevator in which the victim must have risen to meet her doom. Mulrooney and Taggert watched him in visible curiosity, but Wyatt merely nodded as he passed.

She’s anxious. Nervous. It’s night, off the beaten track. The top of the building? Are you sure it’s safe? I’m afraid.

He reached the elevator. Inside, a tech continued to swab the grating, yawning widely as he went through the motions by rote. “You need to go up?”

“When you’re through.”

“I’ve cleared a zone to haul people up and down,” the other man said.

“Find anything?”

“Got some prints; ten to one says any that aren’t from the crew are from the victim.”

He wouldn’t take that bet.

“Stay in that area, okay?” the man said, pointing to a corner.

Alec entered as directed, turning to stare out at the water through the side grates as they slowly ascended to the top of the building.

Slow. It’s so high. Choppy water. Cold and black like a night sky without stars, falling away from my feet. Lights across the harbor? Far away. No one can see. All alone. Private.

Perfect.

The victim’s impression? Or the killer’s?

The higher they went, the easier it was to see. Not just the panorama-the water, the shoreline, the ships-but the past. The crime.

Come with me; I’ll show you the city as you’ve never seen it.

She trusted him enough to trespass on a closed construction site.

She’s willing but she’s nervous, excited. He keeps her calm. Earns her trust. How?

He slowly turned in a complete circle, trying to imagine what she’d felt, what she’d thought as she had been drawn inexorably closer to that date with death.

Did you ride up with her, calm her fears, then strike her into unconsciousness?

That didn’t sound like their man. The Professor’s past crimes had an element of detachment. His letters claimed his hands-and conscience-were clear. He’d never killed anyone, never hurt them, just put them in situations to kill or hurt themselves. Like incapacitating the boys in a car accident before putting them out on that ice to fight for their lives. Impersonal.

She rode up alone. He told her to come up to meet him and she did it.

Why, he couldn’t say.

Deep in thought, he stared down, removing the distraction of the water, wanting to imprint the scene in his head. Make it come to life.

Before it could, though, he saw a tiny red spot near his shoe. He crouched down close, not touching it. No more than the size of a pen’s tip, it must have been overlooked by the tech in his hurry to clear an area to take detectives to the roof.

Not blood; too light. Too waxy.

On his hands and knees, he bent closer, until his face nearly brushed the metal. He suddenly realized the tiny drop was actually the tip of a larger blob that had slipped through the grate. The material had solidified into a tiny icicle hanging from the floor beneath the elevator.

And it wasn’t merely waxy. It was wax. “Candles,” he murmured.

“What?”

He pointed to the spot. “Make sure you get this. I suspect it’s candle wax.”

Red candles. You romanced her, didn’t you, you son of a bitch ?

That was the opening. The one detail that allowed him to build the entire scenario in his head from that starting point.

He had romanced her.

They reached the top floor and the tech, visibly embarrassed, immediately descended on the spot of wax. He couldn’t risk grabbing it here; it could fall, and he was probably eager to go back down. “It’s all right,” he said, waving the man away as he stepped out.

A few feet away, another crime scene investigator was carefully bagging clothing. Yet another was on his hands and knees, outlining footprints left in the faint layer of construction dust. Even from here he saw they had been made from bare feet.

“Here’s where she took the dive,” one of them said, looking up at Alec and obviously recognizing him as a fed.

He nodded, but didn’t walk over. Instead, he stood his ground, still visualizing.

Taped hands. Blindfolded. Did she even try to fight you?

He doubted it. “Any signs of physical attack? Blood splatter?” he asked.

“Nothing so far inside the building,” one of the techs said. “There’s a splash zone outside, where she landed, like something you’d see at a water park.”

Grim visual.

“But in the elevator and up here? Not yet.”

Which just reinforced his belief that the Professor hadn’t physically tangled with her at all, either before he’d stripped her, or after she’d regained consciousness. The tox screen would be important on this one, especially because the unsub had used ketamine, a fast-acting drug, on the help-wanted victim.

He added that piece to the story puzzle in his mind, letting the scene roll out like a snippet of a movie. The operator came to meet some wonderful man in response to an e-mail. Maybe even a phone call, if the Professor was the one who had used Ryan Smith’s cell the previous night. Alec wouldn’t put it past the man to intentionally taunt authorities in that way.

She got into the elevator; the scene had been set. Candles. So romantic. Her guard down, she had consumed something. She lost consciousness. The Professor waited until she was down, stepped into the elevator, took her out, and got her ready.

You never even laid eyes on the man you came to meet, did you?

“How did he leave her clothing?” he asked the tech who had just bagged them. “Neatly piled, folded?”

“Yeah, very carefully,” the guy said, further cementing Alec’s image of what had happened. “Hose tucked into the shoes, underwear inside the dress. All neat and tidy. Which is pretty funny, since they had been cut off her.”

Check for cuts . He wasn’t sure it would be possible, given the condition the body must be in, but he wanted to know. Had the Professor wounded her while cutting off her clothes? If she was conscious, she would have struggled; there would be signs, nicks.

But there had been no blood. She wasn’t conscious . She didn’t struggle. Any wounds would have been inflicted out of carelessness or for the unsub’s own pleasure.

The Professor was never careless.

Besides, the way he’d folded her things hinted at such restraint, such calmness.

You don’t hurt your victims, right? Your hands are totally clean.

Alec would lay money the woman didn’t have a mark on her from the knife. What the construction debris she’d hit on the ground had done to her, however, was another story.

“Think I’ll walk around a little,” he said, already looking past the technician.

“Sure. You know the drill.”

Of course he did. He remained on the periphery, stepping only into already cleared areas. He studied the cut edges of the security netting, the patterns of bare footprints in the dust, running in circles until a straight pair disappeared off the side of the building.