Blake Pierce - Once Lured

“Riley, I’m losing my mind here,” he said. “I know I’m not thinking straight. Lucy’s a great help, but she’s still awfully green.”

Riley understood perfectly how he felt. The irony felt palpable. Here she was beating herself up about the Larry Mullins case. Meanwhile in Delaware, Bill felt as if his own past failure had cost a third woman her life.

Riley thought about the drive to wherever Bill was. It would probably take nearly three hours to get there.

“Are you finished there?” Bill asked.

Riley had told both Bill and Brent Meredith that she would be in Maryland today for the parole hearing.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Good,” Bill said. “I’ve sent a helicopter to pick you up.”

“You what?” Riley said with a gasp.

“There’s a private airport near where you are. I’ll text you the location. The chopper is probably there already. There’s a cadet on board who’ll drive your car back.”

Without another word, Bill ended the call.

Riley drove in silence for a moment. She had been relieved when the hearing had ended during the morning. She wanted to be home when her daughter got out of school. There had been no more arguments yesterday, but April hadn’t said much at all. This morning Riley had left before April was awake.

But the decision had obviously been made for her. Ready or not, she was on the new case. She would have to talk to April later.

But she didn’t have to think long before it seemed perfectly right. She turned her car around and followed the directions Bill had sent her. The surest cure for her feeling of failure would be to bring another killer to justice — real justice.

It was time.

Riley stared down at the dead girl lying on the wooden bandstand floor. It was a bright, cool morning. The bandstand was housed in a gazebo right in the center of the town square, surrounded by nicely kept grass and trees.

The victim looked shockingly like the girls in the photos Riley had seen of the two victims from earlier months. She was lying face up and so emaciated that she appeared to be positively mummified. Her dirty, torn clothing might have once fit but now looked grotesquely large on her. She bore old scars and more recent wounds from what looked like the lashes of a whip.

Riley guessed that she was about seventeen, the age of the other two murder victims.

Or maybe not, she thought.

After all, Meara Keagan was twenty-four. The killer might be changing his MO. This girl was too wasted away for Riley to be able to determine her age.

Riley was standing between Bill and Lucy.

“She looks like she was starved more than the other two,” Bill remarked. “He must have kept her for a lot longer.”

Riley heard a world of self-reproach in Bill’s words. She looked at her partner. The bitterness showed in his face as well. Riley knew what Bill was thinking. This girl had surely been alive and held captive when he’d investigated this case and come up with nothing. He was blaming himself for her death.

Riley knew that he shouldn’t blame himself. Even so, she didn’t know what to say to make him feel better. Her own regrets about the Larry Mullins case still left a bad taste in her mouth.

Riley turned around to take in her surroundings. From here, the only completely visible structure was the courthouse across the street – a large brick building with a clock tower. Redditch was a charming little colonial town. Riley wasn’t really surprised that the body could have been brought here in the dead of night without anybody noticing. The whole town would have been fast asleep. The square was lined with sidewalks, so the killer hadn’t left any footprints.

The local police had taped off the square and were keeping onlookers away. But Riley could see that some press had gathered outside the tapes.

She was worried. So far, the press hadn’t caught on that the two previous murders and Meara Keagan’s disappearance had all been connected. But with this new murder, somebody was liable to connect the dots. The public would know sooner or later. Then the investigation would become a lot more difficult.

Standing nearby was Redditch’s police chief Aaron Pomeroy.

“How and when was the body found?” Riley asked him.

“We’ve got a street cleaner who goes out to work before dawn. He found her.”

Pomeroy looked badly shaken. He was an overweight, aging man. Riley figured that even in a little town like this, a cop his age had handled a murder or two somewhere along the line. But he’d probably never dealt with anything this disturbing.

Agent Lucy Vargas crouched beside the corpse and studied it closely.

“Our killer’s awfully confident,” Lucy said.

“How do you figure?” Riley asked.

“Well, he’s putting the bodies out for display,” she said. “Metta Lunoe was found in an open field, Valerie Bruner by the side of a road. Only about half of all serial killers transport their victims away from the murder site. Of those who do, about half conceal them. And most bodies that are left in view are just dumped. This kind of display suggests that he’s pretty cocky.”

Riley was pleased that Lucy had paid good attention in class. But somehow she didn’t think that cockiness was this killer’s point. He wasn’t trying to show off or taunt the authorities. He was up to something else. Riley didn’t yet know what it was.

But she was pretty sure it had something to do with the way the body was laid out. It was both awkward and deliberate. The girl’s left arm was stretched straight above her head. Her right arm was also straight but placed slightly to one side of her body. Even the head, with its broken neck, had been straightened to align as well as possible with the rest of the body.

Riley thought back to the photos of the other victims. She noticed that Lucy was carrying a tablet computer.

Riley asked her, “Lucy, could you bring up the photos of the other two corpses?”

It took Lucy only a few seconds to comply. Riley and Bill crowded next to Lucy to look at the two images.

Bill pointed and said, “Metta Lunoe’s corpse was a mirror image of this one – right arm raised, left arm to the side of the body. Valerie Bruner’s right arm was raised but her left arm was placed across the body, pointed downwards.”

Riley stooped down and took hold of the corpse’s wrist and tried to move it. The whole arm was immobile. Rigor mortis had fully set in. It would take a medical examiner to determine the exact time of death, but Riley felt pretty sure that the girl had been dead for at least nine hours. And like the other girls, she’d been moved to this spot shortly after she’d been killed.

The more she looked, the more something nagged at Riley. The killer had gone to so much trouble to arrange the corpse. He’d carried the body across the square, up six stairs, and had meticulously manipulated it. Even so, its overall position didn’t make sense.

The body wasn’t aligned with any of the gazebo walls. It wasn’t related to the opening of the gazebo or to the courthouse or anything else that Riley could see. It seemed to be laid out at a random angle.

But this guy doesn’t do anything random, she thought.

Riley sensed that the killer was trying to communicate something. She had no idea what it might be.

“What do you make of the poses?” Riley asked Lucy.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “Not many killers actually pose their bodies. It’s weird.”

She’s still really new to this job, Riley reminded herself.

Lucy hadn’t caught on that the weird cases were exactly the ones they routinely got called in for. For seasoned agents like Riley and Bill, weirdness had long since become numbingly normal.