James Knapp - State of Decay

We’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. They’ll pull me off this.

They won’t.

He won’t kill again while security is this high.

He will, and you’re going to find him. Don’t question the rest. Just shut up and do your job.

I shook my head. My heart skipped a beat.

“Faye?” Shanks prompted. He was starting to look at me like there might be something really wrong. I wondered if he wasn’t far off.

“Let’s just do this.”

Shanks had called in the middle of lunch to let me know the killer had struck again, this time taking not one but three victims right inside their own apartment in Alto Do Mundo: first tier and very rich, with lots of security. He had walked in and walked out again, and somehow no one had seen him.

All those people , I thought. I’d never seen anything like what I saw outside the restaurant. There were bodies everywhere. I saw a man’s head on the sidewalk.

There will be more, if you don’t stop it.

Me? I—

My phone rang, and Shanks removed his hand as I reached to answer it. I thought it might be Nico. At least, I hoped it was.

“Hello?”

“Detective Dasalia, I thought I told you to stop following me.”

Snapping my fingers, I signaled to Shanks to start scanning for the signal while I tried the trace again.

“You did.”

“That man sitting next to you is not your friend,” the killer said.

I scanned up and down the street, but didn’t expect to see him. He was close, though. He had to be; he could see us.

“Why did you kill them? What did these people do?”

“If I tell you, you’ll tell him,” the voice said. “You’ll tell him everything. You’re going to have to figure it out yourself, but to do that, you’ll have to wake up.”

You have to wake up…. The revivor had also said that to me.

“What does that mean?”

“Have you imagined being with him?”

An uneasy feeling grew in my stomach. I looked over at Shanks and remembered my dreams. The dream I had been having just before the first call woke me up that morning.

“Have you imagined him touching you?”

“He’s close,” Shanks said.

“It’s happening. Don’t get in the way,” the voice said, and the connection dropped. I looked to Shanks, but he shook his head.

“Close,” he said. “That’s the best I can do.”

The arm barring the ramp rose and I squeezed the car through the gate, curving down the lit tunnel into the underground parking area. The complex was in a pretty good neighborhood, and there were a lot of nice cars down there. Shanks normally would have ogled them, but this time he didn’t.

“What did he say?” he asked.

“He warned me off the case again.”

“Anything else?”

His expression was one of concern.

“He’s taunting me,” I said. “I’ll have them run it again and see if they can get anything else from it. In the meantime, our best lead is inside.”

None of the doors were forced, so he either had duplicate keys or some kind of electronic lock pick. Security cameras were spaced regularly, and there were plenty more inside, but not one of them had recorded a thing as the killer walked right into the place and took three more victims not even six hours after taking the last.

I parked in the visitor’s area and we headed inside, following the path the killer had taken. The door to the apartment hung open and was crossed with yellow tape. A police officer stood outside.

From the looks of it, the door had been forced in from the outside, leaving a clear shoe print next to the knob. On the floor outside the door were boot tracks, and maybe another set of footprints in sneakers. I ducked under the tape, and Shanks moved in behind me. There were three investigators left inside: one taking pictures down the hall, and the other two sweeping for forensics. Near the officers sat a man in a sweater who looked like a civilian. One of the investigators broke off and approached as we entered.

“Detective Dasalia?” he asked, looking from me to Shanks. I shook his hand.

“I’m Reece. Bodies are down here, off the living room….”

He led the way down the hall, which opened up into a spacious living area with a massive sectional sofa on carved wooden claw feet, arranged so that it was facing a flat-screen television with what must have been a fifty-inch screen mounted on the wall. A home theater sound system was arranged around the room, and there was a fireplace with a brick hearth and bronze fixtures on the wall to the left of the sofa.

“Nice digs,” Shanks said.

“They have any personal security?” I asked. Reece nodded.

“Yeah, but it was bypassed.”

“How?”

“Not sure yet, but whoever did it has some know-how, because nothing got tripped. These people never saw it coming.”

He led us to what looked like a playroom, where another television was mounted in front of a smaller sofa. Wires trailed to gaming devices and audio equipment. It was easy to imagine a group of younger kids in there, sitting on that sofa and playing, but instead something terrible had come to an end in that room.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“The Valles,” the officer said. “The father, Miguel, the mother, Rebecca, and daughter, Kate.”

Lying on the carpet in between the sofa and the television were the three bodies, a forensic examiner kneeling over them. Each was lying facedown, as if they had been on their knees and arranged in a circle like they had been facing one another. Their wrists and ankles were bound with plastic ties, and each of their faces lay in individual pools of blood that had joined in the middle. What looked like castoff and various arcs of arterial spurt had painted the carpet, the sofa, and even the walls. Whatever happened there had gone on for a while.

My eyes went to the young girl and stayed there. Anger and frustration welled up from out of the fog, and as I looked at her face, my throat burned.

“This is different,” I said to the examiner. “He takes single victims.”

“I understand,” she said, “but we found traces of the chemical signature you keep finding, the one for the explosives. It matches the one you found in the vehicle earlier. The wounds are a match, too. They were made by your mystery weapon.”

“Can they be moved?”

“Here,” she said, grabbing the mother by the sleeve of her shirt and pulling her over onto her side. “This is different.”

Rebecca Valle had been mutilated in a way that none of the previous bodies had been. There were cuts on her face, neck, and chest. Her sleeves had been rolled up and there were similar marks on her forearms, cut down to the bone in some places. Her belly had been slit open neatly, but not deeply. Just enough.

“He knew what he was doing,” Shanks said in my ear, and I nodded. The mother hadn’t just been killed; she was tortured extensively first.

“No one heard this?”

“Noise screen,” the officer said. “Might be why he picked this room. You could throw a party in here and not hear it in the bedroom. They could scream all they wanted; no one would have heard them.”

“I get it. Was the place searched?”

“Tossed,” he said. “Yeah, especially the bedrooms.”

“He was looking for something this time,” I said to Shanks. That was different too; in fact, it was the closest thing to a motive I’d ever been able to attribute to him.

“The father and daughter didn’t show the same signs of abuse,” the forensics investigator said.

“What was the cause of death?” I asked. “For the other two, I mean.”

“Actually,” she said, “the mother’s cause of death was a puncture wound to the heart via the sternum, made by your guy’s weapon. The other two were killed with the same weapon, but they were struck at the base of the skull.”