Already Dead, page 14
Laura blinked, looking down at the burger in her hand. Well, that was something. Her visions were still working. It was just that the ones she was getting in relation to the case weren’t getting her anywhere.
“You alright?” Eric asked, his tone one of genuine concern. He’d already taken the first bite of his burger, keeping it wrapped halfway for now.
“Yes,” Laura said, shaking it off. “I just realized I need to send someone a message. Be careful with these burgers – looks like there’s a lot of sauce in them.”
“You haven’t even opened yours yet,” Eric said, frowning a little.
She nodded her head towards him. “I don’t need to. I can see yours.” She opened the packaging with one hand and then grabbed her cell phone as she took the first bite, scrolling to her most recent conversation with Chris and opening it.
Hey, sorry. I’m still on the case out here. I’m not going to be able to make it back to D.C. in time for tonight. I have to cancel. Maybe we can do another night?
She felt a gnawing ache in her stomach as she sent the text, the kind of nervous reaction she always had when she got the feeling that she was letting someone down. It was an awful feeling. She waited for his response, trying not to see the fact that there were still so many messages Nate had not bothered to reply to. At this point, she wouldn’t be surprised if he had simply blocked her number. And if he had, she had no way of getting in contact with him save walking right up to his door – which would probably not do her any favors, either.
Her phone buzzed, and she opened the message hastily to read it. It was from Chris, of course, and while she was glad to hear back from him, she was also annoyed at the way her heart lurched with disappointment with every message or call that wasn’t from Nate.
Sorry to hear that! Hope you get it wrapped up soon. I can’t make the rest of this week – I’m on shift and then I’ve got a meeting with Amy’s teachers on Friday to see how she’s settling in. Playdate this weekend still good?
Laura sighed to herself as she sent back a confirmation for the weekend. A playdate was all well and good, but it was for the girls – not their respective guardians. It was a time for tea parties and dolls and watching inane children’s shows, not having eyes meet over candlelit dinners. Between the fact that they had two of the busiest jobs Laura could imagine – agent and doctor – and their lives as parents, she was starting to wonder if this thing was doomed before they even started it. When would they even get a chance to see one another?
“I wish we would just get something that panned out,” Eric grumbled. It came so out of the blue, Laura almost jumped.
“We’ll get something eventually,” she said. It was the kind of thing she told herself for reassurance, even though it didn’t always make her feel better. “We have to. We’re not letting him slip away.”
“What if it’s too late?” Eric said, frustration evident in his voice. “We’ve already let one girl die on our watch. I really wanted to do well on this first one.”
“Don’t worry,” Laura said, though she wasn’t exactly feeling calm about it herself. “We’ll get him. We just have to keep thinking. Keep seeing what we haven’t seen yet, figuring it out.”
And the same applied, she reminded herself, to both Nate and Chris. It felt like one new flame in her life was being lit, and she didn’t want it to be extinguished before she ever got the chance to find out how brightly it would burn. They would figure something out.
Extinguished…
Laura’s mind shot forward, going over that vision again. Flames being extinguished. What if they were seeing everything the wrong way?
“I have a new theory,” she said, working it out even as she spoke out loud. “We’ve been thinking that the killer uses candles because he’s obsessed with flames. But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s the fact of the candle being snuffed out that is the point?”
Eric spoke around a mouthful of burger. “But wouldn’t that mean his method is wrong? He doesn’t get to blow the candle out. Whoever finds the body does.”
“It’s still symbolic,” Laura said, hesitating then rushing on as her mind worked this new angle. “In fact, it might be even more symbolic for it. This idea of the final resting place of the victim, their discovery and then their light going out forever once someone other than the killer knows that they’re gone.”
“I don’t get it,” Eric said, shrugging. “Sorry.”
“Well, think about it,” Laura said. “Candles are symbolic. They always have been. They represent light against the darkness. They have religious overtones, used in ceremonies even today. Not because we need them – we have electricity now. Because of how symbolic they are. And we even use it as a metaphor – we talk about a candle being blown out to symbolize the end of something, even a life.”
Eric shrugged again. “Sounds like something my English teacher would say,” he said. “I don’t know if the killer is that deep.” He took the last half of his burger out of the wrapper and put it to his mouth with some relish, taking a massive bite.
A dollop of mustard fell neatly out of the back and splattered on his shirt, making him cry out in dismay.
“Damnit!” he said, dabbing at it with a napkin. Laura didn’t need to look to see that that yellow stain was going to be there for the foreseeable future.
“I did tell you to be careful,” she said mildly. It wasn’t her fault if people ignored her warnings. It wasn’t as though she could force them to pay attention.
“I should change this shirt,” Eric said, grabbing the wrapper to hold it under the last few bites of his burger as he wolfed it down. “I have a spare clean one at the motel.”
“No can do,” Laura said. “You’ll just have to do up your jacket if it bothers you. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this – figure out what the candles mean and why the killer is using them. Once we know that, we might just know him.”
Eric sighed. “Look, no offense, but that just sounds like psychobabble to me,” he said. “I’m good at investigating, not profiling. If that’s your thing, whatever, but I’d rather follow real leads. I still think we’re onto something with the whole firebug thing. I want to keep looking into that.”
Laura could have pulled rank on him then and there, told him to shut up and pay attention. That she was the senior officer and he had to do as he was told. But on the other hand, even though she had warmed to him a little, she knew she was better off on her own. Without the distraction. She didn’t need to be anyone’s babysitter. And it was almost always better to have two agents pursuing two theories, rather than getting tunnel vision on one.
“Then do it on your own,” she said.
“Cool,” he said, and then, “Can you drop me off at the motel?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He watched her through the glass, pretending he was looking at the printouts advertising all the local homes for sale in the window. There were some nice ones, at least, that he might have lingered on if he really was in the market for a new home.
Not that he’d had to cultivate the impression that he was. She, Cherry, was admin assistant here in the real estate office, so he always knew that he could see her if he wanted to. He just had to drop by and look in the window. He could even go inside if he wanted to be nearer to her. But there was no need.
After all, he didn’t know her from the work that she did. He hadn’t had any reason to visit this office before, and so if it had been from that, they never would have met. No, Cherry was someone he knew from his own line of work, unlike the other girls. Their connection had started in a completely different way. She’d been the one to come to him.
That made her special, it really did. They were all special in their own different ways, but he loved the fact that Cherry was someone he knew from work. He wasn’t just a customer to her like he was to the others. Actually, if anything, it was the other way around.
Not that Cherry could ever be described as ‘just’ anything. That would have been an understatement of her value to the highest degree.
Of course, it wasn’t like he ever really thought she’d noticed him. He wasn’t stupid enough to have those kinds of fantasies. He knew what he was, and he knew what she was. So far out of his league. She would never normally have given him the time of day, and if she glanced up now and saw him looking in, he reckoned she might not even recognize him.
She stood to move across the office with some files, and he admired the smart way she walked, the way she swayed from side to side in her heels. They did have a connection, even if she wasn’t as aware of it as he was. It was there. And soon, he was going to make sure that that connection was complete.
He moved on from the window, judging that he had probably spent enough time standing there. Any longer, and people might start to get suspicious. He couldn’t risk that, not now.
People were looking at each other these days. Wondering. They knew that there was a killer among their ranks, and they all wanted to be the one to figure out who. Either for protection, or for glory. He wasn’t going to let that happen by doing something stupid and suspicious that would get fingers pointed in his direction – not when it was so easy to slip under the radar and just go on as he always had.
And it wasn’t just the civilians. He moved down Main Street and noticed the police officer walking along in uniform, hands at his sides, surveying everyone with a casual yet alert manner. There were more and more of them out on the streets the last few days, it seemed. Patrols had become more regular. He’d seen the same cop car drive by at least three times since he started his afternoon stroll. They were just going around and around, desperate to catch any hint of a clue.
He was going to have to be extra careful tonight. Taking a day out of his schedule would confuse them at least a little, he hoped. If he waited until tomorrow, everyone would be so on edge and nervous that he would have very little chance of doing what he needed to do. At least, without getting caught.
And if he got caught halfway through? Well, that was even worse. To start without finishing would make a mockery of the whole thing.
He mentally rehearsed his plans, trying to test them for any points of weakness. It was imperative that he finish. Cherry didn’t know him yet, but she would soon – so soon. And given how special he was, he wasn’t going to let anything interrupt him before that happened.
He walked onwards down the street, feeling the budding excitement of another connection ready to be made. Tonight was going to be special.
Tonight, Cherry was going to connect with him in ways she couldn’t even possibly imagine right now.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back at the precinct, Laura settled down in front of the desk she had been given and loaded up the computer, almost rolling her eyes at how slow it was. Why did it always seem like local police departments had the oldest, least functioning equipment in the entire world? At least in a backwater like this she had expected it; but then again, given the wealth of the town itself, it was still disappointing.
She started in a very simple way: she searched for ‘candles,’ and started reading the information that came up.
It quickly became apparent that there were a lot of rabbit holes that this research could take her down. She wasn’t entirely surprised: like she’d said to Eric, candles had a lot of meaning to them. They’d been used for so long as the only means of illumination, meaning that they had a practical history as well as all of the layers of symbolism that had fallen on them over the centuries. Unpicking that wasn’t going to be easy, particularly as she had no idea whether the killer was suffering from some kind of psychosis or reading them the way that they had always been read.
She started down a pathway that was somewhat interesting: the use of candles in ritual sacrifice. Almost any kind of so-called ‘demonic rite’ or Satanic ritual had the use of candles incorporated in some way. Sometimes they were blood-red or coal-black, and other times had to give off a particular scent. Sometimes, though, plain white candles of the kind used in church would be just fine. Of course, most of the research she found on the subject was heavily wrapped into pop culture and fiction. There was no such thing as real Satanism, at least not in the way the media sometimes portrayed it.
That didn’t mean it couldn’t count. There were killers in the past who had been inspired by movies or by books to commit their murders. At least, the method in which they committed them. Laura had come across enough killers to not believe in the story that violent movies and video games could create violent people. It was the violent people in the first place who were drawn to that kind of thing. People who either didn’t develop a moral code to understand that killing or hurting others was wrong – or understood it and enjoyed it for precisely that reason.
This was the problem she was dealing with, the thorny briars she had to cut through: did the killer believe in what he’d been told, or was he capable of distinguishing the difference between fact and fiction? Was he perfectly rational and logical and yet also a killer, or was he suffering from psychosis? And without knowing more about his motivation, how could she even tell?
Laura doubled down, emerging from her rabbit hole about sacrifice and going back to the more pure and factual roots of candle use. They had been used to light the way for centuries – the same thought that had occurred to her earlier. But today? The largest use of candles was in religious ceremonies, most notably in churches of various Christian denominations.
Laura rubbed her lower lip, thinking. The dominant religion of the population around here would match that, of course, and she had seen a couple of churches around town as they were driving. In a cultural sense, Caucasians living in the US were far more likely to be influenced by Christian symbology than by that of any other religion, since most of them would have grown up learning about or even being raised in that faith. It stood to reason, then, that anything done by a killer living locally was most likely to be influenced in some way by that symbology.
Unless their killer was a minority, of course, which would throw everything off. But killers, especially the kind who earned the moniker ‘serial,’ were usually white men. If she was following the statistics, she should logically focus on this area of research.
Laura checked her phone, seeing no messages from anyone – no reply from Chris, no call back from Nate, no indication of what Eric was up to out there. She tried not to worry about any of it. She had to get on with this, now, and get back home so at least one of her worries would be taken care of. Three more days and she needed to be picking up Lacey for another weekend together. Christ. Her life seemed to be a rush these days, always a dead sprint from one thing to the other, always worried she wouldn’t make it in time.
“Religion,” Laura muttered under her breath, trying to keep herself on track. What did candles mean in religion, especially in connection with death? She thought about people filing into a church, lighting a candle in prayer. They were a way to send a message to God, to have your prayer heard.
She thought, too, about a memorial service. An image came to her head, probably something she’d seen on television or in a movie, of a misty scene, mourners around a coffin. A large-printed portrait of the deceased propped up in front of it and surrounded by white flowers. All around and among the scene, white candles burning, fat bodies and strong flames. Memorial.
Didn’t that kind of feel like what the killer was doing? The way the women were found, it was almost as though their hands were crossed over their chests in prayer. Like they were posing for that open coffin service.
She had something here, she thought. They were placed down carefully, almost reverentially, and then a candle was lit for them. A candle that would burn brightly in the night and lead to their discovery. There was something, now that she connected the thought, about the funeral service in it.
So, was that it? Memorial? A way for him to remember them?
She glanced out of the window at the slowly darkening sky, realizing that it was getting on for the evening now. She didn’t have long to get this figured out. She would go to each of the churches in town, she thought, speak to the staff there, try to get a fix on –
“Agent Frost!”
Laura turned her head sharply to see Eric entering the room, a wide grin plastered on his face. He was slightly out of breath, his hair a little damp around the temples, as though he’d recently engaged in some kind of exertion. And behind him, he was dragging a young man in handcuffs – a young man with a wide-eyed look and a conspicuously muddy rip in his blue jeans.
“Agent Won?” she responded, frowning.
“I have our killer!” he exclaimed triumphantly, his chest practically swelling up as he said it.
Laura blinked.
“Excuse me?” she said, getting up from the desk with a rattle, not minding the fact that she’d bumped her thigh into it as she stood with haste. She started to rush towards him, as did most of the other few cops in the room.
“Let’s get him processed,” Eric said, turning to one of the cops who always seemed to be at the precinct – a desk sergeant who was perfectly placed to go through the paperwork. “I want to start questioning as soon as possible.” Handing the kid over, he stood with his hands on his hips in a self-satisfied pose as he watched a cabal of the locals taking him over to a relevant desk.
Laura grabbed his outstretched elbow and steered him away quickly, pulling him to the furthest side of the room. It wasn’t as far as she would have liked, but in a precinct of this size, that couldn’t exactly be helped.
“What’s going on?” she hissed at him, trying not to be overheard by anyone else.
“I found him,” Eric said, with that same self-satisfied air. He was clearly riding high, impressed with himself and on top of the world. “Our killer. It’s him.”
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