Ambrosia (Frost and Nectar, #2)(76)

His body seemed tense. “Agent Liddell,” he said. “I’m glad you could make it.”

“Call me Cassandra. ”

“Okay,” he said, his tone cold. “Cassandra.”

It didn’t take a PhD in psychology to pick out the chilliness in his voice. I guess I had a few ideas why he might not be thrilled to have me there. For one thing, American law enforcement agents hadn’t always done well with the British police. We tended to ignore their pesky legal systems and make our own rules. Plus, FBI consultants in general had a reputation of disregarding local expertise. And if all that weren’t bad enough, he was probably terrified I was going to have a chirpy American attitude and say things like “good work, team,” or force him to high-five at the end of the day.

“Come with me.” He turned and walked away.

I followed him. As we drew closer, my mood darkened. I began to pick up the details—the red gash across her entire body, throat to belly, and the dark pool of blood beneath her. Lumps of flesh glistened under the lights. A woman stood above her, photographing the carnage.

“We can stop here,” he said when we still stood twenty feet away. “It’s intense, and I doubt you need to see it up close to profile the killer. We can provide you with photographs later on.”

“Thanks for caring.” I raised an eyebrow. “I think I can handle it.”

I marched forward. When I reached the body, I crouched by a man who eyed me warily beyond a pair of glasses. I could have sworn I heard him mutter something about Americans under his mask, but I kept my focus on the victim.

Up close, bile began to rise in my throat. She was young, no more than twenty, her face full of pain and horror, mouth ajar in a voiceless cry, eyes staring emptily at the night sky. Her dark hair spread out on the pavement between her arms, giving the impression she was falling. The killer had torn her shirt, exposing the top of her ravaged body. A deep slice exposed her internal organs, or what was left of them. The glaring spotlights highlighted her white skin and bones, shockingly pale against her crimson blood. And as if that weren’t bad enough, he’d mutilated her face, slashing perpendicular lines in her cheeks. Dread roiled in the back of my mind. Somehow, the marks looked eerily familiar, like something I’d seen in a nightmare, but I had no idea why.

I tried not to imagine what she would have felt in those final moments, but the images came anyway. The gash on her throat indicated that the killer was likely standing behind her, but her expression left no doubt—she had felt the hand that gripped her, the blade that cut her.

I could only hope that the shock of the attack had overwhelmed her, dulling the pain of the knife wounds somewhat—that her mind hadn’t been able to process the horror of what was happening to her. I hoped most of the damage had been postmortem.

As my mind roamed over the horror of her final moments, I was almost sorry I hadn’t listened to Gabriel. But this was important. This was the murderer’s work, and I had to see it up close. This was his sadistic form of expression, how his mind worked. I pushed my visions of her death to the back of my skull, trying to focus.

A steady buzz drew my attention. Several flies roamed the open, bloody cavity. When a body was hours or days old, flies were valuable allies of the forensic team. A skilled investigator could estimate the time of death using fly and larvae samples taken from the body. But this corpse was fresh, and the flies were nothing but parasites, using the poor woman to feed their young.

I waved my hand to shoo the flies away. The coppery smell of blood overpowered me, and I quickly stood up. The flies returned, haunting the woman’s wounds again.

I struggled with the desire to close her eyes, to soothe the tortured stare from her face. Somehow, that was what hit me the hardest: her eyes. Wide open and in pain. Maybe I couldn’t feel her emotions on a visceral level, but they were written plainly on her face.

Stepping away from the body, I gritted my teeth, trying to picture the monster who would rip apart four young women like this. How many more would he kill before someone stopped him? Would I be able to help?

I was pretty sure I would. This was what I did best. I helped find men like him and put an end to their murder binges.

From the perimeter around the police tape, I felt the crowd’s horrified energy, and it began to build my resolution. I wouldn’t return to the US until we’d put this monster in prison.

“Are you okay?” Gabriel asked, handing me a pair of latex gloves. I took them and put them on, the synthetic material somehow reassuring .

“I will be,” I muttered. “Looks like the viciousness is increasing.”

“That was our impression as well,” Gabriel said. “This one is the worst so far.”

I looked around the small city square. There were no shop fronts here, just the back entrances of buildings, a fenced-in parking lot, and a tiny road. Still, it seemed impossible that he’d slaughtered her in the center of the city without anyone noticing.

“Do we have any witnesses?” I asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “No. A passerby found her at twenty past eleven. He saw no one near the body.”

“Do we have an estimated time of death?”

“Yeah. Between eleven and eleven twenty.”

“So he found her only minutes after she had been killed.”

“Yes.”

I frowned. “This doesn’t make sense. Someone killed her and disemboweled her completely. It would have taken some time. How did he manage to do that without anyone noticing? Surely people must cut through here to get to the bars and restaurants I saw on Bishopsgate?”