Paranoid(74)

“I won’t be long,” he told Harper.

“Okay, Dad.” His daughter moved away from him, looking small and pale.

“Ten minutes,” he repeated, then headed across the uneven ground of the old school yard. Voss was over by the school, her flashlight illuminating the patches of grass and dirt.

“We think the attack started here,” she said. “You can see signs of a struggle.” She ran her flashlight’s beam onto a door and the broken cement of the porch where there was evidence of blood and scuff marks in the dust. “One shoe here.” She illuminated a red high heel. “Another here.” Not far away, the mate of the first shoe lay on its side.

“Then he dragged her this way.” She ran the beam over the ground where shallow, parallel ruts were scraped into the bare earth—a trail leading across the yard. They disappeared in the spots of grass only to show up in other spots of wet earth. “Her heels are scraped, so it looks like he dragged her.” Voss was slowly walking toward the chapel. “He probably picked her up and carried her from here. The door was pried open and there are no drag marks inside the building.”

Cade nodded, reviewing what she’d told him, trying to envision the crime as it had been committed.

A fierce attack.

Brutal.

The killer had been determined.

He glanced up at the spire of the church, and then let his gaze move downward in the night sky to the fence at the back of the chapel. Just beyond the fence, he could see the roof of the building next door, his old man’s law office. A muscle began to work in his jaw. He knew the place well, especially the apartment where Vale had taken up temporary residence.

Hadn’t he used that very spot himself when he was younger?

Hadn’t he and Rachel spent nights alone up in that studio?

Doing the same things his seventeen-year-old daughter was doing with Xander Vale?

What goes around, comes around.

Son of a bitch!

“In here,” Voss said, urging him on.

They stepped through the door and into an anteroom. Lights were visible on one side of the altar, shafts falling through an open doorway. Following the beam of Voss’s flashlight, they walked carefully down the aisle and around a corner to the base of the bell tower, where the woman lay crumpled on the floor of the square space. A severed rope was still tied around one ankle. Her hair fanned out on the ground around her, and her eyes were glassy and fixed, bits of some gooey substance clinging to the skin near her eyes.

“Tape,” Voss said, as if reading his thoughts. “It was over her eyes. As she was still alive, Vale tore it off her face before he tried to revive her.” She motioned to the side of the enclosure where a wad of blue tape was tacked to the wall. It appeared to be identical to the tape they’d found slapped across Violet Sperry’s face.

Evidence.

Destroyed.

Two rescue workers, a man and a woman, were bending over the woman.

“No one would have been able to save her,” the male hypothesized. “Once the killer strung her up, she was probably too far gone.” A lanky twentysomething, his face pockmarked from acne in his youth, his hair trimmed tight on the sides giving way to a thick tuft of red on top, he nodded as he stared at the lifeless woman. “Looks like a ruptured trachea, broken windpipe.”

“Hyoid fractured?” Voss asked.

“Probably,” the female EMT agreed. “Have to wait until the autopsy for the actual cause of death. ME’s on his way.”

“Crime scene team, too. They should be here any minute,” Voss said, then added, “It looks like Vale’s story holds up. He had a knife, gave it up.” She cast a glance up at Cade, her face in weird shadow cast by the eerie lights. “The kids were lucky they didn’t surprise the killer.”

“Not for her,” Cade said, glancing down at the corpse.

The male EMT stood up and scrabbled in a front pocket for a nonexistent cigarette. “As I said, nothing they could do.”

Cade looked upward to the dark recess of the tower overhead and imagined the brute force required to carry the victim here, presumably as she fought back. He wondered about the adrenaline rush firing the killer’s blood. Why had the killer brought her here? Why string her up? Why not leave her at the site of the attack, across the way at the school?

Premeditated.

This wasn’t a random killing.

“She have any valuables on her?”

Voss nodded. “Wedding ring set, lots of diamonds in the setting, credit card and forty dollars in her back pocket along with her driver’s license. Robbery wasn’t the motive.”

That much he knew just by considering the brutality of the crime, the way the body was staged to be found.

“Her husband been notified?”

“Yes, she’s married. Is that a lucky guess?” Voss asked.

“I knew of her. Small town.”

“We reached the husband, but he’s in Seattle. On his way back here now.”

“You found her cell phone, right?”

“Yeah. Checking the recent calls and contact list already.”

“Good.” He glanced down at the body one last time. “I gotta go.”

On the way back to the parking area he said, “I’ll be back once I get Harper home and settled, make sure she’s all right.”