A Murder in Time(57)

“You don’t believe in spirits, then?”

She grinned at the girl. “Only the kind you drink.” She used her apron to erase the mark she’d made, and frowned when it didn’t come off. She rubbed harder.

“You need to wet it,” Rose said from behind her.

“Oh.” She turned to find the maid eyeing her oddly again. “Thanks, Rose.”

Rose hesitated. “Will that be all, miss?”

“You know, you can call me Kendra.”

“Aye, miss.”

Kendra had to smile. “Go to bed, Rose. I’ll be up soon. I just need to work on a couple of things here.”

When Rose left, she took her candle with her, reducing the light to Kendra’s single flickering flame and the glow of the moon. Briefly, Kendra looked around for more candles or an oil lamp, but found nothing. She supposed the thrifty Mrs. Danbury had taken all useful items from the room before shutting the doors.

Setting her candle on the desk, Kendra went to work. On the slate board, she drew three vertical lines. In the first section she wrote: Unsub; in the middle section: Victimology; in the third: Forensics/Pattern.

She started in the middle. Victim—Jane Doe; Age—approximately fifteen; Race—Caucasian; Hair—brown; Eyes—brown.

Height . . . Kendra closed her eyes to bring up a mental image of the girl. She was small. Five-one, maybe, or five-two. As for weight, Kendra doubted if the victim would have tipped the scales at more than one hundred to one hundred and five pounds. She opened her eyes and jotted the information down. Satisfied, she moved on. Profession—Prostitute (likely).

Kendra paused, considering that. It wasn’t surprising. Even in the twenty-first century, prostitutes were the primary targets of serial killers. They were society’s throwaways. A dead hooker never registered the same on the horror meter or had the same cachet with the media as a dead housewife. Still, the way the men had talked, this girl had been a part of a brothel, not a street whore. That made her more likely to be missed.

There was easier prey. Why this girl?

Moving to the third section, Kendra began ending sentences with a question mark. Body dumped in the river—deliberate or discarded? Did the killer want Jane Doe found? Or had he expected the body to be carried out to sea?

The hair cut off in sections—a souvenir?

Single bite mark on the breast—sexual?

Many serial killers were biters, she knew. The mark of the beast. That’s what Keith Simpson, Britain’s first professor of forensic pathology, had labeled the bites inflicted by killers in the twentieth century.

The fact that Jane Doe had only one bite mark was interesting, though. Most likely part of a fantasy developed over time.

Jane Doe had fifty-three cuts on her torso made by four different knives. Kendra wondered if there was any significance to the number of wounds or variety of knives. The victim had been handcuffed. She was petite, so she could have been easily controlled. Unless the killer wasn’t a big man himself.

The victim had been raped repeatedly. Strangled repeatedly. Did the killer get sexual gratification by maximizing the girl’s terror?

Based on the bruising and decomposition, the girl had been killed last night. Kendra thought of the Duke’s charts, and wondered if there was any significance to the full moon, if that was part of the unsub’s pattern.

Kendra returned to the first section. The unsub. The big unknown.

Slowly, she lifted the hand clutching the piece of slate, and wrote: Mission-oriented killer, or power-and-control killer?

Not mission-oriented. She lifted her apron to scrub that away, then remembered she needed to have a wet cloth. She ended up drawing a line through “mission-oriented,” and circled “power-and-control.” That’s who they were dealing with—someone who fed off his victim’s terror, who relished their suffering, wanted to hear them scream.

And scream.

A chill raced up Kendra’s arms. It was always this way, brushing up against evil. She’d fought hard to be a field agent, but she remembered her first case, when several teenage girls in Kentucky had been found dead, their bodies dumped along the Appalachian Trail. Their throats had been cut, but the fatal wound had been hidden by the pretty pink bow the killer had tied around their necks. Each victim’s feet had been severed and taken as souvenirs. She recalled how her stomach had knotted, and she’d just managed to stumble to a ravine before throwing up.

Over the years, she’d gotten used to the gruesome, unspeakable images, to the buzz of flies, to the sickening, rotting scent of death. But she would never get used to the twisted mind that could commit such atrocities. Thank God.

“Who are you, you sick son of a bitch?” she whispered, staring at the section that had the least words written in it. She lifted the piece of slate again, and wrote: Male; familiar with the area; intelligent; organized.

A cloud passed over the moon, leaving only the meager light from the one candle. The shadows around her deepened and crept up the walls like tormented souls escaping the underworld. Tension pricked at her nape. Her heart rate escalated as she thought of Rose’s ghost story of the weeping child. Get a grip, Donovan. She didn’t believe in ghosts.

Then again, she hadn’t believed in time travel, either.

She found herself holding her breath, letting it out in a rush of relief when the moon reappeared and flooded the room again in its silvery light.