Ceremony in Death (In Death #5)(38)

“Keep a hold of him, Roarke. Stay here.”

“I’ve got him,” Roarke replied, but he’d be damned if he’d stay back. He tugged Jamie through the gate, met Eve’s annoyed stare blandly. “Our home, our problem.”

She said something nasty under her breath and turned left. She didn’t have to go far. It wasn’t hidden, it wasn’t subtle.

The body was naked and strapped to a wooden form in the shape of a star. No, she realized. A pentagram. Inverted so that the head with its dead doll eyes and gaping throat hung over the bloody sidewalk. The arms were outstretched, the legs parted in a wide vee. The center of his chest was a mass of black blood and gore, the hole hacked out of it bigger than a man’s fist.

She doubted the ME would find a heart inside when he opened the body for autopsy.

She heard the choked sound behind her and turned to see Roarke shift his grip on Jamie and step over to shield the boy from the view.

“Lobar,” was all he said.

“Yeah.” She stepped closer. Whoever had taken his heart had also plunged a knife through a sheet of paper and through his groin.

DEVIL WORSHIPPER BABY KILLER BURN IN HELL

“Take the boy inside, will you, Roarke?” She glanced at the collapsible ladder tilted against the wall. “And get rid of that. Pass the kid off to Summerset for now. I can’t leave the scene.” She turned, her face blank and impassive. Her cop face. “Will you bring me my field kit?”

“Yes. Come on, Jamie.”

“I know who he is.” Tears swam in Jamie’s eyes and were viciously blinked away. “He’s one of the bastards who killed my sister. I hope he rots.”

Because his voice had broken at the end, Roarke slipped an arm around his shoulder. “He will. Come inside. Let the Lieutenant do her job.” Roarke sent Eve one last look before hefting the ladder and leading Jamie back through the gates.

With her gaze still fixed on the body, Eve pulled out her communicator. “Dispatch, Dallas, Lieutenant Eve.”

“Dispatch, acknowledged.”

“Reporting homicide, requesting assistance.” She gave the necessary data, then replaced her communicator. Turning, she stared across the wide, quiet street into the dark, shifting shadows of the great park. In the east the sky was stripping off the first layers of night, and the stars, such as they were, were blinking out.

Murder had come into her life before and would again. But someone would pay for bringing it into her home.

She turned as Roarke approached not only with her field kit but her battered leather jacket. “It gets chilly this close to dawn,” he said and handed it to her.

“Thanks. Jamie all right?”

“He and Summerset are eyeing each other with mutual dislike and distrust.”

“I knew I liked that kid. You can go inside and referee,” she told him as she took out Seal-It and clear-coated her hands, her boots. “I’ve called it in.”

“I’m staying.”

Since she’d already figured he would, she didn’t argue. “Then make yourself useful and record the scene.” She took her recorder out of the kit, passed it to him, then covered his hand with hers. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re too smart to be sorry for something that isn’t your responsibility. He wasn’t killed here, was he?”

“No.” Confident that Roarke could function as her aide until Peabody arrived, Eve approached the body again. “Not nearly enough blood. He’d have gushed from the jugular. That was likely the cause of death. We’ll find the other wounds are postmortem. In any case, there’d be splatters all over hell and back. We’d be wading in it. Record on?”

“Yes.”

“Victim identified as Robert Mathias, aka Lobar. White male, eighteen years of age. Preliminary visual exam indicates death was caused by a sharp-bladed instrument that severed the throat.” Shutting off everything but training, she took out a pencil light, examined the chest wound. “Additional insults include a wound in the chest, probably inflicted by the same weapon. The victim’s heart has been removed. The organ is not on scene. I need close-ups here,” she said to Roarke.

She took instruments out of her kit to calibrate. “The throat wound is six and a quarter inches across, approximately two inches deep.” Quickly, competently, she measured and recorded the other wounds. “A knife, black-handled with carving, was left in the body in the groin area to anchor what appears to be a computer-generated note on treated paper.”

She heard the shrill sound of sirens coming closer. “Uniforms,” she told Roarke. “They’ll secure the scene. Not much traffic out this way at this time of night.”

“Fortunately.”

“The body has been strapped by leather strips to a wooden structure, pentagram shape. The small amount of blood and blood patterns indicate victim was killed and mutilated elsewhere and transported to scene. Perimeter security to be scanned. Possibility of breech onto private property beyond security gate and wall. Body discovered at approximately four-thirty a.m. by Lieutenant Eve Dallas and Roarke, residents.”

She turned and walked over as the first black-and-white screeched up to the curb. “I want a privacy screen employed. Now. Block off the street in a twenty-foot perimeter. I don’t want gawkers here. I don’t want the f**king media. Got it?”