She turned off the rural road and onto the long gravel lane that ambled through the estate, past century-old trees, and over leaf-strewn ruts. Brush and brambles obscured the view of the lodge from the road, but she noticed that the gates had been left open. Weird. Though the maid service and gardener didn’t have the keys, they knew to close the gates.
It seemed as if nothing about this listing was going right!
“You can pull this off,” she said then caught herself as she heard a bit of her Appalachian twang, the speech pattern she’d spent years disguising. It wasn’t the part of the country that embarrassed her. Lord, some of the nicest people she’d ever known lived in the mountains and hollers of West Virginia, the breathtakingly beautiful country filled with God-fearing, music-loving, hardworking people. It was the poor part of her past that made her skin crawl and caused her to spend her life running from that poverty.
She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She still looked good, even though the big four-oh loomed just over next spring’s horizon. Her hair was a vibrant red with perfect gold highlights, her green eyes wide and sexy, her body toned by a strict regimen of salads, low-fat dressings, sugar-free yogurt, and two hours in the gym every morning at five. Two cups of black coffee and she was wired for the day.
God, she loved her work.
But not when some idiots tried to sabotage it.
She’d gotten a call from a neighbor that there was a car at the lodge…and on tour day! At first she’d thought it was the groundskeeper who had been scheduled to clean up the place, but the neighbor assured her no work was being done on the estate and the car was not the usual beat-up green pickup.
Great,
she thought angrily.
Just…freaking great!
She’d already had the interior of the place cleaned to a spit-polished glow, and her car was filled with two thermoses of coffee, a fruit platter, and a basket of minibeignets for the other agents who were planning on driving all the way out here as part of the weekly tour. The first of the lot were due to arrive at the Pomeroy hunting lodge in less than two hours. How the hell was that going to happen now?
“Damn it,” she muttered as she spied the old Buick in the drive. The neighbor had been right. Well, whoever was here was going to get the hell out.
Careful, Laura. Tread carefully. Remember what Mama used to say: “You can’t tell a book by its cover.” Maybe whoever is here is interested in buying the place. There could be an armada of Mercedeses and Porsches or Ferraris in this guy’s garage.
No way.
The neighbor had called two hours earlier and Laura doubted a prospective buyer would hang out for hours just waiting. It wasn’t someone here early for the tour and the Regal sure as hell didn’t look like someone’s idea of a hunting rig.
Strange.
She nosed her Lincoln close to the Buick and parked. Climbing out of her car, she felt the first little tickle of a run in her panty hose—dear God, why had she bothered today? No big deal. She’d strip them off and show off her legs. Carefully dodging puddles, she walked up to the Buick. It was unlocked. And empty.
So where was the driver?
Inside?
She looked at the large rambling old lodge with its steep roof, dormers, and pine needles collecting in the gutters. All the windows seemed shut. How would the Buick’s owner get inside? The building was locked and secured with a real estate agent’s lock box. Or had been. Maybe the maid had returned with another key. Or maybe she’d left not only the gate wide open, but the building unlocked as well.
That thought royally pissed Laura off.
The tiny run in her stocking crawled upward and moisture seeped through the sides of her shoes as she marched up to the door, ready to use her electronic release for the lock box and grab the key hidden inside.
But as she mounted the two wide steps, she stopped dead in her tracks. The lock box was missing, not hooked to the handle of the giant door of the lodge as she’d left it two days earlier. Damn it. What did that mean? Her gaze took in the broad porch and she made a mental note to sweep it off before the tour began. The past few nights’ storms had pushed dry leaves and pine needles onto the hundred-year-old floorboards, and the damned lazy landscape maintenance man hadn’t bothered to show up…oh, hell. She spied the lock box, its handle snapped clean through, propped against a post of the porch rail.
“Son of a bitch,” she muttered, now not the least bit disconcerted about her twang.
She walked to the door, turned the knob easily, and pushed on the heavy oak panels. So much for security. The door opened as softly as if the hinges had been freshly oiled.
Strange.
Frowning, she took a step inside and had the instant sensation that something was wrong.
Well, no shit! The place is open!
“Hello?” she called out, the knockoffs clicking on the polished hardwood of the foyer. Smudges of dirt and a few dry leaves marred the shine. And there was something else. A hundred-dollar bill. Big as you please. Ben Franklin staring up at her from beneath a small table near the front door. “What the devil?”
Who had been in here and dropped a C-note?
The driver of the Buick?
The person who had broken in?
Glancing up the stairway, where hand-turned rails supported a gleaming banister, she yelled, “Anybody here?”
The rambling country home was silent as a tomb.
“Hello?”
She noticed a second bill in the archway leading to the living area…and another. Three hundred dollars. She picked up each of the bills and walked into the living room, where she saw more bills, a dozen or more, lying on the floorboards but they weren’t pristine. They were smudged with dirt and…
blood?
Her heart kicked. Oh, God. That’s what it was, red stains smudged over Ben Franklin’s face. Then she smelled it, that coppery odor that had accompanied her father when he’d come back from a hunting trip with gutted deer or from slaughtering the pigs…Yes, that’s what she smelled. Blood and urine turning acrid, to sting the nostrils with the burn of ammonia.
She took two steps farther into the living area, where she could see the floor in front of the couch.
“Oh,
God!
”
Two bodies were lying on the floor. Obviously dead. A fully dressed, plump black woman on top of a bare-assed naked Asa Pomeroy.
“Jesus, no!” Laurie cried, backing up, nearly screaming out loud. “Oh, no, no, no…” She saw the bullet holes and the blood, pooled beneath Asa and streaking down the side of the woman’s face. A pearl-handled handgun was still clutched in the woman’s right hand.
No, not just any woman, Laura finally realized. As her brain kicked into gear, she recognized the facial features of Gina Jefferson, the woman who’d been reported missing earlier today.
Laurie gagged.
Throughout the room, hundred-dollar bills were scattered, littering the bodies floor and couch, catching in the breeze from the open door.
Laura stumbled, turned on the thin heel of her sling back, ran for the door. She lost one of her shoes in the process. She didn’t stop, nor did she lock up, just leapt off the porch and sprinted to her Lincoln.
Inside, she turned on the ignition. The Lincoln’s tires sprayed gravel as she tore out. Her heart was pounding and she felt as if every hair on her head had turned instantly gray. Asa’s bloated face, his mussed white hair, the stain of blood, and his hideous beached-whale, white carcass, covered with the body of Gina Jefferson.
Her stomach curdled.
“Oh, God,” she whispered and scrabbled in her purse for her cell phone. She dialed 911 on the fly, not stopping at the country road, just careening onto it and nearly hitting a pickup truck loaded with live chickens as she slid over the center line.
The pickup driver laid on his horn and shook his fist, but she barely noticed as the emergency operator answered. “Nine-one-one. Police Dispatch. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
“I need to report a murder. A double murder!” Laura yelled, hyperventilating, her heart pounding, feeling for all the world as if she might pass out as the Lincoln streaked down the highway. “And…oh, God…you can stop looking. I’ve found Asa Pomeroy and Gina Jefferson. He’s dead! She’s dead! Oh, God, they’re both dead!” she cried, fighting the urge to puke. She cranked on the steering wheel at the next driveway, stood on the brakes, heard the thermoses slosh and the tray of fruit and pastry slam forward against the front seat. For once she didn’t care, just threw open the door and leaned out, heaving up this morning’s coffee.
“P
omeroy owns this place?” Montoya asked as he surveyed the crime scene. The 911 dispatch center had notified homicide as well as the FBI of the call they’d received. The operator had managed to pull the address out of a horrified Laura Beck, the real estate agent who had found the bodies and was now down at the police station talking to Brinkman.
It was late evening and dark. Lights had been set up, and the area roped off with crime-scene tape. Crowded inside this old hunting lodge, there were not only the crime-scene investigators but agents from the local field office, the sheriff’s department, and the Louisiana State Police. Also, detectives from both the Cambrai and New Orleans Police Departments had shown up earlier in the afternoon, trying to work together and stay out of each other’s way.
Bonita Washington, in a no-nonsense mood, had already barked at Montoya twice, first to sign the damned log and then to don covers for his shoes. He’d done both and held his tongue while Inez Santiago measured and took pictures. Another investigator dusted while a fourth studied the blood spatter.
The old hunting lodge was being examined board by board, trace evidence collected, the victims’ hands bagged, not only photographs snapped but a video recording taken as well.
Everyone was tense.
No one cracked a joke.
They knew they were dealing with another serial killer in an area that had seen far too many.
This scene was staged identically to the Gierman-LaBelle murders with the one exception that Gina Jefferson hadn’t been dressed in a bridal gown. In fact, it appeared as if she was wearing exactly what she had on when she’d gone missing. Her husband, Walter, had described her navy blue pantsuit and blouse to a T.
But Asa was naked as the proverbial jaybird. Not a stitch on. The clothes he’d been wearing had been left in a wrinkled pile near the fireplace: hat, boots, slacks, jacket, and underwear. Without so much as a drop of blood on any piece of the clothing. Nope. He’d been stripped before he was killed, rather than after. Just like Gierman.
The obvious difference in this scene was that over the bodies and the surrounding flooring, hundred-dollar bills had been strewn like snowflakes.
Why?
“Take a closer look at his body,” Bentz said, motioning toward Pomeroy. “Check out the tiny bruise marks on his neck, close together, the skin red.”
“Stun gun?”
“That would be my guess.”
“What about her?” Montoya asked, hitching his chin at the corpse of Gina Jefferson.
“None found yet.”
“So our killer only pulled out the voltage for Pomeroy.”
“Right. But then he’s a lot bigger than the woman and might have put up more of a fight. He had a reputation for being tough.”
“Not tough enough,” Montoya observed, frowning as he rubbed at his goatee. “If we’re talking about the same killer, and I’d put money on it, he’s changing his routine. This is different from how Gierman and LaBelle were handled. No stun gun marks on their bodies. And look here.” He pointed to one side of Gina Jefferson’s face, where a long thin cut sliced down her cheek and blood had oozed only to dry. “This isn’t the same as the first scene either.”
“Maybe these two weren’t as compliant as the first. Or it could be that he’s honing his skills. Something didn’t work as well as he’d wanted the first time, so he improved his system, pulled out the stun gun and knife.”
“Or he’s getting off on his victim’s pain,” Montoya said, not liking that train of thought.
“We’re already checking on who purchased a stun gun lately; maybe by the marks on Pomeroy’s throat, we can figure out the make and model.”
“That would help,” Montoya agreed. “So what about the weapon that killed them?”
“We think it belonged to Mrs. Jefferson’s husband, Walter. A few weeks ago, he came into the station and reported one of his pearl-handled revolvers had been stolen. Two were in the gun case, only one taken. From his den, while both he and his wife were working. I’ve got a call into the officer who took the report and did the follow-up, but I doubt if we get much. Weapons are stolen every day. We’ll see what the officer has to say, but the husband’s a real mess, doesn’t want to believe that his wife is gone, blames himself for the weapon being taken, the whole nine yards. Zaroster and Brinkman have already talked to him, gotten one of his brothers to come and stay with him, just in case he’s so depressed he loses it and tries to do something stupid, like off himself.”
“This just gets better and better,” Montoya said with more than a grain of sarcasm. He scanned the interior of the pine-paneled room and stared at the money, still left where it had fallen, while the scene was meticulously photographed. “What’s with all the cash?” There had been no hundred-dollar bills, or bills of any amount, cast upon the previous scene, though there had been a lot of feathers from the pillow strapped to Gierman. No pillow here that he could see. “How much is it?”
“Near as we can tell without moving the bodies, over six grand.”
Montoya whistled. “Obviously the motive wasn’t money.”
“I talked to Pomeroy’s wife. She says Asa kept five thousand locked in the glove box of his car at all times in case he joined up with a private poker party. Kept it in one of those purple velvet Crown Royal whiskey bags. But that was just his backup wad. He usually carried another fifteen hundred or so on him, in the gold money clip she gave him for Christmas a couple of years back.”
“Is the money clip here?”
Bentz shook his head.
“You figure the killer took it?”
“If the missus can be believed, he never left home without it.” Bentz shot him a look. “Wives have been known to be wrong about their husbands’ habits when those husbands are off-leash.”
Montoya walked around the bodies, viewing the death scene from another angle. “Let’s just assume the wife knows what she’s talking about. So, the killer takes the money clip but leaves the cash Pomeroy had in his pocket at the scene. The killer also somehow knows about the glove box stash and includes that in our confetti here. Either Pomeroy, maybe pleading for his life, told him about his money or the killer, or someone he works with, is close enough to Pomeroy to know about the cash in the glove box.”
“Until we find the car, we won’t know.”
“The Buick out front belong to Ms. Jefferson?” Montoya glanced at Bentz.
“Yeah.” Bentz nodded. He was avoiding staring for any length of time at the victims. Montoya remembered that Bentz always had trouble keeping the contents of his stomach down whenever he visited a murder scene.
“Anything taken from her?” Montoya asked. An investigator was prying the two corpses away from each other to check for lividity and take each body’s internal temperature.
“Maybe. Mr. Jefferson swears she always wears a simple gold cross, one her mother gave her years before. On a chain around her neck.”
“I take it, it’s not there.” Montoya glanced at the two now separated bodies.
“Not that we’ve found.”
“Bingo,” Santiago said, lowering her camera. She was looking at the base of a leather ottoman and the swatch of purple fabric that was peeking from beneath it. “Bet the Crown Royal Bag is under this.” She took several more shots and, using gloves, moved the ottoman, then snapped off several more shots of the floor beneath the crumpled whiskey bag.
“Looks like the wife was right this time,” Montoya said as Santiago slipped the purple velvet drawstring pouch into a plastic evidence bag.
Montoya had seen enough. He didn’t understand why in each case the bodies had been positioned in a way to suggest the victims were lovers. What was the point of that? Skirting the central part of the crime scene, he walked with Bentz through the front door to the porch, where an officer stood guard, the sign-in log in his hand. Headlights and klieg lights were visible through the trees; the press was still camping out. Overhead the steady whoop, whoop, whoop of helicopter blades accompanied the beam of a searchlight from a local television station.
Bentz and Montoya lingered under the porch’s overhang rather than be caught by the sweep of the searchlight or the cameraman’s lens. “Courtney LaBelle always wore a diamond cross, and it was left in favor of the promise ring.” Bentz looked thoughtful.
“As I said, our boy ain’t about money.” His back to the breeze that was carrying the scent of damp earth and rain, Montoya automatically reached into his jacket pocket for his pack of cigarettes. His fingers scraped the empty pocket liner before he realized what he was doing. If Bentz noticed, he didn’t comment.
“Serial killers don’t do it for the money. It’s about power, ego-stroking, showing off, or some kind of personal mission.”
“And they don’t usually cross race lines,” Montoya said. “Whites kill whites, blacks kill blacks. But now, it appears we’ve got three white bodies, one African-American.”
“Usually. Yeah.” Bentz scowled and jammed his hands into his pockets. “What makes you think there’s anything usual about this case? Our guy has an agenda. This isn’t random. So he might not fit the profile.”
“Agreed.” Montoya knew that statistically serial killers were usually white, male, and somewhere in their twenties or thirties. They may have been abused; they probably had a history of childhood violence. It wasn’t true in every single instance, but it was the norm. However, there was always the exception to the rule, and Montoya wondered if this guy just might be it. “It’s obvious he’s trying to tell us something. With the things he’s taken, the way he stages the crimes. Why are the men naked, the women dressed and lying on top? Is he showing that there’s sex involved? Or is he signifying physical or psychological dominance? Why make it appear as if the woman killed the man, then turned the gun on herself?”
“If we knew all that shit, we’d have him.” Bentz scratched the back of his neck and gazed into the surrounding darkness. Another chopper joined the first, and arcs of blue light sliced through the night. He glanced up at the sky. “Give me a break,” he muttered.
Montoya’s cell phone chirped and he answered, “Montoya.” “Hey, it’s Zaroster. You aren’t by any chance listening to the radio?”
“I’m at the crime scene.”
“Take a break and listen to WSLJ,
Gierman’s Groaners
. It could be that the killer’s surfacing.”
“Got it.” Montoya was already on his way to his cruiser, long strides tearing up the ground, Bentz at his side. The sweep of the helicopter’s light zeroed in on them, but he didn’t care.
“What is it?”
“Zaroster thinks the killer’s contacted the radio station.”
He turned the ignition to ACC, flipped on the radio, and found WSLJ. Maury Taylor’s nasal voice was on the airwaves.
“…that’s right, so I’m not sure if this is the real deal, or a fake,” he was saying. Every muscle in Montoya’s back grew taut. He hardly dared breathe he was concentrating so hard, glaring at the radio’s digital display. “I mean it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to send a simple, and I mean
simple,
note to the station here. Any idiot can do that. So, if you’re listening Al, I don’t get it. I mean, I know that you’re trying to creep me out and all, but I’m not all that convinced you’re the real deal.”
“What?” Bentz asked softly.
“I mean, I’d expect something a whole lot better than this to prove that you’re the killer. So I’m going to assume that it’s a fake, that whoever you are, Al, you’re just out for your fifteen minutes. Sorry, Pa-
Al,
you won’t get ’em from me. So, okay, enough with cowards and fakes, let’s get down to the topic of the night: Cheating on your spouse. If you can get away with it, who does it really hurt?”
“Son of a bitch!” Montoya hit the dashboard with his fist. “The killer’s contacted him. That scrawny-necked piece of crap!”
“Maybe the killer’s contacted him, maybe not. Remember who we’re dealing with. Maury Taylor would sell his soul to the devil, then renege on the deal if he got a better offer and higher ratings were involved. This could all be just a publicity stunt.”
Montoya, ready to spit nails, swore again. “Damn it all to hell, I think it’s time to visit our friends over at WSLJ.”
“Good idea. I’d better finish up here. Call me.” Bentz glanced at the dash where Montoya’s fist had hit. “Careful with the car,” he said, climbing out of the Crown Vic. “It’s publicly owned.”
“Shove it, Bentz. Get the hell out of the car so I can go throttle that little dick-head.”
Bentz slid across the seat, slamming the door shut behind him.
Montoya backed up then hit the gas, tearing down the lane, only to have to slow for the cluster of vehicles at the gate. Cop cars, lights flashing, half barricaded the drive while press vans collected as close to the crime scene as possible. Vehicles from rubberneckers lined the street, and knots of people stood and stared through the open gate, hoping for a glimpse of a victim or God knew what. Montoya wished they’d all go home. “Get a life,” he muttered under his breath as one woman wearing a yellow slicker barely moved out of his way. She stared after him. He wondered vaguely if the killer was among the curious and had left instructions for the cops guarding the gates to check and keep track of anyone who wanted a closer look.
Once through the tangle of vehicles, cameras, klieg lights, and humanity, Montoya hit the gas again. He gripped the wheel as if he could strangle it and listened with half an ear to the police band. As the Crown Vic’s tires hit the pavement of the country road, he switched on his lights. He was nearly an hour away from the city. He planned to be there in half that time.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
His muscles screamed at the punishment, but he kept persisting, going through set after set of push-ups as he listened to the remains of the Gierman program. He strained hard and sweat ran down his naked body, along the cords of his neck, and dripped from his nose.
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
The disk jockey was an imbecile. An insult to the human race, a pea-brain who was awkwardly, and so obviously, attempting to lure him into exposing himself.