The Bride Collector (2 page)

Kim continued her initial examination, gently prodding the woman’s flesh, checking her eyes, lifting her hair, inspecting
the backs of her shoulders. But Brad already knew what she would find.

The question was,
Why?
What motivated the Bride Collector? How did he make his selections? What good or evil did he think he was doing? What had
been done to him to motivate his taking of life in such a manner? Who had he decided to kill next? When would he take her?

Where was he now?

The questions spun through Brad’s mind as one, yet distinguishable. Some were clearer than others, but all whispered from
beyond, tempting him to listen because each question already contained an answer. He simply had to find it and unpack it.

Nikki paced with one arm pressed against her belly, the other propping up her chin. It struck him that like her, two of the
victims had been brunettes. Like her, all four had beautiful complexions.

What would enter the killer’s mind if he were staring at Nikki through a hole in the wall at this moment? Brad pushed back
a fleeting impulse to check the wall behind them to see if there might indeed be a hole, filled with a single eye peering
in at them.

Instead, he let his eyes wander over Nikki—her calves well defined beneath the hem of the black skirt. Her wavy long hair
cascading on her shoulders, her eyes bright with question. Her forefinger absently brushing full lips. A perfectly symmetrical
face.

Would the killer feel any desire?

No. No it wasn’t desire, was it? She was beautiful, but beautiful women filled the world. Something else drew the Bride Collector,
in the same way that something else was drawing Brad now, though he had a difficult time putting a finger on it.

Of the numerous women he’d dated over the past ten years, only four relationships had lasted two months or more, each ending
sooner than the previous one. Nikki had once accused him of playing the role of bad boy. He thought
picky
was a better label. He had taste, after all.

After what he’d been through, he needed to be picky.

Nikki was thirty-one, married once at age nineteen, divorced six months later. She held her doctorate in psychology from CSU.
Highly intelligent, witty, reduced to deep introspection by scenes that left most people heaving.

This would excite the killer, wouldn’t it? And if Nikki came on to the killer, would that excite him?

No, Brad thought.

“He would like you,” Brad said.

Nikki glanced back at him, arm still around her waist. “Excuse me?”

He caught himself. This was one of those frequent times when honesty might not be so wise.

“I was just thinking that he liked her. You. That is, speaking to the victim. He.
He
would like
you,
meaning he would like
her.
”

Kim saved him. “Speaking to cadavers now, Brad? Don’t worry, I do it all the time.”

“You were looking at me when you said it,” Nikki said.

“So I was. I tend to do that.”

“What, stare at women? Or specifically at me?”

“Both, on occasion.”

A faint smile turned the corners of her mouth up. She winked. Not a full wink, but the movement in her right eyelid was unmistakable.
Or was it?

Nikki turned to face the wall, leaving Brad to feel somewhat dirty. In an attempt to help the woman on the wall, he’d somehow
violated her privacy. Yet her story was still unknown and demanded respect.

Silence. Remorse. Shame.

“Sir?” Frank’s voice intruded again.

Brad turned from the wall and walked to the door. “Bring the team in. Photograph every inch, dust every exposed surface. Blood,
sweat, spittle, hair; bag and tag the air if you have to. I want preliminaries from the lab this evening.”

“Um… It’s getting late. I don’t—”

“He’s staring through a peephole at another woman already, Frank. We have less than a week to stop him from showing that woman
his love. Preliminaries tonight.”

Brad left the shack thinking he might have chosen better words to express the urgency burning across his nervous system.

FBI FIELD OFFICE,
Stout Street, Denver, 9:00
PM
.

Nikki Holden stood next to Brad beside the stainless-steel examination table in the basement morgue. Watching Kim gingerly
turn the body onto its back, she noted the pathologist’s care not to disturb the shoulder-blade skin they’d cut to release
it from the wall.

The victim was a twenty-one-year-old named Caroline Redik. The name had surfaced when the lab ran her prints through the Automated
Fingerprint Identification System, better known by its acronym, AFIS. The ever-expanding database now included anyone who’d
applied for a passport, which Caroline had done before taking a trip to Paris one year earlier, for reasons yet unknown.

Calm and delicate, Kim labored with a plastic face shield in place. Not much could ruffle the forty-three-year-old. She was
as comfortable dipping her hand into a bloody gunshot wound as, when it mattered, peeling back the layers of society’s skin
with a well-placed question. She kept her blond hair short. Easier to keep out of the way. If there was a mother in the office,
it was Kim. Her manner created an interesting but somehow fitting contrast with her well-known love for a smorgasbord of men.

Nikki turned her attention back to the body. The skin was very pale, translucent, showing the blue veins beneath. She lay
prone, looking like a dressmaker’s dummy, displaying perfectly formed breasts, a flat belly, and well-defined hips. Nikki
found her rather bony, actually. While affixed to the wall, her flesh had settled over her bones and given her a less emaciated
appearance. On her back, however, she looked quite gaunt.

The eyes stared up at the ceiling, blue but lifeless. Her makeup was far more obvious under the bright halogen lights than
it had been before the evidence team illuminated the shack. The eyeliner and eye shadow had been carefully applied, evidence
of a steady, experienced hand. Was the killer a cosmetologist? Or a drag queen, even? Nikki could just see vertical streaks
running down from the corners of her eyes and ruining the perfect surface, as if poor Caroline had cried before the final
application.

Nikki recalled a memory of her father holding her shoulders when she was twelve. He’d knelt and brushed a tear from her right
cheek, where a dime-size birthmark had once darkened her skin. “You are beautiful, Nikki, and your birthmark makes you even
more beautiful. You don’t need to cover it up. And if the boys don’t see that, it’s only because they’re foolish, prepubescent
puppets of the system.” Then he’d kissed her on the cheek.

The memory still brought a tightness to her throat, maybe because his noble ideals hadn’t really survived him. She’d had the
brown mark surgically removed when she was eighteen.

If she had it to do over again, would she remove it today?

“… drugs in her system,” Kim was saying. “Benzodiazepine, the same psychoactive sedative he’s used on all four. More than
enough to make her susceptible to suggestion.”

“No sign of sexual contact?” Brad said.

“None.”

Nikki caught Brad’s sharp look. “That doesn’t mean this wasn’t a sexual act,” she interjected.

He offered her a slight nod. Just that, a simple gesture of acknowledgment and appreciation for her input. Funny how he could
lighten her mood without the slightest knowledge of his overall effect on her.

The other women in the office insisted he was a dead ringer for a blond-headed George Clooney, ten years younger, perhaps.
She could see the similarities. The dark, perpetually smiling eyes, probing deep. The short hair, the soft boyish face, slightly
elongated. The quintessential look of a perfect gentleman reinforced by his often thoughtful and polite demeanor.

But her closer working relationship had taught her that those qualities didn’t make Brad a soft or pliable man. If anything,
his edges were rougher than they first appeared. Clean on the outside, giving great attention to detail, but confident enough
to say what was on his mind whenever he saw fit.

His unapologetic talent for drawing women with his boyish good looks and strong conviction was tempered only by his notorious
refusal to commit. Which, in turn, made him a considerable mystery.

To Nikki’s way of thinking, he carried all the markings of a man with a past so deeply scarred that he was compelled to build
walls of self-preservation. Which was why she had resisted her own attraction to him for so long. Even if he was interested
in her, as she suspected, she wasn’t sure
she
was interested in a man she couldn’t quite peg. As a psychologist, it was her job to analyze people down to their uttermost
depths. The fact that she could not do so with Brad nagged her with an unshakable sense of wariness.

His eyes were soft and kind, but what lay hidden behind those eyes gave her pause. The unknown. She’d misjudged a man once
before and wasn’t eager to do it again. Her training in behavioral science hadn’t made her any more trusting.

“He wouldn’t grow impatient,” she said. “He would relish his time with her.”

Another nod, this time looking at the cadaver. “He would.”

Kim looked up, then turned to the victim’s other side and dramatically ran her index finger over the foot, tracing each toe.
Always one for theatrics when the opportunity presented itself.

“She took care of her feet. The toenail polish is fresh, applied in the last twenty-four hours. But she’s taken care of her
feet, her whole body for that matter, for a long time.”

“He likes to apply makeup and give pedicures,” Nikki said.

A half-inch hole, now bloodless and black, ran up into the heel. “He used the same half-inch bit size, maybe the same bit.
Ran it directly through the skin, the calcaneus bone, severing the peroneus longus tendon, and into the anterior tibial artery.
Everything’s as it was with the other three, except for this.” Kim traced her finger down to the victim’s right heel. “This
is what’s new.”

She picked up a small roll of bloody paper, maybe two inches long, and held it up between her thumb and forefinger. “This
time he left this in the right heel.”

Brad stepped forward. “Writing?”

“I can see some markings, yes. But I haven’t unrolled it yet. I thought you would want a look before I sent it up to the lab.”

Brad’s face lightened a shade.

The killer had left them a message.

SPECIAL AGENT IN
Charge James Temple sat against the edge of the secretary desk on the conference room’s north end and gazed at them with
brown, glassy eyes, hands folded up by his chin. Nikki leaned against the wall, arms crossed, fixated on the enlarged photograph
of the Bride Collector’s note on the screen. Two other agents, Miguel Ruffino and Barth Kramer, lounged in chairs, their focus
divided among the note, the SAC, Nikki, and Brad, who paced at the head of the conference table.

There was a reason these two would always be good, but not great, at their jobs, Brad thought. They lacked the obsessive personality
required to bring inordinate focus to any single task.

“So this is it,” Temple said to Brad’s left. “We have us a certified wacko. A freaking lunatic from some funny barn who’s
out there drilling holes in women to make a point.” He looked around with a bemused look. “No pun intended, of course.”

Ruffino and Kramer guffawed, just as Nikki shot the SAC a sharp look. “I wouldn’t put it like—”

“Spare me the psychobabble.” Temple stood and shoved his hands into his pockets. “If this isn’t certified crazy, I don’t know
what is.”

The man stood maybe three or four inches shy of six feet, wiry as a bull snake. He shaved his head and took pride in his body,
which he regularly and rigorously brought into submission at the gym. The man was a misfit in Denver, Brad thought. In the
Southeast, from which he’d been transferred a month earlier, his attitude would have been less of a problem. But up here,
gunslingers were frowned upon, and James Temple was most definitely a gunslinger—hotheaded, quick to conclusions, and choleric
to the bone.

“On balance, most pattern killers are mentally stable,” Nikki said. “They are well educated, financially stable, often good
looking, seemingly well-adjusted people. Unlike mass murderers, whose delusions feed beliefs of supremacy, serial killers
act for personal gain or revenge. They do so in a calculated, thoughtful way. Hardly your freaking lunatic.”

“Read it.” Temple frowned and jabbed his sharp, dimpled chin in the direction of the screen. “Any idiot can see that this
religious nutcase slobbers on himself. You’re saying you see something different?”

Nikki’s face reddened, but she didn’t point out the man’s blunder in essentially calling himself an idiot. She looked at the
screen.

The note was written in black lettering, with a fine ballpoint pen. The two-by-three-inch piece of white paper had been cut
using a straightedge, then was folded several times before being rolled and inserted into the hole in Caroline’s heel, at
least several days after it had been written.