Unspeakable (11 page)
“Aggravated assault?”
Cinco winced. “That was this thing over at the Dockhouse. Long time ago.”
She skimmed the info. “He
stabbed
someone?”
“Yeah, but the guy was really out of line.”
Elaina just stared at him, waiting for more.
“See, Troy’s girlfriend at the time had just won fifty bucks off these guys at pool. One of them started talking trash to her. Him and Troy traded punches. The guy pulled a knife, but Troy took it right off him. Might have nicked him some.…” Cinco’s voice trailed off and he looked apologetic.
“So now he has a criminal record over a game of pool.” Elaina shook her head.
Men.
“He’s really a stand-up guy, though,” Cinco said. “Just has a temper.”
Elaina flipped to the last page, some thirty-nine-year-old who’d been arrested four times this year for smoking pot on the beach. Naked, evidently.
“Inoperable cancer,” Cinco explained. “Hell, I’d be lighting up, too.”
Elaina looked up to see Troy towering over their table. Faded jeans again. Black T-shirt. His shaggy hair was slicked back, hinting at a shower, but he hadn’t bothered to shave.
“You look worse than your mug shot,” she said drily.
Troy slid into the booth and scooted her over.
“Ex
cuse
me,” she said as he reached across her to grab a menu.
“Your friend leave?” he asked her.
“He got called in this morning.” But not before admonishing her to keep her distance from Troy. Weaver had good instincts about people, and he was protective of the ones he cared about. Sometimes annoyingly so.
Elaina stashed the file beside her purse and pretended
not to notice Troy’s warm bulk beside her. Aggravated assault. With a knife, too. It should bump him right to the top of her suspect list, but it didn’t. She glanced down at his denim-clad leg beside her. Maybe she was letting her attraction to him cloud her judgment.
But despite his rap sheet, Elaina’s instincts told her he was safe. Instincts—plus the fact that she’d been
on
the phone with Troy when she’d received the call from the unsub—had made her scratch Troy off of her suspect list.
The waitress appeared with an English muffin and Cinco’s whatever-it-was that smelled heavenly and came with a side of jalapeños.
“Okay, you win,” Elaina told Cinco. “What is that, anyway?”
“Migas.”
“I’ll have the same,” Troy told the waitress. “And coffee. Black.”
“Here’s that other thing you asked for.” Cinco slid a single slip of paper across the table.
“Is this the list?” she asked, and Cinco grunted around a mouth full of eggs.
“What list?” Troy asked.
“Window peekers. The vast majority of serial killers start out as Peeping Toms,” Elaina said, reading over the addresses and dates. “It’s just something I wanted to check.”
The incidents were between eight and fifteen years old, just as she’d requested. A report halfway down the list caught her attention. It had occurred a few weeks before Mary Beth Cooper’s murder. She glanced at the address.
“Bay Port?” she asked.
“Yep.” Cinco exchanged a look with Troy. “Same street where Mary Beth Cooper lived. Thought you might want it.”
Uh,
yeah.
“Did the Bay Port police look into this?”
“No idea,” Cinco said. “From what I hear, they barely got started on the case when the feds took over. She was connected with the Charles Diggins murders pretty quick there. Most of those victims were Latina, so it was being investigated by the feds as maybe a race thing.”
Troy’s breakfast arrived and he dug right in. Elaina watched him, wondering how he felt about her putting forward a theory that called his credibility into question. He didn’t seem resentful, but he was a tricky man to read.
Elaina tucked the paper into her file. She’d make some calls this afternoon, see if the same family still lived at this address and if they’d mind sitting down with her. It might not go anywhere, but who knew? Maybe whoever had reported this Peeping Tom had gotten a look at him.
Elaina eyed Troy’s sausage links as she nibbled her English muffin. She glanced up, and he was smiling at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Hungry?”
“No.” She sipped her coffee.
“So let’s have it, Cinc.” He picked up a sausage and popped it in his mouth. “There any truth to that rumor about a task force?”
Cinco gave Elaina a sheepish look, and she knew she wasn’t going to like this.
“There’s a task force forming?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “That’s the word.”
“Who’s on it?”
And why am I the last to know?
“I don’t know yet. Breck’s coordinating with the sheriff’s office, the Texas Rangers. Looks like everybody’s got a hand in.”
Except for the FBI agent sent here to work the case. Elaina’s temper simmered. This was bullshit. Again.
She rummaged through her purse and jerked a ten out of her wallet. “Excuse me,” she said, placing it under her coffee cup.
She made her way to the front of the restaurant and stepped outside as she dialed her boss’s number. Only then did she think to look at her watch. Ten-thirty on a Sunday morning. Would he be at church right now? Waking up with some girlfriend? Scarborough had no spouse, no kids. He was a highly demanding boss because personal commitments meant nothing to him.
“Scarborough.” The voice was clear and alert. He hadn’t been rolling out of bed.
“Sir. It’s Elaina McCord. I hope you’re not at church.”
I hope you’re not at church?
What an idiotic thing to say.
“What is it, McCord? I’m in the middle of something.”
“Right.” She cleared her throat. “I’m on Lito Island assisting in the Whitney Bensen homicide. It seems they’re putting a task force together, and I wanted to make sure—”
“Relax, you’re on it.”
She released a breath. “I am?”
“Yeah, this idea of yours about the Cooper connection, it’s getting some legs.”
“It’s…” She wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t want to discredit her own theory, but since when had anyone been taking her seriously?
“They found another body,” Scarborough told her. “Not an hour ago. I just got off the phone with Breck.”
Her stomach twisted. “Is it Valerie Monroe?”
“The missing med student, they think. I don’t know her name.”
“Valerie Monroe. What’s the connection—”
“Geography. Killer dumped her in the exact same place as that Cooper girl.”
Bay View Nature Preserve
N 26° 19.307 W 097° 30.875
11:55 A.M. CST
Cinco flashed his badge, and the cop manning the blockade waved him through. He drove past the crime-scene van and wedged his pickup truck into a spot between two sheriff’s units.
“You need some shoes?” Cinco asked, eyeing Elaina in his passenger seat. She had on that same outfit from Friday, including the heels. They weren’t all that high, but still. “I’ve probably got some duck boots in back. It’ll be muddy.”
“Sure.”
He twisted around and dug through the crap in the back of his cab: clothes, fishing gear, tools. He handed her some mud-caked boots from the floor. She slipped her shoes off, and he watched—impressed—as she wrestled her feet into his boots without seeming to care about the dirt getting all over her pantsuit. Maybe she only
looked
uptight.
“So what’s the protocol here?” she asked.
Or maybe not. “Protocol?”
“Who’s in charge of this crime scene? I understand it’s a park now? Nine years ago it was just private land transected by a highway.”
“Yeah, they got some endangered bird nesting here. Some kind of crane or something. While back, a lot of the bird people pushed to have it made into a nature preserve. I’m not sure who’s in charge, to tell you the truth.”
She glanced out the window at all the law enforcement types standing around. The friendly Agent McCord from breakfast was long gone. She’d put on her game face.
“You ever worked a homicide before?” he asked.
She glanced over at him. “I participated in a drug raid a few months ago. A guy got shot. Died at the scene.”
“This isn’t like that,” he said, needing to warn her. “I’m not saying you’re not up for it or anything, it’s just… it’s bad, okay? I don’t care how long you been on the job, what he does to these girls is bad.”
“I know.” She met his gaze, and he knew she was prepared. As prepared as you ever could be, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t spook her. He’d seen some bad shit over the years, but nothing that compared to this.
He pushed open the door and got out. She followed suit.
“Hey,” she said.
He glanced at her over the hood, and she smiled slightly. “Thanks.”
“For what?” he asked.
“The boots, and you know, the rest of it.”
She ducked under the crime-scene tape and trudged
across the field, right up to the group of men huddled together beside a wooden sign that read
BAY VIEW NATURE PRESERVE
.
Cinco looked around and tried to get the lay of the land. They were on the mainland side of Laguna Madre, just a few hundred feet in from the bay. The ground looked soft, despite the recent dry spell. A fairly large perimeter had been set up and almost everyone was milling around outside it. Some cops were reluctant to sign into a crime scene and make themselves fair game for a defense attorney down the road. No one wanted to be the jackass who touched the wrong thing and got some scumbag off on a technicality.
A guy Cinco recognized from the Lito County Sheriff’s Department walked up to him.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” Cinco remembered his name, finally. Ketchem. People called him Ketch.
“Man, oh,
man,
” Ketchem said, shaking his head. “This one’s bad.”
Cinco nodded.
“You never seen anything like it. Swear to God, I nearly booted up my breakfast.”
Cinco watched Elaina. She stood beside a crime-scene technician, peering into a ditch.
“Vic’s over there?”
“Yup. Guy dumped her in that gulley. Couple inches a water. Fish’ve been at her. Bugs, buzzards. Damn near everything’s had a bite of her. Don’t know how they’re gonna get an ID.”
The image Cinco had been trying to get rid of was back now—Whitney Bensen in vivid detail.
Elaina knelt down and pointed at something on the ground. She waved over a ranger who was standing nearby and exchanged words with him.
“She the fed?” Ketchem asked.
“Yeah.”
He grunted something that could have meant anything from “She’s hot” to “She looks like a pain in the ass.”
Elaina stood up, and Cinco watched her talk to the ranger, then the sheriff. He had to admire her, just wading into the fray like that. She didn’t act intimidated, even though he would’ve thought she would be. The only other woman around lay naked in that ditch, gutted with a hunting knife.
The smell alone had to be unbearable.
“This guy’s a twisted fuck.” Ketchem shook his head and turned his back on the scene. He looked pretty gray, and Cinco decided he probably
had
booted up his breakfast.
A second crime-scene van pulled up, and two men got out. They opened the back doors, and Cinco watched as they zipped themselves into some white coveralls. One of them took a stretcher from the back and the other grabbed a body bag. A white sedan pulled up beside it. Frank Cisernos. The ME wore khaki pants, a blue golf shirt, and a grim expression. Whatever plans he’d had for his Sunday afternoon had just been canceled. They’d do the autopsy today. Soon, most likely, before the body got any worse.
Cinco wiped his brow with the back of his arm. He gazed up at the sun. Not noon yet, but it was a hundred degrees, at least.
“Fuckin’ heat’s not helping,” Ketchem said.
“Yeah.” Cinco glanced over at Elaina, who had to have a strong stomach to be standing there just a few feet from the body.
He won’t stop.
She’d told him that yesterday as they’d sat in that stuffy conference room pulling together the suspect list.
He’ll either get caught or get killed, but he won’t stop.
Cinco gazed up at the white-hot sun again. A pair of buzzards circled overhead, all the time in the world, just waiting for another turn. Meanwhile, he was about to spend the next three hours picking through grass and muck, looking for clues, while the techs spooned that poor girl out of the ditch. Cinco didn’t want to be here again. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. He wanted to nail this guy.
He watched Elaina. She met his gaze briefly, and he knew she felt the same way.
“Come on,” he told Ketchem. “Let’s do something useful.”
Elaina sat in the Taurus and cursed the GPS. “Invalid Address,” it told her for the third time. She took a deep breath and keyed in the letters again.
The passenger door jerked open.
“God, don’t
do
that!”
Troy slid into the car and pulled the door shut. “Do what?”
She shot him a glare and turned her attention back to the navigation system. “I can’t talk right now,” she told him. “I’m on my way out.”