Assuming it was a knife, maybe it had been thrown or dropped by the killer in his haste to escape the scene.
It seemed unlikely, but based on the condition of the victim’s body and the damage that had been done to her, Holland felt there was at least some chance the patrol officers might uncover something useful. He was no psychologist, but as a longtime homicide dick he felt he could reasonably make a few assumptions based on both the condition of the victim and of the apartment itself.
The nature of the wounds on the body suggested that the suspect possessed, in addition to a terrifying level of psychosis, a meticulous personality and high intelligence, as evidenced by his preplanning skills. It couldn’t have been easy to set up the torture device and to lure the young victim here without being discovered.
But the sloppiness of the execution—blood splattered everywhere, the corpse still strapped into the chair, the crime scene not even the subject of the most perfunctory cleanup—gave Holland pause.
He had worked similar scenes before. If his theory was correct, the man—it was almost always a man when the crime was this vicious—was dissembling. He was being overtaken by his psychosis. He was becoming even more dangerous and unpredictable than he clearly already had been. The thought gave Holland a sinking feeling in his gut.
He wandered around the tiny shell of abandoned apartment, concentrating mostly on the room where the young girl had been butchered. The living room. He thought about the irony of such a vicious murder occurring in the “living room” and a chuckle that sounded suspiciously like a choked-off sob escaped before he was able to stop it. He looked around to see if anyone had noticed and was relieved to see no one had.
He considered the murder weapon. Or, more accurately, the absence of a murder weapon. What did it mean that the knife was gone? In most cases, it would simply mean the killer had maintained the presence of mind to take it with him when he left and had disposed of it elsewhere.
But in this case, Holland wasn’t so sure. The perpetrator had not made any attempt to hide the mutilated body of his victim or in any way clean up his mess. Would it be consistent with the apparently mindless, frenzied nature of this attack to assume the man had regained enough logic and preplanning skill after committing this horrifying crime to take the murder weapon with him and get rid of it somewhere?
Holland didn’t think so. He thought maybe it meant something else. Maybe it meant the killer wasn’t quite done yet. Maybe he planned on using the knife again.
Holland had moved to the entryway between the living room and the kitchen in an attempt to stay out the way of the evidence techs, whose work he hoped would be finished soon. He shook his head slowly, thinking about Mr. Midnight running around the city, and when he did, his eyes fell on a piece of trash, no great surprise since the entire apartment was filled with trash. But this particular piece of trash appeared to have been placed, not scattered haphazardly like everything else, on a small uncluttered portion of the scarred kitchen counter. Something about it bothered Holland. He bent down and examined it without touching it. It looked like the back of a cardboard insert to a snack cake package. Written on it in messy, spidery script, was “7 Granite Circle.”
Holland felt his pulse quicken. It was a long shot, but maybe this “7 Granite Circle” was where the killer had gone. Maybe he had tortured this information out of his victim and was even now either at this address or on his way there. That the person who had planned and executed a crime of this magnitude would leave a handwritten note leading investigators to his current whereabouts seemed unlikely in the extreme, but if Holland’s theory about the killer dissembling was correct, it was at least a possibility.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. Holland Montvale had no idea how many towns and cities in the surrounding area had an address of 7 Granite Circle within their boundaries, but that information could be accessed easily enough. And it needed to be accessed right now.
Before it was too late.
CHAPTER 43
When the disgusting murdering psycho had offered his knife to her, flipping it into the air and then holding it out like a proud teen offering flowers to his date on prom night, Cait had known immediately he was screwing with her; she wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t nearly as clever as he thought he was. But she still could have grabbed for it. She had just been so concerned with Kevin and the awful blood bubbling out of his chest that she was just a little too slow on the uptake.
If she had only whipped her hand up and grabbed it out of his slimy paw! She pictured herself plucking it cleanly from his palm and stabbing him in the heart, puncturing his chest like he had punctured Kevin’s, blood pouring out of the wound as he stared disbelievingly at the tiny woman he had so badly misjudged, at the knife handle sticking out of his own body, quivering to the pulsing beat of his dying heart.
Cait considered herself a pacifist and not so long ago would never have imagined herself capable of the sort of black fantasy she was currently experiencing. But the world she had known her entire life, a world where people treated each other with dignity and respect and where things proceeded along a rational and understandable arc, that world was gone, at least for now. It was gone and it had been replaced by a world of madness and hate and unimaginable brutality and violence, a world where an armed police officer is no match for a madman with a knife.
Cait was so wrapped up in the vision—not a Flicker, just a regular, garden-variety daydream—she didn’t realize the murdering bastard was talking to her until he leaned down into her face and shouted, “Hey!”
She recoiled in surprise. “What?” she whispered.
“I said, it’s time to get this production rolling. Are you ready for Act One?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re to get your pretty little ass over to that couch and lie down on it.”
Oh, God.
This was worse than she thought. The idea of that horrible, nasty man raping her, sticking any part of his disgusting body inside her, was too much to bear.
As if he could read her mind, the man snickered. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Although, if you don’t get moving, I might fuck you just to make a point.”
Cait knew she should shut her mouth and do what the man said, but she couldn’t help herself. “What point would that be?” she said, half wondering when the breakdown she was expecting any moment would strike and she would be reduced to a blubbering, sniveling idiot. So far it hadn’t happened, but how far off could it be? She felt her sanity warping, being stretched to its limits.
“The point,” he answered, baring his teeth, his hate for her radiating off him like a force field, “is that you think getting raped is the worst thing I could do to you, but you have no fucking idea how wrong you are. But if you don’t do as you’re instructed, and I mean right fucking now, I will rape you just for the fun of it and then we’ll take things from there.”
Cait began moving in a confused daze toward the couch. She wondered why he wanted her to lie down if he didn’t plan on raping her. She wondered what she had ever done to this man to warrant the kind of hatred he clearly felt for her.