“Same MO?” Nick zipped up his jeans and pulled a black T-shirt over his head. Threaded his holster through his belt, secured his gun.
“Her head was covered by a garbage bag.”
“Her head? Where’s the rest of her body?”
She blinked, at first not understanding what he meant, then realizing he thought just her head was found. “It’s all there, but her body was wrapped in plastic wrap.”
“Mouth?”
“Don’t know. The responding officer didn’t remove the bag from her head. He checked her pulse and she was dead. He secured the scene, called it in. The crime techs are meeting us there.”
Nick slid his feet into boots and picked up the coffee Carina had brought, took a sip. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“I don’t know about you,” she said as she headed down the stairs to her car, “but three hours of sleep doesn’t cut it for me anymore.”
Since it was the middle of the night with no traffic, it took less than twenty minutes to reach the library. The crime scene van was already there, but they were still unpacking their equipment. Carina introduced Nick to Jim Gage and his assistant, Blair Duncan, who was fresh out of college. Jim pulled the case when he heard it might be related to the Vance homicide; Blair pulled the case because she had the misfortune of being the lowest man-or woman-on the totem pole and drew the graveyard shift.
Another car drove up and Jim said, “Did you know Dillon was coming?”
Carina glanced behind her. Dillon got out of his Lexus and walked over. “Yeah. He’s been consulting informally, though now…” she didn’t need to finish. Chief Causey had put together a small task force for Angie’s funeral; Carina would demand that they expand it after this. Two girls brutally murdered in less than a week. Carina was certain she’d win the argument this time.
“I called Missing Persons on my way in,” Dillon said. “A seventeen-year-old intern has been missing since Wednesday evening. She left the library at eight but never arrived home. Her car was found here, in this lot, the next morning.”
“Do you have a name?” Carina asked.
“Becca Harrison.”
Gage approached the victim first while his assistant photographed the scene. When she was done visually cataloging the body and immediate surroundings, she walked in a circle outward while Gage inspected the body.
“Carina, look at this,” he said.
She approached. A plastic garbage bag had been tied with white nylon rope around the victim’s neck. Her body had been wrapped with plastic wrap. Her hands were bound together by rope.
“Could it be a copycat?” she asked, her voice unusually quiet.
“One way to know for sure.” The press had gotten wind of the garbage bags, but they’d never released information about the glued-on gag.
Gage carefully removed the rope and bagged it. Next, he gently pulled the bag from her head.
Her mouth was sealed with a black bandanna identical to the one found on Angie.
Carina turned to Nick. “Let’s find out if she had a sex diary and if Bondage or Scout commented on her page. And I’m going to wake Patrick up. We need something more to go on than two unknown profiles in cyberspace.” She motioned for Dillon to approach.
Her brother stared at the body, his face long. “She’s so young.”
“Do you have a description of Becca Harrison?”
“Long dark hair, blue eyes, five-foot-four, one hundred five pounds.”
“It fits. Let’s run her prints before we call the parents, just to be sure.”
Dillon looked at her with compassion. Was he thinking about the day when the police came to the Kincaid house and told them that Justin’s body had been found? Every time she had to talk to her parents, she thought about the anguished cry that came out of her sister’s throat, a sound that could only be described as the voice of pain itself.
“I’m sorry,” Dillon now said.
“I’ll be okay.” She would, that was her job. And doing the job helped make her okay.
“Look at her.” Carina pointed toward the victim’s body, harshly visible in the lights Gage had set up around the perimeter. “The MO changed. Why the plastic wrap?”
“The media has always jumped on the similarities between crimes, the so-called signature of a serial killer,” Dillon said. “But in truth, killers are always trying to perfect their crime. With every kill they lose something, part of the fantasy. This is why they start killing in the first place-the mental fantasy is no longer enough to satisfy them. They escalate. Some might rape first, then rape and kill. But the kill itself, while it’s a momentary high, leads to depression when it’s over. So a killer will change things to keep the excitement high.”
“But why plastic wrap?” Carina pushed. “Is this a way to keep evidence off the body?”
“I think that’s one purpose, yes,” Dillon said.
“And the other?”
This time Nick spoke. “He wanted to feel her die, be closer to her when she died. The plastic wrap is thinner than garbage bags. And look how carefully he wrapped her. Not bulky. He could feel her beneath the plastic while still keeping trace evidence-his hair and skin fibers-off her body.” He looked from Carina to her brother. “I’m not a shrink, but I’d bet my pension that he had sex with her while she was dying.”
Carina paled. “That’s-” she was going to say That’s sick, but the entire case sickened her. She pulled out her cell phone and woke Patrick up at home, told him about the murder. “Two hours, downtown.”
Dawn had just crested by the time Carina and Nick entered police headquarters. The smallest interview room had been converted to the task force headquarters and Chief Causey had come in early so Carina and Nick could brief him privately, then he joined the task force meeting.
After Carina brought everyone up to date on the case, Patrick took the floor.
“I woke up the security chief at MyJournal as soon as Detective Kincaid called about the Harrison homicide. I told him we had enough for a warrant but if he wanted to pull together the information now we would appreciate it.”
The chief interrupted. “I talked to Stanton this morning. He’s getting the warrant as we speak.”
Patrick nodded. “The MyJournal people are pulling every comment both Bondage and Scout posted in the last three months, including the deleted comments that are maintained on the server for three months. Beyond that, everything is wiped unless archived on an individual MyJournal user page. There’s no way to retrieve it, but three months should be enough to establish any pattern.”
“But is one of these people the killer?” one of the cops in the room asked.
“We’re not sure, but it’s all we have to go on right now. One of the deleted comments scared the first victim enough that she believed someone dangerous knew where she worked,” Carina interjected. “We’re not only focusing on the first victim’s online journal. We also have Becca Harrison. The fact that she disappeared from the library Wednesday night and her body was dumped there thirty hours later is significant. We’re looking at any connection between Angie and Becca, but on the surface we haven’t been able to find anything other than they both worked in La Jolla.”
“Becca has no online diary that I could find, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist,” Patrick said. “Her parents have been notified, and I’m sending a team to retrieve her home computer this morning. I’ll also check the library network. When I get the unique user identification code from MyJournal for the two people we’re interested in, I can run it against any network and know whether they used the library to log on to the MyJournal site. I’ll go first to the library, then Angie’s place of employment, since they have a public network for patrons.”
Chief Causey spoke. “I need something for the press. They’ve already sniffed out that these cases are connected.” He looked pointedly at Carina.