J.T. Ellison Read online

  He came back down to earth with a sigh. Like that would ever happen. His friends were all dungeon masters.

  But before he lost his nerve, he filled out the contact information on the e-mail and sent a quick note to Tommaso’s address.

  Dear Tommaso,

  I’m a great admirer of your work.

  The catalog photographs from the Strozzi collection are utterly superb. Unfortunately, JPEG 10334 did not come through properly. Would you please resend the original shot?

  Thank you so much.

  G. Adler

  Gavin hit send and sat back, breathing deeply. Should he have said Ciao? Or would that have been stupid? What had come over him? Was it too late? Could he undo the e-mail? What was he thinking?

  He ran his hands across his scalp, vaguely noting that his hair was growing back. He’d have to shave again soon. No, there was nothing to be done about the e-mail now. As his mother always said, “Don’t do something you might regret, Gavin.” He didn’t really regret it. Chances were someone as big as Tommaso had an assistant who looked at the e-mail, and the message hadn’t come from him directly, anyway.

  He forced the action from his mind, vowing to think about it no more. The rest of the photos were fine, he could work around the missing image for now.

  He worked quietly, humming under his breath on occasion, placing photos here and there, getting the most pleasing backgrounds, choosing a variety of accent colors and washes, until he felt comfortable that his settings would showcase the photographs perfectly. This was another nice thing about working for yourself—you could spend an afternoon in contemplation of what shades really did show off the Strozzi paintings, keeping in mind the art that might be coming in from the Pitti and the Uffizi. It was a delicate balance. He was always struck by the fragility of the ancient art pieces. Combined with the robust options the computer provided—Old World Masters and cutting-edge technologies made beautiful bedfellows.

  All the information for each painting had to correspond and fit onto the pages of the catalogs: its history, dates and provenance, the artist’s background, the artist’s influences, who donated the cash to allow the loan to take place, every conceivable trivia tidbit was sandwiched into the pages. Small public relations kits needed to be made, and special upgraded catalogs designed for the “Friends of the Frist” to take home from the private opening. And then the catalogs would be reproduced for the Web sites and the gallery showings.

  There was plenty of work to be done. Plenty to keep his mind occupied, away from the joy that awaited him at home. That was Gavin’s greatest talent. He could focus. Put away one facet of his being to explore another. He’d been compartmentalizing for years.

  Eight

  Being a member of the Behavioral Analysis Unit meant being on call 24/7, so when Baldwin was working an actual case, there were few breaks and many sleepless nights. Part of it was the nature of the job, but it was also his fault. He couldn’t turn it off. Couldn’t walk away. And that was dangerous. He thought he’d been successful in pulling away a bit over the past year, setting up a home and life in Nashville, only consulting on the biggest of cases. But lately, he found himself being dragged back in, bit by bit.

  The problem was, he loved it. He hated the means that brought him the cases, despised what the men and women he hunted did, was constantly amazed at the depths of human cruelty. But as a student of psychology, finding out why some sociopaths choose to become serial killers had become his vocation. His art.

  The call he’d been waiting for came at 9:10 a.m. He received the news, said thank you, and set the phone back in its cradle.

  The phone call confirmed it. They had a match. The same man had killed in Florence and London. He paced the house, thinking. His mind was in overdrive. Il Macellaio, the Italian serial killer who’d been operating for ten years, had finally made a huge tactical mistake.

  Baldwin was tired. So very tired, and so very jazzed. Now they had the confirmation that II Macellaio had moved his hunting grounds to London three months prior. He’d claimed three victims, all slightly out of his usual victim profile. These were working girls. In Florence, he preyed on students, and he was careful to choose girls who would go unnoticed for a time if they disappeared. Mousy, shy girls who didn’t have a lot of friends.

  At the beginning Baldwin assumed he flattered them, seduced them, got them to leave their lives and go home with him. He would hold them for weeks, slowly starving them, until they were so sluggish that fighting him wasn’t an option. Once they died, he had sex with their bodies, then washed them and left them posed, with a print of the painting he was mocking nearby.

  Necrosadism wasn’t something he came across every day, though it did happen. The very act of murdering a woman to have sex with her corpse was an extreme variation of necrophilia, which many times was characterized more by fantasies of having sex with dead women than actually going through with it.

  But there was something out there for every killer to devolve into, and II Macellaio was a true necrosadist. He’d started by starving the girls, but quickly moved on to strangulation. Even then, in his later cases, the girls were given zero nourishment, no water at all, so they were weakened, couldn’t put up a fight.

  Il Macellaio’s desire was playing havoc with his self-control. In his early days, he wasn’t rushed, was able to sate his needs with a kill a year. Now, he’d gotten a taste for dead flesh, and he hastened the deaths of his victims along so he could have more time with their bodies. It was good news, in a way. When a serial killer’s self-control slipped, you had a chance to catch him.

  Baldwin turned back to the files on the table in front of him. The new murders in London, with the prostitutes as victims, shook him. Geographically, serial killers tend to stay in certain areas. To jump countries, well, that was a huge step.

  If he had actually crossed to America as well, they’d catch him. Baldwin flipped through the pictures from the Nashville crime scene. So very familiar. The posing, the emaciated body. The one huge difference between the London and Florence killings and this possible American murder was the race of the victim.

  All the overseas victims were white. This one was black. And that was enough to give Baldwin serious pause. For a sophisticated, organized serial, a well-defined signature can evolve over time, getting more specific, more exact. Killing methods are perfected, the suspect learns from each crime scene. He figures out what works and what doesn’t, what turns him on and what doesn’t, and adapts. Just like any predator.

  But killers didn’t usually start with one race then switch to another. If he’d been equal opportunity from the beginning…but II Macellaio hadn’t. He’d exclusively killed white women. At least that they knew of.

  Baldwin sighed deeply. He sent an e-mail to the Macellaio task force, asking them to pull any unsolved murders of young black women in Florence or London over the past fifteen years. The carabinieri kept meticulous records; the search shouldn’t take too long. The Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard were fully automated. They could have their answers by end of day tomorrow.

  He was afraid of what those answers might be.

  His phone rang, the caller ID showing a London exchange. They’d been faster than he expected.

  “This is John Baldwin,” he answered.

  A British voice, cultured and aristocratic, said, “Dr. Baldwin? Detective Inspector James Highsmythe, Metropolitan Police. Have you seen the results of the tests you ordered?”

  “I have. Nice to meet you, Highsmythe. I’ve heard good things.”

  “As have I, Dr. Baldwin. We have submitted a formal request for the FBI’s help in this matter. I trust you’ve seen it?”

  “I have.”

  “Then you will appreciate the nature of the request. My superiors are sending me to Quantico to give you a full briefing.”

  “Detective Highsmythe—”

  “Do call me Memphis.”

  “Memphis. I’m in Nashville now, attending to a murder that
looks eerily similar to II Macellaio. Perhaps you’d like to join me here, then we can head to Quantico to meet the rest of the team?”

  “Nashville?” The man sounded surprised for a moment. “He’s struck in the United States as well?”

  “It seems there is a possibility, yes.”

  “I’ll see what I can do about rearranging the travel arrangements. Barring unforeseen complications, I should be there tomorrow.”

  “Good. I’ll get you a place to stay, don’t worry about that. Least I can do for dragging you down here. It will be worth your while, I think.”

  “I appreciate the offer. Tomorrow, then.”

  Nine

  Before she left the house, Taylor had downloaded the Dvořák piece to her iPod. Baldwin had been converting all of her CDs over to the computer, and had installed a plug in her truck’s radio so she could stick the nano in the slot and hear all of her music. It was a wide-ranging and eclectic mix, gathered over two decades. It reflected her alternative tastes, but there was a great deal of classical as well, leftover vestiges of her early days in the orchestra. She didn’t play anymore, but she still loved the music.

  She climbed into an unmarked pool car, wishing for her truck’s speakers. She put in the earbuds, hit play and left downtown for the fifteen-minute drive to Forensic Medical. The flow of the Dvořák was calming. She liked the scherzo, forwarded to that spot. The opening was the brand music for something, she couldn’t remember what. Some financial institution, something that had quick television spots that needed the grabbiness as their theme.

  She forwarded again to the Allegro. The score for Jaws must have been based on this piece. The two-note heartbeat, the quickening pace—John Williams was obviously a Dvořák fan. It was grand, in-your-face music. She wondered what the killer was thinking when he chose it, then admonished herself. She didn’t know for sure that he had chosen it. She pulled her to-do list out of her pocket and added a note, driving with one hand, writing on her knee. Check with owner about CD.

  She arrived at Sam’s office well before the piece ended. She sat in the car for a few minutes, letting it play out. Assuming it was the killer’s music, why had he chosen the New World Symphony? Perhaps that was a message, too. If this was the same man who had committed the murders in Italy and England, why was he here in Tennessee? Did he think of it as the new world? It was such a leap, a serial killer crossing the Atlantic to start killing in her backyard with a slightly different M.O. That seemed so highly unlikely, yet Baldwin was struck by the pictures of the scene. The similarities were unmistakable. She groaned aloud when the next thought crossed her mind. Was it a copycat?

  Like she needed another one of those.

  ViCAP, ViCAP, ViCAP. That was the first thing she’d do when she left the postmortem. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more to come. Damn Julia Page and her prescient comments.

  Abandoning the nano and her thoughts, Taylor entered the building on Gass Street. She couldn’t help but sigh. The scents were so familiar she sometimes didn’t smell them, but today she felt like she’d walked into her high school biology lab. The pervasive, artificial smell of formalin, the reek of death. It was too much to bear. She wondered how Sam did it sometimes, how she could cross the threshold of this place, day after day, and work. She left the twins at home with a nanny and became another person for ten hours a day.

  Taylor wished she could do that as well. Just morph, become someone else, someone who didn’t have to think about death all the time. She knew that would never happen. She wouldn’t trade the idea of working with the police for anything. It was important to her to actually be who she said she was, to be the person she’d set out to be in the beginning. Four deaths on her conscience, cold-blooded murders, yet all justified. She was a cop. It was her job. These were the things that she had to do to survive, and to make the people around her, the strangers she loved, safe.

  The desk was manned by Kris, a smiley girl with butter-yellow hair and too-big implants. She’d gotten them recently and they hadn’t dropped yet; they stood out on her chest like overfull water balloons. She waved at Taylor and the breasts bobbled joyfully. Taylor waved back and moved to the door that led to the biovestibule that separated the administrative offices from the gut work. She swiped her card and the lock disengaged.

  The locker room was empty. She covered her clothes with surgical scrubs, slipped on blue plastic clogs, then went through the smaller air lock into the autopsy suite. Renn McKenzie was sitting on a stool, gazing anywhere but at the action. Sunlight from the skylights shone down on his hair, making the blond strands at his temples glint silver.

  Sam was washing the body of a teenager. She was reverent and slow; Taylor could feel her intensity, aching with the need to make it right for this young man. It was heartbreaking, watching her brush the hair back from his forehead, a thick shock of brunette shot through with lighter streaks of caramel, like he’d been in the sun for days on end. Closer inspection showed Taylor that his head was lying flat against the plastic tray. No, that wasn’t right. It was just his face, straight on the table. There was nothing to the back of his head, he was practically two-dimensional.

  “What happened to him?”

  Sam started, looked at Taylor guiltily. Caught in the act of caring for her subject. When she realized it was just Taylor, she relaxed and went back to stroking the boy’s hair. Only then did Taylor see she was actually using a fine-tooth comb to gather particles.

  “Do you remember Alex, from sophomore year? My French tutor?” Sam asked.

  Taylor remembered. How could she ever forget? “Yes, I do.”

  “Our boy here took a shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He did this to himself. The dummy. Just like Alex did.”

  Sam’s voice was thick with emotion. Alex had been a bit more than her tutor. Sam had nursed a horrid crush on him for ages. Alex hadn’t ever reciprocated her puppy love. He was a sad boy. Dark black hair and matching eyes, hidden scars inside the irises.

  When they were in tenth grade, Alex could stand the torture of life no longer. He wrote a long note, explaining his actions, loaded his father’s shotgun, slipped it between his lips, and shot himself. He had pulled the trigger with his toes.

  It was inconceivable to them, at the time. They sat around in friends’ houses, numb, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, pondering. What could have been so bad in a fifteen-year-old’s life? How had Alex’s world been destroyed to the point he felt the need to take his own life? His note explained his rationale, his father’s coldness, the inability to please. Taylor always suspected it was more than that, but never had the proof.

  Sadness overwhelmed her. She looked at the young man on the table, wondered what drove him to despair.

  “Do you know why?” Taylor asked. “What might have pushed him to this? Was there a note?”

  “No, there wasn’t. But there was a lot of anal tearing. It was pretty apparent that he was being abused, for a prolonged period of time. I’m not sure exactly what his story is, but he doesn’t have biological parents in the state. He was a part of the foster system.”

  Taylor felt the fury bubble up from within her soul. “So we have foster kids being raped who kill themselves with shotguns now. Jesus, Sam.”

  McKenzie spun on his stool and faced them. “I had a friend kill herself. It was awful.” He spun away and Taylor met Sam’s eyes. That sentiment they understood all too well.

  Sam signaled to one of her assistants. “Could you finish this for me? I’ll be back to post him next.”

  She walked two tables over to the prepped body of the victim from last night, stripped off her gloves and replaced them with a fresh set.

  McKenzie followed them reluctantly. “The prints are back. Her name’s Allegra Johnson.”

  Taylor looked at the girl, so insubstantial. The steel table dwarfed her, like it would a child. The wound tract from the knife that had been buried in the girl’s chest glared under the light
s, an angry slit.

  “She was in the system?”

  “Yeah. Solicitation. Shocking. Skinny girl like this—drugs and prostitution were my first guess,” he answered.

  Sam and Taylor’s eyes met again. Taylor took a deep breath. “McKenzie, kill the sarcasm. You can never assume, or guess, when it comes to a victim. You end up planting ideas in your head about them, and then you try to make the crime fit your preconceived notion of what makes sense to you. There could be other explanations for her physical appearance. She could very well be ill, or homeless, unable to feed herself. This could have been a crime of opportunity. We don’t know yet why she was chosen. We won’t know until we do a thorough victimology, okay?”

  McKenzie’s brows furrowed for a moment while he thought it out. What she said must have made sense, because his forehead smoothed and he nodded. “Okay,” he said. Maybe training him wasn’t going to be as hard as she expected.

  Sam cleared her throat, and another tech, a quiet man named Stuart Charisse with incongruously lighthearted curly hair, appeared to help her. He started taking pictures while Sam turned on the microphone attached to her face shield, and started the case rundown. Taylor listened with half an ear as Sam gave the details—date, time, who was present, all the minutiae that was necessary to the formal autopsy process. McKenzie stood next to her, bopping his head up and down in an internal rhythm to Sam’s dispassionate recitation.

  Allegra’s body was a mass of wretchedness. Every bone was clearly defined; Taylor could count each rib individually. The girl looked like she’d literally wasted away.