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.
2
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