as a rose—as red as her blood must have been as it drained from the wounds carved into her flesh.
She lay discarded like a life-size broken doll—made up, torn up, and cast aside, her brown eyes cloudy and lifeless.
Beside her lay a smaller doll—her child—head resting on her shoulder, face streaked with the last of her mother’s life’s blood.
The flies buzzed. The wall clock ticked above the sink.
The telephone receiver dangled near the floor, stenciled with small bloody fingerprints. The last words spoken into it were a whisper still hanging in the air: “My daddy hurt my mommy ...”
2
“The victim is Marissa Fordham, twenty-eight, single mom. An artist.”
Sheriff’s detective Tony Mendez rattled off the facts as if unaffected by what he had seen inside the house. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, shortly after he arrived at the scene, he had had to excuse himself from the kitchen to vomit under a tree in the backyard.
He had been second on the scene, the property being on his side of town. The first responder—a young deputy—had puked under the same tree. Mendez had never seen so much blood. The smell of it was still like a fist lodged at the back of his throat. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the victims in freeze-frame shots from a horror movie.
His stomach rolled.
“You said there were two vics.”
Vince Leone, forty-nine, former special agent with the FBI’s legendary Behavioral Sciences Unit, former Chicago homicide detective. Leone had been his mentor during his course at the FBI’s National Academy—a training program for law enforcement agencies around the country and around the globe. In fact, Leone had come to Oak Knoll more than a year past in part to work a serial-killer case, in part to try to recruit Mendez to the Bureau.
The case was ongoing. Neither of them had left.
Leone had just arrived on the scene. They drifted slowly away from his car toward the house, both of them taking in the cool, eucalyptus-scented air.
“The woman’s four-year-old daughter,” Mendez said. “She had a faint pulse. She’s on her way to the hospital. I wouldn’t expect her to make it.”
Leone muttered an expletive under his breath.
He was an imposing man. Six foot three with a mane of wavy salt-and-pepper hair. A thick mustache drew the eye away from the small, shiny scar marking the entrance wound of the bullet that should have ended his life. Instead, the thing remained in his head, inoperable because of its precarious location.
“I hate when it’s a kid,” he said.
“Yeah. What did a four-year-old do to deserve that?”
“Witness.”
“She knew the killer.”
“Or he’s just one mean bastard.”
“I’d say he has that covered,” Mendez said.
They went through the little gate to the yard and followed the rock path around the side of the house, past an old concrete fountain that gurgled soothingly despite the occasion.
“Who called it in?”
“A friend who happened to drop by.”
Leone stopped and looked at him. “It’s the crack of freaking dawn.”
To be precise, 7:29 A.M. The sun was barely up.
“Yeah,” Mendez said. “Wait until you meet him. Odd guy.”
“Odd how?”
“Looks-like-a-suspect odd. Who drops in on a neighbor at six in the morning?”
“Is he here?”
“He’s with Bill.”
Bill Hicks, sheriff’s detective, Mendez’s partner. Hicks had a way of putting people at ease.
“Is Cal coming?” Leone asked.
Cal Dixon, county sheriff, Mendez’s boss.
“On his way.”
“I don’t want to step on toes here.”
Leone was not on the SO payroll, but he was too good a resource not to call. Studying the country’s worst serial killers for more than a decade, he had seen just about every atrocity one human being could inflict on another. More important, he could discern much from the scene that could point them in a direction in the search for the perpetrator.
“I spoke with him,” Mendez said. “He agreed.”
“Good.”
They paused at the kitchen door. Mendez pointed at the tree.
“The official puke zone. In case you need it.”
“Good to know.”
The scene struck him almost as hard going in this time as it had the first time. The contrasts, he decided—and the smell. Visually, the contrasts rocked him. The kitchen was like something from another era: old-fashioned painted cupboards, a cast-iron farmhouse sink, checked curtains, appliances that had to have been from the fifties.
It was the kind of kitchen that should have had June Cleaver or Aunt Bea in it. Instead, crime-scene techs bustled around like so many cooks, dusting this, photographing that, all working around the bloating, discolored body of a murdered woman on the