EMTs scrambled toward it with a stretcher. One was kneeling on the gurney itself, straddling a body of indeterminate sex, performing CPR with single-minded intensity.
The open doors of the ambulance blocked the rest. Moments later, they slammed shut and it left in a hurry, sirens wailing. The fire trucks followed, calm now, big beasts rumbling into the night.
The police stayed.
Definitely not a good sign.
She wondered if her friend Darren Fletcher, the newly minted homicide lieutenant, would show. She didn’t know why she assumed it was a homicide, or an attempted homicide, given that someone had been brought out at a rush. It could be anything. More than likely, at this time of night, it was a simple domestic dispute. Someone was punched, had a bloody nose, a black eye, then things got out of control. She ran through the neighbors she knew on O Street, people she’d waved to when walking Thor, imagining them in various states of fury and undress.
Maybe a heart attack. Or a stroke. Embolism, aneurysm, overdose.
God, you are cheery, aren’t you?
She heard one of the cops say, “Hernandez, while you’re at it, go ahead and call the OCME. We’ll need them.”
And she knew. Something inside her gave a little buzz. Death comes in all forms, from all directions. Expected or by surprise, it was the greatest common denominator, the great equalizer. She felt an affinity with the grimness, couldn’t help that. But she had a choice, now. A choice to walk away from the carnage, from the horror. To face death on her own terms, especially since she’d agreed to work with the FBI on their more esoteric cases. A deal made all the more tantalizing because they wouldn’t be dragging her out of bed in the middle of the night to parade, yawning, to a crime scene, where she’d face death in all its incarnations, as she had for so many years as a medical examiner.
She had a more immediate choice, as well. She could open the gate, walk around the block, stand with the crowd of neighbors who’d come to watch the show. Or she could go back inside and return to bed. She’d be able to get several more hours of sleep if she went inside now.
You’re not the M.E. anymore, Sam. She stepped away from the fence.
Thor took advantage of the nocturnal walk to do his business, then she followed him into the silent house, feeling strangely hollow. As she closed the door behind her and watched Thor scoot back to bed, something made her pull out her cell phone and send Fletcher a text.
What’s up on O Street?
She knew it wasn’t too late for him; he was a night owl, especially now that he was seeing FBI Agent Jordan Blake. He’d be up, one way or another. She sent another, this time to Xander.
Miss you.
She poured herself a finger of Ardbeg, thought about it, brought the bottle with her to the couch. Sat down. Took off her boots.
Waited.
Didn’t know exactly what she was waiting for.
She spared a glance at the file folders on the coffee table in front of her. She’d left them scattered carelessly in frustration before climbing the stairs to bed. Crime scene and autopsy photos spilled out of the manila folders, coupled with her notes and Baldwin’s notes and toxicology reports, all jumbled together on the smoky glass. She’d pulled all the autopsy reports from the files and stacked them neatly on the side table; they were her reading material and were proving to be an even bigger frustration than the case itself. This massive, sprawling, unnamed and unacknowledged case.
There were so many pathologists, coroners, methods, regulations, jurisdictions. No one did a postmortem exactly the same, much less were handling several of the individual cases as if there was a criminal component. She’d begun to feel she was interpreting without a Rosetta stone.
When John Baldwin had talked her into coming on board the FBI as a consultant to the behavioral analysis unit, BAU II, to work with his infamous group of profilers, he’d promised she could pick her cases. True to his word, he’d brought her to Quantico, gotten her set up with passes and emails and paperwork galore, then set her loose in the BAU file room. They had so much work, and so few people to handle it, any help was welcome.
And whether she was trying to prove her worth to her new team, or to herself, she’d chosen the big daddy of them all. A stack of files that were getting dusty, because no one could manage to link them, even though there was a single similarity between each victim—every woman was from the same hometown. New Orleans.
She’d seen the box, labeled Cold Case. Read the previous profiler’s report. There was nothing tying them together. The women had died by various means. Stabbings and stranglings and gunshots, one a cardiac arrest from a drug overdose, even a bridge jumper. Nothing highly unusual, nothing esoteric, nothing sexually motivated or even creepy. On the surface at least.
Baldwin had a feeling about the cases, had spent years compiling the ones he thought fit a pattern, and she’d learned to trust his gut when it came to crime. Despite the sometimes innocuous causes of death, the link to New Orleans shouted “connection” to him. But he couldn’t definitively tie all the cases together, nor could anyone on his staff.
Sam had looked through the files in the storage room, shaking her head. The murders did seem unrelated—they were spread all over the country, with different MOs, different murder weapons, different victimologies of all ages and races and socioeconomic levels. And yet, like Baldwin, she sensed the tenuous thread holding them. All of these women had been murdered by the same person. She could just feel it. There was something here. This was a series. Eight of them at last count, over more than twenty years.
Baldwin had just added what he thought might be number nine to the stack, a young woman named Olivia Rives, who’d been found shot to death in Minneapolis last month.
Nine dead. Multiple jurisdictions. No apparent links outside of a hometown and a profiler’s hunch.
A nightmare.
She shot the Ardbeg, poured another and gathered up the thick stack of papers on the side table. No sense going back to bed just this moment. She’d read a while more, keep filling her brain with the disparate notes of nine different autopsy reports by nine different doctors and coroners.
Maybe this time, something would be different.
McLean, Virginia
ROBIN SOULEYRET’S PHONE rang at 3:23 a.m. Eyes snapping open, she saw the number on the caller ID. Surprised, she palmed the receiver. “You know better than to call in the middle of the night unless someone is dead. So who died?”
There was silence.
“Amanda? What is it? Are you okay?”
Nothing. Then a click.
That was odd. Robin sat up in the bed, realized she was still naked, glanced at the empty spot beside her. Felt the pillow. It was cold. He’d left. She tamped down the feeling that churned in the pit of her stomach. Annoyance? Relief? Sorrow? She didn’t know, but this was their deal. No strings, and definitely no feelings. They were just filling a need for each other.
With a sigh, she reached
