Killing Jane: An Erin Prince Thriller Page 2

  She reached into a box sitting next to the pot of mums and retrieved a set of booties and a pair of gloves. The blue footwear slipped awkwardly onto her heels, the stilettos threatening to tear the fabric. Erin yanked the heels off, tucked them under her arm, and pulled the booties onto her bare feet. “I usually dress with common sense, but I had dinner with my parents tonight.” Really, Erin? Justifying your attire?

  Between the shoes and her sweating hands, she couldn’t get the damned gloves on.

  Beckett watched her without comment, and the back of Erin’s neck heated. He had years of experience in homicide with bigger cases. Was he judging her already? The Philadelphia police had a reputation for harboring a grudge against anything perceived as a threat against the male status quo. Did he resent her being a woman? Indignation flashed through her, and she glared at him.

  He smiled and held up his large hands. “Always clammy. I hate the gloves too.”

  Her irritation turned to shame. Her brother’s words singsonged in her head. You know what they say about assumptions. It makes an ass out of you not me. She sat the heels a few feet away from the door, folding her coat over them.

  Beckett disappeared into the narrow doorway as though he’d gone inside one of those creepy funhouses at the street carnivals Abby and her uncle loved so much.

  A flash of vertigo forced Erin to lean against the doorframe. The house seemed to clench, blowing the foul stench of death in Erin’s face. Her muscles tensed, pain shooting down her legs. The fear in Murray’s eyes haunted her. Get it together, Prince.

  “You coming?” Beckett waited a few feet away, watching her.

  Erin gathered her composure and marched forward, the paper booties feeling strange against her bare feet. Immediately, the stench of dried blood and death bloomed in her nose and clung to her tongue like a moldy pasta sauce. Additional odors followed: the lingering hint of Chinese takeout, a musky perfume, the faintest tinge of bleach. The tiny entryway had less room than a sardine can. Erin breathed through her nose and found her voice. “Victim is Bonnie Archer, age twenty-six, right?”

  “Right.” Beckett’s eyes focused somewhere over Erin’s head. “The guy who’s not a boyfriend discovered her about an hour ago. Rigor hasn’t fully set in, so the death investigator estimates she’s been dead about six hours. Maybe less.”

  A steep staircase hugged the wall to her right, a living room area to her left. The old floor beneath her paper-clad feet seemed uneven, bits and pieces of it settling over the years. She touched the shared wall, feeling its gritty plaster. “What about the house next door?”

  “The responding officer reported no one answered,” Todd said. “A neighbor two houses down said the woman works nights.”

  “Perfect,” Erin said. “We’ll have to get that confirmed, but it’s sounding like my luck.”

  “Mine too,” Todd said. “Add that to the big party, and I get the feeling we’re screwed before we get started.”

  Erin almost smiled, but the cloying scent of blood, sweat, and bodily fluids threatened to dredge up her dinner. She moved into the living area, bracing for the horrible thing Clark and Murray warned her about. But the living room and the combined kitchen and dining area held nothing of interest. Someone had turned on the halogen lamp in the corner, the bulb casting a yellow tone over the home’s worn furnishings.

  Bonnie Archer appeared to be a tidy person; the crooked coffee table and cheap shelving were devoid of dust. Not a lot of personal touches scattered about, but she liked her tawdry romance novels. Her paperbacks appeared well-read, the spines heavily creased. One of the crime scene guys had already started collecting trace evidence.

  “Prince?” A familiar female voice called from the narrow hallway.

  Erin turned to see a tall woman wearing protective gear heading toward them. Built like a runway model with striking, exotic eyes, Marie Valari had been one of the first civilians to enter the Forensic Science Division at Metro P.D. Shortly after starting with the force, Erin watched the normally patient Marie skewer someone who made the mistake of assuming her excess of beauty also meant a lack of brains.

  Marie pulled off her mask, breathing as if she’d been sprinting. “Jesus Christ, Erin. I had to walk away for a minute.” Her olive skin had turned the color of flaxen melting wax. “Dan Mitchell’s upstairs doing his thing. You should go ahead. Just brace yourself.” Marie’s voice trembled.

  Those words yet again. Tension lodged in Erin’s shoulders. Her fingers numbed. She struggled to maintain some sort of control over the anxiety threatening to cripple her. She had prepared for this moment, studying crime photos and reading the literature on how good cops coped. This wasn’t her first dead body. And yet the chill emanating up her spine made her cold and electrified all at once. Erin’s reflection in the mirror hanging crookedly in the pockmarked hall left no doubt her nerves shined for all to see. Her skin resembled gray ash, and her strained expression made her look like a Botox victim. What if she couldn’t handle the horrific thing that rattled everyone else?

  “Tell me our killer left us something we can use to find him. Name and address, preferably.” Bad humor made working on a crime scene bearable, but her attempt at a joke came out crooked and pathetic.

  Marie’s gaze jerked to meet Erin’s. “That’s exactly what he did.”

  Erin kept her hand against the wall for balance. The narrow wooden steps groaned as though they might collapse at any moment. The trio’s footsteps clunked against the wood, each individual’s pace different and yet still dragging in a slow march toward the inevitable. She spoke to break the pressure mounting in her skull. “This place is awfully big for a single girl working a part-time job and going to school. I don’t know how Bonnie could afford to live alone.”

  The District—especially an emerging area like Columbia Heights—was expensive. Families struggled to afford a condo, let alone a house. Most single people, especially those without a full-time job, needed a second or even a third source of income.

  “Well, I’m new in town, but this area’s not exactly high-end,” Beckett said. “How much does rent cost?”

  “High-end doesn’t matter,” Erin said. “I’d bet a place like this is at least $1800 a month.”

  Beckett whistled. “That’s a lot, especially if she’s just working part-time. Maybe her parents are helping out.”

  “That’s why I live in Arlington, and I have a renter.” She could always dig into her trust fund for a place closer to work, but she didn’t want to live off her trust when she worked so hard to escape the family notoriety.

  Upstairs, the smell of death intensified, trapped in the confines of the hallway. A yellow evidence placard sat to the side next to several large droplets of blood.

  “So our killer missed something in his cleanup,” she said. “If we’re lucky, he cut himself, and he’ll be in the system.”

  “That’s not his blood.” Marie looked at the ceiling as something dripped onto the floor.

  “Holy shit.” A metallic taste coated her mouth, and her lungs squashed inside her ribs. How much blood did a person need to lose for it to seep through the floorboards?

  “Exactly.” Marie led them past the second-floor bedrooms. “We haven’t found much downstairs or on this floor. Everything’s up here.” She took a deep breath and then disappeared up the attic stairs.

  Anxiety burrowed into every synapse of Erin’s brain. Why did it have to be in the damned attic?

  The space narrowed further as though the house squished in on itself the higher they ascended.

  Beckett’s shoulders brushed the walls as he started up steps, which were barely deep enough to accommodate the average foot. He glanced down at her. “You coming?”

  Her armpits heated. Her lightweight, fall dress was suddenly as heavy as a soldier’s equipment pack. The man who raped her lived in an attic apartment. A year later and attics still terrified her.

  Did Beckett notice the dampness on her forehead or the way her thick, w
avy hair had gone limp from the sweat on her scalp? Once again, she wanted to cut and run, but Erin wasn’t about to be victimized a second time.

  The smell blistered her nostrils. Blood, urine, feces, already decaying flesh.

  She climbed the dark stairs, the pressure in her head building by the second.

  Evil.

  An act borne of pure cruelty occurred in the attic and left behind a malicious energy that wound its way into every cell in Erin’s body. The strange cone of light peering through the railing surrounding the attic’s landing only heightened the sense of malice.

  The light didn’t come from the crime scene lights—their blue glow illuminated everything else, a garish gloom fit for a horror movie. She reached the top, dizzy with morbid anticipation. Everything came into hyper-focus.

  First, the light source: a studio light typically used for photography had been knocked over, one of its muslin panels ripped. Its stream cast much of the attic in harsh shadows. The low-hanging beams seemed to float above them. Ghostly piles of discarded junk lurked in the corners.

  Then the body.

  Bile thickened in Erin’s throat. The ghastly image imprinted on her consciousness. Some naïve part of her insisted it was a mannequin used for target practice.

  Bonnie Archer lay in the middle of the attic surrounded by a river of blood cascading into the shadowy corner. Arms and legs stretched out in an X-pattern, her youthful, soft skin appeared waxen and almost lavender under the harsh glare of the Klieg lights. Blood loss had turned her hands and feet blue.

  Erin catalogued each visible injury. Deep gouges on her breasts, the nipples sliced through the middle. Slashes on her snow-white arms and legs. A seven-inch kitchen cleaver protruding from her vagina.

  She turned away, sucking in air and praying for composure. How could one human being inflict so much pain on another?

  Erin’s chest ached with the need to breathe deeply, but the combination of all things death and the musty stench of the attic wouldn’t allow it.

  “We wanted you to see her like this before we moved her.” Dan Mitchell, lead medico-legal death investigator for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, looked mournfully at Erin.

  His skeptical eyes and sagging cheeks always reminded her of Droopy the cartoon dog, and his perpetual need to shave didn’t help the situation.

  “All the necessary pictures have been taken, so as soon as you’re done, we’d like to move the arm before rigor makes it impossible.”

  Erin focused on the mangled corpse. Bonnie Archer had most certainly felt pain. Her suffering was etched into her face—the only part of her relatively untouched. She’d died screaming, mouth stretched open and somehow frozen in place. Wide, terror-filled eyes the color of blue sky now lifeless. Her bloody left arm reached toward the steps; her slender, blue fingers curled and dug into the wood. A phone sat less than an inch away. The bright Klieg lights sitting next to the body added a final macabre touch worthy of the most gruesome horror films.

  “How many times was she stabbed?” Erin’s voice sounded as though she spoke through a tube. She needed to pull herself together. A female homicide investigator was still a rare gem in the District, and Erin would be damned if she broke down. Not after the way she’d busted her ass to get the position.

  And her duty was to the woman lying prone on the attic floor. Bonnie Archer deserved justice.

  Mitchell beckoned Erin to come closer. “Stabbed isn’t the right word. Ripped is more like it.” His gloved finger made a circling motion. “Come around to her right. The worst of the blood ran out of her left side from her carotid artery. Femoral too. But the throat came first.”

  Beckett stepped aside. “I’ve already been up close. Go ahead.”

  She didn’t want a closer look. Four feet away seemed like more than enough. So much blood, with only paper booties to protect her feet. Erin imagined the blood soaking through and getting into some cut on her toe she didn’t know she had. Why had she worn heels tonight?

  Mitchell looked at her expectantly, and she skirted around to stand over Bonnie.

  The gashes to her throat had nearly decapitated her. With most of the young woman’s blood drained out of her body, the knife wounds gleamed purple-white, the edges of the skin serrated like a bad cut of meat. The coppery stench of dried blood made her still full stomach turn. God help her if she tossed up her mother’s catered prime rib. Erin swallowed back her disgust and leaned closer for a better look.

  Instead of the killer simply cutting her throat from side to side, he’d jabbed the knife straight into her throat, turning her larynx into shredded meat. Blood stained Bonnie’s neck and shoulders—a cordlike, sinewy section of artery barely visible.

  Mitchell spoke again. “He slashed her over and over again until he cut the carotid. I don’t think he was in a hurry to kill her.”

  Erin squinted at the ruined flesh and tried not to think about the fact this girl had once been a human being. “Can you tell whether the knife entered from the front or behind?”

  Mitchell pointed to the small strings of remaining skin. “Look at the wound pattern. The M.E. will confirm, but I say front. And given her position and the blood spatter on the downed portrait light, I’m guessing the killer used his right hand.”

  Erin followed his gaze. She hadn’t noticed the haphazard dark-red splotches on the thin muslin. The weird cone of brightness emitted by the photography light seemed to flow into nowhere, swallowed up by the dark corners of the attic. Erin snapped her arms around her chest and hoped no one noticed her trembling fingers.

  Mitchell shined his light left and up onto the low beams, and more red streaks glowed in the dim light. “Pretty clear those are arterial spurt.”

  Fresh sickness swirled in Erin’s stomach. “I hope he did that first, and she died quickly.”

  “I don’t think so.” Mitchell eased to his knees, his gloved hands hovering over Bonnie’s bloody, naked body as though he was praying. “He cut her from pelvis to breastbone.”

  The gashes on Bonnie’s thin stomach ran deep. Encrusted with drying blood, they resembled the red velvet cake Erin had for dessert.

  “The first stab was to the stomach, right above her pelvis. She’s a small girl and the wound is fairly deep, although not life threatening, but severe enough to incapacitate. There’s bruising on her cheek and above her eyebrows. He hit her early on, before she bled out.” He pointed to Bonnie’s open legs. “Those bruises on her knees are new. Definitely perimortem. And you can see lividity on the backs of her heels. We’ll see more when we turn her over, but she bled out so much it won’t be as significant as it could have been.”

  Lividity meant the blood pooling to the lowest part of the body. She narrowed her eyes, surveying Bonnie, trying to get a clearer picture, but Mitchell’s words didn’t quite make sense. Bruises of all colors dotted the upper part of her thighs not covered with blood. Another bruise decorated her thin upper arm.

  “She lands on her back, and he starts in? The fighting came before? What about the bruises on her thighs and arm?”

  “Those are yellowing around the edges,” Mitchell said. “Look at her fingers, the bottom of her feet,” Mitchell said. “Defense wounds and scrapes. She fought, but once she fell on her back, that was it.”

  “So.” Beckett’s soft voice made Erin jump.

  She’d nearly forgotten about him.

  “He surprises her up here, or he brings her up here. He hits her, and she fights back. She’s stunned, likely in intense pain. He jabs the knife into her gut.” He shifted his head to the side, lips pursed, his moustache nearly blocking his nostrils. “She falls to her knees?”

  “And then is slammed to the floor.” Mitchell cradled the back of Bonnie’s head. “Big bump back here, nearly dead center. My guess is after she fell to her knees, he shoved her to the floor.” He grimaced.

  “And then he takes her clothes off?” Erin, the new girl on the team who’d never picked up a racquet, had fallen completely ou
t of her element.

  “Possibly. Or they were getting ready to have sex. She’s disrobed, doing half the job for him. She definitely expected the man who found her. Look at her makeup.”

  Smoky eyes, smeared red lipstick. Bright, straight teeth stained with blood from biting her tongue.

  “And we checked the non-boyfriend for blood and trace?”

  “I did it myself,” Marie spoke again. “No blood on him. Some hairs, but that’s normal. We’ve all got strays.”

  “But he came to see her. So was the door unlocked, or does he have a key?”

  “Unlocked,” Beckett supplied, edging closer. “So he told Sergeant Johnson. He went through every room. He wouldn’t have gone into the attic, but he saw the blood leaking through the ceiling.” He looked at Erin, his eyebrows slashed into a tight line. “And we’ve just gone over the first cuts. Right, Dan?”

  Mitchell took over again. “It took several tries to get deep enough to slice all the way to her breastbone. The knife he used wasn’t strong enough to do more than nick it.”

  “Pre or post-mortem?” Erin prayed for the latter, but Dan’s sad eyes told her it wasn’t the case.

  “Definitely pre.” Mitchell gently touched the gashes. “He cut through flesh and muscle, making her bleed profusely. If the arterial spurt happened prior to this cutting, the heart would have stopped, and there would be little to no bleeding from these wounds.”

  “He cut deep enough to make her bleed,” Beckett said, “but not enough to get through the major organs.”

  “Correct,” Mitchell said. “And my guess is that was intentional.”

  “To make sure she felt it.” The blood and gore Erin could handle. But the idea of any human being suffering something like this, feeling every minute of it ...

  “Until she passed out from the pain, yes,” Mitchell said. “Like I said, severing her carotid is what killed her.” He shifted to her lower extremities. “I think he hit the femoral artery next and probably very quickly. Thus the sea of red.” He cleared his throat, hand poised over the knife sticking out of Bonnie. “It looks like he thrust this in several times. Perimortem, judging by the bloody tissue.”