“Finch showed the apartment to a couple on Saturday afternoon. He’s getting us the contact information, along with the file on the previous tenant.” Mosley’s gaze was on Sean. “So what do you think? Is this your guy or what?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
“But it could be, right?” Mosley seemed almost giddy with anticipation. “Look at the tattoo on her back. A Rorschach inkblot, just like the one you guys found.”
“Listen to that,” Danny said. “Junior here’s been doing his homework.”
Sean snapped on a pair of latex gloves and moved around to the other side of the body. Kneeling, he gently lifted the hair from the woman’s cheek so that he could get a look at her face. What was left of it. The mouth had been cut in the same upward curl and the left eyelid had been sliced away, exposing most of the eyeball. Sean quickly dropped the hair back into place.
Danny had moved around and was staring at the body over Sean’s shoulder. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.”
“It is the same guy, then,” Charlie said grimly. He obviously didn’t share his partner’s enthusiasm at the prospect of serial murder. “We need something like this about as bad as we need another hurricane. I don’t think this city can take much more.”
The victim’s arms were pressed close to the body, her hands arranged with the palms up. No tattoo, Sean noted, but she had ligature marks around both wrists.
“He had her tied up.”
Danny leaned in for a closer look. “That’s different from the other one.”
“Some of the abrasions look like they were starting to heal,” Sean said. “He had her a while before he killed her.”
“Petty found carpet fibers on the body,” Mosley said. “Hundred bucks says the perp drove around with the vic in the trunk of his car.”
“Wonder how long it took him to memorize the lingo?” Danny said in a voice low enough that only Sean could hear.
“She must have been missing for days,” Sean said. “Has anyone checked the lists?”
“We’ve got a possible match,” Charlie said. “The victim’s description fits a Shreveport woman who disappeared from her home a couple weeks ago. Name’s Jessup. Holly Jessup.”
“Her husband is some kind of bigwig up there so the case has gotten more exposure than it normally would have,” Mosley added. “We’ve faxed a photograph and a list of identifying marks to the Shreveport P.D. They’re contacting next of kin, and with any luck, we’ll have a positive ID by the end of the day.”
“Then you’ll have more than we’ve got.” Sean stood and glanced around. The setup bothered him. The killer had taken great care to stage the last scene, right down to the street number of the house and the ritualistic triangle in the victim’s right palm. Sean saw none of that here. The only patterns that had been repeated from one kill to the next were the inkblot tattoo and the facial mutilation.
“Be interesting to see if the autopsy turns up any bruises,” Danny said.
“Yeah, won’t it?”
Patrice was just coming out of the bathroom and Sean walked over to see what she’d found.
“No blood in the sink, nothing in the toilet or pipes.”
“What about prints?”
“I found a couple on the fixtures, but the place was wiped down pretty good by the cleaning crew the landlord brought in after the last tenant moved out.”
Sean glanced over Patrice’s shoulder into the bathroom. The medicine-cabinet door over the sink was slightly ajar. “Was that already open?”
“Yeah. That’s the way we found it.”
“No prints on the edge of the mirror?”
She shrugged. “Sorry.”
“This may sound a little strange, but did you find any animal hair on the body?”
“You mean as in cat or dog hair?”
“No, I’m thinking of something more unusual. Goat hair maybe.”
She lifted a brow. “I’ll let you know if anything turns up when we go through the evidence at the lab.”
“Thanks.” Sean moved around her to the bathroom door. “All right if I take a look inside?”
“I’m finished, so be my guest.”
As Sean stepped inside the tiny space, he turned and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
And saw something besides his reflection.
The cabinet door hadn’t been randomly left open, he realized. It had been positioned so that someone standing right where he was could see the body in the other room.
He leaned forward and blew on the mirror. A tiny patch of fog appeared. He continued until most of the mirror was frosted and he could see the spidery script the killer had left on the glass.
I am you.
Chapter 12
Michael Garrett glanced at his watch. As always, she was right on time. Not a minute before or a minute after, but straight up two o’clock. Sarah DeLaune was nothing if not punctual.
Unlike Sarah, though, the clock had gotten away from him, and he hadn’t had much time to prepare for their appointment. Ever since he’d moved his practice from the Poydras office to the upstairs apartment of his Garden District home, he’d been finding that distractions came a little too easily.
Last semester, he’d accepted a full-time teaching position at the university and had cut his practice back to only a few sessions per week. Keeping the medical-center office open had seemed an unnecessary extravagance, and most of the patients he still saw had been with him long enough not to be disconcerted by the new arrangements. It helped that the office had a private entrance by way of an outside stairway at the back of the house.
Michael stood at the window now and watched as Sarah came through the garden gate, pausing on the other side as if to get her bearings. That brief hesitation had become her ritual, and Michael often wondered what went through her head at that moment. What internal battle she had to wage before she could continue across the garden to his office.
She was an attractive young woman, intelligent and articulate, but she wore her self-defense like a suit of armor. And she was full of contradictions. A tattoo artist without any visible tattoos. A nonconformist whose past hung around her neck like a noose.
Today she had on a lightweight jacket with black pants and boots. A leather handbag was slung over one shoulder, and as usual, her face was heavily made up. Kohl liner around the eyes, dark red lipstick on the mouth. Her thick, black hair was twisted up in the back, but the wind had whipped it loose and she lifted a hand to swipe a strand from her face.
The gesture held a certain unconscious elegance that took Michael by surprise. Sarah’s hidden grace was yet another of the many dichotomies he’d noted.
She reminded him a little of Elise, and Michael sometimes wondered if that faint resemblance was enough to warrant suggesting another psychologist. The last thing Sarah needed was a distracted therapist, and he had to admit that her dark eyes and full lips had caused his mind to wander on occasion. Even more so now, with the anniversary of Elise’s death coming on. Some days his head was filled with so many bleak thoughts he had a hard time concentrating.
But even more problematic was the way Sarah’s therapy had stalled. She’d been referred to him by her doctor when medication had failed to alleviate her insomnia, but the walls she’d erected since her sister’s murder were proving formidable. She’d told him something of her background, something of her sister’s death, but always she kept a distance. Always she kept some doors closed.
She’d once inquired about memory-regression hypnosis, but for Michael, that was a treatment of last resort. Far from a magic solution, hypnosis was often ineffective—even downright risky, with sometimes unexpected consequences. And, too, a therapist could inadvertently feed his patient leading or suggestive questions in order to produce a response that fit a preconceived theory.
Michael was not one of those psychologists who eschewed the entire concept of repressed memories. He did believe, however, that dissociative amnesia was extremely rare, and that in most cases—perhaps Sarah’s as well—the inability to recall certain events was not the result of lost memories, but of a lost neural connection. In other words, something physical may have destroyed Sarah’s memories of her sister’s murder, and it was entirely possible she would never recover them.
Michael watched her move across the garden, and a few moments later, the door to the outer office opened and closed. He turned from the window a split second before she knocked.
“Come in, Sarah.”
She opened the door and hesitated for another fraction of a minute before entering. “How did you know it was me?”
He smiled. “It’s two o’clock on Friday afternoon. Who else would it be? Besides, I saw you in the garden.”
“The banana trees are a mess from the freeze.” She shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it on the floor with her purse. “You’ve got some serious work to do in that garden.”
“I’m not too worried about the banana trees. They’ll recover soon enough, but I’m afraid I may have lost most of the plumerias.”
“You can’t save everything, I guess.” She sat down and folded her hands in her lap as she waited for Michael to take a seat. “So,” she said. “Here we are again.”
“Yes. Here we are. How have you been sleeping since I saw you last?”
She shrugged. “I catch a few hours now and then.”
“Are you still taking Xanax?”
“Only when I need to.” She laughed softly.
“Any adverse side effects? Memory loss, blackouts...?”
“I had an episode of sleepwalking last week. I woke up and found myself sitting in the shower. Thank goodness the water wasn’t turned on.” She laughed again.
“Another drug might be more effective as a sleep aid,” Michael said. “I can talk to Dr. Bayden about other options if you’d like.”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.” Her smile disappeared. “I don’t really want to talk about my sleep disorder today.”
“Okay.”
She bit the side of her lip. “I want to talk about Sean.”
Michael nodded. He knew who she meant. She’d talked about Sean Kelton before.
“I saw him the other night,” Sarah said. “He called and asked me to meet him at a crime scene. The victim had a lot of tattoos and he wanted to know if I could identify the artist.”
“Did you agree to go?”
Her gaze drifted to the window. “Yes. The body was found near my home. I suppose that’s one of the reasons he called.”
“How did it feel seeing him again?”
She took a moment to answer. “I’ve been surprised at how angry I still am.”
“Why would that surprise you?”
“Because it’s been months. I should be over him by now.”
“According to whose schedule?”
“I know, I know.” She ran her fingers through her bangs, ruffling them into a charming fringe above her winged brows. “I saw him again the next day and things really got ugly.”
“Would you like to talk about that?”
“No, actually.” She twirled a strand of hair around her finger, a gesture that reminded him of Elise. She’d done that, too, when she was nervous or anxious. When she was getting ready to go home to her husband.
A frown flicked across Sarah’s face. “What I want to talk about is something Sean said to me at the crime scene. It’s been bothering me ever since.”
“What did he say?”
Her eyes turned pensive, as if she was still trying to work it out for herself. “He implied that the reason I can’t remember what happened the night Rachel died is that I’m trying to protect someone.”
“Why did that bother you so much?”
Her gaze went back to the window. She couldn’t see anything from where she sat, except for treetops and sky, but the scenery seemed to fascinate her. “I guess because it made me think about that night in a different way. I’ve always thought I couldn’t remember being at the farmhouse because of the trauma and shock of witnessing Rachel’s murder. But what if Sean’s right? What if I suppressed those memories, not because of what I saw, but because of who I saw?”
“The killer, you mean.”
She sat up straighter. “Maybe the killer was someone close to me. Maybe even—” She stopped herself short and pressed her lips together, as if afraid she might blurt out more than she intended to divulge.
“You told me once that you believed someone named Ashe Cain was responsible for your sister’s death.”
