Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [33]
chapter twelve
Maria Lopez had fought for her life. With every inch of muscle, every ounce of strength she possessed she went down fighting. And it showed. But her body was nowhere to be found.
The white-and-blue checkered curtains and their fixtures lay in a heap on the floor. A white ceramic lamp shattered next to the toppled table on which it had sat. The imitation Oriental screen that separated her bed from the rest of her small studio apartment looked as if someone had been thrown through it, a large hole pouting in the center panel. The checkered sheets of her bed, which matched the curtains, were drenched in blood, soaked through to the mattress.
This is where he got her, thought Chief Simon Morrow, as he touched a gloved finger to the blood. A sharp instrument to a major artery—the throat, the leg … he couldn’t be sure. He could imagine the faceless killer on top of her, his knee on her chest. He winced at the image in his mind, in spite of having seen worse. Her fear echoed in the tossed-up room.
He got down on his knees, tucked the bedskirt up between the mattress and the box spring and shone his flashlight under the bed for anything that may have fallen under there in the struggle. He reached for a small wooden crucifix he saw there. He could see where it had fallen from, by the bare nail and the cross-shaped clean space on the dirty white wall above her bed.
“Jesus Christ. Shit.”
He wondered how long the neighbors had heard the screams and the banging before they called the police. How he had got her out of the apartment after that. There was no way she walked out, not with all that blood on the bed.
One of the uniformed officers walked in the front door.
“Anybody see anything?” the chief asked, knowing the answer already.
“No. No one I spoke to saw or heard anything, Chief. But some people didn’t open their doors.”
“Figures. I’ll send a detective out in the morning. In fact, page Keane right now, tell him to get over here.”
Morrow knocked on the wall with a pudgy callused hand.
“These apartments might as well be separated by cardboard. Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
If there had been any doubt in his mind that the two prior missing-persons cases on his desk were somehow connected, and connected somehow to the dog and the surgical-supply warehouse, he was sure now. The other cases on his desk were cold. No leads. No witnesses. No family or even friends to interview. Those people had dropped from the face of the earth, leaving no trail behind them to follow. But Maria Lopez had made sure her departure was not silent like the rest. There had to be something in this mess. Hair, fibers, prints, something—anything. She had to have been cut very deeply with something razor-sharp for that much blood to be spilled, possibly with a surgical implement. Maybe the same type of instrument used to slice up the German shepherd and remove its organs, an act that had been completed with precision. Lopez was the fourth person missing in two months in a sleepy town that saw little violence. Something was definitely going on.
Morrow still had the crucifix in his hand, was clenching it so hard the edges were hurting him through his latex gloves. He’d found one of these in the home of each of the missing persons—a detailed Christ figure, highly varnished wood. Did it connect them? He couldn’t be sure. People were very religious here—especially those who had little else to live for.
“Call in Homicide and Forensics from State,” he said to the uniformed officer standing closest to him. “We need to treat this like a murder, with or without a body.” If these cases were connected, he was going to have to call in the FBI. If he did it too soon, he’d look like a yokel who couldn’t handle a few missing persons. If he did it too late, if someone else disappeared …
He’d had to make this