Angel Fire - Lisa Unger [73]
She thought about all the various people she had encountered during the purchase of her home: real-estate brokers, mortgage brokers, maid service, lawn maintenance people, locksmiths. She could think of nothing that had made her uneasy, no one who had seemed off to her.
“What do you want from me? And why did you want me to come here?” she said softly. She thought about the pen he had left for her and the note: Vengeance is mine. Did he want to wreak vengeance on her? Did he perceive her as having wronged him in some way? Had she written about him and offended him?
She walked the edge of the clearing, peering down a slight slope that led to a heavily forested area. She could see the windows of the neighboring house through the pine glinting in the sunlight. She sidled down into the trees, holding on to branches to keep her balance, her lizard-skin boots not finding much of a hold in the dirt. Once she reached level ground, she walked away from the clearing, her eyes on the forest floor, scanning for anything left by humans … a matchbook, a cigarette butt, a soda can, anything. She heard a soft rustle of leaves to her left and turned, expecting to see the doe again but there was nothing there. The sun moved behind a patch of cloud and it became more difficult to see the ground. Then about fifty feet in front of her she saw, mingled in with the green, red, and brown of nature’s palette, a square inch of pure white.
She continued to move toward the white patch, when she was startled by her cell phone. “Hello?”
“Where are you? The desk sergeant said you took off out of here like you were being chased by a ghost.”
“Hold on a second.”
“Lydia … Lydia …”
His voice was distant as she bent down and started brushing aside the leaves and dirt. Sticking out of the ground was a soft corner of plastic. She moved away from it, not wanting to touch anything and contaminate the scene any more than she already had.
“Jeff,” she said into the phone, as she looked around her into the darkness of the trees.
“Lydia, where the fuck are you?”
“I’m at 124 Black Canyon Road, there’s no marker, but it’s the only drive without one on the street. You better come with Morrow. We’re going to need the ME and all the usual suspects.”
“What have you found?”
“I think someone’s been buried here.”
Jeffrey’s voice was soft, but authoritative enough to hold rapt the room of men and women gathered to discuss what was now the first serial-murder case the jurisdiction had ever seen. In the room dimmed by pulled shades, Lydia, Chief Morrow, Henry Wizner, and several local police officers sat around the conference table taking notes. The shifting tray of slides in the projector that Morrow operated punctuated Jeffrey’s comments. Images of gore and decay reflected on the screen.
“We’ve asked Private Investigator Jeffrey Mark and Lydia Strong to be involved in what we now consider to be a serial-offender situation, because of their vast experience in this area,” Chief Morrow had said by way of introduction between them and his department. “Having them here allows us to conduct this investigation without calling in the FBI, which no one wants. So I will ask that you give them the same amount of respect that you give me, and take their orders as you take mine, and by the time the feds hear about this, we’ll all be heroes instead of local yokels that couldn’t handle the situation ourselves.”
“The bodies of Christine and Harold Wallace were found today,” Jeffrey began. “So now we have three corpses missing their hearts. We don’t know where the killer is removing them or why. We do know that the locations where he’s dumped the bodies are not the locations of the kill. As far as evidence goes, we have turned up nothing except a partial footprint at the Lopez dump site.
“Due to some very unglamorous but very important legwork—no pun intended—on the part of Homicide Detective Raymond Barnes,” Jeffrey continued, motioning to a heavyset man with a military bearing