Devious - Lisa Jackson [134]
Someone from the ME’s office was already examining the body of the victim—a redhead who lay on her mussed bed, as if she were staring up at the ceiling. Had she been alive. Half dressed, her face contorted in horror and pain, a bloody ring around her neck, scratch marks on her throat where she’d tried to tear off the garrote.
Montoya imagined her last minutes and looked away. Helluva thing. Maybe Abby was right; maybe it was about time he retired.
The room smelled of vanilla and garlic and death—a bad combination, one that had Bentz looking green around the gills. Then again, tough a cop as he was, Bentz always fought nausea at a homicide. He tried to hide it, but Montoya had caught the guy puking just outside a crime scene more than once.
“Time of death?” Montoya asked as the examiner took the body’s temperature.
Frowning thoughtfully, the assistant ME studied his thermometer. “I figure she died sometime around midnight, maybe one o’clock this morning.” He nodded to himself, as if silently confirming what he’d come up with. “Amount of rigor concurs.”
“That’s about the time Mrs. Snoop saw the priest leave,” Brinkman observed.
To the room in general, Montoya said, “Be sure to bag her hands.”
“Yeah, like we wouldn’t.” Lowering the clipboard onto which she’d been scribbling notes, Washington cast an irritated look his way. “Do your job, Detective. I’ll do mine.”
Brinkman’s eyebrows bucked upward. “Ouch,” he mouthed.
Montoya didn’t give a damn. He just wanted to see what was under the vic’s nails.
Bentz was quiet, and Montoya figured he was just battling the urge to purge when his partner said, “Look at this.” He was in the living room, and his face was white as death, his jaw so tight the bone was bulging.
On the table in front of him was a radio and a hundred-dollar bill, the eyes of Ben Franklin blackened by a felt pen.
“Oh, hell and she’s—”
“A red-haired prostitute. Check the station on the radio.”
Montoya knew, deep in his gut, that the digital readout would be the numbers for WSLJ.
“Dr. Sam still does her radio show, doesn’t she? You know, the one where she gives out advice in the middle of the night?” Bentz asked.
“Midnight Confessions. Yeah, Abby listens to it sometimes when she’s up feeding the baby.”
Samantha Leeds Wheeler was still on the air, still giving out advice despite the fact that she’d been the target of the insidious killer the police and press had dubbed Father John. A killer who raped and murdered his red-haired victims while listening to her show. He’d always left a hundred-dollar bill with the eyes of Ben Franklin blackened.
Montoya’s gut clenched, and he felt that spooky sensation, a premonition that things were going to get worse before they got better. “Someone better call the radio station and talk to Dr. Sam, see if she’s been getting any strange calls.”
“I’m on my way,” Bentz said, his jaw still set. It had been his shot that had nailed Father John, his bullet that had sent the guy into the depths of the swamp to become, they’d all hoped, gator food.
Since his body had never been recovered and it had been years since his last rampage, they’d all thought—police, press, and populace—that Father John, the serial killer who dressed as a priest to gain his victims’ trust, had died in the brackish waters of the bayou.
Now, it seemed, they’d been wrong.
“Call Dr. Sam? What the fuck for?” Brinkman asked, always a little slow on the uptake; then, as if the light were slowly dawning, he muttered, “Holy shit!” when he spied the defaced C-note on the table and put two and two together. Shaking his bald pate, he added, “Well, ladies and gentleman, it looks like he’s baaaaack.”
“Or someone who knows his MO well enough to be a convincing copycat,” Montoya said, though some of the details of the original crimes the cops had kept from the press. This guy, whoever he was, was informed.
“Five to one it’s Father John,” Brinkman said, biting his lower lip and narrowing his eyes on the defaced hundred-dollar bill.
No one took him up on the bet.
Val had nearly convinced herself that her