Lover Unleashed - J. R. Ward [179]
The air was choked with the smell of fresh blood . . . and formaldehyde.
At that moment, the photographer’s flash went off and the body of the victim was spotlighted on the bed—as were the specimen jars on the bedside table. And the knives.
He closed his eyes briefly.
“Detective?”
José glanced over his shoulder at Veck. “Yeah?”
“We have the registration on the truck. Illinois. Owned by a David Kroner. It has not been reported stolen, and guess what—Kroner is a white male, thirty-three years old . . . unmarried . . . on disabili—fucking hell.” Veck’s convo stopped altogether as he came to stand by the bed. “Jesus.”
The flashbulb went off again, and there was an electronic wheeze as the camera recovered from the effort.
José looked at the coroner. “How long’s she been dead?”
“Not long. She’s still warm. I’ll give you a better idea when I’m done here.”
“Thanks.” José walked over to the crappy bureau and used a pen to push around a thin gold ring, a pair of sparkly earrings, and a bracelet that was pink and black.
The tattoo that had been cut out of the victim’s skin and relocated to the specimen jar next to her was pink and black, too. Probably favorite colors of hers.
Or had been.
He continued to wander around, looking for things that were out of place, checking the wastepaper baskets, peeking into the bathroom.
Someone had clearly disturbed the killer’s fun. Somebody had heard or seen something and busted the door open, causing a fast departure out this back window above the toilet.
The 911 call that had come in had been made by a male who refused to identify himself. He’d said only that there was a dead body in the room at the end and that was it. Wasn’t their killer. Bastards like him didn’t stop unless they had to, and they didn’t willingly leave behind the kinds of trophies that were on the nightstand and the bureau.
“Where did you go after this?” José said to himself. “Where did you run to . . .”
There were K-9 units searching the woods out back, but José had a hunch that was going to come to nothing. A mere tenth of a mile from the motel was a river shallow enough to wade through—he and Veck had gone over the little bridge that spanned the damn thing on the way here.
“He’s changing his MO,” Veck said. When José turned, the guy planted his hands on his hips and shook his head. “This is the first time he’s done it in this public a place. His work is really messy—and potentially noisy. We’d have found more scenes like this after he was done.”
“Agreed.”
“David Kroner is the answer.”
José shrugged. “Maybe. Or he could be another body we’re about to find.”
“No one’s reported him missing.”
“Like you said, unmarried, right? Maybe he lives alone. Who’d know he was gone?”
Except even as José poked holes in the theory, he did the math and came up with a similar conclusion. It was rare that a person could disappear without somebody missing them—family, friends, coworkers, apartment manager. . . . It wasn’t impossible, but very unlikely.
The question was, where was the killer going to go next? If the bastard followed conventional wisdom, he was probably entering a gorging stage with his pathology. In the past, victims had shown up months apart, but now they’d found two in a week?
So if he worked off that assumption, he knew the careful actions that had masked the killer previously were going out the window, whatever patterns he’d fallen into dissipating in the face of a frenetic drive. The good news was that sloppy was going to make him easier to catch. The bad news was that this might well get worse before it got better.
Veck came up to him. “I’m going to get into that truck. You want to be there?”
“Yeah.”
Outside, the air didn’t smell like copper and chemicals, and José took some deep breaths as Veck snapped on gloves and went to work. Naturally the vehicle was locked, but that didn’t stop the guy. He got a slider and popped open the driver’s-side door like he was an old hand with the B&E.
“Whoa,” he muttered as he reared back.
It didn’t take long for the stench to hit José, and he coughed into his