Vic just shakes his head and uses his mug to gesture at the spread of files on the table.
“Of the sixteen, one, two, four, seven . . . no, eight were raped, and beaten to varying degrees. Their clothing was torn, and either left on them or in a heap next to them. The other eight were not raped, no signs of sexual assault. Hints of bruising around their necks indicate they were probably choked to unconsciousness. Clothing was carefully removed and placed at a distance. To keep it clean?” Eddison skims quickly through the relevant medical reports. “No other signs of physical trauma on those eight.”
“And after death? What did he do with the bodies?”
“That’s what spurred the initial theory they were connected.” He pulls photos out of each file, still feeling like an idiot making a class presentation, but layers them so Vic can see. “Every victim was found in a church, even those who weren’t religious or overtly Christian. The churches themselves span a number of denominations. ME reports say the victims were not moved. Arranged, yes, but they were killed where they were found.”
Eddison thinks of the plain white Baptist church for Tereza’s funeral, the icy politeness with which the Kobiyashis greeted the agents, the outright rudeness they offered to Bliss and Inara.
Bliss snarled back, but it was Inara who opened the casket to set a few pages of folded sheet music under Tereza’s crossed hands.
Eddison runs a hand through his hair, scraping his blunt fingernails against his scalp. He needs to get a haircut soon; it’s getting long enough to curl. “They were all in roughly the same part of each church: between the altar space and the seating. They all had flowers on or around them, a unique flower for each victim.”
“Where did the flowers come from?”
There are pages upon pages of police interviews with florists in every folder. Some flowers were local to the area and in season, and could have been gathered in the wild by the killer. Others had to have been purchased, but were likely bought out of town to avoid suspicion. A few local flower shops had records of cash sales for the particular type of flower, but not enough to account for the number present at the scene. Even if he buys some in town, the rest are bought or found elsewhere.
But there was one exception. “Meaghan Adams, victim number fourteen, was found with camellias almost certainly purchased from her mother’s shop. Cash, no security cameras, and the clerk wasn’t paying enough attention to give a description other than ‘male, tall, and somewhere between thirty and sixty.’” He tries not to be irritated by that. Most people aren’t trained to actively observe, to notice and remember details of strangers.
“What else?”
“The murders all take place within a two-month period. The earliest is in mid-March, the latest almost mid-May. There’s something about the time of year, something about spring that sets this guy off.”
Standing up with a muted groan and a stretch, Vic reaches for the bowl of dry-erase markers on the table. Most of one wall is a whiteboard, currently taken up with bullet points of what appears to be a sexual-harassment seminar. Vic wipes off all of it with quick strokes and tosses the eraser to the floor. “All right. Let’s chart.”
It must be nearly midnight, but Eddison nods and opens the first file, clearing his throat to read aloud. “First known victim, Darla Jean Carmichael, age sixteen. Killed in Greater Glory Southern Baptist Church in Holyrood, Texas, outside of San Antonio, on the twenty-third of March. Zoraida Bourret . . .”
As Eddison reads off names and dates, along with any other details that jump out, Vic copies it onto the whiteboard, color coding the information. Green for locations and dates, blue for officers and agents on the cases, purple for family statements, red for the victims’ details. They’ve done this before, on this case and others: put everything up on a single page and hope to see something that gets lost in the shuffle of papers.
There’s a question the instructors pose to every cohort at the academy: why is it more difficult to find someone who kills less often?
The answer has a lot of parts. A pattern that’s spread out is harder to identify. Pieces of the signature get lost. A spree killer rushes and leaves clues behind. A serial murderer might take longer to make mistakes.
In Eddison’s mind, it always comes back to control. The more time passes between kills, the more in control of himself a killer is, the more likely to plan, to be careful. Someone who only kills once a year isn’t in a hurry, isn’t desperate and likely to fuck up. A patient man isn’t worried about getting caught.
Eddison is not a patient man. He’s waited too long already to tell Priya—to tell all the victims’ families—that they’ve got the bastard who killed their girls. He doesn’t want to add another folder to the pile, another name to the list.
He’s just not sure there’s a way to avoid it.
It’s practically March.
Her name is Sasha Wolfson, and you see her for the first time when she nearly crashes her uncle’s convertible. The top is down and the crisp spring wind rips through her hair, waving it all around and into her face. She pulls over abruptly so she can knot it back, but she’s laughing.
She has a wonderful laugh.
Her uncle is laughing, too, even as he hands her a scarf to tie over her hair, and he patiently explains things like lane changes and merges and blind spots. He’s teaching her to drive.
You follow that laugh for weeks, through driving lessons and afterschool walks and the weekends she spends working with her family’s landscaping business. She’s so good with the flowers; there are always some in her hair. Her parents nearly always give her the delicate work to do, twining slender, fragile vines through latticework and repotting the less hardy plants. She loves the butterfly gardens best, and sometimes she makes a coronet of honeysuckles.
You can smell them in the air when she walks by, the tiny flowers bright against her red hair.
Her sister is a wild girl, you learn. Off at college, screwing everything that will stand still long enough. Her poor parents, you hear, and the midnight calls from policemen. Drugs, and car crashes, and drinking. At least they have Sasha.
At least they have a good girl they can be proud of.
But you know how girls can get as they grow older. Darla Jean was a good girl, until she wasn’t. Zoraida withstood temptations, and is protected from them now, but Leigh . . . Leigh Clark was always a vicious girl, and the world is well rid of her. When Sasha gets her license, when she can go off on her own in a car, who knows what she’ll get up to?
No. Her parents may have failed their elder daughter, but they’ve done well by Sasha, as she does well by them. They deserve to know that Sasha will always be a good girl.
It’s almost summer, and her coronet of honeysuckle is a thick crown today, her hair woven through it in places until it’s all up, precariously balanced, somewhere between elegant and untamed. This is a fairy-tale maiden, and all nature bends to please her. You’ve read fairy tales, though. You know the prince comes, and the princess is no longer pure. There’s a kiss to wake, a kiss to cure, a kiss to keep. Princesses become queens, and there’s never been a queen undeserving of burning.
Red tendrils, dark with sweat, escape from the crown and plaster to her neck, her throat, as she tends the flower beds outside the church. She stands and stretches, heads into the dark, quiet church for a drink, a chance to cool off.
And you follow, because you know what happens to princesses who aren’t protected from the world.
After, you pluck a single flower from the disintegrating crown and place it on your tongue. Under the copper shock of blood, you can taste the sweetness of honeysuckle.
MARCH