Federal Bureau of Investigation
San Diego District Field Office Kendra was seated in the building’s main lobby for a full ten minutes before Special Agent Gina Carson arrived looking bleary-eyed and slightly disheveled.
“This is some kind of hazing ritual, isn’t it?” Gina said sourly. “The San Diego office does this to all their new people?”
“No hazing. Just the Kendra Michaels trial by fire, I guess.” Kendra flipped open the lid on the box Olivia had given her. “Doughnut?”
Gina just glared at her.
Metcalf entered from the door across the lobby. He looked even more bleary-eyed than Gina. “Not cool, Kendra. I’d only been asleep for an hour and a half when Griffin called.”
She looked at him with mock concern. “Up late cataloging your comic book collection?”
“Hah. That’s hilarious.” He shrugged. “Actually, I was playing the new Mortal Kombat Playstation game.”
“Ooh, even geekier.”
“Afraid so. Wanna go look at some gory crime scene photos?”
“No. But that’s why I’m here.”
They took the elevator upstairs to the third-floor conference room, which was centered by a long conference table. Metcalf motioned to two bulletin boards covered with printed photos. “Here are the first two crime scenes. I’d just as soon show you on the television monitor. But you know Griffin. He’s old school. He insists on printing the photos and sticking them up here with pushpins like in 1985 or something.”
Kendra stepped over to the bulletin boards. “I like it. It’s good to be able to see everything at a glance. Sometimes it helps you make connections that are hard to see otherwise.”
Metcalf turned back to Gina. “It’s a rare and beautiful thing when Kendra agrees with anything Griffin does.”
Gina crossed her arms and stifled a yawn. “She persuaded him to stir us from our nice warm beds, so there was bound to be some sadistic common ground there.”
“Who is this?” Kendra was staring at the photo of a young woman’s pale, bloated corpse. “First victim?”
“Yes.” Metcalf picked up a manila file folder and opened it. “Meet Sofia Williams, age twenty-six. She was abducted outside her apartment building Sunday night. Her car door was still open and keys, purse, and phone were left on the passenger seat. San Diego PD fished her out of the bay the next morning.”
Kendra nodded, trying not to dwell on the family and friends left behind, the years of joy taken from this woman. This wouldn’t help now.
Detach.
Concentrate.
She pointed to a series of marks on the corpse’s torso. “Stab wounds?”
Metcalf nodded. “Eleven to be exact. It was the cause of death. The punctures were made with a large, double-serrated blade, two and a half inches at the widest point.”
“The wounds are how they were able to connect the first two murders,” Gina said, pointing to the other bulletin board. “It’s a unique signature. The serrations on each side of the blade are remarkably different. One side is better suited for scaling fish, the other better for skinning a deer. There aren’t many knives out there with that size and character. Our lab is pulling together a list.”
Kendra’s eyes narrowed on a photo of the corpse’s feet. A short length of twine was knotted around one of them and extended out of frame.
She looked up. “Was something tied to her left ankle?”
Metcalf pointed to another photo. “This small plastic bag. It was sealed tight. There were two objects inside.” He pointed to a pair of photos. “A pocket watch and a sun visor.”
Kendra leaned closer for a better look. “Do you have them here in evidence?”
“Afraid not. We officially took this investigation over from San Diego PD just today. We’ll be picking up all the evidence later in the morning.”
“Yet another reason why you should have waited,” Gina said.
“Not that you’re bitter or anything.” Kendra was still studying the photos. “These objects probably weren’t hers. Not many twenty-something women wear watches of any kind and even less carry antique brass pocket watches. And that visor looks far too big for her.”
“That’s the consensus,” Metcalf said. “But we don’t have any idea why this was attached to her. Just like we don’t know why that stuff was attached to the chair today.”
She moved on to the next board, which was centered by an eleven-by-fourteen-inch print of another woman’s corpse. The skin was a light shade of blue and her hair looked almost like icicles dangling in front of her face. Her eyes were wide open, but not in the thousand-yard stare she’d seen in too many dead bodies; the victim looked strangely alert, almost expectant in her bearing. Kendra abruptly turned away. “What happened to her?”
Gina picked up another file folder. “She was found thirty-six hours after the first victim. Her name was Amber McKay. She was an assistant manager at a movie theater. She was abducted late Monday after she got off work and was walking toward her car in the small lot behind the theater. Her purse, phone, and keys were found on the ground by her manager less than ninety minutes later. Amber turned up just a few hours later in a freezer behind a Chinese restaurant. It’s normally padlocked, but it looks like the lock was snapped off by a pair of bolt cutters.”
Kendra pointed to the corpse’s left wrist which had a cord wrapped around it. “And this?”
“Bolo tie,” Metcalf said. “And threaded through it is a 300 ring.”
“A what?”
“The American Bowling Congress used to give away a commemorative diamond ring every time a bowler scored a perfect game during sanctioned league play.”
“And they didn’t go broke?”
“Perfect games used to be rarer. These days, bowling alleys oil the lanes in such a way to make it easier to score higher.”
Kendra turned back to face him. “Something tells me this is knowledge you didn’t just recently obtain.”
He shrugged. “I grew up in St. Louis. Big bowling town.”
Kendra nodded her approval. “Apparently.”
“Anyway, there’s a number inside the ring and we’re trying to track its owner through the association that took over a few years ago.” Metcalf grabbed a freestanding bulletin board from the other side of the room and rolled it closer to the others. Its surface was only partially filled with photographs of the crime scene they’d visited just hours before. “We started this after we got back here. It’s not complete, but it might jog your memory about what we saw out there in front of the school.”
She didn’t need her memory jogged; it was too vivid at the moment. “Thank you.” Kendra stepped back to look at all three boards at once. “Three murders in four days. Serial killers usually take more time between kills.”