After about a minute, Ryan straightened up and cleared his throat. “It would seem that whoever drew the runes on the girl is familiar with your actual scars. Or at the very least your pendant. You wear that necklace quite a bit, don’t you?”
“All the time now,” I muttered. “All the damn time now. Out in the open where everyone can see it. What a fucking fool I am.”
Ever since Owen had given it to me, I’d always been so proud of the pendant, since it was something from my childhood that I’d thought was lost forever. Even more than that, ever since I’d become head of the underworld, a small part of me had liked people knowing my symbol—and especially fearing it. I just never thought that someone would take my spider rune and do something so horribly sick and disgusting with it.
And I still couldn’t puzzle out what it really meant. If someone wanted to warn me that I was on their hit list, that they were coming for me, that they wanted me dead, there were far easier ways to do it. Why not spray-paint the symbol on the front door of the Pork Pit? Why not scratch it on the hood of my car while it was parked near the restaurant? Why not just burn it into the front lawn at Fletcher’s house, if they wanted to be truly dramatic?
Any one of those things would have immediately gotten my attention. So why put the symbols on a dead woman instead? Was he just mocking me? Or was something else entirely going on here?
I didn’t know—but I was going to find out.
The killer might think that he was taunting me, using my runes in such a sick, disgusting fashion, but all he had really done was piss me off. He wanted to get my attention? Well, he had it now, in fucking spades. I was going to hunt down this blackhearted son of a bitch, and he was going to pay for what he’d done to this poor, innocent girl.
More than he’d ever imagined.
“Gin,” Bria said in a low, warning voice. “Take it easy.”
I looked at her, and she pointed at the table. Ice crystals flowed out of my fingertips and ran across the metal table, quickly creeping toward the girl’s body like a tidal wave of frost. A sign of my own cold, cold rage.
I yanked my fingers off the table and forced myself to tap down my magic, pulling it back inside my own body where it belonged. “Sorry.” I looked at Ryan. “I didn’t mean to hurt anything or destroy any evidence.”
“You didn’t.” He gave me a sad smile. “Besides, she’s well beyond any sort of physical hurt or pain now.”
He looked down at the woman, his face creasing with more sadness. Like most people in Ashland, Dr. Ryan Colson had had his own share of tragedy. His younger brother had been shot and killed right in front of him when they were both just kids. I wondered if he was thinking about the brothers and sisters who might be missing this girl, whoever she was.
After several seconds, Ryan shook his head, as if chasing away his own bad memories and heartache. He raised his gaze to mine again, his face even more somber than before. “There’s something else you need to see, Gin. Something to do with this girl.”
My heart clenched, and my gut twisted. What now?
Bria frowned. “Do you mean . . .”
Ryan gave a sharp nod. “Yeah.”
“And you think that this girl . . .”
“Yes. Unfortunately.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them, not understanding their shorthand sentences, but they stared at each other instead of me, once again having some silent conversation that I couldn’t follow.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Bria sighed. “Nothing good.”
Ryan turned to me. “Follow me, please, and I’ll explain it all.”
• • •
Curious and more than a little wary, I followed Ryan out of his office and through the waiting room, with Bria trailing along behind me. Sophia and Jade were gone, although Sophia had left a note on the waiting room table saying that they were in the restroom and would be back in a few minutes.
Ryan left the waiting room and led us down a couple of hallways before stopping in front of an old wooden door that was set in the very back corner of this level. I looked over at Bria, but her face was grim, and she stood right alongside Ryan like the two of them were soldiers in some battle that no one else even knew about.
There was no sound this far back in the basement, not even the faint hum of the distant elevators or the gurgle of water running through the overhead pipes. The air was absolutely still and even colder here than it had been in his office, as though this part of the basement was completely cut off from all heat, life, and ventilation.
Ryan pulled out a ring of keys, flipped through them, and stuck one of them into the lock. He opened the door and stepped aside so that Bria and I could enter first. Then he slipped into the room behind us, closed the door, and hit the switch on the wall.
The overhead lights slowly winked on one by one, as if waking up from a long winter’s nap. I blinked against the harsh glare and studied the area before me. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves covered all the walls, and several more free-standing shelves took up a good portion of the back of the room. Heavy-duty cardboard boxes lined each shelf from top to bottom and side to side, and each box had its own unique numbers and names written on the cardboard in permanent black marker. The air smelled old and musty, and a heavy coating of dust covered many of the boxes and shelves, as though they’d been brought down here years ago and totally forgotten.
“This is the cold-case storage room,” Bria said. “One of them, anyway. For crimes that go unsolved. Lots of those in Ashland.”
I nodded. I’d heard her talk about this room in passing, about sending evidence down here for safekeeping or bringing up the boxes when she got a long-awaited break in a case, but I’d never been here myself. Then again, I wasn’t a frequent visitor to the police station; it was one of the few places in Ashland that I avoided like the plague.
Ryan disappeared back behind a row of shelves. Several faint scrape-scrape-scrapes sounded, as though he was pulling a cardboard box down from up high on one of the shelves. A few seconds later, he reappeared with a box in his arms, walked over, and set it down on a metal table in the center of the room. He looked at Bria, who nodded. Ryan pulled a small knife out of his pants pocket and used it to carefully slice through the red evidence tape that was wrapped around the box.
“A knife in your pocket? You’re a man after my own heart, Colson,” I drawled, trying to lighten the mood.
He flashed me a grin and continued his work. A few seconds later, he slid the knife back into his pocket, pulled the lid off the box, and set it aside. I stepped forward and peered down inside, not quite sure what to expect, but all I saw were thick manila file folders.
One by one, Ryan pulled out the folders and carefully, neatly arranged them on the table. Once all the folders were out of the box, he flipped them open and drew out a photo from the top of each file. He turned the photos around so that I could see them and lined them up side by side. There were a dozen of them, and they all showed the exact same thing.
A dead woman.
At first, I wondered what the point was, but then I took a closer look at the photos, and I began to see the similarities. Each woman was lying on a metal slab in the coroner’s office, cold and still in death. Each one had long blond hair and had probably been young and pretty—until someone had beaten her face to an unrecognizable pulp. Ugly, purple bruises also ringed each woman’s throat from where she had been strangled.
I moved down the row of photos, staring at them all in turn. But they were all so similar that they could have been carbon copies, and one face melted into the next and the next until they all seemed to solidify into a single dead woman. My breath caught in my throat, and my stomach churned as I realized exactly what I was looking at.
“All these photos, all these women. You’re saying that this girl tonight and all the rest of these poor women ar
e connected . . .” My voice trailed off for a moment. “You’re saying that there’s a serial killer in Ashland.”
12
For the second time in the last ten minutes, my mind spun around and around, trying to make sense of this startling new revelation.
Even in Ashland, where violence was sadly so very common, serial killers were exceptionally rare. The only one that I knew of recently had been Harley Grimes, the Fire elemental who’d kidnapped and tortured Sophia, and had done the same to dozens of other men and women before Sophia had finally killed him last year. But even then, Grimes had just been a mean son of a bitch who liked to hurt everyone who crossed his path. He hadn’t been a true serial killer, driven to hunt, abduct, torture, and murder the same kind of person over and over again.
But all these young women, all roughly the same age, with roughly the same features, and all killed in roughly the same way. It was a stunning new horror.
“How many?” I whispered. “How many women?”
Bria looked at Ryan, letting him take the lead.
“The dozen women before you are all the ones that I know of, that I’ve done the autopsies for,” he said, gesturing at the files and photos on the table. “There could be more victims—many more victims. I’ve been going through the cold-case files, trying to figure out if there are others and how long the killer has been active, but I haven’t found anything conclusive yet. All of these women have been murdered over the past two years. All of them badly beaten and strangled, with their bodies dumped in locations all over Ashland.”
“What made you connect the deaths? What ties them all together? Besides how they look and how he kills them?” I asked, part of me not wanting to know the answer. “Because it sounds like there’s something else. Something worse, if that’s even possible.”
Ryan reached back into the box and drew out a large plastic bag that I hadn’t noticed before. Several small compacts, all different colors, shapes, and sizes, rattled around inside, along with pots of eye shadow, sticks of eyeliner, and tubes of mascara. “Makeup.”
“Makeup?”
He nodded. “Makeup. Foundation, powder, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara. I’ve found quite a lot of it on all the victims’ faces. Far more than anyone would normally wear, and all of it in these bright, gaudy colors that look more like paint than makeup.” He shifted on his feet. “It looks like the killer . . . dolls them up, for lack of a better term. That he either makes the women put on the makeup or he does it himself before he, ah, well, you know.”
“Kills them,” Bria finished in a harsh voice.
Ryan winced and nodded again. He set the bag down on the table, making the compacts and other items inside rattle together again. The harsh sound reminded me of bones breaking.
“My resources are limited, but I’ve been working on it in my free time,” he said. “I’m certainly no expert, but so far, I haven’t found one brand or type of makeup that seems to be used more than any other.”
I glanced down at the photos of the dead women spread out on the table. I didn’t want to ask the question, but I had to know more. “What about lipstick? Like the blood-red lipstick he used for my spider runes?” A horrible thought occurred to me, and I had to clear my throat before I could force out my next words. “Has he . . . drawn my spider runes on any of the other women?”
“No,” Ryan said. “This is the first time that he’s put any sort of runes on his victims.”
I exhaled. It didn’t change anything, and it certainly didn’t help any of the dead women, but at least he’d only used my runes this one time. I didn’t know what I would have done if he’d marked them on all his victims. Probably felt even more sick guilt than I already did. Although I wondered why he had drawn them on this girl and not any of the others. Why mark her up? Why now?
“As for the lipstick, I have found that on all the victims. Their lips are the one thing that he actually seems to use the same color on from woman to woman,” Ryan said. “I’ve been trying to determine exactly what color and brand of lipstick it is, but it’s been hard to get a good, clean sample, given how badly he beats the women, and their subsequent exposure to the elements.”
I barked out a short, brittle laugh. “Well, now you have a clean sample, thanks to my spider runes.”
He gave me a grim look. “Yes, I do.”
I curled my hands around the edge of the table, feeling the cold metal dig into the still itching and burning spider rune scars on my own palms. Fletcher had been wrong. Sometimes you just couldn’t brace yourself for the worst. Because I had never expected something like this to happen, not even in Ashland.
“So he kidnaps them, puts makeup on them, and kills them,” I said. “What else does he do to them?”
Ryan shook his head. “Nothing. He doesn’t do anything else to them. At least, not before the end.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t do anything else to them?” I asked. “Surely there has to be more to this than some creep painting women’s faces. He has to take them and make them up for some reason.”
He waved his hand over the photos. “There are no signs of physical abuse. No cuts, no burns, nothing like that. He restrains them, probably with a heavy rope, judging from the bruises around their wrists and ankles, but he doesn’t torture them.” His mouth twisted. “The beatings the women endure are horrific enough all on their own.”
Ryan looked at Bria, and she nodded, telling him to continue.
“If I had to guess, I would say that he ties them down to a chair. But he takes care of them. He feeds and bathes them on a regular basis, judging from my examination of the bodies.”
“So he kidnaps these women and holds them hostage. How long?” I asked. “How long does he keep them?”
“That’s a bit harder to determine. But judging from when some of the women were reported missing and when their bodies were found, the weather and the temperature at the time, and the varying rates of decomposition, I would say that he keeps them for at least four days. Sometimes a week or longer.”
So all of these women had endured at least four horrific days of being tied down, knowing that they would never see their friends and family again, knowing that they were going to be killed sooner or later, whenever the urge struck the monster who’d taken them.
That sort of helplessness was its own kind of cruel, cruel torture.
My gaze dropped to the photos of the dead women again, and for a moment, I could hear each and every one of their frantic cries ringing in my ears, screaming, begging, pleading for their captor to release them. Promising to do whatever he wanted if only he would let them live. If only he would let them go home to their families. A cold shiver crawled down my spine. I shook my head, but I couldn’t get rid of those dark, wailing echoes.
“But why even take them in the first place if he doesn’t actually do anything to them?” I asked. “If he just wanted to kill women, he could do that easily enough. Snatch them off the street, drag them into some dark alley, beat them, and leave their bodies behind. Not keep them prisoner for days on end.”
Ryan raised his hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know why he chooses these women, what they represent to him. My theory is that they remind him of someone close to him, someone he maybe even loved once upon a time. Whatever happened to that woman, and if he killed her too, well, that’s anyone’s guess. But I think that he’s trying to replace this person in his life. And when the women don’t measure up to his standards or don’t act the way he wants them to, that’s when he flies into a rage and kills them.” He hesitated again. “I think that he paints their lips last, right before he starts beating them. Then, of course, the strangulation is the final death act.”
“Why do you think that he paints their lips last?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Because I’ve found traces of lipstick on all of the women, especially in and around the wounds on their f
aces. Like it transferred from their lips to the fists of the man beating them and back again first thing, before he did anything else to them, before he strangled them.”
That made sense, but there was another question that I needed to ask. “Are you sure that it’s a man?”
Ryan nodded. “Yes. Most serial killers are men, and the size and the pattern of the strangulation marks around the women’s necks also indicate a man. A very strong man, judging from the fractured bones in the victims’ faces.”
“So you think that it’s most likely a giant or a dwarf,” I said, picking up on his train of thought.
“I do. Or perhaps even a vampire who drinks giant or dwarven blood on a regular basis. Whatever else he is, this man is exceptionally strong.”
My gaze moved from one woman’s photo to the next, their faces all cold, still, and frozen in death. Not just strong but smart too—a dangerous, devious kind of smart that had let him kidnap and murder a dozen women, maybe more, without getting caught.
I turned to Bria. “How long have you known about this?”
“About six months,” she answered.
“And why didn’t you tell me about it before now?”
“Because you’ve got enough on your plate dealing with the underworld and everything else. You didn’t need to be worried about a serial killer too.” Bria crossed her arms over her chest and gave me a pointed look. “Besides, I know you, Gin. You would somehow think that it was your fault that this guy was kidnapping and killing women.”
“Isn’t it my fault?” I growled. “He’s doing it in my city. What’s the point of being the big boss if I can’t stop horrible things like this from happening?”
She shook her head. “No, it is not your fault. You are not personally responsible for all the crime in Ashland, especially not something this terrible.”
I knew that she was right, that people made their own choices, including whether to hurt other people, but anger and frustration filled me all the same. Maybe if I had known sooner, I could have done something to help Bria, Xavier, and Ryan catch this guy. Maybe I could have put the word out on the street about this killer. Maybe I could have offered a reward for information. I glanced at the photos again. Maybe I could have saved some of these poor dead girls.