The heavy weight of her mother’s gaze had her sliding into the front seat of Mazur’s SUV. She settled her backpack by her feet and pulled on her seat belt. Mazur settled behind the wheel.
“Your mother is nice,” Mazur said.
“Most people aren’t sure I have a mother. Some assume I was spawned.”
He laughed. “It did cross my mind.”
His rich, deep laughter lifted some of her dark mood. She appreciated his directness. No hidden agendas with Mazur from what she could tell. A straight shooter.
As he drove, he studied the neighborhood filled with one-story stucco homes, many landscaped with desert plants and pale rocks. “You grew up in this neighborhood, didn’t you?”
“We moved here when I was fourteen. We started off in Austin until my father took the job with the local district attorney’s office.”
“How did you handle the move?”
“It wasn’t easy at first, but then you find a friend and it gets better.”
“I hope the same for Alyssa. Uprooting and coming here has been hard for me, but I figure it’s worse for Alyssa.”
“Kids are more resilient than adults.”
“In Chicago, I lived a few blocks from where I grew up. Even to this day the old-timers like to share stories of my escapades as a young man.”
She angled her head toward him. “You were a troublemaker?”
“The Mazur brothers were legendary.”
As an investigator, making small talk could be critical when dealing with a suspect. Get them to open up about the small things and then the big might follow. She sensed Mazur was doing this to her. “What was it like living around so much family?”
“Great times. All my cousins lived within a few blocks. Holidays and birthdays were always a blowout. Mom was usually the host. Our house was always filled with people. Laughter.”
“And you gave up all your family and career to be here for your daughter?”
“In four years she’ll be off to college. I’ll never get that back, but Chicago isn’t going anywhere.”
“Have you thought more about moving to Washington?” she asked.
“I’ve thought about it a lot.”
“Have you considered staying here and keeping Alyssa with you? Lots of single dads in the world.”
He drove down the darkened streets that were only just beginning to fill up with commuters. “I have. Not sure I want to take a kid from her mother. A girl needs her mother.”
“A girl needs her father, too.”
A half smile tweaked the edge of his lips. “Trying not to be an asshole in this joint-parenting thing, but it’s hard.”
“Alyssa is lucky to have you.”
They drove in silence for several minutes.
Early-morning sun cut across his face, deepening the sharp angles and highlighting his white teeth as he grinned. “FBI is a hell of a career.”
“I wanted to catch bad guys. Also thought I’d get in some very interesting travel.”
“How’d the travel work out?”
“Been in hundreds of small towns, back alleys, corn fields, and swamps. The full tour of America.”
“I think you were just trying to figure out how to leave San Antonio with grace.”
Frowning, he drove in silence for a few more minutes. “Think you can find Bauldry?”
“Yes.”
They arrived at the small café located in the city center. Mazur parked across the street. This early, the shop should have been bustling with customers. But it was dark and quiet as a temporary memorial to Rebecca. However, tomorrow the café would reopen and be back in business. No matter how gripping a tragedy, the world moved on, leaving behind fading memories.
“Why here?” Kate said more to herself as they walked down the alley behind the café. “Why Rebecca? As crazy as William is, he was always methodical. And sixteen years in prison would have taught him patience, too.”
They walked toward a small parking lot. “Maybe Rebecca and Bauldry had a thing, and she was breaking it off with him.”
“Perhaps.” She knelt down and touched the worn asphalt, wishing it could share its secrets. “His tone on the phone this morning was so smug. It’s as if he had a secret he couldn’t wait for me to discover. He’s really proud of himself.”
“You said you recorded the call.”
She fished out her phone and hit “Play.”
Mazur’s jaw clenched. “He’s done his homework. Your mother might not have seen him, but he’s seen her. She said she had the locks replaced.”
“Yes. Observing is what he does best. He always took his full allotment of time before making each move in chess.”
Mazur checked his watch. “We need to get to the medical examiner.”
She rose and brushed the dust from her hands. “Right.” She paused and looked back at the scene. “William knew both the victims. Why them? Why now?”
In his car, she replayed in her mind William’s phone call as they drove toward the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s office.
Neither spoke as he parked and they crossed the lot. Inside, they took the elevator down to the autopsy suite, where they found the medical examiner gowned up and talking to his assistant. Between them was a body covered by a sheet.
Kate had attended countless autopsies during her seven years with the FBI. Each autopsy suite was different, but there was a likeness about them that enabled her to quickly adapt. She set her backpack aside and pulled on a gown. As she reached up behind her to tie off the gown, strong hands brushed hers away.
“I got this.”
Mazur’s hands were large but nimble as they tied the strands into what felt like a tight, neat bow. Before she could offer to help him with his gown, he moved past her toward the table, pulling on rubber gloves. She followed, and Mazur exchanged pleasantries with Dr. Ryland and his assistant.
The technician pulled back the sheet to reveal the nude body of Rebecca. Gashes marred her flesh. Most of the wounds were around the heart, lungs, neck, and abdomen.
The victim’s eyes were removed. Cutting patterns suggested they had been gouged out of her head with the tip of a blade. Her skin was pale and clear, her cheekbones high, and her lips full.
“Rebecca Kendrick is a twenty-six-year-old Caucasian female, who is sixty-five inches tall and weighs one hundred and thirty pounds. Each eye along with a section of the extra ocular muscles has been removed. There’re no other wounds on her face. Also, no defensive wounds on either hand.”
“Was she alive when the eyes were removed?” Mazur asked.
“My guess is no. Otherwise, I would expect potential pain, conscious or not, would have made removing them impossible without more trauma to the face.”
“Thank God,” Mazur said. “Was that true for the Soothsayer cases you worked for the FBI?”
“No,” she said, unflinchingly.
Mazur and Dr. Ryland exchanged troubled glances. The focus then shifted to the victim’s arms, where multiple scars were clearly visible. “Her body shows signs of extensive and prolonged IV drug use. We’ll run a tox screen to determine if she was using at the time of her murder.”
Everything they’d learned about Rebecca so far suggested she’d been cle
an at the time of her death. But addicts often relapsed in their first eighteen months of recovery. And when they did, some could be quite clever hiding it.
The dead woman had three tattoos: a heart on her inside wrist, a scroll around her right biceps, and a set of teardrops over her right ankle. Her muscle tone was good. Her ears were pierced, and she had a belly ring.
The doctor held up the victim’s left hand. The nails were painted a bright blue, made garish when contrasted to the pale skin, and were all neatly rounded except for the right index finger, which was broken and torn. The cuticles had already receded.
Dr. Ryland took tweezers and a scalpel and held the edge of the nail while simultaneously trimming the tip off. “Maybe she scratched him and we’ll find his DNA.”
The doctor pressed the tip of his scalpel to the flesh above her right breast and made a diagonal slash toward her midsection. He repeated the cut on the left side and then drew the blade down across her midsection for the classic Y-incision.
What followed was the sound of flesh pulling and the rib cage snapping as the doctor removed the bones. The wounds had caused a significant amount of blood to pool in the chest cavity, which now oozed onto the stainless-steel autopsy table. The technician wiped up the blood and suctioned the interior cavity, giving the doctor an unobstructed view of the organs.
The killer’s knife had lacerated through what had been a normal kidney, stomach, and descending thoracic aorta, which was the largest artery in the body.
The doctor held up the damaged artery. “Both the jugular wound and this would have bled out very quickly. No emergency care could have saved her.”
The clinical savagery of the autopsy was necessary, but knowing that didn’t cool Kate’s rising anger. William had known this woman. Surveillance footage confirmed he’d been in her shop the day she died. And the phone call from him early this morning cemented in her mind that William had killed Rebecca to make some kind of point to Kate. This was a game to him. If not for Kate, this woman might have dodged the Reaper.