Once Gone

Then came the familiar, ugly laugh.

The last thing she felt was a hard object – maybe metal – impacting her head, and then she was spinning into the very depths of blackness.

Chapter 1

At least the stench hasn’t kicked in, Special Agent Bill Jeffreys thought.

Still leaning over the body, he couldn’t help but detect the first traces of it. It mingled with the fresh scent of pine and the clean mist rising from the creek – a body smell that he ought to have been long since used to. But he never was.

The woman’s naked body had been carefully arranged on a large boulder at the edge of the creek. She was sitting up, leaning against another boulder, legs straight and splayed, hands at her sides. An odd crook in the right arm, he could see, suggested a broken bone. The wavy hair was obviously a wig, mangy, with clashing hues of blond. A pink smile was lipsticked over her mouth.

The murder weapon was still tight around her neck; she’d been strangled with a pink ribbon. An artificial red rose lay on the rock in front of her, at her feet.

Bill gently tried to lift the left hand. It didn’t budge.

“She’s still in rigor mortis,” Bill told Agent Spelbren, crouching on the other side of the body. “Hasn’t been dead more than twenty-four hours.”

“What’s with her eyes?” Spelbren asked.

“Stitched wide open with black thread,” he answered, without bothering to look closely.

Spelbren stared at him in disbelief.

“Check for yourself,” Bill said.

Spelbren peered at the eyes.

“Jesus,” he murmured quietly. Bill noticed that he didn’t recoil with disgust. Bill appreciated that. He’d worked with other field agents – some of them even seasoned veterans like Spelbren – who would be puking their guts up by now.

Bill had never worked with him before. Spelbren had been called in for this case from a Virginia field office. It had been Spelbren’s idea to bring in somebody from the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. That was why Bill was here.

Smart move, Bill thought.

Bill could see that Spelbren was younger than him by a few years, but even so, he had a weathered, lived-in look that he rather liked.

“She’s wearing contacts,” Spelbren noted.

Bill took a closer look. He was right. An eerie, artificial blue that made him look away. It was cool here down by the creek late in the morning, but even so, the eyes were flattening in their sockets. It was going to be tough to nail down the exact time of death. All Bill felt certain of was that the body had been brought here sometime during the night and carefully posed.

He heard a nearby voice.

“Fucking Feds.”

Bill glanced up at the three local cops, standing a few yards away. They were whispering inaudibly now, so Bill knew that he was supposed to hear those two choice words. They were from nearby Yarnell, and they clearly weren’t happy to have the FBI show up. They thought they could handle this on their own.

The head ranger of Mosby State Park had thought differently. He wasn’t used to anything worse than vandalism, litter, and illegal fishing and hunting, and he knew the locals from Yarnell weren’t capable of dealing with this.

Bill had made the hundred-plus-mile trip by helicopter, so he could get here before the body was moved. The pilot had followed the coordinates to a patch of meadow on a nearby hilltop, where the ranger and Spelbren had met him. The ranger had driven them a few miles down a dirt road, and when they’d pulled over, Bill could glimpse the murder scene from the road. It was just a short way downhill from the creek.

The cops standing impatiently nearby had already gone over the scene. Bill knew exactly what they were thinking. They wanted to crack this case on their own; a pair of FBI agents was the last thing they wanted to see.

Sorry, you rednecks, Bill thought, but you’re out of your depth here.

“The sheriff thinks this is trafficking,” Spelbren said. “He’s wrong.”

“Why do you say that?” Bill asked. He knew the answer himself, but he wanted to get an idea of how Spelbren’s mind worked.

“She’s in her thirties, not all that young,” Spelbren said. “Stretch marks, so she’s had at least one child. Not the type that usually gets trafficked.”

“You’re right,” Bill said.

“But what about the wig?”

Bill shook his head.

“Her head’s been shaved,” he replied, “so whatever the wig was for, it wasn’t to change her hair color.”

“And the rose?” Spelbren asked. “A message?”

Bill examined it.

“Cheap fabric flower,” he replied. “The kind you’d find in any low-price store. We’ll trace it, but we won’t find out anything.”

Spelbren looked him over, clearly impressed.

Bill doubted that anything they’d found would do much good. The murderer was too purposeful, too methodical. This whole scene had been laid out with a certain sick style that set him on edge.

He saw the local cops itching to come closer, to wrap this. Photos had been taken, and the body would be removed any time now.

Bill stood and sighed, feeling the stiffness in his legs. His forty years were starting to slow him down, at least a little.

“She’s been tortured,” he observed, exhaling sadly. “Look at all the cuts. Some are starting to close up.” He shook his head grimly. “Someone worked her over for days before doing her in with that ribbon.”

Spelbren sighed.

“The perp was pissed off about something,” Spelbren said.

“Hey, when are we gonna wrap up here?” one of the cops called out.

Bill looked in their direction and saw them shuffling their feet. Two of them were grumbling quietly. Bill knew the work was already done here, but he didn’t say so. He preferred keeping those bozos waiting and wondering.

He turned around slowly and took in the scene. It was a thick wooded area, all pines and cedars and lots of undergrowth, with the creek burbling along its serene and bucolic way toward the nearest river. Even now, in midsummer, it wasn’t going to get very hot here today, so the body wasn’t going to putrefy badly right away. Even so, it would be best to get it out of here and ship it off to Quantico. Examiners there would want to pick it apart while it was still reasonably fresh. The coroner’s wagon was pulled up on the dirt road behind the cop car, waiting.

The road was nothing more than parallel tire tracks through the woods. The killer had almost certainly driven here along it. He had carried the body the short distance along a narrow path to this spot, arranged it, and left. He wouldn’t have stayed long. Even though the area looked out of the way, rangers patrolled through here regularly and private cars weren’t supposed to be on this road. He had wanted the body to be found. He was proud of his work.

And it had been found by a couple of early-morning horseback riders. Tourists on rented horses, the ranger had told Bill. They were vacationers from Arlington, staying at a fake Western ranch just outside of Yarnell. The ranger had said that they were a little hysterical now. They’d been told not to leave town, and Bill planned to talk to them later.

There seemed to be absolutely nothing out of place in the area around the body. The guy had been very careful. He’d dragged something behind him when he’d returned from the creek – a shovel, maybe – to obscure his own footprints. No scraps of anything left intentionally or accidentally. Any tire prints on the road had likely been obliterated by the cop car and coroner’s wagon.