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“This victim has four lines down, four across. And that’s not the only thing that’s off.” Borkowski bent down to trace a finger gently along the vicious bruising across the young woman’s neck.
“That looks as if someone strangled her with a strap of some sort,” Daniel said, crouching down on the other side of the body. “Carter liked to use his hands.”
“Exactly.”
“Signatures can change over time, Borkowski. Sure we have some variation, but the overall theme is still there.”
Signatures were behaviors that went beyond what was necessary to commit a crime, and fulfilled a killer’s twisted psychological needs. Repeatedly strangling his victims and reviving them was one of Carter’s signature behaviors. Cutting that grid into her abdomen was a signature behavior. He’d changed things up a bit, but it still might be Elijah Carter. Or, as Borkowski obviously hoped, it might not.
“The M.E. will have to tell us for sure, but I think she may have been sexually assaulted, too,” Liz said. “Carter never did that. That would change his MO. Which just doesn’t happen.”
Daniel made a point to keep his focus steady on the contusions on Janie Sanchez’s neck. It seemed like another violation to look at the rest of her body while having this discussion.
“Dammit, Cardenas, it has to be a copycat.”
He jerked his head up in surprise—his tough-as-nails partner never let her emotions show. Not like that—imposing her own interpretation on a crime scene because she couldn’t bear to think of the alternative.
She didn’t meet his eye, instead rising from the ground. Squaring her shoulders, she came back to herself and started barking orders. She swept from the room, and everyone else hustled to comply with her commands, obviously relieved to have something to occupy their too-busy minds.
As Daniel rose, Lockwood approached him.
“Up until 1905, it was legal in China to execute someone for a capital offense by lingchi , or the ‘death of a thousand cuts,’” Lockwood murmured as he, too, stared down at the body.
Daniel knew what he was talking about. The ancient form of capital punishment was reportedly as gruesome as the name suggested, with the executioner inflicting multiple nonlethal cuts all over the victim’s body, prolonging death until said victim finally expired from his cumulative wounds.
“Janie Sanchez died of a thousand cuts,” Lockwood continued. “Borkowski might want to insist it’s a copycat, but I don’t know…I’ve never seen another man who did that to his victims.”
Chapter One
Hustling out the door on her way to work, Adriana Torres caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye that stopped her in her tracks. Her keys fell out of her suddenly slack grip, jangling loudly as they hit the ground.
A nasty-looking hunting knife protruded from her home’s siding. Pinned to the wood by the sharply gleaming steel was a folded slip of paper. She didn’t need to read its contents to know that the message would be very concise and very disturbing.
“Nice.”
Some people’s neighbors said good morning to each other as they started their day. Hers jabbed knives into her house. And por el amor de Dios, what had her house ever done to them?
Rolling her eyes heavenward and muttering a brief prayer for patience in Spanish, Addy grabbed hold of the handle, giving it a good tug. When it didn’t come out on the first try, she dropped her tote back on her front stoop with a thud and tried again with both hands until the knife chunked free.
She didn’t bother to glance around her quiet street, figuring it was hardly worth it to muster up the energy to be annoyed anymore. As one of the neighborhood dogs started up a faraway, staccato bark, she examined the latest addition to her growing collection of cutlery. It felt heavier and looked a little more expensive than usual.
Whatever. Maybe the idiot who’d put it there thought that spending more money would be scarier. As if.
Purposefully adopting a bored expression, just in case the nasty little twerp was watching, she picked up her keys and dropped them back into her purse. She’d always hated the thought of living in a wealthy gated community, but at times like this the idea had its attractions.
Pushing the door back open with one hip, she kicked at the slip of paper that had fallen to the ground after she’d freed the knife holding it. It fluttered inside the house, and she picked up her tote and followed suit. Without bothering to pick the paper up, she headed for the phone in her kitchen. She dialed the familiar number without glancing at the list of her favorite contacts stuck to the fridge.
“Borkowski,” came a woman’s curt response.
“Hey, Liz, it’s me.” Addy leaned against the counter, a frisson of annoyance tracking up her spine as she contemplated being late to work because of a stupid prank…again. But while she and Liz both knew that none of the teenage troublemakers who lived on her block was going to slink forward and confess, she’d promised her friend she would call each and every time someone stabbed her house. “Got another note.”
“Same deal as last time?”
Addy tossed the knife on the counter. “If by that you mean, one large, ugly knife that left yet another large, ugly hole in my siding, yes. Every time Halloween comes around, it’s the prank du jour.”
Liz swore softly—which was very uncharacteristic of her—and for the first time, Addy realized that the usual sounds she heard in the background when she called Liz at the station—papers shuffling, phones ringing—weren’t present. Instead, it sounded like Liz was outside.
“Is this a bad time?” Addy asked. “You out and about doing your cop thing?”
“No, no,” said Liz, sounding somewhat preoccupied despite her denial. “I’m at a scene, but this is important.”
“After seven of these notes since…” She let her voice trail off, not wanting to think about the event that had divided her life into before and since. “I don’t think it’s all that important, Liz. The sky hasn’t fallen yet.”
The first threat had also come in October, exactly a year after the love of Addy’s life, Monterey Police Detective James Brentwood, had been killed in the line of duty while hunting a prolific serial killer—a serial killer who was now dead, thank you very much. But a bestselling book about the case had made her little corner of the city rather notorious, since the killer known as The Surgeon had drowned just a few yards away from Addy’s home in an FBI-Monterey PD undercover operation.
And suddenly the kids in her neighborhood had found it amusing to leave notes on her door, pretending to be the resurrected killer of her beloved fiancé by mimicking his favorite way of terrorizing his intended victims.
Sometimes you just had to wonder what was wrong with people.
The first time, the message had terrified her beyond belief, coming on the grim anniversary as it had. Then, more notes came, and they were always the same—someone would leave a cheap knife embedded in her wooden door, along with a childishly scrawled note saying he was “coming for” her.
So she’d bought a security system and a steel front door, and the notes kept coming, until there had been so many, all they sparked in her was contempt. If someone was really out to get her, she figured they’d have done something by now, rather than simply continuing to write about it. And on one occasion, she’d seen a suspiciously gangly, teenager-looking shadow lurking about her front door when another note had appeared, which had led her and the police to believe that she was merely the target of a few young pranksters in the area with tragically inept parents.
“I’m sorry, Addy,” Liz said, breaking a silence that had stretched out for too long. It seemed as if all of her conversations did that, in the four years since James had died. “This has to be so hard on you, especially now.”
Especially now. October again. The month when she’d lost James.
Addy picked at a hangnail as she watched the cold waves of the Pacific Ocean crash spectacularly against the jagged black rocks that lined the shore outside her window. Four years. She’d gotten to the point where she could handle being left behind most days, where the intense, indescribable grief she’d felt at losing him was just a dull memory, hanging in the background of her everyday activities—always there, but something she could live with. Like Liz lived with it, although she and James had just been work partners and friends.
And then sometimes, out of the blue, it sucker-punched Addy in the stomach, leaving her gasping for air and wondering whether she’d even be able to function into the next hour, much less the next decade. And all the ones that would come after.
Too long. Too long to be without him.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to pull herself together enough to finish the conversation, so she could hang up, call in sick and scream into her pillow until she fell into an exhausted sleep, the way she’d done too many times to count. Unfair.
Unfair-unfair-unfair-unfair-unfair….
“Addy.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen the news this morning?”
She shook her head, swallowing hard a couple of times before she answered so she wouldn’t sound half-strangled. “No. I don’t watch the news until after dinner. It’s not a positive way to start your day.”
“Look—” Liz exhaled sharply into the phone “—I can’t leave just now, but I’m sending someone over—”
“No.” Clenching her teeth together so hard, she thought they might crack, Addy shook her head and willed herself to function. Don’t think. Don’t feel. Put James back in the little box inside her head where she kept him, so she could interact with others like a semi-normal human being. Howling at them in grief never made for good conversation. “No.”
“Addy, I mean it, stay there.”
Grabbing a paper bag from under the sink, the phone tucked between her shoulder and chin, Addy stuffed the knife into it and headed for the door. Just before she reached it, she picked up the note from the floor and put it in the paper bag, then shoved the whole mess into her tote. “No. I’m sick of letting these idiotic pranks disrupt my life.”
Liz let out a muffled groan, and Addy could visualize the exasperated, because-I’m-the-mom look on her face. “I can’t tell you what’s going on right now, but you really ought to stay put.”
“I’m going to my car,” Addy singsonged, feeling stronger now as she locked her front door. Defying Liz’s prudent sense of caution always had that effect.
She made her way to the boxy little Scion XB that sat in her driveway. Fortunately, no one had yet jabbed a knife into it. “I’m getting in and turning the key. Screw you, socially stunted neighborhood children.”
“Adriana, could you stop for a minute and tell me where the note is?”
Addy turned the key and put the car in gear, backing slowly out of her driveway. “Sitting next to me, along with the knife. You can send one of your lackeys to the studio to get it.” Addy owned a yoga studio on Cannery Row, the trendy, store-lined street in Monterey made famous by John Steinbeck, and she had no intention of being late to her first class of the day because her neighbors were jerks. Not this time.
“Okay, look,” Liz said, “I need you to pull over and read the note to me.”
“Dear Miss Torres, We’re coming for you. This time we mean it, just like the other seven times. Love, your friendly neighborhood troll children,” Addy droned.
“You know,” Liz said, her too-polite tone barely concealing her growing impatience, “you really should talk to my new partner—he’s the department go-to guy for stalking cases. He could tell you some stories about why this isn’t funny.”
“Okay, fine.” Addy sighed and fished around in her tote for the paper bag while keeping her eyes on the road. Hearing the telltale crinkle, she opened it up and picked the note out of it, unfolding it against the steering wheel. As she hit an open stretch of road, she glanced down at the contents.
Her hand involuntarily jerked the wheel; the car jolted to the right.
As the note fluttered to the car floor, Addy managed to steer the Scion to the curb, where, hands shaking, she put it in Park. She pitched forward, until her forehead rested against the steering wheel. A sickly, clammy feeling prickled across her skin, and she gripped the wheel as if it were the last thing anchoring her to the sane world. Not that. She couldn’t have seen that.
“Addy?”
“Just a minute.” Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she slowly raised her head and picked the note up off the floor. Instead of the childish penciled scrawls or cut-out magazine letters affixed to a page of loose-leaf that she’d received in the past, what she held was a computer printout of a photo. The image was slightly pixilated, so maybe she had been mistaken….
But then it snapped into focus. A low, soft, keening sound filled the car, and it took a moment to realize she was making it.
“Addy?” Liz snapped, the urgency in her voice carrying through the phone.
“Oh, God.” Scrabbling for the driver’s-side armrest, Addy punched the button to activate her automatic door locks. She twisted around to look back down her street, her pulse kicking into overdrive.
Deserted.
But who was hiding out there? Who had left this?
Who would do this to her?
Suddenly furious, she let the note fall as she smacked her hand against the window. A stinging, fiery pain shot across her palm. She curled her arm against her chest and sank back in her seat.
“Addy, for heaven’s sake, tell me what the note said!”
She doubled over, trying to regain control and finding that for the first time in four years, she just couldn’t. “Liz, it’s awful,” she gasped, trying desperately not to cry, not to lose it completely until she’d told her friend what she’d seen. “I can’t breathe.”
“I’m coming over.”
“No. I can’t go back there.” Focus. She had to focus. “God, Liz, I’m afraid to go back to my own home.” Pressing her palms against the steering wheel, she narrowed her focus to the space between her thumbs, inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. In. Out. In. Out. “It’s different this time,” she said, her voice regaining some of its former calm.
“It’s James.” Inhale. Detach, just like her first yoga master had taught her. Detach. What shows up must be accepted without upset. “It’s a picture of James. Someone took a picture of his body the day he…” Exhale. Accept. She glanced at the slip of paper and the tremors in her body worsened. “Liz, I think this was taken right when he died.”
Chapter Two
Adriana hugged her elbows, feeling cold and almost painfully brittle, as if someone had opened her up and exposed her insides to the world. “You don’t think it’s just a prank?” she said into the phone. To tell the truth, she didn’t think it was just a prank, but something in her was holding on to that idea all the same, with the desperation of a shipwreck victim clinging to a piece of driftwood.
“No, I don’t,” Liz replied softly. “I was there, remember?”
The day Addy had lost James wasn’t one she could easily forget. But while her experience had been confined to getting the long-dreaded visit from a cop who wasn’t her fiancé, Liz’s had been far more physically painful. James had been shot in the line of duty while pursuing a killer, and Liz had been right beside him when it had happened. James’s murderer had taken Liz hostage for several hours, an experience she never talked about, which had landed her in the hospital for over a week. If the rumors were true, her clothes concealed some nasty knife-wound scars.
Addy looked to her right, where the ocean was barely visible between two of her neighbors’ houses. She could just glimpse a tiny corner of the sharp rocks that lined their portion of the beach, around which the cold sea boiled and churned, filled with riptides ready to drag down anything that fell into it.
Elijah Carter, aka The Surgeon—the man who’d killed James, who’d nearly killed Liz—had fallen into that water, in his final confrontation with the FBI and Monterey PD. His body had never been found.
“He couldn’t have survived, could he?” she asked, not taking her eyes off that sliver of blue-gray. In all the years that she’d lived on Monterey’s Mermaid Point, she’d never heard of someone falling into that water, and living.
Liz didn’t answer, and Addy’s vision blurred, until all she could see was the mental image of James as he was in the photo lying beside her. His cheek pressed into the wood-chip-lined ground, his glasses half off his face, one lens cracked in a spiderweb pattern, the rumpled brown hair she’d loved to smooth off his forehead partially obscuring his unfocused stare. He’d been breathing just seconds before that picture had been taken. She knew it. He’d been alive, and somewhere across town she’d been coming home after a day at work, engaged and in love. She’d been happy.
“Why?” The word came out broken, and sounding so lonely and scared, she wanted to take it back as soon as she’d said it.
“I don’t know, Addy. I’m so sorry.”
Wanting to get as far from Mermaid Point as she could, Addy said goodbye to Liz, who promised to wrap up her work at whatever scene she was at to meet her at the studio. Calling ahead to ask her office manager to cancel her classes for the day, Addy didn’t stop driving until she reached the bustling street. She pulled into the little parking lot behind her studio and took the keys out of the ignition.
And then found herself unable to get out of the car.
If he survived the fall off those rocks…
The thought of leaving the Scion and walking out into the wide-open street where anyone could see her made her stomach clench. He could be anywhere. He could be watching her. She glanced at the piece of paper lying facedown on the passenger seat. Who else but the man who murdered James could have taken that photo?
The man who got off on torturing women. The man who’d stalked and nearly killed two of her friends.
She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror, all too aware of just how neatly she fit The Surgeon’s victim profile: unmarried students or working women in their twenties and thirties, with dark hair, who live alone.
All alone.
Someone tapped on the driver’s-side window, and she jerked backward in her seat. Her hand flew to her mouth to muffle her instinctive shout.
One of her students. Stan, an inexperienced yoga practitioner who’d just started coming to her beginner class a few weeks ago. Forcing a smile, which made her skin feel too tight and her jaw ache, she rolled down her window.
“Hey, Stan.”
He shoved his overly long hair out of his eyes and smiled shyly at her, revealing a slight gap between his two front teeth. One of them looked slightly gray and off-kilter, as if it had been knocked out in the past and then haphazardly glued back into his mouth. “Hi, Addy.”
She waited for him to let her know what he wanted, but when he remained silent—for far longer than was socially acceptable—she grabbed her bags and the stupid note and busied herself with getting out of the car. As his yoga instructor, she was probably supposed to be radiating Zenlike patience, but something about Stan had rankled from the first day he’d walked into her studio. For one thing, she’d never asked him to call her Addy—most of her students called her Adriana.
“Can I help you with something?”
