Mark Blakemoor’s gaze was instantly drawn to the mutilation done to the corpse’s chest. There were the familiar cuts, the skin having been laid neatly back after being incised by a scalpel or something equally as sharp.
The sternum cut with a saw.
The rib cage spread wide to expose the lungs and heart.
The heart torn away, as always, and, in this case, missing entirely. Kept by the killer as a souvenir? Or taken by some foraging animal? More likely the latter — if this fit what had been called the Kraven pattern up until now, the killer wasn’t interested in souvenirs.
He was, however, interested in leaving signatures.
“Photo guys through?” he asked.
“They burned enough film to make a movie,” someone said.
Carefully, Blakemoor moved one of the lungs enough to get a look at the interior of the dorsal surface of the thoracic cavity.
The moment he saw the familiar form of the lightning bolts that had been etched into the pleura, he glanced up at Lois Ackerly and nodded almost imperceptibly. Easing the lung back into the position in which he’d found it, he forced himself to look at the victim’s face.
A woman; at least in her sixties, maybe older. In death her skin, already sagging, had gone slack, and the thick layer of makeup she’d worn when she died had been reduced by the elements to dark streaks of mascara under her empty eye sockets; a stain of rouge still clung to one of her cheeks.
Her hair, the too-dark black of someone desperately pretending that the date on her birth certificate was a grotesque error, had broken out of its prison of hairpins and holding spray and was spread around her face in a mud-and-blood-spattered halo. But despite the depredations of the elements, the animals, and time, Mark Blakemoor recognized her almost immediately.
Getting to his feet, he turned to Lois Ackerly. “This is getting weirder and weirder. First he kills Richard Kraven’s brother, now he kills his mother. What the hell is going on?”
Lois Ackerly gazed expressionlessly at the body. “I don’t get it — first he sets up Richard Kraven, then waits until he’s executed, and goes after the brother and the mother. How come?”
Mark Blakemoor’s lips curved into a dark smile. “I don’t know, either, but at least he’s giving us a pattern this time,” he said. “And with a pattern, we can find him. Let’s get to work.” He began issuing orders, organizing a systematic search of the entire area, although he was pretty sure that, as ever, the killer had cleaned up after himself, leaving nothing in the area that would lead anyone back to him. Still, the search had to be made. Sooner or later even this killer would make a mistake.
And when he did, Mark Blakemoor intended to be the one to find it.
CHAPTER 58
“Dad? Hey, Dad, is something wrong?”
The words hovered on the fringes of Glen Jeffers’s mind, not quite penetrating. From his place in the Saab’s passenger seat, Kevin looked worriedly at his father. Then, just as Kevin was about to speak again, the words sank in, and Glen glanced over at his son.
“No, everything’s fine. We’re almost there.” He sounded confident enough, he knew, but Glen wondered how much truth there was to what he’d said. The fact was, he wasn’t really fine; hadn’t been since he’d gotten up this morning. Almost as soon as he awakened he had a feeling that something was wrong, that maybe he shouldn’t take Kevin fishing after all. But when he’d suggested postponing the trip until the following weekend, the look of devastation on his son’s face had quickly changed his mind. Besides, when Anne had asked him what was bothering him, he hadn’t been able to tell her — indeed, he hadn’t even been quite able to figure it out himself. All day yesterday he’d been feeling fine. There were no repeats of the blackout he’d experienced on Thursday, and finally he’d decided the vague sense of unease he was feeling wasn’t worth disappointing Kevin over. By the time the two of them had actually gotten into the car and headed east across the Evergreen Point bridge, he’d felt much better. But as they’d moved farther east, passing through Redmond, then continuing on out toward Carnation and Fall City, he’d started to experience a strange sense of déjà vu — strange because it wasn’t exactly that eerie feeling that what was happening right at the moment was a perfect repeat of something that had occurred before. Rather, the experience Glen was having this morning was something else, not a flash of familiarity, as though something was being repeated, but a stroke of anticipation, a feeling that he was about to repeat something.
Something that had given him great pleasure, and that even now, even when he couldn’t quite grasp what it was, still sent a shiver of excitement through him.
He glanced over at Kevin, and an image flashed through his mind, disappearing so quickly he was almost unaware that it had happened at all.
Yet the memory of it held.
A heart.
A human heart, which he was holding in his hand. Where had it come from?
Then he remembered the experience he’d had two days before, when he imagined himself staring down at the naked torso of a woman, then watching helplessly as he cut her chest open.
Her heart? Had he taken her heart out? His stomach twisted with revulsion merely at the thought, and he felt a burning sensation as bile rose in his throat.
But it hadn’t happened! None of it had happened! It had only been a horrible nightmare, or a trick of his imagination. Hadn’t the psychiatrist told him it couldn’t possibly have been real?
He shut his mind to the terrible image, and when his eyes threatened to turn toward Kevin once more, he forced them to stay on the road ahead. Now they were starting up into the mountains. To their right the river cascaded down its rocky channel, frothing white as it roared over broad rapids.
“Where are we going, Dad?” Kevin asked, gazing anxiously at the tumbling waters. What would happen if he slipped while they were fishing? He could swim, but not really very well. “We’re not going down there, are we?”
“Another couple of miles,” Glen said. “There’s a campground. We can park there.” A campground? he thought. What campground? He didn’t know of any campground. But a few minutes later, as he came around a bend in the road, he saw a sign with the familiar graphics of a tent, a picnic table, and a hiker, with the phrase 1 MILE emblazoned below them. Glen felt his hands turn clammy. How had he known it was there? Was it possible that somehow, in some way he couldn’t fathom, the dream had been real? No! It had to be some old memory from one of the drives he, Anne, and the kids had taken over the years. That must be it — although he had no conscious memory of it, the campground must have registered on his mind long ago. He slowed the car, ready to turn in when the side road became visible, but as he rounded the next turn in the road, he saw a police car blocking the entrance, and a State Patrolman waving him on by. As they passed, he was barely able to catch a glimpse of several other police cars parked in the lot at the end of the narrow lane.
“What’s happening, Dad?” Kevin asked, twisting around to stare out of the back window. “Can we stop and find out? Maybe a bear got someone!”
“We’re not stopping,” Glen told Kevin as the boy faced forward again in his seat. “And fasten your seat belt, okay?” He glanced over at Kevin, and as his eyes fixed on his son, he heard a voice in his head:
Remember the cat?
Glen tensed, his fingers tightening on the wheel.
We could do it, the voice whispered. We could do it, and no one would ever know.
Suddenly Glen’s eyelids felt heavy and the road ahead blurred. A fogginess began to settle over his mind, and he felt sleepy. If he could just close his eyes for a—