Through the glare and confusion, Rebecca saw more uniformed cops easing a visibly distraught man toward a car, no doubt to be delivered to neighbors, friends, family-anything to get him away from a site of inexplicable horror.
"Hey, you! Get that car the hell out of here. This is a crime scene."
And a fresh one at that. Rebecca could almost smell the lingering trace of the perpetrator. She resisted the temptation to study the crowd. It would be pointless; he wasn't the type to take nourishment from the fear he engendered in the living. Instead, she pulled her ID from the pocket of her blue leather jacket and angled it so that the cop approaching her could see it in the light from the lamppost. "Who's in charge?"
The cop looked her over once and turned a pointed gaze to her empty car.
"Contrary to popular myth," Rebecca added, "we don't all wear black overcoats and travel in a posse."
"No! I can't leave! She… she…!"
The cop's attention was drawn to the distraught guy-victim's husband, most likely-being helped into the other vehicle. An agonized sob was cut short when the car door was closed behind him. It was more than grief, Rebecca knew, but an emotion that spoke of horror and something more… an edge of desperation and… urgency? A childhood memory briefly mounted an assault, but her well-honed defenses soon shut it down. Still, she watched the car drive away, vaguely uneasy that she'd missed something.
"This way." With another look, this time frankly appraising, the cop led Rebecca up to the front porch and announced her arrival to his clipboard-wielding partner. "FBI."
"Feds, huh?" The second cop, rumpled, weary-looking, and considerably older but clearly just as disturbed by the situation, regarded Rebecca with a mix of suspicion and relief.
Local law enforcement didn't much like it when the feds stepped on their turf, despite-or perhaps because of-the numerous Denver police officers now assigned full time to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. This crime, though, had nothing to do with terrorism. Fundamentalism and terror, yes, but not terrorism as the world currently defined it.
"Not exactly," she replied, trying to suppress a yawn with a rapidly expelled breath that sounded like a sigh. "I'm a forensic psychiatrist. Your boss called my boss after the second victim, so do me a favor, would you, Officer-" she glanced at the nametag- "Wilson, and save any indignation for him."
"Okay, Dr. Larance, but… look, this is a bad one. Really." Even under the frosted yellow porch light, Wilson's features were gray, and his freckled fingers shook as he filled in her information on his crime scene log.
What was the standard for bad? When could someone say with any certainty that one scene was worse than any other? It was all a matter of perspective. For her, for an investigator, it depended on how much could be read from it. Bad was when the body lay intact and clean, a dozen or more people having come stumbling through. Worse was a DOA, the forensic evidence contaminated by discarded items from EMTs and anyone else involved in the failed attempt at first aid. Best was when the patterns of the killer's mind were still intact. Like now.
"I appreciate the heads-up, Officer Wilson. Mutilated and set on fire in what looks like a satanic ritual. Got it." She lifted her cell phone. "Welcome to the wonderful world of text messaging. Detective Ramirez and the ME inside?"
Wilson nodded and kept writing, taking his time to note her ID number. His partner wandered off to man the plastic tape barricade.
"Tell them I'm here. I'd like to get a look in before the crime scene guys arrive and start stomping all over the place." With their sterile equipment and methodical indifference, they would rapidly dissolve the subtle, persistent scent of fear, and the equally subtle sense of satiation.
Pen frozen mid-stroke, Wilson shot her a peculiar look. The crime lab had bitten heads off over the mess the Sheriff's Department had made of the first cases.
"Kind of ruins the atmosphere for me. You know what they say about profilers," she added with a conspiratorial grin.
A familiar expression settled over his face; contempt born of ignorance, with a hefty dose of good old-fashioned chauvinism thrown in. Rebecca didn't come across it too often, but there were still some old timers who lumped profiling into the same category as Tarot card reading and crystal ball gazing, plus maybe a touch of voodoo-the latter no doubt inspired by the occasional need to interpret artfully macabre displays of human entrails.
Giving no indication that he'd even considered her request, Wilson went back to writing.
Rebecca's patience was pretty much at an end. Enduring a transatlantic flight in a coach class seat beside some guy whose philosophy of personal hygiene didn't include deodorant had been bad enough, but, to add to her misery, he'd had the most vocal case of sleep apnea Rebecca had ever encountered. By the time she'd cleared customs, collected her luggage, and gotten a taxi to her apartment in D.C., she'd seriously entertained the idea of ignoring the order to get her ass out to Colorado Springs. A hot shower and comfortable bed beckoned.
It had been a nice fantasy, but the situation was escalating and the FBI only had so many resources to go around. She'd had just enough time to swap the dirty clothes in her suitcase for clean ones, calla cab-same taxi, same driver-and head back to the airport.
She was about to pull rank when a touslehaired detective with a caffeine-deprived expression emerged from the front door. Ramirez, presumably, had been dragged out of bed for this one. "You the profiler'?" he asked, shooting her a hopeful look.
Wilson, who looked more like he'd been dragged out of a marriage, stopped writing and looked up. "By the way," Rebecca told him, "she's not going to take you back, so deal with it."
"I'll take that as a yes," Ramirez said, smirking.
Ignoring Wilson's dropped jaw, Rebecca introduced herself, and said, "Tell me about the vic."
"Jamie Cabal, thirty eight, engineer; three months pregnant. Her husband, Logan, got here about two minutes ahead of the fire trucks. Somehow he managed to keep it together long enough to put out the fire with an extinguisher." Ramirez's dark-eyed gaze slid from Rebecca's and moved across the faces in the nearby crowd.
"Don't bother," Rebecca told him. "Not his style to hang around." A couple of television trucks had arrived and were setting up rooftop cameras, completing the scene.
Ramirez's gaze returned to hers. "His'? Witnesses in the D.C. cases all saw a woman."
"That was D.C. This is Colorado. How 'bout we go inside and you can walk me through it?"
Nodding, Ramirez pulled his jacket closer, consigning the temptation to touch anything to deep pockets. Rebecca did the same, mostly to reassure him. Forensics would get nothing of substance from this, not because of ham-fisted cops or sloppy procedures, but because there was little in the way of physical evidence to be found. There never was in these cases, which was why she'd been called in.
"Was it the badly ironed shirt, or the stain on Wilson's tie?" Ramirez asked her when they were inside.
"Both, plus attitude and statistics. Divorce rate for cops in this neck of the woods is off the charts." Framed prints of Air Force planes lined the entryway walls. No sign of kids. "Civilian engineer, huh'?"
"The Cabals worked for the military. Victim was a radar technician." Ramirez stepped into the living room. "Couch was on fire," he added unnecessarily. "That triggered the alarm."
Either the fire department was right around the corner, or-