“I know.”
“And yet you want to know if I’ll ‘help’?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t how it works.”
“This is how it works with us.”
“With Limbus?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
I drummed my fingers on the desk top. “You have your own car or should I call you a cab?”
The smile widened. Just a little tiny bit. But she didn’t answer. She wiggled the flash drive back and forth between her fingers.
I sucked my teeth. “What’s on it?”
Instead of answering she handed it over.
I hesitated for a moment before accepting it, but figured what the hell. This would be the world’s most absurd set-up for someone trying to infect my computer with a virus. Maybe the flash drive had photos of girls and this broad was a very charming pimp. Or maybe the Jehovah’s Witnesses were going high-tech and this was the latest issue of the Watchtower in eBook format.
I took the drive.
Something really weird happened when I did, though. Flash drives are small so it’s not unusual for fingers to touch when giving and receiving. When my fingertips brushed the edges of her painted nails, there was a shock as sharp and unexpected as an electric shock. Like the little snap of electricity you get on cold days when you touch a doorknob. I could even hear the crack in the air as the energy arced from her to me.
I snatched my hand back.
She didn’t.
She withdrew it slowly, smiling that cat smile of hers. There was an opportunity to make some kind of joke about how shocking it all was, yada yada, but it would have been lame. She wasn’t a chatty, laugh-a-minute kind of gal. She also wasn’t the kind to waste a lot of her time in idle chitchat.
So, I plugged the flash drive into my laptop, located the device, accessed the menu and saw that there was one Word document and sixteen image files. Jpegs.
“Open the pictures,” she suggested.
I selected all of them and hit the preview function.
My computer’s preview function acts like a slideshow unless I hit a key to give me static images. By the time the first image popped up I forgot about the keys. I forgot about pretty much everything.
The picture was high-definition and tightly focused. No blur to soften any of the edges. No grain to reduce the impact.
It was a girl.
Or, at least it was girl-shaped.
She lay in the open mouth of a grungy alley, her body partially covered by dirty newspapers. Her mouth was wide open, the lips stretched as far as they could go, tongue lolling, teeth biting into the scream that must have been her last. The scream that was stamped now onto the muscles of her face.
Muscles, I said. Not skin.
She had no skin.
Not on her face.
Not on her body.
Not anywhere.
Not an inch of it.
The image vanished to be replaced by another girl.
Different girl, and I could tell that only by location — this one had been spilled out of a black plastic industrial trash bag — and by size. She was bigger, taller and bigger in the breasts and hips.
But that was the only way to tell the difference. All other individuality — skin tone and color, scars and tattoos, marks and moles — had been sliced away. All I saw was veined meat.
Another image. Another girl.
Another.
Another.
Another.
Sixteen.
The slideshow ground on mercilessly and I was absolutely unable to move a finger to stop it. The images flicked across my laptop screen. Sixteen young women. At least, I think they were young. Somehow I knew they were young.
All dead.
All stripped of more than flesh. Someone had torn away their lives, their individuality and their dignity along with their flesh.
When I raised my head to look over the laptop at her, there must have been something in my eyes because her smile vanished and she physically shrank back from me. Not a lot, but a bit.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked, and I barely recognized my own voice.
The woman cleared her throat, licked her lips, smoothed her skirt again. Rebuilding her calm façade.
“Beyond the obvious — the murder and mutilation of young women — we don’t know what it is.”
“A serial killer?”
“So it would appear. Sixteen dead girls over a period of roughly sixteen months.”
“This isn’t happening here in Philly,” I said. “I’d have heard something.”
“The first girl was found in Seattle. Felicia Skye, seventeen,” she said. “Other bodies have been found in nine cities in five states. All girls ranging in age from sixteen to eighteen. They’re all runaways, and all of them have worked as prostitutes. Eight have also worked as exotic dancers.”
“Strip clubs don’t hire kids.”
“Anyone can get a false I.D., Mr. Hunter,” she said coldly. “You know that.”
I pointed at the screen. “Where’s this shit happening?”
“The most recent — the sixteenth — was found in a storm drain in New York.”
“When?”
“Twenty-six days ago.”
“It wasn’t in the papers.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
She took a moment on that. “We don’t know. None of these have been in the media. Not one.”
“That’s impossible. Murders like this are front page.”
She nodded. “They should be. This should be all over social media and Internet news, but it’s not.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If you know about it and you want something done, then why don’t you take this to the press?”
Another pause. “We have.”
“And—?”
“We’ve contacted six separate reporters in six cities. All six have died.”
“Died?”
“Three heart attacks, one stroke, one fatal epileptic seizure, one burned to death after smoking in bed.”
I stared at her. “You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not.”
“What about the Feds? If this is happening across the country, then the FBI should—”
“They are investigating it. But they’ve had some problems of their own with the case. The lead agent fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. Freak accident. His replacement was killed in a car accident when an ambulance ran a red light. That sort of thing. The investigation is ongoing but agents have been shying away from it. They think it’s jinxed.”
That didn’t surprise me. Even this deep into the 21st century there was a lot of superstition. Everyone has it — from people who knock wood to baseball players who have to wear their lucky socks. Cops have it in spades, just like soldiers, just like anyone whose day job involves real life and death stuff. When I was on the cops back in Minnesota I heard about several jinxed cases. No one wants to say it out loud because of how it sounds, but people still fear the boogeyman.
I got up and crossed to my file cabinet, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the only bottle of really good booze I owned — an unopened bottle of Pappy Van Winkle's 23-Year-Old bourbon. At two-hundred and fifty dollars a bottle it was way out of my price range, but a satisfied client had given it to me last Christmas. I brought it and two clean glasses back to my desk, and the woman watched while I opened the bottle and poured two fingers for each of us. I didn’t ask if she drank. She didn’t tell me to stop pouring.
I sat down and we each had some. We didn’t toast. You don’t toast for stuff like this.
The bourbon was legendary. I’d read all about it. It’s aged in charred white oak barrels. Sweet, smooth, with a complex mix of honey and toffee flavors.
It might as well have been Gatorade for all I could tell. I drank it because my laptop was still fanning through the images. And because that, even if I didn’t take this case, those dead women were going to live inside my head for the rest of my life. You can forget some things. Other things take up residence, building themselves into the stone and wood and plaster of the structure of your mind.