Her gaze cut to his. “It never is. But she has to be somewhere close enough that I can get to her. I never get called for acts out of my reach. If we check all the slum areas . . . ” She started to say something more when suddenly her back snapped straight, so hard and fast that she bowed up onto her tiptoes with a painful gasp.
Luther was on his feet in an instant. “Gaby!”
“He’s here.” Her voice crooned with frigid intensity. “He’s close.” She dropped back to her feet with steely purpose and joyful anticipation. Chin tucking in, eyes brightening with morbid objective, she started out of the room.
Luther reached for her—and she jerked out of his reach.
“No! Don’t touch me.” Eyes unseeing and muscles clenched, she made ready to battle with him if he tried. “Don’t fuck with me, Luther. I mean it. I need to get him, and I can’t if you start hovering over me, dicking with my perception.”
“All right.” He held up his hands, showing that he respected her decision. “But I’m coming with you, no arguments.”
She said nothing. In less than a minute she had on jeans but no shoes. She’d buttoned the flannel shirt only enough to cover her breasts.
Luther had no choice but to follow her out into the cold, early morning obscurity wearing no more than unbuttoned jeans and carrying his gun in one hand, his cell phone in the other.
“No car,” she told him as she reached the sidewalk and launched into a flat-out run away from his home.
“Damn it.” Luther ran as hard as he could, but the icy walkway numbed his feet and each pounding footfall sent pain radiating up his shins. He hadn’t run barefoot on concrete since he was a young boy. He blocked the discomfort to push himself, and still he couldn’t keep up with Gaby.
He’d almost lost sight of her when, for no apparent reason, she came to a dead stop.
At the end of a driveway, near bagged refuse ready for pickup, she turned a full circle, scanning the area, hunting for something.
Or someone.
He’d gotten to within forty feet of her when her face tightened and she took two hard steps toward a cross street—only to draw up short as an idling car a block down the road, hidden by the darkness, suddenly gunned the engine and sped away.
Gaby didn’t chase after it, thank God. But her eyes narrowed with a transcendent apperception that Luther couldn’t comprehend.
Even as the car passed beneath a streetlamp, thick fog made it impossible to see the license plate, or even identify the make and model, especially since the car kept the headlights off.
Why wasn’t Gaby upset at losing her quarry?
“We’re not going after him?” Feeling like the wimp she often accused him of being, Luther bent, hands on his knees, and tried to regain his breath.
“No.” Gaby wasn’t breathing hard, but he could barely draw enough air into his laboring lungs. “There’s no need, not right now.”
She continued to stare in the direction the car had fled until the sound of the engine faded into nothingness.
Almost to herself, she mused aloud, “I couldn’t see him, but he couldn’t see us either. I’d say that’s a fair trade-off.”
“Who?”
“Not sure yet, but I’ll figure it out.” Gaby put her nose in the air, inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes with a fervid satisfaction that altered her expression. “Oh yeah. I have him now.”
“What is it, Gaby?” Luther straightened as he watched her. What did she know that he didn’t?
“I smell it.”
Dread knotted inside him. She smelled . . . human remains? He looked at the garbage bags. “Oh fuck.”
He started to reach for one, and Gaby grabbed his wrist in an unbreakable hold.
“No.” Her gaze was truculent, almost . . . inhuman.
It reassured him. This was Gaby at her best, and knowing she had a handle on things meant fewer people would die.
“Call it in,” she ordered. “Have them get forensics here or whatever you cop-type people do.”
“Okay.” He covered the hand she’d placed on his wrist and pried it loose. Flexing his fingers to restore the blood flow, he asked, “On what grounds? Unlike you, Gaby, I can’t claim a sixth sense. I have to give them something more solid to go on.”
She turned and crouched down near the stuffed bags. A damp wind blew the flannel open over her midriff, but this Gaby, Gaby in the zone, didn’t feel the cold. Her hair whipped past her eyes, and still she didn’t move, didn’t speak.
Finally, her thigh muscles flexing, she stood. “Tell them you saw him dumping body remains. Bones, brains. Tell them we have the grisliest murder evidence they’re ever going to see.” Her gaze swung around to his. “Tell them we need this prioritized.
“All right.” He lifted his phone.
“Wait.” She worked her jaw, solving some inner turmoil. “Tell them to keep us out of it. He doesn’t know us, and we don’t want him to. As long as we’re unknown, we can continue to investigate. Make them understand.”
Their gazes held. Luther didn’t relish the possibility of being caught in such a farfetched lie. “You’re sure about this?”
“Fuckin’ A, I’m sure.” She all but vibrated with purpose, with devotion to her certainty. She pointed at the garbage. “There is a mishmash of inedible human pieces in those bags, Luther. Body parts already stripped of chunks of flesh because our fiend likes to store his food.” She put her head back, closed her eyes. “When we find him, we’ll find a full freezer, too.”
“Christ.” Luther rubbed his eyes. He wanted to take Gaby away from this, but he couldn’t. He was a cop down to the marrow of his bones. And she was a paladin.
With her guidance, they’d get the cretin that much sooner, and save lives in the process.
She looked around, eyes narrowed, hands on her lean hips. “If you can get some units to check the rest of the neighborhood’s trash, I’m betting you’ll find more bags, too.” She glanced at Luther. “Our guy is smart enough to scatter around the remains.”
Luther’s guts knotted in rebellion to the vividness she described. “You can smell that?”
In the slightest movement imaginable, she slowly shook her head. “Oh no, I smell something far more important than blood and guts and intestines.”
He straightened. “What?”
Her eyes brightened in the darkness, and she said with enthusiasm, “I smell ink.”
Head down, music blaring in her ears, Gaby strolled along the curb toward Mort’s place. It was late afternoon, and she and Luther had already had a long day.
“I don’t smell it,” Luther had said about the ink, as if they operated on the same plane. As if anything about her was perceptible to him.
When would he get it? When it was too damned late?
Not much separated her from the ghouls she killed. When Luther realized that, would he revile her?
She just didn’t know, and it made her tetchy.
At least he had believed her, had thrown himself into her instructions without reserve. In record time, Luther had gotten half the damn police force out on the scene. Neighbors awakened to the racket and lights. News crews showed up on the scene.
From inside a dark cruiser, wearing a hat and sunglasses, Luther directed the search. Gaby tucked into the backseat and thought about what needed to be done, and how she’d do it.
Toward dawn they discovered the third and last bag, thanks to stray dogs that sniffed out the feast. At the sight of a mutt gnawing on a human foot, a young female officer puked up her morning coffee and Danish.
Luther didn’t relieve her of duty. He kept them all searching until the last of the garbage had been screened.
They now knew that their cannibal refused feet and hands, intestines, brains, and the spinal cord.
Internal organs were missing, so he either ate those or hadn’t yet had an opportunity to dispose of them.
After they concluded the search, Luther had trailed Gaby to several tattoo shops. He didn’t send other officers to do the same, because he had no legitimate reason to present for the search. He couldn’t very well announce that Gaby smelled the ink, especially when the overwhelming scents of dead flesh mixed with refuse presented a cacophonous assault on the senses, enough to drown out every other odor—at least for the average person.