Zoned out, he glanced at Chief Danbury’s face. He took a step back. Something big must be going on to drag him out of his office and upstairs.
Friction snapped in the air between them and heightened his interest.
The chief raised his hand and acknowledged Adelaide. “Miss Charboneau.” He motioned Royce out into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind him.
“What’s up?” Royce asked.
“I need you to roll on a homicide call that just came in. Detective Hicks and Detective Lawton are already on their way to the scene. A deceased female has been found out in Bucktown on the edge of City Park.” He turned and headed for the elevator. Royce fell in next to him.
“It looks like a ritualistic killing. The body was posed. We may have some sort of a serial killer on our hands.”
Royce absorbed the chief’s information, but it was the word ritualistic that played bad inside his head and raised his caution level. That was his take on the disturbing drawings he carried in his hand right now.
Adelaide Charboneau’s sketches were of ritualistic-style murders and posed female victims. Four, to be exact, excluding the one she claimed would be her own. But only one of the four victims in the sketches had a face. A haunting face he couldn’t get out of his mind.
He tried to relax as they stepped into the elevator, tried to dumb down the persistent feeling of dread growing inside him like kudzu, but the insidious vine had already taken hold, and it couldn’t be uprooted.
WATER AS FAR AS THE EYE COULD see blurred Royce’s vision as he exited Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard, headed due north straight for Bucktown and Lake Pontchartrain. A beautiful view…an ugly place to die.
Deleting his last thought, he sobered, recalling the sketch of Adelaide he’d shuffled into the others and locked in his desk drawer at the station. None of it made sense, at least not within the parameters he used to define the world. How did someone even go about sketching their own murder, much less somebody else’s?
Ahead he saw the flashing lights on police units lined up in succession until he could almost believe they disappeared into the flat gray water. On the opposite side of the street he spotted a WGNO-TV van with its occupants in the process of gearing up.
He eased his car in on the tail of the parade, cinched his tie and stepped out of the air-conditioned car straight into a wall of heat.
Good thing cool-on-the-outside Ice Man Beckett was his motto, but he left his jacket on the front seat and headed into the fray, passing five patrol units before he saw Gina Gantz climbing out of the back of the CSI van.
“You came to the circus,” she said when she saw him, but she wasn’t smiling, and he could always count on her for that.
His nerves pulled tight. “Have you already been to the scene?”
“Yes.” She swallowed.
“How bad?”
“The chief has two more technicians rolling in to help me collect evidence.”
“Brutal?” he asked.
“Creepy is more like it. No blood, no gore. Just a beautiful young woman, murdered and posed for some sick reason.”
Royce took a deep breath and settled in next to her as she walked toward a perimeter of yellow crime-scene tape.
He flashed his badge to the uniformed officer guarding the scene, lifted the crime tape and followed Gina underneath it. Glancing down toward the water, he spotted Detectives Hicks and Lawton standing with several other officers.
His skin was pretty thick. Armored in fact, but it came with the job. It had to.
Hicks glanced up, spotting him as he stepped closer.
“Detective Beckett.”
Nodding to the detective who outranked him by a couple of months, he got his first look at the victim.
“Her name’s Missy Stewart,” Hicks said, glancing down at his notepad. “She’s twenty, a student at Tulane, reported missing the day before yesterday by her roommate.”
Royce pushed back a rush of anger over the senseless killing and put his detective face on. Cold, hard, analytical thinking solved cases, not emotionally clouded judgment.
He stepped closer, studying the details. “You found her wallet open and displayed next to her body?” It was something missing in Adelaide’s sketch.
“Yeah. It wasn’t moved or touched by the jogger who found her this morning. We believe it was placed there by the killer.” Hicks motioned with a tilt of his head. “You saw her right hand?”
“Yeah.” But he didn’t need to take a second look. He knew the positioning of the body. Laid out, fully clothed. Long hair fanned out around her face, eyes wide open and fixed on the sky. Legs together. Left arm straight at her side, right arm stretched out, level with her shoulder. Right thumb locked across three fingers, and her index digit pointing in a southerly direction.
“The chief’s right. This looks ritualistic in nature. Any idea what her cause of death is, and what the devil this grainy substance is around the body?” Another detail missing in Adelaide’s depiction of the crime scene, but she was still four for six.
Gina looked up from her task, reached into her pocket and pulled out a GPS locator for the exact placement reading.
“Judging by the fixed open position of her eyes, my best guess is some sort of drug.” She put the GPS button down at the tip of Missy Stuart’s finger. “The substance around the body is where this gets creepy. The granules are sodium chloride.”
“Common table salt.”
“Yes.” Gina took the reading. “This has voodoo written all over it, Beckett. Dark magic. I don’t believe in any of it, but some folks do and salt plays a role in some of their rituals.”
She reached down and picked up the marker. “Are you okay, Beckett? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Ghost? No. A sketch? Yes. Voodoo was a wrinkle he hadn’t anticipated, but he planned to confront Adelaide Charboneau and have her try to explain why the dead woman at his feet matched one of her sketches. He wouldn’t take any mumbo-jumbo dark magic reasoning for this.
He’d charge her with murder, or at least accessory, arrest her and haul her off to jail.
“HOLD ON TO YOUR HATS, FOLKS. There’s another tropical storm brewing in the Atlantic. This one has affectionately been named Kandace, and she’s packing winds of seventy-five miles per hour. She could reach hurricane status by week’s end—”
Adelaide pushed the off button on the TV remote and tossed it onto the coffee table. Two storms were her limit. One packed wind and rain, the other packed a badge and a gun, and enough sex appeal to brew his own weather system.
Why he hadn’t blown down her door yet, she didn’t know, but she was sure he’d roar in much sooner than Kandace.
The department was abuzz with details about the girl they’d found murdered in Bucktown. Normally it would have been internalized, but the fact that she’d been posed and circled with salt seemed to give everyone permission to speculate on the dark magic details.
She owed her own certainty to some of the telltale details. The victim’s pointing finger on her right hand, the fan of hair spread out around her head, eyes wide open. All details she’d been compelled to sketch over and over again.
Buzzed with the jitters, she got up off the sofa and went into the kitchen to make a cup of herbal tea.
Detective Royce Beckett was an intelligent man, a good cop. He’d no doubt done a comparison between the victims in her sketch and the body found this morning.
Adelaide