Picture Me Dead

Ashley told him about the accident they had witnessed, and he told her stories about calls they’d taken on I-95, some tragic, some simply bizarre. When the others rejoined them at the table after dancing, she found herself repeating the story, knowing Len might be interested, since it had occurred in their neck of the woods.

“Ashley, you’re going to see things like that more and more often,” Len said. “Bad things happen on the highways.”

“Hey,” Karen said. “We all decided we were not going to focus on that awful scene.” She stared at Ashley, who hadn’t even realized she had a pen out, or that she was sketching the highway scene on a cocktail napkin.

“Ashley is an artist,” Karen announced. She kept her eyes glued sternly on Ashley and flipped the napkin over.

“An excellent artist,” Jan said. “Draw a face, Ashley. Draw Kyle.”

Ashley obediently began a sketch of the firefighter. The others rose and stood behind her, staring over her shoulder as she drew.

“Wow!” Kyle said, looking at her with new respect. “That’s great. Sign it. I want to keep it.”

“Will you do one for me, too, please?” Mario asked.

“How about Karen and Jan?” Len asked when she was finished, handing her a stack of napkins.

“I’ve drawn them dozens of times.”

“But maybe Kyle and I would like to keep them,” Len said.

Karen covertly jabbed her. “Of course,” Ashley said.

She finished the pictures and passed them out. Kyle shook his head. “So…Len says you’re going to be a cop, right? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with being a cop but…these are great.”

“And she has a photographic memory. Draw someone from today—show them,” Jan insisted.

Karen placed a hand over Ashley’s. “Not the highway,” she said.

Ashley shrugged. “All right.”

“You go ahead, I’ll get the check,” Len said.

“Hey, Len, that’s not necessary.”

“You’ve fed me plenty of times, Ash, at Nick’s place.”

“That means my uncle fed you,” she protested.

“Don’t argue with an officer of the law,” he teased and walked to the bar. Ashley watched him go, shook her head and set her pen to the paper. She hesitated, then started another face. She was startled herself when she saw what she was doing. Strong, craggy features, dark hair, dark eyes, square jawline, high, broad cheekbones, and the mouth…drawn into something of a tight line, but a good mouth…

“Wow. Cool. Who is it?” Karen asked, picking up the napkin.

“The guy I spilled the coffee on this morning.”

“Good-looking son of a gun,” Karen murmured.

“See, photographic memory,” Jan said, pleased.

“Not really. But I like to draw faces. I always have,” Ashley said to the two firefighters. Kyle whistled softly. She stared down at her own drawing, oddly stirred by it. Good-looking son of a gun. Yeah, he had been. Walking aggression and testosterone, but…hmm. There was something about him. A beckoning power or strength or sensuality. Maybe all of them. She hated the saying, but animal attraction might just be the right phrase to describe him.

He did have something that…

Something that, for her, Len just didn’t.

Don’t you ever just want to have sex?

She looked back at her drawing. His type probably had lots of sex. He wasn’t the kind of man with whom she would ever want to become involved. Not that she wanted to be involved.

With luck, she wouldn’t even run into him again. Literally or otherwise. Even though he did seem to know Nick, and she had actually seen him around the place before. Lots of customers came and went, some of them frequently, some of them not so frequently.

“You’re good. You shouldn’t waste this kind of talent,” Kyle said, interrupting her introspection.

She exhaled, glad to return to the present. “Thanks,” she said, then crumpled up the napkin.

“You destroyed it!” Mario protested.

“She didn’t like him very much,” Jan said, grinning.

Len returned from paying the check. They talked as they exited the dance hall, Len expressing his regret that they were heading back the next afternoon, since Mario and Kyle went back on duty the next day.

They parted outside to head for their respective hotels, but not before Kyle and Jan exchanged numbers. As they walked back, Karen suddenly linked arms with Ashley and let out a soft whistle. “Wasn’t it a great evening?”

“Yes, I had a good time, and I really hope you and Len do keep seeing each other.”

“Yes, a guy like Len shouldn’t go to waste,” Jan said. “And, Ashley, your guy was mature…a little scary. But…appealing.”

Ashley stared at her, frowning as she arched a brow. “Definitely a nice guy. And married,” she informed her.

Karen laughed, throwing an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t think Jan means the firefighter. She means the guy in the sketch.”

“He isn’t my guy!” Ashley insisted, startled.

“Oh, yeah? You should have taken a good look at that picture you drew. You saw something in that guy,” Karen told her.

“I don’t even know him. And with any luck, I won’t.”

“There’s nothing like a mystery man,” Jan teased.

“Oh, yeah, right, nothing like one.”

As soon as they reached the suite, they headed for bed. But Ashley couldn’t sleep. When both Karen and Jan were deeply out, she was still wide awake. So she closed the door over to the bedroom, went out to the living area to make a cup of tea, and picked up her sketch pad from the coffee table.

When the three men reached the room they’d rented for the night, Len suddenly drew back as Kyle fumbled with the plastic card that had replaced the use of keys at most hotels.

“Hey, you know what? I’m suddenly dying for a burger.”

“You want us to come with you?” Mario asked. “I guess I could eat a burger.”

“Hell, no, you don’t really want a burger, and I don’t need help to take a ride to Denny’s,” Len said cheerfully.

“You sure?” Mario asked. He yawned. “Hell, I’m beat.”

“Get to sleep. I won’t be long, and I’ll try not to make a racket when I get back.”

“Last man in gets the cot,” Kyle reminded him.

“Yeah, well, one of us had to get it, right?”

He grinned, turned and headed back for the car.

He didn’t drive to Denny’s. He turned his car toward the girls’ hotel and parked.

Karen had given him their room number, and mentioned that they’d wound up on the first floor, so the sliding glass doors at the back opened up to a little courtyard and garden area.

He headed for the courtyard and figured out which room it would be.

The lights were on. One person was moving inside. He knew it was Ashley.

The drapes were thin, the light behind them bright. He could see her every movement. She walked around, paused by the window, drew the curtain back and looked out.

He flattened himself against a gardenia tree.

She was holding a cup of something, just gazing out. She was wearing a long T-shirt that clung to her. In the artificial light, her hair blazed. The wavy ends seemed to curl protectively around her breasts. The knit shirt hugged the length of her. She never could have imagined just how provocative she looked.

His fingers wound into his palms, and tension streaked through the length of him. You don’t know just how well I know you, Ashley, he thought. I knew you’d be the one who was awake, I knew I could come here and see you. And one day, Ashley, you’ll find out just what you’ve made me feel all this time.

One day.

The sliders were open, only the screen in place, letting in the breeze.

That one day…

Could be tonight.

No. Not tonight. Tonight, he would just watch.

But soon. Soon she would know. He’d make her know.

The night was beautiful. Just beautiful. But not even the stars in the sky or the soft glow of moonlight on the exquisite little garden could draw her attention.

She stepped back into the room and went over to the desk. She’d already taken her sketch pad out.

She started to draw. First, the body…the body on the highway.

A man, young, muscle structure taut beneath…the spatters of blood. His hair covering his face, a soft ash blond.

Around him…the officer who had arrived on the scene. The police car. The two drivers. Their cars. The traffic slowing, veering…nearly hitting the median.

The median. The opposing traffic…

The figure across the expanse of lanes.

She sketched, shading in until, even in black and white and shades of gray, the scene was eerily real. And everything detailed except…the figure. The vague figure across the many lanes. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember any details…

It was all as she had remembered it, how the camera in her mind’s eye had frozen the image.

Everything so specific—except for the dark figure who seemed to be watching…looking…

For what?

Assurance that the man—the poor, pathetic man, near-naked and bloodied—was, indeed, dead?

A chill suddenly swept over her.

A breeze…

More than a breeze. Something that made her slightly…uneasy.

She turned quickly, then felt foolish. Even so, she walked over to the doors, then closed and locked them. She looked at the thin drapes, frowning, thinking that the sun would come rushing in the next morning.

The next morning. It was morning, and that sun would be coming soon.

Pulling the light draperies back, she saw the set of lightproof draperies, pulled them, then checked the lock once again and went to lie down on the couch.

She closed her eyes, but the image of the body on the highway still haunted her.

Swearing, she pounded her pillow. Counting sheep had always seemed like such a ridiculous thing to do….

And yet she was desperate.

She counted horses instead.

Strange dream. There was fog and sunlight. She was walking toward him in the dream. Sometimes they were on a beach, and sometimes she was moving toward him in the cabin of the Gwendolyn. Hair spilling down her back, flesh…yeah, naked flesh, all of it being touched by the sun and by the shadow.

Nancy…

He’d dreamed often that she’d been there, with him, trying to tell him something. Except that it hadn’t been like this. Before, they’d just been talking. Discussing the case. The frustrations, the dead ends. But she’d known something. Reckless, restless, unhappy in her married life, she was determined to throw her heart into her work.

They were good partners.

Not good enough. There had been something more, something she had suspected, something she had thought of doing to break the wall they were up against.

Then he dreamed of her face as it had looked, on the autopsy table, after they had found her. And that would always strike such a chord of horror in his heart and mind that he awakened.

Not tonight, though. Tonight that image didn’t appear.

He couldn’t see her clearly. Her hair wasn’t dark; it was red in the light.

It wasn’t Nancy. Just someone like her. Who moved something like her…

It was Nick’s girl. Walking with a slow, confident, easy rhythm. She reached him. The dream progressed. Memory faded, the now took hold. She was different, very much alive, real, vibrant. She was…reaching him. Touching him. She was…

He awoke abruptly, in a cold sweat. The alarm was ringing.

Fuck.

No. Not the alarm, the phone. Hell, what time was it? The middle of the night. And still, bleary, wretched, he was glad of the sound. It had drawn him from the depths of the most bizarre wet dream…about Nick’s kid. He needed to stay the hell away from her. Far away.

Shouldn’t be hard, not after the way they had just reacquainted themselves.

The phone…

Still ringing, like a hammer pounding inside his head.

He picked up the phone. Listened. And his knuckles went white against the receiver.

CHAPTER 3

“There’s not a lot left of the face,” Martin Moore said, nodding to the uniformed officer who allowed him and Jake through the crime tape to the off-road location where the body had been discovered.

“I think the recent rains washed her down here. She was probably buried in a shallow grave farther in from the road.”

It was the crack of dawn, Saturday morning.

He wished he hadn’t switched to Scotch the night before.

And he wished he had one then. Marty’s call had been way beyond bizarre.

So much for the long weekend off. But since the case had never been officially closed, he had been called in. Marty had been in vice, the narcotics squad, five years ago, when the first murders had occurred, but he had worked with Jake for a long time now and knew the past history of what were still referred to as the Bordon murders—as well as anyone. He also lived in the area, so he’d reached the scene first.

Police floodlights helped illuminate the area, which was still dark. Inky dark. Much of this part of the county had been developed out of land that was really part of the Everglades. The dirt was rich here and the foliage thick. Lights were few and far between. Before dawn, the darkness could be a strange ebony, as if the Glades had reclaimed what was really part of a no man’s land.

Jake paused a few feet from the corpse, taking his first look at the body that had been discovered that morning by a jogger. A foolish jogger, he thought, running at a time when the night still held sway in an area where the obsidian shadows and undergrowth could hide many a sin.

The jogger, he noted, was still on the scene. She was a middle-aged woman with a pretty, too-skinny face, a sweatband around her forehead, and the typical shorts, T-shirt and sneakers found among those who chose the quiet paths out in the farm district for their morning rituals. She was badly shaken by her discovery. He could hear her sobbing softly, speaking to the officers, who had supplied her with a blanket and hot coffee.

“My God, I was just running and then…there she was. I saw her…and it was so dark, I didn’t even realize at first. And so I doubled back. And I was so frightened I could barely punch the numbers into my cell phone. Thank God for cell phones! I know now that I’ll never go out jogging when it isn’t full light again. I don’t care if I have to learn to run around my own living room, I’ll never, never come out like that again. It’s so terrifying. But then, of course…she was just left on the road, right? She might not have been killed there, right?”

Jake could hear one of the uniformed officers telling her that they had no facts right then, but that she didn’t need to worry, one of the officers would get her back home.

Lady, you shouldn’t go out jogging along this path alone before the sun is up in any way, shape or form, Jake thought. They were in what most people in the county considered to be the country. Far south in Miami-Dade, an area where the old encroached on the new, where waterways connected to the deep river of grass that was Everglades. There was good land out here. Some people kept large tracts with beautiful homes, and some had acreage where they grew strawberries, tomatoes and other produce.

Good earth for growing intermingled with sawgrass, deep dark muck and tangled trees.

Much of the land, such as this immediate area, was county owned. It was often heavily wooded, and where there weren’t actually trees, the foliage was thick and dense.

A good place to dispose of human remains, a place where nature could inflict tremendous damage on a corpse and render many of the clues it might have given up hard to discern, even destroy them. Over the years, a number of criminals had tried to dispose of bodies and evidence on land much like this. And, God knew, many of them had succeeded.

The jogger was just the poor civilian who had happened upon the physical remnants of a brutal crime. There would be little, if anything, she could tell him. Still, he would speak with her himself for a moment. Later.

For now…

The victim.

“Where’s the M.E.?” he asked.

“Right over there, talking with Pentillo, who was first officer on the scene. The M.E. is Tristan Gannet. Mandy’s taking the last of the pictures he requested right now.”

“Good. I’m glad we’ve got Gannet and Nightingale.”

Mandy Nightingale, one of their best photographers, was snapping photos as they carefully approached the position of the body.

“Hi, Jake,” she said, acknowledging his arrival with a quick nod before she snapped another photo.

“Mandy, good to see you here.”

They had worked together many times. She was thin as a wraith, with steel gray, close-cropped hair, and a strong, Native-American facial structure that defied age entirely. She was quick and efficient, careful to snap a crime scene in its entirety, to make sure that she not only got excellent photographs of the body but of the surrounding elements as well.

“Thanks, Jake. I’ll be out of your way in just a second.”

“Take your time, Mandy,” he told her. “There’s no hurry for this one now.”

“I think I’ve gotten just about everything I can and everything that Dr. Gannet specified,” she assured them, squatting low to focus on a last photograph. “I’ll be over with Pentillo, hanging around ’til the M.E. moves the body and I can take the rest of the shots,” she told them.

“Thanks, Mandy.”

She nodded. “I think Dr. Gannet knows you’re here. I’ll send him right over.”

Jake hunkered down on the balls of his feet to study the body in the position in which it had been found.

He didn’t need the medical examiner to tell him that the woman had been dead for some time. She had been exposed to the elements and to the small animals that called the area home. There were places where she was down to no more than bone, and places where flesh clung precariously to the body. It appeared that she had been left without clothing of any kind. A quick look, using his pen to shift fallen foliage for a better view, showed that unfortunately the hands had decomposed almost fully, as had much of the face.

Another murder in the county. It happened. Put millions of people together, and murder happened.

But he knew exactly why Martin had been so tense when he had called him, urging him to reach the scene as quickly as possible.

The face, though maintaining few of the qualities that marked men and women as human, had apparently not taken the same abuse as the hands.

And it was apparent that what had once been the ears had been slashed.

A chill crept through him, along with a bitterness he could actually taste.

Déjà vu.

Peter Bordon, also known as Papa Pierre, had been locked up for a long time now. Five years. But even a seconds-long, cursory inspection of this body was eerily reminiscent of the victims that had been discovered during Bordon’s reign as leader of the bizarre cult called People for Principle.

“Yes, he’s still in prison,” Martin said, reading his partner’s mind.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I called and checked the moment I saw the body, right after I called you,” Martin said. “He’s in prison—whether it really matters or not, that’s where he is.”

“Sorry,” Jake murmured. He couldn’t quite help having a tense attitude on this one. Peter Bordon had garnered a group around him as if he had been a true modern-day prophet. He had preached about community, working for the benefit of all mankind and giving up the luxuries of a sinful life. For most of his followers, that had meant donating everything they had ever worked for to Bordon’s own bank account.

Three of his alleged followers had wound up dead. Discovered in fields and canals.

With their ears slashed.

No weapons had ever been found. No real leads had ever been discovered. Bordon had been the only suspect, but there had been nothing whatsoever to prove he might be guilty. The police had managed to obtain a search warrant for his holdings, but nothing had been found except for some illegal financial activity, which in the end had been enough to earn him jail time.

Late one night, an itinerant man had come bursting into one of the small precinct stations, confessing to the murders.

While homicide was being notified of his arrival and confession, the young man had hanged himself with his belt in his cell.

And that should have been it.

But Jake and most of his task force hadn’t believed that one crazed man had been responsible for a series of killings that had been so meticulously carried out. The case had never been officially closed, but with the death of the man who had confessed, the imprisonment of Bordon based on what they were able to bring into court, and the fact that no more bodies had been discovered, they had been forced to move on to new investigations.

Jake had never been satisfied, though. For him, it had never ended.

They hadn’t gotten Bordon on murder.

Bordon had been involved. He was sure of it. But there was no proof. Jake had never thought that Bordon had physically carried out the crimes; they had been done at his command.

Now he was in prison, but there was no reason in hell why he couldn’t be calling the shots from his cell.

Bordon had a power far greater than strength or any material weapon. He had the ability to manipulate men and women. To get into their minds.

He didn’t need to dirty his own hands with the blood of others.

Planning a murder, however, could bring the same penalties as the act of carrying out the deed. But complicity had to be proven.

Five years ago, the task force had plowed through Bordon’s records, desperate to get him on something. They had never gotten him for ordering the killings, but just as, decades ago, the law had managed to put away the infamous Al Capone, they had at last gotten him on tax evasion and fraud.

Unsatisfactory, but at least he’d been locked away.

The murders had stopped. Most people seemed to assume that had been because the man who had confessed to the killings had committed suicide in a jail cell.

But now it seemed that the killings hadn’t stopped.

There had just been a hiatus, because here was another body, jarringly reminiscent of those they had found in the past.

“Jesus, Jake, don’t look like that,” Martin said softly. “Maybe you shouldn’t even be on this case.”

Jake stared at him, dark eyes hard as coal.

“All right, all right. Sorry.”

“Gentlemen, may I get back in there? I’ll give you my initial findings.”

Jake turned. Dr. Tristan Gannet made his way back over to them. Jake was glad that it was Gannet on the case. He had been with the M.E.’s office almost twenty years and had had experience with the previous murders.

“Glad to see you, Gannet,” Jake said. He quickly scanned the scene again himself before joining Gannet down by the body. No apparent materials or fabrics. No sign of footprints, but if they were right and the body had washed down here with the rain, there wouldn’t be. No obvious sign of cause of death, most likely because the body was so decomposed. Victim was most probably a young woman, a few strands of long dark hair remaining. The first patrolman to arrive on the scene had done a damned good job of taping the scene off and keeping it untainted. This was no instance of a dozen officers arriving and contaminating the area. There was just so little to be found when a body had been given time to decompose. Of course, there was always the hope that the specialized crime scene investigators could find a clue that wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

Jake had a feeling this one would be hard work for the crime scene investigators. When a murderer was careful and knew that minuscule clues could give his or her identity away, there was often little to go on.

There was still hope, of course. His associates might find a hair, a fiber, trace evidence. Doc Gannet might find a microscopic clue on the pathetic remains.