The Last Victim (A Ryker Townsend Story) Read online

  “You’re losing it, Townsend, if you ever had it in the first place.”

  Odd how I didn’t recognize my new loft in Woodbridge, Virginia. The industrial look of it had appealed to me, but apparently I hadn’t gotten used to it. An exposed red brick wall ran the length of the space that could’ve passed for a warehouse. A transient quality I rather liked. On one end was a cook’s kitchen in stainless that fed my culinary fantasy. Between the bed and the well-equipped kitchen were sofas and a dining table in one open space. Spring cleaning would merely require good water pressure and a long garden hose, if I ever wanted to test the theory.

  Except for a pile of moving boxes, the place looked like an upgrade I didn’t deserve.

  “Shit.”

  I raked a hand through my hair and when I felt the cool of my damp bed, I yanked off the T-shirt I’d soaked with night sweats and glanced at the clock on my nightstand. Four-thirty in the morning. I gave thought to sleeping again, but I suspected my mind wouldn’t let me rest now. It harbored too many dark places to hold me prisoner.

  I got up, stripped the sheets from my bed, and tugged off my boxers. Naked, I hit the shower to wash off the tainted remnants of the dream. With my hands braced on the tiled wall, I stood under the showerhead and let the hot steamy water run down my face and shoulders, as if it would be easy to forget.

  “There’s no light without the dark.”

  I repeated what my mother always told me as a kid, after I’d wake up shaking. In the intimacy of shadows I still heard her on quiet nights. She got me to understand I could hate and crave my dreams, but my internal struggle turned my mind into a battlefield where opposing energies fought inside me. The way I dreamed had taken over my life like an undiagnosed mental condition to which there was no cause and no cure. All that remained was acceptance, but everything in my life had gotten complicated.

  After I got out of the shower and toweled off, I decided more sweat would be a thing of beauty and put on my running gear. Living alone had its drawbacks, but not having anyone around to tell me that I was crazy for taking a shower and washing off the spoils of my dream before I ran, wasn’t one of them.

  My new loft apartment butted up against a lighted trail system that snaked through a greenbelt and wetlands preserve. Ten miles of hills usually left me exhausted at the right pace. Abusing my body with a punishing run beat the alternatives of forced therapy if anyone at my work found out why I couldn’t sleep.

  I’d chosen to move not long ago, outside Washington DC and nearer to Quantico, for a shorter commute. If I didn’t travel so much, I might’ve appreciated setting down roots, but after I laced up my running shoes, I stood and stared down at a stack of unopened moving boxes. They were in plain sight as a chronic reminder. The absurdity of those boxes had become symbolic—a cardboard testament to my nomadic, unencumbered, uncommitted personal life. With my work, I was all in, but when it came to taking care of me, I had turned into an abandoned pile of unopened boxes filled with contents I didn’t want to see.

  Before I got out the door, my cell phone rang and life beckoned. I looked at my watch. Five-twenty. It had to be work—and this time of morning, the news would never be good.

  “Townsend.”

  “SSA Townsend? We’ve got a request for assistance. A familiar one, I’m afraid. I’m sending you and your team to Seattle. The jet leaves in two hours. You’ll be briefed en route. Your team’s being notified as we speak.”

  I recognized the voice of Anne Reynolds, my unit chief of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit 4 under ViCAP. She’d recruited me fresh out of college from the University of Maryland, but it wasn’t until three years ago I ended up under her seasoned supervision in the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, hunting serial offenders. I led my own team under her watch as a Supervisory Special Agent.

  Seattle. I knew what that meant. Our UNSUB, that the news media had dubbed the Totem Killer, had erected another work of art, but I couldn’t help feel our Unknown Subject’s hunting ground had been fate messing with me. To hear I’d soon be landing in Seattle brought more significance to the puzzle of my dream.

  I had personal connections there I’d been avoiding. Apparently providence had other ideas.

  “Is it TK?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Wear good boots. I hear the terrain is a challenge. This one’s bad, Ryker. Worse than the others.”

  “Worse is hard to fathom. Thanks for the heads up.”

  The call soon ended, but her words stayed.

  This one’s bad.

  Her warning lingered in my head as I went to my closet to grab a few things. I had a ready bag that I kept at work, carry-on luggage filled with everything I’d need to stay a few nights. Whenever a call came for FBI assistance, I didn’t have to go home to pack. I could hit ‘wheels up’ time without breaking a sweat.

  It struck me that I must’ve had the dream for a reason, one I would find out about soon enough. I’d stopped questioning the timing of my nightmares and my peculiar ability to conjure them—and since the death of my mother I never talked about my so-called gift—or visions, as she’d called them.

  Over the years I’d covered up my ability and amassed my secrets. I explained my leaps in logic to colleagues as the science of profiling, but I’d learned to trust the elusive messages hidden within my dreams—even when they taunted me.

  I accepted them like death and taxes.

  ***

  Snoqualmie Pass- Cascade Mountains

  Outside Seattle

  Ryker Townsend

  I sidestepped down a steep embankment with my boots cutting into dirt and tufts of grass. Dressed in khaki tactical pants and a navy polo with my Glock 21 in a holster, I wore my uniform to crime scenes when I could. The stench of decomp had a nasty way of bonding to fabric. Since I didn’t always know how bad it would be, I’d taken precautions and had a heavy duty plastic bag in my luggage to seal the smell until I could sterilize my gear. As the terrain leveled out, a dense canopy of Hemlock and Fir trees towered over me and blocked the steel gray of an overcast sky as a fine mist dappled my FBI windbreaker and cap.

  “This is random…and remote.”

  Why here? The UNSUB picked an isolated spot for his body dump. That sent up a flare that our unknown subject had become bolder in stretching his boundaries.

  No one on my team spoke as we trudged through the wet brush toward the crime scene. Like me, the others were steeling themselves for what they’d find. Every investigator had their thing—a way to mentally prepare for what they would see—for what they would bring home.

  When the flash of a dull fleeting shadow crossed my path, looking like a wisp of black smoke hovering over the ground, I glanced up to catch the dark wings of a raven cutting through the trees and the computer part of my brain kicked in.

  Raven. A Trickster god. Prevalent myth in the Pacific Northwest. Poe. Edgar Allan.

  My mind acted like a hard drive of stored random facts, especially at stress times. Sometimes they hit me hard and I blurted them aloud. That made dating a challenge. I’d always been drawn to intelligent women, but once I let them into my world, crossing that line usually ended any relationship. I simply had no interest in hiding who I was.

  At the sight of the raven, keywords pummeled my brain to trigger imagery and I flashed on pages in a book I’d read, but spotting the bird meant something else. Scavengers would’ve already hit the crime scene and done their damage. All things considered, I preferred thinking of mythology and Edgar Allan Poe. If I had more of an appreciation for the circle of life, I might’ve embraced the synergy of being nothing more than walking worm food.

  “We caught a break this time,” Special Agent Lucinda Crowley said as she walked alongside me. She was my number two and another profiler on my team. “The local field office dispatched agents to preserve the scene before the locals trampled over it.”

  “Yeah, good,” I said.

  I stopped and gazed toward the next rise. I didn’t have to ask how
far the crime scene was. A circle of ravens and crows had gathered. Their black winged bodies cut across the gray sky like an ominous Hitchcock montage. The eerie echo of their squawks and their frenzied aerial acrobatics told me all I needed to know.

  My body tensed and I emptied my mind to brace for what I’d see as I hit the crest of the hill.

  It never failed. When I looked down to the clearing below, standing shoulder to shoulder with my team, a familiar twist hit my gut. I stared at the grisly work of the Totem Killer and forced myself to look beyond the shocking horror. Every severed limb was someone not coming home—a brother, a husband, a boyfriend, a son. The violation clenched my belly, but I owed it to each of the victims not to turn away.

  I would have to speak for them now.

  “Dear, God,” someone muttered.

  A monolith of bloodied flesh stood fifteen feet high like a statue to be idolized. Dismembered legs, arms, and faces were tied to a tree to make a macabre tower. As exhausted as I was, my eyes tricked me into seeing severed limbs that twitched and slithered like entwined snakes under the circling cloud of ravens. When I blinked, the bodies stopped writhing and I let out the breath I’d been holding, but I’d gotten a taste for the dreams that would punish me later.

  “We are your sons. We are your husbands. We are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the bodies as I recited the quote.

  “Who said that?” Crowley asked.

  “Ted Bundy.”

  I wanted to believe in God, but standing there, I couldn’t. With what I see, I don’t hear him anymore.

  I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t turn away. Seeing the depraved display from a distance gave me a perspective that would haunt me. Body parts were broken down to their artistic elements and artfully strapped to a tree, making a mockery of real Totems seen throughout the Pacific Northwest. Where most people would only be revolted, I forced myself to see the symmetry and the attention to detail of a meticulous mind. I saw the artist behind the work. It’s how I compartmentalized the shock and kept my objectivity.

  The way I saw the scene spoke volumes of the killer.

  I ignored what it said about me.

  I headed down the slope, unable to take my eyes off the Totem. The peeled skins of faces were stretched and nailed in a neat row down one side. I suspected TK did the faces as an inventory list—his version of a head count. A line of bent legs were attached upside down, flaring out to make a visual ledge, and a ring of butt cheeks and two severed penises dangled at the base. A spray of arms were fixed as if they were raised in prayer, exalting the freshest body at the top.

  A fleeting thought hit me.

  “The way they look in moonlight. The memories…and the power of your creation.”

  I said the words aloud to give my first impressions gravity, but it felt as if someone else had spoken. A distant muffled voice filled my head. My voice, yet not. The moon and its shadows painted folds of dead flesh. Questions struck me. I wondered how the Totem of severed limbs would’ve looked at night—how the intimacy would’ve felt—when the UNSUB must have fashioned it.

  I let my mind go there. I never liked it, but I couldn’t afford to filter the darkness. For the victims, I had to allow the killer in.

  “He left you whole,” I said these words aloud, not caring if anyone else heard me. “You must’ve been special, my unlucky friend.”

  I found it helped to speak to the dead. It was an ice breaker for when they returned the favor during the autopsy where they shared their secrets in the only way they could. Talking to the dead at the scene reminded me they were someone’s child or lover…or lost brother.

  This time our UNSUB gave us a gift.

  A whole body would allow us to examine what the killer did to his victims. We could enhance our profile. The autopsy would be key, but beyond the evidence my team would uncover, the killer had deliberately flaunted his ability to get away with murder by giving up an entire body for us to study.

  Pure arrogance.

  “This is one sick son of a bitch,” a local cop said as he glanced at me. He expected me to agree, but I didn’t confirm or deny.

  I simply resisted the temptation to demonize the human beings I hunted by calling them names. Most people did it, but I couldn’t afford to give in to the impulse. I had to get into their heads and keeping an open mind helped me to understand them. The fact I could do this instinctively had been one of the reasons Unit Chief Reynolds had recruited me.

  “The stuff of nightmares,” Crowley said as we got closer.

  She looked up and so did I. Death cast its pallor on both of us and the whine of flies escalated—the sound from my sleep.

  It’s happening. Again.

  I’d quit being surprised at how similar my dreamlike visions were to actual crime scenes I’d not seen before. I’d never told anyone about my disturbing episodes with déjà vu. I chalked them up to bad memories leaking out. There were places in my head—deep seated in my brain—that were hidden behind closed doors of my making. The barriers, the way I compartmentalized, allowed me to cope and do my job.

  But my dreams opened those doors.

  Seeing the horror never got easier. I looked at dead bodies as if they were an intellectual exercise to analyze. I used to think that helped, but lately I’ve had my doubts. My mind housed the memory of countless dead faces. From my own hellish repository, the dead rose up and visited me in my sleep, coiling from my head as gruesome puzzle pieces when cases were similar.

  “We should’ve stopped for coffee.” I winced.

  Without a caffeine fix, I’d hit empty.

  “What’s wrong with your face?” Lucinda Crowley asked.

  I shot a sideways glance at her. It hurt.

  “You’d be the better judge, but if you must know, I’m engaged in a mêlée with an arduous headache. My back’s to the wall.”

  Crowley gave me a look I’d seen before.

  “Drop the ten dollar words. This isn’t Jeopardy,” she said. “Take one of your chill-lax pills. I’m sure it’s not terminal…yet.”

  ‘Your optimism gives me strength.”

  “I’m here to serve.”

  From inside my windbreaker, I pulled out a bottle of aspirins and popped a couple to choke down dry before I grabbed my sunglasses and put them on. The brightness of the overcast sky hurt my eyes, but I had another reason for needing my shades. The dark lenses distanced me from the shock as I let my gaze drift to the faces nailed to the bark.

  “Five this time,” I said.

  Four skinned faces lined the pole beneath the full body of a naked man at the top, splayed to look like Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man.’ The victims were all men. I stared up at the last kill—the special one the killer had chosen for the high point of his creation. Dead eyes were filmy white. As I stared into them, random particulars helped me deal with my natural revulsion.

  Corneas became cloudy and opaque after death. It’s natural. It happens. It’s pure science. Takes a few hours if the eyes are open. Twenty-four hours if the eyes are closed. Cause: Potassium concentration in the vitreous humor. A thick jelly-like substance in the eyeball.

  I took a slow measured breath and my gaze shifted to the mouth that gaped open to capture the terror of his final minutes. He’d been stabbed in the heart. He would’ve drowned in his own blood from a severed artery, but not before his body had been carved as if he were a human Etch A Sketch.

  Poor man.

  “Did you hear me, Ryker? I got us a meet and greet. Come on.”

  Crowley had interrupted my link to the bodies. Unlike other investigators, I used more than my eyes and my mind to take in a crime scene. My sixth sense had a tenacious grip that was often difficult to shake off. Being interrupted felt as if Crowley had shoved me into the deep end of the pool, when I couldn’t swim. She didn’t know how profoundly I connected to the dead.

  I didn’t trust anyone with my secret. Not ev
en Crowley, a woman I considered to be a tolerable friend.

  “Sorry, yes.” I waved a hand to let her pass. “You play the brilliant flash and I’ll be the thunderbolt that follows.”

  Her eye roll told me she recognized my version of the bastardized quote. No doubt I’d used it before.

  “It’s definitely too early for Voltaire. Let me do the talking.”

  “My aching head thanks you.”

  After introductions with the locals who had requested the FBI’s help, we set up a game plan for the investigation and my team got to work to lend their expertise and resources. Dr. Julian Martinez was a Medical Examiner and would oversee the autopsies once we got the bodies back to home base. That would give us continuity across the jurisdictions our UNSUB operated. Special Agents Devin Hutchison and Camilla Devore were my evidence recovery techs and the last member of my team had stayed in DC, my computer specialist and resource diva, Sinead Royce.

  When I could focus again on the crime scene—after pressing flesh with the locals—I had questions for Lucinda Crowley.

  “Did this masterpiece come with a note?” I asked. “Our boy loves taking credit.”

  “Yeah, it’s already been bagged and tagged.” She held it out to me. “First thing I asked for, but this one is different.”

  From the expression on her face, I wouldn’t like the difference. I pulled on my latex gloves before I took the bagged piece of evidence in my hand. At the last two crime scenes, the UNSUB had left a generic message, taunting the FBI in a brazen display of superiority.

  This time, the letter had my name at the top.

  “He’s fixated on you now,” she said.

  I felt her eyes on me, but I didn’t meet her gaze. The typed message on the page was personal, directed at me. I read every word.

  This one is for you, Ryker Townsend, Golden Boy of the FBI. My best work yet. It’ll be hard to top, but you know I will.

  A voice and a touch yanked me back to reality.

  “Are you okay?” Crowley reached for my arm. “I’m sure this is nothing more than our UNSUB following the case in the media, but still. It’s creepy.”