Blood Sport

  BLOOD SPORT

  JUDITH E. FRENCH

  “Come, Jillian,” he whispered.

  “Come out and play.”

  If just thinking about Jillian could bring on such physical pleasure, what ecstasy would he feel when he drew the blade across her throat and felt the hot spray of her life’s blood on his face? She might be the best kill he’d ever experienced, a worthy addition to his growing flock.

  A woman’s laughter cut through his reverie.

  “Good night,” he heard her say. The gate at the side of the house opened and two figures loomed in the shadows.

  “Sure you don’t want to stay the night?” A male voice.

  “Go to bed. We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  Jillian appeared on the brick walk. Silver moonlight illuminated her face, and Christian’s throat constricted with desire. He reached for his scalpel case, flipped it open and slid out his weapon. It fit his hand perfectly.

  His mouth went dry, and his pulse thundered in his head. She wore only a flimsy shirt and obscenely short shorts. Her feet were bare, and she carried her shoes in one hand. She came closer and he could see her hair hanging loose and wanton around her face.

  She smelled of sex.

  For V. K. Forrest, with love…

  Contents

  Title Page

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Review

  Praise

  Also by Judith E. French

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Northern California

  The gulls had plucked out her eyes.

  Jillian broke into a cold sweat and fought to hold back a hot gush of bile as she stared down at the bloated corpse. Light-headed, breathing through her mouth to avoid the smell, she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the nude body. Ravaged by churning tides, salt water, and jagged rocks, the victim lay sprawled on the coarse sand in a tangle of rotting seaweed.

  Surf crashed and foamed, soaking through Jillian’s sensible Ferragamo pumps, sending icy rivulets to lap around the mutilated remains of what had once been a human being.

  Female. Definitely female.

  Arabella Norwood? Or someone else?

  Despite the salty wind ripping off the ocean and the primeval scents of stormy beach and conifer forest, the body oozed a putrid stench. Drifting black dots vied with pelting needles of rain to blur Jillian’s immediate line of vision. The half of a Cobb salad she’d snatched an hour earlier soured in her stomach. She swallowed hard.

  The local police officer—a forty-something Andy Garcia look-alike who’d first responded to a whale watcher’s hysterical report of a dead body on the beach—gestured toward the dead woman. “Warned you it wasn’t pretty, Special Agent Maxwell.”

  Jillian swallowed again, trying to retain her professionalism despite waves of nausea. She’d sat through gruesome autopsies, watched her share of shattered flesh-and-bone slide shows in the classroom, and even spent more hours than she cared to remember in the ER of an inner-city hospital. Nothing had prepared her for the reality of this victim’s tallow skin and distorted features, the gaping wound in her throat, or the raw, sand-filled hollows—empty cavities that had once held human eyes.

  This death wasn’t accidental. It wasn’t suicide. This was a deliberate and brutal act, committed by a two-legged monster.

  Gusts of wind ripped at Jillian’s hair and wailed in her ears, nearly drowning the banter between her partner, Special Agent Carl Sylvester, and the state policeman. Nearly, but not quite.

  Carl raised his voice to carry over the gale. “Ten bucks says she spews all over her fancy shoes. I offered to let her wait in the car.”

  Jillian fixed Carl with a shriveling glare and mouthed a silent but graphic rebuttal.

  He laughed, a deep-bellied rumble that ended in an annoying wheeze.

  A police photographer in boots and full rain gear tapped Jillian on the shoulder and she stepped back. By the time he’d shot the corpse from all angles, giving special attention to the dragon tattoo that curled around the vic’s buttocks and down one thigh, Jillian had stopped hyperventilating and pulled on a lab glove.

  “Not so prime now, is she?” the local officer shouted. “Hard to imagine she could give anybody a good time for twenty bucks.”

  Carl shrugged. “What do you expect?” And then, ever the comedian, added, “She might have been hot stuff once, but now she’s just another dead crack whore.”

  Incensed by the callousness, Jillian bit back a retort. What ever bad choices the victim had made to bring her to this place, she didn’t deserve such an end. She merited respect. And justice…

  Heart thudding, mouth dry, Jillian knelt in the wet sand and gently lifted the victim’s seaweed-tangled hair off the nape of her neck. The fish-belly-white flesh was bruised and mottled, but the distended skin bore no birthmarks or tattoos here. “It’s all right,” Jillian murmured. “You’re safe now.”

  She let the vic’s hair fall back into place and began to rise when a tiny fiddler crab scuttled from the massive gash in the dead woman’s throat. One claw gripped a clot of something white and obscene. Sickened, Jillian staggered a few yards from the crime scene, dropped to her knees on the sand, and emptied the contents of her late lunch.

  “Pay up,” Carl guffawed.

  “Hell, no! She missed her shoes.”

  Later, as Jillian followed her partner up the steep, rocky path to the highway in her ruined pumps, she paused and glanced back at the body on the beach.

  They’d have to wait for official confirmation, but because of the unusual tattoo, the body was probably Congressman Norwood’s missing twenty-four-year-old daughter, the elusive Arabella, whom a witness had reported seeing dragged into a van two weeks ago. Eventually, someone would have to notify the family. She hoped it wasn’t her.

  Jillian nibbled on the inside of her cheek. It wasn’t the identity of the victim that troubled her. Something about the crime struck a chord. She kept thinking about another case the agency had investigated in Oregon just after Christmas.

  On the surface, the two cases had little in common. Miranda Washington, the Oregon vic, had been a middle-aged, African-American estate lawyer whose fully clothed body had been discovered along a busy interstate highway. Other than gaping throat wounds that had been the cause of both deaths, there wasn’t any obvious link between the cases.

  Jillian’s fingers tingled, as though her skin was too tight, and she felt the first sharp pain of a migraine. Logic, she reminded herself. Logic and good detective work were what solved crimes, not hunches.

  “You coming, Maxwell?” Carl shouted from the gap in the guard rail thirty feet above. “Or do you need me to carry you?”

  She didn’t bother to answer. Thirty-three days until Carl’s retirement. She’d worked with the man for two months and proximity hadn’t endeared him to her one iota. It was a toss-up as to which of them would be happier when he cl
eaned out his desk.

  The rain was coming down harder. The steep path was slippery, and it wouldn’t take much for her to lose her footing. From now on, she’d make it a habit to carry an extra pair of athletic shoes in her briefcase. They’d had a meeting scheduled this morning. She’d never expected to end the afternoon climbing down a cliff face to a rocky beach. So much for her four-hundred-dollar pumps.

  A car horn blared.

  “Stuff it, Carl!”

  Jillian kept mulling over Miranda Washington’s death. Like this victim, Miranda had been murdered elsewhere and dumped. There the similarities ended. Miranda had been married with children. Her husband—the prime suspect in any spouse’s death—had a perfect alibi. He’d been hospitalized on the day of her disappearance. Washington’s car had been found parked in its usual space outside her office, miles from where she was found. Her purse, containing nearly two hundred dollars in cash, and her credit cards lay under her body.

  Strictly speaking, the Washington murder shouldn’t have been an FBI case at all: The police chief in her upscale suburban community had suspected a kidnapping and had asked for the agency’s help.

  Jillian scrambled up the bank to the edge of the road. She could hardly see the surf through the downpour, but she could hear it. Considering the conditions, it was a wonder anyone had found Arabella Norwood at all. Her body could just as easily have lodged in the rocks, been devoured by sharks, or washed out to sea.

  Gooseflesh rose on her nape and Jillian shivered. Miranda and Arabella were two dissimilar women who’d never crossed paths in their lives. Had they in death? Was she searching for a pattern where none existed?

  Probably. It was a fault of hers…always looking for something below the surface…always suspecting the worst.

  Jillian hoped that her intuition was wrong, that Arabella’s murder and Miranda’s hadn’t been committed by the same psychopath. And most of all, she hoped that they weren’t the start of some psychopath’s hot streak.

  ONE

  South Carolina

  June…four years later

  Reed Donovan could think of a lot of places he’d rather spend his afternoon than the Charleston city morgue.

  He glanced back at the remains of the dead woman in the refrigerated drawer and tried to imagine what Tess D’Angelo had looked like when she’d had hair…or skin. He’d never get used to crispy critters. He wasn’t sure why the new team leader had insisted they had to view the victim personally, but from Maxwell’s composure, the sight didn’t bother her as much as it did him.

  Maybe her years on the elite serial killer task force had given her a lot more experience with mutilated corpses. Most agents never investigated a single mass murderer in their careers. Jillian Maxwell had been instrumental in the arrests of three super killers, one of whom had eluded the authorities for twenty years.

  “As you can see,” the deputy medical examiner continued, “the condition of the body—the extent of charring—didn’t give us a lot to work with, but the throat wound was so severe…” He shrugged. “The murder weapon was very sharp. A scalpel…a straight razor…filleting knife…something of that sort. The victim’s head was nearly severed from her body, most certainly before she was engulfed in flames.”

  Charming, Reed thought. He stepped back as the drawer glided shut on silent runners. The fluorescent-lighted morgue was clammy-cool, with a strong smell of freshly applied floor wax underlain with the antiseptic odor of death. His new leather shoes squeaked on the tile as the two of them followed the deputy medical examiner out of the bowels of the medical center to a floral-scented elevator.

  “This will take you to the main floor. If there’s anything else I can do for you, don’t hesitate to contact me. Now…if you’ll excuse me, I’m afraid I’m scheduled for another autopsy.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Maxwell said. “You’ve been most helpful. We can find our own way out.” She shook the man’s hand and stepped into the elevator.

  Reed waited until the door closed behind them. “Sorry I didn’t meet you at the airport. My plane was delayed on the runway in Baltimore.”

  “No problem. It happens.”

  “I didn’t want you to think I make a habit of leaving my partner waiting.”

  He’d promised to meet her at the Charleston Airport so they could drive to the medical examiner’s office together, but he’d arrived thirty minutes late. By the time he’d reached the agreed-upon spot, she’d gone on ahead. There was a line at the rental station, and he’d made things worse by taking a wrong turn coming out of the airport.

  Maxwell was here in the parking lot when he’d reached the ME’s office. They’d exchanged hasty pleasantries and arrived twenty minutes late for their meeting with the chief medical investigator, one of his deputies, and two detectives. Not the best beginning when their involvement was strictly a courtesy on the part of the Charleston police department.

  “The day has to get better,” Reed said. “I hate being late, and I hate morgues.”

  Maxwell nodded.

  “I’ll be glad to get outside and breathe some fresh air.”

  “Affirmative.” The sickly sweet smell in the elevator made her light-headed. Tess D’Angelo’s remains had been bad. The worst she’d ever seen. But she wasn’t going to be sick this time. She’d deliberately skipped lunch, unwilling to allow Donovan any reason to ridicule her or to forget who was in charge of this operation. Secretly, she’d been glad he’d screwed up. It had given her the edge, and he was scrambling to catch up.

  She hoped the infamous “Cowboy” Donovan would be an asset to her investigation. He was larger than life, a legend in the ranks of field agents, but he was one of the old guard. He might not appreciate being pulled off a high-profile extortion and money-laundering case to take orders from a woman eleven years his junior. Regardless of Donovan’s enthusiasm or lack of it, she was confident of her ability to deal with him. He might be a hotshot, but so was she.

  As they reached the main floor and exited the elevator, Reed glanced at his watch. Somewhere in the rush, he’d forgotten breakfast. The last thing he remembered eating was a burger and fries sometime around midnight. Now, it was way past lunchtime and his stomach was protesting.

  Maxwell had originally intended to fly in to Baltimore from her home in San Francisco on Thursday, but she’d called earlier in the week to ask him to meet her here in Charleston. Tess D’Angelo’s murder wasn’t a Bureau case—simply an exchange of information between local authorities and the agency. He wasn’t certain why Maxwell was so interested in what appeared to be a routine homicide, but upper management had been clear. Maxwell might call herself his partner on this assignment, but he’d been put on notice. She was in charge.

  One of the city detectives involved in the investigation had read an article Maxwell had written on serial killers in Psychology Today. Although D’Angelo’s husband, Peter, was the prime suspect, Detective Williams thought Maxwell might be interested.

  Reed waited until they’d passed through the lobby and were outside before he asked, “Want to check into the hotel, freshen up, and catch an early dinner? I know a great bistro. Terrific seafood.”

  After viewing the burned body in the morgue, Jillian didn’t think she’d want to eat again for a long time. She shook her head. “I’d rather inspect the area where the body was discovered.”

  “Not much there, according to Detective Williams. Lonely dead-end marsh. No houses or businesses. We could check it out in the morning before we fly back to Baltimore.”

  “I still want to view the scene,” she insisted.

  “You’re the boss. You can bring me up to speed on why you think this murder is linked to your unsub.”

  “I never said that. I don’t make assumptions without evidence.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do I suspect he could be involved? Maybe.” She put on her sunglasses. “Let’s not waste time. We can leave one car here or at the hotel and take a look before dark.”

  Reed stifled a groan.
His empty stomach would have to wait a while longer. “All right, we’ll check out the crime scene. But we’re taking my SUV.” He indicated the big vehicle parked in the visitors’ section. “According to one of the detectives, a lot of the low-lying streets—including the area where the victim’s body was discovered—are still flooded from the heavy rains earlier this month. I’ve got four-wheel drive.”

  “The hotel it is, Cowboy.”

  He grimaced. “It’s Reed. Not Cowboy. Cowboy was a long time ago.”

  She chuckled. “Not so long. How many bad guys did you take out in that gunfight in D.C.? Four? I know you saved the lives of two wounded DEA agents and received a special citation for bravery under fire. Sounds like you earned the title.”

  “Fifteen years ago. You can call me Donovan, if you prefer.”