The Surviving Girls Read online

  Then again, he wouldn’t be here otherwise.

  He held the police tape out of the way for Clarke Rowan, his partner. She shot him a sharp look, but it was half-hearted at best. In the years they’d worked together, they’d learned to pick their battles. Clarke put up with his “macho blue-blood bullshit,” and he didn’t take the chip on her shoulder personally.

  She ducked under the tape. “Figures that we’re not getting two cake cases in a row.”

  “Not sure the last one qualifies as a cake case.”

  “It was as open-and-shut as they get. Husband cheats on wife with yoga instructor. Wife kills husband and yoga instructor and, since she happens to be an avid Stephen King fan, tries to put a ritual spin on the murders to point the cops in a different direction. It took us twelve hours to figure out.”

  “Because you’re an avid reader of horror, and those cops weren’t.”

  Clarke’s fascination with all things macabre qualified as one of those things he’d never understand, no matter how long they were partners. Working for the FBI—and the Behavioral Analysis Unit, specifically—meant they saw the worst humanity had to offer. After the cases he’d worked, he needed the mental break that comedy or even action provided. Horror didn’t fit the bill.

  But Clarke never bothered to fit into any expectations.

  Dante nodded at the detective standing outside the front door. It was rare that the BAU was called in before the scene had gone cold, but he and Clarke had already been in the area for the aforementioned murders about an hour south of here. “Detective Smith?”

  “You BAU?”

  “Agents Young and Rowan.”

  He eyed them, and Dante found himself holding his breath. Seattle was known for being forward thinking, but that didn’t mean it extended to Detective Smith. He and Clarke were quite the pair, and he knew it. A big black man and a tiny little redhead with freckles who looked about sixteen didn’t exactly scream Feds to most local cops. It was why Britton Washburne, their boss, usually kept them to cases in bigger cities unless he felt an exception needed to be made.

  Finally, Smith sighed, and his shoulders dropped half an inch. “Might as well take a look.” He motioned to a scrawny brunet standing by. “Mitch, get them booties and gloves.”

  Dante exchanged a look with Clarke. Booties weren’t a good sign. The bodies had already been carted off by the coroner, and the preliminary forensics scan was complete. There was less worry about contaminating the scene now, but if they needed to cover their shoes, that meant the scene was just as bad as he’d expected from the cops’ faces.

  He pulled on the plastic shoe covers and followed Smith into the apartment. They were in the university district, which meant the victims were likely students. “Where did they attend?”

  “University of Washington. All three were graduating this year.”

  “Bummer,” Clarke muttered.

  Smith shot her a sharp look but didn’t comment. The main floor of the apartment didn’t appear to have anything out of place but for a single lamp knocked over. Dante moved to the sliding glass door overlooking the street. They were on the second floor, which was high enough to give the occupants comfort, but it wasn’t much of a deterrent if someone was determined to gain access. He tried the door. “Unlocked.”

  “You think he came in there?”

  Dante was already moving again, circling through the kitchen. A knife was missing from the block. Not enough to break in. Have to kill them with a weapon from their own apartment. Something about that pulled at him, like he’d seen or heard of it before, but he set it aside.

  This pass was for first impressions. Later he’d go through second impressions and see what else popped.

  “That way.” Smith pointed up the stairs.

  “Not joining us, Detective?” The edge in Clarke’s voice spoke volumes. She’d seen that initial hesitation and resented it. She always did—as much on his behalf as on her own.

  “I’ve seen it. No need to see it again.”

  Dante braced himself. He already knew the bare minimum—three female victims, all stabbed to death—but there was stabbed and then there was stabbed. For the BAU to be the first call the locals made . . .

  Walk up the damn stairs and see for yourself.

  He followed Clarke to the second floor. For a second, Dante thought the carpet had changed from the nondescript beige to a shocking crimson, then his mind caught up with his eyes, and he realized that it was soaked with blood. It started just before the first door, and even after several hours, spots gleamed wetly in the light.

  “Fuck,” Clarke breathed. “This is worse than the last one, and that chick was trying.”

  “Yeah.” He edged around her and walked carefully down the hall. There were several sets of footprints in the liquid, but there was no telling which belonged to the unsub—the unknown subject—and which to investigators.

  The first door was cracked open, and he touched it with a gloved finger to push it the rest of the way open. Where the downstairs looked almost eerily idyllic, all the violence had been saved for this floor of the apartment.

  Judging from the shredded state of the mattress and the blood spatter on the wall, the unsub had caught a victim here in her room and then dragged her into the hallway. “Where were the bodies found?” He raised his voice just enough to carry down to Smith.

  “Office up there. All three were laid out.” Smith sounded vaguely sick to his stomach and pissed off about it.

  The other two rooms were variations of the same. Slashed beds. Blood everywhere. A trail leading into the hallway and then farther down to the fourth door. “Lots of work. How’d the others sleep through their roommate being stabbed to death?” Clarke grimaced at the blood on the floor. “This is a shit-ton of trauma. No one sleeps through that, even if you’re drunk as fuck during spring break.”

  “Time of death and a tox screen will tell us a lot.” He followed her into the office. It was the biggest of the rooms, and it was more rec room than office. A desk with an iMac was set up in the corner, as well as a printer and some other tech. A second desk held a charging station with two computers; headphones in pink, blue, and red, respectively; and a tablet. The couch was old and threadbare, but clean. Or it had been.

  There was enough blood on the floor that he could see the faint impressions where the bodies had lain until the cops were notified by a friend of one of the girls who’d come over for a study session but found that no one answered the door or their phones. The landlord had let her in, and they’d found the carnage. The girl’d had the foresight to call the police and stay out of the scene—a small miracle.

  But Clarke was right. There was something off about the timing. Dante turned a slow circle, taking in the room again. “Phones.”

  “What?”

  He strode to the desk with the charging station. Tucked in the drawer were three phones, all crushed.

  Clarke leaned around to get a look at them. “Why crush the phones if he sneak-attacked them in their rooms? For that matter, how the hell did you know they were here?”

  The memory that had bothered him downstairs solidified. I know this case. I’ve seen this before, if only in case files. “You’re, what, twenty-five?”

  “You know damn well that I’m twenty-nine, asshole.”

  He gave her a brief smile despite the scene around them. “Right around the time you were graduating high school, there was a case like this. Bigger. Flashier. A higher body count. The Sorority Row Murders.”

  “No shit? I vaguely remember that.” She frowned at the room. “That guy killed like thirty women. Even as far away as Chicago, that was big news. Weren’t there survivors?”

  “He killed twenty-one, and yeah, there were two survivors.” He’d been going through the academy at the time, and one of his instructors had used the case as a teaching point. Those survivors—their names escaped him—were key witnesses in identifying Travis Berkley as the man who killed their sorority sisters, but
local cops still had to build the case against him.

  As the only son of billionaire Gerald Berkley—along with being a football star, holding a 4.0 GPA, and volunteering at a homeless shelter in his free time—Travis was borderline untouchable. The girls’ accusations initially brought only disbelief.

  But as more and more evidence was collected, it became increasingly clear that he was just as much a monster as they’d accused him of being. It had been one of the most sensational cases in the last decade or so, and Dante had found the whole thing fascinating, in a horrifying kind of way. To him, it just went to show that good police work could bring down even the smartest and most privileged of killers.

  “Don’t tell me he got out on parole?”

  Dante shook his head. “He’s still locked up, last I heard.” He eyed the phones. “He locked the girls in their main room and then took them out one by one. At first, he told them he was letting each girl go, but eventually the carnage was too much to hide, and he stopped pretending he was doing anything other than murdering them.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “Yeah.” The stuff of nightmares. “But if this guy is following that MO, then that explains why the women didn’t hear their friends being murdered—they didn’t sleep through it. They were locked in here.”

  “Which invites the question—who’s using Travis Berkley’s playbook?”

  And where would he strike next?

  CHAPTER TWO

  The coroner represented Dante’s least favorite stop in any murder investigation. There was no escaping the smell he always associated with death—cold and clinical, with the underlying base of shit and blood. No amount of sterilization could cover up the fact that the row of square metal doors on the far side of the room contained any number of bodies.

  But only three bodies brought them there today.

  Detective Smith had escorted them down to the morgue. He didn’t look any happier to be here than Dante was. The older man held himself straight and looked pointedly at the medical examiner instead of the corpses. “What have you got for us?”

  The ME had the physique of someone who ran regularly—thin and ropy in his midfifties. His dark hair had a smattering of gray at the temples, but he wasn’t slowing down anytime soon, if Dante didn’t miss his guess.

  The medical examiner raised his thick eyebrows. “Feds? Already?”

  “You’ve seen the bodies. You know why I called them in.”

  Dante exchanged a look with Clarke. They’d been under the impression that it was the state of the crime scene that prompted BAU’s involvement. Obviously Smith had held back something important.

  “Point to you.” The ME turned to them. “Dr. Jordan Franco. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but no one comes down here for the pleasure of my company.”

  “Get to it, Franco.”

  Dr. Franco smirked. “Put on your big-boy pants, Smith. This is going to be a bad one.” He moved to uncover one body after the other.

  Two Caucasians and one African American. Pretty girls, though that was the only thing they had in common. The first was tiny and dark haired. Her skin would have been pale even before the multitude of stab wounds drained the blood from her body. The black girl was tall and lean with well-defined muscles that spoke of many hours in the gym, and probably some kind of sport. Her neatly cornrowed hair supported that theory. The final girl, a blonde, was curvy with shoulder-length hair. She had bright-red nails, which drew the eye in a room devoid of color.

  Each girl’s torso was a mess of wounds, ranging from the throat to just above the pubic bone. Dante tried to count, but it was impossible—especially since some of them ran into one another. “How many?”

  “Fifty-one, twenty-seven, sixty-two.” Dr. Franco pointed to each body in turn.

  “That’s a lot of frenzy.” Clarke moved closer to the brunette. “Did he rape them?”

  “It appears he tried but wasn’t able to complete the act.”

  Was the frenzy because he was unable to perform? Or did the frenzy come first? Dante joined his partner at the edge of the metal table. “How close were the deaths, timewise?”

  “It’s hard to get a good gauge, but they were all killed within a two-hour window from one a.m. to three a.m.” Dr. Franco hesitated, looking less than sure of himself for the first time since they’d walked into the room. “This is where it gets weird.”

  Clarke barked out a laugh. “It wasn’t weird before? We practically needed waders to walk through the blood in that apartment.”

  The ME pulled back the coverings that had hidden the girls’ lower bodies. Dante froze. It took him precious seconds to make sense of what he was seeing. “He wrote on them.”

  “He carved words into them.” Dr. Franco paled slightly. “These wounds happened before the stabbings.”

  Dante shifted to read the words better. “‘For Trevor,’” he read aloud. The same phrase on all three bodies.

  Clarke whistled. “If he’s that much of a fan, you’d think he’d get the name right. You said the Sorority Row Killer was Travis Berkley?”

  “Yeah.” The message could be meant for someone else entirely, but that didn’t seem to jibe with the details they’d come up with so far. This had all the elements of a tribute, but the obvious target for the obsession was the Sorority Row Killer. To have a different—similar—name on the bodies . . . It didn’t make sense.

  “Do you see what we’re dealing with now?” Smith finally moved forward. “I remember the Berkley case back in the day. I had a friend who worked it, but I’d left California by that point.” He shook his head. “I don’t want a copycat fucking around in my city. I don’t have any use for the Feds normally, but this is bigger than a pissing contest over jurisdiction.”

  Dante didn’t take the detective’s dislike of Feds personally. It was a viewpoint that a lot of cops shared. The media liked the FBI. The second they discovered the Feds were on the scene, they focused on the agents rather than the local police. If and when the case was solved, the glory often went to the FBI as a result, despite their best efforts. He focused on Smith. “You think he’s linked to Travis Berkley.” Dante believed as much, but he wanted to hear the detective’s thoughts.

  “I looked up the details of that case to refresh my memory the second I realized what these murders reminded me of.” Smith squared his shoulders, as if preparing to walk into a fight. “The details match, though we can’t be sure if this guy was let in by one of the girls or if he broke in. But the process of hauling them to the office and then taking them out one by one to rape and kill matches. Though Berkley was able to perform the rape itself, and he only stabbed about half of the victims.”

  Dante remembered. The other half were bludgeoned, strangled, or shot. Berkley had worked his way up to stabbing the last fifteen girls. This unsub had started right in with it.

  Fewer girls means less warm-up time. The thwarted rape would enrage him, too. All that planning and careful execution, and he couldn’t perform. “Berkley killed those girls in California. What’s linking Seattle to LA?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  Clarke crossed her arms over her chest. “We know where the survivors are? If this guy is a fan, he might take it into his head to finish what Travis Berkley started. Berkley might even be encouraging him to do exactly that.”

  Which meant they were going to have to talk to Travis Berkley.

  It also meant they were going to have to see how easy the survivors were to track down. If this unsub was writing love notes on the bodies of his victims, this wasn’t something that was going to stop. Whatever the source of the obsession—whether romantic or adoration or something else altogether—he would only escalate, either to provoke a response from Berkley or to prove his devotion. Neither option was good for his future victims.

  Lei took Saul for a quick walk around the property before she went into the house. Theoretically, it was to give him some exercise after the long car ride
before they settled in for the night. In her heart of hearts, though, she could admit that what she really wanted to do was make sure everything was as it should be.

  All the cameras were working, and nothing had been disturbed, but that didn’t stop the hair from rising at the nape of her neck. She stopped in the middle of the lawn and turned to face the trees that edged the area. If there was someone out there, the cameras would have caught them, and Emma would have called the cops. Saul would already be on high alert, rather than sitting next to the front door and patiently waiting for her to let him inside.

  Yet the heebie-jeebie feeling raised goose bumps along her exposed skin.

  Lei gave herself a shake and took the porch stairs two a time. She unlocked the front door and held it open for Saul. “Rest, Saul.”

  He nosed her hand and then trotted down the hall to the kitchen where they kept the dogs’ food. Lei shut the door and locked both dead bolts behind her before she called out, “I’m home.” Even as she said the magical words, the tense thing inside her slowly uncoiled. Another one down. She wasn’t sure she believed in karmic balance, but after everything, the only thing Lei wanted was to put out some good in the world.

  “In the kitchen,” came the reply.

  She followed Emma’s voice and found her friend pulling a rack of cookies out of the oven. Chocolate chip, from the smell. Her friend looked much the same way she had on that first day of rush for Omega Delta Lambda—beautiful and blonde and curvy. Back then, they’d both smiled a lot more and laughed about nothing and had secretly believed they were immortal. Their friendship might have survived that horrible night—but not much else of their respective personalities had.

  Lei leaned against the doorframe. “What’s wrong?”

  “Why would anything be wrong?” Emma set the cookie sheet on the stove and then popped a second one in the oven and started the timer. All while not looking over.

  “Because you’re baking cookies while on a no-carb diet.” She kept her voice low and even. Once upon a time, Emma had been a social-justice warrior who was all too willing to step to the line in any argument, while Lei shied away from that kind of confrontation because it reminded her of her parents’ constant arguing. These days, they’d flipped. Lei jumped headfirst into every confrontation in an effort to conquer the fear she never quite escaped, and Emma curled up like a wounded animal at the first sign of raised voices.