Survival Clause
it easier,” Rafe agreed. “The feds sometimes try to take over. And they can be…”He hesitated.
“Pushy?”
His lips curved. “I was thinking ‘condescending bastards,’ but pushy works, too.”
I nodded. “So first you have to figure out who she was and where she came from, and then you can go there and start looking around?”
“Something like that. And on that note—” he turned to Grimaldi, “I’ll go get ready.”
She nodded. I busied myself with the hot chocolate while he walked through the kitchen and down the hall. Over by the door, Pearl the pitbull looked up and slapped her tail against the fabric of her pillow a couple of times before she settled back down. The bullet wound on her flank was still pink and puffy against the silvery gray fur that was just starting to grow back around it.
“Good girl,” I told her, and turned back to Grimaldi. “How do you feel?”
She opened her mouth, probably to claim she had no feelings whatsoever, but she closed it again without speaking. And took a few seconds to settle her thoughts before responding. “I’m not sure. I’ve been tracking this guy—or his victims, more accurately—since I came on the job almost a decade ago. They were always left somewhere else. Now that he’s put one where I can actually investigate it, I’m almost afraid to believe it.”
I nodded. I could well believe that. “Worried you won’t be able to solve the case?”
“No.” She sounded surprised I’d even ask.
“He probably isn’t local, you know. You might be able to investigate the crime—” If Bob Satterfield allowed it, since it was his jurisdiction, “but if the murderer isn’t local, you won’t be able to catch him.”
“I’ll find a way,” Grimaldi said.
“As you said, he might not even be in Tennessee.” No reason to think he was. He could be based anywhere along I-65, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.
That included here, of course. So he might be from here, huge coincidence or not.
Grimaldi nodded when I said so. “That would be nice. But not very likely, I’m afraid. Whoever dumped the body was at the trailer stop. If he lived nearby, he had no reason to stop at the truck stop. He could just go home.”
“Unless he wanted to get rid of the body,” I said. “He wouldn’t want to take it home. It’d be hard to explain away, if he doesn’t live alone.”
“Eighty percent of serial killers are unmarried,” Grimaldi said.
“That means twenty percent are married. He could have a wife.”
Grimaldi shrugged.
“And he has to be from somewhere. I don’t think the truck stop is enough of a clue, though. He could have stopped there simply to get rid of the body. Or to do whatever it is he does to them…”
“Rape,” Grimaldi said distantly, “mutilate, and strangle.”
I blinked. And it took me a second or two to get my voice to cooperate. “What do you mean, mutilate? What does he do?”
“Carves a number on the body,” Grimaldi said. “Or a numeral, I should say.”
That wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, honestly, although it was bad enough. And quite chilling. I could almost feel the ice cubes drop into my stomach as I asked, “You mean, he numbers the victims?”
She nodded.
“In Roman numerals?”
“Yes,” Grimaldi said.
Well, that made a certain kind of sense, anyway. Roman numerals are all straight lines. Much easier to carve than curved Arabic numbers. Which, I’m sure, was why the Romans did it that way in the first place. Made it easier with all those marble monuments.
“Which number is he up to?” I wanted to know, and I’ll admit that it took effort to keep my voice steady.
“Eighteen,” Grimaldi said.
“XVIII.”
She nodded.
“He’s killed eighteen people?”
“He or they. There might be more than one murderer.”
Maybe. That’s a lot of murders for just one person. On the bright side— “At least you know that those are all the victims.”
“Not necessarily,” Grimaldi said. “We know that those are the victims he’s claimed. But there might have been earlier murders. While he was practicing, finding his style. Before he decided to start counting.”
Ugh.
“And there could be others he just didn’t claim, for one reason or another. But we can say with certainty that these eighteen are his. There might be more, but there can’t be less. Not if they were all marked in the same way. No one else would have known to do that.”
We stood in silence a moment. I took another sip of chocolate, but instead of tasting rich and creamy, it filled my mouth with bitterness. I put the cup down. “Your mother…”
“Number three,” Grimaldi said.
I saw the three straight lines in my head, and swallowed hard. “At least you know for sure that she’s one of them. Once you find him, there won’t be any doubt that he did it.”
Grimaldi nodded, just as Rafe’s footsteps came down the stairs and then along the hallway toward us. He stopped in the doorway and looked from Grimaldi to me and back. “Everything all right?”
“As right as it can be,” Grimaldi told him, as she put her mug on the counter. “Ready?”
He nodded. “Sorry, darlin’. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
“Take your time,” I told him. “Pearl and I, and Carrie, will be fine here.”
He nodded, and dropped a quick kiss on my lips before turning to the door. “Let’s go.”
They went. I followed them out to the foyer, where I watched Grimaldi’s official SUV roll down the driveway to the road before I locked and bolted the front door and headed back to the kitchen to clean up the mugs.
It was late when he came back. I was up again with Carrie, for her middle-of-the-night feeding, when I saw the headlights move across the wall as the car turned into the driveway, and heard the crunch of tires on the gravel. A car door opened and—with a low-voiced comment—closed again, and then I heard footsteps on the porch and the key in the door.
He gave me a quick