Death Notice. Todd Ritter
He pointed to a footprint a few feet away. It was marked with a yellow evidence tag.
“You wax it?” Nick was referring to impression wax. Sprayed from a can, it let them make impressions in the snow without destroying the footprint itself.
“Yeah,” Rudy said. “It belongs to the first responder.”
“Where’s the body?”
“The medical examiner took it away fifteen minutes ago.”
The answer came from the last member of Nick’s team—Cassie Lieberfarb. She stood behind him, a state police baseball cap pressed onto her frizzy orange hair. On her feet were the bright green galoshes she always wore in the field. She called them her profiler boots.
“How was Florida?” she asked, her eyes zeroing in on Nick’s face.
“Hot and sunny.”
“Then where’s your tan?”
Nick shrugged. “I used sunblock. Now back to the murder—who’s the victim?”
“Caucasian male,” Tony said. “Mid-sixties.”
“Just what our guy likes,” Cassie added.
“When is the autopsy?”
“At four.”
Nick compiled a list of things that needed to be done that day. He and Cassie had to examine the corpse before the autopsy started. While they did that, Rudy would supervise the collection and examination of evidence. Tony would wrangle up the best sheriff’s officers he could find and start the legwork. When they met up again eight hours later, they’d hopefully have a time of death, a cause, and enough evidence to point to a suspect. Only Nick and the rest of them already had an idea who the killer was. As for why he killed, none of them could begin to guess.
“Has the victim been identified?” he asked.
“The first responder did an ID,” Tony said.
“Who was that?”
“The police chief.”
“Let me talk to him.”
Cassie pointed to the crowd, picking out a woman in uniform who was dwarfed by the other cops around her.
“She is right there,” she said with sisterly pride. “Her name is Kat Campbell.”
Nick took a moment to size up the chief. She looked exhausted. Her kind eyes were dimmed by the dark circles sagging beneath them, and she moved in the weary, slump-shouldered way of someone carrying a heavy load on her back. Discovering a murder in your own backyard would do that.
“Are you Chief Campbell?” Nick asked as he approached.
The chief nodded. “Are you in charge of the task force?”
“I am,” he responded, shaking her hand. “Nick Donnelly. BCI, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations.”
She eyed his civilian clothes, hoping in vain to find something that indicated his rank and position. Since there wasn’t, Nick volunteered the information.
“I’m a lieutenant,” he said. “But in rank only. In reality, I’m just part of a team trying to catch bad guys.”
“We thank you for the help.”
“Just so we’re clear, the county sheriff has turned the case over to us. So the state police, specifically the BCI, is in charge of the investigation. I hope that sits well with you.”
Kat responded tersely. “Understood.”
“Good. I heard you were first on the scene.”
The chief briefly described everything she had seen and done that morning. It was all by the book, from finding the box to forming a perimeter around the crime scene. That made Nick happy. Sometimes local cops did more harm than good.
“I was told you knew the victim.”
“Only by sight. Perry Hollow’s a small town. After a while, you know everyone.”
Her voice caught on the last word, and for a second, Nick worried that the chief was going to start crying. But she swallowed hard and kept her emotions in check.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We’ve never had a murder before. So it’s been a bad day.”
Nick had no doubt. For Chief Campbell, it was probably the mother of all bad days. And she didn’t know the half of it yet. Once she did, her day was going to go from bad to downright miserable.
FOUR
Kat understood the situation perfectly.
She knew the limitations of Perry Hollow’s police force. Between her and Carl, they barely had enough manpower to write speeding tickets, let alone investigate a homicide. She knew the chain of command in such a situation. If the local cops couldn’t handle a case, jurisdiction moved to the county sheriff. And the sheriff, who was busy running for re-election in the fall, didn’t want to get his hands dirty in a homicide that—if unsolved—could sully his reputation. So he had called in the big guns—the state police. They had the manpower and equipment and a special investigative task force led by lieutenant-in-rank-only Nick Donnelly. Most of all, Kat knew that she needed them more than they needed her, which is why she vowed to do anything that was asked of her.
So, when Nick asked if there was a place his team could work out of, she offered her office. When he wondered if they could make full use of her police force, she introduced him to Carl Bauersox, his eager baby face poking out of his too-tight jacket. And when Nick sought a private place where they could talk, she led him to her patrol car.
And there they sat, the heater cranked on high while the slowly fogging windshield painted the action outside a gauzy gray.
“So why do we need to speak in private?” Kat asked.
Nick answered with a question of his own. “Have you ever heard of the Betsy Ross Killer?”
“No. Interesting nickname, though.”
“I hate it,” Nick said. “But you can thank The Philadelphia Inquirer for it.”
“Why do they call him that?”
“Because like Betsy, he’s good with a needle and thread. His victims had their wounds sewn shut postmortem. Then they were dumped in a public place.”
“How many victims are we talking about?”
“Three so far. The first was found in a park in Philadelphia last year. Another washed up on the shore of Lake Erie nine months ago. The third was found up north in November at World’s End State Park.”
“And you and your task force have been leading the investigation?”
“We have. Three murders. All across the state. And now it might be four.”
It was obvious what Nick was implying, and the thought of it made Kat’s spine stiffen.
“This Betsy Ross Killer—you think he’s the one who murdered George?”
“Perhaps.”
A strong, primal fear pinned Kat to her seat. A murder taking place in Perry Hollow was bad enough. But knowing it could be the work of a serial killer made it all the more horrible. What if he was still in her town? Or worse, what if he lived there, blending in with everyone else?
“Will you be able to confirm that?”
“I hope so,” Nick said. “I need to examine the body. See if there’s a similarity in the stitches and the wounds. Maybe my guys will be able to pick up something from the evidence. So far, Betsy Ross hasn’t left a lot of it behind.”
“And what can I do?”
“Just