Killer by Stephen Carpenter Read Free Book Online Page B

he was smart, he was cool-headed, and he was meticulous. Katherine had seen all manner of crime scene photographs of other murder victims’ graves, but this was the first time Katherine, in her rookie year as an FBI Special Agent, had seen Killer’s handiwork up close and in person.
    The most telling thing, she thought, was the pattern of footprints around the grave. It was always the same. Not the prints themselves—Killer changed his shoes for each murder, using different sized shoes. It was the pattern of the footprints that revealed him to her. She could tell from the footprints that he had walked around the grave for a long time, looking down at Grace Beverly before he began dumping dirt on her. All of the other footprints—approaching the scene, carrying the body, then leaving—showed an economy of action. His movements were direct and certain; he knew exactly what he was doing and where he was going and there were no false starts, there was no backtracking. Except for the burial itself. And then, at each gravesite, he would move around the grave many times, walking around and around it several times…
    To what purpose?
    Katherine imagined him, pacing around the grave. She could see from the angle of the footprints that he was looking down at her—all of the footprints pointed toward the grave, with a slightly deeper indentation at the front of the foot, suggesting his head was tilted down. It seemed to have the feeling of ritual. There was something almost elegiac about it.
    Or was he simply gloating? Admiring his work.
    A warm Santa Ana wind blew Katherine’s short brown hair across her face. She thought of Grace Beverly in her final moments when he took the knife to her—and the projection of sheer terror made Katherine stop her mind instantly, as she had been trained. She tucked her hair behind her ear and knelt carefully at the gravesite and examined each footprint closely, focusing on the job to chase away the Darkness that was palpable in places like this. Since her training began she had been on site at eleven separate murder scenes. They could drag out a million floodlights and the Darkness would still be there, hovering around the place of death. Katherine didn’t believe in ghosts, but she believed in monsters. Because she had seen firsthand what monsters do.
     

    CHAPTER EIGHT

    Dawn is breaking over New York City as we make our approach at Newark. I have finished Killer, reading a few passages several times. I close my eyes, exhaustion catching up with me.
    There was nothing in the book about the hair clip or the olive tree. I remember why now. In my first draft Killer put Grace Beverly’s head and hands in the tree, with her hands in a praying position. But Judith Price, my editor, had scratched the sequence out with her blue pencil. “Too much information!” she had scrawled in the margins. It gave her the creeps. I told her that was the point, but I didn’t put up much of a fight. It was, after all, my first book, and it was far too long. I had to cut something. So I took it out.
    The wheels bump on the runway and I am propelled forward as the pilot deploys the thrust reversers. I feel tired and drained by fear and confusion.
    The passage about Katherine Kendall’s visit to the crime scene at Temescal Canyon was hauntingly exact, but there were a few odd discrepancies. The parking lot was gravel, not paved, the cinderblock meeting house was on the other side of the creek, and the grave was much higher up on the ridge. Like Beverly Grace’s name, which I simply reversed to Grace Beverly, there was a strange kind of reversal to certain things. They were flipped, as though reflected in a mirror.
    I sit staring ahead, my mind and body numb. I am hungry and tired and I can’t think. I get up and follow my fellow passengers off the plane as everyone takes out their cell phones and calls the office, calls home, calls their ride, calls someone.
    I come out of the gate and into the airport and I