Next Victim by Michael Prescott Read Free Book Online Page B

top, darker at the sides. He had no obvious scars, moles, or birthmarks. There was nothing distinctive about him at all.
    Was it Mobius’s face? Could he be this ordinary, this forgettable?
    There was no way to know. Dozens of people had seen Mobius in Denver, and a few had seen him in LA, but no two of them ever seemed to see the same man.
    All that could be said about Mobius was that he was Caucasian and at least five-foot-ten, with a lean but wiry build. All the bartenders and witnesses agreed on these details. That he was white was no surprise; for some reason, nearly all ritualistic sex murders were committed by white men. That he was physically strong was no surprise, either—it would take a strong man to hold down a struggling woman while duct-taping her to a bed.
    Nothing else was known about him. Sometimes his hair was brown, sometimes blond, sometimes thick and long, sometimes thin and close-cropped. He wore glasses occasionally but most often did not. Beards and mustaches came and went on his face, changing as frequently as his style of dress—casual one night, stylish the next.
    People remembered him as anywhere from thirty to fifty. He was a young professional or a middle-aged working man. He reminded some people of a plumber or electrician, while others had him pegged as a college professor or business executive.
    He had never used valet parking, and no one had ever seen his car. He wore a condom and left no semen for the forensic analysts to find. And he was careful to present them with no other clues—no fingerprints, no telltale fibers. He routinely cleaned and disinfected every surface at the crime scene before departing.
    He was cunning and obsessed, and he gave his enemies nothing to work with.
    After the second killing, the Denver media had nicknamed him the Pickup Artist. Although the case had been widely publicized, there had been no decline in the number of people frequenting singles’ bars. Evidently the element of danger injected into the dating milieu had served as a turn-on. No one in LA was paying attention, either—but the media had not yet connected Angie Callahan’s death with the Denver story from two years ago.
    Eventually the details would come out, but most likely curiosity and a pleasurable thrill of passing interest would be the only public reaction. Tess ought to have been happy about that. It made her job easier. But she couldn’t help wondering if passive acceptance of a phenomenon like Mobius was not, in the long run, a greater threat than Mobius himself.
    She noticed that the computer operator was sneaking glances at her. She returned his stare, and he smiled, embarrassed. "You’re Tess McCallum, right? The Black Tiger case."
    Black Tiger again. People always wanted to talk about that.
    "Yes," she said with a shrug.
    "We, uh, we studied it at the academy."
    This made her feel old. "Thanks."
    "That was some amazing work you did."
    "It was a long time ago."
    "Not so long. Seven, eight years, right?"
    She turned away, ending the conversation. "Seems longer."
    Seems like a lifetime , she thought.
     
    "Well," Michaelson was saying, "why don’t we see if you can help us with our problem, Bill. I want to talk about what happened tonight."
    "Nothing happened tonight," Hayde said.
    "Nothing?"
    "Nothing important. Hell, I thought LA was supposed to be laid-back. Live and let live, isn’t that the local philosophy?"
    He seemed calm. Tess wasn’t certain if this was a good or bad sign. Most innocent people, accused of a crime, would protest noisily. But there were exceptions—people so sure of their innocence that they figured it was all a misunderstanding, easily worked out. Or people who simply didn’t allow themselves to be flustered, people who needed to be in control.
    Of course, a sociopath wouldn’t be flustered either.
    Tess wondered which kind of man William Hayde was.
    "It’s the land of casual sex and sunny hedonism," Hayde said. "At least, that’s the subliminal