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Once Craved

Chapter Eight

The broad surface of Nimbo Lake looked still and tranquil as the helicopter approached it.

But looks can fool you, Riley reminded herself. She knew well that calm surfaces could guard dark secrets.

The helicopter descended, then wobbled as it hovered in search of a place to land. Riley felt a little queasy from the unsteady movement. She didn’t much like helicopters. She looked at Bill, who was sitting next to her. She thought he looked equally uneasy.

But when she glanced over at Agent Holbrook, his face seemed blank to her. He had barely said a word during the half-hour flight from Phoenix. Riley didn’t yet know what to make of him. She was used to reading people easily – sometimes too easily for her own comfort. But Holbrook still struck her as an enigma.

The helicopter finally touched down, and all three FBI agents stepped out onto solid ground, ducking through the churning air under the still-spinning blades. The road where the chopper had landed was nothing more than parallel tire tracks through the desert weeds.

Riley observed that the road didn’t look heavily used. Even so, it appeared that enough vehicles had passed over it during the past week to conceal any tracks left by whatever the killer had been driving.

The noisy helicopter engine died down, making it easier to talk as Riley and Bill followed Holbrook on foot.

“Tell us what you can about this lake,” Riley said to Holbrook.

“It’s one of a series of reservoirs created by dams along the Acacia River,” Holbrook said. “This is the smallest of the artificial lakes. It’s stocked with fish, and it’s a popular recreation spot, but the public areas are on the other side of the lake. The body was discovered by a couple of teenagers stoned on pot. I’ll show you where.”

Holbrook led them off the road to a stone ridge overlooking the lake.

“The kids were right where we’re standing,” he said. He pointed down to the edge of the lake. “They looked down there and saw it. They said that it just looked like a dark shape in the water.”

“What time of day were the kids here?” Riley asked.

“A little earlier than it is right now,” Holbrook said. “They had cut school and gotten stoned.”

Riley took in the whole scene. The sun was low, and the tops of the red rock cliffs across the lake were ablaze with light. There were a couple of boats out on the water. The sheer drop from the ridge down to the water wasn’t far – a mere ten feet, maybe.

Holbrook pointed to a place nearby where the slope wasn’t as steep.

“The kids climbed down over there to get a closer look,” he said. “That’s when they found out what it really was.”

Poor kids, Riley thought. It had been some two decades since she’d tried marijuana back in college. Even so, she could well imagine the heightened horror of making such a discovery while under the influence.

“Do you want to climb down there for a closer look?” Bill asked Riley.

“No, it’s a good view from here,” Riley said.

Her gut told her that she was right where she needed to be. After all, the killer surely hadn’t lugged the body down the same slope where the kids had gone down.

No, she thought. He stood right here.

It even looked like the sparse vegetation was still broken down a little where she was standing.

She took a few breaths, trying to slip into his point of view. He’d undoubtedly come here at night. But was it a clear night or a cloudy one? Well, in Arizona at this time of year, the chances were that the night was clear. And she recalled that the moon would have been bright about a week ago. In the starlight and moonlight, he could have seen what he was doing pretty well – possibly even without a flashlight.

She imagined him putting the body down right here. But then what had he done next? Obviously he had rolled the body off the ledge. It had fallen straight down into the shallow water.

But something about this scenario struck Riley as wrong. She wondered again, as she had on the plane, how he could have been so careless.

True, from up here on the ledge, he probably couldn’t have seen that the body hadn’t sunk very far. The kids had described the bag as “a dark shape in the water.” From this height, the submerged bag had likely been invisible even on a bright night. He’d assumed that the body had sunk, as newly dead bodies do in fresh water, especially when weighted down with stones.

But why did he suppose that the water was deep right here?

She peered down into the clear water. In the late afternoon light, she could easily see the submerged ledge where the body had landed. It was a small horizontal area, nothing more than the top of a boulder. Around it, the water was black and deep.

She looked around the lake. Sheer cliffs jutted up everywhere out of the water. She could see that Nimbo Lake had been a deep canyon before the dam had filled it with water. She saw only a few places where one could walk along the shoreline. The cliff sides dropped straight down into the depths.

To her right and left, Riley saw ridges that were similar to the one where they were standing, rising to about the same height. The water beneath those cliffs was dark, showing no signs of the kind of ledge that lay below right here.

She felt a tingle of comprehension.

“He’s done this before,” she told Bill and Holbrook. “There’s another body in this lake.”

*

On the helicopter ride back to the FBI Phoenix Division headquarters, Holbrook said, “So you think this is a serial case after all?”

“Yes, I do,” Riley said.

Holbrook said, “I wasn’t positive. Mostly I was eager to get someone good on the case. But what did you see that made up your mind?”

“There are other ledges that look just like the one he pushed this body over,” she explained. “He used one of those other drop-offs before, and that body sank just like it was supposed to. But maybe he couldn’t find the same spot this time. Or maybe he thought this was the same spot. Anyway, he expected the same result this time. He was wrong.”

Bill said, “I told you she’d find something there.”

“Divers will need to search this lake,” Riley added.

“That will take some doing,” Holbrook said.

“It’s got to be done anyway. There’s another body down there somewhere. You can count on it. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but it’s there.”

She paused, mentally assessing what all this said about the killer’s personality. He was competent and capable. This wasn’t a pathetic loser, like Eugene Fisk. He was more like Peterson, the killer who had captured and tormented both her and April. He was shrewd and poised, and he thoroughly enjoyed killing – a sociopath rather than a psychopath. Above all else, he was confident.

Maybe too confident for his own good, Riley thought.

It might well prove to be his downfall.

She said, “The guy we’re looking for isn’t some criminal lowlife. My guess is he’s an ordinary citizen, reasonably well-educated, maybe with a wife and family. Nobody who knows him thinks he’s a killer.”

Riley watched Holbrook’s face as they talked. Although she now knew something about the case she hadn’t known before, Holbrook still struck her as utterly impenetrable.

The helicopter circled over the FBI building. Twilight had fallen and the area below was well lighted.

“Look there,” Bill said, pointing out the window.

Riley looked down where he pointed. She was surprised to see that from here the rock garden looked like a gigantic fingerprint. It spread out beneath them like a welcome sign. Some offbeat landscaper had decided that this image arranged out of stone was better suited for the new FBI building than a planted garden would have been. Hundreds of substantial stones had been carefully placed in curving rows to create the ridged illusion.

“Wow,” Riley said to Bill. “Whose fingerprint do you suppose they used? Someone legendary, I guess. Dillinger, maybe?”

“Or maybe John Wayne Gacy. Or Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Riley thought it a strange spectacle. On the ground, no one would ever guess that the arrangement of stones was anything more than a meaningless maze.

It struck her almost as a sign and a warning. This case was going to demand that she view things from a new and unsettling perspective. She was about to probe regions of darkness that not even she had imagined.

Chapter Nine

The man enjoyed watching streetwalkers. He liked how they grouped on the corner and pranced up and down the sidewalks, mostly in pairs. He found them to be much feistier than call girls and escorts, prone to easily losing their temper.

For example, right now, he saw one cursing a bunch of uncouth young guys in a slow-moving vehicle for taking her picture. The man didn’t blame her one bit. After all, she was here to do business, not to serve as scenery.

Where’s their respect? he thought with a smirk. Kids these days.

Now the guys were laughing at her and yelling obscenities. But they couldn’t match her colorful retorts, some of them in Spanish. He liked her style.

He was slumming tonight, parked along a row of cheap motels where streetwalkers gathered. The other girls were less vivacious than the one who had done the cursing. Their attempts at sexiness looked awkward by comparison, and their come-ons were crude. As he watched, one hiked up her skirt to show her skimpy underpants to the driver of a slowly passing car. The driver didn’t stop.

He kept his eye on the girl who had first drawn his attention. She was stomping around indignantly, complaining to the other girls.

The man knew he could have her if he wanted her. She could be his next victim. All he had to do to get her attention was to drive along the curb toward her.

But no, he wouldn’t do that. He never did that. He’d never approach a hooker on the street. It was up to her to approach him. It was the same even with whores he met through a service or a brothel. He’d get them to meet him alone somewhere separately without ever asking directly. It would seem like their idea.

With some luck, the feisty girl would notice his expensive car and trot right on over. His car was wonderful bait. So was the fact that he dressed well.

But however the night ended, he had to be more careful than last time. He’d been sloppy, dropping her body over that ledge and expecting her to sink.

And such a stir she had created! An FBI agent’s sister! And they’d called in big guns from Quantico. He didn’t like it. He wasn’t out for publicity or fame. All he wanted to do was indulge his cravings.

And didn’t he have every right? What healthy adult man didn’t have his cravings?

Now they were going to send divers down in the lake to look for bodies. He knew what they might find there, even after some three years. He didn’t like that at all.

It wasn’t just out of concern for himself. Oddly, he felt bad for the lake. Having divers probe and poke into its every submerged nook and cranny struck him as rather obscene and invasive, an inexcusable violation. After all, the lake hadn’t done anything wrong. Why should it be harassed?

Anyway, he wasn’t worried. There was no way they were going to trace either victim back to him. It simply wasn’t going to happen. He was through with that lake, though. He hadn’t yet decided where to deposit his next victim, but he was sure he would come to a decision before the night was over.

Now the vivacious girl was looking at his car. She started walking toward him, with lots of sass in her step.

He rolled down the passenger window and she poked her head in. She was a dark-skinned Latina, heavily made-up with thick lip liner, colorful eye shadow, and fierce arched eyebrows that seemed to be tattoos. Her earrings were big gold-painted crucifixes.

“Nice car,” she said.

He smiled.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing out so late?” he asked. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“Maybe you’d like to tuck me in,” she said, smiling.

Her teeth struck him as remarkably clean and straight. Indeed, she looked remarkably healthy. That was pretty rare out here on the streets, where most of the girls were “tweakers,” in various stages of meth addiction.

“I like your style,” he said. “Very chola.”

Her smile broadened. He could see that she took being called a Latina gangbanger as a compliment.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Socorro.”

Ah, “socorro,” he thought. Spanish for “help.”

“I’ll bet you give great socorro,” he said in a leering tone.

Her deep brown eyes leered right back. “You look like maybe you could use some socorro right now.”

“Maybe I could,” he said.

But before they could start settling terms, a car pulled into the space right behind him. He heard a man call out from the driver window.

“¡Socorro!” he yelled. “¡Vente!”

The girl drew herself up with a rather lame show of indignation.

“¿Porqué?” she yelled back.

“Vente aquí, ¡puta!”

The man detected a trace of fear in the girl’s eyes. It couldn’t be because the man in the car had called her a whore. He guessed that the man was her pimp, checking on her to see how much cash she had brought in so far tonight.

“¡Pinche Pablo!” She muttered the all-purpose insult under her breath. Then she walked toward the car.

The man sat there, wondering if she was going to come back, still wanting to do business with him. Either way, he didn’t like it. Waiting around was not his style.

His interest in the girl suddenly vanished. No, he wouldn’t bother with her. She had no idea how lucky she was.

Besides, what was he doing slumming like this? His next victim ought to be classier.

Chiffon, he thought. He’d almost forgotten about Chiffon. But maybe I’ve just been saving her for a special occasion.

He could wait. It didn’t have to be tonight. He drove away, gloating over his show of self-restraint, despite his enormous cravings. He considered that one of his best personal qualities.

He was, after all, a very civilized man.

Chapter Ten

The three young women in the interview room didn’t look at all like Riley had expected. For a few moments she just watched them through the one-way window. They were tastefully dressed, almost like well-paid secretaries. She’d been told their names were Mitzi, Koreen, and Tantra. Of course Riley was sure that those weren’t their real names.

Riley also doubted that they dressed so acceptably when they were on the job. Working for about 250 dollars per hour, they’d surely invested in elaborate wardrobes to cater to all sorts of clients’ fantasies. They had been colleagues of Nancy “Nanette” Holbrook at Ishtar Escorts. The clothes Nancy Holbrook had been wearing when she was killed had been markedly less proper. But, Riley figured, when not actually on the job, the women wanted to look respectable.

Although prostitutes had played a role in some of the cases Riley had investigated in the past, this was the first time she’d been called on to work so directly with any of them. These women were potential victims themselves. They might even be potential suspects, although virtually all murders of this type were carried out by men. Riley felt sure that these women weren’t the kind of monsters she hunted in her job.

It was late Sunday afternoon. Last night Riley and Bill had settled into their separate and comfortable hotel rooms not far from the FBI building. Riley had phoned April, who was in a Washington, DC, hotel with the history field trip. April had been giggly and happy, and had warned her mother that she didn’t really have time for phone calls. “I’ll text you tomorrow,” April had said, shouting over the teenage clamor in the background.

Riley felt that too much of today had already been wasted. It had taken most of the day to round up the prostitutes and bring them in. Riley had told Special Agent in Charge Elgin Morley that she wanted to talk to the women without any men present. Perhaps they’d be more open with another woman. Now she thought she’d observe and listen to them unseen for a few minutes before actually questioning them. Through the speaker, she could hear their conversation.

Their styles and personalities were distinctive. Short, blonde, buxom Mitzi displayed a certain small-town, girl-next-door image.

“So has Kip popped the question?” Mitzi asked Koreen.

“Not yet,” Koreen said with a conspiratorial smile. She was a slender brunette with something of the grace of a ballerina. “I’ve got a feeling he’s bought a ring, though.”

“Does he still want to have four kids?” Mitzi asked.

Koreen let out a high, lilting laugh. “I’ve talked him down to three. But between you and me, he’s only going to get two.”

Mitzi joined in Koreen’s laughter.

Tantra gave Koreen a nudge. She was a tall African-American with a tawny complexion. She seemed to have adopted the glamorous poise of a supermodel.

“Better make sure he doesn’t find out what you do for a living, girl,” Tantra said.

All three women laughed heartily. Riley was taken by surprise. These three prostitutes were talking about having families, just like any ordinary women in a beauty parlor. Was that kind of normality really in the cards for any of them? She couldn’t imagine that such a thing was possible.

Riley decided that she’d kept the women waiting long enough. When she walked into the interview room, she could feel the relaxed atmosphere suddenly pop like a bubble. Now the women were visibly on edge.

“I’m Agent Riley Paige,” she said. “I’d like to ask you all a few questions.”

All three women let out groans of dismay.

“Oh, God, not more questions!” Mitzi said. “We’ve talked to the cops already.”

“I’d like to ask a few questions of my own, if you don’t mind,” Riley said.

Mitzi shook her head. “This is starting to feel like harassment,” she said.

“What we do is perfectly legal,” Koreen said.

“I don’t care about what you do,” Riley said. “I’m an FBI investigator, not a judge.”

Koreen murmured under her breath, “Like hell.”

Mitzi looked at her wristwatch. “Can we make this quick?” she said. “I’ve got three classes today.”

“How many credits are you taking this semester?” Koreen asked.

“Twenty,” Mitzi said.

Koreen gasped. “That’s a pretty big load.”

“Yeah, well, I want to get my degree as soon as I can.”

Riley was taken aback again.

Mitzi is going to college, she thought.

She had heard that sometimes women pursuing an education chose prostitution as a way of paying tuition. With the money she was making, she might not have to go too deeply in debt. Still, it struck Riley as strangely unsettling.

“I’ll try to keep this short,” Riley said. “I just want to know more about Nanette.”

Koreen’s expression suddenly turned pensive. “Poor Nanette,” she said.

But Mitzi seemed unperturbed. “What happened to Nanette’s got nothing to do with us,” she said.

“I’m afraid it does,” Riley said. “We have good reason to believe that her murderer is a serial killer. And I can tell you from years of experience, serial killers are relentless. He’ll kill again. And one of you might be his next victim.”

Mitzi frowned disdainfully.

“Not a chance,” she said. “We’re not like Nanette.”

Now Riley was shocked. Could these women possibly be naive enough to think that what they did for a living was safe?

“But you work for the same business, doing the same kind of work,” Riley said.

Mitzi was starting to get defensive.

“Hey, I thought you weren’t here to judge,” she said. “You can look down your nose at us if you like. But what we do is as respectable as this kind of thing can be. And as safe. We can turn down any clients we don’t like. We keep the sex safe, and we get regular check-ups, so we don’t have diseases. If a guy gets too kinky or violent, we can walk away. But it usually doesn’t come to that.”

Riley wondered about that word “usually.” Surely their business sometimes took them into pretty dark territory. And how “safe” could hired sex possibly be? How long could they continue without falling prey to AIDS?

“As far as Nanette goes,” Mitzi continued, “she was on her way down. She’d lost all her class. She was meeting clients outside of the service, shooting smack, losing her health and her looks. She wouldn’t have lasted at Ishtar’s a lot longer. She’d have been fired for sure.”

As Riley took notes, she eyed the women, trying to understand them better. Little by little, she sensed something behind their placid expressions. She was pretty sure it was denial. They refused to accept that theirs was a losing way of life, and that they’d all fall into the same decline as Nanette sooner or later. Their dreams of family, education, and success were ultimately doomed. And deep down, they knew it.

Riley noticed that Tantra had gotten quiet and was looking off into space. She had something to say, but hadn’t yet said it.

Riley said, “We believe that Nanette was killed about a week ago, probably on Saturday. Do you know who her client was that night?”

Koreen shrugged. “I’ve got no idea.”

“Me, neither,” Mitzi said. “Actually, that’s none of our business, you’d have to ask Ishtar about that.”

Riley knew that the local agents were already looking for the escort service owner and would bring her in for questioning.

“What about other places of work?” Riley asked.

“We’re contracted to Ishtar,” Mitzi said firmly. “We’re not allowed to follow our line of work through any other agency or on our own.”

The other two women were looking downward, avoiding Riley’s eyes. She asked the question more directly.

“Did Nanette ever do extra work anywhere else? Did she ever go out on her own without having a date made through Ishtar?”

The room was silent. Finally, in a barely audible voice, Tantra said, “She told me she’d just started working at Hank’s Derby.”

“What?” Mitzi said, sounding surprised.

“She didn’t want me to tell anybody,” Tantra told the other women.

“Jesus,” Mitzi said. “So she was turning into a lot lizard. She was in worse shape than I’d thought.”

Riley’s mind was buzzing with questions.

“What’s a ‘lot lizard’?” she asked.

“It’s the lowest class kind of whore,” Koreen said. “They work truck stops, like Hank’s Derby. It’s really a rock bottom life.”

“She was just so strung out,” Tantra said. “She wasn’t getting the clients she used to at Ishtar’s. She told me she wasn’t making enough to feed her habit. She said she was just doing it on the side. I told her how dangerous it was. I mean, hookers just disappear from truck stops without a trace, it happens all the time. But she wouldn’t listen.”

A cloud of gloom had settled over the women. Riley didn’t guess that they had a lot more information to give. They’d given her one important lead already.

“That will be all,” Riley told them.

But as they got ready to leave, the women started chatting again as though nothing unusual was going on.

They really don’t understand, Riley thought. Or they don’t want to understand.

“Listen,” she said, “this killer is dangerous. And there are many other men like him. You’re making yourself into targets. If you think you’re safe doing what you do, you’re just lying to yourselves.”

“And just how much safer is your job, Agent Paige?” Mitzi asked.

This retort left Riley speechless.

Is she really comparing what she does with what I do? she wondered.

As she followed the women out of the interview room, Riley’s heart sank. She felt as hopeless for them as she would if they had been common streetwalkers. In a way, this seemed worse. Their superficial veneer of respectability concealed a life of degradation even from themselves. But there was nothing she could say or do to make them face the truth.

Riley felt sure that this killer wasn’t finished murdering prostitutes. Was his next victim here right now, or would she be someone Riley hadn’t yet met and warned?

*

Riley was in the field office hallway looking for Bill when her cell phone buzzed. She saw that the call was from Quentin Rosner, head of the dive team that was searching Nimbo Lake.

Her heart quickened. Surely he and his divers had found the second body by now.

“Hello, Mr. Rosner,” she answered eagerly.

The voice on the line said, “I called Special Agent in Charge Morley. He told me I should report to you directly.”

“Good,” Riley said. “What have you got for me? Have you found the other body in the lake?”

She heard a faint, wordless grumble, followed by, “Agent Paige, you’re not going to like hearing this.”

“Well?”

“There’s no body in that lake. It’s a big area but we’ve looked everywhere.”

Riley had trouble believing her ears. Had her hunch been wrong?

No, she still felt sure that Nancy Holbrook’s killer had previously dumped a different body in that lake. It helped explain why he hadn’t gone down to the water to make sure that his latest victim had disappeared into the lake’s depths.

As she puzzled over what to say, she saw Bill walking down the hall.

“I’m headed out to interview Ishtar Haynes,” he said. “At her place of business. Want to come along?”

Riley nodded yes, but first she had to sort things out with Rosner.

“How was the visibility?” Riley asked.

“I won’t lie to you, it really sucks down there,” Rosner said. “Flooding a canyon stirs up a lot of sod and rotting vegetation and it can take several years for the water to clear up. Anything dumped here when the lake was new could actually be buried under debris.”

“The body I’m looking for could have been put there several years ago.”

“Then that’s a problem. But we know what we’re doing, Agent Paige. We’re a well-trained unit. And we’re really sure there’s no body to be found in this lake.”

Riley thought for a moment. She deeply wished that Morley had called in actual FBI divers. The Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team was amazing and those divers would have considered every possible angle without any prompting. Instead Morley had called in help from a local dive training school. He’d said that there was no legitimate reason for the FBI to be involved in this case anyhow. He wasn’t going have an FBI team fly in here from LA.

She realized that in spite of what Riley had reported to him, Morley was still thinking of this as a single murder that they were investigating as a favor to a fellow agent. She would just have to work with the team they had. But what might these guys have missed?

She asked, “Have you looked at maps of the canyon before it was flooded?”

Rosner was silent for a moment.

“No, but what good would that do?” he said.

Riley stifled a groan of impatience.

How much training does this guy actually have? she wondered. Do I really have to tell him how to do his job?

She said, “How can you be sure that you checked every nook and cranny without knowing more about the terrain?”

Another silence fell.

“You should be able to call it up on your laptop,” Riley added.

“We’ll get on it,” Rosner finally said, sounding gloomy.

“You do that,” Riley told him.

She ended the call and stood in the hall wondering what to believe. Was there no second body after all? If there wasn’t, then this probably wasn’t even a serial case. She felt a flood of mixed feelings. She hated making mistakes. Even so, the possibility that Nancy Holbrook’s murder hadn’t been the work of a serial killer might be good news.

But Riley’s gut still told her that there was another body in the lake. That this was a familiar type of monster who would strike again.