Next Victim by Michael Prescott Page A

"I can’t define it precisely—but I have a sense of what he’s like. Of his manner, his…mien."
    "Mien?" DiFranco sounded dubious, or maybe he was just unfamiliar with the word.
    "What it’s like to be around him when he’s just being himself."
    "Not a good place to be. Around him, I mean."
    "No," she said. "Not if you want to live."
    There was no more discussion. Tess knew they were all thinking of Angie Callahan.
     
    Angie Callahan had been a systems analyst for a defense contractor in Marina del Rey. She drove a Porsche, she had 150 channels on her satellite TV system, and she’d recently broken up with a marketing executive based in San Francisco who flew down to LA every Tuesday and Friday on a corporate jet.
    Eleven days ago, Angie had gone to a bar on Melrose Avenue populated by an upscale thirtysomething crowd. It was a meat rack, but an exceptionally high-class meat rack. According to the eyewitness accounts of the bartender and several bar patrons, the man she’d left with had been well built, with thick brown hair and strong features behind his mustache and beard. No one had heard him say his name, and he paid in cash, leaving a tip that was neither large nor small enough to cause comment.
    When Angie failed to arrive at work the next morning, her colleagues tried to reach her. Phone calls to her condo went unanswered. Messages to her pager were not returned. By late afternoon, her friends had prevailed on the president of the condo association to unlock Angie’s door.
    They found Angie in the bedroom, her wrists duct-taped to the headboard of her bed, her throat cut.
    It was a police investigation for a few hours, until Robbery-Homicide’s nationwide database search for crimes with a similar MO turned up the Denver case code-named RAVENKIL—in reference to a bar called Raven’s Roost, where the first victim had been acquired. Then the police brought in the FBI.
    Tess learned about the killing at ten o’clock, as she was turning down the bedcovers and debating which of three books to read. The phone rang, and it was Assistant Director Gerald Andrus in LA. Except for the obligatory Christmas cards, he hadn’t been in touch with her since he was transferred out of Denver a year and a half earlier.
    "It’s starting again," Andrus said without preamble.
    For a moment she hadn’t trusted herself to speak. Then she’d asked Andrus why he was calling her.
    "I’ve arranged for a loan-out. You’re coming to LA to be part of the task force."
    "You’ve cleared it with Cooper?" SAC Cooper was Andrus’s replacement at the Denver field office.
    "I’ve cleared it with the people who will clear it with Cooper. I have friends in high places, Tess."
    Of course he did. He might very well have called the director himself.
    "It’s a violation of policy," she said for no reason except that her mind had lost the ability to focus on anything that mattered. "I mean, I have a personal connection with the case."
    "I’m well aware of that. I want you here anyway. Be on a plane tomorrow."
    "I can leave tonight."
    "No, get your rest. You’ll need it."
    But she’d gotten no rest that night, and in the ten days since, she’d slept only when her body gave out from sheer exhaustion. Even then there was no rest. There were dreams. Dreams of the night of February 12, the bedroom door—and what lay beyond it.
    She wondered, at times, what kept her going. Was it simple inertia, the inability of a body in motion to cease its forward progress even when there was nowhere to go? Or was it revenge—and if so, was that an honorable motive for someone sworn to uphold impartial justice?
    Tess knew she could never be impartial in this case. She could not seek justice in its sterile, socially acceptable incarnation. Justice was the blindfolded lady with the balanced scales. She could never be that lady again. She had lost all sense of balance, and no blindfold could shut out the things she saw with her eyes closed.
    Whatever drove