Free Redheads by Jonathan Moore Page A

at them. “He made sure of that.”
    He spoke quietly and slowly.
    “I’ll start from the top and just go down. He ate off her face. There were bite marks in her facial bones underneath her nose. Which he bit off. The surgeon’s report says he may have been shaking his head back and forth. That’s the only way to explain the shape of the bite marks. Ever see a dog kill a squirrel? It would’ve been like that. He bit and shook until he pulled her face completely away from her skull. Most of it was missing and was never found. The presumption being, he swallowed it.”
    Julissa had turned white. She was squeezing a ballpoint pen in her right hand.
    “Aaron, I’m so sorry—”
    “After he was done with that, he ripped her shirt off and started on her chest. Her breasts—he ate them both. Probably at that point, while she was still alive, he raped her. The semen samples got lost in the shuffle. I checked in ’96.”
    Chris saw that Mike was looking at him. He nodded slightly. This was news to both of them and he would bring it up.
    “The surgeon speculated she was still alive for about ten minutes after the rape. Based, I guess, on the amount of internal bleeding. But by then she wasn’t conscious anymore. She probably died when he ripped her stomach open and took out her liver. The skin and muscles were ripped and not cut, so he likely just tore her open with his bare hands. You want me to go on?”
    “No,” Julissa said. “Oh god.”
    She got up and went to the sliding doors, stepping to the balcony. Chris could see from the movement of her shoulders that she was sobbing. Mike Nakamura went to follow her, but Chris held out his hand.
    “Leave her alone, Mike.”
    Mike sat down. Chris looked at Westfield.
    “You say they found semen?”
    “Yeah. I know. I guess I hadn’t focused on it until just now. There’s been none at the scenes I’ve investigated since ’96.”
    “And the bite marks.”
    “That too,” Mike said. “The victims have all been savagely attacked. But probably not with his teeth. So the one in ’78, the murder of your wife, is different. We’ve never seen that.”
    “Why would he change his style?” Westfield asked.
    “If it were just the semen missing, given the time that’s passed, I’d say he was impotent. But it’s the biting too. I bet in the last fifteen or twenty years he heard about DNA testing,” Chris said.
    There was a knock at the door and they all jumped. Julissa came back inside. They were all looking at the door.
    Chris walked over and looked through the peephole.
    “Just room service.”
     
     
    At first none of them would eat.
    Chris was hungry and he suspected Mike was too, but Julissa hadn’t even looked at the room service cart when the waiter pushed it in. Westfield looked embarrassed. Not that he should have been, in Chris’s opinion. What had happened to Tara Westfield needed to be told. Maybe some good had already come from the telling. They knew the killer changed over time, adapted to avoid capture, learned from newspapers and paid attention to technology. For years Chris had imagined him as simply a raving beast, incapable of thoughts or plans or even fully conscious of anything other than his own blood lust. This was better, Chris thought. Some people might pity a rabid dog, but not this. No one would blame them for what they were going to do.
    Mike, Westfield and Julissa were sitting at the table again. Julissa had found a tissue in the bathroom and was wiping her eyes. Chris went to the map and, from memory, marked the thirty-six cities in twenty countries from which he and Mike had culled news reports of linked murders. When he was finished, the pushpins were clustered in Scandinavia and along the east and west coasts of North America; they were scattered across Western Europe, and more thinly, across the Pacific and Asia. There were three in Africa: one in Alexandria, one in Lagos, and one in Cape Town. There was a lone pin in South America,