Free American Devil by Oliver Stark

and then drawn in pale eyebrow pencil, and her lips still retained a translucent pink lip gloss. Even on a mutilated corpse, the little marks of recognition and individuality demanded to be known. Harper noticed a mark just below her lips. Smudged lipstick. Maybe the killer had left a print. He zoomed close to her lips, until they covered the entire screen. It wasn’t a fingerprint. A faint outline of a kiss lay half across her lips in her own lipstick. The killer must have kissed her, coated his lips in her lipstick and then kissed her again. There was a half-print of the killer’s lips sitting right there.
    He gave Latent Prints a call and suggested they get a print. Everything needed to be processed, every tiny detail. He never knew, down the line, what would help him nail this bastard and get him locked up. Sometimes it was a single hair, sometimes a significant coincidence, sometimes a cell phone call that put the killer at the scene, sometimes something as simple as a kiss.
    What were they dealing with? A sociopath? A thrill seeker or a sexually sadistic serial killer who wouldn’t stop until someone stopped him? The team didn’t talk much as they wandered in and out of the precinct late into the night. Not even the jokes were flowing yet, just the grim sense of a difficult journey and the knowledge of how much pain and suffering these victims had been through.
    Harper picked up the congealed dinner of chicken noodles that had been half eaten a few hours earlier. He was halfway through the first mouthful when he caught the image again in his mind’s eye.
    Harper moved back to his desktop and clicked on her photographs again. The hands in prayer , he was thinking. That little detail from Grace Frazer’s murder was sitting right there in Harper’s mind and the link to the parking lot killing flashed into his mind. He found the image he wanted. The woman’s corpse was shining bright. Her skin was so pale it was almost iridescent, the wings were blood-dark, and the fluorescent lights glistened gold on the bloody circle around her head.
    Harper stopped mid-chew. A halo?
    Yes, he knew that there was something in that image, something that connected it to Grace Frazer. The killer had started to express himself, let himself be known a little. First a woman with her hands in prayer and now he’d made wings and a halo. Amy looked like an angel with her heart torn out.
    Harper was fired by the thought and quickly printed three photographs, one of Mary-Jane Samuelson, one of Grace Frazer and one of the Angel. He went up to one of the big boards that had been set up in the investigation room and pinned the pictures side by side. Garcia looked across from the computer he was working at. ‘What you looking at, Harper?’
    ‘He’s signing his corpses.’
     
    Harper picked up his coat and walked down the stairs. He needed some fresh air and a chance to think. A killer’s MO was one thing - it was what he needed to do to kill - but an MO could change, as it had in this case. He had cut them to different degrees, but the signature was what he needed to do to fulfil himself, what he couldn’t kill without doing. The angelic wings and the hands in prayer were part of a ritual, just like the cherry blossom, which struck Harper as almost bridal. The killer needed to pose his corpses like dead angels. Harper felt that he knew something about the killer now. He hated goodness and religion. Like a devil, he needed to degrade it all.
    Harper stepped across the street towards a coffee shop. It was close to midnight. Outside, the air was good and cool. The winter migrants who had stayed in New York would appreciate the break from the harsh cold wind. Harper’s footsteps echoed in the quiet night air. Then he spotted a guy up ahead staring at him.
    Harper turned and behind him saw two more big guys walking towards him. All three were over six foot and burly. They looked like security guards, or maybe even police.
    ‘I guess this